Anti-Terrorism Pioneer Is Prepared for Fight

By SEBASTIAN ROTELLA

Oct. 14, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PARIS — France’s pioneering anti-terrorist judge expounds elegantly on the cultural nuances of Islam, pilots airplanes for fun and won fame for packing a .357 magnum during the peak years of the battle against Middle Eastern terrorism here.

And when he talks about Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere gets a look of grim relish on his craggy face. A look that says it’s time to go to work.

“This is a planetary, global enemy,” Bruguiere says. “It’s a horizontal organization that defies charting and eludes a classic response--especially for Anglo-Saxon countries that are not accustomed to this, whose methods have been inspired by the concept of sponsor states, by the Cold War.”

Bruguiere recently got back from a lightning trip to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he interrogated the accused ringleader of a Bin Laden network that was dismantled in raids across Europe for allegedly plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris. It was the judge’s latest stop in two decades of pursuing terrorists across the globe.

Bruguiere’s case files read like an all-star team of outlaws. He has prosecuted senior Libyan and Iranian officials accused of sponsoring terrorism, Venezuelan hit man Carlos the Jackal, Palestinian groups, the Irish Republican Army and French left-wing extremists who tried to assassinate the judge with a grenade rigged at the front door of his apartment.

That’s why he is escorted by bodyguards and keeps an eye on the entrance of a hotel cafe here while he sips tea at a corner table. That’s why he’s at the forefront of an anti-terror offensive since Sept. 11. European authorities are scrambling to ward off new attacks and to construct a continental law enforcement strategy.

In recent years, Bruguiere warned publicly that Bin Laden was an urgent threat and that the United States would be the target of unprecedented mayhem by Islamic fundamentalists. Bruguiere spoke from the experience of investigating Bin Laden’s organization and the sinister talent pool from which it has drawn recruits, especially Algerian groups that besieged France with hijackings and bombings in the mid-1990s.

“This is an enemy without a face. I compare it to AIDS: a virus that mutates,” he said. “To fight back, human intelligence-gathering is vitally important. And international cooperation in all domains: intelligence, police, the judiciary.”

Bruguiere was not altogether surprised by last month’s attacks in the United States. On Sept. 10, he had opened his own investigation into the alleged plot to attack the U.S. Embassy here.

Today, Bruguiere hopes that the world community will learn to think like the terrorists in order to combat them.

“Like the economy, the terrorists have globalized,” Bruguiere said during a recent interview. “Their strategy is to strike all over the world. And the response must be global.”

Bruguiere, 58, is a sixth-generation judge; his ancestors belonged to the judiciary since before the French Revolution. He makes the most of powers that a centralized state gives investigative magistrates, who meld the functions of U.S. prosecutors and judges and also have police and intelligence services at their disposal. With a mere phone call, Bruguiere can order spy operations, police sweeps and investigative expeditions to exotic locales.

Although he works closely with the FBI and other international counterparts, Bruguiere is no diplomat.

In 1992, at a time when France was attempting to improve relations with Libya, the judge tried to interrogate the brother-in-law of dictator Moammar Kadafi by steaming into Libyan waters on a French warship. The questioning did not take place. But Bruguiere made a name for himself by convicting Kadafi’s relative, Abdullah Senoussi, the de facto head of Libyan intelligence at the time, and three other Libyan leaders of the bombing of a French airliner over Africa that killed 171 people in 1989.

Puffing his trademark pipe, Bruguiere is a cool Gallic combination of hard-eyed crime fighter and worldly intellectual. He is a celebrity, and he draws both adulation and derision. His high-powered friends included John P. O’Neill, the former FBI counter-terrorism expert who retired, became security chief for the World Trade Center and died in last month’s airborne attacks.

U.S. officials made Bruguiere a star witness in the trial of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian convicted of plotting an attack on Los Angeles International Airport that would have been timed to millennium celebrations.

It is not hyperbole to call Bruguiere one of the world’s best counter-terrorism experts, a U.S. official said.

“He’s very tough-minded,” the U.S. official said. “He has a clear understanding of the nature of the threat. He’s committed to rooting it out. He’s good at what he does.”

On the other hand, French leftists grumble that the judge throws suspects into jail with little attention to the niceties of human rights. Miffed by the media attention and the colorful nicknames--”the Cowboy Judge” and “the Admiral” are examples--colleagues in the judiciary and French diplomats have called him a hip-shooting, camera-hogging prima donna.

“Bruguiere is not the fight against terrorism in France, he is just one piece of it,” a fellow lawman growled. “Believe it or not.”

Bruguiere is unruffled. The media get carried away about details like his onetime penchant for packing a pistol, he said.

“Journalists sometimes give me a Western-movie image,” he chuckled. “I stopped carrying the gun years ago, but I still have my bodyguards.”

Right now, authorities all over Europe look to Bruguiere as a walking encyclopedia of Middle Eastern terrorism. Because of their expertise, he and other French judges have led a crackdown during the past month that has netted suspects in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Spain and Italy.

The French are also key to a push by European leaders to create a continent-wide justice system. The ponderous process of building pan-European institutions has been shaken up by sudden revolutionary proposals: regional intelligence-sharing, a regional counter-terror task force and court system, the abolition of extradition procedures.

Those methods, Bruguiere said, must drive the war on terrorism even after the battlefields of Afghanistan fall silent.

“This will also be a war fought by intelligence services, by judiciaries,” Bruguiere said. “It will not be easy.”