Nuclear terrorism is still an open question

By DAVID IGNATIUS, Washington Post
Published October 17, 2007

WASHINGTON - Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is paid to think about the unthinkable. As the Energy Department's director of intelligence, he's responsible for gathering information about the threat that a terrorist group will attack America with a nuclear weapon.

With his shock of white hair and piercing eyes, Mowatt-Larssen looks like a man who has seen a ghost. And when you listen to a version of the briefing he has been giving recently to President Bush and other top officials, you begin to understand why. He is convinced that al-Qaida is trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that will leave the ultimate terrorist signature - a mushroom cloud.

We've all had enough fear-mongering to last a lifetime. Indeed, we have become so frightened of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, that we have begun doing the terrorists' job for them by undermining the legal framework of our democracy. And truly, I wish I could dismiss Mowatt-Larssen's analysis as the work of an overwrought former CIA officer with too many years in the trenches.

But it's worth listening to his warnings - not because they induce more numbing paralysis, but because they might stir sensible people to take actions that could detect and stop an attack. That's why his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, is encouraging him to speak out. They don't want to anguish later that they didn't sound the alarm in time.

Mowatt-Larssen has been gathering this evidence since a few weeks after 9/11, when then-CIA director George Tenet asked him to create a new WMD branch in the agency's counterterrorism center. He helped Tenet prepare a chapter on al-Qaida's nuclear efforts that appears in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm. Now that the uproar over Tenet's mistaken "slam dunk" assessment of Iraq has died down, it's worth rereading this account. It provides a chilling, public record of al-Qaida's nuclear ambitions.

Mowatt-Larssen argues that for nearly a decade before 9/11, al-Qaida was seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As early as 1993, Osama bin Laden offered $1.5-million to buy uranium for a nuclear device, according to testimony presented in federal court in February 2001.

Even as al-Qaida was preparing to fly airplanes into buildings, the group was also trying to acquire nuclear and biological capability. In August 2001, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a campfire with Pakistani scientists from a group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau to discuss how al-Qaida could build a nuclear device. Al-Qaida also had an aggressive anthrax program that was discovered in December 2001 after bin Laden was driven from his safe haven in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaida proclaimed a religious rationale to justify the WMD attacks it was planning. In June 2002, a Kuwaiti-born cleric named Suleiman Abu Ghaith posted a statement on the Internet that "al-Qaida has the right to kill 4-million Americans" in retaliation for U.S. attacks against Muslims. And in May 2003, at the same time Saudi operatives of al-Qaida were trying to buy three Russian nuclear bombs, a cleric named Nasir al-Fahd issued a fatwa titled, "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels." Interrogations of al-Qaida operatives confirmed that the planning was serious. Al-Qaida didn't yet have the materials for a WMD attack, but it wanted them.

Most chilling of all was Zawahiri's decision in March 2003 to cancel a cyanide attack in the New York subway system. He told the plotters to stand down because "we have something better in mind." What did that mean? More than four years later, we still don't know.

After 2004, the WMD trail went cold, according to Mowatt-Larssen. And many intelligence analysts have concluded that al-Qaida today doesn't have nuclear capability. Mowatt-Larssen argues that a more honest answer is: We don't know.

So what to do about this spectral danger? The first requirement, says Mowatt-Larssen, is to try to visualize it. What would it take for al-Qaida to build a bomb? How would it assemble the pieces? How would the United States and its allies deploy their intelligence assets so that they could detect a plot before it happened? How would we reinvent intelligence itself to avert this ultimate catastrophe?

A terrorist nuclear attack, as Tenet wrote in his book, would change history. If we can see how this story might end, perhaps we can deflect the arrow before it hits its target.

David Ignatius' e-mail address is davidignatius@washpost.com

[Last modified October 16, 2007, 20:55:53]