SurveillanceKouachi intelligence failure: The struggle to balance security, privacy, budgetary concerns
About seven months before the attacks on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, French domestic intelligence agency monitored Saïd Kouachi for at least two years, and his younger brother Chérif Kouachi for at least a year. The surveillance of both brothers had led nowhere, and was later considered a non-priority for intelligence officials. The Kouachi brothers did not appear to be an imminent threat, and it would have taken twenty-five agents to monitor the two brothers around the clock. Experts say that the failures and missteps by French law enforcement in the Kouachi case should be a lesson to other Western governments which may have relaxed surveillance practices targeted at would-be terrorists in order to comply with budget cuts or out of genuine concern for civil liberties.
About seven months before the attacks on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, French domestic intelligence agency Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI, formerly the DCRI) monitored Saïd Kouachi for at least two years, and his younger brother Chérif Kouachi for at least a year. The surveillance of both brothers had led nowhere, and was later considered a non-priority for intelligence officials.
Patrick Calwar, head of DGSI, said the decision to turn over surveillance of Saïd Kouachi to local law enforcement in early 2014 was made so his office could focus resources on a new wave of jihadist fighters who had traveled to Syria and could return to France to launch attacks. Prime minister Manuel Valls was also under pressure to focus resources on potential threats posed by returning Syrian-war fighters, since the previous month saw an attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels by Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman who had fought in Syria.
TheNew York Times reports that current and former French intelligence officials say the Kouachi brothers did not appear to be an imminent threat, adding that it would have taken twenty-five agents to monitor the two brothers around the clock. “You can’t follow everyone,” said Bernard Squarcini, who headed the D.C.R.I and oversaw the surveillance efforts on the Kouachi brothers after receiving a tip-off from the United States in 2011. “These were two inactive targets that had been quiet for a long time. They were giving nothing away,” he said.
One former senior U.S. counterterrorism official disagrees with Squarcini, saying, “Even if you give France a bit of a break, given what we know, and what the French knew then, these guys should have been high on any list. Especially since they seemed to have all the warning signs: travel to the region, a prison record, a social media profile. What more did they need?”
Early in the Kouachi case, French intelligence agencies had failed to recognize the extent of Chérif Kouachi’s connection and relationship with other jihadists. In 2011 Yemeni officials informed U.S. authorities that a Frenchman they believed to be Saïd Kouachi, visited the country. The United States passed the intelligence on to French authorities at the time, but it was only after the Charlie Hebdo shootings that counterterrorism officials learned that it was Chérif Kouachi who had traveled to Yemen, on his brother’s passport. It was also only after Chérif Kouachi spoke with a television station right before his death, that authorities learned that while in Yemen, he had met with radical American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. It is likely that while in Yemen, Chérif Kouachi also met with Peter Cherif, a French jihadist who had links to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former al-Qaeda leader in Iraq.
The Times also notes that French authorities failed to update their surveillance methods as their targets grew more sophisticated. Surveillance of Chérif Kouachi was limited mostly to phone conversations, but seeing that Chérif Kouachi was previously arrested based on intercepted phone conversations, he must have been aware of the likelihood that authorities had tapped his phone again, making it unlikely that he would discuss a planned attack via phone. “The phone tapping yielded nothing,” Marc Trévidic, the chief terrorism investigator for the French judicial system, said in an interview. “If we had continued, I’m convinced it wouldn’t have changed anything. No one talks on the phone anymore.”
The decision to scale back surveillance of the Kouachi brothers is one of the many failures and missteps of French intelligence and law enforcement – failures and missteps recognized in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Experts say this should be a lesson to other Western governments which may have relaxed surveillance practices targeted at would-be terrorists in order to comply with budget cuts or out of genuine concern for civil liberties. “The prevalence of such substantial terror-related activities in the not too distant past of these terrorists is quite concerning, particularly given the degree to which they appear to have been overlooked or under-watched,” said Jacob Kennedy, an intelligence analyst at AIG’s AIG Global Security Operations Center.
