WASHINGTON — Al-Qaeda can be expected to attempt an attack on the United States in the next three to six months, senior U.S. intelligence officials told Congress on Tuesday.
The terrorist organization is deploying operatives to the United States to carry out new attacks from inside the country, including “clean” recruits with a negligible trail of terrorist contacts, CIA Director Leon Panetta said. Al-Qaeda is also inspiring homegrown extremists to trigger violence on their own, Panetta added.
The annual assessment of the nation’s terror threats provided no startling new terror trends, but amplified growing concerns since the Christmas Day airline attack in Detroit that militants are growing harder to detect and moving more quickly in their plots.
“The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11. It is that al-Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect,” Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Al-Qaeda is increasingly relying on new recruits with minimal training and simple devices to carry out attacks, the CIA chief said as part of the annual assessment of national threats provided to Congress by the top five U.S. intelligence officials.
Panetta also warned of the danger of extremists acting alone: “It’s the lone-wolf strategy that I think we have to pay attention to as the main threat to this country,” he said.
The hearing comes just over a month since a failed attempt to bring down an airliner in Detroit by a Nigerian suspect.
That suspect has been cooperating with investigators since last week, a federal law enforcement official said Tuesday. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has been providing useful intelligence that FBI agents working with the intelligence community have been following up in the United States and overseas, the official said.
On Capitol Hill, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that Abdulmutallab did talk to FBI agents after he was arrested on Christmas Day, speaking freely until he went into surgery for burns on his legs.
FBI agents reportedly flew to Nigeria and got the alleged bomber’s family to help them persuade him to cooperate.
