Qaeda, Iran top list of threats

WASHINGTON -- Al Qaeda and associated groups top the list of threats to the United States, leading government intelligence officials told Congress yesterday in a grim assessment that also highlighted Iran's emergence as a major threat to American interests in the Middle East.

Despite gains made against Al Qaeda and other affiliates, CIA Director Porter Goss, in an unusually blunt statement before the mostly secretive Senate Intelligence Committee, said the terrorist group is intent on finding ways to circumvent US security enhancements to attack the homeland.

''It may be only a matter of time before Al Qaeda or other groups attempt to use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons. We must focus on that," Goss said.

FBI Director Robert Mueller cautioned of the risk posed by radicalized Muslim converts inside the United States and said he worries about the possibility of a sleeper operative who has been in place for years, awaiting orders to launch an attack.

''I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing," he said in his prepared remarks.

More than three years since the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Goss, Mueller, and other intelligence leaders provided these and other bleak assessments at the annual briefing on threats from around the globe.

Also at the hearing, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, painted Iran as a leading threat to US interests in the Middle East. In his prepared testimony, Jacoby said he believes that Iran will continue its support for terrorism and aid for insurgents in Iraq.

He said the country's long-term goal is to expel the United States from the region, and noted that political reform movements there have lost momentum.

Goss said that Islamic extremists are exploiting the conflict in Iraq and fighters there represent a ''potential pool of contacts" to build transnational terror groups. He said the most-wanted terrorist in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, hopes to establish Iraq as a safe-haven to bring about a final victory over the West.

Goss also said that the intelligence community has yet to get to the ''end of the trail" of the nuclear black market run by disgraced Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. Goss wouldn't rule out the possibility that organizations, rather than states, could obtain nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.

He also couldn't assure senators that the United States doesn't face a threat from nuclear weapons possibly missing from Russia.

In the past year, the intelligence community has been faced with a series of negative reports, including the work of the Sept. 11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee's inquiry on the flawed Iraq intelligence.

And next month, President Bush's commission to investigate the intelligence community's capabilities on weapons of mass destruction is also expected to submit its findings.

Given the after-the-fact investigations into the Iraq intelligence, Senate Intelligence chairman Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said his panel will become more proactive in how it reviews the intelligence community's strengths and weaknesses, already focusing on nuclear terrorism and Iran.

The Senate hearing came as the White House continues its eight-week-long search for a new national intelligence director, a position created in last year's intelligence reorganization bill.

Democrats were critical yesterday of the pace of the search.