Bin Laden expert reflects on elusive terrorism

Terrorism expert Peter Bergen

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. President Bush has said the network allegedly headed by suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden is to terrorism what the Mafia is to crime. The network of organizations called al Qaeda is believed to have cells all over the globe. Former CNN producer Peter Bergen, now working on a book about bin Laden and al Qaeda, spoke Friday with CNN anchor Miles O'Brien.

O'BRIEN: Peter, is that a good analogy? The Mafia?

BERGEN: As a larger point, I think it's a good analogy, I think in the sense that al Qaeda is the source of multiple terrorist attacks against the United States.

But let me tell you where the analogy may fall down a tiny bit. In a Mafia crime family, it's kind of a reasonably well-ordered institution, in the sense that the capo, or the don of the family, orders let's say a hit, and then it's executed by the faithful foot soldiers.

I think the bin Laden organization may act like that sometimes. But it also acts in a much more vague and amorphous way, in the sense that bin Laden sets out general policies, which are then relayed down a chain of command and years later, implemented for instance in the U.S. Embassy bombing attack in Africa.

That attack was on the drawing board for five years. Some of the people involved in that attack had never actually met bin Laden himself. So there's some truth to analogy, but I think it kind of sometimes sort of falls down on specifics, Miles.

O'BRIEN: Here are some of the attacks linked to either al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden in general. It begins in 1992 in the port of Aden in Yemen. And in that case, a bomb blew up in a hotel. The goal was to injure or kill U.S. servicemen in that hotel. One tourist was killed.

In 1993, the first attack on the World Trade Center, Osama bin Laden was an unindicted co-conspirator. There were loose links to that group. First of all, would you put that in the category of an al Qaeda attack, or was that simply people who might have been inspired by bin Laden's rhetoric?

BERGEN: I think two things, Miles, as you mentioned, bin Laden was an unindicted co-conspirator in that attack. But there are about 100-plus people who are unindicted co-conspirators. But as a result of his name popping up in that investigation, FBI and CIA started paying more attention to bin Laden.

But if we go back and look at that attack, you see ... members of al Qaeda itself were U.S. citizens, were on the periphery of that attack. In my view, the World Trade Center attack in 1993 was a sort of an al Qaeda-affiliated bombing attack. I think would be very hard to prove that bin Laden had a direct role in it.

But nonetheless, people operating on the peripheries and the radical Egyptian cleric, who is now in prison in America for his role in New York terror plots, is the spiritual guide of a lot of members of al Qaeda. So you're going to see a lot of connections.

O'BRIEN: Mogadishu, Somalia. Now this is an interesting one. One wouldn't necessarily link this to terrorism per se. U.S. troops were in there to help in famine relief. The U.S. Blackhawk helicopter was shot down by rocket-propelled grenades. The link here to Osama bin Laden and his organization is that they were helping out the warlords there by teaching them how to do just that. Is that the allegation?

BERGEN: This is one of the very few areas where the U.S. government and bin Laden are sort of in agreement. I mean, both the U.S. government and bin Laden say his followers had some role in the attack., the fog of battle being such that it is. It probably never is going to be very clear what exact role bin Laden's followers had in the actual killing of those 18 American servicemen.

But nonetheless, his organization certainly sent people to Somalia to train Somalians who may have been involved in killing those American soldiers, Miles.

O'BRIEN: In Saudi Arabia, where Osama bin Laden is from, there was an attack in 1995, a car bomb detonated. Five service personnel, U.S. servicemen, were killed in that attack. And in 1998 a synchronized attack on two U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. In those cases, 224 people were killed. It seems as if, looking at these attacks, that things get more complicated, more intricate and more deadly as time goes on.

BERGEN: Miles, I think you're right. It's sort of an exponential graph, starting with that first example in 1992 in Yemen with an unsuccessful attack and culminating the with the dual embassy bombing attacks in Africa, and then two years later, with the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. And so it seems that these attacks have gotten more sophisticated, more complex, and more deadly with every passing year.

O'BRIEN: Yemen is known to harbor terrorism in general. This is a country that, in President Bush's mind, might be against us, if you will, the way he put it in his speech to Congress on Thursday night: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."

This attack happened in October. There was some hope on the part of some of the bin Laden followers to try to stage a Y2K spectacle, where a U.S. warship would have been sunk. That was thwarted. How many attacks do you know of that have been thwarted by authorities or perhaps the ineptitude of people who were following al Qaeda?

BERGEN: Well, the millennium plot, as you referred to, was supposed to be a terrorist spectacular, as you will, that would span the globe from Los Angeles airport to Jordan to that failed attack on U.S. warship in Yemen. That was the most spectacular.

But I mean, there have been several cells that have been taken down. Recently, in fact, in June, in New Delhi, some people were arrested who were planning to blow up the very busy visa section of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India. So there have been a lot of plots that have been foiled because of the incompetence of the plotters or because of good police work. Obviously, many also have not failed, unfortunately.