Writer William Langewiesche

DATE May 27, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: William Langewiesche discusses his new book, "The
Outlaw Sea"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The sea has always been a relatively anarchic place. Piracy continues to be a
menace. Ships have been attacked by terrorists, and the threat remains that
terrorists could transport their weapons by sea. My guest, William
Langewiesche, says it has grown increasingly difficult for governments to
control the oceans. He explains why in his new book "The Outlaw Sea: A World
of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime." Langewiesche is national correspondent for The
Atlantic Monthly. His other books include "Inside the Sky," reflections on
his experiences as a professional pilot, and "American Ground" about the
clean-up at ground zero and the culture that developed around it. He's
currently working on a series of articles on the rebuilding of the Iraqi
justice system.

Langewiesche says more than 40,000 large merchant ships are wandering the
world with little or no regulation under the system that's become known as
`flags of convenience.' I asked him to describe that system.

Mr. WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE (Author, "The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos,
and Crime"): It started with World War II as an American governmental
invention, in fact, to get around our own neutrality laws and to be able to
provide goods to Great Britain. And in the years before we joined the war, we
decided to take a lot of our own ships and flag them as Panamanian ships. Of
course, Panama was, really, essentially almost like a colonial state of the
United States at that time. And so we felt we could maintain control, and we
did and it was very effective. And after the war, that spread.

But starting in the 1980s, especially--in fact, ironically, just at the time
when the United Nations, the IMO, was trying to address the big organic growth
of these artificial flags, there was an explosion of this in direct reaction,
I believe, to the explosion of regulations, in fact. This became, really, the
only way to do business on the high seas. If you didn't do this starting in
the 1980s--it was no longer a choice, really, I think for ship owners. If you
didn't do it, you couldn't compete. The margins are razor thin. And you
needed to milk the most efficiency out of your ships, which means that you
needed to employ very cheap crews, and you needed to do minimal training and
minimal maintenance on these ships and just milk every ounce of efficiency
from the operation if you wanted to survive in that business. It started in
the 1980s, and it has grown since then.

GROSS: Let's say I have a ship. What's the difference to me financially and
in terms of the regulations I have to follow if I put a Liberian flag on vs.
if I put an American flag on it?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: Well, the American flag, like many of the European flags,
is quite extreme in that it requires American crews. In other words, there
are union rules. So the first thing is that your labor costs are much, much
cheaper if you go to a Third World country. Operationally, the regulations
are very similar between the American rules about how you should operate and
maintain your ship and, let's say, Liberian rules or Maltese rules or Tongan
rules, Bolivian rules. They're all about the same, and they're all based on
the IMO, the United Nations system out of London.

The difference is in the enforcement. In the United States, the Coast Guard
definitely enforces the regulations. So you not only have to--you would have
to comply with the regulations, whereas in other places, in the most egregious
flags of convenient states, there is really no regulation.

GROSS: So one of the problems that this flag of convenience system causes is
that a lot of the ships aren't in as good shape as they ought to be to be
sailing the seas. What are some of the other problems?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: You know, I think that you can talk about flags of
convenience as being a terrible, terrible problem. I'm not sure that it is.
I mean, I'm really an observer rather than a worrier about this system. In
some ways I think we can celebrate the freedom and the internationalization
that it represents. It certainly is a problem if you are a US sailor and you
want to make a living. The flags of convenience means pretty much you can't.
There's an exception to that: US ships doing business within the United
States, from a US port to another US port, are required by law to fly American
flags and hire America crews. But that's limited business.

Flags of convenience from an American sailor's point of view is a very bad
thing because it means you don't have a job anymore. You'd better find some
other line of work. From an environmentalist point of view, it certainly does
lead to low-quality ships that have a habit of breaking apart suddenly because
they're so old, typically in a storm, and spilling, in the case of
oil--spilling oil, for instance, crude oil or the products of oil, causing
mass pollution. Ships would be doing that anyway. The Exxon Valdez, the
famous American tanker that broke up in Prince William--they ran aground in
Prince William Sound and spilled a lot of crude with an American-flag ship
with an American crew that was sailing from one American port to another.

So it's not really a--there's not a direct relationship between flag of
convenience and a huge problem with the environment, but there's a rough
relationship. Should we worry about that? I'm not much of an
environmentalist, personally. I don't worry too much about that. I think
there are other things that we can worry about before we worry about the
occasional oil spill. Certainly, though, Europe has been blanketed by oil
spills in recent years.

GROSS: Well, it also seems that aboard a lot of these ships you have a very
multicultural staff, which sounds great--you know, multicultural crew. But
the fact is that a lot of them can't communicate with each other, and if
there's an emergency, that's a real problem.

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: There have been cases. There have been cases of ships
running aground where afterward and during the investigation it has been found
that essentially the captain couldn't talk to the crew. That's, I think,
rare. And some form of broken English seems to be the universal maritime
language on these ships. So I think, generally speaking, that is not a huge
problem. And from God's eye view, from God's perspective, this
multinationalism is probably a good thing. I mean, all people are created
equal, and the idea that the good jobs or the jobs, in general, should be the
preserve of the West probably is questionable from God's point of view, if you
know what I mean. So...

GROSS: You do make some of the ships sound like multicultural floating
sweatshops.

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: Well, they are. They are. But, of course, one person's
sweatshop is another person's opportunity, and that's one of the problems we
face when looking at the ocean and when looking at the economies on land. So
that who are we--I try, in a way, to say in this book without lecturing the
readers--to impose Western standards of labor on Third World people if that
imposition means, in fact--not in principle, in fact--that we take the jobs
away from them and give them back to ourselves?

GROSS: William Langewiesche is my guest, and he's a correspondent for The
Atlantic. His new book is called "The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos,
and Crime."

One of the issues you write about is piracy at sea. And, you know, piracy, I
suppose, is related in some way to terrorism, too, because pirates can be
terrorists; piracy can become terrorism; terrorism can be a form of piracy.
And certainly we've already faced some acts of terrorism at sea, such as when
the USS Cole was blown up by al-Qaeda in 2000, 11 months before September 11.
You say in your book that bin Laden is said to control up to 20 aging
freighters. How much do you know about that?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: I know very little about it. I think no one knows much
about it. This is typical of the sea and of the world in which we live. It's
very large, very complex, very easy to hide in. But it is, I think, generally
thought that he does control freighters. There is one known case in 1998 in
Tanzania of an al-Qaeda ship delivering explosives, which were then used in
the embassy bombings. So this is--and there are other cases that are known.
So either for the transport of weapons or the transport of people, there is
evidence that bin Laden personally has been involved.

Now aside from that, he simply seems to be in the shipping business. I mean,
apparently, much of what is transported on al-Qaeda ships, such as they are at
any given month as they're traded and bought and sold--much of what is
transported is just regular stuff--bulk, grain, chickens for all I know--for
reasons of business and a way of making money. And the fit is natural and
quite beautiful, in a way. In other words, what interests me about this is
the correlation or the similarity between the methods of business of regular
ship owners, of this new form of extranational terrorist and of this new form
of extranational piracy. And these are sort of subsets. I mean, there are
many terrorists in the world, and we use that word much too loosely these
days.

But if you look at the specific al-Qaeda form of terrorism, in which
territory's really not the issue, and you look at this new form of piracy, in
which the groups involved are multinational, ephemeral, always changing and
are not tying themselves down by national allegiances and you look at the way
normal ships operate, you find a striking similarity. The purposes, of
course, are quite different.

GROSS: What is the new kind of piracy that you're talking about?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: It's a subset of a sort of piracy. I mean, piracy has
always existed, and I think there are reasons that can be explained why, over
the last five to 10 years, there's been an upsurge of sort of hand-wringing
type of journalism in which we're bemoaning the rise of piracy. I think
that's largely bogus. Most piracy is the old kind of piracy, which amounts to
poor people sitting on a shore seeing the wealth of the world go by and
jumping out in little boats, outboard motors, going out there, hitting the
ships as best they can, stealing things from the crew, maybe a little bit of
cargo and disappearing, opportunistic acts that are similar to street crime.
That's not very interesting, and that's always existed. And so that gets
reported a lot, and all these things get blurred and, as I say, there's much
hand-wringing going on.

But inside those numbers is this other form of piracy that I report on in this
book, and that is numerically not significant but structurally significant.
And that is these are basically multinational gangs, much more sophisticated,
that exploit national laws; that use laws and citizenship to hide in rather
than running away from and are quite sophisticated in the use of airlines,
passports and equipment. And they tend also to be ambitious. This goes hand
in hand with the other. And they tend--rather than simply stealing a little
bit, they steal the whole thing. So they take the whole ship, and they steal
the--they unload the cargo onto the black market somewhere. And that's a lot
of cargo. And then they take the ship and they may change the name, they may
then pose as a legitimate ship, do business somewhere in the world, grab
another load of cargo as a legitimate ship, disappear with that and eventually
maybe sell the ship or just beach it somewhere finally. So, of course,
they're in the habit often of killing the entire crew. These are very, very
dangerous people.

GROSS: You give an example in your book of the Alondra Rainbow ship that was
captured by pirates. And, as you say, you know, the pirates renamed the ship,
they reflagged the ship, they disguised the ship, and no one could find it for
quite some time. Who were the pirates who took the ship?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: Typically, the trigger men, so to speak, the ones who put
their feet on the decks--they came up the stern of the ship in Indonesia.
This was in the last few weeks of 1999, in fact, when they hit that ship. It
was loaded headed for Japan. The crew was both Filipino, and the captain and
first engineer, I believe--no, the captain and first engineer were Japanese.
The ship was flagged in Panama, and it disappeared. The crew was put
into--after being held on another pirate ship for a few weeks, they were put
into a life raft and abandoned for dead. By a chance, after 10 days in this
life raft, they were rescued by a Thai fishing boat, but the ship had
disappeared.

And there had been quite a search mounted by various navies, including
aircraft, for this ship. And it had simply disappeared. This would seem to
sort of to be a surprise to somebody who looks at a map and says, `Well, how
can the modern world with technology such as it is and satellites and this and
that--how can a ship disappear?' The minute you get out on the ocean and
begin to contemplate the actual size and turbulence of that massive water, it
becomes much easier to understand how a ship like that can disappear.

GROSS: The pirates who took the Alondra Rainbow successfully hit it by
repainting it, renaming it, reflagging it and so on. But eventually it was
discovered. Were the pirates ever brought to trial?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: The Indians chased them. The Indian Coast Guard chased
them in international waters, running--What was it?--a two- or three-day fight
during which they were simply shooting up the ship. The pirates were hiding
in the engine room. The ship was proceeding at full speed on auto pilot.
They finally were forced to stop, and they were boarded--the Indian Coast
Guard boarded them and arrested this crew of pirates. They took them to
Mumbai, otherwise known as Bombay, and there was a trial. This trial was the
first, at least in modern times, maybe ever, of--a true international trial of
international pirates. It's a complicated subject, but it was a landmark
trial. And through the very slow process of Indian justice, they were finally
convicted and they were sent to prison in a city called Puna(ph) outside of
Mumbai. I went to see them in the prison and talked to them about their
experience.

GROSS: My guest is William Langewiesche. His new book is called "The Outlaw
Sea." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is William Langewiesche, national correspondent for The
Atlantic Monthly. His new book is called "The Outlaw Sea: A World of
Freedom, Chaos, and Crime."

So you've learned a little bit about piracy. Are the laws getting tightened
at sea as a result of terrorism now? Are there more controls?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: Yes, there are, and that's one of the things that interests
me. I mean, the growth in laws related to security after 9/11 at sea is, in
many ways, parallel to or similar to the general growth in maritime laws that
have been issued by the United Nations and the IMO in London. And it's one of
the paradoxes of this story; that governments really have no choice but to act
as governments. So that the American reaction to the very real threat of
terrorism coming at us from the sea via ship has been willy-nilly simply to
create these regulations and to work through the existing structures of
regulations like the IMO, which have proved to be meaningless actually.

And the people who are involved in this, in the security field in the United
States, off the record will--most of them will admit that, really, these
regulations are not going to be effective and you cannot stop a terrorist
attack from the sea because of the nature of the sea. You cannot stop a
terrorist attack with yet more regulations. But, in a way, they really have
no choice. I mean, especially in the Coast Guard, they've been given the job
of protecting American shores, and this is what they have to work with.

GROSS: Do you think that another terrorist attack against the United States
at sea is inevitable?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: Not inevitable, but I think it's certainly one of the
avenues available to terrorists to attack the United States and in a big way
because, of course, a ship can carry a lot of material. The ship itself can
be one hell of a weapon if it blows up in a harbor. And more, I think,
significant, a ship can be used--given sort of the anarchy and the difficulty
of seeing what's going on in the ocean in normal business, a ship can be used
to bring things into the United States like devices, weapons. It can be used
very well because anything can be brought into the United States relatively
easily via ship, much easier than bringing it in on an airplane or, for that
matter, bringing it over land through our ports of entry, across the Rio
Grande or something like that.

GROSS: Now one of the pieces in your new book is about a subject I've really
given absolutely no thought ever in my life to until I read your piece, and
it's about what happens to large ships when they're obsolete, when they're
ready to be scrapped or junked. And there's a part of the world that a lot of
them go to now to meet their fate. What part of the world is that?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: India and Bangladesh. In fact, they're in more than just
a part of the world, there are two beaches. There's one in India called
Alang; another in Bangladesh just north of the big port of Chittagong. And
the ships are sold to scrap dealers. They're rammed up onto these beaches,
onto these shores, and they're torn apart by armies of the poor. And you're
driving through farm fields, typically dusty, poor Indian peasants in the
fields poking at this parched earth, a very Indian scene. And beyond a tree
line on a certain dirt track, suddenly you see the superstructure of a huge
ship. It's as if the ship is growing out of the earth. It rises above the
trees. It's a very unlikely thing suddenly to come upon. You go beyond the
tree line, and it all unfolds in front of you. It's Alang. And for miles
along this coast, there is one ship after another after another stretching
into the horizon, I mean, down the beach, hundreds of these ships. And
they're huge. And because they've come out of the water, they've been rammed
up on the shore, so you see the true size of these machines. And they're in
various states of deconstruction. I mean, they're being torn apart by hand.

GROSS: By hand and, like, hammer?

Mr. LANGEWIESCHE: Crowbar, hammer and cutting torches using cooking gas,
which is a low-temperature form of cutting torch, and mostly simply by sweat
and willingness to work and willingness to take risks.

GROSS: William Langewiesche is national correspondent for The Atlantic
Monthly. His new book is called "The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos,
and Crime." I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, misconceptions about why people join terrorist networks.
We talk with Marc Sageman, author of "Understanding Terror Networks." He's a
forensic psychiatrist and former undercover CIA agent. He worked with the
Afghan Mujahadeen in the late '80s during the Afghan war with the Soviets.

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

Interview: Marc Sageman discusses terror networks
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The new book, "Understanding Terror Networks," was written by a former CIA
agent, but you wouldn't know that from reading the book. It wasn't until
after its completion that the author, Marc Sageman, revealed he'd worked
undercover with the Afghan mujaheddin when he was based in Pakistan in the
late '80s. In a few minutes, he'll explain why he recently revealed his
secret identity. Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist who now teaches at the
University of Pennsylvania and its Center For Study of Ethnopolitical
Conflict. His new book challenges some preconceptions about why people join
jihadi groups. His conclusions are based on his study of biographical data on
172 participants in the jihad. I asked him first about his reaction to the
Bush administration's new warning that al-Qaeda is plotting a major attack on
the US this summer.

Now we were just warned by the FBI and the Justice Department that al-Qaeda or
terrorists are planning another major attack in the United States and there's
particular fears that the attack might be against big events like the
political conventions. What do you think about when you hear that?

Mr. MARC SAGEMAN (Author, "Understanding Terror Networks"): Well, there's no
doubt that al-Qaeda really wants to hurt the United States, so the desire is
real. But what has changed since 9/11 is the vigilance inside the United
States and at the borders, preventing them from performing such a large
operation. So I think to be fairly skeptical, not so much because of
the--al-Qaeda decides to actually carry out such operation, but our ability to
stop them.

GROSS: OK. So you're skeptical that the terrorists will actually be
successful at pulling off another terrorist attack over the summer, but let me
point out something else that you've said. The Bush administration says that
we've succeeded in killing or imprisoning much of the leadership of al-Qaeda,
and you've said, sure, that's the 2001 leadership that we've done away with,
but now there's the 2004 leadership, and we haven't hurt them. So if you
think that al-Qaeda is back with a new leadership in spite of all the people
who we've killed or imprisoned, why are you reasonably sure that they wouldn't
be successful in pulling off a terrorist attack?

Mr. SAGEMAN: My level of certainty is really to the level, to the site of
the attack, as opposed to carrying out an attack. I mean, you can always have
a single person, a singleton, going out to the El Al counter, let's say, in
Los Angeles and kill two people. That is almost impossible to prevent, but
what's very possible to prevent is a large-scale operation. And since 9/11,
al-Qaeda has changed quite a bit. The new leadership is a very young,
aggressive, reckless leadership, and so operation after 9/11 have multiplied.
There are far more operation after 9/11 against targets all over the world
than were before 9/11, but they were poorly planned and were not as lethal as
9/11, even though perhaps the Madrid bombing was extremely lethal, but again,
this was a fairly--a rush job. It was put together in about six to eight
weeks.

GROSS: Can you talk a little bit more about the difference between the new
al-Qaeda leadership and the pre-9/11 al-Qaeda leadership?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Yes. It seemed that before 9/11, they had more hierarchical
overlay over the various clusters of small organization in various countries,
and they were able to coordinate a little bit better. This was a much older
type of leadership, if you can call it leadership. What happened is after
you degrade the network by really eliminating the communication between
leaders that can help in terms of planning and money and training, and even
give advice, local people, aggressive local young men, then step into those
gaps, and for instance like al-Zarqawi that we hear a lot right now.

GROSS: This is the man believed to be the person who decapitated Nick Berg.

Mr. SAGEMAN: That's correct, yes. So you almost select for young aggressive
leaders to--local leaders, not really global leaders anymore, but local
leaders like for instance perhaps Amer Azizi in Madrid, and those leaders, if
you think of the analogy of the war on drugs, where the police comes in and
arrests the fellow who's at the street corner, well, there's a gap, and what
happens that you have an intense internal competition, and the most aggressive
wins out. So you have a progressive self-selection for aggression and
aggressive young leaders who may not have the global vision of the old
leadership, but are just as lethal, locally.

GROSS: So it sounds from what you're saying that you think in some ways we're
better off than we were before September 11th in terms of being able to stop
terrorist threats, but in other ways, we're worse off because we have a
younger, more reckless leadership, and there's probably a lot more people out
there who see themselves as potential suicide bombers or terrorists.

Mr. SAGEMAN: That's correct. I think that's exactly right.

GROSS: The International Institute for Strategic Studies just released a
report saying that overall, the risks of terrorism to Westerners and Western
assets in Arab countries appears to have increased after the Iraq War. Agree
with that?

Mr. SAGEMAN: No. I smiled when I saw the number, 1,800--I mean, 18,000
members of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is an organization that network has what I call
fuzzy boundaries. That means that it's very hard to actually tell who is in
al-Qaeda and who is not. It has now become more a series, a collection of
local organization, where local young men decide to, with their friends, carry
out operation. Do they think of themselves as al-Qaeda? Probably not, and
this was the case in Casablanca. In Casablanca, they were part of the overall
movement called Jihadi al-Salafi, but they didn't even call themselves that.
It's usually journalists and local law enforcement officers who put the label
on this movement. It's really a bunch of friends getting together and
carrying out these operations.

So when I see 18,000, there is no formal induction into al-Qaeda anymore, and
I'm just wondering how do they go about looking at this number. There is no
doubt to my mind, because of what happened in Iraq, that the potential number
of people who want to carry out this operation has grown, but whether they
will or not is an open question.

GROSS: And you don't think they're all reporting to the same guy.

Mr. SAGEMAN: Well, again, the hierarchical levels of command has broken
down, so it's really very much a collection of local phenomena.

GROSS: My guest is forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, author of
"Understanding Terror Networks." He'll explain why he recently revealed he's
a former undercover CIA agent after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Marc Sageman. He teaches at the University of
Pennsylvania. He's a former CIA agent and author of the new book
"Understanding Terror Networks."

In your book you've tried to profile, to do portraits of, people who join
terrorist networks and understand, `Why do they join?' And you say that some
of the assumptions that we make about why people join are really myths.
They're not joining because they were indoctrinated. They're not joining
because they were poor; a lot of the people are middle class. And you say
that a lot of the reasons why people join is because they know other people in
it. Could you talk about why would that be a motivation?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Yes. Most people who actually join are part of a social group.
What really--actually, in my data, my data count fell into four large
clusters. And each have separate type of perhaps not profile but ways of
getting to terrorist operation. The one that is called the core Arab cluster
really consists of, really, the elite of the core Arab world. And by core
Arab world, I mean the Egyptian, Jordanian, Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Saudis. And
because they're very elite and they're good students, they're sent abroad to
study. And while they're abroad, they become homesick, and they become a
little bit alienated, distant, from their cultural bonds and the bonds to
their friends. And they feel homesick, and therefore they drift toward
mosques because that's where familiar sites and people are.

They don't do that out of religiousness. They do that for social reason.
And, well ...(unintelligible) befriend other people, and they often move into
apartments. For instance, the cell in Hamburg was exactly created that way.
And there is an intensification there to become--of feelings and of friendship
bonds and become very close to each other and very distant from the rest of
their ambient society. So you have out-group hate, and you have in-group
love. And at the end of that process they often are all willing or they all
decide to join the jihad, and they do that collectively as a group. For
instance, a Hamburg group, all eight of them, decided to go to Afghanistan,
and they went there in two waves. The first wave was, of course, the four
pilots, and the second wave were the people who supported them.

GROSS: There was a flow chart in The Atlantic magazine recently that you put
together showing the leadership and the structure of al-Qaeda. It's the
equivalent of, like, a corporate flow chart but for al-Qaeda. But unlike a
corporate flow chart where there's the CEO at the top, the vice president's
beneath the CEO, the middle management is beneath that--it's kind of a
pyramid--your flow chart is more of a flow chart showing who knows who rather
than who takes orders from who.

Mr. SAGEMAN: That's correct because most of the orders--well, most of the
operations are decentralized. And it's more a collective decision-making
process as opposed to a single person making up a plan. And in my book, I
argue that that type of strict, rigid, hierarchical flow of information is a
sure recipe for failure, especially in terrorist operation. You really need
an informal network to be able to overcome the inevitable obstacles that you
have in the field because when you want to actually perform a terrorist
operation, you actually don't know what the target is, you don't know how
you're going to do it, you don't know who you're going to do it with. So you
really need a lot of flexibility and a lot of horizontal flow of information
between the members who are going to carry it out to be able to carry out that
type of operation.

GROSS: You know, you have a file that you keep, a matrix, of people who are
known to be in the international jihadi movement and who knows who, who's
affiliated with who. And after the terrorist attack on Madrid, you went into
that network and came up with some interesting information. What did you
find?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Yes. If you'll recall, the Madrid operation happened on a
Thursday. By Saturday, the Moroccan authorities released the three names of
the three suspects. One of them was Jamal Zougam. And I ran Jamal Zougam
against my database, which included Judge Baltasar Garzon's 700-page
indictment. And Zougam's name appeared on page 89 and 285 of the indictment,
and it said that he was very close to Barakat Yarkas, who is also named Abu
Dada, and he was the head of the al-Qaeda Spanish cell. So I finally made the
link to al-Qaeda--that was on Sunday morning--e-mailed the information to CNN,
which released it as worldwide scoop from Madrid on Sunday.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Marc Sageman. He teaches at
the University of Pennsylvania. He's the author of the new book
"Understanding Terror Networks." And he's a former CIA agent, but you
wouldn't know he's a former CIA agent, no matter how closely you read his new
book.

And that is because, Mark, you were not out of the closet, so to speak, about
being a former CIA agent when you wrote this book. It was only after you
wrote it that you revealed you are a former agent. What made you reveal that
part of your past?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Mainly, two things. One is, of course, the Valerie Plame
affair. I came into the agency in 1984 as a NOC, which is an unofficial cover
officer, which are the assignment of being sent abroad without being linked to
official Americans, like an embassy. And, of course, you can then go to
denied areas, areas denied to official Americans. And this is very dangerous
because we don't have the safety net of being an official American, where you
have diplomatic immunity. So if you're arrested, you may be shot. And this
was the position that Valerie Plame was in, so I felt very strongly about
this. Larry Johnson, who is, of course, the person who spearhead the movement
to find out who leaked the name, asked me to put my name to a letter that he
sent to Congress, and so I signed that letter. That's number one. And the
second reason is the superb book by Steve Coll that revealed a lot of the
programs that I started and ran for three years in Afghanistan.

GROSS: And Steve Coll is the author of a book about Afghanistan, and he's
with The Washington Post. He's an editor there.

Mr. SAGEMAN: That's correct. It's called "Ghost Wars."

GROSS: Can you talk about what your job was when you were undercover with the
CIA based in Pakistan and working with Afghanistan?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Most of my job consisted of leveling the playing field. If you
remember, all of...

GROSS: And I should say this is, like, '87 to '89 we're talking?

Mr. SAGEMAN: That's correct.

GROSS: OK.

Mr. SAGEMAN: That's at the end of the Afghan war, before the Soviets had
publicly stated that they were going to withdraw and up to the time of the
withdrawal. So my program was really designed for three purposes. One was
this: level the playing field, which means we were going to unilaterally,
unbeknownst to the Pakistanis--it was not declared to the Pakistanis--to
provide support and advice to commanders that have been neglected or
relatively neglected by the Pakistanis. The second, we wanted to make sure
that the Pakistanis were really being honest with us. So I was collecting
information by what the Pakistanis were doing. If you recall, there was a lot
of money involved, and there was a lot of concern around Washington that
perhaps some of that was siphoned out into their own pockets. And it turned
out that the Pakistanis actually were pretty honest in terms of helping us run
the war. And the third was, of course, to collect information on how the war
was going and develop our own unilateral contacts to find out.

GROSS: Why did you want to join the CIA?

Mr. SAGEMAN: That's a very good question. I'm a child of Holocaust
survivors and, in a way, since I was born after World War II, I never really
got to defend my family, perhaps, retrospectively, and--but children of
Holocaust survivors always have the Holocaust on their mind. So when I was in
Japan as a flight surgeon for the US Navy, all the rumors of the genocide in
Cambodia came out and it was very hard to believe that this was happening
again and I felt the military was not doing very much so I simply wrote a
letter to the CIA and, said, `Gee, you guys may, actually--you know, you may
want me,' you know. `I speak foreign languages. I'm a physician.' And, of
course, by return mail they said, `Yes, we do.' And my security clearance and
my process of joining took about a year.

GROSS: So you thought that if you joined the CIA you would be more useful
than you are in the military in terms of helping to stop this type of
genocide?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Yes, if you remember, you know, the next genocide, to me, after
Cambodia, was, of course, Afghanistan. The early years of the Soviet
invasion, about a million and a half Afghans were killed. Eight million were
displaced. Five million were outside refugees. Three million were in
Pakistan. Two million were in Iran. And you had three million internally
displaced where they swelled up the population of Kabul and Kandahar and
Mazar-e Sharif, names that now we are all familiar with, but at that time
nobody was. And so to me this was as much a disaster as any large-scale
epidemic so I was still a physician looking at it from a humanitarian point
of view and I felt that this was a very clear-cut situation, that the Soviets
have to go back to prevent or to stop this genocide that was going on in
Afghanistan.

GROSS: OK, so you go to Islamabad and try to help prevent this kind of mass
death in Afghanistan. Your parents are Holocaust survivors. You're Jewish.
And you're now based in a part of the world that is growing at that time
increasingly anti-Semitic. And now, I mean, we see how truly rapidly
anti-Semitic the jihadi movement is. How aware were you, then, of this kind
of growing strain of anti-Semitism?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Well, the Afghans were not really anti-Semitic during the war.
They--some of them argued that there's a lost tribe, the Afghan tribes, the
Pashtun tribes were the last tribes, but if you'll recall at the time Yasser
Arafat, the chairman of the PLO, was very pro-Soviet, and therefore he
supported the Soviet Union and their policy on Afghanistan. And every Afghan,
in fact. And so they were not pro-Palestinian because, to them, Yasser Arafat
was the head of the Palestinian people and in my contact with a lot of the
Afghan Mujahadeen, they were telling me `Gee, after we're finished with the
Soviets here, we can go to Israel and clean up the mess for you.' And I was
saying, `No, no, please, don't muddy the situation.'

GROSS: So you didn't have to hide the fact that you were Jewish?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Oh, yes, I did.

GROSS: You did hide it?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Yes.

GROSS: Why?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Well, as you kind of pointed out, al-Qaeda now claims that it
was Allah, or God, that vanquished, conquered the Soviet Union. And I didn't
really want them to know that behind Allah stood Jehovah in Pakistan. That
would just muddy the water, not only with the Afghans but also with the
Pakistani interservices intelligence directorate who would probably have put
more surveillance on me, which is something I definitely did not need so I
decided to actually have a low profile.

GROSS: My guest is forensic psychiatrist and former CIA agent Marc Sageman.
His new book is called "Understanding Terror Networks." We'll talk more after
a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is forensic psychiatrist and former CIA agent Marc Sageman.
His new book is called "Understanding Terror Networks." Part of what you do
now is you work as a forensic psychiatrist.

Mr. SAGEMAN: Yes.

GROSS: So you deal with crime, you've dealt with serial killers. And, of
course, you're still doing work on understanding terrorists and the jihadi
network. Do you see any connection between, say, the mind of a serial killer
and the mind of a terrorist, only because they both end up committing murder?

Mr. SAGEMAN: No, actually, I don't. But I almost had to have that experience
with serial killers for me to understand the difference. I see terrorism,
really, as very much a group phenomenon, or terrorism, the al-Qaeda type of
terrorism as opposed to, for instance, Ted Kaczynski who also could be
considered a terrorist. But Ted Kaczynski was a loner. And the loners may
have something wrong with them psychologically or psychiatrically. And so a
serial murderer or a mass murderer--and they're very different--may have
something psychologically wrong with them and they're loners and they act out
of their internal drive. But terrorism is very, very different. It's really
a group phenomenon.

You can't really have terrorists like al-Qaeda without having friends to
motivate, sustain your desire and your enthusiasm, especially when you kill
yourself the same way a lot of the al-Qaeda agents have. This is very
much--you're doing it for your comrades and for your god. But in fact he's
really doing it for his friends. He's really trying to show the ultimate
loyalty to this band of brothers and we've known that for a long time, since
older studies were done on soldiers, in World War II, where people fought
because of their friend, not because of any ideological reason up to just
about any kind of studies in social psychology in the last half century,
this has supported this view of why people do those things.

GROSS: So you actually see a connection between suicide bombers and the
American soldier, that both are willing to give their lives for their comrades
but the concept of how and why are really different?

Mr. SAGEMAN: That's correct and if you see most Medal of Honor winners are
people who jumped on a grenade to save their buddies. I think it's almost a
majority. And it's similar except people tell you `Well, perhaps, the guy
who jumped on the grenade didn't have time to think about it,' but you see
I think the instinct is very similar.

GROSS: Now it's just been a couple of months, maybe, since you came out as a
former CIA agent. How has your life changed? I imagine people who know you
are kind of stunned to find that out?

Mr. SAGEMAN: They--many people suspected. People who knew me suspected.
Probably my family was the most surprised.

GROSS: Your family didn't know?

Mr. SAGEMAN: Yes, my parents, my sister, they didn't know. My niece did not
know. My wife did know. I told her. But it's still the same old me.

GROSS: What was your parents' reaction?

Mr. SAGEMAN: I'm not really sure they still understand.

GROSS: Right, right. Marc Sageman, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. SAGEMAN: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Marc Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA agent. He
teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and its Center For Study of
Ethnopolitical Conflict. His new book is called "Understanding Terror
Networks."

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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