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THE
LATEST LETTER
The statement also reportedly demands that our troops leave the Arabian Peninsula; endorses the killings of American civilians because we pay taxes that fund military operations against Muslims; and condemns our policy toward Iraq. These themes have all been emphasized in previous al Qaeda communiqués. Ridge says there's nothing new in the letter. "The threats contained in that piece are the same threats we've been hearing now for the past year," he told Fox News Sunday. But in fact, the specificity of the threats — the public naming of New York and Washington as targets — is new. Al Qaeda does nothing randomly or without purpose; and if the letter is genuine — as Ridge himself suggests — then the new particularity merits attention. It's possible that the naming of New York and Washington is intended to mislead us, to divert our attention and resources. That's unlikely, however. Tactical disinformation of that sort is rarely conveyed in public media. More typically, it's injected into a given intelligence community, via dangled agents or disinformants, or in communications which are deliberately left vulnerable to interception. Mass media, by contrast, are usually used for propaganda directed toward a larger, strategic purpose. For the propaganda to be effective, and for the strategic purpose to be gained, the credibility of the propagandists is paramount. For just that reason, al Qaeda would not be inclined to make threats that it had neither the intention nor the capability to fulfill. THE
STRATEGIC PURPOSE 1. By saying what they are going to do — and then doing it — the terrorists will dramatically demonstrate that we're unable to stop them. The result will be an exercise of "pure power," akin to the Mafia's placing of a horse's head in the bed of the recalcitrant film producer in The Godfather. The demoralization within the U.S. will be extreme. The terrorists will thus hope to advance their near-term political objective: persuading us that our support for Israel, our attempts to defang Saddam, and our military presence in the Middle East are not worth all the toe-tags. 2. By establishing that they can do what they say they will do, where they say they will do it, the terrorists will position themselves up for a masterstroke of disinformation preceding a more spectacular future attack. For instance: If, after carrying out the threatened attacks on New York and Washington, the terrorists then warn of similar attacks on Los Angeles and Chicago, public pressure for visible, intensive countermeasures in those locations will be politically irresistible. The diversion of resources and attention to those areas — encouraged also by false reporting through secret intelligence channels — would then be exploited by the terrorists, in attacks to follow soon after the diversionary threats. Since the success of these later attacks would presumably be the objective of the disinformation, a high strategic value — a capability and intention to inflict massive casualties — should be assumed. MAJOR-LEAGUE
KILLERS That al Qaeda is not highly sophisticated has been the working assumption of the FBI since bin Laden came to its attention in 1993, after the first World Trade Center bombing. This downplaying seems to be a corollary of the idea that al Qaeda lacks state sponsorship and is, therefore, an amorphous, ad-hoc group, without any strict doctrine or formal structure. That view has survived at the bureau even after 9/11. The hijackers were not "a cohesive group," one FBI agent told Seymour Hersh, late last year, but just "a bunch of guys who got together... [like] a pickup basketball team." They were not skilled so much as they were "simply lucky." But as the saying goes, you make your own luck. The 9/11 attacks were nothing if not brilliantly planned and executed. How the terrorists orchestrated such an elaborate and unprecedented operation; how they sluiced tens of thousands of dollars, and moved and cocooned nearly two dozen men, across several continents, and around the U.S., over several years, without detection — these questions ought to haunt us. The simplest and the best answer, to my mind, is that given by former CIA officer Robert Baer: "The people who planned this attack are good. Very good." Why is al Qaeda so good? One reason is that it has a keen understanding of our intelligence system — and uses that understanding to deceive us. "[W]e should not underestimate the skill of our enemies or their determination to conceal their activities to deceive us," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cautioned at a September 19 hearing of the Joint Intelligence Committees. "They understand how we collect intelligence, how we are organized, and how we analyze information." Eli J. Lake, the State Department correspondent for UPI, has documented many al Qaeda deceptions, and I have found reference in the public record to more. Deceptions occurred, for instance, before the 1998 East Africa bombings (false threats were made, to test how the embassy would react); in July 2001, when French intelligence was tricked by massive feint to Europe, while the real attack was always planned for the U.S.; and in December 2001, when bin Laden's voice was beamed from the caves of Tora Bora, but he was not there. In light of all this, the belief that our enemy is disorganized and unsophisticated is not tenable. Unless we grasp that al Qaeda is tightly structured and operationally expert, we will soon have tragic cause to say again, as did President Bush after 9/11: "Never did we realize that the enemy was so well organized. They struck in a way that was unimaginable." WHEN,
WHERE, AND HOW Because the goal of this phase of the jihad is to make good on the threats already made, the targets will be chosen more for their ease of access (and difficulty of defense) than for their overall strategic value. Thus, highly surveilled and fortified targets, such as U.S government offices, national monuments, and airlines, will probably not be attacked. Car bombs and package bombs are distinct possibilities. But subways, trains, and buses, which can be boarded by killers with their weapons in briefcases or backpacks, will probably be the targets of choice. In New York City, especially, public-transit systems must be rated priority targets. The recent arrest in Britain of North African Islamists, who had apparently planned to disperse cyanide in the London subways, should be an indicator of neon significance. Given the subways' unique importance to those who live and work in New York City — and the impossibility of preventing armed terrorists from boarding them — the city's subways must be rated al Qaeda's most likely target there. The assets used by the terrorists in this operation will not be their most competent, discreet, and valued. Those operatives will be saved for the future, more spectacular attack. Thus, some of the terrorists who will soon attempt attacks in New York and in Washington may be "dirty" assets — individuals that al Qaeda suspects may already have come under surveillance, e.g. at mosques. There is, accordingly, some chance that aspects of these attack plans will be detected and disrupted. There is also a corresponding chance that the attacks, if mounted, will be less effective than intended. In either case, however, the strategic objective of "making good" on the threats in the six-page letter will have been achieved. Because the mere attempting of attacks in Washington and New York will be sufficient to achieve the strategic objective, our government must regard the likelihood of such attempts as close to 100 percent. Accordingly, the threat level should already have been raised. And when the intelligence chatter ends — when our sources go abruptly and inexplicably quiet — we should go at once, if we have not gone already, to red (highest) alert. If the analysis above is correct, and the threat level is not soon raised, Ridge's public refusal to credit the threats on New York and Washington will haunt him. It will hang, like an incubus, over his confirmation hearings as Secretary of Homeland Security. But ultimately the fault will not rest with Ridge, and he should not be the fall guy. He would likely raise the threat level, if the FBI would give him a better interpretation of al Qaeda's latest missives. And with a better strategic insight, we do have the capabilities to thwart these pending attacks. But we will not have that insight unless we create — despite Ridge's denial that the administration plans to create — a new domestic spy unit, modeled on Britain's MI5, devoted solely to understanding how the enemy operates. The enemy operates in a continuing, coordinated, long-term paramilitary campaign. The FBI is countering this enemy short-term, case-by-criminal-case, gaining no larger view. Until that changes — or until we have Osama's head on a platter — we should remain at red alert. — Mark Riebling is the author of Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: How the Secret War Between the CIA and FBI Has Endangered National Security (Simon and Schuster). |
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omeland
Security Director Tom Ridge is gravely mistaken to 
