Caught Between Internal and External Terror Threats, France Struggles to Cope (VIDEO)

Well, I guess that's putting it bluntly.

And it's going to get worse before it gets better. That's for sure.

At the Washington Post:

Two weeks ago, France’s top spy arrived in Washington for urgent meetings with his counterparts at the CIA and other agencies on the war in Syria and the rapidly morphing terrorist threat emanating from the Islamic State.

“We have now two kinds of threats,” Bernard Bajolet, the head of the French spy service, said in a rare public appearance during his visit. There is an “inside threat,” he said, speaking of young radicalized French residents, but “in addition to that we have the threat from outside, either through terrorist actions which are planned [and] ordered from outside or only through fighters coming back to our countries.”

The attacks Friday in Paris showed how these twin threats are converging on France like a vise, putting extraordinary pressure on security services that have long been regarded as among the most capable in Europe but now seem overwhelmed by a surge in plots tied to Islamist terrorist groups.

French and U.S. intelligence services were scrambling Saturday to make sense of the still-emerging details about an attack that involved eight militants launching assaults on targets scattered across the French capital, leaving at least 129 people dead.

But a flurry of related arrests outside France and clues suggesting that at least one of the gunmen recently entered Europe through Greece seemed to bolster French President François Hollande’s description of the attack as one that was “prepared, organized and planned from outside the country by the Islamic State, but with help from inside.”

If so, the attack appears to have been a hybrid of the threat streams cited by the French spy chief last month, as well as an alarming evolution of the objectives and tactics employed by the Islamic State.

“They’re exploiting a seam in France,” said a senior U.S. official with access to classified information about the attacks and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “This could be ISIL-inspired” or involve “trained fighters from ISIL coming back to France,” the official said. “I’m not sure it makes much of a difference. ISIL feeds on this chaos.”

More.