If Osama bin Laden is killed or captured, the effectiveness of the terrorist network he heads will be reduced, but the network will not cease functioning, two senior FBI officials told a Senate subcommittee yesterday.
"We need to go beyond Osama bin Laden," J.T. Caruso, acting assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, told the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on international operations and terrorism.
Caruso predicted that the loss of bin Laden and the elimination of terrorist bases in Afghanistan would reduce the ability of the al Qaeda network to commit "horrific acts" by 30 percent. "That still means 70 percent" of the organization's capabilities for terror will remain intact, he warned the senators.
"It is too early to tell, from a law enforcement perspective, how the current military campaign in Afghanistan will affect al Qaeda and its ability to operate in the future," Caruso added.
If bin Laden had vanished five years ago, the story might be different, said Thomas Wilshere, deputy chief of the FBI's international terrorism operational section. In that time, Wilshere said, al Qaeda has built a "critical mass" of several hundred "hard core" operatives capable of carrying out major acts of terrorism around the world. In addition, he said, the network can count on support from thousands of people who "graduated" from its training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan during the 1990s.
Asked by Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) what the impact of bin Laden's death would be, Caruso answered, "We'll see a stuttering, but whether there will be a pause, we don't know."
"I don't believe there will be a VJ Day," he added, referring to the day that World War II ended. "It is one thing to disrupt an organization such as al Qaeda. It is another to totally dismantle and destroy it."
Wilshere, who has questioned several al Qaeda members, including some who testified as government witnesses in federal trials this year, said they described bin Laden as extraordinarily charismatic. In contrast to the image of a man smiling with pleasure on a recent videotape as he recalled the World Trade Center attack, Wilshere said bin Laden was viewed by followers as "humble and down in the dirt with his troops, putting himself in the line of fire."
Since 1996, when bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan and set up headquarters there, roughly 15,000 Islamic recruits have gone through his terrorist training camps, according to a senior intelligence official.
But only a small percentage of them formally became al Qaeda members by signing an agreement called a bayat in Arabic, Wilshere said. With that oath of allegiance, a person swears "to agree about the jihad, listen to the emir [bin Laden] . . . and do whatever work they ask you" to do, Jamal Ahmed Mohamed al-Fadl, a former al Qaeda member, testified during a trial in New York this year of participants in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who became a government witness after being convicted in April of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, said in court that his fellow students in al Qaeda's training camps in 1998 came from Algeria, France, Germany, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Turkey, Yemen and Russia's breakaway Chechnya region.
In his time, Ressam added, the trainees were gathered in national groups. His Algerian cell included four other persons who moved to Europe under the control of an "emir" with connections back to two al Qaeda trainers, one in Pakistan and the other in Europe. In Ressam's case, the cell decided independently on its target, which was to be a bombing inside the United States at the time of the millennium celebrations.
"There are conflicting thoughts on how much autonomy the cells had then, or have now," according to a senior administration official said. Both the bin Laden videotape and the embassy bombing trial, he noted, showed that planning for major al Qaeda operations can take years.