At the crossroads of terror: Inside the clandestine operations center where the CIA tries to anticipate what al-Qaeda will do next

CIA scientists are investigating exotic supercomputer programs and artificial intelligence that might help analysts link hundreds of thousands of names, places and bank accounts.

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The Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, as veteran hands call it, has become the CIA’s busiest outfit. Organized in 1986 to coordinate America’s effort to foil terrorists overseas, the center has doubled its manpower since the Sept. 11 attacks to more than 1,100 analysts and clandestine agents. Some 2,500 cables pour into the CTC every day from CIA stations around the world, from interrogators interviewing al-Qaeda prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and from foreign intelligence services that have tips on terrorists.

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The center is trying to do what it could not do before: pluck obscure bits of information from the flood of often irrelevant or insignificant data and connect the dots to foil a major new attack.

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