Author: Chitra Ragavan and Mark
Mazzetti
Publication: U.S.News
Date: May 31, 2004
URL: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040531/usnews/31cia.htm
Suspicions about a new terrorist
attack have U.S. spies scrambling
The chatter was persistent--and
alarming. In the weeks after the deadly March bombings of four commuter
trains in Madrid by al Qaeda operatives, the supersecret U.S. surveillance
network, Echelon, intercepted a number of messages from suspected terrorists
suggesting planning for a massive, multipronged assault on the United States.
When? Between this summer's political conventions and October, one month
before the presidential election. The intelligence appeared to confirm
information obtained from some seized al Qaeda computers and from several
human sources, government officials say. Officials at the CIA and the National
Security Agency, which runs the Echelon program, believe the information
is credible but worry that the human sources were on the periphery of the
now widely dispersed al Qaeda network. Nevertheless, the information pointed
to two, perhaps three, targets, the sources say: New York, Washington,
and Las Vegas. The objective of the suspected attack, the officials continued,
would be not only to cause mass casualties and devastation of U.S. infrastructure
but to roil the presidential race. The Madrid bombings, which killed 191
people and wounded 1,800, also toppled the Spanish government and triggered
the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. "Since Spain," says a Bush
administration official, "al Qaeda has had the feeling of 'We can do this.
We can affect an election.' "
Washington is scrambling to react.
Last month, U.S. News has learned, the CIA began a massive effort to pull
operatives from around the world and redeploy them to Afghanistan and Pakistan,
where al Qaeda's base of operations is still believed to be. "We think
that's where the best effort can be made," says a U.S. counterterrorism
official." The CIA declined to comment, but intelligence sources say the
agency is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to recruit more Arabic
and Pashto speakers; agency officials hope they will be able to corroborate
signals traffic and intelligence from human sources with information from
the al Qaeda computers and databases. "They want hard data," says an intelligence
source familiar with the CIA's recruiting efforts, "and that's tough as
hell to get."
U.S. special operations forces are
also being deployed in greater numbers to the region, but just to Afghanistan.
The CIA has long been able to operate in Pakistan's lawless tribal lands
near the Afghan border, but U.S. troops are not supposed to be used as
spies. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, the target of two recent assassination
attempts because of his support of the U.S. war on terrorism, has barred
American troops from stepping on Pakistani soil, even though he has only
cursory authority over the sprawling mountainous tribal lands where Osama
bin Laden is thought to be hiding. "It's its own goddamn country, and we
can't send our people in there!" says a senior military official, speaking
about the tribal areas. "But where's the next best place we can do business?
Afghanistan."
"Hammer and anvil. " The heightened
efforts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border began last winter. In operations
Mountain Resolve and Mountain Storm, conventional and special operations
forces conducted sweep operations from spartan "fire" bases near remote
villages along the border in order to develop better intelligence networks,
in hopes of picking up leads on bin Laden's movements. But the heralded
"hammer and anvil" strategy--with Pakistan pushing terrorists out of safe
havens in the tribal lands and U.S. forces grabbing them in Afghanistan--has
achieved only modest success because Musharraf hasn't followed through
on pledges to carry out sustained military operations in the borderlands.
For CIA operatives and special operations
troops, the hunt for bin Laden has now all but been supplanted by the urgent
assignment to try to thwart a new terrorist attack in the United States.
Navy SEAL units are shuttling through the Middle East and Central Asia
on three-month rotations, administration sources tell U.S. News, instead
of the usual six months, in order to make more commandos available to take
part in the mission.
It is, in some respects, a catch-as-catch-can
operation. "They're not even close" to having enough CIA personnel in Afghanistan
to get the job done, a government official says, and agency recruiters
are concerned that they are hiring new assets in the region so quickly
that background checks may fail to detect problems or even potential double
agents, who might deliberately send the agency astray with false information.
Given the nature of the suspected
threat, however, officials say, they're just going to have to live with
such uncertainties. Analysts say the intelligence chatter about an attack
on the United States has shown up in open Internet forums and is similar
to message traffic that preceded the Madrid bombings. "It's not just the
official [terrorist] websites but also the chat rooms and Web forums,"
says Gabriel Weimann, a scholar in residence at the U.S. Institute for
Peace. "The picture is not looking very good." Messages posted before the
attacks in Madrid, Weimann says, described the Spanish government as "the
first domino." Last week, the FBI sent out an advisory to law enforcement
to be on the lookout for suicide bombers. Homeland Security Secretary Tom
Ridge also issued guidelines to Amtrak and other passenger train services
to beef up security, including using bomb-sniffing dogs and removing trash
cans from key locations. In a stunning move, the organizers of the Democratic
convention, to be held in July in Boston, said they would shut down the
area's busiest highwayduring the morning and evening rush hours for the
entire four days of the event. It is still unclear whether the train stations
at FleetCenter in Boston and under Madison Square Garden in New York City,
where the Republican convention will be held, will be allowed to remain
open.
The convention sites aren't the
only possible terrorist targets. The summit of leaders from the Group of
Eight industrialized nations is scheduled to be held in Sea Island, Ga.,
in June, and the Summer Olympic Games begin in Greece in August. "That's
a group of lucrative, attractive targets," says a senior FBI official.
"We have what's generic--at best--intelligence, and we're attempting to
react to it without knowing quite what it might be."
