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is at last being processed with sufficient speed for an instant military response.
    All but forgotten last week were the countless lost opportunities in Afghanistan, where poor communications, flawed intelligence or an over-extended chain of command allowed Osama Bin Laden and Muller Omar, the Taliban leader, to slip from Washington’s grasp. This time the CIA spotted its man – and nailed him.
    Randy Scheunemann, an intelligence analyst who has advised senior officials, said the significance of the Yemen attack was that the highly perishable nature of intelligence had at last been understood. ‘If you get information like this, You don’t necessarily have three hours to make satellite phone calls and to hold inter-agency meetings in time zones 12 hours apart.’ He said. ‘You need rapid action, and the US government has streamlined its procedures to provide exactly that.’
    It was soon after the September 11 attacks in 2002 that President George W Bush authorised the CIA to begin ‘lethal, covert action’ against Al Qaeda fugitives. A B ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, the CIA’s executive director, told a private intelligence gathering at the time: ‘Today there is only one rule and that is: there are no rules.’
    The capture of Al-Qaeda planners such as Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi Binalshibh – a Yemeni seized in Karachi – has increased the flow of actionable intelligence and helped American officials to roll up Al-Qaeda networks from Buffalo, New York, where another cell with Yemeni connections was exposed last September, to Bali.
    It was a little-reported incident in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, that launched the CIA on the trail of al-Ahdal and al-Harthi. In the searing summer heat of August an explosion in a block of flats in the Bir Obeid district rocked market stalls nearby.
    One man died instantly at the scene, another on his way to hospital. The two had blown themselves up while making a bomb. When investigators arrived they found a stash of documents and weapons, including rocket propelled grenades. A third man sharing the flat was detained and he provided a breakthrough in the long hunt for the bombers of the USS Cole. Last December a force of Yemeni troops tried to ambush al-Harthi in the tribal village of al-Hosun. The operation turned into a fiasco; 18 soldiers were killed and the terrorist escaped. Now the CIA was back on his tail.
    American officials have long insisted that they prefer to capture Al Qaeda suspects alive so that they can be interrogated, not least about possible clues to the whereabouts of Bin Laden. But it was clear to Washington that short of sending a significant invasion force to Yemen, they had little chance of winkling targets out of their well-protected refuge among the Empty Quarter’s Islamic tribes. If they found al-Ahdal or al-Harthi. They would have to kill them or risk another escape.
    The Predator took off from an airstrip in Djibouti on Sunday afternoon. The French military outpost 100 miles from Yemen has become a key American base for anti-terror operations. On Tuesday a contingent of 400 US Marines set sail from Norfolk, Virginia on board the USS Mount Whitney, an amphibious command ship that will anchor off Djibouti’s coast to co-ordinate future operations in the region.
    In a borrowed French hangar the Predator’s remote operators – known in the Pentagon as the ‘joystick generation’ for their computer guiding skills – watched a bank of video monitors as the 27ft drone closed in on its target. The same pictures, transmitted by secure satellite link, were visible half the world away on CIA screens in Langley, Virginia.
    It may never be clear how the CIA knew exactly where to find al-Harthi, but the betting in Washington last week was that the information had come from a satellite telephone intercept.
    Either way, the terrorist was doomed from the moment the Predator’s 360-degree revolving camera pod picked up the speeding Land Cruiser. This time there was no