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Select Committee on Intelligence on September 2,Tenet was told that the intel-
ligence community knew more about Bin Ladin's network "than about any other
top tier terrorist organization."
102
The CIA was using this knowledge to disrupt a number of Bin Ladin­asso-
ciated cells.Working with Albanian authorities, CIA operatives had raided an al
Qaeda forgery operation and another terrorist cell in Tirana.These operations
may have disrupted a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Tirana, and did lead
to the rendition of a number of al Qaeda­related terrorist operatives. After the
embassy bombings, there were arrests in Azerbaijan, Italy, and Britain. Several
terrorists were sent to an Arab country.The CIA described working with FBI
operatives to prevent a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Uganda, and a
number of suspects were arrested. On September 16, Abu Hajer, one of Bin
Ladin's deputies in Sudan and the head of his computer operations and weapons
procurement, was arrested in Germany. He was the most important Bin Ladin
lieutenant captured thus far. Clarke commented to Berger with satisfaction that
August and September had brought the "greatest number of terrorist arrests in
a short period of time that we have ever arranged/facilitated."
103
Given the President's August Memorandum of Notification, the CIA had
already been working on new plans for using the Afghan tribals to capture Bin
Ladin. During September and October, the tribals claimed to have tried at least
four times to ambush Bin Ladin. Senior CIA officials doubted whether any of
these ambush attempts had actually occurred. But the tribals did seem to have
success in reporting where Bin Ladin was.
104
This information was more useful than it had been in the past; since the
August missile strikes, Bin Ladin had taken to moving his sleeping place fre-
quently and unpredictably and had added new bodyguards. Worst of all, al
Qaeda's senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communi-
cation almost immediately after a leak to the Washington Times.
105
This made it
much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his conver-
sations. But since the tribals seemed to know where Bin Ladin was or would
be, an alternative to capturing Bin Ladin would be to mark his location and
call in another round of missile strikes.
On November 3, the Small Group met to discuss these problems, among
other topics. Preparing Director Tenet for a Small Group meeting in mid-
November, the Counterterrorist Center stressed,"At this point we cannot pre-
dict when or if a capture operation will be executed by our assets."
106
U.S. counterterrorism officials also worried about possible domestic attacks.
Several intelligence reports, some of dubious sourcing, mentioned Washington
as a possible target. On October 26, Clarke's CSG took the unusual step of
holding a meeting dedicated to trying "to evaluate the threat of a terrorist attack
in the United States by the Usama bin Ladin network."
107
The CSG members
were "urged to be as creative as possible in their thinking" about preventing a
Bin Ladin attack on U.S. territory. Participants noted that while the FBI had
RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS
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