U.S. officials received intelligence that al-Qaida operatives had been 45 days away from releasing a deadly gas into the city's subways when the plan was called off by Osama bin Laden's deputy in 2003, according to a book excerpt released Sunday on Time magazine's Web site.

Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri speaks in an image taken from video footage released on April 29, 2006. [Reuters]

According to the investigative report by Ron Suskind, an informant close to al-Qaida leaders told U.S. officials that Ayman al-Zawahri had canceled the plan in January 2003, despite the likelihood that the strike would have killed as many people as the Sept. 11 attacks.

The informant said the operatives had planned to use a small, easily concealed device to release hydrogen cyanide into multiple subway cars. U.S. officials had already discovered plans for the device on the hard drive of a computer of a Bahraini jihadist arrested in February 2003, and they had been able to construct a working model from the plans.

The easy-to-make device, called "the mubtakkar," meaning "invention" in Arabic or "initiative" in Farsi, represented a breakthrough in weapons technology that "was the equivalent of splitting the atom," Suskind writes in his book. All previous attempts to use the deadly gas, similar to that used in Holocaust-era gas chambers, in mass attacks had failed.

The FBI declined to confirm the details of Suskind's account. Spokesman Bill Carter in Washington said Saturday the bureau would have no comment on the excerpted material.

A New York Police Department spokesman said authorities had known of the planned attack. "We were aware of the plot and took appropriate precaution," Paul Browne said.

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