New security and surveillance measures brought in after the Charlie Hebdo attack have yet to make a significant impact

France’s intelligence services are facing intense scrutiny over whether they could have prevented the Paris attacks, but their defenders argue the scale and complexity of the jihadi threat has simply overwhelmed the country’s defences.

According to Yves Trotignon, a former counter-terrorism official in the French external service, DGSE, the security services had long feared such an event. They used the terrorist assault on Mumbai in November 2008 as their model, an invasion of a crowded public building by gunmen determined to kill as many people as possible in a short time.

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Being prepared for such an attack scarcely makes it any easier to stop, however, given the vast number of potential targets.



“It is extremely difficult to defend against such an attack once it has begun to be executed,” Trotignon said. “We have seen that not only in Mumbai, but also in Nairobi and Peshawar.”

“It is hard to qualify yesterday evening’s events as a success for the intelligence agencies,” said Trotignon, now an adviser at Risk & Co, an engineering and risk assessment consultancy. “But until we know more about the organisation of the attack and its authors it’s impossible to blame this or that service.”



The Paris atrocity comes after a security services thwarted a series of attempted attacks by Islamic militants in France in recent months. They successfully uncovered at least six plots, but many senior French officials appear to have been deeply worried by the accelerating tempo of operations in their country and the growing involvement of French citizens in violent activities at home and abroad.

“We have now become the Islamic State’s enemy number one,” Marc Trevidic, France’s outgoing examining magistrate in counter-terrorism cases, said shortly before the Paris attacks. “France is the principal target for an army of terrorists of unlimited means. Furthermore it’s also clear that we are particularly vulnerable because of our geographical position, for the ease of entrance on to our territory for jihadists of European origin.”

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Trevidic told Paris Match: “Our darkest days are ahead of us. The real war that Isis intends to wage on our soil has not yet begun.”



The French president, François Hollande, speaking after the attempted shooting by a gunmen on a Thalys train to Brussels in August, said the nation needed to prepare itself for further terrorist strikes.

Since the shootings at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January – France’s worst terrorist attack for decades – a range of measures have been brought in to reinforce the security services. French counter-terrorism units have been reorganised with a new joint headquarters under the minister of the interior and new powers of surveillance. The measures, however, have yet to make any significant impact. About 2,000 new posts created are still in the process of being filled.



The reinforcements are primarily aimed at allowing intelligence services to watch more individuals suspected of involvement in extremist activities, an acknowledgement that they were previously under-resourced. Surveillance on key figures involved in the Charlie Hebdo attacks ended shortly before they appear to have started planning their attacks, and redirected towards suspects involved with networks linked to Syria and Iraq. More than 1,500 French citizens are believed to have travelled to one of the two countries, and about 250 returned. A database of suspect individuals has more than 11,000 names on it. Le Monde described services as overrun by the demands placed upon them.

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The new counter-terrorism measures in June were intended to increase surveillance capacity, but Trotignon questions the effectiveness of doing so without an organisational overhaul of the intelligence services so that the flow of information can be properly assessed and real threats identified. The perpetrators of several recent attacks in Europe have been known to the intelligence services, he said, but that had not enabled them to stop them.



The possibility that plots uncovered by security services in recent months may included at least one targeting concert halls will increase pressure on officials to explain how they failed to stop the latest attacks.

A man suspected of planning an attack on an entertainment venue was arrested in Paris in August. He had spent only six days in Syria before being wounded in the leg during fighting, L’Express Magazine reported.

A commander from Islamic State in the city of Raqqa had told him to conduct attacks in Europe, not only in France, and had indicated concert halls as possible targets, police sources said at the time.



One reason for the absence of attacks in France in the decade after 9/11was the efficacy of intelligence services that had been quicker than their counterparts elsewhere in developing an understanding of the real nature of the threat posed by Islamic militancy. The experience of the 1990s, and the nature of French policing more generally, also meant the country’s security services already had legal powers of arrest and detention that were far greater than those of their counterparts in other European countries.



A further reason for the lack of violence in France was the success of its political class in distancing the country from the US-led war on terror and its almost universal opposition to the war in Iraq.



Those defensive advantages, however, have now evaporated. “We can’t close our eyes to it,” Trevidic said. “We are now in the eye of the hurricane. The worst is yet to come.”

