Al Qaeda's calling card

By ANDREW BUNCOMBE in WASHINGTON

Only a week ago the United States intelligence community was talking with an arrogance not seen since before the attacks of September 11.

Al Qaeda was on the run, said officials in Washington. It may not have been destroyed, but the back of the organisation had been broken, its leadership and capabilities severely disrupted.

"It's no coincidence [that al Qaeda did not launch an attack during the war against Iraq]," boasted Cofer Black, a CIA veteran who now heads the State Department's counter-terrorism office.

"This was the big game for them - you put up or shut up and they have failed. It proves that the global war on terrorism has been effective and has these guys on the run."

Yesterday, however, rescue workers in Riyadh were clearing their way through the rubble left by a series of attacks that Black's boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell, said had "the fingerprints" of al Qaeda.

In the aftermath, it seems astonishing that US intelligence could have been so apparently complacent.

On more or less the same day that Black told the Washington Post he believed al Qaeda was on the run, a self-proclaimed spokesman for the organisation set up by Osama bin Laden was warning the London-based Arabic weekly, Al-Majalla, that al Qaeda had in fact undergone a thorough restructuring and was planning further spectacular attacks against US targets.

Thabet bin Qais, who said he was al Qaeda's new spokesman, claimed that the intelligence on which Black and others were so confidently relying was old and no longer reliable.

"The Americans only have predictions and old intelligence left," he said.

He said his organisation was "way ahead of the Americans and its allies in the intelligence war. American security agencies still are ignorant of the changes the leadership has made."

With a now chilling prediction that referred to a possible suicide attack, he then added: "A strike against America is definitely coming. Martyrdom operations in the jihad will go on."

In the year after September 11, 2001, more than 3000 suspected al Qaeda members around the world were arrested. More recently the leadership has also been attacked.

Osama bin Laden may still be alive, but many of those believed to have senior positions in his organisation have been either captured or killed.

Under interrogation, it was said, these men were providing US intelligence with crucial information that was helping them disrupt planned attacks and round up suspects.

"The nucleus of the al Qaeda leaders was relatively small, and [Mohammed] Atef and [Khalid Sheik] Mohammed were significant losses," one senior US intelligence analyst said recently.

But although the US was having success in disrupting the al Qaeda leadership, there was plenty of other evidence that people with links to the organisation were still more than capable of carrying out attacks, most notably last October, when 202 people were killed in Bali.

Some experts say part of the problem is that Western intelligence has been too quick to visualise al Qaeda as a rigid organisation.

Peter Bergen, a CNN al Qaeda analyst, said yesterday: "I think this action speaks for itself. I mean, you've got US Secretary of State Colin Powell arriving in the country. This attack happened.

"Prince Nayif, the Minister of the Interior, just last week said that al Qaeda was weak or perhaps non-existent in Saudi Arabia. Well, this is their answer."

- INDEPENDENT