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American Morning
Behind the Raised Threat
Aired January 05, 2004 - 09:08 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.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Michael Isikoff joins us from Washington D.C. this morning.
Nice to see you, Michael. Good morning to you.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF, "NEWSWEEK" MAGAZINE": Good morning.
O'BRIEN: Let's talk about this flight 223 which was coming in from Heathrow to Dulles. It was delayed Sunday again, canceled twice last week. How much was this a response to a specific threat? And how much was just overanxious officials, or freaked out officials, as you call them?
ISIKOFF: Combination. What you have is two things going on. One is sorts of intelligence analysis, which is looking at developments around the world, people monitoring al Qaeda, what Web sites, bombings last month in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. And then also the Zawhiri (ph), Ayman Al Zawhiri, bin Laden's No. 2, who released an audio tape, or an audio tape was released of him by Al Jazeera on December 19th. All of which seemed to indicate to intelligence analysts that something might well be up.
But on top of that, just in the few days before Christmas, you had NSA electronic intercepts showing this sort of spike in chatter, and interrogations that really alarmed people, because for the first time, there were references to upcoming attacks with specific flight numbers mentioned, and that level of specificity is something that is rarely seen or heard in the intelligence community. And that's what really, as we reported in the story, freaked people out. The initial flight numbers seemed to refer to these Air France and Air Mexico flights coming into LAX over Christmas. And then later in the week, there were additional references, the intelligence, to these British Airways flights coming in from Heathrow.
O'BRIEN: So is the sense then from the Homeland Security Department that they were duped? Or is the sense that they were able to thwart an attack?
ISIKOFF: We don't know. Certainly al Qaeda disinformation is something that can't be ruled out here. Were they trying to -- was this a head fake, designed to throw U.S. intelligence off by mentioning flight numbers as a way of scrambling, getting people scrambling, looking in the wrong direction? That's one possibility.
Another possibility is, of course, that the heightened security alert did forestall an attack, that once we went on December 21st into that higher alert status and these extra security measures were taken, maybe they did force al Qaeda operatives to cancel an operation. The other, the third, which may be the most likely, although we don't really know, is that the intelligence was just simply off, or incomplete or wrong. I mean, this happens so often in this game. It's -- we're dealing with imperfect pieces of data points of information that may or may not be what mean intelligence analysts think they do.
O'BRIEN: O'BRIEN: Michael Isikoff, the article's in "Newsweek" this morning.
Nice to see you, Michael. Happy New Year. Thanks for being with us, Michael.
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 January 5, 2004 - 09:08 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Michael Isikoff joins us from Washington D.C. this morning.
Nice to see you, Michael. Good morning to you.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF, "NEWSWEEK" MAGAZINE": Good morning.
O'BRIEN: Let's talk about this flight 223 which was coming in from Heathrow to Dulles. It was delayed Sunday again, canceled twice last week. How much was this a response to a specific threat? And how much was just overanxious officials, or freaked out officials, as you call them?
ISIKOFF: Combination. What you have is two things going on. One is sorts of intelligence analysis, which is looking at developments around the world, people monitoring al Qaeda, what Web sites, bombings last month in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. And then also the Zawhiri (ph), Ayman Al Zawhiri, bin Laden's No. 2, who released an audio tape, or an audio tape was released of him by Al Jazeera on December 19th. All of which seemed to indicate to intelligence analysts that something might well be up.
But on top of that, just in the few days before Christmas, you had NSA electronic intercepts showing this sort of spike in chatter, and interrogations that really alarmed people, because for the first time, there were references to upcoming attacks with specific flight numbers mentioned, and that level of specificity is something that is rarely seen or heard in the intelligence community. And that's what really, as we reported in the story, freaked people out. The initial flight numbers seemed to refer to these Air France and Air Mexico flights coming into LAX over Christmas. And then later in the week, there were additional references, the intelligence, to these British Airways flights coming in from Heathrow.
O'BRIEN: So is the sense then from the Homeland Security Department that they were duped? Or is the sense that they were able to thwart an attack?
ISIKOFF: We don't know. Certainly al Qaeda disinformation is something that can't be ruled out here. Were they trying to -- was this a head fake, designed to throw U.S. intelligence off by mentioning flight numbers as a way of scrambling, getting people scrambling, looking in the wrong direction? That's one possibility.
Another possibility is, of course, that the heightened security alert did forestall an attack, that once we went on December 21st into that higher alert status and these extra security measures were taken, maybe they did force al Qaeda operatives to cancel an operation. The other, the third, which may be the most likely, although we don't really know, is that the intelligence was just simply off, or incomplete or wrong. I mean, this happens so often in this game. It's -- we're dealing with imperfect pieces of data points of information that may or may not be what mean intelligence analysts think they do.
O'BRIEN: O'BRIEN: Michael Isikoff, the article's in "Newsweek" this morning.
Nice to see you, Michael. Happy New Year. Thanks for being with us, Michael.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
