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Greenfield at Large

Tracking the Terrorists

Aired October 22, 2001 - 23:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEFF GREENFIELD, HOST: Before we begin, I'd like to thank Frank Sesno and Keith Olbermann for sitting in while I was away last week.

Tonight, as the sixth week of the new world era ends, we are watching battles on many fronts: the combat in Afghanistan, the fight to contain the anthrax attacks here in the United States, and the most ambitious, consequential and difficult battle of all, the fight to uncover and combat a terrorist network that knows no boundaries.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): In Afghanistan, U.S. air power and special ground forces are aimed at disrupting the training camps of al Qaeda. But no one seriously contends that this is, in any real sense, where al Qaeda is. Their cells have been raided in the Philippines and thousands of miles away in the nation that once owned the Philippines, Spain.

Their operatives have been traced to Hamburg, Germany; to Milan, Italy; and to at least one mosque in Great Britain, America's staunchest ally in the anti-terror fight.

The government believes many of the September 11 hijackers were of Saudi descent. And intelligence sources have told reporters that some of the wealthiest families in this longstanding U.S. ally in the Middle East have sent huge sums of money to terrorist groups in exchange for domestic peace.

And within the U.S. itself, reports say some 800 suspects have been detained by authorities, though in many cases it turned out that those detained had no connection whatever to terrorism. Authorities say they are certain, though, there are terrorists at large in the United States.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

Do authorities know who they are, where they are, their real names? More broadly, do we have any coherent picture of the web that by every possible measure intends to strike again? Do we know how to find out what we need to know?

We're joined first by CNN national security correspondent David Ensor in Washington.

David, since September 11, are there any steps that you can point to, that authorities can point to, where they say, you know, this is good, we're getting stuff we never would have had before September 11?

DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, they certainly are getting stuff they never could have had before September 11. They've got over 100 nations helping them to do it.

They say they have multiple and extensive evidence that al Qaeda was behind the attacks of September 11. For example, they have evidence that close associates of bin Laden were warned to return to Afghanistan before September 10, that Khalid al-Midhar, who was on that flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, that he has been linked to another man who was involved in both the African embassy and Cole attacks.

Most of the investigation is now overseas. They're even getting help from places you would never expect, like the country Sudan, where an Islamic republic is in place that hasn't always been too cooperative. But they're allowing the FBI to interrogate people.

In Italy, for example, there are now -- there's now information from wiretaps that shows that European targets were scheduled to be hit, and that a particular Tunisian, named Useed Sami bin Kemas (ph), who was in Milan, was talking to a whole lot of different people in the al Qaeda network, and that they discussed, for example, an extremely efficient liquid that suffocates people that was going to be used in some sort of terrorism.

They have thwarted attacks, they say, against the U.S. embassies in Paris, in Rome and a facility in Turkey. So they feel they've made some headway. But have they got this licked? Do they know where the next attack will be? No, they do not.

GREENFIELD: But where then is the source of the biggest frustration for folks in the United States, trying to gather evidence from other countries? What most frustrates them now?

ENSOR: The most frustrating thing is that these networks, which have been going for years and are full of people who are related to each other and don't trust anybody that they haven't been with since the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets, are extremely hard to break into, to get agents into.

Money doesn't necessarily buy you access. They are using the help of the ISI, the Pakistani Intelligence Service. But that was the one that helped set up the Taliban in the first place and some people suspect may have dual loyalties.

So it's extremely difficult work. And yet, the country's in a hurry, understandably. So, that's the problem.

GREENFIELD: Now one writer in this field, Sy Hersh, has written that the Saudis are providing the United States with some real frustrating moments in terms of what the United States wants to know from the supposedly staunch ally in the Middle East.

ENSOR: Well, Saudi Arabia has always had a rather ambivalent view of Islamic fundamentalism. To some extent, they've gone through life buying it off. And yes -- what was it? -- about 11 of the hijackers were in fact Saudi citizens.

Large amounts of money from Saudi Arabia clearly have gone to al Qaeda. I know from one knowledgeable source that a member of the royal family has actually sent money to a charity that is -- that they know is connected to al Qaeda. Very frustrating situation.

What U.S. officials today are saying is they'll be watching in the next few weeks to see whether the Saudis comply with the U.N. Security resolution, under which they have to cut off that money. And it's very specific. And there's 90 days. And then they have to report back in detail. That's what the U.S. wants to see, whether they really will do that or not. If they don't, there's going to be problems.

GREENFIELD: All right, CNN national security correspondent David Ensor. Thank you very much for joining us.

Joining me now from Washington are "Newsweek" assistant managing editor Evan Thomas, who's written extensively about intelligence gathering. Former ambassador at large for counterterrorism, Paul Bremer. He's now chairman and CEO of Marsh Crisis Consulting. And also with us, former CIA deputy director John Gannon. He is now vice chairman of the Intellibridge Corporation.

Evan Thomas, pick up on what I was talking about with David Ensor. In terms of what we don't know, from your analysis, what's the scariest gap?

EVAN THOMAS, "NEWSWEEK": What's in the United States. I think we're actually making some progress abroad using these foreign services. And as David pointed out, we've thwarted some plots, or they've thwarted some plots emanating from Italy and Spain and so forth.

But in the United States, I don't think the FBI has a handle on this at all. What they've done since September 11 is throw out a big dragnet. And they've taken 100 people -- 800 people off the streets.

I think that may have served in the kind of blunderbuss fashion to have disrupted these networks. You know, for instance, who's -- nobody came to claim a bunch of plastique explosive that was left in the Philadelphia bus station. Maybe that person who has the claim check for that is sitting in some federal prison today. But I think they're kind of shooting in the dark and just hoping that they can disrupt these networks by a massive round-up.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Gannon, let me turn to the area of what we need to know from other nations and go back to what David Ensor was talking about. You were, until relatively recently, in the CIA. How frustrating was it for you in dealing with your counterparts in an ostensible ally, like, let's say, Saudi Arabia?

JOHN GANNON, FORMER DEPUTY CIA DIRECTOR: Well, I think the role that the liaison services plays is critical in fighting any transnational issue, and particularly terrorism. I think the -- some of the frustration, however, was felt by some of our counterparts in other countries.

In Western Europe, for example, I think the investment in intelligence had declined. And the general, I think, respect for the intelligence effort in those populations in the post-Cold War period had declined. And I think September 11 has been a wake-up call for those democracies as well as in Saudi Arabia.

GREENFIELD: But Mr. Gannon, I'm sorry.

GANNON: And while I hear -- while I hear the criticism of Saudi Arabia, I would also say that it is important to note that the Saudis in fact are supporting the coalition and are now engaged with us in the effort to pursue Osama bin Laden.

GREENFIELD: Well, they may be in the coalition, Mr. Gannon, but if they're not, as Sy Hersh has written in "The New Yorker," even prepared to go and check the names that the United States has given them of the suspected hijackers, whose identities are apparently Saudi, that doesn't speak about their sense of urgency in finding out how this disaster happened, does it?

GANNON: The Saudi relationship has always, to one degree or another, been a challenge. But I would assure you that the Saudis know exactly where we stand and what we need. And there is, I think, appropriate encouragement being placed in that relationship now to provide us with the information that we need.

GREENFIELD: OK, Mr. Bremer, you were a member, an important member of that national -- one of the people, one of the commissions that studied terrorism before September 11. When you read now, as some of your worst nightmares come true, and you see that the first bioterrorism death on United States soil, maybe a couple more have already occurred, does -- what does it tell us that we don't know who is sending anthrax through the mails?

PAUL BREMER, CEO, MARSH CRISIS CONSULTING: One of the problems that we addressed in the National Commission on Terrorism, which, as you noted, I chaired, was the importance of getting good intelligence. And that's really the vital part of counterterrorism, because in the end, if you look at this problem through the glass and look at the vulnerabilities -- if you say, well, we have to make ourselves invulnerable from all kinds of attacks across the country -- basically it's a fool's errand. You can't look at it that way, because we have too many vulnerabilities. In fact, our vulnerabilities are essentially infinite.

So you have to go back and deal with the people who are conducting the attacks, which is why the intelligence matter is so important. And we've obviously had a colossal failure of intelligence here, and a failure of our law enforcement, as Evan was pointing out earlier. And one must say, at least until recently, a colossal failure on the intelligence and law enforcement of our close allies in Europe, where a lot of these attacks were plotted.

GREENFIELD: Has it gotten better? We've all heard that September 11 was a wake-up call, but we keep hearing of continuing bureaucratic snarls, of turf protecting. From your perspective, has there been a sea change in the attitude toward intelligence gathering in the terrorism field?

BREMER: I think it's fair to say there has been a real sea change in the last few weeks. The question really is whether it will last. In the past -- we've had these terrorist attacks going back over 30 years. Nothing on this scale, of course.

But after a terrorist attack, there's usually somebody saying, this is a wake-up call for America, we have to change the way we do things. And for several months, everybody agrees and nods sagely. And then, their attention wanders off.

The president has quite right said, I think, this is different. This is the way in which the world's most powerful country, the only way in which we can be attacked now is by this -- these kinds of asymmetric attacks. So we've got to change our bureaucratics. We've got change our thinking. We've got to be more risk-taking in the collection of intelligence around the world.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Thomas, you've written about this area both well before and after September 11. Do you sense that we are actively -- by we, I mean the United States and its allies -- actively changing how we're gathering intelligence, how we are sharing intelligence?

THOMAS: Yes. For one thing, we're detaining people in a way that we never would have before. Those 800 people that we've rounded up, a lot of them are completely innocent and they're languishing in jails. I mean, it's a civil liberties mess.

Now, it happens to be one that I, like most citizens, can live with because the threat is so grave. But we are using police tactics that we wouldn't have imagined before September 11. So, that's one big difference.

And it may be an effective difference, because, as I was saying earlier, I think the dragnet may have the effect of disrupting the terrorists, because some of them are sitting in jails right now. We don't know who they are, but they're sitting in jails and they're not out on the street planting bombs.

GREENFIELD: And what about the relationship between United States intelligence gatherers and our friends or alleged friends abroad? Has that changed dramatically from your perspective?

THOMAS: I'm sure it has. I mean, it wasn't too great before. We've always relied on these foreign security services, but they have been awkward or distrustful relationships. I mean, the Pakistanis really were down on us, because we essentially pulled the plug on them in the '90s. And in fact, we imposed sanctions after Musharraf took over in a coup.

So our relations with Pakistan were terrible before September 11. I think they're greatly improved. You had the secretary of state out there and I think the ISI is helping us now. However, there are these lingering suspicions that the ISI is at least capable of playing a double game, and working -- some people in the ISI are working for bin Laden and not working for the United States.

GREENFIELD: OK. I want to pick up on this when we get back. And I also want to also ask if key information might save thousands of innocent lives, should any method of getting that information be out- of-bounds? We'll pick up that in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: I absolutely believe that we have to go back and see what happened, not in order to hang somebody at the yardarm or to disgrace anyone, but so that we will not make mistakes again that we've made before.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: That was, of course, Senator John McCain talking on "Meet the Press" yesterday.

And we're back, assessing what we know and don't know about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups perhaps, with "Newsweek's" Evan Thomas; the former U.S. ambassador at large for counterterrorism, Paul Bremer; and former top CIA analyst John Gannon.

Mr. Gannon, when you hear the calls for a tough-minded look-back at the failure of intelligence, once we put aside the fingerpointing and scapegoating, from your own perspective, if they called you to a Senate committee and said, all right, you tell us from the inside where the central failure of intelligence gathering was, what would you point to?

GANNON: Well, first of all, Jeff, I would say that it is appropriate to want an investigation as to why we lack the intelligence that we would have needed to prevent the attack on 11 September. But I would not want the investigations to be one that is a blame game. I would want it to be a serious look at the intelligence community, how it's structured, how it's resourced, and to fundamental questions of why the community was unable to perform in a better way.

I think the people in the agency are first-rate. I think organizations like the Counterterrorism Center can be made a lot better if we enable those people to do a better job.

So I would like to see an investigation that looks at some of the reports that have already pointed out, including in the public domain, some of the problems that exist in the community.

The Bremer report on terrorism did so. We have reports on signals intelligence. We have a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Commission report, which looked at overhead. We have an NRO commission that looked at satellites.

We have the -- Don Rumsfeld's report on ballistic missiles, which also looked at analytic capabilities in the community.

We have a very broad agenda for reforming the community. I would like to go back to Congress, which is quite aware of all of these reports, and ask why were we unable to implement some of the proposals that were made here that would have improved our capabilities.

I would very much not want to see a kind of blame game or witch hunt that has, in fact, in the past, weakened the intelligence community's ability to deal with the current challenges that we face.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Bremer, one of the articles that was in the public domain, about which Mr. Gannon may be referring, was an article in "The Atlantic" just a couple of months before September 11 by a former CIA desk officer. His name -- and I may be mispronouncing it, I apologize -- is Raoul Garrett (ph), who said basically Osama bin Laden had nothing to fear from the CIA, because it had become a risk- averse bureaucracy.

I'm going to give Mr. Gannon -- Mr. Thomas a chance to weigh in on that as well. But is that your assessment of what had had happened in part, that the CIA was just not willing to take the kind of chances it had to?

BREMER: Yes. I think -- and we use that term risk-averse in our -- in the Bremer Commission report last year.

But look, it took a long time really for us to arrive at the point where our agencies were not able to pick up this kind of thing. And we're not going to fix it overnight. The problems are in both the collection, the analysis, and the dissemination of information. All three of those areas, as we pointed out in our report, need to be looked at.

And I would put particular stress on a point that's been talked about in the last few weeks, which is getting a seamlessness of the intelligence that the intelligence agencies collect and the information which the law enforcement agencies collect.

These -- there's been sort of a Chinese wall between these, particularly the information collected by the law enforcement agencies, in particular the FBI. And I think we've got a break down some of those walls very quickly so that the analysts can get a full picture of what they're looking at.

And of course, that I think has changed a bit since September 11. I think we're moving in the right direction there. But this is going to take a long time to put it back together.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Thomas, speaking of risk aversion, we talked about this the last time I think you were with us. One of the issues that's come up is whether or not the tactics used to attempt to gain intelligence from people who might know something and might be willing to talk may have to be the kind of tactics that would have greatly offended us and may still.

And that is specifically, should the United States be prepared to take some of these suspects who it believes to have knowledge and perhaps turn them over to the less-than-tender mercies of other intelligence agencies, whose methods of information extraction might be considered a bit rough?

THOMAS: Well, actually right now that's prohibited by law. There's a specific case about this. The FBI arrested somebody they thought was involved with the Khobar Tower bombings in Canada. And they thought they were being very clever.

They said: We'll give you a choice here, you can cooperate with us, or we'll send you back to Saudi Arabia, where you'll get your head cut off. The guy hired himself a lawyer. And the lawyer found a statute that says the United States can't turn over people to foreign countries where they know their human rights are going to be abused.

Now, that's the law. I think as a practical matter what's going to happen on the ground is we're going to look the other way. We're going to have -- we're going to let foreign security services do our dirty work for us. We're going to let them arrest people and torture them and extract information, and we're going to want to know the take, as they say, the results, but we're not going to know about the methods. We're just going to look the other way.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Gannon, you know, the Hollywood version of the agency you worked in is filled with pictures of tactics that would be considered pretty brutal. Do you think in real life that it's going to be necessary for the United States to either by officially or by looking the other way to simply accept methods of interrogation that it might not want to in regular times?

GANNON: I think there's, Jeff, there's wide latitude for what intelligence folks can do in the field, that can be done within the rule of United States law.

I think one of the most encouraging things that our case officers would have heard in recent days is the statement from the president of the United States that he, in fact, is willing to share the risk of people in intelligence and in the field. I think that is the most important message to case officers out there who have to take the risks. It isn't a matter of paper documents that they have to fill out. It is a sense that at the political level of our government they are going to be supported in taking the risks. They're going to be supported if, in fact, there are failures. And they're going to be supported, in fact, as we hope there will be successes.

But that support at the political level has to be sustained. And I think you're going to find that the behavior of our intelligence officers, based on the leadership the president has shown, I think is going to be very positive in this regard.

GREENFIELD: Well, I think I'm going to ask you a somewhat blunter question. Apparently, the Philippine intelligence community got some pretty important information out of one of the people it was interrogating, but the methods of interrogation included, you know, physical torture. The same -- we got information about one of the original World Trade Center bombers the same way. Is that something we're going to have to accept as part of the cost of combating terrorism?

GANNON: Well, what I say to you, Jeff, is that, you know, let's look back on history, dealing with the issues like terrorism, like narcotrafficking, like proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, like international organized crime. You invariably get involved with characters who are undesirable. You get involved with intelligence systems and services that don't behave the way we do. You have to find ways to achieve our goals working within those systems, but also working in accordance with U.S. law. I don't believe that we have found that impossible to do.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Bremer, I've got about 30 seconds for you to get the last word on this particular subject. Are we going to have to either shut our eyes or open our eyes to methods of getting information that we would not have thought about six weeks ago?

BREMER: I think we probably will have to be somewhat more open to receiving information from wherever it comes and however it comes to us.

GREENFIELD: All right. Thank you very much to all my guests: "Newsweek's" Evan Thomas, former ambassador at large for counterterrorism Paul Bremer, former CIA deputy director John Gannon, all from Washington.

When we come back, I've got a personal note about life and death.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: Finally, a personal note. Years ago, when the Cold War was at its peak, I read a story about a man going through a personal crisis as the world seemed to be hurtling toward nuclear war. The story ends with his prayer, "Please, let us die in our own beds, one at a time."

I thought of this last week when my mother died in the fullness of her years, with the chance to say goodbye to those she loved and who loved her in as much peace and comfort as was humanly possible. It is this human desire that is one of terrorism's most vulnerable targets.

Six weeks ago, terrorism sent thousands of innocents to a horrible death, ripping them from their families and friends. But it did more. With that act and with the fear now spreading from the malls to the mail, terrorism has made millions hostage to a most primal of fears, that we will suddenly, randomly be deprived of the chance to live and in time to die on our terms. And this is the real irony.

If that fear of sudden, random death is strong enough, we will deprive ourselves of the very life we desire by retreating from life, by shrinking the scope of our travels, our friendships, our ambitions. What happened six weeks ago, after all, did not really change the human condition nor the fundamental reality of our mortality. The real question is, will we let it change what we do with this precious gift of life that has been lent to us?

I'm Jeff Greenfield. Thank you for watching. "LOU DOBBS MONEYLINE" is next.

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