TERRORIST DRAGNET - Ran out of time

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News - Homefront Preparations : One Thread

Terrorist Dragnet 'Ran Out of Time' - 40-Country Intelligence Network Races Clock to Disrupt Plans for Future Attacks

By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 15, 2001; Page A06

Last summer, after the CIA received credible specific warnings that Osama bin Laden was planning a major attack against U.S. targets, the agency clandestinely worked with police and security services in 20 foreign countries to arrange the arrest and interrogation of 12 al Qaeda operatives.

This kind of dragnet, known in intelligence terms as "disruption," is the prime technique employed by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to handle terrorist threats when the time, place and target remain unknown.

"Disruption," a senior intelligence official said recently, "is doing something that throws the terrorists off their game plan."

"It takes possible participants off the streets . . . and word goes through their network someone is not going to be there," he said. They pull back, he added, "but they often come back later to try again."

In the case of last summer's warnings, the CIA believes, the disruption approach may have thwarted some plots. But it also failed to halt the most horrendous terrorist attacks in history, the hijackings that caused more than 5,000 deaths at the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

The mixed success of disruption is what has intelligence officials nervous as they try to respond to new intelligence suggesting that additional terrorist attacks are imminent. Since Sept. 11, the CIA has arranged for 230 people in more than 40 countries who are suspected of being part of al Qaeda or associated terrorist networks to be jailed and questioned, according to intelligence sources.

In this country, the FBI has detained about 700 individuals as part of what Justice Department officials have described as an effort to disrupt al Qaeda networks operating across the country. But current and former intelligence officials warn that even such zealous efforts are not 100 percent fail-safe.

"A dozen victories in the dark make one loss in daylight look like we are losing badly," said a former White House terrorism specialist.

The terrorist attacks have brought calls from Capitol Hill and elsewhere for the removal of CIA Director George J. Tenet. But his defenders at the agency said Tenet warned repeatedly about bin Laden and his network over the past four years, making it difficult to conclude there was clearly an intelligence failure.

"Failure is not paying attention," the senior intelligence official said. "We made a supreme effort. . . . No one in the world knows more than we about bin Laden." With regard to Sept. 11, he said, the agency believes terrorist planning began more than two years ago and that in trying to uncover it, "We just ran out of time."

"It has to be seen in the context of all the work we are doing," this source added. "It must be seen as a war against a worldwide army. . . . In war you win some battles and lose some, and although we lost this battle, we are going to win the war."

The former head of Navy intelligence recently criticized the intelligence community for being "mired in conventional thinking" and "taken by surprise by the imagination and sophistication" of the Sept. 11 attacks. According to retired Rear Adm. Thomas A. Brooks, director of naval intelligence from 1988 to 1991, the intelligence failure was in the "inability to think the unthinkable, and to understand the mind-set of the enemy and extrapolate that into a warning of what could happen."

Disruption remains the main intelligence weapon in this war. But as a senior counterterrorist specialist said, the approach "only buys you time to look for more leads." For example, it worked that way in 1997 when an attempt to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi was disrupted after Kenyan police collected documents that led to the temporary break up of an al Qaeda cell. However, a year later, the bombing occurred.

Disruption worked in late 1999, when intelligence gathered by the CIA forecast multiple attacks at the time of the millennium celebrations. President Bill Clinton was told that five to 15 attacks against U.S. targets at home or abroad could be expected, former White House and intelligence sources said.

The CIA worked with Jordanian, Egyptian, Canadian and Pakistani services, picking up terrorists, some associated with al Qaeda, and moving them to either Jordan or Egypt. Those services then received information that in December 1999 led to disruption of millennium bombing plots aimed at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, and a religious site on Jordan's Mount Ebo. A Canadian border arrest in mid-December followed by widespread detentions among the Algerian Muslim community in the United States and Canada led to disruption of a plot to attack Los Angeles International Airport and tourist targets in Washington state, according to intelligence officials.

"In successful cases, we can apprehend someone and move that person to another country where he can be arrested and interrogated," an official said.

One major benefit of putting possible terrorists in the hands of foreign services, according to intelligence sources, is that most countries do not have the same legal rights and procedures as are practiced in the United States. Many foreign countries fighting terrorism use interrogation methods that include torture and threats to family members.

In the United States, by contrast, potential terrorists and their accomplices, such as those who carried out the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa and the Sept. 11 attacks, lived in the United States "under the protection of our legal system, which prevents intrusive investigative techniques," an intelligence official said.

One result is that in the war against international terrorism, "the front line is what we do with liaison partners abroad," said a former terrorist specialist who worked in the Clinton White House. Over the past five years, CIA and FBI personnel have worked closely with foreign police and security services in more than 40 countries, the specialist said.

"In some countries, we work with services where our diplomatic relations hardly exist," a former intelligence officer said. "They recognize we all have the same interests when it comes to terrorists." Bin Laden's network has targeted many nations besides the United States, he said, "and does its basic planning, recruiting, training and fundraising abroad."

Another need met by working with foreign police and security services is the potential for early warning. Those services have informants in places where the CIA and the FBI have had almost no success penetrating terrorist networks -- particularly al Qaeda. "They have the assets in their own countries for their own self-protection," a retired intelligence officer said. "It would take years for us to penetrate or buy our way into those groups. Sometimes we have had to buy security service informants when host governments in the Arab world won't come clean with us on what they know."

Although the CIA will not discuss the 1999 millennium disruption operations, King Abdullah of Jordan said during a CNN interview last month that the cell uncovered in 1999 in his country "allowed us the ability to uncover a series of operations in Europe and in the United States, and in Canada."

Since Sept. 11, CIA officials have reviewed information gathered to date about the 19 terrorists, looking for what they may have missed.

One finding is that the terrorists "have tightened their security overseas," a senior intelligence official said. "When we take one [plot] down, they go to school and now we are looking at tighter communications overseas."

When it comes to "time, location and target, communication is now in very elaborate code and closely held," he said.

The official also noted that although "some [foreign country] services worked carefully [on CIA requests] last summer, others did not." At least two countries, he said, "did not focus [their] people on the threat. There was a climate of disbelief before" Sept. 11.

While refusing to name the countries, the official said, "Since September 11 those countries and every foreign service take every lead seriously." In addition, he said, "our information then was good, now it is very good since we are getting better."

-- Anonymous, October 14, 2001


Moderation questions? read the FAQ