By Guillaume Dasquié
Le Monde Monday 16 April 2004
It's an impressive mass of documents. From a distance, one would imagine a doctoral thesis. On closer inspection: nothing of the kind. Red stamps "Confidential-Defense" and "Strictly National Usage" on every page.
At the top on the left, a royal blue logo: that of the DGSE, Direction générale des services extérieurs [General Directorate for Foreign Services], the French secret services. In total, 328 classified pages. Notes, reports, syntheses and summaries, maps, graphs, organization charts, satellite photos. All exclusively devoted to al-Qaeda, its leaders, its seconds-in-command, its hide-outs and training camps. Also to its financial supports. Nothing less than the fundamentals of the DGSE reports compiled between July 2000 and October 2001. A veritable encyclopedia.
At the end of several months of investigation of this very special documentation, we contacted DGSE headquarters. And on April 3, the present chief of staff, Emmanuel Renoult, received us there, within the confines of the Tourelles garrison in Paris. After thumbing through the 328 pages that we set on his desk, he can't keep himself from deploring such a leak, all the while allowing us to understand that the packet represents virtually the entirety of DGSE production on the subject for this crucial period. On the other hand, it was impossible to draw the least comment from him on the substance of the material. Too sensitive.
It's true that these secret services chronicles about al-Qaeda, with their various revelations, raise many questions. And at first, a surprise: The high number of notes devoted exclusively to al-Qaeda's threats against the United States, months before the suicide attacks in New York and Washington. Nine whole reports on that subject between September 2000 and August 2001, including a five-page summary entitled, "Airplane Hijacking Plans by Radical Islamists," and dated ... January 5, 2001! Eight months before September 11, the DGSE reports therein tactical discussions conducted between Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies from the beginning of 2000 on the subject of hijacking American commercial airliners.
Pierre-Antoine Lorenzi, chief of staff to the DGSE director up until August 2001, and today the president of a company specialized in crisis and influence strategies (Serenus Conseil), reviews these 328 pages in front of us and also stops short when he comes to that memo. He hesitates, takes the time to read it and admits: "I remember that." "You have to remember," Mr. Lorenzi elaborates, "that in 2001, hijacking an airplane didn't mean the same thing as it did after September 11. At the time, it implied forcing a plane to land at an airport to conduct negotiations. We were used to dealing with that." A useful perspective to understand why that January 5 alert didn't provoke any reaction from its recipients: the pillars of executive power.
As of January 2001, the al-Qaeda leadership nonetheless showed itself to be transparent to the eyes - and ears - of French spies. The redactors even detailed disagreements among the terrorists over the practical modalities of the planned hijacking. They never questioned their intention. Provisionally, the jihadists favored capturing an airplane between Frankfurt and the United States. They established a list of seven possible companies. Two would finally be chosen by the September 11 pirates: American Airlines and United Airlines. In his introduction, the author of the memo notes, "According to the Uzbek intelligence services, the airplane hijacking plan seems to have been discussed at the beginning of 2000 during a Kabul meeting of representatives from Osama bin Laden's organization...."
Consequently, Uzbek spies informed French agents. At the time, the opposition of Muslim fundamentalists to the pro-American regime in Tashkent united the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the MIO. A military faction of this group, led by a certain Taher Yudachev, joined the Afghanistan camps and swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, promising him he would export his jihad to Central Asia. MIO military leaflets and correspondence discovered in al-Qaeda's Afghan camps attest to that.
Alain Chouet remembers this episode. Until October 2002, he directed the Security Intelligence Service, a DGSE subdivision charged with following terrorist movements. According to him, the credibility of the Uzbek channel devolves from the alliances formed by General Rashid Dostom, one of the main Afghan warlords, himself of Uzbek ethnicity, who was then fighting the Taliban. To please his protectors in the neighboring Uzbek security services, Dostom infiltrated some of his men into the heart of the MIO, right up to the command structures of the al-Qaeda camps. That's how he informed his friends in Tashkent, knowing that the intelligence would then make its way to Washington, London and Paris.
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