Playing Offense
The inside story of how U.S. terrorist hunters are going after al Qaeda
One of the richest finds came in November, after a CIA Predator--a remote-controlled drone-tracked dozens of the enemy to a hotel outside Kabul. A U.S. airstrike blew the building apart, killing close to 100, including Mohammed Atef, al Qaeda's longtime military commander and a key planner of the 9/11 and U.S. Embassy attacks in Africa. Investigators also found in the rubble scores of documents and videotapes that would spark alerts in a half-dozen countries. The videos featured five would-be martyrs railing against "infidels" and vowing to die in suicide attacks. Analysts soon recognized one of them: 30-year-old Ramzi Binalshibh, a glib young Yemeni whose hopes to join the 9/11 hijackers were thwarted by visa problems. Binalshibh was nabbed in Pakistan months later. But another--Khaled Jehani--surfaced only last month in Saudi Arabia, blamed as the mastermind of the suicide car bombings in Riyadh.
From the rubble came another video, one revealing assassination plots against leaders at an upcoming Persian Gulf summit. U.S. officials pulled faces off the tape of some 45 al Qaeda operatives. Also in the ruins: a German passport in the name of one Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a fugitive thought to have recruited the Hamburg, Germany, cell members behind 9/11. Investigators soon caught up to Zammar in Morocco. But perhaps the biggest find was yet another video--a homemade, 20-minute surveillance tape of Singapore. The tape helped officials there thwart an extraordinary series of plots by Jamaat Islamiya--al Qaeda's key ally in Southeast Asia. The militants hoped to spark a holy war by bombing U.S. military sites and businesses, diplomatic posts, and the city's subway and water supply.
The intelligence "take" from the Kabul hotel and other sites was quickly crated up and shipped to the CTC for a closer look. Once considered a backwater at the CIA, the CTC now stood at the heart of the biggest surge of covert action since the Cold War. Cofer Black found himself overseeing secret operations, paramilitary units, propaganda efforts, and more. In the weeks after 9/11, the CTC nearly doubled in size to over 1,100 people, including FBI agents, military officers, and CIA operatives. Before 9/11, the CTC had focused on a dozen different terrorist groups; it now restructured to zero in almost exclusively on al Qaeda. New teams concentrated on finances, leadership, collection of intelligence, and work with foreign governments. Analysts sorted through reams of field reports, satellite photos, and electronic intercepts. Link-analysis printouts, some as big as bedsheets, lined the walls of cubicles, as researchers charted al Qaeda's far-flung contacts. "There are subnetworks of subnetworks," says a top intelligence official. "Thank God we've got giant printers."
By late November, the amount of intelligence pouring in was overwhelming, and CTC staffers understood why. For years, their efforts at fighting terror had vied with a dozen other priorities of U.S. foreign policy. But the message from Washington now was clear. "No nation can be neutral in this conflict," declared President Bush. "You're either with us or you're against us." The results were immediate. "Before 9/11, the cooperation was halfhearted," recalls Richard Clarke, the top counterterrorism official at the National Security Council at the time of the attack. "But now everyone knew the president had a blank check to do whatever he wanted." From the Indian government came intercepts of al Qaeda-tied militants in Kashmir; from Italy, wiretapped conversations of Islamic radicals in Milan; from Sudan, long-awaited files on bin Laden operatives once headquartered in Khartoum. Much to the delight of old pros at the CIA, intelligence arrived even from old foes, among them Libya and Syria.
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