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American Morning

Mysterious Al Qaeda Financier Said He Has Some Detailed Information on Bin Laden's Whereabouts

Aired January 17, 2002 - 09:06   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.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Up front this morning, breaking news out of Pakistan. A carload of men believed to be members of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network were just arrested after a high-speed chase. It's possible they've got it. According to "The Independent of London" the mysterious Al Qaeda financier who turned himself into U.S. Marines in Kandahar earlier this week said he actually has some detailed information. This as word of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld saying he believes the terrorist chief is still in Afghanistan.

CNN military analyst General Don Sheppard joining from Washington.

Good morning, general.

MAJ. GEN. DON SHEPPARD, (RET.) CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Good morning, Paula.

ZAHN: So what do you make of the secretary's comments yesterday after a week or so of not hearing anything about where Osama bin Laden was?

SHEPPARD: I think the secretary is on the mark. I think that bin Laden is either in Afghanistan or nearby in one of the border areas of Pakistan. The reason I believe that is that wherever he is going right now, he has a lot of people looking for him. So he has to go some place that he thoroughly familiar with and some place that he can move quickly to alternate locations nearby. He's totally familiar with Eastern Afghanistan, the area around Khowst, and that type of thing, the Tora Bora area, if you will, and then down into the Kandahar area and the area around Maruf (ph). I think he's think probably in those areas.

ZAHN: There's still people, you know, unnamed sources in the paper saying this morning, they're not sure why Mr. Rumsfeld said that, because there's no indication, you know, that he's not in Pakistan.

SHEPPARD: Yeah. This is -- a real strange thing is developing here that I'm marking, if you will, as unusual. Normally, we hear all sort of leaks about hey, he was here, he was there, someone overheard on a telephone call or a radio transmission. We hear absolutely nothing of that type, which leads to believe there's a possibility he's dead. Either that or he has gone what we call cold mic or cold- microphone totally, and no emissions anywhere. One of the big ways you search for the people listening to communications from there or about them, and evidently none of that coming through. So that's a little bit of a strange pattern developing here.

ZAHN: General, we had some reports from Ben Wedeman in Afghanistan earlier today, confirming the fact that U.S. officials have talked to this informant. They're now calling him a detainees, a guy who apparently has information on Osama bin Laden. How much faith do you have on this guy who apparently was a financier of a drug trade, someone who had a lot of contact with the Taliban, might have anything useful to the U.S. government?

SHEPPARD: Hard to say. Strange a guy would show up all of a sudden and turn himself in like that, especially under the circumstances. On the other hand, we treat this like any other piece of information. You got to find out if this guy for real. Does he have information that really is useful or not? Is he after the 25 million? These people do these things for their own reasons, some of them to avoid prosecution, some of them to avoid death, some of them for money. So it's going to take a while to find out if he's for real and find out, does he really know anything that's really useful to us?

ZAHN: Just your quick reflection on implication of the reports that Pashtun tribal leaders basically told the U.S. government, now we are not going to help you go cave to cave? What does that mean for us, particularly when the U.S. government has made clear to the American public that they think there's useful information that could prevent a future terrorist attack in those caves?

SHEPPARD: Not unusual at all, Paula. We've thought from the beginning we would get varying levels of cooperation and varying people at different times. We would like willing cooperation, where people would really give us total information right now. But we realize that some of them haven't changed their hearts, and some will change their hearts for money. What we are doing is the same thing we have done from the start. We are looking at with all of the censors, and you look for gatherings of people, you look for emissions, that type of thing, and so we're look for changes, and we will go after them when we find those changes with human intelligence.

ZAHN: General Sheppard, as always, good to have you with us on the air. Thank you for helping us make sense of some of those conflicting reports this morning.

Good to see you, again.

SHEPPARD: Pleasure.

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