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Bodies, Debris From AirAsia Plane Found; Sony Hack Debate

Aired December 30, 2014 - 15:00   ET

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

ANA CABRERA, CNN ANCHOR: Top of the hour. I'm Ana Cabrera. Thanks for staying with us as we have CNN's special breaking news coverage for the search of Flight 8501.

And, today, we have a huge development, the discovery of wreckage, luggage and bodies all spotted floating in the Java Sea just six miles from the plane's last known location, now, below the surface, a dark shadow that could be the plane, this discovery confirming the worst fears of the families.

In fact, the wife of the captain speaking to CNN Indonesia in the heartbreaking moments just after finding out the wreckage had been found.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WIDYA SUKARTI PUTRI, WIFE OF PILOT (through translator): I must be strong and tough, and I'm here for my children and their future. So I must be strong and open with this situation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: When the sunrises over the Java Sea in just a few hours, search planes, submersibles, even divers will be out on the water searching for more wreckage and more victims.

And it's not just the navy that will be out there.

CNN's Paula Hancocks has been aboard a fishing boat as the crew there heads out to search for the wreckage.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The search-and-rescue operation is over for this particular boat. It's a local fishing boat that we have been on, and it just shows how the local community all wanted to rally together and to try and help the efforts to find this missing plane.

Now, certainly, the mood on the way back to harbor as opposed to on the way out has been a lot more somber. We know that, obviously, they are members of the local community. They're not just people who were trying to help the search-and-rescue operation.

And we did also speak to one man who is part of the local government who is helping the effort on this boat. And he said he was very disappointed at the news, but also relieved that there had been some news.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): I am very sad about what was found today. I want to send my condolences to the families. I only hope they can find the strength to get through this difficult situation.

HANCOCKS: So for this boat, it's now time to go back to harbor. Obviously, this is a very low-tech way of trying to find anything in the water. This is done simply by the naked eye. So all the assets that can be of use are now heading towards the area where that plane is believed to be.

Paula Hancocks, CNN, off Belitung Island, Indonesia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CABRERA: Our thanks to Paula.

And it's not just the locals searching. It's a handful of countries. We know China, France, Malaysia, Australia, even the United States is joining the search. The USS Sampson is now in the Java Sea. And a second U.S. ship will join the recovery efforts as well.

But how difficult will it be to recover this wreckage?

Tom Foreman is joining us from Washington.

Tom, walk us through what we can expect.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Ana.

Well, the first thing you can expect is fairly favorable conditions. And by that, I mean this location where the debris has been spotted here is only about 100 miles offshore here. It is in an area that is generally shallow; 131 feet is the average. The area we're talking about right now is more like here, about 100 feet down.

That's all promising. Now, that said, don't forget that any kind of operation underwater like this is always challenging. There are currents to deal with. There are weather conditions above which we're dealing with already. Yes, at this level, you can actually have divers that can reach down to the bottom and help in the search for the flight data recorder, the voice recorder, for big pieces like engines, things like that.

Certainly, it's much easier if you have an idea where you're going to put a towed sonar array out there to catch the pinging off of these flight data recorders and any sort of submersible robot that you want to use to help search. Yes, all of that is much more operable in this level. But here's a point of comparison, Ana.

When TWA 800 down off Long Island, it also went down in about 100 feet of water. And despite the fact it was in 100 feet of water, it took months, 10 months until they were able to find the last of the victims there, and an awful lot of time gingerly, carefully working up and down with divers and all this equipment to collect everything. The good news is, in the end, they collected about 95 percent of that

plane, and that gave them a tremendous number of clues as they built their investigation to explain why that plane went down. With some luck in this area, they may have a similar success rate in terms of collecting all the parts of the plane, all the victims, all of which will give them clues as to exactly what happened, Ana.

CABRERA: And they move into the recovery and then the reconstruction phase. Tom, that diagram, that explanation is really interesting. We really appreciate it.

Now, once the wreckage is indeed recovered, the grim task of trying to recover the bodies as well and eventually the remnants of the plane. And that will begin. Recovery of the victims as the first priority. That job will mostly fall on the divers.

With us now is David DeVilbiss, the vice president of marine casualty and emergency response services for Global Diving and Salvage.

David, what will those divers be looking for, if you can walk us through the process of searching the wreckage?

DAVID DEVILBISS, GLOBAL DIVING AND SALVAGE: Certainly.

Well, typically, a sonar survey would be conducted before the divers go down so there would be a good map of the debris field, so you can see where everything is.

Once that's established, the divers will go down on specific tasks going to specific components of the plane. The debris that's been recovered so far would indicate some catastrophic damage to the fuselage. Before they move the large sections of the fuselage, they're likely to go and get the loose debris that might fall out when you lift them out.

Now, that would require the divers to go inside the plane potentially. Of course, they will be focusing in on the black boxes initially for part of the investigation.

CABRERA: I know it's a slow process. Put that into perspective. How long might this take?

DEVILBISS: Well, really, it's the care that needs to be taken in removing the pieces that really adds to the length of time. It would be fairly easy to go down and just grab everything and pull it out.

But we're trying to maintain the integrity of everything as best as possible for the investigation and other purposes. For that reason, you're working in assumedly to 100 to 130 feet of water. The bottom time for divers is limited. Ideally, saturation systems would be used so that divers stayed under pressure and can work for lengths of time down there.

But they're going to go down and carefully rig the pieces to be lifted up through the water and then into the air. It's the water-air interface is when the pieces start to carry water into the air and get heavier. So it needs to be very carefully done.

CABRERA: What kind of toll -- I can only imagine that this is a difficult process for the divers not just physically, but emotionally. What is it like for them knowing so many lost their lives?

DEVILBISS: It's something that it comes with the job for a particular type of commercial diver.

It's something you have to view as something that needs to be done. You work carefully, but always respectfully as you're dealing with wreckage and remains.

CABRERA: All right. David DeVilbiss, thank you.

Up next, our experts are going to analyze each piece of debris, what the images tell us about the plane's final moments.

Plus, the son of a passenger on Flight 370, which, of course, is still missing, is going to join us with his emotional advice to the families waiting inside the airport.

And in a major story developing right now, I will speak with one expert who agrees with a security firm that says the Sony hack was an inside job, not North Korea, this despite brand-new CNN reporting that suggests otherwise.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: So far, there's precious little evidence of what happened to Flight 8501. For now, investigators are sifting through what we have, including air traffic control audio, the last known recordings of the pilots' voices.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Wagon 8501, cleared. Again, 8501 cleared to Singapore. Flight level 240 initial.

Do you want alpha departure? Squawk number 7005.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Squawk 7005, alpha departure 8501.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

CABRERA: What else can we learn from the debris found in the Java Sea?

Here to talk about this, David Soucie, CNN safety analyst and former FAA inspector and author of "Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Why It Disappeared and Why It's Only a Matter of Time Before This Happens Again," written before this latest missing plane. Also with us, Jeff Wise, science writer and author of "Extreme Fear."

Thank you, both, for being here.

David, let's start with you. We have some pictures of the debris they have collected so far. When you take a look at some of the images we're going to put up here, based on -- I know you already have already seen some of them from other reporting we have been doing -- what strikes you about what they have pulled out of the water?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, it appears to me that what they have there, we thought that that was the baggage from the passengers. But after talking with some mechanics who work on that aircraft, that that's actually a go bag or an air flight bag.

What's contained is extra lightbulbs, oil, things like that that would be necessary if the aircraft had to land in a place where there was no maintenance in case it had to go again. So it's a bag that contains that stuff.

(CROSSTALK)

CABRERA: Almost like a first-aid kit, but with more technical...

(CROSSTALK)

SOUCIE: Like in your car you have those extra lightbulbs, things like that.

It's just extra stuff that they might possibly need. In addition to that, the bottle that came out there is a bottle that was used to inflate the slide that goes over the top of the wing. And that slide that goes over the top of the wing is what I think the other object is as well.

(CROSSTALK)

SOUCIE: It appears that what happened is that door that came off was in the aft baggage area, because all these things are contained in that same area. So something happened in that area.

CABRERA: So that would be in the back of the plane or underneath?

SOUCIE: Correct, on the aft ride side.

CABRERA: Now, based on this being again just six miles from where the plane was last located according to the radar and the communication back at air traffic control, what can we learn from sort of how the debris field is now defined, Jeff?

JEFF WISE, "SLATE": Well, bear in mind, of course, that what we have now is just the beginning of the data that's going to allow us to define the debris field. So,

You know, as the day continues in Indonesia, they will be gathering more material. They will have a sense. And probably you will have a kind of circular scatter pattern and then they will do a drift analysis, and have an -- I presume they have been dropping buoys and they know how the water is moving through this body of water.

And they will be able to then narrow down the area where, presumably, the black boxes will be underwater. CABRERA: Does a larger debris field mean one thing vs. a shorter

debris field? Or does that tell us how the crash happened? Or is it more about currents that it tells us?

(CROSSTALK)

WISE: It's both. Listen, if you have a massive depressurization at altitude or a decompression that, you know, blasts the material into a wide area from altitude, then, yes, that itself is going to give you a big debris field.

If you have an intact airplane that's hitting the ground at high speed, you can get a very compact debris field. But then -- as you point out, you then have the environmental effects. The water currents always generally make a larger and larger pattern as time goes by.

Now, compared to some of the other recent incidents that viewers will be aware of, this debris field will be located much more quickly than some of the others, like Air France 447, for instance. It was five days before debris first was located. And so, it should be more compact. But, yes, there are these multiple factors that will affect the size of the debris field.

CABRERA: And it's obviously very sensitive how they go about doing the search.

SOUCIE: Very much so.

CABRERA: Right, David?

SOUCIE: Yes. Everything has to be documented exactly where it is.

As far as 20 years ago, we were using GPS to document every piece of wreckage at every accident site I was at. So luckily we could do that digitally. Before that, it was flags and buoys and things.

CABRERA: I want to read you something about the black boxes that we heard from, I guess, the president of Malaysia, excuse me, not Malaysia, but the AirAsia flight and leading all of this. If I can find the piece of paper where I put it, and of course, I can't at the moment.

But essentially I will paraphrase what he said. He talks about how once they find where the black boxes are, if they, indeed, find those elements, that they don't actually extract them from the water immediately. They basically just say, OK, they're here, but there's a process, he says in terms of removing them in order to contain the clues that they may hold.

SOUCIE: Yes, it's a very sensitive operation, really, and they're more susceptible than people would think.

It's like a laptop being dropped down into the water. But mostly what it's about is the corrosive material, not just -- in MH370, we worried about pressures. If it's at a low pressure and then you bring it to a high pressure, it can affect it structurally.

But in this case, what we're talking about is the buildup of salt. And the salt gets in on the components inside can actually short those components out and cause transfer of static electricity. So you want to make sure you rinse that thoroughly and maintain the same pressure as you bring it up and then you rinse that thoroughly and get all of the saltwater out to where you have clean, pristine water to move everything out of there if it, indeed, was breached, which most of the time it is.

CABRERA: And, of course, there's a little bit of a time limit on how quickly they will find that because of the pings that those transmitters put out on the black boxes, right, Jeff?

WISE: You remember in the case of MH370, there was this great race against time to try to locate the black box pingers before the batteries ran out and, indeed, they were never located before the time, 30-day limit ran out.

In this case, you know, we have got a much, much better situation, shallower water, probably a much smaller search area. And so I don't think that that's going to be a problem in this case. But I think, you know, people with memories are going to be fresh, as David can attest, that, you know, people were really thinking, if only, if only these batteries had been mandated to be longer, you know, it wouldn't have been so tense. I don't think we're going to be worrying about it here.

(CROSSTALK)

CABRERA: It's tough to talk about the victims of this flight, because obviously it's such a tough situation for those families. And we know that three bodies have now been recovered. There were 162 people on board the flight. One of the bodies that was pulled from the sea was of a woman. And she didn't have any clothing on, but her undergarments. I understand that tells us a little bit about, perhaps, the crash impact.

SOUCIE: It's a little early to talk about that stuff for me. But there are some very strict statistics that I wrote about in the "Why Planes Crash" book about how as an accident investigator we can determine the speed and the impact.

The only reason that we talk about those things and understand them so thoroughly is so that we can understand exactly how it hit the air -- hit the water in determining the initial cause, because if we can't figure out the root cause, then these are just all simply clues. It's important to point out when we talk about these things and we have been today talking about these things, it's not for the purpose of making it difficult for other people.

And so I think it's best that at least for me I'm going to back off on that question until it's pertinent to exactly what it is trying to accomplish.

CABRERA: I think, you know, we talk about it in the goal of trying to find answers for the families as well. If you're a family member, everybody wants first and foremost to know where their loved one is. Is it surprising that we have only now learned of finding three victims where there are 162 people on board?

WISE: I wouldn't say so at all. This is a process, it takes time.

This is a fairly normal pace of after a plane goes missing, it takes time to locate the wreckage and then to locate the black boxes and so forth. There was a case in 2007 that was very similar in many respects to this air crash, which a plane was flying also in a very similar part of Indonesia.

It took 12 days before wreckage was discovered. What we really saw in this case was a lot of nations committing resources, a lot of money and energy being expended. I think in the wake of MH370, there was a lot of concern about another plane going missing. Can this really be happening?

And I think everyone wanted to move this out of category of missing airplane to trying to understand what happened, trying to get a grip. As David says, the reason that we apply all of this brainpower and manpower to understanding what happened is so it doesn't happen again. We want to understand so that no other families have to go through this again.

CABRERA: Exactly. And I guess I will let you have the last word on that note.

David, how does finding these different pieces and providing answers for families and the rest of us help to prevent another disaster in the future?

SOUCIE: Well, we talk about the root cause. And that's root cause or the proximate cause. The proximate cause is the last thing that could've prevented the accident. We look for that, and that's what the NTSB is finding primarily is finding, how could it have been prevented?

What it needs to -- what the clues lead us to is back up that chain of events through the Swiss cheese is what we were talking about before. The defenses are the Swiss cheese and the holes in those defenses when they line up, and failures occur, that's when an accident happens. The ability to trace that back and find out what was the latent causes, why was the aircraft in that situation, was there a failure in the systems of being able to identify the storms? Or was it a decision-making process, a distraction in the cockpit, perhaps?

All of those things are taken into consideration on every accident because we're at a really fine detail now. We're not just saying we're trying to reduce accidents and deaths. We're trying to reduce the potential for an accident or death as well. So we're really, really working on those fine, fine details.

CABRERA: David Soucie, Jeff Wise, thanks to both of you for being here. Just ahead, Richard Quest is going to join me live on how this airline

is handling the investigation and also important how the airline is treating the families.

Plus, developing right now, a security firm says the Sony hack was an inside job, that a former employee could be to blame and not North Korea. But brand-new reporting from CNN says otherwise. More details straight ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: Now to the mega-hack of Sony. And a cyber-security pro says it comes from not a dictator, not North Korea, but a disgruntled ex- employee.

Sam Glines from Norse Security blames an ex-worker with the code name Lena for leaking the mass amounts of data. He says Lena worked with Sony security for several years and had the means and motive.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAM GLINES, NORSE CORPORATION: And the suspects had -- at least one had ties to critical knowledge of Sony systems, I.P. addresses, credentials, et cetera, and also had motive for being what I would say would be upset at Sony due to reorganization that happened within the department.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: So Norse's CEO says North Korea did come into the picture eventually, but it was after the data was stolen.

Multiple administration officials with the White House, with the State Department, including President Obama himself, have all been placing full blame on North Korea.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The FBI announced today that and we can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.

MARIE HARF, SPOKESWOMAN, STATE DEPARTMENT: As the FBI and the president and everyone has now made clear, we are confident the North Korean government is responsible for this destructive attack. We stand by this conclusion.

SAMANTHA POWER, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS: In the most recent example of its recklessness, the DPRK carried out a significant cyber-attack on the United States in response to a Hollywood comedy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Joining me now, Mark Rasch, who used to prosecute cyber- crimes for the Justice Department. And also here, CNN's Evan Perez.

Evan, let's start with you. Norse Security, we now know, met with the FBI. What does the FBI think of their claim that this was an inside job?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Ana, they're not buying it.

This was a meeting that, you know, I thought was very strange. I asked some folks about this. You know, a lot of times FBI comes out with a finding and then you have people who try to poke holes in it. And the FBI doesn't normally really give them the time of day. In this case, they had a three-hour meeting in Saint Louis with this company.

And I asked them why it is that they would even have it if they are so sure what their own findings have found. And what I'm told is, you know, the FBI wanted to make sure that they heard, that they're not accused of not hearing out everybody who believes they have evidence.

Now, I will tell you this. The FBI's findings, I'm told, are based not only on the FBI's own forensic work, but also on stuff that they probably will never release, stuff we will never be able to see, which is stuff from the intelligence community, especially the NSA, which has, I'm told, very good visibility on the Internet traffic in that region. They have a lot of focus on that region, obviously. And so that's one reason why they believe they know where this is coming from.

CABRERA: So Norse is just one private cyber-security firm that is pointing the finger to an insider within Sony.

And I know, Mark, you too, believe that that could be the case, that this was an inside job of some sort. Why?

MARK RASCH, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: Well, sure, Ana.

And I'm not saying that it can't involve North Korea. The problem is, the evidence we have right now doesn't definitively point one way or the other. You have to keep investigating. You look at this attack, and it's insanely personal. It's really personally attacking specific Sony executives.

That's not the kind of thing you would expect to have from a state- sponsored attack. It showed a knowledge and a deep understanding of how Hollywood works and how this studio works, again, pointing to an insider. It shows what the pain points are of the studio, again pointed to an insider. It shows knowledge of how the organization was structured. So, there's a lot of things that point to an insider.

It doesn't mean it can't have been North Korea, but it means that the attribution is really hard to do.

CABRERA: So, Evan, Norse points out that the first demand by this hacker was ransom. It wasn't to pull the movie, which again points to a potential motive from an insider. So what is the FBI saying about that kind of argument?

PEREZ: Well, they're also not buying that there was a really much of an effort of a ransom effort. Look, there's a ransom where it's actually a big problem, it's a

growing problem on the Internet. But, you know, people usually who are doing that are trying to steal a few thousand dollars. You know, there's an instance of small police department in Massachusetts that got its files all locked up and they had to pay a few thousand dollars to get it reopened.

These are people, criminals who want to do this stuff and do it again. And you're talking about terabytes of information that were stolen from Sony. So, what kind of ransom possibly could have been asked for? It's not really something that the FBI thinks was ever really feasible.

The issue here, in going back to Mark's question, comment, I think the insider thing was very much looked at by the FBI. And they concluded that they just didn't find any credible evidence of this.