roland
07-04-2005, 03:45 AM
washingtonpost.com
Help From France Key In Covert Operations
Paris's 'Alliance Base' Targets Terrorists
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 3, 2005; A01
PARIS -- When Christian Ganczarski, a German convert to Islam, boarded an Air France flight from Riyadh on June 3, 2003, he knew only that the Saudi government had put him under house arrest for an expired pilgrim visa and had given his family one-way tickets back to Germany, with a change of planes in Paris.
He had no idea that he was being secretly escorted by an undercover officer sitting behind him, or that a senior CIA officer was waiting at the end of the jetway as French authorities gently separated him from his family and swept Ganczarski into French custody, where he remains today on suspicion of associating with terrorists.
Ganczarski is among the most important European al Qaeda figures alive, according to U.S. and French law enforcement and intelligence officials. The operation that ensnared him was put together at a top secret center in Paris, code-named Alliance Base, that was set up by the CIA and French intelligence services in 2002, according to U.S. and European intelligence sources. Its existence has not been previously disclosed.
(...)
The top anti-terrorism magistrate, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, has said that in the past decade, he has ordered the arrests of more than 500 suspects, some with the help of U.S. authorities. "I have good connections with the CIA and FBI," Bruguiere said in a recent interview.
In France, which has a Muslim population reaching 8 percent -- the largest in Europe -- U.S. and French terrorism experts are desperate to take terrorist-group recruiters and new recruits off the streets, and have been willing to put their own anti-terrorism laws into the service of allies to lure suspects such as Ganczarski from abroad.
"Yes, without a doubt there are some cases where we participate that way," one senior French intelligence official said.
France sent its interrogators to Guantanamo Bay to gather evidence that could be used in French court against the French detainees the United States was holding there. France is the only one of six European nations that continues to imprison detainees returned to it from the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Bruguiere and other French intelligence officials like to note dryly that France first realized it had become a target of al Qaeda-style jihadists when a group of Algerian radicals hijacked an airliner with the intent of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower in 1994. They viewed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as another, if much larger, part of the jihadist campaign against Western civilization.
So it did not surprise many intelligence officers when, in the days after the attacks, President Jacques Chirac issued an edict to French intelligence services to share information about terrorism with the U.S. intelligence agencies "as if they were your own service," according to two officials who read it.
The steady, daily flow of encrypted messages increased. "We saw a quantitative and qualitative difference in the degree of detail in the information," said Alejandro Wolff, the second-in-charge at the U.S. Embassy here, whose portfolio includes fighting terrorism.
One CIA veteran with knowledge of the U.S.-French intelligence work estimates that the French have detained about 60 suspects since the end of 2001, some with the help of the CIA. "They do as much for us as the British and in some ways more -- if you ask them," said a recently retired senior intelligence official who worked closely with France and other European countries.
France was also an early and willing collaborator in other parts of the world, allowing the CIA to fly its top-secret, armed Predator drone, still controversial inside the Pentagon, from France's air base in the former French colony of Djibouti. Its mission was to kill al Qaeda figures on a classified CIA list of "high-value targets." On Nov. 3, 2002, CIA officers operating remote controls from the air base took their first shot, killing Abu Ali al-Harithi, the mastermind of the October 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole, and six others, including Ahmed Hijazi, a naturalized U.S. citizen, in a Yemeni desert.
The broader cooperation between the United States and France plays to the strengths of each side, according to current and former French and U.S. officials. The CIA brings money from its classified and ever-growing "foreign liaison" account -- it has paid to transport some of France's suspects from abroad into Paris for legal imprisonment -- and its global eavesdropping capabilities and worldwide intelligence service ties. France brings its harsh laws, surveillance of radical Muslim groups and their networks in Arab states, and its intelligence links to its former colonies.
"There's an easy exchange of information," said Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, director of France's domestic CIA, the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance, who declined to comment on specifics of the relationship. "The cooperation between my service and the American service is candid, loyal and certainly effective."
(...)
the full version there
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/02/AR2005070201361_pf.html
Help From France Key In Covert Operations
Paris's 'Alliance Base' Targets Terrorists
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 3, 2005; A01
PARIS -- When Christian Ganczarski, a German convert to Islam, boarded an Air France flight from Riyadh on June 3, 2003, he knew only that the Saudi government had put him under house arrest for an expired pilgrim visa and had given his family one-way tickets back to Germany, with a change of planes in Paris.
He had no idea that he was being secretly escorted by an undercover officer sitting behind him, or that a senior CIA officer was waiting at the end of the jetway as French authorities gently separated him from his family and swept Ganczarski into French custody, where he remains today on suspicion of associating with terrorists.
Ganczarski is among the most important European al Qaeda figures alive, according to U.S. and French law enforcement and intelligence officials. The operation that ensnared him was put together at a top secret center in Paris, code-named Alliance Base, that was set up by the CIA and French intelligence services in 2002, according to U.S. and European intelligence sources. Its existence has not been previously disclosed.
(...)
The top anti-terrorism magistrate, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, has said that in the past decade, he has ordered the arrests of more than 500 suspects, some with the help of U.S. authorities. "I have good connections with the CIA and FBI," Bruguiere said in a recent interview.
In France, which has a Muslim population reaching 8 percent -- the largest in Europe -- U.S. and French terrorism experts are desperate to take terrorist-group recruiters and new recruits off the streets, and have been willing to put their own anti-terrorism laws into the service of allies to lure suspects such as Ganczarski from abroad.
"Yes, without a doubt there are some cases where we participate that way," one senior French intelligence official said.
France sent its interrogators to Guantanamo Bay to gather evidence that could be used in French court against the French detainees the United States was holding there. France is the only one of six European nations that continues to imprison detainees returned to it from the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Bruguiere and other French intelligence officials like to note dryly that France first realized it had become a target of al Qaeda-style jihadists when a group of Algerian radicals hijacked an airliner with the intent of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower in 1994. They viewed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as another, if much larger, part of the jihadist campaign against Western civilization.
So it did not surprise many intelligence officers when, in the days after the attacks, President Jacques Chirac issued an edict to French intelligence services to share information about terrorism with the U.S. intelligence agencies "as if they were your own service," according to two officials who read it.
The steady, daily flow of encrypted messages increased. "We saw a quantitative and qualitative difference in the degree of detail in the information," said Alejandro Wolff, the second-in-charge at the U.S. Embassy here, whose portfolio includes fighting terrorism.
One CIA veteran with knowledge of the U.S.-French intelligence work estimates that the French have detained about 60 suspects since the end of 2001, some with the help of the CIA. "They do as much for us as the British and in some ways more -- if you ask them," said a recently retired senior intelligence official who worked closely with France and other European countries.
France was also an early and willing collaborator in other parts of the world, allowing the CIA to fly its top-secret, armed Predator drone, still controversial inside the Pentagon, from France's air base in the former French colony of Djibouti. Its mission was to kill al Qaeda figures on a classified CIA list of "high-value targets." On Nov. 3, 2002, CIA officers operating remote controls from the air base took their first shot, killing Abu Ali al-Harithi, the mastermind of the October 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole, and six others, including Ahmed Hijazi, a naturalized U.S. citizen, in a Yemeni desert.
The broader cooperation between the United States and France plays to the strengths of each side, according to current and former French and U.S. officials. The CIA brings money from its classified and ever-growing "foreign liaison" account -- it has paid to transport some of France's suspects from abroad into Paris for legal imprisonment -- and its global eavesdropping capabilities and worldwide intelligence service ties. France brings its harsh laws, surveillance of radical Muslim groups and their networks in Arab states, and its intelligence links to its former colonies.
"There's an easy exchange of information," said Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, director of France's domestic CIA, the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance, who declined to comment on specifics of the relationship. "The cooperation between my service and the American service is candid, loyal and certainly effective."
(...)
the full version there
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/02/AR2005070201361_pf.html