Both Zarqawi, on the run in Iraq, and bin Laden, hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, continue to carry out high-level planning and independent plotting, intelligence officials said, although their logistical challenges are presumably great.
The plot, U.S. intelligence officials believe, was ordered by the crown prince.
American officials — who said they based their reconstruction of the plot on intelligence reports, witness statements and intercepted electronic messages — say the Shabab may have recruited English speakers from the United States and possibly other Western countries so that they would be able to operate effectively in Kenya, where English, along with Swahili, is the national language.
Fearing that terrorist networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by elves, gnomes and supermodels.
It is unlikely that any mainstream politician will directly blame the Blair government either for inviting an assault through its intimate links with the Bush Administration or by failure to detect any apparent plot by intelligence means.
A plot demands intelligence and memory. .
Even before Ressam's public testimony linking Doha to the LAX bomb plot, European intelligence sources also had confirmed that the London-based Algerian was in regular contact with one of Bin Laden's chief lieutenants, Abu Jaffar in Peshawar.
To disrupt these new plots, some intelligence officials concluded, American agents and analysts would need to cooperate just as fluidly — trading tips quickly among agents and agencies.
While U.S. officials have accused Iran's top leaders of being behind the biggest plots, Iranian intelligence factions have sometimes acted in competition with one another, with little apparent coordination with the country's ruling clerics, former U.S. officials said.
It's not the cool calculation of spies plotting an intelligence operation, nor the furtive euphemisms of criminals planning a bank heist, but something more ordinary and more intense: lovers in the throes of an illicit affair.
