The frightening evolution of al-Qaida

Inspiration, support instead of orders
And Spain is not alone. There is no evidence to suggest that attacks that killed dozens of Westerners in Casablanca, Morocco, for example, were carried out with the knowledge of al-Qaida leadership. And while earlier attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, were ordered by al-Qaida Central, the later ones were not. Al-Qaida is becoming what its earliest architects had hoped it would be: a support “base” for Islamic radicals around the world. Even al-Qaida in Iraq, the new name for Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s forces, does not take orders from bin Laden or his No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, rather just inspiration, technical support and military guidance.

It is this change in strategy that is now driving intelligence-gathering by the United States and its Western allies, requiring a switch in both intelligence-gathering and analysis.

Phil Mudd, the deputy director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center and the man Goss most relies on for his analysis of the al-Qaida threat, agrees that things are changing and that tracking Islamic terrorism as a general threat, rather than as al-Qaida specifically, can make it harder to find out what’s really going on out there.

“I think in some ways it does,” he said. “One of the few advantages of operating against an organization as capable as al-Qaida was we had a hierarchy, a central unit that we could go against. What we now have is a sense of localization of groups, of the threat so in some ways, so it does make it more difficult to chase the target.

“In other ways, though, the advantage that it gives us is, we're fighting groups that don’t have the strategic capabilities of al-Qaida, so advantages in some areas, disadvantages in others.”

Degrees of separation
Now, Mudd notes that more important than lists of top people in the hierarchy are the “influence nets” derived from interrogations and the detritus left behind by or found with terrorists: the laptops, jump drives, CD-ROMs, DVDs, notebooks and phone books. It is this gold mine of information that shows who in the Islamist movement knows whom, who trained whom, who fought with whom, who likes or doesn’t like whom. It was no accident that al-Qaida’s No. 3, Abu Farraj al-Libbi, was trying to destroy a paper notebook when captured in the Pakistani city of Mardan in early May.

What is retrieved from interrogation now approaches or surpasses any other intelligence on the subject of al-Qaida and the construction of the network, say senior U.S. intelligence analysts. And while rarely operational intelligence — al-Qaida is now too compartmentalized, too diffuse for that — it becomes the basic building blocks for the influence nets. And that in turn is crucial to breaking the networks.

Also critical is cooperation among the nations fighting al-Qaida, whether they be European, Arabic, other Islamic or otherwise. France, for example, has been America’s most effective partner in counterterrorism, according to several U.S. officials — in spite of disagreements over the war with Iraq. 

“We have a very, very good relationship and very good cooperation between United States and France in intelligence as well as law enforcement, you know,” said Jean Louis Brugiere, France’s chief counterterrorism judge, who describes the United States as his “best partner.”  “…Even before Sept. 11 and of course after, we have reinforced this cooperation.”

But Brugiere also admits that Iraq remains a major, if not the major problem now for the United States in combating terrorism.

“We think the level of threat is very high right now,” he declared.  “And for many, many reasons, but especially Iraq. The problem has a direct law of attraction for the loose conglomeration of Islamic cells and groups scattered in Europe.”

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