Signs Point To a Surviving Terror Network

"Al-Qaeda hasn't been eliminated," a senior administration official said. "It's metastasized. It's changing all the time. It's adapting to a different environment. In many ways it's weaker as an organization, I'm convinced of that. But the global battlefield and affiliated groups is expanding."

Some outside experts faulted the U.S. government and its allies for allowing al-Qaeda to regroup inside Pakistan after its ejection from Afghanistan. "Al-Qaeda has been Pakistanized, if you will," said M.J. Gohel of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London security think tank.

Others were withholding judgment on al-Qaeda's ties to the alleged plot in England. "I would say that the core of the organization has suffered some serious blows," said Daniel L. Byman, director of Georgetown University's Security Studies Program. "It's harder for them to do large-scale operations successfully, and their ability to do long-term planning of catastrophic events has degraded. But they still have a number of skilled operatives and global connections, and a strong desire" to stage such attacks.

Byman said, however, that he is "still very skeptical until I see more evidence of how close these guys really were" to al-Qaeda. "I've read too many breathless FBI statements" over the years, he said.

Peter Neumann, director of the Centre for Defense Studies at King's College in London, said the alleged operation has all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda. Neumann and others noted strong parallels to the "Bojinka plot," planned in 1995 by Ramzi Yousef with help from his uncle, Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Yousef's plan to blow up 11 trans-Pacific airliners with liquid explosives concealed in bottles of contact lens solution was aborted after a fire erupted in the Manila apartment where he was preparing the bombs.

"I'm fairly convinced they were trying to model this attempt after what Ramzi Yousef tried to do," Neumann said, noting that it was "precisely" al-Qaeda's "kind of signature. They've been very fond of the transport system. They've been very fond of simultaneous, multiple attacks. I can think of no other terrorist group in the world that could be capable of something like this."

Staff writer Dan Eggen, correspondent Craig Whitlock and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.