PARIS, 13 September — The counter-intelligence official responsible for France’s war against terrorism has dropped the veil of secrecy that hangs over his operation to let it be known that France will henceforth make a major effort at stamping out terrorism — but that it will do so more quietly than under the Prime Ministership of Lionel Jospin.
Louis Caprioli, who is the anti-terrorism chief at the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), chose to meet with the press this week, marking the first time that the high-level DST official has decided to make public not only his identity but also speak on record with regard to his operation’s future plans.
His decision to go public — one of the rare occasions on which the DST has chosen to go public with a sensitive subject like terrorism — came in the wake of the decision by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to provide the DST with funds to hire 400 additional officials, most of them destined to play a role in the country’s stepped-up war against Islamic terrorism. The funds for the additional anti-terrorist personnel are provided in the new national budget introduced recently by Raffarin before Parliament.
Caprioli, who has until now been the official most directly involved in the day-to-day surveillance of Al-Qaeda and notably its activities on French soil, said it was important that a distinction be made between French members of Al-Qaeda — their number, he said, was limited to “a few dozen” — and those who simply resided in France, implying that they accounted for the lion’s share of terrorist activity within France.
As for the “few dozen” who hold French passports, he noted that they had been trained in camps operated by Al-Qaeda. “These individuals,” he said, “have been trained in Al-Qaeda camps located in Afghanistan in such activities as making bombs and preparing explosives.” He also revealed that the French Al-Qaeda operatives “have a great deal of liberty in deciding where their terrorist attacks are to take place, and at what particular moment.”
The tight-lipped official would say no more than that with regard to his knowledge of Al-Qaeda activities on French soil, letting it be known that henceforth his activities would be kept under wraps, certainly more so than they were under the government of former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, when DST and other police officials were allowed to provide information on terrorist activity in France on a background basis, usually to announce the
capture of suspected kingpins of the Al-Qaeda network in France. But, notes a DST source close to Caprioli, such announcements often proved self-defeating, as other members of the network would often, as a result, go into hiding to avoid being captured in turn.
Caprioli was also meeting with the press to assure the French that contrary to other countries where terrorist actions were expected to coincide with the first anniversary of Sept. 11, that in his estimation “there are no terrorist attacks being prepared at present on French soil.”
Meanwhile, French police said they are stymied by a recent series of grenade attacks against the residences of some of the country’s principal business leaders, undertaken in the name of a mysterious organization calling itself the “armed branch of the FPLP.”
The organization, whose leadership French police say they’ve been unable to identify, follows up the grenade attack with a letter demanding that the person targeted — most recently the presidents of the French subsidiaries of Rolex and Adidas — hand over to the organization between $500,000 and $700,000 which it characterizes as a “revolutionary jihad tax.”
The letter — which usually arrives a week or two after the grenade attack — threatens harm to the person targeted and his family if the “tax” is not paid. It also usually indicates that “we love death in the same way you love life” and is accompanied by the photo of a man dressed in a djellabia and whose face is hidden behind a kaffieh, in whose hands is a large open book in which appears a photograph of Osama Bin Ladin.
French police, who say they know nothing about the mysterious organization which had never previously operated in France, have decided to open an investigation into its activities, charging it with “attempted extortion and death threats”.
