Sept. 12 — Advanced technologies and more sophisticated methods of organization have made would-be international terrorists more difficult for the U.S. government to identify and stop, experts say.And for such reasons, they say, U.S. government agencies apparently failed to detect and prevent Tuesday's terror attacks that killed thousands of people and destroyed four airliners, the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon.
"One recalls that the modern intelligence community was created after Pearl Harbor precisely in order to prevent such an attack in the future, and today, of course, it was not up to the task," says Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.
"That is not a matter of pointing fingers at anyone, but simply realizing that we need to rethink and perhaps rebuild or refocus our intelligence apparatus," he says, adding: "I'm not sure anyone imagined anything like this might have been possible: multiple simultaneous hijackings, the use of the hijacked aircraft as missiles, in effect. That's not a scenario that anyone has seen before."
Listening In
One of the most important ways of gathering intelligence on potential terrorists, experts say, is through signals intelligence — intercepting their communications by phone, fax, computer, wireless and other equipment.
America's largest intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, headquartered in Fort Meade, Md., is responsible along with the military for gathering, decrypting and analyzing signals intelligence information. It does so in a number of ways, including through a large network of receivers positioned around the globe that intercept communications passing through commercial communications satellites.
Signals intelligence is the "only thing that gives you an indication about the future," says James Bamford, author of two books about the agency.
But it appears neither the NSA, or any other U.S. agency, had collected signs that might have pointed to the attack.
"There were no warnings regarding time or place," a senior U.S. official told ABCNEWS Tuesday. "There are always generic threats now but there was nothing to indicate anything specific of this nature. In fact, in recent weeks, we were not in all that high a period of threat warning. All along we have known that it was not a question of if terrorist would strike but when."
Technological Challenges Growing
Gathering signals intelligence on potential terrorists has become increasingly difficult over the past decade with the increased use of fiber-optic lines for transmitting communications and the proliferation of advanced cryptographic systems for coding communications, analysts and U.S. officials say.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, in 1998 congressional testimony, called criminal access to encryption "one of the most important issues confronting law enforcement and [it] potentially has catastrophic implications for our ability to combat every threat to national security."
"The guys at NSA work really hard, they can't be blamed personally, but the world has changed with communications and technology has changed a great deal over the last 10 years and there's not a lot they can do about it," says Bamford.
The fact that the NSA's budget and manpower has been scaled back by one-third since the end of the Cold War hasn't helped either, says Bamford. "They've been working a lot harder now then they've ever worked," he says.
Even as the work force has scaled back, U.S. interception technology has improved, allowing NSA to gather more information than it can process.
Since March 1999, when Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden took over as director, the NSA has been undergoing a major reforms and there is a movement this year in the Senate to increase its budget.
But even a significant budget increase may not be enough, says Aftergood.
"The margin by which collection [capabilities] exceed encryption or other means of evading collection is shrinking or may be zero," he says.
Infiltration and Apprehension
Another potentially profitable way of identifying and preventing potential attacks is by infiltrating terror groups to learn their plans, a CIA-type of job. But that can be more difficult, says Bamford.
"We've never been very good at getting human sources in these terrorist groups, particularly, because they are closely knit and clan-based," he says.
Capturing terrorists or potential terrorists, on the other hand, has brought U.S. agencies a wealth of information on how groups are trained and organized and how they plan to operate.
For instance, information given U.S. authorities by Algerian national Ahmed Ressam, convicted of smuggling explosives into the United States in December 1999, is said to have provided insight into cells of potential Algerian terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden, the suspected terrorist leader who tops the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.
That information led to the indictment of a man named Abu Doha, who was arrested in London early this year. Authorities believe he provided money, safe houses and false documents for Ressam and others to attend bin Laden-associated terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, so they could learn various ways to attack U.S. citizens.
The capture in 1995 of another terror suspect enabled U.S. authorities to mine the laptop computer he was carrying for details of a plot to destroy 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously in one coordinated operation.
The laptop belonged to Middle Eastern-born Ramzi Yousef, who was arrested and convicted for involvement in the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people, officials say. Yousef's decrypted files revealed the operation's code name, "BOJINKA"; how the bombs would be timed; flight schedules for the targeted airlines; and five participants, who were identified in a decrypted letter.
But information gained that way, even if accurate, can have limited value, because terrorist groups like those associated with bin Laden increasingly work in small units, or cells, which may know nothing about other cells, experts say.
New Approaches May Be Needed
With the technological challenge rapidly increasing of intercepting, identifying, decrypting and analyzing the communications of terrorists, the United States may need to put more effort into other forms of intelligence, and develop new approaches for counter-terrorism, according to Aftergood.
"It would be a mistake to think that the solution is simply to through money at this problem," he says. "We may need [human intelligence, such as through infiltration] to help penetrate the communications systems, to steal the encryption keys, whatever might be.
"The immediate task is to understand what happened, and we're a good ways from understanding what happened," he says.
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