Six Al Qaeda Deceptions

1. In November 1997, al Qaeda agent Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed walked into the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and warned that terrorists were planning to blow up the building. Al Qaeda spies then watched the embassy over the following days, taking notes on the security measures put in place to ward off the threat.

2. At the end of July 2001, Djamel Beghal, a Franco-Algerian al-Qaeda agent, was arrested in Dubai on his way from Afghanistan back to Europe. Beghal started talking and implicated a network of al-Qaeda operatives in Europe, who, he said, were planning to blow up the American embassy in Paris. French intelligence has concluded that Beghal's tale was part of a massive feint to Europe while the real attack was always planned for the U.S.

3. Documents confiscated from Al Qaeda lairs in Afghanistan include handbooks on how to evade and deceive U.S. signal-interception systems, such as detailed instructions on when various kinds of satellites orbit over specific areas.

4. In December 2001, the CIA believed that an intercept of bin Laden's voice on the radio in the caves of Tora Bora had pinpointed his location. The Defense Intelligence Agency, based on an analysis of NSA data, now believes this was deliberate deception.

5. In April 2002, one of bin Laden's chief operations officers, Zayn al-Abidin Mohammed Husayn, commonly known as Abu Zubaydah, told interrogators that Al Qaeda would target U.S. banks in the Northeast. The FBI warned police and financial institutions in twelve states plus Washington, D.C. In hindsight, one former FBI official has said, the bank warning was "bullshit."

6. In June of this year, apparently working also from prisoner interrogations, the Coast Guard issued an alert to its units across the nation warning that terrorists could go underwater, perhaps with scuba gear, to stage attacks at ports, bays and other waterways. A national security consultant to the government, familiar with interrogations of catpured Al Qaeda operatives, told Eli Lake: "Suffice it to say, some of the stuff that has come out of the terrorist camps, part of the interrogation take, is made up. ... These guys were having fun with us."