(CNN)-The
night that shook Paris started with three rental cars: three cars with
three teams of terrorists maneuvering through the Friday evening
traffic, armed with the weapons of war.
A little before 9 p.m., a Renault Clio driven by Salah Abdeslam, the Paris plotter captured on March 18 in Brussels,
pulled up outside the national stadium. An international soccer
friendly match between France and Germany was just kicking off and
80,000 fans, including French President Francois Hollande, were already
inside. Three men got out of the car and headed toward the stands.
One
of them -- Bilal Hadfi, a young French citizen living in Belgium -- can
be seen on surveillance video speaking into a cell phone. The other two
were Iraqis who had slipped into Europe weeks before by posing as
refugees. One of the trio was dressed in a Bayern Munich football team
jogging suit. Concealed underneath their clothes were shrapnel-filled
suicide vests held together with tape.
A
few miles away, a black Seat Leon weaved toward the busy cafe district
of Paris. The man behind the wheel, an already notorious Belgian ISIS
operative named Abdelhamid Abaaoud,
was on the phone speaking to Hadfi at the stadium to make sure
everything went according to plan. In the passenger seats, two of his
childhood friends, Chakib Akrouh and Salah Abdeslam's older brother,
Brahim, clutched their Kalashnikovs, readying themselves.
Not
far away, a black Volkswagen Polo with another trio of heavily armed
terrorists headed toward the Bataclan concert hall, where hundreds had
gathered to hear the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal. The
French ISIS fighters in the car -- Ismael Omar Mostefai, Samy Amimour
and Foued Mohamed-Aggad -- had all recently been on the front lines in
Syria, and were moments away from carrying out the worst massacre in the modern history of France.