|
|
 |
|
 |
|
| TERROR ALERT | |
 October 31, 2001 
|
|
|
|
| MARGARET WARNER: And
for more on what's behind yesterday's terror alert, we turn to Neil Lewis,
a Washington-based correspondent for the New York Times. Welcome,
Neil. What more can you tell us about what led to this alert and what
these credible sources are that Tom Ridge was just talking about?
NEIL LEWIS, The New York Times: Well, Margaret, here's what the analysts do in this kind of a case. They go back and look at the intelligence they had at the time of previous terrorist actions. In this case, we know of two that are attributable to al-Qaida or so officials believe. And that is the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. And there are certain patterns of intelligence, information they pick up before those that may seem inconsequential at the time but loom very large in hindsight. This is called refracted intelligence. These are things that are now seen through those events. I believe what they're suggesting is that we are now seeing... They are seeing the same kinds of things they saw before those events, the same kind of patterns, be they phrases, be they certain patterns of communications or certain systems of communication. Remember, there are sort of two forms of intelligence here. You heard Governor Ridge and Mr. Ashcroft yesterday decline to say what they are. But there are generally human intelligence and signal intelligence, interception intelligence. We're generally believed to be light on the human intelligence in terms of penetrating these groups, and this is signal intelligence. So it's hard to... The analysts have a chore of trying to extrapolate from things they overhear. I might analogize it to if you were trying to figure out what was going on in a house across the street, you might have a source, a child in that house or a neighbor will come and give you a coherent story, perhaps not trustworthy but that person will tell you what's going on there. You have to judge that by that person. On the other hand, if you were tapping the phones here, you would hear fragments of conversations that you would have to extrapolate and figure out what was going on because people do not talk from the beginning of the story to the end. They talk functionally. So it's quite a difficult chore to sort of extrapolate. In this case, the officials said they were getting a number of... You heard Governor Ridge just say convergence of some of these congruent kind of signals that they got before the other events. MARGARET WARNER: There have been stories, as you know in the past few days, that the CIA has information that bin Laden and his top lieutenants have told operatives in Europe and here, "You don't have to wait for a signal from us to launch an attack. You can act on your own." Does that fit into this at all? NEIL LEWIS: Well, I have to say if it does, I'm unaware of it. It's not anything I know from my reporting nor from my colleagues at the New York Times. I think it's similar though to something we have reported and do know about, and that is that bin Laden has adopted a different form of communication. He has decided, we are told and we have so reported, not to be anywhere near any electronic communications devices. He first supposedly adopted this sort of after reports of that western intelligence agencies were eavesdropping on his cell phone and satellite phone conversations. But when the Israelis assassinated a PLO figure in Ramallah in late August, officials here believe he became convinced and perhaps with justification that the cell phone was used to hone in and fire the missile. So his mode of communication is through subordinates. He tells people in person things. They go far away from him to transmit the messages and spread his commands from different locations away from him. He will not be in the vicinity of a television, radio, cell phone, Cuisinart, I don't know. MARGARET WARNER: Do the CIA and FBI still believe there are still sort of functioning al-Qaida cells in this country in a position to carry out attacks here if indeed the targets are here? NEIL LEWIS: The consensus among officials now is probable not. The truth is for most questions you can ask in this area is they don't know, they don't know with certainty but as to whether there are people still here, they don't know. They've detained an awful lot of people, some of whom they think have connections or knowledge, some of whom are not cooperating, all of whom have produced a great reprisal of the civil liberties debate about how these people are being held. But as to whether there are other cells here or people here, they don't know. They have sort of put in place, as I understand it, a new kind of warning system for intelligence that at the FBI when these reports come in, they have a quick time limit that they have to be evaluated and gotten up to senior levels. This was because you may recall the story of the pilot or the would-be pilot, I should say, Zakarius Musawi -- he's the fellow who was since renown for asked how to steer a plane but was not interested in landing or taking off. And that kind of information enough rose to a high enough level to alert people. Now within the intelligence community that's considered kind of an example of what they don't want to happen. They want things to move more quickly up the chain of command. MARGARET WARNER: And, finally, very briefly, are your sources telling you anything about what happened... There was an alert ten days. Do they think that turned out to be false or it just didn't happen or that they thwarted it? NEIL LEWIS: Don't know. But the only difference is, as we understand it, is that again in these patterns, that was fewer than they have this time. As far as these... The ones that are most credible, we're told, are those that are vague and ambiguous, as you heard Governor Ridge say. The ones that turn out to be hoaxes and false are very specific ones about a time and a place and an action, but not just ambiguous, they fit this pattern that the analysts have seen before. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Neil Lewis, New York Times, thank you very much. NEIL LEWIS: Thank you, Margaret. |
 |
        |
|
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | ||
| ||
| PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved. | ||
| ||
