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12/31/01 WSJ Al 12/31/01 Wall St. J.A1 2001 WL-WSJ 29681987

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The Wall Street Journal Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Monday, December 31, 2001 Files Found: A Computer in Kabul Yields a Chilling Array Of al Qaeda Memos Talk of 'Hitting Americans' And Making Nerve Gas; Spats Over Salaries, Rent

The computer files don't appear to detail the plotting of Sept. 11 or to contain any clear plans for future attacks. But hundreds of documents, ranging from the murderous to the mundane, illuminate issues bearing on America's war on terrorism. Among them:

A Guide to "The Company' By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

-- Files outlining al Qaeda efforts to launch a program of chemical and biological weapons, codenamed al Zabadi, Arabic for curdled milk. As part of the plan to develop a "home-brew nerve gas," members were given a long reading list that included a study titled "Current Concepts: Napalm."

KABUL, Afghanistan - Last May, someone sat down at an IBM desktop here and typed out a polite letter to a bitter foe of al Qaeda, the anti-Taliban leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. The writer tapped at the computer for 97 minutes, according to its internal record, then printed out the fruit of his labor: a request for an interview with Mr. Massoud, to be conducted by "one of our best journalists, Mr. Karim Touzani."

-- A video file in which Osama bin Laden speaks for 23 minutes, focusing on what he calls America's antiMuslim crusade_and mentioning the Sept. 11 attacks. Another video shows a top al Qaeda cleric and spokesman, Sheikh Abu Gaith, appearing to acknowledge al Qaeda responsibility for the strikes. "God Almighty has enabled our brothers to carry out these strikes," he says, "and make the enemies of God taste what they made our brothers taste."

On Sept. 9, two men posing as journalists, one carrying a passport in the name of Karim Touzani, detonated a hidden bomb as they interviewed Mr. Massoud. The_legendary Afghan commander was mortally wounded. Two days later came the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

~ A letter in which a militant using the name Abu Yaser stresses that "hitting the Americans and Jews is a target of great value and has its rewards in this life and, God willing, the afterlife." The letter as addressed to top al Qaeda lieutenant Ayman alZawahri and the author says he has written to Mr. bin Laden separately.

Now, as al Qaeda, the group blamed for all of those lethal attacks, is uprooted from its Afghan sanctuaries, it is leaving behind cyber-fingerprints. The letter to Mr. Massoud is one of hundreds of text documents and video files in a computer evidently used for four years by al Qaeda chieftains in Kabul. Its hard drive is a repository for correspondence with militant Muslims around the world, portraying al Qaeda bosses struggling to administer, inspire and discipline the sprawling global organization. Dating from early 1997 through this fall, the files paint a picture of both ghoulish ambitions and quotidian frustrations within an organization that, despite its medieval zealotry, sometimes mimicked a multinational corporation. Memos refer to al Qaeda as "the company" and its leadership as "the general management."

— A memo referring to a "legal study" on "the killing of civilians." The writer, acknowledging this is "a sensitive issue," says he has found ways to keep "the enemy" from using the killing of "civilians, specifically women and children," to undermine the militants' cause. How a computer apparently stuffed with al Qaeda secrets came to light involves a combination of happenstance and the opportunism of war in a country schooled for 20 years in conflict and chaos. The -desktop was installed in a two-story brick building in Kabul that was used bv al Oaeda as an office, according to a looter who says he grabbed it and a Compaq laptop from the office. He says he • entered the building, which is now occupied by Northern Alliance soldiers, after a November U.S. bombing raid killed several senior al Qaeda officials

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1/16/02 WSJ Al 1/16/02 Wall St. J. Al 2002 WL-WSJ 3383036

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The Wall Street Journal Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

appointed lawyer, Tamar Birckhead, says she is "not aware of any evidence" linking him to any terrorist group or individual.

Wednesday, January 16, 2002 Terror Tour: How al Qaeda Agent Scouted Attack Sites In Israel and Egypt Account on Kabul Computer Matches Travels of Reid, The Alleged 'Shoe-Bomber' Photographing Tall Buildings By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal KABUL, Afghanistan - Less than a month before hijacked airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, al Qaeda chieftains received a report spelling out "exceptionally good opportunities" for terrorism in Israel and Egypt. Among the suggested targets: tall buildings and planes.

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The report, found on a computer used by Osama bin Laden's lieutenants in the Afghan capital, details a target-scouting mission by an operative who flew from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv on El Al with a "new British passport. After traveling arnnnd TsraeK he went to Egypt by bus and then to_jjrj;Ivj5a' Pakistan by air. The report calls the peripatetic operative "brother Abdul Ra'uff." As it happens, his travels bear a striking similarity to those of Richard Reid, the airline passenger who allegedly tried to set off explosives hidden in his shoe during a trans-Atlantic flight on Dec. 22. Mr. Reid went to the same countries, in the same order, and also got a new passport in Amsterdam just before setting out on El

U.S. intelligence officials, who have reviewed the computer files, believe that "Abdul Ra'uffs" true identity "may well be" Mr. Reid, as one puts it. A senior Israeli intelligence official says Israel is "positive" Mr. Reid had been sent to Israel by al Qaeda to scope out possible targets. Mr. Reid is now in a Massachusetts jail on a charge of interfering with a flight attendant. His court-

Whether Mr. Reid was in fact the scout or the similarity between his activities and "Abdul Ra'uffs" is simply coincidence, the computer file on the scouting mission provides a striking view inside al Qaeda's workings. The lengthy report is among more than 1,750 text and video files on the hard drives of two computers that a looter offered for sale to a Kabul computer merchant. The looter said he got them from an office al Qaeda abandoned as its Taliban protectors were fleeing Kabul in midNovember. A Wall Street Journal reporter acquired them for $1,100. A Dec. 31 Wall Street Journal article described some of these files, including some from 1999 that outlined al Qaeda efforts to build germ and chemical weapons. Other files were protected by passwords and encryption that were much harder to crack, but the Journal has now managed to access some of these as well, and has translated them from Arabic. They contain no clear reference to the Sept. 11 attack in New York and Washington. But the files provide new details about al Qaeda's meticulous planning, its global roster of operatives and its security procedures in the period just before the attack. The contents include: -- A file that names 170 al Qaeda members. A significant portion of the names, say U.S. officials who have examined the computer files, weren't known to law-enforcement and security agencies triaT have long sought to identify bin Laden acolytes. - A report on a planned operation to "gather intelligence about American soldiers who frequent nightclubs" along the U.S.-Canada border and about Israeli diplomatic missions in Canada. It requests information on "obtaining preparatory devices for explosives from inside Canada." — A primer on coding and encryption of documents. Other files outline procedures for transmitting messages via Pakistan.

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7/2/02 WSJ Al 7/2/02 Wall St. J. A1 2002 WL-WSJ 3399560 The Wall Street Journal Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Tuesday, July 2, 2002 Terrorist's Odyssey: Saga of Dr. Zawahri Illuminates Roots Of al Qaeda Terror Secret, Failed Trip to Chechnya Turned Key Plotter's Focus To America and bin Laden Sojourn in a Russian Prison By Andrew Higgins and Alan Cullison DERBENT, Russia — On a winter night five years ago, Ayman al-Zawahri slipped into Russia across a narrow wedge of land between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains. Dr. Zawahri, now America's most wanted man after Osama bin Laden, was on a risky clandestine mission as head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant group that was spattered, battered and nearly bankrupt after years on

His purpose: to scope out Chechnya as a possible sanctuary for his wounded cause. Traveling in a minivan with two confederates, he came equipped with $6,400 in cash, a fake identity as a businessman, a laptop computer, a satellite phone, a fax machine and a small library of medical textbooks. His plans quickly unraveled. After a night of furtive travel, the Egyptian trio ran into a Russian roadblock on the outskirts of this ancient walled city. Police, seeing they had no visas, handed them over to tjie Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet version of the KGB. Dr. Zawahri spent the next six months in a crumbling jail, fretting that the Russians would discover his true'identity and lock him up for years or send him back to Egypt to face likely execution. In the end, his cover held, and he was freed. Still, Dr. Zawahri's brush with disaster, previously known to only a few Islamist chieftains, forced a critical change in his lethal planning. It also set the stage, ultimately, for Sept. 1 1 and the global war now under way between America and terrorists under the banner of al Qaeda. Instead of C h f?hn)"iii the locus of his terrorist plotting. Ajid_Ameiica,_not

Egypt, became the target. The Wall Street Journal has pieced together the story of how this happened from interviews with Islamist activists and investigators, court files and documents contained on an al Qaeda computer found in the Afghan capital of Kabul. It illuminates the evolution, motives and also weaknesses of what is today America's principal enemy. Through apocalyptic violence and a cult of secrecy, Islamic militants torment the West with the specter of a highly disciplined and unshakably united foe. In reality, they have regularly been torn by venomous policy disputes, personal feuds and repeated failures. The Sept. 11 cataclysm both masked and flowed from militant Islam's truest feature: disarray and an inabilitjrto take and hold power in almost any Islamic country since Iran in 1979. Islamists preaching revolution in Egypt and elsewhere were in retreat, not ascendancy. Attacking America, Dr. Zawahri hoped, would reinvigorale~ana unite their cause. His story shows from the inside how the down-on-his-luck Egyptian Jihad leader came to link up with Osama bin Laden and contribute a critical arsenal of terrorist skills and manpower to the cause. Jreed from Russian jail in May 1997, Dr. Zawahri found refuge in Afghanistan, ynkinp his fortunes tq Mr. bin Laden. Egyptian Jihad, previously devoted to the narrow purpose of toppling secular rule in £gypt, became instead the biggest component of al (jaeda and major agent of a global war against America. Dr. Zawahri became Mr. bin Laden's closest confidant and talent scout. "Zawahri was cornered. He had nowhere to go. He joined with bin Laden because he needed protection," says Hani al-Sebai, a former Egyptian Jihad activist who spent time in a Cairo jail with Dr. Zawahri in 1981. Eight months after the Russian fiasco, Dr. Zawahri and Mr. bin Laden annnnncsH an fllljance dedicated to killing Americans, a task they called the "duty of every Muslim." '

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8/2/02 WSJ Al 8/2/02 Wall St. J. Al 2002 WL-WSJ 3402444

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The Wall Street Journal Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

considered the Taliban leader a bumpkin, and their work was stymied by the near-medieval backwardness of the place.

Friday, August 2, 2002 Strained Alliance: Al Qaeda's Sour Days in Afghanistan Fighters Mocked the Place; Taliban, in Turn, Nearly Booted Out bin Laden

"This place is worse than a tomb," wrote a bin Laden associate from Egypt to comrades back home, after checking out Afghanistan. The country, he said in a message stored on a computer found by The Wall Street Journal in Kabul, "is not suitable for work."

A Fateful U.S. Missile Strike By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In April 1998, shortly after Osama bin Laden called on Muslims everywhere to slaughter Americans, a group of senior U.S. officials traveledjo the Afghan capital to try to break the ice with the Saudi exile's Taliban hosts.

The Taliban gave the Americans a brisk tour, showing off a concrete traffic booth from which they had hanged a former Afghan president. Then they drove their visitors past a ragtag honor guard waving rifles to a shabby hall equipped with a multivolume set of Thomas Jefferson's writings. The Taliban were trying, in their way, to please: It was a Friday, the day for public executions and amputations in the football stadium, but on this Friday, the Taliban gave the executioners the day off.

"The whole thing had a certain surreal quality," recalls Karl Inderfurth, who was an assistant secretary of state and part of this first, and last, senior U.S. mission to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The most surreal feature of all, though, remained carefully hidden. Behind a facade of Islamic solidarity presented to the visitors raged a bitter struggle between two standard-bearers of radical Isjam: the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omafana' Mr. bin Laden!

- A relationship that appeared smooth and even symbiotic to the outside world was rent By disillusionment, anger and petty one-upmanship? A country the U.S. considered a terrorists' paradise was, in the view of many of the terrorists who arrived there from other lands, more like a hell: They couldn't trust the locals, the food was bad, they

The Taliban, in turn, grumbled that Mr. bin Laden was arrogant, publicity- seeking and disrespectful. The rift ran so deep that some of his entourage of Arab revolutionaries expected to get booiCd uul uf Afghanistan, as they had been earlier from Suctan. Indeed, by the summer of 1998. according to a former Saudi intelligence chief. Mullah Omar had Mr hjn Laden packing.

But then came the 1998 lethal bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, to which the U.S. replied by raining down cruise missiles on a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan. The retaliation had fateful consequences. It turned Mr, h'" T a^n intr* a figure among Tslamic radicals, made Afghanistan a rallying point for (tefianr? r>f Amprira and shut off Taliban discussion nf p.ypellinp the militants. T^also helped convince Mr. bin Laden that goading America to anger cpnlfl he lp his cause, not hurt it!

Today, thanks to the war in Afghanistan following Sept. 11, Islamist militants have lost their arid haven for training, networking and plotting. U.S. bombs have flattened the Afghan camps that trained fighters for battle in Kashmir, Chechnya and other local conflicts. Yet, in another paradox of American response to terrorist violence, the rout has forced what many Arab militants wanted all along: relocation away from a treacherous backwater. Those targeting the West didn't need shooting ranges so much as access to reliable electronic communications, false documents and the "infidel" countries in their sights. Mr. bin Laden first took refuge in Afghanistan in May 1996, bringing his three wives, 13 children and tfroop of bodyguards after Sudan expelled him. His grotector was a friend from the anti-Soviet struggle of the 1980s, a warlord named ¥ unls Khahs who was

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11/11/02 WSJ Al 11/11/02 Wall St. J.A1 2002 WL-WSJ 3411334

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The Wall Street Journal Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Monday, November 11, 2002 Uploading Terror: How al Qaeda Put Internet in Service Of Global Jihad With Sites in China, Pakistan, A U.K.-Based Web Master Kept 'the Brothers' Abreast Disney and Wildlife Film Clips By Andrew Higgins in London, Karby Leggett in Guangzhou, China, and Alan Cullison in Washington In February 2000, an Egyptian merchant here in the commercial hub of southern China asked a local Internet firm for help in setting up a Web site. After lengthy haggling over the fee, he paid $362 to register a domain name and rent space on a server. Chen Rongbin, a technician at Guangzhou Tianhe Siwei Information Co., and an aide went to the Egyptian's apartment. They couldn't fathom what the client, Sami Ali, was up to. His software and keyboard were all in Arabic. "It just looked like earthworms to us," Mr. Chen says. All he could make out was the site's address: "maalemaljihad.com." Mr. Chen had no idea that meant "Milestones of Holy War." Nor that China, one of the world's most heavily policed societies, had just become a launchpad for the dot-corn dreams - and disappointments — of Osama bin Laden's terror network. In the months that followed, Arab militants in Afghanistan, a radical cleric living on welfare in London, a textile worker in Karachi, Pakistan, and others pitched in, laboring to marry modern technology with the theology of a seventh- century prophet. Their home page, featuring two swords merging to form a winged missile, welcomed visitors to the "special Web site" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a violent group at the core of al Qaeda. A few clicks led to a 45-page justification of "martyrdom operations," jihad jargon for kamikaze terrorism. It explained that killing "infidels" inevitably caused innocent casualties because "it is impossible to kill

them separately." Since the Sept. 11 attacks, radical Islam's use of technology has stirred both scrutiny and fear. The White House has warned that video footage of Mr. bin Laden could hold encrypted messages. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has called for vigilance against hacking into the computers that control vital services. Some experts have wondered if terrorism might even lurk in pornographic Web sites, with instructions embedded in X-rated photos. The Milestones of Holy War site signals much more modest cyber-skills. Al Qaeda operatives struggled with some of the same tech headaches as ordinary people: servers that crashed, outdated software and files that wouldn't open. Their Web venture followed a classic dot-corn trajectory. It began with excitement, faced a cash crunch, had trouble with accountants and ultimately fizzled. But the project also illuminates the elusive contours of al Qaeda's strengths: far-flung outposts of support, a talent for camouflage and a knack for staying in touch using tools both sophisticated and simple. Though driven from Afghanistan, al Qaeda still has many hiding places, many channels of communication and - beasts Mr. bin Laden's senior lieutenant, Egyptian Islamic Jihad chief Ayman alZawahri - many means of attack. Al Qaeda chiefs communicate mainly by courier, say U.S. officials. But their underlings make wide use of computers: sending e-mail, joining chat rooms and surfing the Web to scout out targets and keep up with events. Since late last year, U.S. intelligence agencies have gathered about eight terabytes of data on captured computers, a volume that, if printed out, would make a pile of paper over a mile high. The rise and eventual demise of maalemaljihad.com — pieced together from interviews, registration documents and messages stored on an al Qaeda computer The Wall Street Journal obtained in Kabul -- provides an inside glimpse of this scattered, sometimes fumbling, but highly versatile fraternity. Using Microsoft Front Page and other software, militants in Afghanistan devised graphics and assembled content, packaging hundreds of text, audio and video files for display on the Web. Because of

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12/20/02 WSJ A1 12/20/02 Wall St. J. A1 2002 WL- WSJ 103129360

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The Wall Street Journal Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Friday, December 20, 2002 Friend or Foe: The Story of a Traitor to al Qaeda Murky Loyalties in Yemen Undo the Betrayer, Who Finds Himself Betrayed Ominous Words Before 9/11 By Andrew Higgins and Alan Cullison SANAA, Yemen — Fed up after two decades of Islamist plotting, the veteran Egyptian militant decided to jilt the jihad. In early 1998, he walked into the heavily guarded offices of Yemen's intelligence agency, the Political Security Organization, with a startling proposal: He could help unravel Osama bin Laden's network. — He disclosed the hiding places in Yemen of foreign terrorists, including one who would shortly become Mr. bin Laden's chief lieutenant. He described the extremists' weaponry, security and violent plans for the future. He revealed the locations of al Qaeda encampments in and around Marib, a desert region scattered with ruins of the biblical kingdom of Sheba. But instead of cracking down on the militants, members of Yemen's security service tipped them off. Mr. bin Laden's acolytes grabbed their turncoat, grilled him about his treachery and made plans to send him to Afghanistan to be killed. What should have been a triumph in a shadowy struggle against terrorism became an intelligence coup for the terrorists. Safe in Yemen, they went on to launch a string of attacks there, from the bombing of the USS Cole to an assault on a French oil tanker, the Limburg, this fall. On Nov. 3, more than four years after the warning about camps in Marib, the desert region was targeted for a lethal assault ~ not by the Yemenis but by the Central Intelligence Agency. Monitoring satellitetelephone chit-chat, the CIA tracked two Toyotas carrying suspected al Qaeda members across the desert. An unmanned U.S. spy plane then fired a Hellfire missile that incinerated six people, including Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a Yemeni suspected of helping organize the Cole attack.

The missile strike blew a hole in a diplomatic facade, as well. After Sept. 11, President Bush gave the world a simple choice: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Yemen -- Mr. bin Laden's ancestral homeland - and other hotbeds of Islamist sentiment such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia declared themselves "with us." Their leaders pledged unequivocal support for the struggle against al Qaeda. But within these nations' bureaucracies, not to mention their citizenries, the lines of loyalty are fuzzy. The U.S.-Yemen relationship is unusually delicate today, after the U.S. asked Spain's navy last week to intercept a North Korean ship heading for Yemen and carrying hidden Scuds. Those were the missiles made famous in the Gulf War when Iraq, which was backed by Yemen, lobbed Scuds at Israel. After a tense diplomatic exchange, Washington reluctantly permitted Yemen, which said it was the customer for the Korean Scuds, to take delivery of them. Over the past year, Yemen has detained hundreds of militant suspects, told clerics to purge extremism from education and warned the public of terrorism's cost to its economy. State-run radio broadcasts a skit -ridiculing jihad hotheads. Yet months after Sept. 11, al Qaeda still looked to Yemen as a haven. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a suspected mastermind of the hijack attacks, spoke this spring of plans to regroup in Yemen, according to an al Qaeda operative captured by the U.S. And at Yemen's PSO, officers who monitored extremists when the organization betrayed the informant remained at their posts. Most unsettling of all, transcripts of monitored conversations raise the possibility that a Yemeni security operative knew of the Sept. 11 attacks before they took place. Much mystery surrounds this security officer - first because of indications he was the case officer who betrayed the informant, and second because he has suddenly vanished. His family in Yemen claims Egyptian agents grabbed him. Some Islamists claim the CIA has him now. The CIA, as is its policy, won't comment. An account of divided allegiances within the Yemeni bureaucracy illuminates the muddle hampering the hunt for al Qaeda. It's a story based on

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12/30/02 WSJ A1 12/30/02 Wall St. J. Al 2002WL-WSJ 103129821

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The Wall Street Journal Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Monday, December 30, 2002 Suicide Watch: Al Qaeda Acolyte, One of Many, Vows To Die for the Cause Elusive Agents Like Mr. Yusuf Confound Efforts to Judge Progress in War on Terror Macabre Poems for bin Laden By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Faisal al-Yusuf, a 26year-old computer programmer, had one small son and, by his own account, one big ambition: to slaughter "infidels" on behalf jrf Osama bin Laden. "By the time you receive this will, I will be in the craws of birds, God willing, after performing a martyrdom operation against the land of infidels," he wrote late last year in a suicide note to his wife in Saudi Arabia. "This operation will, God willing, turn the tide for Islam and Muslims." At the time, Mr. Yusuf was in Afghanistan. He had arrived there three months earlier from Saudi Arabia, where he had done programming work for Saudi companies and Islamic charities. By the time he wrote his note, the Taliban regime was crumbling under U.S. bombs and al Qaeda was preparing for the future, mobilizing kamikaze recruits and making plans beyond Afghanistan. Dettgfrte&at his "nomination" for a suicide mission, Mr. Yusuf, writing under a jihad alias, composed a series of macabre poems and asked Mr. bin Laden to read them in public "after I die in the battle against the enemies of religion." One of these said: "Just one push on the trigger and I'm finished, and disfigured is the face of the enemy." Its title: "Going to God." Thirteen months later, Mr. Yusuf has yet to strike. He wasn't among the terrorists who this year blew up themselves - and more than 200 other people - in attacks on a synagogue in Tunisia, U.S. Marines in Kuwait, a nightclub in Indonesia, a French oil tanker off Yemen and, most recently, a hotel in Kenya. All

these occurred in places with large Muslim populations, not in Mr. Yusufs "land of infidels." This suggests that his own attack, apparently targeted at either America or a European country, has either been aborted for some reason or still lies ahead. The Central Intelligence Agency doesn't know where Mr. Yusuf is. Saudi Arabia, too, has nothing to say about his whereabouts. His failure so far to act, although a relief to officials in Washington and Riyadh fearful of yet another Saudi making headlines with terrorist bloodletting, points to a conundrum at the core of the war on terrorism: How can the U.S. gauge victory or defeat against an enemy that often remains unseen until it strikes? It is a question of critical importance as America prepares for a possible new war against Iraq and diverts its military and intelligence resources toward the defeat of Saddam Hussein, a conventional foe with tanks and territory, instead of al Qaeda's invisible legions. Al Qaeda's footsoldiers "are walking time bombs. You only find them when they explode," says Mohsen al-Awaji, a former soil scientist turned Islamist activist who was jailed twice by Saudi authorities in the 1990s for his radical views. America, he says, is "not fighting a country or a government but ghosts." Over the past year, Washington has measured its success against al Qaeda largely by counting the scalps of terrorist chiefs. It has failed to get Mr. bin Laden "dead or alive" as promised by President Bush but has killed or captured many other senior operatives, including a self-declared architect of the Sept. 11 plot and al Qaeda's military chief. President Bush keeps a scorecard with names and pictures, crossing them off as they fall. "We're making good progress. Slowly but surely, we're dismantling the al Qaeda network," he said earlier this month. Perhaps more revealing, however, is the yardstick set by Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants in messages stored on a computer they used in Afghanistan and in statements issued since Sept. 11 through Arab media and the Internet. The internal messages, placed on the computer shortly before U.S.-backed Afghan troops seized Kabul on Nov. 13, 2001, include communications from Mr. bin Laden to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. It couldn't be determined

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