After Paris Attacks, Questions On Intelligence Lapses Arise
World | Steven Erlanger and Jim Yardley, The New York Times | Updated: January 10, 2015 09:04 IST
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A
view from the fourth floor of the apartment building where Cherif
Kouachi, one of two brothers who killed staffers at Charlie Hebdo, lived
in Gennevilliers, a suburb of Paris. (Agnes Dherbeys/The New York
Times)
How did several jihadis - and possibly a larger cell of co-conspirators - manage to evade surveillance and execute a bold attack despite being well known to the country's police and intelligence services?
On its own, the Wednesday morning slaughter that left 12 people dead at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo represented a major breakdown for French security and intelligence forces, especially after authorities confirmed that the two suspects, the brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, had known links to the militant group, al-Qaida in Yemen.
Then on Friday, even as police had cornered the Kouachi brothers inside a printing factory in the northeast suburbs, another militant, Amedy Coulibaly - who has since been linked to the Kouachis - stormed a Kosher supermarket in Paris and threatened to kill hostages if the police captured the Kouachis.
"There is a clear failing," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told French television Friday.
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"When 17 people die, it means there were cracks."
A U.S. official speaking about the failure to identify the plot said that French intelligence and law enforcement agencies had conducted surveillance on one or both of the Kouachi brothers after Said returned from Yemen, but later lessened that monitoring or dropped it altogether to focus on what were believed to be bigger threats.
"These guys were known to be bad, and the French had tabs on them for a while," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid complicating a delicate intelligence matter. "At some point, though, they allocated resources differently. They moved on to other targets."
The official acknowledged that U.S. spy agencies tracked Westerners, particularly young men, traveling in and out of Yemen much more closely after a failed al-Qaida plot to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day 2009.
But the official said the United States left the monitoring of the Kouachi brothers and other French citizens in France to that country's security services.
One reason for the lapses may be that the number of possible jihadis inside France has continued to expand sharply. France has seen 1,000 to 2,000 of its citizens go to fight in Syria or Iraq, with about 200 returning, and the task of surveillance has grown overwhelming.
The questions facing French intelligence services will begin with the attack at Charlie Hebdo.
Authorities knew that striking the satirical newspaper and its editor, for their vulgar treatment of the Prophet Muhammad, had been a stated goal of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, through its propaganda journal, Inspire.
Intelligence officers also had identified the Kouachi brothers as being previously involved in jihad-related activities, for which Cherif was convicted in 2008. Investigators also have linked Cherif to a plot to free from prison an Islamic militant convicted for the 1995 bombing of a French subway station, while French news organizations have reported that Coulibaly was also implicated in that case.
Much still remains unclear about the three suspects and whether they were working in a coordinated fashion. But the French apparently knew, or presumably should have known, either on their own or through close intelligence cooperation with the United States, that Said had traveled in 2011 to Yemen.
News reports Friday said Said had met with the U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki, a member and propagandist for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, who was later killed by a U.S. drone strike.
Security officials and acquaintances said Kouachi's travels in Yemen stretched from 2009 until at least 2012.
Mohammed Al-Kibsi, a journalist, said he met Kouachi in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in January 2010. At the time, Al-Kibsi was working on an article about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas 2009, in a plot that that intelligence officials believed was guided by Awlaki.
While looking for Abdulmutallab's house, Al-Kibsi said he came across Said Kouachi playing soccer with a group of children. Kouachi told him that he and Abdulmutallab were friends: they had lived together for a week or two, a few months before the bombing attempt. They were both learning Arabic at the Sanaa Institute for Arabic Language, and both worshipped at the same local mosque, he said.
Kouachi was "so friendly" and spoke using a mix of English and French, Al-Kibsi said, adding that he saw Kouachi on at least two other occasions, at a different Arabic institute in Sanaa's old city.
It was not immediately clear whether Kouachi studied at Al-Iman University, an ultraconservative religious center with links to militants that Abdulmutallab attended.
Yemen has been a U.S. priority, not a French one, intelligence analysts said Friday, making it likely that the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly were put lower on the priority list, the analysts said.
Indeed, Coulibaly in July 2009 apparently met President Nicolas Sarkozy, according to the French newspaper, Le Parisien. At a media event to encourage youth employment, Coulibaly was scheduled to be among a group of nine people who had taken part in a work-training program and was now working at a Coca-Cola factory in the Parisian suburbs.
"It is a pleasure to meet the president," he told a journalist before the meeting. "I don't know what I'm going to say to him. I will start with, 'Good morning!'"
Authorities released pictures of Coulibaly and a companion, Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, though it was not clear what became of her and how deep her were links to the group.
On Friday, even as the Kouachi brothers were confronting the police several miles away, people in the Gennevilliers suburb where Cherif lived described a man who, by appearances, was a devout and solemn Muslim, if giving a few hints of extremism.
Mohammed Benali, president of the mosque in Gennevilliers, said Cherif Kouachi was an infrequent visitor who was polite, was shaven and wore jeans, and showed no signs of radicalization - "except for one incident."
During France's recent election, the imam consecrated a Friday prayer to the importance of voting, which prompted Kouachi to abruptly jump up in the prayer hall and begin arguing that it was un-Islamic to vote.
"Our security personnel escorted him outside," Benali said. "They tried to calm him down. They asked him to respect our mosque and our people."
Cherif Kouachi was a familiar figure among some neighborhood shopkeepers, who regarded him as a serious Muslim. The owner of a bakery said whenever Cherif came inside, his wife remained outside the glass door.
Inside the apartment building where Cherif lived on the fourth floor, he was described as polite, someone who helped women carry grocery bags up the stairwell during the frequent breakdowns of the elevator. Some neighbors said they saw his wife fully covered in a niqab, others said they assumed he lived alone.
"I always thought that he was single," said one 24-year-old woman, who like others asked not to be identified. "He was always alone. I saw him once with a friend."
For the French authorities, the basic questions are why they had not monitored the three men more aggressively and why the offices of Charlie Hebdo were not better protected.
"The problem we face is that even though there are not that many radicalized Muslims in France, there are enough of them to make it difficult to physically follow everyone with a suspicious background," said Camille Grand, a former French official and director of the independent Foundation for Strategic Research, a Paris group.
"It's one thing to listen to the phone calls or watch their travel, but it's another to put someone under permanent physical surveillance, or even follow all their phone conversations full time for so many people," she added.
Jean-Charles Brisard, head of the French Center for Analysis of Terrorism, praised the security response and said there were simply not enough police and security officers to keep full monitoring on everyone who goes through prison.
"It's a problem of resources," Brisard said. "To follow a person 24 hours a day you need at least 20 people. And you cannot impose surveillance on everyone, even legally it's impossible."
He added that the authorities had Cherif Kouachi under surveillance "for a period of time, but then they judged that there was no threat, or the threat was lower, and they had other priorities," he said.
"We are understaffed," complained an officer involved in the search of Cherif Kouachi's apartment in the Gennevilliers suburb. "We would need to triple our staff to better protect the city."
President Francois Hollande went on television Friday - before the two standoffs had ended - to try to reassure the nation, and visited the Interior Ministry to supervise the police action.
The attacks were likely to aggravate the problems of Hollande, already considered weak and indecisive. Moreover, serious internal questions are also likely, as they were after Mohammed Merah, who had been known to the police and intelligence services, killed seven people in southwestern France in 2012, saying that he was acting on behalf of al-Qaida.
It later emerged that Merah had traveled to Afghanistan, and that the Americans had alerted the French, who had not reacted with sufficient attention in what was considered an operational failure.
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a former anti-terrorism judge who knew Cherif Kouachi when he was arrested in 2005 and a former presidential adviser on terrorism, said the authorities could not monitor every person of interest. "You can't keep a policeman tracking every single one of them," he said, noting that he had interviewed hundreds of aspiring jihadis.
Some kind of strategic overhaul of counterterrorism efforts in France was now likely, he said, but it should not be rushed. "It will take time, we need to get it right," he said.
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