Osama bin Laden: The Biggest Fish of Them All

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That's a big claim. Official U.S. judgments don't go quite so far. But last week's classified FBI Intelligence Bulletin did say the arrest of Mohammed "deals a severe blow to al-Qaeda's ability to plan and carry out attacks against the United States." That includes "spectacular" operations. The bulletin says Mohammed met last year with Jose Padilla, an American convert to Islam who was arrested in Chicago last summer on his return from meetings with al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. Mohammed, says the bulletin, discussed with Padilla "a plot involving the detonation of a radiological device" in the U.S. Mohammed, speaking to his interrogators last week, referred to himself as the Brain, according to a U.S. intelligence source.

He might also have called himself the Graybeard. Though only 37, Mohammed was one of the older members of al-Qaeda's leadership--old enough to have fought against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and to have forged there the ideological and personal links that have sustained al-Qaeda's strain of terrorism ever since. Of the most wanted Islamic terrorists still at large, very few--they include bin Laden, his chief ideologist Ayman al-Zawahiri and Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian army officer who is thought to be al-Qaeda's head of security--are older than Mohammed. Increasingly, the foot soldiers of international terrorism are too young to have taken part in the Afghan war. That doesn't mean that they are any less brutal. They include members of Algerian terror groups whose favored modus operandi in the civil strife of the 1990s was to slit the throat of every person in a village. Nor are they necessarily less tested in combat: some have fought in Bosnia and Chechnya. But the absence of a common, annealing experience in Afghanistan may mean that the younger men lack the long-term commitment to the struggle and networks of trust their elders possessed in abundance.

Still, the international terrorist network has proved itself infinitely adaptable. There are plenty of potential lieutenants waiting to replace Mohammed, even though they may lack his experience. In that regard, Gunaratna and U.S. sources mention Tawfiq bin Atash, otherwise known as Khallad, a Yemeni. Bin Atash attended a notorious meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000, at which two of the Sept. 11 hijackers were also present, and is thought to have run--under Mohammed's guidance--the operation later that year to bomb the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor. According to reports out of Pakistan, bin Atash's brother, Umar al-Gharib, was arrested in the raid in Karachi last September that collared Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni who allegedly ran the logistics for the Sept. 11 attacks out of Hamburg. Other possible replacements for Mohammed include three of his nephews. One is named Ali Abd al-Aziz; the other two--Abd al-Karim Yousef and Abd al-Mun'im Yousef--are brothers of Ramzi Yousef, now serving a life term in a U.S. prison. One of these three men--authorities will not say which--was arrested overseas about a month ago. A counterterrorism official identifies al-Karim Yousef--who, like Mohammed, attended North Carolina A&T State University in the 1980s--as the man most likely to fill the void left by his uncle.