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CNN Live At Daybreak

Discussion with Former CIA Director James Woolsey

Aired November 01, 2001 - 07:24   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.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Now to the war front. The U.S. is stepping up the bombing of Taliban front line positions in Afghanistan. The military is also stepping up the effort to find Osama bin Laden. A vital weapon in that part of the campaign is intelligence, of course. An article in the current issue of "Newsweek" suggests the U.S. may have to buy its way to victory.

The article says, and we quote now, "It has become a cliche that beating the Taliban would be easier with bribes than bullets."

Joining us from Washington to talk about U.S. intelligence gathering and its costs is former CIA Director James Woolsey. Mr. Woolsey, good to have you with us.

JAMES WOOLSEY, ATTORNEY/FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Miles, good to be with you.

O'BRIEN: What about that? I mean a cruise missile is, I think, almost a million dollars. If you refrain from firing a cruise missile and instead use that for bribe money, could you get a little further?

WOOLSEY: Well, there are two things. First of all, people have been bribing informants for thousands of years in the intelligence and espionage business and it will always be thus. Not all spies are bought. Some come to you because they believe in what you're doing. But in this part of the world, I imagine money is going to have to change hands. And some of the people who have strong allegiances, religious and others, to the Taliban, may not be able to be persuaded to be separated under any circumstances and they will have to be regarded the way we regarded the Nazis in WWII. They will be the enemy, period.

O'BRIEN: But once you get away from that core of true believers, if you will, Afghanistan by its very nature, because of its tribal nature and because of, perhaps, the shallow support that these tribes have for various factions, shifting sometimes depending on the season, might be ripe for bribery. Would you go along with that?

WOOLSEY: It's possible. The key thing is the divisions among the Pashtun in the south and some of the leaders of subgroups in the Pashtun are just really opposed to the Taliban and they're going to be our natural allies. Others certainly might be more likely to come along if the pot was sweetened. O'BRIEN: All right, now, going into Afghanistan with a bag full of money and putting it on the table there and trying to buy some allegiance, probably not a great idea.

WOOLSEY: Well, no, you -- that's not the way you do it. It's a matter of negotiation and discussion and exploiting differences that already exist and rivalries that already exist. And as I say, some of these people really will want a different Afghanistan than the Taliban has brought. Even people in, even some of the Pashtun. And certainly some of the other tribal groups are going to be hostile to the Taliban because they've been treated very badly by them, to put it mildly.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's shift gears here for a moment. The Predator unmanned aerial vehicles which are circling over Afghanistan now have been equipped with these Hellfire missiles, normally an anti- tank missile, but certainly could be anti-personnel. And the CIA is in the loop here on whether to decide to fire on a target on the ground.

WOOLSEY: Yes.

O'BRIEN: Is that a significant shift and do you think that's an important shift that we should take note of?

WOOLSEY: Well, it's a shift and it's a shift to take note of. But it's a shift because we're at war. I mean during peacetime, the assassination ban that applied back in, began in 1975, President Ford signed an executive order and all the presidents since have signed one. But this is different. This is like WWII. You know, in WWII we broke the Japanese codes and we found out where Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral who commanded at Pearl Harbor, was going to be in an aircraft and we sent up aircraft and shot that plane down precisely because he was in it.

In wartime you kill enemy commanders and this is war. This is very different than peacetime.

O'BRIEN: Well, let me ask you this. Should we be at all concerned, though, that perhaps the Pentagon might be out of the loop on a decision whether to fire, a real time decision that must be made. If Osama bin Laden or some target that is justified is in the sights of a Predator and the CIA makes a decision, is that a concern?

WOOLSEY: I imagine that Don Rumsfeld and George Tenet have had more than one conversation to sort that out. But sometimes you have to act quickly and just as the OSS under certain circumstances in WWII had the authority to kill people, so -- without going all the way up to General Eisenhower -- so under these circumstances they're going to have to work out rules of engagement in which these things can be done.

O'BRIEN: Of course, in the case of Abdul Haq, the opposition leader on that quixotic mission which failed, he ultimately was executed, the Predator and the Hellfires didn't do much good, which raises the question about intelligence on the ground. You've been critical of the inability, for example, of language skills, of many people within the U.S. intelligence to deal with the Afghan factions. How much of a disadvantage are we at or is the U.S. at?

WOOLSEY: Well, we have a lot of work to do to get back some of the language skills that we had in the agency back in the '80s and have lost through retirement and the like. And happily, some very bad guidelines that were adopted in late '95 -- I hasten to say I left in early '95 -- guidelines that made it much harder for us to recruit spies that might have some violence in their past have been now apparently repealed, or at least heavily modified by the CIA.

So we ought to have a better chance than we did before September 11 of recruiting some spies inside some of these extremist organizations.

O'BRIEN: James Woolsey, we appreciate your insight and intelligence. Thanks for being with us this morning.

WOOLSEY: Good to be with you.

O'BRIEN: Paula.

ZAHN: How come you never say that to me, Miles?

O'BRIEN: Have you given me intelligence? Is that it? Is this classified stuff?

ZAHN: Yes, exactly.

Still to come this morning, the changing face of film since September 11. The president of the Motion Picture Academy and a kinder, gentler Hollywood. Also ahead, wild fires rage in Colorado. We're going to take you to the front lines, when we come back.

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