E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

Help From France Key In Covert Operations
French intelligence has a looong working knowledge of the arab world, and has been working on sunni islamists since the 90's (not to mention the 1986 iranian-based bombings).
Paris's 'Alliance Base' Targets Terrorists
By Dana Priest
When Christian Ganczarski, a German convert to Islam, boarded an Air France flight from Riyadh on June 3, 2003, he knew only that the Saudi government had put him under house arrest for an expired pilgrim visa and had given his family one-way tickets back to Germany, with a change of planes in Paris. He had no idea that he was being secretly escorted by an undercover officer sitting behind him, or that a senior CIA officer was waiting at the end of the jetway as French authorities gently separated him from his family and swept Ganczarski into French custody, where he remains today on suspicion of associating with terrorists.

Ganczarski is among the most important European al Qaeda figures alive, according to U.S. and French law enforcement and intelligence officials. The operation that ensnared him was put together at a top secret center in Paris, code-named Alliance Base, that was set up by the CIA and French intelligence services in 2002, according to U.S. and European intelligence sources. Its existence has not been previously disclosed.
Why disclose it now, then?
Funded largely by the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, Alliance Base analyzes the transnational movement of terrorist suspects and develops operations to catch or spy on them. Alliance Base demonstrates how most counterterrorism operations actually take place: through secretive alliances between the CIA and other countries' intelligence services.
There are routine alliances between European and Anglosphere countries that don't involve the CIA, too...

Posted by: anonymous5089 2005-07-04
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=123135