Al Qaeda's Summer Plans

The case of Abu Qatada illustrated the difficulty of shutting down a Qaeda branch. The imam has been held without trial in a high-security British prison since last October. (He denies being a terrorist and is appealing his detention.) Yet British authorities believe that he somehow delivered instructions to followers in Britain and elsewhere around Europe to launch a series of terror attacks using homemade batches of ricin, a lethal poison. Dozens of plotters were arrested in Britain, France and Spain, and U.S. intelligence believes that other suspected plotters are still on the loose.

U.S. intelligence believes that some senior Qaeda leaders are holed up in Iran. Scores of Qaeda fighters fled there after U.S. forces toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan. The question--a source of considerable debate in the intelligence community--is whether Iran is a safe haven or a jail cell for Al Qaeda. Some intelligence officials, principally at the CIA, believe that Saif Al-Adel, an Egyptian who is reputedly Osama bin Laden's intelligence and security chief (No. 3 in the Qaeda pecking order), is now in custody in Iran. But other intelligence analysts, primarily Pentagon hawks, believe that Al-Adel--along with bin Laden's son Saad, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a one-legged Jordanian militant with alleged ties to the former Saddam Hussein regime--are being secretly supported in Iran by Islamic extremists in the Iranian clerical establishment.

The more urgent question to most Americans is whether Al Qaeda is operating inside the United States. The answer is yes. "The only thing we can say with certainty is that they're here," says a top law- enforcement official. Al Qaeda has been patiently working on ways to get inside America in the new age of heightened security. Al Qaeda has long studied American vulnerabilities. After 9-11, American soldiers and spooks rooting through the caves of Afghanistan found technical reports by the U.S. General Accounting Office, detailing weak links in the U.S. infrastructure. Lately, Al Qaeda has been working on the problem of sneaking spies and suicide bombers across the borders. The terrorists are looking for new pools of potential assets--Canadians, women and African- Americans--and Arabs with "clean" passports, i.e., not on any watch list.

With a million legal immigrants and 42 million visitors to the United States each year, weeding out terrorist operatives is a daunting task. The FBI and CIA are worried about suspected terrorists like Abdul Rahman Jabarrah. A protege of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's, the operations chief arrested in February, Jabarrah is alleged to have been a key figure in the Saudi bombing attack. His younger brother Mohammad, captured in Oman last year, gave interrogators a chilling description of how the Jabarrah brothers became Qaeda --hit men. Schooled in Canada (where his father was a successful businessman) and trained in the Afghan terror camps, Mohammed Jabarrah says he became an acolyte of bin Laden's. "The Source [Jabarrah] explained to UBL [bin Laden] that he spoke English very well and had lived in Canada for six or seven years, so he had a 'clean' Canadian passport," reads an intelligence document obtained by NEWSWEEK. Jabarrah told his interrogators some Qaeda code: "Market" meant Malaysia. "Hotel" was the Philippines. "White meat" was an American.

The Feds have identified a few Qaeda soldiers already in the United States. Intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK that during his interrogation, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed fingered an Ohio truckdriver. In a major breakthrough, the Feds picked up the truckdriver, who began to cooperate. According to law-enforcement sources, the truck- driver was involved in plots to bring down a bridge and blow up an airliner. The truckdriver was asked by his Qaeda masters to obtain the proper tools for loosening the bolts on a suspension bridge. As for the airliner, the truckdriver said that cargo trucks could easily drive underneath passenger jets without arousing suspicion.

Working together in unprecedented harmony, the FBI and CIA have a much better handle on the terrorist threat they had pre-September 11. The many captured Qaeda leaders have been a treasure-trove of information. Under interrogation, the prisoners have spilled the identities of confederates and the details of many plots. The CIA and FBI do not always know whom or what to believe--the terrorists often spew lies along with the truth. But the intelligence services have been able to build up vast databases to cross-check leads.