By Stephen J. Hedges and Andrew Zajac,Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON – The deadly terrorist strike on London commuters last week was a reminder of what U.S. authorities have warned since Sept. 11: Another attack in this country is not just likely, but certain.

Increased security, the arrest of key al-Qaida operatives abroad and a refocused counter-terrorism effort at home have reduced the likelihood that an attack on the scale of Sept. 11 will be repeated here, but top law enforcement and intelligence officials agree that al-Qaida’s network has become more diffuse and decentralized, and thus tougher to track.

FBI officials said the prospect of “sleeper” terror cells in the United States that have not been identified is a gnawing worry.

“That’s the daily concern,” said FBI Deputy Director John Pistole. “Are there individuals we have not identified who have not been in contact with or financed by those who we know of? If it’s people similar to the situation of the people who carried out the London attack, how do we prevent that? And that’s the challenge.”

In the last two years, federal and state authorities have prosecuted a raft of terrorism cases, but most of them have been against individuals or small suspected cells.

“Most of the people who have been caught have not been prosecuted for terrorism,” said Daniel Byman, director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. “And most of the terrorism cases in general seemed to involve people who were amateurs. It’s interesting that we haven’t seen here what we have seen (elsewhere), the major jihadist (holy warrior) presence that they have in Spain or in France or in Britain.”

Recent terrorist-related indictments vary greatly. Ali al-Timimi, a speaker at an Islamic center in Virginia, was indicted for his alleged involvement in recruiting U.S. citizens to take part in training to conduct a jihad, or holy war. In New York, Yassin Muhiddin Aref was arrested on money-laundering charges in connection with an alleged plot to kill a Pakistani diplomat. Last month a father and son from Lodi, Calif., were indicted on charges that they lied about the son’s attendance at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan in 2003 and 2004.

Those cases could point to a decentralization of terrorist activity. Smaller, isolated groups might not be capable of carrying out highly coordinated, Sept. 11-type attacks, federal law enforcement officials said, but they could still strike such “soft” targets as subways and shopping malls.

“We are concerned about the spectacular, especially chem-bio or radiological” attacks, Pistole said. “That’s the greatest priority. But if the London attack occurred in D.C. or New York, what a tragedy to have 50 people killed and hundreds injured. That would be a serious blow.

“I think people forget about the psychological aspects of terror,” he said. “It’s not just the number dead or wounded. It’s how it affects the psyche of people.”

Despite the steady pace of arrests of terrorist suspects in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa, the overall rate of al-Qaida-related terrorist incidents worldwide has actually increased since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, according to Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corp.

“Since 9/11, (al-Qaida has) carried out major attacks, not counting Iraq, … on an average of every 2.5 to 3 months,” Jenkins said. “You’ve had attacks like Bali, Karachi, Riyadh, Istanbul, Mombasa (Kenya), Egypt, Casablanca, Madrid and now London.”

At the same time, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies are undergoing a wrenching reordering.

The federal government’s 15 intelligence agencies, especially the FBI and CIA, have been under intense pressure to cooperate with each other ever since investigators identified a failure to share information as a critical shortcoming in the months leading up to the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans nearly four years ago.

In perhaps the most glaring example, investigators found that the FBI missed at least five chances to track down two of the Sept. 11 hijackers because of turf battles with the CIA and a reluctance to share information even within the bureau.

Since the attacks, the government has tried four times to set up an information-sharing agency, but each effort has been found wanting.

In March, the Silberman-Robb Commission studying the failures of U.S. intelligence on pre-war Iraq called for “stronger and more centralized management of the intelligence community, and, in general, the creation of a genuinely integrated community instead of a loose confederation of independent agencies. This is not a new idea, but it has never been successfully implemented.”

The latest effort to coordinate intelligence involves creation of the office of director of national intelligence. The first director, former diplomat John Negroponte, took over in May.

While Negroponte has more power over the country’s anti-terror apparatus than any previous intelligence official, significant gaps in his authority remain.

He does not, for example, have complete authority over the military component of the espionage budget, which comprises about 80 percent of federal spending on intelligence. Military planners have made no secret of their intention to expand their own spying capability.

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The Bush administration has said it wants to consolidate Negroponte’s authority over other portions of the intelligence community by making some changes, mainly at the expense of the FBI.

Late last month, the administration ordered the creation of the National Security Service within the FBI, gathering the bureau’s intelligence-gathering and anti-terror units under a single umbrella group that reports to both FBI Director Robert Mueller and Negroponte.

Still, these top-down changes offer no guarantee of rank-and-file cooperation.

On Thursday, a senior intelligence official, briefing reporters on homeland security measures in the aftermath of the London bombings, offered a less than glowing assessment when asked if U.S. intelligence agencies were finally working well together.

“We continue to work through these issues, and we’re trying to make sure they’re working as effectively and efficiently as a community. It’s an evolving process that will continue,” the official said.

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While government officials have vigorously restructured the intelligence bureaucracy, there’s still much debate about whether the money is being spent as prudently as it could be to safeguard the country.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, said Friday that the London bombing shows that spending on security needs to be driven by “threat analysis rather than pork barrel.”

That means targeting money on protecting the biggest, most vulnerable targets, many of them in big cities like New York and Washington, and possibly spending less in sparsely populated areas, something that so far has not been a politically popular position in Congress.

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It also means allocating more money for safeguarding ground transit systems, Ben-Veniste said, noting that 90 percent of spending on transportation currently goes to aviation.

Despite those concerns, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to cut $50 million from the $150 million budgeted for rail and transit security grants for local governments this year. Now, in the wake of the London attacks, that cut is likely to be restored.

Other important priorities include setting aside radio bandwidth to make sure that police and emergency responders can talk to each other in a crisis and doing more to round up stray nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, according to Ben-Veniste.

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Another commission member, former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, said, “We probably can do more around the edges” in enhancing security. But he cautioned against believing that the United States can think or spend its way to complete safety.

Certain worthy goals, such as securing the nation’s borders, are beyond reach, Thompson said.

“The truth is we have no more borders in this world,” he said. “The reality is that we’re probably going to have to live with the possibility of terrorism for many years to come.”

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(Chicago Tribune correspondents Michael Tackett and Cam Simpson contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-07-09-05 1754EDT

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