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American Morning

What Terror Archive Tells Us About Al Qaeda's Global Reach

Aired August 23, 2002 - 09:17   ET

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

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: All this week here on CNN, in our special report "Terror on Tape," we have seen disturbing footage showing Al Qaeda's sophisticated training at times, and its ability to spread death and destruction. Perhaps even more alarming, though, than the network's deadly skills is what the terror archive, as a whole, tells us about the group's global reach.
Mike Boettcher has been studying this group for, I don't know, Mike, going 20 years just about right now.

Good morning to you. When you see the tapes, and I guess you'd look after the past five days of our reporting on this and you consider the global reach and the context that we've been reporting so far today, what's it tell you?

MIKE BOETTCHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, it tells me that they've been working very hard, harder than most people ever imagined. And right now, the situation is, post-attack on Afghanistan and the coalition efforts there, is that Al Qaeda is now falling back on that training all around the world. They have set up super cells made up of Al Qaeda veterans, like the ones you have seen here who have trained, and gone back to their country, and formed alliances with other terrorist groups. Now they are planning to launch small to mid- scale attacks, while and at the same time, the main core Al Qaeda leadership are still attempting those big attacks.

For example that planned attack from the Moroccan cell, which was to attack U.S. and British ships in the straits of Gibraltar. That cell received $300,000 dollars in just a short period of time wired to it by Western Union. So the money is still there, and the training is still there and the people are still there.

HEMMER: Mike, tell me about Osama bin Laden himself? What have you been able to gauge or take away from these tapes that might tell you a little more about possibly personality, his character, maybe even his vulnerabilities?

BOETTCHER: I take away from this that he is a micromanager. He's meticulous. That's why this archive was kept, because he wanted to keep tabs, according to expert I've spoken to, and coalition intelligence analysts, he wanted to keep track on everything that was going on, and he wanted to proceed on various different levels, weapons of mass destruction, the chemical testing, training for assassination, training for kidnap, using SA-7 surface-to-air missiles; he wanted to keep track on his cells all around the world.

So this a man who was very, very meticulous, but for the first time, you also see a man who shows a human emotion, fear, that we've never seen before, that was when he was coming out of that press conference with the Pakistanis, and there was a shot fired, an RPG fired over his head, and he flinches, like any human would do. That indicates that Osama bin Laden in human, like any other...

HEMMER: Mike, what do you gauge based on some say it's a multimedia organization that we've seen with all this videotape, and Paula and I have talked about in the morning today, Al Qaeda loves videotape. But when it goes hand in hand with these complex manuals what does that tell you?

BOETTCHER: It tells me they're trying to spread their information very rapidly. You have the manuals. People can read it, but this is a television age. They wanted to make sure that their people out in the field, when they were spread out, if Afghanistan was taken away as a base, they had the institutional knowledge on videotape and in manuals to spread that around the world, and it's also spread very rapidly, frankly, Bill, over the Internet.

So this is an organization that had big plans, that looked at many different contingencies. They may not have thought that the U.S. would succeed so quickly in rousting them from Afghanistan, but they had to have considered that possibility, and I believe they did, and I believe these videotapes, and the way they disseminate that information now says that.

HEMMER: Mike, listen, I'm out of time, but you just spent several weeks in Afghanistan. Based on your experience there and what you found out and discovered, knowing that the Taliban has been routed out and Al Qaeda essentially is on the run, how much has their methods, their network been impaired right now? Can you gauge that? They've lost their training base, but they haven't lost their operations. They've lost their central communication core, but they're rebuilding and they're rebuilding around the world.

BOETTCHER: Thank you, Mike. Mike Boettcher in Atlanta.

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