Terror's new focus unheeded

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 14, 2001

The CIA intercepted a cryptic but chilling message last year from a member of al-Qaida, 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 U.S. interests around the world since 1998 set off an immediate but fruitless search for evidence.

But intelligence officials now acknowledge that they never imagined bin Laden's al-Qaida organization had the ability to kill thousands of people in coordinated attacks on the American homeland.

Looking back through the lens 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-Qaida over 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-Qaida's operations in this country has stunned the FBI, which assured the White House late last year that it had a "handle" on the group's operatives in the United States, the New York Times reported, quoting an unnamed senior Clinton administration official. And bin Laden's plan to take the war inside the United States was likewise unknown to American intelligence officials.

What was perhaps most important to 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 gave his group a much broader range of targets.

Indeed, American officials are 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 Atta took his plan to al-Qaida representatives and that bin Laden then approved the plan and provided the funds, logistics and planning support through his lieutenants. As officials trace 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-Qaida for clues about its future, American officials say they are increasingly convinced that the group gained its new operational capabilities 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 Sadat of Egypt in 1981, long had ties to bin Laden. But government officials believe his prominence within the leadership of al-Qaida marked the beginning of a new global strategy of terror.

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.

It was the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa a few months after the declaration of a jihad that began the new phase of al-Qaida's development: a relentless campaign aimed at the indiscriminate killing of Americans wherever they could be found.

From 1999 to 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.

2 years of planning

U.S. officials believe the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks probably began two years ago. The timing suggests to them that al-Qaida has both the organizational capabilities 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.

Bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan have been important in expanding the group's power and reach, attracting 15,000 to 20,000 radicals from Muslim countries around the world, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.

While most of the extremists who train in al-Qaida 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 bin Laden forge alliances across the spectrum of Islamic terrorism.

Algerian extremists who have joined al-Qaida 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-Qaida, officials said.

The emergence of sleeper cells of Algerians in Canada and Europe in connection with the millennium bombing plot caught U.S. intelligence officials off guard. They now acknowledge they were fortunate that operatives involved in that plan were caught trying to enter the United States before they could carry out their attack.

U.S. officials continue to believe that last month's attacks were ultimately coordinated by bin Laden's three top lieutenants, Zawahiri, Muhammad Atef and Abu Zubaydah. Analysts at the CIA who pored over the videotape released by bin Laden last weekend have tentatively concluded that one of the meanings of the tape was that Zawahiri was now bin Laden's highest-ranking deputy and his hand-picked successor.

Officials said, however, that none of the three top lieutenants were known to have traveled to the United States or Europe to coordinate the operations on the scene. The officials also said they believed the lieutenants' communications with Atta and the hijackers were apparently carried out through a series of intermediaries.

The al-Qaida network had its origins in the jihad, or holy war, stirred by Muslim religious leaders to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan after the 1979 invasion.

"We are young, we don't know anything: Let's go, it's an adventure," recalled L'Houssaine Kherchtou, an al-Qaida member from Morocco who later became a federal witness.

The first wave of warriors included a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, who arrived in the mid 1980s and took up residence in one of the many guest houses set up to receive the volunteers. His multimillion-dollar fortune -- estimates range from $25-million to several hundred million dollars -- made him immediately popular.

Bin Laden's rise

Bin Laden soon allied himself with Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Palestinian who gained prominence among the foreign Muslims who came to join the Afghan resistance. Azzam founded the Office of Services, to coordinate the flow of Arab volunteers and money into Afghanistan. Bin Laden provided money and took a hand in military planning.

By the late 1980s, the Arab Afghans, as they were called, were bitterly divided. Some, particularly the Egyptians, objected to Azzam's single-minded focus on the Afghan cause and pushed bin Laden to form a group that would bring Islamic rule to their homelands.

One of the most vocal advocates of taking the jihad back to the Middle East was Zawahiri, the Egyptian militant. By 1989, bin Laden had founded his own network of training camps, which he called al-Qaida, Arabic for "the base."

Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, an al-Qaida insider who defected to the United States, testified this year that bin Laden began with a loftier goal: the creation of an empire of all the world's 1-billion Muslims ruled by a single leader.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden began looking for opportunities elsewhere. Two years later, al-Qaida accepted an offer from the fundamentalist rulers of Sudan to take up residence in their country.

Al-Qaida enjoyed direct support from the government of Sudan, which provided it with passports and allowed its training camps to flourish.

One of its earliest operations involved a November 1991 attempt to assassinate the exiled king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah. An assailant posing as a Portuguese journalist stabbed the king at his home in northern Rome, and American investigators later concluded that the attacker had ties to al-Qaida, a finding that has not been previously disclosed.

The Persian Gulf War in 1991 and its aftermath gave the group a new focus. Bin Laden was infuriated by the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia. "We cannot let the American Army stay in the gulf area and take our oil, take our money," he told associates, according to Fadl.

A new approach

Al-Qaida found a new target in 1993, when American troops led the U.N. mission to Somalia. Federal prosecutors say that al-Qaida members offered military training to some of the Somalis who later attacked a group of U.S. special forces, killing 18.

The arrest in 1993 of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric who was living in the United States, prompted Atef to propose an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Other members of the group opposed the operation because innocents would be killed, Fadl testified. The attack never took place, and more than a dozen Egyptian militants quit the group, he said.

Under pressure from the United States in 1996, Sudan threw al-Qaida out of the country. Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, where he ingratiated himself with the Taliban leaders, building roads and supplying tens of millions of dollars in financing.

He announced his goal of driving "heretics" from the Arabian peninsula by attacking the American "enemy." Zawahiri and the Egyptian wing became more influential with bin Laden as al-Qaida re-established itself in Afghanistan, according to Kherchtou, the Moroccan defector.

In February 1998, bin Laden defiantly announced his group's new strategy, declaring that he had formed the World Islamic Front, an amalgam of militant groups that included al-Qaida and its partner, Zawahiri's Armed Vanguards of Conquest.

Any qualms about the killing of innocents had been put aside, and bin Laden said that Muslims should kill Americans, including civilians.

Zawahiri's group also issued a statement that echoed bin Laden's declaration, but in a sign of the Egyptian influence over strategy, it also counseled cold calculation and careful planning.

Six months later, two American embassies in Africa were in ruins. Soon after that, American officials believe, the planning began for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

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