Hate Club

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JONATHAN EVANS Qatada’s hateful preaching has placed him on the list of suspected terrorists

Antiterrorist officials say the typical inducements to sing don’t work with fundamentalists well-versed in their rights under Western legal systems. "With the Mafia, it was usually enough to offer them a lighter sentence or a bit of money," says an Italian judge. "This is a different phenomenon. But it’s still early. We have to give it time. You have to isolate them from their network." Others remain less optimistic. "Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a turncoat among Islamist militants," says an experienced European interrogator. "A change of heart could be transitory. People we’ve considered ‘defectors’ from the jihad have been re-recruited — some actually felt guilty about having given up the fight. A lot of Islamists who seem to be confessing may actually be thinking, ‘I’ll tell them what they want to hear, but I’ll never change.’"

And even as the detainees deny involvement in eventual attacks on designated targets, some are "talking about very important figures in the al-Qaeda structure — right up into bin Laden’s inner circle," a European justice official told TIME. Such information involves "names, responsibilities, and functions. People we weren’t even aware of before." One name officials were familiar with was bin Laden’s top terror strategist, Abu Zubaydah — who Beghal at one point said sent him to set up a European network for al-Qaeda.

That information can come none too soon. There have been reports that Zubaydah left Afghanistan on Sept. 15, bound, according to some sources, for Europe and likely set on sowing mayhem. But the lesson of the Atta group has to be a sobering one for Europe’s harried antiterrorist officials. Nobody heard them playing war videos, and nobody taped them boasting of their abiding desire to die a holy warrior’s death.

Europe’s terrorist hunters know all too well that today’s militants have shucked off many of the attributes that earmarked their precursors. Ziad Jarrah, for one, suspected by the FBI of being among the hijackers of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, exhibited none of the alienation or obsessiveness that characterized other suspects. His cousin Salim Jarrah, 26, who owns a trattoria, catering service and dry-cleaning establishment in the town of Greifswald on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast, says Ziad preferred discos to "veiled women." He recalls him sneaking shots from a bottle of whisky hidden in the refrigerator at a cousin’s wedding. "He had everything going for him: he came from a good family, he knew a good job was waiting for him at home, he had a girlfriend — there was no reason whatsoever for him to do a thing like that," says Jarrah, who came to Greifswald five years ago together with Ziad. He just doesn’t buy the circumstantial evidence pointing to Ziad’s involvement — flight lessons in Florida, a passport conveniently lost at the same time as those of members of the Hamburg cell, his inexplicable presence on the doomed plane.

Jarrah is beyond confessing, but investigators say they’ve interviewed other suspects who appear perfectly able to lead a Europeanized lifestyle while harboring deadly intentions against the West. One example: Djamel Beghal, purported leader of the cell alleged to have planned an attack on the U.S. embassy in Paris. According to a French police source, Beghal issues from the al-Qaeda-allied group Takfir wal Hijra (Anathema and Exile), whose members make a point of concealing their strict fundamentalism behind a Western façade. "The goal of Takfir is to blend in to corrupt enemy societies in order to plot attacks against them better," said the French official. "Members live together, form businesses together, will drink alcohol, eat during Ramadan, become smart dressers and ladies’ men in order to show just how integrated they are," says an investigator. Suspects like Beghal, he says, "are well-spoken, affable, very intelligent, ready with a laugh, good-looking guys. You can’t believe they’d be involved in this kind of terror. Which is one reason you’ve got to force yourself to think twice when they say they’ve turned their back on it."

Certainly Europe’s intelligence antennae are tuned to al-Qaeda terror as never before. But as long as its superstructure is in place, the network can change the frequency. Now that European intelligence services have homed in on Arab men as potential terrorists, the organizers could shift to Asian Muslims — Filipinos, Malaysians, Indonesians. Security officials in Europe and Asia profess concerns about al-Qaeda links to the Philippines’ Abu Sayyaf group. Philippine officials acknowledge that bin Laden’s brother-in-law Mohamad Jamal Khalifa served as a financial backer for Abu Sayyaf up to 1994. Two months ago the government rejected his offer to help crush the movement.

Any mutation of al-Qaeda’s approach in Europe wouldn’t have to happen fast. In fact, security experts in Europe and Israel have suggested that, given the military pressure in Afghanistan and the police surveillance in the West, al-Qaeda might well want to bide its time for the next couple of months before launching another dramatic attack. Quiescence is no cause for relief. The history of Islamic terrorism may be short, but it has already established a pace of deadening patience.