The Flip Side of the NIE

A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released yesterday spurred fresh fears that a resurgent Al Qaeda is rebuilding its capability to attack the United States. But the much-publicized document—actually a two-page summary of the entire report, most of which remains classified—is riddled with caveats and qualifiers that underscore how little hard evidence U.S. intelligence agencies really have about the size and capabilities of international terrorist groups and the threats they pose.

There's no precise information in the report on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri—or whether their network has any operatives currently inside the United States. In the declassified portion of the NIE, which reflects the consensus view of all U.S. intelligence agencies, the government also admits that since 9/11, they "have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to Al Qaeda senior leadership," although U.S. agencies estimate that "Al Qaeda will intensify its efforts to put operatives here." FBI Deputy Director John Pistole acknowledged at a press conference announcing the new report that no Al Qaeda sleeper cell was currently known by U.S. authorities to exist inside the country. "Of course, it's the ones that we have not identified which would constitute a sleeper cell," he cautioned.

The NIE asserts—without much evidence—that U.S. agencies believe a renascent Al Qaeda central command will try to "leverage the contacts and capabilities of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)," the deadly jihadi network set up by the late Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, which pledged its loyalty to Osama bin Laden after wreaking havoc in post-invasion Iraq. However, officials at the press conference indicated the only hard evidence they had that AQI had an interest in attacking inside the U.S. was a statement posted on a Web site last October by Abu Ayyub, the network's purported leader, expressing the group's desire to try to attack inside the United States. The NIE's principal author, Ted Gistaro, the U.S. intelligence community's top terrorism expert, told reporters that U.S. agencies believed that "the overwhelming amount of AQI resources at present are focused on the conflict in Iraq, and that occupies most of their resources." (Gistaro also said flatly that AQI did not exist before the U.S. invasion of Iraq).

The NIE summary also warned that the Lebanese-based Shiite Hizbullah movement, which had conducted anti-U.S. attacks overseas in the past, might consider striking against American interests or the continental United States. But the report suggested this was probably only likely if Hizbollah perceived the United States as a threat either to the movement itself or to its long-time patrons in Iran.

Officials said that they did not necessarily believe that Al Qaeda's leadership was as strong today as it had been before 9/11. At that stage, Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, aided by a sympathetic regime in Afghanistan run by Taliban militants, operated an elaborate network of camps that recruited, indoctrinated and trained literally thousands of would-be Islamic holy warriors for terrorist and paramilitary operations in the region and abroad. The U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan after 9/11 drove the Taliban from power, and put Al Qaeda on the run. But the "peace pact"—under which the Pakistani government essentially agreed to allow tribes in remote border provinces to govern themselves without interference from Pakistani authorities (let alone their U.S. allies)—has given fugitive Al Qaeda leaders the space to groom new field commanders and recruit and train a new generation of jihadis.

U.S. officials do not believe that the situation in the tribal areas has degenerated to the point where Al Qaeda is once again operating large-scale training camps in the area. But these officials do believe that similar terrorist training now is going on in "compounds" inside the tribal areas, declining to be more specific. Officials also say there is evidence of a new "flow" of jihadi recruits to and from the region, particularly from countries in the "Maghreb," a region of Islamic influence in North Africa extending from Libya on the Mediterranean to Morocco on the Atlantic.