Intel failure

Could the Carnage in Nice Reshape France’s Spy Agencies?

Earlier this month, a French parliamentary report delivered a sobering assessment of the country’s intelligence agencies: They had failed to collect or analyze information that could have helped prevent the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the coordinated bombings that struck Paris in November.

That report called for a major overhaul of the country’s six intelligence agencies, and with dozens dead from a terror attack on a seaside boulevard in Nice, France is once more asking how authorities who have been handed wide-ranging powers in the aftermath of last year’s attacks failed to prevent yet another massacre.

On Thursday, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old French national of Tunisian descent, plowed a 19-ton truck through a crowd in Nice gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks, killing 84 and injuring more than 200 others, including 52 with critical wounds. The dead included at least two Americans and 10 children.