French Betrayal of America

Chapter 1 Le Divorce When I first met him, many years ago, the butt end of his .357 Magnum peeped out whenever he unbuttoned his coat. Today, he has given up the Magnum in favor of around-the-clock bodyguards. At the time of the September 11 attacks on America, French counterterrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere arguably knew more about Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network than any man alive. I bumped into him in the staircase of a secluded wing of the Palais de Justice in Paris in early October 2001 just ahead of a scheduled interview and remarked the almost boyish gleam in his eye. He had just come back from interrogating a detainee and looked like a cat that had swallowed a canary. "You've heard about Moussaoui?" he said, unable to suppress a wide grin. Zacarias Moussaoui was the alleged twentieth hijacker who had been arrested on August 17, 2001, by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents because of suspicious activity while attending the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The case against Moussaoui being worked up by lead U.S. prosecutor Rob Spencer in Alexandria, Virginia, was in trouble. Evidence tying Moussaoui to al-Qaeda was circumstantial, as were his ties to the 9/11 hijackers. Indeed, the initial grand jury indictment against Moussaoui was a boilerplate document for the overall conspiracy that mentioned him by name only a handful of times. But Moussaoui had left a long trail behind him in France. If anyone had the goods on him, that would be Bruguiere. "There are new developments that are going to be of great interest to our friends in Virginia," he said with a toss of his head up toward his office. With Bruguiere, that meant a file a foot high crammed with seized documents, flowcharts of conspiratorial telephone calls, interrogation transcripts, and reports from French intelligence on Moussaoui's travels, his friends, and his bank accounts. Bruguiere liked to call al-Qaeda and its followers a global "spider's web." Since 1995, with method and determination, he had been pulling it apart thread by thread. The French judge has received letters of commendation from former FBI Director Louis Freeh and from Attorney General John Ashcroft, thanking him for his help in convicting al-Qaeda terrorists in the United States, in particular "Millennium bomber" Ahmad Ressam, who plotted to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Eve 1999. At Bruguiere urging, French intelligence gathered on-the-ground intelligence on bin Laden's rat line into Afghanistan and his support network in Pakistan, which he personally provided to the United States in a still-classified March 1995 report. The information was so detailed it included the names of top al-Qaeda recruitment officers, detailed rosters of foreign cells, and photographs of safehouses and "welcome centers" in Islamabad, Peshawar, and elsewhere. Even more significantly: it traced the rat line back to recruiting centers in Europe, Asia, and North America. Bruguiere had twice tried to warn the Clinton administration of imminent terrorist threats from al-Qaeda networks operating inside the United States, but was waved off. When by luck an alert U.S. Customs officer in Port Angeles, Washington, caught Ressam as he got off the ferry from Vancouver, British Columbia, with a truck filled with explosives, Bruguiere not only turned over his files to the U.S. prosecutors: he gave detailed testimony at the trial that helped put the would-be Millennium bomber in jail for life, as I first revealed in a Reader's Digest exclusive. Now that cooperation was about to come to an end, just when America needed it the most. Shortly after our meeting on October 8, 2001, the French Ministry of Justice put the kibosh on Bruguiere's effort to assist the Moussaoui prosecutors bTimmerman, Kenneth is the author of 'French Betrayal of America', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400053667 and ISBN 1400053668.