The 'massive intelligence failure' that led to the Paris attacks

BY CHRISTOPHER MILLER

Western intelligence services — in particular France's counterterrorism system — are under serious scrutiny after reports that officials received warnings in advance of the Paris attacks that killed 129 people of 19 nationalities last Friday.

On Monday, President Obama announced a new intelligence-sharing arrangement with France to more quickly share military planning regarding the campaign against ISIS.

The United States and Britain have an intelligence-sharing program but France is not part of that and so it doesn't receive all intel gathered by American intelligence services.

Information that has come out in the wake of the attacks — the worst against France since World War II — shows that France and its allies bungled intelligence specific to the ISIS attack and assailants, some of whom had even been stopped by police and then released.

Some security analysts, though, argue the attacks were complex and well planned by skilled operatives who chose so-called "soft" civilian targets that are almost impossible to protect.

Still, the Paris attacks were a "massive intelligence failure," according to somesecurity analysts.

Take for instance the fact that senior Iraqi intelligence officials had warnedmembers of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS of imminent attacks by its members just last Thursday.

They sent a dispatch saying ISIS' leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had ordered an attack on coalition countries fighting against them in Iraq and Syria, as well as on Iran and Russia, through bombings or other attacks in the days ahead. But a senior French security official told the Associated Press that French intelligence gets this kind of communication "all the time" and "every day."

Before that, Turkish investigators had warned French officials twice about Omer Ismail Mostefai, one of eight gunmen identified in the Paris attacks. But Turkish officials never got a response from France.

While France had requested information from Turkey about four terror suspects in October 2014, it was Turkish authorities who identified Mostefai as a fifth person and warned France about him — twice: first in December 2014, and again in June 2015.

Then, in the wake of the attacks, Saleh Abdelslam, 26, the only suspect directly involved in them who did not die slipped by police in a getaway car, headed for France's border with Belgium, after dawn on Saturday.

French officials have admitted intelligence failures. But it is hard for many to understand how it happened, given that the country had been on high-alert since the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January.

As Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia, a researcher at Paris’s Center for Political Research, put it: "We knew for months, especially after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the question was not if but when we would have another terrorist attack."

Even CIA director John Brennan admitted on Monday that the deadly attacks "were not a surprise... we did have strategic warning."

But sometimes that isn't enough.

"It's very easy for terrorists to be successful," said Robert McFadden, private security consultant with expertise in terror groups, adding that terrorist attacks by their nature is about creating terror. "So there is a high degree of successm even if they don't fully pull it off."

However, he added, "for the good guys, you only have to make a mistake once, and not prevent an attack, and you've failed."

http://mashable.com/2015/11/16/western-intelligence-under-scrutiny-after-failure-to-stop-paris-attacks/#_u5d27EKu5qs