Terror in Paris: Why Everyone Is So Concerned About the Olympics

On Friday, the twenty-sixth of July, 2024, at precisely 7:30 in the evening, local time, the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games will begin. From that moment onward, through Sunday, the eleventh of August, the people of Paris, many thousands of international attendees, and people watching at home will be treated to a display of considerable athletic talent. From mainstays like gymnastics, diving, fencing, and football, to new arrivals like break-dancing and skateboarding, the 2024 Paris Olympics promise to be nothing short of spectacular.

But in the lead-up to this year’s Games, intelligence services and security analysts across the world have made it crystal-clear: in Paris, there is potential not only for great achievements on the athletic stage, but great and terrible violence. A wide range of potential bad actors across the world are believed to have their sights set on the Games, raising fears of everything from terror attacks in France, to major assaults in cyberspace, to related violence around the world, timed to coincide with moments when the world’s attention will be fixed firmly on a single event.

Games in Turmoil: Over a Year of Escalating Warnings

The idea that this year’s Olympic Games might be at risk of a terror threat is not a new one. Over a year before the Games began, global security firms were already warning of a severe risk of a terror attack, and world nations were already hard at work preparing their athletes and supporting Olympic delegations for the risk of emergency. Per the security firm Dragonfly Intelligence, risk levels for the Games were quite obviously high, even despite a planned massive police presence all over Paris and the rest of France.

Quoting from Dragonfly’s 2023 report: “Even in the absence of specific threats, the interior minister has recently shared general concerns about the potential intent of far-right and, particularly, jihadist extremists to target the Olympics, in light of several attacks in France in recent years. Possible risks from ‘bomb-carrying’ drones are also a ‘new threat’ the minister has considered. Given these concerns, along with the hundreds of countries participating and the potential for exposure, our terrorism threat level for Paris remains severe.”

Since then, concerns around the Games have only intensified. A risk assessment by S&P Global in May of 2024 highlighted the risk of not only terror attacks, particularly by way of Islamist groups, but mass protests with the potential to devolve into riots, along with sabotage attacks and attacks in the digital realm. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, or ICCT, based in The Hague, wrote in a recent analysis: “For decades, the Olympic Games have been a tempting target for terrorists, and the Paris Olympics are taking place at precisely the time when the Islamic State threat has risen, partly due to the group’s successful exploitation of the Gaza war.”

The team overseeing the risk management platform Crisis24 wrote: “Key security threats identified include terrorism, cyber threats, health risks, and drone activity. Civil unrest, crime, and environmental risks are also of concern. The political climate in France is tense, and the global situation, particularly conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, adds to the complexity.”

Paris has seen worrying violence in advance of the Games, slated to begin in just a few days. On July 15th, a French soldier was stabbed outside a train station in Paris; the attacker was arrested, and the soldier was hospitalized with a non-life-threatening shoulder injury. The attacker’s motives are unclear, but the soldier in question was part of the Sentinelle force, a domestic security arm of the French military that will be on hand to secure this year’s Games.

Two days later, on July 17th, French security forces arrested an “ultra-right” sympathizer in the eastern regions of the country, on suspicion that the man was plotting a violent attack during the Games. Per the French outlet Le Parisien, the young man was from the Alsace region, and ran a Telegram group called “French Aryan division.” All the way back on the thirty-first of May, the French Interior Minister announced that an 18-year-old from Chechnya had been arrested a bit over a week prior, on suspicion of plotting to attack football events in the city of Saint-Etienne, southwest of Lyon.

Per the French government’s statement on the arrest, the attacker intended “to die and become a martyr” over the course of the attack. Per that same statement, France’s Interior Minister identified a range of other potential threats, coming from every corner of the world—and perhaps most concerning of all, the Interior Minister also specified that at least at that time, concrete security threats had not yet been detected. In a situation where potential bad actors are known to have a vested interest in carrying out attacks, a lack of evidence of a concrete plot isn’t a positive; it only raises further questions around what threats may be lurking in the shadows, ready to emerge when the Games are already underway.

A History of Olympic Terror: From Munich to Pyeongchang

The Olympics have long been the target of major terror plots and attacks throughout history, with a wide range of violent organizations, past and present, recognizing the unique opportunities the Games present. Not only are the Games well-attended by nearly every major nation on Earth, with prominent citizens of those countries sent to a common area, but the whole world is watching, meaning that whatever attacks do take place, and whatever ideological messages are wrapped into them, are even more amplified. In 1968, the Mexican government killed over a hundred student and civilian protesters in a violent crackdown, in response to protests that tried to take advantage of the Mexico City Olympics and the attention they brought.

In 1972, the Palestinian Black September Organization organized the Munich massacre, when eleven Israeli Olympic athletes and officials were kidnapped and killed. In 1976, the bombing of a Cuban airplane killed the entire Olympic fencing team from the nation, along with the rest of the 73 people onboard, in an attack by Cuban exile terrorists. In 1987, a North Korean attack on a Korean Air flight was timed to destabilize the South Korean government and instill fear in South Korea’s Olympic delegation in advance of the following year’s games; all 115 people aboard the flight were killed.

In 1996, an American domestic terrorist carried out a bombing during the Olympic Games in Atlanta, killing two and injuring over a hundred. In 2008, Beijing saw a series of bomb attacks on buses, killing two and injuring fourteen, and in 2014, an Islamist group from the Russian republic of Dagestan killed thirty-six people in a pair of suicide bombings in advance of that year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi. In 2016, eight men were jailed in Brazil for plotting attacks on behalf of the Islamic State for that year’s Rio games, in a plot that was foiled shortly before the event began.

In 2018, a computer virus called Olympic Destroyer was unleashed during the Opening Ceremony of that year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Olympic Destroyer was believed to have come from Russia.

Civil Unrest, Jihadist Threats, and the Sahel Dimension

For this year’s Games in Paris, there are anticipated threats that echo every single motive that the historical record provides. Social unrest in Paris and across France is at an unusual high, especially with the country’s recent political upheaval. France’s largest-scale riots in years came during the summer of 2023, when, after the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old Moroccan-Algerian boy named Nahel Merzouk, many thousands of French protesters took to the streets to protest police brutality, racial profiling, poverty among racial minorities, and more.

That protest movement descended, in some places, to riots, looting, and arson, with one town hall in a Parisian suburb firebombed, thousands of cars torched, thousands arrested, over a thousand buildings damaged, and half a billion euros in collective damages. This May, mass protests broke out again, with some 18,000 protesters, according to French police estimates, engaging in bitter and sometimes violent protest action over many of the same issues. Since then, France has undergone a series of snap elections, where bitter polarization in the country has left all sides ultimately unsatisfied and even more frustrated.

While peaceful protest movements stand to gain by taking advantage of the spotlight that the Olympics brings, high tensions and high nerves on all sides can quickly lead to violence that spirals out of control. The risk of more intentional violence by political extremists cannot be ignored either, as evidenced by the arrest of the purportedly ultra-right potential attacker arrested on July 17th. The threat of violence from jihadist groups cannot be overstated.

The Islamic State – Khorasan Province group has recently called for mass terror attacks in Europe, shortly after its own members attacked a concert hall outside Moscow and killed 145 people. The threat of mass attacks by jihadists is especially salient in Paris, after the Paris attacks of November 2015 saw 130 people killed. Also on the list of threats are Chechen militants, like the apparently lone terrorist arrested in the Alsace region this year.

The rate of attacks by jihadists across Europe has picked up significantly since the start of the Israel-Hamas War in October of 2023, and for militants looking to make a statement about that war, Paris is a prime target. Israel will send 88 athletes to compete in Paris this year, along with a non-athletic delegation to join them, and Israel’s main backer on the international stage, the United States, will send 592 of their own athletes as well. France, too, has maintained support for Israel despite condemning many of the tactics Israel has used to prosecute its offensive against Hamas, meaning that the potential for retaliation directly against France, as well as Israel, is worth noting.

With France’s ongoing racial tensions, and an influx of migrants from all over the world, but especially sub-Saharan Africa, comes the risk of terror attacks from different vectors. Insurgencies across the African region known as the Sahel, a narrow belt of savanna just south of the Sahara desert, happen to be spread across much of Francophone Africa, the same areas where France was the primary pre-independence colonial power. French-speaking nations, both in and out of the Sahel, from Algeria to Chad to Mali to Niger to the Congo and more, all struggle with their own violent insurgencies to varying degrees.

Any one of those insurgencies may choose to make itself known in France during the Games, especially after several nations in the region have pushed more and more forcefully against French involvement in their affairs.

Russian Sabotage, Drones, and the AI-Powered Threat Landscape

Making matters worse from a risk-analysis perspective, that wide array of potential attackers has a wide array of motivations and known methods, making them less of a homogeneous single threat and more of a collective puzzle to solve. Then, there is the threat of Russia. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has a history of starting trouble during the Games, and it has done so more than once.

In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia during the Beijing Summer Olympics; in 2014, Russia invaded Crimea as it hosted its own Winter Olympics in Sochi; and in 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine just four days after the close of the Beijing Winter Olympics. But with Russia fully bogged down in Ukraine and lacking the military means or apparent buildup to try to start trouble elsewhere at large scale, the risk Russia poses may take another form: sabotage. Over the last few months, Russia is suspected of having launched a widespread sabotage and hybrid-warfare campaign against the European nations of NATO, from arson attacks against weapons factories supplying materials to Ukraine, to assassination plots, to cyberattacks, to disinformation and election-meddling campaigns, and more.

It is rather unlikely that Russia would launch a full-scale attack on France, trigger NATO’s Article 5 provision for collective defense, and launch into World War III, but like the current Russian sabotage campaign, lower-grade attacks during the Olympics can fall short of provoking such an escalation. From acts of sabotage against energy, transportation, and sanitation infrastructure to cause headaches in Paris, to cyberattacks that can sow chaos across the country, to even targeted assassination of government and private-industry leaders who will be at the event, there is no shortage of chaos Russia can cause. According to a report by Microsoft’s threat intelligence unit, Russia already has its sights set on the Games, and is launching ongoing influence operations to both discredit the Games themselves and raise fears of violence or terror attack.

There is also the threat of new weapons and new tactics coming from all sides. One specific item of public concern is France’s apparent vulnerability to drone attacks, something that an anti-drone system called Parade was supposed to deal with in Paris but has since proven in testing that it is a long way off from addressing. France 24 wrote on the threats that French security forces imagine: “The scenario of a swarm of explosive-laden drones sweeping in over the 300,000 spectators seated along the 6-kilometre stretch of the Seine during the July 26 opening ceremony would be nothing short of a nightmare for French police.”

France is believed to be host to some three million drones, most of which are in private hands. Waterborne drones are also a significant threat; although Ukraine’s use of them has sown havoc across the Black Sea in its fight against Russia, it is not hard to imagine that smaller, explosives-packed boats could be used one at a time or en masse to attack Olympic athletes floating vulnerable down the river Seine. Even the ongoing Russian influence campaign, called out by Microsoft in advance of the Games, has gained a new edge by relying on generative AI.

In one case, Russian cyber-sabotage group Storm-1679 went to the trouble of making a deepfake version of Tom Cruise to narrate a documentary criticizing the International Olympic Committee, which has been circulating on Telegram and other platforms since last year.

Unprecedented Stakes: World Leaders, Open-Air Parades, and Ten Million Visitors

The stakes for this year’s Olympics simply could not be higher. During the Opening Ceremonies, over a hundred world leaders will be in Paris, while ten thousand athletes travel on open-air boats along the river Seine in a massive parade that will feature gigantic crowds. Paris expects some three hundred thousand spectators to attend, coming from all over the world, and even that is a reduction from the planned six hundred thousand that were initially intended to watch the Opening Ceremonies.

All in all, ten million people are expected to arrive in France at some point over the course of the Games, meaning not only ten million potential victims of an attack, but ten million individual security threats that must be cleared as thoroughly as possible. Even in the event that Olympic locations are hardened to attack, the many shops, hotels, restaurants, public spaces, and other venues all across France where innocent civilians will be gathering absolutely must be accounted for as well. With so many threats against this year’s Games, it is easy to find cause for concern—and quite frankly, concern is justified.

Even in far smaller sporting events, national or regional ones, security threats are hard to deal with—and in a situation like this, with so many potential sources of threats and so many actors operating independently from each other, it is orders of magnitude more difficult.

France’s Layered Defense: Police, Military, Cyber, and Intelligence

France, joined by Olympic participant nations around the world, is taking steps to address the risk. The first step to addressing the situation is police presence. Per 2023 estimates, some thirty-five to forty-five thousand French police officers were expected to be deployed to locations where Olympic events will take place, alongside several dozen small security vessels patrolling the waters where both inland and coastal events will take place.

Dragonfly Intelligence wrote: “Paris’s local police appear well prepared to secure the spectacle from any potential extremist threats.” At present, Paris is expecting to deploy around 30,000 police officers per day during the entire span of the Olympics, with more coverage on certain days, and the most of all for the Opening Ceremonies, when a full forty-five thousand officers will be on hand. Police deployments in other French cities, although not quite so large, will be roughly proportional when compared to the number of events and visitors those cities plan to welcome.

Joining the police in Paris will be about 18,000 members of the French military, including thousands who will be staying in a massive camp erected on the outskirts of the city. Per agents of America’s Diplomatic Security Service, an intelligence and law-enforcement organization that has been working alongside France for two years ahead of these Games, France has put together an “excellent security plan” for the event. Per the American DSS, the areas within France that are set to host the Olympics are shielded and hardened by a multi-layered, overlapping defensive structure—not a physical structure, but a combination of physical assets, law enforcement and intelligence, mechanisms to protect cyberspace, and far more.

Bridge access across the river Seine has been restricted during the Opening Ceremonies, and ballistic glass has been installed across the walls of the river, while large-scale vetting processes have seen every spectator for the Opening Ceremonies vetted in advance of their arrival. Backpacks will be limited in and around Olympic events, credentials will be required to access established secure zones, and agents from many of the world’s foreign intelligence organizations are expected to be embedded in and around crowds, with global embassies in France on high alert to react to any potential problems. On the technology front, France’s anti-drone system continues to undergo modification in advance of the Games, and it should be active while the Games are going on.

France and its international partners have prepared for potential cyberattacks, running training scenarios to counter a potential attack against the host nation, other participating nations, or corporate sponsors. France’s cyberspace defense around the Games is believed to involve mass coordination across nations, including special intelligence-sharing arrangements, and the cybersecurity headquarters for the Paris Games will be operating from an unknown, secret location with authority and equipment to oversee the Games in full. One known part of the Games’ cybersecurity defense has been the extensive use of so-called white hat hackers, ethical hackers for hire who have worked extensively to expose and record every vulnerability they can find in order to inform France so they can be corrected.

And just as Russia has used AI in its efforts to sow fears around the Games, so too has France leveraged AI to perform sophisticated triage efforts for incoming threats, and examine cyber systems well in advance of the Games to make sure they are sufficiently hardened. Despite the risks, the 2024 Paris Games are going to be among the best-defended Olympic Games in history, if not the best-defended ever. Undeniably, this year’s Games will come with risk, as have every Olympic Games of the past half-century or more.

As many sources, in France and elsewhere, have expressed, it is unlikely to the point of being ridiculous to imagine that there will be no bad actors, zero attempts to incite or carry out violence, and zero attempts to engage in sabotage or attacks in cyberspace. All that can be hoped for, in both these Olympic Games and any other event for the public to enjoy, is that when a bad actor comes to do the Games harm, they will find a robust and formidable defense waiting in their path.

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