WHY NASTY PEOPLE ARE SO HARD TO TRACK DOWN AND CAPTURE

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When a pair of suicide bombers crippled the destroyer USS Cole in a Yemeni port in mid-October 2000, killing 17 American sailors, top U.S. counterterrorism officials had a fearful intuition: This is revenge for Albania. In mid-1998, the CIA, working with Albania’s intelligence service, had rolled up a terrorist cell guided by wanted dead or alive Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. A deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Albania’s capital, Tirana, was barely averted. The Middle Eastern plotters were sent home to face prosecution. They have not forgotten that. And they’re still looking for payback.

The United States has yet to nail all of those responsible for the Cole attack (even though a few suspects have been detained), but that first guess made a macabre sort of sense for those waging the interminable war against terrorism. Few Americans realize the full extent and intensity of what has become an around-the-clock, across-the-globe campaign against fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, a confusing web of groups and names fused only by their hatred for the United States and, often, their shared experience fighting the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

This war is waged largely in the shadows, a cat-and-mouse contest between terrorists and intelligence agencies that only rarely comes into public view. But much of the vast U.S. national security machinery (and a ballooning budget) is trained on the threat. Fragmentary bits of data gleaned from eavesdropping satellites, human informers, friendly governments, and old-fashioned police work are pieced together to deter and disrupt terrorist attacks on a regular basis.

High Alert

Recently, U.S. intelligence agencies warned that U.S. naval forces in Italy and the airbase in Incirlik, Turkey, were being targeted. The posts went on high alert, and the aircraft carrier USS Truman was diverted from Naples to Crete. Meanwhile, the State Department sent a global alert to all its posts, ordering them to review security procedures.

The war comes out of the shadows when U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agents lose a battle, such as in the Cole attack or the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa (see sidebar, “Putting Terror Inc. on Trial”). But as traumatic as they are, for each such loss there is many an unheralded success—dashing terrorists’ hopes of more bloodied bodies and battered buildings on the world’s TV screens.

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Putting Terror Inc. On Trial

Ali Mohamed is a man of many faces: Egyptian intelligence agent, U.S. Army paratrooper, FBI informant, and aide to wanted dead or alive terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Before bombs shattered U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Mohamed says, he scouted possible targets and personally brought bin Laden photos of Nairobi sites. Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy, and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.

Mohamed, 48, is now poised to play a new role—as the Justice Department’s star witness in the long-awaited trial of bin Laden’s alleged followers which started in January, 2001 in New York City. A sweeping 319-count indictment charges bin Laden and 20 others with a terrorist crime spree dating back to 1991. Among the charges: bombings, perjury, and conspiracy to murder Americans around the globe. The attacks include not only those on the U.S. embassies in 1998 (which left over 220 dead and 5,000 injured) but also on U.S. troops in Somalia and Saudi Arabia. Although bin Laden remains at large (with a $100 million U.S. reward on his head), five of those indicted are now in U.S. custody—as is Mohamed, who pleaded guilty in October 2000.

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Infidels

October’s (2000) suicide bombing of the USS Cole and the 9-11 attacks (tied by investigators to bin Laden’s network) has added fresh urgency to the government’s efforts to thwart the wanted dead or alive Saudi exile, now hiding in the badlands of Afghanistan or nearby in Pakistan. Led by Mohamed’s likely testimony, the trial promised an unprecedented look at America’s most wanted terrorist and at al-Qaeda, the fanatic organization that he guides. The indictment imparts an image of a paranoid, virulently anti-American network determined to purge Muslim lands of “infidels.” To achieve this, bin Laden’s men strove to obtain chemical and even nuclear weapons, according to prosecutors.

Proving a grand conspiracy may be difficult. Prosecuting international terrorists is often a delicate balance between law enforcement’s need for evidence and the intelligence world’s need to protect sources and methods. Through electronic eavesdropping, for example, U.S. officials quickly learned of bin Laden’s involvement in the embassy blasts, but they are loath to introduce such sensitive records into court.

Holy War

Such concerns may explain the indictment’s at times tenuous links among the alleged terrorists. Prosecutors tie bin Laden to the conspiracy largely through his funding of al-Qaeda and his calls for holy war against the West. For some defendants, their work with al-Qaeda appears to be enough. For others, it is their work in his businesses in Sudan, from construction and agriculture to an investment house, which prosecutors call fronts for terror. Still others are tied to al-Qaeda’s ruling council, where terrorist plots (like the 9-11 attacks) are said to be hatched.

With his guilty plea, Mohamed has now made the prosecution’s job far easier. Under oath, Mohamed already has done more than tie bin Laden directly to the embassy bombings. He strongly hinted he could connect the dots to the five others in custody, who have all pleaded not guilty.

Two of the defendants, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owali and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, face the death penalty if convicted, as prosecutors have the strongest evidence tying them to the embassy attacks. Al-Owali, a Saudi Arabian, allegedly filmed a statement before the bombing celebrating his “martyrdom,” and rode in the pickup carrying the Nairobi bomb; he was found later in a hospital with keys to the truck’s padlock nearby. Prosecutors say Khalfan Mohamed, a Tanzanian, helped grind up TNT and load the truck used in the Dar es Salaam bombing. A third defendant, Saddiq Odeh, a Jordanian, is allegedly tied to TNT and detonators used in Tanzania.

A fourth man, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, allegedly purchased the 1998 Toyota Dyna truck that carried the bomb in Nairobi. His case was recently severed from the others after he stabbed a prison guard in the eye. Investigators are hoping a fifth defendant, Wadih el-Hage, will follow Ali Mohamed’s lead and cooperate. A tire store manager in Arlington, Texas, he acted, prosecutors contend, as a bag man and passport fixer while working as bin Laden’s personal secretary.

Targets

Ali Mohamed’s testimony, which will likely earn him a reduced sentence, may prove particularly damning to el-Hage. The former U.S. Army sergeant, a naturalized American citizen born in Egypt, claims he worked with el-Hage in Nairobi and that during a visit to the man’s house, bin Laden’s security chief told him to conduct surveillance on American, British, French, and Israeli “targets” in Senegal.

Defense attorneys on the case know they’re facing tough odds. Mohamed’s guilty plea has thrown “a wrench” into their strategies. For defendants facing the death penalty, their lawyers’ primary focus is to stop them from getting killed. If Ali Mohamed does indeed take the stand, his credibility will likely come under fire. The talkative terrorist has a record of shifting loyalties and admits to lying to investigators in the past.

El-Hage, a naturalized U.S. citizen, certainly seems to be feeling the pressure. Five days after Mohamed’s testimony, he suddenly also attempted to plead guilty. The plea, offered without consulting with prosecutors, was thrown out because el-Hage told the judge he was acting not out of guilt, but because he wanted to escape the humiliation of a trial. Should el-Hage decide to flip with prosecutorial blessing, his testimony could offer a trove of information. Court documents place the 40-year-old el-Hage within a rogues’ gallery of terrorists. The Lebanese native is allegedly tied not only to the embassy bombs but also to a string of criminal acts, including attempted arms sales to those later convicted in the 1990 murder of radical Rabbi Meir Kahane and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Further revelations may come from Ali Mohamed, who is cooperating with the FBI. Terrorism experts already are pondering his assertion that through the mid-1990s, bin Laden’s al-Qaeda maintained close ties to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, and to Iranian security forces. Al-Qaeda and its allies received explosives training at Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, Mohamed claimed, and received bombs disguised to look like rocks from the Iranians. The implications are troubling. Iran is an untold story in this. How many elements have they kept out of this indictment?

Perhaps several. Ties to the USS Cole bombing may well emerge from trial testimony. And a further indictment in New York (this one under seal) names even more alleged bin Laden conspirators. Clearly, the trial will be but one act in an ongoing and altogether grim play.

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In November, 2000, for instance, authorities in Kuwait, who thought they had radical Islamists under control, got a nasty shock. They uncovered a tiny terrorist cell plotting to bomb U.S. and Kuwaiti facilities, and quietly called in the CIA, which helped trace the plot beyond Kuwait’s borders. A suspect, Mohammed al-Dosary, led investigators to a desert weapons cache that held 293 pounds of high explosives, 1,450 detonators, and, for good measure, five hand grenades. They were in the final stages of casing targets, claims a U.S. official. Even more worrisome, the plotters had helpers in Kuwait’s government, one of the closest U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.

Publicly, the face of the adversary is bin Laden’s. But focusing on one man misses the full picture. Bin Laden has tapped into what U.S. officials sardonically call the “Afghan Veterans” Association, Arabs who answered the call to holy war against the Soviets two decades ago—at the time, with backing from the CIA. The threat posed by the Jihadist network didn’t become clear until five years ago, with the U.S. arrests of those behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That case sounded the first broad alarms that thousands of Arab veterans from the Afghan war had now trained their sights on the West.

Terror Inc.

Bin Laden finances and motivates a “network of networks,” co-opting homegrown terrorist groups, from Egyptian Islamic Jihad to the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. It’s like you’re winding up little dolls and sending them back to their own countries and letting them create their own movements. The United States was slow as a government to recognize what bin Laden was doing. Bin Laden was doing something much more than spreading the money around.

Without fanfare, Washington in 1999 opened a new front in the war. The strategy: Go on the offensive, and hound and disrupt terrorist cells wherever they can be found. U.S. intelligence agencies routinely tip off local security services to a problem they didn’t even know they had. Cells are placed under surveillance or, using a legal process called “rendition,” suspects are forcibly returned to their home country. In Albania, Algeria, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere, bin Laden devotees have been booted out, often on immigration charges and with little publicity. More than two dozen suspects have been brought to justice. The war on terror is fought down in the weeds. It’s guys talking to their sources, pulling people in for questioning, and digging for telephone records. It’s the slow, dirty, grunt police work that goes on every day.

In 2000, the CIA launched the largest counterterror operation in U.S. history, working with counterparts in Jordan and other countries to thwart a multicontinent “terrorist spectacular” during the millennium celebrations. CIA operatives in more than 60 countries pressured, pleaded, and paid local authorities to crack down on Islamic radicals. The message was: It’s crunch time. This cost the agency a great deal of money and resources.

But like battling the mythical Hydra, an eliminated terrorist cell only seems to regenerate, sometimes in the same place. Bin Laden and his organization, al-Qaeda, are still itching to pull off an attack in pro-Western Jordan. And though U.S. and Kenyan authorities busted up an al-Qaeda operation in Nairobi in early 1998, the victory was only temporary. They immediately came back in. They were able to use the infrastructure that was in place, spin up a new cell, and go after the target. The August 7, 1998 blasts at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed more than 220 people.

Just as sobering is what officials call the “mujahideen underground railroad,” a vast effort to move young recruits to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. An estimated 40,000 recruits have gone to Afghanistan since 1996. Using professionally forged documents and Hotmail Internet accounts to keep in touch, network members move people through Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, and Dubai.

Recruitment

The Finsbury Park Mosque sits in a gritty part of London, not far from the Arsenal soccer stadium. Inside, the only sign of Islamic activism is a hand-made sign protesting Russia’s war in Muslim Chechnya. But U.S., British, and Yemeni officials say the mosque is a recruitment station for terror camps and that its fundamentalist imam, Abu Hamza al-Masri, has ties with terror groups abroad.

Often, the process begins when a potential recruit visits a local mosque and makes a small donation. While some of the funds may go to legitimate Islamic charity work, bin Laden receives a steady stream from mosques, charities, and schools. The way to get rich is to come up with a scheme to get everyone to pay you 5 cents a month. That’s what he’s done. The United States has tried to block the money flow but has made little progress.

Despite the nature of the quarry, progress is being made in the war on terrorism. The U.S. is certainly holding their own. There’s a chance that the U.S. is gaining ground, but not very much. Bin Laden’s very success (due to the 9-11 attacks) has spurred unprecedented international law enforcement cooperation. Jordanian officials alerted U.S. agencies to the millennium threat. Even Russia, which fears radical Islam in Chechnya and Central Asia, now works regularly, if quietly, with U.S. counterparts. This is a dramatic turnaround. Nevertheless, some U.S. agencies still dropped the ball in not being able to prevent the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Through eavesdropping and, increasingly, informants, Western spy agencies are gaining a clearer picture of the structure of bin Laden’s network and his inner circle. But penetrating the distinct cultures in which the terrorists operate is difficult. The CIA has begun a special program to recruit Muslims, in hopes of worming its way inside. One advantage: the terrorist networks’ decentralized structure. They are vast, but they’re not real tight. The CIA is more aggressive but is hampered by 1995 regulations restricting recruitment of sources with unsavory backgrounds. The CIA claims the rules don’t block operations.

Nor have the terror fighters been able to get bin Laden himself, who still moves between homes, residences, and underground bunkers in Afghanistan or in neighboring Pakistan. He is protected by what a Pentagon official calls “double walls of security.” One is provided by his dwindling Taliban hosts, and his own personal security detail includes an elder son who is said to rarely leave his side, but now is presumed dead.

Note 

Recently, terror fighters were further embarrassed by the elusiveness of bin Laden, when he showed up at his elder son’s wedding in full view of international media cameras.

The terrorists do their own spying. They do exploit our weaknesses. The Cole attackers slipped through a small window (four hours every other month) as U.S. ships refueled in Yemen. They hit U.S. in exactly the right place. Sometimes, terrorists dispatch walk-ins, “informers” who proffer false information to U.S. agents. Bin Laden previously used an INMARSAT satellite telephone—on which U.S. spy agencies eavesdropped and quickly established his role in the East Africa bombings. When that fact became public, he switched to a system of mule messengers and code words.

Still, U.S. high-tech wizardry plays a key role in combating terrorists who are increasingly high-tech themselves. When Khalil Deek was arrested in Pakistan in December 1999, U.S. and Jordanian officials weren’t sure how much of the millennium plot they’d unraveled. Deek (who denies involvement) had computer files locked with a commercially available encryption program. U.S. agents rushed the computer to the Fort Meade, Md., campus of the code-breaking National Security Agency. It was a race against time. NSA had to know whether Deek had operational information such as where and how the attacks were planned.

That threat was thwarted, but others keep coming: an average of 40 each week, according to the FBI. Fighting terrorism is like being a soccer goalie. You can block 99 shots, but you miss one and you lose the game.



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Computer Forensics. Computer Crime Scene Investigation
Computer Forensics: Computer Crime Scene Investigation (With CD-ROM) (Networking Series)
ISBN: 1584500182
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 263
Authors: John R. Vacca

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