A Resilient Al Qaeda Regroups and Plots

Shrewd recruiting of new, young militants has allowed Al Qaeda to reestablish itself here in Osama bin Laden’s homeland and around the world as an elusive and resilient threat that is seeking to launch new attacks in the United States and other countries, many U.S. officials now believe.

Al Qaeda has not only survived the U.S.-led crackdown against it, but it has also found weaknesses in the tactics of its pursuers and is exploiting them, according to interviews with U.S. officials here and in Washington.

Of particular concern, these officials say, are indications that the terrorist network has infiltrated an unknown number of essentially untraceable operatives into the United States. Some of them are believed to be planning suicide bombings against “soft targets” such as subways within the next several months, U.S. officials said.

The assessment is based, in part, on information gained over the last two weeks by U.S. and Saudi authorities jointly investigating the May 12 bombings in the capital of this oil-rich kingdom. The synchronized blasts killed 34 people at three residential compounds frequented by Westerners. Those who died included eight Americans and nine suicide bombers.

“At the same time we have learned a lot about how Al Qaeda has operated, they have done their homework and figured out ways to get people in who can evade scrutiny and the techniques that have been successful in the past,” said one senior U.S. official. “They’re bringing in these people because they know they’re not known to law enforcement and intelligence [officials]. It gives them the opportunity to operate under the radar screen.”

U.S. authorities believe that the names of members of such new “operational cells” don’t appear in the database listing suspected Al Qaeda operatives, supporters and even sympathizers that they have built in the 21 months since the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

The database, which is used by law enforcement, intelligence and immigration agencies, cross-references many thousands of names gleaned from abandoned training camps in Afghanistan, safe houses raided elsewhere, electronic intercepts, interrogations and other sources.

“We thought we had a really good picture of it,” the senior official said of Al Qaeda’s current membership. “But what we’re now seeing is that there are a lot of new cells, many of them beyond the penetration of the CIA. They’re ciphers.”

Some authorities and terrorism experts caution that new recruits may never amount to more than Bin Laden “hero worshipers” who will never actually do anything. Other authorities, including the senior U.S. intelligence official, said the new waves of recruits may be even more dangerous than those who joined Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks. Al Qaeda has purposely chosen many locations, such as Riyadh, in which the local Muslim populations are boiling with anger over worsening economic conditions and what they perceive to be a U.S.-led campaign to smash Islam under the guise of the war on terrorism, he said.

Officials believe that the suicide bombers here belonged to one of several Saudi-based Al Qaeda cells, and that several dozen hard-core members are plotting further attacks within the kingdom. Last week, even after the Saudis announced the arrest of 21 people who they said were linked to the bombings, U.S. Ambassador Robert Jordan ordered all “nonessential” U.S. Embassy employees to leave the country by Friday.

“There is a real and palpable Al Qaeda threat here,” said one top-ranking diplomat here who has access to classified intelligence cables. “The lethality of the threat, I think, is extraordinary.”

U.S. officials said they were investigating whether bomb blasts in Morocco that occurred just four days after the Riyadh attacks are linked.

Initial indications are that the 14 men who launched the five attacks in Casablanca, killing 43 people -- including 31 bystanders -- were local militants who might have received financing from Al Qaeda or one of its regional affiliates.

But U.S. officials said their concerns about an Al Qaeda offensive and its apparent emphasis on using relatively new recruits were a factor in the decision to dispatch a team of FBI agents to Casablanca.

Another Saudi-based Al Qaeda cell might be trying to sneak into the United States to launch attacks, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, told reporters here recently, citing evidence from the investigation.

The Riyadh investigation represents the first time FBI and CIA agents have been given on-the-ground access by Saudi Arabia, an Al Qaeda recruiting and staging center that played a central role in the Sept. 11 attacks and other plots.

Investigators say they have uncovered details about current Al Qaeda activity in the Persian Gulf, including evidence that its members are getting large amounts of weapons smuggled in from Yemen and even Iraq.

And because the inquiry fully combines U.S. and Saudi intelligence and law enforcement capabilities, it has given the Americans a better understanding of Al Qaeda’s structure a year and a half after its leaders and foot soldiers alike were forced to flee their safe haven in Afghanistan.

Officials say the investigation has dispelled any idea that Bin Laden’s role or that of top aide Ayman Zawahiri has diminished because of their flight from Afghanistan and the continuing hunt for them. What is now known about the Riyadh bombings and other terrorist activity in Saudi Arabia, the officials said, demonstrates that Bin Laden and Zawahiri still plot the organization’s long-term strategy.

For months, Al Qaeda factions within Saudi Arabia clashed on whether to launch attacks within the kingdom, with some arguing that such attacks would jeopardize fund-raising efforts and alienate their support base of Muslims.

The attacks were launched only after Bin Laden personally approved them, according to the senior U.S. official.

“They don’t do anything without someone going back to Bin Laden,” the official said.

U.S. authorities also believe that the senior Al Qaeda leadership, from hide-outs in Iran, near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and perhaps elsewhere, is coordinating an effort to find and train new recruits and reestablish its network of cells on nearly every continent, including North America.

Officials are particularly concerned by intelligence indicating that Al Qaeda wants to carry out attacks on U.S. soil as soon as possible.

“They are trying very hard to find ways to do that,” the official said.

Al Qaeda members have studied the new U.S. homeland security system and immigration reforms put in place by the Bush administration, looking for ways to circumvent them, officials said.

One of the most important ways is its recruiting efforts.

Its youthful new militants lack any connection to known terrorist organizations or radical religious groups that are being monitored by the U.S. government, so their names aren’t on any government watch list or computer database, the officials say.

And the terrorist network is believed to have dispatched to the United States operatives from countries in Europe, parts of Asia and elsewhere that don’t raise the same suspicions or trigger the increased visa scrutiny and travel restrictions as those seeking entry from countries where Al Qaeda is known to operate.

“They are able to move and operate in the U.S., and in Canada, England, Germany, France, in the [other] Islamic communities where they can blend in,” said the senior U.S. official.

“I’m not thinking wannabe cells such as Lackawanna,” added the official, in reference to a group of Upstate New York men convicted recently for merely visiting an Al Qaeda camp, “but ones where mid-level people have been allowed to recruit and operate.”

FBI and Justice Department officials have not commented on whether they have taken any such recruits into custody, but for months they have stressed that they believe Al Qaeda has maintained a presence in the United States.

Several U.S. officials here said last week that a few suspected operatives have been detained in the United States but that no direct links to Al Qaeda have been established.

The national threat level was lowered a notch Friday because Homeland Security officials determined that the recent elevated risk of a terrorist attack in the United States had passed.

But some U.S. officials here said the new information about Al Qaeda efforts to infiltrate the United States helped prompt the elevation of the threat level in the first place. So did the raid by Saudi authorities of an Al Qaeda safe house May 6 in Riyadh, which found not only a huge cache of explosives, weapons and cash, but also information that tipped off the Saudis to the cell members trying to gain entry into the United States or Europe.

U.S. and Saudi officials also have confirmed that one of 19 men linked to that safe house, whom the Saudis had been watching for weeks, is a young militant with dual Kuwaiti-Canadian citizenship named Abdulrahman Mansour Jabarah, who is still at large.

Jabarah’s younger brother, Mohammed, is a former Bin Laden bodyguard who was captured last year after plotting bombing attacks at embassies in Singapore and Manila. Both are believed to have fought and trained in Afghanistan. The younger Jabarah also worked directly for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was regarded as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and Al Qaeda’s chief of operations before his capture March 1 in Pakistan.

Unlike the new Al Qaeda recruits, many of the Sept. 11 hijackers had some connections to Al Qaeda operations overseas that had been overlooked by law enforcement officials, including attendance at Afghan camps and mosques in Germany frequented by extremists.

U.S. congressional investigators looking into the Sept. 11 attacks concluded last year that Mohammed probably succeeded in getting other Al Qaeda operatives into the country who have never been found.

On Saturday, the senior U.S. official confirmed that the FBI, the CIA and Canadian authorities have placed an urgent priority on finding Jabarah and any associates to see if they are planning attacks on U.S. soil.

Meanwhile, the CIA and State Department have picked up reports that new Al Qaeda members are being deployed around the world.

Over the last two weeks, Internet “chat rooms” linked to Al Qaeda have buzzed with veiled hints about a terrorist offensive, some of them in what authorities say are hidden messages in Koranic verse. A collection of them was circulated last week among U.S. intelligence officials because they all seem to predict imminent attacks.

“You will all rejoice with what will bring happiness to your heart soon. Very soon,” said one e-mail on a Web site called “Fortress Forum” that is known to be used by Islamic extremists.

The Riyadh bombers, some officials said, appear to be prototypes of what Al Qaeda has become: relatively new cells in which well-disciplined, battle-hardened guerrillas share their lehal skills with a rapidly swelling army of inexperienced but militant foot soldiers.

U.S. officials say they now believe that at least one of the Saudi cells was created long after Sept. 11, by Khaled Jehani, and perhaps the elder Jabarah and another man, Ali Abdulrahman Said Alfagsy Ghamdi.

Jehani, like Jabarah, is a veteran of both the Afghan terrorist camps and the battles against Soviet and U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. He is believed to have replaced a top Al Qaeda commander named Abd al Rahim al Nashiri as chief of Persian Gulf operations after Al Nashiri was captured last year.

“With every arrest, someone has been there immediately who has stepped up to take their place,” the senior official said.

But many others within the cell, including some of the nine men killed in the Riyadh suicide bombing attacks, appear to be much younger, inexperienced operatives who only recently came to the group, authorities said.

No one knows how many such cells there are. But last week, U.S. officials estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters who fled Afghanistan when the United States invaded dispersed to as many as 100 countries.

In some ways, the new recruiting tactics are more a defensive response than an offensive one.

In large swaths of Europe and Asia, in particular, police have rolled up numerous Al Qaeda cells, including their leaders and regional commanders, and they are closely watching the mosques, study groups and other recruiting grounds for signs of recruiting activity.

Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said Al Qaeda cells have always relied on such tactics to evade scrutiny. But Ranstorp, a consultant for European governments on terrorism issues, said many authorities have detected such a shift recently that they have begun calling the new approach Al Qaeda’s “lily whites” campaign, in reference to the Irish Republican Army’s practice of seeking youthful and innocent-looking recruits with clean passports and no criminal record.

At the same time, Ranstorp said, European authorities have been picking up the same signs of an Al Qaeda resurgence as their U.S. counterparts.

Concerns about a new Al Qaeda offensive have prompted emergency security measures throughout Europe, particularly in Britain, where counter-terrorism authorities have placed security barriers outside Parliament.

Commercial flights to and from the East African country of Kenya were halted for a time, after intelligence agencies picked up chatter pointing to an imminent attack. Canada also has reported a drastic increase in Al Qaeda-related activity, as have many Asian nations including Cambodia and others that until now had not detected any terrorist activity, authorities said.

Ranstorp says that Al Qaeda’s tactics are not surprising, given its history of studying its pursuers and trying to stay one step ahead of them.

“For law enforcement to think anything else is naive,” he said. “They are like criminals. They study the methodology of law enforcement, they know how we monitor and track them, and they change their tactics constantly to maintain the element of surprise.”