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Cryptic al-Qaeda missives leave the CIA scratching its head By Tabassum Zakaria in Washington May 24 2003 Fugitive al-Qaeda leaders still have the ability to send orders to their followers in ways that shield their location and keep intelligence agencies guessing, United States officials said. Al-Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan after the US bombed their bases after the September 11, 2001 attacks on America were still able to get orders out to followers, the officials said. "I think it is possible there are guys in Iran and/or guys in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area [who] are ordering things and things get done," one US official said. The fugitives use mobile phones that are quickly discarded, create email accounts for one-time use and employ human couriers to pass along verbal messages, US officials and terrorism experts said. And al-Qaeda suspects use unfathomable wording that can bewilder intelligence analysts as they plough through mountains of intercepted communications. "They will often use specific words to mean one thing, and we think it means something different," Roger Cressey, a former White House counter-terrorism official, said. " 'We are delivering the grapefruit today' - now is the grapefruit people, passports, weapons, explosives, or what?" One intelligence official said al-Qaeda used phrases like "the sun will come up on Sunday" which has a precise meaning for the recipient of the message but means little to an analyst looking for details of a plot. Three weeks before the September 11 attacks, two al-Qaeda leaders used a coded message in a phone call - "two sticks, a dash and a cake with a tail" - to describe the date 11-9 which is the way September 11 is expressed in many countries. After last week's suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, in which a total of 75 people were killed, US authorities interrogated al-Qaeda leaders already in detention in a bid to gain insights into the planning. "There are still a lot of details not yet known about the decision-making process," a US official said. "Some of the detainees give us some light on that, which I think is generally in the direction of increasing decentralisation. "I think we will see increasingly that the threat is one of operations that are decided on at lower levels in a more decentralised way than may have been the case in the past," the official said. The ability of US spy agencies to eavesdrop on terrorism suspects does not necessarily provide the information to capture them, experts said. "It is the quintessential needle in the haystack. They are constantly moving, they are constantly changing their communications method," Mr Cressey said.