[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: New Cooperation and New Tensions in Terrorist Hunt

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New Cooperation and New Tensions in Terrorist Hunt

August 17, 2004
 By AMY WALDMAN and ERIC LIPTON 



 

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 16 - Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan
walked into the Lahore International Airport on the morning
of July 13, in search of a package that had been sent to
him by his father in Karachi, some 600 miles away. 

But something other than his package was awaiting him. A
group of Pakistani security officers detained Mr. Khan, a
tall, heavy-set 25-year-old computer engineer, on
suspicions that he was the same elusive operative for Al
Qaeda whom United States intelligence sources had tipped
them off to two months earlier. 

The apprehension of Mr. Khan, in this ancient Punjab city
not far from the Indian border, was wrapped up with almost
no notice; his arrest did not even make the local papers.
But before the end of the month, that single act would have
enormous global repercussions. 

The government's alert level would be raised in the
financial sectors of Washington, New York and Newark,
warning that financial buildings might be the targets of an
attack. Commandos elsewhere in Pakistan, using information
gathered after Mr. Khan's detention, would apprehend one of
the suspected masterminds behind the bombing of two United
States Embassies in East Africa in 1998. And a string of
arrests would be made in Britain, rounding up 13 men who
the authorities there suspected might be terrorists. 

Just how imminent any threat related to Mr. Khan might have
been and how much progress was made in defeating Al Qaeda
as a result of his arrest remains unclear. The
synchronicity of the arrests may have also given the
impression that an organized crime ring has been broken up
on two continents; that too remains unclear. 

But the rush of activity demonstrates the extraordinary
interconnection among international intelligence services
that has surfaced since the Sept. 11 attacks. It also
exposes the awkward and at times clearly testy
antiterrorism partnership between the United States,
Britain and Pakistan - tension that has been so evident in
the past few weeks that the British have suggested that
undisciplined acts by their two partners may have
compromised the ultimate success of the operation and
unnecessarily alarmed the public. 

The British are not alone in expressing some frustration.
One senior American official said last week that the United
States was letting Pakistan and Britain take the first
passes through material from computer records seized in
Pakistan. "It's not going as fast as we would like," the
administration official said. "But the Pakistanis work at a
different pace than we do." 

The differences in how swiftly the distinct intelligence
services have gathered and analyzed the data and whether
details are then shared with the public are examples of the
varying tactical styles that the United States, Britain and
Pakistan have shown as they work together to dismantle the
Qaeda terrorist network. 

A Collaborative Hunt 

It was back in May that Pakistani officials received from
their American counterparts a somewhat murky tip that would
eventually lead them to the Lahore Airport and the arrest
of Mr. Kahn. 

There was a man, Pakistani officials said they were told by
their American counterparts, who represented the "new Al
Qaeda." He spoke Urdu and Arabic, as well as English with a
British accent. He was apparently based in Karachi,
Pakistan's largest city, but he frequently moved to tribal
areas, sometimes driving a motorcycle and at other times a
car. And he was believed to be helping plan some kind of
operation against United States or other Western targets,
perhaps a kidnapping or another relatively modest-scale
attack. Officials, however, did not know the man's name. 

Mr. Khan, at least superficially, offered no obvious hints
that he might have been that man. He was raised in a
professional middle-class family and had studied at a
respected engineering university in Karachi. Two years ago,
he traveled to London to take a course at City University
in human resource management. His father works as the
senior purser for state-owned Pakistan International
Airlines; his mother is an assistant professor of botany at
St. Joseph College in Karachi. 

There have been conflicting reports from Pakistan about how
investigators ultimately tracked down Mr. Khan, finding at
first his family and then the suspect himself. 

"Three years ago, you wouldn't have believed that we could
have this kind of cooperation from Pakistan on
counterterrorism," Frances Fragos Townsend, President
Bush's homeland security adviser, said in an interview on
Fox News in the weeks after Mr. Khan's arrest. "They were
not our strongest partners, and now they really have come
around." 

The description of Pakistan's new spirit of cooperation has
been voiced broadly across the Bush administration and has
been backed up with both money and military and espionage
equipment. But it remains a delicate relationship; the
United States has not sold the Pakistanis the additional
F-16 fighter jets it had promised and the Pakistanis have
not allowed the Americans to directly interrogate Abdul
Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program,
who has acknowledged that he shared nuclear technology with
Iran, North Korea and Libya. 

Two assassination attempts against Pakistan's president,
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, last year may have also played a
role in that country's cooperation with the United States.
"Those Al Qaeda attempts focused Musharraf's mind," a
senior administration official said. "He understands that
Al Qaeda is coming straight at him. So we've got a common
interest here." 

Key to Qaeda Transmissions 

Even before this summer, the collaboration had produced
some major gains: the apprehension in March 2003 of Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of the Sept. 11
attacks, as well as two other major Qaeda leaders, Abu
Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Muhammad Khan, the
arrested computer engineer, is not in this league. But only
after his arrest on July 13 would investigators learn that
he had been part of an apparent terror plot that reached
far beyond Pakistan. 

Mr. Khan, investigators say, was at the center of a complex
communications network in which he would take messages from
Qaeda operatives he had met in the tribal areas of
northwestern Pakistan and send them on in coded e-mail
messages or in a covert way on the Internet. This window
into how Al Qaeda communicates inside a global network may
prove to be one of the most important outcomes of his
capture. 

And ultimately, investigators say, the computer and other
equipment seized when Mr. Kahn was arrested held something
else critically important: the highly detailed information
about the surveillance of financial buildings in
Washington, New York and Newark. 

Yet it was still the middle of July. And before they would
find those surveillance details, investigators said, they
would need to figure out a way to get access to the heavily
protected and encrypted computer files. 

Local police officers and commandos wearing T-shirts
labeled "No Fear" surrounded a two-story house in Gujarat-a
city 110 miles southeast of the Pakistani capital,
Islamabad-on the night of July 24, 11 days after the arrest
of Mr. Khan. Gunfire soon erupted, echoing through the
darkness. 

The siege, recorded on a private television station,
ARY-One World, had none of the bravado of a Hollywood
takedown: a shot would be fired, long periods would pass
with no action, and then perhaps a shot would be fired
back. 

But when it was over, officials said, Pakistani forces,
relying on information received from Mr. Khan and other
sources, had tracked down what they said was a star target:
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. News of the surveillance
information that apparently was in Mr. Khan's computer
still had not broken. But already the investigation was
expanding. 

Mr. Ghailani, a native of Tanzania, had long been listed by
the United States government as one of its 25 most wanted
international terrorists. He was indicted six years ago for
the central role United States officials say he played in
the bombings in August 1998 of the United States Embassies
in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, which
killed more than 200 people. 

He is believed to have spent most of his years on the run
in West Africa, working with rogue nations like Liberia to
help Al Qaeda secure a lucrative piece of the diamond
trade, according to a report by the United Nations. 

When the gun battle ended, investigators took Mr. Ghailani
into custody, along with weapons, foreign currency, two
laptop computers and computer discs that suspects had
unsuccessfully tried to destroy. 

His arrest would be announced at midnight in Pakistan on
July 29. But so far, this still was a relatively
low-profile case. 

It was not until investigators found the surveillance
information in the computer equipment recovered earlier in
the month that the isolated arrests became an international
incident. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge called a
news conference on Sunday, Aug. 1. 

"We do have new and unusually specific information about
where Al Qaeda would like to attack," Mr. Ridge said, in
announcing that the alert status for the financial sectors
in New York, Washington and northern New Jersey was being
elevated. "The reports that have led to this alert are the
result of offensive intelligence and military operations
overseas, as well as strong partnerships with our allies
around the world, such as Pakistan." 

The New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup in Manhattan,
Prudential's headquarters in Newark and the headquarters
buildings of the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank in Washington would immediately be surrounded with
armed security and other new antiterror measures. 

Much of the focus of news reports about the threat would be
on how Mr. Ridge and others failed to emphasize that the
information recovered from the computers in Pakistan was,
in most cases, at least three years old. The administration
defended elevating the alert status, offering more details
about what led to the decision. 

"There were multiple reporting streams that came together
in such a way that gave us grave concern," Ms. Townsend
said at a White House news briefing on Aug. 2. 

There were also repeated statements by senior officials in
Washington and Pakistan saying that regardless of how old
the information was, a strike in the United States might
still be imminent, that it was perhaps part of a plan to
attack before the Nov. 2 election. 

"Much of the information in the market is raw," a senior
Pakistani intelligence official said, adding that both
Pakistani and American intelligence officials were under
pressure to produce results. 

What this means, he said, is that unsorted and unanalyzed
intelligence sometimes now reaches the public domain after
a remarkably short time in the classified realm. It was
just this trend that was about to start evoking complaints
from Britain. 

A 13-Suspect Sweep 

In a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of northwest
London called Willesden, a caravan of cars pulled up to a
two-story apartment building, and officers with automatic
weapons drawn spilled out, smashing their way into the
building and rounding up several men, witnesses said. 

Several blocks away, another man sought by the authorities
tried to elude capture by ducking into the Golden Touch
Barber and Beauty Salon, which sits among takeout chicken
restaurants and betting shops on a busy two-lane main road
through Willesden. 

"He's a very dangerous man," a police officer told
Stephanie Walker, who witnessed the arrival of the officers
at the salon. 

It was midday on Aug. 3, and the police in Britain were
moving quickly to detain 13 terror suspects, all in one
swoop. 

Among the men arrested that day would be a Qaeda operative
named Issa al-Hindi, who had apparently been sent to New
York three years ago to scope out possible targets on
American soil. Mr. Hindi, along with an explosives expert,
had visited Mr. Khan in Lahore back in March 2004 for some
kind of a strategy session, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, a
Pakistani government spokesman, said in an interview on
Monday, citing Mr. Khan as the source for the details about
the secret gathering. 

But the exact connection between Mr. Khan and Mr. Hindi
remains difficult to decipher, as there have been differing
reports from different sources - a common occurrence in the
entire affair - as to where and with whom the two might
have met, or whether they have met at all in person. 

How details of the arrests emerged in the United States and
in Britain illustrates that despite the cooperation between
the countries' intelligence services, tensions remain. In
Britain, the police would not confirm Mr. Hindi's name,
saying little more in an official release than that the
arrests were "part of a preplanned, on-going intelligence
operation" and that the 13 suspects were involved in the
"commission, preparation or instigation of acts of
terrorism." 

As for the timing of the arrests, British officials hinted
that they were concerned that the investigation might be
compromised by the flurry of news reports about the
heightened alert in the United States and the details about
the life and activities of Mr. Khan. 

The release of Mr. Khan's name - it was made public in The
New York Times on Aug. 2, citing Pakistani intelligence
sources - drew criticism by some politicians, like Senator
Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who charged that
this leak might have compromised the search in Britain and
Pakistan for Mr. Khan's Qaeda partners. (No officials in
Britain, Pakistan or the United States have told The Times
on the record that identifying Mr. Khan had such an
impact). 

It was American officials, meanwhile, who released Mr.
Hindi's name, details about his possible connection to Mr.
Khan and information on his suspected role as the leader of
a three-man team that surveyed the New York Stock Exchange
and other buildings in New York. 

"It's a big moment; and it's also very visible, and that's
okay," Ms. Townsend, the homeland security adviser to
President Bush, said in the Aug. 8 interview on Fox News.
"People ought to feel good about the fact. What we're
seeing now are the dividends based on the president's
counterterrorism policies." 

The same day Ms. Townsend and other Bush administration
officials were on television heralding progress that had
been made in American antiterrorism efforts, David
Blunkett, who as home secretary in Britain serves as one of
the country's top antiterrorism experts, was emphasizing
his very different approach to making public comments about
the Qaeda threat. 

"I could have appeared a dozen times last week on radio and
television, but I turned down the offers," he wrote in a
commentary piece published in The Observer in Britain. "I
would have merely added to the speculation, to the hype, to
the desire for something to say for its own sake. In other
words, to feed the news frenzy in a slack news period. 

"Is that really the job of a senior cabinet minister in
charge of counterterrorism? To feed the media? To increase
concern? To have something to say, whatever it is, in order
to satisfy the insatiable desire to hear somebody saying
something? Of course not. This is arrant nonsense." 

Amy Waldman reported from Islamabad for this article and
Eric Lipton from Washington. Patrick E. Tyler and Richard
A. Oppel Jr. contributed reportingfrom London. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/international/asia/17terror.html?ex=1093766311&ei=1&en=3753d3cbdc6f6733


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