12.26.03

Attack of the Flying Weasels

Foiled terrorist plot or major freak-out? The American and French press have been abuzz with the story of three Paris-Los Angeles Air France flights cancelled because of hijacking fears.

On the American side, the story got play in the Washington Post and several Reuters pieces, but most of the details seem confined to the French press.

Le Figaro describes the initial events that led to the grounding:

Suspicion resting on Air France flights appeared at the start of the week, when American intelligence services intercepted a "chat" (dialogue over the Internet) between presumed islamists. There was an allusion made to the possible hijacking of an Air France flight around Christmas, and the flight number was given: AF068 between Paris and Los Angeles.

And from a companion article:

"In examining the manifest of AF068 for December 24, the American police were able to identify a half-dozen "suspected" names. The first of these strongly resembled that of a pilot with connections to islamist networks, and the five others were similar to names of presumed members of al-Qaeda included on the FBI's list of wanted persons."

A small bit of contextual salt - as Bruce Schneier has pointed out in an earlier critique, the FBI's terrorist watch list includes 13 million names. And as anyone who tried to do a Google search on Muammar Gadaffi knows, Arabic names can transliterate into a forest of variants. So it is unclear just how many passengers on a given flight would fall into the "suspected" category, even if you assume terrorists will be sporting enough not use an alias. To be honest, the cynic within me fears the FBI just applies a Perl script:

foreach $name ( @manifest ) {

	if ($name =~ /^(al-|ibn|bin)/ ) { 

		 send_to_guantanamo();

	 }

}

But I digress...

Le Monde covers the flurry of events following the initial intercept:

"In Paris, the precautionary principle and the desire to not envenom Franco-American relations outweighted the doubts of French intelligence services about the reality of the threat. Especially because the most senior American officials took pains to confirm the fears of their intelligence services.

The first phone call between Washington and Paris dates from Sunday night, December 21. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, called his French counterpart, Dominique de Villepin, to advise him of the growing uneasiness of the American intelligence agencies. Later that night, these agencies sent supplementary material backing up their apprehensions. These materials came from "technical intercepts", although it is not clear yet - not even at the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST) - whether this means an Internet discussion forum, an intercepted letter, or telephone surveillance. [...]

On the afternoon of Monday, December 22, an interministerial meeting was held at Matignon [the Prime Minister's palace] chaired by the head of [Prime Minister] Raffarin's cabinet, Michel Boyon. At the conclusion of this meeting, it was decided to increase security inspections. At the same time, the Minister of Transportation, Gilles de Robien, was receiving a phone call from his American counterpart, who strongly suggested that armed police be placed on all at-risk flights on the routes Paris-Los Angeles, Paris-Papeete with a stopover at Los Angeles, and Paris-Newark.

SUSPECT PASSENGERS

That night, it was American Ambassador Howard Leach's turn to present the same request to Nicolas Sarkozy. Towards 9 PM, the government decided to have multiple soldiers from the national gendarmerie intervention group (GIGN) on board the Tuesday flights to Newark and Los Angeles [dressed in plainclothes - M].

On Wednesday, December 24, the mobilization took a more dramatic note when the American ambassador visited the Minister of the Interior. After being received by Claude Guant, Mr. Sarkozy's chief of staff, Howard Leach explained that the degree of the terrorist threat, as estimated by American intelligence services, was so high that he strongly suggested that the French government cancel all of the at-risk flights.

Incidentally, some press reports suggest that the intended target of these planes was Las Vegas. This doesn't appear to come from raw intelligence data (at least any that got leaked), but from an analysis of the CDG->LAX flight path. Las Vegas and Los Angeles are the only cities on that route that prospective hijackers could attack without veering substantially off their flight plan. Assuming that hijackers would want to have as much fuel and airspeed going for them as possible, and considering that Las Vegas is likely to be high on the Wahhabi shit list, our boys in blue drew the obvious conclusion (but they didn't share it).

The decision to cancel the flights was taken before the departure of the 1:35 PM flight. Border patrol agents, members of the DST and the Parisian criminal service were asked to question passengers considered suspects by the American authorities on this flight, as well as on the 7 PM flight. Having obtained access to the reservation lists, the Americans had compiled a list of some dozen "suspects" on the two flights headed to Los Angeles. The police searched the baggage, checked all specialized databases, interrogated passengers as to their point of origin and the reasons for their trip to the United States. No suspect profiles were found, and no passengers were detained.

One of the names provided by the Americans was that of a Tunisian, expected on the 1:35 PM flight. He was making a trip from Tunis to Los Angeles, with a transfer at Paris. His frequent trips to the United States and especially his pilot's license had attracted suspicion. But he was not present at check-in in Tunis. After making further inquiries, in collaboration with Tunisian authorities, no compromising factors were found. The man is unknown to anti-terrorism agencies and is not included on any list of islamist activists.

As if additional proof of the paucity of credit accorded to American fears by the French authorities were necessary, due to the absence of material evidence, the anti-terrorist section of the Parisian police did not deem it necessary to open a preliminary investigation. The decision to cancel flights was made based on other factors. "We were mindful of the quality of their intelligence services, and of the active engagement of Washington with this issue", explained a source at the Ministry of the Interior. "The United States is still experiencing the trauma of September 11, something that in France one often forgets to take into consideration." [...]

Some observations:

First, hindsight changes everything. If these flights had not been stopped, and had in fact been hijacked, the failure to act on the intelligence in hand would rightly be seen as inexcusable.

Second, as a plain old citizen, I have no way to second-guess this kind of decision. We're in the same position as a poker player who can't see the hole cards - depending on what else the American spooks are holding, this could be a dumb mistake or a genuine near-miss. The press accounts are an epistemological hall of mirrors.

Third, as a plain old citizen without the information I need to evaluate the decisions of my government's intelligence services, I need to have a certain degree of trust in those services' ability to gather information, analyze it, and act on it with celerity, competence, and without political interference.

This has become a bit of a tall order. In the past few years, we've seen our intelligence services demonstrate both serial incompetence (9/11, anthrax, Indian and Pakistani nukes, the hunt for Bin Laden) and a disturbing lack of resistance to political pressure. And this pressure has become intense, as the top levels of our government have not hesitated to cherry-pick whatever intelligence best fits their ideological agenda. In the process, they have shown themselves quite willing to politicize the so-called War on Terror. This tendency does not seem likely to diminish in an election year.

So on the one hand, we have an intelligence community that is bumbling and somewhat less than trustworthy. On the other hand, there is a bona-fide terrorist organization that really is trying to kill us. What's a poor citizen to believe?

Inevitably in this kind of conflict there are going to be false positives. The cost of getting it wrong is so catastrophic that it means we have to put up with a fair number of false alarms. All the more so when you factor in the intense 'cover your ass' pressure at the intelligence agencies. That 13 million name terrorist watch list says it all.

But false alarms come at a price. The exercise at Roissy, for example, does not bear much repeating. It involved cancelling six international flights on short notice (the three outbound, plus three return flights), lodging eight hundred passengers at Air France expense, buying space for them on other outbound flights, and issuing an unspecified number of passenger refunds. These are, of course, minor inconveniences compared to having a Celine Dion audience destroyed by a plummeting 747, but the cost is there.

There's also a goodwill cost to consider. That the French authorities complied so completely with the American request demonstrates the considerable amount of goodwill remaining in France towards the United States, even after the acrimony over Iraq. Here I'm not only talking about shutting down international flights when the US asks for it - after all, the Americans could have kept the aircraft out by more unilateral means. I mean the the kind of low-level cooperation between intelligence agencies that maximizes both countries' ability to fight terrorism. When goodwill is high, there is trust, shared information, and a willingness to go the extra mile for the other party. When goodwill runs out, there is sniping, recrimination, and stonewalling.

People in this country sometimes forget (or are not often reminded) that France is second only to Israel in its extensive experience fighting against islamist terrorism. As Le Figaro rightly puts it,

French intelligence services offer their American counterparts information, but also their experience in the fight against Islamist terrorism, undertaken by Paris in the 1980's at a time when Washington was still flirting with jihadi networks in order to use them against communism.

The French know what it means to be the targets of islamist terrorism, and in the past twenty years have gained much valuable expertise in how to fight it. There are whole sections of the world (notably North Africa) where French intelligence is the best available.

Given this context, it has been particularly galling to watch the United States go out of its way to alienate France in punishment for its opposition to the Iraq war. Consider the remarks of Tom De Lay in March of this year:

"I don't think we have to retaliate against France [for their opposition to the Iraq war]," De Lay said. "They have isolated themselves. They have resigned from any responsibility for the war on terror."

Well, obviously they haven't. They're still searching planes for phantom terrorists for us.

And by alienating allies who don't agree with our policies, we end up shooting ourselves in the foot. The Le Monde article pointedly ends with one example of how the rift between Europe and the US is becoming harmful:

At present, the American secret services have complete access to the passenger files of European airlines. Names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers, meal preferences, medical information, car rental data, persons accompanying passengers during previous trips, etc. are all known to the American authorities. On March 5, 2003, a provisional agreement, signed by the European Commission, but described as "an attack on privacy" by the National Commision on Freedom and Electronic Data [Commision nationale de l'informatique et des liberts] required airlines to provide their passenger data. Companies who do not comply risk being fined $6,000 per passenger and losing their landing rights. A new agreement - which is still awaiting approval by the European Parliament - was concluded in December. It sets a limit of 35 pieces of disclosable personal information per passenger, excluding (for example) a passenger's criminal record. But it will not be possible to put these electronic data filters in place until sometime in 2004.

European citizens see a vindictive foreign policy and draw their own conclusions about American good faith. Suddenly the tradeoff between privacy and the desire to help an ally starts to look less appealing. Over time, this means less information being shared between American and European intelligence agencies, and more opportunities for disaster.

Pretending that Europe has 'resigned from any responsibility in the fight against terrorism' is just reckless. Our government has decided to make the "War on Terror" a kind of giant tent, big enough to slide any policy under. And it has decided to ostracize France because that country won't pretend the Iraq adventure is relevant to bringing the organizers of September 11 to justice.

It's worth remembering that those same organizers are still alive, still active, and very much interested in repeating their earlier success. And as the Roissy incident demonstrates, we need all the help we can get to fight them.

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