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CNN Larry King Live

London Terror Attacks

Aired July 07, 2005 - 21:00   ET

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

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ladies and gents, we make to clear now Russell Square.

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LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, terror in London. At least 37 deaths, 700 wounded, as four explosions rocked the city's underground trains and blew up a bus during the morning rush hour. Who did it? Was it a European group linked to al Qaeda?

With British police on an intense manhunt, we've got the latest from eyewitnesses and reporters in London. And with U.S. mass transit systems on heightened alert, how safe are we in America?

It's all next on LARRY KING LIVE.

We have a wide and varied amount of guests throughout this program tonight on this terrible day in London and a day that affects the entire world. We'll be meeting them all as we go through the show.

Let's first go to London and talk with Simon Hughes, a member of parliament and an eyewitness to those events this morning. Simon, where were you? What did you see?

SIMON HUGHES, MP: Good evening, Larry. Thank you for taking an interest. I was going to Kings Cross station, which is in the northeast of London, the northeast to the middle, to catch a train out of town up to Yorkshire. The message reached us as we were getting off the bus that there had been an explosion on the bus, and as I walked towards the station, I could see people emerging from the underground, covered in soot, covered in dust, covered in dirt, injured, white, shocked, and many of them clearly hugely traumatized.

I've been there before. We had a terrible fire at Kings Cross station, underground station, some years ago. There were terrible scenes in this very place. But the knowledge that something had happened down the road as well, at the same time, immediately told me this wasn't an accident. This wasn't a transport collision. This was clearly something else.

KING: And what did you immediately do?

HUGHES: I immediately went up to see if there was anything I could do to the people who were coming out. The emergency services were arriving at that time. Police were beginning to start to control the crowds. I went to assist the immediate people who came in my direction, to comfort them, to make sure they were OK. The very, very heavily injured, of course, didn't arrive at that time. They came later, and some, of course, never emerged at all.

So it was really dealing with the immediate people who presented themselves up above ground, whilst the fire service went down below, and the police were not allowing ordinary members of the public, apart from the emergency services, to go down underground.

KING: With us here in our studios in Los Angeles is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the new mayor of the city of Los Angeles. How did you hear about this?

MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA, LOS ANGELES: I was awakened by Chief Bratton about 3:30 in the morning, Pacific Standard Time, informed of what happened in London. Made absolutely clear that there was no threat here in Los Angeles, but nevertheless, that we were going to go on a heightened alert. I was in communication with him throughout the morning, and beginning at 6:00 a.m. this morning, we convened a group of people who normally work on emergencies here in the city of Los Angeles and the county, that included the chief, Sheriff Baca, Chief Bamattre and many other representatives of law enforcement agencies.

KING: How well were you briefed? You've just taken office.

VILLARAIGOSA: Well, I was briefed on the phone about 10 or 15 minutes by the chief, and then briefed again in...

KING: I mean, before all this, were you well briefed on...

VILLARAIGOSA: Well, fortunately, I had been briefed on what we do in emergency services whenever there's an emergency in the city of Los Angeles prior to getting sworn in as mayor. I thought it was important to get that kind of information, and luckily, it served me well, because as you know, I have the responsibility, ultimately, in an emergency here in Los Angeles.

KING: James Woolsey is the former head of the director of the CIA. He's vice president of Booz, Allen and Hamilton, international management and technology consultants. He comes to us from Aspen, Colorado. Was this a surprise, Jim?

JAMES WOOLSEY, BOOZ, ALLEN, HAMILTON: Well, any given event is a surprise, but the overall idea of al Qaeda and al Qaeda affiliated organizations, Islamist terrorists attacking our infrastructure, in Britain or here, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. We're going to be in this for a long time, I think, Larry, I think maybe decades.

KING: Should we expect the same in American cities? Should Mayor Villaraigosa be prepared?

WOOLSEY: It's certainly possible. Al Qaeda, in coming against us, has shown back in the '90s that they like to wait a year or two between attacks, and have each attack be bigger than the last one. So the thing that I think most people are focused on even harder is the possibility that something as bad as 9/11 or even worse could be what's in the planning, rather than bombs on transit, as terrible as that is.

Look, Larry, the basic problem is that our infrastructure here, and it's true in a lot of other countries, was put together with no thought at all to terrorism. These -- our transport, our Internet, everything was put together with an idea toward openness, ease of access, ease of maintenance, user-friendliness, maximum publicly available information. Nobody was thinking when they put our electricity grid together about terrorist interference. And we're all going to have to shift gears and make our infrastructure a lot more resilient, because we are not going to have warnings on a number of these things, at least certainly not with much specificity.

KING: Before we go back to London, Mayor Villaraigosa is joined here in our studios in Los Angeles by the chief of police, an old friend of ours, Chief William Bratton.

Chief, these things, this is part of life now in the United States. How well prepared is Los Angeles?

CHIEF WILLIAM BRATTON, LAPD: I think Los Angeles, fortunately, is as prepared as any American city, particularly in its place along with New York and Washington, D.C. as probably one of the top three targets in this country, because of LAX, the symbolic value of the entertainment capital of the world.

KING: You were former police chief in New York, too, right?

BRATTON: That's right.

KING: Is what happened in London today, frankly, preventable?

BRATTON: No, to be quite frank with you.

KING: No.

BRATTON: It is preventable in many ways in terms of good intelligence gathering, getting them before they get us, and we're getting better and better at that all the time, learning from these. But the reality is, in a world of 5 billion people, that they can strike anywhere, and that's where the intelligence component and the shifting of resources and the gathering of it, the prevention of it, rather than just having the capabilities to respond to it, is so critical.

KING: Let's go to David Messenger in London. He was an eyewitness to the event. Where were you, David, and what did you see?

DAVID MESSENGER, EYEWITNESS: ... a business meeting down in East London, on Liverpool Street. And I got to the station at Euston (ph), found it closed, and walked down Raven Place (ph), which is where the bomb on the bus went off, in Tavistock Square. I was about 50 meters away from the actual bomb when it exploded. So quite a hairy moment, it's -- just a big explosion, plenty of smoke flying up in the air, and the roof of the bus literally peeled back like a can. And the two sides of the bus flapped out like wings. It was an awful sight. And there was a lot of people shouting and screaming, as you might imagine, and a very, very tough day.

KING: What did you do?

MESSENGER: Pretty much just tried to help people out. There was a few people in the sort of area nearby me that were hyperventilating and things like that. And I tried to sort of try to calm them down and try to sort of help out as best I can. But it was just a scene, I never thought I'd see a scene like it. And we've known for a long time in London, people that (INAUDIBLE) on a daily basis have always had that in the back of their minds, that something like this could happen. And it's always -- it felt like it's been a case of, you know, of not if, but when.

And that's pretty much what happened to us today, I think.

KING: When we come back, we'll check in with Christiane Amanpour. Others will be joining us. Bob Woodward, who, by the way, is doing a book on the second Bush administration and is getting into things like preparing for terrorism.

We'll be back with our panel. Don't go away.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I followed the bus, thinking I could catch up with it, as it went slowly down the street, thinking I could get on it. And I was about sort of 25, 30 meters away from it when it just completely blew up. And into thousands of pieces that looked to me as though there was no bus left at all.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People were physically ejected out of their chair. Just flashes of lights on the side of the two carriage. Smoke immediately billowed into the carriage. It filled it. People started to scream because it was a burning smell. And everyone, just kind of long story short, thought they were going to die. People started saying prayers. The smoke intensified. The screaming intensified. The hysteria -- and that's what it was -- became almost a pandemonium.

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KING: Christiane Amanpour, what is the setting now in London?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's 2:00 in the morning, or just after. We're at Kings Cross, which was the second station to be hit and the one where there were the most deaths, 21 confirmed dead here at Kings Cross. And they're treating these like -- as crime scenes, as you can imagine, and forensic investigations continue. But what has changed since the early hours is that traffic is now running in these areas, whereas before, all this area was cordoned off. The buses are running again, and passengers on the buses. And they say that even the London Underground will start tomorrow, although there's bound to be some disruptions and some delays.

But, you know, the police at the moment have no -- they say there's no evidence that there were suicide bombers involved. There is evidence that there were explosives used, and they continue to investigate.

KING: Chief Bratton, is one of the keys to get the public back to a semblance of normalcy as quickly as possible?

BRATTON: That so is key. Be aware, be -- but not be afraid. It's critical to dealing with these terrorism incidents.

KING: With us on the phone is Dr. Lawrence Buckman, a physician and an eyewitness. Dr. Buckman, where were you and what did you see?

DR. LAWRENCE BUCKMAN, EYEWITNESS: I was going to the building, the British Medical Association, which is next to where the bus was blown up. I was going there for a meeting, as planned, and realized I couldn't get there because the streets had already been cordoned off. I met a policeman by the cordon who said, you better go inside, into the building I was going to anyway, they need you in there.

So I went into where I was going, and as I walked through the archway, somebody grabbed me and said you take this one and look after them.

KING: And what did you have to do?

BUCKMAN: Resuscitate somebody who had been blown up.

KING: Did you know right away this was terrorism?

BUCKMAN: Well, it was pretty obvious. The first thing you saw was blood splashed all over the building. It's a building with a large white front to it, so it was pretty obvious something very strange was going on. I didn't realize it was a bus at first, because so much of it had been blown off, it didn't look like one anymore. But thinking back, it must have been the bus.

KING: What about the people around you?

BUCKMAN: Well, there were an awful lot of physicians, because it's a building where lots of physicians go for various reasons. And we were all busy getting on with our jobs, us plus the ambulance crews and the firemen and the policemen and so on. And there were quite a lot of passers-by who were not injured, who were helping us with the injured.

KING: Thank you, Doctor.

Joining us now is Ken Knight of the London Fire Brigade. Ken, where were you when this happened and what can you tell us about the aftermath?

KEN KNIGHT, COMMISSIONER, LONDON FIRE BRIGADE: Good morning, Larry. Well, London Fire Brigade -- I'm the commissioner for the London Fire Brigade, and therefore, I was in my office, when we were getting early calls at about five to 9:00 in the morning, heart of the rush hour, that we were receiving calls to a potential fire or explosion on London Underground. And over the next 12 minutes, we received two further calls, of course, at two other underground stations, and it was very clear very quickly there was an escalating potential, at that time potential terrorism attack.

And, of course, 40 minutes later we had the bus explosion as well.

We were well trained and prepared, and we'd taken a view for a long time, this was likely to be an event that was going to happen at some point. And therefore, the training was put in place to a large extent, of course, since 9/11, with London firefighters being trained in new techniques, some of them trained in the United States with new equipment and new procedures, as first responders, to be prepared for any eventuality. And I'm proud to be commissioner of London Fire Brigade, because firefighters lived up to that challenge today, and they tested their training in a reality scenario that came good together with the other emergency services.

KING: Those are very narrow streets in London. Is that a big problem with fire engines getting through?

KNIGHT: No, we're used to our narrow streets, Larry, and we respond from a range of different locations. Of course, when that happens, we start a number of cover moves taking place, as firefighters and fire services do the world over.

So our first response, in fact, was in the event of it being even more serious, in that it could have been a chemical, biological or radiological attack. And so you saw the first scenes of firefighters being deployed as a worst-case scenario, that there could have been something even more sinister in the underground. And that early assessment, joint assessment with the emergency services and by firefighters meant that we could deploy crews for exactly what they saw.

There wasn't, of course, clear at the early stage whether there was fire either. The dust and the debris coming out of the underground and people sootied as a result of that explosion gave first indications there may have been a fire. Thankfully, there wasn't. There were still horrific scenes down there, and firefighters and the members of the public saw some horrible scenes today in London.

But they all came through it well. And can I just say, Larry, the public as well acted in a very cool, calm, and collected way, not only assisting each other, but coming to the surface from the other railway stations and got back to normality as quickly as possible.

And I think the training and procedures did work well today. KING: Thank you, Ken Knight, chief of the London Fire Brigade.

What do you fear the worst, Mayor Villaraigosa? What's your biggest fear?

VILLARAIGOSA: Well, the loss of life, and...

KING: Well, any particular -- like the LAX or...?

VILLARAIGOSA: LAX certainly an important target of opportunity, and it's something that I'm very concerned about. And I know that the chief and others with our forces, the law enforcement forces are very clear about what we need to do in case of emergency.

KING: But you were saying, Chief, during the break, that what they fear now is little things, right? Not necessarily the big building, but a bus stop.

BRATTON: Right. What they're trying to do is basically spread fear into every environment, that we're getting better at securing our physical infrastructure, and now they're hitting the easier target, the bus, of which there are thousands, or the trains in Los Angeles, hundreds; 6,000 subway cars in New York City. Almost as many in London. So the idea is fear that we can get you anytime we want.

The incident today was bombing, but the initial concern was initially biological or chemical, which you have to deal with.

So this is where the emphasis has to be on the intelligence gathering and getting them before they get us, because you can't protect against everything.

KING: We'll be right back with more. Don't go away.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was in the front carriage, and people were severely injured there. But I've heard, and I don't know if it's right, that people were even worse further back. Some people were very calm, others very panicky.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE), maybe six, seven people lying on the floor. People with a lot of blood in their faces and ripped clothes. A number of people were fine. It's difficult to say numbers. But when we got up above onto the concourse, there were probably about six or seven people in similar condition to myself, and I wasn't really looking around to be honest. I was just trying to stop the cuts from flowing blood.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I remember we could hear the screaming coming from the carriage just in front of us, who took the full blast, and there was people trapped, twisted, there was bits of the carriage missing, seats missing. And people covered in blood.

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TONY BLAIR, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: I'd like, once again, to express my sympathy and my sorrow to those families who will be grieving so unexpectedly and tragically tonight. This is a very sad day for the British people, but we will hold true to the British way of life.

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KING: Joining us now from Washington is a good friend, Bob Woodward. He due to be our only guest tonight. His new book, "The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat," was just published. He will be with us Monday night. He's the long-time reporter and editor at the "Washington Post." He's doing a book on the second Bush administration. Are you getting into things like this?

BOB WOODWARD, "WASHINGTON POST": Well, obviously, the War on Terror is ongoing and so much of it is secret. And in the White House and in the intelligence agencies, one of the issues they've been debating very privately for months or over a year is: Is al Qaeda capable of some sort of what they call high-end catastrophic attack? In other words, can they do another 9/11 or something worse with, say, weapons of mass destruction?

And the question really has not been answered. Some people think that the disruption efforts have been very effective, that funding has been cut off and they can't do something like that. Others think that they can.

What happened today is, assuming it's al Qaeda and there are all kinds of indicators that it is, they put something up on the board, they've demonstrated that they can attack in the most vicious way and they have this awful capacity to do it at the right time, in a theatrical way.

So, I mean, as you watch the videos of this, I mean, it literally grips the throat of the world, because everyone says: Well, it could be down the street; it could be in my city; it could be me.

KING: Boy, aptly put. Alex Thompson of ITN, a news correspondent who has covered wars. This is a little different. Is it -- do you regard it as a war, Alex?

ALEX THOMPSON, ITN NEWS CORRESPONDENT: It's a war of sorts. The politicians sort of -- certainly regard it as a -- their words, not mine, a war on terror, whatever terror may be.

And it's a war certainly being fought on all sorts of fronts. Clearly, the al Qaeda strategy is all about changing the targets from hard targets, we've seen in blown-up embassies in East Africa, we've seen them blow twin towers, of course. What could be a softer target than either leaving a bomb or putting a suicide bomber onto an underground train in the rush hour? But the classic al Qaeda hallmarks -- I mean, this is a seriously competent operation, the timing of it, the day after London wins the Olympic bid, the main day of the G-8 conference up in Scotland. Absolutely the hallmarks of al Qaeda: Maximum publicity, maximum impact, shut down the entire transport system of the capital city of Britain.

KING: The mayor and chief will be leaving us shortly, so I want a few more comments from them. Mayor, you took office expecting to deal with things like roads and poverty and cleaning up areas. Is this now the highest priority?

VILLARAIGOSA: It has to be. Public safety is always the highest priority. The threat of homeland security is a major priority in any city in America, but especially a city like Los Angeles, which is clearly one of the highest targets of opportunity. And so, we're very fortunate, as I said earlier, that we have, I think, a very strong law enforcement coordinated effort to address these kinds of situations and I think we saw that today.

KING: Where does it come in the crime category, chief? Are police trained for this?

BRATTON: This is the new paradigm and we are very quickly adjusting to it. We must adjust to it. And in both New York and here in Los Angeles, where I have experienced that we do it about as good as anybody.

KING: Because it ain't like a homicide investigation is it?

BRATTON: In many respects, this is very much like dealing with traditional crime: Timely, accurate intelligence, rapid response to that intelligence, effective tactics to deal with what you discover and relentless and continuous follow-up. It's just like the CompStat system in New York getting street crime. That's how you go after the terrorists, exactly the same way.

KING: Same extended concept.

BRATTON: Same way.

KING: Thank you both very much for coming over here tonight on short notice.

VILLARAIGOSA: Thank you for having us and our prayers and condolences are extended to the people of London.

KING: And I know you've worked over there in London, right?

BRATTON: Yes.

KING: Thank you both very much.

We'll be back with lots more to go and don't forget Aaron Brown will be doing more of the same at the top of the hour.

Don't go away.

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KING: James Woolsey, former CIA director, joining us in Aspen, Colorado tonight. Is this combined agencies now of FBI and security and the rest making it more streamlined, will that help combat this better?

WOOLSEY: A little bit. I think it's been overrated as a big solution. If it helps the CIA and FBI work together more closely, that's a real plus. After all when you have terrorists as we did 9/11 that were living in Hamburg and Orlando and meeting in Malaysia and training in Oklahoma City and flying out of Logan, you can't keep track of that at all unless you have the FBI and CIA working closely together. And that's sometimes been a problem in the past, I guess, to put it mildly. So, I think the reorganization may help that way.

But people shouldn't get too confident in getting a precise indications from intelligence of these attacks. We may get lucky from time to time and that may happen.

But, you know, Larry, there are days in a really odd kind of sense in which I miss the old Soviet Union. They were pretty bureaucratic, they did things in pretty regular ways. And although not many people fore saw their demise, except for Ronald Reagan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and, I guess, maybe that means that the Irish sometimes hear voices the rest of us don't hear, they nonetheless, they did things fairly -- the Soviets -- fairly regularly.

And we could watch them. And they developed patterns in the way they deployed ICBMs, they way they ran their exercises. We had a pretty good sense of warning of what they're going to do.

We're not to have that, although we need to make a lot of changes in our intelligence cultures and do a better job. We're generally not going to have that with these types of attacks no matter how hard we work. We have to be able to deal with these and be resilient, even though we're going to take some hits.

KING: Bob Woodward, what do you think?

WOODWARD: Well, I think Jim is right. And we're in a period of transition. John Negroponte has taken over as director of national intelligence so the reporting lines are being changed and adjusted and that always takes time and there's a certain amount of uncertainty. There's a new organization in the FBI that is going to hopefully integrate all of the information and the CIA has made strides here.

But you know, this -- one of the things that I think is really interesting here is watching President Bush today when he came out and made his statement. I remember a couple of years ago one of the things he said is the leader has to be the calcium in the backbone. And you could almost see the calcium flowing into his backbone. He is going to be more determined in the war on terror. He is going to come back from this G-8 meeting once again a wartime president. KING: Simon Hughes, a member of parliament in Britain who witnessed this this morning. Britain being much smaller than the United States, are they better equipped to deal with it on a national scale?

HUGHES: The answer is probably yes, Larry, to that question. And we certainly learned from the experience of your good people after 9/11. All the learning that went into the rescue operation then has been applied here and, again, after the tragedy in Madrid.

And one of the obvious signs for me of that this morning in the UK was that when the bombs went off underground, in the past, people had frozen that train system at that moment. All the trains were moved through the system to the next stations apart from those that were disabled, which made rescue services going in much easier, which made people coming out much easier.

So we have been learning. We have a very good integrated system. From what I saw, it was being very well handled. And of course, because we are an island, or set of islands, we have more defensible borders. We've just reorganized our own external security force to do what many of us had been asking for a long time, which is have a common border force. We've moved down in that direction. And we have strengthened our controls. They're not perfect, but they're much stronger.

So, yes, I think we should be able to, with better intelligence and better policing, manage the threat better than we were.

But to answer the question you asked one of your other interviewees, can you have perfect protection? No, you can't. Can you stop everybody getting through? No, you can't. Some of these guys may have been born in Britain, may have been brought up in Britain or may have come here legitimately and may have just turned to do their evil deed and nobody could have spotted that coming.

KING: Alex Thomson, what do you think of timers being used in some areas of the explosion and not in others?

I'm sorry, I thought Alex was there.

What do you read into that, James Woolsey, that there apparently were timing devices used in some aspects of this?

WOOLSEY: Well, that's no trick for al Qaeda or al Qaeda related organizations. There are a lot of engineers, unfortunately, in these groups. And to be able to pull off something like that takes some skill. But they are, I'm afraid, capable of understanding our technology and using it in rather even more demanding ways than that.

KING: Simon Hughes, any special meeting of parliament tomorrow?

HUGHES: Unlikely in the next 12 or 24 hours. We had a statement from the home secretary about six hours -- no, just less than that after the event. I think the wisdom was that because parliament will gather on Monday -- parliament's not sitting Friday. It's probably better to wait for the information to be collected.

The usual delicate balance. It would have been unwise for the home secretary to say too much. And all parties, representatives, were very cautious not to be asking questions on the basis of supposition and speculation. We have enough facts to worry about.

Thank God the casualties may, in terms of fatalities, have been far less than you might have expected from three underground explosions. So, no, I think there will be a gathering of information over the next few days. We'll be making sure the underground and rail systems can work securely. And then there will be an opportunity for considered response in parliament on Monday, which that has been promised, which will certainly happen.

Tragically, it means that all the good things that may come out of G-8 are going to be overshadowed for us in the UK and partially overshadowed for you in the States and elsewhere.

KING: We'll take a break. When we come back, we'll talk with Charles Gargano of the port authority of New York and New Jersey. What a job that is. Don't go away.

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GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We'll not yield to these people. We'll not yield to the terrorists. We'll find them. We'll bring them to justice. And at the same time, we'll spread an ideology of hope and compassion that will overwhelm their ideology of hate.

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KEN LIVINGSTONE, MAYOR OF LONDON: This city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. And Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity, around those who have been injured, those who have been bereaved.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: With us in New York is Charles Gargano, the vice chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. What a problem you face. You're in charge of what?

CHARLES GARGANO, VICE CHAIRMAN, PORT AUTHORITY OF NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY: Well, Larry, let me tell you that in light of the events that took place this morning in London, the Port Authority has had to enhance its police presence at all of our facilities, and they are many. Such as the PATH, the train system, our airports, our bridges, our tunnels, all of our facilities. And in light of the -- of that, as I said, our special operations units also have been enhanced, and those units are made up of K-9 dogs, motorcycle units, commercial vehicle inspection units, all of this has been heightened.

Obviously, it is very, very important to do that. We have gone through this in a big way before, unfortunately, and we are well aware of the kinds of destruction, the loss of lives and pain that so many people endure.

So we want to be as alert as possible. We have, in addition to that, we have a heightened alert by our police command center to all of our operations and maintenance units, to be on the lookout and be out there scrutinizing anything that they see that's unusual. So we are certainly at a very heightened alert status right now.

KING: Chief Bratton said earlier that now they fear more likely incidents like buses, trains, rather than the big buildings somewhere, that the attacks seem to be more hitting people where they live.

GARGANO: Well, the thing is that we don't know where they're going to hit, and that's the important thing. I think what we have to do is be aware, all of us, those in law enforcement, government officials, government leaders. I think everyone has to be aware that these people are out there. They want to harm people. They want to kill people. They want to destroy our way of life, and we can't let that happen. To the extent that we can all be alert, and certainly if we see anything, any of us, whether you're in government, in law enforcement, or just the citizen, anything that you might see that appears to be suspicious, follow through, call up law enforcement. Let's all work together and see how we can deter these things. They're very difficult, obviously, to deter, but we all have to work very hard to try and do that.

KING: Do you have the necessary personnel?

GARGANO: Oh, we certainly do. I think the Port Authority Police Department, working with the New York City Police Department, state troopers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, the surrounding area, the federal government, all of these law enforcement units working together, I think, is certainly helping out a lot. And we have to continue to do that and cooperate with each other.

KING: Thank you very much, Charles.

GARGANO: Thank you, Larry.

KING: You got a gargantuan job.

Simon Hughes, is Great Britain well prepared, manpower-wise?

HUGHES: Yes, I think we are, again, much better than we were. We've increased the numbers of our police service considerably in London. It's up to 31,000. Less, I appreciate, than yours, but considerably increased in recent years, and across the country, that's the highest level ever. Our armed services are stretched. They come as a support mechanism.

But personnel isn't really the issue. I guess the issue has always been well trained in the practices and procedures, and we've done that better recently. And also having the intelligence to be able to spot the places that are vulnerable, the sort of people who are suspicious.

I myself took part in a simulated exercise. And of course, sort of very different difficult judgment calls. There are people who act suspiciously, who may have a history of being under surveillance, who you may, if you're in the security or intelligence services, think are about to do something. Do you then go in and literally take somebody out, shoot somebody, when they may not be carrying a bomb? It may just be a replica, or it may be that they passed it to somebody else, or maybe they weren't doing it at all. So there's some very difficult judgment calls.

But no, we're getting better, we're working much more effectively across Europe and through Interpol worldwide. And the big cities of the world who all share the same threat, Japan has suffered, as you know, Rome has suffered, Munich suffered, Madrid suffered, and New York, great cities have suffered too. We all now understand that it could happen anywhere, and particularly at great international occasions like gatherings of the G-8 leaders today. We are better prepared, but we can never, never, never get it perfect.

KING: More in a minute. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Alex Thomson of ITN, in the early hours of the morning, is there a mood of fear in London?

THOMPSON: I think there's a mood of sleep right now. It's been a long day for everyone over here, Larry.

I don't think so. I mean, this is not on the scale, thank goodness, of what happened in New York City, of course, in September the 11th. And it's also a city which, when all is said and done, in the longer memory, gone through the blitz of the second world war, slightly shorter memory has gone through the IRA bombings back in 1973 and 1974. There's a certain degree of stoicism.

People were not -- and I was amazed by this -- a lot of people coming out of the tube tunnels this morning, I was myself passing through Liverpool Street station, where one of the incidents happened. People were certainly shocked and stunned, and many of them injured. But a great many of them said, there was, OK, there was panic and shock at first, but people actually moved out in a fairly orderly manner, those who could move, the walking wounded, those unaffected. And then at the other end of the day, on the way home, nobody complained because there was no form of transport. People simply started walking. And really, that has characterized the day.

I think tomorrow people wake up -- they were told, they were all but promised by our authorities, it's not a question of if this happens; it is a question of when it happens. That is as near to a guarantee as you're going to get from the security services. And so it proved today. KING: Bob Woodward a CNN/Gallup poll just in, conducted in the United States, 624 adult Americans, indicates it's having some impact. Asked if they were worried or not worried, 62 percent are worried that a similar attack will occur in the United States, 38 percent said not worried. That surprise you? Or is that about right?

WOODWARD: Well, it's because of what's before us, particularly on television. If you look at al Qaeda or their siblings or their offshoots who are possibly responsible for this, they don't follow one attack immediately by another. And, in fact, their tendency is to wait. So statistically, it's probably less probable right now.

At the same time, all the people who were in charge of security in London and here in the United States would be negligent if they did not go to some higher alert and put more people out and increase consciousness about this.

And of course, this is the great dilemma in fighting terrorism. You're doing -- you're fighting this war and the big battles are on somebody else's timetable and at a location that they choose. And that makes it impossible to predict. And so we live in this dilemma.

KING: Christiane Amanpour, who will be leaving us, as usual doing yeoman-like work. Christiane, you live in London. Are you more worried now than yesterday?

AMANPOUR: No, probably less, because it's happened. I think everybody expected this to happen in London. As grotesque as that sounds, people believed this was going to happen, because it was happening in other capitals, because Britain supported the war in Iraq that's so unpopular, and because of 9/11.

And as we've heard over and over again, the security services had warned people here that this was going to happen. And there's a certain sense for those of us who were lucky enough to have escaped harm, of relief that it's happened.

Obviously, for those who have been injured and for the people who have lost their lives, this is a terrible thing for all of them, for their families. Their lives have been turned upside down by what's happened. People who have got relatives or friends who have even been severely or critically injured, with limbs amputated, chest injuries and the kind of grotesque injuries that you can get in this kind of attack, they will never be the same. They will forever have this as one of those black days in their lives.

But for London as a whole, I think that it reacted incredibly well. The people were incredibly stoic. What we saw was just people walking wherever they had to go, helping each other, trying to help with cell phones, sharing taxies. Children remained in schools. There wasn't any sense of a mass shutdown of the city. And the emergency services sprung into action.

There has been a real letdown, of course, as you can imagine, as well as the horror and the shock of what happened, but a real let letdown, because they had been so happy just a few hours before that they had received the 2012 Olympic games. And so it's particularly painful.

KING: Thank you, Christiane Amanpour. We'll be back with some more moments with what remains of our panel after this. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: That was the U.S. military band playing today, "God Save the Queen" in tribute to the tragedy in London. You'll remember after 9/11, they did somewhat a similar thing in Great Britain, playing the National Anthem.

James Woolsey, in our remaining moments, we want to get a comment from each of our guests. We learn from this or not?

WOOLSEY: I think, Larry, one of the things we'll have to learn is that these may not all be foreigners inside our countries who have come here doing this, but domestic recruits are a real possibility and that makes the job a lot easier for al Qaeda.

The Wahabi sect from Saudi Arabia has gotten $80 to $90 billion dollars from them since the 1970s. And one of the things they do with it, for example, in the U.S. is get imams with that point of view into our prisons and they recruit people and they produce recruits who are fanatically anti other Muslims anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti- democracy, anti-female, anti-music.

And those young men who come out of prison are cocked guns ready to be pointed at something and used. And they may well not look or seem to be from the Middle East at all. They may look like younger versions of you and me. And this is going to be a very serious problem for Britain and the United States for a long time.

KING: Simon Hughes, will Great Britain rebound quickly?

HUGHES: Yes. You heard quite rightly that people have been very resilient. There was amazing calm really today. We've been there before. We'll come through. We're grateful for support. And very sincerely -- it actually does unite those of us who have suffered together.

There's always a bit of a tension that government wants to overreact in terms of legislative proposals. We're debating identity cards at them moment. People like me have always argued against them. We don't believe they're fundamentally what's needed. So there may be some arguments as to clamping down on the restrictions of the citizen.

But as your last interviewee said, the citizens could be anybody. And I hope that we remember the big battle is the battle against fundamentalism. And we have got to fight that on all continents. And get tot he seeds and the roots of that. And it's the next generation who we have to wean away from fundamentalism in any faith and in every faith.

KING: Bob Woodward thanks for sharing the time with us tonight. We will give on a full hour Monday night to talk about the "Secret Man." Any closing comment? We have 30 seconds.

WOODWARD: Real quickly. I think it's all very sobering. And let's hope that the era we live in doesn't get defined as the age of terror.

KING: Yes, very well put.

We thank all of the contributors tonight to our program. Bob Woodward will be back with us Monday night. We'll do a complete show on this again tomorrow evening. The aftermath of what will be another date etched in the history of the 21st Century, which is probably going to be known, the early part of it, at least, as the terror century.

Joining us now from New York is Aaron Brown, the host of "NEWSNIGHT." Aaron will be doing two hours tonight. It would be silly, of course, to repeat any programming. We'll be live throughout the night. Aaron Brown, another day.

AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: It is another day we'll remember from the very moment we woke up, Larry. Thank you. And we'll talk to you again tomorrow.

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