CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN REFORM
briefing note
TRANSATLANTIC DISPUTES MUST NOT UNDERMINE EU AND US COUNTER-TERRORISM CO-OPERATION By Adam Townsend Not all is doom and gloom in the tattered transatlantic relationship. EU member-states and the US are cooperating effectively over terrorism. But the US needs to work more with the EU as a whole, rather than simply through individual European governments. Moreover, officials on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly concerned that co-operation could be undermined by the poisonous political climate. Police and intelligence services may be the only government organizations that retain the transatlantic solidarity forged after the attacks of September 11th and shattered by Iraq. After those terrorist attacks, all EU member-states gave the green light to their spies and policemen to work more closely with their American counterparts. The US and Europe exchanged unprecedented quantities of information and worked together to freeze the funds of suspected terrorists. The EU and the US established a number of joint task forces while the Europeans allowed CIA and FBI agents to become involved with terrorist investigations on European territory. The intensified co-operation quickly bore fruit, with the disruption of a number of terrorist cells. The attacks of ‘911’ broke the traditional pattern of transatlantic intelligence co-operation. The US and British intelligence communities have long enjoyed a ‘special relationship’, working together much more closely than either work with the other European agencies. After September 11th, lots of European countries queued up to help the US catch terrorists. Germany’s federal police, the BKA, worked closely with the FBI to piece together the activities of the hijackers in Hamburg and Frankfurt. President Chirac ordered the DGSE, France’s main external intelligence agency, to co-operate more closely with the Americans. And various EU member-states sent officers to a counter-terrorist joint task force command center based on a US warship in the Gulf of Aden. Surprisingly, relations between the US, German and French law enforcement and intelligence communities have stayed healthy to the present day. Shortly after President Bush triumphantly declared the end of hostilities in Iraq, a veteran CIA analyst remarked to the author that collaboration with the French had not only weathered six months of degenerating relations between the Bush and Chirac administrations, but remained, “better than ever before”. And last month the joint counter-terrorist task force in the Horn of Africa moved to a base in a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti – taking all its European members with it. After September 11th, European governments also directed the resources of the European Union into the fight against terrorism. They used the EU’s limited powers on internal security matters to implement a longproposed Europe-wide arrest warrant, draw up a common definition of the crime of terrorism, and draft