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The headquarters of Prudential Financial Inc. in Newark, N.J., would not seem like an obvious target for terrorists. It is neither a venerated symbol of American capitalism like the New York Stock Exchange building nor an iconic piece of modern architecture like the Citigroup building in midtown Manhattan, which houses America's biggest bank. It looms over a city that was once the very symbol of urban blight in America. On a clear day the more famous spires of Manhattan are visible from Newark, and so too is the empty space in the skyline on the island's southern tip, where once the city's two tallest buildings stood side by side.

As unspectacular as it might seem to most Americans, the Prudential Plaza building is a site of intense interest to Osama bin Laden and his operatives. Beginning in 2000, al-Qaeda operatives inside the U.S. conducted detailed surveillance of the Prudential building, with the apparent intent of destroying it and killing the civilians who work there. They took multiple photographs of the building and observed the parking garage underneath. One report outlined possible methods for carrying out an attack. Written in English, the report noted that it might be difficult to drive trucks or vans into the parking lot.

Black limousines, however, could approach without much trouble. The report proposed acquiring a limo, gutting everything except the front seats and presumably filling it with explosives. It then provided details on the New Jersey Transit rail system and nearby path trains and maps of the network and train timetables—suggesting that instead of deploying a suicide-bomb squad, al-Qaeda may have been exploring ways to escape after pulling off the attack.

Most chilling, the al-Qaeda operatives managed to keep their attack plans a secret from the U.S. government—until July 24 of this year, when a raid begun on the house of an al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan uncovered three laptop computers and 51 data-rich discs. Stored on the computers were 500 photographs of potential targets inside the U.S., minutely detailed analyses of the vulnerabilities to a terrorist attack of several of them and communications among some of the most wanted terrorists in the world. In their volume and specificity, the discs amounted to what a senior U.S. intelligence official calls an unprecedented "treasure trove" of information about al-Qaeda's determination to pull off more catastrophic acts on U.S. soil. The catalog of targets found on the discs is part of what led to a heightened security alert last week at financial institutions in New York City and Washington and induced the latest episode of anxiety among residents of those cities—fear that for some subsided when Bush Administration officials acknowledged that most of the surveillance data on the hard drives were at least three years old.

But there remains plenty of cause for concern. Al-Qaeda has cased targets for years before attacking; preparations for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa began in 1993, for instance.

Intelligence and law-enforcement officials familiar with the material recovered in Pakistan told TIME that the discs revealed far more detailed, wide-ranging and current research and planning by a terrorist group than have so far been made public. Though the surveillance information on the discs was done mostly in 2000 and 2001, one disc contained an updated photo of the Prudential Plaza building that was added to the al-Qaeda file in January of this year.

The discs also detailed the operatives' extensive reconnaissance of the design, construction and layouts of four other sites: the New York Stock Exchange, the Citigroup building and the Washington headquarters of both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The plot's specificity is alarming. A surveillance report noted that the windows behind the six columns at the front of the n.y.s.e. building made it appear "a little fragile," while another concluded that attacking the IMF and the World Bank structures would be "tricky" because of the heavy security surrounding them. The terrorists reported that the Citigroup building, "like the World Trade Center, is supported on steel, load-bearing walls, not on a steel frame." The operatives recommended employing "usual methods" and specifically discussed using a heavy gasoline truck or an oil tanker to attack facilities. The computers also contained surveillance of helicopter ports in New York City as well as cockpits and controls of helicopters, suggesting that al-Qaeda has investigated the possibility of using them for an airborne attack.

"This new information is chilling in tone, dramatic in its detail and very professional," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "It was done by someone who clearly knew what he was doing."

The discovery of such material would be unsettling at any time. But the trove of raw data from Pakistan has hit the intelligence community amid escalating worries that al-Qaeda may be on the verge of attempting another 9/11-size attack inside U.S. borders. A U.S. law-enforcement official told TIME that a recent Pakistani intelligence report made available to senior U.S. intelligence and security officials offers details of alleged al-Qaeda plans to use speedboats and divers for attacks in New York harbor before the November 2004 elections. A top U.S. intelligence official says, "There is nothing current we deem credible" about such an attack but noted that reports of possible attacks on the harbor are not unusual.

Two federal officials said the government is also concerned about the use of large trucks and "vehicular bombs" by al-Qaeda operatives or unwitting third parties. A law-enforcement official said Islamic extremists posing as local drivers but hailing from overseas are a "huge, huge concern." Assessing the accumulation of evidence of a possible attack inside the U.S., a senior intelligence official says, "This is looking more like the real deal every day."

That frightening prospect has thrust law-enforcement and intelligence agencies into a race against time to find and roll up the al-Qaeda sleeper cells around the world that may be planning to strike. The scramble began in mid-June, when a CIA tip to Pakistani paramilitary forces led to the arrest of a suspected al-Qaeda operative. That catch, in turn, helped U.S. and Pakistani investigators untangle a network of high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives across Pakistan.

Information gained from those detainees and the computers found in their safe houses led to the arrest by British authorities of Abu Issa al Hindi (Issa al-Britani in the 9/11 report), who U.S. officials now believe was dispatched to the U.S. by bin Laden in 2001 and was the main author of the surveillance information found on the discs in Pakistan on July 25. "People get rolled up, and that leads to other people, and they get rolled up and so on," says a U.S. military official. "People get flushed out, and when that happens, other people get nervous, and as they start to move, they talk, and then we hear them. It's like hunting birds. You scare 'em up, they run, and then you shoot them."

At the same time, the intelligence windfall was a bracing reminder that bin Laden not only remains at large but also may already have ordered up another major attack. Although bin Laden is thought to be on the move in the rugged terrain along the Pakistani-Afghan border, his desire to inflict damage on the U.S. is unabated. A top Homeland Security official told TIME that "we have a number of times picked up information that al-Qaeda wants to attack us before the election, and some of the communications attribute that desire to Osama bin Laden."

A critical, unanswered question for U.S. investigators is how many of the terrorists are still at large. A senior U.S. law-enforcement source says the FBI is pursuing information from the computer files that may lead to al-Qaeda members in this country, including e-mail addresses that have been traced to the U.S. An American official says the FBI is considering a roundup of perhaps half a dozen individuals in the U.S. believed to have been in contact with at least one of the men apprehended in Pakistan. The FBI recently began interviews of "a few thousand people that they believe could be helpful," the official says. "It's all been going about very quietly. They're trying to just get anything they can that could lead them to uncovering what the plot or the plots are." Here's how the U.S. and its allies are piecing together what they now know, how much damage they may have inflicted on al-Qaeda and what remains to be done.

An Arrest in Karachi
for Musaad Aruchi, terrorism was apparently a family affair. The Pakistani, about 40, is the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the brains behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003. He is also a first cousin to Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who planned and executed the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and is serving a life sentence in jail in the U.S. Earlier this summer CIA intercepts of Aruchi's phone calls and Internet messages allowed Pakistani law enforcement to track him to densely populated Karachi, on the southern coast of Pakistan. On June 12, Pakistani paramilitary forces arrested him.

The government of Pakistan held him at an air base for three days before turning him over to the U.S. The CIA ferried him in an unmarked plane to a location the agency will not identify. Aruchi proved a valuable source of information. Before being turned over to the Americans, he told Pakistani investigators that he was sure al-Qaeda was planning to hit the U.S again "soon." More important were the leads he provided. Aruchi identified a photograph of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, 25. Pakistani police described Khan as a rising star in al-Qaeda's next generation of fighters, someone equally comfortable in cyberspace and in the mountains of Afghanistan, where he learned to handle small arms at one of bin Laden's training camps in 1998.

According to a Pakistani law-enforcement official, Khan was a gifted techie. He helped bin Laden's network set up incendiary Islamist websites in Pakistan and abroad, sent encrypted messages through the Internet to al-Qaeda cells and helped research other useful information, such as how to use computer models to determine the amount of plastic explosive required to blast through a skyscraper's concrete foundations. Pakistani investigators say Khan used different Internet cafes and relayed coded messages through secure websites that required a numbered password to gain entry. He never used a cell phone and instead made calls to operatives on pay phones.

In early July, according to a Pakistani intelligence official, Khan made plans to leave Pakistan, perhaps aware that investigators were onto him. But he never got the chance. On July 13, he was arrested in Lahore. Under the supervision of Pakistani authorities, Khan sent e-mails to other al-Qaeda members, who were unaware he had been arrested, allowing investigators to pinpoint the coordinates of key operatives. Khan's cover was blown when press reports last week revealed he was in custody. "We would have preferred it if his name had remained undisclosed by the Americans," says a Pakistani official in Karachi who was involved in monitoring Khan. But Khan delivered tantalizing leads, and last month law-enforcement officials hit pay dirt. On July 24, an armored personnel carrier pulled up near a two-story corner home in the Pakistani town of Gujrat. It had been inhabited by three al-Qaeda members wanted by the U.S. for their roles in the African embassy bombings in 1998, men who had been fingered by Khan. Inside the besieged house—"The whole night there was shooting," said a neighbor—the three al-Qaeda men made futile efforts to burn a cache of computer discs in their possession, but a relentless barrage of gunfire and tear gas pinned them down. When their ammunition ran out 16 hours later, the al-Qaeda operatives surrendered with their wives and five small children, including a 10-day-old baby.

One of the suspects, a short, wiry Tanzanian named Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, had a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head for his suspected role in planning the 1998 Dar es Salaam and Nairobi bombings, which killed more than 200. His two housemates, both from South Africa, were also wanted in connection with the attacks. The three Africans arrested in Gujrat were significant, to be sure, but what they had in their house proved to be the true prize. Police gathered up the suspects' computers and 51 discs and passed them on to U.S. officials in Pakistan, who quickly forwarded them to Washington. Over the next two weeks, as CIA, Homeland Security and FBI analysts frantically combed through the data, they realized they had hit the closest thing to a mother lode since Sept. 11. Among other things, the information led to the arrest in England on Aug. 3 of al Hindi, who counterterrorism officials suspect was the leader of the team that, on orders from bin Laden, produced the surveillance reports on New York City financial institutions in 2001. British authorities also arrested Babar Ahmad, 30, who was detained last year after being found to be in possession of documents from 2001 describing the vulnerability of a U.S. Navy battleship group in the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. now believes Ahmad, a cousin of Khan's, may have been in on al Hindi's surveillance mission too.

Code Orange
On friday, july 30, Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge was flying from Miami to Port Canaveral, Fla., to meet with cruise-industry executives about their security plans. At 1 p.m., he got a call on an unsecure phone from White House Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend. She was purposefully vague, saying only some "interesting information" was turning up. When he landed, Ridge spoke again with Townsend, who told him that the Gujrat casing reports, which were still being analyzed, were very detailed and disturbing and that there was another threat to New York City that was worrisome.

Returning to Washington later that day, Ridge convened a meeting of his 35 top people to discuss what they were learning and what needed to be done to prevent a possible attack. "It wasn't a black-and-white situation then," said an official. "It was more like a dinosaur bone sticking out of the sand. You needed to do more excavation around it."

On Saturday morning, the Administration's national-security principals, people like the Attorney General, the heads of the FBI and the CIA, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Ridge, gathered in the White House. The CIA wanted until Monday to continue analyzing the data. Ridge was working at the Department of Homeland Security when Townsend called in midafternoon. The analysts, she said, were rapidly uncovering more significant information; a decision on what to do might be needed soon. At 4 p.m., the principals of the White House's national-security team held a secure video conference for almost two hours. Ridge led the group to a consensus to raise the color-coded threat level to orange but just for the financial-services sectors in New York, Newark and Washington. They were joined for the first time by New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly, since much of the information that the group had was related to possible attacks in his city.

The intelligence was sobering. "It underscored the sophistication of the enemy," Kelly told TIME, "the detail, what might [even] be thought of as the minutiae," of al-Qaeda's planning. "We'd heard about it, but you saw it in black and white." A senior law-enforcement official says the Gujrat information was buttressed by an intelligence report, based on a warning from an overseas source, of attacks on U.S. financial institutions. "It's what made [analysts' reactions] go off the charts," says that official. Adding to the intrigue was the case of Farida Goolam Mohammed Ahmed, a woman picked up in Texas by federal agents after entering the U.S. from Mexico without a valid visa. Though not brought up on any terrorism charges, Ahmed was carrying a mutilated South African passport—an accessory of interest to counterterrorism investigators. Recent intelligence suggests that al-Qaeda has attempted to enlist non-Arab recruits because they are less suspicious. It specifically cited South African passport holders as prime targets because they enjoy visa-free entry into many countries.

That evening Ridge decided to go public with the names of the targeted buildings, arguing that employees of the targeted companies could be helpful in reporting anything relevant they had seen or heard over the past few years and in unraveling the mystery of who had done the surveillance. "This new intelligence [that we had]," Ridge told TIME, "far exceeded any potential threshold for putting the information out to the public."

But he immediately undermined his case. At the Aug. 1 press conference announcing the alert, Ridge failed to mention that the information from the Gujrat discs was from 2000 and 2001. Worse, he attributed the discovery of the information to the "President's leadership." The news prompted immediate grumbling among Democrats.

Howard Dean, the onetime Democratic front runner turned attack dog, gave voice to the suspicions, saying, "It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics." Even Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission, said, "We shouldn't have found out the next day that the surveillance was done four years ago. That wasn't helpful." And yet the fact that the surveillance took place years ago fits al-Qaeda's methodical, deadly pattern. "The date of the casings," an FBI official says, "is immaterial." Successful attacks—like the embassy bombings in Africa and 9/11—as well as such aborted missions as a 2003 plan to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge had involved meticulous surveillance completed years in advance. Bin Laden and his lieutenants first discussed the idea for the 9/11 hijackings in 1996.

In a conversation last Tuesday with New York Governor George Pataki, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Kelly, Ridge reminded them of al-Qaeda's patience. He also reiterated that some of the files on the discs from Pakistan had been updated as recently as January, indicating that the plot was likely still live as recently as eight months ago.

Democrats who received intelligence briefings quickly told their colleagues to hold their fire. During a conference call that House minority leader Nancy Pelosi held last Wednesday with Democratic Representatives scattered throughout the country, some were still grumbling about the politics of the Ridge press conference. Jane Harman, senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, quickly cut them off. Everyone should "take this threat very seriously," she told them. Indeed, members of Congress themselves may be in the terrorists' sights. Two days before Ridge issued his nationwide alert, an FBI official warned a congressional leader that he and other top legislative officials could be targeted by al-Qaeda in Washington or on their trips around the country.

Race Against Time
At the sites identified by the terrorists, the security measures served as unmistakable signs that despite terrorism-alert fatigue among many Americans, the government feels it has little choice but to brace the public for another big attack. Bomb-sniffing dogs and explosives-detection teams reappeared in subways and outside public landmarks. In Washington, police set up barricades and checkpoints around the Capitol that could remain in place through Inauguration Day in January. Inside the secure war room at the Department of Homeland Security, officials from various agencies marked dozens of potential targets, ranging from the IMF and the World Bank to New York City's Federal Hall National Memorial, where George Washington was inaugurated as the first U.S. President, and the Eldridge Street Synagogue in lower Manhattan—a site singled out, an official says, because information on the Gujrat discs reveals that al-Qaeda may try to target the Jewish community. One map shows heliport sites in Manhattan.

The unspoken reality, though, is that all the current scrambling may still not be enough to keep the U.S. safe. While intelligence experts believe the busts in Pakistan have helped provide new insights into bin Laden's network and the deadly activities it evidently had planned, the scope of the terrorist threat has only widened as officials learn more. Which plots might still be going forward and which have been foiled is frustratingly unclear. For all the progress against a deadly and elusive target—and progress it was—that is the nature of the war against al-Qaeda. Says Michael Mason, head of the FBI field office in Washington: "What we have over the U.S. is a net.

At best, what we're doing is shrinking the mesh in the net. We're trying to kick down the door of the person who's going to drive the truck loaded with explosives. But can we do it in time?"

• BILL POWELL