France Moves to Better Coordinate Its Antiterrorism Efforts French intelligence agencies to share information and resources By Matthew Dalton
http://www.wsj.com/articles/france-deepens-intelligence-agency-cooperation-after-terror-attacks-1452778265
PARIS—France on Thursday said it is moving to increase cooperation between its domestic and overseas intelligence services, pushing to break down bureaucratic barriers that have hindered its efforts to prevent terrorist attacks.
The government has been seeking to bolster its antiterrorism infrastructure since Islamist militants killed 130 people in Paris in November and another 17 a year ago. A weak point, security analysts say, is the lack of coordination across the multitude of French intelligence agencies, including the police, the country’s foreign intelligence service, its counterespionage agency and a military intelligence directorate.
The French government decided “to deepen coordination between interior and exterior intelligence services in France as well as overseas…particularly from transit zones and sanctuaries where terrorists gather who want to commit acts on our territory,” President François Hollande’s office said after the government’s weekly cabinet meeting.
France, like other Western governments, is scrambling to gather information on Islamic State’s attack planning in Syria, where hundreds of French citizens are still fighting in the ranks of the militant group. France ramped up that effort even before Islamic State operatives from France and Belgium slipped into Europe to sow carnage on the streets of Paris on Nov. 13.
That intelligence usually collected by France’s main external intelligence agency, the DGSE, or by its military intelligence agency. But the information sometimes isn’t shared with France’s main domestic intelligence service, the DGSI.
“Information collected overseas is not transmitted systematically and automatically to the DGSI,” says Jean-Charles Brisard, president of the Center for Analysis of Terrorism, a French think tank.
Related Coverage
- Charlie Hebdo Commemorative Issue Hits Raw Nerve in Anxious France (Jan. 4)
- Paris Terror Attacks Transform Debate Over Europe’s Migration Crisis (Nov. 16, 2015.)
- Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight (Nov. 27, 2015)
- Paris Attacks Reveal Tangles in Belgium’s Convoluted System of Government (Nov. 27, 2015)
An investigation conducted by the French legislature in the aftermath of the January 2015 attacks, which left 17 people dead, including 12 at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, called for better intelligence cooperation, in particular between the DGSI and the intelligence service of the French police. The report cites an example in which the local police stopped monitoring Said Kouachi, one of the two brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo, when he moved outside their area of jurisdiction in June 2014.
Western intelligence agencies have for years grappled with problem of sharing information, even within the same government. Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency was slow to warn the Federal Bureau of Investigation or other U.S. domestic authorities about the hijackers, including several who were known al Qaeda operatives. The men were granted U.S. travel visas under their own names.
After July 2005 bomb attacks in London, a panel of lawmakers recommended improved cooperation between police and intelligence agents at home and overseas. The government created regional counterterrorism hubs around the country to enable police and intelligence agents to work more closely together as well as increase their reach outside of London.
Thursday’s announcement in France places the interior minister at the head of the nation’s daily antiterrorism operations, drawing support from all the country’s intelligence services. It also calls for the different agencies to share resources.
Such changes may do little to address a fundamental problem that has vexed Western intelligence agencies: that they have little clarity into what terrorist operations Islamic State may be planning from Syria.
“The French services, like others, are today blind in the [Syrian] theater of operations,” Mr. Brisard told the French legislature before it issued its report. “We don’t cooperate, officially in any case, with the Syrian services.”
Comments are closed.
