Bin Laden Tops List of Suspects

U.S. intelligence agencies gathered initial evidence Tuesday that “strongly points” to the amorphous network of cells run by terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and headquartered in Afghanistan for the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to senior U.S. officials.

One of the pieces of evidence is an intercept of communications between Bin Laden allies talking about attacks on the two sites after they were hit Tuesday, according to well-placed U.S. sources who asked to remain anonymous.

One official said that the information was “not absolutely definitive yet,” but that Bin Laden and possibly allies of his Al Qaeda organization were now “at the top of the list of suspects” responsible for the bloodiest terrorist attack in U.S. history. At the same time, however, other groups are not being ruled out, a second well-placed source said. Bin Laden agents also may have worked with other groups, as is now suspected in the attack on the U.S. warship Cole in Yemen last year.

One official said the intelligence information, which was collected domestically and “came up after the attack,” was a key focus of the immediate investigation.

Afghanistan’s Taliban government--which hosts Bin Laden, his operatives and his camps--vehemently denied Tuesday that the wealthy militant had anything to do with the twin attacks in New York and Washington.

In Kabul, Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Mutawakel told reporters that the Taliban had stuck to its promise to limit Bin Laden’s ability to communicate by taking away his satellite telephone and other equipment.

He said the Taliban condemned all forms of terrorism as “hateful.” He also warned that any U.S. strike on Afghanistan in retaliation would be viewed as “state terrorism.”

Amid conflicting claims, it may be days, weeks or even months before a fuller picture is assembled. In past attacks, early speculation has been dead wrong: Mideast extremists were suspected in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which turned out to be work of a former U.S. soldier. For two years, Iran was suspected in the 1989 Pan Am 103 midair bombing, for which a Libyan intelligence agent was convicted in January.

But U.S. officials have built a strong circumstantial case for Bin Laden involvement. His network of extremists from Islamic countries, most of whom trained in Afghanistan, is the only international terrorist group known to have the means, motive, methods and track record to carry out such a terrorist attack.

“It’s very difficult to imagine anyone but Osama pulling this off. He has the declared motive and the stated objective. He has to be the most plausible, credible suspect. It looks like he’s finally hit the home run that he’s been talking about for years,” said an intelligence analyst.

Indeed, U.S. intelligence officials have been expecting a major Bin Laden attack, evident in a series of published government warnings to Americans in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia in recent months.

In congressional testimony in February, CIA Director George J. Tenet warned, “Osama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat. Since 1998, Bin Laden has declared all U.S. citizens legitimate targets of attack.”

As evident in the twin 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which Bin Laden was indicted, he is “capable of planning multiple attacks with little or no warning,” he said. He also cautioned that Bin Laden operations are increasingly difficult to trace because he has turned to allies to cover his tracks.

Al Qaeda, or “The Base,” was formed in the late 1980s to bring together Arabs who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion, according to the State Department’s “Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000.” It “serves as a focal point or umbrella organization for a worldwide network” that includes cells in countries as diverse as Egypt and Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic in central Asia.

U.S. counter-terrorism officials say no other domestic or international group has the capability or expressed interest--much less the well-established history--to execute such an assault. Other Mideast groups, such as Islamic Jihad or Hamas, are less sophisticated and have limited attacks largely to the region.

“This kind of attack would require a great deal of preparation. You’d need people in place for at least three to four months to accomplish this unprecedented set of attacks,” said Stanley Bedlington, a former CIA terrorism analyst.

The sheer scope of the operation may be the strongest piece of evidence pointing to Bin Laden.

“The global network needed to pull this off, the finances involved in training people and putting them in place, the operational resources, the teams of people to do advance intelligence requires a truly robust organization. And there’s only one of that caliber: Bin Laden,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist and director of the Rand Corp.’s Washington office.

Among the groups on the U.S. list of suspects, most are Islamic extremist movements, according to intelligence sources.

In a twist indicating a change in terrorism worldwide, there are no nations high on the list, even though Iraq tried to orchestrate a series of attacks against American targets around the world during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis.

In contrast, Al Qaeda is known to have tried to establish cells in the United States.

America’s vulnerability to terrorist attack was forewarned in a thwarted bomb plot targeting Los Angeles International Airport nearly two years ago that was traced to Algerian associates of Bin Laden in Canada and Europe. The plot revealed the existence of terrorist sleeper cells and a sophisticated network of jihadists, or holy warriors, operating independently of the suspected terrorist mastermind.

The subsequent testimony of Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested crossing the Canadian border with bomb materials in a rented car, revealed that jihad leaders were seeking to infiltrate terrorist agents into the U.S. using stolen or counterfeit passports.

Ressam has told authorities that after receiving a year of training in firearms and advanced explosives at Bin Laden’s Afghanistan camps in 1998, he was given $12,000 and a mission to return to his home city of Montreal “to set up a house and prepare for the arrival of the rest of the cell members who would help him conduct the millennium attack,” according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Joseph F. Bianco in New York.

Once the group was reunited in Montreal, they were to launch as deadly a strike as possible, placing a suitcase bomb in a crowded LAX terminal at the height of holiday travel leading up to New Year’s Day 2000. The plot was thwarted when Ressam was stopped at the U.S.-Canadian border on Dec. 14, 1999, and arrested with more than 130 pounds of bomb-making materials.

Ressam has told authorities that his particular unit of terrorists in training, composed of Algerian expatriates, was only one of many at the camp, according to Bianco. Other units, or cells, originated from Yemen, Germany, Italy, Jordan and other countries and left Afghanistan with missions of attacking U.S. and Western targets.

Authorities say evidence from past operations point to a loose federation of terrorists who adhere to a horizontal structure. The cells are semi-autonomous and have interchangeable players who use Islamic code names.

“They are almost impossible to catch--and monitor,” said James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI New York bureau who presided over the massive World Trade Center investigation.

Another Bin Laden operative who provided information in the recent trial of conspirators in the 1998 African embassy bombings was Ali Mohamad, a naturalized American citizen born in Egypt who worked for Bin Laden after serving with the Army’s Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C.

He told the FBI that hundreds of “sleepers” and “submarines,” or secret agents, are in place who don’t fit neatly into the terrorist profile.

Times staff writers Bob Drogin in Washington and William C. Rempel in Los Angeles, and special correspondent Craig Pyes in Paris, contributed to this report.