Al Qaeda's Summer Plans

The mood swings are misleading. In truth, the United States is engaged in a quiet, dirty war that has gone on, and will go on, for years. The weapons are technology (spy satellites, eavesdropping devices, code-breaking computers), vigilance and careful coordination between rival government agencies (a big problem prior to 9-11), and buckets of cash, spread around to win friends in foreign intelligence services (the intelligence community's secret, or "black," budget has reportedly increased by half in the past two years). Progress is necessarily slow. Al Qaeda morphs and mutates "like a virus," says Richard Haass, outgoing Director of Policy Planning at the State Department . "It's just like fighting a disease. You rarely have permanent or complete victories."

In a suite of rooms filled with harried- looking analysts staring at computer screens deep inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center tries to connect the dots. "It's an art and a science," says a senior intelligence official. Sometimes, more art than science is involved. "There are just lots of pieces. It really is a puzzle," acknowledges the official. The analysts in the TTIC--drawn from the FBI, CIA, State and Defense, and the alphabet soup of government agencies lumped into the Department of Homeland Security--are often working "on the margins," he says. Al Qaeda has been "knocked back on its heels" since 9-11, says the official, who describes the terror network as "a wounded animal."

And like a wounded animal, dangerous. The analysts in the TTIC were struck by Al Qaeda's wholesale slaughter of Muslims in the attacks in Saudi Arabia. Normally, Saudi Arabia is a recruiting and funding center for Al Qaeda, not a target. The impact of the attacks, which killed 34 people (eight Americans), was to warm up the sometimes chilly ties between the Saudi regime and Washington. One top official in a neighboring Arab nation described a debate that had been going on in Saudi Arabia between the hard-liners, who wanted to crack down on Al Qaeda, and the soft-liners, who wanted to deal with the fundamentalists by embracing them. "After what was done in Riyadh, the hardliners have won," said this official. "Everybody is united." The Saudi Interior minister, Prince Nayef, who once dismissed the existence of Al Qaeda in the kingdom and blamed the 9-11 attacks on "the Jews," is now working more closely with the CIA and FBI. They are trying to root out the five or so Qaeda cells (each numbering 12 to 20 operatives) believed to be hiding inside Saudi Arabia.

Al Qaeda's willingness to antagonize the Saudi regime suggests a level of desperation. "They've lost a lot of key people. They have to show they are resilient," a senior intelligence official told NEWSWEEK. What better way than to attack the American homeland? The desire and intention appears to be there. Less certain is whether Al Qaeda can pull off such an attack, at least on a scale resembling the September 11 suicide hijackings.

Since the Iraq war, Al Qaeda has been able to recruit angry young Arab males determined to strike at the "Crusaders." Intelligence officials caution that they have no evidence that Al Qaeda operatives have made off with nuclear material or chem-bioweapons from Saddam's mysterious--and still missing--WMD arsenal. Not all the new recruits are geniuses. In the Morocco attacks, British intelligence officials tell NEWSWEEK, some of the bombers appear to have struck the wrong targets. The bombers who hit the Spanish cafe in Casablanca "got lost," say these sources. Last week three Moroccans checked in for a flight out of the Jidda airport in Saudi Arabia. Saudi officials identified one on a terrorist watch list. The other two were questioned: are you both with him? One said no. The other said yes. The Saudis arrested all three and discovered them carrying knives--possible weapons for a hijacking. Less encouraging, in the Morocco attack an unsophisticated band succeeded in using homemade explosives to carry out a coordinated attack in which 12 of 14 bombers completed their suicide mission.

Al Qaeda has always been more of a pirate federation than a Stalinist top-down organization. "It's not IBM," says a U.S. counterterror analyst. While financed by Al Qaeda, the Moroccan terrorists were an offshoot group. Some franchises are stronger and smarter than others. Intelligence officials are trying to gauge the reach and power of a cleric who has spent most of his time in London, or "Londistan," as the Feds call the area around the Finsbury Park mosque. A London imam, Abu Qatada, appears to European authorities to have had a role, possibly more inspirational than organizational, in any number of planned and accomplished catastrophes. According to a British dossier obtained by NEWSWEEK, as far back as the mid-'90s, Abu Qatada issued a fatwa for the slaughter of women and children in Algeria by a radical organization called the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Jordanian authorities implicated Abu Qatada in the planned (but thwarted) Millennium attacks on American tourists. The imam was said by the French to have provided "spiritual advice" for terrorist plots in Strasbourg and Paris in 2000 and 2001, and 18 tapes of his sermons were found in the Hamburg apartment of Muhammad Atta, the lead hijacker on 9-11.