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Military Intelligence Sifting Through Tips

Aired April 16, 2003 - 12:20   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.


KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: The war is in the endgame, but the question remains, where is Saddam Hussein? U.S. officials still don't know whether they killed the former Iraqi leader in airstrikes, or even if he got away.
Joining me now to talk about the possibilities and how you determine whether a tip is solid or not, Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy. She is a former U.S. Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence.

Good to see you again.

Well, let's talk about this news that we were talking about in "The New York Times," the 75th Exploitation Group. Explain the duties of this group and the fact that it feels it doesn't have the resources to do what it needs to do.

LT. GEN. CLAUDIA KENNEDY, (RET.) CNN MILITARY ANALYST: There were reports they had too few people for so much work, and the understanding is that we have a lot of troops out there looking with some level of expertise, then you have the 75th Exploitation Group that's at work, then the highest level of expertise is the Iraq support group, the inspectors. They're not in there now, but they have been there in the past. It's a layer of expertise that represents the highest technical ability.

Well, my understanding is that there will be a joint task force that will be created that will do something about increasing their expertise. They'll in fact triple or quadruple in size the number of people available to work on this problem.

PHILLIPS: All right. So that moves them to, of course everybody wants to know where is Saddam Hussein? Where are his sons? Let's talk about the intelligence process here. What is the intel community going through now? What is the intel community doing, and how does this fold in with the 75th?

KENNEDY: Well, the kind of work the intelligence community does now is pretty much the way it's been working before. We use the same tactics, the same techniques, and it is to gather information from all sources. So what's been happening now that the regime has fallen is that there are more people willing to talk. We have more access than ever. We're able to verify the human intelligence we gather by technical means. We have the same surveillance and reconnaissance being conducted that was being conducted during major military operations.

PHILLIPS: So you do find more Iraqis coming forward and being more blunt and being more direct?

KENNEDY: You do, although there will be a continued period of uncertainty for them until they see the next regime, because you know, there are a lot of different internal groups within Iraq that want power. And my guess would be that any given person might want to be sure that they're very careful about who they align themselves with right now during this period of uncertainty and transition.

PHILLIPS: How do you -- I can imagine you get so many tips in a situation like this. How do you know what to weed out? How do you know what's a good tip and what's not a good tip?

KENNEDY: Well, intelligence analysts keep track of who has been a good source in the past, and they know who's credible and who's not over time. They also not only follow the track record of a given person who's a source, but they also take a look at the information offered by other more technical means to see if it's been verified.

PHILLIPS: And you know that these tips work. You had the rescue of Jessica Lynch. That came from a tip. Also now most recently Abu Abbas. It proves that the intel does work. It does lead to captures.

KENNEDY: That's right. And the other part of it is the information technology that is at our disposal in a way that it never was 10 years ago. In other words, we can do data mining. We use commercial off-the-shelf applications in intelligence work to sort out all of these many, many different fragmentary reports.

PHILLIPS: OK, tell me what that means in layman's terms. OK, it sounds very official, very military, but explain to me what that means.

KENNEDY: What that means is that if you have a lot of information gathered in one place, and it's from a lot of different places, it may be very hard for one human being to keep track of it all. But if you have it in a database, and you're able to prompt the database to collect all information in a given topic, it can do that.

PHILLIPS: General Claudia Kennedy, thank you very much.

KENNEDY: Thank you.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com






Aired April 16, 2003 - 12:20   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: The war is in the endgame, but the question remains, where is Saddam Hussein? U.S. officials still don't know whether they killed the former Iraqi leader in airstrikes, or even if he got away.
Joining me now to talk about the possibilities and how you determine whether a tip is solid or not, Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy. She is a former U.S. Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence.

Good to see you again.

Well, let's talk about this news that we were talking about in "The New York Times," the 75th Exploitation Group. Explain the duties of this group and the fact that it feels it doesn't have the resources to do what it needs to do.

LT. GEN. CLAUDIA KENNEDY, (RET.) CNN MILITARY ANALYST: There were reports they had too few people for so much work, and the understanding is that we have a lot of troops out there looking with some level of expertise, then you have the 75th Exploitation Group that's at work, then the highest level of expertise is the Iraq support group, the inspectors. They're not in there now, but they have been there in the past. It's a layer of expertise that represents the highest technical ability.

Well, my understanding is that there will be a joint task force that will be created that will do something about increasing their expertise. They'll in fact triple or quadruple in size the number of people available to work on this problem.

PHILLIPS: All right. So that moves them to, of course everybody wants to know where is Saddam Hussein? Where are his sons? Let's talk about the intelligence process here. What is the intel community going through now? What is the intel community doing, and how does this fold in with the 75th?

KENNEDY: Well, the kind of work the intelligence community does now is pretty much the way it's been working before. We use the same tactics, the same techniques, and it is to gather information from all sources. So what's been happening now that the regime has fallen is that there are more people willing to talk. We have more access than ever. We're able to verify the human intelligence we gather by technical means. We have the same surveillance and reconnaissance being conducted that was being conducted during major military operations.

PHILLIPS: So you do find more Iraqis coming forward and being more blunt and being more direct?

KENNEDY: You do, although there will be a continued period of uncertainty for them until they see the next regime, because you know, there are a lot of different internal groups within Iraq that want power. And my guess would be that any given person might want to be sure that they're very careful about who they align themselves with right now during this period of uncertainty and transition.

PHILLIPS: How do you -- I can imagine you get so many tips in a situation like this. How do you know what to weed out? How do you know what's a good tip and what's not a good tip?

KENNEDY: Well, intelligence analysts keep track of who has been a good source in the past, and they know who's credible and who's not over time. They also not only follow the track record of a given person who's a source, but they also take a look at the information offered by other more technical means to see if it's been verified.

PHILLIPS: And you know that these tips work. You had the rescue of Jessica Lynch. That came from a tip. Also now most recently Abu Abbas. It proves that the intel does work. It does lead to captures.

KENNEDY: That's right. And the other part of it is the information technology that is at our disposal in a way that it never was 10 years ago. In other words, we can do data mining. We use commercial off-the-shelf applications in intelligence work to sort out all of these many, many different fragmentary reports.

PHILLIPS: OK, tell me what that means in layman's terms. OK, it sounds very official, very military, but explain to me what that means.

KENNEDY: What that means is that if you have a lot of information gathered in one place, and it's from a lot of different places, it may be very hard for one human being to keep track of it all. But if you have it in a database, and you're able to prompt the database to collect all information in a given topic, it can do that.

PHILLIPS: General Claudia Kennedy, thank you very much.

KENNEDY: Thank you.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com