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Investigation into Terror Attacks on "Charlie Hebdo" Reveals Intelligence Failures; Growing Unrest in Yemen; FAA Safety Inspector Arrested for Flying With Gun

Aired January 19, 2015 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

We begin this hour with the latest in the fight on terror. A short time ago, we learned that the Pentagon has prepared to evacuate the U.S. embassy in Yemen if the situation there deteriorates to a dangerous degree. Yemen is home to the al Qaeda branch that claims responsibility for the "Charlie Hebdo" office massacre.

Also new this morning, French investigators have uncovered a number of intelligence failures on the brothers who carried out the killings. The missteps all before the attack include a lack of communication among the intel agencies and surveillance failures.

And French police are now on the hunt for two possible accomplices of the Amedi Coulibaly, the terrorist at the kosher supermarket. A source telling CNN their DNA was found on a magazine clip that belonged to the gunman.

But right now let's head to France where the investigation into the Kouachi brothers is revealing more and more missteps. CNN's senior international correspondent Jim Bitterman joins me from Paris with more.

Hi, Jim.

JIM BITTERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi there, Carol. In fact, this is just coming out this morning, and a lot of it sounds very similar to what we heard in the United States after 9/11. Basically about failure of intelligence agencies to communicate with each other. And to understand what happened here, you have to understand that in fact there's an exterior intelligence agency, interior intelligence agency, and there's also an intelligence agency charged with surveillance, and the communication between those three and among those three was apparently not very good.

There were a lot of things that happened. For example, the surveillance part of that equation, they were not conducting surveillance on the Kouachi brothers' computers. They were watching their telephones, and they did not, for instance, pass along something that might have been very vital, which was an alert between the surveillance agency and the domestic intelligence agency in February of 2014 until June of 2014, and at that point they had dropped off their radars. The two brothers dropped off the radars of the internal intelligence agency. So it was a lot of communications errors, which may have contributed to the fact that they missed the planning for the "Charlie Hebdo" attack.

I think we're going to hear a lot more about this in coming days, because one of the things that politicians on both sides of the aisle here are talking about is some kind of an investigation into exactly what did go wrong and why there wasn't more advanced intelligence, Carol.

COSTELLO: All right, Jim Bittermann, reporting live from Paris this morning, thank you.

With a growing number of raids and terror-related arrests across Europe, foreign ministers from several European nations are scrambling to find a way to keep more attacks from happening. They are tackling the issue at a meeting today in Brussels, Belgium. They say one way to do this is by working with Muslim countries.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FEDERICA MOGHERINI, EU HIGH REP. FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS: We start with obviously a discussion on how to counter terrorism not only in Europe but also in other parts of the world, being it the Mediterranean, Africa. I'm just having now before we start a meeting with the secretary-general of the Arab League, as the threat is not only the one we faced in Paris but also spreading in many other parts of the world, starting from Muslim countries, and we need to strengthen our way of cooperating together. First of all with other countries and then internally.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Amnesty International calls Islamophobia one of Europe's biggest challenges, leaving the Muslim population there more vulnerable to radicalization.

After heavy clashes and growing unrest in Yemen, the country's interior minister says rebels and the government have just agreed to a cease-fire. New video coming in from clashes outside of the presidential palace. The U.S. is particularly interested in what's happening in Yemen and is closely monitoring the situation there because Yemen is home to what U.S. officials consider the most dangerous branch of al Qaeda. It's the same branch that has claimed responsibility for the "Charlie Hebdo" attack. CNN's Barbara Starr live at the Pentagon with more. Good morning, Barbara.

BARBARA STARR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. Cease-fire or not, whether it lasts or not, the situation in Yemen very much on the radar of U.S. officials, especially due to their concerns about the safety of the U.S. embassy there and U.S. diplomatic personnel. In fact, a U.S. Navy warship, the USS Iwo Jima, remains offshore. That would be the platform from which helicopters would go to the embassy if there was a request by the State Department for the military to evacuate it. We must be very clear, there is no such request at the moment. But the military, always a planning organization, has plenty of forces on standby we're told, if the situation were to deteriorate to that point.

Yemen is a big concern right now as these Houthi Shia rebels have launched these attacks across the capital for the last 12 to 14 hours. The concern really still remains the same. Can the government of Yemen hold? Can it maintain even its fragile control over the country? Is this a country that's about to absolutely disintegrate into sectarian warfare? And of course the problem is that leaves the door wide open for that al Qaeda organization in Yemen to grow even stronger with no government if that were to happen and no central control if that were to happen. Carol?

COSTELLO: All right. Barbara Starr reporting live from the Pentagon.

I want to continue our discussion right now. The Pentagon's readiness for a possible evacuation of the U.S. embassy there. Lieutenant Colonel James Reese is a former officer with the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force. He now serves as a CNN global affairs analyst. Welcome.

LT. COL. JAMES REESE, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Good morning, Carol.

COSTELLO: So I guess we have a warship off the coast ready just in case the embassy is evacuated.

REESE: We do.

COSTELLO: So that's a plus.

REESE: Absolutely. Yes. It's what we call power projection. The USS Iwo Jima has all these assets. It has Marines. They are trained to do what we call noncombatant evacuations if need be, if the ambassador -- and they don't want to do this. They want to hold out until the last possible minute. If the ambassador says we need to evacuate, we can project power and get everybody out safely.

COSTELLO: Why do they want to wait until the last possible moment and why leave the decision to diplomats?

REESE: Well, again, we want to be able to do diplomatic and political aspects with the country. We want to hold off. What the military though in coordination with the State Department wants to be able to do is tell the State Department, please don't put us in a position where we have to do a forced entry, where we have to fight our way in and fight our way out. It's an art to decide when we go.

COSTELLO: It's a scary art. Let's talk about Yemen itself, and if the government there totally disintegrates, and what that means to our fight against ISIS and al Qaeda.

REESE: Sure. You know, the whole peninsula you have to keep (inaudible) is predominantly Sunni, OK, especially with the Saudi influence right above Yemen. The Houthis are now Shia based, which again it's a huge clash between the Sunnis and Shias in the Islamic world. If that collapses, what we now have is another safe haven that allows al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to have a place where people can train, go back to Europe. COSTELLO: So another Syria?

REESE: Another Syria. Another Somalia. Another Libya. It's a safe haven that are starting to pop up in areas that we have just collapsing the entire governments.

COSTELLO: If that happens, how might the United States react?

REESE: Well, we'll have to go in there and take a look. Again, if we have to pull our embassy out, that really puts us in a bad position to have an idea of what's going on, on the ground. Only way we could react is to give the government, the Sunni government of Yemen, support, to push back these rebels, and now again we're in another conundrum in the Middle East.

COSTELLO: Colonel Reese, thanks so much, we appreciate it.

CNN will take an in-depth look at the battle against terrorism tonight with two CNN special reports. At 9:00 p.m., Jake Tapper goes "Inside the Paris Attacks," and at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, "New Day's" Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota anchor "The War Within Islam," taking a look at what can be done to eradicate violent extremism.

Still to come in the "Newsroom," they are the ones who protect us when we fly, but this morning the FAA is cracking down on its own security. We'll talk about that next.

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COSTELLO: We want to take you back out to Yemen right now, because CNN has a correspondent there, Nick Paton Walsh, he is in San'a, the capital, where that presidential palace is that has come under siege by rebels. Apparently there is a cease-fire in place right now. Is that holding, Nick?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Tough to tell. The problem with cease-fires is if one side does not think the other is ceasing fire, things can go very bad and very wrong very quickly.

About ten minutes before you joined me, we heard sustained exchanges of automatic gunfire right behind me, kind of in the distance. The mist is coming over the city. That could be problematic. We have to wait and see if it endures through the night. Night very complicated because often militias like these are roaming the streets and don't know who is shooting at who. So it could still fall apart. But it's been a very messy day, Carol, frankly. The presidential administration under sustained artillery dueling (ph). We've seen all around residential buildings nearby hit. It already started with presidential staff trying to make themselves they say feel more secure by cutting off some of the roads around their key buildings. The Houthi rebels didn't like that. Then the fighting started. Both sides blames the other side for that.

Right now we are seeing a strange calm. I should point out, I was just at the U.S. embassy, and for those with families working there, it's a calm situation, they don't really want to close their consulate section, there is no sign of them imminently going anywhere at all. But it's a tense city, certainly, because that political deal, which is supposed to come after the cease-fire, that really hasn't been hammered out yet, and the Houthis here have been accused of an attempted coup, frankly, of trying to take the building, the presidential administration that most cities say is effectively the key to power in the country.

Do they want power? Do they want to just try and get a bigger slice of the cake? Nobody knows, and that is what those closed door negotiations that are going on are all about, and there's a third problem in this. That's really, we don't know what the ex-president, who has a lot of armed men at his behest too, we don't quite know what he wants. So still a lot hanging in the balance here, and that sound of gunfire I'm sure will come back again tonight as it gets darker here, Carol.

COSTELLO: I want to go back for a bit to the U.S. embassy. You said you visited it. It's under heavy guard. Right? U.S. Marines are guarding it. You said it's relatively calm. How close is the U.S. embassy to the presidential palace?

WALSH: Quite a long way away. We're not far from some of the embassies here. It's perfectly calm in that area, and there's a large hill effectively as the eye sees between that and the area where much of the fighting has happened. But still, that embassy has always had substantial security procedures, and it's a very well protected area. I saw the U.S. Marines myself around there. It seems quite safe at this stage. There's no sense of imminent departure of anybody. In fact, they say their numbers aren't diminished, and the consulate section is still open. So while everyone of course is on edge, taking every precaution they can, we're not looking at a situation here where necessarily the USS Iwo Jima will be called into action imminently.

COSTELLO: Nick Paton Walsh reporting live from Yemen this morning. Thank you.

An FAA safety inspector making an unsafe move, carrying a gun onboard a plane in his carry-on bag. The inspector was arrested last week for flying from Atlanta to La Guardia airport with a gun in his carryon bag. Authorities say the federal employee used his badge to bypass TSA screening. You might recall last month, two men were charged with smuggling more than 100 firearms on the same route. One of the men also an airport employee, who skipped security checkpoints. Aviation and government regulation correspondent Rene Marsh is following the story and is live in Washington. Good morning.

RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. Flat out, this should not happen. The TSA and the FAA are now investigating this case. The federal employee was traveling with a .22 caliber gun in his carry-on. He did not have the same security clearance privilege in New York, and that's where TSA agents discovered the gun.

Now, Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport is the world's busiest, and it has been under the microscope for its security procedures, of course this follows the recent incident just last month where a baggage handler was accused of using his security clearance to bypass security checkpoints to smuggle guns onto multiple New York bound commercial aircraft. Now, the FAA has suspended this practice of allowing safety inspectors to bypass security checkpoints while it looks into this most recent incident. TSA also saying that they are taking this breach very seriously. They say that they are considering or will put into place new procedures, which could include additional employee screening.

COSTELLO: So why should anyone be given a clearance?

MARSH: Well, the argument is resources, really. There are so many employees, airport employees, FAA investigators like this one, who go in and out of the airport, and TSA just does not have the manpower to screen every individual who has business at the airport. So they prioritize. And many of these employees do get that clearance. However, the FAA making the move at least temporarily while this is investigated to stop that program that allows their own employees to circumvent TSA checkpoints until they figure out why this happened and how this happened.

COSTELLO: Rene Marsh reporting live from Washington. Thank you.

Checking some other top stories for you at 16 minutes past the hour. Reuters reporting that Indonesian investigators looking into the crash of AirAsia flight 8501 say there are no signs it was a terrorist act. After listening to the flight voice recorder, officials say the pilots were busy handling the plane before the crash. They also say there were no sounds of explosions. As you know, all 162 people died.

Her movie "Selma" is drawing crowds at the box office, but yesterday Oprah Winfrey and stars from the movie marched with hundreds of people in Selma, Alabama, to honor the late reverend -- to honor the late Dr. King, Jr. The march from city hall continued to the city's Edmund Pettus bridge. In 1965, civil rights protesters were beaten and tear gassed as they tried to cross the bridge on a march to Montgomery.

Still to come in the "Newsroom," a rare move by ISIS. What may have influenced the terrorist group to release a group of religious minorities.

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COSTELLO: ISIS has done something completely unexpected in Iraq. It's actually freed about 250 members of the Yazidi religious sect. CNN's Ivan Watson tells us most of those released were children and elderly people.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

IVAN WATSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The Iraqi Kurdish government and Kurdish activists are trying to take care of an enormous number of prisoners from the Yazidi religious minority, who were released without really any explanation by ISIS militants on Saturday, after they had been held for months in ISIS captivity. These members of the Yazidi religious minority described by one activist I talked to as almost entirely elderly men and women, many of them filthy and hungry and sick after months in captivity. Some of them mentally and/or physically disabled. We don't know why they were released. They were dumped by an ISIS frontline and sent walking, those who could, towards Kurdish peshmerga positions near the northern Kurdish held city of Kirkuk.

Their release underscores a much bigger problem. The fact that when ISIS launched its military offensive last summer in northern Iraq, they took thousands of members of the Kurdish religious minority hostage. Many of them girls and women, who have basically, according to some survivors that I talked to, been sold into slavery. Modern- day slavery, where they have been used in many cases as effectively sex slaves.

ISIS has been very public about this. They have justified this along religious grounds, and they've even issued instructions for what age, for example, someone can begin to have sex with their Yazidi slave, under what condition they can trade or sell their slaves. This has been a devastating development for members of this religious minority, some of whom have been forced to try to gather up money to pay ransoms to win back the release of their missing loved ones, still believed to be missing and held hostage in the thousands at this date.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: Ivan Watson reporting. Still to come in the NEWSROOM, Boko Haram's reach spreading into a neighboring country. The effort now under way to free dozens of people kidnapped by the brutal group.

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COSTELLO: Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me. This morning, we're learning about more intelligence failures involving the two brothers behind the "Charlie Hebdo" massacre. A source familiar with the investigation says French intelligence agencies made multiple missteps, even after American intelligence gave them a heads-up. Among them, a lack of communication and delays in circulating information, as well as confusion over the brothers' travel. Also, French authorities are trying to track down two people who may be connected to the man who killed four hostages at that kosher grocery store in Paris. They found two sets of DNA on a car and a gun magazine belonging to the gunman. That DNA not his. As the investigation goes on, European ministers are meeting in Belgium to come up with a plan for fighting terrorism. CNN's Phil Black is there. Hi, Phil.

PHIL BLACK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Carol. That's right. It's going to be an issue at the very top of an agenda at the meeting of European foreign ministers today as they come to terms with the dramatic events in Europe over the last couple of weeks. First Paris, and while that was still being digested, this major terror plot disrupted here in Brussels.

Here in Brussels, there's been progress in the investigation to determine the extent of that plot, which investigators believe was going to target police officers on the streets of this country. And again, it has international connections. Most recently, it is Greek police who have arrested someone who is of interest to the authorities here in Belgium. They are acting on information provided by the Belgian authorities, they have arrested someone. Belgium now wants to extradite that person back here to this country to be prosecuted. So in total, eight people are now facing prosecution over this attack. The one man from Greece, two people who have been picked up in France, and five people who are currently facing charges here as well, Carol.

COSTELLO: As far as this meeting of the European ministers is concerned, what kinds of things will they be talking about?

BLACK: From the statements we heard so far, first of all, they are concerned with increasing cooperation not just among European countries, although that's clearly a priority, they say. Trade of information. Greater cooperation. Really tackling this problem of Islamist extremism in a more unified way, breaking down borders between European countries to ensure that information and intelligence is traded as quickly as possible so that these sorts of attacks can be prevented. But they are also looking at increasing cooperation with other regions, notably the Middle East, Africa and Arab countries. That's a priority they believe in order to determine the level of travel, the level of coordination that takes place between these terror groups, not just from the individuals