Homeland Security Chief Calls Plot ‘Comparable to 9/11’

RAY SUAREZ:

Now we turn to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.

Secretary, welcome to the program. What can you tell us about how many men or how many suspects are still at large?

MICHAEL CHERTOFF, Homeland Security Secretary:

Well, we know the British are obviously continuing to follow the trail of the men that have been arrested. And they're going to have to make judgments about whether those who are connected, either by telephone contacts or other kinds of interactions, are really culpable and part of this plot or whether they just are innocent bystanders.

So we may not know for some time what the total number is, but as Home Secretary Reid said, they believe they have the major players.

RAY SUAREZ:

As long as there are an undetermined number of coconspirators at large, can this plot be considered rolled up or is it still a live threat?

MICHAEL CHERTOFF:

Well, certainly we believe the plot has been disrupted. But as I said earlier today, we're not certain that the members have all been rolled up or that we have completely thwarted the plan. And that's why we, too, have taken precautionary measures with respect to our alert level.

We matched the alert level the British set for flights coming from Britain into the United States, and we went to the level orange here in our own airports and also with respect to other international flights precisely because we're not certain that everything is over. And while we believe that the plot has been disrupted, we need to be careful and not assume too much.

RAY SUAREZ:

What do you know now about the planned chronology, when some of the aspects of this plot were meant to roll out?

MICHAEL CHERTOFF:

Well, we believe this was a well-advanced plan and could have, in fact, been executed within a matter of a week or two, perhaps even earlier. So this is not a case where we stepped in at the early stages.

They had the capabilities; they had assembled a team; they had the final stages of planning under way. And that meant we were really in the critical period of time before the plan was actually launched.

RAY SUAREZ:

Is it a difficult decision to know when to come in and finally execute those arrests, in the hopes of perhaps maximizing your haul by waiting until the latest possible moment?

MICHAEL CHERTOFF:

Well, Ray, this was in fact the difficult set of decisions that officials on this side of the Atlantic and the other side of the Atlantic wrestled with literally every day this week. Obviously, you want to continue to go as long as you're collecting information about new participants in the plot and new details. That's very important to make sure you scoop up everybody.

But at the same time, you can't afford to wait too long, because the worst result would be one in which somebody got wind of the investigation or they simply went ahead with the part of the plan that you didn't know about and wound up killing a lot of people.

So this is, perhaps, the hardest decision people with jobs like mine make, which is that balancing of what more we need to get against what we fear may happen if we delay too long.