Special Analysis: A Window Into al-Qaeda

Back during the Cold War, the rule with intelligence was, "If it's sensational, don't believe it." Of course, back then we were fighting something resembling a rational enemy, whereas these days it seems like we're reliving the plots of far too many bad novels. I've got half a mind to recommend that they open up US intelligence to all of these comic book geeks who keep track of every detail of their favorite characters online. They, at least, could remember all of these damned names.

- Former senior US intelligence official in conversation to me, circa July 2004

As some of you already know, last weekend I was at a counter-terrorism conference in New York City at the behest of my patrons, who were nice enough to fly me out there and for the purposes of me posting on the Internet would prefer to remain anonymous, if for nothing else than so they can plausibly deny everything they say ;) I've also been finishing finals and watching the extended edition of The Return of the King, so I apologize in advance for the number of Tolkien references that are likely to be used here.

The conference's attendees included a wide variety of law enforcement, intelligence, military or former military, and think tank types from pretty much across the ideological spectrum and I learned a great deal both from the presentations and in conversation. None of the information that was shared at the conference was classified or anything like that, and I have my own doubts (and in some cases extreme disagreement) about some of what was said. Still, I figure that this may all be valuable to you, perhaps because it runs against some of what I have argued.

• Al-Qaeda Command & Control
• Al-Qaeda Training Facilities & Infrastructure
• Al-Qaeda in General
• Iraq and al-Qaeda
• Iran & al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda Command and Control

• Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are still #1, Abu Faraj al-Libi has taken over from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the global operations chief, and Saif al-Adel is the grand strategist. All of the top four have a limited command and control due to a variety of constraints so a lot of the impetus for the attacks have been shifted to lesser lieutenants, but they're still at the top of the pyramid and the US most wanted list.

• There's been a solid string of captured couriers with audio casettes or letters from bin Laden to his subordinates and senior lieutenants since roughly August 2002, nearly all of which have been intercepted coming out of the Afghan-Pakistan border region. Recent information recovered from Fallujah has led US intelligence to believe that bin Laden is also in touch with Zarqawi through electronic means, though I have no idea as to exactly how.

• Claims that Zarqawi was at one point a rival to bin Laden are based on more than just Shadi Abdallah's interrogations in Germany but are instead one possible view of a variety of data, including how Zarqawi interacted with senior al-Qaeda members post-Afghanistan and electronic surveillance of both him and his top lieutenants in al-Tawhid wal Jihad. Another possible view of this intel is the official position of the US government, i.e. that he's a senior al-Qaeda associate in the mold of somebody like Hambali. Pretty much an academic debate now, as the most recent intel indicates that his group has folded directly into those of the al-Qaeda fighters who were already in Iraq.

• Abu Khabab, al-Qaeda's top WMD expert, has only chemical rather than biological warfare expertise. We are very fortunate on this point, though he and every body who went through Darunta camp (which he has attempted to create a successor camp to on at least 2 occasions) with him should probably be rounded up on general principle.

• There's still a lot of disagreement in the international intel community as far as how much control the al-Qaeda leadership actually has over the 40 or so groups that operate under its aegis, whether the al-Qaeda leadership = the militant Islamist internationale leadership, whether al-Qaeda is more a movement or ideology or brand name than it is an organization these days, etc. The US, Russia, and India, usually favor the broad definitions of al-Qaeda, while the Europeans tend to try to be nuanced in this regard, though France and Italy are shifting more and more away from that direction.

• The Shura Majlis has been expanded to encompass leaders of the Algerian GSPC, Islamic Army of Aden in Yemen, and a number of other affiliate organizations in an effort to shore up the group's global cadres using local or regional groups. I myself am kind of interested as far as why the GSPC was tapped ahead of the Chechens or JI, but this is apparently far more of a racial thing than anything else.

• Bin Laden's pre-election videotape was an odd beast and continues to raise all kinds of questions as to why he broke cover when he did after more than 2 years of maintaining a deliberate level of ambiguity in many of his statements as to whether he was dead or alive.

Al-Qaeda Training Facilities and Infrastructure

• Is now organized along regional node form, with most of the training infrastructure being run out of Georgia, Pakistan, Somalia, and Mindanao in the southern Philippines.

• Georgia infrastructure has been heavily eroded since the fall of the Shevardnadze government, though isolated pockets of al-Qaeda activity remain due to corruption or lack of central government control. Most of the senior Chechen Islamist leadership (Basayev's Killer Korps) is now on the run due to the Russians launching Operation Vengeance, a concerted effort to eliminate all of the key enablers of what happened in Beslan, a la Israel's response to Black September.

• Areas of the Northwest Frontier Province, Baluchistan, and Azad Kashmir have become de facto havens for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hizb-e-Islami. There's a lot of internal Pakistani politicking that severely hampers the fight against al-Qaeda. The US consensus is that Musharraf is doing everything he can against the international terrorists, but is being far more reserved about acting against local or regional groups like the Taliban or Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). LeT has been basically subcontracted by al-Qaeda to run its infrastructure, propaganda, and recruiting efforts in South Asia while the central leadership remains underground. It's the whole attempt to distinguish between good/bad jihadi groups that is going to bite Musharraf in the ass sooner or later, but for now that's likely to be the Pakistani policy for the immediate future. Binori Town is still more or less al-Qaeda's officer training school and the insurgency in southern Thailand is the work of some of the most recent alumni. The main reason that al-Qaeda hasn't been more successful to date at subverting the Pakistani state or killing Musharraf is due to a mixture of incompetence, factional rivalries, and corruption among the local jihadi groups and political parties that al-Qaeda leaders such as al-Zawahiri seek to enlist as their foot soldiers.

• Somalia continues to be a complete hell-hole and as such is an ideal al-Qaeda haven. Ethiopian and US troops based in Djibouti have conducted military operations there since 9/11, but there is very little solid intel about al-Qaeda's activities except that they're there and are reasonably well established. Al-Ittihad al-Islamiyyah also isn't the only al-Qaeda affiliate active in Somalia, though it is one of the best organized. The group also has a whole network of regional, tribal, and marital alliances with a number of the local strongmen to help protect them in the event of a US invasion.

• In Philippine Mindanao, the Arroyo government is restrained due to domestic political constraints from acting against the MILF training camps that form the bulk of JI's training infrastructure. MILF relies on JI for both ideological and strategic reasons and membership in the two organizations often overlaps between one another, Abu Sayyaf, and even the kidnapping cartels Abu Sofia and the Pentagon Gang. The Philippines are becoming a regional problem - as long as those camps remain open to JI, they will always be able to rebuild its terrorist infrastructure no matter how much other regional governments do to restrain them.

• Attempts to reconstitute al-Qaeda bases in the Sahel region of North Africa are regarded as having been thwarted by the US-backed success of regional governments against the GSPC. Most African governments are only too thrilled to have America offer to train their armies for them and it has paid off in spades from our perspective. More worrisome is the rise of al-Qaeda activity among several of the ethnic groups in northern Nigeria, which the US has so far been unable to counter.

Al-Qaeda in General

• Al-Qaeda recruiting in Europe in particular has sky-rocketed since first 3/11 and then the Filippino withdrawl from Iraq, even more so than actually during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The main reason for this is that the group is now seen as having evicted at least two "Crusader states" from Iraq and as such is perceived among its "soft" sympathizers to have the momentum with it. Increasingly pessimistic Western commentary on the situation has also led many of these same "soft" supporters to believe that very soon the organization can defeat the US inside Iraq, thereby leading to the nucleus for the eventual restoration of the Caliphate in the Middle East. Second generation Muslim immigrants without any exposure to Islamist violence in the Middle East are far more likely to hold to extremely romanticized notions about al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism in general, as they have no real clue about what these guys do in the process of setting up their little utopia.

• The core of the 3/11 cell was made up of seasoned al-Qaeda leaders like Amer Azizi, Serhane bin Abdelmajid Fakhet, Jamal Zougam, Adnan Waki, and the grand boss of the whole plot Rabei Osman Sayyid Ahmed, but most of the cannon fodder were recruited from among the European immigrant community and told only what they needed to know to carry out the attack. This kind of local autonomy and organization meant that there was no chatter or forewarning from outside of Spain prior to attacks, which is one of the reasons why the Spanish initially suspected ETA as the culprit. A number of the Moroccan 3/11 plotters, Zougam among them, were also involved in the Casablanca bombings and had to flee from Morocco into Europe when King Mohammed decided to clean house.

• Spain may have given al-Qaeda their first victory, but Garzon, Spain's top anti-terrorism judge, is an apolitical kind of guy [Hispalibertas.com says: political] and hasn't let up on the fight against the organization. This apparently led to a plan by the remnants of the cell that carried out 3/11 to off him and destroy all the information he had on the group by staging a massive bombing of the national courthouse. I hope he has somebody starting his car every morning.

• The better al-Qaeda is perceived to be doing abroad, the more unrest Europe is likely to experience among its own Muslim populations at home. This unrest can be seen in such things as the assassination campaign that was intended to be initiated with the killing of Theo Van Gogh. For a variety of reasons, a majority of the estimated 1,000 members of the cell that were involved in the assassination campaign have yet to be arrested or even questioned by the Dutch authorities, in many cases due to political reasons that to be quite honest struck many of us at the conference as some kind of insane worship of Political Correctness above all else. Then again, there were upwards of 100 unindicted co-conspirators in the first World Trade Center bombing, and many of them are still active in our society at various levels.

• Al-Qaeda activity in the Carribean and Latin America appears, at least for right now, to be limited to Trinidad and Tobago, Margarita Island, and the Tri-Border Area and mostly financial rather than operational in nature. As it now stands, reports of the al-Qaeda/Mara Salvatrucha alliance are being discounted by US intelligence because of who the sources are.

• One of the things we're very fortunate about is that al-Qaeda is not quite as unified as media coverage or the group's own propaganda would lead one to believe - they can be divided. This is going to be quite important in the future as there is now a new branch to the organization - the al-Douri branch, led by none other than former Iraqi vice Revolutionary Command Council chairman Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri.

• Al-Qaeda does have at least some kind of weaponized chemical capacity for cyanide and maybe mustard or sarin gas. All of the Darunta camp alumni were taught how to create at least the first of these, which is what Zarqawi was planning on using in Jordan (whether or not the method of dispersal was feasible or not is a matter of debate within the intelligence community - a lot of people are of the opinion that the blast used to destroy the Jordanian targets would have taken the cyanide along with it). Abu Khabab has worked on VX in the past, but he doesn't seem to have gotten very far. Among the poisons in the group's arsenal are ricin, arsine, phosgene, botulinum, and alfatoxin. The next round of al-Qaeda attacks on the US are likely to include at least some kind of chemical element to them.

• Al-Qaeda's alliance with al-Douri's Baathists has enabled them to enlist former Baathist scientists to their cause for the purposes assisting them in refining their chemical weapons capacity. Recent discoveries in Fallujah have indicated that the al-Qaeda/al-Tawhid insurgent forces as well as the Iraqi Jaish Mohammed (which, while composed largely of Baathists, has a number of Saudi al-Qaeda members acting as senior leaders of the organization), the latter of which has been the most ambitious in seeking to develop an offensive chemical weapons capacity.

• Adnan al-Shukrijumah remains the most dangerous and immediate threat to the US in the near future. He has also sought to accquire radioactive material from Canada at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's behest (KSM was apparently the driver behind the whole radiological weapon idea) but has shifted back towards a more conventional means of attack, perhaps involving truck bombs. There are also a small number of American nationals believed to be currently serving in al-Qaeda.

• The surveillance data found on Khan's computer was extremely sophisticated to the point where there are some suspicions that at least some of this had to have come about through the aid of a foreign intelligence agency. Iran is at the top of that list of suspects, as VEVAK operatives operating under diplomatic cover have been busted on multiple occasions in NYC as early as January, but this is purely speculative.

• Everyone at the conference seemed extremely confident that we had thwarted a pre-election terrorist plot of some kind. No clue what, when, or how and Shukrijumah unfortunately remains in circulation.

Iraq/al-Qaeda

• Pre-war intelligence debate is still in the spin phase between neocons and their opponents; we won't know the truth for years about what intel was accurate, etc. The administration seems to have won the political battle on Capitol Hill with respect to the SSIC report, which cleared them of most egregious charges. Unfortunately, these charges are still being repeated uncritically by a press corps that feels they were used and abused by the administration to push the war, but at the same time lost the public relations fight. A lot of people were fed up with all of the politics, since the end-result has been to make the average individual who pays attention to this stuff extremely cynical or else view any and all news out of Iraq through a strictly partisan lens. It's unfortunate, because foreign policy positions are not (or shouldn't be) nearly as much of a right/left issue.

• As a result of the ongoing intrigue in DC, the average American who pays attention to this stuff is more or less in the same position as an intelligence analyst, but without the benefits. There's a lot of contradictory information floating around, most of it being leaked deliberately by people with an agenda to manipulate public perceptions. None of this would have been stopped had Kerry been elected, the sides would have just flipped. It's agenda rather than partisan-based, or so I am given to understand. I was told that the folks doing the leaking are taking the majority of Americans for fools as they seek to accomplish their agenda - perhaps they've never heard of the blogosphere.

• Nobody wanted to talk about what they knew about Zarqawi pre-war, except to confirm that he was in Baghdad and staying at the Olympic Hospital. That gem, like a number of other points of information, comes from the Jordanians rather than Chalabi, so all those blaming the INC for all the pre-war Iraq/al-Qaeda stuff are barking up the wrong tree. The INC's big selling point on that was apparently Salman Pak, though I'd be interested if anybody could confirm that much to me.

• The whole issue of foreign fighters, as I think I've noted before, is a lot more complex than most of the punditocracy likes to point out. These guys don't volunteer themselves upon capture and while there are linguistic differences in the Arabic that one can discern, it isn't as easy as it sounds to sort these guys out from the rest of the cannon fodder. Foreign fighters are also more likely to fight to the death than not, and identification of the enemy dead as Iraqi or foreigner is not exactly a top US priority at the moment. To further complicate the matter, there are also a sizeable number of native Iraqis serving in al-Qaeda and related groups and there are little if any differences between the Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish members of Ansar al-Islam. No doubt an anthropologist could better discern the differences between Iraqi and foreign elements of the insurgency, but as I said, body identification is not a top priority for the US at the moment, especially given the number of dead European nationals that such an accounting would turn up as well as for interrogation purposes (i.e. other countries tend to complain if their nationals are imprisoned or killed). As a result, those classified as foreign fighters are in many cases those who can be demonstrably shown to be non-Iraqi, such as possessing foreign identification, a passport, or in some cases such simple things as good dental work.

• The al-Qaeda alliance with the Baathists started up around February and it wasn't just al-Qaeda that made up the foreign fighters. LeT sent jihadis for example, as did the Jordanian and Yemeni branches of the Baathist parties. A lot of the tougher foreign fighters we're dealing with now are those that survived OIF and managed to retreat to the Sunni Triangle and blend in with the locals to continue the fight another day.

• Baathist attitudes towards al-Qaeda seem to have varied post-war, but in general the former military and Saddam Fedayeen were nicer to them than were the mid and higher-level Baathist Party members or the Mukhabarat members. The former saw them as another arrow in their quiver while the latter regarded them as a snake clasped to their chests. The latter's fears increased dramatically after Saddam's capture when sizeable numbers of Baathists started embracing Salafism en masse, with Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri even going as far as to convert to Wahhabism from his former Sufism. This led to an inter-Baathist schism that is still being resolved.

• After the fall of Saddam, a major split developed among the Baathists over who got to be #1 now that their glorious leader was in chains. One group, led by Colonel Hani Abdul Latif al-Tilfah al-Tikriti and commanding the backing of the Special Security Organization, the Tikriti and Majidi tribesmen, and a good chunk of the former Mukhabarat, the other is made up of al-Douri and commands the loyalty of the Special Republican Guard and the Saddam Fedayeen. The split had more to do with power than anything else and is now at a somewhat interesting point, with al-Douri having recently traveled from Mosul to Syria (where the al-Tikriti faction got to hang out in return for recognizing Bashar al-Assad as the biggest, baddest, Baathist around) to reconcile the two Baathist factions under one banner in an effort to derail plans for the new Iraqi elections in January.

• Al-Douri is related to Abu Wael, hence his prior ties to Ansar al-Islam and by extension al-Qaeda. Since both Baathist factions now recognize al-Assad as #1 under the terms of the reconciliation, Iranian aid to Iraqi insurgent groups is apparently being viewed by the Iranians through the context of their pre-existing alliance with Syria against Israel rather than their own hostility towards the Iraqi Baathists. The CIA wants Allawi to negotiate with the al-Tikriti faction as a means of drawing them into the political process and splitting them away from augmenting the already potent al-Douri/Zarqawi alliance.

• MEK isn't the INC, no matter what one thinks of them. They have their own agenda, but also some useful intel. The US and France defanged and detained them in an effort to convince Iran to cough up Saif al-Adel and Co, but that failed in large part due to the Iranian failure to provide any kind of acceptable confirmation that the individuals in question were anything other than under house arrest or that the people in the Iranian government who were offering such a claim would be able to wrest the al-Qaeda leaders away from their hosts in Qods Force.

Iran/al-Qaeda

• Nobody seriously doubts that the al-Qaeda Shura Majlis has reconstituted itself in eastern Iran under the protection of Qods Force, the issue is whether Qods Force is pursuing official Iranian policy or acting out on its own. If the latter, then weakening the central government would be the absolute worst thing for the US to do as it would strengthen the hands of Qods Force. The belief of the pro-engagement types is that engagement with Iran will strengthen the hands of the central government and encourage them to crack down on groups like Qods Force. The argument goes that the new generation of the hardliners, the same ones that are rapidly rising to positions of ascendance in the Iranian hierarchy, are going to be the least likely to compromise on such issues as aiding a group that is kin to the Sipah-e-Sahaba or Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

• On a similar note, some members of al-Qaeda, especially those of South Asian and Saudi origin, tend to be extremely distrustful of the Iranians and Shi'ites in general, whereas the Egyptian members are the most supportive of the alliance and ecumenical in their outlook because of their own assistance from and to the Iranians against their own government back in the 1980s.

• Richard Clarke and Mike Scheuer seem to have dramatically different views of both Iraq/al-Qaeda and Iran/al-Qaeda despite the fact that the two men interacted on a regular basis as (purportedly) apolitical officials. I read through both Against All Enemies and Through Our Enemy's Eyes during the course of the conference and on the basis of those two books, one can get the distinct impression that the Iraq/al-Qaeda relationship is of the utmost importance and the Iran/al-Qaeda relationship only tenuous in nature or vice versa. If there's a way to harmonize how these two men who interacted on a regular basis came to such radically different conclusions on such a regular basis (Scheuer's faux denial notwithstanding), I myself cannot fathom it.

Anyways, hope you guys have found this of value, I may update later today if time allows.