For more than five years, U.S. intelligence agencies, counterterrorism operators, and the military have been intensely focused on trying to stop al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemen branch of the global terrorist network, from sneaking hard-to-detect bombs onto airplanes and slaughtering hundreds of people.
What they got last week was Paris—a completely different kind of attack.
In claiming credit for last week’s decidedly lower-tech shooting spree at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, AQAP seems to have flipped its playbook, leading to inevitable questions about whether U.S. officials misjudged the terror group’s capabilities or were too focused on the wrong threat: bombs instead of bullets.
All this, despite a slick AQAP magazine that called specifically for shooters—and for Charlie Hebdo to be put in the crosshairs.
“In some quarters there’s skepticism that [the Paris attack] was AQAP because analysts expected that AQAP would launch an attack against aviation, rather than this kind of tactic,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, an experienced terrorism analyst and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “We get into trouble when we think we know a clandestine foe better than we actually do.”
In interviews with half a dozen current and former U.S. officials with frontline experience fighting al Qaeda, a clearer picture is emerging about the years leading up to the rampage in Paris. While intelligence and security agencies never ruled out the possibility that the terror group could employ mass shootings as a way to “create havoc in the West,” as one former
Article source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/17/u-s-spies-expected-airline-bombs-and-got-the-paris-attacks-instead.html