Best way to stop terrorist cells?

Factual Questions
1

It occured to me that one of the best ways to stop terrorist cells (domestic and international) was for Arab-Americans to go undercover to infiltrate developing cells. You always hear about how they are always looking for new recruits and are forming and reforming here and there. Just hire them in the CIA, train them, have them find a group to join, work their way up the chain of command and then call in the troops. Just like you see on TV when cops go in undercover to bust up crime/drug/mob rings.

Then I figured “well, duh” this is probably exactly what they’re doing all over the place right now. But it’s not exactly something you want to broadcast to everyone.

So, does government have dozens of undercover Arabs working for them busting up cells on a regular basis?

2

I think you’ve already figured out why no one is going to give you a straight answer to this question.

3

As I understand it, Al Qaeda is not organised as heirarchically as you might think.

Various experts in the serious newspapers say that its much more like a franchise system, there isn’t any obvous way to rise up within the organisation, more like small units are recruited by perhaps a group of like minded individuals, who all know each other very well.

They then start looking around for things to do, but in effect they are almost their own little stand alone terrorist group.

Quite how they then go on to acquire materials and support, I do not know, but it appears to be extremely decentralised.

Infiltration into a group who may have known each other since childhood is likely to be extremely difficult, its a problem that law enforcement agencies have with neighbourhood drug dealers too and this makes catching those further up the chain very difficult.

It seems intuitive to me, that these individuals must somehow be schooled in intelligence matters, ‘need to know’ and all that stuff, no doubt other resources such as money and technical knowledge also must be distributed, and that this would be a means to track them.

There will be all sorts of methods used, from tax records, through to accidental things like being involved in unpredictable incidents that happen to us all such as traffic mishaps, mobile phones, chatrooms etc.

Frankly I would be amazed and very dissappointed if our intelligence services didn’t employ Arabs, from individuals right through to agencies operated by other Arab nations.

I guess we will never know how many will simply just ‘dissappear’, of the plots that never came to fruition, the worry is that we have to get it right 100%, they only need get it right once.

4

Hiring them, having the CIA train them, and arming them worked real well for us with Osama Bin Ladin when he was back in Afghanistan fighting the Russians now, didn’t it?

5

The Arabs and Muslims actually in the employ of US counterintelligence are all US citizens, and all hold security clearances. This fact should be kept in mind before impugning anyone’s loyalty based on their ethnicity or religion. Their loyalty is established more firmly than yours, if you don’t have a clearance.

6

If I remember correctly, shortly after 9-11, several folks from the intelligence community lamented that we had been sorely neglecting “human intelligence” of the type you describe, and that that neglect was a large part of why something like the 9-11 attacks were possible. One would hope that we’ve been taking steps to correct that, since, but I’m not optomistic, and even if we are, it can take years or decades to get someone thoroughly embedded.

7

Since they’re probably always in need of bomb making materials and weapons, the CIA could create some “rogue arms dealers” and set up shop. Good way to find out who’s buying. Sell them weapons with onstar type tracking devices.

8

For example, from what I read about the two young men who tried to blow up trains in Germany recently, they apparently were not part of a larger organization (prosecutors are pretty frantically looking for a third conspirator in order not to get the ‘membership in a terrorist organization’ part of the charge thrown out). They seem to have acquired jihadist ideology on their own (the brother of one was killed in the Lebanon bombing but that seems to have been incidental), and got bomb making knowledge from the Web. If they had been successful they might well have claimed their deed for AlQ, and OBL would have claimed it for AlQ, but they did not have an inside track to AlQ.

9

Just make sure they aren’t stem cells.

10

This is most likely your biggest problem; working your way up the ‘ranks’ of a ‘terrorist organisation’ is likely to require committing ever greater acts of violence against innocent civilians. Any person capable of such activity is unlikely to make a good security agent.

11

A couple of points.

‘Going under cover’ is a bit tricky, since it is pretty easy for small tight groups to check people back to their date of birth - they tend to come from distinct communities.

Getting existing prospects to infiltrate and inform strikes me as viable.

Identifying and turning existing members is even more viable, I would have used camp Guano for that (probably it has been going on).

Ijit makes a good point, infiltration and promotion took place in Russia the IRA and some undesirable rivals to the IRA - it is rumoured that Joe Stalin was an agent for the Cheka.

An interesting problem as the security services start controlling both ends of the game, and it is not exactly in their interest to close things down and write themselves out of the budget.

You can be darn sure that the USA and the UK are recruiting people of Arab and Pakistani background - but I doubt that many would be going ‘under cover’.

The ones without ideal backgrounds will be used as spotters and for useful things like identifying, marking and trailing the more obvious nutters in UK demonstrations.

12

It looks like Hollywood thought of this before you did -

Sleeper Cell

This is actually a great series! The first season is on DVD, I recommend anyone interested in terrorist organizations and terrorist planted in US society to check it out.

13

Link to the main page of Sleeper Cell:

Sleeper Cell

14

Apparantly, and they haven’t been shy about trumpeting their success. Undercover agents posing as islamist terrorists have helped foil a number of plots, including:

[ul]a plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station in NYC[/ul]
[ul]a plot by leaders of an Albany mosque to buy shoulder fired missles [/ul]
[ul]a plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago[/ul]

Those are just three examples. There have been several others. Also, it was an undercover UK agent who uncovered the recent plot to blow up planes headed from the UK to the US.