Risk of terror strike grows

In the new threat assessment, U.S. intelligence officials lay most of the blame for Al Qaeda's resurgence on a peace agreement between the Pakistani government and tribal leaders last fall, said the counter-terrorism official and a colleague familiar with its contents, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. The report concludes that the agreement has given the terrorist network virtually free rein to plan attacks worldwide, they said.

The report, titled "Al Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West," makes dire assessments of the network's ability to attack within the United States and Europe, the two officials said. They said its conclusions will be incorporated into a more comprehensive and formal National Intelligence Estimate that is scheduled to be released this summer after two years of preparation. Details about the report were first disclosed Wednesday by the Associated Press.

Kringen said Wednesday in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee that Al Qaeda seemed "to be fairly well settled into the safe haven in the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan," adding that "we see more training. We see more money, and we see more communications."

At the congressional hearing, Thomas Fingar, chief of U.S. intelligence analysis, Robert Cardillo, the Defense Intelligence Agency's deputy director for analysis, and Kringen spent more than three hours discussing a wide array of threats, including Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, alleged economic espionage by China and Russia and the destabilization of large swaths of Africa.

They spent much of the hearing answering pointed questions about Al Qaeda's presence in Pakistan, offering new details about the network's operations in tribal areas that border Afghanistan and about the elusive Al Qaeda leader.

U.S. intelligence and military officials are traditionally reluctant to discuss what they know about Bin Laden's whereabouts, or even if he is alive and healthy, after much public speculation that he was either in failing health or dead.

But Wednesday, Kringen said U.S. intelligence officials believe that Bin Laden is alive, "probably" in the tribal areas of Pakistan and hard to catch because he "goes into extended periods in which he does not communicate, does not interact with anyone directly."

When asked by Rep. Robert E. Andrews (D-N.J.) why the CIA hadn't worked more closely with tribal leaders to catch Bin Laden, Kringen responded: "In some cases, those tribal leaders are the very people who are protecting him, sir."