The United States has deployed anti-aircraft missiles around Washington and other possible terrorist targets in fear of another attack using a commercial plane, but there is disagreement among intelligence officials about how direct the threat is to the US.
Tom Ridge, the head of US homeland security, put the country on high alert on Sunday, warning of a possible attack over the holiday season on a par with the September 11 attacks, or even more devastating.
He said there was reason to believe that al-Qaeda would try to repeat the tactics it used against New York and Washington two years ago, using hijacked aeroplanes as missiles.
US officials have insisted that there is unanimity within the administration over the credibility of its intelligence on this occasion, but one intelligence source in Washington said that some CIA officials believe that Ridge has exaggerated the threat to the US.
”There has been a lot of dissent about this,” said the source, who has close contact with CIA officials. ”There isn’t any substantiated information about an attack on the US itself. Everything seems to point towards an attack on Saudi Arabia or the Arabian peninsula.”
On Tuesday, the US embassy in Bahrain announced it has intelligence of a possible attack on the Gulf state ”between now and January 2 2004”.
It appears the decision to raise the national alert level arose partly because of tip-offs from British, Turkish and Yemeni intelligence.
Some of the intelligence suggested that al-Qaeda recruits may have been trained, licensed and hired as pilots by an unsuspecting foreign airline. This would raise the nightmare scenario of a scheduled flight turning into a suicide mission at the last minute, with no time to intercept it.
Another possible threat being urgently studied is the use of trained pilots to hijack a commercial plane flying into the US from a country with less stringent security. Washington has been in urgent contact with Canada and Mexico in an attempt to ensure that the security precautions taken in airports in its neighbouring countries are stepped up in light of the perceived threat.
In addition to discreetly deploying anti-aircraft missiles around Washington and other potential targets, possibly including nuclear power stations, the US air force has stepped up air patrols by fighter jets, particularly over the eastern coast.
Amid the flurry of intelligence ”chatter” US officials say they are hearing in communications between suspected terrorists, there are also suggestions that al-Qaeda is contemplating an attack with a weapon of mass destruction.
NBC news on Tuesday quoted US officials as saying there were ”indications that al-Qaeda may already possess a radiological weapon, or so-called dirty bomb”. But the officials did not elaborate.
Since the September 11 attacks, there have been repeated but unsubstantiated reports that Osama bin Laden’s organisation has acquired or sought to acquire a ”dirty bomb”. This may consist of radioactive material clustered around a conventional explosive.
The Bahrain warning has heightened fears of an attack in the Middle East against Western targets or Arab states seen by al-Qaeda as Western clients. The possible means of attack range from the use of hijacked airliners and small planes to the firing of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles at commercial planes.
Turkish intelligence has been feeding information to the US from interrogations of those arrested for suspected involvement in the bomb attacks against the British consulate, HSBC Bank and synagogues in Istanbul last month, in which 61 people died.
Some of the intelligence behind the high alert also came from Yemen, where authorities have been interrogating a senior al-Qaeda leader, Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, arrested there last month. — Guardian Unlimited Â