Candice DeLong, a retired FBI agent with 20 years undercover—including profiling terrorists and hunting the Unabomber—reveals systemic failures like the "Career Path" promotion system that left incompetent supervisors overseeing counterterrorism. She dismisses claims of domestic anthrax framing but questions why Saudi Arabia (15 of 19 hijackers) wasn’t targeted post-9/11, despite Bush’s suspicious bonding with a Saudi prince. DeLong warns of future attacks, possibly via dirty bombs or open borders, and defends aggressive interrogations like sodium pentothal after French intelligence exposed a Paris embassy plot. Her book, Special Agent, pushes for transparency in taxpayer-funded agencies, underscoring the FBI’s post-9/11 overreach—detaining suspects indefinitely—while exposing lingering ineptitude despite heightened global threats. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the entire world, where we cover it one way or the other.
I'm Art Bell, and the program is Coast to Coast AM.
I'd like to welcome yet another new affiliate to the network.
It would be WRJM FM in Geneva, Alabama, 93.7 on the dial, 100,000 watts.
Now, that'll promote an electric bill, I'll tell you.
WRJM, Geneva, Alabama, 93.7, 100,000 watts.
The GM there is Jack Mazzell, and the TD, Susannah Hodges.
Hello to you both.
I recommend as you listen to this program, patience.
For at first you will not understand it.
Even after you've been listening for a while, you may not understand it.
Listen, we just had an X-Class flare.
In the last few minutes, the Sun erupted with a massive X-Class flare.
So last night we were discussing, of course, the Sun on this program.
And lo and behold, it may not be a triple peak for the Sunspot cyclist.
You know, something up there, that's for sure.
It really let loose the other day.
We had a picture last night, yesterday actually.
And now an X-class flare today.
And, of course, space weather is kind of like Earth weather.
And they didn't call for any possibility of that's where they said, well, maybe an isolated M-class flare.
That's like saying isolated clouds, and then you get, you know, hail.
So space weather may not be any easier to call than terrestrial weather.
But we had a big X-class flare, so the sun is up there doing something serious.
Upset by an air attack in which scores of villagers died, the Afghan government demanded Tuesday the U.S. take, quote, all necessary measures to avoid civilian casualties.
Unprecedented statement, U.S. troops who inspected the hospital in Kandahar, where some of the wounded had been taken, came under fire late today as they were returning to the American base just outside the city.
So apparent retaliation.
A Russian pilot ferrying children to Spain for a beach vacation had less than one minute to get out of the way of an oncoming cargo jet, but the planes rammed into one another over southern Germany after both apparently took the same evasive action at the same moment.
71 dead.
In other words, both pilots saw it coming, and both pilots decided to take the same evasive maneuver at exactly the same time with predictable results.
They now have something in our major airliners, of course, that avoids that and puts the two planes in touch, and it will instruct the pilots which way to turn so that that does not occur.
Didn't happen in this case.
Well, he's finally done it.
And you've got to give Steve Fawcett credit.
Tenacity.
Oh, man, does that guy ever have tenacity?
He covered 19,428.6 miles on the trip, went all the way around the world.
And I have watched him sort of agonizing with him as he would end up failing time after time after time because of, you know, usually weather, that kind of thing.
But you've got to give it to the guy.
Fawcett hung in there and just kept on doing it and did.
And that's usually how it gets done.
The stock market is hard to watch.
The Dow down another 102 points, the NASDAQ leading the way, falling 46 points percentage-wise.
Not good.
Not good at all.
The Dow closing seven points above 9,000.
The NASDAQ falling almost 46 points, actually, to 1357.
1357 from a high above 5,000 to 1357, turning a lot of millionaires into, I don't know, billionaires into millionaires for sure, and millionaires into, I don't know what.
Occasionally on this program, we get stories that you just never hear the end of.
One of those is the bouncer story in England.
Remember that?
Well, I still don't have any answer for you.
Try as I might, reach out as I might, this story dead ends, you know, found dead, bloodless, remember?
Really weird, weird stuff.
Oh, follow up.
Why do we get no A story last week, I think, from Buenos Aires, Argentina on the mysterious cattle mutilations may not be so mysterious.
Recent mutilations of cattle and horses in the Argentinian countryside were the work of, get this folks, rodents.
According to scientists on Monday, not ritualistic slayings by extraterrestrials.
Why did they word it that way?
Or vampires, as some farmers had feared.
Why would the extraterrestrials do ritualistic slangs?
I don't think they meant to say that.
The ritualistic slayings would be by Satanists or something like that.
The ETs, who knows why they do it, but it's probably not a ritual.
They don't need to come light years to get to Earth and have a ritual with one of our cows.
And if they do, well, then we probably don't want to meet them.
Argentine's National Food and Animal Health Inspection Service, SENSA, sent Its own ex-pile scientists to remote planes to look into the deaths of farm animals found mutilated and drained blood.
Farmers claimed to have seen bright lights and UFOs in the area where the deaths occurred, but Senosa Village, I guess it is, officials said the dozens of livestock whose genitals, tongues, and other organs appeared to have been removed with surgical precision were victims of rodents, foxes, or other animals.
That farm animals likely died from common infections, and wild animals later mutilated the corpses.
Quote, we see these as natural deaths, and there is clear evidence of the presence of rodents and birds, which led us to our conclusions.
The strange circumstances surrounding the deaths, one horse's hoof had a circle drawn into it.
Some animals were surrounded by charred grass.
And still, now you've got to wonder, what am I reading here?
This is from Reuters News.
I just, I don't know about you, but I have a hard time squaring the initial report of surgical precision, removal of genitals and genital areas, reproductive organs, that sort of thing, with surgical precision.
How do you square that with, what do they say, rats?
Rats wouldn't remove anything with surgical precision, would they?
So, you know, I wonder what we've got here from Reuters.
This the real McCoy, or is this, in fact, a cover story?
I have no way of knowing.
No way of knowing.
So here is at least an answer.
I'm not telling you it's a true answer because I have no way of knowing.
Just read them as they come in.
The bouncer in England, don't know a thing about that.
Certainly would love to.
What I really want to talk to you about is coming up in just a moment.
Could it be that the Vatican has had a time machine for a while now?
unidentified
Coming up...
Take Coast to Coast AM with you anywhere on your mobile phone.
CoastToCoastAM.com can be conveniently accessed on your iPhone and most Android platforms, which means that you are never without your Coast to Coast AM fix.
If you're a Coast to Coast Insider subscriber, you can listen to the show live in the middle of the night or previous shows 24-7.
Plus, you can browse all the great photos, videos, and news stories.
Keeping up with Coast to Coast AM has never been easier with our Coast Insider service.
Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night.
But you know, you don't have to be nocturnal to enjoy this amazing show.
The Coast Insider is your key to a normal life.
For 15 cents a day, you can wake up refreshed knowing that last night's show is waiting for you with podcasting.
As a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Nouri and special guests.
The Coast Insiders Club is a must-have feature for all Coast to Coast AM listeners.
Visit CoastToCoastAM.com to sign up today.
Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
And this is going to be, there are going to be, well, I can't give away a lot of secrets, but it's just going to be one monstrous display.
And as I said yesterday, here you don't ask, you know, in Nye County, you don't ask where they came from.
All these giant fireworks.
You just relax and enjoy the show.
This is really the old west here still, you know.
Somehow, anyway, they got them.
But I'm not asking.
Anyway, it should be fun, 4th of July here.
Little prompt, Nevada, the desert.
Now, here's a story that if you wish to check it out, it is on my website right now under What's New.
And you know me in time travel, right?
Anything involving time travel immediately grabs my gut and twists me like a rag.
And, you know, I'm just really, really, really fascinated by time travel.
And the headline reads, Boca Raton, Florida, the line Boca Raton by the Wireless Flash.
Boca Raton, I used to live in Boca Raton, went to Del Rey Beach High School.
Anyway, listen to this.
Boca Raton, Florida.
First, the Vatican was accused of hiding the records of priests who've been abusing kids.
Now it is being accused of hiding a time machine.
The time machine in question is called a chronovisor.
That's C-H-R-O-N-O-V-I-S-O-R chronovisor.
And was built in the 1950s by a Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti.
No photographs of the chronovisor exist, but paranormal journalist John Chambers says Ernetti reportedly used the, this is in quotes, way back machine to film Christ's crucifixion for Vatican officials.
Ernetti died in 1994 without revealing the secret of the chronoviser, But Chambers says that evidence is mounting that the Catholic Church is hiding a working model from the rest of the world, supposedly to keep it from getting into evil hands.
Evil hands.
Sounds crazy, the story goes on, maybe, but there may be something to it.
Chambers says a Jesuit priest named Father Francius Brunet, I guess it would be, believes the chronovisor must exist because in the priest's words, Ernetti wouldn't lie about such things.
Now, as you might well imagine, I have instructed my network, though it's going to be very difficult, to try and get somebody on this story.
Maybe this John Chambers would be a person.
Maybe one of the other this Jesuit priest might be the way to go.
I don't know.
But let's think about this a little bit, shall we?
Time machine was invented, as is being suggested here.
And the person inventing this time machine was, and you can imagine it could be anybody worldwide.
It could be somebody in Italy for all we know, right?
It could be a good Catholic, and there's lots of Catholics out there.
So this Catholic, not understanding the spiritual possible implications of such a device, if he didn't go to the government, I mean, put yourself in the position of somebody who's invented something of this magnitude.
Just think about it a little bit.
Invented a time machine and you wanted it to be in somebody's hands for some good reason.
What would you do with it?
Would you give it to our government?
Would you walk into some government agency and say, listen, guys, I know you're busy with terrorism and everything that's going on in the world today, but you know, I've invented a time machine.
After you had either been laughed out of the FBI or CIA's office, you might then turn to the church.
And you've got to imagine it possible that the church would somehow take this person seriously, and that word would go straight up the ladder to the Vatican, that a real time machine is in our hands.
And then you've got to wonder, well then, well, let's see, what would the Vatican do with a time machine?
You could say, I'm sure, suggest, well, why not tell the whole world?
it would make policies and go through the roof it would Aside from the crucifixion of Christ, maybe they saw things that are not totally in line with the way we understand the crucifixion took place.
Maybe a million different things.
But I thought this a very interesting story, just from all kinds of points of view, and we've got a half hour of open lines coming up.
You may want to comment on it.
To try and follow up on this story, I can't make any promises because who knows.
But John Chambers, if you're out there, I'd like to talk to you.
Ambers, a paranormal journalist, actually, not investigators, says journalists.
And or this other witness, Jesuit, a priest, who says that he does believe this exists because, in his words, the gentleman, the priest now passed on, wouldn't lie.
So it gives a person a lot to think about.
News be kept secret by the Catholic Church.
Well, let's see now, does the Catholic Church keep other stuff secret?
Oh, yes.
I am told that there are tunnels beneath the Vatican with secrets that have been around longer than probably we can trace our relatives back.
Lots and lots of secrets.
That's why they called it the third secret of Tarama, right?
Because it was a secret.
So the Catholic Church has secrets, and if they had a time machine, would they keep that secret?
I think a lot of people, maybe even me included, if they actually did have a time machine, they could be selective about it and they could actually go back and film something.
Even I might pick that exact thing to go back first and verify.
Even I might do that.
I had the usual atheist on the line that I always have.
You know, he's going to be dialing a mile a minute for something like this, right?
And of course, his comments were as predicted, or it could be easily predicted why they don't have any time machine, because there never was crucifixion, because there never was Christ, because all things lie, right?
So even he, even our atheist friend up there in the Northeast, he might be tempted to go back first and see if he should revise his views in any way.
unidentified
Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 2, 2002 on Premier Networks.
And by the way, at the top of the hour tonight, we've got Candace Long.
She was an FBI agent retired now.
Incidentally, during the time between now and the top of the hour, since you're going to go to a website anyway and probably look at this time machine story, the Vatican Time Machine story, you might check out tonight's guest and then take a look at my guest coming up tonight.
You know, I interviewed Candace one time previously, and I had never seen her photograph.
And somebody tonight prior to the interview sent me the photograph of Candace.
Oh, my goodness.
Clarice, big time.
Clarice, look at her.
Aye, aye, aye.
What a photograph.
That'll be in the next hour.
So we're going to plunge into open lines right now.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air, top of the morning.
I'm getting some fast blasts from around the country on the computer.
And of course, everybody has gone absolutely berserk.
And I've got here's one from a priest who says the Vatican absolutely, even a priest would not reveal the presence or the possession of anything like this, of any sort of time machine.
He said, absolutely not.
It would be a secret.
unidentified
And I'd like to make one other quick comment.
Yes.
I emailed you a question when you were doing those questions.
What would you do if you were the devil and so forth and so on?
if I didn't it sounds like an interesting question sure what would you do if you were the devil anyway I'm not sure but I sent you a question would you go back in time and change the the events of 9-11 would you go back a week and stop it okay thank you I don't know I wouldn't know how to respond to that I my response would be we only have conjecture about the nature of time right we have Dr. Kaku we have others of great scientific repute who comment on the possibility
time travel and nobody's really absolutely sure what the consequences would be of changing an event.
There are theories about it, but remember, it's theoretical physics.
Key part there is theory.
Not fact yet, it's theoretical.
So it could well be that you would set off a chain of events in changing an event of that magnitude that would end the world as we know it, or create a new universe, or, you know, who knows?
Who knows?
But you would have to consider it.
Because so far, that's all we know about what would happen if you did change something.
Filming something, that's a little different, I suspect.
Although, you could also argue that even the filming of that, were it to become general knowledge, read here, another reason for keeping it secret, folks, knowledge would indeed influence the entire timeline, and that something awful would happen.
It may well be that we are not supposed to know or have videotape of the crucifixion at all, right?
But would the Vatican at high levels do it and then keep it secret?
You know, the network had cell connections, landline connections, websites, all kinds of information on this man who was doing the most serious work I'd ever heard on time travel.
At least one possibility that has to be considered, of course, is they set their date and
went back maybe that suggests you don't come back suggests a lot of things I don't know but I thought I'd drop that on you the the most recent scientific guest we've had on time travel Dr. David Anderson is gone to all we can discover right now gone make of it what you will I'm simply reporting to you the facts as they are relayed to me by the network first time caller line you're on here hello hey Art
unidentified
time Travel is a lot of fun.
You know, the interdimensionals are picking up these guys and, you know, taking them off.
National Security, you know that's the first thing, right?
Well, anyway, I called just for breaking information that California, I called friends in a few other states here in the United States, and they stopped spraying us with camsprays.
Chemtrails stopped about three months ago here in California, and I got real nervous going, oh, my God, it's been going on for years, and they just stopped three months ago.
And I started to talk to my friends and going, what's going on in your state?
Well, you've got a, you went back in time, and they say that if you go back to the time when you were still alive, in other words, you go back and you see yourself, they say that the same matter cannot occupy the same space.
There's two camps of thought on the question of ghosts.
This relates to time travel.
The fundamental Bible-believing Christians say that ghosts or communication with the departed is impossible because, according to the words of Christ, everybody's dead until a future day of resurrection.
They say you're just mistaking what you're seeing, and they're demons.
unidentified
But then there's other people who have, you know, including my mother, have had realistic experiences where they seem to communicate with departed loved ones.
I've got a theory to bring the two camps together.
My theory is the Bible is right, people who die are unconscious until a future day of resurrection, but then those that make it after the resurrection in the millennium will find that time travel to the past will be possible at that time.
So therefore, like my mom who saw her uncle warn her of a fire in the garage, he went on to what is still our future, and after the resurrection, went back in time to Warner.
Well, if time effectively ends, everybody would mostly perish.
Right.
In the physical, anyway.
That's very interesting.
That's all I really wanted to know about the Mayans, if their calendar has significance, if 2012 really is it.
Why would they stop at 2012?
Well, I guess they could have figured well we're looking far enough ahead.
We don't have to go out beyond this Maybe it was as simple as that, you know either that or it ends because it ends if you follow me wildcard line you're on the air.
unidentified
Hello I'm in Honolulu listening on AMA 30 KHVH the monster in Honolulu.
Yes, sir.
Alright what I'd like to do if it's okay is I want to offer a short commentary on a particular alien contact case.
Okay we don't have a lot of time so you know we're right at the end of the hour here so fire away.
unidentified
Well basically he the contact that he had with the the Verdons I think that the Verdons made a mistake with the people they originally selected to represent us, you know.
Those are I the way I look at it, someone who's a successful product of a collapsing civilization is kind of like Tyrannosaurus, the end of the dinosaur age.
You know, and I was thinking what they really ought to do is collect, assemble our accomplished spiritual adepts from around the planet on their spaceship.
And what I'm thinking is, I've got an idea that it might be possible for a team of those guys to maybe activate healing of world karma.
I mean, I know it's pretty off the wall, but what I'm thinking is that...
Why not simply gather, I don't know, all the congressmen, all the senators, the vice president, even the president, which would upset everybody because they'd both be gone at once, and leaders of other countries as well, and take them on board the spaceship.
Then you'd see some action, sir.
But, you know, if it's the spiritualists that are gathered and then have to come back and preach the word to get the minds to concentrate on some great world healing, if that would be the object, they wouldn't have a whole lot of success.
But I mean, you get Bush and Cheney up there, and now you're talking.
You get the Russian leaders, the Chinese leaders up there, now you're talking.
I think.
They're the policymakers.
They don't much listen to the spiritual people in our society, do they?
They kind of blow them off.
Yeah, I get politicians up there.
It'd be kind of fun and, in my opinion, kind of interesting to hear all their stories when they got back anyway.
All right, coming up, we're going to move into the world of the FBI.
And the world of the FBI since 9-11, believe me, it's a very changed place.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
Darling is my wildest dream.
never thought He came from somewhere long ago.
Sarah Bethabeba, she tried it hard to recreate, but you get to be creative.
Once in her life, she must have smiled for his nostalgic care.
Never coming near what he wanted to say.
Or if you realize it never really was life and things as she rises to her poverty,
everybody else would surely know she's what you want for me.
We'll see you next time.
Keep something worth until long ago.
But he can still believe there's a place to hide.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired July 2nd, 2002.
I don't know, months ago now, I interviewed Candace DeLong, the next FBI, retired FBI agent.
And during the course of that interview, I'd never seen Candace DeLong.
And tonight I took a look at her photograph because someone sent it to me before the show, and I got it up on the website, by the way, if you want to see her.
And I went, ooh, look at that picture.
I didn't realize when I did the last interview.
What a looker she is.
That picture, that gun, hurt me, Mama.
Anyway, for 20 years, Candace DeLong was on the front lines of some of the FBI's most memorable and gripping cases.
Some have called her a real-life Clarice Starling and a female Donnie Brascoe.
She's tailed terrorists gone undercover as a gangster's mall, that must have been interesting, was one of the agents chosen to carry out the manhunt for the Unabomber in Montana.
For the first time, she reveals the dangers and rewards of her career as a field profiler in the FBI, the world's most powerful law enforcement agency now, a lot more powerful, I think.
Now retired, Agent DeLong offers a day-in-the-life glimpse of her work.
Field profiling, pioneered by John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood, who trained Agent DeLong, is one of the most fascinating and challenging branches of the FBI.
She traces the unusual career path that led her to crime fighting, recounts the obstacles she faced as a woman, you can imagine, and as a fledgling agent.
Now, a lot has happened to her since she last appeared on the program.
She's become a news commentator to NPR, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and recently signed an exclusive contract with MSNBC.
Holy mackerel, she comments on FBI matters, crime stories, and terrorism matters.
It all began with Gary Kunt, it then expanded after 9-11, of course.
The movie rights have been sold, and the first screenplay is currently being written for a TV movie of the week.
Wow.
The entity that brought it hopes to franchise and make it two or three TV movies a year.
Woof.
She would prefer not to say who bought it just yet.
However, loose lip sync ships, right?
So a whole lot has happened to Canvas since she was last on this show.
Tonight, she is back, and there are lots and lots of really heavy questions to ask her.
unidentified
a little detail on her life in the FBI and then I've got some really spiffy questions and I'm sure you do too the the Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night.
But you know, you don't have to be nocturnal to enjoy this amazing show.
The Coast Insider is your key to a normal life.
For 15 cents a day, you can wake up refreshed knowing that last night's show is waiting for you with podcasting.
Listen on your way to work and again on the way home.
Or listen to one of over a thousand archived shows from the past three years.
As a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Nouri and special guests.
The Coast Insiders Club is a must-have feature for all Coast to Coast AM listeners.
Visit CoastTocoastAM.com to sign up today.
You'll sleep like a baby, knowing you'll never miss your favorite guests and topics ever again.
Remember, a one-year subscription comes out to only 15 cents a day.
Sign up today at CoastTocoastAM.com.
Take Coast2Coast AM with you anywhere on your mobile phone.
Coast2CoastAM.com can be conveniently accessed on your iPhone and most Android platforms, which means that you are never without your Coast to Coast AM fix.
If you're a Coast to Coast Insider subscriber, you can listen to the show live in the middle of the night or previous shows 24-7.
Plus, you can browse all the great photos, videos, and news stories.
Keeping up with Coast to Coast AM has never been easier with our Coast Insider service.
Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
I would say the first, from 1980 to 1990, there was a lot of not a lot, but there was a certain amount of funny business.
And when I first started, there were a number of male agents, both at the FBI Academy and then in Chicago, where I was assigned, that just would not only not work with a woman agent, wouldn't even say good morning.
Does it have to do just with the fact, this is going to get real heavy real fast, I can tell it, that just the fact that you're female, or does it have to do with the fact that there are men who believe that a woman without the same amount of upper body strength,
without the same testosterone-driven instincts, you can yell at me when you're ready, that a woman like that can't keep your back, you know, can't watch your back, and so therefore as a partner is more likely to get you killed.
I like going through the door with someone right next to me.
As a matter of fact, just thinking of we had a drug arrest back in Chicago, and we arrest druggies at 4 in the morning because they're just getting to bed.
And three or four of us tried to get through the door at the same time.
It was kind of a Keystone's Cup kind of thing.
But that was fine with me.
One thing that you rarely see in law enforcement is for any of the guys to hand the woman the shotgun and say, here, it's your turn.
So, all right, so I want to talk about a lot of contemporary things.
We'll keep coming back to what's happened with your career.
Sure.
You know, the United States now, all we've got going on sort of is waiting for the next bomb to go off.
I mean, it's kind of down to that point.
We're getting warnings now, of course, about the 4th of July coming up.
Nothing specific, but I heard one report that there was almost as much communication among the terrorists going on right now before the 4th as there was prior to 9-11.
Here's an interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Long article, but its headline is FBI Checking Out Americans' Reading Habits.
For the first time since the Cold War, the FBI is visiting public libraries to keep tabs on the reading habits of people the government considers dangerous.
The searches of some records kept by libraries and bookstores were authorized in an obscure provision of the U.S. AID PATRIOT Act, quietly approved by Congress six weeks after September 11th.
So, you know, they're monitoring what people are even reading.
They're monitoring the Internet.
They're monitoring telephones.
You know, it's like we're living in a different place here.
Well, I can tell you that when I was working on the Unibomb case after Kaczynski had been identified as probably the prime suspect, and I was doing library checks because he listed four books in his manifesto.
And I was trying to get information, actually, I was going from one library to another in Montana, trying to find out if he had checked out any of these four books.
We were trying to build the affidavit for the search warrant, getting enough probable cause to go in and search his cabin or arrest him.
And it would have been very helpful had I been able to find out that, yes, Theodore Kaczynski checked out this book, this book, The True Believer, a couple other things from the library in Lincoln.
That would have been a nice little building block.
But still, Kennis, that's in connection with a specific investigation and the investigation of a specific individual, totally understandable, but expanded to a nationwide program of monitoring what's getting checked out from the library.
I was unable to find anything out because one of the things I learned is that for about at least the last 20 years, when you take out a book, the library, it's private information.
I would have to have a subpoena to find out the library and say, what has Art Bell checked out?
I mean, if somebody was going to a library and they were checking out a lot of books on how to build a bomb, for example, you're telling me there wouldn't be any flag issued as long as they return the books on time?
Well, now, how would you, I mean, let's just, what if, what if the story is true.
If it's true, would that give you pause?
In other words, I understand we're in a war, and it's going to be hard to know when we've gone too far, when we've begun to destroy the very things we say we're fighting to protect.
You know, what I'm thinking is that, and this is a guesstimate here based on 20 years with the Bureau and having been involved in library projects myself, I'm thinking that the Patriot Act may allow FBI agents to go in and ask a librarian what Art Bell is reading without a subpoena.
She can give the information.
However, I have a feeling That there may be more to it than that.
It's just simply not that easy.
And like I said, once you return the book, there's no record that you checked it out.
However, let's say for the sake of argument, I wanted to know who has checked out the Anarchist Cookbook or the Turner Diaries or things that actually promote the kind of thing that we're talking about or can.
I mean, these books were written for people to be instructed on how to make bumps.
And I don't even know if they could give me a list.
But let's say for the sake of argument, I go in to a library and I say, who's checked out the Turner Diaries and the Anarchist Cookbook in the last year?
And they hand me a list.
Now, I'm not going to go open up an investigation on all those people.
But what I am going to do, I'm going to take that list back to the office and I'm going to start running names through a computer and see if I get the same name turns up somewhere else.
For example, maybe I might find out that not only did Art Bell check out the Anarchist Cookbook as well as the Turner Diaries, my computer search tells me that Art Bell was seen at an underground meeting for the We Want to Blow Up America group two months ago.
So now I have something else that has piqued my interest in Art Bell.
And then we keep checking and checking.
A tremendous amount of people, I'm thinking, I'm guessing, check out books like this just because they're curious and they would never build a bond.
What if you don't have to go to the library to look at their records at all?
What if in the FBI office you can access one gigantic database that is tied to libraries all over the place that will tell you exactly what Art Bell or anybody else checked out?
There would have to be another 9-11 before anything like that would even be considered.
And as a result of the investigation, it would have to really show that the event could have been prevented if the FBI had been able to see who was reading what.
Okay, well, but having said that, Candace, you know what echelon is, right?
Echelon listens to telephone conversations, has computers listening to conversations, looking for keywords, kicking out interesting conversations for people to listen to.
Now, I know they're not supposed to listen domestically, but if Great Britain uses echelon and acts on a request of the U.S. to listen to a U.S. citizen, same effect, Candice, you know, U.S. citizens' telephone calls are being monitored.
If they'll monitor our calls, why not our library books?
A lot of people are worried that it's on the way out.
And I'm not saying that some of the measures that are being taken are not justified.
I'm just sort of wondering when we drift, you know, if everybody's thinking about when we drift over that line or if in the frenzy to catch these jerks that want to kill us, we just, you know.
I mean, we always seem to move a bit over the line as we did with internment with the Japanese in the Second World War.
And, you know, I see, I mean, for example, we can hold somebody now, or the FBI can hold somebody now, can't they, without any sort of charge if they think they're involved in terrorism of one sort or another, or they suspect they have information about people who are involved in terrorism, you could be held with normal rights more or less suspended, couldn't you?
And it's my understanding that an awful lot of people that have been arrested since 9-11 on INS violations, although they have been charged, they have not, here we are eight months later, have not had due process.
Even Director Mueller admitted, I believe in the congressional hearing, that it appeared not only did the FBI drop the ball, but that possibly if the overused expression coming up dots had been connected, perhaps 9-11 might have been prevented.
Then we find out a couple weeks after the Colleen rally memo that the CIA was watching two of the terrorists extensively and knew they were al-Qaeda, didn't tell us.
And then NSA comes up, I think it was just a couple of weeks ago, some intercept over here the day before, September 10th, that should have been a tip-off that something was amiss.
And I must say, not just those agencies, but I do recall seeing Condoleezza Rice on TV when she was taking the heat for the White House and when the finger was being pointed at the White House.
And she admitted, and so did President Bush, that they were aware that there might be some problems with some airplanes being hijacked, but they had no information that they would be thrown into flown into buildings.
And so my question that I'm asking the television said as I'm watching them, well, then why didn't we have our airports on higher alert than they were?
If you thought there were going to be planes hijacked, I mean, 11 of the 19 suicide pilots were stopped and questioned extensively before they got on the planes that morning because their papers were not in order.
And yet they were still out on the plane.
I think if we'd been on high alert, they wouldn't have gotten on those planes.
Actually, Candace, what I heard is that the scary has been tightened in the East Coast, Midwest, but that the West, which is particularly open and vulnerable right now, particularly L.A., is just not seeing the replacement of personnel that the other areas of the country have.
The thing is, Art, I think it's equally important that people not get on planes with guns is that those pilots follow protocol and do not come out of that cockpit.
That's the problem is getting the pilot out of that cockpit.
They've got to stay in there no matter what's going on in the back of the plane.
You know, I'd be interested in what you think America's future is going to be.
In other words, if we've got to put up with this constant threat, whether it's dirty bombs, real atomic bombs, biological dispersals that would be suicidal even for those who let it all loose, but that's what they do.
They kill themselves.
Or whatever else it is.
I mean, if that is to be our future, Candace, America's, I don't know.
I don't know how we're going to come through this.
And I think not too well.
And if something else of as large a proportion as 9-11 occurs, oh man, all bets are off.
I mean, our economy is tanking right now, Candace.
I think that I have to tell you that I'm surprised that there have been no more attacks.
I really thought that we were going to start seeing them after the war started.
There hasn't been anything.
I know a few things have been stopped.
It shook me to the depths of my being when the dirty bomb suspect turned out to be a Chicago gangbanger who got religion in prison and now was involved with al-Qaeda and looking into, supposedly, allegedly, detonating a dirty bomb in America.
I mean, we think our enemy is this guy that lives in caves 10,000 miles away, and we can't understand him.
And here it is, this Chicago, born and raised in Chicago with a chip on his shoulder.
Al-Qaeda is claiming now that 98% of their leadership and their organization remains intact.
And this may be way out of your area, but there's a lot of criticism that our military, for example, had about 1,100 al-Qaeda trapped, and they let them get away.
I hope that's not true, but from what I've heard, it very well might be.
It's also my understanding, looking at a lot of, watching TV, as you can imagine, I watch the news a lot, that an awful lot of people that do know that that is their field are saying we just did not have enough of a ground war in Afghanistan and that perhaps that's why a lot of these people got away.
I don't know that I would believe al-Qaeda's statement that 98% of their leadership is intact.
It could be that they have replaced people that were killed with new, you know, new leaders.
But I've said it before on national news, so I don't have any problem saying it now, and I really believe this.
I do not understand, okay, we need a moratorium on allowing not only students, but other people from what I would call criteria countries in the United States.
And yet, you know, everyone's afraid of stepping on somebody's toes.
And, you know, I'm sorry.
There probably are lots of decent people from some of these criteria countries that would be deprived of the fine, fine education that they could have received in America if they were not from that country.
Is it the case that people at the special agent level or even agents in charge, they knew pretty much what was about to come down or that something really heavy was going to come down.
And one can only imagine, I mean, the FBI just doesn't leak stuff very often.
And so you can only imagine how ultimately frustrated whoever it was who leaked this must have been in not getting their information heard, in not getting their warnings that they knew about her to go to the press.
I mean, that would be a career-ending kind of decision, right?
But can you imagine, and I don't know how these, I will speculate on how I think these things got leaked, but can you imagine how Colleen Rowley and all the Minneapolis agents that were involved in that situation and the Phoenix agents that were involved in that, you imagine what was going through their minds and their hearts at 8 a.m. on September 11th?
They're looking at those buildings falling down after those planes are hijacked and they knew now they're looking at, oh my gosh, that's what these people were up to.
And if headquarters had just listened, maybe we could have stopped this.
But I mean, to get to the point in that position, to leak it, to be so frustrated with your own bureaucracy that you leak it to the press, that's like way over the top.
It's way over the top, but 9-11 was way over the top.
We'd never been attacked before, and 3,000 people died.
And I think it was just something that these memos got leaked somehow.
You know, let me tell you how.
The memos might not have been leaked.
Somebody might have picked up a phone, somebody that knew what happened, somebody, maybe not even an agent, but somebody, a close friend or relative of an agent that knew.
Normally there would be an investigation into the leaks, but I bet in this case there wasn't because the FBI management was too busy running and answering to Congress to otherwise known as spinning.
I never saw anybody reprimanded, punished, or anything for a leak because they're just not investigated that seriously.
And I don't think this one would be investigated at all.
I mean, what would the public think to know that the girl was wasting time, money, and agent manpower trying to find out how these memos got leaked when these memos proved that the FBI agents on the street were doing their job?
It wouldn't look very good for management, that would be a lot of fun.
But if you recall and just cast your memory back to the Nixon administration, they spent a fairly significant number of taxpayer dollars on looking at all kinds of things like this, Candace.
Well, what I really want to know, and I think everybody wants to know, is, and I don't know if you can render this judgment, but since all of that screw up, and we can talk more about it, but I mean, you know, it's history now.
Since all of that, is it all fixed?
Are these agencies now communicating effectively with each other?
Is whatever was wrong then right now so that we can all sleep well at night knowing that information is being exchanged freely, flowing upwardly as it should, that sort of thing, can we all sleep well at night or not?
I think there's some things that have to change that Director Mueller might not even be aware of, unless he's been seeing me shoot my mouth off about it on TV at the last part of May when all of this was hitting the proverbial fan.
And Mueller did not come up through the FBI.
It's been the prosecutor's seat all of his career.
There are policies and procedures that management engages in that must stop or must change if you are going to be able to sleep better at night.
And things like, you're going to be shocked when I tell you three things about FBI management.
One of them is, okay, here's, I'm hanging my hat on that management's the problem.
If you ask any FBI agent that's been in 20 years or 20 days in one word, can you sum up what's wrong with the FBI, you're going to get a one-word answer, management.
Why?
Why is management such a problem?
Here's a few things that I witnessed repeatedly in my 20 years.
An FBI agent that wants to be a manager, and many of them do, can throw their hat in the ring to be a supervisor with only three years' experience out of the FBI Academy.
That is like letting a third-year medical student do brain surgery without the attending physician standing there.
This is a guest you want to listen to, canvassed along with the FBI 20 years now retired and talking.
I'm Art Bell.
Stay right where you are.
unidentified
Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night.
But you know, you don't have to be nocturnal to enjoy this amazing show.
The Coast Insider is your key to a normal life.
For 15 cents a day, you can wake up refreshed knowing that last night's show is waiting for you with podcasting.
As a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Nouri and special guests.
The Coast Insiders Club is a must-have feature for all Coast to Coast AM listeners.
Visit CoastToCoastAM.com to sign up today.
Take Coast to Coast AM with you anywhere on your mobile phone.
Coast2CoastAM.com can be conveniently accessed on your iPhone and most Android platforms, which means that you are never without your Coast to Coast AM fix.
If you're a Coast to Coast Insider subscriber, you can listen to the show live in the middle of the night or previous shows 24-7.
Plus, you can browse all the great photos, videos, and news stories.
Keeping up with Coast to Coast AM has never been easier with our Coast Insider service.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from July 2, 2002 on Premier Networks.
Candice, we were talking about the sort of management, middle management type people, and you were saying that somebody three years out of the academy could apply to be in, in fact, perhaps even get into middle management.
There's three things that I think very much contribute to the problem of FBI supervisors and managers being incompetent, ineffective.
The first one is yes.
They're allowed to put their hat in a ring.
An agent can put their hat in a ring after three years.
What this means is a supervisor might only have three or four years experience and he or she is supervising a squad of anywhere from eight to 40 people who know much more about what they're doing than the supervisor does.
Second problem, specialization is not required and it's not always honored.
What do I mean by that?
I mentioned I was a nurse for almost a decade.
I specialized in psychiatry most of my career and I did spend some time in substance abuse.
After about six or seven years I wanted to be head nurse and I applied for a position in psychiatry when one became available.
It's the only position and the hospital was one of the largest private hospitals in the world in Chicago.
If there had been an opening in pediatrics for a head nurse, they wouldn't have even taken my application.
They would have said, Candace, you're a psych nurse.
You don't know anything about PEDS.
Take your application and go away.
And that's how it is, I think, in most other fields.
Now, let's say somebody wants to be an FBI supervisor and there's an opening on a drug desk.
That's what they call them, a desk.
And that agent applies for it and may get it and they may never have worked a drug case in their life.
There's a problem.
And lastly, I saw repeatedly throughout my career that when an FBI manager screws up, not only are they not told they must step down from management or be put on probation or something like that, they are oftentimes promoted up and out.
And I'm sad to say that on at least three occasions I'm aware of, inept or problematic supervisors were promoted to up and out of the division and were given a desk in terrorism.
Now there's two kinds of terrorism desks in the Bureau.
There's domestic terrorism and international terrorism.
Three times I saw that happen.
One time, every field division of the FBI gets an internal inspection every three to four years.
But we inspect ourselves.
In one inspection in one of the divisions, well this is the worst thing that can happen.
And they go to a field division and they go over all their paperwork and make sure they've been doing everything right.
They rarely find anything wrong.
But a bad write-up, the worst thing that can happen to an agent or supervisor is to be found I and I, inefficient and ineffective.
It's the equivalent of being told, not only do you not know how to do your job, you're wasting time and you're ineffective.
And I am aware of a case that this particular supervisor was found to be ineffective and inefficient.
And he was supervising one of the terrorism desks before 9-11.
After that write-up, was he asked to step down?
Was he moved to a lesser squad that had less responsibilities?
No, he remained in that position for the next 20 minutes until finally two weeks after 9-11, the boss finally pulled him out of there because he didn't know what was going on.
Well, it was explained to me once by a colleague of mine who's a retired supervisor, and He joined the Bureau long before I did.
He actually put himself through college.
So he was working as a clerk before he became an agent.
And basically what his explanation is, is that after the Vietnam War vets started coming back to America and they wanted government jobs and a lot of them came on with the FBI and they wanted to, these are former military men and they wanted to get to the top quickly.
So they devised this thing called the Career Path and it's a path that one took to get to the top in 20 years.
There's another thing if I was going to say, and I gave you three things I think are wrong, this feeds into the fourth thing, is this method to get to the top.
Every two years you get promoted to a higher level and more responsibility and it's to another division or back and forth to headquarters and whatnot.
Two years, 24 months, is not long enough to get your feet wet and then you're pulled out of there to get to another promotion.
If you stay five years in one place, that's the kiss of death.
And so unfortunately, there's a lot of people go into management that did not have very much time on the street since Hoover died.
Now when Hoover, I'm told, I never worked under Hoover, he passed away eight years before I became an agent, but I'm told by the old-timers, the Hooverites we call them, that no one would even be considered to be a supervisor on a squad that didn't have 10 to 15 years experience with that violation, with what that squad handled.
I heard a story today that about 200 people are complaining that they're getting sick from irradiated mail in Washington.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about the anthrax because, you know, there's a big story out there, Candace, right now, about the anthrax case and a missing biochemist.
And that the truth about what's going on or who perpetrated this anthrax thing is somehow wrapped up in national security in some way that we're never going to hear who the hell did this to us.
One of the things that happened there was the Bureau, of course, not being comprised of a lot of PhDs, although we do have some PhDs in our lab, and we do have some agents out in the field that have PhDs.
We were getting a lot of information in the early days of the anthrax case.
We were talking to PhD bio experts all over the world and getting information from them.
We were asking them questions, and they were giving us answers.
And if we had 10 PhDs in a room with 30 years' experience with anthrax, we were getting oftentimes two different opinions, five in one camp and five in the other.
So it was a problem in the beginning with wrong information.
Now what does the fact that as a profiler, what does the fact that it was extremely sophisticated and well done, what does that tell you about who did it?
Well, what it tells me about who did it is, and I was back in New York the weekend that the FBI released the profile on the anthrax killer, and I was at MSNBC one day.
I just all day long I was talking about it.
And one of the things that the FBI official profile said was that it was of such a grade that it somebody could have taken crude anthrax and with a centrifuge and a few chemicals and equipment totaling no more than 2,500 turned it into weapons grade in their basement with certain chemicals and equipment.
Now I don't know if that's true or not.
What it tells me, in answer to your question, what does it tell me that it was weapons grade?
It tells me that the person who is responsible for this crime probably has at least three initials after his name, Ph.D. come to mind.
At first, when Dashill and Brokaw and the guy down in Florida, when they were the only ones that had received the anthrax, I was not convinced that it was not state-sponsored, that it wasn't phase two of a terrorist attack from an outside source.
I wasn't convinced until Patrick Leahy got his letter.
Then I was, that tipped the scale for me that this was domestic.
I keep up on things.
I read a couple of newspapers every day, national magazines.
Is this, in your opinion, the kind of person who would quit forevermore after taking the opportunistic moment of delivering these letters, or would he inevitably strike again?
I think he's going to strike again, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he's listening to the show.
Nor would I. He seems to me the type of person that would be up late at night in his little laboratory.
What I was going to say is regarding there's tremendous similarities between, I think, the person that did this and the type of crime and the Unibomber.
Now let's not forget, the Unibomber got away with his crimes for 17 years for a few reasons.
If this person, and after all, he's narrowed down, you said probably three initials after his name, is if they've got it narrowed down and they see, he sees, I'll stay with the he for you, sees that he's being closed in on, would he do it again before they got to him?
Well, back in the early 80s, there was a group of Puerto Rican independence extremists.
And their initials for their group, the underground group, was the FALN.
And they were very active in Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago.
And prior to they were the most successful terrorist group this country had ever seen.
Very few people have heard of them outside of New York, Puerto Rico, and Chicago.
But they successfully placed over 120 pipe bombs, and the one most deadly was put down at France's tavern on Wall Street on a Friday at lunch and killed five people and injured 60.
And then they took credit for it.
And they were eventually, 11 of them were apprehended in the spring of 1980 in Chicago.
And a little old lady was looking outside her window and decided not to mind her own business and made a phone call of some suspicious people outside.
And that arrest resulted in 11 of them.
And then several years later, another group of them were arrested.
And back in those days, when I was chasing terrorists around Chicago, we didn't have cell phones.
I don't even think we all had beepers.
It was just good old-fashioned learn the subway.
And there was this one guy we were following.
It took us a year.
We knew he was leaving his house every Tuesday to go somewhere, but we kept losing him.
He'd get on the subway system, and he was engaging in behaviors that we call dry cleaning.
He was engaging in behaviors to lose a tail, not because he saw a tail, just assumed that he was being watched, and that told us he was going somewhere that he really did not want anyone to follow him.
And so for a year almost of Tuesday nights, we followed him.
And every Tuesday night took him a little bit farther, a little bit farther, and then finally took him to the safe house.
We figured he was going to some safe house, meeting with his comrades or something.
And it turns out, when we got a search warrant for the safe house after he left, we found 24 pounds of unstable dynamite, 48 blasting caps, and 3,000 rounds of ammo.
It was enough to build up, to completely blow up the 41-unit building that we found it in, plus a few of the surrounding buildings.
And so that paid off well, that year of surveillance work.
And there have been some tremendous terrorism events that were stopped.
There's always probably going to be things that you're not going to hear about.
But there are some of the bigger ones, 1993 there was a case called Terr Stop, T-E-R-R Stop, and it was a five-prong attack.
The first one was the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
The plan was that one building would fall, hit the other building, and knock it over.
It didn't work, as we know.
But five people did die, and several hundred were injured.
The four other prongs of that attack were the Lincoln Tunnel, the Holland Tunnel were going to be blown up, the New York Division of the FBI building, and the United Nations building.
And that was stopped because we had an informant in the group who was one of them, and he became ideologically disenchanted with what they were going to do, and he came to us.
And we worked him and the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is comprised of cops and FBI agents and Secret Service and ATF.
And basically, when they were ready to make the arrest, they knocked the door down of this factory in Queens, I think it was.
And they were literally stirring in these big 60-gallon drums, stirring the precursor chemicals.
We get these warnings now that are quite nonspecific.
Just we have a lot of information from always undisclosed sources that something bad is going to happen in the week of or during the celebration of or whatever.
We get a lot of these warnings these days.
If our government, FBI, or whatever, had specific information about, for example, a biological or nuclear event in, say, a place like Los Angeles or Chicago,
is it your opinion, particularly if it was in the short term, that a specific warning would be issued or that it would be concluded that the ensuing panic and it would override any decision to issue that specific warning, get the hell out of Chicago, something's about to go off, that kind of thing.
And I'm sure that that exact issue has been debated ad nauseum behind closed doors.
However, I think when we look at the backlash that hit the White House, the FBI, and the CIA in May about not preventing this attack and we should have known more, and we should have told people more, et cetera, et cetera, I think if there's enough time to make some kind of safe evacuation, I can't imagine if they found out that something was going to happen in one hour.
You just have varying reliabilities with regard to the information you've received.
You never know, or rarely would you ever know for absolute certain that it was going to occur.
So you would only have a partial certainty, and you'd be balancing that against what surely would occur with regard to panic trying to get out of a city.
I can't even imagine what would happen if New Yorkers, for example, were told we have reliable information from a credible source that in the next seven days is going to be a dirty bomb set off in Manhattan.
I can't even imagine the panic.
If I was in Manhattan, I would sprout wings and fly out.
And a lot of people were criticizing him because it wasn't specific enough, and what are they supposed to do anyway, and blah, blah, blah.
He took a lot of heat for it.
And I have to say, I was glad that he did it because although I do not travel the bridges very often, I don't commute over them daily as hundreds of thousands of people do, I want to be able to make that choice.
Am I going to drive over the bridge or am I going to take the ferry into work today?
Or am I going to stay home?
You know, let it be my decision based on the information that I'm given.
Now, that's one thing.
Knowing that a dirty bomb may be going off in a major metropolitan area in seven days is completely different.
But it's just so hard for me to imagine the White House feeling Okay about keeping that kind of information from the public after what we just went through or what they just went through.
Well, that's why I said earlier, Candace, and this would be thinking from you only as a private citizen, but even aside from keeping students out of this country from nations that would send them here to train to kill us, if another major incident occurs,
if we are biologically attacked or attacked with a nuclear device of any sort, there's going to be an awful lot of pressure to use really serious force in return of a nuclear nature, probably.
How would you feel about such thinking?
I mean, it is going on right now.
They're changing policy.
In fact, I've got a story saying that the president is about to issue some big thing saying that there's a big policy change coming and the U.S. will attack first.
Here it is.
Let's see.
Bush to issue strike first strategy.
And this comes from the Baltimore Sun, I think.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Sun National Staff, that's right.
Sometime this fall, the President will issue what some are calling the biggest change in U.S. strategic policy since the dawn of the Cold War.
Well, it sounds to me like we are getting ready to take out our enemy before they do it to us, anticipating that if they have the opportunity, they will do it.
My understanding from what the information the government has released, there's been a tremendous amount of evidence found in Afghanistan since the war began regarding al-Qaeda's attempts to get plutonium and to make nuclear devices and to all of this stuff that they're finding in deserted homes and caves and whatnot.
There is every reason to believe anybody that thinks that I think anyone that thinks that they wouldn't try it if they had it is naive.
I think if they'd had a nuclear weapon, 9-11, they would have used that instead of the airplanes.
I said a few months ago, I was on a radio show and regarding profiling, racial profiling.
And I said it wasn't enough that we just scrutinize Mideastern males, that we really needed to probably, you know, look very careful at everyone.
You know, if your enemy knows you're doing one thing, he'll change.
And no sooner had I said it than there was the first female suicide bomber in Israel.
We also, it's not known widely, but there have been a number of attempts of passengers not related to any terrorist group or any criminal group in the last year and a half before 9-11 try to take an airplane down because the passenger was crazy.
It happened the guy last summer that tried to take schizophrenic.
He was hearing voices.
He was on a British Airways flight in Africa.
He stormed the cockpit and the plane went into a nosedive several thousand feet before it recovered.
Art, if he had gone into the laboratory where he had privacy, that plane would be in the Atlantic.
And that was December 23rd.
We'd still be looking for the pieces.
It would have been determined within hours who Robert Reed was, the problems that he had had gotten on the plane.
British intelligence knew that he was running around in the mosque with one of the, with Massawi, Zacharias Massawi.
They went to the same mosque.
We would have known, what I'm saying, if that Flight 63, I think it was, had gone down, and it would have gone down if he'd gone in the lavatory.
And I don't think enough was made of that.
I think you would have seen air travel all over the world just growing to a halt for the Christmas season, no less.
And I just don't think enough was made of it.
And here's this doofus guy.
What the heck was he doing?
Why did they have him do it?
And we know from previous people that have been arrested that it was one of their plans to have this guy, Ramzi Yosef, who was convicted, one of the 11, the leaders of the group in New York.
He was the one that masterminded the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.
He was, after he fled a bomb factory that he was in when a bomb accidentally went off, he fled it and the Filipino Secret Intelligence Service found information that they shared with us, his plan.
He was making plastic explosives into small compartments like in the band of a hat or the sole of a shoe.
And the plan was they were going to take down 11 jetliners in one day.
You simply don't get the opportunity very often to question 20-year FBI agents on the radio.
That's what's coming up now.
We're going to go to the phones here shortly, and we're going to take calls.
A lot talked about with Candace the Long.
Her book, by the way, is Special Agent, My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI.
That's a book you might definitely want to read.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
I'm Art Bell.
Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night.
But you know, you don't have to be nocturnal to enjoy this amazing show.
The Coast Insider is your key to a normal life.
For 15 cents a day, you can wake up refreshed knowing that last night's show is waiting for you with podcasting.
Listen on your way to work and again on the way home.
Or listen to one of over a thousand archived shows from the past three years.
As a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Nouri and special guests.
The Coast Insiders Club is a must-have feature for all Coast to Coast AM listeners.
Visit CoastToCoastAM.com to sign up today.
You'll sleep like a baby, knowing you'll never miss your favorite guests and topics ever again.
Remember, a one-year subscription comes out to only 15 cents a day.
Sign up today at CoastToCoastAM.com.
Take Coast2Coast AM with you anywhere on your mobile phone.
CoastTocoastAM.com can be conveniently accessed on your iPhone and most Android platforms, which means that you are never without your Coast to Coast AM fix.
If you're a Coast to Coast Insider subscriber, you can listen to the show live in the middle of the night or previous shows 24-7.
Plus, you can browse all the great photos, videos, and news stories.
Keeping up with Coast to Coast AM has never been easier with our Coast Insider service.
I was telling a friend the other day, if I'd known the last couple of years of my bureau career that what I was looking at in front of me after retirement, I would have smiled a whole lot more.
Larry, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I get these computer messages.
Brings an interesting point, maybe meaningless, maybe not.
9-11 occurred, then a plan to take out 11 airliners.
You mentioned it yourself.
And a lot of people wonder if there is any significance to the number 11.
I mean, I know it seems crazy to look at some of these things, but people look at a lot of these things and they think, and frankly, maybe they're not wrong because in the Muslim world there's a lot of significance to certain dates, just as there is here.
The last thing I read about that was that they had pretty much figured out that it was a rapid movement of the rudder by the pilot, which apparently should never be done.
And that was a couple of months ago I read that.
I don't think it went away too soon, actually.
I'm not worried about that plane accident being a part of any terrorist act at all.
Apparently they've got a lot of structural engineers have come to the same conclusion.
It could be something as severe as a jetliner going into a building or a dirty bomb, God forbid, or it could be a car bomb in front of a school.
Any number of things that we haven't thought of that go on in Israel all the time.
They affect not only is going to be devastating on the economy, one of the other things you've brought up is the foreign students in this country from what I would call criteria countries, I think are going to have to pack up and leave.
I can't imagine, I can't imagine, I could be wrong, Americans being tolerant of foreign students in the United States who are from a country that we may be able to prove was involved in a terrorist attack on us.
If I was the leader of a terrorist group, that's exactly what I would do.
I would not concern with the 4th of July.
And, you know, it's interesting, you were talking earlier, Art, about these electronic overhears or intercepts that have increased the last few days as we, looking back, now know that we saw the days before 9-11.
That might be a deliberate scheme on their part to make us think something's going to happen this Thursday.
Why do you think that, as of yet, the homicide bombers, which is, I think, the preferable way to refer to them, the homicide bombers have restricted what they've done mostly to Israel.
Isn't it likely to arrive on our shore like any minute?
After the war started, or before the war started, I really thought, and I said it to many people, that we were going to start seeing car bombings and suicide or homicide bombings, as you call it, in the United States.
I thought it was going to happen as soon as the war started, and I'm surprised that it hasn't.
I think that, well, I don't know if you recall, but a man attempting to get into the United States to disrupt the Millennium Celebration in Seattle 1999 was apprehended simply because,
God bless her, a Border Patrol agent thought he seemed a little nervous when she was questioning him, asked him if she could look in the trunk, and he stupidly, for him, wisely for us, said yes.
Just because she was on her on her game that day and a little suspicious of this man who did look Middle Eastern, and one thing led to another, and that act alone, God knows what, she prevented from happening in Seattle.
Yeah, but the other side of the point is, for example, I've seen lawsuits filed by Middle Eastern appearing people who were not allowed on airliners for whatever reason, you know, who are doing a damn thing wrong.
100% of the suicide pilots or homicide pilots, whatever you want to call those 19 men, 100% of them were males between 20 and 50 of Middle Eastern descent.
100% of them.
What happened on 9-11, they did not make life in America any easier for Middle Easterners here.
And I don't think it's going to be at all restricted to men.
You know, in Vietnam, there were sappers, and there were lots of females, believe me.
So if you have a strong belief in something and you're willing to sacrifice your own life, then I think eventually you'll end up with an equal number of women, don't you?
But for now, like I said, I think we need to carefully scrutinize everyone, but especially those that fit the profile of those that have committed terrorist acts against us and those that have sworn to continue to try to do so.
Yeah, Israel's beginning to get rather proactive themselves.
They fired a missile here a couple days ago and dispatched a bomb maker, one of the top bomb makers for, you know, the suicide bomb, one of the real experts.
I mean, they just put up a helicopter and fired a missile, and it was, you know, they had a car, and that was it.
That's what I was talking about earlier, but I mean, that's what's at risk.
And, you know, sometimes in a war, this is a war, sometimes in a war, you've got to kill the enemy.
I mean, you've just got to kill them.
Assassination is a word.
But if you know that there's a guy, you know, in southern Lebanon, for example, that's driving in a car with lots of bombs made up and ready to go to dispatch to bombers that will come across our borders, and you have a chance to send out an F-15 or something and send one up his tailpipe.
When you execute someone or you kill them or you have just dried up a source of information, I'd say grab them, get all the information you can out of them, find out who they've been calling, who's been calling them, where have they been, trace their credit card usage, and you're going to find more bad guys.
I don't know if you're aware of it, but the French intelligence service was following a suspected terrorist around the summer before 9-11, last summer.
And they watched him go back and forth to Afghanistan.
They know that he met with bin Laden.
And they apprehended him, I think, two weeks before 9-11.
They admit they tortured him.
One of the things they found out as a result of the torture is what exactly he was up to, and what he was up to was he had been given the directors from Osama bin Laden to blow up the American Embassy in Paris.
I think when one considers what they would do to us if we were committing terrorist, trying to commit terrorist acts in their country, there's also different types of torture.
Torture isn't necessarily physical and the horrible things that we've all heard about.
Torture can be there can be methods to enhance your chances of someone telling you things through chemical means.
Sodium pentathol is called a truth serum.
In fact, it is not truth serum.
When I was a psychiatric nurse I was present and assisted during a few sodium pentathol interviews of some people.
What sodium pentothol is, it's like a chemical hypnosis.
It relaxes you so much that you're almost in a hypnotic state and you can focus on one thing.
I once went to the dentist, you know, and I was going to get put to sleep and he did that with sodium pentathol and Nurse said, you're going to tell us all.
She was joking, I think.
Anyway, he put the needle in my arm and he just pushed it a little tiny bit and I went, do it again.
And he did.
And I went, you know, I was gone.
He wasn't about to give me a little squirt.
He gave me the whole ball of wax and I just went away.
I'm Art Bell and I will be right back probably.
unidentified
This is Premiere Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this, somewhere in time.
Calling in the air of the night.
Hold up.
I'm waiting for the soul for all my life.
Hold up.
Can you feel it coming in the air of the night?
Hold on.
All my life.
Oh no, oh no.
Oh no, oh no.
I remember all worries.
How could I ever forget the first time the last time we ever met?
But I know the reason why you keep this silence so beautifully.
The hurt doesn't show, but the pain is your rose.
Lord, if you are free, I'm here to come in here at night.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
But I've been waiting for this moment for all my life Oh Lord I've been waiting for this moment for all my life Oh Lord But I've been waiting for this moment for all my life You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired July 2nd, 2002.
Tom in Petalone, California says, hey, Art, did you ever stop to think about how the World Trade Center looks like a giant number 11 on the New York skyline?
That was.
No, I never thought about that.
It's very interesting.
Okay, I want to really lay into the phones.
I promised, and so I need to do it with Candace.
Candace DeLong, wildcard line, you're on the air with Candace DeLong.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes, I heard earlier on the program, the former FBI guest mentioned that the anthrax was actually perpetrated domestically by someone with access to the National Security Agency type of anthrax.
And I also read in Covert Action Magazine and some other very, unfortunately few mainstream media, that Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the Federation of American Scientists directorate specializing in chemical biological weapons, says it came not from any foreign source, but from the only kind that has been produced by the United States military or the CIA using the chemicals and the grade of anthrax.
And I think as the guest pointed out, this was a phony attempt to try to pin this on what would be a target of opportunity for the United States government to go off and attack.
And I think even beyond that, we've got to consider that there's this would not be just an individual.
This would be someone of people involved with the top levels of government who have a powerful, frantic interest in framing up countries like Iraq, the round of the Rumsfeld Wolfritz faction in and out of government in the media, who are just desperately trying to cook up a pretext to attack Iraq now that Saddam Hussein is no longer a puppet of the United States.
That we would have essentially done this to ourselves to frame Iraq and give us a public justification, a political justification to go in and finish the job in Iraq.
And we have there have been some obvious, although they're suppressed in the news, there have been obvious evidence of how unfriendly the Saudis really are to us.
And I notice that we just play it down and spin it down.
Normally they deal with things like skateboarding and rock groups and that sort of stuff.
For those two days, 12 days before 9-11, they had a very strong focus, two-parter, on Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda terrorist network, the oppressive nature of the Taliban, and the inevitability of coming al-Qaeda terrorist attacks against targets within the United States.
Now my question that I'm trying to form here, obviously, I mean, see, I was asked to record this and play this for six consecutive social studies classes.
And I kept thinking, now, why are they showing this to these kids?
This is terrible.
This is depressing.
This is awful.
You know, of course, 12 days later, I knew why.
Now, my question is, if it was found with no question, the members, and by the way, they did interview people in the agency.
And the spokesman said, yes, this is inevitable.
This is coming.
We've got to, you know, be prepared for this.
If you can get a copy of that and please watch that with an agent's eye, see what that tells you about what was really known.
If it was found, just without question, that somebody knew, what steps would the agency take toward members of our own government for either hiding the information, spinning the information, or using it to their personal advantage?
You know, I think that we, not related to this film that you're talking about, but in response to what you just said, how would people respond?
I think we just went through that in May when the fur started flying about what did the White House know, when did they know it, what did the FBI know, what did the CIA know, and you saw what happened.
There's this flurry of activity.
Congress passes a bunch of new laws.
We have a new government agency that's going to be formed.
Homeland Security is turned into a cabinet-level position.
And there's all these knee-jerk responses.
And then it all went away.
I would be surprised to find out that with absolute certainty the administration knew exactly what was going to happen when, because I was in government work long enough to know two government employees can't keep a secret.
And that would just be a secret that it's way too hot to handle.
I mean, a lot of people believe that it was well known that we were going to be attacked at Pearl Harbor, and it was allowed to occur.
So This is not really that far from that category of kind of question.
I never believed it about Pearl Harbor, which will give me a lot of emails, and I don't really believe it about this either, and maybe that's just hopeful patriotism, but I don't think so.
I think if there had been real knowledge at high places, there would have been something done, right?
And I don't think we're going to be hit hard again until around December sometime.
these terrorists are calculated enough to know that they don't want to jeopardize the election of any liberal candidate in November that would be sympathetic toward issues that are important to terrorists.
There would be a political backlash they could not tolerate if they hit us hard before November.
They know who their buddies are in Congress.
They know who's sympathetic toward issues like open borders.
Sure, they weren't afraid to awaken the sleeping giant on 9-11.
And, you know, I mean, it didn't stop them.
The fact that we would get angry, the fact that we would get conservative, the fact that we would get tough, that didn't scare them.
They did it anyway, right?
unidentified
Well, right, but they had to pick a moment.
I mean, they weren't going to do it.
You know, they're thinking now, I think, at this point, it would be suicide for them to hit us again hard because the backlash would be just so, you know, the borders would close up, student visas would end overnight.
You know, all the things that are important to them would dry up immediately.
I think that this gentleman has thought of some things that perhaps the terrorists haven't.
You know, you're right, it's not in the terrorists' best interest to hit us hard again.
However, let's not forget that when Congress voted whether or not to go to war, every single one of them, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, with the exception of one lone dissenting vote, voted to go get them.
And there was no ifs, ands, or buts.
I don't really think the terrorists have thought all of these things through.
And if we stop all student visas and kick everybody out of the country that we think doesn't belong here, they're still going to find, that's not going to bother them.
They're still going to find another way to infiltrate and to get in.
Look at this Jose Padilla.
I hate to beat a drum here, but here's an American born and bred in America, raised on the streets of Chicago, and he was recruited.
Ma'am, would you speak to the issues that I think are alive and well in this country that the FBI has achieved that adversarial juxtaposed position to our people through that long-running spate under the tutelage of Mr. Hoover?
And where today, we much don't think that they're doing enough or that they keep us out of the loop or not telling us what's happened.
Like there's many of us believe we were already once attacked off the coast over there when they shot our plane down with a shoulder-fired missile.
And perhaps the FBI was instrumental in covering it up because nobody wanted all them airlines to quit flying.
It's my understanding, there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever recovered and the plane was almost 100% recovered.
That's why the man in charge of the investigation, Jim Calstrom, was adamant that no findings be made until as much of the plane, of all of the plane if possible, was recovered.
There's no indication whatsoever that an explosive device went into that plane.
What a lot of people saw burning in the sky that was a projectile was a part of the plane shooting from the plane down to the water.
So if you looked across the dark sky and you saw a glowing projectile and it just lasted a matter of seconds before it was in the water, it could have been interpreted as something going from the ground level up to the plane as opposed to something when the plane exploded, the gas tanks, that's how they've determined it happened, and a piece of the plane shooting down to the ocean.
Well, a lot of bad things have happened, Canvas, and a lot of times we attribute it to, in the case of planes, pilot error or mechanical difficulties or a million different things that could be said.
And one has to wonder how many terrorist-originated things have occurred that have been attributed to something else, and nobody really came out and took credit for doing it, or that credit never became public.
It's a good question, but if you look at the nature of terrorism and what it is the terrorist is trying to do, why wouldn't they take credit for a plane going down?
I was very, very shocked that Bin Louden, in the early days after the attack, denied that he did it.
And the only, because that's so not him.
That is so not him.
The only thing I could think of was that the world was horrified at what, love America or hate us, the vast majority of people in the world were shocked and horrified that the Twin Towers were destroyed and innocent people were killed.
Part of the reason I wrote the book was I wanted people to see that the FBI does a lot of things well and does a lot of things right and that it's just a bunch of good stories.
And I think since we are a government agency supported by taxpayers' funds, it has a right to know.
I was reading, there's a book out called, I forget the author, but it's called Germs.
And it came out right around 9-11.
And in many ways it was very reassuring.
You know, for one thing, the delivery system that would be necessary, like say if you were going to put a bunch of Eboli or anthrax on a missile, when the missile explodes, you're going to destroy the vast majority, something like 99% of your agent, your chemical or your biological agent.
Well, when you're dealing with people that have already demonstrated they will sacrifice their life to take ours in as large a number as possible, then biologicals make some horrid sense.