“The U.S. State Department is aware of this matter. Diplomatic Security is aware of the matter,” State Department spokesperson Patrick Ventrell told reporters on Wednesday. Ventrell said that the department was working with both the Justice and Homeland Security departments and specifically Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who is taking the lead on the case.

In a statement, ICE spokesman Brandon Montgomery told ABC news that its agents “did encounter two potential victims of human trafficking and the investigation is on-going.”

The department responsible for human-trafficking cases, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, focuses on a victim-centered approach. Agents rescue individuals first and then begin a full investigation, so that alleged victims don’t have to linger in potential abuse while the investigation is on-going.

A senior State Department official confirms that agents from Diplomatic Security, which is a division of the State Department, were with ICE agents during the raid. The official was not aware of any arrests made yet.

Should the diplomat be arrested he could claim diplomatic immunity, which shields foreign diplomats from criminal charges in the United States.

Ventrell would not specify whether the case falls under a diplomatic immunity qualification but said, “Diplomats are under a duty to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving state” under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

“That’s something that holds true for diplomats here and that we hold true for our people … when they’re posted overseas,” said Ventrell. “In many instances, our folks face the legal system back here for issues that have arisen overseas.”

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

More than seven months after the attack Sept. 11, 2012, on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama administration continues to defend itself against allegations from House Republicans that the administration has not fully cooperated with Congress on the investigation into the attack.

On Tuesday, both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry addressed claims being made by House Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committee leaders that the administration is impeding the Congressional testimony of State Department and CIA employees who survived the attack.

“I’m not familiar with this notion that anybody’s been blocked from testifying,” said the president. “What I’ve been very clear about from the start is that our job with respect to Benghazi has been to find out exactly what happened, to make sure that U.S. embassies, not just in the Middle East but around the world, are safe and secure and to bring those who carried it out to justice.”

Speaking to reporters following a meeting with the Spanish foreign minister  at the State Department on Tuesday, Kerry  said “there’s an enormous amount of misinformation out there” about Benghazi. He referenced his testimony before the House two weeks ago, when he  told members that the State Department would work closely with Congress to clear up any lingering questions about the attacks so that everyone could move on and begin focusing on other pressing global issues.

“I do not want to spend the next year coming up here talking about Benghazi,” Kerry said.

He also promised to assign someone from his staff specifically to work with Congress to answer all remaining questions.

On Tuesday, Kerry confirmed that he has tasked his chief of staff, David Wade, with working “openly and accountably” with House GOP members on Benghazi issues. But he also expressed some exasperation about the politics of the continued debate.

“We have to de-mythologize this issue and certainly depoliticize it,” said Kerry. “The American people deserve answers. I’m determined that this will be an accountable and open State Department, as it has been in the past. And we will continue to do that, and we will provide answers.”

At the State Department briefing on Tuesday, spokesman Patrick Ventrell went further, denying GOP House members’ allegations that the State Department is trying to stop whistleblowers in the department from talking.

“Let me be very clear: The State Department is deeply committed to meeting its obligation to protect employees, and the State Department would never tolerate or sanction retaliation against whistleblowers on any issue, including this one. That’s an obligation we take very seriously, full stop,” said Ventrell. “The department regularly sends notices, as we do to our entire staff, to employees advising of their right to federal whistleblower protections.”

Ventrell said the State Department sent a “routine” update just last week advising department staff of their whistleblower protections.

He also flatly denied the claims that State Department employees who were survivors of the attack have requested security clearance for private attorneys because the administration is trying to block them from talking to Congress or the public.

“We’re not aware of any employees who have requested … security clearances for private attorneys in connection with Benghazi,” said Ventrell. “In the event of such requests, the department has a security clearance process in place under which clearances can be provided to private attorneys who are representing individual employees of this building.”

But Victoria Toensing, a lawyer for one of the State Department employees who witnessed the attack and is seeking to share the story fully with Congressional investigators, says the department is not being entirely truthful. Toensing maintains that asking employees, who are acting as whistleblowers, to go come forward, identify themselves and then inform the State Department that they are seeking council before they have representation leaves them vulnerable to intimidation and retribution.

“These people want their own lawyers,” Toensing tells ABC News. “They shouldn’t have to go in to their employer  what I call ‘naked’, without an attorney.”

On April 16th, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to State Department lawyers asking for guidance on the process to have private attorney’s cleared, but Toensing says he never received an answer.  As a result ten days later Issa sent another letter, this time to Secretary Kerry, detailing the various ways he said the State Department has “attempted to impede or otherwise delay the committee’s investigation”

Issa specifically highlighted restrictions the department put on members reviewing classified and unclassified documents, allowing them only to review them while being monitored in a room that houses classified documents, not allowing members to photocopy or examine documents in a lengthy fashion.

“Notwithstanding the fact that the committee has both the right and the capability to review and possess classified information, I note that approximately 80 percent of the documents in question are unclassified and marked identically to documents routinely sent to the committee without the same restrictions placed upon them,” Issa wrote in the letter.

The congressman also accused the State Department of purposefully restricting access to witnesses of the attack for the Congressional investigation.

Toensing, a former Chief Council for the Senate Intelligence Committee who also served in the Department of Justice under the Reagan administration, says  she is still waiting for the State Department to provide her with what she needs to do to be cleared to represent her client. She says that her client faced pressure and threats from the department during the initial Benghazi  Congressional hearings and subsequent investigation, which is why she and other lawyers  have taken the cases of both State and CIA employees who want to talk, pro-bono.

She says she and other lawyers  are not asking that their clients be free to divulge classified information to the general public or media, but to speak fully with Congressional investigators. Toensing says being blocked from doing so is tantamount to obstructing justice.

“By not clearing lawyers they have made it so that clients cannot give lawyers the full story,” she says.

Toensing, who represented New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time’s Matt Cooper in the Valerie Plame case, says she’s “a lawyer before… a Republican”  and that her involvement in the on-going controversy over the Benghazi attack is not driven by partisanship, but on what she thinks is right.

“Why can the Boston bomber get a team of defenders right away, and I agree with him getting that, he should, that’s our system; but a career public servant, who’s wants to represent government employees can’t be cleared three weeks later ?,” she says. ” I just want to be able to represent my client fully”

The name of the mother  of alleged Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was placed in a U.S. terrorism database at the same time as her son’s was in October 2011.

The CIA requested that both their  names be placed in the U.S. government’s terrorism database known as TIDE (Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment) after it received information from the Russian government that it considered the pair to be potential Islamic militants.  An earlier FBI investigation prompted by another Russian request determined that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had no ties to terrorism.

(Image Credit: Musa Sadulayev/AP Photo)

Tsarnaev  died in a fierce gun fight with Boston police last week.  He and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, are accused of carrying out the bombings at the Boston Marathon that killed three and injured more than 260. Dzokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is in the Federal Medical Center Devens, about 40 miles from Boston.

PHOTOS: Week of Terror at Boston Marathon

On Thursday, at a news conference in Makhachkala, Russia, Zubeidat Tsarnaev said her sons had been “framed” by U.S. authorities, and she denied that her son had made contacts with Islamist militants during an extended visit to Russia last year.

Inclusion on the TIDE list of 700,000 names does not mean an individuals are suspected of carrying out terrorist activities or that they require surveillance or face travel restrictions.  Instead, the list, maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center,  serves as the base point for relevant federal agencies to come up with more specific watch lists that match their criteria, such as the Transportation Security Administration’s no-fly list.

RELATED: Mother of Accused Bombers Faces Her Own Legal Woes

Earlier in the week  U.S. officials confirmed that Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, had made two separate requests of the FBI and the CIA to investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev for potential ties to Islamic extremists.   The FBI’s investigation in early 2011 concluded that Tsarnaev did not have ties to terror groups.  That information was conveyed to the FSB, but the FBI never received a response.

The intelligence official says that a subsequent FSB request sent to the CIA in September  2011 to investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev also contained information about his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva.

RELATED: Times Square Was Next Stop for Accused Bombers, Mayor Says

The official said the Russian request indicated the pair were considered to be strong believers in Islam and potential militants, and it was  feared they  might cause trouble if they came back to Russia.

A U.S. official said earlier this week that the CIA had “nominated” Tamarlan Tsarnaev’s  name for inclusion in the TIDE database out of “an abundance of caution.”  It was later determined that the alternate spelling of his names and dates of birth provided by Russia to the CIA were all incorrect.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was also included in a separate  database in the spring of 2011 as the FBI tried to determine whether he had conducted any foreign travel.

RELATED: Boston Bombing Suspect’s Name Was in US Terrorism Databases

Those entries place in TECS — the Treasury Enforcement and Communication System — remain active for only a  year.

This was the database that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate panel Tuesday had “pinged” when Tsarnaev left the United States in January 2012 on a six-month trip to Russia. The trip has been a focus of speculation that Tsarnaev might have made contact with or received terrorist training in the Dagestan region where he was visiting relatives.

A U.S.  official explained that the positive hit when Tsarnaev left the United States resulted in the Joint Terrorism Task Force’s being notified that he had left the country. It is unclear which federal agency within the task force would have actually received the notification of his travel and what was done with the information.

RELATED: Boston Marathon Bombing Suspects’ Twisted Family History

When Tsarnaev returned to the United States in June 2012, there was no “ping” of his TECS database entry because it had already expired.  TIDE entries do not expire, but there was also no positive hit in the TIDE database because it turned out that all of the personal details provided to the CIA by Russia were inaccurate.

According to the official, even if Tsarnaev’s name and details had been accurately fed into the TIDES database, U.S. customs officials would have found that the FBI’s investigation had been closed and that it had  not been determined that he was a threat.

Furthermore, even if the TECS database entry for Tsarnaev had not expired after a year, that, too, would have brought up the information that his case had been closed.

Ben Curtis/AP Photo

The State Department is defending its investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, against a new report from House Republicans calling into question the department’s actions, including those of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The interim progress report was put together by members from the Armed Services, Judiciary, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight and Government Reform committees, and is being distributed to House GOP members.

The Interim Benghazi Progress Report’s conclusions directly call into question the culpability of the State Department and contradict the State Department’s own internal investigation conducted by an Accountability Review Board.

State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters on Wednesday that the department disputes the report’s findings.

“They are not consistent with what we believe in terms of our transparency and the work that we’ve done, so we don’t agree with their conclusions,” said Ventrell.

The interim progress report claimed that security requests for the consulate were sent to the highest levels of the State Department and were subsequently denied. The report found that there was one memo signed by former Secretary Clinton in April of last year that denied a request for additional security by the then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz. The finding contradicted Secretary Clinton’s testimony before Congress in January of this year, before she stepped down from her post.

“The specific security requests pertaining to Benghazi, you know, were handled by the security professionals in the department,” testified Clinton. “I didn’t see those requests. They didn’t come to me. I didn’t approve them. I didn’t deny them.”

The progress report’s authors did not provide a copy of the memo for review.

The report also cited email exchanges between senior State and White House officials that it claimed showed the motivation behind changing intelligence talking points immediately following the attack was to protect the State Department’s reputation, rather than protecting classified information or the FBI investigation, which both the intelligence community and the State Department have stated.

“Email exchanges during the interagency process do not reveal any concern with protecting classified information.  Additionally, the [FBI] itself approved a version of the talking points with significantly more information about the attacks and previous threats than the version that the State Department requested,” the report said.  ”Thus, the claim that the State Department’s edits were made solely to protect that investigation is not credible.”

Ventrell maintains that the State Department has exhibited an “unprecedented level” of transparency and cooperation with Congress in investigating the Benghazi attack.

“There’s been eight hearings, there have been 20 briefings, and as … the House Republicans noted in this report, there have been 25,000 pages of documentation which we’ve handed over to them in response to their requests,” said Ventrell. “We’ve provided all this information and we’ve continued to be transparent.”

House Democratic members from the committees with the Republicans responsible for the report issued a letter criticizing the investigation process and called the findings partisan, undermining the report’s credibility. No Democratic members were invited to take part in the process.

“Although staff reports may be appropriate in some circumstances, we do not believe a partisan staff report should be used in this case, which involves the death of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans and is based on sensitive and classified national security information,” said the letter.

                                                 (Image Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

WASHINGTON — President Obama and his national security team met today in the wake of the dramatic arrest Friday night of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect of the terror attack at the Boston Marathon.

The weekend meeting lasted 90 minutes and was attended by FBI Director Robert Mueller, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, CIA director John Brennan, Attorney General Eric Holder, and other members of the National Security Council, according to a White House statement.

Vice President Joe Biden joined the Situation Room session via teleconference; Biden traveled to Detroit today for an evening fundraiser for the Michigan Democratic Party.

“The President commended the work that was done to pursue justice in the Boston Marathon bombing, and underscored the need to continue gathering intelligence to answer the remaining questions about this terrorist attack going forward,” the White House statement said.

Live Updates: Boston Bombing Suspect in Custody, Day 2

Federal authorities tell ABC News they are planning to invoke a “public safety exception” with Tsarnaev, which allows for them to engage the naturalized U.S. citizen in limited interrogations when there is a threat of danger to the public, without his being read his Miranda rights.

But as the president met with his council today some Republican lawmakers urged the Obama administration to label Tsarnaev an “enemy combatant” — a legal status – after a habeas hearing – that they say could allow his continued confinement for intelligence gathering.

A statement penned by Rep. Peter King and senators John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, and Lindsey Graham said that while they agreed with the decision not to read the suspect his Miranda rights during his arrest,  failure to elevate him to an enemy combatant “could severely limit our ability to gather critical information about future attacks.”

“We should be focused on gathering intelligence from this suspect right now that can help our nation understand how this attack occurred and what may follow in the future,” it reads. “That should be our focus, not a future domestic criminal trial that may take years to complete.”

ABC News’ Pierre Thomas contributed to this report.

The Sea-Based X-Band Radar looks like a giant golf ball placed atop a platform that resembles a floating oil rig.

It contains a precise long-range radar that is part of the integrated missile-defense system and helps track launched missiles so they can be brought down by missile interceptors.

With North Korea threatening to launch missiles against the United States, the Pentagon reportedly sent the radar system out to sea April 1 from its home port of Pearl Harbor to assist with tracking a potential missile launch.

The next day, Pentagon spokesman George Little denied that was the case, underscoring that the radar had gone to sea as part of previously scheduled sea trials.  ”They’re undergoing semiannual system checks,” Little said. “Decisions about further deployments have not been made to this point.”

A U.S. official now says the SBX is no longer undergoing sea trials and “has been deployed to the Pacific for an operational missile-defense mission.”

“It’s up and running and active,” the official said.

U.S. officials believe that at least one Musudan missile transported to North Korea’s eastern coast last week is ready for launch and has been fueled.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters Wednesday that the United States “is fully prepared to deal with any contingency, any action that North Korea may take or any provocation that they may instigate.”

He said the international community has been very clear that North Korea “with its bellicose rhetoric, with its actions, have been skating very close to a dangerous line.”  He said their actions and words “have not helped defuse a combustible situation.”

He urged North Korea to turn down the rhetoric.

U.S. Pacific Command Adm. Sam Locklear told a Senate panel Tuesday that the United States has the capability to intercept a Musudan missile, but that he would not recommend shooting it down if its trajectory did not pose a threat to the United States or its allies in the region.

With a range of more than 2,000 miles, the Musudan cannot reach Hawaii or the U.S. mainland, although it could reach U.S. bases in Okinawa and Guam.

The U.S. Navy has deployed two Aegis destroyers to the region that are equipped with SM-3 missile interceptors that could bring down a North Korean missile.  Both South Korea and Japan have each deployed two similar Aegis destroyers to the waters off the Korean peninsula to provide missile defense.

Ng Han Guan/AP Photo

The ongoing tense situation on the North Korean peninsula has led the top American general in South Korea and South Korea’s top general to cancel long-planned trips to Washington this week.  

It has also led U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to postpone an ICBM test launch scheduled for Tuesday  to avoid a” misperception or manipulation”of the test  by North Korea.

On Sunday, Col. Amy Hannah, a  U.S. Forces Korea spokesperson, said that Gen. James Thurman, the commander of U.S. and U.N. forces in South Korea, would not be traveling to Washington this week for previously scheduled congressional budget hearings.

“Given the current situation General Thurman will remain in Seoul next week as a prudent measure.  He has asked the Senate Armed Services Committee,” said the statement.

PHOTOS: An Inside Look at North Korea

The statement says that Thurman had asked three congressional committees to ” to excuse his absence until he can testify at a later date.  He looks forward to appearing before the committee at the earliest possible date.”

Earlier on Sunday it was announced that  South Korea’s top military officer was rescheduling a planned visit to Washington because he could not be away while North Korea was making bellicose threats.

South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Jung Seung-jo was to have visited the Pentagon on April 16 to meet with his American counterpart, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for regular consultative meetings.

The meeting in April had been scheduled during their previous meeting in October.

RELATED: North Korea Could Be Preparing Missile Test

Both the U.S. and South Korea believe that North Korea may be planning to soon test launch as many as two Musudan medium-range missiles that were spotted earlier last week moving by train to its east coast.  The missiles’ exact location has not been pinpointed since then.

On Saturday, Pentagon officials confirmed that Defense Secretary Hagel  had delayed a Minuteman 3 missile test scheduled for Tuesday at Vandenberg AFB in California “to avoid misperception or manipulation” by North Korea.  Minuteman 3′s are intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM’s).

RELATED: Minuteman 3 Test Delayed to Avoid North Korean ‘Manipulation’

The official said the test has been long planned “and thus unconnected from the recent tensions with North Korea.”

“We recognized that an ICBM test at this time might be misconstrued by some as suggesting that we were intending to exacerbate the current crisis with North Korea,” the official said. “We wanted to avoid that misperception or manipulation.

“We are committed to testing our ICBMs to ensure a safe, secure, effective nuclear arsenal,” the official said. “The test is being rescheduled, likely next month.”

RELATED: U.S. Wargames North Korean Regime Collapse, Invasion to Secure Nukes

According to the official, Hagel made his decision Friday night.

The test was for the Air Force and not part of the Missile Defense Agency’s program to test missile interceptors as part of the missile defense program designed to counter a North Korean missile threat to the U.S.

MDA routinely conducts tests of the interceptor missiles and uses Minuteman 3-s for targeting purposes.

The test that had been planned for Tuesday was part of a long-scheduled series of launches for the Air Force’s Global Strike Command to test the effectiveness of the Minuteman 3 fleet.

The U.S. has 450 of the missiles in its arsenal that are equipped to carry nuclear warheads.

The official said the test has been long planned “and thus unconnected from the recent tensions with North Korea.”

“We recognized that an ICBM test at this time might be misconstrued by some as suggesting that we were intending to exacerbate the current crisis with North Korea,” the official said. “We wanted to avoid that misperception or manipulation.

“We are committed to testing our ICBMs to ensure a safe, secure, effective nuclear arsenal,” a second defense official said. “The test is being rescheduled, likely next month.”

According to the senior official, Hagel made his decision Friday night.

The test was for the Air Force and not part of the Missile Defense Agency’s program to test missile interceptors as part of the missile defense program designed to counter a North Korean missile threat to the U.S.

MDA routinely conducts tests of the interceptor missiles and uses Minuteman 3′s for targeting purposes.

The test that had been planned for Tuesday was part of a long-scheduled series of launches for the Air Force’s Global Strike Command to test the effectiveness of the Minuteman 3 fleet.  The U.S. has 450 of the missiles in its arsenal that are equipped to carry nuclear warheads.

AP Photo via AP video

By LUIS MARTINEZ, NICK SCHIFRIN and ALEEM AGHA

Six Americans were killed today in Afghanistan in two separate incidents.  Five of them, including two civilians, were killed when their State Department convoy was struck by a car bomb as it headed to a local school to donate books to students.

Another American civilian was killed in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan.

The bomb attack on the convoy took place in Qalat, the capital of the southern Afghan province of Zabul.  The blast killed three American military service members, a female State Department Foreign Service Officer and a civilian working for the Department of Defense.

Another 10 people were also injured in the blast including four additional State Department employees, one of them injured critically.

In a statement Secretary of State John Kerry said the team was en route to a local school in Qalat to donate books to local students “when they were struck by this despicable attack.”

He praised the fallen State Department employee as “an exceptional young Foreign Service Officer” and said “our State Department family is grieving over the loss of one of our own.”

Kerry said he had met the unidentified Foreign Service Officer during his recent trip to Kabul “when she was selected to support me during my visit to Afghanistan.” He described her as “everything a Foreign Service Officer should be: smart, capable, eager to serve, and deeply committed to our country and the difference she was making for the Afghan people.  She tragically gave her young life working to give young Afghans the opportunity to have a better future.”

It remained unclear whether insurgents were targeting the American convoy or the governor of Zabul, who was nearby at the time of the attack.

An Afghan police official told ABC News that the American convoy had pulled out of its Provincial Reconstruction base in the middle of the city of Qalat and was next to a convoy carrying the governor, who was on his way to open up a school when a car sped into the combined convoy and exploded.

Another American civilian was killed in a separate insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, U.S. Forces Afghanistan said in a press release today.

A NATO press release about the Zabul attack indicated that two “coalition civilians” had been killed.  A short time later the U.S. Embassy in Kabul released a statement confirming that there were American and Afghan casualties in the attack.  That led to speculation that one or both of the civilians mentioned in the NATO press release worked for the State Department.

A NATO press release about the Zabul attack indicated that two “coalition civilians” had been killed.  A short time later the U.S. Embassy in Kabul released a statement confirming that there were American and Afghan casualties in the attack.  That led to speculation that one or both of the civilians mentioned in the NATO press release worked for the State Department.

Located north of Kandahar,  Zabul has not had much of a U.S.  military or civilian  presence in the 11 years that U.S. forces have been involved in Afghanistan.  That started to change as the number of troops there increased after the military and civilian surge approved by the Obama administration in late 2009.

Earlier this year there were only a handful of American fatalities, partly because of the lull in fighting during the winter season and the ongoing transition that is placing more Afghan military forces in the lead for security in most of the country.  In late February, there was a 30-day gap in between U.S. military fatalities, the first time such a gap had occurred in six years.   By March however, U.S. military fatality numbers spiked back to levels seen in previous years. 

 While the number of American and NATO fatalities has decreased, NATO officials have expressed concern about significantly higher fatality rates among Afghan security forces during the same time period. 

In early March, Gen. James Mattis, the former commander of U.S. Central Command told a congressional committee that at the time four American military service members had died in Afghanistan while 198 Afghan forces had died during the same time period.  He attributed that to the fact that Afghan forces were now doing much of the fighting in Afghanistan as the U.S. military moves toward a combat support role.

The Associated Press reports that by their count, there have been six foreign civilians killed in Afghanistan this year.

The U.S. and NATO intend to pull out all of their combat forces by the end of 2014, though it remains to be decided how many training troops will be left after that date.

U.S. officials suspect that North Korea may be preparing for a test of its Musudan medium-range missile after seeing evidence of it being transported to North Korea’s eastern coast.   Such a launch would be the latest in a series of provocations by North Korea in recent weeks.

Earlier Thursday, South Korea’s defense minister told his nation’s lawmakers that a North Korean missile with “considerable range” had been transported to that country’s  eastern coast.  Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin said he could not explain the movement and added that the missile was not capable of reaching the  United States.

Ng Han Guan/AP Photo

U.S. officials have identified the missile as a mobile-launched Musudan missile estimated to have a range of between 1,800 and 2,500 miles that could put U.S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam within its range.

RELATED: North Korea Relocates Long-Range Missile in Latest ‘Rhetorical Threat’

The officials said that, two days ago surveillance satellites detected the movement by train of a Musudan mobile launcher as well as fuel and equipment needed for a missile launch.

One official said it is possible that as many as two missiles could be readied for a potential launch because there were more missile components spotted than might be needed if only one missile was being launched.

The U.S. is trying to locate the location on the eastern coast where the launcher and missile components are currently located.

The officials said there is speculation that a missile test could be in the works and that it could occur soon.  Unlike long-range missiles, which can spend weeks on a launch pad in preparation for a launch, mobile-launched missiles can be launched fairly quickly and with little warning.

PHOTOS: Inside North Korea

The Musudan is a medium-range missile that has never been tested before, though it has been publicly paraded by North Korea in the past.  U.S. officials have been expecting it to be tested at some point over the past few years.

A U.S. official said that, so far, North Korea has not provided a notice to mariners about a potential missile launch.  During previous long-range launches, the North Koreans have listed advance warnings to mariners and aviators.  In addition to serving as safety warnings that a missile may land near a body of water, they have also served as indicators of a possible launch.   The official said launching this missile without such an advance advisory would be seen as a provocation.

READ MORE: N. Korea’s Real Power, Kim Jong Un’s Aunt, Uncle

One of the officials said there  is also concern about how Japan might react if a North Korean missile were to overfly its territory. Placing the Musudan on the eastern coast indicated the trajectory might take it over Japan.   Last December, in advance of North Korea’s  long-range missile test that month, the Japanese government gave orders to its military shoot down a missile should it appear to be headed for  Japanese territory.

That did not happen, as the Unha 3 missile was launched on a southward trajectory away from the Korean Peninsula.   Japan has both land-based and ship-based missile interceptors like the ones aboard U.S. Navy ships.

In light of North Korea’s recent threats to launch missiles at the United States, the Pentagon has assigned  two of its missile-defense-capable Navy destroyers to provide missile defense if needed.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon confirmed the destroyers USS John S McCain and USS Decatur  had been sent to pre-determined locations in the western Pacific.

The USS Decatur will soon be replaced by the destroyer USS Fitzgerald so that it can return to its homeport of San Diego after a seven-month deployment.

RELATED: U.S. Troops Stand ‘Poised to Respond’ at NKorea Border

Japan and South Korea both have short-range air missile defense systems, the U.S.  Navy ships can provide backup if the trajectory is beyond that range and pose a threat to other partners in the region and U.S. territory.

In the wake of North Korea’s missile threat on Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that it was sending a land-based missile defense system to Guam.

North Korea also has a mobile-launched, long-range missile known as the KN-08.  North Korea has never tested the missile, but it is of particular concern because it can be launched with little warning and is believed to be able to reach parts of the United States.

One official said there has been no worrisome activity related to the KN-08.