Is more terror in US inevitable?

For perhaps America's most chilling, top-secret document, it's very nondescript.

The report runs five to 10 pages on white letter-size paper, depending on the day. Inside, tidy columns of plain black print form a simple chart.

Yet the CIA's daily "Threat Matrix" is a must-read for leading US national-security officials. The first item President Bush reviews each morning, it sums up the latest raw intelligence from around the globe on possible suicide bombings, infrastructure attacks, and other terrorist threats against the United States.

Since its creation following Sept. 11, the matrix has supplied the key scraps of information behind a series of highly publicized government alerts – from general cautions to the specific warnings of possible attacks on Northeast banks and West Coast suspension bridges.

Still, even America's most important compendium of threats offers no clear road map for stopping future attacks, US officials and intelligence experts say. A few of the entries are highly credible, including some intercepted communications. But most consist of vague warnings from unsubstantiated walk-in, phone-in, or e-mail sources – threats lacking a place or time that are rarely "actionable" and sometimes are deliberate deceptions.

"The odds are that on any given day nine-tenths will be all walk-in traffic – some people trying to find out how we'll respond," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a daily reader of the threat report, told the Senate on Tuesday. "They ... try to jerk us around and test us – stress our force in a way."

Given the difficulty of pinpointing the who, where, and how of terrorist plots against the United States, blocking all strikes will be impossible, say Mr. Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush security team. They say Americans should expect suicide bombings, and even assert that terrorist groups will inevitably acquire – and not hesitate to use – chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons on US targets.

Still, new US intelligence tools such as the Threat Matrix, as well as cross-agency intelligence sharing through daily secure video teleconferences, are helping to ensure the right people are focusing on the full range of known terrorist threats, boosting the odds of preventing attacks, officials say.

Begun shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, the Threat Matrix is a joint product of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is compiled early each morning by the reinvigorated Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) at the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters. From there, it is transmitted to the most senior national-security officials, including the president, national security advisor, attorney general, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and joint chiefs of staff.

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