US Spy Agencies Had 30 Pre-9/11 'Chatter' Messages

by Tabassum Zakaria
Reuters
September 9, 2002
http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=topnews&StoryID=1428750

WASHINGTON - Before Sept. 11, U.S. agencies collected about 30 communications from suspected al Qaeda operatives or other militants referring to an imminent event, but many were false alarms, a U.S. intelligence official said on Monday.

"You can't dismiss any of them, but it doesn't tell you tomorrow is the day," the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Messages from members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network included the phrases "Tomorrow is zero hour" and "The match begins tomorrow," which government sources have said were picked up on Sept. 10 by National Security Agency eavesdropping on global communications.

Those two messages were not translated from Arabic until Sept. 12. Critics have called them examples of missed clues.

The United States has blamed al Qaeda for the Sept. 11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people.

Intelligence officials say many such communications, called "chatter," end up being just a show of bravado or morale boosting. Without a specific location and time for a planned attack it was difficult to assess the threat, they say.

More recently, U.S. intelligence agencies have picked up a handful of al Qaeda communications making vague threats related to the Sept. 11 anniversary, but without any specific details.

"You should not put a chatter meter on it," a U.S. official said. "Just because you hear a lot doesn't mean it's going to happen. Just because you hear a little doesn't mean it's not."

NOT A PATTERN

Al Qaeda has not in the past pegged attacks to anniversaries, but rather conducts them when its plans are ready for execution, U.S. officials say.

"If they could do something on 9/11 that they could do today, they will do it today," one official said.

"Anniversaries can be occasions -- not necessarily always -- can be occasions of heightened terrorist activity," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters traveling with President Bush to Detroit.

"I can't characterize the chatter level as anything out of the ordinary at this time. But just given the fact that it's the one-year anniversary, we are going to be on our toes," Fleischer said.

U.S. officials characterized level of the recent communications as slightly higher than average, but considerably less than around the Fourth of July holiday and last summer before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Al Qaeda has the pattern of being in the midst of planning another attack as one is being executed. When it attacked a U.S. warship in a Yemeni port almost two years ago it was already planning Sept. 11, U.S. officials say.

"Every time there was a terrorist attack in the past, they were already planning another," an intelligence official said. "We have to assume when they attacked the World Trade Center, they were planning something else, some of which may have been disrupted by the war on terrorism."

U.S. embassies are frequently mentioned as targets for attack. Since Sept. 11, plots against embassies in Rome, Singapore, and Paris and U.S. military facilities in Turkey have been uncovered.

More than 2,800 terrorism suspects have been arrested in 98 countries since Sept. 11.

But bin Laden's fate remains a mystery, with U.S. officials saying they do not know whether he died in the bombing of caves in Afghanistan or survived and is hiding out in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan or elsewhere.

Copyright © 2002 Reuters Limited.

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