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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (9808)	10/22/2001 9:45:37 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 23153

More attacks coming, allies warn BY RAYMOND BONNER AND JOHN TAGLIABUE New York Times Service Published Sunday, October 21, 2001 LONDON -- More than a month after the September terror attacks, the United States and its close allies are still intercepting communications among Osama bin Laden's associates and are convinced more attacks are coming, intelligence officials in several countries say. While U.S. officials have also been warning of another attack, the foreign intelligence officials stress that they base their analysis and conclusions on what their own agencies have gathered and not on intelligence they are getting from the United States. In interviews over the past week, intelligence officials in six countries in the Middle East and Europe said they were unsure where to expect the attacks or whether they would be with explosives or with chemical or biological weapons. But they said their intercepts and other tools convinced them that a second and possibly a third wave of attacks were planned. NO EVIDENCE YET There is no evidence yet linking the recent anthrax-tainted letters to Osama bin Laden, said intelligence officials from two European countries that have been working closely with the United States. But if the letters are bin Laden's work, they are likely only the beginning of more attacks, they said. Still, arrests in the United States and the disruption of suspected terrorist plots abroad may have bought some time in the battle against terrorism, U.S. officials said. Since Sept. 11, foreign intelligence services have arrested and interrogated hundreds of suspects, and they claim to have disrupted at least four separate plans to attack American and allied institutions in France, Belgium, Jordan and Turkey. Interpreting intercepted communications, which are cryptic and in code, and sorting through all the rumors present a formidable challenge. EARLY WARNING One intercept before the Sept. 11 attack was, according to two senior intelligence officials, the first early warning of the assault, and it set off a scramble by U.S. and other intelligence agencies. In that call, bin Laden advised his wife in Syria to come back to Afghanistan. That message, which was intercepted by the intelligence services of more than one country, was passed on to the United States, officials from three countries said. ``The question mark was when and where, mainly where because we assumed it would be soon,'' a senior intelligence official said. The United States and allied governments began looking hard at possible targets outside the United States, in the Persian Gulf, in Europe ``and in other corners of the world,'' he said. Now the United States and its allies find themselves in a similar quandary. They know something is coming, but not when or where. In the past, officials noted, there had been many months between attacks -- two years between the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa and the attack on the destroyer Cole last year in Yemen, for example. But this time the follow-up attacks are likely to come much sooner because bin Laden had probably set them in motion before Sept. 11, the officials add. They said that they were confident bin Laden had anticipated the United States would respond militarily, and that he was ready with counterattacks. Intelligence agencies in Europe and the Middle East say they continue to monitor some communications between bin Laden associates despite the fact that they are aware of the intercepts. On the day of the attack, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, revealed that conversations among bin Laden followers had been intercepted. He was relying on evidence he had received at a White House briefing, which in turn was passing on what it had learned from the German government. SHARING INTELLIGENCE The divergent views on the nature of future attacks can be explained in part because there is no central repository of intelligence information from which all countries can draw. Most countries pass what they get to Washington, but U.S. intelligence agencies do not reciprocate as fully. Allied governments share their intelligence with each other even less. An Israeli expert said that based on the intelligence he had seen, both before and since Sept. 11, he expected that bin Laden would now turn to chemical and biological weapons, and that American interests in Western Europe were the likely targets. ``We have some basic signs that the people of bin Laden have been interested in chemical and biological materials,'' he said. He said investigators were looking into reports that a couple of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks had sought training in Europe to fly crop-dusting planes. The officials agreed that further attacks against the United States had been planned by bin Laden before Sept. 11.