FRONTLINE EUROPE: THE INTELLIGENCE WAR
WITH ISLAMIST TERROR ATTACKS ROCKING FRANCE, GERMANY AND BELGIUM TO THEIR CORES, STRONG INTELLIGENCE GATHERING IS KEY TO PROTECTING CIVILIANS, BUT, FINDS FOREIGN EDITOR DAVID PRATT, EUROPE’S SPYING AND SECURITY SERVICES ARE NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE
FRENCH politicians now simply refer to it as “la guerre” – the war. Right now that war against the shadowy terrorist foe that is Islamic State has taken on a new urgency as France, like its European neighbours Belgium and Germany, reels from the latest wave of attacks carried out by young men heeding the jihadis’ call to attack the “crusaders”.
For so much of Europe today this war is not one against an external threat, but a battle to cope with monsters in its very midst. In France, all the major jihadi attacks over the last 18 months have been conducted by French nationals, a sobering thought for the French authorities and security services.
The news this weekend that Abdelmalik Petitjean, one of the two attackers who is alleged to have killed a Catholic priest last week, managed to clear a security check to work as a baggage handler at Chambery airport, will only add to the calls for a shakeup in the French intelligence services.
Across much of Europe, this too is rapidly becoming a summer of unease. On the French Riviera, holidaymakers have been banned from carrying large bags and gun-toting police patrol the beaches.
In Germany, organisers of the upcoming world’s largest heavy metal music festival, Wacken, insist they will check the bags of every single visitor and in some instances ban rucksacks altogether.
“Everyone knows that this is what the terrorists want; everyone knows life should go on as normal as possible, but when a priest is assassinated in his own church in a place no-one has heard of, it seems anything can happen,” was how one French mother-of-two, who did not want to be named, summed up the mood to journalists in Paris.
Faced with this widespread public unease and impatience over security failings, some of Europe’s intelligence services have come under the spotlight, notably in France.
A recently published French parliamentary report following a six-month probe into the handling of the terrorist attacks that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at the Bataclan concert hall in November last year in Paris, cited considerable organisational dysfunction within the country’s intelligence agencies.
“We are not pointing a finger at men but at organisations,” insisted Georges Fenech, a centre-right MP who headed the probe.
In one example of a failing that happened during the Bataclan attack, Fenech said a special police unit that showed up first was insufficiently armed to take on the attackers.
But when the arriving officers asked a group of soldiers deployed as part of an anti-terrorism operation to lend them their assault rifles so they could attempt a raid, the soldiers refused. They were under orders not to fire their weapons and had heard no updates.
But it is not just France’s rapid response capability that has come under scrutiny. Another major point of concern is the complexity and overlapping competences of France’s domestic intelligence agencies.
The National Police, which protects large cities, and the Gendarmerie, a branch of the military that protects small towns and rural areas, have separate intelligence divisions
Meanwhile, France’s domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, has national competency, but often has to give way to local police on specific tasks.
Failure to co-ordinate between the DGSI and Paris police, for instance, led to interruptions in the surveillance of Said Kouachi, one of two brothers who ended up carrying out attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices in January last year.
There is, according to the parliamentary report findings, a desperate need to clarify lines of authority.
To that end its recommendations suggested that all French police and gendarme intelligence groups should be placed under the authority of the Interior Ministry, and the DGSI – currently under the Interior Ministry – should be under direct command of the president.
Down the line, it would become a “national counter-terrorism agency”, whose chief would be France’s de facto head of domestic security.
THAT France, in effect, currently does not have a single unified national counter-terrorism agency is in itself remarkable. As part of its fact-finding mission, the French parliamentary committee visited a number of countries in its efforts to overhaul the French model.
“We noticed when travelling abroad that no Israeli, Greek, Turkish or American head of a security service was able to clearly designate their French counterpart,” Fenech added.
During the mission’s visit to the US, the
group “did not meet a single American official who did not truly urge us to create and strengthen a real intelligence operation at the European level”, he explained.
Sebastien Pietrasanta, the top socialist politician on the French investigating committee, echoed those views. “Clearly, Europe is not up to the task in the fight against terrorism, even if progress has been made in the past months,” he said.
If the Paris attacks last year were meant to be something of a wake-up call for European intelligence agencies, then the task of achieving greater co-ordination and information sharing was taken up by the European Counter-Terrorism Group (CTG)
Formed in 2002, the aim of the CTG is to further intelligence-sharing co-operation between the 28 member states of the EU, Norway and Switzerland.
Since the Paris attacks last year, officials from these 30 European intelligence services have been meeting at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Netherlands on a weekly basis, ostensibly to share information about terrorists.
According to the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant this was the initiative of the Dutch intelligence service AIVD, which chaired the Counter-Terrorism Group until the beginning of this month, when that role was taken over by Slovakia. As recently as June, Dutch home affairs minister Ronald Plasterk, insisted that the CTG had made “enormous strides in intensifying co-operation” and that “information about European foreign fighters is now available for all the services”.
What was created, said the CTG, is a platform to exchange information on all European people who joined jihadist organisations. Given this vast pooling of information and data is it unreasonable to expect a greater level of success in identifying, monitoring or even apprehending some of the suspects and accomplices responsible for the recent spate of attacks across France, Belgium and Germany?
AS ever in the intelligence world it is not as straightforward as it appears. To begin with, intelligence service-watchers point to the fact that secret services tend to be selective in what they share, fearing to reveal their sources. Then there is the “third country rule”, whereby countries cannot share intelligence from a friendly country.
Added to these restrictions, too, is the fact that the CTG and its “virtual platform” is, in effect, really only an informal group.
It was born out of its predecessor, the socalled Club de Berne, an intelligence sharing forum that has existed since 1971 that takes its name from the city of Bern, where it used to meet.
Though surprising as it might seem given today’s terrorist threat level, the CTG is little different in makeup.
“The CTG doesn’t follow EU decision-making rules because they are an independent body,” said James Walsh, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina and a specialist in intelligence and national security.
“And it is hard to tell how they operate because they don’t have an office or headquarters, or a staff.”
Inevitably, there is some confusion over how the CTG deals with the different laws that restrain what information its members can collect and share with other agencies.
“Even countries in the EU, which have similar goals, have found it difficult to share because you lose control over information as soon as you share it,” Walsh explained. “Intelligence services don’t want to share their sources and methods, but if you are another country looking at information without sources, it is hard to know what you can trust.” And therein lies the limitations of the CTG, for while European intelligence services have always shared information, rarely has it been on a structured or multilateral level. At face value the CTG might now appear to be exchanging information about terrorists but not as meaningfully as Plasterk suggests.
MEANWHILE, as European intelligence services like those in France try to remodel and streamline themselves into a more effective force, IS is undergoing something of a transformation. Under pressure on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq it is increasingly leaving its territorial caliphate ambitions behind and becoming more transnational in its operational capacity.
The jihadis are well aware that recent attacks will place tremendous strain on the political and social cohesion. That sense of national unity that was evident in France after the 2015 attacks, for example, is now far from apparent in the wake of the Nice attack. President Francois Hollande faces a real challenge to his political credibility, while his far-right critics call for a “French Guantanamo” or insist last Tuesday’s attack on priest Jacques Hamel is a sign that France’s “Christian roots” are in peril.
For now, feelings in Germany are a little more subdued, restrained perhaps by historical memories of how easily extremist views can take hold. Nevertheless, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has gained influence on a narrative of rejecting Muslims.
That both France and Germany face elections next year will be on the radar of IS’ planners, aiming to create as much suspicion and division as possible.
France especially will remain a prime target. The one argument the IS propaganda machine puts out time and again when exhorting supporters to target France is Paris’s muscular military interventions in Muslim lands.
Then there is the continued festering problem of radicalisation in places like Molenbeek, in Brussels, or the Paris banlieues.
European cell members of Islamist extremist groups have often known one another since childhood, been in street gangs or been incarcerated at the same time.
As long as the ideology of jihadism survives, and as long as Europe’s Muslims remain marginalised and disenfranchised, European security services will struggle to simply arrest their way out of trouble.
While fighters returning to Europe perhaps pose the most acute threat, homegrown jihadist operatives present a significant and sometimes global threat, even if they lack, for the most part, the capabilities of their militarily trained colleagues
The battle against Islamist jihadism only looks set to intensify over the coming months and years. Only yesterday, two brothers suspected of planning attacks were arrested in Belgium in an anti-terror operation. In response to these seemingly relentless threats there is no getting away from the fact that Europe’s intelligence and security services in many instances are still playing catch-up.
As Fenech ,of the French committee investigating the systemic security failures during last year’s attacks in Paris, summed up: “Today we don’t measure up to those who are attacking us.”