TERROR'S NEXT STOP

Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi didn't start off life as a mystery. And nothing about the shabby two-story house where he grew up in Jordan suggests that it once nurtured a terrorist mastermind. A few weeks ago in this hardscrabble town of Zarqa, 17 miles from Amman, his family held a party at the house. Sitting on flat mattresses on the ground, picking at an assortment of pizza, cake and grapefruit, his sisters said the man born Ahmed Khalaylah (Zarqawi, which derives from his hometown, is his nom de guerre) was popular as a youth and kind to animals as well as very religious. Later, reached by telephone after coordinated attacks against Shiites in Iraq left nearly 200 dead, one sister flatly said: "My brother wouldn't do that." Told that U.S. officials had fingered him, she shot back, "What do you expect from the infidels?"

Zarqawi's green-eyed mother, Um Sayef al-Khalaylah--interviewed before her death earlier this month--also scoffed at the idea that her 37-year-old son was a terrorist big shot. "Al Qaeda is rich. If my son worked with Al Qaeda do you think my house would be like this?" she had asked, gesturing at her austere surroundings.

U.S. officials insist there's no question Zarqawi is now a major terrorist leader. In fact, Bush administration officials have made a conscious decision to portray him as the Next Bad Guy in the war on terror, possibly the successor to Osama bin Laden, who is said to be on the run in Afghanistan. That's one reason why, in recent weeks, officials were so eager to publicize a 17-page terror memo that Zarqawi allegedly sent to the Qaeda chieftain, and why they were so quick to name Zarqawi as the culprit behind the horrific bombings of Shiites in Iraq that preceded the Madrid train attacks by a week. In addition to numerous attacks in Iraq, Zarqawi was implicated in a bomb plot in Morocco last year--raising questions of whether any link exists between him and the Moroccans arrested in Spain late last week.

But here's the problem. Unlike bin Laden, no one can say what the round-faced Zarqawi even looks like today. Like many current terrorist cell leaders, Zarqawi is a graduate of bin Laden's Afghan training camps, and one thing he may have learned from the master's mistakes is the virtue of staying anonymous. In fact, for a long time authorities haven't even known how many legs he has, much less where he is. Before the Iraq war, one article of indictment against Saddam was that he had supplied Zarqawi with medical treatment in Baghdad--including a prosthetic leg--after the latter was badly wounded in Afghanistan. But that appears to have been based on more bad intel. Senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad tell NEWSWEEK they are now convinced Zarqawi has two fully functioning legs.

Authorities do know a few things about his network. According to Shadi Abdallah, a Jordanian-born refugee in Germany who became an informant, Zarqawi's group, Al Tawhid, has several cells in Europe. In Abdallah's debriefings with German investigators--copies of which were obtained by NEWSWEEK--he said one Zarqawi cell was headed by the spiritual leader of an obscure London mosque allegedly attended by Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-born jihadi awaiting trial in Virginia, and Richard Reid, the London-born petty criminal convicted in Boston of trying to blow up a U.S. airliner using a shoe bomb. But officials are stumped about Zarqawi's whereabouts today--they know only that he is just one of many such threats facing America and its allies. "Dozens of such groups exist," CIA Director George Tenet told Congress two weeks ago. "I've identified the Zarqawi network, the Ansar al-Islam network in Iraq, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan."

The Qaeda organization that committed the horrors of 9/11 was, at the time, the only group that had declared global war on America. While it had widespread cells, it was anchored in Afghanistan as well. Al Qaeda also had a well-established history: bin Laden had emerged from the mujahedin movement against the Soviets and unit-ed with his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had cut his teeth on the Islamist struggle against Egypt's secular leaders. Now, says Milt Bearden, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, "I think the [terror threat] has metastasized to the point where we haven't got a clue where it will pop up next."