Visor Consultants Ltd.

On July 7, 2005, and the following days, consultant Peter Power reveals that his company, Visor Consultants, a private security and crisis management firm, was staging a terrorism exercise involving explosions in the exact same three London subway stations at the same time that real 7/7 London bombings occurred (see July 7, 2005). He says his company’s client is a City firm but does not otherwise identify it. Power insists it is a coincidence, but many are incredulous.
First Account – On the afternoon of July 7, Power tells BBC Radio 5: “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.… [I]t 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 they’re listening and 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, ‘this is the real one‘….” [BBC Radio 5, 7/7/2005]
Second Account – Later in the day, Power appears on ITV News and gives a similar account: “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 organization—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 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.” [ITV, 7/7/2005]
Third Account – Power also tells the Canadian television program CBS: Sunday Night that it was a “spooky coincidence,” adding: “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.” Colman Jones, an associate producer for the show, later claims in his blog that after the show was over, he asked Power “why there had not been more media coverage of this.” “They were trying to keep it quiet,” Power allegedly responds, with what Jones called “a knowing smile.” [Channel 4 News (London), 7/17/2005]
Fourth Account – The following day, the Manchester Evening News publishes an interview with Power in which he says, “Yesterday we were actually in the City working on an exercise involving mock broadcasts when it happened for real. When news bulletins started coming on, people began to say how realistic our exercise was—not realizing there was an attack. We then became involved in a real crisis which we had to manage for the company.… During the exercise we were working on yesterday, we were looking at a situation where there had been bombs at key London transport locations—although we weren’t specifically looking at a scenario where there had been a bomb on a bus. It’s a standard exercise and briefing that we carry out.” [Manchester Evening News, 7/8/2005]
Theories on the Internet – Theories spread on the Internet that, as ITV describe them, “simulated attacks were, whether Power knew it or not, intended to act as a cover for the real ones.” The Al Jazeera satellite network boldly asserts that Power’s “exercises were used as the fallback cover to carry out the attack.”
Said to Be Paper-Based Only – But Power soon claims that the exercises he spoke of were purely paper-based in nature, only involving a small group of seven or eight executives in a room seeking to examine the impact on corporate decision-making of a potential crisis situation, and no actual participants in the subway system. As for coincidence of timing, Power explains that away by saying, “Every week across [Britain] there are probably about hundred exercises, tests and simulations going on to get crisis teams familiar with their roles. We certainly do this regularly for many clients, the vast majority of them paper-based.” [Channel 4 News (London), 7/17/2005]
Power’s Controversial Past – Power was a high-ranking police officer in Dorset when he left the force after an investigation into drug trafficking allegations. He was not indicted and the results of the investigation were not released. [Sunday Times (London), 8/8/1993] Power took part in a May 2004 BBC program entitled “Panorama: London Under Attack,” which staged a mock terrorist attack in London to test emergency preparedness. The sequence of events in that program also bears an uncanny resemblance to the 7/7 bombings: three subway explosions timed closely together, followed by an above ground explosion about an hour later. The main difference is the fourth explosion is a chlorine tanker while in the real bombings it is a bus. [BBC, 5/16/2004] Power will make no further significant public statements except for a 2006 blog post on a BBC web page to dismiss conspiracy claims regarding the exercise. [Power, 9/16/2006]