Al-Qaeda In America: Target: America

The headquarters of Prudential Financial Inc. in Newark, N.J., would not seem like an obvious target for terrorists. It is neither a venerated symbol of American capitalism like the New York Stock Exchange building nor an iconic piece of modern architecture like the Citigroup building in midtown Manhattan, which houses America's biggest bank. It looms over a city that was once the very symbol of urban blight in America. On a clear day the more famous spires of Manhattan are visible from Newark, and so too is the empty space in the skyline on the island's southern tip, where once the city's two tallest buildings stood side by side.

As unspectacular as it might seem to most Americans, the Prudential Plaza building is a site of intense interest to Osama bin Laden and his operatives. Beginning in 2000, al-Qaeda operatives inside the U.S. conducted detailed surveillance of the Prudential building, with the apparent intent of destroying it and killing the civilians who work there. They took multiple photographs of the building and observed the parking garage underneath. One report outlined possible methods for carrying out an attack. Written in English, the report noted that it might be difficult to drive trucks or vans into the parking lot. Black limousines, however, could approach without much trouble. The report proposed acquiring a limo, gutting everything except the front seats and presumably filling it with explosives. It then provided details on the New Jersey Transit rail system and nearby PATH trains and maps of the network and train timetables--suggesting that instead of deploying a suicide-bomb squad, al-Qaeda may have been exploring ways to escape after pulling off the attack.

Most chilling, the al-Qaeda operatives managed to keep their attack plans a secret from the U.S. government--until July 24 of this year, when a raid begun on the house of an al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan uncovered three laptop computers and 51 data-rich discs. Stored on the computers were 500 photographs of potential targets inside the U.S., minutely detailed analyses of the vulnerabilities to a terrorist attack of several of them and communications among some of the most wanted terrorists in the world. In their volume and specificity, the discs amounted to what a senior U.S. intelligence official calls an unprecedented "treasure trove" of information about al-Qaeda's determination to pull off more catastrophic acts on U.S. soil. The catalog of targets found on the discs is part of what led to a heightened security alert last week at financial institutions in New York City and Washington and induced the latest episode of anxiety among residents of those cities--fear that for some subsided when Bush Administration officials acknowledged that most of the surveillance data on the hard drives were at least three years old.