Scattered Followers Pose New Threat
by Susan Schmidt and Dana Priest, The Washington Post
One year into America’s war against al Qaeda, U.S. intelligence officials believe that the thousands of al Qaeda followers who have graduated from terror training camps in Afghanistan will try to launch their own rudimentary but deadly attacks.
Al Qaeda’s hierarchy has been significantly disrupted, according to officials trying to assess the state of threat against the United States and targets abroad. But the U.S. military’s success in rousting al Qaeda from Afghanistan has had the unintended consequence of widely dispersing its adherents, determined to make jihad on whatever scale they can muster. Those fears were reinforced in recent days with the arrest in Germany of an al Qaeda follower and his American girlfriend for allegedly planning to bomb the U.S. Army’s headquarters in Europe and the assassination attempt against Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The latter followed by hours a car bombing in downtown Kabul that killed 12 people.
As the one-year anniversary of al Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center approaches, the CIA and FBI counterterrorism centers are seeing increased communication among suspected terrorists, approximately equal to the heightened levels they recorded leading up to July 4. But neither those communications nor information from informants has persuaded government officials to issue a public alert, as they have done four times over the past year.
“Is an attack more likely on the 11th than on the 10th or the 12th? Not necessarily,” a senior intelligence official said.
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials say that, although another large-scale attack could be in the works, they are more immediately concerned about ad-hoc operations such as truck bombs, assassinations and suicide attacks by low-level operatives, especially against U.S. targets abroad.
“All the people who went to the training camps and have graduated -- not a lot is known about those individuals,” a senior counterterrorism official said. “Those are the threats that we face inside the United States; those are the biggest threats outside the United States.”
The FBI has opened several hundred investigations of people in this country who have gone through the camps or who have other links to al Qaeda. Firm estimates of the number of camp graduates are difficult to ascertain, but some experts put it at about 15,000. The number of sworn al Qaeda members is a fraction of that.
With many of al Qaeda’s fighters killed, detained or in hiding, the official said, those able to act are eager to let the world know they’re alive. “It might be mid-level operatives in Africa or the Far East who says, ‘We’ve got to do something to show we’re still in business,’ ” he said.
U.S. intelligence officials say they are uncertain whether Osama bin Laden is dead, but they at the least believe his organization’s upper ranks are in disarray.
Two key second-tier leaders who helped organize the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the attack on U.S. troops in Somalia are in Iran, not commanding operations but hiding out, officials said. The leadership void may have spurred two other mid-level operatives who helped orchestrate the Sept. 11 plot, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, to surface publicly in a documentary to be broadcast this week by al-Jazeera, the Arabic news network.
Disruption at the top of the organization appears to be sowing confusion but not inaction, officials said. From the local cells, an official said, “we hear things like: ‘Are you sure this is what they want?’ ”
Al Qaeda operations are also changing their communications methods. With intelligence agencies having penetrated many of al Qaeda’s telephone and computer conversations, some higher-level operatives have turned to couriers -- a slower but more secure option.
“They are moving around a lot, expressing concerns about avoiding capture,” said a senior intelligence official with access to the most current, sensitive reports on terrorists. “We know they are communicating with each other, and they are, as a class, also more conscious of communication security than they were in the past.”
“Whatever al Qaeda was on 9/11, it is a weaker organization today,” said Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corp. terrorism expert who serves on the Defense Department’s counterterrorism advisory board.
But the hierarchical breakdown has created opportunities, too.
“Because they are more spread out, they are more autonomous than they used to be. This is an evolving situation. You don’t need permission from the top. There’s a sincere effort to decentralize and set more fires worldwide,” said the senior intelligence official with access to current reports.
“Al Qaeda has a remarkable adaptive ability and nimbleness. It changes as needed,” Hoffman said.
Al Qaeda’s ability to launch a large-scale, multipronged attack on U.S. soil continues to be debated among the most experienced analysts studying the threat level. Some top analysts believe that if al Qaeda were capable of mounting another spectacular attack, it would have done so to regain its momentum. Likewise, many analysts inside and outside government say that bin Laden has tried repeatedly to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and that if he had succeeded, he would have used them.
Intelligence officials don’t know whether the absence of another attack since Sept. 11 means the planning simply has not ripened, or whether those efforts have been disrupted. Al Qaeda has a history of planning one major attack as another is being launched; the Sept. 11 attacks were being planned even before the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.
“There’s nothing to lead us to believe they can’t do again what Mohamed Atta did -- kill 3,000 Americans,” a senior intelligence official said. “There is a diminution in the number of attacks they can mount, but no diminution in the size of the attack they could mount.”
The main component they need is “organization skills, the ability to collect and communicate operational information to plan and execute an attack,” said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee who has access to the highly classified reports on al Qaeda. “Prudence would say we should assume they still have the capability of conducting significant-scale operations in the United States,” he said.
Jack Devine, a former CIA operations officer who headed the agency’s Afghan task force in the mid-1980s, agreed that al Qaeda’s infrastructure has been severely disrupted, but he estimates it took only 50 people to execute the Sept. 11 attacks. “Regrettably, they have the capacity to repeat that over and over again. . . . I will be surprised if we get to January without another attack.”
CIA, FBI and White House officials who monitor the terrorist threat every day say al Qaeda terrorist camp graduates are well trained and prepared to act. Documents, manuals, CD-ROMs and other material seized during the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and in Pakistan and Afghanistan since Sept. 11 paint a picture of a professional, disciplined cadre of followers with a skill level that is, at the minimum, that of an infantry grunt. U.S. officials have also recovered a trove of photos and names of camp graduates.
The terrorist tradecraft includes lessons on living undercover in a Western culture and using disguises and false documents. But more compelling is the tactical paramilitary training in a wide range of weapons -- from land mines and machine guns to shoulder-fired missiles -- and such terrorist techniques as building and planting bombs in trucks, planes, radios, alarm clocks, shoes and beds. Manuals and videotapes also make clear an elementary level of training in the use of poisons, including chemical and biological agents.
Law enforcement officials have said they view American converts to Islam as a particularly dangerous subset of al Qaeda because they may not draw much scrutiny and can travel easily on U.S. passports.
U.S. and foreign officials have arrested about 2,700 known or suspected al Qaeda members in 100 countries since Sept. 11, but about half have been released for lack of evidence.
One year into the war, “there is no overt presence anywhere” of al Qaeda, a senior intelligence official said. Rather, the remnants of the organization have burrowed deeply into the most forbidding and lawless corners of the world, where even indigenous military and U.S. special operations troops have a hard time operating, much less finding and targeting small numbers of civilian-clothed fighters.
U.S. officials are focused on five parts of the world:
• The Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, a former Soviet Republic where intelligence analysts believe that as many as 800 terrorists from various groups, including 20 to 100 linked to al Qaeda, have taken refuge.
• Northern Iraq, where 150 al Qaeda followers who crossed Iran from Afghanistan may be in hiding and have experimented with small-scale chemical toxins.
• Iran , which is sheltering dozens of fighters and two figures who have assumed critical roles in the al Qaeda hierarchy in recent months, Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian on the FBI’s most-wanted list; and Mahfouz Ould Walid, also known as Abu Hafs the Mauritanian. They are living in hotels and guest houses in the cities of Mashhad and Zabol, according to Arab intelligence sources.
• Yemen, bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, a tribal outpost where al Qaeda followers have found refuge.
• The largest concentration of al Qaeda remain along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier region. No more than a few hundred al Qaeda are there, but they have proven able to mount lethal small-scale attacks against Pakistani and U.S. special operations troops culling the area.
The new, reduced al Qaeda, U.S. intelligence officials believe, has also maintained its ability to operate by forming tactical, ad-hoc alliances with other terrorist organizations. The most worrisome of these new alliances is with the Lebanon-based Hezbollah organization, one of the world’s most formidable terrorist groups.
According to U.S. and European intelligence officials and terrorism experts, al Qaeda and Hezbollah have recently cooperated on explosives and tactics training, money laundering, weapons smuggling and acquiring forged documents. The cooperation mutes years of rivalry between Hezbollah, which draws its support primarily from Shiite Muslims, and al Qaeda, which has predominantly Sunni Muslim followers.