WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda operatives may be plotting several unrelated attacks in the United States, targeting not only major cities but also remote bulwarks of the "critical infrastructure" in an effort to cause mass casualties and major economic damage throughout the nation, U.S. officials said Monday.
Senior U.S. counter-terrorism officials said they have been unable to nail down specifics about a time or place for any potential attacks, despite a mad scramble to do so since receiving an alarming cache of corroborated intelligence beginning Thursday and Friday.
But the officials say the intelligence they have received -- much of it from intercepted communications among known terrorist operatives overseas -- clearly refers to at least one series of coordinated, simultaneous strikes, like Sept. 11, as well as isolated plots of varying degrees of sophistication.
"We're concerned that there could potentially be many separate plots," said one U.S. official with knowledge of the recent intelligence. "It's hard to establish a certain theme to all of this because we are getting such a massive volume of reporting."
That official and others stressed that while much of the intelligence about a coordinated attack has been corroborated, references to other unrelated plots were in many cases based on far less reliable or fewer sources.
Much of the recent intelligence makes broad references to large urban areas, including New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Other pieces of intelligence cite such obscure locales as Rappahannock, a rural Virginia county with several government facilities, and Valdez, Alaska, where tankers load oil from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, said several senior U.S. officials.
According to data received as recently as Monday, officials remain primarily concerned about Al Qaeda operatives plotting to hijack passenger and cargo planes and fly them into U.S. targets, as Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Sunday in announcing the decision to elevate the terror threat level one notch, from elevated, or yellow, to high, or orange.
They cite a large amount of corroborated and specific intelligence that refers to efforts to hijack planes not only outside the U.S., where security is not as tight, but also at domestic airports by using new and improved techniques that terrorist operatives believe could thwart the nation's vast new homeland security apparatus.
