bin Laden's ambitions

["Austin, Andrew" <austina@xxxxxxxx>]

The New York Times

October 14, 2001

THE INTELLIGENCE

Failure to Heed Signs of Change in Terror Goals

By JAMES RISEN with STEPHEN ENGELBERG

The Central Intelligence Agency intercepted a cryptic but chilling message
last year from a member of Al Qaeda, who boasted that Osama bin Laden was
planning to carry out a "Hiroshima" against America, according to government
officials.

The mention of "Hiroshima" by a group that had repeatedly struck United
States interests around the world since 1998 set off an immediate but
fruitless search for further evidence. But intelligence officials now
acknowledge that they never imagined that Mr. bin Laden's organization had
the ability to kill thousands of people in coordinated attacks on the
American homeland.

Looking back through the prism of Sept. 11, officials now say that the
intercepted message was a telling sign of a drastic shift in the ambitions
and global reach of Al Qaeda during the last three years. Clearly, the
officials agree, the United States failed to grasp the organization's
transformation from an obscure group of Islamic extremists into the world's
most dangerous terrorists.

Most significant, the extent of Al Qaeda's operations in this country has
stunned the F.B.I., which had assured the White House late last year that it
had a "handle" on the group's operatives in the United States, a senior
Clinton administration official said. And Mr. bin Laden's plan to take the
war inside the United States was likewise unknown to American intelligence
officials.

What was perhaps most important to Mr. bin Laden's growth and development as
a major threat was his decision to act as a franchiser of terrorism,
providing crucial financial and logistical assistance to locally sponsored
plots brought to his organization by Islamic extremists. This new approach
gave his group a much broader range of possible targets.

Indeed, American officials are now actively examining the possibility that
the Sept. 11 attacks were primarily the initiative of the man now believed
to have been their local coordinator, Mohamed Atta, a 34- year-old Egyptian
with no known previous ties to Egyptian-based terrorism.

American officials say that it is possible that Mr. Atta took his plan to Al
Qaeda representatives and that Mr. bin Laden then approved the plan and
provided the funds, logistics and planning support through his lieutenants.
As officials trace Mr. Atta's movements through the United States and
Europe, investigators have tentatively concluded that he was the primary
link among the 19 hijackers.

As they scour the history of Al Qaeda for clues about its future, American
officials say they are increasingly persuaded that the group gained its new
operational abilities and ruthlessness in 1998, when it merged with other
Islamic radical organizations, including the Armed Vanguards of Conquest, a
little- known cell of Egyptian extremists who had fled their own country
after a government crackdown.

Its leader, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had been involved in the
assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt in 1981, long had ties to
Mr. bin Laden. But government officials believe that his prominence within
the leadership of Al Qaeda marked the beginning of a new global strategy of
terror by the group.

American officials said the Sept. 11 hijackings, accomplished with box
cutters and the brute strength of 19 men, did not represent a technological
leap forward for the group. Instead, the ingredients for success came from
the audacity to execute a plan that was certain to spur retaliation and the
ability to bring "sleeper" agents into the United States undetected.

"We would understand it better if we had someone sitting on the pillows in
Kandahar with him," one official said.

It was the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa a few
months after the declaration of a jihad that began the new phase of Al
Qaeda's development: a relentless campaign aimed at the indiscriminate
killing of Americans wherever they could be found.

Between 1999 and 2001, American intelligence officials say, the group or its
followers were planning attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and
on an American destroyer in Yemen, and a series of bombings in the United
States and Jordan timed to the millennium celebrations in December 1999.

Planning Began 2 Years Ago

American officials believe the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks probably
began two years ago. The timing suggests to American officials that Al Qaeda
has both the organizational abilities and the internal security to prepare
several large operations at the same time while keeping the existence of
each plot secret from those involved in others.

Mr. bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan have been a key tool in
expanding the group's power and reach, attracting 15,000 to 20,000 radicals
from Muslim countries around the world, according to United States
intelligence estimates.

While most of the extremists who train in Al Qaeda camps eventually return
home to fight their own indigenous wars, the flow of radicals through the
camps has helped the group scout for willing recruits and has also helped
Mr. bin Laden forge alliances across the spectrum of Islamic terrorism.

Algerian extremists who have joined Al Qaeda from the Islamic Group, an
Algerian extremist organization that had been driven out by the Algerian
military government, have been among the most valuable to Al Qaeda,
officials said.

The emergence of sleeper cells of Algerians in Canada and Europe in
connection with the millennium bombing plot caught American intelligence
officials off guard. They now acknowledge that they were fortunate that
operatives involved in that plan were caught trying to enter the United
States before they could carry out their attack.

American officials continue to believe that last month's attacks were
ultimately coordinated by Mr. bin Laden's three top lieutenants, Dr.
Zawahiri, Muhammad Atef and Abu Zubaydah. Analysts at the C.I.A. who pored
over the videotape released by Mr. bin Laden last weekend have tentatively
concluded that one of the meanings of the tape was that Dr. Zawahiri is now
Mr. bin Laden's highest-ranking deputy and his hand- picked successor.

Officials said, however, that none of the three top lieutenants are known to
have traveled to the United States or Europe to coordinate the operations on
the scene, and that they believe that their communications with Mr. Atta and
the hijackers were carried out through a series of intermediaries.

American officials remain uncertain about many aspects of the plot. "Part of
what is so hard is that so many of the key players are dead," one senior
official said. "With the embassy bombings, there were key arrests. They made
confessions, named names. We don't have anything like that."

The Qaeda network had its origins in the jihad, or holy war, stirred by
Muslim religious leaders to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan after
the 1979 invasion.

"We are young, we don't know anything: let's go, it's an adventure,"
recalled L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a member of Al Qaeda from Morocco who later
became a federal witness. The first wave of holy warriors included a wealthy
young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, who arrived in the mid-1980's and took up
residence in one of the many guest houses set up to receive the volunteers.
His multimillion-dollar fortune - estimates range from $25 million to
several hundred million dollars - made him immediately popular.

The Rise of bin Laden

Mr. bin Laden soon allied himself with Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic
Palestinian who gained prominence among the foreign Muslims who came to join
the Afghan resistance. Mr. Azzam founded an organization known as the Office
of Services, to coordinate the flow of Arab volunteers and money into
Afghanistan. Mr. bin Laden provided money and took a hand in military
planning.

By the late 1980's, the Arab Afghans, as they came to be called, were
bitterly divided. Some, particularly the Egyptians, objected to Mr. Azzam's
single-minded focus on the Afghan cause and pushed Mr. bin Laden to form a
group that would bring Islamic rule to their homelands. One of the most
vocal advocates of taking the jihad back to the Middle East was Dr.
Zawahiri, the Egyptian militant. By 1989, Mr. bin Laden had founded his own
network of training camps, which he called Al Qaeda, Arabic for "the base."

Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, an Al Qaeda insider who defected to the United States,
testified this year that Mr. bin Laden began with a loftier goal: the
creation of an empire of all the world's one billion Muslims ruled by a
single leader.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Mr. bin Laden began
looking for opportunities elsewhere. Two years later, Al Qaeda accepted an
offer from the fundamentalist rulers of Sudan to take up residence in their
country.

Al Qaeda enjoyed direct support from the government of Sudan, which provided
it with passports for travel of its members and allowed its training camps
to flourish.

One of its earliest operations involved a November 1991 attempt to
assassinate the exiled King of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah. An
assailant posing as a Portuguese journalist stabbed the king at his home in
northern Rome, and American investigators later concluded that the attacker
had ties to Al Qaeda, a finding that has not been previously disclosed.

The Persian Gulf war in 1991 and its aftermath gave the group a new focus.
Mr. bin Laden was infuriated by the stationing of American troops in Saudi
Arabia. "We cannot let the American Army stay in the gulf area and take our
oil, take our money," he told associates, according to Mr. Fadl.

After Gulf War, a New Focus

Al Qaeda found a new target in 1993, when American troops led the United
Nations mission to Somalia. Federal prosecutors say that Al Qaeda members
offered military training to some of the Somalis who later attacked a group
of American special forces, killing 18.

The arrest in 1993 of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric who
was living in the United States, prompted Mr. Atef to propose an attack on
the American Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Other members of the group
opposed the operation because innocents would be killed, Mr. Fadl testified.
The attack never took place, and more than a dozen Egyptian militants quit
the group, he said.

Under pressure from the United States in 1996, Sudan threw Al Qaeda out of
the country. Mr. bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, where he ingratiated
himself with the Taliban leaders, building roads and supplying tens of
millions of dollars in financing. He announced his goal of driving
"heretics" from the Arabian peninsula by attacking the American "enemy." Dr.
Zawahiri and the Egyptian wing of the group became more influential with Mr.
bin Laden as Al Qaeda re-established itself in Afghanistan, according to Mr.
Kherchtou, the Moroccan defector.

In February 1998, Mr. bin Laden defiantly announced his group's new
strategy, declaring that he had formed the World Islamic Front, an amalgam
of militant groups that included Al Qaeda and its partner, Dr. Zawahiri's
Armed Vanguards of Conquest. Any qualms about the killing of innocents had
been put aside, and Mr. bin Laden said Muslims should kill Americans,
including civilians, anywhere they could be found.

Dr. Zawahiri's group also issued a statement that echoed Mr. bin Laden's
declaration, but in a sign of the Egyptian influence over strategy, it also
counseled cold calculation and careful planning, saying that "addressing
problems without finding suitable solutions is liable to lead eventually to
bad results."

Six months later, two American Embassies in Africa were in ruins. Soon
after, American officials believe, the planning began for the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.


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