Al-Qaeda soldiers on the run, experts say
Wednesday, May 4, 2011 -
Terror-stricken al-Qaeda terrorists are probably on the move, fearing the sudden arrival of helicopters overhead and Navy SEALs blasting through their doors, as America’s best intelligence minds scour Osama bin Laden’s computers for data they can use to smash the deadly Islamic extremist network, experts said yesterday.
“If it were me, I’d get out of town,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “I’d have a go-pack with a small quantity of unmarked bills and an extra set of ID. And I just would not have come home.”
Navy SEALs grabbed 10 hard drives, five computers and more than 100 storage devices, including flash drives, DVDs and documents. The SEALs also confiscated phone numbers from bin Laden’s body.And if panicked jihadis are indeed bolting from compromised safe houses, they could be vulnerable.
“Part of the game could be to put chum in the water and see how the fish react,” said Thomas Donnelly of the Center for Defense Studies. “To see if they start moving and scuttling and in what direction.”
Experts are hopeful al-Qaeda could be severely disrupted by the intelligence threat. Hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. intelligence experts from federal agencies as wide-ranging as the CIA and the Treasury are likely working feverishly to crack bin Laden’s files for any clues to operatives’ identities and whereabouts, said Scott Stewart, a former State Department special agent now with the corporate intelligence firm STRATFOR.
“Having the data is one thing,” Stewart said, “but putting it in proper context and understanding, the vernacular can sometimes be difficult.”
Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation, a former deputy secretary of defense, added, “I almost wish they kept this a secret and looked at it before the world knew. If you can find out without the bad guys knowing about it, you might be able to exploit it.”
With the uncontainable news of a U.S. raid in a Pakistani city, that was an unlikely option. What remains unclear is whether bin Laden was an archival pack-rat, or if he operated more cautiously, destroying files as he went. But if SEALs did strike the intel motherlode, it could crack al-Qaeda wide open.
“On the financial side, I believe that may be one of the biggest boons out of this — this intelligence may provide a way to clamp down on the ways the core guys have been funding themselves, including donors and how they’ve transferred money,” Stewart said.
“It may be that the most important thing we got was not bin Laden, but the al-Qaeda archives,” Pike said.
Meanwhile, bin Laden’s henchmen have now two choices, both dangerous.
“If they suddenly get up and start moving around, they might be noticed,” he said. “On the other hand, if they sit still, and bin Laden had their current location on one of their drives, well, the patrol car will be pulling up in front of their cars any minute. . . . They all have to be looking over their shoulders in a way that they were not two days ago.”