New Year's Evil?

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What Washington does claim is that American intelligence has taken down more than two dozen of bin Laden's cells in the past two years. In the summer of 1998, the U.S. got wind of a serious plot against the U.S. embassy in Tirana, Albania, evacuated the facility and worked with Albanian authorities to corral the suspects. Last fall in Germany, local authorities arrested a man thought to be bin Laden's head of procurement in Europe, allegedly on the prowl for weapons of mass destruction. And earlier this month, acting on a tip, Jordan rounded up 13 terrorists with possible links to bin Laden who were plotting, says an Amman official, to blitz the U.S. embassy, Christ's baptismal place on the Jordan River and the tomb of Moses near Mount Nebo, all haunts of foreign tourists.

Washington insists it is watching not only bin Laden's cells but also dozens of other potentially dangerous groups from its special Counter Terrorism Center in Virginia. Though the best way to track these groups would be to infiltrate them, that poses a nearly insuperable problem. "Terrorist cells are frequently very small groups of people who are all related to each other," says a CIA defender. "You don't just suddenly make yourself a cousin of somebody."

What's scary is the unknown terrorist. Last week's case of Administration anxiety came largely from the sudden appearance of a 32-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam. Trying to sneak into the U.S. from Canada, he was caught by luck as much as diligence. The 3,000-odd-mile northern border of the U.S. is as porous as Swiss cheese. Some checkpoints are screened only by video camera. The one at Port Angeles, Wash., where Ressam was arrested, might have seemed like a sleepy, lax place to cross into the U.S. But around 6 p.m. on Dec. 14, Diana Dean, an inspector working that checkpoint, was doing her usual routine for travelers getting off the ferry from Vancouver: Where are you going? What do you have with you? When she came to the man in the rented Chrysler, her attention was piqued by his shaking hands. Dean asked the man to step out of his car and set in motion the search that would send a frisson of fear all the way to Washington.

Not only did he carry several false identity cards alongside his Canadian passport in the name of Benni Noris, but the well of his car trunk revealed a chilling cache: 10 plastic bags loaded with 118 lbs. of urea, two 22-oz. jars three-fourths full of a volatile liquid similar to nitroglycerine and four small boxes containing circuit boards connecting Casio watches to 9-volt detonating devices. The man trying to enter the U.S. 17 days before the millennium was carrying enough explosive material to take out the Seattle Space Needle. He was also carrying a plane ticket to London, via New York. Target, or escape route?

According to French experts, the suspect quickly identified as Ahmed Ressam was all too familiar in Paris. Officials say he belongs to "an extremely dangerous network of Islamic fundamentalists" intent on an "international holy war." He might connect to the Armed Islamic Group, a radical group in Algeria renowned for indiscriminate and barbarous acts of violence in their quest to turn the country into an Islamic republic. But Washington wants to know very badly whether Ressam is a free-lancing foot soldier for bin Laden. The leader of Ressam's French cell has been identified as Fateh Kamel, thirtyish, an Algerian-born naturalized Canadian who later set up shop in Montreal to gather money and materiel but was arrested last April in Jordan and then extradited to France. Another member of the group, said French authorities, was Said Atmani, an Algerian zealot who may have roomed with Ressam in Montreal.

Atmani may be the man American police are still searching for: an accomplice, thought possibly to have fled from the ferry--along with "sleeper" associates already hiding somewhere in the U.S. It's likely that at least one other person would have been required to transform the volatile chemicals in Ressam's trunk into bombs. The chemistry alone could take a couple of days; the assembly process would have been tricky as well. Ressam's chosen crossing point seemed amateurish: he would stand out among the sparse travelers. And though he could be a lone crank with a totally fanciful notion of what it takes to perpetrate mayhem, if he is not, it means several other people have to be in on the plot. "It's a multiheaded monster," says a French official, adding, "There are probably other Ressams out there right now."

The Ressam in U.S. custody was charged Wednesday with five counts of activities that are possibly terror linked. He has entered a not guilty plea, and he is not cooperating with police--it took five FBI agents just to wrestle a set of fingerprints from him--and the U.S. still has no idea what he was up to. His trail through Canada includes a history of eluding authorities, acquiring the Noris passport using a fake baptismal certificate and stealing a computer from a car in 1998. But Canadian authorities who held him in jail for two weeks for the theft apparently never cross-checked his fingerprints with provincial police, immigration or international intelligence agencies. French officials complain bitterly about the "weak" and "passive" attitude of the Canadians even when visiting magistrates showed them the complete dossier on Ressam, documenting his frequent contacts with a band of gangster-terrorists who used theft to finance their plots. "They dragged their feet on everything," says a French official.