A man crosses the Central Intelligence Agency logo in the lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va.
Near the one-year anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the CIA stopped an al Qaeda plot to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner with an underwear bomb, the Associated Press reports.
According to the report, the bomb was an upgraded version of an explosive device that was to be used aboard a plane in Detroit on Christmas day in 2009. The new bomb didn't contain any metal, so it would have been difficult to detect by an airport metal detector. The CIA apparently thwarted the plot before the Yemeni bomber bought a plane ticket or chose a target. According to the AP, the Obama administration plans to issue a formal announcement Tuesday. Authorities have been on heightened alert in recent weeks as experts suspected that al Qaeda was plotting an attack to commemorate the May 1, 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden.
[Photo Gallery: One Year After Bin Laden's Death.]
News of the plot comes less than a week after the Pentagon said "it is hard to imagine" a bin Laden-less al Qaeda having enough organization pull to conduct a terror attack in the United States.
Seth Jones, a political scientist at the Rand Corp., told U.S. News and World Report that although al Qaeda's "core" appears to have been decimated, that there are still plenty of "very competent people" focused on attacking America.
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