Via CT Blog -
On the heels of CIA Director Gen. Mike Hayden's recent "Meet the Press" appearance, in which he disclosed that Al Qaeda is recruiting and training operatives who "look western" in order to penetrate the U.S., another top spook offered a few additional scraps of information about the new threat on Friday.
"There is attention being given to finding people who can live in the west, have lived in the west, comfortably, and who can appear western, wear western clothing," Charlie Allen, chief of intelligence and analysis at the Homeland Security Department, told reporters. "I'm talking about people who are Caucasian and non-Caucasian."
Allen, who spent decades as a top CIA official, said there was "a shift in Al Qaeda's strategy" after the late 2005 assassination of Al Qaeda's external operations commander, Abu Hamza Rabia.
According to recent congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, it only took Osama Bin Laden's fanatics a mere six months to begin bringing western converts into Pakistan's lawless tribal areas for training. The New York Daily News reported last year that top counterterror officials fear the western-looking operatives can more easily penetrate U.S. security by blending in.
"I would think that you'd believe that Al Qaeda would look to Europe and to North America for such operatives. That's something to which we're very attentive," Allen said.
He also echoed recent comments Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff made to The News, that no Al Qaeda operatives are known to have crossed the southern border from Mexico into the U.S. But, he added, "We do know that going back to 2004, the southern border is something Al Qaeda senior leadership has looked at."
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