Just great:

A German intelligence officer has reportedly been arrested over a suspected Islamist plot to bomb the agency’s headquarters in Cologne…

The BfV said the man “behaved inconspicuously” prior to his arrest. He had, since April, been engaged in gathering intelligence on Islamist extremists in Germany, Der Spiegel said.

Online chats were apparently found between the suspect and other Islamists in which he attempted to recruit them to the intelligence agency to mount an attack on “non-believers”, carrying out a bomb attack on the spy HQ “in the name of Allah”.

He used several different names online and his activities were uncovered about a month ago.

The man’s family reportedly knew nothing of his conversion to Islam two years ago and subsequent radicalisation.

The suspect was thought to have pledged allegiance to of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist group.

First, the good news: they caught the guy.

Next, the bad news: just about everything else.

This man was a convert, and another article states that he was “of Spanish origin.” This means he could be of European ethnic origin rather than Middle Eastern or other Muslim-area origin. Or perhaps not; people are often referred to in the press by their places of birth rather than their hereditary ethnicity.

At any rate, this story appears to highlight the difficulties facing those dedicated to preventing terrorist attacks. Who to look for? This man purposely kept his Islamic identification under the radar, so—especially if he was a native European—how would one know?

This article also says that he was a follower of Mohamed Mahmoud, who is described as the Austrian leader of ISIS. ISIS has an “Austrian leader” and we know his name? How did that happen?

Some clues here:

[Mahmoud] was born 18 June 1985 in Vienna, Austria. His father Sami Mahmoud was a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Fearing arrest, he fled to Austria and received asylum five years later.

So, the ISIS guy’s father was Egyptian and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt found him too dangerous. And yet Austria welcomed him with open arms. First error.

In October 2002, aged 17, [Mahmoud] traveled to Iraq via Italy. He was trained in a camp by Ansar al-Islam in Iraqi Kurdistan. He was gone for eight months, but he was arrested two months before the war in Iraq started.

That’s a bit unclear. Was he arrested in Iraq? Or in Austria? But wherever he was arrested, he certainly didn’t stay incarcerated for very long if at all. Second error.

A few years later:

In 2005 he founded the ‘Organization of the Islamic Youth’ in Austria.

So, he’s a free man in Austria and a community organizer of sorts, despite having been trained by a group that was designated a terrorist organization as well as an al Qaeda affiliate. He was an activist in Austria for the next couple of years. Then:

In 2007, authorities became suspicious when he started to buy ingredients for a possible suicide belt and the Media Front published a video threatening to carry out attacks in Germany and Austria if they did not withdraw their troops from Afghanistan.

On September 12, 2007, he and his wife were arrested in Vienna. He denied that he had anything to do with the production of the video or that he had any plans for a suicide attack.

So apparently they were at least monitoring him in some way. As a result of these activities he was imprisoned. Next:

In April 2008, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb called for his release from jail in Austria, in exchange for freeing two Austrian captives. While incarcerated, he held a two-month hunger strike in an attempt to secure his release.

There does not seem to have been an exchange, so we won’t count that as an error. However, here’s error number three:

He was released from prison in Austria on September 15, 2011 after serving a four-year prison sentence for being a member and supporter of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

Four years? Slap on the wrist. Maybe not even a slap; I’d call it almost a love tap. The problem (reading between the lines) seems to have been that he wasn’t convicted for any terrorist acts or attempted or planned terrorist acts, but rather for being a member of a terrorist group, which is a lesser charge.

Hardly missing a beat:

He moved to Berlin upon release, and between 2011”“12, he moved to Solingen alongside Denis Cuspert. There he founded the Salafi organisation Millatu Ibrahim.

Finally:

On April 26, 2012, Hesse Interior Minister Boris Rhein expelled him from Germany, asking him to leave within one month. He left to Egypt.

Today, with modern communication and border permeability extending a person’s reach and influence, exile isn’t always all that effective. Next moves for Mahmoud:

In March 2013, a video appeared on the Internet, in which he burned his Austrian passport and threatened terror attacks. A few days afterwards, he was arrested in Hatay, Turkey with a fake Libyan passport. It was alleged he was planning on traveling to Syria and he was held until 19 August 2014 in a Turkish prison.

Score one for the Turks. But it was a short-lived respite:

Austria pleas to extradite him were denied by the Turkish state. Due to Turkish law, police could only hold him for a short period and he was released subject to conditions of reporting to police regularly.

What comes next could not possibly have come as a surprise to anyone:

He ignored the reporting restrictions and disappeared to Syria.

Since then, he’s appeared online in connection with various ISIS murders, and seems to still be in Syria or thereabouts.

I keep thinking these people are probably laughing at the stupid stupid suicidal west.

But I don’t have to imagine. Here are some quotes from an interview Mahmoud gave on his release from his four-year stint in the Austrian prison, in 2011:

“I want to send the message that I am ready to die for my religion any time. I have nothing to lose in life. Today I know that demonstrations and protests don’t help, and today I know that the West is lying about its freedom of speech and human rights.”

Freedom of speech and human rights of which he has taken full, complete, and probably knowing advantage. The article continues:

Mohamed Mahmoud may only be 26 years old, but he is clearly positioning himself for a senior leadership position within al-Qaeda in the wake of the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric turned militant leader who was killed by an American missile strike in Yemen in September.

One of the many ironies of this story is that Mahmoud, like many other terrorists in the west, could only be imprisoned for a paltry number of years under our anti-terrorist laws. But now he can be killed with a drone, if only we could locate him.

He was apparently very inspirational while still in Austria:

…Mahmoud is extremely well-connected within the al-Qaeda network. Many of those connections were made while he was in prison or when he attended a a training camp in Iraq as a teenager. The camp, organized by Ansar al-Islam, is a group that has been responsible for many suicide attacks. Mohamed Mahmoud is also known to be a charismatic speaker with many German-language jihadi adherents smitten with his fiery speeches of hate-filled jihadist rhetoric.

I’ve tried to find out what the penalties for someone like Mahmoud would be if he’d been in this country, but the best I could come up with is a very general article that isn’t particularly helpful. The issue, of course, is where speech in judged to have segued into dangerous action, and whether and when pro-terrorist speech constitutes “incitement”.

Expect more of this sort of thing.

But to get back to the story of Mahmoud’s disciple, the as-yet-unnamed German intelligence guy who turns out to be a terrorist—I don’t speak French, but Ace’s translation of this French-language article contains more information about him:

…this agent recruited in April 2016, father of four children born in Spain but naturalized as a German, who had appeared in gay pornographic films…

If this is correct, know that he was recruited for the first time in April, but we don’t know when he came to Germany, why or how he was “recruited,” and in what way he was screened.

As for the gay pornographic background—excuse me, but is this for real? Did the Germans not think this could be a wee bit compromising? Perhaps open him up to some sort of blackmail? What are the criteria for “recruiting” intelligence officers these days? Inquiring minds want to know.

It also appears that he was caught plotting some sort of attack with a person who turned out to be an “informant for interior security.” A sort of spy vs. spy setup: