No Direct Evidence of Plot To Attack Around Elections

By Dan Eggen and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A01


On Sept. 15, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and John E. McLaughlin, then
acting director of the CIA, brought a special note of concern to their daily
briefing with President Bush.

Fresh intelligence had arrived pointing to plans for a mass-casualty
terrorist attack before Election Day, bolstering previous indications that
such an assault was possible on U.S. soil, according to accounts of the
briefing provided to Mueller's and McLaughlin's subordinates. What's more,
intelligence officials told Bush, there was reason to believe that the
plotters may already have arrived in the United States, according to the
accounts. The new information led the FBI and other agencies across the
government to launch a well-publicized campaign aimed at foiling potential
plots before the elections, including hundreds of interviews in immigrant
neighborhoods and aggressive surveillance of suspected terrorist
sympathizers.

But five weeks after the effort began, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement
officials say they have found no direct evidence of an election-related
terrorist plot. Authorities also say that a key CIA source who had claimed
knowledge of such plans has been discredited, casting doubt on one of the
earliest pieces of evidence pointing to a possible attack.

Intelligence officials stress that they continue to receive reports
indicating that al Qaeda and its allies would like to mount attacks in the
United States close to the Nov. 2 elections, and that such reports have been
streaming in since terrorists blew up commuter trains in Madrid days before
Spanish elections in March. Yet after hundreds of interviews, scores of
immigration arrests and other preventive measures, law enforcement officials
say they have been unable to detect signs of an ongoing plot in the United
States, nor have they identified specific targets, dates or methods that
might be used in one.

"We've not unearthed anything that would add any credence to talk of an
election-related attack," said one senior FBI counterterrorism official, who
spoke on the condition of anonymity because authorities have been instructed
not to talk publicly about the issue before the elections. "You can never
say there is not a threat, but we have not found specific evidence of one."

Like so much of the war on terrorism, the possible election threat is
distinctly alarming and maddeningly opaque, according to government
officials. The situation provides a clear example of the challenges facing
the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other U.S. agencies as they
wrestle with foes whose intentions, capabilities and identities remain
unclear.

"We remain convinced that al Qaeda's allies and sympathizers are intent on
striking in the U.S. homeland," said one U.S. intelligence official who,
like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the threat involves
classified information. "But the time frame, as it always is, is ambiguous.
If we get through the election, it's not like we can walk off the field."

"Until you find the Mohamed Atta of this plot," the official added,
referring to the ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, "how can you
stop?"

For their briefing with Bush, McLaughlin and Mueller had only fragments.
They were concerned enough that they separated their report on the election
dangers from the routine daily synopsis of threat reporting known as the
"threat matrix," law enforcement sources said.

Yet the two men could not tell Bush who or where the suspected plotters
were, whether they had evaded screening at U.S. borders, which targets they
had in their sights, or what weapon they planned to employ. McLaughlin and
Mueller could not, in fact, say for sure that the plot existed, the sources
said.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Mueller and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft had warned as early as May
that al Qaeda may seek to strike close to the elections, but the reports had
reached such a pitch in September that officials chose a large-scale
response. Their plan called primarily for aggressive, and overt,
surveillance of people already under scrutiny for possible terrorist ties.
In a few cases, law enforcement officials said, the plan would lead to
arrests before the bureau would otherwise have made them. In most others,
the FBI and its joint terrorism task forces would do little more than "pull
up in traffic and have people staring" at their subjects, as one official
put it.

"Even if this guy is not likely to become a suicide bomber, will security
benefit by letting the guy know we're watching him?" one official said. The
hope is to "dissuade them from doing things they might otherwise have done,"
the official said.

At the Department of Homeland Security, an immigration unit has detained 120
foreigners so far this month on charges of being in the country illegally,
including some who are named in databases of criminal or terrorism suspects,
officials said yesterday.

At the FBI, about 2,000 counterterrorism agents have been assigned the task
of conducting interviews and following up on leads, with instructions to
report to 24-hour call centers in each field office. The disruption plan "is
intense up to the election, but they're keeping command posts operational
for longer than that," one official said.

The person in charge of the campaign is Patrick Cook, who was summoned to
FBI headquarters the day after Bush's briefing, officials said. Reassigned
on the spot from his job as a senior official in the Washington field
office, Cook moved to the FBI's Strategic Information Operations Center with
a mandate to run the national disruption plan.

"They told him his whole job is to prevent an attack before the
inauguration," said a sympathetic colleague who works elsewhere. "Which is
like being told, 'Make the sky turn purple.' "

The FBI's approach depends on "tripwires" to detect suspicious activity. The
system, implemented last year and based on the behavior of the 19 Sept. 11
hijackers, generates alerts if a known subject buys an airline ticket, rents
a car or applies for a driver's license -- in his or her own name. The
national criminal information database, consulted routinely when local
police make a traffic stop, is now capable of sending a "silent hit" to the
bureau if the driver is on a watch list.

"If they follow the model of the 19 [hijackers], we'd detect them, I can
tell you that," said a high-ranking law enforcement official, who added that
he is unable to discuss the screening methods in public.

The FBI and other agencies have also performed exhaustive searches of
records on explosives permits, rental storage facilities, crop-dusting
airplanes and other specialized areas that have been identified as potential
targets of al Qaeda.

Yet law enforcement and intelligence officials frankly acknowledge that
their information is limited. "People are so terrified because they can't
see clearly anymore," a government counterterrorism analyst said. Because of
the success in closing al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, the analyst
said, "we can't see the training camps, we've driven their communications
further underground, and the operators have effectively disappeared."

Even as the government intensified its campaign, authorities discovered that
one of the CIA sources they had relied on had fabricated his story,
according to several counterterrorism officials. One intelligence official
said the revelation "caused us to go back to square one and reassess where
the plotting really is."

Other officials, however, played down the source's importance. "It's thought
that what he had said was pure misinformation" designed to mislead the
government, a different intelligence official said. But, the official added,
that did not increase anyone's comfort level, because there are many other
sources indicating that al Qaeda wants to launch an attack.

FBI and Justice Department officials said they are still keenly worried
about the whereabouts and activities of seven fugitives who were named in
May as possible suspects in the planning of an al Qaeda attack. One person
of particular concern is Adnan G. el Shukrijumah, a Saudi-born radical
raised in Guyana and the United States who has been identified as a valued
operative by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the al Qaeda lieutenant who is in U.S.
custody.

Shukrijumah, 29, is a trained pilot who lived in Florida until he fled after
the Sept. 11 attacks. He has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head. U.S.
authorities have linked him to numerous possible plots, including an
abandoned scheme with U.S.-designated enemy combatant Jose Padilla to blow
up U.S. apartment buildings with natural gas. The FBI has fielded numerous
reported sightings of him from Morocco to Central America, but none has been
confirmed.

"A number of the detainees, when asked 'Can you think of who would be sent
to the U.S. for an attack?,' " have named Shukrijumah, a terrorism analyst
with the government said. "He's a real threat. He speaks Spanish, English
and Arabic; he's totally bought into the plan, and nobody -- but nobody --
knows where he is."

A key component of the disruption plan has focused on scrutinizing
immigrants for violations. Among those arrested by Homeland Security in
recent weeks was a 28-year-old Saudi who had dropped out of a U.S.
university after enrolling last year, according to a news release from the
department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau. The student,
who was not identified, was stopped last year while trying to carry a stun
gun onto a U.S. airliner, the release said.

Another former student, a 24-year-old Lebanese citizen, had his visa revoked
by the State Department for national security reasons, the release said. He
was working in a convenience store and was no longer in school, according to
the release. It did not say where the former students were living.

The arrests were made by ICE's Compliance Enforcement Unit, which flagged
the suspects with the help of three new systems for tracking visitors: a
student database, a system for identifying arriving and departing
foreigners, and a program that requires men from two dozen mostly Muslim
countries to register.

Not all of the 120 arrests involved security risks. One of those listed, for
example, was a South African woman who entered the country this year on a
student visa but never enrolled. She was arrested and placed in deportation
proceedings but was released with an electronic monitoring bracelet, the
news release said.

Staff writers John Mintz and Mary Beth Sheridan contributed to this report.



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