Bin Laden a Top Terror Threat, FBI Chief Says

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh warned Thursday that retaliation by Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden for U.S. missile strikes against suspected terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan “is about as serious and imminent a threat as I can imagine.”

This grim assessment came as Freeh offered the Senate Judiciary Committee a broad panorama of the terrorist threat in the United States and the capacity of the FBI and other agencies to counter it. He said U.S. counter-terrorism efforts were stronger than ever--but still in need of improvement.

Freeh testified that 20 to 25 terrorist organizations, backed up by “many other loosely affiliated groups,” now operate within the United States. Aside from the network linked to Bin Laden, he did not identify them by name.

Freeh would not estimate the number of terrorists operating on U.S. soil but agreed with Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) that the total is “significant.”

The FBI, Freeh said, is conducting “active investigations on many individuals in the United States who are suspected of active terrorism or being agents of foreign powers or organizations who perform acts of terrorism.”

Looking at the worldwide picture, Freeh singled out the group tied to Bin Laden as particularly dangerous because of its “great resources” and “multinational following.” “You have individuals literally all over the world who are followers of Bin Laden,” Freeh said.

He said some Bin Laden disciples operate in the U.S. “We’ve identified people in the United States or people who have transited the United States who are associated with him,” Freeh said.

After listening to Freeh’s description of the threat, Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) said, “It certainly seems to me that we’re in for something that we’re not ready for as a people.”

In reply to questions, Freeh said the White House consulted with him before ordering the Aug. 20 cruise missile attacks on a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, and on camps in Afghanistan linked to Bin Laden.

But Freeh said he was not part of the decision-making process. Instead, the director said, he was asked first to assess the evidence pointing to Bin Laden as the mastermind of the twin U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7 and then to predict whether the missile attacks would hinder the FBI investigations in East Africa.

He did not reveal any details of his advice but told the committee that the missile attacks did not hurt the FBI investigations. To bolster this assessment, he cited the cooperation of the Kenyan government in the arrests and extradition to New York last week of two suspects in the Nairobi bombing.