Disrupted Terror Plot Was Homegrown

Ronald Kessler
Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The plot disrupted by British authorities to blow up airliners with devices hidden in hand luggage was an example of a homegrown effort by terrorists emulating al-Qaida, according to an FBI source.
"These are wannabes," the FBI agent said. "They are driven by the same ideology that drives al-Qaida, and they are inspired by al-Qaida, but they have no known ties to al-Qaida."

Indeed, key counterterrorism officials say they have so disrupted al-Qaida and effectively isolated Osama bin Laden that the organization would have great difficulty carrying out such a plot today.

"Al-Qaida still exists, but its capability is close to non-existent," the FBI source said.

The terrorists had intended to target flights to Washington, New York and California operated by American Airlines, Continental Airlines and United Airlines.

The FBI source said the plotters likely were not going to pull off the plot on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks because they would know that "security will be much tighter on Sept. 11."

While the plot disrupted in Great Britain was massive in scope, involving an effort to bring down multiple airlines, other, less ambitious homegrown plots have been disrupted recently in Montreal and Miami. A previous plot in London and the plot to blow up tunnels leading to Manhattan were also homegrown, with no direct ties to al-Qaida.

"Key planners and facilitators of the organization [al-Qaida] have been captured or killed," Joe Billy Jr., the FBI's chief of counterterrorism, told me. "Obviously, you still have number 1 and number 2 who are still about, and they still have influence. But their infrastructure and ability to organize and carry out a large-scale attack has been somewhat curtailed. ... I think we've done well, meaning we in the U.S. and our partner countries, have done well to really hinder al-Qaida's abilities to launch a large-scale, multi-pronged attack 9/11 style."

While the British arrests were made by Scotland Yard, disruption of terrorist plots usually entails at least some international cooperation. Since 9/11, intelligence and law enforcement agencies throughout the world have integrated their operations and largely abandoned territorial concerns in the effort to hunt down terrorists.

Nowhere is that better illustrated than at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which President Bush established to bring together all terrorist-related information in a single secure building in northern Virginia. While the media and politicians still say the FBI and CIA don't talk to each other, the fact is that about 200 analysts from those and other federal agencies sit together in one operations center at the NCTC 24 hours a day sifting through the latest threats and sending out leads to be pursued. They have access to the raw intelligence reports of the CIA and the FBI.

The initial lead in a case such as the one in Great Britain could have come from a National Security Agency (NSA) intercept of a conversation by an al-Qaida operative, from tracking of international banking transactions, from an informant developed by Britain's MI6 counterterrorism agency or the CIA, from police monitoring of secure chat rooms, or from a walk-in looking for money.

Before 9/11, if Osama bin Laden were calling an al-Qaida operative in New York to plot the detonation of a nuclear device, NSA could listen in on the conversation and report it to the FBI, with one exception: The agency had to delete everything about the New York operative, including what he said.

Thus, if the operative said he planned to meet fellow plotters at the northeast corner of Central Park and set off the device at 10 a.m. the next day, NSA's hands were tied. Unless someone at NSA decided to skirt the rules, the device would go off and millions of Americans could be killed. In NSA's report to the FBI, the phone number of the New York operative would appear simply as "(212) XXX-XXXX."

Two weeks after 9/11, President Bush met with General Michael V. Hayden, then director of the NSA, and other NSA officials in the Oval Office.

"The president asked, 'What tools do we need to fight the war on terror?'" recalled Andrew H. "Andy" Card Jr., his chief of staff, who attended the meeting.

Hayden suggested changing the rules so that both sides of terrorists' conversations would be reported to the FBI. Later he suggested preserving records of toll calls so that if bin Laden called an operative in New York, the FBI could retrospectively trace that person's previous contacts.

Contrary to reports in the media, the purpose was not to engage in data mining or to hunt for patterns; it was to follow real leads that would not otherwise be there: Normally, telephone providers keep call records for only 18 months.

"Bingo. As a result of the president's question, we took a fresh look at what NSA could be doing to protect us," Andy Card told me.

Bush's question led to the secret NSA program to monitor conversations of people in the United States who are phoned by al-Qaida terrorists overseas. The program contributed to the FBI's roll-up of Iyman Faris, an al-Qaida operative who was plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. More important, "It gave us an entire window into al-Qaida operations in the U.S., giving us the leads we needed to pursue hundreds of cases," says an FBI counterterrorism agent.

Before 9/11, the government kept four different terrorist identity databases and 13 independent watch lists. In part because the databases were incompatible, two of the 9/11 hijackers managed to slip into the country before the 9/11 attacks.

Today, the NCTC has a single database of 325,000 names of people worldwide who are known terrorists or who are suspected of terrorist activities. Portions of this database are fed to the Transportation Security Administration for its no-fly list with 40,000 names. The State Department's system for issuing visas to foreigners is also tied into the database. Meanwhile, the NCTC's Identities Analysis Branch culls information on suspected terrorists from passport and visa information, NSA intercepts, human intelligence, and financial activity.