The Bourbon Street Attack As An Intelligence Failure

Examining the tragedy as a former intel analyst.

Many moons ago, when I was a baby intel officer at the CIA, I took a lengthy course on intelligence analysis. A large focus of this course was on intelligence failures, both recent (9/11, Iraq WMD) and long past (Pearl Harbor, Yom Kippur War) with an eye towards learning from past failures to prevent future ones.

It was drilled into us there that good analysis requires an understanding of past failure and a willingness to honestly accept and confront those failures. And the same is true of good policy. In that light, I wanted to take off my crime data analyst hat and put on my former intel analyst hat for a post that examined the horrific tragedy which befell my hometown earlier this year.

Let’s start by taking Pearl Harbor as an example to better understand the possible layers of intelligence failure. There were many layers of failure to the December 1941 attack.

Pearl Harbor was a strategic failure in that US intelligence organizations failed to put the pieces together — mostly gathered via SIGINT — that Japan was about to attack the United States. Conspiracies aside, there were lots of clues though no smoking gun of an impending attack before it was launched. Strategically speaking, US intelligence organizations failed to connect the various dots beforehand.

The attack was a tactical failure in that the assets available to the commanders in Pearl Harbor did not detect the attack before it began. There was evidence of the attack, namely sightings of Japanese submarines, prior to the bombing. In addition, reconnaissance assets were available but did not find the Japanese. Simply sighting the Japanese prior to launching might have prevented it from occurring.

But, most importantly, Pearl Harbor was an institutional failure. There were multiple failures within United States institutions that created an environment where an attack could occur.

SIGINT was passed slowly to field commanders due to (well founded) security constraints, a somewhat vague “War Warning” on November 27th did not include Hawaii on the list of possible targets, intelligence elements in Pearl Harbor did not have the equipment needed to decrypt Japanese messages on their own, there weren’t enough recon planes to provide full coverage so spotting the enemy would have taken some profound luck, and Army and Navy organizational bureaucracies made it difficult for senior intelligence officers in both services to talk to their counterparts in Hawaii (there are obviously many more failures that have been discussed at length in lots of places!¹).

The tactical and strategic failures are what we generally think of when we talk about the missed signs of Pearl Harbor, but it was the institutional failures that made it all possible. The attack on Bourbon Street similarly had failures at all three levels.

The strategic failure was relatively straightforward. Federal law enforcement failed to identify the perpetrator’s intentions to mount an attack. The perpetrator claimed to have joined ISIS and previously traveled to Egypt though I don’t believe it’s clear yet whether he had any formal contact with the terror group.

The tactical policing failure has received the most attention and I’d highly recommend excellent reporting from The Advocate/Times Picayune for a full picture of what went wrong tactically (see here, here, and here for the pieces I refer to when citing The Advocate). To summarize: there were no bollards nor were hydraulic wedges deployed to add an extra layer of security, and a single SUV was deployed with no sidewalks blocked.

Still, none of these tactical failures — if corrected — would have guaranteed successfully stopping an attack. The attack could have unfolded in a way that enabled the attacker to detonate the homemade bombs he had scattered along Bourbon Street. Alternatively, the attacker had twice surveilled Bourbon Street and had researched accessing a Bourbon Street balcony and Mardi Gras. He could have certainly have chosen an alternate method of inflicting evil had the option of a vehicle-based attack not been available.

The tactical failures have gotten most of the attention, but it is the institutional failures at the local and state levels that scream out as most in need of fixing. Much like Pearl Harbor, the tactical failures came to roost as a direct result of the larger institutional failures which created an environment conducive to failure.

The City of New Orleans was well aware of a possible vehicle-based attack on Bourbon Street as early as 2016, and planning under former mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration clearly reflected this prioritization. The bollards were first installed under Landrieu in 2017, and The Advocate cites former NOPD Chief Michael Harrison as noting that “preparations in past years have included an in-depth review of the plans in meetings that required agreement from various department heads, as well as “table top” exercises aimed at looking for flaws and gaps that could be exploited.”

Per Harrison, “The mayor was always at the head of the table, and we would go around the table to ensure every aspect of the plan was accounted for, that there weren't gaps…Everybody had to agree to support that before we left the room.”

Yet all of these plans and institutional coordination appear to have fallen apart by New Year’s Eve 2025. Perhaps most troubling, is the fact that it is not clear from public statements who was supposed to be in charge of coordinating security efforts in the French Quarter that night. The police department was in charge of deploying assets, but who was supposed to be in charge overall?

A lack of institutional coordination and clear command with regards to French Quarter security is not a new issue.

A consultant report from 2019 examining all aspects of French Quarter security for the French Quarter Management District highlighted this problem. The report by Interfor Internationl recommended that “current vulnerabilities can be reduced by strengthening and improving existing security agencies, deployments and procedures, in addition to significantly improving coordination among the various security stakeholders operating within the FQ.”

In theory command and coordination should fall under the purview of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness (NOHSEP). NOHSEP “serves as New Orleans' coordinating agency for public safety and emergency management. We oversee administration of all crisis and consequence response protocols safeguarding New Orleans” according to the agency’s website. Moreover, The Advocate notes that “The law gives the [NOHSEP] director ‘direct responsibility for the organization, administration and operation” for security and emergency planning.’”

Yet, as The Advocate reports, “Asked who decided to position the SUV at the Bourbon Street entrance, Arnold [the NOHSEP director] said he was surprised to learn about that after the fact. He said he thought the NOPD plan called for a truck, based on what had been done for past events.”

But it’s not clear how much the security measures that night differed from measures employed during similar events like New Year’s Eve last year. According to The Advocate “Documents obtained by The Times-Picayune show that it was the second straight year that the written security preparations for New Year’s Eve did not reflect ad hoc measures that were actually used.” It’s possible that NOPD deployed an SUV similarly last New Year’s Eve, my guess (and it’s just a guess) is that this wasn’t the first time that NOPD deployed its security assets in this manner during a high profile event.

That the office tasked with coordinating security efforts did not know what security assets would be deployed and how is a clear problem.

If the plan and its execution had flaws — and they clearly did — then it is incumbent upon the institutional process to identify and correct those flaws. Yet it is not known from the public reporting whether any “table top” exercises were held and the director of the organization nominally tasked with coordinating security efforts said he was surprised by the security measures being employed.

At a minimum there was no coordination between the what was intended on paper and what ended up occurring which represents a serious institutional failure.

Even the tactical failures from the deployment of assets — such as the lack of bollards and wedges — were, at their roots, institutional failures. The Advocate reports that the wedges tend to malfunction and this fear of failure in an emergency when vehicles need to enter or exit Bourbon Street kept them from being deployed on New Year’s Eve.

The bollard system was an even greater failure. The 2019 report from Interfor states that “The current bollard system on Bourbon Street does not appear to work. Interfor has received conflicting explanations as to why the existing bollard system is rarely used. Some residents and business owners reported that beads frequently fall into the tracks rendering the devices temporarily inoperable.”

That was in 2019.

Interfor also wrote in its report that:

“The risk of terrorism - specifically mass shootings and vehicular attacks - remains highly possible while moderately probable.

The two modes of terror attack most likely to be used are vehicular ramming and active shooting. Both international and domestic terrorists have turned to these methods as a cheap low-tech alternative to complex bomb plots, particularly in the case of lone wolf attacks. Considering that the most high-profile target in New Orleans - Bourbon Street - is an open air thoroughfare with little to no access control reinforces the rationale for these two methods.”

The bollards were used intermittently in the ensuing years before being abandoned completely in 2022. This despite a clear awareness that the bollards needed replacing amid the constant possibility of a vehicle-based attack.

Perhaps most telling about the lack of institutional prioritization of stopping a vehicle-based attack on Bourbon Street is the fact that the new bollards that were planned to be installed before the Super Bowl were not rated as strong enough to prevent the attack that occurred on Bourbon Street.

The tactical failures almost certainly would not have occurred without the accompanying institutional failures. It was institutional failure that led to the bollards having not been replaced in the last 5+ years. It was institutional failure that led to the fears that the wedges might fail in an emergency not being addressed. And it was institutional failure when the office nominally tasked with oversight and coordination of security efforts in the French Quarter did not know how security assets were deployed despite planning being described as “pretty standard.”

In the end, as NOPD Chief Anne Kirkpatrick rightly pointed out, the perpetrator was “hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.” The attack without the noted security lapses would have looked different, but the perpetrator could have still caused tragedy and mayhem in many different horrific ways.

Intelligence failures happen to even the best of intelligence officers. Compounding those failures by failing to identify and correct the root institutional causes is a recipe for future problems.

The tactical failures from January 1st are relatively easy to identify and correct, but the institutional failures run deep. Sunday night's Super Bowl highlighted what a stronger, coordinated security effort across multiple institutions looks like, though replicating that amount of effort for less high profile events is highly unlikely.

The next major security threat is unlikely to look like the last one. Fixing only the tactical policing issues that allowed a vehicle-ramming attack without thinking about the larger organizational issues invites future failures. The city and statewide institutional failures should be acknowledged and addressed to lessen the odds that a similar tragedy ever happens.

1. Edwin Layton’s “And I Was There” is a great resource for understanding the US intelligence picture prior to Pearl Harbor.