To win the war against terrorism, we have to think like a street gang, swarm
               like a soccer team, and communicate like Wal-Mart. The latest thinking from
               the military's greatest minds: It takes a network to beat a network.

               The United States is at war with a foe that is, as the cliche has it, "a shadowy terrorist network," a multinational
               private army whose nodes and lines of communication reach invisibly and murderously across national borders.
               It's centipedal, multiheaded, hard to find, difficult to kill. Don't be fooled by familiar-seeming before-and-after
               images of bomb damage or shots of jet fighters streaking off the decks of aircraft carriers: This is a new kind of
               war -- netwar. "Netwar requires a whole new set of strategies and tactics," says John Arquilla, a consultant at
               the Rand Institute and a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. You could have seen it
               coming, and Arquilla, who with his Rand colleague David Ronfeldt coined the term "netwar," is among those who
               did. So is a forward-thinking group in the U.S. military, which has planned for what it calls "network-centric
               warfare." Businesspeople have for years studied military strategy and spouted military metaphors. Now the
               armed forces are looking at businesses like Wal-Mart and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell and boning up on
               economists like Brian Arthur and Kenneth Arrow -- and discovering some of netwar's most potent weapons in
               avant-garde theories of management and organization that were once the realm of captains of industry, not
               armies.

               Netwar has been molded by trends that have been reshaping big global institutions for years. One is the growing
               influence of "non-state actors" -- corporations, activist groups, and other nongovernmental organizations and
               networks. Examples are everywhere. Supranational organizations like the European Union and NAFTA perform
               formerly sovereign tasks. Private companies take on political responsibilities: Royal Dutch Shell has a policy on
               human rights. Activism and protest have globalized. A second trend is the flattening of hierarchies, both social
               and managerial, and their replacement with more fluid and horizontal organizational forms. Layers of middle
               management have been scraped away; project teams, alliances with other organizations, and outsourcing
               proliferate. A third factor is the explosive growth of computer and telecommunications networking. When the
               senior George Bush led America into Iraq a decade ago, the Internet sported a mere 500,000 host computers,
               mobile phones were just starting to go digital, and only psychics read Palms.

               Like intersecting roads, these trends feed each other. For example, the Net helped enable nongovernmental
               anti-globalization activists around the world to converge on Genoa and Seattle with no formal organization
               managing the process. When these trends take on a military mien, the result is this: The world's most virulent
               aggressors are not armies whose order of battle is a tidy ziggurat of corps, divisions, and brigades, but
               amorphous networks of terror and crime -- groups like Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and its affiliates, the Irish
               Republican Army, and Colombian narco-trafficking cartels. "Warfare is irregularizing," Arquilla says, and it's
               driving regular armies nuts.

               No military on earth can go toe-to-toe with the U.S. armed forces. But no hierarchy on earth can keep up with a
               well-functioning network. "One is a football team, the other a soccer team," says Richard E. Hayes, president of
               Evidence Based Research, a company that advises the military on issues like command and control and
               information warfare. If the soccer players have enough destructive power -- and the attacks of Sept. 11 proved
               that they do -- they can swarm downfield, score, and be gone before the defense even buckles its chin straps.

               There have always been irregular forces -- guerrillas, mobsters, revolutionaries. Mostly, however, they have
               been local and limited in firepower. In many cases -- Mafia and Bolshevik cadres, for example -- they have
               been rigidly hierarchical, with inviolable commands flowing down from the top. Netwar is different and scarier. Al
               Qaeda and its cousins are designed to exploit all the advantages of networking -- robustness, speed, flexibility
               -- that business has discovered. Communication is multidirectional. Command is shared. People are multiskilled.
               Trust is high.

               A networked force can, up to a point, "offset a disadvantage in numbers, technology, or position," according to
               U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, former head of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. They are hard
               to target because they have few formal procedures to disrupt and little physical infrastructure to destroy. They
               are hard to infiltrate because they are held together by close personal ties and intensely shared values. When
               they need expensive equipment, such as Boeing 767 airliners, they borrow from someone else. "Terrorists don't
               need much coordination," says David Alberts, director of research and strategic planning for what the Pentagon
               calls C3I (command, control, communications, and intelligence). "They are following a self-synchronizing
               approach" -- what business calls "self-managing teams." These are superb, malevolent examples of what
               Information Age organizations can be.

               So how do you kill them?

               Within days of the assaults on New York and Washington, a group of academics and consultants began e-mailing
               each other about America's newly infamous adversary. Anthropologists, mathematicians, and sociologists, they
               are experts in the little-known field of social and organizational network analysis. They study groups the same
               way engineers do computer and phone nets. Where are the nodes? How are they linked? Are the links
               many-to-many, so that each node (i.e., each person or place) connects directly with many others? Or are there
               central nodes, like switches, through which communication must pass? Is there a lot of redundancy in the
               network -- i.e., if a node is destroyed or a link is cut, are there alternative paths?

               Bombnet, the group calls itself. Its most central node is Barry Wellman, who founded the International Network
               for Social Network Analysis in 1976. Since the attacks, the Bombnet friends have trained the tools of their trade
               on the al Qaeda network, trying, in the words of consultant and Bombnet participant Valdis Krebs, "to figure out
               what this thing looks like."

               It's not an academic exercise. The Bombnet participants have counterparts -- including friends, former
               colleagues, and students -- inside all the intelligence agencies. They are using social network analysis to chart al
               Qaeda's structure and find potential vulnerabilities. Krebs, for example, analyzed the "centrality" and
               "connectedness" -- two important attributes of a network's design -- of the group directly associated with the
               Sept. 11 hijackings. (For a look at that analysis, see "Six Degrees of Mohamed Atta.")

               Other Bombnet analysts have focused on al Qaeda's social structure. Bonnie E. Erickson of the University of
               Toronto is an expert on networks-at-risk, such as prisoners of war and members of outlaw societies like the Ku
               Klux Klan. What has come out about al Qaeda confirms her research that people in such situations rely on
               previously trusted relationships -- family members, old army buddies. The intensity of those ties makes it
               difficult to use standard tactics -- sowing distrust, for instance, by means of disinformation -- against the
               veterans in al Qaeda's core. "Social capital has to be very high for people to be willing to commit suicide," says
               Wayne Baker, a network expert at the University of Michigan Business School. "But you might not have the
               same levels of trust, collaboration, and reciprocity across units as you have within units." Where al Qaeda has
               seams, it may have weaknesses.

               "That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the three-star Army general who was deputy
               chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement late last year. Analyzing networks requires maximum
               information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and
               their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks,
               well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

               Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the
               United States. All networks have to manage a trade-off between security and robustness; lots of redundant links
               make a network hard to disconnect but easier to penetrate. Al Qaeda seems to do a pretty good job of getting
               the best of both worlds. For instance, its use of public networks, such as the Net for communications and an
               ancient money-transfer system called hawala for moving cash, is highly effective and protects anonymity
               extremely well. Al Qaeda's most important nodes -- bin Laden himself, for example -- aren't put at risk by
               having direct contact with operatives who are more exposed or of less certain loyalty. Peter Schwartz,
               co-founder of Global Business Network and an adviser to people involved in the war effort, says al Qaeda
               appears to be what network mavens call a SPIN: a segmented, polycentric, ideologically integrated network. Its
               semiautonomous pieces don't depend on each other for survival, nor does a SPIN rely on just one leader --
               indeed, taking a leader out might energize the network, whose most important asset is its ideological fervor.

               A SPIN is "the hardest to see or to dismantle," Schwartz says. "You need to attack it with many, many
               components going simultaneously at many, many points."

               It takes a network to fight a network, John Arquilla believes. A group like al Qaeda doesn't put 20,000 troops in
               the field where they can be bombed, enfiladed, or flanked. Most of the time, it's dispersed and hidden in caves,
               literally or metaphorically. It's almost impossible to do wholesale damage to it, because the whole is never
               engaged. You nickel-and-dime it to death, over a long period of time.

               A charismatic speaker who segues effortlessly from tactics in the Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C. to contemporary
               Russia's war on Chechnya, Arquilla teaches his students at the Naval Postgraduate School that enemies like this
               can be fought only with small, mobile forces using the best intelligence and arrayed in networks similar to the
               ones they fight against. The intelligence must go far beyond traditional "humint" (human intelligence) from spies
               in trench coats, and "sigint" (signals intelligence) from satellite photos and intercepted radio and phone
               transmissions. "The networks out there -- criminal or terror -- have migrated to the Internet and World Wide
               Web," Arquilla says. "It gives them real-time communications out of the realm of most of our surveillance
               assets." There are, of course, people who know all the Net's back alleys. "World-class hackers ought to be
               treated a little like German rocket scientists at the end of World War II," Arquilla says. Equally crucial are
               operations that scarf up and mine the vast amount of "open-source" data -- phone and bank records, visa and
               immigration data, licenses for transporting hazardous materials or using anti-eavesdropping equipment or flying
               planes -- and combine it with clandestine intelligence.

               When it comes to actual combat, netwars will be fought at distances of 3 feet, not 30,000. None of the
               conventional tactics of Desert Storm could have nailed Mohamed Atta and his cronies. The forces we put in the
               field ought to be small, nimble, and "packetized," Arquilla argues. "We need a military reorganization designed
               to optimize the use of this good intelligence right down to the platoon level. It's geeks at war."

               Netwar, Arquilla says, demands examining an enemy in five different dimensions: technological, social,
               narrative, organizational, and doctrinal. Technology is partly, but by no means entirely, a matter of Tomahawks
               vs. truck bombs. Al Qaeda and other terror networks rely on a lot of freelance technical expertise. For example,
               we know to our sorrow that al Qaeda had to go outside the organization to train its operatives to fly airplanes.
               As Business 2.0 went to press, it was unclear whether recent anthrax attacks are al Qaeda's work, but whoever
               is behind the scheme needed more than a chemistry set to pull it off. By taking out or compromising technical
               experts like document forgers and money launderers -- or anthrax cooks -- authorities can force a network to
               make itself vulnerable, says Dutch criminologist Peter Klerks, an expert on drug-smuggling networks. Just
               chasing bad guys doesn't work. "The net effect is almost negligible," he says. What works is targeting their
               processes and technology; if you shut down one supplier, the bad guys have to find a new one. That disrupts
               their operations and creates the potential for security leaks.

               The social dimension looks at the kinds of ties -- kinship, marriage, religion -- that bind a network together. Al
               Qaeda seems almost impenetrably close-knit, but its social fabric frays away from the center. At least one
               suspected al Qaeda operative arrested last summer in the United Arab Emirates started talking when authorities
               brought in Muslim clerics who persuaded him that al Qaeda was perverting the faith. The FBI's hypothesis that
               only a few of the Sept. 11 hijackers knew that the planes were to be turned into guided missiles also implies
               that trust doesn't run far in the network. There are many ways to degrade it further. One might be described as
               the Whack-a-Mole approach: Grab every suspected terrorist and associate, comb their every canceled check
               and telephone bill, and interrogate them to the limits of the law. Some will talk. The more terrorists have spent
               a few weeks on the griddle, the more likely it is that a network may begin mistrusting itself. "You can't
               undermine the religious and kinship ties," Arquilla says, "but you can undermine the social structure and their
               trust in the system, and that will cramp their style."

               The narrative dimension revolves around the story the network tells about itself to maintain loyalty and
               sympathy. The battle of narratives is one of the most visible elements of the war on terrorism. The United
               States focuses on its story: We are attacking the Taliban, not Afghanistan; terrorists, not Muslims. Al Qaeda
               fights back with tales of civilian casualties; its leader speaks in flowery Arabic of defending the faith against
               Christian crusaders. Winning the clash of narratives is crucial in netwar. Americans need forward airbases and
               at least grudging cooperation from military, political, and intelligence people -- and the private sector -- in
               places like Syria and Pakistan. The irregulars of al Qaeda, who need sympathy and cover, are doomed if they
               lose the battle of the story. "That's where the Chechens fell down terribly in their second war" against the
               Russians, Arquilla says. "In the first, in 1994 to '96, they were plucky freedom fighters. The second time around,
               the Chechens look like a bunch of terrorists and the Russians portray themselves as waging a war for
               civilization" -- and the global sympathy that was generated by the Chechens in the earlier campaign has
               diminished.

               Doctrine, in military jargon, has to do with strategy and tactics. Al Qaeda, for example, seems to believe in
               striking every so often against showy targets in far-flung places: the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen, embassies
               in Tanzania and Kenya, the World Trade Center and Pentagon, all on different continents. "If that's their
               doctrine," Arquilla explains, "you can't meet it with a doctrine of overwhelming force" -- the old Powell doctrine,
               which worked so well against Iraq during the Gulf War. "That's just going to be trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."

                Pentagon planners responsible for doctrine -- some of them, anyway -- endorse many netwar precepts. But the
               Pentagon has its own version, called network-centric warfare. The idea first took hold in the Navy; Vice Adm.
               Cebrowski was an early promulgator. For Cebrowski, network-centric warfare stands in contrast with
               "platform-centric warfare," in which military strategy revolves around the platform -- such as an aircraft carrier
               or a unit of infantry.

               Network-centric war begins with an intelligence network, sometimes called a "sensor grid." This grid collates
               real-time information from every kind of sensor -- from satellites in space to sharp-eyed soldiers -- to create a
               shared image of battlefield conditions. Parallel to the sensor grid is a "shooter grid": carriers and battleships,
               fighters and bombers, commandos and copters. Connecting them is an "information grid" of computers and
               communication devices. The idea is to achieve "information superiority" and almost instantaneous
               responsiveness. In theory, a sensor ought to be able to spot a target and see it destroyed by whichever shooter
               -- regardless of branch of service -- is best positioned to take it out, the way taxi dispatchers call out fares and
               cabbies put dibs on them. Strategists call aircraft carriers, missiles, and bombers "peripherals" -- like printers
               and keyboards. "In a network, 'commander's intent' and a set of rules of engagement take the place of direct
               orders," says C3I's Alberts. "I'm counting on you to read the situation and respond accordingly. It's a far more
               robust and effective organizational method."

               If earlier soldiers idealized Napoleon or Patton, network-centric warriors admire Wal-Mart, where point-of-sale
               scanners (part of the sensor grid) share information on a near real-time basis with suppliers (comparable to the
               shooter grid) and also produce data that is mined to help leaders develop new strategic or tactical plans.
               Wal-Mart, says the Navy's Cebrowski, is an example of "translating information superiority into competitive
               advantage."

              That's the theory, anyway. Will it work in practice? We are but weeks into a war on terror networks that could
               last decades, and the military is a long way from really putting netwar principles into action. Still, some of the
               challenges of waging real-life netwar were apparent even before the World Trade Center attacks. Arquilla, who
               helped Cebrowski develop the military's idea of network-centric warfare, thinks it doesn't go far enough. "You
               ought to think about the small and the many, not the few and the large," he says. That's hard to take for the old
               guard in the Pentagon, which cherishes its hulking carrier groups and other industrial age systems. Arquilla says
               the military's idea of total information superiority is a pipe dream. "The only phrase worse than 'information
               superiority' is 'infinite justice,'" he says. The temptation it poses is to devote enormous treasure and time to
               processing every last bit of data, while not paying enough attention to structuring and sharing information in
               ways that people can act on: Data, data everywhere, but not a chance to think.

               More problematic, Arquilla says, are "the cultures of the different organizations that control and disseminate
               information in different ways." Interservice rivalries are bad enough -- and actually not as fierce as they once
               were. But waging netwar requires an extraordinary sharing of information and resources among the military,
               intelligence agencies, the FBI, and local police forces -- not to mention their counterparts in the scores of
               nations where terror cells lurk. "This is a problem that falls into almost every crack we have," Alberts says.
               Beyond that, the reported missed opportunity, just days into the conflict, to blast a convoy in which Taliban
               leader and bin Laden protector Mullah Mohamed Omar was traveling because of the need to first go through a
               military lawyer shows that we haven't achieved the streamlined command-and-control and instantaneous action
               that netwar envisions. In Arquilla's battle of the narratives, the West started out ahead, given the widespread
               moral revulsion over the Sept. 11 attacks. But the counteroffensive -- wrapping terror's cause in Palestinian and
               Islamic cloaks -- did better than it ought to have, and the early U.S. response was, by Defense Secretary
               Donald Rumsfeld's own admission, inadequate. U.S. policymakers now seem to grasp the importance of the
               narrative struggle. But the United States needs to expand its efforts and take them into the Muslim heartland
               over television and radio and through public statements from Islamic academics, theologians, and others.

               Netwar is new, and innovators in war, like innovators in business, often have first-mover advantages. It takes a
               while to learn how to defeat an innovative enemy. But the United States seems to have learned the overarching
               lesson of netwar: It is fought with every means, military and other, with no front line and little distinction
               between offense and defense. It requires patience -- and fury. Since al Qaeda shows itself as little as possible,
               the United States needs to develop the ability to swarm over it when it does appear, attacking with enormous
               speed and ferocity from every possible direction.

               Between those moments, the United States needs to exploit its own considerable advantages. Gary Anderson at
               the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, who helps school the Marine Corps in war games, says,
               "The terrorist side doesn't have the capability to conduct large, flexible operations and put on events like a
               campaign. They don't do sequels." The United States, by contrast, "can lean on them all the time. If we do that
               and take advantage of fast-moving opportunities, we can take away their flexibility."

               In an odd way, al Qaeda might be too virtual, too Information Age, for its own good. It is amorphous and
               unstructured; chase it relentlessly, hit it hard and in the right places, and its very lightness of being becomes a
               fatal liability, not a strength. "In the 19th-century Indian wars, we could put infantry in the field in the wintertime
               and keep the pressure on year-round," Anderson says. "And that's why we will win this one -- we can keep up a
               tempo that they can't sustain." It could take years. But it wouldn't be the first time that an organization with a
               great brand name, lots of assets, and strong cash flow withstood a terrifying assault from a new kind of foe,
               picked up a few new tricks, and then crushed its attacker.
 

Six Degrees of Mohamed Atta     By: Thomas A. Stewart, Business 2.0, December 2001.
 
 

               Good maps are underappreciated in times of war, as the world was reminded by the inadvertent U.S. bombing
               of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, the result of attack planners' reliance on an out-of-date street
               map. Maps play a particularly vital role in netwar: If you can accurately map a network, you can figure out how
               to break it apart.

               The illustration here is based on social network theorist Valdis Krebs's examination of the interrelationships
               between the 19 hijackers aboard the planes used in the Sept. 11 attack and 15 people authorities say are
               connected with them. Employing proprietary software called InFlow, normally used to help companies improve
               communication, Krebs entered every publicly disclosed contact between people in the network. He then dated
               and weighted the contacts. Strong ties -- such as sharing a house or attending the same flight school -- got
               more weight than weak ones such as telephone calls. (Not everyone listed is necessarily a terrorist, of course;
               some of the contacts may have been innocent.)   Click to see Map.

               When all the data was entered, the software drew a picture. It shows every direct contact between network
               members: Mohamed Atta, for example, is known to have been in touch with 16 others, with strong links (the
               thicker lines) to 6. Mohamed Abdi, by contrast, has just one known link, of medium strength.

               InFlow also analyzes and clusters the nodes in the network -- that is, the people -- according to three measures.
               One is "degrees," or activity, which measures the number of times someone contacts others in the network. A
               second is "betweenness." For example, there appears to have been no direct link between Abdulaziz Alomari
               and Ziad Jarrah; Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi stood between them. The more often someone is in that "between"
               position, the more control he exercises in the network. The third attribute is "closeness," which measures the
               extent to which a person has direct contact with others, with no go-between; this is another clue to how
               important an individual is to the network.

               The map is the software's attempt to make a picture that takes all three attributes into account. It is not a
               complete picture; among other problems, it shows only those links that have been publicly disclosed. Still, it's
               possible to make some interesting inferences. First, the greatest number of lines lead to Atta, who scores
               highest on all three measures, with Al-Shehhi, who is second in both activity and closeness, close behind.
               However, Nawaf Alhazmi, one of the American Flight 77 hijackers, is an interesting figure. In Krebs's number
               crunching, Alhazmi comes in second in betweenness, suggesting that he exercised a lot of control, but fourth in
               activity and only seventh in closeness. But if you eliminate the thinnest links (which also tend to be the most
               recent -- phone calls and other connections made just before Sept. 11), Alhazmi becomes the most powerful
               node in the net. He is first in both control and access, and second only to Atta in activity. It would be worth
               exploring the hypothesis that Alhazmi played a large role in planning the attacks, and Atta came to the fore
               when it was time to carry them out.

               It's also clear that this network would have been hard to dismantle. A hub-and-spoke network, where there is
               no contact between nodes except through a central figure, is an easy target: If just the central node is
               destroyed, the network disintegrates. Network analysts say a highly centralized network typically can be taken
               down by eliminating about 5 percent of the nodes. But the diffuseness of the hijacker network means that it
               won't suffer significant damage until the six nodes with the most numerous and important connections -- 21
               percent of the group -- are removed.

"Meet General Bratton"    By: Thomas A. Stewart, Business 2.0, December 2001
                     In 1995 the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a team to New York City to study the New York police department. Under
               the leadership of police chief William J. Bratton, the NYPD was revolutionizing police work in ways that seemed
               relevant to the hoped-for revolution in military affairs. Between 1993 and 2000, crime in New York fell nearly 52
               percent. Bratton was the architect of the system that did it. Multinational terrorism isn't the same as urban
               crime, but there are enough similarities that Bratton can be said to be one of the few people with real-world
               experience in destroying outlaw networks on a large scale.

               "A lot of what we did in the '90s is likely to be very applicable" to the war on terror, says Bratton, who resigned
               in 1996 and is now a security consultant. When he took the reins at the NYPD, most of the force's information
               was stale. Data sharing between precincts and headquarters was lousy. Special squads -- narcotics, homicide,
               guns -- hoarded their information. "The policy was 'need to know' and very exclusionary," Bratton says.

               Bratton put timely, accurate intelligence in the cops' hands through what the department called "compstat" --
               computerized statistics -- which gave precinct captains up-to-date info about every single crime committed in
               their commands. The data created the "common operating picture" that network-centric warfare demands.

               "Compstat flattened a very large hierarchy," Bratton says. He freed his captains to respond quickly to events on
               their parts of the battlefield, another echo of netwar. "We authorized precinct commanders to tactically achieve
               strategic goals," he says. "The idea is to tip the offensive capability from them to me." He believes that the
               same strategy will win a netwar against Osama bid Laden. "I don't care how smart the bastard is," Bratton says.
               "He misjudged."

Breaking a Terror Net:  Israeli agents on what they've learned.     By: Stacy Perman, Business 2.0. December 2001
                         Sept. 11 made it devastatingly obvious that American intelligence agencies' approach to terrorism has failed.
               Now U.S. spymasters are embarking on a crash course to infiltrate and bring down Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda
               and similar networks across the globe. But how do you build an organization to do clandestine battle with an
               amorphous and ruthless new enemy? David Kimche has some insight into the matter -- and much of it is not
               very comforting.

               Kimche helped run covert operations for the Mossad, Israel's storied spy agency, in Lebanon during the 1970s,
               and is credited with successfully infiltrating several Palestinian militant networks. He reportedly became known
               in intelligence circles as "the man with the suitcase" for his habit of quietly showing up in African outposts right
               before a government was overthrown. He was the secret Israeli contact during the Reagan administration's
               Irangate arms-for-hostages deal. Now retired from the spy business, he says his first message for Americans is
               to prepare for years of often frustrating and bloody work. It took the Israelis as long as a decade to insinuate a
               single agent into the inner sanctum of some terror cells. "This is definitely going to be a long war," Kimche says.

               Infiltrating terrorist rings, Kimche says, starts with an understanding of what he calls "the onion theory." "The
               core of the onion is made up of a small number of highly educated, motivated, fanatical people" -- tough to
               crack, Kimche says. "But around the core are layers of people needed to plan the operations or who have
               contact with the leaders, like families, mistresses, drivers ... These lads are easier to penetrate." The key is
               finding each person's pressure points. "Everyone has a weakness -- even the most fanatical member may have
               a family member who is sick" and might be willing to trade information for medical treatment. Most people,
               terrorists included, "like to brag, to show they're important," Kimche says. Play to that vanity in the right way,
               he says, and a terrorist "will give away things without even knowing it." Blackmail remains a tried-and-true
               weapon: Israel has been known to squeeze information out of terrorists who have frequented casinos all over
               the world -- including one in the West Bank; gambling is forbidden by Islam.

               Planting a homegrown agent inside an organization can provide a far richer pipeline of information, but it is
               infinitely more difficult than turning existing members of a terror group. If a plant's cover "is as a businessman,
               he has to act, learn, and dream as a businessman," says Kimche. "If an agent is sloppy in his cover, he will be
               caught very quickly." Kimche says the United States should try to recruit people of Middle Eastern origin --
               preferably, but not necessarily, Americans -- who know the cultures from which the terrorists spring. Eli Cohen,
               considered Israel's greatest spy, was a Jew born in Egypt to Syrian parents. Under deep cover as a supposed
               Syrian emigre who had made a fortune in Argentina, Cohen managed to worm his way into the inner circles of
               the Syrian government, at one point even being considered as a possible deputy minister of defense. Starting in
               1962, Cohen radioed detailed information on Syrian military strategy back to Israel, intelligence that later
               proved vital to Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. Cohen wasn't around to see the fruits of his labor:
               He was found out and publicly hanged in Damascus Square in 1965.

               Kimche and other espionage experts -- including many Americans -- say the United States made a grave error
               in recent years in de-emphasizing human spies in favor of electronic snooping. But technology will remain
               crucial in a revamped American intelligence effort. Ehud Ram, a former top Israeli military intelligence officer,
               says U.S. spy agencies need ever-more-powerful data-mining software to sift through massive volumes of
               information; such exercises can detect patterns of communications or odd recurrences of a particular phrase --
               "Let's go to the club," for instance -- that terrorists might be using as code. "You may find out the messenger
               comes from Bahrain, and you check him out," Ram says. Ram also recalls how electronic intercepts of phone
               conversations and faxes enabled Israel to close in on Yehia Ayyash, a particularly effective Palestinian
               bombmaker known as "the engineer." He was killed by an exploding cell phone believed to have been planted
               by Israeli agents.

               Such combinations of human and electronic intelligence are the United States's best hope of combating bin
               Laden and al Qaeda. But can bin Laden actually be nabbed in his presumed Afghanistan hideout? Rafi Eitan, who
               spent 25 years as Mossad's director of operations and commanded the operation that captured Adolf Eichmann
               in Buenos Aires in 1960, says it's unlikely but not impossible. "You start with visual information, day and night,
               with electronic equipment, radar, and infrared," says Eitan, who was reportedly the model for the assassin of
               Arab terrorists in John Le Carre's novel The Little DrummerGirl. "You can know his every movement. By
               bombing, you destroy his means of secure communication, force him to use messengers or satellite" phones
               that are easier to intercept. If you get lucky and can pinpoint his whereabouts, "you have a very precise
               commando operation."

               Eitan says there is no doubt what must be done if the United States finds bin Laden. "You should kill him," he
               says. Israel has come under sharp global criticism -- including from the current Bush administration -- for its
               own policy of selective assassinations of Palestinian militants. But as Business 2.0 went to press, the
               government was moving toward essentially giving spy agencies the green light to kill bin Laden and other terror
               net members, at home and abroad. It was among the starkest signals of how America's plan for fighting terror
               changed forever on Sept. 11. Not long after the first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center, in 1993, a group
               of senior Israeli intelligence officers met with their U.S. counterparts in Washington to discuss thwarting future
               attacks. The Israelis warned of the looming danger of militant cells forming inside the United States; the
               Americans downplayed the threat, and explained that U.S. law prevented them from moving aggressively to
               preempt suspected terror groups' plans. "They said, 'We have rules. We can only act after something happens,'"
               recalls one member of the Israeli delegation. "We said, 'By then it's too late.'"

After the event of September 11th, Senior Writer Stacy Perman traveled to the Middle East to talk with various members of the intelligence community in Israel. Most of her findings, unfortunately, couldn't fit in the magazine. So we've decided to serve up the full version of her notes, insights, and interviews online. Read more about the following Israeli spymasters: Rafi Eitan, Gideon Ezra, Danny Yatom and Meir Amit.