Even from a distance, Binalshibh played a vital role on Sept. 11, according to U.S. investigators. From his base in Germany, he handled logistics and financial arrangements for the hijack team, funneling cash to them and also, on one occasion, to Zacarias Moussaoui, who was detained in Minnesota before the attacks and has since been charged with six counts of conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism. Binalshibh also is thought to have worked closely with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 38, a Pakistani born in Kuwait with a long history of links to terrorist groups, who investigators believe was also involved in the Sept. 11 plot. Mohammed, too, appears in the al-Jazeera interviews, in which he describes himself as "the head of the al-Qaeda military committee" and characterizes Binalshibh as "the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation." U.S. intelligence sources say Mohammed was not among those detained in the Karachi raid.

Binalshibh is a stunning catch. It isn't just his intimate knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot and his link to Moussaoui; CIA officials believe he was present at an extraordinary rendezvous in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000, together with two of the hijackers and several other al-Qaeda operatives, including Tawfiq bin Atash, the man thought to have been the mastermind behind the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen's Aden harbor. On the run since September 2001, when he left Germany for Madrid, Binalshibh could provide investigators with a clearer picture of how al-Qaeda works and what it might be planning next. And even if he won't talk, officials may be able to extract information from the four laptop computers and the satellite phone left behind in the Karachi apartment. He was still in Pakistan late last week, though U.S. officials were negotiating with Islamabad to take custody and transport him to an undisclosed location where the FBI and CIA can begin questioning.

Binalshibh's arrest highlighted a remarkable few days in the fight against terrorism. On Sept. 9, two days before President Bush was to lead his nation in remembering the victims of last year's attacks, CIA Director George Tenet learned of an astonishing breakthrough in the interrogation of Omar al-Faruq, a 31-year-old Kuwaiti who had been taken to the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, after being arrested in Indonesia last June. Al-Faruq confessed last week that he was al-Qaeda's senior representative in Southeast Asia, according to a CIA summary of the interview obtained by TIME. Moreover, al-Faruq said that two senior al-Qaeda officials, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had ordered him to "plan large-scale attacks against U.S. interests in Indonesia, Malaysia, (the) Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia" to coincide with the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the CIA report, al-Faruq told his interrogators that even though he was in detention, "contingency plans were put into effect so that other operatives would assume responsibilities to carry out operations as planned."

Al-Faruq's questioners relayed the revelations to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Va. In a series of conference calls, Tenet shared the intelligence with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Attorney General John Ashcroft and homeland-security czar Tom Ridge. On the morning of Sept. 10, the fivesome, along with General John Gordon, Rice's top counterterrorism aide, gathered in the Oval Office to brief the President about the latest threat. The news from Bagram tracked with several other intelligence reports from Southeast Asia that detailed an increase in suspicious activities around American embassies. And just days earlier, intelligence officials told TIME, a credible report from a second al-Qaeda prisoner warned that the group was poised to launch attacks on other U.S. targets overseas.

Administration officials had one more thing on their radar: concerns about a group of Yemeni Americans alleged to be al-Qaeda sympathizers in Lackawanna, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo. The various bits of information didn't appear to be linked, but the accumulation of threats caused U.S. officials to recall the situation a year ago, when intelligence analysts picked up "chatter" about possible terror attacks abroad but missed signs that the hijackers were already on American soil. "Everybody thought last year it would be outside," says a senior FBI official. "History has proven that we were incorrect." This time the President acted: Bush ordered the closure of all U.S. embassies in Southeast Asia and of some other diplomatic facilities around the world. For the first time, the homeland-threat level was raised to Code Orange, one level below an imminent attack. Last Saturday U.S. officials arrested the five men in Lackawanna.

Though the operations in Karachi, Bagram and New York State count as clear successes, they also suggest just how arduous the process of defeating al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups will be. Investigators are operating like children trying to understand the night sky, picking off one constellation at a time — there's Orion, there's the Big Dipper — without being able to see the pattern of the universe. Still, we know far more about Islamic terrorism than we did a year ago; and each week, we learn a little more.

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