At the Crossroads of Terror

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Courtesy CIA

Signs point the way within the Counter-terrorism Center's maze of offices

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The biggest prize the CTC has captured since Sept. 11 has been Abu Zubaydah, bin Laden's chief of operations and recruiting. At the beginning of the year, the CTC formed a special Abu Zubaydah Task Force, manned with 100 covert operatives, CIA analysts, technicians and even agency rookies who had agreed to interrupt their spy training to mine data banks. Working around the clock for six weeks, sifting through thousands of agent reports, spy-satellite photos and signal intercepts, the task force finally pinpointed the 31-year-old Saudi-born Palestinian in a villa near Faisalabad, Pakistan. On the evening of March 27, Tenet and as many of the task-force members as could fit into the ground-floor conference room crowded around speakerphones that were patched into a team of CIA, FBI and Pakistani intelligence agents raiding the villa.

When the agents finally reported back that Abu Zubaydah had been captured in a gun battle, wounded but still alive, only quiet smiles went around the room. Everyone was too exhausted from the ordeal to cheer. Besides, there was no time for celebration. The approximately 10,000 pages of documents seized in the villa had to be translated quickly and analyzed. An interrogation team had to be organized for Abu Zubaydah, who when he had healed began giving CIA and FBI agents tantalizing hints of future strikes.

More than 2,000 al-Qaeda suspects have been arrested around the world, many because of tips the center fed to foreign police. A country-by-country scorecard is kept of the people nabbed, and periodically a chart of top al-Qaeda operatives is sent to Bush, color-coded to highlight the ones put out of action. So far, 10 of the 24 men the CIA considers bin Laden's senior lieutenants are dead or in custody. Pakistani forces, with the help of intelligence from the center, last week raided an al-Qaeda hideout near the Afghan border. The four-hour gun battle killed 10 Pakistani soldiers and at least two al-Qaeda fighters. The CTC has assembled a task force to try to find bin Laden's other top aide, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who the agency believes is still alive and on the run.

The final prize, of course, is bin Laden, who the CIA thinks is hiding along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Since 1995, the center has had a special station devoted to bin Laden, made up of more than 50 CIA officers who have studied everything they could find on the man. Even though his top command has been cut almost in half, the CTC's officers know that bin Laden remains a powerful enemy. His 14 senior lieutenants still at large are on the run, but according to the CIA, they are plotting and sending out orders to a terrorism network that may still number in the thousands. The CTC, fearful of another strike around the July 4 holiday, is "on a heightened state of alert," says Bernazzani. Its members live each day worried that the next attack will come tomorrow.

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