The Terror Hunters

By Massimo Calabresi

At 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 12, the telephone on Deputy FBI Director Thomas Pickard's desk rang. It was an aide in Secretary of Defense William Cohen's office: "We've had an explosion aboard the Cole. We think it might be a terrorist act." Pickard quickly dialed FBI Director Louis Freeh, Attorney General Janet Reno and Dale Watson, head of the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Division, bringing them online and then activating the FBI's high-tech Strategic Operations and Information Center. Then he called Roger Nisley, chief of the Critical Incident Response Group, and delivered a go message: "Get the Rapid Deployment team rolling toward Andrews [Air Force Base]," he ordered. Nisley, an experienced counterterror tactical agent, knew what to do. After the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, it took 40 hours to get most FBI investigators on site. Learning from Africa, Freeh created five special Rapid Deployment teams around the country ready to fly anywhere. The first FBI boots hit Yemen four hours after the blast. Agents then arrived in waves over the next 30 hours.

In Washington a discreet but active substratum of the government has developed. It includes the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Division, the interagency Counterterrorism Center at the CIA and the Counterterrorism Security Group at the White House. In aggregate, this is the nation's backbone in the fight to combat terrorists. Call them the Terror Hunters.

It's a high-tech group, well funded and selectively high profile, especially on Capitol Hill. But as America's law-enforcement and intel network struggles to adapt, the terrorists too are changing, becoming more diffuse and better armed. As the U.S. has brought more pressure to bear on nations that sponsor terrorism, terrorists have become more elusive, avoiding alignments with any single mentor. These traits apply not only to the fanatical anti-Western cells associated with Osama bin Laden (pictured), which have emerged as possible suspects in the Cole bombing, but also to groups opposed to Middle East peace like Hizballah and even radical Christian millenarians operating in the West. The U.S. is struggling to keep even.

The Cole attack was in many ways a perfect example of the challenges the U.S. faces. It appears to have been well planned by a cell with international logistical support and sophisticated bombmaking expertise, according to U.S. officials working on the case. The cell-like structure, in which groups are run as tiny bubbles of terror instead of as part of a central hierarchy, makes intelligence work tricky. It also tends to make a group more divorced from reality, enabling it to nurture suicide bombers more easily. And it does wonders for security: cells are often composed of people who have known one another since childhood or fought side by side for years. Infiltration is difficult, and even when it is possible, entry can involve committing an initiation crime. Yemeni investigators believe at least five people were involved in the construction and deployment of the Cole bomb.

But just how far can American spies go as they try to prevent terror? The CIA has human-rights guidelines for dealing with bad guys and says they don't impede its mission: it calculates risk against reward for getting involved. Yet critics say the CIA is still too shy about trying to infiltrate terrorist groups for fear the politicians won't back its agents if they get they get their hands dirty. "We have seen a risk-averse environment [at the CIA] because of that," says a top intelligence-community source. "Case officers [wonder], Will the government be there when they turn around?" CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher says the agency is not afraid. "We do take risks where we need to," she says. "If there's someone worth recruiting, we'll do so."

At the White House, the Counterterrorism Security Group oversees U.S. antiterrorist policy and scans the intelligence reports for threats. The day of the Cole attack, the group met three times. "We were in crisis mode," says a member. Last week the group spotted a threat from an undetermined source against U.S. citizens in Turkey, the Arabian Peninsula and the gulf, and the State Department issued a warning to Americans to avoid those regions. "It could be a threat from a variety of groups," says the CSG member. "Al-Qaeda, Hizballah, the Jerusalem Warriors--all sorts of scum."

The FBI has taken the lead in the Cole investigation. Last week it got a break in another case when a former Army sergeant pleaded guilty to conspiring in the embassy-bombing plot, fingering Bin Laden as an associate. In Aden, FBI and Navy divers have set up a crime-scene grid on the bottom of the harbor to sift evidence systematically. The divers are searching it inch by inch for the remains of the bomb, the boat that carried it and the suicide bombers. Officials tell TIME that sailors aboard the Cole took snapshots as the ship arrived in port. FBI agents took the film for processing but, so far, don't think anyone got a shot of the bomb boat as it pulled alongside the Cole. Last week the Navy revised its time line of the attack, suggesting that the Cole had already moored when the bombers struck. The FBI hopes the bomb boat was photographed shortly before. Such pictures could reveal the bombers' faces.

Yemeni cops claim a crucial lead in the case came from a 12-year-old boy, whom the suspected terrorists gave $12 worth of Yemeni rials to watch their car. The cops say they found the suspects' vehicle undisturbed in the same location, bearing license plates stolen in Yemen's hinterlands and loaded with diving gear and alleged bomb equipment, since taken by the FBI for analysis. Among the discoveries: the men may have had as many as five safe houses. Yemen's President has implied a link between the suspects and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group closely tied to Bin Laden. But FBI officials say they have seen no evidence of that. Unlike the East African governments, Yemeni officials have refused to allow the FBI to join local cops on joint searches and interviews with witnesses and suspects. Without timely, full access to all evidence, bureau officials say, they cannot embrace unilateral Yemeni findings as valid.

As FBI agents gathered evidence last week, America buried 17 Cole sailors. At a ceremony in Norfolk, Va., honoring the Cole's dead and wounded, Defense Secretary Cohen warned the killers: "You are on notice. Our search for you will be relentless." Relentless, perhaps, but also complicated.

--With reporting by Edward Barnes/Aden and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Edward Barnes/Aden and Elaine Shannon/Washington