U.S. Intercepting Messages Hinting at a New Attack

WASHINGTON, May 18 — American intelligence agencies have intercepted a vague yet troubling series of communications among Al Qaeda operatives over the last few months indicating that the terrorist organization is trying to carry out an operation as big as or bigger than the Sept. 11 attacks, according to intelligence and law enforcement officials.

But just as last summer's threats left counterterrorism analysts guessing about Al Qaeda's intentions, and believing that the attack might be carried out overseas, the new interceptions are so general that they have left President Bush and his counterterrorism team in the dark about the time, place or method of what some officials refer to as a second-wave attack. As a result, the government is essentially limited to taking broad defensive measures.

"It's again not specific — not specific as to time, not specific as to place," one senior administration official said.

The officials compared the intercepted messages, which they described as cryptic and ambiguous, to the pattern of those picked up last spring and early summer, when Qaeda operatives were also overheard talking about a big operation. Those signals were among the evidence that intelligence agencies presented to President Bush in August about the possibility of an imminent attack against the United States.

The senior official said Friday that the amount of intelligence relating to another possible attack, in Europe, the Arabian Peninsula or the United States, had increased in the last month. Some of it comes from interviews with fighters captured in Afghanistan.

But despite the disruption of Al Qaeda's operations around the world since Sept. 11, and despite major spending increases and shifts of resources to counterterrorism operations, American officials say they have not been able to fully piece together the clues about Al Qaeda's plans.

"There's just a lot of chatter in the system again," the official said. "We are actively pursuing it and trying to see what's going on here."

The government's frustration underscores the problem in fighting an unconventional foe like Al Qaeda.

Interviews with law enforcement and intelligence officials suggest that in the eight months since Sept. 11 the government has made only limited progress in its ability to predict Al Qaeda's next move, and that many proposed improvements in counterterrorism operations have yet to be put into effect.

This is despite considerable advantages that the United States lacked a year ago. The war in Afghanistan has provided a wealth of new information about Al Qaeda's structure and organization, for example.

In addition, the United States is also interrogating captured Qaeda fighters about the organization's plans. Officials say that debriefings of detainees have in some instances provided general warnings of another major attack that dovetail with the threats picked up in the intercepted communication traffic.

Facing intense criticism in recent days over disclosures that a series of possible clues about Al Qaeda's plans fell through the cracks in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, officials say that some significant changes have been made in the way threat information is studied and circulated within the upper reaches of the Bush administration.

For the first time, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. now compare notes on all terrorist threat information that comes in each day, filtering the intelligence through what they call an analytical "matrix" to determine which threats are the most credible and deserve the most attention. Their daily threat report is distributed to senior policy makers, including the White House director of homeland security, Tom Ridge. It provides a structure for debates among senior officials about whether to issue public threat warnings.

President Bush also now receives daily briefings from both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, are frequently present during those White House sessions. That way, each agency is able to hear the other's latest advice to the president. Before Sept. 11, he received a daily briefing only from the C.I.A.

Although officials say some potential attacks have been foiled, that has been largely credited to the arrest of terrorist operatives overseas by foreign governments rather than to intelligence gleaned from intercepted communications.

United States intelligence officials said that they began to intercept communications among Qaeda operatives discussing a second major attack in October, and that they have detected recurring talk among them about another attack ever since. Some of the intercepted communications have included frightening references to attacks that the Qaeda operatives say would cause vast numbers of American casualties.

The intercepted communications don't point to any detailed plans for an attack, and even the messages mentioning mass casualties don't refer specifically to the use of weapons of mass destruction like chemical, biological or nuclear devices.

Still, American officials say they believe the intercepts represent some of the most credible intelligence they have received since Sept. 11 about Al Qaeda's intentions. They have provided a troubling undercurrent for the Bush administration as it tries to sort through the hundreds of other terrorist threat warnings it has received over the past few months.

The pattern of intercepted communications that began last October has helped prompt at least five public threat alerts issued by the F.B.I. since last fall.

By contrast, federal law enforcement and intelligence officials say they have been skeptical of many of the far more specific threats they have received from individual informants over the past few months. One of the problems now facing American counterterrorism experts is that they say communications intercepts, while vaguely worded, are often highly credible threat warnings, while the very detailed and specific threats passed on by individual informants are often far less reliable.

Individual informants who approach American investigators in the United States or overseas often know what kind of story will get the biggest reaction. They also often come forward because of hidden motives, perhaps hoping for money or entrance into the United States. The C.I.A. routinely gives its informants polygraph tests in an effort to validate their stories.

But officials say that in some cases they have been forced to take tales told by informants more seriously than they otherwise might, at least in part because officials suspect from the intercepted communications that Al Qaeda is planning something big.

In recent months, officials have issued threat alerts regarding nuclear plants, financial institutions and even specific structures like the Seattle Space Needle and the Golden Gate Bridge, even as some counterterrorism experts privately regarded those threats as not based on solid intelligence.

Some officials say the government's new color-coded threat alert system is less useful than the system it replaced, because it is subject to political influences from appointees who are fearful of being criticized if they fail to pass on every possible threat, no matter how remote.

Yet even as the less credible threats have been widely publicized, the more worrisome and credible undercurrent of intercepted communications has not been made public.

In hindsight, analysts now view the pattern of intercepted communications they saw last May, June and July as a sign of the impending attacks. Those intercepts, coming after embassy bombings in Africa and the suicidal bombing of a Navy ship in an Arabian port, were sometimes alarming.

Their references to mass attacks against American interests prompted a series of public alerts against possible terrorist attacks last summer, including one concerning a possible strike over the Fourth of July holiday. Officials said that they never had any evidence that an attack would occur inside the United States, and instead focused most of their attention on possible strikes against American facilities in the Middle East, Europe or Asia.

After the summer holiday passed quietly without any attacks, American analysts were relieved, but still believed that an attack might be coming. However, they lacked any further details of where or when the strike might come, and some officials began to think that the immediate danger might have passed. Now that analysts are seeing a similar pattern of communications intercepts, they say they are determined to avoid a repeat of that mistake.

So, since we agree that I should have either asked you what you meant, or just ignored the post altogether,....

We don't agree as such. My position is that if a post is unclear to you, then you would be wise to ask a question about it instead of making an assumption. Why, in a dialogue, would you not make use of communication to resolve questions?

I said nothing about ignoring.

... would you agree with me that your first post to this thread did not clearly represent what you were thinking about at the time?

No, it represented exactly what I was thinking. The problem is that it wasn't exactly what YOU were thinking and you chose to assume/invent a concept to assist you in assimilating the post. This is behavior consistent with an individual who is not aware of the option of ASKING for clarification. In a dialogue, there is no reason to assume when you can ask.

The reason FR (and similar forums) are so much more productive than one-way communication is that there is the opportunity for two-way communication. Why would you forego this opportunity?

"Why, in a dialogue, would you not make use of communication to resolve questions?"

Until a post generates a response, no dialoge is taking place. It's just the poster making a statement. I added ignoring sometime back, as a possible course of action, and was not challenged on it (granted, an argument from silence), so it remains in my list of options.

"No, it represented exactly what I was thinking.:

Well, okay. Only you know what you were thinking. I just don't understand why you, or anyone, for that matter, would think clearly and specifically about something, then write about it in vague generalities, leaving out important details like who, when, where, how and why (although 'why' is pretty obvious in this instance and shouldn't require defining). It's like yelling "fire" in a theater and then blaming the resulting panic on the failure of the theater patrons to ask you where the fire was.

I suppose you could say that you were thinking in vague generalities, but I would find that a little hard to believe, considering that the act of reading the article would tend to focus the thoughts of even the most artistic amoung us.

"Why would you forego this opportunity?"

I'm not advocating forgoing dialogue, only that more clarity, more specifics should be included in the statements we make. I want to discuss the whole house design, not the particular brand of nails used in it's construction. It's difficult to say anything of significance with a single sentence, let alone, give clear meaning to our thoughts, especially in the English language, where context oftentimes determines the meaning. If you were a sailor aboard a ship who noticed a fire had started in the galley, would you run through the ship yelling "fire", expecting your shipmates to ask you "where's the fire?" That's ridiculous. No, you'd say "fire in the galley", a clear, concise statement which leaves no obvious questions unanswered. I see I already used a "fire" example, but I like them both, so I'll leave this one in too.

Take this thread, for example. How much of it has been generated by you and I, at first clashing, then trying to figure out what the other means through an analysis of different writing styles (at least, it's not as long as the latest drugged America thread)? Instead of bantering back and forth questions about 'why did you write it this way' and 'why did you read it that way', we could have been discussing 'why do you think that will help' and 'it will help because...'. Give me something significant to ask questions about. Answer the obvious questions in the beginning. Don't write in such a way which demands the reader constantly ask: "what do you mean by that?"

At this point, all I know is that you don't want government doing the profiling (and that when you post something, more than likely, there's much more to it than meets the eye). With what I've learned so far, to get to the meat of what you wrote, I would have to ask you to define what you mean by the expression: "protect my family" (who does this, when do they do it, what do they do it with, where should it be done, and how should it be done), as well as what you mean by "profile" (who, when is this necessary, what criteria should be used, where should it be done, how would it be implemented).Obvious questions, that could have been satisfactoraily addressed in the initial post, which after all this dialogue between us, remain unknown quanities. You know, this is basic high school english or at least, it was when I was in high school (granted, that was a long time ago).

Don't you think that after awhile, answering obvious questions, would get pretty tedious for you, especially if dozens of people asked those same questions. You'd have to keep track of the first post numbers where those questions were answered, and then refer subsequent posters back to the answers, or repeat yourself over and over again. People seem to comment on the first posts first, without reading through the whole thing. A bad habit, yes, but that would appear to be the reality of the situation.

This discussion reminds me of the communication protocols used on computer networks. Some use the available bandwidth more efficiently than others. Those less efficient are sometimes referred to as being "overhead-heavy". Selecting the protocol that will get the job done, with the least amount of overhead is an important consideration when designing a network. Applying that to this discussion, we're still battling with the overhead. Somewhere is the data, the meat of the discussion, but it hasn't arrived because we're still trying to negoiate a common protocol to pass the data with (the 'what do you mean by that' questions).

Anyhow, I have to go build some bicycle frames now, so I'll check in this evening.

Take care.

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