A ploy for what? - A changing Qaeda seen on 5 continents
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff, 4/5/2004
WASHINGTON - Foiled attacks last week by suspected followers of Osama bin Laden in Britain and the Philippines and a deadly string of bombings in Uzbekistan demonstrate that the Al Qaeda terrorist network has grown larger and looser, making it far more difficult to track than when bin Laden sat at the head of an army of terrorists, US intelligence officials say.
Al Qaeda has morphed into splinter groups on at least five continents, the officials said. Penetrating the new network will be more difficult than unraveling the old network, which took half a decade and at least four deadly attacks, according to a new report from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a bipartisan group investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"The Al Qaeda of today is different from the Al Qaeda of 2001,'' Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and a member of a House subcommittee on terrorism, said last week.
"Like a virus, Al Qaeda has evolved and adapted to the US-led war against it,'' Schiff added. "We may have made remarkable inroads in destroying the Al Qaeda of 2001, [but] are we making progress against the Al Qaeda of 2004?''
New revelations from the 9/11 commission show just how little the United States knew about Al Qaeda before the 2001 attacks: Between 1992 and 1997, bin Laden's network assassinated a rabbi in New York, exploded a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, trained guerrillas in Somalia to kill US soldiers, and attacked a US military barracks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Still, no US intelligence agency even knew of Al Qaeda, let alone that a Saudi millionaire was commanding a low-level war against the United States, until the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa, Clinton administration officials testified before the 9/11 commission.
But now that the United States is hunting Al Qaeda, the network no longer exists in the form that it took years to identify, according to US and foreign intelligence officials.
More than two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the US-led war against Al Qaeda has eliminated 70 percent of the network's leadership and captured or killed 3,400 of its members, according to CIA statistics. Yet since the 2001 attacks, more than a dozen bombings across the world have been linked to Al Qaeda subgroups, many of which are not counted in the CIA statistics.
``Literally scores of groups are present around the world today,'' Cofer Black, the State Department's chief of counterterrorism, told a House panel Thursday, saying that bin Laden is no longer in charge ``the way we think of it.''
``Some groups have gravitated to Al Qaeda in recent years, where before such linkages did not exist,'' he added.
These groups include the Salafist Group for Call and Combat in Algeria, Salifiya Jihadia in Morocco, Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Many of the groups, such as the shadowy Abu Hafs Martyrs Brigade, which has taken responsibility for a series of attacks including the bombing of two synagogues last November in Istanbul, remain mysteries to US intelligence, officials said on the condition of anonymity.
The struggle to identify Al Qaeda commanders in the 1990s, a process spelled out in the new memoir of former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, demonstrates the difficulty in going after what is now a much less organized, but still deadly, movement, according to intelligence officials.
Early on, only a few in Washington knew of bin Laden from his days fighting the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. Those who did thought he was a financier of terrorist activities, not the head of an international network of thousands of trained operatives.
Al Qaeda, which translates to ``the base,'' grew out of the Afghan Services Bureau, ostensibly a humanitarian organization made up of veterans of the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Bin Laden transformed his base in Afghanistan into a network that linked returning Afghan war veterans in Algeria, Chechnya, Bosnia, Egypt, and the Philippines.
Officials now believe that the first Al Qaeda member to be arrested in the United States was El Sayyid Nosair, who shot to death Rabbi Meir Kahane, the firebrand leader of the Jewish Defense League, in New York in 1990.
Clarke revealed in his book that federal agents found materials about the Afghan Services Bureau in Nosair's apartment, but the documents were not translated for years. Bin Laden later paid Nosair's legal bills.
In 1992, Al Qaeda operatives bombed a hotel in Yemen, although US Air Force personnel staying there were tipped off by Yemeni officials beforehand. Still, ``CIA had not been able to figure out who had bombed the hotel,'' Clarke wrote.
The United States also did not connect the dots when bin Laden foot soldiers bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.
``Osama bin Laden had formed Al Qaeda three years earlier,'' Clarke recounted. ``Not only had no one in the CIA or FBI ever heard of it, apparently they had never heard of bin Laden, either. His name never came up in our meetings in 1993 as a suspect in the World Trade Center attack.''
But there were signs. Ramzi Yousef, the leader of the cell that attacked the World Trade Center, called bin Laden from New York. Another operative, Ahmed Ajaj, carried a manual with Al Qaeda stamped on it. The financier of the attack was Yousef's uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who would plan the Sept. 11 attacks.
``We now know that three of the key planners and players were Al Qaeda,'' John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 commission, said last month of the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
Also in 1993, Al Qaeda helped destabilize the US peacekeeping mission in Somalia. ``Although the CIA did not know it ... evidence later emerged and was included in the US indictment of bin Laden that Al Qaeda had been sending advisors to [Somalia] and had helped to engineer the shoot-down of the US helicopters,'' Clarke wrote.
In 1995, a US military facility in Riyadh was bombed, killing five Americans, and again the United States did not suspect bin Laden. The Saudis were more suspicious, but also missed the signs.
``We knew he was trouble as early as 1993,'' said a senior Saudi government official who asked not to be named. ``He was doing mischief in Egypt and Yemen. But we didn't know the extent of his network.''
The official said that after the 1995 Riyadh bombing, ``our investigators were convinced it was bin Laden who did it, but the US didn't share that view.''
US leaders, who suspected either Iraq or Iran, complained that the Saudis captured four terrorists but beheaded them before they could be interrogated, according to Clarke and the Saudi official.
It wasn't until 1997 that American intelligence agencies knew bin Laden was the primary organizer of all the attacks - and only then after a bin Laden confidant simply walked into a US embassy in a foreign country and gave up the goods, according to a staff report of the 9/11 commission released in late March.
That organization, commanded from the top down by bin Laden and his top lieutenants, is a shadow of its former self. But the attacks of recent years - in Spain, Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, Iraq, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere - indicate there is a growing threat from a looser network Clarke likens to a mythical hydra.
Last week, 10 people - eight Britons and two men living in Canada - were arrested in a suspected plot to bomb London. A series of police raids in London netted half a ton of fertilizer that could be used to construct a huge bomb. Meanwhile, a terrorist bombing on the scale of the Madrid attacks was averted in Manilla with the arrest last week of four members of Abu Sayyef, an Al Qaeda splinter group, and the seizure of 36 kilos of TNT, officials said.
Also last week, a series of suicide attacks by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Uzbekistan killed 47 people. And yesterday, Spaniards were bracing for another possible Al Qaeda attack, after railroad workers found a bomb Friday along the high-speed tracks between Madrid and Seville.
"Osama bin Laden and [his deputy Ayman] al-Zawahri for the past two years have been tied up with saving their skins, and yet Al Qaeda has come back with even more vengeance,'' noted Nadeem Ayub Khan, a former Pakistani intelligence official. "This Al Qaeda movement is much wider than that one individual. Al Qaeda is now a global phenomenon.''
The Saudi official, a veteran of counterterrorism issues, said the good news is that these groups are less professional than the corporate Al Qaeda and are not as well positioned to pull off large-scale attacks like Sept. 11.
However, "the bad news,'' according to Black, the counterterrorism official, is that what is left of Al Qaeda is "reaching out, trying to co-opt the missions of other terrorist groups.''
"Identifying and acting against the leadership, capabilities, and operational plans of these groups poses a serious challenge now and for years to come,'' he said.
Globe correspondent Victoria Burnett contributed from Islamabad. Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
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