Preet Bharara: John Miller, thank you for being on the show.
John Miller: Thanks for having me.
Preet Bharara: So, I’ve been wanting to have you on for weeks, and you agreed graciously to come on some time ago. And I should tell our listeners that we’re actually recording on Monday afternoon, October 2nd. And I have a lot of things to get to with you, because you’ve had a very interesting dual life in some ways as a journalist and as a law enforcement official. But as we sit here right now, the news is coming in, you know, bit by bit about the tragedy in Las Vegas. And obviously, you know, when things like that happening, the mass shooting and the current news—and this may change by the time this airs—more than 50 people have been killed. Over 400 people have gone to the hospital in Las Vegas. This is the kind of thing you dread in New York, where you have an active shooter. What’s the mindset of the head of police in Las Vegas today?
John Miller: The mindset of the Las Vegas police chief, who’s the sheriff there, is I’ve got to be four or five people right now. I’ve got to show extraordinary leadership, because everybody is looking to me to decide whether they feel safe or not. That’s externally to the public. I have to show extraordinary leadership within my own organization, because I have police officers who were injured, hurt, and may die in this. I have to show extraordinary organizational leadership and prowess, because I have to pull together a tremendously complex investigation and one of the more challenging crime scenes in the history of the annals of American crime. And I have to do all this at once? It’s a real challenge for Sheriff Lombardo. And I know him, and I think he is uniquely prepared for that. He’s a remarkable law enforcement officer.
Preet Bharara: So, when something like that happens, you have an active shooter—and I want to talk about active terrorists also, because you and I together have dealt with some of those situations too—what happens? How does NYPD go into action?
John Miller: So, from the minute it happens, we start gathering information. What happened? The who, what, when, where, and how. Then when we get offender information—who’s the suspect and what are they connected to? What’s their social media platforms? What can we learn about them? Is there a claim of responsibility? And then at the same time we’re doing this, simultaneously, we’re measuring that against New York. Do we have a similar venue? Do we have a similar event? Do we have a similar thread? Does this person have any connections to New York, connections to people in New York? It’s a complicated process, but it’s become a routine process, where we don’t need to send out instructions to the team—you do this, you do that. That information starts pouring in almost immediately.
And, you know, when you look at the schedule today, there’s a concert event today in Times Square. There’s another one on Friday. We’ve already built out the policing for that and the counterterrorism overlay. But today, we were paging back through that, looking at, among the 2,000 long guns that the NYPD has in the hands of trained officers—these are officers, you see them out there with the heavy vests and the rifles and the helmets—those are deployed based on the threat stream of that day. And we’ll shift those resources around every day. All of this fits into the threat stream, where we are constantly adjusting.
Preet Bharara: Can I ask you what I think is a question that a lot of people have when these kinds of things happen? And it’s kind of a conundrum? And it’s often the case that— we don’t know if this is gonna be true in the Las Vegas situation, and maybe we’ll find out by the time this episode airs. But often, it’s the case that the person who engaged in this violence—the Tsarnaev brothers fall into this category—these guys were known to the FBI, the local police, as people to keep an eye on. But there was not enough to detain them or to arrest them. And then the question that the public asks is, well, why didn’t you do something about it? Now on the other side of the coin, if the police and the FBI and federal officers begin to take actions against someone who hasn’t committed a crime, they say, you know, you’re overreaching. How do you strike the balance? When someone comes across your desk as a person of interest or somebody to be worried about, but they haven’t done this yet, they haven’t shot anybody yet, what do you do about that guy?
John Miller: So, as you’ve very well framed it, this is emerging as the pattern. Now, part of this is the great law of unintended consequences, which is, if you get very good at collecting intelligence and threat information and then sifting through it, you’re gonna end up hearing from the public, from tipsters, from informants, about a lot of people, and you’re gonna be investigating them. That means you’re doing your job. And you do that by the rules. The upside to that is, when you get a piece of threat information, you’re able to interdict that by focusing on the right people, figuring out the network, stopping the threat. There’s 22 plots that we can talk about that were either hatched in or targeting New York City since 9/11 that have been prevented in almost every case through this kind of work.
The flip side is, if you looked at the Boston Marathon bombing, they were on the radar. If you looked at the Pulse Nightclub shooter in Orlando, he was on the radar. If you looked at the Chelsea bomber right here down the street from the studio in Manhattan, he was on the radar.
Preet Bharara: Right. That trial, by the way—we’re gonna get to that case—starts today, the Chelsea bomber.
John Miller: Exactly. So, if you’re doing this right, when something does happen, there’s a pretty high likelihood that that’s gonna be somebody you heard about or looked at for a time. And this is where you see that conundrum, which is, if they’re not committing a crime, the attorney general guidelines, the FBI’s domestic operations guide, the NYPD’s hand shoe (ph.) guidelines all say you cannot investigate someone with the absence of criminal activity forever. The other issue there is, we don’t have the resources to put people under surveillance permanently.
So, there was an individual in the Bronx who was radicalized and talking about violent things, but he wasn’t doing anything. And of course, you always kind of run into that debate over is this protected speech, even though it seems to exhort violence, or is this support of a terrorist organization? And in that case, we also determined he seemed to be emotionally disturbed. So, there’s a case where we engaged with him, and we developed a relationship with him, between him and the detective. We engaged with his parents.
Preet Bharara: When you say you engaged, you mean you shot pool with the guy? What did you do?
John Miller: Oh, we had conversations. We visited him at home. We visited him at work. We created a relationship with his family. We talked to his doctors and therapists, and talked about what we were seeing and hearing. And we pushed the individual towards more help, more supervision, because he seemed in need of it. There was another case of an individual like that in Brooklyn, where one week, he was talking terrorist stuff, and another week, he was talking anti-police stuff, and another week, he was talking some other kind of violent jargon. And we ended up arresting him for a different crime. It was a legitimate felony crime, but it was a vehicle to get him off the street because he was one of those people that needed to get into the system, maybe needed to get psychiatric help, but was definitely dangerous.
My point is, whether we’re talking about the Bronx example or the Brooklyn example, this is not altogether uncommon. Because what we find is, there are people who are ideologically committed to violence. And then there are people who are emotionally disturbed to some degree who want to take a violent theme and adopt that as an excuse for actions they want to or plan to take.
Preet Bharara: For self-aggrandizement or some other reason.
John Miller: Right.
Preet Bharara: But do you think that the guidelines are good and just and fair, or do you think that you should have more leeway to interdict at an earlier stage? I mean, because that has consequences too, and that, you know, maybe in a free society, people would not like. But do you think the balance should be struck in a different way, given what you know?
John Miller: Every intelligence guy I know would say, I would like more leeway, because I hate walking away from a target when I feel there may still be something there, and the rules say I have to.
Preet Bharara: And more leeway to do what?
John Miller: More leeway to do everything. Here’s what I say.
Preet Bharara: To do everything. [Laughs]
John Miller: Yeah. Here’s—everybody wants more leeway because it makes their job easier. What I say is, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. And those who study policing know we don’t study history. So, if you look at the history of intelligence in policing, you see the FBI’s intelligence program that began under J. Edgar Hoover, called COINTELPRO, ended up with very few rules and almost no guidelines, and ended up in a scandal for the FBI, ended up with agents being charged with crimes, ended up with people on grand juries.
Having rules and structure, even rules that make your job harder sometimes, those rules are your friend. We’ve learned over and over again that intelligence collection in a free democratic society without strict rules always ends up running aground.
Preet Bharara: Yeah.
John Miller: So, we have rules I think we can live with.
Preet Bharara: Okay. So, rules are not only your friend if you’re in the police. They’re the friend of fair and open society as well.
John Miller: And I believe that we strike that balance.
Preet Bharara: So you have a view, John—some people think it’s never a good time to talk about regulation of guns. But as someone who’s been in the NYPD and a spokesperson for law enforcement, the FBI, and at the NYPD, do you think there’s a role for police officers to speak out about the regulation of guns?
John Miller: I think there is. You know, if you look at this conversation, it’s been stuck for a long time. You’ve got a powerful gun lobby. You’ve got members of Congress who benefit from the tremendously, and you have very little progress in gun laws. But as I argued before a Congressional committee some time ago, I always thought, well, when members of Congress start getting shot, that’ll change. But Gaby Giffords was shot down in a parking lot at a campaign stop. Congressman Scalise was recently severely wounded in a similar incident. So, we know that’s not the breaker there. I thought, well, you know, when we go with our families to the mall or the movies and we’re being in massacred in numbers there, that that would be the breaking point, and we’d get serious about this conversation. But we had a shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado during the Batman premiere, where women and children and men were killed when they were out with their families to have fun. And that conversation lasted a very short time and resulted in nothing. The governor tried his own gun laws there and was run out in the next election for it.
And then I thought, when they massacre our babies in their kindergarten classes, our little children, that will be when we ask ourselves, can we continue with this madness? But that happened, and nothing changed there either. So, I guess we know who we are and what’s important to us. If our guns are more important than our elected officials, more important than our families at the mall, more important than our children in school, even when they’re in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, shouldn’t have been able to obtain them, people who are emotionally disturbed where that’s been documented—if that’s who we are, I think we need to ask why. I think we should all be asking a question, what makes sense? And it’s not the—it’s not the question we’re asking.
Preet Bharara: So, what does make sense?
John Miller: What makes sense is we should probably as a civilized country not be able to go to gun shows and buy assault weapons anonymously. We should probably not be able to buy weapons over the Internet that can be easily converted with a quick set of tools. We should probably not be able to elect whether to contribute to the database that’s supposed to keep guns out of the hands of people who have been adjudicated in court as to be mentally disturbed. I think there’s a whole lot of things that would make sense that we’re avoiding because the other side of this argument insists that bringing up any one of these things is the first chink in the armor or the first crack that will lead to black helicopters, and the new world order, and the government rounding up everybody’s guns. That’s just not true.
We have to ask ourselves after Las Vegas what we should have asked after Newtown, which we should have asked after Aurora, which we should have asked after Columbine—I mean, how far back do you want to go? Is this who we are? And if it is, because it is, Preet, is this who we want to be as a country still?
Preet Bharara: So, pivoting from what happened in Las Vegas, you’re both an award-winning journalist, and you’re also a police official. So, what the hell are you? Are you a journalist or are you a cop?
John Miller: If you look at what are the professional requirements, as a journalist, it was when something happened or was about to happen, you had to figure out what it was, where it happened, who was behind it, what it meant, and then be able to explain why is this important or not to your bosses, who are the public. That’s about blasting out information to the masses.
On the other hand, when I worked in the intelligence community as the head of intelligence analysis for a number of agencies that we coordinated at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, they said, well, now we’re on the secret side and everything’s different. I said, well, how do we work? And they said, we gotta find out either what happened or what’s about to happen, who’s behind it, what it means, why it’s important, and be able to explain that to a small group of people. The disciplines turned out to be extraordinarily similar.
Preet Bharara: I get that.
John Miller: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: But it’s a very strange revolving door through which you have passed multiple times. And I get what you’re saying about the disciplines being similar. But if that’s so, how come you’re the only guy I know who’s done what you’ve done?
John Miller: Because I’m an odd duck. So, my resume would go from Channel 5 News to NBC News to the NYPD, where Bill Bratton, the commissioner from 20 years ago, brought me in to do something very logical. Let me get a guy out of the press who covers the police to do public affairs in the department. Knows the department, knows the press. It’s a good mix. I went from the NYPD to ABC News, and then to the LAPD, because when Bratton became the chief out there, he said, well, here’s a guy who’s been covering terrorism at ABC for a long time and understands that world in a different way from what my police officers do. So he said, well, come here and be the head of intelligence and counterterrorism. And I said, but do I have enough background with the LAPD—that’s a department I don’t really know—to do that?
And he said, “I have 9,200 people here who have a background in the LAPD. I need someone who thinks differently. I’ll pair you up with a good chief from here. You’ll be a team, and you can think outside, he can think inside. And hopefully, you’ll come together,” which we did. From there, I went to the FBI in public affairs, then to the director of national intelligence and analysis, and then to CBS News, covering the very fields I had just left, and then back to the NYPD. So, it’s a perfectly normal resume, if you think about it.
Preet Bharara: [Laughs] Maybe you could read my ads for me.
John Miller: I would be happy to.
Preet Bharara: Just try this first. Just for me, just say, stay tuned. Supported by Stamps.com.
John Miller: By who.com?
Preet Bharara: Stamps.com.
John Miller: Stay tuned. Supported by stamps.com.
Preet Bharara: See, that’s so much better. That’s so much better than what I do.
John Miller: If you need me to do some of the wraparounds, I’m like an all-purpose guest.
Preet Bharara: We’re gonna cut this from the final episode, I think. Because you make me look terrible. [Laughs] I’ve been working on my voice, John.
John Miller: You’re beautiful.
Preet Bharara: Thank you.
John Miller: And you’ve always got that going for you.
Preet Bharara: That’s why I’m doing audio. So, I want to talk about some of the things you did as a journalist that I think will be surprising to folks. You landed some of the biggest, most impressive interviews that one can land, and not just with law enforcement officials, but with bad guys, some of the worst bad guys. You interviewed John Gotti. What was that like?
John Miller: So, for background, John Gotti commits the hit, the murder, the Gangland murder of Paul Castellano, and then takes over the Gambino crime family as the boss.
Preet Bharara: Right in front of the Sparks. Right in front of the Sparks.
John Miller: Exactly. Sparks Steakhouse on the East Side of Manhattan, December, 16, 1985, at about 5:45 PM. So, then he emerges as this different character which is—
Preet Bharara: And also, to be clear, this was within the Gambino family.
John Miller: Right. So, with Gotti, there was this public fascination with him. And I thought, you know, we really have to try and get him to talk to us. And every time we approached him, he had like two guys with him, giant people, Bobby Boriello (ph.) and another person. These were like football player-sized people who were members of the Gambino crime family. They would advance on us, and next thing you know, the cameraperson would be on the ground. I’d be knocked over, and the film, when we went to look at it, was a lot of like the sky spinning around. And then one day, I was watching television, and I saw Geraldo Rivera. So, Geraldo Rivera has got a hidden camera, and he walks up to John Gotti, and the two big guys move up and they intercept him. Gotti does an about-face, goes the other way. And by the time Geraldo Rivera knows what’s going on, it’s all over. Gotti’s escaped. He didn’t get anything. And only by sitting on TV and watching someone else try what we kept failing did I—it was like a football play. The two linebackers move forward. They intercept this guy. Gotti drops back, feints left, go into the social club, he’s gone.
Preet Bharara: Wait a minute. So, you watch Geraldo Rivera, of all people, screw it up, and then come up with a better play for yourself?
John Miller: Exactly.
Preet Bharara: I love that so much.
John Miller: So, what we did was, we did a diagram. Gotti’s lair was the Ravenite Social Club, 247 Mulberry Street. He would come out with who he wanted to have a meeting with, because he assumed, and rightly so, that the club was bugged by the FBI. And he would literally walk them around the block.
Preet Bharara: Right. A walk and talk.
John Miller: A walk and talk. So, we said, okay. So, if we comes out there and he walks to the corner, when he reaches the corner, that’s the farthest he is on that block. But when he makes the left and then goes down the next block to come all the way around the block, by mid-block of that next block, he is the very farthest away he’s gonna get from the refuge of the club, which means if you’re gonna stop him, that’s when he’s got the longest to run.
So, we put a camera crew a block south, a camera crew a block north, and then I had a camera crew in the middle of the block in a gas station across the street. And when he came around the block the first time, it was with like 20 guys, and they said, not gonna work. Got on the two-way radio, said, “Red light, red light. Nobody move.” When he came around the next time, he had Sammy the Bull Gravano, who at that point was the consigliore, and Frankie Locascio, who at that point was the Underboss. And I said, well, here it is. It’s John Gotti, the consigliore, and the Underboss. It’s the administration of the Gambino crime family, the tree of them.
Preet Bharara: And Geraldo Rivera was nowhere to be seen.
John Miller: Nowhere to be seen.
Preet Bharara: Okay.
John Miller: So, I gave the signal to go, and one car raced up Lafayette, and one raced down Lafayette, and we came across, and it was just like the football play. Gotti sees the first cameras heading towards him. The two guys step forward. They intercept the camera. Gotti turns around and walks straight into the second camera, now with no coverage. And as he goes to cross the street, he walks right into me with the third camera, and we start to ask him questions.
Preet Bharara: And you literally—do you have a microphone in his business? How aggressive were you being with this guy, who, by the way, murders people for a living?
John Miller: [Laughs] Everybody has a microphone on the end of one of those long poles.
Preet Bharara: Right.
John Miller: And the math question here was, if you have two guys whose job it is to block the cameras, but you have three cameras, there’s gonna be one camera that’s always not blocked. So, if you edit your way around the cameras, whichever one they’re blocking, you just cut to the other one. And this goes down the block, this caterpillar of arms and legs and wires and people trying to lock cameras. And I get to ask Gotti, “Are you the boss of the Gambino crime family? Did you authorize the murder of Paul Castellano? Are you this? Are you that?” And he’s saying, “Why are you doing this? I always treated you with respect, John. You know, this isn’t very respectable. You’re not being a very nice guy.” And I said, “I’m just doing my job.” And he said, “You’re not behaving yourself.”
And at some point, it seemed like, well, he’s not gonna really answer the questions, but we have shown that, you know, there’s a conversation going, and we attempted to ask him these things. So, I wave the camera crews off. And Gotti says, “What was all that about?” And I said, “Well, every time we try to talk to you, you know, your people knock down my people, and that’s not treating me like a gentleman.” And he said, “Well, what was this?” I said, “Well, this is how we’re gonna have to do it from now on. We’re just gonna have to bring more people.” And he said, “Don’t ever do this again. You want to ask me a question, I’ll answer the question. My people will never touch your people from hereon out.” And so, there became this odd detente where I could walk up to John Gotti with a camera crew, ask him whatever the questions were that day. He would give some quip or some type of non-answer answer. But the end result was, there was a lot of footage when I was at NBC of me and John Gotti walking the streets seemingly conversing. People actually got the idea that we were friends.
Preet Bharara: Were you?
John Miller: No, we were never friends. He was a gangster and I was a reporter, and I tried to never forget that. Because a lot of people got caught up in this cult of charisma that was coming from a guy who murders people for a living, right?
Preet Bharara: Well, you’re a charismatic guy yourself. You don’t need to fall for that. Not to be rude about this, but was their value in having all those cameras come and try to ambush this noted crime figure who wasn’t saying much?
John Miller: I thought there was, because we yell questions at the President of the United States about controversial issues, where he elects to stop and answer them or doesn’t.
Preet Bharara: This is a gangster.
John Miller: So, the idea that a self-appointed head of a crime family that at the time was controlling rackets from the concrete industry to the convention center, to the fish market, to the laundry business, to you name it, is not put to the same questions in public was something that I didn’t understand.
I said, you know, why aren’t we asking him that? First of all, people are curious. They want to see him. They want to hear him. They want to know, what would he say? And most people weren’t asking.
Preet Bharara: So, John Gotti is about as bad a guy as you can come across, responsible for untold numbers of murders, all kinds of crimes, as has been well-documented in trials and elsewhere. But in your career, you’ve actually interviewed someone not only worse, but a lot worse.
John Miller: You know, when John Gotti went away for life, one of the things he said to the reporters and to the agents was, “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone, because you’re gonna see what comes next is a lot worse.” I never knew what he meant by that, but Osama bin Laden may have been the answer.
Preet Bharara: So, it’s 1998. Osama bin Laden has not become a household name as he later became known as the face of evil. And you’re a journalist at ABC?
John Miller: Mm-hmm.
Preet Bharara: And you set about trying to interview this person. Some months before, as we alleged out of the southern district of New York and proved that he was responsible as the head of Al Qaeda, which people didn’t know about yet; responsible for the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. 224 died. And just a few months before that, you set about trying to get an interview with bin Laden. How did that come about, and why were you doing that?
John Miller: So, it all starts over dinner at Campagnola on First Avenue on the East Side.
Preet Bharara: Where it always does.
John Miller: Where it always does. Prosciol (ph.) with rigatoni and meatballs. By the way, why anybody would—
Preet Bharara: How do you remember every meal you’ve ever had? I think you’re making some of this up.
John Miller: I didn’t get to be this size by skipping meals. But you know, it was very rare that they had prosciol. So, it was that special that night. So, I had gone with basically kind of the components of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, and we were enjoying this great meal. And a report of a shooting at a hotel downtown came in.
And we were gonna rush through the meal and go down there, but then it turned out that it was the shooting of a rabbi, and the rabbi was Meyer Kahane This was the leader of the Jewish Defense League, a former member of the Knesset, a radical kind of rightwing Jewish figure who was kind of a lightning rod in a lot of ways. But he’d been gunned down, and they had arrested an individual at the scene trying to escape named El Sayyid Nosair. When that investigation touched on the potential of that being a conspiracy, it got to be a very interesting case about who was behind this assassination. By 1993, a lot of the people that the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Taskforce looked at and the NYOD looked at in the Kahane assassination turned out to be the people behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center.
Through these cases, there was an echo in the background. The name bin Laden had come up and come up and come up seldom, but persistently, as the guy who may have paid for Nosair’s defense fund, who may have financed the World Trade Center bombing. But the question was, bin Laden was the equivalent in Saudi Arabia of, like, one of the Rockefellers. You know, he was the son of a very rich guy who had vast business interests in building buildings and making highways. So, what was he? Was he an operational terrorist leader running a network? Was he just a dilettante who was a financier who believed in the cause? And I wanted to know. And I present this story as we’ve got to do a story on this guy. And Chris Isham and Terri Lichstein, the two senior producers kind of on the investigative side, said, well, why don’t we go find him and talk to him? And that just seemed implausible to me. I said, you know, here’s a guy who’s hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, being guarded by hundreds of Mujahedeen soldiers. I mean, I don’t think we call his agent up and say, hey, we’d like to do an interview.
Preet Bharara: Do you try to see who Geraldo tried to do it?
John Miller: [Laughs] Well actually, I shouldn’t laugh. A number of people have tried to do it. Sam Donaldson, Diane Sawyer.
Preet Bharara: Can I ask you—you said your first reaction was that it was implausible, not whether it’s a right or wrong thing to do. And I—with respect to John Gotti, that’s one thing. But was there any discussion at all or worry at all about the idea of giving platform on national American television to somebody who was believed to be responsible for the deaths of Americans and others?
John Miller: Not in the slightest bit. Because, Preet—
Preet Bharara: Well, explain that, because not everyone gets that.
John Miller: Okay. So, Preet, this is—
Preet Bharara: I’m not sure I get it.
John Miller: Okay.
Preet Bharara: Explain that to everyone.
John Miller: In the mind of a journalist as opposed to a law enforcement person, this is a total no-brainer. Let’s do both heads. My law enforcement head says, this guy is a dangerous shadowy terrorist leader, and we’re closing in on him with this case. Let’s keep all this secret and not saying anything, because we don’t want to give him a platform, any exposure, or do anything that will bring more attention to our case.
Preet Bharara: And that’s a valid consideration—
John Miller: It makes perfect sense.
Preet Bharara: For a law enforcement guy.
John Miller: Right. Let’s flip to my journalist head. Wait a minute. Are you saying to me that there is a rich guy from Saudi Arabia who has sanctuary in Afghanistan, who has blown up the World Trade Center in New York City, plotted to kill his holiness the Pope, has looked at an assassination plan against President Clinton, was going to blow up dozens of airliners over Pacific routes, potentially killing thousands of people, many of them Americans? And that he’s been operating this way for years, and nobody among the American people knows this name or the danger he presents, or whether their government is doing enough to get him? From the journalist standpoint, it is a total no-brainer. We had to put a spotlight on this individual, describe the threat, and warn the world about a guy who, if left unchecked, might come back and blow up the World Trade Center again, which he did.
Preet Bharara: So, you were not seeing this as giving a platform to a bad guy, but alerting the world about a bad guy.
John Miller: Right. I understand both views, but actually, looking back at how history unfolded, only one of them makes sense.
Preet Bharara: So, let’s go back to how you got the interview. How did you get the interview?
John Miller: So, at ABC, the investigative unit had a lot of contacts. And they contacted a former government intelligence official who had great contacts in that world, and said, “If you were looking for bin Laden, who would you—where you would start?” And he referred us to an individual in northern Virginia, of all places, who was kind of in the seams between journalism and advocacy, who had a blog and a website, involved in a group that did some publications and fundraising for Hamas and things like that. And that individual put us in touch with a guy in London who was basically an agent of al Qaeda. He said, “Write a letter.”
Preet Bharara: You wrote a letter?
John Miller: So, we wrote a letter. Dear Osama bin Laden. Actually, we were told to write it to bin Laden’s deputy, Mohammed Atef, former Egyptian policeman, noted terrorist in his own right. Dear Mr. Atef, we’d like to interview Osama bin Laden about his views of matters as they unfold in the Middle East. And, you know, signed it and sent it. And it went to a fax machine in London, and then it was faxed to Afghanistan. And basically, we were told, come to London, and we were interviewed by two people.
Preet Bharara: You were pre-interviewed.
John Miller: We were vetted.
Preet Bharara: By bin Laden’s people.
John Miller: By bin Laden’s people.
Preet Bharara: To see if it was okay for you to meet bin Laden.
John Miller: Right. And they wanted to know, what’s this interview about, and how long is it gonna be, and what’s it gonna be on, and what kind of things are you gonna talk about?
Preet Bharara: And you were prepared to jump through all those hoops because it was a big interview.
John Miller: Well, this is what you go through to get an interview with somebody who is hard to get. If you were doing an interview with Castro, you’d go through his version of this. With Saddam Hussein, you went through his version of this. With Carlos the Jackal, I’m sure there was some version of this. But this was the bin Laden version. So, we spoke to those two people, and they said, “Go to Islamabad, Pakistan. And when you get there, tell us how to find you.” So, we went to the Marriott in Islamabad, and—
Preet Bharara: And when is this?
John Miller: This is in early May of 1998. We check into Islamabad. And right then, India and Pakistan get in a nuclear showdown, and then the entire world media shows up. And they’re all at the same hotel.
Preet Bharara: To rain on your parade. To rain on your parade.
John Miller: So, I don’t know about that. I mean, first I thought, these people are all gonna say, what are you guys doing there? But then when we said, “We’re doing here what you’re doing here,” it actually gave us plenty of cover.
Preet Bharara: Okay. So, now take us to when you actually go and meet with bin Laden himself.
John Miller: So, this is plains, trains, and automobiles. I mean, we are taken to airports and shoved onto airplanes where we don’t know where they’re going. We get off in Pashour and then the next day are put on another plane to a place called Banu, which is basically a hut in the middle of an airfield.
Preet Bharara: Are you nervous or scared at all by all this travel?
John Miller: Well, what we’re—what is dawning on us is, we are literally driving back into history. We’ve gone from big cities with computers, and hotels, and running water, and electricity, to primitive places where there’s things being pulled by—on carts, and no electricity to total barren lands where there aren’t even roads, and we’re driving through steam vents.
Preet Bharara: Which is like one Holiday Inn Express.
John Miller: Right.
Preet Bharara: Okay.
John Miller: So, it’s kind of like we’re not in Kansas anymore, and there’s no way to call the mother ship.
Preet Bharara: You don’t have communication ability?
John Miller: No, we have nothing.
Preet Bharara: That was taken from you?
John Miller: Well, this was part of Al Qaeda’s operational security, taking us through the tribal areas, getting us farther and farther away from contact.
Preet Bharara: Wait. So, you gave up all your phones, and you’re being taken from place to place. How many of you were there?
John Miller: There was the cameraman, Rick Bennett, myself, and the fixer from northern Virginia who had arranged the contact was kind of along as our interlocutor and translator.
So, you’re just putting your lives in the hands of these Al Qaeda guys.
John Miller: Yes.
Preet Bharara: To get the interview.
John Miller: Yes.
Preet Bharara: Okay.
John Miller: Well, and a lot of people have done it, and a lot of people have paid a terrible price for that.
Preet Bharara: Right.
John Miller: If you think of Daniel Pearl, was killed, or you think of the Christian Science Monitor reporter or other who were kidnapped and helped for long periods.
Preet Bharara: Sure.
John Miller: It’s a dicey business.
Preet Bharara: And then you had no weapons.
John Miller: No.
Preet Bharara: So, how long di the trip take?
John Miller: It took, you know, kind of a week on the ground in Islamabad, and then two or three days on the road before we ended up on a mountaintop and were introduced to—
Preet Bharara: And mountaintop where?
John Miller: In Afghanistan.
Preet Bharara: Mm-hmm. And you don’t know precisely where?
John Miller: Today I could probably tell you it was near Kandahar. There were three Al Qaeda camps kind of in a triangle there, and I believe it was one of them.
Preet Bharara: Okay, so you show up at the camp.
John Miller: So, we meet Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is now the head of Al-Qaeda, but then was bin Laden’s deputy.
Preet Bharara: Was Zawahari known to you then?
John Miller: No. And Mohammed Atef plays to his part as the former policemen. He’s the security guy. He takes our stuff, goes through everything. He’s not very friendly. Zawahari says, “Thank you for coming. We’re looking forward to your chat with Mr. bin Laden.”
Preet Bharara: In what language?
John Miller: In English.
Preet Bharara: Okay.
John Miller: He’s an Egyptian, but an educated pediatrician who became a terrorist. We were searched by Abu Jandal, bin Laden’s personal bodyguard, and Salim Hamdan, his driver, Rick Bennett and I and our fixer. We were thrown in the back of a truck, where we drove for hours. I mean, the next three hours from the time we left at 9:00 till just before midnight. We were stopped at checkpoints. Some checkpoints opened fire from the side of the road, and by the time we got up to the top of this mountain, then there was a big scene. Lights, generators. Everybody who had been along the way was somehow in that crowd of people in a big circle. The guys who picked us up at the hotel in Islamabad, and the guys who took us across the Afghan border. And bin Laden arrives in this motorcade, and everybody opens fire into the sky with tracer rounds. And I’m thinking, on one side, why are they putting on this big show of having this big crowd here, and the motorcade arriving, and the tracer rounds? And then it occurs to me—I said to Zawahari, we needed B-roll. We needed footage to go with—and I believe they had actually kind of staged this whole thing because they were just beginning to get an understanding of television.
Preet Bharara: Take us to the moment when you first speak to bin Laden and meet him and speak to him.
John Miller: Well, he comes across in the giant phalanx of bodyguards shooting their guns in the air. And then I go down into this little hut kind of dug into the ground. And I’m introduced to bin Laden, and he sits down. He’s wearing his green army jacket. He’s got a shalwar kameez. He kind of sits down cross-legged. He props his AK-47 up behind him. He puts a red blanket with black stripes kind of across his lap. He walked in with a cane, and seemed to be kind of gaunt and feeble, like he had a fever. He was coughing a little bit and took drinks regularly from a glass of water.
Preet Bharara: And what did you make of him?
John Miller: He was not what I was expecting. Having covered terrorism in New York and known the blind sheikh (ph.), I expected somebody who would be screaming and yelling and pounding the table. And here was this very tall, skinny guy who, when I began to start asking questions, was answering in this very kind of soft, almost melodic voice that they were not translating back to me.
Preet Bharara: You didn’t know what he was saying.
John Miller: I had no idea. And I was struck by the idea that his answers seemed to be very long and detailed. Did you blow up the World Trade Center? Did you know Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that plot? Did you—are you worried about being captured or killed? And he’d go on for a couple of minutes. So, I thought, well, this is either complete palaver, or it’s very interesting. But he kept looking at the translator as if the translator was gonna translate. But the translator had his instructions, and he only translated the questions. So, I made eye contact with bin Laden and started to nod up and down, as if I understood. And I never broke the eye contact.
I would nod again, okay, yeah, uh-huh, hand gestures, everything to show that I was following this so that I could keep him focused on me, which is how the audience would expect to see the interview. And when it was over, I went back to our fixer in the back, and I said, “Could you hear any of it?” He said, “I heard most of it.” And I said, “What did he say?” And he said, “We need to get the tapes and get out of here.” And I’m like, “Well, what?” He said, “We have a big story. He declared war on America. He said, I predict a black day for America, after which nothing will be the same. This will be greater than our battle with the Russians,” referring to the war in Afghanistan in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. And he said, “You will only understand this when you bring back the bodies and coffins and in boxes in your shameful defeat.”
And I said, “Well, when he was saying this, what was I doing?” He said, “You were nodding in agreement,” which was just because I was trying to keep him—
Preet Bharara: You didn’t what he was—
John Miller: Focused. I had no idea.
Preet Bharara: How’d you feel about that?
John Miller: About which part?
Preet Bharara: A guy who’s—about, going back to an earlier question, kind of—so, you’re sitting there. You’re interviewing a guy you know to be evil, and then you find out he was actually projecting even more evil and violence against innocent people. And you were part of getting that message out.
John Miller: I feel really good about that. Preet, if a guy who is already tried to commit several bombings, who’s planning more, who’s already financed a terrible attack in New York City, is declaring war on America, and the American public doesn’t know that? That means the government is not under the pressure of public scrutiny. And at the time, you could argue, well, the government was operating in secret and they coulda/woulda/shoulda got him. But that was a multibillion-dollar intelligence community that continued to not get him for a long time, even under the pressure of public scrutiny. So, I don’t have a single nanosecond of second thoughts about why that was important to get out. And I don’t think that anybody rewinding history after we saw how everything turned out could have questioned whether that was a good thing. America needed to be warned about Osama bin Laden.
Preet Bharara: What I change the question, and after he became known to everyone in the world as the face of evil and responsible for so much tragedy and destruction and death in the United States and elsewhere, and he was on the run before he was killed in Abbottabad years later. But between 9/11 in the time when bin Laden was killed and the greatest manhunt in the history of the civilized world was going on with respect to him, and you had the opportunity to interview him in a cave, what would you have thought about that opportunity at that time?
John Miller: So, that would have been totally different. And the reason it would have been totally different is you would have to measure it based on the same standards, which is what are we telling the world? Does the world know how this guy is? Yes, they do. Do they know what his intentions are? Yes, they do. So, you’d have to ask between 9/11, where he’s killed 3,000 people on U.S. soil, and you’re going to secretly go and meet him at some location and not disclose that? That’s one of those things that runs afoul of journalistic ethics. We’re not an arm of law enforcement. As reporters, we have to do our job. Our job is to get the story to inform the public. But things are now magnified to a point that they hadn’t been. We understand who this guy is and what he’s about. He’s committed mass murder on a scale we’ve never seen before on U.S. soil, so.
Preet Bharara: So, you would not do the interview in 2005?
John Miller: I mean, the problem would have been, you would be turning down the most important interview of anybody’s career, but you would also be doing the right thing at the same time. You know, at some point, you have to ask, okay, what am I? Am I a journalist? Am I an American? Am I somebody looking for the next scoop, or am I a human being who understand perspectives and degrees?
Preet Bharara: So, should journalists be Americans and human being s first?
John Miller: We all serve the same public. Government serves the same public, reporters serve the same public. Serve them in different ways. But as a reporter, there are times—and I find a lot of reporters miss this—where you have to ask yourself, is what I am doing serving the public in a good way? And that would have been one of those times where you said, I don’t see how this is serving the public in a good way.
Preet Bharara: On that note, John Miller, thank you. Thank you for service, both as a journalist and as a law enforcement official, and thanks for being on the show.
John Miller: Well, thanks for having me, Preet. This was interesting and fun.
Preet Bharara: Thank you, sir.
[End of Audio]
