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CNN Saturday Morning News

Al Qaeda's Global Reach

Aired August 24, 2002 - 09:35   ET

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

CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: All week here at CNN, we've been giving you an exclusive glimpse inside a terrorist network. CNN obtained 64 tapes from a source in Afghanistan showing al Qaeda's global reach and its preparation for a global campaign.
Well, this morning, we are taking your questions and your comments. You can e-mail them to wam@CNN.com.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: And joining us now, our senior international correspondent, Nic Robertson. Thanks for being with us.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Thank you.

COOPER: You've been working just unbelievably hard this week, and you were up late last night. So we do appreciate you coming in early.

ROBERTSON: Well, thank you very much. I have a big team here helping me too, so it spreads the load a little.

LIN: Making coffee, bringing doughnuts, (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

ROBERTSON: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) organize the ideas, yes.

LIN: Really.

COOPER: We, we've been getting a lot of e-mails for you, and just let's just start right off. First one is from a Kurmanj Sadalla. He writes -- writes in, "What was your reaction when you first saw those tapes?"

ROBERTSON: I was really surprised. I mean, I thought that -- I hadn't seen it before, and I figured that no one else had either, or least, you know, I was aware that it hadn't been out in the public domain. But I was so busy trying to look at the different material that was being presented that I just put it -- each tape, I put it to one side, put it to one side.

And then it was a matter of getting, getting it back here, getting it to where our analysts could take a look at it.

LIN: So you had a clinical response to them first.

ROBERTSON: I would say I had a clinical response, try to be professional, separate myself from what I was seeing. It was the next day when I was driving back and I saw a dog for the first time after seeing the testing on the dogs, the chemical testing, and then it impacted me. I thought -- I really -- I just thought in my gut what I had seen at that moment. It was quite chilling.

LIN: Interesting.

COOPER: Yes. Another e-mail from Dale Friesen, who's actually a very loyal CNN viewer and e-mails us a lot. Dale wrote in saying, "What happened to the people who received the training in the al Qaeda archives? Where did they go? How many more may not be on the video? Is this the tip of the iceberg?"

ROBERTSON: Experts believe perhaps about 4,000 to 5,000 al Qaeda members have been trained. We know some of them have been captured, even some of, some of bin Laden's close security personnel we know have been captured.

Where are the others? Many are believed to have fled through Iran, some are believed to be in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, they went east. Others, experts just don't know.

And who left Afghanistan before September 11? Maybe even the years before? Who would receive the training? Where are they now? These are really some of the unanswered questions, and these are perhaps some of the most troubling issues at this time.

COOPER: And is -- as -- oh, I'm sorry. As you said to me yesterday, I mean, your sources are telling you that Osama bin Laden is still alive and in (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

ROBERTSON: Is still alive, the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, the area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the area that the Pakistani government, its rule of law doesn't carry there. It's a tribal area. It's one of these relatively safe areas, the ideal place for somebody like Osama bin Laden, out of the reach of government agencies.

LIN: The 5,000 who have been trained, do they know each other? And what is their ability to communicate with each other?

ROBERTSON: The communications, as we've seen, has been done, some of it, over the Internet. It's encrypted. They apply a set of codes to it as well, so there is a method of communication they have established there. And we've seen this is one of the ways they've been communicating over the last few years.

How well are they able to do that now? Was there an important element to that that was destroyed in Afghanistan? That is not clear to us at this time.

LIN: All right. Our next e-mail, let's see who we've got, one from Naum Pejkov, I think, from Toronto, Canada. "It has been documented that al Qaeda has close links with Muslims in the Balkans, in Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo, with Bosnian Muslims and Albanians. Do the tapes show any evidence of this?" Good question. ROBERTSON: One of the tapes, in fact, several of the tapes were from Bosnia. They were recorded in 1995, and they were from the seventh Muslim brigade that went and for (ph) -- there were a lot of former fighters, Arab fighters who'd been fighting in Afghanistan.

They formed a very, very hard-core fighting unit in central Bosnia, and they were responsible for breaking out in central Bosnia and connecting up areas in Bosnia that the Bosnian army hadn't been able to do.

They are also known to have perpetrated war crimes in that area. And we see some pretty damming evidence of that on some of these tapes. There are some quite atrocious acts that we see on these tapes.

Of recent evidence of groups in these areas, from those tapes we saw, no. But for our experts, it's an indication of the people -- of how al Qaeda grew to be where it is, that this group of people here.

And what we saw was a promotional video. They were actually advertising for recruits. They actually put out a phone number. And this tape had been disseminated quite some time ago.

COOPER: I remember actually working Bosnia during the war, and you would occasionally out in the countryside run across those Jihadi fighters, and they'd have bandanas around. And you would basically, just, like, avert your eyes and just kind of like go past them, because they're very serious guys.

ROBERTSON: Very serious guys. They wouldn't let you come by and film them. And they were responsible for hijacking and executions at the roadside of U.N. workers.

COOPER: Right. That is one of the things that was so striking about the tapes that you showed yesterday, is that -- we saw a video from Chechnya, as you said, and, from, from, from Burma or Myanmar, and, and also from Eritrea. I mean, the global reach of, of...

ROBERTSON: Sudan, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), Uzbekistan, Algeria.

COOPER: Yes.

ROBERTSON: There were other tapes there that, for reasons of time, we just haven't been able to show. But the Uzbekistan material, it's very rare, very, very rare footage (UNINTELLIGIBLE) from Algeria. These were groups that were close. And indeed, that is -- represents the global reach of al Qaeda.

COOPER: And clearly, they see themselves as a global force. I mean, if anything, perhaps this video archive was a way of them documenting their history, and they see themselves as this global operation.

ROBERTSON: Absolutely. And it's, and it's, in so many ways, it's a methodology of staying hidden. They are associated with forces in other countries that are indigenous to those countries. What better way for a guerrilla force to stay hidden? And indigenous forces generally have support among the population, elements of the population. That is exactly how a guerrilla force survives. It can't do it without that.

COOPER: Let's take another e-mail. Want to do that?

LIN: Yes, yes. Let's see what we've got.

COOPER: I think Anthony Arena wrote in saying, "Did the tapes of 9/11 seen on TV coverage begin recording before the first plane hit? If so, is this still further proof Osama is responsible?" That's an interesting question.

ROBERTSON: An interesting question. What we have on the videotape there, it was number B-222, it's a recording of CNN's coverage of Al Jazeera, the broadcaster in the region of their coverage as well, nothing to indicate there were cameras rolling prior to the impact, prior to what we've all seen already.

COOPER: OK.

LIN: All right. Coming up next, another e-mail, folks?

COOPER: Yes, Shawn in Memphis.

LIN: Do we have them? All right, Shawn in Memphis. "Do you think the tapes will actually help you in counterterrorist tactics toward Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist group? Like you said before, it's split up into cells, and each cell has their own agenda. So how will those tapes, how will those tapes are different cells?"

COOPER: I think that was grammatically incorrect, but how will those tapes be used by different cells? probably what (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

LIN: And it also makes it sound like he thinks you're responsible for hunting down Osama bin Laden, which you're not necessarily.

ROBERTSON: Which I'm not, no.

LIN: No.

ROBERTSON: We are responsible for retrieving this material, for sharing it with analysts, and for trying to explain what we found.

It may very well help, the material we broadcast that has been seen around the world may very well help government agencies in trying to track down, it may very well inform them.

How does this keep cells separate? Well, it certainly shows a way that they can disseminate information, and they can send a tape off or a video CD or whatever to one cell. The other -- another cell may not know what they've received. There -- it allows for the compartmentalization. It doesn't bring people together to you necessarily. It doesn't show your face to them, their face to you, they don't see other members of your other teams.

So that kind of dissemination of information in discrete ways, that does help us study the structure.

LIN: Has this been helpful to the intelligence community?

ROBERTSON: Certainly, we do know that from what we hear, the tops of -- from the tops of intelligence agencies, this has provided new information and it documents it in a way that they haven't been able to see before and has certainly given them material put, in their view, on CNN material that they wouldn't otherwise maybe not have seen.

COOPER: We've got another interesting e-mail, this one from Lois Steinberg of Washington, D.C. She writes in saying, "What has been the reaction to the videotapes in the Arab world? Do they believe they came from al Qaeda? Have they even been shown on the Al Jazeera network?"

ROBERTSON: We -- CNN, as we all know, is broadcast around the world on CNN International, so certainly they will have been viewed there. I have not heard a response from that part of the world so far.

LIN: Nic, what are you taking away from this experience?

ROBERTSON: I am taking away perhaps something I didn't fully appreciate before, the dedication and sophistication of al Qaeda, the way that they are spread out around the world. But perhaps the most important thing, I think, is, don't underestimate them. Don't underestimate their capabilities. Don't play them up, but at the same time, don't underestimate them.

LIN: During the week, as we were broadcasting your special series, there were bits and pieces of breaking news. For example, you know, suspicious powdery substance at a, at a hotels.com office building, the Miami B concourse had been evacuated.

When things like that happen, those were explainable, not, as we know, related to any sort of terrorist threat.

But when something like that happens, do you look at that event differently now?

ROBERTSON: I certainly listen to it much more closely, and I certainly try and analyze it to see if it fits the models that we are beginning to see coming out from al Qaeda.

LIN: You have more tapes that you're going to be viewing, right?

ROBERTSON: Indeed, we do, and we hope to be looking at them shortly. COOPER: And you've got a special coming up tomorrow night, right?

ROBERTSON: That's right, we'll be talking with our military affairs analyst, retired general David Grange, Mike Boettcher, CNN's correspondent, who's been working extensively on al Qaeda, and also, of course, our analyst, our al Qaeda analyst Peter Bergen, along with Wolf Blitzer.

LIN: We'll look forward to it. Thank you very much. Thanks, Nic, good to see you, always.

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