FEBRUARY, A MONTH after the attack, the Charlie survivors visited their umpteenth new offices with good company: specialists in armor-plating and bombproof systems. From that point onward, they would be working in a bunker. Writing these lines, I recall what Patrick Pelloux said shortly after the attack, explaining on TV that “for the Charlie team, it wasn’t possible to work in a bunker. They didn’t talk about security.”
So it took the murder of ten of them, Georges included, for them to stop working in a carefree way.
Actually, since the time they were located on the rue Étienne-Marcel, Charlie Hebdo had moved continuously. In April 2011, because of their difficult financial situation, the team moved to the porte de Montreuil. Barely one year later, feeling they were too far from the center of Paris, they started looking for new offices in the 20th arrondissement, on boulevard Davout. There the cartoonists didn’t hesitate to hang their drawings in the windows. In November, when an issue of Sharia Hebdo came out after the elections in Tunisia (which voted in an Islamist party), there was an arson attack. Accommodated for a while by the left-wing newspaper Libération, the team was again forced to find new offices. They ended up on rue Serpollet, in the same arrondissement.
This time, it was under police surveillance: on the ground floor of the new building was a police station. Several police cars were permanently parked in front of the building. But as the newspaper lost more and more readers, the management team once again decided to find less expensive premises. The city of Paris then offered the paper space in a commercial building where the rent was very low, on the rue Nicolas-Appert, run by a property management company partially owned by the city. As the newspaper’s financial situation had become so difficult, the team signed up. But the building had several entrances and doors were often left open, because the companies with offices throughout the building’s three floors used messengers, as people who work there stated—people who also were attacked by the Kouachi brothers because they didn’t know that the satirical paper was located there.
So, a building with no security. Nevertheless, it was soon decided that work had to be done to make the premises safer, and it began in the summer of 2014. For the authorities, the satirical paper remained a target. The security section of the local administration, which was authorized to work on this type of case, was brought in. An inspector was appointed, responsible for finding ways to make the offices safe. He soon got in touch with the paper’s accountant, then met with him and his wife. The inspector immediately informed them that the building was seriously vulnerable in several areas. He particularly mentioned the access points on the two different streets, one on 6, allée Verte and the other on 10, rue Nicolas-Appert, which both led to the same building, as well as another access point in the basement, since the entrance to the parking lot provided passage from one road to the other. But the choice had been made, and it was too late to find somewhere else. Work would have to be done to make the place safe, and that was that.
Given the risks run by the paper, it was an unwise decision. The premises themselves were a problem. They were narrow and only had one exit door, which meant that the escape route could easily be blocked in an emergency. After his visit, the inspector left with everything he needed to carry out his study. He came back later to detail the security measures necessary, which mainly had to do with the offices.
That day, he was greeted by the accountant’s wife, to whom he presented several possibilities regarding making the space safe for the newspaper, the cartoonists, and the journalists. First, in spite of the narrowness of the space, he advised the installation of two airlock doors, which had to be opened in sequence, like the ones in certain banks. But he immediately realized that this would never be done, as the Charlie Hebdo staff had already started moving in. His second proposal: transform the small waiting area, where the staff had planned to put desks for the webmaster and the receptionist, into a buffer zone to protect access to the editorial room and the rest of the newspaper. It would be an area whose walls were bulletproof, actually turning it into an armor-plated room, at the end of which the two doors leading to the editorial room and Charb’s office would also be armor-plated and could be opened only by entering a code. Other measures included putting alarms in the offices with a videophone, installing a camera on the landing, and installing video cameras in the armor-plated waiting area. Finally, the inspector recommended putting special blinds on the windows that overlooked the street.
The report was passed on to the local government representative, who sent it to the newspaper’s management team, reminding them that the cartoonists were in great danger. The inspector responsible for the report had, moreover, detailed the threats along with his security recommendations. He was then told: “We would never be hit, not us.” Lack of foresight, carelessness, the feeling that humor makes people invulnerable? Finally, the paper’s own management team decided that a simple video camera would be installed in the entrance.
“Could we force them to protect themselves against their will?” the inspector wondered aloud when I asked him if they couldn’t have been obliged to accept the security measures. And he added that they could have asked for financial aid from the city of Paris, even the Ministry of Culture, which would have helped, given the attack on the paper a few years before. At the local government headquarters, and especially in the department that dealt with vulnerable targets, a commando attack with use of military weapons had even been envisaged—which was why the drastic security measures had been recommended. Even without the security doors, the Kouachis’ bullets would not have penetrated an armor-plated door. And even if the brothers had decided to use grenades, the team would certainly have had time to react.
Yes, there were flaws in the security preparations at the Charlie Hebdo office, and they were numerous—because unlike the local government’s department for vulnerable targets, the state, the police force, and the newspaper’s management team refused to accept the idea that we were already at war. A war of ignorance against culture, against the freedom so cherished by Georges, against obscurantism.
Yes, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi certainly had a great window of opportunity. In the days preceding January 7, when Saïd was bored in Reims with nothing to do but pray, and Chérif and his accomplices in Asnières were planning the attack, they probably didn’t expect that it would be so easy to carry out their massacre. In the end, they would find only one obstacle to getting in: the security code. Not difficult to surmount when you’re armed with a Kalashnikov.
Did the General Directorate for Internal Security allow itself to be fooled by the tricks taught to the terrorists during their training in Yemen? Chérif Kouachi had been identified in 2011. He’d been training with Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and was instructed to keep a low profile, hide his fundamentalism, and shave off his beard once he returned to France. Alerted by the Americans that he was back, the French authorities put the Kouachi brothers under surveillance. But they were obeying al-Qaida’s orders, and, as they seemed to have come around, were no longer considered a threat, so the surveillance stopped. They had become “sleeper agents.” This is why, three days after the attack, the US Department of Homeland Security held a press conference to inform the reporters that “nothing in the surveillance of the Kouachis or Coulibaly led us to believe that they were preparing an attack.”I
Five thousand radicalized people are listed in the S file (S for state security). The files are reviewed every two years, and if the people in them have not been reported for any incidents, their names are removed. How many sleeper agents are there in our country? Since the publication of the caricatures of Mohammed, al-Qaida’s leaders have been determined to act against Western countries, and particularly against France. Hence the announcement of the 2013 fatwa against Charb, which was published in the magazine Inspire, founded by al-Qaida.
The Worst Is Yet to Come—that was the prophetic title of one of Georges’s books.
I. Amedy Coulibaly was the terrorist who killed a policeman on January 8, 2015, and four people in a kosher supermarket on January 9.