ABC News Correspondent John Miller

DATE August 21, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: John Miller discusses the movements of al-Qaeda leading
up to the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, John Miller, is one of the few Western journalists who have
interviewed Osama bin Laden. He's been reporting on terrorism for the past 10
years and is the co-author of the new book "The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot,
and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It." Miller is an ABC News
correspondent and co-host of "20/20." His 1998 interview with bin Laden was
broadcast on ABC's evening news and on "Nightline." That interview was also
videotaped by bin Laden's cameraman, and that tape is one of the al-Qaeda
videos that CNN just acquired. I asked Miller if there were guidelines that
he was given by al-Qaeda for his interview with bin Laden.

Mr. JOHN MILLER (Journalist): Well, it was a very odd set of ground rules.
They weren't really worked out in advance as much as they were worked out on
the spot. We were asked to submit the questions in writing, which is
something we normally do not do, but they said that it would be necessary for
their translator to be able to copy the questions over into Arabic, so that as
I asked them, he could translate them exactly in real time correctly. But
they also said we could pretty much ask anything we wanted, so we gave them a
list of about 20 questions, and when we got to the site of the interview a
couple of days later, they said that Mr. bin Laden would answer all the
questions, but that they would not translate his answers. I objected, saying
that makes it very difficult to ask follow-up questions, and they said,
`That's no problem. There will be no follow-up questions.' So the ground
rules were a little odd.

GROSS: Well, it must have been bizarre for you to interview somebody and have
no idea what he was saying in response to your questions.

Mr. MILLER: Well, made more bizarre by the fact that bin Laden had the trace
of a smile. He had what appeared to be very kind and understanding eyes. So
here's this fellow looking at you with a bit of a smile, looking at you right
in the eye, and he's speaking in this almost high-pitched, soft voice, and if
you had to guess what he was saying, it would have been like getting advice
from a sweet old uncle. Later, when it was translated and we learned that he
was saying that he was declaring war on America, that he would send Americans
back in coffins and boxes, and that the war would start soon, it was very
disconcerting, considering what it looked and sounded like. The other odd
thing was to keep him focused on me and not the translator, who he kept
looking at with the perfect knowledge that I didn't understand what he was
saying, I kept giving him eye contact and nodding up and down. So, of course,
when the translation runs, it looks like I'm nodding almost in agreement.
Like I said, it was not your normal interview.

GROSS: That's right. Because he's saying things like, `We are sure of our
victory. Our battle with the Americans is larger than our battle with the
Russians. We predict a black day for America and the end of the United
States,' right? And you're nodding in agreement, it looks like.

Mr. MILLER: Although I have to say, if you look back, if you looked at those
words at the time--and we all did. We thought it was pretty hyperbolic.

GROSS: Yeah, sure.

Mr. MILLER: `Who's this guy? What's he going to do, you know, declaring war
on the United States from his little camp?' If you look back at it in the
post-September 11th reality, the words have a very different resonance.

GROSS: What do you think are the most important things bin Laden told you in
your interview with him?

Mr. MILLER: Well, I think the context of the interview itself was important,
meaning this just wasn't a personality profile on a guy named bin Laden who
might have been a bad guy. We were allowed to locate him. We started this.
He didn't. He didn't call up and invite us to do this interview. We were
trying to connect with him for months. I think the reason he allowed us to
find him was because this was essentially his coming-out party as a terrorist
leader. He had been on the CIA's radar screen and the FBI's for a while, but
he hadn't introduced himself to the American public really, not in that kind
of forum. So I think he had things to say and he wanted them to reach the
American public before he organized and had carried out the embassy bombings,
which were scheduled for six weeks after the interview. He wanted to put a
stamp on it in advance.

The most important things he said? He framed his issues at the time, which
were US military to leave its bases in Saudi Arabia--he felt they were
desecrating holy ground--for the US to end its support of Israel in
consideration of the Palestinian issue and to end the bombing of Iraq.

GROSS: Now one of the main points in your book, "The Cell," is that United
States intelligence failed to follow up on a lot of the clues that could have
prevented September 11th. Were there clues, do you think, of what was to come
that bin Laden gave you in the interview he did with you in 1998?

Mr. MILLER: Well, bin Laden always leaves hidden messages--at least that's my
feeling--when he does an interview like that. If you read that interview now
and say that he had said that a week before September 11th or even a week
after, it would have made perfect sense. He said it in 1998, but there's a
pattern there, meaning he did that six weeks before the embassy bombings.
Just before the explosion of the USS Cole, the attack by a boat bomb sent by
bin Laden, he released a videotape of him and his leaders saying that `There
was too much talking, talking, talking and not enough action. The time had
come for action,' and he was dressed in Yemeni traditional garb with a Yemeni
dagger sticking out of his belt. Nobody made much of that at the time. Of
course, after the Cole was bombed in Yemen, people looked back at that tape
and they said, `Hey, you know, we may have missed a signal here.'

So he does leave subtle hints. I think if you look at his interview with ABC
News in 1998, talking about declaring war on America, talking about issuing a
fatwa that included not just people in military uniforms, to use his words,
but this fatwa also applies to civilians, too, I think he was telling us the
ground rules, or at least, we believe, the ground rules of the war on
terrorism and its war against us were changing.

GROSS: Do you think that bin Laden is still alive?

Mr. MILLER: I believe he's alive. That's not based on evidence per se, but I
speak to sources every day who say they continue to get intelligence about
sightings, not the kinds of sightings that they're sure enough about, but the
kind of sightings that still are hints of bin Laden's presence. But I also
look at it in an overall picture. He's worth $25 million, dead or alive,
according to the president of the United States, and if he were dead and
people in, let's say, Afghanistan knew about it, that's a country with a lot
of people in a position to move around with weapons who would maybe want to
come up with that body and collect that money, and no one's been able to do
that.

GROSS: One of the CNN tapes brought back from Afghanistan, and the tape that
so far has gotten the most attention, is the one of a dog who is exposed to
what appears to be a chemical weapon. And the dog loses muscular control,
chokes and apparently dies. What does that lead you to speculate about bin
Laden's, al-Qaeda's capability with chemical weapons?

Mr. MILLER: Well, I mean, there's no real secret about bin Laden's intent
there. We asked him and he told us in the interviews that he felt it was his
duty to obtain chemical and biological, even nuclear weapons--to obtain them
and use them as he saw fit. After the fall of Kandahar, I've been told by
sources in the intelligence community that bin Laden's chemical weapons
laboratory was discovered just a few miles east of the Kandahar airport. I've
reviewed some of the evidence that they say they collected there, which shows,
you know, a real lab set-up with beakers and test tubes and chemicals. Of
course, it was hit by US bombs and destroyed, but the fact that there is this
video of that experiment, of them actually--apparently what appears to be
testing a chemical weapon, like sarin gas or VX gas, that apparently was
either obtained by them or made by them, shows they were a couple of steps
closer in their program to having something that they could use, and that's a
little worrisome.

GROSS: A little?

Mr. MILLER: A lot worrisome when you consider it in the context of they
adjust with these attacks. I'm not talking about bin Laden as much as all
terrorists, but the pattern is, they launch one kind of attack, whether it's
airplane hijackings or truck bombs, and we tend to respond by hardening the
targets. We put walls around the embassies that trucks can't penetrate. We
increase airline security. They usually just switch to another kind of attack
and target a softer target. So, of course, you want to conceptualize what
would happen if the material that killed that dog was poured out onto the
floor in the middle of a busy mall in Anywhere, USA. People would start to go
down. Someone would call the police. Police, ambulance, fire people would
respond. They would start to go down as well. It would take till the second
or third wave of first responders to realize probably what was going on. And
very much like the anthrax scares we've had here in the United States,
including the incidents with real anthrax, there's not going to be 2,800
people killed in an incident like that from the World Trade Center, but the
fear factor's going to be very high.

GROSS: My guest is ABC News correspondent John Miller. He's the co-author of
the new book "The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot." We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: (Joined in progress) "...Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop
It."

You have a lot in the new book about clues that the FBI and CIA didn't pick up
on, clues that they could have followed and didn't. And one of the main
stories that you follow in the book dates back to--I think it's 1990: the
assassination of the far-right Israeli leader Meir Kahane, who actually grew
up in New York, where he founded the Jewish Defense League, a far-right group.
The assassin was El Sayyid Nossair. What are some of the clues that the
assassination of Meir Kahane could have provided to future attacks on the
United States?

Mr. MILLER: Well, it's the clues that it did provide that were somewhat
overlooked, especially early on. El Sayyid Nossair shoots Meir Kahane that
night in the Marriott Hotel in Manhattan. That night, police from New York
City go to his house and they detain two men as possible accomplices, because
they readily admit to having been in the area of the hotel at the time of the
murder. They're ordered by the police brass to cut these guys loose right
away with no further investigation. They really were anxious at that time to
get onto the press and say, `We have a murder. We have a gunman. The case is
solved. There's no reason to be afraid.' Those two men later ended up being
two of the World Trade Center bombers in 1993. So they weren't looked at
closely enough at the time.

They also took 16 boxes out of El Sayyid Nossair's house in New Jersey which
contained diagrams of how to make and dismantle bombs, confidential documents
from the US Special Warfare School in Ft. Bragg, things that were training
exercises for the US military, diagrams of New York landmarks, writings in
Arabic that weren't translated for years that included discussion of plans to
topple America's tallest buildings, things that have a lot more resonance now
than they did then. But after the World Trade Center bombing was committed
and the investigators learned that the men around that plot were essentially
the followers of Nossair, they really had to take a look back and say, `Should
we have looked at this stuff harder a long time ago?'

GROSS: Why didn't they? Why didn't the FBI follow up on investigating
Nossair's collaborators?

Mr. MILLER: Well, I think that involves more law enforcement's dirty little
secret, which is they're very competitive. You know, every press conference
at every major bust starts off with, you know, how closely all the agencies
worked together. The fact is I worked in law enforcement long enough to get
an inside view of that, and they've very competitive, they've often trying to
undercut each other. After the Kahane murder, there was a fight between the
FBI and the US attorney and the NYPD and the local district attorney over who
would really handle the case. Ultimately, the district attorney in New York
City said, `This is a local murder and it's my case,' so the FBI had taken all
of the evidence found in Nossair's house from the police and then the district
attorney demanded it back. And while it went from the police office to the
FBI office to the district attorney's office--after they were done fighting
over who would get the case, no one really went through the boxes and analyzed
what was in it until after the World Trade Center bombing. Then they found it
was filled with a lot of clues.

GROSS: Right. Now you describe Nossair, the assassin of Kahane, as becoming
a star of the new jihad movement in the United States.

Mr. MILLER: They referred to him as the godfather of jihad among the
detectives on the Terrorist Task Force and the agents because he was the first
one to take direct action for an Islamic terrorism cell in the United States.
And when he was caught and sentenced to prison, in the meetings in Attica, he
urged the others to take action, saying, `Listen, I'm here in jail. Now
someone else has to step up to the plate.' The plots discussed were plots to
break him out of prison, plots to assassinate not just Jewish leaders and
politicians in New York City, but politicians like Alfonse D'Amato, who just
supported Israel--there was a hit list, and then a plot to blow up 12 Jewish
locations in New York City, which ended up developing into a plot not to blow
up 12 locations, but to place one big bomb in one location: the World Trade
Center.

GROSS: Did any of the terrorists involved with the September 11th attacks
have any affiliation with Nossair?

Mr. MILLER: No, it was a generation of terrorists later by the fact that
Nossair's cell was broken down after the first World Trade Center bombing.
Then the Terrorist Task Force broke up the plot among Nossair's other
followers to blow up the bridges and tunnels, the UN and the FBI building in
New York. So that group was pretty much taken off the map. But by then, the
signs were there that there was a larger force here. Nossair's followers were
also followers of the blind sheik, as he's known today, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who
was preaching at mosque in Brooklyn at the time and calling for his followers
to act out jihad against the United States--holy war. So that group was taken
out, but what they learned was Nossair's defense fund was funded by Osama bin
Laden to the tune of $20,000. Some of that money was allegedly diverted to
finance the World Trade Center bombing, that the blind sheik's living expenses
were being paid for month to month by bin Laden, that the refugee center
located in his mosque was being paid for by bin Laden and affiliated with the
other Afghan services office and refugee center in Peshawar, Pakistan, which
was the organization that eventually turned into al-Qaeda.

GROSS: In looking at some of the history that led up to September 11th, what
do you think is one of the biggest missed opportunities that intelligence
didn't follow up on?

Mr. MILLER: If I had to pick one--and I wouldn't pick one; I'd say it was
the combination. But if I had to focus on a single one that was probably the
most serious miss, it would be the CIA was tasked at the point that they were
sure an attack was brewing somewhere in the world, maybe even in the United
States, to try and pull out all the stops. They went over everything they
had, and they came up with a meeting of al-Qaeda terrorists in Malaysia that
was videotaped. They brought photographs of that meeting to the FBI's
Terrorist Task Force in New York and they laid the photographs out and they
said to the agents and detectives, `What can you tell us about these guys?'
And then instead of putting their cards on the table and sharing what they
had, after the detectives and agents said, `Well, we can identify this one or
that one. We think some of them were involved in the Cole bombing'--when the
detectives and agents said, `What can you tell us?' the CIA essentially told
them, `Well, you're not cleared for that information.' The meeting
degenerated into a shouting match and ultimately broke up. That was on June
11th.

I think had everybody put their heads together and compared notes, they
probably would have found out that two of the people at the meeting were
Khalid al-Midhar, another one of the 19 hijackers, Mr. Alhazmi, Nawaf Alhazmi.
Had they decided, `Well, let's see if these people are in the United States,'
yes, they had come into the United States under their real names. Could they
have been located and put under surveillance? Had that happened, they would
have been trailed to flight schools. They would have been seen meeting with
the other hijackers. Their phones could have been bugged. Their e-mails
could have been monitored. A lot of things could have been done that could
have really put investigators onto the plot before it happened.

None of that happened. And essentially, it all boils down to interagency
bickering and hoarding of information and not sharing the facts. And I think
that's one of the things that has hurt the effort over the years.

GROSS: Has there been any reform on interagency communication?

Mr. MILLER: I think there's been a lot since September 11th. I think the
message from the White House to the FBI and the CIA has been, `Hey, you guys
get together on this, and let's not have anything else slip through the cracks
because the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.' I also think
with a new FBI director, Mr. Mueller, in place--I think his relationship with
George Tenet at the CIA is fairly fresh and open. And I certainly think
because of what happened on September 11th, the actual sharing between agents
at the FBI and officers at the CIA has probably broken through a lot of the
barriers that would have been in place before that.

GROSS: There was a Pentagon-funded report that was released in 1993 that
referred to the possibility of terrorists using planes as bombs. The report's
principal author, Marvin Cetron, wrote that he could imagine coming down the
Potomac, you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out
the White House or you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon.
This report apparently was never released. Why wasn't it released?

Mr. MILLER: Well, I spoke to Marvin about that an awful lot. And, of course,
Marvin was Chicken Little. He was running around saying, `The sky's falling.
The sky's falling,' after the Defense Department had contracted him to say,
`If the sky was going to fall, what could we do about it?' And the answer was
we were very vulnerable. He wrote the report, and it was shown to the Defense
Department and the State Department. And the State Department's Office of
Counterterrorism reviewed it and said, `A, the things in here probably are
never going to happen. B, if we release this to the public, it's going to
scare the heck out of everybody. And, C, if we scare the heck out of
everybody and there isn't a crisis, we're just going to get yelled at for
frightening them.' One person told Marvin, `You can't manage a crisis until
you have the crisis.'

So they put the report in a drawer--showed it around the government a little
bit, shoved it in the back of a drawer, and it was never really seen till a
newspaper reporter found it and started writing about its predications. The
thing is, they had hired Marvin to predict the future, and if you read that
report, Marvin did his job, I'm sorry to say.

GROSS: Who is he?

Mr. MILLER: He is a really interesting character. He's a futurist. He is
not a terrorism expert, although he has become one because of this. He is a
guy who looks at trends in business, in science and then tries to predict
where they'll go and where we'll end up in 10 years or 20 years. He was
simply tasked after somebody read one of this other reports about the future
of something else to say, `Forecast the future of America's vulnerability to
terrorism.' And he did that. The bad news is, a lot of his forecasts came
true.

GROSS: John Miller is an ABC News correspondent and co-host of "20/20." He's
the co-author of the the book "The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the
FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It." He'll be back in the second half of the show.
I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new 13-CD
compilation of recordings by pianist Maurizio Pollini. And we continue our
talk about terrorism with ABC News correspondent John Miller, co-author of
"The Cell."

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Let's get back to our interview with John Miller, ABC News correspondent
and co-host of "20/20." He's been covering terrorism for 10 years, and
interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1998. Miller is the co-author of the new book
"The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It."
I asked him about one of the leaders of the plot, Mohamed Atta.

Now it seems that Mohamed Atta's original plan was to use crop dusters, and...

Mr. MILLER: Mohamed Atta walked into a US government farm loan office and
tried to get a US government loan to buy a crop duster, which would have been
kind of a terrible irony that the government could have actually financed this
plot, as well as having been one of the primary victims of it. And it seemed
that Atta's interest in crop dusters seemed to revolve around what their
containment was, what their ability to carry crop-dusting chemicals were, how
many gallons, what's the disbursement rate.

A lot of people took that as a signal that they must have been planning a
chemical weapons attack to spray some city with anthrax or sarin gas. But
it's much more likely, based on the analysis of investigators I've spoken to
at this point, that Atta was trying to find a plane that had a large enough
storage compartment for explosives, a plane like a crop duster that they could
get a couple of and fly into the Pentagon or the White House or the Capitol or
the World Trade Center that would have a big explosive charge.

As it was, failing to obtain either the money to buy the crop dusters or the
ability to obtain one of those planes another way, it appears that the plan
just had to develop; it had to change. And the only way to get a big plane
with explosive capability for free was to buy a ticket on one and take it.

GROSS: So you could argue that by--that when his plan to use crop dusters was
foiled, he had to come up with an even more ambitious plan.

Mr. MILLER: That's correct. And while it was more ambitious, it also, unlike
the crop duster plan, which was a little complicated as well as ambitious,
this plan was diabolically ingenious in its simplicity. To take on the
government and economic structure of a superpower, to injure its economy, to
carry out the largest terrorist attack in world history, to commit nearly
3,000 homicides, all it took was, not a nuclear device or a `dirty bomb' or
chemical or biological weapons. It was plane tickets and box cutters and a
very good plan.

GROSS: How far up within the al-Qaeda leadership do you think there was
knowledge of the actual September 11th plan? I mean, do you think bin Laden
knew the specifics of the plan? Do you think his aides knew the specifics of
the plan? Or do you think they just knew that something big was going to
happen and their guys were taking care of it?

Mr. MILLER: Yes and no. Yes, I think bin Laden knew the plan, had approved
the plan, signed off on the plan, had intimate knowledge of what the attack
would be. That's actually borne out by videotapes that were recovered after
the invasion of Afghanistan where bin Laden is seen meeting with a supporter
from Saudi Arabia where he tells him what he knew in advance. The other thing
that tape revealed is the `no' part, that one or two of bin Laden's closest
aides--I would guess Zawahri and Atef--probably knew the same details of the
plan--the date, the time and the place. But other aides who were in on this
discussion proffered to this sheikh who was visiting from Saudi Arabia that
when they heard the news, they were with bin Laden and that it came as a big
surprise to them, that they hadn't been in on the plot.

So what the military calls `operational security,' keeping things close to the
vest on a need-to-know-only basis, seemed to be maintained very well by
al-Qaeda. Bin Laden and his two or three top people may have known.
Certainly the operators of the cell knew--Mohamed Atta and his gang--although
even they didn't know what their mission and their targets were until they day
of the actual attack, probably beyond Atta and a couple of others.

GROSS: Now on September 9th of 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
threatened to urge a veto if the Senate proceeded with its plan to divert $600
million from missile defense to counterterrorism. The Bush administration was
really pushing missile defense then. Has Rumsfeld said anything after
September 11th about how he feels about that statement now and if he thinks it
was still legitimate to try to use the money for missile defense, as opposed
to counterterrorism?

Mr. MILLER: You know, I haven't heard him say anything about that, nor have I
really heard much discussion from the attorney general about turning down an
FBI request for $56 million to revamp and increase their counterterrorism
section before September 11 also. Of course, you know, they've done that
threefold since then, but there was a pre-September 11th reality, and there's
a post-September 11th reality.

The pre-September 11th reality was Tom Picard, the acting director of the FBI,
walked into the attorney general's office and counterterrorism was at the top
of his list. But he told me he couldn't get in to see the attorney general
for a long time about counterterrorism because the attorney general's message
was clear, just as Rumsfeld's message was clear about missile defense. His
main issues were guns, drugs and civil rights. And I would suggest that in
his presentation to Congress, his main issues were guns and drugs until they
asked him an awful lot of questions about racial profiling, and then civil
rights was added to the agenda. But terrorism was nowhere the focus.

When the Bush administration came in, there were two submarines parked in
position to launch missiles against bin Laden's camp that had been there for
months in the Clinton administration. They were pulled out. The focus was
very different.

GROSS: The last line of your book "The Cell" is a very creepy last line. It
says, `The next wave of attacks, if they are not prevented, could make
September 11th a pale and distant memory.' What are some of the things you're
thinking of there?

Mr. MILLER: Well, if you look at some of the things that have just come up
in the past few days that bin Laden has possessed, and it was experimenting
with chemical weapons; some of the other plots that they've talked about,
including everything from flying planes into buildings to driving a large
truck bomb into Herald Square in New York City in front of a department store,
or to Century City in Los Angeles, or into the middle of the Financial
District in New York, or a busy place in Chicago--if you did that once, you
could cause terror. If you had cells operating in the United States, as the
US government believes they do, and you did that five times in one day or even
one week, you could cause massive terror.

I think the one thing we learned from September 11th is almost no matter how
much terror you cause here, it is very hard to cause panic. Even through such
an attack, New York City and the federal government held themselves together
and acted very responsibly and very responsively.

GROSS: My guest is ABC News correspondent John Miller. He's the co-author of
the new book "The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot." We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is ABC News correspondent John
Miller. And he's also a co-host of "20/20." His new book is called "The
Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It."

I've got a more personal question for you. I read in a biography that your
father was a reporter for The National Enquirer, for the tabloid. And I've
got to wonder, what kind of stories did he write?

Mr. MILLER: Well, he wrote--he was a real character, and he wrote seven
different columns in The Enquirer under six different names. So he was John
J. Miller in the column that had his best items. He was John Rellim(ph),
which was Miller spelled backwards, in the column that got his second-string
items. He was Sergio(ph) someone from Rome, and Nigel(ph) someone from
London, and Pierre (Ph) someone from Paris. And he was somebody from LA. And
he would sit in an office with five telephones lines ringing and a secretary
juggling the calls. And he would kind of take rat-a-tat items from waiters
and showgirls and maitre d's and press agents and stick them all on the spike
that went to the different column that they were intended for and, you know,
ran a small kind of cheesy tabloid empire from a little office. It was
interesting to watch as a kid. It was more interesting to go with him on his
rounds, though.

GROSS: Why was that so interesting?

Mr. MILLER: Well, because I was seven, eight, nine years old, and he would
take me out in the city at night. And the police radio would be crackling in
the car. And he would take me to the Copa and to the El Morocco, and you
would see a show with Shecky Greene as the comic followed by Dean Martin as
the main act. And you'd end up in the lounge surrounded by a bunch of guys
named Tough Tony and Angelo Two-Times(ph) and, you know, guys banging their
pinky rings on the table and smoking cigars. And then you'd end up a crime
scene, and you'd get home way past your bedtime and try and tell this to the
kids in the second grade the next day. It was an entertaining way to grow up.
It taught me a part about New York City that most people wouldn't learn for
years to come.

GROSS: Did you...

Mr. MILLER: And by the time I would have learned it, it was gone.

GROSS: Writing for the National Enquirer, did your father, when he came home
from work, tell you `Don't believe everything you read, son'?

Mr. MILLER: He told me the opposite. He said, `This paper is sued so much
that if we print it, the lawyers have been over it 15 times. It's got to be
true.' Of course, I always questioned that when they said, you know, the
two-headed alien baby headline was on the front page.

GROSS: Yeah. So what did he tell you about that?

Mr. MILLER: But then again, how many two-headed babies really had lawyers
who could sue? I mean, it was a very interesting time, because when the
Enquirer came out, it wasn't the National Enquirer. It was the New York
Enquirer. It was a local weekly here, and the owner had decided he could find
a niche in the market for a different kind of newspaper. The other papers
combined to keep it off the stands 'cause there were seven dailies at the time
and nobody wanted an eighth paper to compete with. So the owner of the paper,
Gene Pope, went to a business consultant and said, `I can't sell my paper on
the newsstands and I don't know where else to sell a newspaper.' And the guy
thought about it for a while and said, `Listen, you ever been standing in the
supermarket at that checkout line where there's nothing to do and nothing to
see? Why don't you put your paper there?' And thus was born the supermarket
tabloid.

GROSS: What was it like for you when you started working in journalism
yourself and you were exposed to all the ethics of journalism that you had to
learn and abide by, after growing up in this kind of anything-goes type of
environment with a father who worked at the National Enquirer?

Mr. MILLER: Well, it sounds like Bert Kearns' book "Tabloid Baby," right? I
guess I was literally the tabloid baby. First of all, my father was a pretty
good reporter. He taught me the ethics of journalism and he taught me a lot
of the tricks of the trade, also. But when I went to work in the Channel 5
newsroom, I was 14 years old, I was in the ninth grade, I'd been trained on
the street by my dad, and I ended up working on the desk with Ted Cavanaugh
and Mark Monsky, some really brilliant people there, who taught me the real
rules of journalism, which was how to get it fast, how to get it right, how to
keep it fair. There was a big sign over the door at Channel 5 News when you
walked out to go on your story. It said, `There are two sides to every story.
How many did you get?' And I remember I came back years later and the sign
had changed. It now said, `Do you have your beeper? Is it on?'

GROSS: Yeah, go ahead.

Mr. MILLER: Oh, that was--I don't have--I'm not gonna make a conclusion
there, it's just that the shifting priorities in television journalism had
posted themselves in my mind.

GROSS: Oh, right. No, another question for you. In 1994, you briefly gave
up journalism to join the New York City Police Department as deputy
commissioner for public information. What was it like to see law enforcement
from inside the operation as opposed to investigating it as a journalist?

Mr. MILLER: Well, it was fascinating. I mean, like anybody who's had their
nose pressed up against the same piece of glass long enough, you want to know
what it's really like on the other side. And I remember trading in a fairly
good television salary and a lifestyle to go to work essentially as a civil
servant, and I showed up the first day and I thought, `Well, at least now I'll
have the access.' 'Cause frankly, the police department is the last exclusive
club on Earth, you know. When you flash your badge at the scene of the crime
and you cross that yellow tape, there are very few people allowed on the other
side of that, whether they have money or power or friends. That's a pretty
private zone, and to be on the other side of the tape was fascinating.

But I have to say in the first week we had--some crisis developed, and I
remember walking past all the cameras, flashbulbs popping, people yelling
questions and thinking, `Just a week ago I would have been on the other side
of that tape and I would have been the one with the questions. I'm gonna go
in behind this door and it's gonna close and I'm gonna be on the other side
and I'm gonna be the one learning the answers.' And I remember the door
closed and John Timminy, our chief, was there and he said, `Let's get one
thing straight. Those fellows on the outside already know more about this
case than we do, and if we don't spin it right we're dead.' And I thought,
`Maybe I made a really big mistake here.'

The other thing it taught me was, we had a shooting and we were having trouble
getting the details from the cops about how it had come to pass that they had
shot this fellow, and it had been hours and we were about to do a press
conference but didn't have enough answers, and I said to Timminy, `Well, it's
been hours. Why haven't they been able to tell us their story?' And he said,
`Jonny Boy, you'll learn when there's trouble getting the information, it's
usually because there's trouble with the information.' In many ways, the
experience made me a better reporter when I left.

GROSS: How?

Mr. MILLER: I realized two important things. One, that so many times when I
had 9 out of 10 pieces of the story and I called some public official and
said, `Is this true?' and they waved me off, I was probably right, because I
had many reporters call me and they would kind of lay out the whole story
before me, and it was something that was either confidential or that we didn't
want out, and I would say, `I can't comment on it,' and hang up the phone, and
oftentimes they went with it and sometimes they didn't, but it was always
remarkable to me how oftentimes they had it all and just didn't know if they
had it all.

The other thing it taught me was what it's like on the other side. I mean, I
think in the context of this book what it's like on the other side, because as
a reporter, you're always covering the police saying, `Look at what they've
done wrong. Look at this scandal. Look at the corruption. Look at the
mistakes.' As a police official, I remember showing up to work every day
saying, `Every day, 40,000 people come to these buildings and precincts and
police cars and set out to try and do the right thing, and every day it seems
like we're under assault from the press from every direction, for any little
thing they can find.'

If you look at the 9/11 plot, there were so many detectives and investigators
and FBI agents and CIA officers who had been doing the right thing for years
and, of course, the focuses are all on the missteps and the mistakes and
that's, of course, because the cost was so great. But it almost sounds like
you write them off as being the Keystone Kops when most of the time they do
pretty well.

GROSS: Well, listen, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. MILLER: Oh, thank you, Terry, and thanks for having me on and thanks for
giving me so much time.

GROSS: John Miller is a correspondent for ABC News and co-host of "20/20."
He's the co-author of the new book "The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why
the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It."

Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new 13-CD box set of recordings by pianist
Maurizio Pollini. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: New 13-CD box set featuring Maurizio Pollini
TERRY GROSS, host:

Pianist Maurizio Pollini has been playing in public for more than 40 years.
Now there's a 13-CD compilation of his recordings called the "Maurizio Pollini
Edition." Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz considers Pollini one of the
great musicians of our time.

LLOYD SCHWARTZ reporting:

There's a bonus disk in the new 13-CD anthology of recordings by Maurizio
Pollini that includes a live performance of Chopin's "First Piano Concerto"
made during the 1960 Chopin Competition in Warsaw when Pollini was only 18.
Here's a passage from the lovely slow movement "Romance."

(Soundbite of piano concerto)

SCHWARTZ: You can already hear the miraculous Pollini qualities: the
extraordinary sweetness of the sound and the uncanny definition of every note,
no matter how fast it's going by. There's a brilliant gleam some critics have
called cold, but which to his admirers seems like controlled white heat. And
the shapeliness of the phrasing, like singing, a sense of both moment and
movement, that everything is connected, coming from somewhere and heading
somewhere.

The whole set brings home the great range of Pollini's musical interests.
Although there's no Bach or any Baroque music at all--the earliest composer
represented is Mozart--Pollini presents a direct line from Mozart and
Beethoven to Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, remarkably unmelodramatic Liszt,
brilliant yet unshowy Chopin and scintillating, witty Debussy
Then--zoom--we're in the 20th century with ravishing performances of the major
modern masters--Schonberg, Webern, Stravinsky and Bartok--and of the most
radical music of the next generation. One piece by Luigi Nono, called "Like a
Wave of Strength and Light," has some of the most elegant pounding on record.

(Soundbite of "Like a Wave of Strength and Light")

SCHWARTZ: Pollini was only the second major pianist to record the complete
solo piano music of Schonberg. Glenn Gould beat him by a decade. And it's
startling how different they are. Here's the last movement waltz from
Schonberg's "Five Piano Pieces, Opus 23," his very first full use of the
12-tone system. Pollini plays it as a real waltz, in the tradition of Brahms
and all the Strausses. It's flowing, gemutlich, lilting. Yet its harmonies
are also something new in the world. Pollini lets us hear the continuity not
only within this short piece, but also with its history, the past out of which
it has emerged.

(Soundbite of waltz played by Pollini)

SCHWARTZ: Compared to Pollini's version, Gould's 1965 recording sounds as if
it comes from a different century, a newer century--disjunctive, angular,
teasing. Gould's Schonberg is nothing if not modern.

(Soundbite of waltz played by Gould)

SCHWARTZ: We can hear the shadowing waltz in the distance, but this isn't
music you could dance to. Pollini's version may not be quite as much fun as
Gould's, as crackling, but it's more knowing, insinuating, more European and
more beautiful. Pollini isn't always on. I'm a little disappointed with the
two late Beethoven sonatas. The sheer facility of Pollini's playing seems to
undercut the very struggle with form and articulation Beethoven seems to be
grappling with. I've heard concerts at which it has taken him the entire
first half to warm up, to get over his shyness. What a peculiar genius.
There's no major musician today who can be more frustrating or more profoundly
satisfying.

GROSS: Lloyd Schwartz is classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix. He
reviewed the new Pollini collection on Deutsche Grammophon.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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