An update on this story. “White House, FBI Agents Race to Disrupt ‘Summer of ’07’ Threat,” by Brian Ross, Richard Esposito, and Chris Isham for ABC News’ The Blotter:
Senior law enforcement officials said today that the growing signs of a “Summer
of ’07” terror attack on the U.S. have led the FBI to dispatch dozens of agents to track down new leads across the country.
The threat has also led the White House to begin a weekly meeting of senior law
enforcement and intelligence officials.
The group met last Friday and will meet tomorrow in the White House Situation
Room at 1 p.m., according to the officials.
The White House has described the meeting as “not urgent” and “regular,” but
law enforcement officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com the new weekly sessions, to be
held every Thursday, were designed specifically to counter the summer threat.
“The Thursday meetings will be regular, but the first one is tomorrow,” said one official.
Dozens of FBI agents have been given a two-week deadline to run down more
than 700 leads on an FBI “worry list,” developed in the wake of the failed attacks in London and Glasgow. The list includes some 100 specific leads in the New York area, senior law enforcement officials also told ABCNews.com.
Although the White House says there is no credible, imminent threat to the
United States, the origin of the intelligence that a small group of al Qaeda terrorists was
headed to the United States came from a credible intelligence source, who in the past has
been reliable, officials said.
The source of the intelligence specified the small cell was traveling from
Pakistan.
The new threat comes as FBI agents were already trying to sort through a mountain of e-mails, jihadist message board postings, telephone intercepts and human source
intelligence, in an effort to pluck an intelligence gem from the background of “chatter”
louder than has been heard in any recent summer season.
There is so much terrorist “noise” that some agents and officers have already
dubbed June and July a “summer of chatter.”
Agents also have been running down financial leads and telephone records
that could have linked several members of the recent failed London and Glasgow, Scotland
incendiary bomb plots to North America.