Al Qaeda In America: The Enemy Within

Many of the Qaeda operatives have not been arrested or charged with a crime. The Bush Justice Department is reluctant to throw terror suspects into the American criminal-justice system, where they can avail themselves of lawyers and use their rights to tie prosecutors into knots (the alleged "20th hijacker" of the 9-11 plots, Zacarias Moussaoui, has succeeded in bringing his criminal prosecution to a grinding halt). Rather, the Justice Department has essentially been working in the shadows. FBI agents confronted some of the suspects directly and convinced them that it would be in their interest to work with the government without getting their own lawyers. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently told Congress that the Justice Department had obtained criminal plea agreements--"many under seal"--with more than 15 individuals who are cooperating with the government, leading to "critical intelligence" about Qaeda safe houses and recruiting tactics. But others--including some of those identified by KSM--may have been "turned" by the Feds. "You can't say they've been arrested," said one official. Some of the terror plotters confronted by the bureau have been secretly squirreled away in hotel rooms, living around the clock under FBI surveillance and working with the authorities to identify other Qaeda plots inside the country.

The cooperating witnesses have "given us a few leads" about "where to look," said one official, but, as yet, no major finds. That may be because Al Qaeda, like all successful terrorist organizations, is carefully "compartmented." Different cells are kept apart. Some top investigators have a nagging suspicion that KSM just fed his interrogators the small fry to divert investigators from the really big--and deadly--plots. "The problem is," said the senior official, "we don't know what we don't know."

Still, the Feds have learned a great deal more than the public record suggests. Ashcroft routinely gives lurid speeches about the enemy within. But the evidence from criminal prosecutions has been underwhelming. The Buffalo Six (later, Seven) rounded up as a terror cell looked more like some hapless, jobless American Muslims who had been lured into a Qaeda training camp on a pilgrimage to Pakistan. The threat level has bobbed back and forth between Yellow (Elevated) and Orange (High) four times in the last year. Alternately fearful and cynical, the public has become just plain weary.

But the "threat matrix" presented to President George W. Bush every morning at his daily intelligence briefing has been cause for genuine concern. As the Feds, working with foreign police, captured top-level Qaeda operatives after 9-11, interrogations and electronic eavesdropping revealed some scary plans. Abu Zubaydah, the Palestinian terrorist who ran Al Qaeda's training-camp network in Afghanistan, told interrogators that the bin Laden network was deeply interested in bringing down "the bridge in the Godzilla movie." That sci-fi fantasy led New York police to scramble to guard the Brooklyn Bridge every time there is a terror alert. Put under the hot lights, other Qaeda lieutenants named names and pointed to likely targets.

It was the seizure of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in March that allowed the Feds to really begin to connect the dots. KSM is a fanatical and committed terrorist who has spent years planning the mass murder of Americans. Long before 9-11, he had planned (along with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, a plotter in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) a fantastic exercise called Project Bojinka (Serbo-Croatian for "big bang") to blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific Ocean. KSM's more recent pet proj-ect has been to disrupt the American economy by attacking its infrastructure. He wanted to destroy key transportation nodes--bridges, planes, trains and fuel supplies.

Indeed, KSM was planning to time some of these attacks, possibly against gas stations in New York and Washington, to coincide with the 9-11 attacks, but Osama bin Laden himself vetoed the idea, according to intelligence reports obtained by NEWSWEEK. Bin Laden was apparently worried about maintaining operational security for the spectacular hijackings. After 9-11, KSM revived the plans to attack a series of gas stations. According to Justice Department documents describing KSM's interrogation, he "tasked" a former resident of Baltimore named Majid Khan to "move forward" on Khan's plan to destroy several U.S. gas stations by "simultaneously detonating explosives in the stations' underground storage tanks." KSM was intimately involved in the details. When Khan reported that the storage tanks were unprotected and easy to attack, KSM wanted to be sure that explosive charges would cause a massive eruption of flame and destruction.