Introduction

On 16 January 2013, thirty-two terrorists from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Masked Brigade launched an armed assault near the town of In Amenas in the Algerian desert. Their target was a joint venture gas field operated by the Norwegian state-owned energy enterprise Statoil (later rebranded Equinor) in conjunction with the British oil and gas company British Petroleum (BP). Present at the gas field were some 800 personnel of thirty nationalities. The terrorists entrenched themselves and wreaked havoc in the gas production facility for four days while Algerian special forces prepared and launched their counter-assault. The attack left forty civilians from ten countries dead, among them five Norwegian nationals employed with Statoil. In its report on the Norwegian crisis management effort, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) describes the incident as ‘the most serious peacetime attack ever on Norwegian interests abroad’.

This chapter explores the In Amenas terrorist attack as a case of intelligence warning. It focuses on the role, responsibility and performance of the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS), primarily in terms of warning about the attack, and Norwegian authorities and the Statoil security apparatus in responding to warning. It surveys open-source information, shedding light on NIS's decisionmaking support in establishing the security measures in place in In Amenas at the time of the attack. These sources most notably include the Norwegian services’ annual unclassified threat and risk assessments, the investigation report Statoil commissioned on the attack and MOFA's report evaluating the Norwegian authorities’ crisis management.