A file picture of Ayman al-Zawahri (left) and Osama bin Laden in Khost, Afghanistan. (AP)

Washington, July 24: The CIA has intelligence agents inside Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida network — as it did before the September 11, 2001, attacks — but they are not within the terrorist leader’s inner circle where key information about any future attack would be discussed, a senior intelligence official said yesterday.

“They are beyond foot soldiers but not in the inner circle,” the official said. The agents — Afghans, Pakistanis, Uzbeks and others recruited and run by CIA case officers — “are more senior than the agents [the US had] three years ago who were on the periphery,” the official said.

Aided by these agents, electronic intercepts, satellite imagery, and extensive help from foreign intelligence services, the US over the past two years has captured or killed two-thirds of bin Laden’s top aides and broken up plots against US embassies, US and foreign aircraft, and ships and other targets worldwide.

Although the US intelligence community believes that al Qaida today is far less capable than the team that put together the September 11 attacks, bin Laden “looks to the US still as the brass ring,” another senior intelligence official said. “They still want to continue to attack us in the ways they did three years ago,” he said during a Wednesday briefing, which was held on the condition that reporters not disclose his name or the identity of two other senior intelligence officials who spoke.

This is the first time that CIA officials have publicly described with such specificity the placing of agents and other steps aimed at cracking al Qaida — the sort of information that the agency generally guards very closely.

They made the revelations as part of a response to the stern criticism of the agency this week by the September 11 commission. It portrayed US intelligence as having failed dramatically before the 2001 attacks, largely because it lacked significant sources of human intelligence about bin Laden’s organisation.

The comments came at the briefing, held the day before the commission report was released, and in interviews yesterday that elaborated on some points.

“We have busted plots repeatedly” that were undertaken by “serious al Qaida players” involving both aircraft and ships — some in Northeast and Southeast Asia — one official at the briefing said.