Officials in France and Belgium are under pressure from frightened and angry citizens, who want to know how their security services let men they knew to be involved in extremism carry out Friday’s attacks in Paris.
At least three of nine people now known to have been involved in the Paris strikes had been identified by security services as potential threats.
Ismail Omar Mostefai, 29, involved in the Bataclan concert hall attack, had been listed in 2010 for reported radicalisation. He still managed to make it to Turkey, and probably Syria, in 2013.
Samy Amimour, a 28-year-old from Drancy, north of Paris, had been under official investigation since October 2012 and was the subject of an international arrest warrant since late 2013, when he too is believed to have gone to Syria.
Abdel-Hamid Abu Oud, the Belgian suspected mastermind of the attacks, has boasted publicly of entering and leaving the country to plot terrorist attacks. He was involved in a series of planned attacks there that were foiled by the police last January, but escaped to Syria at least six months ago, officials believe.
Sadly, these kinds of lapses are not new. Mohammed Merah, who killed seven people in 2012, was not just on the radar of local security services in his home town of Toulouse, but was actually interviewed on his return from a training camp in Pakistan just months before his shooting spree. An officer accepted his story of seeking a wife in the unstable south Asian state.
Other services have made similar errors. US authorities came across the trail of the 9/11 hijackers but failed to connect the clues. MI5 had come acrossMohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7/7 bombers, years before that strike. The service had been intermittently tracking Michael Adebowale and fellow Muslim convert Michael Adebolajo for years before they murdered Lee Rigby, a British soldier, in London in 2013. The older of the two Tsarnaev brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon that year was investigated by the FBI but deemed harmless.
One reason for these failures is the nature of Islamic militancy, particularly given the resources needed to watch a single individual. It takes dozens of officers to mount 24/7 surveillance of one person and hours to listen to phone calls or comb other communications data. Even the best resourced services therefore have to prioritise.
Security services have evolved various ways of doing this. Most grade the threat from an individual, focusing on those who are deemed high risk. Those not considered an imminent danger are barely monitored.
But extremists, like everyone else, do not behave predictably. Radicalisation is not a linear, uniform process. Someone considered peripheral and harmless can rapidly become more threatening. Likewise, someone who is seen as very dangerous can, for a variety of reasons, move to less threatening activities or even cease their involvement in extremism altogether.
Indeed, as Stephen Grey, an expert on espionage, points out, it is these former militants who are often the best sources for intelligence services.
“Of course there is a massive value in surveillance but... getting good human intelligence from within a radicalised community is absolutely key. Some of the best sources have been the people who were close in but who don’t like the way things are developing. Counter-terrorist campaigns have turned when people are prepared to literally shop their brother or husband,” said Grey, the author of the recently published book The New Spymasters.
In the case of Mohammed Merah, an apparent abandoning of jihadi activism may have been a deliberate ploy to throw the spooks off his track. Or it may have been genuine but temporary. The interest of Adebelajo, one of the killers of Rigby, in violent or even non-violent activism seems to have waxed and waned over the years.
If giving security officials greater powers of surveillance may help in some ways, it is far from a silver bullet, however. Agencies are already swamped by vast quantities of data. Human intelligence remains the most valuable tool – and human errors the biggest source of failures.
