Frontline Europe: the intelligence war

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 itself 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 murdered 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 shake up in the French intelligence services.

Few were surprised when French Prime Minister Manuel Valls was loudly booed recently during a commemoration for the victims of the Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice that killed 84 people. The French people are rapidly running out of patience when it comes to security lapses.

Across much of Europe this too is rapidly becoming a summer of unease. On the French Riviera, holidaymakers are 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 nobody 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 on 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 - themselves deployed as part of an anti-terrorism operation - to lend 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 coordinate 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 traveling abroad that no Israeli, Greek, Turkish or American head of a security service was able to clearly designate their French counterpart,” Georges Fenech added.

While visiting the US, Fenech said 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.”

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,” Pietrasanta said bluntly.

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 coordination and information sharing was taken up by the European Counter Terrorism Group (CTG)

Formed in 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the United States the aim of the CTG is to further intelligence-sharing cooperation 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 who was the chair of 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 cooperation” and that “information about European foreign fighters is now available for all the services”.

What in effect was created, say 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 so called 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.

Set up between the EU member states, Norway and Switzerland, the ‘club’ was based on a voluntary exchange of secrets, experience and views as well as discussing problems and had no secretariat or decision-making powers.

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,” says 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.

This is a perennial problem in the EU, where security remains the task of individual states who are determined to maintain sovereignty.

“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 Dutch home affairs minister Ronald Plasterk, suggests.

Meanwhile as European intelligence services like those in France try to remodel and streamline themselves into a more effective force, the Islamic State (IS) itself is undergoing something of a transformation.

Under pressure on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq it is increasingly leaving it territorial caliphate ambitions behind and becoming more transnational in its operational capacity.

The jihadists are well aware that recent attacks especially in France and Germany will place tremendous strain on the political and social cohesion of both countries. 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.

Francois Hollande faces a real challenge to his political credibility while his far right critics call for a “French Guantanamo” or insist that 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 election next year will be very much on the radar of the Islamic State’s own terrorist 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 especially across the Sahel and North Africa.

Then there is the continued festering problem of radicalisation in places like Molenbeek in Brussels or the Paris banlieus.

European cell members of Islamist extremist groups have often known one another since childhood, have been in street gangs together, or have 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 the growing threat in the region’s midst.

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.

The two men, named as Nourredine H, and his brother Hamza were detained after house searches in the Mons region and the city of Liege.

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 George Fenech of the French committee investigating the systemic security failures during last year’s attacks in Paris summed it up: “Today we don’t measure up to those who are attacking us.”