There are three Saudi counterterrorism tools that stand out as especially successful. The first is probably the most obvious but most difficult to replicate: Foreign language speakers who, to put it bluntly, aren't white. U.S. intelligence agencies, owing to understandable concerns about foreign infiltration, have long preferred hiring U.S.-born American citizens over immigrants or foreign nationals, who are frequently used as short-term assets or sources but less commonly integrated into the agency as a whole. But white faces stand out in places like the Middle East, and most American universities teach formal Arabic rather than the many local dialects more commonly used. U.S. intelligence agencies will have to start fielding agents who can blend in and who speak the local language or dialect.

Second is the Saudi program of terrorist rehabilitation, which seeks to reintegrate terrorists back into society by way of counseling, job training, and even financial assistance. The program, which I explored more fully in 2009, not only neutralizes individual terrorists but also seeks to roll back the social causes of their entire movement. Reformed terrorists, once they return to their communities, serve as walking--and, sometimes, proselytizing--arguments against terrorist radicalization or recruitment. Sending a suspected terrorist to Guantanamo or Bagram risks angering his community and inspiring even more militancy.

The third tool, though it has proven invaluable for Saudi counterterrorism, would go against many of the core operating principles of the U.S. intelligence community: don't kill or capture every terrorist we find. Rather than eliminating them one by one, the Saudis monitor suspects, often for years. Sometimes they even work with them, seeking to turn an individual from an enemy into an informant.

This Saudi methodology has proven so much more effective at counterterrorism than the American system because it understands terrorism as a permanent phenomenon--something to be monitored rather than eradicated--and because it prioritizes infiltrating terrorist networks above seizing individual terrorists. At the heart of the American approach is the assumption that terrorism can be eliminated outright. If we could just seize enough al-Qaeda officers or shut down enough funding streams or launch enough drone strikes, the thinking goes, threats could be ended forever. But this approach has proven self-defeating. Extreme Islamic terrorists are ultimately guided by abstract ideology, and though specific networks can be eradicated, the ideas behind them cannot.

In the U.S. model, when we locate a terrorist cell, we capture or kill its members. This only ensures that, another cell will pop up in its place, except this time we won't have as much intelligence on it. In the Saudi model, the network is left preserved so that it can be monitored or one of its members can be turned. In this way, the Saudis not only neutralize that one cell, but any other cells or individuals it comes into contact with. This is how Saudi General Intelligence may have been able, according to sources speaking to the New York Times' Robert Worth, to do what the U.S. has failed to do despite billions of dollars in intelligence spending: infiltrate al-Qaeda itself.