US intelligence 'heightened threat' environment

WASHINGTON, July 17 (Reuters) US intelligence agencies today warned that al Qaeda would intensify efforts to put operatives inside the United States and said there was a heightened threat of attack.

The assessment came in unclassified judgments from a ''National Intelligence Estimate on the Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland,'' which is a compilation of views from the various spy agencies.

Al Qaeda, responsible for the September 11 attacks in 2001, remained the ''the most serious terrorist threat'' to the US homeland and its leadership continued to plan ''high-impact plots,'' the report said.

''Although we have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to al Qaeda senior leadership since 9/11, we judge that al Qaeda will intensify its efforts to put operatives here,'' the report said.

''As a result, we judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment,'' it said.

Frances Townsend, homeland security adviser to President George W Bush, told reporters there was no specific or credible threat but the administration was taking the warning seriously.

Authorities have not raised threat-alert levels.

White House spokesman Tony Snow, asked to respond to critics, said the administration was not using the threat from terrorism as a distraction from Iraq.

''What we're trying to remind people of is this is a real threat,'' he told reporters before the report was released. ''This is not an attempt to divert.'' The report, put together over three years, warned of a persistent threat from terrorism to the United States over the next three years.

But it said the threat from Muslim extremists inside the United States was ''not likely to be as severe as it is in Europe.'' The assessment said increased global counterterrorism efforts over the past five years have ''constrained'' al Qaeda's ability to attack within the United States again and led militant groups to perceive it as ''a harder target to strike'' than on September 11.

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