A tightening noose
The capture of an al Qaeda mastermind spurs a manhunt for Osama bin Laden and company
In the traumatic days that followed 9/11, senior American officials warned that the war against terrorism would be long and difficult. Wins and losses, they said. Right now, the United States and its allies are toting up a few in the win column. The arrest of al Qaeda's operations chief, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the brains behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has touched off an even more intense hunt for Osama bin Laden and his associates. The bust has yielded some of the most promising clues in months about the whereabouts of bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in western Pakistan along the Afghan border.
Computers, documents, and cellphones seized during the raid on Mohammed's safe house in Pakistan are giving investigators an unprecedented look at al Qaeda's operations. "This is some of the best intelligence in years," says a senior counterterrorism official. "You've got details, names, locations, plans, tactics, agendas--and it ties them all together."
Armed with these new leads, authorities fanned out from the badlands of Pakistan's frontier all the way to Arab quarters of American cities to disrupt any possible terrorist plots and grab suspects before they might flee. At home, the FBI scrambled to follow up on the most chilling discovery--Mohammed's computers contained the names of "dozens" of al Qaeda associates holed up in the United States, American officials reported. Some were already under FBI surveillance. At the same time, Pakistani police raided a series of suspected hideouts, hunting for key al Qaeda operations in Pakistan's western tribal belt.
Hatching plots. The arrest of Mohammed, held in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location, offers both opportunity and risk. Mohammed, says one U.S. intelligence official, "not only is knowledgeable about things they did in the past but central to things they were planning to do in the future." Some of these plots were being hatched inside the United States, while others apparently targeted U.S. forces in Afghanistan and U.S. private interests in Pakistan. At the same time, al Qaeda operatives could accelerate plans and strike early. There is particular alarm that terrorists may be plotting attacks to coincide with the onset of a war with Iraq, prompting some officials to discuss raising the homeland security alert status back to orange again.
Mohammed's capture was the worst setback in a week of bad news for al Qaeda. In the same Rawalpindi raid that netted Mohammed, agents nabbed Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a key moneyman who had provided funds to the 9/11 hijackers. Perhaps more significant, in the pair's safe house, officials found leads on how al Qaeda moves cash, including the names of banks, underground money exchangers, and couriers. In New York, officials obtained an indictment of Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, a Yemeni cleric arrested in Germany who, they claim, is another key financier. In Lebanon, on the same day Mohammed was nabbed, a car bomb blew apart Mohammed Shanouha, an Egyptian thought to head al Qaeda's operations in the region. Shanouha allegedly helped plot millennium strikes against U.S. and Israeli targets in Jordan.
Mohammed's capture and other successes reflect a growing understanding in U.S. intelligence of al Qaeda and its loose network. "Some 40 percent of the top leadership is dead or in the pokey," says one official. "That doesn't happen by accident. We're more nimble than we were 15 months ago." Systematic interrogation of a growing number of detainees is slowly providing a wealth of information, which can then be double- and triple-checked with other sources. The prime focus today is on Pakistan. "We're learning about the tribes, tribal leaders, and elders, the cellphone sites and telecom networks, the schools," says Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism analyst at the Congressional Research Service. "We're now mapping the topography of Pakistan."
Short-order cook. That attention to detail helped capture Mohammed, an elusive quarry whom U.S. intelligence had missed nabbing three times before. In his case, American technology paid off, big time. One high-level official tells U.S. News that the National Security Agency used its Echelon surveillance system to monitor more than 10 different cellphone numbers that Mohammed used. The Echelon system links phone numbers and voices and can locate these phones by triangulating with cellphone sites and satellites. "They were tracking him for some time," this source says. "He would shift; they would follow."
His arrest, officials hope, might shake al Qaeda's confidence. For one thing, it is likely to dent the image that Mohammed has crafted for himself as a suave and untouchable mastermind of terror. "For those who bought into the notion that he was some charismatic al Qaeda master of disguise, James Bond bon vivant, they just have to look at the picture of the guy at 3 a.m. Saturday morning," exults one intelligence official. "This makes him look like some short-order cook from north Jersey."
Mohammed's arrest clearly is one of the biggest blows yet to al Qaeda. The network lost its most prolific and hands-on planner. He bragged about shepherding the 9/11 attack, which he called "Holy Tuesday," in an interview with a journalist from the Arab TV network al Jazeera. "The attacks were designed to cause as many deaths as possible," he said. More recently, he has been tied to a synagogue bombing in Tunisia that killed 21 people and an attack on a French tanker off the coast of Yemen. In the Tunisia attack, Mohammed helped plan the attack "right up to the last minute," according to confidential German prosecution documents. Pakistani police are eager to grill him about two terrorist acts last year in Karachi, including the June bombing of the U.S. Consulate.
Mohammed also served as a recruiter for al Qaeda and helped indoctrinate prospective suicide bombers. But perhaps most important, U.S. officials say, he served as the communications linchpin for operatives around the world, meaning that some plotters now could be left out in the cold, fearing imminent capture. "He was the link between a lot of people who didn't know each other and relied on him as a conduit," says one U.S. official.
Mohammed is also America's first captive who was in direct and frequent contact with bin Laden. "I think we could see a breakthrough on bin Laden himself," says one counterterrorism official. "For the first time, they have some real information about where he may be."
For now, the government's terrorism experts are not sure who might replace Mohammed. There are candidates among midlevel operatives, such as Walid Attash, the Yemeni who engineered the plot to bomb the USS Cole, and Abu Mohammad al-Masri, an Egyptian operational planner. "Some of these midrankers who come out may be more ruthless, even if they're not as strategic," says Ahmed Hashim, a terrorism analyst at the Naval War College. This means that al Qaeda could end up plotting fewer "spectaculars" like 9/11--Mohammed's specialty--and smaller, more frequent attacks on softer targets like private American interests abroad.
Unfortunately, some of Mohammed's likely replacements may already be outside America's reach. U.S. News has learned that American officials have intelligence suggesting that an increasing number of key al Qaeda leaders are hiding out in Iran, where local officials generally have been unwilling to hand over suspects to the United States and its allies. Pakistani intelligence sources say that more than 100 sworn al Qaeda members are based in Iran.
Vengeance. Still, it will be difficult for al Qaeda to recover from the loss of Mohammed. With no clear heir apparent, some intelligence officials foresee a power struggle and speculate that different al Qaeda affiliates could decide to go their separate ways. Others might simply go to ground. "They can't retaliate at this point because most of them are changing their residencies and identities," says Rohan Gunaratna, a leading terrorism expert and author of Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror. "Once they regroup, they will retaliate. Islamists think five, 10, 20 years down the road."
Even if al Qaeda disappears, the threat of Islamic terrorism remains. Many experts worry that the U.S. war on terror is doing little to address the root causes of extremism, such as poverty and hopelessness, or the appeal of jihad (or holy war). Anti-Americanism appears to be growing worldwide at an alarming rate. "The overall ranks of jihadists are increasing, not decreasing," one intelligence source tells U.S. News. "You can dismantle [al Qaeda], but this wellspring of hatred and discontent is still growing." U.S. intelligence is also warning that a war with Iraq might serve as an effective recruiting tool for a range of terrorist groups, much like what happened after the Gulf War in 1991.
Down the line, many experts fear a more diffuse, but equally violent, threat. "Even a fool with a grenade in his hands can make things happen," says a senior government official, citing shoe bomber Richard Reid. As important as Mohammed's arrest is in hurting al Qaeda, some experts warn that it may end up being only a fleeting victory. "We're in a big, long war, and this isn't the end of it," says Gary Richter, a terrorism analyst at the Sandia National Laboratories. "The danger is that we risk becoming like the Israelis--tactically adept at fighting terrorism but strategically with an intractable problem on our hands."
With David E. Kaplan, Chitra Ragavan, Aamir Latif, Laurie Lande and William Boston
This story appears in the March 17, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.