Peter Power

Peter Power is a "crisis management specialist" who went out of his way to reveal on 7-7 that he was running a drill at "precisely" the same stations at the same time as the attacks took place. After a couple of years of near silence on the matter, he issued some further details but has never been asked to testify under oath about the events of that day.

Background

Peter Power was born in the UK in 1951. He served in the 10 Battalion Parachute Regiment Territorial Army from 1969-1971 before joining the Metropolitan Police in 1971. His service in that force included the Special Patrol Group and attachments to the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch and other front line units. In 1990 he transferred on promotion to Dorset. He retired from Dorset in 1993. In 1995 Power set up his own crisis management company in central London, Visor Consultants.

Terror Expert

Power has appeared regularly on television and radio in connection with terrorism and security items. Between 2000 and 2007 he was mentioned as a terror expert in 119 articles according to an analysis of 'major world newspapers' by David Miller and Tom Mills.

The Terror Exercise Drill of July 2005

Little information has emerged about the drill referred to by Peter Power, who refuses to provide any more details on the matter. An investigation by the BBC series The Conspiracy Files suggested the client company that Power refused to name as Elsevier publishing.

BBC 5 radio

On the afternoon of 2005-07-07, on the BBC 5 Drive radio program Power went out of his way to introduce the subject of the training exercise (before the police timeline was revised to indicate simultaneous bombings).

HOST: How do you effectively provide security on an underground system?

POWER: You're quite right. Security at the very best is proportionate, it'll never ever be absolute. The thing that concerns me is that what are we doing for the thousands of men and women actually who are in London working. And I say that because at half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.
HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?
POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but [if] they're listening they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.

ITV

A short while after his appearance on BBC Radio, at 20:20 on 7/7, Peter Power gave a television interview to ITV news which revealed a little more about the nature of the operation as well as hinting at the sort of organisations for whom the operation might have been organised:

POWER: Today we were running an exercise for a company - bearing in mind I'm now in the private sector - and we sat everybody down, in the city - 1,000 people involved in the whole organisation - but the crisis team. And the most peculiar thing was, we based our scenario on the simultaneous attacks on an underground and mainline station. So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from 'fictional' to 'real'. And one of the first things is, get that bureau number, when you have a list of people missing, tell them. And it took a long time -

INTERVIEWER: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?
POWER: Er, almost precisely. I was up to 2 oclock this morning, because it's our job, my own company. Visor Consultants, we specialise in helping people to get their crisis management response. How do you jump from 'slow time' thinking to 'quick time' doing? And we chose a scenario - with their assistance - which is based on a terrorist attack because they're very close to, er, a property occupied by Jewish businessmen, they're in the city, and there are more American banks in the city than there are in the whole of New York - a logical thing to do. And it, I've still got the hair....

CBC News Sunday

Power went to Toronto for the 15th World Conference on Disaster Management. He appeared on a discussion panel for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news discussion programme CBC News: Sunday, in which the host remarked upon the 'extraordinary' coincidence of Power's rehearsal scenario:

Evan Solomon: We've heard something quite extraordinary - could be a coincidence or not - that your firm, on the very day that the bombs went off in London, were running an exercise simulating three bombs going off, in the very same tube stations that they went off. How did this happen? Coincidence, or were you acting on information that you knew?

Peter Power: I don't think you could say that we had some special insight into the terrorist network, otherwise I would be under arrest myself. The truth of it is -
Solomon: But it is a coincidence.
Power: It's a coincidence, and it's a spooky coincidence. Our scenario was very similar - it wasn't totally identical, but it was based on bombs going off, to the time, the locations, all this sort of stuff. But it wasn't an accident, in the sense that London has a history of bombs, and the reason why our emergency services did so well, and prepared probably better than any other city in the world, sadly they have to be. So it wasn't exactly rocket science or totally out of the pale to come up with that scenario unusual though it be to stop the exercise and go into real time, and it worked very well, although there was a few seconds when the audience didn't realize whether it was real or not.

Further Statements

On 15 December 2007, Power stated:

I rarely respond to allegations that there was a direct connection between an exercise my company was running on 7 July 2005 and the real events that happened that day, but having just seen on You Tube a highly misleading video following a childish stunt against me on 12/12/07 I feel I have little choice but to make three important points:

First, I chose to meet 2 people that day who requested an interview with me while I was attending a conference in a London hotel. Having shaken their hands and asked where they were from I noticed I was being covertly filmed by one of them who denied it, although it was obvious. As it is not possible to have a civilised conversation when deceit from one side was apparent from the outset, I apologised that I could not help in such circumstances and suggested another time perhaps? I then walked back to the conference – suddenly pursued by 2 or 3 shouting people trying to make it appear I was fleeing?

Second, it’s worth reminding some people that the London underground system has so far been the subject of terrorist bombings on 21 occasions, going back to 1885. Also, on the same day as our exercise, a major law firm in the City of London was running an exercise that involved bombs on the underground. A few days before so did a major German bank in London and even the Metropolitan Police. We were not alone.

Third, our table top exercise was to involve a very small group of crisis managers under test, from a company employing c1000 people. No one was on the streets at all. Just one part of the scenario was similar to IRA incendiary bombs planted on the underground in 1992 to start fires on three underground trains, albeit the locations were by sheer coincidence, more 2005 that 1992. That’s not so surprising when we had a limited number of underground lines to choose from, given the location of our client in the centre of London.

There will be no convincing some very odd people who think actors were on the bus that was actually bombed and the UK Government staged the whole thing on 7/7, the World Trade Centre was pre-wired with explosives on 9/11 and even that tragedy was a US Government setup.

At a time when this country is under a sustained terrorist threat it makes sense to base any exercise scenario on realism and historical events and in so doing hopefully increase our overall resilience to this threat. Had the odd people I met on 12.12.07 bothered to have a proper conversation with me I would have explained all this to them but fantasists will, no matter what I say, always prefer sensationalism to sense and conspiracy to coincidence.

External links

• About Peter Power
• Summary of Peter Power and Visor Consultants' "simultaneous bombs" drill, as of 2011-01
• BBC - Organising forward command. Kings Cross 18 November 1987