France's legendary terror cop
Carlos the Jackal's nemesis walks the global beat, warning of a "permanent" threat.
By Jay Cheshes
Jan. 3, 2002 | PARIS -- As the most senior counter-terrorism man in France, Jean-Louis Bruguière has often felt like there's a bull's-eye painted on his forehead. Over the years he's made mortal enemies of some of the world's most prolific political killers. In 1987, one of them tried to blow him to bits by placing a primed hand grenade on the doorknob of his Paris apartment. The attempt on his life was foiled by a vigilant member of Bruguière's security detachment, who spotted the explosive and defused it while the judge was still at work.
After the attack Bruguière, an investigating magistrate in the counter-terrorism division of the French judiciary, started carrying his own gun to the office -- a .357 Magnum he proudly showed off to visiting reporters. "I'm quite a good shot," he liked to say, brandishing the weapon like a Gallic John Wayne.
The judge, who a few years ago started leaving his gun at home, now travels in an armor-plated car with two full-time bodyguards. His work quarters are the most heavily fortified in the Palais de Justice, with security cameras, two levels of bulletproof glass and a small detachment of heavily armed judicial police on duty 24 hours a day. Although much of the 17th century complex is ornate and gilded, Bruguière's office itself is unremarkable. A drab institutional space at the end of an attic-like corridor lined with wooden benches, it looks more like it might house a private-school headmaster than a man known in law enforcement circles as one of the world's most tenacious terrorist hunters. Besides a brightly hued abstract painting of squiggles and swirls that hangs over his big wood desk there's nothing much on the walls -- no plaques, pictures or framed press clippings immortalizing his exploits tracking down killers of every ideological persuasion.
Bruguière is 58 years old and has tiny eyes and a hangdog scowl that flattens his pencil-thin lips and blows out the puff in his cheeks. In his office, whether leafing through a case file or staring down his nose at a terrorist suspect, he is usually sucking on a pipe or chewing on a cigar. He favors pinstripe suits and wears a trench coat and wire frame reading glasses. He speaks softly, in short, unadorned sentences. Although he sometimes flashes the slightest self-satisfied smirk, Bruguière's poker face gives away next to nothing, which has led many to underestimate him -- and to learn of their mistake the hard way.
When Bruguière discovered in late January 1992 that officials in the government of Francois Mitterrand had secretly given the green light for a notorious terrorist leader to slip into Paris for medical treatment, he decided very quickly to take matters into his own hands. Old and frail and recovering from a stroke, George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- a radical splinter group of the PLO that virtually invented airplane hijackings -- had flown into Le Bourget Airport and, with a clandestine wink from the right people, quietly checked into a Red Cross hospital.
By that time, despite what often seemed a lack of French political will to support his efforts, Bruguière had been waging his own personal war on terrorism for nearly a decade. Under the French system, investigating magistrates are like supercharged district attorneys: Entirely independent and unconstrained by politics, they have extraordinary powers. In directing criminal investigations, they can file charges, issue search and arrest warrants and commandeer detectives, spies and diplomats. And, like an independent counsel in the U.S., they can even bring their own government to the verge of collapse.
Habash's presence in Paris offered Bruguière the opportunity to plumb unanswered questions about unsolved hijackings and a large arms cache found hidden in the woods near Fontainebleau; but most of all, it offered the chance to make headlines, the kind that would teach the politicians a painful lesson. A few days after Habash checked into the Hopital Henri Dunant, Bruguière made a public announcement that he was heading down there to question him. "We didn't know what would happen," explains Alain Marsaud, a former judge and politician who founded the counter-terrorism division of the French judiciary. "Bruguière really did it to amuse himself, to force the government to its knees." Because case files under French law are closed to public scrutiny, nobody had any idea what the judge had on Habash -- whether he planned to merely question, or possibly arrest, the man. "The politicians were terrified," continues Marsaud. "Over a period of 48 hours he made them very, very scared."
Chasing George Habash in Paris at his own government's expense all but cauterized Bruguière against political and administrative reprisals, guaranteeing him carte blanche to take his investigations wherever they might lead him. When the Palestinian's doctors insisted their patient was in no condition to talk to anyone, Bruguière holstered his guns long enough for Habash to be whisked from France. Afterwards Mitterrand made a very public show of denying foreknowledge of the fiasco and after calls for the resignations of both the foreign and interior ministers, scrambled to quiet the furor by canning a dozen lesser bureaucrats. The following year, many in that government were ousted.
Due in large part to his own bravado, Bruguière has truly become one of the most fearsome opponents of terrorism in Europe. For years he has enjoyed the kind of investigative freedom that was only recently approved for American law enforcement, with great leeway to authorize wiretaps and hold terrorist suspects for long periods before trial. With only a fraction of the resources available to his FBI colleagues across the Atlantic, the judge has racked up an impressive string of coups -- although often at the expense, say critics, of the civil liberties that are the backbone of French democracy.
Over the last few months French police under his direction have smashed several al-Qaida cells, including a group that had been planning to attack a cathedral in Strasbourg and another that had been plotting to blow up the American Embassy in Paris. In the last two decades he has had his fingers in the investigation of just about every terrorist incident involving French victims. He is the man who finally put Carlos the Jackal behind bars, and he was the first investigator to publicly link the Libyan government to acts of terrorism. Last spring he traveled to Los Angeles to testify in the terrorism trial of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian militant who'd crossed into the United States from Canada carrying powerful explosives he intended to use at Los Angeles International Airport.
The judge takes a fairly liberal interpretation of what constitutes terrorism. Authorized to pursue any case that abuts the interests of mother France, Bruguière seems to adopt any high profile act of violence that might thrust him further into the spotlight. A few years ago he flew to Cambodia to dig for information on the kidnapping and murder by Khmer Rouge guerrillas of a couple of French tourists. He later traveled to central Africa after opening an investigation into the attack that brought down the Rwandan president's plane and ignited that country's 1994 genocide. Bruguière has pursued terrorism cases against the governments of Libya, Iran and even Israel -- whose intelligence service he's accused of being behind the assassination in Paris of a Palestinian official. At times he seems to be making his own foreign policy, often to the great annoyance of French diplomats and politicians. "He likes playing ambassador, playing minister of foreign affairs," says a former colleague. "He adores that."
Since Sept. 11, Bruguière has been working almost exclusively on cases involving the European activities of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, which he has described as being "like a cancer ... spreading very quickly." He opened an official investigation into a bin Laden cell in France the day before airliners first screamed into American landmarks, and by the time U.S. bombs began raining down on Afghanistan, he had rounded up more than a dozen suspects. "We started working on these networks as early as '94," he says. "Unfortunately the 11th of September didn't change much in my work. All it did was accelerate investigations we had already started."
