(9 of 10)
They do now. Since Sept. 11, the number of FBI personnel working on counterterrorism has grown from 1,000 to 4,000. A new cybercrime division monitors credit-card-fraud schemes that terrorists use to fund their activities. Stung by criticism over its historic reluctance to share secret evidence with local cops, the FBI now sees it doesn't have a choice. Edward Flynn, the police chief in Arlington County, Va., says the FBI is giving local cops more leads than they can handle. "They feel compelled to tell us this stuff," he says.
Meanwhile, arrests of al-Qaeda suspects in the U.S. have dwindled. A handful of people in federal custody are still being investigated for possible links to terrorist activity. The worldwide dragnet has snared 600 alleged al-Qaeda operatives. And yet the bottom line is sobering: after six months of gumshoe work by just about every law-enforcement official in the U.S., the number of al-Qaeda sleeper cells that have been busted inside the country is precisely zero. Does that mean bin Laden's men have gone further underground? "We don't know," says an FBI official. "If you go back and look at the hijackers, they had zero contact with any known al-Qaeda people we were looking at. They didn't break laws. They didn't do anything to come to anybody's attention. Are there other people in the U.S. like that? We don't know."
As long as such uncertainty persists, so will the military assault on al-Qaeda abroad. The U.S. military campaign has removed bin Laden's sanctuary and degraded his infrastructure of terror. Pentagon sources say that the U.S. has killed as many as eight high-ranking al-Qaeda officials, but most of the 11,000 terrorists believed to have spent time in al-Qaeda camps are still on the loose. Efforts to apprehend al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan have slowed, as thousands have bought safe refuge in the hamlets and villages of the Afghan countryside. "The mission is to take al-Qaeda apart piece by piece," says Mohammed Anwar, the head of intelligence in Mazar-i-Sharif. "But it's very difficult work." CIA, FBI and military intelligence officials have spent eight weeks interviewing the 300 detainees in Cuba for information on the whereabouts of the al-Qaeda leadership, but defense sources told TIME that any prisoners now in U.S. custody know little, if anything, about bin Laden's coordinates. While there is a genuine debate inside the government about whether he is still alive, there is far less argument about what will happen after Washington is able to confirm that he is dead. A U.S. official told TIME last week that it is widely presumed that al-Qaeda sleeper cells will take retaliatory action once the terrorist leader is killed or proved dead.
With al-Qaeda sprinkled around the globe, it becomes harder to develop the intelligence needed to take the fight to the enemy. Last week the Administration gave its clearest signal yet that the war won't stop in Afghanistan or even the Philippines, when it announced plans to send special-ops troops to Yemen and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, both countries where al-Qaeda fighters are believed to be hiding.