Tenet Warns of More Attacks

Nearly five months after deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the nation’s top intelligence officials said Wednesday that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network has been badly damaged around the world but still plans further attacks against America and its allies.

“We know they’ll hurt us again,” George J. Tenet, head of the CIA and the national intelligence community, warned the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in his first public appearance before Congress since Sept. 11.

Despite military victories in Afghanistan--and the arrest of nearly 1,000 suspected Al Qaeda operatives in more than 60 countries--Tenet said Bin Laden’s terrorist network “has not yet been destroyed.”

U.S. intelligence has confirmed the death of only two of Al Qaeda’s top 10 leaders in Afghanistan, and Tenet said those who escaped “are working to reconstitute the organization and to resume its terrorist operations.”

Tenet said he does not know if Bin Laden is alive. Bin Laden disappeared from U.S. surveillance in eastern Afghanistan in early December, and intelligence officials have said they believe he eluded capture and is hiding in the region.

The CIA director and intelligence chiefs from the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the State Department provided their first public assessment since last fall of suspected terrorist plots and capabilities around the globe. Delivering their annual report to Congress on worldwide threats, they also provided sobering new insights into the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

Tenet declined to characterize the Sept. 11 attacks as an intelligence failure and said the U.S. has thwarted other strikes and succeeded in Afghanistan largely because of the “heroic effort” of the nation’s spy community.

Although Bin Laden had sought to acquire or develop a nuclear weapon, for example, Tenet warned that documents recovered from former Al Qaeda labs and other facilities in Afghanistan showed the group had focused more on biological warfare agents and weapons.

President Bush is seeking nearly $6 billion in his current budget request for dealing with possible attacks involving bioterrorism. So far, the FBI says no evidence has linked Al Qaeda to the nation’s deadliest bioterrorism attack: the still-unsolved anthrax mailings last fall that resulted in five deaths and at least 22 illnesses.

In the United States, Tenet said, operatives “have considered” attacks against “high-profile government or private facilities, famous landmarks and U.S. infrastructure nodes, such as airports, bridges, harbors and dams.”

Overseas, he added, Al Qaeda cells already in place have plans to strike U.S. and allied targets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. U.S. diplomatic and military facilities are at “high risk,” he said, especially in East Africa, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

“Their modus operandi is to have multiple attack plans in the works simultaneously and to have Al Qaeda cells in place to conduct them,” he said.

Tenet singled out Somalia as a country “in which groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda have offered terrorists an operational base and potential haven.”

The Bush administration has deployed warships off the African country’s coast to intercept ships thought to be carrying Al Qaeda members on the run and recently increased military reconnaissance flights and other surveillance activities over the country.

In addition, the Pentagon last week began military exercises off the coast of Somalia’s neighbor, Kenya, involving helicopter landings and more than 2,400 Marines.

Tenet emphasized the dangers from what he called a “convergence” of threats from terrorists and other hostile forces, their search for weapons of mass destruction, and the economic, political and social tensions that give rise to them and other extremist groups.

“Never before have the dangers been more clear or more present,” he said. Specific plots to bomb U.S. embassies or other targets have been detected and prevented in recent months in France, Turkey, Singapore, Yemen, Bosnia and elsewhere.

Tenet said the U.S.-led campaign to deny Al Qaeda its haven, command center and training camps in Afghanistan had dealt “severe blows” to the group and its leaders. Bin Laden “did not believe we would invade his sanctuary,” Tenet said. “He saw the United States as soft, impatient, unprepared and fearful of a long, bloody war of attrition.”

The combination of precision airstrikes, commando raids, high-tech surveillance and local ground forces obviously worked, said Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides military intelligence to the Pentagon.

Al Qaeda, Wilson said, “has suffered a loss of prestige, institutional memory, contacts and financial assets that will ultimately degrade its effectiveness.” Even if Bin Laden survives, he added, “his ability to execute centralized control over a worldwide network has been diminished.”

If Bin Laden is killed or captured, Wilson added, “there is no identified successor capable of rallying so many divergent nationalities, interests and groups” to re-create Al Qaeda.

Tenet said Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, has responded to America’s war on terrorism by launching “a political and diplomatic charm offensive to make it appear that Baghdad is becoming more flexible.”

Hussein’s regime has “had contacts” with Al Qaeda, Tenet said. “Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible.”

Tenet said initial signs that Iran would cooperate with the U.S. over Afghanistan “are being eclipsed” by recent reports that Tehran has allowed Al Qaeda members to cross its border and has sent security agents into western Afghanistan to reassert ties to local tribal chiefs.