3 Lessons from London

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They are the lumpen jihadists. "Today Europe is facing a Europeanized form of jihad," says Eric Denécé, director of the French Center of Intelligence Research in Paris. "These are young men who were born and grew up in Europe. They look like normal Europeans; they sound like normal Europeans; and they harness this seething anger and sense of righteous outrage in a manner adapted to what they see as jihad in Europe." While there is some evidence that the bombing of four Madrid trains on "3/11"--March 11, 2004--was inspired by seasoned radicals who had been to al-Qaeda's Afghan camps before 9/11, those attacks were perpetrated mostly by Moroccans who had been living in Spain for years.

And yet even after Madrid, Europe has been slow to respond. The office of the European terrorist czar, created after 3/11, has just three employees. "Often we need attacks to get serious," says Stefano Dambruoso, Italy's top antiterrorism magistrate until last year. Until recently, the British were notoriously indulgent of hate-spewing imams and the fanatics who worshipped at their mosques. "It took years to convince the British authorities that they had a significant homegrown Islamic threat," says a recently retired FBI counterterrorism official. "I remember being there in 1999, and one of our guys joked, 'If you don't start paying attention to the radical elements in your country, the Queen's going to be living in Ireland.' They didn't think that was very funny." Just in March, the British released a detainee called Abu Qatada, considered the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Europe. The British are watching Abu Qatada carefully, but authorities in half a dozen countries would like to question him, and he was indicted by a Spanish antiterrorism judge in 2003.

For the U.S., it's the second-generation European Muslims--most of them European Union citizens--who are a security risk. "As E.U. citizens, they're eligible for U.S. visa waivers, which means they can represent a direct threat to the U.S.," says Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank founded by the former President. "Local groups that are already in place, that grew up in Western Europe and can conduct surveillance for multiple bombings without arousing a great deal of suspicion--this can be an enormous problem." Right now the FBI has no evidence of any hard-core al-Qaeda operatives left in the U.S. But a senior U.S. intelligence official says American law enforcers have ramped up surveillance of what he called "possible facilitators" for terrorists. The official put the number of such "individuals of interest" at fewer than 100. Still, when FBI director Robert Mueller spoke to the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this year, he was worried about "the potential recruitment of radicalized American Muslim converts ... The process of recruitment is subtle and, many times, self-initiated, and radicalization tends to occur over long periods of time."

Lesson #2

THE ENEMY ADAPTS