Al-Qaeda In America: Target: America

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That frightening prospect has thrust law-enforcement and intelligence agencies into a race against time to find and roll up the al-Qaeda sleeper cells around the world that may be planning to strike. The scramble began in mid-June, when a CIA tip to Pakistani paramilitary forces led to the arrest of a suspected al-Qaeda operative. That catch, in turn, helped U.S. and Pakistani investigators untangle a network of high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives across Pakistan. Information gained from those detainees and the computers found in their safe houses led to the arrest by British authorities of Abu Issa al Hindi (Issa al-Britani in the 9/11 report), who U.S. officials now believe was dispatched to the U.S. by bin Laden in 2001 and was the main author of the surveillance information found on the discs in Pakistan on July 25. "People get rolled up, and that leads to other people, and they get rolled up and so on," says a U.S. military official. "People get flushed out, and when that happens, other people get nervous, and as they start to move, they talk, and then we hear them. It's like hunting birds. You scare 'em up, they run, and then you shoot them."

At the same time, the intelligence windfall was a bracing reminder that bin Laden not only remains at large but also may already have ordered up another major attack. Although bin Laden is thought to be on the move in the rugged terrain along the Pakistani-Afghan border, his desire to inflict damage on the U.S. is unabated. A top Homeland Security official told TIME that "we have a number of times picked up information that al-Qaeda wants to attack us before the election, and some of the communications attribute that desire to Osama bin Laden."

A critical, unanswered question for U.S. investigators is how many of the terrorists are still at large. A senior U.S. law-enforcement source says the FBI is pursuing information from the computer files that may lead to al-Qaeda members in this country, including email addresses that have been traced to the U.S. An American official says the FBI is considering a roundup of perhaps half a dozen individuals in the U.S. believed to have been in contact with at least one of the men apprehended in Pakistan. The FBI recently began interviews of "a few thousand people that they believe could be helpful," the official says. "It's all been going about very quietly. They're trying to just get anything they can that could lead them to uncovering what the plot or the plots are." Here's how the U.S. and its allies are piecing together what they now know, how much damage they may have inflicted on al-Qaeda and what remains to be done.

AN ARREST IN KARACHI

For Musaad Aruchi, terrorism was apparently a family affair. The Pakistani, about 40, is the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the brains behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003. He is also a first cousin to Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who planned and executed the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and is serving a life sentence in jail in the U.S. Earlier this summer CIA intercepts of Aruchi's phone calls and Internet messages allowed Pakistani law enforcement to track him to densely populated Karachi, on the southern coast of Pakistan. On June 12, Pakistani paramilitary forces arrested him.