Al-Qaeda's Paper Trail

By Elaine Shannon

Some of the most valuable residue of the Taliban collapse in Afghanistan may turn out to be paper. FBI, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officials have quietly mounted a crash intelligence project to collect and analyze attendance rosters, pay ledgers, letters from home and other paperwork in bombed-out al-Qaeda training camps. From these and other sources, counterterror specialists are racing to assemble a master list of thousands of radical jihadists who studied and bonded at the camps, then scattered around the globe to form "sleeper cells." "A lot of documents have been left behind, and we've got to get our hands on that stuff," says an official. To that end, orders have gone out to military and CIA personnel on the ground to preserve every scrap found, down to notes from wives and scribbles on matchbooks. Yet even with a list of names, intelligence agents will have a daunting task. Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian al-Qaeda operative who turned government witness after being convicted of a plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium celebrations, has told the FBI that camp officials banned the use of real names and handed out aliases. U.S. counterterror experts hope to pierce this security veil by showing photos of suspected jihadists to Afghans who worked in the camps as cooks, drivers, translators, bookkeepers and in other positions but who have turned against the Arab al-Qaeda followers. They will also be asked to describe unusual scars, missing fingers and other physical characteristics of terrorists they knew in the camps. All this information will go into a database to be shared among allied intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

--By Elaine Shannon