Al Qaeda Still at Work in U.S., Officials Say

Two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda maintains a largely invisible but extensive presence in the United States that includes logistical support, recruiting and fund-raising operatives and financial conduits linking them to the terrorist organization’s global network, U.S. officials say.

Several senior U.S. officials confirmed that they are only now realizing the full extent of Al Qaeda operations in the United States. Their new insight, they said, is based largely on intelligence-gathering investigations into terrorist financing underway here, in Saudi Arabia and other countries, as well as interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees.

The new information indicates that while Al Qaeda has been battered by the U.S.-led war on terrorism, it remains a resilient and deadly organization, with a deep bench of leaders and field commanders and a steady stream of funds and new recruits worldwide. In some ways, they say, Al Qaeda is more dangerous than ever, with a broad base of supporters willing to participate in bombings and other attacks against U.S. interests.

Even as a new videotape of an apparently healthy Osama bin Laden surfaced Wednesday, President Bush hailed the successes in the war on terrorism during a speech at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Va.

The video was the first in almost two years to show the elusive Al Qaeda leader. He was accompanied by his top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, strolling across rocky terrain. A voice believed to be Zawahiri’s called on Iraqis to “bury” American troops “in the graveyard of Iraq.”

Of particular concern are recent indications that many of these so-called holy warriors are incensed by the U.S. occupation of Iraq and appear to be more intent than ever on launching attacks on U.S. soil, according to interviews with dozens of U.S. officials and terrorism experts.

One senior U.S. counter-terrorism official confirmed that authorities are tracking “at least several dozen people” believed to be involved in Al Qaeda plots in the United States and that Joint Terrorism Task Force investigations are active in as many as 40 states.

Those investigations have found that as authorities have cracked down on known Al Qaeda methods of funding its attacks, such as petty crime and document fraud, the organization has begun using new tactics to help its rapidly regenerating network of cells. Those include the bootlegging of cigarettes, the counterfeiting of music CDs and movies and other products, drug trafficking and even the smuggling of humans for profit, according to the senior counter-terrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and other authorities.

“Money is coming in and out” of the United States, the senior official said. This includes money transfers from the U.S. to known terrorist operatives overseas and to offshore bank accounts.

U.S. counter-terrorism authorities have long been concerned about Al Qaeda’s presence in the United States. But the new information has caused grave top-level concerns because it comes amid a flurry of intelligence about Al Qaeda operatives trying to gain entry into the U.S. through Canada, Mexico, U.S. ports and airports -- even by hijacking airliners in Mexico or Canada so they can be flown into American targets, officials said.

“I wouldn’t term it as worse” than before Sept. 11, the senior official said of the current Al Qaeda threat in the United States. “But our knowledge base is better, so we see a deeper threat. We certainly have a deeper appreciation for the sophistication and the capabilities that we are dealing with and the fact that we have to constantly adapt to them.”

As the anniversary of Sept. 11 approached, there were also indications that Al Qaeda operatives in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the U.S. were plotting attacks that, while probably not on the scale of Sept. 11, could cause widespread casualties and profound economic and psychological fallout, said another U.S. official based in the Middle East, citing recent intelligence reports.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned that Al Qaeda could use the anniversary of Sept. 11 to attack “softer” targets inside or outside the U.S. Similar intelligence reports of pending attacks have surfaced sporadically over the last two years, but no new attacks have occurred in the United States.

Over the last week, the FBI has issued worldwide alerts for four Al Qaeda operatives who it believes are plotting attacks, most likely overseas. On Tuesday, authorities posted a $5-million bounty for a Yemeni-born U.S. citizen linked to an upstate New York sleeper cell, saying he was plotting attacks on U.S. interests overseas and communicating with associates in the United States.

And U.S. officials said several recent high-profile cases in Canada, including the arrest of 19 men with similarities to the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, have underscored their concerns that Al Qaeda is trying to infiltrate terrorists into the United States.

“They’ve shown an interest in coming through our borders both in Canada and Mexico,” said one FBI official. “It is a concern. It is a vulnerability.”

The White House on Wednesday released a 22-page “Progress Report on the Global War on Terrorism,” reciting strides made in dismantling Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which the Bush administration has said was in league with Al Qaeda terrorists.

U.S. and allied countries have captured two-thirds of Al Qaeda’s leaders, including Abu Zubeida, who ran the terrorist camps; Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to have been the operational mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks; and most recently, Riduan Isamuddin, or Hambali, who ran Al Qaeda’s South Asia operations and is believed to be responsible for the bombing at a Bali nightclub in October that killed 202 people.

The government also said it has charged more than 260 individuals in counter-terrorism investigations, nearly half of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted. And it has disrupted terror cells in half a dozen cities while denying “terror networks” access to nearly $200 million, the report said.

U.S. officials also say the military campaign in Afghanistan deprived Al Qaeda of its command and control center and the training camps in which it taught guerrilla warfare to tens of thousands of supporters.

Even so, the overseas-based intelligence official discounted speculation that Al Qaeda has been crippled by the arrest of many of its leaders and the destruction of its haven in Afghanistan. “While we have managed to shut down some things they are able to do, it simply means that they will pop up somewhere else.”

Even the CIA’s unclassified assessment of Al Qaeda, which listed successes in the terrorism war, is peppered with references to the terrorist network’s capabilities.

While it said that “Al Qaeda’s central leadership is at growing risk of breaking apart” and that the organization is “rapidly losing its cadre of senior planners who have access to and the trust of Bin Laden,” the report also noted that Al Qaeda “has a large bench of middle managers and foot soldiers” who have been active in launching attacks.

” “It takes only a handful of terrorists with little more than creativity, dedication and luck to successfully cause mass casualties,” it said.

“To say we’ve taken out two-thirds of their leaders, it’s pretty impressive,” said Daniel Byman, a staff leader of last year’s congressional joint intelligence inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, who is now a scholar at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. “But they have had two years to regroup and they have.”

Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism analyst for the research arm of Congress, said the U.S. presence in Iraq also has been a boon for Al Qaeda, allowing it to “piggyback” on local Islamic political and religious movements worldwide and recruit their followers. “This is an organization that was very much off balance a year ago, but that has significantly gained ground in the past year,” Katzman said.

Al Qaeda has also orchestrated recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and perhaps even in Iraq, U.S. officials said, and has continued to infiltrate operatives into the U.S.

Just how many such operatives are in the United States is unclear, but finding them is the FBI’s most pressing and urgent priority, according to Larry Mefford, the FBI’s chief counter-terrorism official.

Mefford, in recent congressional testimony, said Al Qaeda remains an extremely deadly organization capable of mounting simultaneous and large-scale terrorist attacks, including within U.S. borders. In a briefing with reporters, Mefford said he believed the presence of hard-core Al Qaeda operatives in the United States is “very small but

Mefford cited the cases of Adnan El Shukrijumah and Iyman Faris, two Al Qaeda operatives who acted as Al Qaeda scouts in the United States after being sent here by Mohammed, the Al Qaeda operations chief.

Faris, an Ohio truck driver, was arrested and has pleaded guilty, but Shukrijumah remains at large and is believed to be overseas. FBI officials liken him to Sept. 11 plot leader Mohamed Atta, saying he is particularly dangerous because he is a trained pilot who is fluent in English and familiar with the United States and its customs because he lived here for years.

Captured Al Qaeda leaders such as Mohammed and Zubeida have confirmed to interrogators their long-running efforts to send waves of sleeper agents to the U.S., but so far, U.S. authorities have found little or no evidence of such operatives.

Some officials said that’s because so many terrorists are new recruits who were not on their radar screen or in their databases, while others are veteran guerrilla warriors who could be using aliases or simply sneaking across borders.

“That’s what people don’t get. They think we know the names of all the terrorists and we don’t. Sept. 11 proved that,” said FBI Supervisor Special Agent Peter J. Ahearn, who heads the bureau’s Buffalo, N.Y., field office near the Canadian border.

“Every time my pager goes off or my cellphone goes off, that’s what I’m worried about, and we are all like that ... that it is going to be the call that we had something major go down,” he said. “It’s what I don’t know, what the FBI doesn’t know and what the CIA doesn’t know is what worries us. It worries all of us.”