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| Terror Networks |
| Al-Qaeda's pre-election plot |
| 2004-08-08 |
| It's called the president's Daily Threat Report (PDTR), or, in bureaucratic shorthand, the Putter. The document is so secret that only about a half-dozen people in the U.S. government are allowed to see it. When the Putter contains especially sensitive information, a red stripe runs down the side. At 6:40 a.m. on Friday, July 30, Fran Townsend, the president's homeland-security adviser and counterterror chief for the national-security staff, opened up her red-striped Putter and received a jolt. For several months, the U.S. government had been picking up reports from its spies, electronic intercepts and "liaison services" (friendly intelligence services) of a Qaeda plot to strike the American homeland before the November election. High-level Qaeda operatives had been traveling from around the world to the outlaw wilds along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, apparently to meet and plan, NEWSWEEK has learned. These terror summits had an uncanny resemblance to the Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 that firmed up the 9/11 plot. But no one seemed to know the essential details: What were the targets? When would Al Qaeda strike? And were the attackers already in the United States? The Friday-morning Putter revealed that an undercover operation on the far side of the world was starting to bear fruit. In mid-July, the Pakistanis, working with the CIA, had arrested a Qaeda operative named Mohammed Neem Noor Khan and "flipped" him—turned him into an undercover agent who could lead investigators right into the Qaeda network. The 25-year-old computer engineer was a Qaeda facilitator, a midlevel logistics man who knew and communicated with the top operatives meeting to plan an attack on the United States. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Townsend recalled thinking, "This is the real deal"—a chance to crack the plot. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |