Intel failure

Frontline Europe: the intelligence war

A recently published French parliamentary report following a six-month probe into the handling of the terrorist attacks that took place on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at the Bataclan concert hall in November last year in Paris, cited considerable organisational dysfunction within the country’s intelligence agencies.

“We are not pointing a finger at men but at organisations,” insisted Georges Fenech, a centre-right MP who headed the probe.

In one example of a failing that happened during the Bataclan attack, Fenech said a special police unit that showed up first was insufficiently armed to take on the attackers. But when the arriving officers asked a group of soldiers - themselves deployed as part of an anti-terrorism operation - to lend their assault rifles so they could attempt a raid, the soldiers refused. They were under orders not to fire their weapons and had heard no updates.