MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to go back now to one of the other major stories we've been following - the fight in the cockpit of a FlyDubai plane this week. We heard from the Indian pilot who was apparently stabbed by his co-pilot for the first time today, Captain Smit Machchhar, in a conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The captain described the moment he realized he wasn't just fighting for his own life, he had to get backup to save the passengers.
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SMIT MACHCHHAR: (Non-English language spoken).
MARTIN: Saudi Arabia says the co-pilot has been handed over to the United Arab Emirates. The flight from Dubai was headed for Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the co-pilot, quote, "underwent Islamist radical indoctrination" unquote. We've called Philip Mudd to help us understand what investigators will look for now. He served as deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and the FBI's National Security Branch, serving under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Good morning, Mr. Mudd. Thanks for joining us once again.
PHILIP MUDD: Good morning. Thank you.
MARTIN: So, Mr. Mudd, what kind of personal information would give clues about potential radicalization?
MUDD: Well, there's a couple of basic pieces you'd be looking at at this point, which is fairly early in the investigation. First, obviously, you're looking at his digital footprint, how he communicates, whether he's emailed people, whether he texted people, what his search history is over time, whether there are documents on a laptop that show radicalization, whether he watches YouTube videos. The second piece is more physical. Not only do I want to search where he lived, where he worked, but I want to conduct interviews of friends and family to see what his mindset was, whether he talked about this, whether his mindset changed over time. So you can look at - think of it broadly in the baskets of digital and physical and say, over the course of a few days, a few weeks, you should be able to get a picture of a mindset.
MARTIN: OK. And President Trump was asked about any links between the co-pilot and Iran. And he said, quote, "the answer based on what I'm hearing is yes," unquote. But he did not give any details or proof. So how would you determine if another actor was involved, including possibly a state actor?
MUDD: You want to look at things like travel patterns. You want to look at who his friends and family talk about him associating with. Obviously, you want to look at communications, but the Iranian Security Service - I worked against them for years - is very good. The likelihood that they would have been easy to - that connections would have been easy to uncover, I think, is not high. So if there were connections, those would have been, I think, difficult to uncover in the short few days that this investigation has been underway. Possible, I think, but, man, that is not easy to find out.
MARTIN: So I'm wondering if this is a circumstance or how, like, public interest and political pressure could affect an investigation. And I note that because these are sort of, you know, look, the United States is at war with Iran. Israel certainly has an interest in this. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu has certain political pressures weighing on them. So I wonder, honestly, having been at the center of some of these, whether that would affect an investigation.
MUDD: Yes, it would, and there are two things to think about. First, the public wants to know why, what just happened, and the investigators want to know whether there's another who. That is, the first question investigator has might not be motivation. It's did anybody know, did anybody else participate? Are there people in a chat room, for example, who might do the same thing? Mitigating threat is the first question, not figuring out motive. So they're working on mitigating threat. The other thing I would say is determining motive, especially if you have a solitary individual who may have thoughts in his head that are hard to determine, takes more than a couple days. He may say, for example, that he was motivated by extreme ideology, but what was his financial condition?
MARTIN: OK.
MUDD: What was his emotional state? Did that change over time? That is difficult to ascertain this quickly.
MARTIN: That's Philip Mudd, a former counterterrorism official who served in the FBI and the CIA. Mr. Mudd, thank you so much.
MUDD: Thank you.
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