Failure to Heed Signs of Change in Terror Goals
By JAMES RISEN with STEPHEN ENGELBERG
October 14, 2001
THE INTELLIGENCE
The Central Intelligence Agency intercepted a cryptic but chilling message last year from a member of Al Qaeda, who boasted that Osama bin Laden was planning to carry out a "Hiroshima" against America, according to government officials.
The mention of "Hiroshima" by a group that had repeatedly struck United States interests around the world since 1998 set off an immediate but fruitless search for further evidence. But intelligence officials now acknowledge that they never imagined that Mr. bin Laden's organization had the ability to kill thousands of people in coordinated attacks on the American homeland.
Looking back through the prism of Sept. 11, officials now say that the intercepted message was a telling sign of a drastic shift in the ambitions and global reach of Al Qaeda during the last three years. Clearly, the officials agree, the United States failed to grasp the organization's transformation from an obscure group of Islamic extremists into the world's most dangerous terrorists.
Most significant, the extent of Al Qaeda's operations in this country has stunned the F.B.I., which had assured the White House late last year that it had a "handle" on the group's operatives in the United States, a senior Clinton administration official said. And Mr. bin Laden's plan to take the war inside the United States was likewise unknown to American intelligence officials.
Law Missed Man With Ties to bin Laden (October 14, 2001)
What was perhaps most important to Mr. bin Laden's growth and development as a major threat was his decision to act as a franchiser of terrorism, providing crucial financial and logistical assistance to locally sponsored plots brought to his organization by Islamic extremists. This new approach gave his group a much broader range of possible targets.
Indeed, American officials are now actively examining the possibility that the Sept. 11 attacks were primarily the initiative of the man now believed to have been their local coordinator, Mohamed Atta, a 34- year-old Egyptian with no known previous ties to Egyptian-based terrorism.
American officials say that it is possible that Mr. Atta took his plan to Al Qaeda representatives and that Mr. bin Laden then approved the plan and provided the funds, logistics and planning support through his lieutenants. As officials trace Mr. Atta's movements through the United States and Europe, investigators have tentatively concluded that he was the primary link among the 19 hijackers.
As they scour the history of Al Qaeda for clues about its future, American officials say they are increasingly persuaded that the group gained its new operational abilities and ruthlessness in 1998, when it merged with other Islamic radical organizations, including the Armed Vanguards of Conquest, a little- known cell of Egyptian extremists who had fled their own country after a government crackdown.
Its leader, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had been involved in the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt in 1981, long had ties to Mr. bin Laden. But government officials believe that his prominence within the leadership of Al Qaeda marked the beginning of a new global strategy of terror by the group.
American officials said the Sept. 11 hijackings, accomplished with box cutters and the brute strength of 19 men, did not represent a technological leap forward for the group. Instead, the ingredients for success came from the audacity to execute a plan that was certain to spur retaliation and the ability to bring "sleeper" agents into the United States undetected.
"We would understand it better if we had someone sitting on the pillows in Kandahar with him," one official said.
It was the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa a few months after the declaration of a jihad that began the new phase of Al Qaeda's development: a relentless campaign aimed at the indiscriminate killing of Americans wherever they could be found.
Between 1999 and 2001, American intelligence officials say, the group or its followers were planning attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and on an American destroyer in Yemen, and a series of bombings in the United States and Jordan timed to the millennium celebrations in December 1999.
Planning Began 2 Years Ago
American officials believe the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks probably began two years ago. The timing suggests to American officials that Al Qaeda has both the organizational abilities and the internal security to prepare several large operations at the same time while keeping the existence of each plot secret from those involved in others.
Mr. bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan have been a key tool in expanding the group's power and reach, attracting 15,000 to 20,000 radicals from Muslim countries around the world, according to United States intelligence estimates.
While most of the extremists who train in Al Qaeda camps eventually return home to fight their own indigenous wars, the flow of radicals through the camps has helped the group scout for willing recruits and has also helped Mr. bin Laden forge alliances across the spectrum of Islamic terrorism.
Algerian extremists who have joined Al Qaeda from the Islamic Group, an Algerian extremist organization that had been driven out by the Algerian military government, have been among the most valuable to Al Qaeda, officials said.
The emergence of sleeper cells of Algerians in Canada and Europe in connection with the millennium bombing plot caught American intelligence officials off guard. They now acknowledge that they were fortunate that operatives involved in that plan were caught trying to enter the United States before they could carry out their attack.
American officials continue to believe that last month's attacks were ultimately coordinated by Mr. bin Laden's three top lieutenants, Dr. Zawahiri, Muhammad Atef and Abu Zubaydah. Analysts at the C.I.A. who pored over the videotape released by Mr. bin Laden last weekend have tentatively concluded that one of the meanings of the tape was that Dr. Zawahiri is now Mr. bin Laden's highest-ranking deputy and his hand- picked successor.
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