Inside the Threat: John Miller on Bin Laden, ISIS, and the Iran Crisis

Today on the Fairfax Files, we're joined by one of the most experienced voices in American law enforcement and intelligence, someone I'm proud to call a friend for a very, very long time. For decades, John has held senior positions in the FBI as Assistant Director, Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, Deputy Commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department, and as a senior level official at the National Intelligence Directorate working on counterterrorism, intelligence and major investigations. He's an award winning journalist who is now CNN's leading crime and law enforcement analyst, and he brings unmatched insight into how threats are evolving in today's world and the forces working to stop them, often behind the scenes. He is known for his fearless reporting on organized crime here in the United States with figures like John Gotti, and of course his groundbreaking interview with Osama bin Laden three years before the 9/11 attacks, in a cave in Afghanistan. John, it's such a pleasure to have you here today.

Well, thanks, Mike. I can't think of anybody else from the world of investigations or intelligence that I've known longer than you, so I'm just nervous about what you remember.

Well, you and I go back. It seems like generations. When we first met you were a crime reporter at Metro Media News, and if my memory serves me correctly, you were following in your dad's footsteps, who happened to also be a very well known crime reporter.

Yeah. It was carrying forth the family tradition. Although, as you laid out, I made some twists and turns along that career path, which either means I'm vastly experienced, or, as you pretty much established for the audience, I cannot seem to hold a job. You could take it either way.

Well, it's interesting you say that. Going from a crime reporter at Metro Media to ABC, CBS, NBC, co-hosting 20/20 with Barbara Walters, you were at the peak of your career and then you decided to do something pretty unusual. You decided you wanted to be a cop.

This was a repeated sequence. It seemed like every time I got to whatever the top of the game was in my media life, whether it was the number one station in New York at NBC, I went to the NYPD; when I was the anchorman of 20/20 I quit and went to the LAPD; when I was at CBS 60 Minutes, on my fourth episode as a correspondent for CBS This Morning and other shows, I quit and went back to the NYPD. It's not a career path in the traditional sense, but my technique, or habit, whatever it is, has always been: wherever you are, you've got to be scanning the horizon. Professionally, it's better to be a moving target in many ways. But it was really not about advancing. It was about, what is the next coolest thing? What is the next biggest challenge? What is the next thing that you would think being there would be exciting and interesting and challenging? And every time one of those emerged I kind of thought, take it. Because, and I think you know this better than most people, you don't want to look back at the end of your story and say, I wish I would have made that turn or taken that opportunity. Most normal, rational people look at that and say, that's a risk. I'm going in the right direction right now, I should keep going in that direction, I should be moving onward and upward. I was always like, can't resist.

Well, you're anything but traditional or rational, and one of the things I most admire about you is that when you went to the Los Angeles Police Department as Deputy Commissioner, you decided before you accepted the job that you wanted to go through the police academy.

ISIS was much more direct action, much faster than bin Laden and Zawahiri's kind of long term plan, which could have spanned a thousand years. Theirs was slow and steady. ISIS was fast and violent. And then you have Iran. Those two are Sunni groups; Iran is basically a Shia country that controls Hezbollah, a terrorist organization based in Lebanon. Interestingly, the attacks we've had on U.S. soil, except for the one in Michigan, have been largely ISIS driven. But ISIS is at war with Iran. ISIS has conducted terrorist attacks in Iran, against Iran. That was the one thing we had in common with Iran, that ISIS was a common enemy of both countries. So why is ISIS attacking the United States as the United States is attacking Iran? The answer is age old: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. What they see is not, we're both aligned against Iran. What they see is, there's crisis, and out of crisis comes opportunity. We can wrangle, through our propaganda, through our computer networks, through our chat rooms and carefully curated films, those who will rise up on their own valor. You'll be a hero, belonging, you'll be part of something, empowerment, you'll do something that has impact. ISIS relies on that as their push to find that lone wolf and activate them with that promise. ISIS has no motive to sort through, well we're against Iran but we're also against the United States. They're just saying, you're seeing turmoil and you must react.

So there are rumors, and these are fairly recent rumors, that Saif al-Adel, a senior member of al-Qaeda, has been in hiding, or at least been accommodated, in Iran for years now. Do you have any insight on that?

Sure. Saif al-Adel is a key member of al-Qaeda, and yet he is a reluctant leader. Bin Laden was the leader until he was killed. Zawahiri picked up the mantle from bin Laden as his deputy until he was killed. So many al-Qaeda potential leaders had been killed in various U.S. strikes, on various battlefields and in various hideouts, that Saif al-Adel had been part of a core group of al-Qaeda people who had escaped to Iran. Now al-Qaeda and Iran are not on the same page, again, al-Qaeda as a Sunni group, Iran as a Shia run religious government. But the same mantra came to bear: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Did Iran want to be housing the al-Qaeda leaders who were in on the planning and the concept of 9/11? Not in a public way. On the other hand, they had them under sometimes house arrest, sometimes not. They opened and closed that valve depending on what their interests were, particularly against the United States. The idea, if you're Iran, is on a normal day I'd want nothing to do with al-Qaeda because they're not our friends. But if you're Iran during those particular periods of time, you're saying, al-Qaeda is against the United States, they're a capable terrorist network, they're capable of attacking and inflicting damage and death, and that's within our interest if it's against the United States or other enemies. So we will house them, we will monitor them, we will control them, but we will also let them do what they do. They provided this kind of odd sanctuary that kept them out of the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where there were missile strikes targeting them, into basically a safe haven where they let them operate. That included bin Laden's family members, Saif al-Adel, other leaders. A moment about Saif al-Adel: former Egyptian military officer, trained in intelligence, trained in tactics, consummate planner of operations and terrorist attacks. He was the guy who ran al-Qaeda's intelligence school. When people joined al-Qaeda, they went into one of three places. If you scored high on the list, you went into the intelligence school with Saif al-Adel as your trainer. If you scored medium on the list, you would become one of the bomb makers and technicians. And if you scored at the bottom of the list, they put you in the infantry, infantry to go fight the Americans in the field.

I don't know where on that list the actual vest-wearing suicide bomber falls.

So the vest-wearing suicide bombers fell into that bottom category. If you want to go out in the field and fight you can achieve martyrdom, or, if you'd like to achieve martyrdom on a determined schedule, you can do the ultimate martyrdom by wearing the suicide vest, and they would indoctrinate them. But those who went through Saif al-Adel's intelligence school, they learned surveillance. They learned how to conduct surveillance, assess targets, determine vulnerabilities, weak spots. They learned counter surveillance, how to tell while you're doing that, you're being watched or followed. It was very sophisticated. For al-Qaeda's purposes, having someone in the sanctuary of Iran, which is a bit chaotic right now, who had that level of sophistication, when they finally ran out of leaders, he was tapped to say, you are it. So one of the questions is, can you run al-Qaeda from semi house arrest in Iran? And the answer seems to have been yes.

So look, you mentioned Afghanistan. I want to roll the clock back. You were at ABC News, I think it was 1998, and you obviously took a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in a cave with Osama bin Laden. How did that come about?

I was brand new at ABC News and I was trying to figure out, what's the untapped story worth? I had worked for years on characters like John Gotti. You'll remember, who's more scary, John Gotti, Osama bin Laden, or Barbara Walters? I'll tell you, out of the three of them, I knew how to deal with John Gotti, and I knew a lot about Osama bin Laden and how his network worked, but with Barbara Walters, she was a legend who was intimidating, and I actually was very nervous around her, even though she took very good care of me. But back to that cave, back to bin Laden. When I started talking to people about him, you could have stopped 100 people on any street in America and said, who is Osama bin Laden? And 100 of them would have said, I don't know, I've never heard of him. But in the intelligence world his name kept popping up. Was he an operational commander? Was he running an army, or was he a rich Saudi dilettante who was financing operations and hiding out in Afghanistan? People kept saying, no, he's more than that. He's got a crew, he's got this growing army, he's living in these caves, he operates these bases, and he's been behind the financing of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 before 9/11, assassinations, attempted attacks around the world, most of them have failed. But, as Sandy Berger, the then National Security Advisor in the Clinton administration, described him, he was the single most serious non-state threat to the United States.

Let me follow up on that, because when you interviewed him, I remember he declared war on Americans at that point. Did you tell him you were Canadian in that interview?

He was speaking in Arabic, and the translator was translating my questions, but he wasn't translating bin Laden's answers back. In fact, bin Laden kept looking at the translator, so I kept trying to make eye contact with him and nod as if I understood, to keep him focused on the camera that was behind me. But at the end, when I went to our fixer who was in the back of the room, and I said, could you hear it? What did he say? Is there a story there? Because he gave these long answers. He said, we have a very big story. We need to get the tapes and get out. And I said, well, what did he say? He said, he declared war on the United States. He said this will be bigger than our war with the Russians in Afghanistan that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the wall. Superpowers don't believe this until it's too late. You will only understand this, America, when you bring the bodies back in the boxes, in coffins, in your shameful defeat, and then you will leave our lands.

But he also justified, or tried to justify, the killing of civilians.

Oh, he was clear about that. He cited a fatwa, a religious decree from the religious committee of al-Qaeda. He said this is not just against those in the military uniform, civilians are targets of this also, which basically meant he was telling us, I'm about to unleash a series of terrorist attacks, because that asymmetric war was the only kind of war somebody like Osama bin Laden could commit to. He wasn't going to take al-Qaeda and invade America.

Did the American government take him seriously after that? I want to ask, because three months later we had the bombings at the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, hundreds of people died. That had to be underway in terms of the planning while you were sitting there talking to him.

It absolutely was. And I think it had something to do with the interview. Other people had tried to interview bin Laden. Peter Bergen had done a remarkable interview with him a couple of years before. But the idea that they said yes, and that they facilitated basically getting us there to do that interview, under immense secrecy and security, we never knew where we were going or how we were getting there, they controlled that process in a way that didn't really allow us to communicate, said to me, they have a message to get out. And that was the message. He was declaring war. And of course, the embassy bombings that you referenced in Kenya and Tanzania, they were ready to go. I feel bin Laden wanted to do the interview then, so that when al-Qaeda pulled off these two bombings, massive truck bombs that destroyed both embassies and killed hundreds, he didn't want a debate over who was behind it, or some competition for who would get credit for it. He was trying to put his stamp on it by saying, this is our decree, we're declaring war, and you will see the results of that war soon.

The fact that he said in that cave, I'm going to kill American civilians and otherwise, and then three months later demonstrated it, did we learn a lesson? I say that, John, because 9/11 proved to us that we had lapses in our communications between our intelligence and law enforcement organizations. I hope we're doing a better job at that now. What do you think?

We're doing a much better job of it now. If you go back through the factual autopsy of what we knew and when we knew it: bin Laden declared war, the CIA was very much engaged. There was a cell in Mombasa that they did a raid on, and they found a letter that said, we're in touch with the engineers, meaning the bomb makers, and the project is nearly ready. It was coded, but not that well coded. A trained person couldn't look at it and say, there's an imminent plot here. And yet the embassies were blown up, people were killed. Then a couple of years later in Yemen, the USS Cole attack, between the NSA and the CIA they had intercepts of basically al-Qaeda's telephone switchboard in Yemen, where one individual connected calls between different planners and messages, and those signals were missed. The Cole went in there to refuel, basically as a sitting duck. And then you see 9/11. The NSA had this piece, the CIA had this piece, the FBI had this piece, and because of the amount of secrecy and the walls that had been built up between places, nobody put all of those dots on the table to say, let's see if we can connect them. Connecting the dots became one of those sayings in the post 9/11 period. But 9/11 was about the worst lesson you could learn that you had to fix the information sharing between the agencies.

I remember I was here in Manhattan at 9/11 and I was called to NBC to be a talking head, and I was asked the question, how could these terrorists learn how to fly an airplane? And my answer at that time was, well, anyone can take lessons here, they don't do any background checks. And it turns out that some of them actually were instructed on flight lessons here in the United States. But now we have something called drones. How do you protect the country from, let's say, an attack by Iran of a ship off the coast of the United States, or even through a sleeper cell domestically here, from a $35 piece of military equipment that has this destructive force?

It's a tremendous challenge, and we're learning very quickly. We thought we understood drones and that threat. But then the laws of the United States said, well, if you're the NYPD and you're running the Thanksgiving Day Parade security piece, or Times Square New Year's Eve, or the New York Marathon, or Saint Patrick's, pick your mega event in New York, because there's one every weekend starting with New Year's Eve and going through the year, the FAA was saying, you can't shoot down a drone, because we control the skies and you're not authorized to interfere with aircraft. Then Homeland Security said, well, you can control a drone. Then they said, no, you can't. Then we said, well, you can detect a drone. And they said, no, you can't, it violates, I'm not making this up, it violates the wiretap statute, because you're intercepting a signal between a transmitter and a receiver. That's a Department of Justice memorandum. I sat there in the New York City Police Department and said, what does it take? Does it take a drone attack, some drone with a hand grenade or an IED on it, to fly over a massive crowd, and somebody presses that button and blows up? Does it take a drone that has a machine gun attached to it with a radio transmitter? What will it take for this to happen? Only recently, and I mean very recently, within the last couple of months, have there been executive orders that say police can now, at major events under certain conditions, take over control of a drone if it is determined to be a threat. That took ten years. Where did we learn the hardest lessons that brought that sense of urgency? In Ukraine. The Ukrainians were using drones, the Russians were using drones, the Iranians were supplying drones, and they were all weaponized. Once you saw Ukrainian soldiers in the field, not with their AR-15 or their AK-47 but carrying shotguns, you ask, who fights a war with shotguns? And they said, we're not fighting people anymore, we're fighting flying robots. The shotguns are to shoot them out of the sky because the other weapons don't work. Then you know that drones have redefined what war is going to look like in the future. And what we're seeing right now in Iran is just another signal of that.

Do you see an exit strategy? Is there a way to get out of the mess that we're in in Iran right now? Look, we have paratroopers on the way, we have a Marine expeditionary force already deployed, we don't know what they might be used for. How does this end? Any idea?

Well, a couple of ways. Number one, we are in a period of push pull confusion where you have to wonder, is there some brilliant master strategy behind this that we're just not sophisticated enough to understand? Because I know Iran has been planning for this. I know this from my intelligence background for 30 years on some level. The United States seems to have been planning this since a couple of Fridays ago. That has become apparent by some of the fits and starts we've seen. Think about it. First we say we're going to bomb all of this stuff, and then the people can take to the streets and take over the government. Then we say, that's not going to quite work now, but we're going to cripple them in terms of defenses and economy. Then they attack the rest of their neighbors in the Middle East, which causes oil prices to surge. Then they close the Straits of Hormuz. Then we react by saying, all right, well, we can't have gas prices go up, so there's 140 million gallons of Iranian oil at sea, we're going to lift the sanctions on those and let that get sold for our own economic good. So now theoretically that money goes to Iran, so we are now financing the enemy. We have sought to allow them to build more missiles and more drones to use against us. Then we say, but there's the Russian oil, so we're going to give them a special license to get that sold, which means Putin, who is about broke because of this ongoing war against Ukraine, is now getting an infusion of money, because we're giving less to Ukraine, because we're focusing our munitions and resources on Iran, but now we're giving more to Russia, because we're saying, sell that oil, take that cash, it'll even things out economically for us. In other words, it may be a really brilliant strategy. The flip side is, it looks like there may be no coherent plan at all. But your question was about exit strategy. One exit strategy is to leave, and the President has hinted that, I'll know when I have the feeling that it's time to go, that we can pick up and go. Does that mean we won? We lost? Let's think about it in practical terms, take the politics and the emotion out of it. Iran is a danger to Israel, to the United States. We can talk about all the Iranian operations that unfolded on U.S. soil that we were able to shut down, that were tremendous threats, to Europe, to our allies. So can you get a tiger to change its stripes? Probably not. Can you even negotiate with Iran? Is there a way to do that? Well, sure there is. But you have to understand your adversary. If you can't get a tiger to change its stripes, if you make it toothless, then it may be an annoyance, but it's much less of a threat. The idea that we have destroyed nuclear facilities, that we've made them difficult to get to, that we've interrupted Iran's enrichment programs for uranium, that we have put a much larger distance than we had even in the first instance of attacking those sites between them and a nuclear capability, that's one thing that makes the world safer. The idea that we have destroyed many of their missile capabilities, many of their missile stockpiles, many of their missile launchers, that's a second thing that makes the region a safer place. The idea that we have set back an ICBM program that would allow them, if they ever developed a nuclear warhead, to send missiles intercontinental, across Europe and even the United States, that makes the world a safer place. So you wouldn't pick up and leave and say, well, that was a waste of time. But you wouldn't have achieved a specific goal, whether it was regime change or bringing freedom to the Iranian people. So it's not all for nothing. The question is, do we have a coherent strategy, and if so, who knows it?

John, thank you for your time today. It's been an incredibly informative conversation, and I hope we'll have you back one day.

Inside the Threat: John Miller on Bin Laden, ISIS, and the Iran Crisis

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