Frederick Forsyth’s best thriller was his first: “The Day of the Jackal” — a compelling tale of a nearly successful plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.
Forsyth’s novels are nothing if not authentic (disaffected army officers actually did try to kill de Gaulle in 1962, which is where the novel begins) and it’d be hard to find a more detailed account in popular fiction of how an international assassin goes about his work.
Those details — the creation of false identities, the circumvention of national borders, the subversion of security in a country with a faint affection for civil liberties but a violent aversion to terrorism — give the novel its compelling heft.
Even 50 years later, the degree of difficulty overcome by Forsyth’s assassin remains astonishing — and that was long before near-universal street cameras, facial-recognition software, phone-tapping from space, and databases that can parse critical facts in nanoseconds.
That was before Friday, and radical Islam’s latest surprise attack on civilization. Before the superbly coordinated assaults took at least 129 lives.
The attacks, said French President François Hollande, were “an act of war committed by a terrorist army . . . prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside.”
Indeed. But how?
How disciplined those terrorists must have been. How complex the networks that dispatched them must be. What a grave threat they represent — and not just to France.
“The city’s Muslim community is a potentially rich fishing ground for Islamist recruiters.”
New York has been in the Islamists’ cross hairs before — on 9/11, and at least 16 times since then, according to the NYPD. The Heritage Foundation, which tracks such things in the face of the administration’s indifference, counts at least 73 Islamist terror plots or attacks nationwide since the Twin Towers came down — 11 this year.
True, most were small-bore affairs. Then again, France has been a hive of such relatively low-grade activity for years.
So if the Islamists are stepping up their game there — why not here? Why not New York, or Boston (again), or Washington or San Francisco?
America brims with sports stadiums, concert venues and shopping plazas — tempting targets as the Islamists apparently shift their attention from institutions to people.
How best to stop them? It’s all about the information.
The meticulous collection and deft analysis of information thwarted Forsyth’s assassin — and, indeed, the post-9/11 conspiracies against New York.
Many ears to the ground contributed to those successes — but a large part of the burden was carried by the NYPD’s anti-terrorism detectives and superb cadre of intelligence analysts. Then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, understood the challenge and rose to it.
But not without issues.
New York City is now home to hundreds of thousands of Muslims — richly and productively marbled into civic life, an affirmation of America’s traditional affinity for immigration.
At the same time — and there is no gentle way to put this — the city’s Muslim community is a potentially rich fishing ground for Islamist recruiters. And a strong political base from which to push back against necessary but understandably unpopular public-safety measures.
Bloomberg and Kelly caught hell, but didn’t flinch.
Then Mayor Bill de Blasio came to office on an anti-NYPD plank generally, with particular hostility to the Kelly terror-containment policies — swiftly scaling them back and deflecting much of the responsibility to the FBI.
Yet Paris may have been an epiphany for de Blasio. In a sharp turnaround Saturday, he had surprisingly kind words for those policies: “Commissioner Kelly, to his credit, put a big, big focus on fighting terror. He built a very strong apparatus.” True.
“We have continued to build on that foundation,” he added — not true, not even close, but it’s never too late to start.
Friday night’s carnage numbs the soul, and New York well knows the feeling. But soon the horror will recede — and, absent strong leadership, vigilance, too.
There are no guarantees in the war on terror, but what successes there are require relentless attention to detail and great moral courage.
If Bill de Blasio finally gets it, so much the better. There’s nothing fictional about the threat his city faces.