Al Qaeda can be expected to attempt an attack on the United States in the next three to six months, senior U.S. intelligence officials told Congress on Tuesday.
The terrorist organization is deploying operatives to the U.S. to carry out new attacks from inside the country, including “clean” recruits with a negligible trail of terrorist contacts, CIA Director Leon Panetta said.
Al Qaeda is also inspiring homegrown extremists to trigger violence on their own, Panetta added.
The annual assessment of the nation’s terror threats provided no startling new terror trends, but amplified growing concerns since the failed attack on Christmas Day to bring down an airliner bound for Detroit that militants are growing harder to detect and moving more quickly in their plots.
“The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11. It is that al Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect,” Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Al Qaeda is increasingly relying on new recruits with minimal training and simple devices to carry out attacks, the CIA chief said as part of the annual assessment of national threats provided to Congress by the top five U.S. intelligence officials.
Panetta also warned of the danger of extremists acting alone: “It’s the lone-wolf strategy that I think we have to pay attention to as the main threat to this country,” he said.
Director of National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said that al Qaeda can be expected to continue and try to attack the United States until Osama bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, are dead.
Blair also warned of a growing cyber threat, saying computer-related attacks have become dynamic and malicious.
President Barack Obama has promised to make cyber security a priority in his administration, but the president’s new budget asks for a decrease in funds for the Homeland Security Department’s cyber security division.
The government’s first quadrennial homeland security review states high consequence and large-scale cyber attacks could massively disable or hurt international financial, commercial and physical infrastructure.