[2] In the article, both the CIA and the French government declined to comment on Alliance Base, while all intelligence officers requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the project, in particular relating to its political and judicial dimensions.
"No country wanted to be perceived as taking direction from the CIA," wrote Dana Priest, while France was the only European state willing to engage in more than simple information exchange.
[2] By reporting information to its counterparts, French intelligence agencies helped the US convict Ahmed Ressam, arrested in 1999, as well as Zacarias Moussaoui, who lived a long time in France.
According to The Washington Post investigative reporter, the arrest of Christian Ganczarski, alleged to be a senior Al Qaeda leader, was one of the 12 major operations it conducted during its first years.
Jean-Louis Brugière, on the other hand, was quoted by Dana Priest as saying that "The relations between intelligence agencies in the United States and France has been good, even during the transatlantic dispute over Iraq, for practical reasons".
[3] Christian Ganczarski, a German convert to Islam, took an Air France flight from Riyadh on June 3, 2003, back to Germany, with a change of planes in Paris.
[2] On May 20, 2003, Alliance Base learned that Ahmed Mehdi, who lived near Ganczarski in Germany, was about to travel for a 14-day vacation to La Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy implicitly referred to Alliance Base on June 11, 2003, declaring to the National Assembly that "This arrest took place thanks to the perfect collaboration between the services of the great democracies.