The Eye of The Storm
In a secret, high-tech spy hub near Washington, the war on terror is 24-7
"The fight of a generation." The deluge of information is intimidating. The NCTC maintains the intelligence community's ever expanding central repository of suspected terrorists, called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (which is used to feed several terrorist watch lists, including the TSA's no-fly list). Russ Travers, a career Defense Intelligence Agency official, manages a youthful team of 80 analysts who sort through the mass of reporting on possible terrorist names. Every day, the NCTC receives as many as 2,000 cables-containing some 5,000 to 7,000 names. The database has quadrupled to 400,000 names in three years (although about 100,000 of the names are aliases). Further complicating the task is the fragmentary, often contradictory, nature of the intelligence and the language barrier. "Right away, you run into the whole problem with Arab names," says Travers. "Trying to sort out this 'Mohammed Mohammed' from that 'Mohammed Mohammed' can be a tremendous challenge for these young people."
Perhaps the most ambitious part of the NCTC's mission is its strategic operational planning function. As the "mission manager" for terrorism, the NCTC is supposed to work with the newly created DNI's office, which is charged with reforming the intelligence community, to eliminate gaps in the U.S. counterterrorism effort as well as unnecessary overlap. Without direct command authority, however, the NCTC will have to rely on the DNI's influence over the budget to help push change. It is unclear just how much clout either organization will have.
The NCTC has already issued several plans, including the first National Action Plan to Combat Foreign Fighters in Iraq, completed in June. Officials are now working on another, to counter terrorists' use of the Internet. The most comprehensive effort is the now completed National Implementation Plan, a nearly 200-page document that has become the de facto war plan for the struggle against terrorism. Signed by President Bush in June, the classified plan assigns a lead agency to each of more than 500 different tasks related to the war on terrorism. Some of them are obvious, such as the FBI's lead role in hunting terrorists at home. Others relate to the war of ideas and the need to quell violent Islamic extremism, an area where the State Department has many of the lead roles. The new plan tries to take a broader view, including goals like bolstering educational institutions that focus on Islam and the Muslim world. "This is the fight of a generation," says Vice Adm. Bert Calland, a former deputy CIA director who is now the deputy director for strategic operational planning at the NCTC. "We need to start establishing processes and capabilities with that in mind." Many experts are skeptical; previous efforts by the Bush administration to do outreach to the Muslim world have foundered.
"Radicalization." At the same time, the terrorist threat and the al Qaeda network have become increasingly diffuse. NCTC's analytical director Liepman says that the most credible terrorist plotting appears to have some al Qaeda link back to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but officials are increasingly worried about individual extremists-particularly Muslim men already living here who may be drawn to jihad but who have no ties to known terrorist groups. "In looking at threat reporting on a daily basis, you tend to get a sense of issues of concern and things that might help us understand where radicalization is taking place, why it's taking place, and what we need to be worried about in the future," says principal deputy director Brock. "Radicalization happens in different ways, at different times, with different people, and that's what makes it such a difficult problem."
Redd offers a simple, if unsettling, way to measure their success: "Do the 5-year-olds of today turn into terrorists or do they decide there is something better out there?"
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