Getty Fourth Estate The Myth of the Terrorist Mastermind Why do we need to keep telling ourselves the plotters are special?

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer.

Now that French authorities have named a suspected chief planner of the Paris attacks—27-year-old Belgian ISIS veteran Abdelhamid Abaaoud—the press is building him up as if he’s 100 feet tall. Abaaoud isn’t just another opportunist butcher of innocent flesh, he’s a “mastermind,” concur the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, CBS News, Fox News, Time, NPR, the Guardian, NBC News, the Independent, and other outlets. Even POLITICO gets in on the act, though hedging it as the “alleged mastermind.”

It doesn’t diminish the horror of Paris slaughter in the least to note that there was nothing “masterful” about the operation that took place last Friday. Nor was any special genius on display at two failed operations from earlier this year, on a high-speed train and in a church, attributed to Abaaoud’s know-how. These two operations—providing shooters with firearms and pointing them in the direction of a group of unsuspecting civilians—took about as much imagination and skill as ordering a pizza. The Paris assault was more complex: Abaaoud allegedly dispatched three teams of attackers to six or seven locations to perform their killing chores. But no true mastermind would brag about the results. At or near the stadium, where upwards of 80,000 fans were watching a soccer match between Germany and France, the three suicide bombers detonated their charges and killed only one other person.


About two score victims were killed at restaurants by gunmen, and other 89 were killed at the sold-out Bataclan theater (1,500 capacity) by three shooters and their suicide bombs. It might take a cold heart to say this, but by one measure the Paris attack was a failed plan. Several hundred or maybe even 1,000 could have died if a real mastermind had been in charge. If we accept estimates that eight killers were responsible for the Paris attacks, they managed to kill fewer people, on average, than one unbalanced person did at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Nobody calls him a mastermind.

What makes us so susceptible to the idea that the author of the Paris killings is a “mastermind”? Why can’t he be called something more mundane, like an organizer or a commander? I think we ascribe evil brilliance to terrorists because we can’t accept that a normal working Joe of standard intelligence could kill so freely as this. We see this again and again in novels and movies, presenting us with villainous killers who possess a commanding intellect, like Professor Moriarty, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and Hannibal Lecter.

But if we’re serious about contending with the problem, we need to resist the mastermind trope. Our enemies are nowhere near as invincible as Moriarty, Blofeld, or Lecter. If the leading terrorists are so brilliant, how come we’ve taken so many of them out with a drone or a Delta Force team, a fate that will soon visit Abaaoud, too, even if he hides himself in a spider hole? The “mastermind” narrative treats terrorism like 24, in which the forces of good predictably vanquish the forces of evil in each season’s finale; a far better framework for the terrorist perplex might be The Wire, a world of basic human limits and long, painful, insoluble conflicts.

And there’s another risk: By casting terrorists as masterminds, we overestimate them, and this overestimation boosts their reputations, inadvertently increasing their global status and recruiting power. Overestimation also makes the West swing wildly in response (see the invasion of Iraq). Casting terrorists as masterminds also tends to under-estimate the capacity of the West to confront, if not defeat, terrorism with its prestigious resources and military might. If there is any real genius to the terrorist method, it’s the ongoing ability of its commanders to persuade individuals to lay down their lives in suicide operations. That idea may be genius, of an evil kind, but the implementation is not. The designer of a suicide operation is no more a mastermind than is the pilot of a U.S. drone, and he’s much more vulnerable to a counterstrike.

If we shouldn’t consider the architect of the Paris attacks a mastermind, how about the man behind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? In a brisk piece from 2009 titled “Are Terrorists Stupid?,” my colleague Timothy Noah notes that U.S. authorities missed a half-dozen obvious clues that an airline-based terrorist plan was in the works. Some of the 9/11 perpetrators, namely Khalid Almihdhar, Nawaf Alhazmi, and Zacarias Moussaoui, practiced extraordinarily sloppy terrorist-craft, Noah writes. The most remarkable thing about the 9/11 attack wasn’t KSM’s plan—Tom Clancy and William Pierce got there first—but his great luck in encountering a statistically improbable confluence of blunders by U.S. intelligence.

Last week, a pair of suicide bombers killed 43 in Beirut—a better terrorist-to-death ratio than the Paris terrorists recorded. Yet the press did not use the word “masterminds” to describe the perpetrators of that attack, according to a Nexis search. Perhaps it’s because readers and editors have normalized suicide bombings that take place the Middle East, seeing them as part of a long-running war and not as anything remarkable or unique.

I’m not suggesting that the press adopt a “new normal” attitude toward Paris attacks, but we all need to ask itself if the attacks have really told us anything about this never-ending war that we didn’t already know. Ever since the Charlie Hebdo killings, tourist spots have been patrolled by well-armed French military personnel and Paris police officers; France had already started dropping bombs on ISIS in Syria before the Paris attacks. It is hard to look at the horror of Paris and tell ourselves that it wasn’t exceptional, that it didn’t require a masterful plot to disrupt one of the world’s great cities—it just took weapons and commitment and luck, good and bad. But that’s the problem we’re really dealing with. When we turn the bad guy into a mastermind, we’re offering ourselves an oddly false comfort—a way to make sense of a world that is neither as full of evil geniuses as the TV version would have us believe, nor as comforting.

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