Higher Terror Risk Is Declared

Terrorist threats against Western targets Tuesday forced the closing of the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia and prompted Homeland Security officials to elevate the national threat level, amid intelligence reports raising the prospect of attacks in the United States.

In Washington, officials boosted the national threat level from “elevated” to “high risk” of a terrorist attack, responding to the deadly bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, and what officials feared was a possibly resurgent Al Qaeda operating on U.S. soil.

It was the fourth time in the last year that the threat level has been raised to orange from yellow on the color-coded assessment scale. The last increase was on the eve of the U.S. war in Iraq, and the threat was scaled back to yellow in mid-April after hostilities waned. Like the previous alerts, Tuesday’s triggered heightened security measures by cities, states and businesses across the country.

In Los Angeles, Mayor James K. Hahn and Police Chief William J. Bratton announced Tuesday that the police will step up patrols around 605 potential targets citywide and reestablish checkpoints at Los Angeles International Airport. Authorities also asked the public to report suspicious behavior immediately.

The nationwide change in the threat level “is based upon the recent terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, also in conjunction with intelligence reports concerning anti-U.S. terrorist group intentions,” Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security Department’s undersecretary for border and transportation security, said at a news conference in Washington.

“The United States intelligence community believes that terrorists continue to plan attacks against targets in the United States, and for this reason, the alert level has been raised,” Hutchinson said. “There’s been an increased specificity in terms of the threats that we hear, but not necessarily specific in terms of the target.”

The heightened alert comes as intelligence and law enforcement officials are evaluating evidence that a new crop of Al Qaeda operatives may be mobilizing for attacks in the United States.

The FBI has previously said that there are potentially hundreds of Al Qaeda sympathizers in the United States, and has prosecuted a number of people allegedly tied to the group.

The FBI has detained two Arab men who officials suspect may have been sent to the United States to scout out new targets, a law enforcement official said. The official cautioned, however, that the FBI has yet to link the two men to Al Qaeda, and notes that information about their identities and arrests are under court seal.

Senior U.S. counterterrorism officials confirmed that the alert was raised more because of general concerns about attacks within the United States rather than specific and corroborated bits of intelligence.

One official said the latest move was based almost entirely on “logic” -- the result of the recent attacks combined with a continuing stated desire by Al Qaeda to revisit targets in the United States that it previously failed to destroy.

In recent days, U.S. officials have received some ominous pieces of intelligence, including an intercepted e-mail in which the sender warned of a possibly “devastating” and imminent attack on major East Coast cities such as Boston and New York, according to one senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The author of the e-mail message, who officials believe was overseas, told the recipient in the United States that all Muslims should leave such cities within 48 hours, the senior official said. In a second e-mail intercepted by U.S. authorities, the sender also mentioned Washington and referred to possible attacks in New York and elsewhere on the eastern coastline, the official said.

Both messages were described in a confidential FBI bulletin that was circulated internally and to high-level counterterrorism authorities. But the consensus among U.S. officials, several said in interviews, was that the two e-mails, as well as other intercepted discussions about possible attacks in the United States, were uncorroborated and too general to warrant greater alarm.

Several U.S. counterterrorism officials, all speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they remain convinced that, although Al Qaeda would like to launch attacks on U.S. soil, the vast majority of terrorist plots that appear to be in motion -- if not all of them -- are aimed at targets overseas.

“Clearly, we’ve laid out an analysis about why [the American public] should be concerned, but there is no specific indication about an attack here,” said a second U.S. official. “There is an extrapolation that goes way back to after 9/11, when we knew [Al Qaeda] wanted in the worst way to attack us here,” the official said. “But that is more logic and deduction.”

In the Saudi kingdom, stunned from last week’s suicide car bombings in Riyadh, the capital, that killed 34 people, officials increased security and searched for Al Qaeda cells, amid a growing sense that another attack was impending.

The U.S. Embassy closing was ordered after Saudi and U.S. intelligence intercepted electronic chatter from suspected terrorist operatives indicating that “some strikes may be imminent,” according to a statement released by the U.S. Embassy.

“I don’t know the specifics of the threat, but it was enough to scare the hell out of us,” said one U.S. official based in Riyadh.

A Saudi intelligence official said a terrorist cell was planning a suicide truck bombing. “It’s a question of time,” said the official, referring to the possibility of another attack. “It’s not if, it’s when.”

The U.S. Embassy and its consulates in Jeddah and Dhahran will be closed until at least Sunday. More than half of the embassy’s 120 full-time employees will leave the country with their families by May 28, said embassy spokesman John Burgess. The British and German embassies are also closing.

Heightened fears that more explosions may shake the capital have turned parts of the city into security zones of barricades and police roadblocks. The May 11 triple bombing, which killed seven Americans and targeted residential compounds leased by westerners, jolted Saudis into the realization that Al Qaeda was willing to strike within their country.

More than 60 FBI, CIA and other American investigators are working with Saudi intelligence services to track down a Riyadh-based cell headed by Khaled Jehani. Nine members of the group are believed to have died in the attacks. At least 10 others, including Jehani, escaped. A 29-year-old Saudi, Jehani appears in an Al Qaeda martyrdom tape retrieved by the U.S. during the Afghan war.

Al Qaeda had long recruited from Saudi Arabia and had used the nation as a base. But the recent bombings indicate, according to Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, that the organization’s mind-set changed after the arrests and disappearances of a number of its key lieutenants. Some of its new leaders, said the ambassador, determined that Saudi Arabia’s ties to the U.S. made it a legitimate target.

“They decided to go all out,” Bandar said.

In Washington, the White House called the embassy closures a “precaution.”

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Schmitt, Meyer and Wright reported from Washington. Times staff writers Jeffrey Fleishman in Riyadh and Richard Winton in Los Angeles contributed to this report.