Military

DATE= 06/22/2002

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01144

TITLE= AL-QAIDA ON THE RUN

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0037

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: Keeping the al-Qaida terrorists on the run. Next, On the Line.

Host: From the U-S to Europe, the Middle East to South Asia, police are tracking down members of al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden's terrorist network has not yet been destroyed, but a flurry of arrests suggests that international cooperation in the war on terrorism is beginning to unravel al-Qaida's web. Most recently Morocco arrested Abu Zubair Al-Haili, a senior al-Qaida recruiter known as "the Bear." Morocco also broke up an al-Qaida plot to attack U-S and British ships in the Strait of Gibralter, arresting three Saudi Arabians. Also arrested in Morocco was Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian with German citizenship. Zammar recruited Mohammad Atta and other September 11th hijackers in Hamburg. Morocco turned Zammar over to Syria where he was wanted for a previous bomb plot. Is al-Qaida on the run? I'll ask my guests, Gary Schmitt, director of the Project for the New American Century; Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, and Evan Kohlmann, senior research analyst with the Investigative Project. Welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Host: Gary Schmitt, let me ask you, who is Mohammad Haydar Zammar and how important is it that he's been captured?

Schmitt: That's potentially quite important. He seems to be the guy who did the recruiting in Germany that led to the plot that unfolded in the United States on September 11th. Depending on how much he talks and how much information he gives, it's a little bit of a string that you can pull to unravel a bit more of this puzzle that we're trying to deal with right now.

Host: Frank Gaffney, does his capture help solidify what was already well known of the role of al-Qaida in the September 11th attacks?

Gaffney: Well, I think we have only very limited information about what he has told investigators so far. I must say, I'm a little less than thrilled that we've turned him over to the Syrians.

Host: Now did the U-S ever have custody of him though?

Gaffney: Well, no I don't mean we per se, but that he has been turned over to the Syrians from whom we will presumably henceforth get whatever information we are going to get. The Syrians, after all, being members in good standing, I guess you would say, of the state sponsors of terrorists list of many years -- they are trying clearly to take advantage of what I call the "Bush amnesty program" on terrorist-sponsoring states by being somewhat helpful. But at the end of the day, my guess is that to the extent that this gentleman may be able to shed light on the al-Qaida network in ways that might be unhelpful to the Syrians, that might reflect on, for example, the myriad terrorist groups that they continue to give safe haven to, and bases and facilities and so on in Damascus and elsewhere, we're not going to get much of that. So, how much this is going to solidify the case, how much it is really going to be useful remain remains very much to be seen.

Host: Evan Kohlmann, what exactly was Zammar's role in Hamburg and in al-Qaida?

Kohlmann: Essentially, he's one of a group of senior al-Qaida operatives that is designed to serve as cell leader. Al-Qaida cells are divided into very specific parts. You have a part that's designed for surveillance, you have a part that's designed for execution of the plot, and then you have a leadership role. The problem with his arrest is not really so much that we've intercepted this but that there are others out there -- that Zammar is not alone. Zammar is a group in a group of many al-Qaida operatives who are ready and willing to train to command and even to take part in the execution of the operation themselves. I was discussing this earlier with you. We've got a gentleman who was based in Bosnia, Abu el Maali [Abdelkader Mokhtari], another senior representative of al-Qaida who is missing right now. We don't know where he is. And a few years ago, a U-S official called him a junior Osama Bin Laden. Our question right now should not be how successful are we? It should be going after these people. It should be finding the remainders of al-Qaida. Al-Qaida is an organization whose motto would best be served as saying "if we fail once, try, try again." To rest upon our laurels with the arrest of people like Jose Padilla, people like Mohammed Zammar, it's silly because the threat is still out there. And until we find all these guys and we track them down and we incapacitate them, we're playing with fire.

Host: Gary Schmitt, let's talk about three Saudi men who were arrested in Morocco, by Morocco, planning an attack on ships in the Strait of Gibraltar. Tell us a little bit about that arrest and what it might show about how earlier arrests can lead to new arrests against al-Qaida.

Schmitt: Well, I just want to pick on this point about following through after the original arrests. What we've done to Al-Qaida is like when I was growing up in Texas. You know you had a hornets' nest and you swatted it off the tree or off the house. You know they scattered immediately and you killed some and you certainly disrupted their operations, but of course those hornets immediately started trying to find a new home, and they would disperse, divide.

Gaffney: They'd come after you.

Schmitt: And so we are in that kind of situation where we've done a great deal of damage to Al-Qaida, but there are a lot of hornets still out there and they're busy rebuilding their own nests and their own enclaves. So, there is a lot of work still to be done. Now this arrest in Morocco is again quite important. These people were quite serious, they were going to be able to engage in these operations. And it's to the Moroccans' credit that they have leaned so far forward to try to wrap these guys up.

Gaffney: One other thing though, we just can't overlook the fact that here again you have Saudi nationals implicated in these kinds of operations. Fifteen, I think it was, out of the nineteen were Saudi nationals in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I hope we'll come to grips with the reality that the Saudi government is not doing what it needs to do to try to help us track these guys down, put them out of business. And more importantly, in a way, stop using government vehicles, like the media, the government-controlled media, as outlets for, sort of, incitement to these guys to go do precisely these kinds of things in the name of, you know, their Wahabbist views and nationalist views against the West.

Host: Saudi Arabia has just recently arrested a dozen or thirteen people -- of whom some eleven were themselves Saudis -- for plotting to shoot down American jets in Saudi Arabia.

Gaffney: Again, that can be to the good, unless we find that the Saudis wind up either preventing us from finding out what they learn from these guys, as they have done in the Khobar Towers, and/or execute them so that there's no ability to find out really what these guys were up to and who else they might lead us to.

Kohlmann: More importantly, we still haven't figured out exactly how these people, these conspirators broke through heavy, heavy security at this American air base, security ran by the government of Saudi Arabia. I think the more and more we investigate this, the more and more we're uncovering direct links between different parts of the Saudi government and Osama bin Laden's organization. And a disturbing number of al-Qaida members are Saudi, including from the city of Hael, like Zammar. This phenomenon is so wide-spread. There are so many Saudis involved. There needs to be more openness on the part of Saudi Arabia or else it must be treated as an enemy, because that's essentially what it's allowing itself to become.

Host: Well, Gary Schmitt, Saudi Arabia does seem to be making more of an effort at this point to show that it is trying to round up some people.

Schmitt: Yeah, it depends on whether this is a long-term effort. I think the recent publicity, I mean the recent arrests are directly correlated to the fact that in the United States there's been more public pressure put upon them and more public talk about their lack of cooperation in this war on terrorism. So, I'm not surprised that all of a sudden they've begun to act like they're more cooperative. On this cooperation point, it just goes to show on the Moroccan arrests how difficult this business is, because it was a very thin piece of evidence that we got out of a detainee in Cuba that led to the little trail that led to the guy in Morocco. And it took a lot of effort on the Moroccan's part to take that little bit of evidence and lead to this little cell that was there.

Host: Let's talk about that in just a bit. What all was done as part of that investigation?

Schmitt: Well, I'm not privy to the particulars, but my understanding is that there was a vague, sort of general information that there was somebody in Morocco of Saudi or Yemeni extraction who was involved in a plot and knew sort of vaguely some thing about the guy. And then that information was then taken to the Moroccans and they used that information plus apparently a description of the individual. And basically [they] went through a very large investigation to try to track the guy down and then found him and his compatriots. So it was a big effort on the Moroccans' part.

Host: What does that say, Frank Gaffney about the Moroccan effort at this point in the war on terrorism?

Gaffney: Well, again it's encouraging and I think it's important that we see comparable kinds of efforts and frankly, widespread and sustained efforts for all those who wish to be seen as President Bush put it, as on our side in the war on terrorism [rather than] against us. And it's not being done consistently, particularly in the Arab and Muslim world. It's uneven at best, in some places I think we're definitely seeing, I think, a degree of resistance that as Evan says, suggests perhaps bad faith, a double game or perhaps people who are even genuinely on the other side that we are treating as friends.

Host: Evan Kohlmann, let me ask you, the Saudis who are arrested in Morocco who were plotting to attack ships in the Strait of Gibraltar. They told investigators after they had been arrested that they had indeed been with Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountain area in December and that in fact they had been given directions by Osama bin Laden to disperse, to go out and find anything they could attack and perhaps were given some direction to go to Morocco and pursue ships in the Strait of Gibraltar. What does this arrest tell us about the current state of al-Qaida and its strategy. Is this indicative of what may be happening elsewhere, which is this dispersion of al-Qaida operatives looking for opportunities?

Kohlmann: It certainly is and this is not the only example of that. Last week we saw the bombing of the American Consulate in Pakistan. That again is a lone operation. It's one or two men involved in a very simple operation. A lone wolf operation is what it's called -- where al-Qaida can claim success if there is a successful operation, but if it fails, they don't actually lose anything. They lose one or two lower-level agents, one or two lower-level activists who are not central to the organization. I think we can expect to see a lot more of this. I think al-Qaida has realized at this point that it does not have the ability to directly strike us in the United States. And what it's going to do in the meantime -- until it gets that ability -- is to strike us elsewhere, in foreign countries, places where our security is not as tight. And they will aim to do that with small groups of activists that are hard to track, that are hard to keep up with, that are hard to detect once they're in. This is a Cole attack. This is a U-S-S Cole-style attack. It's exactly reminiscent of what al-Qaida's done before successfully. We're going to see the same tactics over and over again. We're going to see the same easy methods to breach our security. And until we wake up and until we take firm action to take care of this problem, it's going to keep happening over and over again. There's no doubt about it.

Host: Yes, Gary Schmitt.

Schmitt: We did lose some valuable time after we pushed the Taleban and al-Qaida essentially into Pakistan. There wasn't a lot of real hard follow-up and that allowed al-Qaida to get its act together somewhat. And there's a real need to keep them on the run. Any terrorist group that's a little bit on the run is a less dangerous terrorist group. I think they were able to probably consolidate themselves in the spring a little bit more than we would want, particularly over the last few months when tensions between India and Pakistan have been so great. Pakistan has, you know, not been busy worrying about terrorism [but] worrying about a war with India.

Gaffney: But this is just another component of the complex challenge we face. I don't think it's an accident that the pressure was alleviated from the al-Qaida elements who were in Western Pakistan by perhaps friendly elements of the Pakistani intelligence services or others who saw fit to foment the crisis between India and Pakistan justifying the movement of some Pakistani forces and otherwise sort of changing the subject. That's part of what makes this so daunting is there are people in governments, there are people friendly to these organizations that are also part of the problem and have to be ferreted out as well.

Host: Let's talk about the specific people who are at the top of the list right now. Among the al-Qaida operatives we've talked about a few of the people who've been captured but among those who are still on the run are Saif al-Adel, Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, Muhsin Musa Matwalli, Mustafa Muhammad Fadhil, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah and Fahid Muhammad Ally Msalam. Evan Kohlmann, who are these men and is there any sense of how close anyone's coming to finding them?

Kohlmann: In terms of how close they're coming to finding them, they're not coming very close. These men are mostly conspirators from the 1998 bombing of Embassies in East Africa in Kenya and Tanzania. They were engaged in a long-standing plot there. They were well-established, the F-B-I knew about it, the C-I-A knew about it. They had wire taps on these guys. They knew that an operation was coming. They just didn't know when. They waited. They sat back and they waited and they let these guys escape from the country the day before the bombing happened. The very day before, they flew and they flew back to Pakistan mostly. And once they're back in Afghanistan or Pakistan, Western Pakistan, there is simply no way to track them. There are areas along the frontier of Afghanistan and Pakistan which, it's like the Wild West of South Asia. Unless you're from there, unless you're a member of a local tribe there, you are an outsider. Even if you're a Pakistani, you're an outsider. You don't belong there and you will be treated as such. Especially right now, there's a tremendous amount of hostility among these tribes towards the United States and it's very easy for any of these men to hide there. Saif al-Adel is one of bin Laden's senior lieutenants, just like [Mohammed Haydar] Zammar, just like Abu Zubayda, just like so many others that we've seen captured. He right now is most likely helping bin Laden plan future attacks. Until we crack down on the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, we can expect to see more of this. We can expect to see more al-Qaida people that become uncovered fleeing there. Going there because they know it's the only safe place they can hide. Not even Somalia provides as much protection as that region does.

Host: Gary, although the Pakistanis have been effective in helping the U-S capture some people in those areas, perhaps most notably Abu Zubayda from a month or two ago. Is that a promising development?

Schmitt: Well, it's promising to a certain extent, but I think Frank's right. I mean a lot of Pakistani intelligence was involved actually in the early days, in the creation of precisely these kinds of groups.

Gaffney: And the Taleban as well.

Schmitt: And the Taleban as well. So there's a lot of internal tension within the Pakistani security services about how much cooperation they should and will give. And this is something, you know, the president of Pakistan is just going to have to deal with. And we're going to have to force him to deal with it.

Host: Frank Gaffney, how important is the capture though of Abu Zubayda and now, a couple of months after he was captured, the information that has been acquired from him? Whether he's been really trying to give good information or not, obviously the entry into the U-S of Jose Padilla trying to get a dirty bomb plot off the ground tracked back to Abu Zubayda, giving the information that helped capture him. What other kind of information do you think investigators are getting from him? How important is that capture?

Gaffney: I'm not in a position to say. My impression is there may be some things he's saying that he thinks we can't act on. And I think an example of that was this Padilla business. He thought, evidently, he was giving up somebody that couldn't actually be tracked and found and in this case captured. I suspect that there is an awful lot of bum dope or bad information, disinformation that he is also disseminating. And there's been a lot of concern, I think within the community of people who've been doing the interrogations and trying to make sense of them that he's actually either testing our reactions as part of a sort of disciplined effort on his part to see how we would respond if we knew about a threat to sea ports or something else. And/or, that he's just hoping we'll squander immense resources and get people sort of inured to the notion that there's a threat out there by a lot of mischief-making bad information.

Host: Though, Evan Kohlmann, there is an advantage I would think, that would come from, once you've captured Zubayda, once you've captured "the Bear," as he's called, Zubair. He worked closely with Zubayda, you keep them separate, you check the information that you get, one against the other and it helps to sort out the bum information from the real information. What kind of an advantage do you get once you start getting several of these operatives?

Kohlmann: There's an obvious advantage, but that's tempered. We have to temper this because there's a tremendous perception, especially among the public in the United States, to see the arrest of people like Abu Zubayda and think, well, we can just interrogate them now. We can just get all the information we need out of them. And it doesn't work like that. These men are not stupid. These men are not amateurs. The top leaders of bin Laden's organization have been fighting in a war that has lasted since 1986. All of them have seen armed combat. All of them have participated in senior planning of terrorist operations. These are men that worked with Ali Mohammed, the guy that taught American special forces what to expect when they went into Middle East countries. He knows all the Delta Force tactics. He knows all their surveillance and counter-espionage tactics and he's taught all of it to them. They know what they're going to be interrogated about. They know what the interrogation tactics are. There's too much emphasis right now on what Abu Zubayda is saying. Abu Zubayda is running a very deliberate disinformation campaign. He's going to feed some stuff in that's true, some stuff that's false. And he's going to keep us guessing. Is he really being straight with us? Is he not? And it's going to cause so much confusion at the upper levels of the government, that if something else happens, if something else bad happens, Zubayda will not be the source of information for it, definitely not.

Host: We've talked a lot about the various mid to mid-upper level operatives of al-Qaida. Let's work our way to the top. Let me read to you a quote from a New York Times story that ran recently. It reads: "In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden surrounded himself with a phalanx of fanatically loyal security guards, a few of whom have surfaced in other countries in recent months. Some experts say that if Mr. Bin Laden were alive, his retinue of guards would have remained by his side." Gary Schmitt, the New York Times there is speculating that there is evidence to believe that Osama bin Laden himself is dead. Do you agree with that speculation?

Schmitt: Well, there's certainly evidence that he might be dead, just because he hasn't appeared anywhere, but I must say that analysis reminds me that if bin Laden's folks don't operate like the Secret Service, somehow, he's not operating. And I think in fact, it's just the opposite. He would take the security measure of actually dispersing a large retinue to avoid calling attention to himself.

Host: We only have a few seconds left, so just give me a yes or no answer: Evan Kohlmann, do you believe Osama bin Laden is alive or dead?

Kohlmann: I believe he's alive. I certainly believe so and I believe that his security is tight.

Host: Frank Gaffney, alive or dead?

Gaffney: I haven't a clue.

Host: Okay well, I'd like to thank my guests for joining me today: Gary Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy and Evan Kohlmann of the investigative project. For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.