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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the government’s Prevent strategy was developed eleven years ago as a major part of its counter-terrorism plan.  Its aim, to try to stop young men being radicalised and drawn to terror but clearly it is not working.  A video from ISIS last week showed young British men calling on Western Muslims to join their fight in the Middle East.  In a moment I’ll speak to the Shadow Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan but first I am joined in Kew, West London, by Richard Barrett who spent his life working in intelligence and security and was MI6’s Director of Global Counter Terrorism Operations, a very good morning to you Mr Barrett.  First of all, give us more about your estimates of the number of radicalised young men who have already returned to the UK.

RICHARD BARRETT: Well I think it could be up to 300, it certainly is quite a lot.  It’s hard to know whether they stayed or whether maybe they returned to Iraq, particularly now I think as ISIS is looking for more recruits but it is important to remember I think that all these people who have returned may have returned for very different reasons, some of them because they got completely disillusioned or disgusted by what’s going on there and others just because they wanted to have a rest and come back home so we can’t assume that all of those are going to be a terrorist threat in the United Kingdom.

DM: Nevertheless they need looking into, what kind of a nightmare is that for the security agencies?

RICHARD BARRETT: Well it is an absolute nightmare because of course with such numbers there is no way that they have the resources to be able to look at all of them so they have to prioritise and to prioritise is difficult.  Clearly some of them will have come to attention before they went to Iraq so they may be at the top of the list but others probably are completely unknown and maybe even their return is unknown and will only come to light later. 

DM: Well we know about prioritising when it comes to 7/7 and what happened there, the feeling is that some could get through the net.

RICHARD BARRETT: Well indeed yes, and it doesn’t take a big percentage of say 300 people to cause an enormous problem so I think the security services are extremely concerned about this and doing whatever they can, both here domestically but also of course with their partners overseas as well and I think that’s an important point, that everybody now is seeing this as a shared threat and trying to co-operate together to deal with it.

DM: There’s another aspect, looking overseas for the security services here, it seems almost that the huge successes of ISIS in Iraq have sprung up in the last couple of weeks, that nobody knew about it, they have effectively formed a state within two states.  What’s happened to the intelligence?

RICHARD BARRETT: Well I think that people were aware that ISIS was building in strength and I think they were also very aware of ISIS’s plans, that they were able to carry them out so quickly I think was a surprise but that’s really because the Iraqi army collapsed so quickly and I think that was the surprising bit perhaps rather than ISIS making a move towards Mosul and then down towards Baghdad but clearly they have got a lot of strength very quickly and clearly that’s a sort of exponential rise and that they capture more equipment and weaponry and attract more recruits. 

DM: Comparisons have been made with the 1980s and those foreign fighters that flocked to Afghanistan to fight the then Soviet Union, does this look like it’s on a bigger scale and of course it’s much closer to the European heartland?

RICHARD BARRETT: Well both things are absolutely true, yes and [interference] who went all over the world, not just from Western countries, so this influx to Syria is already vastly in excess of that after only two or three years whereas of course in Afghanistan we had a ten year period of Soviet occupation and then another period while the Taliban gained control over the Mujahidin in the Northern Alliance.  So this is in a very short period, we’ve seen a huge influx of foreign fighters and I think that’s quite alarming to many states.

DM: Where do the remedies lie?  I mean it would be better that these people, these young British people weren’t having these thoughts and beliefs at all but once they do travel is there anything more than can be done?

RICHARD BARRETT: Well I think the key thing is to deal with them when they return and as I said earlier, that’s obviously much more than the security authorities can cope with but the communities of course will be aware of them, their friends will be aware of them, their families and so on and I think this will be a great test of the government’s reach out to communities, the police reach out to communities to try and work this problem together rather than identifying communities as fundamentally hostile or difficult to talk to.  So that’s how it’s going to be dealt with if it’s going to be dealt with and not by police investigations and security service investigations alone. 

DM: And what’s your sense of what the security services will be doing now, apart from as you’ve been describing there, scrambling to keep an eye on as many of these people as possible, what about identifying some of the key potential targets and trying to protect them?

RICHARD BARRETT: Well yes, you mentioned Prevent earlier and of course Protect is another strand of the government strategy to prevent terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom but I think that it’s very hard to say that you can protect all targets in the United Kingdom, particularly if people are prepared to attack transport hubs or pubs, things like that.  So it really is a question of finding these guys and finding out whether they do in fact pose a threat or whether they just went for an adventure or went out of a real sense of commitment and obligation but don’t intend to become terrorists back here. 

DM: Thank you very much indeed for your time there, that’s Richard Barrett, formerly MI6’s Director of Global Counter Terrorism Operations so he should know.