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American Morning

Terror Tape: Look at Al Qaeda's Global Reach

Aired August 23, 2002 - 09:04   ET

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

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: For the past week, in our series "Terror on Tape," Nic Robertson has been reporting on the contents of specific tapes from the Al Qaeda collection, tapes on chemical testing, Osama bin Laden's declaration of war, training of operatives, and bomb making.
Now, for this report, the last in the series, Nic looks at what the tapes say about Al Qaeda, its global reach, and the group's leader.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice- over): From tape C89 in the carefully numbered al Qaeda video archive, young Arab fighters, frolicking in an Afghan river, to tape B135 from Chechnya, where Arab fighters ambush a Russian convey. The library contains a remarkable cross-section of material.

(on camera): Digging deep into this archive provides an extraordinary insight into this most secretive of organizations, and the man at its head, but it is the breadth of the collection that reveals al Qaeda's global reach and its links to other terror groups.

(voice-over): Look at tape C205, shot in 1990 in the south Asian country of Burma. It shows jihadi fighters there, training with an Arabic-speaking instructor. And this tape from Eritrea in east Africa shows fighters proclaiming an Islamic battle to drive infidels out of their country.

Just some of the international tapes in the al Qaeda library that terror analyst, Rohan Gunaratna, reviewed for us. For him, proof al Qaeda was binding itself to other jihadi groups, becoming what he calls an organization of organizations.

(on camera): What would you think is the most important thing about the collection?

ROHAN GUNARATNA, AUTHOR, "INSIDE AL QAEDA": It gives a comprehensive picture of al Qaeda's strategic gift, of al Qaeda's global reach. Here, it very clearly demonstrates that al Qaeda is waging a universal jihad campaign.

ROBERTSON (voice-over): As we go through the tapes, we find how al Qaeda kept its growing empire together. Tape C189 shot in a clean office, believed by coalition intelligence sources, who looked at this tape, to have been al Qaeda's secure Afghan communications room. The man using the two-way radio tells the person at the other end to look for a message on his computer and decode it.

(on camera): And the computer wasn't just for sending e-mails. Look at this videotape of Osama bin Laden giving a speech. In the same library, we also found some CDs. On this one, the same Osama bin Laden speech, evidence al Qaeda was disseminating its knowledge through much harder-to-track means.

(voice-over): These CDs, a reminder, says Professor Magnus Ranstorp, that al Qaeda is more than willing to embrace the technology of its enemies to get its message out.

MAGNUS RANSTORP, UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS: Bin Laden uses the whole spectrum of technology -- videocassettes, he uses e-mail, he uses encryption. And he also understands how his enemies operate, and how to function without being impaired in terms of security-wise.

ROBERTSON: Other tapes from the archive, like this one, his own recording of the 1997 interview with CNN, tell us more about Osama bin Laden himself.

Peter Bergen, who was there, was surprised bin Laden had his own camera rolling.

PETER BERGEN, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: It was very odd to see it so many years later and to realize that the whole thing was, you know, being videotaped by him. I mean, I actually I had no idea it was being videotaped. I just had no idea.

ROBERTSON: There are other examples from interviews with ABC, Al Jazeera. For Bergen and others, a glimpse into the terror leader's strategy and his psyche.

BERGEN: Bin Laden has been interested in his sort of media profile for a long time, and in a way, this videotape collection that you have discovered is sort of the ultimate sort of manifestation of that.

RANSTORP: I think it shows personal vanity on behalf of bin Laden, of understanding the power of the media, how to communicate or how to persuade.

ROBERTSON: Personal and institutional vanity, perhaps evident in al Qaeda's final edition to the library. Tape B222, titled "American Under Fire." We see news coverage from September 11.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It seemed like it wasn't even real.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was like a bomb went off, and it was like holy hell coming down them stairs.

ROBERTSON: A chilling reminder of the terror group's dedication to detail, leaving no stone unturned in its planning for the future. It seems al Qaeda and possibly Osama bin Laden were reviewing their own handiwork.

(END VIDEOTAPE) ZAHN: And Nic Robertson, the man who obtained these tapes, joins us now from Atlanta.

Good morning, Nic.

ROBERTSON: Good morning.

ZAHN: I know this is kind of a tough thing to ask you to do. It's like asking you who your favorite child is. When you go back and you look at all of tape that we've seen this week, what is most significant thing we have learned?

ROBERTSON: Paula, a lot of people have asked me that question, I think perhaps the most significant thing that I've learned is the breadth of Al Qaeda's knowledge, the depth and their sophistication, and their intention, their intention to train. rehearse across such a wide spectrum of different forms of terrorism, be it with chemical agents, be it with explosives, be it hijacking, assassinations.

It's very difficult for me to put a finger on just one thing, but perhaps the thing that the had the greatest impact on me was their dedication and efforts to improve their knowledge and sophistication with nerve agents.

ZAHN: I guess the one thing that's caused all of us to pause is we've heard one of your terrorism experts say in the piece about, and actually the same guy that spoke with Bill a little bit earlier this morning, about how feels that you can't really win this war, and he says he doesn't believe that even 10 to 15 years out from the year 2008, you stop these guys. Expand on that a little.

ROBERTSON: Well, number one, we're seeing the coalition forces inside Afghanistan really roll up Al Qaeda's operation inside Afghanistan. They've essentially destroyed the training camps. They're denying them the ability to plan big operations. But what's happening, and what he see in this video library is that Al Qaeda already has trained perhaps 4,000, 5,000 operatives, that it has specialized some of them in different areas, chemical, explosives, urban environment, guerrilla warfare.

So it's clear that Al Qaeda is already perhaps one step ahead. It already has a lot of people out there around the world perhaps hiding in other countries, and again, from the videotapes that we're seeing today evidence that Al Qaeda has linked themselves to other organizations around the world. They are the global reach that is described here in, as one of our experts says, in 60 different countries around the world. So they are sort of almost one step ahead of us in that regard, although intelligence agencies around the world have to filter out an awful lot of information that's coming to them, what they would sort of describe as white noise, when sort of so much information coming from so many sources, and they have to try to filter out all of the sort of erroneous information and follow their correct leads. It's a tremendously difficult, painstaking process.

It is going to take them, and all the other agencies around the world, a long, long time, clearly to sort of catch up with Al Qaeda in this regard.

ZAHN: We thank you for bringing these tapes to us. Certainly at times it has been very compelling, very appalling at times, but I think that we've all learned a lot about the reach and the scope of the organization.

Thank you, Nic.

ROBERTSON: Thank you.

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