In an interview published in Paris Match magazine on September 30th, French investigating magistrate Marc Trévidic, specialised over a period of ten years in investigations into terrorist crimes, warned: “I have acquired the certitude that the men of [Islamic State] have the intention and the means of hitting us very much harder by organizing large-scale actions, incomparable to those carried out until now. I say this as a technician: the darkest days are before us.”
Since the creation in 2008 of France’s reorganised domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI, and even more since the March 2012 killing spree of Mohamed Merah in Toulouse, the interior ministry has produced multiple different reforms to deal with terrorist attacks and the departure to Syria and Iraq of French jihadists.
There have been four anti-terrorism-related laws passed in the last four years. The decree detailing the application of the most recent of these, the law adopted in July which hands extensive new monitoring powers to the intelligence services, was finalised only last month, while more reforms are in the pipeline.
In response to the foiled terrorist attack on the Thalys Amsterdam-Paris express train on August 21st, French parliament’s lower house, the National Assembly, was due to begin studying this Monday November 17th a new bill of law that widens the powers of public transport employees and transport police to search passengers. Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve recently presented a new initiative for a crackdown on networks supplying weapons to the underworld and terrorists. Meanwhile, a new law to remove many of the current restrictions on police officers for opening fire on armed individuals is planned to be put before parliament next year.
But despite all the announced measures and means to combat terrorism, a number of high-ranking police officers and magistrates involved in anti-terrorist judicial investigations have complained in media interviews that they are overwhelmed in face of an unprecedented terrorist threat. Last month, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced that “more than” 520 young French citizens or foreign nationals resident in France, had left for Iraq and Syria, where it was established that 137 had been killed. “Nearly 250 have now already returned to France, while 700 others [in France] have expressed intention of leaving for the [Iraq and Syria] zone,” said Cazeneuve. “In a broad manner, almost 1,800 formally-identified French citizens or permanent residents [in France] are implicated in one way or another in Iraqi and Syrian networks.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The threat of terrorist campaigns in Europe by jihadists returning from the Middle East was first demonstrated with the attack on the Brussels Jewish Museum of Belgium on May 24th 2014, which left four people dead. The main suspect, 29-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche, who has joint French-Algerian nationality, was arrested by accident during a random search by customs officers at the St Charles railway station in Marseille the following day. Before the attack in Brussels, Nemmouche had been categorised as a militant Islamist by the French domestic intelligence agency who created what it calls an ‘S’ file ( for ‘security’) in his name after his return from Syria where he is believed to have joined the Islamic State group.
Similarly, the three terrorists who murdered 17 people in the coordinated shootings in Paris in January, Amedy Coulibaly and brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, were also known to the intelligence services for their Islamist activity. The Kouachi brothers were placed under surveillance, including phone taps, by the French domestic intelligence services between 2013 and 2014 but which was halted last summer after it apparently failed to uncover evidence that they were involved in terrorist activity. Amedy Coulibaly, who killed five people during the Paris terror attacks, fell completely off the radar of anti-terrorist services after his release in March 2014 from prison where he had been serving time for his involvement in a plot to free a convicted terrorist from jail. Yet the three were far from acting as lone wolves; their separate attacks were coordinated, and in the case of Coulibaly, it has since been revealed that he was communicating with someone who appears to have been commanding his actions.
The failings of the intelligence services had already been underlined in the case of Mohamed Merah in Toulouse in 2012. Six months before he began his killings in Toulouse and nearby Montauban which left seven dead, the then-domestic intelligence service, the DCRI (now renamed as the DGSI) had ceased its surveillance of him, and despite the misgivings of local DCRI officers.
'They're forced to make choices, establish priorities'
The 2008 reform of that created the single domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI, out of two existing ones, appears to have created an organisation that was fraught by internal divisions, by the malfunctioning of its regional network, and isolated behind a blanket of secrecy. “The DCRI was conceived like a fortress with which to fight major organised and trans-national terrorism,” said one expert witness insider, whose identity was withheld, in testimony before a French parliamentary commission enquiry in 2012 – prompted by the Mehra affair – into the management of terrorist investigations by the intelligence services.
But with the attacks in Paris in January and now in November, and despite yet another reform of domestic intelligence, which saw the DCRI renamed as the DGSI in 2014, France’s anti-terrorist services, which have gradually built up over 30 years since the 1986 attacks in Paris, appear largely overwhelmed by the task facing them.
France introduced a law on July 24th 2015 that gives sweeping new powers of surveillance to the intelligence services (and which even prompted a UN rights committee to warn they were “excessively broad”). It allows for the use of highly-intrusive technology that can be used to monitor individuals without prior recourse for judicial permission. Meanwhile, the principal domestic intelligence service, re-organised and renamed as the DGSI in May 2014, has been promised an extra 432 staff over the next four years on top of the 3,113 payroll it had last year. Half of the new recruits have already been hired. On top of this, the DGSI is to be given a staggered increase, between now and 2019, of an extra 12 million euros on top of its annual budget set at 34 million euros in 2014.
Meanwhile, a catalogue of new anti-terrorist measures announced by Prime Minister Manuel Valls in January this year included the creation over three years of 1,400 extra police and gendarmerie posts, of which 1,100 will be assigned to the different domestic intelligence services), and an extra 950 posts in the judicial services.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
“In all, up until today 94% of the recruitment planned for the 2015 stage of the anti-terrorist plan has been reached,” said interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, speaking before parliemant on October 29th. “That will allow our services, which were struggling, to dispose of supplementary manpower resources with which to face the terrorist threat.”
“Unfortunately, numerous services have been trimmed down, not to mention reduced to almost zero in some areas,” added Cazeneuve, referring to the reduction in police numbers made during the 2007-2012 government under then-president Nicolas Sarkozy.
As for preventive administrative measures, France’s socialist government can hardly be seen as lax. Since becoming interior minister in April 2014, Cazeneuve has signed six orders for the revocation of French citizenship against individuals convicted of terrorist crimes. That compares with none ever having been applied during the five years of the previous conservative government. Since the beginning of this year, 25 foreign nationals considered to be linked to jihadist movements have been deported from France. Meanwhile, 165 French nationals have been given preventive bans on leaving the country, while 74 minors are the subject of orders banning travel outside France which were voluntarily signed by their parents.
Since the January Paris attacks, the government has released details about five separate terrorist plots that were prevented before they could be enacted. Most of them involved individuals who were known by the authorities as representing a potential threat, like some 4,000 others which the interior ministry claims are identified as radical Islamists and terrorists (whether separately or not). The problem is how to permanently reevaluate the real danger they represent, made all the more haphazard by the evident poor communication between the DGSI and the regional intelligence services, the SCRT. For example, in the case of Yassin Salhi, who in June beheaded his employer before attempting in vain to blow up a chemicals plant near Lyon, an eastern regional office of the SCRT had, on several occasions reported on his closeness to Salafists linked to French radical Islamist group Forsane Alizza, and involvement in weekly meetings of Islamists. But the DGSI did not consider the reports justified the reactivation of Salhi’s categorisation as a notable security risk, his previous ‘S’ file having been deactivated in 2008.
We are no longer able to anticipate attacks as we could in the past,” said Judge Trévedic in his interview with Paris-Match. “Of course, we arrest people, we dismantle cells, and we have luck as well, as we’ve seen with recent affairs. But luck or the fact that terrorists get things wrong in operational mode, or that citizens display great bravery, cannot last forever.”
Following the January attacks in Paris, one of Trévedic’s colleagues, anti-terrorist investigating magistrate Gilbert Thiel, told Mediapart: “Our problem is that we’ve gone from 100 guys [who needed] to be monitored in 1995, to 1,000 today. You need between 12 and 20 agents to watch over a guy 24 hours a day, from taps to shadowing. Afterwards you discover his entourage, who need to be watched too, and you reach saturation.”
“It must be understood that you can’t hire and train 12,000 more cops for the [domestic intelligence services]. So they are forced to make choices, to establish priorities. They watch closely those who are in danger of taking action, and the most often they do a remarkable job.”
'Our anti-terrorist apparatus is no longer effective'
In a response to the problem, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve created in July this year the Operational Chief of Staff for the Prevention of terrorism (EMOPT). The EMOPT is in charge of coordinating between different security and intelligence services to avoid dangerous individuals slipping through the surveillance net. “It is tasked with piloting the whole of the apparatus of detection and monitoring of radicalised individuals who are susceptible to committing a terrorist act,” said Cazeneuve before parliament on Octover 29th.
But French weekly magazine Marianne quotes un unnamed senior civil servant who claimed that Cazeneuve’s EMOPT had “created enormous confusion”, and that it had essentially served to build “an excel chart identifying all the people targeted by the anti-terrorist services”. The interior ministry retorted that the Marianne report was “poorly informed”.
The justice system is also being tested to the limit of its possibilities. The anti-terrorist section of the Paris public prosecutor’s office, which was created immediately after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 1986, is recognised as a competent and experienced body but, like the intelligence and police services, it is overwhelmed (despite being allocated more staff by justice minister Christiane Taubira following the January 2015 attacks in Paris).
In a meeting with journalists on June 23rd, the senior public prosecutor for the Paris appeals court, François Falletti, said the number of judicial investigations into terrorist-related crimes had jumped from 9 in 2012 to 52 by the middle of this year.
“To this day, 157 judicial investigations are ongoing into activities linked to terrorism concerning almost 900 people,” revealed interior minister Cazeneuve last month, adding that 140 of suspects had been placed in preventive detention.
“The threat is at a maximum level, never reached before now,” warned Judge Marc Trévedic in the interview with Paris-Match in September. It coincided with his appointment to the court of Lille after serving for ten years in the anti-terrorist investigation section of the judiciary. By law, no magistrate can serve more than ten years in the same post. “Firstly, we have become for Islamic State [IS] the Number One enemy,” Trévedic continued. “France is the principal target of an army of terrorists with unlimited means. Next, it’s clear that we are particularly vulnerable because of our geographical position, the ease for entering our territory by every jihadist of European origin, French or otherwise, and by the fact of the intention of hitting us clearly and endlessly stated by the men of IS. And then, it must be said, in face of the size of the terrorist threat and the diversity of forms it can take, our anti-terrorist apparatus has become permeable, fallible, and no longer has the effectiveness it had before.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse