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CNN Live Saturday

Interview With Paul Bremer

Aired September 07, 2002 - 12:42   ET

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

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: The September 11 hijackers plan was in many ways simple in its devastation. But it didn't come out of thin air. As Mike Boettcher reports, al Qaeda had a long history of experimenting with hijacking and flying planes into buildings.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MIKE BOETTCHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): October 31, 1999, Egypt Air flight 990 takes off from New York's Kennedy Airport. There are 217 people on board, 30 minutes later, off the coast of Massachusetts, the plane disappears from radar.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL: I lost contact with a Boeing 767 in my airspace...

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL: Yeah, Egypt Air?

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL: Yeah, I mean we lost radar, we lost everything.

(CROSSTALK)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOETTCHER: Everyone on board dies. Accident or act of terror? Within days as the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are recovered, another possibility emerges. Investigators analyzing the cockpit voice recorders say this man, the relief co-pilot, Kamal Al Batuti (ph) waits until he is the only one in the cockpit before he removes the plane from the autopilot and points it toward the ocean.

JIM HALL, FRMR. CHRM., NTSB: You can hear the cockpit door close.

BOETTCHER: Jim Hall was chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board at the time.

HALL: Some seconds after that, there is the Arabic phrase, I rely on God, that is uttered, which was eventually uttered 11 times. And then, seconds after that is uttered, then there is a disconnect of the autopilot and the plane starts into a dive.

BOETTCHER: The pilot, who had been in the bathroom, rushed back to the cockpit, but was too late prevent the tragedy. REPORTER: So, it's a pure case of suicide?

HALL: Well, it would appear to be.

REPORTER: The suicide scenario was worldwide news by mid- November of 1999. And in Afghanistan, someone was watching.

This man, Mohammed Atef, al Qaeda's military commander, in charge of planning al Qaeda operations around the world. CNN has learned that after September 11 Atef boasted that he got the idea for 9/11 from the Egypt Air crash. That's according to interrogation from captured al Qaeda fighters.

BOETTCHER (on camera): If that's the case, what may have struck Mohammad Atef, was just how easy it was to turn for Batuti (ph) to turn his plane into a suicide weapon. That would have filled in a crucial link for al Qaeda, which had been toying with the idea of an airborne attack for many years.

Rohan Gunaratna, the author of "Inside Al Qaeda" helps chart the evolution of the 9/11 plan.

ROHAN GUNARATNA, AUTHOR, "INSIDE AL-QAEDA": It its very possible that Mohammed Atef conceptualized this plan from the Egypt Air incident. But also it is possible that al Qaeda got this knowledge from looking at the Algerian plan to crash dive a plane onto (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

BOETTCHER (voice-over): That was in 1994. After a group of Algerian terrorists hijacked a plane. But French commandos stormed the plane before it could take off and be flown to the heart of Paris.

The same year, an al Qaeda cell in the Philippines, led by Ramzi Yousef, the man who planned the first World Trade Center attacks in 1993, was planning to blow up passenger planes over the Pacific Ocean. After the cell was busted, a year later, this man, Abdul Hakeem Murad, told his Philippine interrogators of another plan where "...he will board any American commercial aircraft, control its cockpit, and dive it at the CIA headquarters."

GUNARATNA: The operation could not be staged because of the arrest. But the very idea survived. That is why we are seeing that -- the doctrine of al Qaeda states very clearly, that they have a doctrine of losing and learning. That is, you may lose this time, but you will learn from that mistake and you will carry it out again.

BOETTCHER: One of the members of that cell, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, escaped to Afghanistan, and is now said by U.S. investigators, to have played an important role, along with Atef, in planning the 9/11 attacks.

Just a few weeks after the Egypt Air crash in December 1999, an Indian Airlines plane was hijacked forced to fly to Afghanistan. The hijackers used box cutters, took members of the flight crew hostage. Forced their way into the cockpit, a seeming dry run for the September 11 attacks, but without the suicide mission. GUNARATNA: Definitely they would have learned the use of box cutters from that particular incident.

BOETTCHER: On September 11, four planes are to be hijacked. One, believed intended for the White House crashes in a Pennsylvania field. But the others hit their targets and Osama bin Laden later brags that the plan succeeds beyond his wildest expectation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL: Any luck with Egypt Air?

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL: No. Nothing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOETTCHER: It may be impossible to ever know whether Egypt Air flight 990 helped inspire the events of September 11. Mohammed Atef, al Qaeda's military commander, the man who could answer those questions is himself believed to be dead, killed in a U.S. attack last November.

Mike Boettcher, CNN, Atlanta.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: For more insights now into what we now understand about how terrorists operate we turn to Ambassador Paul Bremer, who heads Marsh Crisis Consulting and is a former ambassador-at-large for counter-terrorism and joins us from Washington.

Good to see you.

AMB. PAUL BREMER, FRMR. STATE DEPT. OFFICIAL: Nice to be with you.

WHITFIELD: Well, if it's your opinion that you believe what -- what Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has said in the past, that it's not a matter of "if" but a matter of "when". Is it your belief that another attack would be in the form of the use of an airline flight? Or would that be so obvious that it is unlikely measure to take?

BREMER: If you look back at al Qaeda's activities over the last 10 years, what we find is enormous operational creativity on their part. They are always sort of one tactic ahead of us. They attacked embassies in East Africa in August of 1998. We got worried about embassy security. And the next thing they attacked was a ship in Yemen. So we worried about Naval security. And they attacked us in the World Trade Center. So, I think we should not assume that the next tactic will be the same.

WHITFIELD: So, the counter-terrorism measures then, that are being taken, should the concentration be abroad? Or should there still be a heavy concentration that an attack would happen on U.S. soil once again? BREMER: I think we have to assume that we still have al Qaeda cells active here among us in the United States. That doesn't necessarily mean the next attack will be here. Since September 11 we've had at least four al Qaeda attacks, one in Tunisia, three in Pakistan. We seem to have broken up several other al Qaeda cells, including the one yesterday in Germany, and earlier this week in the Netherlands.

So it's possible we'll see an attack against American targets overseas. The targets over there tend to be better defended, because they are basically embassies and military bases.

WHITFIELD: Even though there has not been a direct link been made between the couple in Germany and al Qaeda, it's apparent, though that they had their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, with a poster being found there, that's the only evidence of their link. However, it was American authorities who tipped off German authorities, so there is that cooperation. Is it your concern that the U.S. may not have that kind of level of cooperation outside of European nations, when thinking about -- other nations abroad?

BREMER: Obviously, the best cooperation we have in the intelligence field is with our allies and NATO, because it goes back to the days of the Cold War. But we have had pretty good cooperation from other countries, including Arab countries, particularly in Jordan where you may remember the Jordanians helped us break up a major attempted attack against Americans targets at the millennium.

And we have rather robust relationships now with countries like Pakistan and India. I think when you get further afield when you get to countries Indonesia and Malaysia, we don't have as good an experience. And we obviously, are going to have to develop better intelligence in countries like that.

WHITFIELD: We have learned more intimately, in recent months, about various measures that al Qaeda operatives are able to take in order to study ways to carry out terrorism, with the bomb making and their own chemical labs, et cetera. Is it your concern or -- do you feel it's pretty evident that, right now, as we speak that some of those instructions are being played out, are being distributed to cells around the world?

BREMER: I think we have to assume they are. When we're dealing with al Qaeda we are not dealing with a strongly, hierarchical organization, it is in sort of computer terms, a highly dispersed organization. And even if we succeed in decapitating it by killing bin Laden, we have to assume that these autonomous cells in the United States and in Europe, and in other parts of the world, will have some capability to attack and kill us. We have to keep after them.

WHITFIELD: All right, Ambassador Paul Bremer, thank you for joining us. Appreciate it.

BREMER: Nice to be with you.

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