Posted on 08/06/2004 11:25:56 PM PDT by conservative in nyc
ASHINGTON, Aug. 6 - American intelligence officials now believe that Issa al-Hindi, the alleged Qaeda operative now in British custody, was dispatched to the United States in early 2001 by the mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot at the direction of Osama bin Laden to case potential targets in New York City, senior government officials said Friday.
The officials said that Mr. Hindi was the same person as the figure identified in the Sept. 11 commission report as Issa al-Britani. The account of Mr. Hindi's being dispatched to New York was based on claims by the mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, while in American custody, the report said. But American officials said on Friday that it is consistent with other evidence that Mr. Hindi headed a three-man team that surveyed the New York Stock Exchange and other buildings in New York, probably in early 2001.
Senior government officials said that Mr. Hindi - the name is thought to be an alias - was believed to have visited the United States several times in 2000 and 2001, the same period in which reconnaissance of financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington that was discovered last week is believed to have taken place.
The Joint Terrorist Task Force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department was working on Friday to track Mr. Hindi's movements in New York, focusing on where he lived, anyone with whom he might have come into contact and how long he was there. One law enforcement official said investigators had identified some people in photographs that were included in the surveillance package and those people were being interviewed.
"It's fair to say there is an investigation ongoing to determine specifically where and when he was here," said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.
The accounts describing Mr. Hindi's role in the plot were provided by six different senior government officials in New York and Washington, all of whom had been briefed about the investigation. The officials, who were interviewed independently but provided accounts that were consistent, included those from law-enforcement and intelligence agencies who specialize in counterterrorism.
The officials said information was being very closely held, and said investigators at some agencies were concerned that the publication of too much detailed information could jeopardize their efforts.
In particular, intelligence and law enforcement agencies are now trying to identify and track down two other members of the team believed to have joined Mr. Hindi in gathering information, through public tours, helicopter sightseeing flights and other methods, producing detailed reconnaissance reports on five sites in Manhattan, Newark and Washington in preparation for a possible terrorist attack, senior government officials said on Friday.
Mr. Mohammed was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, but law enforcement and intelligence officials said on Friday that they did not believe Mr. Hindi had been involved in that operation, and suspected that he would not have personally carried out any future attack that might be in the works.
"There was classic compartmentalization taking place," one of the officials said, adding, "This guy doesn't know who was doing the operation."
Even so, senior American officials said they now regarded Mr. Hindi's arrest in Britain on Tuesday as the most significant capture of a Qaeda figure in at least a year, since the arrest in August 2003 of the Southeast Asian operative known as Hambali and the arrest of Mr. Mohammed in March 2003.
While the case reports now believed to have been prepared by Mr. Hindi and others are more than three years old, American officials continue to describe their existence as providing ample reason for current alarm against the backdrop of separate but more general intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda may be preparing to carry out a major attack soon in the United States.
Because he was the Qaeda figure most directly involved in the reconnaissance, the fact that Mr. Hindi was at large was seen as highly worrying to American officials last weekend, after the discovery of computer files in Pakistan first provided the Bush administration with information about the scope and sophistication of the surveillance. Even as they raised the terror alert on Sunday, American officials said on Friday, what weighed heavily on them was concern that Mr. Hindi and others who had gathered information about the buildings and written detailed reports about them were still at large.
A law enforcement official said the reports provide several different alternatives for the attack, the official said. "There are options kind of laid out as to how the buildings could be attacked," the official said. "This is the type of thing you would take and give to an operator; who that is or if it was going to happen soon, nobody knows," the official said.
Mr. Hindi, who had been under surveillance in Britain even before last week, managed to evade the British authorities for several days until his capture on Tuesday. His role in the plot was apparently disclosed by Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, the Pakistani computer engineer who was arrested in Pakistan last month.
American officials cautioned that Mr. Hindi was "a very, very slippery individual" who was "very concerned about surveillance" and known to use many aliases, which cover more than a page in a document seen by one law enforcement official. Under his alias, which means the Indian, he is the author of a book published by an Islamic bookstore in London, Maktaba al Ansaar, under the title of "The Army of Madinah in Kashmir."
A law enforcement official said that one passage in the book offered a statement to the effect "that in order to get the West's eyes off of the Middle East, we're going to have to hit them in their economy."
A brief biography listed in the book described him as having been born in 1971, as the son of Indian parents who were Hindus, but converting to Islam at age 20 and fighting in Kashmir on the side of Islamic separatists backed by Pakistan. That account could not be confirmed, but a senior American official said he was believed to speak fluent Urdu, Arabic and English.
American officials have said that the reconnaissance reports uncovered in Mr. Khan's computers in Pakistan were sophisticated, complete documents written in perfect English, and could only have been written by someone who was fluent in that language and had spent a considerable amount of time in the West.
The Sept. 11 commission report, identifying him as Mr. Britani, says that Mr. Hindi was sent by Mr. Mohammed to Malaysia in late 1998 or early 1999 to visit Hambali, whose real name is Riduan Ismuddin, in order to learn about terrorism operations in Southeast Asia. It says that Mr. Hindi provided Hambali with addresses of people in California and South Africa to contact if help was needed.
The second mention of Mr. Hindi in the report describes a trip said to have taken place in early 2001, when Mr. Mohammed "sent Britani to the United States to case potential economic and 'Jewish' targets in New York City." The report describes the trip not as part of planning for the Sept. 11 attacks, but as evidence of planning for other possible operations, saying that "while the 9/11 project occupied the bulk" of Mr. Mohammed's attention, "he continued to consider other possibilities for terrorist attacks."
The two passages in which "Britani" is named suggest that Mr. Mohammed himself was the main source for the accounts, in interrogations conducted by American officials on May 19, Aug. 14 and Aug. 18 of last year. It suggests that Hambali, in an interrogation on Sept. 12, 2003, corroborated at least the fact that he had been visited by Mr. Hindi. Both Mr. Mohammed and Hambali are being held by the Central Intelligence Agency at secret location centers outside the United States.
American officials also said that Babar Ahmed, a British citizen arrested in London at the request of the United States, had ties both to Mr. Hindi and to Mr. Khan, the Pakistani computer engineer who has been at the center of the inquiry.
The American officials left the impression that Mr. Khan may have been in electronic contact with Mr. Hindi and Mr. Ahmed as recently as last weekend, when he was already in Pakistani custody, as part of a sting operation.
In a speech in Washington, President Bush defended the decision to issue terrorism warnings over the weekend, even though some of the intelligence on which the government acted was as much as four years old. "The threats we're dealing with are real," Mr. Bush said.
Mr. Ahmed, 30, was identified by senior American officials as a cousin of Mr. Khan who uses the alias Abu Khubayb and heads a militant British-based organization known as the Abu Khubayb group. The American officials said they had sought his arrest in a belief that he was linked to the possible plot against the United States.
At a hearing in London on Friday, Mr. Ahmed expressed opposition to an extradition request by the United States. An American lawyer presented evidence that Mr. Ahmed, who has been arrested and released by the British authorities on terrorism charges in the past, had been found last December to be in possession of sensitive documents showing the position of American warships in the Persian Gulf during 2001 among other things.
An arrest warrant issued by the United States attorney's office in New Haven, Conn., said that Mr. Ahmed was wanted for his role in raising money through e-mail messages and American Web sites for terrorist causes in places like Chechnya and Bosnia. But while they did not minimize those charges, senior American officials said the decision to seek his arrest now had been based on the belief that he was working with Mr. Khan, Mr. Hindi and others in the suspected plot against American financial institutions.
It is not clear whether Mr. Ahmed has ever traveled to the United States. As for Mr. Hindi, some law enforcement officials said they were convinced that he had himself conducted surveillance on at least three American targets, including the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup building in Manhattan, and the Prudential center in Newark.
I'm waiting for tomorrow's Slimes article calling this intelligence "old" and "stale".
This is the first NYT article I've been able to finish in a long time.
So who gave the NYTimes an "INTEL" advisory. Toooo bad they won't narrow down a bit who these "intel" officials are.
Who are the liberals that sit on the "INTEL" committee????
Print later bump.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
REPUBLICANS
Pat Roberts, Kansas
Orrin G. Hatch, Utah
Mike Dewine, Ohio
Christopher S. Bond, Missouri
Trent Lott, Mississippi
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
Chuck Hagel, Nebraska
Saxby Chambliss, Georgia
John W. Warner, Virginia
Democrats
John D. Rockefeller IV, Vice Chairman
Carl Levin, Michigan
Dianne Feinstein, California
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Richard J. Durbin, Illinois
Evan Bayh, Indiana
John Edwards, North Carolina
Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland
Take your pick. There are plenty of traterous RATS, including Edwards, on this committee.
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