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Here in the United States the Paris terrorist attacks have led to demands for greater freedom of action for the military and intelligence services to monitor the public. And much bigger budgets. But when was the last time that an intelligence agency really anticipated and foiled a terrorist attack? And I am not talking about the FBI inserting an informant into a group of 16 year old internet wannabes before providing them with a gun or bomb that doesn’t work and making a “terrorism” arrest on the following day. Well, I for one can’t think of a single verifiable incident that actually demonstrated the value of good intelligence work, though senior government officials frequently take the podium and claim that “many plots” have been disrupted. In the U.S. initial claims that the government’s illegal NSA spying programs were invaluable because they preempted 54 terrorist conspiracies were, when challenged, determined to be fraudulent.

In Paris last week, French government spokesmen claimed that six terrorist plots had been recently disrupted but provided no details while on Wednesday night a raid on an apartment in response to what appears to have been a tip from the Moroccan government took place. Three suspects were killed and eight arrested in what was described, though without presenting any evidence, as thwarting a bombing in the city’s financial district. France’s intelligence services had already fallen on their swords, taking the blame for failing to anticipate the multiple attacks that rocked the city on November 13th, exonerating President Francois Hollande and his administration, so a victory over terror was convenient.

Unfortunately in this age of systematic disinformation it has become hard to truly believe government officials when they are claiming either successes or failures. They spin tales so effortlessly that it sometimes makes one wonder what they have been drinking. A first impulse is to ask them to show the evidence, but when challenged they inevitably fall back on the “it’s secret and I can’t tell you” end-of-argument.

There are a lot of good reasons why dismantling of terrorist plots happens in movies but doesn’t happen in the real world.

Actually, there are a lot of good reasons why dismantling of terrorist plots happens in movies but doesn’t happen in the real world. In the recent attacks in Paris the intelligence failure did not consist of inability to collect information relating to the terrorists. The French have what are likely the best and most aggressive intelligence and police services currently operating in Europe, possessing huge data bases relating to potential trouble makers. The failure came about due to the inability to incorporate information coming from the Belgians and Turks that would have identified some of the plotters combined with bureaucratic obstacles that inhibited attempts to put all the fragments of information together in such a way as to reveal what was going to happen. That is the job of an intelligence analyst working together with case managers who have both the experience and instincts required to draw conclusions from bits and pieces of information that do not necessarily appear to be connected. It is an art rather than a science and inevitably a task that leads to more frustration and failure than it does to success.

9/11 is also frequently cited as an intelligence failure in that all the information that was needed to disrupt the plot was in government hands. But those who reviewed some of the evidence never saw all of it because rivalry among various security services meant that everything was not shared and no one was able to connect the dots. That is possibly what happened in Paris, where some of the perpetrators were well known to the French security services but were not regarded as active threats. By one estimate there are at least 10,000 French citizens and legal residents who are on the terrorist suspect list and the security services can only actively surveil and monitor a small percentage of them at any given time. Which means that someone has to make a decision regarding who is dangerous and who is not, admittedly a difficult call that always looks bad in hindsight after a bomb goes off.

And part of the problem is that only stupid terrorists are even likely to become known to the authorities. If there were a college course in Terror 101 the three Terrorist Commandments would be never to talk on a cell phone, never visit a militant site on the internet and never use your true name on any document that just might wind up being registered somewhere. The reality is that most militants become part of the government data base when they go online or try to communicate and after that point they can be electronically followed whenever they surface.

The smart terrorist is a different breed of cat, with a lifestyle dedicated to staying unnoticed. He will inevitably have the edge over the police because he is able to act when he judges the time is right while the security forces can only react. The smart terrorist will know how to avoid coming to anyone’s attention while at the same time using multiple identities that cannot themselves be checked. In September a van was stopped and searched in Bulgaria. Ten thousand fake Syrian passports were discovered, bound for Germany where they would be sold to asylum seekers at $1,500 each. The passports were fabricated in Turkey using Syrian originals and were very close to the actual government issued ones in quality. So how does one determine if a Syrian passport being presented by a refugee is authentic? The answer is “you probably can’t” as Syria is a war zone where much of the civil administration has vanished. And the man in Paris carrying a Syrian passport stamped by Greek authorities upon arrival on the Island of Lesbos? Who is he really?

And once someone is invisible to the system there are all kinds of possibilities. The cancellation of the football match in Hannover last Tuesday over what was viewed as a “genuine” threat suggests that the whip is firmly in the hands of the presumed ISIS terrorist. If you or I were to call up the German police and say that a bomb was going to go off at a sports venue a routine check to make sure the stadium had been searched would follow and the call would be regarded as a hoax. But if someone genuinely linked to a terrorist organization were to make the call from an untraceable public phone and include some information only known to those behind the Paris attack and the authorities investigating it panic would inevitably ensue. Repeat that 100 times and you would have the police in France and Germany constantly chasing deliberately false leads and wasting resources. And producing frustration and overreaction that would result in someone innocent winding up getting shot. All of which are precisely the sorts of developments that the terrorists would like to see.

And that frustration combined with President Hollande’s desire to be seen as doing something might potentially lead to the true objective of the ISIS terrorist, which is to set the government firmly against the local Muslim community. Many young Muslim criminals are already getting radicalized when they are sent to prison and wind up sharing cells with militants. Add to that a police force perceived as hostile and you have a virtual guarantee that the alienation that produced the young extremists in the first place will be repeated over and over again, eventually resulting in a war of words becoming something like a real shooting war not only in Paris but throughout France.