The New Age of Terror

Soldiers in the war on terror have learned much since 9/11. So, too, has the enemy. How the London plot was foiled-and where we are in five-year struggle.
Have we learned anything since 9/11? President George W. Bush has apparently learned not to overreact. In the panicky days after the September 11 attacks, the president wanted to see ant scrap of information, no matter how thinly sourced. As a result, raw and unfiltered intelligence gushed into the Oval Office. A few weeks after 9/11, for instance, authorities in Pennsylvania received a frightening tip from an FBI office overseas: terrorist had a nuclear device on a train somewhere between Pittsburg and Philadelphia. The report went a straight to the White House, where the president was anxiously consuming threat traffic like a midlevel CIA analyst. The information, while terrifying, turned out to be bogus. Within a day it had been traced back to a conversation between two men overheard at a urinal in Ukraine.
Characteristically, some time later, Bush made a mordant joke of the scare. “Is this another Ukrainian urinal incident?” he would sarcastically inquire when some alarming but shaky intelligence came across his desk. His briefers learned to screen out the more lurid but unchecked tidbits, like the poison pen or jilted love letters that sometimes arrive at the FBI to falsely accuse a former spouse or boyfriend of conspiring with terrorist. Bush now trust his team to weed out such speculative intelligence, said senior Bush aide. The aide, who declined to be identified discussing the president’s state of mind, implied, perhaps without meaning to, that earlier in his administration the president was warier of intelligence advisers.
Though Bush can still probe the minutiae in intelligence briefings (He’s like a street cop, say Rep. Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the House), the president took fairly hands-off approach to the biggest terror investigation since 9/11. Over the past several months, although British intelligence was closely tracking a plot to blow up as many as 10 airliners headed toward United States from Britain, Bush was kept only loosely in the loop. At a briefing on August.3, he was basically told,” This is happening and you should know about it, but we don’t have a lot of details yet,’ said a senior White House aide who asked to remain anonymous discussing intelligence briefings. The next day, the president was given a fuller picture. On Sunday, August. 6, Bush spent 45 minutes talking to British Prime Minister Tony Blair about timing-when to alert the airlines?-but he was informed of the impending arrest only they were about to happen. At the time. He was at his Texas ranch, building a dock on the lake and riding his bike. While British intel was closing in on the alleged plotters, Bush was egging his junior aides to join the “100 Degree Club,” an annual run in the scorching heat. Bush, who has quit jogging because of bad knees, rides a bike around his panting staffers, shouting, “Keep going! You can do it!”.
Five years after 9/11, The President’s advisers say they have learned a great deal about how to fight a war on terror, and they are no doubt correct. Bush was right to step back and to let his intelligence officials do their jobs. Before 9/11, America and its allies had few, if any, spies capable of penetrating jihadist cells. Although U.S. officials knocked down press reports that the Brits were able to plan a mole inside the plot, they do say that British intelligence had help-presumably one tip and maybe more-from Britain’s large and disaffected Muslim community. And although rival intelligence agencies at home and abroad still sometimes squabble and spar (and deny and deceive), they also cooperate better than they did Al Qaeda became a truly menace. “Everything flowed and worked as it needed to,” said the Senior Bush aide. “That’s what made this a seamless operation, from start to finish.”
Unfortunately, the enemy has also learned much in this new age of terror. No matter how often the United States or its allies capture a high-value-target- a top Al Qaeda leader- a new one seems to emerge as the shadowy terror network metastasizes. It is unclear if Al Qaeda Central, a hierarchical command structure, still exerts authority, but it may no matter: with the internet and fanatical inspiration, Al Qaeda can morph and spread. The new jihadists learn from the experiments and mistakes of their predecessors. The most recent bombing against radical Islam. A plot was foiled. But a look back at recent history shows how the terrorists can turn old plots into new ones.
Back before there was a war on terror, U.S. intelligence officials could not imagine that scale of what they now face. Steven Simon was a White House national-security official who went around the world meeting with counter terror operatives in other countries, or fingernail pullers, as he jokingly called them. He was in the Philippines in the fall of 1994, chatting with some embassy officials, when he became intrigued by the strange case of a Philippines Airlines flight to Japan that had been target of a terrorist bomb over the Pacific. The Pilot had been able to land the damaged plane, but a Japanese businessman had been blown in half by the bomb planted under his seat. Law-enforcement officials couldn’t figure out a motive. The businessman didn’t seem to be the target of an assassination. Only later did Simon realize that the explosion was a test run for something much more ambitious and horrible, and that the business was only the first casualty of what the terrorist hoped would be a steep butcher’s bill.