Ayman al-Zawahiri May Be Dead
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: A lot to cover in this hour. We begin with breaking news. Half way around the world a secret air strike launched earlier today by the CIA. The target, as we've been reporting, al Qaeda's number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. This is new video.</s>COOPER (voice-over): Take a look at the destruction. The CIA apparently had reason to believe al-Zawahiri was hiding in a remote village in Pakistan near the Afghan border. Nothing is certain tonight. Not the quality of the intelligence, nor the outcome.</s>DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, Anderson, knowledgeable sources are telling CNN that the air strike was ordered and conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. And that new video shows you the village in Pakistan where it went on.</s>ENSOR (voice-over): This was based on what was called good reporting. That Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's number two might be in one of the buildings hit. Sources say the U.S. doesn't know whether Zawahiri was killed in the attack or not. Obviously, that's the pressing question now. Pakistanis are quoted as saying about 18 died in the attack on the village. The attack came just days after a videotaped message from Zawahiri was broadcast on an Arabic language network, in which he called on U.S. plans to reduce troop levels in Iraq a victory of Islam. Now, he, if he is gone, this is obviously the end of the line for one of the greatest enemies that the United States has currently. That nobody's talking in terms of a spokesman for various different departments around town, but knowledgeable officials say that there is a guarded hope that this great enemy of the United States is finally out of the picture.</s>COOPER (voice-over): Nic Robertson, what do you make of this?</s>NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It certainly seems that this is the area Zawahiri would be in if he's hiding along the Pakistan border, which is where he is believed to be, in a remote village, somewhere hard for the Pakistani army, Pakistani intelligence sources to keep track of him, so there are a lot of indicators that this could be the right type of place.</s>COOPER: We have more from Nic Robertson in a report he filed just a short time ago. Let's listen.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We want to speak to the whole world. Who are we?</s>ROBERTSON (voice-over): By the time Ayman al-Zawahiri burst onto the world scene after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he was already a committed Jihadi. The young doctor came from one of Egypt's leading families. There is an al-Zawahiri Street in Cairo named for his grandfather. al-Zawahiri spent three years in prison after Sadat's assassination. After he got out, he made his way to Pakistan, where he treated those who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. That's where he met Osama bin Laden. And by the mid- 1980s, they had found a common cause. He talked about it a decade later.</s>AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI: We are working with brother bin Laden. We know him since more than 10 years. We have fought with him here in Afghanistan. We are working with him in Sudan and many other places.</s>ROBERTSON: al-Zawahiri was at bin Laden's side when he declared war on America in May 1998. Weeks later, they launched an attack on U.S. embassies in Africa. And after the 9/11 attacks, al-Zawahiri began to come out of the shadows, taunting the U.S., making it clear that he was al Qaeda's number two.</s>ZAWAHIRI: Oh, American people, you must ask yourselves, why all this hate against America?</s>ROBERTSON: Along with bin Laden, al-Zawahiri became a man on the run after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. His wife and daughters were killed in a U.S. air strike aimed at him. al-Zawahiri's frequent messages in recent years on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the London subway attacks showed he was up to date on the news.</s>COOPER: Nic Robertson continues to join us, as does David Ensor and CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen, who is standing by in Washington. His latest book is an oral history titled, "The Osama bin Laden I know." An extraordinary amount of research he put into that. We also want to bring in CNN National Security Advisor and Former CIA Deputy Director John McClaughlin. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. We've heard from David, we've heard from Nic. Mr. McLaughlin, what do you make of this?</s>JOHN MCCLAUGHLIN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: Well, if this is true, it will be very important. Zawahiri was the CEO, if you will, of this movement. He was bin Laden's mentor. He was an experienced terrorist when all of that was just a gleam in bin Laden's eye. He was also the chief scientist of the movement. He comes from a long line of doctors and pharmacologists. He's the guy who would have been in charge, for example, of trying to develop the unconventional weapons, biological weapons and so forth, that bin Laden said it was their duty to develop and deploy against Americans. So it would be very important.</s>COOPER: Sources have said it is a CIA air strike. What would that mean? Predator? Cruise missile? A bomb-drop from a plane?</s>MCCLAUGHLIN: Well, we don't know the instrument that was used, Anderson. What I would tell you is that the CIA has developed extraordinarily precise intelligence on targets like this and uses it with great care. There's a checklist of things that you go through to make sure that you have a high confidence in the intelligence. Now that said, as you indicated in the earlier hour, things can go wrong. We don't know yet whether this was Zawahiri. But the agency has been very effective in these kinds of operations in the past.</s>COOPER: Peter Bergen, what kind of cooperation do Pakistani authorities give to U.S. personnel who may be operating in these regions?</s>PETER BERGEN, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Well, I think there's been a great deal of cooperation because we've seen something like a half a dozen senior members of al Qaeda arrested in Pakistan over the past three years. And often those are operations in which the Pakistani police may arrest somebody, but coming with a base on intelligence that the United States government is providing. So, I think there is pretty close cooperation.</s>BERGEN (voice-over): In this particular region, however, it's an area in which the Pakistani army doesn't have much of a presence. And so the kind of cooperation that might exist -- this region, there's going to be less cooperation, I think, simply because of the nature of the region, the fact that it's in the tribal area where the Pakistani government authority doesn't really extend it in quite the same way it would in the normal parts of Pakistan.</s>COOPER (voice-over): And Nic Robertson, our viewers are watching. Well, right now, we're seeing this map of the region. Obviously, as Peter Bergen just saying, a very isolated region. But in that video we were just watching before, you see a dead cow. You see villagers holding up a piece of shrapnel or some metal object. You see -- it looks like a fair amount of destruction. What does that tell you?</s>ROBERTSON (voice-over): It does look like quite a large amount of destruction. It's difficult to see. You don't really see a crater. You can't tell how big the crater is to get an idea of kind of how much explosives must have been involved, but there's several buildings that seem to have collapsed, several walls down. There's some wooden structures still there, little bits and pieces of roofs. It looks like a sizeable blast. It looks like the sort of blast I've seen when I've come upon places where cruise missiles or large bombs have landed. Perhaps not smaller bombs, but quite large bombs. But it is very, very difficult to say unless you're actually there and you're looking in the crater and get a good analysis.</s>COOPER: And David Ensor, how would U.S. intelligence, Pakistani intelligence be able to confirm whether or not Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead or was even there? I guess it would be only through DNA testing. And did they even have his DNA?</s>ENSOR (on camera): Well, they do have DNA -- or that's easily obtained. After all, two members of his -- three members of his family died earlier. That's a possibility. There's also a possibility in Egypt from his family. (voice-over): Also, they may have in their hands the dental records that would allow them to work that way. Clearly, this is going to be difficult. There were reports in Pakistan that immediately after the explosion people in the village were already starting to bury the bodies, as is traditional under Islam. So, there'll be some digging up to do, as well as some forensics and some analysis. This is going to be difficult, especially way up there.</s>COOPER: John McClaughlin, what do you know or what can you say about that process?</s>MCCLAUGHLIN (on camera): Well, it'll be, as David said, it depends on what's left after a strike like this. Frequently after a strike like this, there frankly isn't much left. And they'll have to rely on indirect techniques, I believe, unless they've been very lucky in terms of what's left. (voice-over): But probably dental records, DNA, things like that. And it could take a short time. It could take a long time.</s>COOPER (on camera): John McClaughlin, also, Barbara Starr had reported from the Pentagon in our last hour that there had been intelligence indicators that these two men, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri may have moved back and forth across the border, relatively recently for short trips.</s>MCCLAUGHLIN (on camera): It's entirely possible. As you know, Anderson, there really isn't a border there. It's just a line drawn through these rugged mountains in 1895 by the British. And it isn't seen as a border on either side by the tribes that live there. So for all practical purposes, it's a tribal extremist area that's very tough for Americans to move through, but which bin Laden and Zawahiri know extremely well from their time in the Afghan Jihad in the 1980's.</s>COOPER: Peter Bergen, in that video of the bomb strike or the explosion strike, whatever the air strike was, we see a lot of people in there. There were those people holding up the objects. You see a lot of people kind of milling around. I mean, wouldn't all those people have known that this most-wanted man was living in their midst if in fact he was there?</s>BERGEN (on camera): I believe so. This is such a remote area and any outsider coming into such an area would immediately stand out.</s>COOPER: So, if he's got a $25 million bounty on his head, why wouldn't one of these guys who, you know, can't be making much money, come forward?</s>BERGEN: I mean, it's quite possible that they wouldn't even understand that this amount of money was on -- and obviously there's been an attempt to advertise the fact, people are putting up bin Laden's faces on matchbooks or advertising Ayman al-Zawahiri as a wanted man. But again, it's a very remote area. By the way, one way we might find out that this guy is really dead is that it's possible that al Qaeda might announce it. I mean, you know, they would be rather happy about this in a sense because they would say this is the wonderful news that Ayman al-Zawahiri has been martyred. Because in their view, you know, if indeed he is dead, he instantaneously attains martyr status. So it's possible, but we don't -- one source of confirmation might be the Jihadis' Web sites themselves over the next week or so.</s>COOPER: It's a multi-headed hydra though, al Qaeda is. You chop off one head, there are many more.</s>ROBERTSON (on camera): And Peter's absolutely right. Martyrdom may be a great way for Ayman al-Zawahiri to go, and it's quite possible as well that he may have recorded some message to be played posthumously, knowing that he's a target, knowing that he could die at any time. And the ideology is out there and that's what drives most of the Jihadis today. This might be a psychological blow if Zawahiri is really dead. But to stop their operations, it's unlikely to stop anything immediate. It's the ideology that's keeping them going.</s>COOPER (voice-over): John McClaughlin, I don't know again what you can say. I don't want to put you on the spot, obviously, given your CIA background, but how does it work, the CIA with the Pentagon or with Special Forces? I mean, how would an operation -- an air strike work?</s>MCCLAUGHLIN: Well, it would have to be very closely coordinated. All of these operations are. Typically, when something like this happens, there's a lot of high level coordination among the major cabinet officers in Washington. (voice-over): And no one in Washington is surprised when something like this happens. I can't go into the technology or the precise way in which it's done, but there's a lot of coordination between the Pentagon and the CIA on an operation like this.</s>COOPER: Well said and hated to put you on the spot. Don't want you to say anything that would get you in trouble or anyone else. Appreciate you joining us, John McClaughlin, and also Peter Bergen, Nic Robertson and David Ensor. Gentlemen, thank you all. We'll continue to follow this story throughout the hour and of course there's now daylight in Pakistan. We'll continue to see if there have been any developments there. Here are some of the other stories, though, that we are following at this hour. In Iraq, two pilots were killed today when their helicopter went down in the city of Mosul, just outside of forward operating base Courage. A U.S. commander said there are indicators that the chopper was brought down by enemy fire. Outside Orlando, Florida, a middle school student was shot and seriously wounded by a SWAT team member, after aiming what turned out to be a pellet gun that looked very, very real at the police officer. 15-year old Christopher David Penley, who may have been suicidal, is now in the hospital on life support. Michael Skakel's appeal has been denied. Skakel is the Kennedy family nephew, you will remember, who was convicted back in 2002 of killing his neighbor, Martha Moxley, almost 30 years earlier. Well, today Skakel heard that conviction was unanimously upheld by the Connecticut Supreme Court. The appeal argued, among other things, that the statute of limitations had expired by the time charges were brought against him. Skakel is serving a sentence of 20 years to life. In Atlanta, Baby Nor, the 3-month-old Iraqi girl brought to the U.S. for life-saving medical treatment after being discovered by U.S. soldiers in Baghdad, was released from the hospital today. Doctors say her prognosis is excellent, though Nor, who had surgery for a spinal birth defect, will probably have to use a wheelchair. So, who do you think should be the first female president? First Lady Laura Bush has her own favorite. She revealed the name to CNN during a special one-on-one interview. That is just ahead. Plus, a community mourns the death of its miners. We haven't forgotten he people who are still grieving over the Sago Mine tragedy. Find out how they lone survivor is doing and how the community is doing when 360 continues.