Battlefield Clues Key to Bush’s Next Step

U.S. intelligence officials are reviewing information from prisoner interrogations and documents confiscated in Afghanistan to help the Bush administration determine the next step--and the next targets--in the war on terrorism after Osama bin Laden and his top command are captured or killed.

U.S. officials have begun outlining a more complete picture of Al Qaeda terror cells, recruitment techniques and training camps around the world from questioning of Taliban prisoners and defectors, as well as from documents and computer disks confiscated in houses, offices and military bases across Afghanistan.

Partly as a result, officials said, they now are considering possible action against alleged terrorist recruitment and training facilities in the Aceh region of northern Indonesia and in Bin Laden’s father’s community of Hadhramaut in Yemen, and an alleged training and storage facility in Ras Komboni in southern Somalia, among other sites.

Green Berets already have launched little-noticed raids against alleged Al Qaeda operatives and weapons caches in Bosnia-Herzegovina, arresting more than a dozen suspects. And a team of U.S. advisors visited the Philippines last month to assess how Washington can help Manila quell a terrorist campaign on the island of Mindanao. The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have quietly increased operations and surveillance in dozens of other countries.

“The main front after Afghanistan will be going after Al Qaeda cells hither and yon,” said a U.S. official familiar with the planning. “That will be the main focus.”

None of the alleged facilities is believed to be as extensive, significant or accessible as the training camps Bin Laden ran in Afghanistan.

“The preparations, planning and even training now doesn’t take place in big camps where we can take pictures but behind closed doors in apartments and houses,” the official said.

Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, has come under scrutiny because of reports that 2,000 to 3,000 Al Qaeda followers have trained with weapons and explosives there and that several hundred are fighting in Afghanistan.

One supposed camp is in Aceh, a semiautonomous Muslim province in northern Sumatra that has always resisted Jakarta’s control. Other camps have been identified on the main island of Java and in the eastern Molucca Islands.

Somalia has been a suspected center of Al Qaeda activity since 1993, when Bin Laden sent aides to help Mogadishu warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid avoid capture by U.S. troops. After the U.S. withdrawal, Al Qaeda used the anarchic nation as a base to help prepare for the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Al Qaeda reportedly has built a logistics and training base in Ras Komboni, a small Somalian port near the Kenyan border. Experts say Al Qaeda has used boats to ferry people and supplies, and some U.S. officials warn that the base could be a haven for Al Qaeda fighters or commanders who escape Afghanistan.

Walter Kansteiner, assistant secretary of State for African affairs, told reporters in Nairobi, Kenya, on Friday that the Bush administration had information that a Somalian group with ties to Bin Laden had representatives in the weak transitional government struggling to assert its power in Somalia. He confirmed that the United States is monitoring Somalian air and sea routes.

However, the Somalian government and aid agency officials say the Ras Komboni base has long been abandoned.

Al Qaeda has attacked U.S. forces twice in Yemen. In 1993, its members bombed a barracks that was used by U.S. troops heading into Somalia. And in October 2000, a small group attacked the destroyer Cole while it was refueling in Aden, killing 17 sailors.

Hadhramaut, a remote valley in Yemen, is the birthplace of Bin Laden’s father, as well as the home of one suspect in the Cole attack and the ancestral home of at least one of the Sept. 11 skyjackers. Bin Laden is known to have recruited many followers there.

A Western European intelligence official said Yemen is a particular concern as a potentially “friendly base of operation” for Al Qaeda. “It may be the next step for Bin Laden. The central government can’t control the tribes, and with Bin Laden’s family connections in the region, there could be Yemenites willing to die for him,” the official said.

U.S. Hopes to Avoid Use of Force, Officials Say

Officials said the Bush administration would offer hardware and support to governments in its war on terrorism but will seek to avoid direct military involvement. But U.S. officials said they would respond as necessary to capture or eliminate terrorist cells.

Despite recent arrests across Europe, much remains to be done in the West to rein in terrorists. “We believe 60% of radical Islamic networks are yet to be discovered here,” a Western European intelligence official said.

In Afghanistan, the CIA and U.S. and British military intelligence officers have examined or confiscated computer disks, letters, blueprints, maps and other records at several dozen houses and offices as Taliban troops and their non-Afghan allies retreated in disarray.

The rapid collapse of the Taliban regime, however, meant that opposition Northern Alliance troops in some cases destroyed documents or other evidence before intelligence teams arrived. Some reporters also inspected houses and documents before U.S. teams could scrutinize them.

At an abandoned Al Qaeda compound in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, Times reporters found rubber stamps to forge Pakistani visas, names and addresses in Sweden and Germany, a diamond receipt from Brussels and crates of chemicals. A journal suggests that its owner was trying to make explosives.

But the pages are amateurish, said UCLA chemist Charles Knobler, who was shown photos of the documents by The Times. “It’s like a freshman chemistry experiment, or even high school,” he said.

Other documents have been shipped to Washington and are being translated, officials said. Investigators have gleaned new names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank account numbers and other leads into possible terrorist cells in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. At least some of the material is in code.

“It’s opening up new networks,” said an intelligence official. “It’s still early. . . . But everything will be checked out and exploited to the maximum extent.”

Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said materials gathered in Afghanistan had produced useful leads but not “a lot of huge new surprises.” None of the evidence, he added, has prompted the intelligence community to change its assessment of Al Qaeda’s capabilities and intentions.

“I still think the greatest weapon Al Qaeda has is the fact that they have suicidal people at their disposal to willingly do acts of blatant carnage to instill terror and fear,” Goss said. “That to me is a much more dangerous proposition than an incoming nuclear weapon--dirty or otherwise--from some mad scientist working for Al Qaeda.”

It’s unclear if any of the documents have helped in the hunt for Bin Laden, who is believed to be making a last stand in the heavily fortified catacombs of the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan.

But another U.S. intelligence official cautioned that reported sightings of Bin Laden there remain unconfirmed and that many alleged sightings have proved false.

“Someone even saw [Bin Laden] on the beach in Cancun once,” he said. “We got a report that someone saw a tall bearded guy in sandals walking on the beach there. We laughed at that one.”

Labs, Classrooms Gave Little New Information

Several U.S. officials said they have learned little new from the laboratories and classrooms the terrorist network used to study chemical, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction--except that the Al Qaeda effort was broader than previously thought.

“So far, most of the information we’ve seen there is publicly available from textbooks, or available on the Internet,” one official said. “It’s interesting that it’s there and in so many places, because it validates what we’ve said all along, that Al Qaeda is interested in weapons of mass destruction. But we’ve seen no great surprises, nothing that made us stop and say, ‘How did they know that?’ ”

U.S. officials have known for several years that Bin Laden wanted to buy enriched uranium or other fissile material necessary to build a nuclear weapon, or to obtain spent nuclear fuel or other radioactive material that could be attached to a conventional explosive to spread radiation in a crowded area.

Stories have circulated since the late 1990s that the Russian mafia or Chechen rebels had sold Bin Laden stolen suitcase-sized tactical nuclear weapons or other nuclear material from former Soviet facilities. So far, however, U.S. officials said they have no proof that Bin Laden or any of his supporters have obtained a nuclear weapon or dispersal device.

A U.S. official said the CIA has obtained “reliable reports” that on at least one occasion, Bin Laden was swindled by someone purporting to sell fissile material. “We think they bought a fake,” the official said.

Abdullah Jan Tawhidi, deputy minister of security and intelligence for Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, said he believes that Bin Laden has actively tried to acquire nuclear weapons.

When the Taliban was still in power and the Northern Alliance forces controlled smuggling routes from former Soviet Central Asia, the troops found people transporting what was said to be uranium and another hazardous material on several occasions into Taliban-controlled areas, Tawhidi said in an interview in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

“We captured some smugglers with those things,” Tawhidi said. “We didn’t know whether Arabs used them, or who did.”

He said the material was packed in heavy steel canisters, the smallest of which was sealed inside a second canister that was contained in a third.

“The word ‘uranium’ was written on them in Russian,” Tawhidi added.

But the Northern Alliance seized only heroin from smugglers, not uranium. Tawhidi said his troops were “not interested in those things. We knew we could not use them.”

Northern Alliance troops found about 40 houses in Kabul that were used by suspected Al Qaeda forces, Tawhidi said. Of those, perhaps 10 had either chemicals or books that suggested that the houses were used as laboratories, but not factories, for chemical weapons, Tawhidi said.

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Drogin reported from Washington and Watson from Kabul. Times staff writers Greg Miller in Washington, Craig Pyes in Paris, Megan K. Stack in Jalalabad, Davan Maharaj in Nairobi and Thomas Maugh in Los Angeles contributed to this report.