Feb. 7 The Bush administration raised the national threat alert from yellow to orange Friday after receiving new intelligence reports that pointed to the possibility of multiple imminent attacks by Al Qaeda against Jewish groups and Jewish-owned businesses inside the United States, NEWSWEEK has learned.
ACTING SWIFTLY ON the reports, FBI officials began contacting Jewish leaders and rabbis around the country Friday to warn them to be especially vigilant and to enhance security at Sabbath services and other events over the weekend, law-enforcement sources said. State and local police were also being asked to provide extra patrols for Jewish religious services and other gatherings. Officials said the new intelligence warned about the possibility of attacks on synagogues, Jewish community centers, Jewish hospitals, youth groups, hotels and resorts.
Law-enforcement officials stressed that they had no information that could help them identify any specific targets and that it was difficult to stress the credibility of much of the intelligence reporting. But officials said they were unusually worried both because of recent electronic interceptsboth inside the United States and overseasthat strongly suggests an imminent attack as well as the sheer volume of reports mentioning Jewish targets that came in over the last few days.
This is a full-court press, said one FBI official about the bureaus sudden outreach to Jewish groups. Theres real anxiety about this. A senior law-enforcement official said the volume of threats relating to Jewish interests inside the United States was a major factor in prompting President Bush to raise the intelligence threat level to orange, which is the color code for a high risk of terrorist attack.
Among those Jewish leaders who were contacted by the FBI Friday was Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the countrys leading Jewish civil-rights groups, which has been holding its annual meeting at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla.
Foxman said the FBI asked his help in identifying Jewish organizations and businesses that should be notified about the new intelligence threats. He said the FBI told him the information was nonspecific, adding that his organization has already implemented the kinds of enhanced security measures that the FBI advised.
Weve been through this before, Foxman said. Whenever the country goes on higher alert, Jewish interests are seen as a softer target, he said.
But Foxman said the FBI did appear to focus on one area: to identify hotels that are owned by Jews. The issue of possible attacks on Jewish-owned hotels was specifically raised by senior FBI officials with field-office chiefs during a 90-minute conference call on Friday, officials said. During the conference call, a senior official cited the recent Al Qaeda attack on a Bali nightclub that killed nearly 200 people last October, saying that the bureau now believes the facility was targeted because the owner was Jewish. NEWSWEEK could not independently confirm that assertion.
Another recent Al Qaeda attack in Mombasa, Kenya, was aimed at a hotel that was frequented by Israelis. In addition, sources said, German law-enforcement agencies have collected information from defectors indicating that terror suspect Abu Moussab Al-Zarqawi, a Palestinian whom the Bush administration says is the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, had recently been enciting followers in Europe to attack Jewish targets.
The information about threats to Jewish-related interests was alarming to U.S. officials because of the unusually large number of them that came in over the past few days, the senior law-enforcement official said. But the official stressed that there were also concerns about other threats inside the United States, including reports of an attack using chemical, biological or radiological weapons. We had much more information on chem-bio stuff, the official said. That really unnerved me.
But other officials said the new threats were not materially different than others that have been picked up by the U.S. intelligence community periodically ever since the September 11 terror attacks. In the past, those threats have prompted Bush administration officials to issue public warnings yet no terrorist attacks actually took place. Some intelligence officials say its still hard to know what to make of some of the electronic intercepts of Al Qaeda operatives that prompted the latest action. You cant always tell whether this is idle boasting or evidence of a looming plot, one official said.
But the FBI is leaving little to chance. On Tuesday, before the new threats to Jewish targets came in, FBI issued a classified advisory to all 56 field offices entitled Al Qaeda Set to Attack. The advisory reviewed a series of recent intelligence reportsincluding reliable information from the CIA that Al Qaeda is moving forward with plans for near-term attacks in multiple locations. The advisory said the attacks appear timed to occur in the next two months to coincide with the period immediately after the end of the Haaj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. It also mentioned the likelihood that the attacks would be timed to coincide with the outbreak of war in Iraq.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
