Opinion: French terrorism sleuth sees crisis growing beyond control

PARIS, France — The implacable French cop-judge who for years terrorized terrorists across the globe now sees a growing wave of splinter cells and loners all but beyond control.

“Authorities stop some, but they are also creating more,” Jean-Louis Bruguiere says. “As resentment and hostility grow, volunteers join up or act on their own.”

We talked not long before that young Nigerian nearly blew up a Christmas flight from Amsterdam over Detroit. As usual, Bruguiere was ahead of the game.

He warned that West Africa was a fertile new breeding ground, in cities but also across the Sahara where arms and drugs to pay for them move freely over ancient salt trails.

And, he added, so are parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as disaffected neighborhoods in the heart of Europe.

In the Evil Empire days, the terrorism he battled was a state monopoly, usually with links to Moscow. If Western agents could not prevent it, they could follow its tracks.

Now, he said, religious fervor is fed by bitterness over such tactics as torture and air strikes that kill innocents. “It’s much more dangerous, harder to control.”

Recruiters find suicide bombers in mosques but also via coded internet sites. Al Qaeda provides independent cells with material support and instruction.

Iran gives sophisticated help to terrorists from Algeria to Argentina to keep the West off balance. Its policy of indirect action has not changed for decades, Bruguiere says, but it is now far more dangerous.

With all of this, Pakistan’s senior command includes extremists who protect the Taliban and Al Qaeda and could gain eventual access to nukes.

The man who knows summed it up: “We have never been so close to nuclear terrorism.”

Heftily built and pit-bull tenacious, Bruguiere comes from a line of judges dating back to Napoleon. Under the French system, he does both law and order. Since 2007, he has commuted to Washington on a task force to follow money.

In his new role, he cushions criticism with diplomacy. Still, his message is clear.

"What I Could Not Say," his new book published in Paris, spills the beans on past world-class cases and also hammers the Bush administration for making things worse.

He says fighting terror was much easier in 2002 before Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz set out on what a self-styled quasi-divine mission with little thought to delicate political balances.

He describes how Pakistani officers misled CIA inspectors at military camps, hiding young zealots who they then dispatched on terrorist missions to Western countries.

French terrorist Willie Brigitte told him his handler, a Pakistani military officer, sent him to Australia to join a cell planning to bomb a nuclear plant. Police broke up the plot.

Brigitte said others were infiltrated into Virginia to train with a group known as paintball jihadis. Most were arrested in 2004.

In 2006, Bruguiere went to Karachi to investigate a suicide bombing that killed 11 French contractors. He writes:

"French officials in Pakistan were the target of threats and physical intimidation: a means of dissuading us from returning."

In 2007, he pleaded in vain with White House officials to thwart Pakistan’s double game of pledging tough action while steering clear of terrorist sanctuaries.

Now, he says, Pakistani leaders are no longer able to control rogue Islamist military and intelligence officers who exercise growing influence over state policy.

Bruguiere, 66, gained fame in the 1980s for pursuing Madame Claude and her high-class hookers, patronized by senior officials, mobsters and shadowy foreign agents.

A Bulgarian he investigated for fraud confessed he was a secret-service colonel. He said the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, had ordered a hit on Pope John Paul II.

Poland was restive, and the KGB was waffling. The rival GRU figured that if someone assassinated the Polish pope, violent protests in Warsaw would justify invasion.

In 1989, a French airliner exploded in Chad. Bruguiere spent years convicting Libyan authorities in absentia. He helped corner Carlos the Jackal and bring him to Paris.

Terrorists struck France during the 1990s, and Bruguiere dug deeply into Al Qaeda. He studied their methods, motives and movements. Now he is worried.

Sept. 11 should not have been a surprise, he says. Even so, Americans could have defanged Osama bin Laden until the Iraq war and counterterrorism excesses.

When I spoke with Bruguiere, we talked about this last point.

“As a magistrate and as a human being, I am profoundly against torture,” he said. “But, in any case, it does not work. It never works.”

Investigators need fresh data, he said. By the time suspects are interrogated, anything they might say is stale. Few know the big picture. And anything said under extreme duress must be seen as suspect.

That echoed what so many experts say: torture only creates multiple layers of people who hate you. By condoning it, Bush squandered America’s moral advantage of legality and respect for human rights.

When I asked if the Obama administration was doing enough to stop extreme duress, Bruguiere paused. He looked at his hands and finally offered a one-word answer.

“Slowly,” he said.