(JUDY?) WOODRUFF: Joining me here in the Washington studio, a familiar name, a familiar face, best-selling author of so many novels: Tom Clancy. Mysteries, at the heart, Tom Clancy, of the military community, the intelligence community. People in our newsroom have been saying today that what is happening is like right out of a Tom Clancy novel.
But have you -- could you possibly imagine something like this to write about?
TOM CLANCY, AUTHOR: No. One of the problems with being a writer of fiction is you can't keep up all of the madmen in the world, as much as you try. And I -- I frankly would have thought that this was not a credible threat, to have four separate people decide to commit suicide in the same way in the same morning.
WOODRUFF: Why not? CLANCY: Because ending your own life is not something the average person does. Everyone is assuming that these are Islamic terrorists. If so, they have defiled their own religion. Islam does not permit suicide. It says you go to hell if do you something like this.
WOODRUFF: But we see suicide bombings in the Middle East and in Israel.
CLANCY: Judy, we saw people in Northern Ireland -- Catholics -- acting like savages. And Protestants acting like savages. So now we have a few who call themselves Muslims acting like savages. It happens. It's not because of their religion. It's because they are fools.
WOODRUFF: What does this say now? You've -- you've done a lot of reporting. You not only write fiction, you do a lot of reporting from inside the intelligence community, inside the military community. What does this say about how prepared as a country?
CLANCY: People always ask that kind of question when things go wrong. But you don't ask the question when things don't go right. And the reason is you can't tell when things go right in that business. One of the things that I have been saying for a lot of years is that we need to upgrade the human capability -- the human intelligence capabilities in the CIA and our four-star intelligence community, because you can do a lot with satellites, you can do a lot with eavesdropping techniques, but you can't -- you can't find out what is in a person's mind except by talking to that person. And so the agency needs to increase its human -- its human intelligence capability.
The CIA has about 20,000 employees. Less than a thousand of them are actually field intelligence officers. That number should be at least doubled. But America as a nation doesn't love our intelligence community. And certainly the news media does not love our intelligence community.
WOODRUFF: I'm going to interrupt you, Tom Clancy. I am told Aaron Brown in New York has a development -- Aaron.
BROWN: Well, Judy, another -- just in the last few seconds, another building -- we will speculate carefully here that it was building No. 7 -- one of the buildings in support of the World Trade Center towers has collapsed. Those of you who have been with us for a while, you can see, indeed, that the smoke color has changed, gotten much lighter.
So we believe that yet another building -- this would be the third building -- has collapsed. Likely building No. 7. Although we also heard that there were problems at building No. 5. And it's possible that 1 went down, too. Again, another building in the World Trade Center complex appears now to have caved in after these attacks -- Judy.
WOODRUFF: Aaron, we're looking at these pictures, Tom Clancy and I, as we sit here in the Washington studio. And just as I come back to Tom Clancy, I want to read just a portion of the statement issued by Secretary of State Powell, Colin Powell, calling these attacks a terrible tragedy; terrible tragedy befallen not just my nation, but all of the nations of this region, all the nations of the world, all those who believe in democracy.
Tom Clancy, you were saying, sure, we can ask these questions about failed security, failed intelligence, when things go wrong. But we have every right to the ask these questions, don't we?
CLANCY: You have the right to say anything you want. But as a practical matter, of one of the things we have to do, if you want to prevent things like this from happening, is to build up defenses. And your first line of defense against terrorism is an intelligence- gathering capability. When is the last time that CNN or the news media in general said, "We ought to put more money into the human intelligence capability of the CIA." Answer: You never do it. Never.
WOODRUFF: We wouldn't take a side on something like that, anyway, in terms of what do you fund.
CLANCY: But you always take a side on saying that they have failed. Why not help them succeed once in a while?
WOODRUFF: Are you saying that they are significantly underfunded in that area? Not just the CIA but the FBI?
CLANCY: Human intelligence is de-emphasized. The FBI's job is...
WOODRUFF: Spying is what we are talking about.
CLANCY: That's what intelligence officers do, is they spy. And the CIA has 20,000 employees, about 800 of whom are actually spooks. And of them, maybe as many as two-thirds of them get outside and do spook operations.
WOODRUFF: And we know that...
CLANCY: And we need to do better that. We need to do more than that. You gather information of this type by putting people out on the streets, the same way cops gather information from informants. This isn't rocket science. This is a matter of hiring the people and letting them do the work.
WOODRUFF: I am going to turn it back over to the Aaron. My question is: how do you know what to believe? We had an Arab journalist in London just today saying we had this information a few weeks ago. It was coming. We didn't know whether or not to believe it. Back to Aaron in New York.
