12/31/01 WSJ Al
12/31/01 Wall St. J.A1
2001 WL-WSJ 29681987
The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Monday, December 31, 2001
Files Found: A Computer in Kabul Yields a Chilling
Array Of al Qaeda Memos
Talk of 'Hitting Americans' And Making Nerve Gas;
Spats Over Salaries, Rent
A Guide to "The Company'
By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins
Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal
KABUL, Afghanistan - Last May, someone sat
down at an IBM desktop here and typed out a polite
letter to a bitter foe of al Qaeda, the anti-Taliban
leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. The writer tapped at
the computer for 97 minutes, according to its internal
record, then printed out the fruit of his labor: a
request for an interview with Mr. Massoud, to be
conducted by "one of our best journalists, Mr. Karim
Touzani."
On Sept. 9, two men posing as journalists, one
carrying a passport in the name of Karim Touzani,
detonated a hidden bomb as they interviewed Mr.
Massoud. The_legendary Afghan commander was
mortally wounded. Two days later came the suicide
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Now, as al Qaeda, the group blamed for all of those
lethal attacks, is uprooted from its Afghan
sanctuaries, it is leaving behind cyber-fingerprints.
The letter to Mr. Massoud is one of hundreds of text
documents and video files in a computer evidently
used for four years by al Qaeda chieftains in Kabul.
Its hard drive is a repository for correspondence with
militant Muslims around the world, portraying al
Qaeda bosses struggling to administer, inspire and
discipline the sprawling global organization.
Dating from early 1997 through this fall, the files
paint a picture of both ghoulish ambitions and
quotidian frustrations within an organization that,
despite its medieval zealotry, sometimes mimicked a
multinational corporation. Memos refer to al Qaeda
as "the company" and its leadership as "the general
management."
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The computer files don't appear to detail the plotting
of Sept. 11 or to contain any clear plans for future
attacks. But hundreds of documents, ranging from the
murderous to the mundane, illuminate issues bearing
on America's war on terrorism. Among them:
-- Files outlining al Qaeda efforts to launch a
program of chemical and biological weapons, code-
named al Zabadi, Arabic for curdled milk. As part of
the plan to develop a "home-brew nerve gas,"
members were given a long reading list that included
a study titled "Current Concepts: Napalm."
-- A video file in which Osama bin Laden speaks for
23 minutes, focusing on what he calls America's anti-
Muslim crusade_and mentioning the Sept. 11 attacks.
Another video shows a top al Qaeda cleric and
spokesman, Sheikh Abu Gaith, appearing to
acknowledge al Qaeda responsibility for the strikes.
"God Almighty has enabled our brothers to carry out
these strikes," he says, "and make the enemies of God
taste what they made our brothers taste."
~ A letter in which a militant using the name Abu
Yaser stresses that "hitting the Americans and Jews
is a target of great value and has its rewards in this
life and, God willing, the afterlife." The letter as
addressed to top al Qaeda lieutenant Ayman al-
Zawahri and the author says he has written to Mr. bin
Laden separately.
— A memo referring to a "legal study" on "the
killing of civilians." The writer, acknowledging this
is "a sensitive issue," says he has found ways to keep
"the enemy" from using the killing of "civilians,
specifically women and children," to undermine the
militants' cause.
How a computer apparently stuffed with al Qaeda
secrets came to light involves a combination of
happenstance and the opportunism of war in a
country schooled for 20 years in conflict and chaos.
The -desktop was installed in a two-story brick
building in Kabul that was used bv al Oaeda as an
office, according to a looter who says he grabbed it
and a Compaq laptop from the office. He says he
• entered the building, which is now occupied by
Northern Alliance soldiers, after a November U.S.
bombing raid killed several senior al Qaeda officials
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1/16/02 Wall St. J. Al
2002 WL-WSJ 3383036
The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Wednesday, January 16, 2002
Terror Tour: How al Qaeda Agent Scouted Attack
Sites In Israel and Egypt
Account on Kabul Computer Matches Travels of
Reid, The Alleged 'Shoe-Bomber'
Photographing Tall Buildings
By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins
Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal
KABUL, Afghanistan - Less than a month before
hijacked airplanes slammed into the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, al Qaeda chieftains
received a report spelling out "exceptionally good
opportunities" for terrorism in Israel and Egypt.
Among the suggested targets: tall buildings and
planes.
The report, found on a computer used by Osama bin
Laden's lieutenants in the Afghan capital, details a
7 target-scouting mission by an operative who flew
from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv on El Al with a "new
British passport. After traveling arnnnd TsraeK he
went to Egypt by bus and then to_jjrj;Ivj5a'
Pakistan by air.
The report calls the peripatetic operative "brother
Abdul Ra'uff." As it happens, his travels bear a
striking similarity to those of Richard Reid, the
airline passenger who allegedly tried to set off
explosives hidden in his shoe during a trans-Atlantic
flight on Dec. 22. Mr. Reid went to the same
countries, in the same order, and also got a new
passport in Amsterdam just before setting out on El
U.S. intelligence officials, who have reviewed the
computer files, believe that "Abdul Ra'uffs" true
identity "may well be" Mr. Reid, as one puts it. A
senior Israeli intelligence official says Israel is
"positive" Mr. Reid had been sent to Israel by al
Qaeda to scope out possible targets.
Mr. Reid is now in a Massachusetts jail on a charge
of interfering with a flight attendant. His court-
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appointed lawyer, Tamar Birckhead, says she is "not
aware of any evidence" linking him to any terrorist
group or individual.
Whether Mr. Reid was in fact the scout or the
similarity between his activities and "Abdul Ra'uffs"
is simply coincidence, the computer file on the
scouting mission provides a striking view inside al
Qaeda's workings. The lengthy report is among more
than 1,750 text and video files on the hard drives of
two computers that a looter offered for sale to a
Kabul computer merchant. The looter said he got
them from an office al Qaeda abandoned as its
Taliban protectors were fleeing Kabul in mid-
November. A Wall Street Journal reporter acquired
them for $1,100.
A Dec. 31 Wall Street Journal article described
some of these files, including some from 1999 that
outlined al Qaeda efforts to build germ and chemical
weapons. Other files were protected by passwords
and encryption that were much harder to crack, but
the Journal has now managed to access some of these
as well, and has translated them from Arabic.
They contain no clear reference to the Sept. 11
attack in New York and Washington. But the files
provide new details about al Qaeda's meticulous
planning, its global roster of operatives and its
security procedures in the period just before the
attack. The contents include:
-- A file that names 170 al Qaeda members. A
significant portion of the names, say U.S. officials
who have examined the computer files, weren't
known to law-enforcement and security agencies triaT
have long sought to identify bin Laden acolytes.
- A report on a planned operation to "gather
intelligence about American soldiers who frequent
nightclubs" along the U.S.-Canada border and about
Israeli diplomatic missions in Canada. It requests
information on "obtaining preparatory devices for
explosives from inside Canada."
— A primer on coding and encryption of documents.
Other files outline procedures for transmitting
messages via Pakistan.
7/2/02 WSJ Al
7/2/02 Wall St. J. A1
2002 WL-WSJ 3399560
The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Tuesday, July 2, 2002
Terrorist's Odyssey: Saga of Dr. Zawahri
Illuminates Roots Of al Qaeda
Terror
Secret, Failed Trip to Chechnya Turned Key Plotter's
Focus To America and bin
Laden
Sojourn in a Russian Prison
By Andrew Higgins and Alan Cullison
DERBENT, Russia — On a winter night five years
ago, Ayman al-Zawahri slipped into Russia across a
narrow wedge of land between the Caspian Sea and
the Caucasus Mountains. Dr. Zawahri, now
America's most wanted man after Osama bin Laden,
was on a risky clandestine mission as head of
Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant group that was
spattered, battered and nearly bankrupt after years on
His purpose: to scope out Chechnya as a possible
sanctuary for his wounded cause. Traveling in a
minivan with two confederates, he came equipped
with $6,400 in cash, a fake identity as a businessman,
a laptop computer, a satellite phone, a fax machine
and a small library of medical textbooks.
His plans quickly unraveled. After a night of furtive
travel, the Egyptian trio ran into a Russian roadblock
on the outskirts of this ancient walled city. Police,
seeing they had no visas, handed them over to tjie
Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet version of
the KGB. Dr. Zawahri spent the next six months in a
crumbling jail, fretting that the Russians would
discover his true'identity and lock him up for years or
send him back to Egypt to face likely execution.
In the end, his cover held, and he was freed. Still,
Dr. Zawahri's brush with disaster, previously known
to only a few Islamist chieftains, forced a critical
change in his lethal planning. It also set the stage,
ultimately, for Sept. 1 1 and the global war now under
way between America and terrorists under the banner
of al Qaeda. Instead of C h f?hn)"iii
the locus of his terrorist plotting. Ajid_Ameiica,_not
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Egypt, became the target.
The Wall Street Journal has pieced together the
story of how this happened from interviews with
Islamist activists and investigators, court files and
documents contained on an al Qaeda computer found
in the Afghan capital of Kabul. It illuminates the
evolution, motives and also weaknesses of what is
today America's principal enemy.
Through apocalyptic violence and a cult of secrecy,
Islamic militants torment the West with the specter of
a highly disciplined and unshakably united foe. In
reality, they have regularly been torn by venomous
policy disputes, personal feuds and repeated failures.
The Sept. 11 cataclysm both masked and flowed from
militant Islam's truest feature: disarray and an
inabilitjrto take and hold power in almost any Islamic
country since Iran in 1979.
Islamists preaching revolution in Egypt and
elsewhere were in retreat, not ascendancy. Attacking
America, Dr. Zawahri hoped, would reinvigorale~ana
unite their cause. His story shows from the inside
how the down-on-his-luck Egyptian Jihad leader
came to link up with Osama bin Laden and contribute
a critical arsenal of terrorist skills and manpower to
the cause.
Jreed from Russian jail in May 1997, Dr. Zawahri
found refuge in Afghanistan, ynkinp his fortunes tq
Mr. bin Laden. Egyptian Jihad, previously devoted to
the narrow purpose of toppling secular rule in £gypt,
became instead the biggest component of al (jaeda
and major agent of a global war against America. Dr.
Zawahri became Mr. bin Laden's closest confidant
and talent scout.
"Zawahri was cornered. He had nowhere to go. He
joined with bin Laden because he needed protection,"
says Hani al-Sebai, a former Egyptian Jihad activist
who spent time in a Cairo jail with Dr. Zawahri in
1981.
Eight months after the Russian fiasco, Dr. Zawahri
and Mr. bin Laden annnnncsH an fllljance dedicated
to killing Americans, a task they called the "duty of (
every Muslim." ' /
8/2/02 WSJ Al
8/2/02 Wall St. J. Al
2002 WL-WSJ 3402444
The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Friday, August 2, 2002
Strained Alliance: Al Qaeda's Sour Days in
Afghanistan
Fighters Mocked the Place; Taliban, in Turn, Nearly
Booted Out bin Laden
A Fateful U.S. Missile Strike
By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins
KABUL, Afghanistan -- In April 1998, shortly after
Osama bin Laden called on Muslims everywhere to
slaughter Americans, a group of senior U.S. officials
traveledjo the Afghan capital to try to break the ice
with the Saudi exile's Taliban hosts.
The Taliban gave the Americans a brisk tour,
showing off a concrete traffic booth from which they
had hanged a former Afghan president. Then they
drove their visitors past a ragtag honor guard waving
rifles to a shabby hall equipped with a multivolume
set of Thomas Jefferson's writings. The Taliban were
trying, in their way, to please: It was a Friday, the
day for public executions and amputations in the
football stadium, but on this Friday, the Taliban gave
the executioners the day off.
"The whole thing had a certain surreal quality,"
recalls Karl Inderfurth, who was an assistant
secretary of state and part of this first, and last, senior
U.S. mission to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
The most surreal feature of all, though, remained
carefully hidden. Behind a facade of Islamic
solidarity presented to the visitors raged a bitter
struggle between two standard-bearers of radical
Isjam: the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omafana'
Mr. bin Laden!
- A relationship that appeared smooth and even
symbiotic to the outside world was rent By
disillusionment, anger and petty one-upmanship? A
country the U.S. considered a terrorists' paradise was,
in the view of many of the terrorists who arrived
there from other lands, more like a hell: They
couldn't trust the locals, the food was bad, they
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Pagel
considered the Taliban leader a bumpkin, and their
work was stymied by the near-medieval
backwardness of the place.
"This place is worse than a tomb," wrote a bin
Laden associate from Egypt to comrades back home,
after checking out Afghanistan. The country, he said
in a message stored on a computer found by The
Wall Street Journal in Kabul, "is not suitable for
work."
The Taliban, in turn, grumbled that Mr. bin Laden
was arrogant, publicity- seeking and disrespectful.
The rift ran so deep that some of his entourage of
Arab revolutionaries expected to get booiCd uul uf
Afghanistan, as they had been earlier from Suctan.
Indeed, by the summer of 1998. according to a
former Saudi intelligence chief. Mullah Omar had
Mr hjn Laden packing.
But then came the 1998 lethal bombings of two U.S.
embassies in Africa, to which the U.S. replied by
raining down cruise missiles on a bin Laden camp in
Afghanistan. The retaliation had fateful
consequences. It turned Mr, h'" T a^n intr* a
figure among Tslamic radicals, made Afghanistan a
rallying point for (tefianr? r>f Amprira and shut off
Taliban discussion nf p.ypellinp the militants. T^also
helped convince Mr. bin Laden that goading America
to anger cpnlfl he lp his cause, not hurt it!
Today, thanks to the war in Afghanistan following
Sept. 11, Islamist militants have lost their arid haven
for training, networking and plotting. U.S. bombs
have flattened the Afghan camps that trained fighters
for battle in Kashmir, Chechnya and other local
conflicts. Yet, in another paradox of American
response to terrorist violence, the rout has forced
what many Arab militants wanted all along:
relocation away from a treacherous backwater. Those
targeting the West didn't need shooting ranges so
much as access to reliable electronic
communications, false documents and the "infidel"
countries in their sights.
Mr. bin Laden first took refuge in Afghanistan in
May 1996, bringing his three wives, 13 children and
tfroop of bodyguards after Sudan expelled him. His
grotector was a friend from the anti-Soviet struggle
of the 1980s, a warlord named ¥ unls Khahs who was
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11/11/02 Wall St. J.A1
2002 WL-WSJ 3411334
The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Monday, November 11, 2002
Uploading Terror: How al Qaeda Put Internet in
Service Of Global Jihad
With Sites in China, Pakistan, A U.K.-Based Web
Master Kept 'the Brothers'
Abreast
Disney and Wildlife Film Clips
By Andrew Higgins in London, Karby Leggett in
Guangzhou, China, and Alan
Cullison in Washington
In February 2000, an Egyptian merchant here in the
commercial hub of southern China asked a local
Internet firm for help in setting up a Web site. After
lengthy haggling over the fee, he paid $362 to
register a domain name and rent space on a server.
Chen Rongbin, a technician at Guangzhou Tianhe
Siwei Information Co., and an aide went to the
Egyptian's apartment. They couldn't fathom what the
client, Sami Ali, was up to. His software and
keyboard were all in Arabic. "It just looked like
earthworms to us," Mr. Chen says.
All he could make out was the site's address:
"maalemaljihad.com." Mr. Chen had no idea that
meant "Milestones of Holy War." Nor that China, one
of the world's most heavily policed societies, had just
become a launchpad for the dot-corn dreams - and
disappointments — of Osama bin Laden's terror
network.
In the months that followed, Arab militants in
Afghanistan, a radical cleric living on welfare in
London, a textile worker in Karachi, Pakistan, and
others pitched in, laboring to marry modern
technology with the theology of a seventh- century
prophet. Their home page, featuring two swords
merging to form a winged missile, welcomed visitors
to the "special Web site" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a
violent group at the core of al Qaeda. A few clicks
led to a 45-page justification of "martyrdom
operations," jihad jargon for kamikaze terrorism. It
explained that killing "infidels" inevitably caused
innocent casualties because "it is impossible to kill
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them separately."
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, radical Islam's use of
technology has stirred both scrutiny and fear. The
White House has warned that video footage of Mr.
bin Laden could hold encrypted messages. The
Federal Bureau of Investigation has called for
vigilance against hacking into the computers that
control vital services. Some experts have wondered if
terrorism might even lurk in pornographic Web sites,
with instructions embedded in X-rated photos.
The Milestones of Holy War site signals much more
modest cyber-skills. Al Qaeda operatives struggled
with some of the same tech headaches as ordinary
people: servers that crashed, outdated software and
files that wouldn't open. Their Web venture followed
a classic dot-corn trajectory. It began with
excitement, faced a cash crunch, had trouble with
accountants and ultimately fizzled.
But the project also illuminates the elusive contours
of al Qaeda's strengths: far-flung outposts of support,
a talent for camouflage and a knack for staying in
touch using tools both sophisticated and simple.
Though driven from Afghanistan, al Qaeda still has
many hiding places, many channels of
communication and - beasts Mr. bin Laden's senior
lieutenant, Egyptian Islamic Jihad chief Ayman al-
Zawahri - many means of attack.
Al Qaeda chiefs communicate mainly by courier,
say U.S. officials. But their underlings make wide use
of computers: sending e-mail, joining chat rooms and
surfing the Web to scout out targets and keep up with
events. Since late last year, U.S. intelligence agencies
have gathered about eight terabytes of data on
captured computers, a volume that, if printed out,
would make a pile of paper over a mile high. The rise
and eventual demise of maalemaljihad.com — pieced
together from interviews, registration documents and
messages stored on an al Qaeda computer The Wall
Street Journal obtained in Kabul -- provides an inside
glimpse of this scattered, sometimes fumbling, but
highly versatile fraternity.
Using Microsoft Front Page and other software,
militants in Afghanistan devised graphics and
assembled content, packaging hundreds of text, audio
and video files for display on the Web. Because of
12/20/02 WSJ A1
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2002 WL- WSJ 103129360
The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Friday, December 20, 2002
Friend or Foe: The Story of a Traitor to al Qaeda
Murky Loyalties in Yemen Undo the Betrayer, Who
Finds Himself Betrayed
Ominous Words Before 9/11
By Andrew Higgins and Alan Cullison
SANAA, Yemen — Fed up after two decades of
Islamist plotting, the veteran Egyptian militant
decided to jilt the jihad. In early 1998, he walked into
the heavily guarded offices of Yemen's intelligence
agency, the Political Security Organization, with a
startling proposal: He could help unravel Osama bin
Laden's network. — backed by Yemen, lobbed Scuds at Israel. After a
He disclosed the hiding places in Yemen of foreign
terrorists, including one who would shortly become
Mr. bin Laden's chief lieutenant. He described the
extremists' weaponry, security and violent plans for
the future. He revealed the locations of al Qaeda
encampments in and around Marib, a desert region
scattered with ruins of the biblical kingdom of Sheba.
-ridiculing jihad hotheads. Yet months after Sept. 11,
But instead of cracking down on the militants,
members of Yemen's security service tipped them
off. Mr. bin Laden's acolytes grabbed their turncoat,
grilled him about his treachery and made plans to
send him to Afghanistan to be killed. What should
have been a triumph in a shadowy struggle against
terrorism became an intelligence coup for the
terrorists. Safe in Yemen, they went on to launch a
string of attacks there, from the bombing of the USS
Cole to an assault on a French oil tanker, the
Limburg, this fall.
On Nov. 3, more than four years after the warning
about camps in Marib, the desert region was targeted
for a lethal assault ~ not by the Yemenis but by the
Central Intelligence Agency. Monitoring satellite-
telephone chit-chat, the CIA tracked two Toyotas
carrying suspected al Qaeda members across the
desert. An unmanned U.S. spy plane then fired a
Hellfire missile that incinerated six people, including
Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a Yemeni suspected of
helping organize the Cole attack.
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The missile strike blew a hole in a diplomatic
facade, as well. After Sept. 11, President Bush gave
the world a simple choice: "Either you are with us or
you are with the terrorists." Yemen -- Mr. bin Laden's
ancestral homeland - and other hotbeds of Islamist
sentiment such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia declared
themselves "with us." Their leaders pledged
unequivocal support for the struggle against al
Qaeda. But within these nations' bureaucracies, not to
mention their citizenries, the lines of loyalty are
fuzzy.
The U.S.-Yemen relationship is unusually delicate
today, after the U.S. asked Spain's navy last week to
intercept a North Korean ship heading for Yemen and
carrying hidden Scuds. Those were the missiles made
famous in the Gulf War when Iraq, which was
tense diplomatic exchange, Washington reluctantly
permitted Yemen, which said it was the customer for
the Korean Scuds, to take delivery of them.
Over the past year, Yemen has detained hundreds of
militant suspects, told clerics to purge extremism
from education and warned the public of terrorism's
cost to its economy. State-run radio broadcasts a skit
al Qaeda still looked to Yemen as a haven. Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, a suspected mastermind of the
hijack attacks, spoke this spring of plans to regroup
in Yemen, according to an al Qaeda operative
captured by the U.S. And at Yemen's PSO, officers
who monitored extremists when the organization
betrayed the informant remained at their posts.
Most unsettling of all, transcripts of monitored
conversations raise the possibility that a Yemeni
security operative knew of the Sept. 11 attacks before
they took place. Much mystery surrounds this
security officer - first because of indications he was
the case officer who betrayed the informant, and
second because he has suddenly vanished. His family
in Yemen claims Egyptian agents grabbed him. Some
Islamists claim the CIA has him now. The CIA, as is
its policy, won't comment.
An account of divided allegiances within the
Yemeni bureaucracy illuminates the muddle
hampering the hunt for al Qaeda. It's a story based on
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The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Monday, December 30, 2002
Suicide Watch: Al Qaeda Acolyte, One of Many,
Vows To Die for the Cause
Elusive Agents Like Mr. Yusuf Confound Efforts to
Judge Progress in War on
Terror
Macabre Poems for bin Laden
By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Faisal al-Yusuf, a 26-
year-old computer programmer, had one small son
and, by his own account, one big ambition: to
slaughter "infidels" on behalf jrf Osama bin Laden.
"By the time you receive this will, I will be in the
craws of birds, God willing, after performing a
martyrdom operation against the land of infidels," he
wrote late last year in a suicide note to his wife in
Saudi Arabia. "This operation will, God willing, turn
the tide for Islam and Muslims."
At the time, Mr. Yusuf was in Afghanistan. He had -
arrived there three months earlier from Saudi Arabia,
where he had done programming work for Saudi
companies and Islamic charities. By the time he
wrote his note, the Taliban regime was crumbling
under U.S. bombs and al Qaeda was preparing for the
future, mobilizing kamikaze recruits and making
plans beyond Afghanistan.
Dettgfrte&at his "nomination" for a suicide mission,
Mr. Yusuf, writing under a jihad alias, composed a
series of macabre poems and asked Mr. bin Laden to
read them in public "after I die in the battle against
the enemies of religion." One of these said: "Just one
push on the trigger and I'm finished, and disfigured is
the face of the enemy." Its title: "Going to God."
Thirteen months later, Mr. Yusuf has yet to strike.
He wasn't among the terrorists who this year blew up
themselves - and more than 200 other people - in
attacks on a synagogue in Tunisia, U.S. Marines in
Kuwait, a nightclub in Indonesia, a French oil tanker
off Yemen and, most recently, a hotel in Kenya. All
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these occurred in places with large Muslim
populations, not in Mr. Yusufs "land of infidels."
This suggests that his own attack, apparently targeted
at either America or a European country, has either
been aborted for some reason or still lies ahead. The
Central Intelligence Agency doesn't know where Mr.
Yusuf is. Saudi Arabia, too, has nothing to say about
his whereabouts.
His failure so far to act, although a relief to officials
in Washington and Riyadh fearful of yet another
Saudi making headlines with terrorist bloodletting,
points to a conundrum at the core of the war on
terrorism: How can the U.S. gauge victory or defeat
against an enemy that often remains unseen until it
strikes? It is a question of critical importance as
America prepares for a possible new war against Iraq
and diverts its military and intelligence resources
toward the defeat of Saddam Hussein, a conventional
foe with tanks and territory, instead of al Qaeda's
invisible legions.
Al Qaeda's footsoldiers "are walking time bombs.
You only find them when they explode," says
Mohsen al-Awaji, a former soil scientist turned
Islamist activist who was jailed twice by Saudi
authorities in the 1990s for his radical views.
America, he says, is "not fighting a country or a
government but ghosts."
Over the past year, Washington has measured its
success against al Qaeda largely by counting the
scalps of terrorist chiefs. It has failed to get Mr. bin
Laden "dead or alive" as promised by President Bush
but has killed or captured many other senior
operatives, including a self-declared architect of the
Sept. 11 plot and al Qaeda's military chief. President
Bush keeps a scorecard with names and pictures,
crossing them off as they fall. "We're making good
progress. Slowly but surely, we're dismantling the al
Qaeda network," he said earlier this month.
Perhaps more revealing, however, is the yardstick
set by Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants in messages
stored on a computer they used in Afghanistan and in
statements issued since Sept. 11 through Arab media
and the Internet. The internal messages, placed on the
computer shortly before U.S.-backed Afghan troops
seized Kabul on Nov. 13, 2001, include
communications from Mr. bin Laden to Mullah
Omar, the Taliban leader. It couldn't be determined