[Amanpour:] Welcome back to the program. So what really happened the night the world's most wanted terrorist was caught and killed? And how much did Pakistan know about Osama bin Laden's whereabouts? It was almost exactly four years ago. Those questions are once again in the spotlight after an article this weekend by the often controversial journalist, Seymour Hersh. At the center of it all is the world's most powerful spy organization, the Central Intelligence Agency, and one of its most experienced officers, Deputy Director Michael Morell, has just stepped down after serving six presidents. He was at President Bush's side in that Florida classroom when news of the September 11th attack started to come in. His new book on America's intelligence and security is called, "The Great War of Our Time." Osama may be dead, but that war continues against ISIS now. And Michael Morell joins me live from New York. Welcome to the program.
[Michael Morell, Former Deputy Director, Cia:] Christiane, it's great to be on your program.
[Amanpour:] I wonder whether you ever thought the killing of Osama bin Laden four years later would raise such controversy. And I want to ask you because I know that publicly you've said that what Seymour Hersh says is not true. But I would like to ask you how did you think that the Pakistanis or the ISI or low-level officers may have known about it? You say in your book that you said to the ISI chief, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, that "Americans find it hard to believe that no one in your Abbottabad detachment or in the Abbottabad police ever questioned what was going on in that compound." That's where OBL was.
[Morell:] Correct. So Christiane, I have confidence, very high confidence, 95 percent, 99 percent confidence that the Pakistani government did not know that he was there, that Pasha didn't know, that General Kayani, the chief of staff, didn't know. But I find it very difficult to believe that there wasn't somebody at a local level who was protecting him in some way, somebody with radical leanings. I find it hard to believe that that didn't happen. I find it hard to believe that there wasn't somebody who looked at that compound and said what is going on in there?
[Amanpour:] Before I get to "The New York Times" Carlotta Gall, who had additional information, did you find it bizarre that after explosions and 40 minutes on the ground, the SEALs were uninterrupted and the Pakistanis didn't come until after they had left?
[Morell:] So the Pakistanis who did not know about this and I can guarantee you, Christiane, about that; they did not know about this the Pakistanis were incredibly embarrassed and I know this because they talked to me about it and I talk about this in the book. The Pakistanis were embarrassed by our intelligence that we were capable of finding him in their country and they weren't and they were horribly embarrassed by the fact that we were able fly hundreds of miles into their territory and be on the ground and they couldn't they didn't even know about it until some time into the raid. So they were terribly embarrassed by all of that, didn't say a lot about their intelligence capabilities and their military capabilities. And Christiane, one of the things that I think is going on here is that at the end of the day I think the Pakistanis are putting out propaganda that they knew about this in order to save face on these two things that they're terribly embarrassed about and I think that's what Seymour Hersh picked up on.
[Amanpour:] And what about Carlotta Gall, who, after all, has reported from that area for so long and there's a big "New York Times" article today in which she basically said that some of what Seymour Hersh put out matches her reporting. For instance, she says, "I learned from a high-level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding bin Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence agent." And she says, "It was indeed a Pakistani army brigadier" and she names him, Osman Khaled "who told the CIA where bin Laden was hiding with the knowledge and protection of the
[Isi." Morell:] So I have no doubts that a Pakistani official told her those things. But they are not true. Again, I think it's Pakistani propaganda designed to make the Pakistanis look better here. They've been peddling this ever since the bin Laden raid and people have now picked it up and people are now talking about it. But Christiane, I was in every meeting at CIA; I was in every meeting in the White House Situation Room. I was sent to Pakistan to smooth over relations with the when they were so angry with us after the raid. I can guarantee you that the Pakistanis did not know about this. They didn't know he was there. They didn't know he was coming. And they did not give us any information that led us to find Osama bin Laden.
[Amanpour:] Why do you think this American source then told all this to Seymour Hersh?
[Morell:] So that's the one piece that I have a hard time thinking through. It must be that this American source is somehow getting information from Pakistan and passing it on to Seymour Hersh. That's the only thing that I can conclude. But this person claims to have been at the center of the discussions in the U.S. government about this operation and he was not in the meetings that I was in, I guarantee you that.
[Amanpour:] So let's revert back to the operation to get him and the plan to get Osama bin Laden. You write in your book that Vice President Biden and General Cartwright were against it but that Leon Panetta, Defense Secretary or was he CIA chief at the time? I don't remember. He said to the American
[Morell:] He was CIA chief.
[Amanpour:] still CIA chief he said to President Obama, as you describe it, he put the American people argument to President Obama. Describe that tension between those who wanted and those who didn't.
[Morell:] I think the so for Vice President Biden, I think the issue was is the intelligence good enough to take this risk with our troops. And that was his fundamental question. For General Cartwright, he thought that there was a better way. He thought that we should take essentially a drone strike against an individual who was pacing around the compound regularly who we thought to be Osama bin Laden. So General Cartwright wanted to conduct an operation, just a different one. The vice president wanted to wait for more intelligence. The argument that Leon Panetta made, very powerfully, was if the American people know what we know and I remember to this day him saying this if the American people know what we know, they would want us to act. They would expect us to act. And I think that was a powerful argument around the table.
[Amanpour:] Let me move on to the Arab Spring, because all of this is all part of a big part, people hoped that when Osama bin Laden was caught and the whole idea of democracy coming to the Arab world would actually have a much better effect than it's had. And the CIA I mean, you say that part of the reason you got all that so wrong was that you were relying on the strong men themselves for intelligence. You say, "We failed because to a large extent we were relying on a handful of strong leaders in the countries of concern to help us understand what was going on in the Arab street." But isn't that a basic mistake? Because on the one hand, these leaders are not in touch with their people. That's why there was a revolution. And yet you went to these very leaders to figure out what their people knew.
[Morell:] Sure, Christiane. There were two key analytic judgments. The first was we had been warning for years that pressures were building in the Middle East, social pressures, economic pressures, political pressures for change. And we'd been warning about that. What we weren't able to do is tell the president, Mr. President, these pressures we've been talking about, they're building to the point of boiling over. We didn't do that. We weren't able to call the tipping point. The other judgment and I think we should have been, right. I think we should have been and I think you're right. The other judgment we made was in the immediate beginning of the Arab Spring, we said we think this is going to undercut Al Qaeda. We think this is going to undercut their narrative that it takes violence to bring political change. And that turned out to be wrong. In fact, I have a chapter called Al Qaeda Spring, right. The Arab Spring was really a spring for Al Qaeda. And it was a spring for Al Qaeda in two ways. It really benefited them on the one hand because it destroyed institutions that were capable of keeping a handle on them. Best example, Libya, where the intelligence service and the security service fell apart and militants were able to run wild. And the other thing it did was undercut the willingness of some Arab countries to take on extremism. Best example, President Morsi's Egypt, where the capabilities were there but the officers that I dealt with every day in Egypt, who used to be pretty tough on terrorism didn't think they had political cover anymore and eased up and when they did that, Al Qaeda came back to Egypt for the first time in 25 years.
[Amanpour:] And that is actually a major takeaway from your book, that is your sort of big global analysis that Al Qaeda is back; it's in the form of ISIS now and what then is your analysis about how long and how difficult the struggle will be? You just heard me talk to General Breedlove about training. Most people say it's a little and it's too late. But what is your analysis of how long it's going to take to defeat ISIS? And what you fear they might do?
[Morell:] Christiane, I have a great deal of confidence that what we're doing on the Iraq side of the border is working. We have taken back about 25 percent of the territory that ISIS took during its blitzkrieg. And it's going to be a slow process. And fortunately the Iranians are in there helping us. But we are going to slowly take that territory back. So I'm confident in our Iraqi strategy. We have air power and we have ground troops in the form of the Iraqi military, the Kurdish military and Iranian trained Shia militia. But on the Syrian side of the border, I don't have a lot of confidence that our strategy is going to work. It's not that it's too late, Christiane, it's that it's too little. We need to train ground troops in very large numbers if we're going to be able to take back territory from ISIS and Syria. And what I fear is that we're going to successful in Iraq; we're going to have a hammer in Iraq but no anvil in Syria. So the ISIS guys are just going to go across the border into Syria and they're going to have a safe haven in Eastern Syria, where they're going to be able to continue to plot and that plotting will include plotting against us.
[Amanpour:] Finally, let me ask you to go all the way back to the first Gulf War. I covered it and I was stunned by one of the power grabs that sort of leapt out at me that you quote, you basically quote Saddam Hussein, saying, "Saddam in essence said, 'Look, if you guys did not want me to go into Kuwait" and he's talking about August of 1990 "why didn't you tell me you would deploy 500,000 troops, six carrier battle groups, 1,400 combat aircraft and a coalition of 32 countries? "I am not crazy. If you had simple told me, I would not have gone into Kuwait." Did nobody tell him?
[Morell:] So nobody told him that. This is something that he said to his debriefers after we caught him in Iraq. One of the lessons of my 33 years, Christiane, and you I'm sure you know this, too is that there are a lot of misperceptions in international relations. There's a lot of miscommunication. And I think that that was one of the lessons here. If he had known how we were going to respond, he would not have done it.
[Amanpour:] Michael Morell, really fascinating. Thank you so much for joining me tonight.
[Morell:] Great to be with you.
[Amanpour:] Thank you. And over at the Vatican now, a bowl of diplomatic decision, Pope Francis' Catholic Church today has concluded a treaty that recognizes Palestinian statehood. This follows what the British, the French and the Swedish parliaments have done in the past year. But this packs a moral punch as well as it comes from the head of the world's 1 billion Catholics. And when we come back we travel to Liberia for the mother of all after- parties imagine that after this.