Arson attacks underscore the security and terror threats to the Paris Olympics

Editor’s note, July 26, 2024, 10 am: This story has been updated to include news of arson attacks on the French train system.

It’s not as if no one was thinking about security issues when Paris was awarded this summer’s Olympics back in 2017. Just two years earlier, the French capital had been the scene of one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history, when Islamic State gunmen killed more than 130 people. That attack came only a few months after a massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Then-French President François Hollande said that when he was lobbying for the Olympics in 2016, he was asked by International Olympic Committee officials “whether Paris would be able to organize safe Games.” He made the case that not only would Paris be ready, but an Olympics in the City of Light would be the “most beautiful answer we could give to fundamentalism.”

Seven years later, the Olympics are finally coming to Paris in a very different era with a very different landscape of security threats. While the attention of governments and the media has largely shifted away from terrorist groups like ISIS, the group and its affiliates have demonstrated they can continue to carry out major attacks, including a horrific recent one in Moscow with a death toll similar to what Paris suffered in 2015. The Olympics also take place against the backdrop of the October 7 attacks, Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, and a global surge in antisemitism, France very much included.

The Olympics, which were originally meant to mark a period of truce from war, are taking place in a Europe embroiled in the biggest armed conflict since WWII. The impact of the war in Ukraine will be visible during the competitions themselves: Russian and Belarusian athletes are barred from competing under their countries’ flags, though some will be present as “individual neutral athletes.” A recent string of mysterious events, including past arson attacks, has also raised concerns that Russia could attempt to disrupt the games in retaliation for France and other Western countries’ support of Ukraine, and European intelligence allies have specifically warned of Moscow-backed acts of sabotage.

Some of those fears appeared realized even before the Olympic flame was set to be lit Friday evening Paris time. What looks to be coordinated arson attacks early Friday morning heavily disrupted service on three of France’s high-speed rail lines, causing travel chaos in the hours before the Opening Ceremonies in Paris. According to Jean-Pierre Farandou, chief executive of the railway company SNCF, fires were set in pipes used to carry cables for signaling. The company said one additional attack had been thwarted.

While there were no deaths or injuries reported from the fires, they clearly seemed to be set with an eye toward causing maximum disruption for the Olympics. “The locations were chosen specifically to have more serious consequences, since a single fire cuts off traffic on two branches of the network,” Farandou told reporters.

Train service is projected to be disrupted through the weekend, complicating travel plans for over a million people, including Olympic spectators, Parisians fleeing the Games, and potentially even some athletes. While no one has yet taken responsibility for the attacks, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal called the fires “acts of sabotage that were carried out in a prepared and coordinated way” in a post on X, and that the government would investigate.

The Olympics have been the target of political violence in the past – mostly famously the killing of 11 members of the Israeli team at the 1972 games in Munich by a Palestinian militant group and a bombing by a right-wing anti-abortion extremist at the 1996 games in Atlanta. Al-Qaeda was also known to have planned to attack the 2000 Sydney Olympics but ultimately didn’t follow through.

Large sporting events, with their massive crowds and built-in global media attention, will always present a tempting, if presumably well-defended target. Though it’s less remembered today than the slaughter at the Bataclan rock venue during the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris, one terrorist attempted and failed to enter the Stade de France where 80,000 people including the French president were watching a France-Germany soccer match.

Not surprisingly, security levels at the Games are high with a heavy police and military presence in Paris, as well as the controversial use of artificial intelligence technology for video surveillance. But notably, the opening ceremonies on Friday evening will be held for the first time outside a stadium, with athletes parading in boats along the Seine. It promises to be a beautiful sight — but it will also be a security headache, set out across a sprawling metropolis rather than a closed and controlled location.

One US security official who spoke with Vox said that all Olympics pose their particular concerns, from terrorism in London in 2012 to crime during Rio de Janeiro in 2016 to cyberattacks at the last summer games in Tokyo.

With Paris in 2024, the official said, “you have everything.”

In May, French police arrested an 18-year-old Chechen national who was accused of plotting to attack a soccer game at the Paris Olympics, alleging that he “wanted to attack spectators, but also security forces and die as a martyr.” A month earlier, security was tightened at Champions League soccer games around the continent after ISIS threatened to launch drone attacks on the elite European club tournament.

There’s been no known comparable threat to the Olympics, but the attack on the Crocus Concert Hall near Moscow that killed more than 130 people in March was a wake-up call to many officials: While greatly diminished, the threat from groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS has not disappeared. “If you can do Moscow, you can do Paris,” Gilles Kepel, a French expert on terrorism, told the Economist.

Responsibility for the Moscow attack was claimed by Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the group’s Afghan affiliate in Afghanistan and Central Asia. (Khorasan is a historical name for a region that includes Afghanistan and parts of several neighboring countries.) In the years since the dismantling of ISIS’s territorial “caliphate” in parts of Syria and Iraq, ISIS-K has emerged as arguably the most dangerous and high-profile of the group’s global affiliates. It carried out a bombing that killed more than 100 people in Iran at the beginning of this year, as well as the attack in Kabul that killed 13 US troops and more than 100 Afghans during the chaotic evacuation of US personnel from Afghanistan. Authorities in Europe have broken up several alleged ISIS-K plots in recent months.

Experts say the ISIS of today operates differently than it did in its heyday. Many of the attackers involved in the 2015 massacre had traveled to Syria for on-the-ground training. That’s no longer feasible. “All these things used to be done from ISIS hubs, but ISIS doesn’t have territory anymore. It’s totally dematerialized,” Wassim Nasr, a Paris-based terrorism analyst with the France 24 television network, told Vox.

But ISIS operatives in Europe aren’t quite the proverbial “lone wolves” either. They interact online with what Nasr called “cyber-coaches” abroad who advise them on planning and logistics.

The result, Nasr says, is that ISIS operatives in Europe are likely less trained and less able to carry out attacks than their predecessors. “That’s the difference from 10 years ago,” he says. “The European recruits who could have done this [carried out a successful attack on a high-security event like the Olympics] are now either dead or in jail.”

A US security official told Vox that while authorities aren’t taking ISIS’s decline for granted, particularly in light of the Moscow attack, they see no sign of an active threat. “You have a lot of aspirational chatter online,” the official said. “What we’re not seeing is those aspirational views turned into anything concrete.”

October 7 and the war in Gaza have, of course, raised the level of tension as well. Israel’s presence at the games may drive some protests, as it did at the recent Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden. French authorities announced this week that the Israeli Olympic team would be given 24-hour protection after a left-wing lawmaker said the team was not welcome and should be protested.

The US official said street protests, whether about Gaza or anything else, were not a major security concern and that French authorities were well-equipped to handle them: “It’s the national pastime here. It’s what the French do.”

A greater concern is that the events in the Middle East could inspire violent one-off attacks by individuals. Europol recorded over a dozen jihadist terror plots in Europe in the nine months following October 7 compared to just six in all of 2022. These include the ISIS sympathizer who stabbed a schoolteacher to death in Northern France in October, and the killing of a German tourist in a hammer and knife attack near the Eiffel Tower in December.

For the first time in years, European security officials may be worried less about non-state groups like ISIS than about a hostile government. The continent has been on increasingly high alert for acts of sabotage orchestrated by the Russian government, linked to the war in Ukraine. Russian agents have been accused of plotting sabotage attacks against military targets in Germany, interfering with railways in the Czech Republic, and arson attacks in the UK and Lithuania.

Earlier this month, it was reported that US and German authorities had foiled a Russian plot to assassinate the CEO of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest defense contractor and a significant contributor of ammunition to the Ukrainian war effort. US military bases across Europe were recently placed on high alert because of intelligence about potential Russian sabotage attacks.

Last month, a Russian-Ukrainian man was injured while making explosives near Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport. French authorities say he had been planning to attack a hardware store in Paris as part of a Moscow-orchestrated sabotage campaign.

At the recent NATO summit in Washington, Gabrielius Landsbergis, foreign minister of Lithuania, referred to these events saying, “I’m not sure it can be called “hybrid events” or “gray zone events any longer. It’s quite clear that [these are] terrorist attacks by a hostile neighboring country against NATO countries.”

Petter Nesser, an expert on terrorism in Europe with the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, told Vox that while it can be very difficult to attribute some of these events to Russia directly, it is clear that “Russia wants to sow discord and weaken cooperation among European states to help them have their way in Ukraine. They have shown in the past they can use their spy networks and proxies to sow discord.”

The exclusion of Russia and Belarus — at least officially — from the Games may make them an even more tempting target for sabotage. This need not take place in physical space. The Olympics are always the target of cyberattacks, and British authorities have alleged that Russia plotted large-scale cyberattacks against the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 before they were postponed due to the coronavirus. French organizers say these Games are facing an “unprecedented level of threat” online, and not just from the Kremlin.

Despite the numerous threats, Olympic organizers have promised to turn the French capital into the “safest place in the world” during the games, an effort that involved the deployment of some 30,000 police per day — and up to 45,000 during the Opening Ceremony — including reinforcements from around 40 countries.

Authorities are also using a controversial artificial intelligence system to analyze images captured by surveillance cameras around the city in real-time to identify potential threats such as unusual behavior, abandoned objects, or weapons. French legislators had to amend the country’s laws last year to allow for deployment of the new technology. The system was successfully tested at a Depeche Mode concert in Paris in March.

Privacy advocates worry that the use of the system opens up the floodgates to future use of AI technology to undermine privacy and criminalize what authorities deem to be aberrant or unusual behavior in crowds.

“When the next event comes up in another country, they will, of course, look at France and whether or not there was a political reaction,” Patrick Breyer, a German minister of the European Parliament who organized an open letter protesting the use of the system, told Vox. “There’s a risk this will become standard procedure in connection with large events.”

Before every Olympics, there is a tendency in media coverage to accentuate the negative: terrorist risk, political controversy, shoddy facilities, crime, environmental damage. Once the Games start and the athletes are on the court or off the blocks, these issues tend to be brushed aside, for better or worse.

All indications so far are that the Paris Olympics will be a safe and successful Games. US security officials who spoke with Vox emphasized that for all the threats, they have no concerns about the French authorities’ ability to handle them.

Since 1993, before every Olympics the UN General Assembly has voted to urge member-states to observe the Olympic Truce, which calls for a cessation of hostilities during the course of the Games. This Olympics was no different, with the vote passing in November.

The Olympic Truce has always been more aspiration than reality, and between the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, not to mention countless other conflicts around the globe, we can be sure that war won’t come to a pause during the two weeks of the Paris Games. But as International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said at the UN that day: “The Olympic Games are the only event in our fragile world where people can still come together in peace and harmony.” The hope can only be that the thousands of athletes and the millions of spectators who will gather in Paris can be kept safe from a fragile world beyond the Games.