Tom Secker's debut book has accomplished what nobody else has managed to do...an honest and critical analysis of the available evidence. And that's not just a self-righteous conspiracy theorist caveat. Secker not only picks apart the contradictory, vague and ambiguous official Home Office narrative and Intelligence and Security Committee reports on the attacks - as well as the more recent inquest - but also the leading alternative theories, such as those explored in John Hill's 7/7 Ripple Effect documentary series and the book by Nick Kollerstrom. This is a much needed breath of fresh air on a topic that has been polarized as Official Story vs Conspiracy Theorists, when both sides have equally weak arguments.

Secrets, Spies and 7/7 traces the development of the offical and alternative theories from the beginning. What they all have in common is that they assume guilt or innocence respectively, and then massage "facts" and "evidence" in to place to tenuously support them. For example it didn't matter to the Home Office or mainstream media that number 32 bus eye witness Richard Jones described somebody dressed completely differently to the accused bomber Hasib Hussain, because he claimed to see an Asian man fiddling in his bag and that was enough to fit their preconceived notion that this had all the "hallmarks of Al Qaeda". Thankfully Jones was discredited at the inquest, but there are many more examples of investigators and the media cherry picking evidence or hearing what they want to hear. As Secker explores, this isn't surprising. As seen with the Iraq war invasion, intelligence at that time was being fixed around the policy and there's no reason to think it stopped with Saddam and didn't continue with "Al Qaeda". At one point Western Governments were even trying to link Saddam to Al Qaeda.

Likewise the conspiracy theorists were also biased. For example it didn't matter to Nick Kollerstrom or John Hill that a CCTV still of the alleged bombers at Luton station they said was fake was later supported by moving video evidence. They either ignored it or continued to assert that CCTV had probably been faked...the hallmarks of the "Satanic New World Order" and an inside job, as former police intelligence analyst Tony Farrell describes it. Either way this is an absurd method of reaching truth, and Tom does not fall in to either side of the trap.