Hate Unites an Enemy Without an Army

Al Qaeda, which President Bush identified Thursday as the chief source of international terror and the prime target of U.S. ire, is unlike any enemy America has ever faced.

Launched in 1988, Al Qaeda, Arabic for “the Base,” has no capital city or standing army. Terrorism experts say it is a loosely knit coalition of previously distinct militant Islamic organizations and operatives who are united by their hatred of the West--and by the leadership of Osama bin Laden.

Working from a rugged redoubt in Afghanistan, the fiery Saudi-born fugitive provides inspiration, financing and religious fervor to thousands of followers in scores of countries. His Afghanistan training camps teach suicide bombing and assassination. His multinational staff has tried to create chemical and biological weapons, according to U.S. intelligence sources.

And unlike previous terrorist campaigns, Bin Laden’s crusade against the West is increasingly middle-class. He has drawn in engineers, computer specialists, soldiers, and--as the world learned after last week’s catastrophic terrorist attacks--pilots.

The organization now is so sophisticated that Bin Laden and his far-flung forces have kept Washington off guard for months by using decoy terrorist teams overseas and by feeding disinformation over phone lines and other communications systems monitored by the U.S., officials say.

Washington has shuttered scores of embassies this year and has issued repeated warnings to Americans traveling or working abroad, citing credible terrorist threats in Africa, the Middle East, the Far East and elsewhere. U.S. military forces and facilities were put on alert for a possible terrorist attack in Japan and Korea last month, for example.

In the most dramatic case, the Pentagon in June abruptly halted military exercises in Jordan, ordered 5th Fleet warships in Bahrain out to sea, and called the highest state of alert for U.S. military forces in the Persian Gulf after intercepted communications indicated an imminent attack by Bin Laden operatives.

Nothing happened, and it is unclear if the precautions worked, or if it was a false alarm.

But a U.S. intelligence official said that investigators now suspect that some recent threats were deliberately designed to keep Washington off balance before hijackers seized four passenger jets and carried out the deadliest terrorist strike in U.S. history.

“Our people are looking at that as a possibility,” said the official, who asked not to be identified as a matter of policy. So far, he added, no clear connection has been found.

Another U.S. official said Bin Laden used fake threats, and even decoy terrorist teams, in the last year to “probe our defenses” and see how the U.S. would respond. “They’ve gotten very good at using disinformation, threats that are not real threats,” he said. A third official confirmed that analysis.

Bin Laden’s apparent ability to confuse and confound U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon has huge implications. Timely, accurate information will be crucial if Bush is to fulfill his vow before Congress to find and root out Bin Laden’s terror networks and the governments that support them.

By all accounts, Bin Laden has frustrated the U.S. spy services since at least August 1998, when he allegedly orchestrated attacks using truck bombs that gutted U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans.

The Clinton administration subsequently fired 70 cruise missiles at the Zhawar Kili al Badr training camp in eastern Afghanistan after the CIA said Bin Laden and his top aides were meeting there with leaders of other terrorist groups. But Bin Laden already had left the camp when the missiles hit, and he escaped injury.

Until then, the National Security Agency, which intercepts electronic communications around the world, regularly listened in to Bin Laden’s laptop satellite telephone conversations, according to evidence introduced earlier this year at the federal trial in New York of four men accused of the embassy bombings.

Starting in November 1996, the agency recorded or traced hundreds of calls on Bin Laden’s phone to or from England, Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Azerbaijan and Kenya, prosecutors said.

At one point, the agency even recorded Bin Laden phoning his mother, according to James Bamford, author of two highly respected books about the NSA.

“They used to listen to him,” Bamford said. “They used to intercept him fairly well.”

It is unclear if a U.S. intelligence task force, which was set up three years ago, still is able to track Bin Laden with any precision, however. One knowledgeable official said he has “disappeared” since February. Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that the U.S. government isn’t even sure if Bin Laden is still in Afghanistan.

In part, that’s because Bin Laden and his chief aides apparently gave up their satellite phones, fax machines and other systems when they realized that they not only could be monitored, but that the signals could be traced to pinpoint their locations.

“Just because they’re terrorists doesn’t mean they’re stupid,” said Robert Gates, a former CIA director.

The decoys aren’t the only things that make Bin Laden so difficult to locate. He now is believed to communicate mostly by couriers, who hand-carry coded instructions and guidance to Pakistan and use telephones there. His aides also have sent computer e-mails that use sophisticated encryption software to block outsiders, including NSA code breakers, from deciphering their meaning.

In addition, experts say, Bin Laden doesn’t maintain tight control over Al Qaeda. Experts say he relies on a few trusted aides, with others getting information only on a need-to-know basis. In his speech, Bush likened the organization to the Mafia.

“He’s an inspirational leader, not a micro-manager,” Bamford said. “He doesn’t call up each day and ask, ‘So, how are your grades at the ABC flight school?’ ”

Adding to the challenge is a shortage of translators and analysts fluent in Pakistani Urdu, Afghan Pushtu, Iranian Farsi and other languages used in and around Afghanistan.

“We have reams of data being collected,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counter-terrorism chief. “We don’t have enough linguists to process the material, especially at the NSA.”

Cannistraro said the biggest problem, however, is that U.S. intelligence agencies consistently have failed to penetrate Bin Laden’s inner circle, a core group of like-minded Muslim zealots and self-styled warriors. “Without that, we won’t get the information we need to stop the next operation.”

According to one official, U.S. intelligence officials were told that Bin Laden lived in a heavily fortified cave outside Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan until the U.S. cruise missile attacks in 1998.

The cave supposedly had a communications room with computers, faxes and satellite phones, an armory stocked with assault rifles, mortars and other weapons, and an austere bedroom area and library filled with classic Islamic writings. Bin Laden’s staff stayed in nearby tunnels and bunkers.

After the missile attacks, Bin Laden built a new underground command and control center in the Pamir Mountains that is easier to protect, the official said.

Experts say Bin Laden tends to move at night, traveling with a small but heavily armed cadre of bodyguards in a convoy of black all-terrain vehicles with tinted glass. His teenage son and heir apparent, Muhammad, is usually at his side.

The search for a mobile, midnight terrorist who operates from caves has taxed the super-secret NSA. It largely depends on high-altitude satellites, sophisticated sensors and other high-tech surveillance systems that were designed during the Cold War to monitor Soviet bloc military movements, government centers and other high-profile targets.

As a rule, NSA intercepts of foreign communications are among the most closely guarded and most highly prized of U.S. intelligence secrets. But a retired U.S. diplomat, who sometimes was called in to help NSA analysts in U.S. embassies where he was based, cautioned that intercepts are not always helpful.

“It’s not that the NSA is incompetent,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It’s that they don’t know who’s talking most of the time. . . . They’d call me in and say, ‘Do you recognize this voice?’ And I never did. So they’d send a cable out saying, ‘An unidentified male said so-and-so.’ ”

Marti Mercer, an NSA spokeswoman, declined to discuss the agency’s operations. “We are here 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with many folks working very hard doing their jobs,” she said. “That’s about all the information we can provide at this time.” To be sure, U.S. intelligence agencies have scored several blows against Bin Laden.

Washington has helped European officials and other law enforcement agencies dismantle suspected terrorist cells in Belgium, Germany, Italy and Jordan, among other places, and has helped foil plots that could have killed hundreds if not thousands of people.

Other Al Qaeda cells have been identified or suspected in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Sudan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Somalia, Eritrea, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Yugoslavia, Albania, the United Kingdom, Canada and within the United States.

Ahmed Ressam, an insider at Bin Laden’s camps, testified earlier this year in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that jihad warriors from all over the world came to learn how to coduct guerrilla warfare against the United States and other Western interests.

At the Khalden camp in Afghanistan, radicals received instruction from Bin Laden aides on how to fire weapons, carry out assassinations, and attack centers of commerce and industry.

Some would then go on to more senior-level camps, where they would learn how to make and use high-grade explosives, Ressam testified.

Ressam agreed to tell all he knew about the Bin Laden war camps in exchange for leniency after his conviction on charges of conspiring to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. He described scenes in which warriors-in-training spent their days learning how to use cyanide gas to kill government workers, and their nights plotting attacks that they could carry out when they returned to their home countries around the world. He remains in federal custody.

Bin Laden offers them a mixture of militant rhetoric, rambling theology and personal charisma bolstered by his defiance--and bloody successes--against a superpower that so far has proved powerless to stop him. Experts say he’s a master of the modern media, using enigmatic statements and threats ahead of time, but rarely claiming responsibility later.

Born in 1957 as the 17th son of a fabulously wealthy Saudi Arabian construction magnate, Bin Laden first began building his network during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Although he is widely touted as a leader of that epic struggle, he mostly served far from the front line as a private quartermaster--enlisting, training and arming fellow Arabs.

He turned on the West when he returned home in 1990 and found U.S. forces massing in Saudi Arabia, preparing to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait. After a stint in Sudan, he finally showed up in Afghanistan in 1996 and called for a holy war to oust the West from the Arabian peninsula, and a broader campaign to eradicate Western influences from the world.

Since then, he has taken out insurance on his sanctuary by marrying his daughter to the son of a senior leader in Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, and by building palaces and other complexes for members of the Taliban elite. He also has used his construction experience and engineers to help build extensive fortifications and garrisons for the Taliban military.

In addition, some U.S. experts believe that Bin Laden’s followers were responsible for the assassination last week of Ahmed Shah Masoud, who was the leader of Afghanistan’s last remaining armed resistance group to the Taliban.

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Times staff writer Josh Meyer contributed to this report.