'We've Hit The Targets'

Just as scary, the new attacks also suggested that the terrorists had an extensive domestic support network--confederates on the ground who helped them gather intelligence on the targets and possibly provided shelter and logistical support.

Could the bombers have been stopped? NEWSWEEK has learned that while U.S. intelligence received no specific warning, the state of alert had been high during the past two weeks, and a particularly urgent warning may have been received the night before the attacks, causing some top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. Why that same information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill. In testimony to the Intelligence Committee earlier this year, CIA Director George Tenet said bin Laden posed the most immediate terrorist threat to Americans around the world and was capable of "multiple attacks with little or no warning." "There is a giant accountability issue starting today," says former Afghanistan CIA station chief Milt Bearden, "and in the midst of legitimate accountability there will be a lot of scapegoating. They're going to start looking for the modern-day equivalent of General Short and Admiral Kimmel [the armed-forces commanders at Pearl Harbor], and they're going to find them."

The deeper problem for counterterrorism experts is that bin Laden's network is so diffuse and diverse--a patchwork of renegade Algerian, Palestinian, Egyptian and other cells--and that foreign governments, including friendly ones, move slowly to crack down on people they know are his supporters. Only last February, a few weeks before Tenet's testimony, a NEWSWEEK reporter sat down in a London coffee shop with Yasser el-Sirri, one of bin Laden's alleged associates. El-Sirri cheerfully boasted that the Egyptian government had sentenced him to death for crimes of terrorism. Attempts to snatch or kill bin Laden have been frustrated by the difficulty of getting precise information on where he is in the mountains of Afghanistan, not to mention a U.S. presidential order barring assassination. Though U.S. intelligence had wiretaps on bin Laden's key lieutenants before the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, they were unable to pick up enough information to prevent them.

Some counterterrorism operatives now speculate that intelligence picked up by U.S. agencies about possible terrorist attacks on Americans last June may actually have been leaked by operatives associated with bin Laden. Now it appears the terrorists "may have been testing where and how we picked up information--and what were the things we missed," says a U.S. investigator based in the Persian Gulf. "They saw where we reacted, and presumably also where we didn't react." Were they casing American airports to see if extra precautions went into effect? "They not only know how to plan, but they know how to test," said this source, "and they know, obviously, where the gaps are."

Among the worst of those gaps is the ramshackle state of security checks at U.S. airports. The ability of unknown bombers to exploit these soft spots--and to do it so jarringly, ripping a hole in the heart of America's financial and military power--could itself have serious consequences. For it demonstrates that it can be done again. In fact, terrorism experts say that for years their worst fear has been that a suicide bomber would hit inside U.S. borders. "If someone really wants to kill himself in order to blow up a building here, there is no level of sustainable security in this country that could prevent it," says one official. "We just aren't equipped to handle it. It is beyond us psychologically. And the citizens of this country are not willing to tolerate the lack of freedom that this level of security would mean."

That could now change, as part of a tectonic shift in America's sense of vulnerability. "This shows that you can have mass-destruction terrorism without weapons of mass destruction," says Gideon Rose, a terror expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. And that even a missile defense won't help. "We're going to have to enact laws that some people from the far left and the far right won't like," adds a senior intelligence source. He points to Britain's sweeping new law that, as he puts it, extends the draconian security measures--including surveillance and holding people on mere suspicion--already used in troubled Northern Ireland. He adds: "We have to understand that national security will have to take some precedence over what we have seen as the right to privacy."