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American Morning
Terror on Tape: In Training
Aired August 21, 2002 - 07:05 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: We're going to begin this morning with CNN's weeklong series, "Terror on Tape." Until now, we have seen the deadly result of al Qaeda's training, the days when its meticulous plans led to evil execution, the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole attack in Yemen, and of course, September 11.
Today, we bring you that training as you have never seen it before, training at several levels. Al Qaeda's best and its rookies from lessons in surface-to-air missiles to precise rehearsals of urban attacks.
In the third installment of our exclusive series here, CNN's Nic Robertson shows us how that training over the past few years poses a threat even now.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice- over): Explosions resonate around a remote Afghan hillside, as al Qaeda fighters burst into what appears to be a stone hut, but all is not as it seems on this al Qaeda training video, one of several tapes CNN obtained that record al Qaeda's never-before-seen battle plans.
ROHAN GUNARATNA, AUTHOR, "INSIDE AL QAEDA": Al Qaeda has created a series of exercises to train the recruits who came to Afghanistan, to come to the West, and to conduct terrorist operations.
ROBERTSON (on camera): In the urban environment.
GUNARATNA: In the urban environment. Now they are able to operate in cities.
ROBERTSON (voice-over): This is a remote setting, but the training we see here is, according to al Qaeda analyst Gunaratna, designed to teach the terrorist trainees how to take their jihad to Western cities, in this case, a Western city replicated in canvas and stone on a hillside in eastern Afghanistan.
GUNARATNA: Al Qaeda has built a small city, and they are training, and they are placing real explosives and blowing up that bridge. They are blowing up some of the houses, some of the offices. It is a real thing. It is more advanced than training. It is almost like doing the operation, so that when they go to the real operational theater, they will be 100 percent confident.
ROBERTSON: For al Qaeda, effectively, a kind of special forces. Magnus Ranstorp, one of several al Qaeda experts CNN asked to examine this collection of tapes, says he is startled by the level of expertise.
MAGNUS RANSTORP, UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS: And I don't think anyone ever fathomed, even in the intelligence community, how sophisticated the training was, how well-prepared they were, and how they were working away in secret in imparting this advice, in the developing and thinking, not only what to do, but also the defenses the enemy has.
ROBERTSON: This tape is labeled "Exclusive Abu Hafs," the nomdigure (ph) for al Qaeda's now-dead top military commander, Mohammed Atef. The tape provides step-by-step instruction on how to use a surface-to-air missile.
GUNARATNA: The video of the surface-to-air missile training is something that has never been made public before. No intelligence agency had any idea that al Qaeda has made a video where they would train a person to fire a surface-to-air missile. And I think that this video comes as a shock to the international intelligence community, because civilization (ph) will become very vulnerable because of this type of video.
ROBERTSON: Other training tapes add insights into how al Qaeda works. Here, recruits learn to repel down the side of a cliff. One trainee gets stuck, unable to move.
Exercises like these, an indication al Qaeda was not only putting new fighters through their paces, but selecting the right people for the right job.
RANSTORP: They are really training for specific missions, and it's weeding out the elite of the elite, the creme de la crim, who may be deployed for even more specialized training or may even be deployed into the West for terrorist purposes.
ROBERTSON: Elsewhere on the same training tape, al Qaeda operatives repeatedly rehearse complex hostage-taking and assassination operations, procedures that exactly match diagrams in this hand-written manual, recovered by CNN last November from a former al Qaeda safe house in Kabul.
For CNN's military analyst, retired General David Grange, al Qaeda's tactics present a very clear and present danger.
BRIG. GEN. DAVID GRANGE (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Just the intensity of the training that's described in these tapes, very determined, covered a lot of different areas, information on warfare, bomb-making, assassinations, raids, snatches, destruction of bridges, lines of communication.
ROBERTSON: For Grange, the training tapes provide more than just a wake-up call on al Qaeda's sophistication. He says the tapes also show weaknesses in al Qaeda's organization. GRANGE: And so, you have to be on the lookout of how they use motorcycles together with automobiles as an example. But what really is apparent looking at a higher level of how they operate is that, one, they have to have an idea. They have to have a plan. They have to have resources. They need money. They need chemicals. They need ammunition. They need weapons.
And then, they have to rehearse, practice, stage, and then there's communications requirements. They end up talking to leaders. And then, they have to do the hit. They have to withdraw safely, and then they have to recover somewhere in a safe area.
Throughout that whole stage, that whole process, there are vulnerabilities, and again, they teach offensive and not defensive measures.
ROBERTSON: But those offensive measures were taught to the trainees on these tapes at least four years ago, giving al Qaeda a substantial head-start, experts say, in putting trained operatives in place.
GUNARATNA: In terms of preparation, in terms of planning, al Qaeda has created a large number of Qaedas (ph), a large number of terrorists, who will, over the years, will go in for action.
ROBERTSON: If al Qaeda has indeed stolen the initiative, as these experts fear, the threat of terrorism may be as real now as it was September 11, 2001.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAHN: And Nic Robertson joins us now from Atlanta.
Good morning -- Nic.
ROBERTSON: Good morning.
ZAHN: One of your experts just said that he believed, in looking at these tapes, that it was clear this was training for specific missions. Based on what you have gleaned from these 64 tapes that you have gotten your hands on, what does it suggest to you? What are they training for, an attack on an American city?
ROBERTSON: It appears to be. That's what the experts say, and perhaps one of the things the video doesn't really tell completely is that each of those videotapes on training lasted about three hours, so you see time and time again how the al Qaeda operatives rehearsed, how many times they go through the process of putting these exercises -- being put through the paces of these exercises.
But it is the construction of the village (ph), construction of the houses, the fact that you see these white stones laid out, this appears to be marking roads, perhaps for a specific mission, but perhaps just for that training in an urban environment. But that's what led our experts to look at this across its entirety, plus the fact that many of these operations appear to be taking place on roads. ZAHN: So how would they target Americans or American targets abroad using these exercises we have just witnessed this morning?
ROBERTSON: Well, No, 1, in the hostage-taking, there's a number of sequences where they drive one vehicle next to another. Now, that could easily happen, our experts say, in a city. There's a vehicle perhaps with a target person in that vehicle. They use another vehicle and a couple of people on different motorbikes. They drive up, as we have seen in the video, they stop their vehicle. They get the wanted hostage out of the other vehicle at gunpoint and move them across into their vehicle and drive off. It's all rehearsed to be done very, very quickly.
ZAHN: Nic Robertson, we've got to leave it there at this hour. I know you're going to be back in the next hour with more -- look forward to that.
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