In the June 23 Newsweek exclusive cover story, "Al Qaeda in America" (on
newsstands Monday, June 16), Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Klaidman, Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas, with Investigative Correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball and Correspondent Kevin Peraino, examine how Osama bin Laden's network has been working in America and how federal officials have thwarted plots to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, blow up gas stations around the country and drive trucks full of explosives into trains and airplanes. Thanks to some real breakthroughs by the Feds, the Qaeda plots do not appear to have made it past the planning stage. The inside story of the war at home on Al Qaeda, reconstructed by Newsweek reporters from intelligence documents and interviews with top officials, has been marked by good luck and good work. Still, no one in the intelligence community is declaring victory.

Newsweek reports:

   * KSM revealed an over-haul of Al Qaeda's approach to penetrating America. To foil the heightened security after 9-11, Al Qaeda began to rely on operatives who would be harder to detect. They recruited U.S. citizens or people with legitimate Western passports who could move freely in the United States. They used women and family members as "support personnel," and made an effort to find African-American Muslims who would be sympathetic to Islamic extremism. Using "mosques, prisons and universities throughout the United States," KSM reached deep into the heartland, lining up agents in Baltimore, Columbus, Ohio, and Peoria,
      Ill.

    * According to Justice Department documents describing KSM's interrogation, he "tasked" a former resident of Baltimore named Majid Khan, to "move forward" on Khan's plan to destroy several U.S. gas stations by "simultaneously detonating explosives in the stations' underground storage tanks." When Khan reported that the storage tanks were unprotected and easy to attack, KSM wanted to be sure that explosive charges would cause a massive eruption of flame and destruction. Khan -- a "confessed AQ [Al Qaeda] member" who was apparently captured in Pakistan, according to intelligence sources -- traveled at least briefly to the United States, where he tried unsuccessfully to seek asylum. His family members, intelligence documents say, are longtime Baltimore residents and own gas stations in that city (a detail Newsweek was able to confirm). KSM told investigators that he and Khan discussed a plan to use a Karachi-based import-export business to smuggle explosives into the United States.

    * KSM had more diabolical plans for another of Majid Khan's American relatives, a commercial truckdriver named Iyman Faris. The truckdriver is a naturalized U.S. citizen, a longtime resident of Columbus, Ohio. KSM told interrogators that he wanted Faris to case the Brooklyn Bridge and to obtain "gas cutters" (presumably, metal-cutting torches) that could be used to cut the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension wires. And more: the truck driver was assigned to obtain "torque tools" to bend railroad tracks, the better to send a passenger train hurtling off the rails. And still more: Faris recommended driving a small truck with explosives beneath a commercial airliner as it sat on the tarmac. A licensed truckdriver, he said, could easily penetrate airport security. None of these plots ever came off. Faris has disappeared. No one was home when Newsweek knocked on the door of his apartment in a run-down section of Columbus last week.
NEWSWEEK COVER: Al Qaeda in America How the Terrorists Are Recruiting -- and Plotting -- Here