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American Morning

'Intelligence Briefing'

Aired January 14, 2002 - 08:41   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.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Each Monday here on AMERICAN MORNING, CNN national security correspondent David Ensor will join us for a weekly "Intelligence Briefing," just like they get over there at the White House.

This morning, David is in Washington. Nice to have you with us. Good morning.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Jack.

The president had his intelligence briefing just a few minutes ago before leaving, and now I'm here to try to offer you something that won't be nearly as good.

CAFFERTY: Well, it might be.

Very disturbing story in "The Washington Post" this morning concerning the fact Osama bin Laden's top 10 guys, we've killed two of them, and eight of them are still out there. And the article suggests that there is a very real danger of additional domestic terrorist activity in this country. Of course, the minute 9-11 happened, everybody pointed the finger at the intelligence community, saying that we should have known about this, why didn't we? Give me a sense of where we are in our intelligence capabilities, and how much risk you perceive might still be out there?

ENSOR: Well, there is going to be a congressional investigation into what, by definition, was an intelligence failure on September 11th. And the House and Senate intelligence committees are talking now how they're going to schedule that, when hearings, which documents they want to get access to. How much cooperation will the Bush administration give them? So that's going to be the activity on the Hill over the next few months, without any question. And there are going to be lessons learned in the belief of the chairman of those two committees when they get into the matter.

At the same time, the Congress has given the intelligence community an infusion of cash since September 11, and they expect to be giving more. And there are discussions in the community about how best to spend that money. Now, some of that money is already being spent to provide technical assistance and training for sister agencies, intelligence agencies for other countries, Pakistan is an obvious example, to try to beef up their capability to look into Al Qaeda, both in Afghanistan and obviously in Pakistan and other countries in the region.

CAFFERTY: I don't mean to interrupt, but we talked earlier that there is this possible connection between Iran and Afghanistan. What do we know about that?

ENSOR: Well, as you know, as you can assume, there are hundreds of CIA officers now in Afghanistan, and they noticed that in the last few weeks, particularly in Herat, the western city near the border of Iran, the competition arrived. There are now many Iranian intelligence agents on the ground in Afghanistan, and they are trying to buy their way into favor with some of the armed groups there, some of the warlords, by offering them quite sophisticated weaponry. So there is a growing concern on the part of the U.S. intelligence committee that, as I say, the competition is on the ground, too, in Afghanistan.

CAFFERTY: So we've got a long way to go, even in Afghanistan, in terms of the potential threats still being out there. Is that a fair assessment of where we stand?

ENSOR: Well, that's right. And there's competition in the region for who will influence who, what the future structure of the Afghan government will be, who will arm it, who will have its ear in the future, and Iran is very interested in that. So it's a murky picture, there's no question about that.

CAFFERTY: David, we'll count on you weekly to come along and take some of the murk out of it for us. I appreciate you being with us.

Thank you very much, David Ensor, our national security correspondent down in Washington -- Paula.

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