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American Morning

Interview With Prudence Bushnell

Aired September 03, 2002 - 09:30   ET

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

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: America's ambassadors are charged with keeping relations stable in some of the world's most unstable places. A "National Geographic" documentary takes a close look at some of the risks that come with being a U.S. ambassador.
Prudence Bushnell, the former ambassador to Kenya, is one of those profiled. She was there in 1998 when the U.S. embassy was bombed allegedly by Al Qaeda terrorists.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRUDENCE BUSHNELL, FMR. U.S. AMB. TO KENYA: Part of it was a real sense of, you bombed us to our knees, we are getting back up again. There was that wanting to stand up to the people who tried to kill us. You have a choice. You can either lay down and bleed, or you can get up and pat your wounds, and say, no, no, you can hurt us, but we're not going away.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: It is called "Ambassador Under Fire Overseas." It airs Wednesday on PBS, and we are joined now by the woman you just saw, Prudence Bushnell, who served both in Kenya and in Guatemala.

Good to see you.

BUSHNELL: Good morning.

ZAHN: You couldn't miss the anger in your voice and the frustration in your voice in that little piece of the interview. Take us back to that period of time prior to the bombing when you were asking government officials for a new building. You knew that building was vulnerable.

BUSHNELL: There are a lot of embassies in the world that were and remain vulnerable, because of course they were built at a time when we wanted to be open to the public. So the embassy in Nairobi was in a downtown, very busy area, frankly, a great concern, more than terrorism, because although that was certainly a possibility, we never ever thought it was going to happen; the greater concern was political violence and crime.

ZAHN: At what point did you learn that one of the reasons why that embassy was targeted was the fact you were an ambassador, and the fact a female was an ambassador was a bigger roar, because they thought they could get more publicity this way. BUSHNELL: I learned that at the trial. They surveilled the embassy in 1993. Now mind you, we were blown up in 1998. So these people had taken their time. My predecessor was a woman. Whether it was -- they had made the decision to choose an embassy that was, a, vulnerable, and, b, headed by a woman in '93 or 98, I'm not sure. But I found that shocking.

ZAHN: Prior to your coming in, what did you know about Al Qaeda, and how they operated, and who they were and what they were?

BUSHNELL: We -- having been in African affairs, I knew that this was a terrorist organization that had been in Sudan. I was aware that the Sudanese asked them to leave, and that they were in Afghanistan. I was not aware of the work that they were doing on embassies. Sure did find out.

ZAHN: And then what you -- when you found out, what was your reaction? Most of this information came out of the trial, right? A lot of the information came out at the trial, although the FBI came in days, sometimes hours after the bombing, and immediately began an investigation that was very, very fruitful. So we found the traces to Al Qaeda fairly immediately. The people themselves were taken into custody and put on trial here in New York.

ZAHN: Was there anything that could have been done, short of being given a new building, with state of the art technology, that would have saved that embassy from the attack? One thing we all learned is how patient that Al Qaeda is. You are talking about them casing the joint back '93, five years before they bombed it.

BUSHNELL: Not only that, but I found out, again through the trial, that they had almost literally a file drawer full of photographs of potential embassies. So these were people who had not just one possible target, but another -- but other possible targets. For all I know, they still may, hopefully not. So these folks had an agenda and were going to fill it out, be it in Kenya, in Dar Es Salaam, because we can't forget that our embassy was blown up at the same time in Tanzania or other places around the world.

ZAHN: What are your ongoing concerns about embassy personnel as we go into this heated debate about whether the U.S. should go into Iraq. You hear stories over the weekend about an alleged Al Qaeda operative apparently perhaps hijacking a plane ultimately to go into a U.S. embassy. How vulnerable are Americans serving overseas in embassies?

BUSHNELL: Increasingly vulnerable. We are a community of people who are fiercely patriotic and willing to put ourselves and even our families in dangerous places to represent the United States. We really are on the first line of offense. And the same kind of force protection that we apply to our men and women in uniform, I think also needs to be applied to men and women in civilian uniforms. We are making headway. There are a lot of changes that still need to be made, and I'm hoping that we'll continue to make them.

ZAHN: Do ever get over the feeling of cheating death somehow, that you were there that day and somehow your life was spared?

BUSHNELL: Yes, twice that day I thought I was going to die. There is nothing like that feeling. And my -- I had a wonderful driver, Duncan, whom I sent away it do an errand. Had he been in the embassy where would he have been, he would have been dead. And Duncan very often would say, as he is driving in the front seat, Ambassador, God has a plan for us.

ZAHN: Thank God, God had a higher plan for you here on Earth. Ambassador Bushnell, thank you for sharing your story with us.

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