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But early last week al-Faruq finally broke down. On Sept. 9, according to a secret CIA summary of the interview, al-Faruq confessed that he was, in fact, al-Qaeda's senior representative in Southeast Asia. Then came an even more shocking confession: according to the CIA document, al-Faruq said two senior al-Qaeda officials, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had ordered him to "plan large-scale attacks against U.S. interests in Indonesia, Malaysia, [the] Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia. In particular," the document continues, "[al-]Faruq prepared a plan to conduct simultaneous car/truck bomb attacks against U.S. embassies in the region to take place on or near" the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Al-Faruq said that, despite his arrest, backup operatives were in place to "assume responsibilities to carry out operations as planned." If successfully executed, such a coordinated assault could produce thousands of casualties. Fearing an attack could come at any moment, al-Faruq's interrogators relayed his revelations to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Va. Al-Faruq's story tracked with several recent intelligence reports from Southeast Asia about an increase in suspicious activities near American embassies. A day later the U.S. issued its code-orange terror alert. Al-Faruq's threatened attacks never occurred.
Omar al-Faruq's confessions, as detailed in the intelligence reports obtained by TIME, are much more than a single operative's warnings about possible plots against U.S. interests; they also provide a wealth of new and unpublished detail about the broad reach of al-Qaeda, its efforts to establish a base of operations outside Afghanistan and its success in pulling disparate militant groups and criminals into its lethal struggle against the West. At the same time, the documents illustrate the speed and determination with which U.S. intelligence agents and their foreign counterparts are working to untangle al-Qaeda's web of terror before the group strikes again.
Investigators are still verifying the credibility of the numerous leads into alleged al-Qaeda conspirators identified by al-Faruq. The intelligence documents, combined with TIME's investigation of al-Faruq's past, reveal that:
--With al-Faruq acting as the point man, al-Qaeda received financial and operational assistance from Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a militant group that seeks to establish a pure Islamic state in Southeast Asia and is active in at least five countries--Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. The CIA report states that Abubakar Ba'asyir, 64, the cleric who is the alleged spiritual leader of JI, "authorized Faruq to use JI operatives and resources to conduct" the embassy bombings planned for last week; al-Faruq told the CIA that Ba'asyir dispatched a JI member named Abu al-Furkan to oversee a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Malaysia. Al-Faruq said Ba'asyir was also behind a 1999 bombing of Jakarta's largest mosque and then blamed Christians for the act. Ba'asyir is wanted by Singapore for his alleged role as the mastermind of last December's foiled al-Qaeda plot to bomb U.S. targets there. Indonesian officials have so far declined to arrest him, saying they have no evidence linking him to terrorist activity.