Transcripts For CSPAN Q A At 10 20141230

Himself as a reporter. If he did that, my requisites of satisfied. Have been satisfied. You can see the funeral at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Speakers included tom brokaw and his children. Q and i is 10 years old, and work a decade of conversation, we are featuring one interview. Here is one from 2010. This week on q what are we continue q a, we continue our interviews from london. Dan reed, how would you describe what you do for a living . Im a freelance documentary director and producer. I also direct drama and im sort of at the moment im a bit of a gun for hire. But i tend to make films which you know, in the documentary field. I tend to make films which go behind a big new story or go behind something that has made headlines and try to show the more complex side of it and to try and kind of unpack the hidden truths. Who pays you to do this . Oh, im hired by channel 4 itv, hbo, pbs frontline right now, the bbc. Ive worked for all of the u. K. Broadcasters over the last 20 years. How many documentaries have you done . I must have done about 25 or 30. Ive kind of lost count. We asked you here to talk about terror in mumbai, which is two years old. Yes. What is it . Well, terror in mumbai is the story of the terrorist attack on the city of mumbai in on the 26th of november 2008, and its known in india as 26 11. Thats their 9 11, if you like. And what happened was 10 young men, they came ashore on a beach in mumbai, in the in south mumbai, which is the most prosperous part of the city, and they started killing, and they didnt stop killing for the next 57 hours. And so, i tried to tell the story of the attack, both through the eyes of the victims but also through the eyes of the attackers, the terrorists themselves. Were going to show a little bit of it in a moment. But before we do that, where were you on that date . Where was i . I believe i it was funny, because i was trying to remember the other day exactly where i was, and i think i was in a cutting room, cutting an episode of lewis, which is in the states known as inspector lewis. I direct drama as well, and sometimes i like to its an inspector moore spin off, and so i like to do a Police Procedural or Something Like that. Its a very its a contrast to all the documentary work i do, which tends to be quite fraught and serious and sometimes dangerous, although i do less dangerous since ive had a family. So youre here in london . I was here in london. Yes. Yes, yes. How long did it take you to get to mumbai . Well, the genesis of the film, you know, i didnt it wasnt an instant reaction thing because i didnt work for the news. Im not part of a Quick Response team. So im hired on a jobbyjob basis. And i do the projects that i like and the projects that for some reason turn me on. Now, i got a call, i think it was in january, from an executive producer whom i worked with before who i liked, and he said, dan, would you fancy going to mumbai . And i hadnt made a documentary for about four years, four or five years. Ive been making drama. I did a movie. And my the last documentary i made before terror in mumbai was called terror in moscow. It was also broadcast by hbo and it was the story of a 57hour siege in a moscow theater. The incident happened in late in october, 2002. And it told the story of a chechnyan hit squad with suicide women with suicide belts who took the hundred muscovites the 200 moscow 800 moscowuscovites hostage in russia. And it and it i told that story through the eyes of the hostages. It was really about sitting in a theater with your family, with your friends, powerless and waiting to die. And it was about events that unfolded. And i obtained a tape which have been made shot by the terrorists in the theater, during the siege, on one of the hostages video cameras, and i used this tape to open out the scene inside the inside the theater. And that was my last documentary for a little while. And so i went from i went on to do some fiction and but mumbai just intrigued me too much, and i had a hankering to return to the documentary world and to the, as you like, the real world. I you know, you after a while, talking to actors and living in a very controlled world of a drama, of a fiction shoot becomes you get itchy feet after a little while. And mumbai, although i didnt really know much about at the attack at the time and no one did mumbai seemed like a terrific story to try and tell. Was that an executive producer from hbo . It wasnt. Hbo came on a little bit later. This was an exec producer that id worked with in the u. K. , you know, years back, and sort of knew me of old and decided to try and tempt me back into a documentary. And, i dont know, the notion of mumbai appealed to me, and the challenge of trying to tell a story in a different way. This was a story which, to me, appeared very confused, very muddled. I didnt really understand what had happened in mumbai from my reading of the papers, from my reading from watching tv reports. There were a lot of conflicting views of what happened, a lot of conflicting information. And india is a place that intrigued me, and particularly mumbai, as a very dynamic, modern indian city. Had you been there . Never been to india in my life before i before i made this film. When did you touch down there for the first time . I touched down in march for the first time. In 2009 . 2009. Yes. So this is some time after so this is some time after the attack. When youre did you go by yourself . I did. I did. Did you have a camera . No. The way i approach a film like this is i would go, first of all, to smell the air. I will go and try and make friends, make contacts, try and understand try and absorb as much as i can and understand not by a sort of frontal assault but by kind of nibbling around the edges to try and feel my way into the story. Because this was a story that didnt really you know didnt it didnt surrender itself very easily at all. And my first idea was to try and contact as many victims as possible, people who were there, who were in the Railway Station when the gunmen started firing who were in the hotel, the luxury hotels, when the gunmen broke in and started shooting, and who were in the chabad house, the Jewish Community center. So it was a you know, i had the luxury of being able to take a little bit of time at the beginning of a project, and then it accelerates very quickly once you find what you need and you start putting together the pieces but so i go, im on my own, and i didnt know anyone. Ive never been to the country before. How long were you there the first time you went . So i spent a total, i think of three months overall, and the first trip, i think, was five or six weeks. Were you married at the time . I am. Yes. I was married. Yes. Children . Yes. I had a i have a son and a daughter, and i now have another daughter but how old are they . So theyre seven, three and three months. So, at the time, my children were little littler than they are now, and every time i go away for more than three weeks its miserable. Yes. How old are you . Im 45. Where were you educated in this business . Well, i never had any training in television or in film storytelling. I did a degree in i had a strange kind of academic career because i got into university to do math and physics, and then i changed before i started the course, i changed because i got in very young. I changed to russian and french. I was very curious about russia at the time. This was when russia was the unknown other, the, you know sort of beyond the looking glass. And so i did a degree in russian, i did a little literature. I spent quite a bit of time in russia, which was fascinating, and it intrigued me and it gave me a hunger to explore worlds which were unlike my own. And i, through knowing russian through being able to speak russian, i got a job at the bbc as a researcher on a documentary series, and kind of took it on from there. I saw your documentary in several places, one on hbo and its been available more than one time on video on demand. I watched it on the internet where it had a different moderator. Oh, yes. Different narrator. Yes. One, the hbo documentary is fareed zakaria, well known to american audience. I dont know who the one the other one was, and who the other have been for. In the end, who bought this documentary . Well, the documentary was commissioned by two broadcasters. One was channel 4 here in the u. K. , and the other was hbo in the states. Now, hbo felt that they wanted to have what they call a wrap around, which is an introduction and a and a sort of postscript by fareed, whos wonderful and, you know, a very eminent figure, so i was extremely pleased that he came on board. And he revoiced the commentary, which wed written. For the u. K. , so the u. K. Version was made before the american version. The american version was slightly longer, in fact, and hbo wanted more context and more a bit more detail. For the u. K. Version, we used dominic west, who, funnily enough, plays mcnulty in the wire, and this was his first ever voice over narration job and the wire on hbo. Yes. Yes, yes. Well, lets watch so those who havent seen this can get a sense of the feeling that you put into it. This is fareed zakaria, opening it up. And if you pay close attention all the elements of whats in this are in this opening couple of minutes. What you are about to watch is unique. All terrorist attacks so far have been reconstructed or recounted from the point of view of the survivors, witnesses, and first responders. This time, you are with the terrorists. You will hear the voices of the young men on the ground in mumbai. You will hear their masters in pakistan. And you will also see the victims men, women and children and hear from those who survived. It is the first 360 degree view of terrorism. November 26, 2008. An organization determined to surpass al qaeda as the worlds most feared terrorist group send 10 gunmen to mumbai, indias biggest city. Their mission was to kill and keep on killing, to stage a spectacle so terrifying that the world could no longer ignore lashkaretaiba, the army of the righteous. Foreign Language Foreign Language indian intelligence intercepted the terrorists cell phone conversations with their commanders in pakistan. Foreign Language they were really calm, not shouting, not excited. They were doing their job, as a matter of fact. One gunman was captured alive. Foreign Language Foreign Language Foreign Language Foreign Language for the army of the righteous, it was a test run for future operations, not just in india but perhaps elsewhere. Foreign Language their method of attack could easily be adapted to any american city. No hijacked airliners or sophisticated weaponry, just 10 young men with mobile phones and assault rifles, programmed to kill and die on command. There were a lot of elements in there. When i watched it, i kept asking, where did he get the video of them walking up and down the hotel . Where did he get the audio of the telephone conversation between pakistan and these 10 men . So lets just start with what we just saw there. How many people were killed in mumbai on that occasion . Well, the death toll i think reached maybe 170, and most of these were i think 52 or 53 died at the Railway Station, and the Railway Station was the biggest massacre, although its the least remembered, and the reason for that, i think, is partly because it was over so quickly but also because the victims were poor and not, you know, less important, as you like, in terms of the media and the visibility than the wealthy clients of the taj mahal or the oberoi hotel. Where did you get the video of the where did you get the video of the blood on the floor and all the clothes and all that . That was that video was that was camera phone footage, and that was taken by a guy who used to as a teenager, he was a beggar at the station, and hes quite an extraordinary guy and in fact i he ended up being one of our team. He grew up to be hes a successful young man now, and a politician, funnily enough. But he grew up as a as a hobo on the on the in the station, and so he had a lot of friends at the station, and when the attack happened he went in there and went looking for his friends and picking up the bodies. He helped to collect the bodies as well. And he filmed on his camera phone. Everyone in india is brilliant at using that these smartphones, you know . Its incredible what they do. Everyone has little movies and little things. So i he said have a look at this stuff, and so i bought it from him and put it in the film. Where did you get the audio phone conversations between brother wasi, who is supposed to be in pakistan, and these 10 young men that did the killings . The phone conversations were recorded by two intelligence agencies in india, to my knowledge. There was the Intelligence Bureau in new delhi, in the capital, and then there was a Police Antiterrorism unit that made the recordings in mumbai as well. Exactly how i obtained the recordings, i cant tell you because these are not recordings that were released to us by the authorities. So are the authorities upset that you got them . The authorities were rather upset when i got them and i mean, we didnt we i believe a summons was issued was issued against channel 4, some kind of legal action was threatened by the Mumbai Police chief, but it wasnt followed through, and i think, you know from the from the indian point of view, yes, it was upsetting that this material that wasnt supposed to be publicly broadcast have been given a worldwide audience. But, on the other hand, it demonstrated that pakistan was behind the attack, and that, for them, was, you know, politically useful, i guess and so they wouldnt i guess they werent too upset. How often were you solicited by people in india once they knew you were there and doing a documentary and they wanted to give you stuff . Nobody wanted to give us anything. It was extremely difficult to pry this material from where it was. It that was the hardest part of the production. It was very, very, very difficult. No one in the indian media and no one in the International Media has succeeded in getting the entire recordings before we did. Where did you get the close circuit video from the two hotels . Thats the oberoi and the taj . The close circuit video from the hotels, again, was obtained without the consent of the hotels. So it will they were recordings that existed that had been circulating within the authorities had them and other actors had them, but we did not obtain them, if you like through the front door. We consider that this material that was important for to for telling the story, and it was a very important story to be told. We didnt particularly see why the material was being you know, i thought i suspected that the material was being closely guarded because some of it may have been embarrassing to the hotel. It is it may be considered embarrassing if youre a big luxury hotel to have men Walking Around your hotel, machine gunning your guests. Thats not something that you particularly want to draw attention to if you are a luxury hotel. Have you been back to india since your documentary came out . No, i havent. No. No. Has it run in india . I think the film aired illegally it was in an unlicensed form on one of the local channels in mumbai. We tried to prevent that. Its been seen online. You can see it online now. Yes. You can see it online. But, to answer your question, i dont think its been broadcast in india to, you know, to nationwide broadcast, which is a real shame. Which is a real shame because thats where it should be. Last question on the material, kasab was the one fellow that you had on camera there. First question, how many of the 10 men were killed . 9 of the 10 men were killed. Within that 36hour period . Yes. 9 of the 10 men were killed or 57hour. Yes. And the 57hour period is time pretty much you know, to the end, when the last guy at the taj hotel was killed or burned to death, thats when the clock stops, if you like. Now, kasab was caught on the first night of the attack, and he had machine gunned a whole bunch of people at the Railway Station, killed men, women and children mercilessly. He then killed three cops and a fourth as he was being captured, and so the police really had every reason to treat him with extreme prejudice. And i was surprised at how gentle they have been with him. Whats happened to him since . Hes been put on trial. Hes been sentenced to death, but whether that sentence would be carried out or not is in question. The indian legal system is very, very slow in their appeals, et cetera, et cetera. So did you meet him . I never met him. How did you get the video . Again, the video was not released to us, and we obtained it, you know, through because we thought it had a huge Public Interest value. But it was very, very difficult. That was the most difficult piece of material to get hold of because that really was very closely guarded. How much of this video that you got did you have to pay for . We didnt we dont like to pay you know, we dont like to pay cash for material. We hire people who obtain it for us. And you cant just hire someone i mean, you have a colleague who then works to obtain it. You and you because its not as if you can walk into, you know, a newspaper or, you know some institution in india and say youll do, you know, heres two months work. Go and get me this. The obtaining a material like this is a bit of an art. It involves a lot of trust. You have to make relationships with people and they have to trust you and they have to believe that theyre doing something worthwhile and that the material is going to a good home where it will be well used and honestly used. Heres some more video of this from the train station. With the terrorists gone, the Railway Police rush out of hiding, weapons at the ready. Kasab and his smile had killed 52 people at the station and wounded more than 100. Foreign Language Foreign Language who was the young man . The story afroz, the little boy, a young muslim boy who was at the station with his extended family and six of his family were murdered by kasab these arriving three surviving gunman and his associate. Now, afroz was one of those strokes of luck for me. Those things that you dream about. I knew chasing that chasing up the victims of the Railway Station massacre was very difficult because these were people who had come from far and wide. It was a Railway Station, so a lot of people passing through. And when the bodies were collected and the wounded were picked up, there was a very, very sketchy record of who they were or where theyd gone and even what their names were. And so it was quite difficult to find people, and i had researchers sort of scouring slums and got sixth door on the left after the temple, addresses like that. Now, this so i started looking for a taxi driver whod lost six members of his family. He was afrozs uncle, and his name was muhammad israel ansari. It turned out there were two muhammad israel ansaris who were related, and we spent about a month tracing the wrong guy. And, to cut a long story short eventually i found out that he had moved to a village in bihar, which was a very distant province, three days, i think, train ride from mumbai. And there was a long series of negotiations with the younger members of the family, because i wanted someone to come to mumbai to be interviewed, and eventually the so the taxi driver came, and i interviewed him, and i felt he didnt quite for me, the fact that here was a muslim family whod come to the Railway Station. They were going home for eid the feast of eid. It was a big date in the muslim calendar. And theyd been gunned down by these fanatics from over the water who had a political ideology, which had nothing to do with the religion of the victims. I felt this was a very, very this was a really core thing for me to get, and so i said to muhammad, i said, could we bring some more of your family to speak to us . And he, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, maybe and and so he said yes. Theres a 19 year old i believe its a 19 year old boy who will come. And then one thing and another happened and it wasnt a 19yearold boy who came, it was a 12 year old boy, accompanied by another member of the family. And i thought, oh my god, you know, 12 year old kids in, even in, you know, in confidence, aubaine 12 year olds in london have problems talking about very intimate, personal things and expressing themselves. This guy this kid was amazing. He was fantastic. And we interviewed him in an extremely noisy, crowded place. We found this little shed that we were loaned by a local community association, and we sat on the floor, and i could barely hear his words, and he was just incredible. Incredible. And, for me, hes the heart of the film. How many days have you spent total in mumbai . I spent, you know or months . The research and filming together took three months, a little over three months. So most of that time would have been research, and i think i filmed on and off you know, i filmed for the period of for a period of a month. I filmed some, you know, id film two days and then take a twoday break to try and assemble another twoday schedule and then how many people did you eventually have on your team . My team in india was larger than it usually is, and we had two or three drivers and then that the i used a 35 mm camera for some of the shots of the city. I wanted to create a sense of the city at night, because the attack began at night. And, for me, mumbai at night has this incredible atmosphere and a mood to it, and there were many different types of colors, of light the roadside stalls the taxi drivers had all sort of colored lights in there. So it was very visually a very rich place, and i decided to shoot it on 35 mm, an old style film camera with no sound and to shoot it six frames a second and play it at six frames a second so you have these weird, sort of ghostly shapes. So that camera, which belonged to the bombay film industry, the mumbai you know, bollywood, came in very, very useful. And of course we shot all the interviews on a on a regular video camera. But in order to have the film camera, you know, the camera comes with two what we call attendants and then a special driver, and everything is slightly over manned. But my basic team was my cameraman, a cinematographer who is the second unit cameraman on Slumdog Millionaire fantastic guy who just shot my documentary in haiti, mrinal desai. And the sound recorders, the wonderful sound recorderist, you know, production manager and a researcher, a young, 21 year old guy who i used to send out to the slums to look for the names on the list of dead or the names in the list of wounded. So its quite a small team. How did you decide what music you were going to use . Well, the i wanted to use i wanted to use a specially composed score, and i wanted to use an indian composer. And, you know, we so for a long time i was looking for an indian composer and eventually we found a fantastic young composer whod been sort of anointed by a. R. Rahman, whos the guy who did the score for Slumdog Millionaire. and he did a fantastic score for this. Its you know, we worked down the line, from between london and mumbai and i think, you know, the music was really big part of it. As a viewer, when i watched it, the thing that is most intriguing, i think, besides how horrible the whole thing was, is the ability to hear these telephone conversations. Set it up before we show a little bit of these calls. How did what was going on . Well, heres what was happening. The attack on mumbai was incredibly well designed, if i can say it that way. It was conceived, you know, with a kind of evil genius because they took 10 young men who were not hardened fighters and who were not mujahidin, and they had had a minimum of training, and they were able to control and reinforce their psychological conditioning by use of the mobile phones because these kids were in constant touch with the Operations Center in pakistan where the men who had launched who had sent them on the mission were staying, and saying, you know, now you must do this, and now you remember this. And very calmly very calmly controlling the young men theyd sent to kill in mumbai. By the way, constantly infusing by the way, constantly infusing the word god. Yes. Although not as much i mean, there was less religious spiel than i had expected before i heard them. A lot of it seemed very how shall i put it . Not mundane, but everyday as though they live in a world where the taking of life and this kind of extraordinary killing spree that they were on was just a normal thing to be doing, like driving a cab, a taxi, you know . In fact, the whole thing kind of reminded me of listening to the communications between what we call in london a cab office, you know, a control a dispatchers control room with you know, a bunch of guys sitting around with the mics and talking to the cab drivers. I mean, thats what it felt like to me. And brother wasi, who does he represent . And is he mostly here from pakistan or others . Brother wasi is the main guy. Hes the main sort of m. C. In the whole thing. He is he doesnt seem to be the ultimate authority within the terrorist group. This is lashkaretaiba, the army of the righteous. He\ dont he doesnt seem to be mr. Big, but he is the guy who runs the operations. He doesnt seem to sleep a lot. Hes awake a lot of the time. Hes on the mic. Hes talking to young guys very calmly, with the confidence of a father. Hes like a father figure. And he hes doing most of the talking. Apparently, i was told today that in the Washington Times theres the Washington Times post excuse me, the Washington Post ran an article today or yesterday, which apparently identified brother wasi, but i have yet to read the article. Lets listen. Little use was made of them but the authorities would intercept a total of 284 calls. Most involved a single controller identified only as brother wasi. His grip on the young gunmen would not loosen until they were dead. Foreign Language as scores of people were being gunned down at the Railway Station, another pair of cleancut pakistani boys in their early 20s blasted through the entrance of one of mumbais top fivestar hotels, the trident oberoi. The lead gunman was fahadullah who wore black. Foreign Language fahadullah and his accomplice killed nine staff and three guests in the lobby. At tiffin, a popular eatery, fahadullah murdered 13 diners. Reshma khiani was shot five times and left for dead beside her family and friends. The whole place was very silent. I couldnt see my friends. Whenever i tried to look, i also saw she hadnt moved. She was in the same position from the time she got shot, and so was my cousin and his wife. I tried to nudge my cousins leg because i was close enough to do that. I think i succeeded, but he didnt move. Who was the woman youre talking to . The young lady from the hotel, reshma khiani. She was one of the few people in south mumbai and south mumbai is the upscale neighborhood in mumbai where a lot of the victims in the hotels came from. They used to use these hotels. Theyre like home from home. Theyd go there and have dinner there a lot and have a lot of parties. And reshma was very brave and in agreeing to speak to us because most of the people from that from that sector of society just wanted to have nothing to do with the media. They were very distrustful. Theyd been given a hard time by the indian media. And so reshma was someone who had been having, i believe, a sushi meal with some friends got together on a on a tuesday evening. And some gunmen came in and just butchered everyone in the restaurant. And she was lying there right through the night, surrounded by her dead friends, bleeding, you know, profusely from the she had five bullet wounds, and somehow managed to survive. She was calling for help, but no one came. I mean, that what i discovered in researching the story was that there was such chaos that the victims often just couldnt get help. Even Senior Police officers calling for help, radioing for help, there was no help because the city was taken completely by surprise and people have no idea what was going on. And thats the impact of the surprise attack and the, if you like, the evil genius of the design of this plan was that there was so many events going on. There were bombs and taxies that were being detonated, you know after half an hour, so the taxi will be far away in the suburbs or by the airport and the bomb will go off. And so if you were in the Police Control room, looking at the picture, you would see bombs going off. You would see gunmen here, gunmen there. A lot of false report as well because an incident like this cruisetriggers a lot of panic, and you wouldnt know what the hell is going on. Youre critical of the Mumbai Police department in the documentary. Yes. What did you say about them . Well, the Mumbai Police department kind of fell apart in the in the early hours of the attack and, you know, they were eventually replaced by commanders from new delhi, the specialist commanders, who also took a long, long time to arrive, and their plane wasnt ready, and there were all sorts of delays on route. And so the response was very slow. Now, i was talking to people in new york and theyre saying, you know, if this happened in new york, these guys would have been dead within minutes. I dont believe thats the case that would that would be the case. I think an attack like this has such a dynamism and such an impact and its so hard to get information on whats happening that even in a place like new york or here in london, my city, i think almost as many people would have died in the first half hour. I think the impact of the attack is such that people dont know what to make of it. And, you know, ive been having requests for for my film. Ive been receiving email requests from their swat teams here and in the states, and Homeland Security officials who were desperate to find out what an attack like this looks like and sounds like. So i think, you know, there is maybe if it happens here now, were better prepared because weve seen what happened in mumbai. But i think, you know, these guys, they changed their modus operandi all the time, and they wont do the same thing twice. And each time you know, 9 11 and this attack, what they have in common is theyre almost inconceivable, you know . Theres something about the design of the attack that just create disbelief. You just think for about you know, youre sitting there for about 10 minutes thinking this cant be happening. This cannot be happening. Are we to believe that this is all about kashmir . No, i dont its not all about kashmir and, you know, im not one of the things one of the decisions i said quite early on is to is to that i wouldnt try and i didnt go to pakistan and i didnt try and unlock the pakistani side of the story more than more than i was able to do from india and, you know, which is so that which is not very much. I had these recordings which told me a great deal about the relationship between the controllers and the gunmen and i had, you know, had as much information as i could discover about the group that did it. I believe a lot more is now coming to light about the motives and the and the character of the lashkaretaiba, the organization, the army of the righteous, which carried out the attacks. Lashkar was an organization that came about because of the conflict in kashmir. It was used as a proxy by the pakistani state to attack to attack india in this dispute of territory of kashmir. I believe thats my theory is that lashkar was kind of lagging behind in the in the league of jihadist kind of glory and needed to do something very visible, needed to do something very international to put itself back in the sort of amongst these stars of the jihadist movement. And this was something this was an attack on a modern city. It was highly a very well executed attack. It was a highly visible attack on international targets. This was not a pakistan versus india type of local attack. The one fellow we saw that was talking, kasab. Yes. He tells a story about being sold, basically, into this group by his father . Yes. For what reason and did his father have any idea what hes going to get into . And where did he come from . What kind of a village . Well, kasab, by his own account, came from a small village close to lahur, in punjab, in the pakistani punjab. So these werent big timers . No. This was this was a kid who you know, had gone a bit wrong. He had a bad relationship with his dad. He was doing some, you know, odd jobbing. He was painting houses. He was he also told the police that hed been hed been a robber and he has a sort of typical profile of a young man who gets drawn into these jihadist groups. He was from an unhappy family. He had dabbled in petty crime and violent crime. And in when they when they go to a group like this, when theyre attracted into a group like this, theyre drawn by the glamour and the glory that, i guess, because suddenly you are goodtgo you have a purpose, you have a family, who are the your brothers in arms. You have a father, whos the uncle, who as a jihadist and potentially as a as a fedayeen, a fighter who goes to die in combat. And youre off with this deal. You go to mumbai, you get to kill anyone you want, anyone of these bad people out there. So they tell them in advance theyre going to kill. Yes, yes i think there is a process of selection you know and only the most capable and malleable get chosen. When in the process of the three months that you spent there did you get the different ingredients for this documentary . For instance, how far along the way did you get the telephone call, the audio . I was id say after about six or seven weeks i was told that i would get the audio calls. Where did you live while you were there . I was in an old hotel in the center of town. I was in an old hotel in the center of town. I couldnt afford to stay in one of the big hotels. And i kind of liked it. I had it was a slightly Rundown Hotel opposite the main hospital. When you do this do they give you whoever bought this either channel 4 here or hbo do they tell you heres how much money were going to give you for this whole thing and then you have to live within a budget . Yes, thats right. You live within a budget. The film is commission so you are cash flowed through your production. You know have to put up your own money. Youre cash flowed through and there is a limited amount of money and you cant spend more than what you have. So stuff, you know i like to put it on screen. I like to put as much of it as i can on screen because thats what its all about. Can you give us any idea of how good can you give us any idea of how much money this whole thing cost . Id say you know by the time you including both versions, the hbo version, all the marketing and what have you in the region of 400,000, maybe less. And certainly the british the u. K. Version by itself would have cost a lot less. Who owns the rights to this now . The rights are owned by channel 4 and hbo. So you dont do you hold anything . No. Do you hold the original video and audio that you were able to research . Well i retain copies. Now who owns that is a mute point. I mean is there another documentary that you could put together out of all . Well im very im very curious about what i was told today about the article that identified brother wasi and i think if brother wasi if i could get to brother wasi there would be another film because this mans voice an educated voice speaking good english, very gentle he was brother wasi was speaking to one of the israeli hostages and having a very you know a kind of dont worry madam it will be ok. You will be you know you will go home to join your friends. You will be home for the sabbath. A very soothing, quite you know well educated one would think voice and completely ruthless, completely ruthless. You had a turkish couple. Lets watch them and get you to go is about them. Tell us about them. I threw myself face down and he started to shoot and all the bodies were falling on me. And i was buried under the bodies from my waist down. Fahadullah learned that five people were alive, sophie ph his wife miltum ph and three other women. The other 10 had been gunned down on the narrow landing. You can hear them some of them were not dead yet. You can hear the sounds of their last i dont know. And we had to you know step over those people. I said look i stepped on the back of this man and then on the neck of that man and i will hold your hand. I ushered four women over the bodies and i told them not to step on the blood. There was blood and its so slippery. I never know that blood can be so slippery. At the same as the attack on the trident oberoi. Two backpackers had strolled into the taj, the most exclusive hotel in the city. Each carried an assault rifle, a pistol, hand grenades, hundreds of bullets and enough dried fruits and nuts to last a couple of days. They began killing anyone in their sights. They were soon joined by the two terrorists who had just killed 11 civilians at the leopold cafe a block away. The newcomers narrowly avoided bullets meant for hotel guests. The two pairs joined forces in the lobby by the swimming pool. There were now four gunmen inside the tajh. Who was the turkish couple . Well, saffi ph and miltum ph was, they were having dinner at the oberoi hotel they were on a business trip to mumbai. Saffi makes yachts, he makes luxury yachts, and they were having a nice, relaxed trip, and you know within an hour they were watching their fellow guests being murdered on a narrow fire staircase, and they had the most, i mean, this was the most, one of the most harrowing things of the whole attack. Theyre turks, and theyre muslim turks, and when the terrorists checked their passports they realized they were muslims and they told them to step aside while they murdered all the other men. They were then taken to a Hotel Bedroom and locked in with two women, so there were four of them, and eventually the two women were taken outside and shot in front of saffi and miltum, and they, so the turks were taken to yet another bedroom and sat down on the bed and just left there. And, their lives were spared, we are told, because of their faith. Now, they have nothing in common in there, the muslim religion has nothing in common with those of their attackers, they made that very, very clear. But, this is one of the weirdest and the strangest episodes of this whole story. Where did you interview them . I flew to istanbul it was quite difficult to find them and i flew to istanbul and i was amazed at their courage, and they agreed to go on television and speak of this. What are you like during one of these periods . Im quite obsessive. In fact, i get haunted by the story, and it inhabits my dreams, and you know it has a terrible effect on my family life because im kind of absent and ive learned to counter that i hope. But, yeah, i was obsessed with the story of this turkish couple and i was you know there was there were four guys who in the group who they saw being killed. There were a total of actually 15 men and there were four guys who survived under the pile of bodies, there were four indian men who survived. So, saffi and miltum watched this group of men being machine gunned by the two terrorists all the guys you know fall to the floor dying, and they are taken off to another place. Meanwhile, four of the guys under the pile of bodies are still alive. I found all four of them and i tried to persuade them. I met with two of them two were in mumbai and i met with two of them, and i tried to persuade them to be in the film, and they said no. And, i was in the cutting room about a month later, and i got a call from the son of one of these guys and he said, you know what, dan . We just watched your film, terror in moscow, which i had left with them this, the documentary that i had made before, and they said, we had no idea you know that you were a serious filmmaker, and of course, well do anything you like. My father would like to take part. The guy, the survivor, but by then it was too late, so that was you ask me what im like im extremely civil minded single minded because there are certain things i believe i have to do and have to get for the story, and so i really live it probably, you should ask my wife, i probably take it a little bit too seriously. What are you telling the people who are emailing you who want to get a copy of this . Where can they go . Well at the moment, they cant go anywhere. I mean, they can see it, they can see my film online. I believe there are various sites that have put it up type type in terror in mumbai and boom. Well, thats great. I mean, i want people to be able to watch it. I would prefer, i would like it if people were able to buy a dvd or to download it you know legally, but at the moment thats not possible. Do you know if, i know hbo has put it on demand, but its not there right at the moment. You know how often will do that . I dont know. I hope they put it back on because theres been tremendous demand for it and you know now and again i will send a disc to someone if they reach me personally, but theres a limit to how many discs i can send and i would really love it to be available for sale. Go back to the earlier question i asked you about the audio. And now the video. When did you first meet the fellow whos at the train station . Posted posted how soon the young boy . Yes, no the one who had the video of oh, yes. The i met him very, very early on simchos ph his name was because he was a guy sort of hanging around the train station, and he you know, we ended up filming it at the train station, and he was one of the guys who could sort of smooth the way getting permissions and stuff like that so we got that fairly early on, and we got cctv fairly early on as well. The kasab tape i got very, very late and the audio well i was already in london the audio came to us as i said you know about 2 3 of the way through. A big challenge with the audio you know there was seven hours of these telephone intercepts, seven hours worth. And i had to have it all translated of course because i wasnt going to miss anything. And having it translated and finding people who spoke the right punjabi, pakistani punjabi dialect and whom i trusted to give me an accurate completely you know objective and impartial rendition of what was being said and to go into every detail because sometimes you know the line is bad and you can only hear half a word. So theres a tremendous job translating this. And i believe now you know other people have got hold of these tapes now, these recordings. Im probably the only people with a full translation of the whole thing. Because its expensive and it takes a lot of time to do. But we had it checked and rechecked and rechecked and you know im very, very thorough. I like to know that when we broadcast something it is absolute right. Its absolutely spot on. When this documentary what did ron fursher say here at channel 4 in london . In june, yes. In june of 2010 . Two thousand and nine. Two thousand and nine . Yes. Oh, thats right. And then when did it run on hbo . It ran pretty much on the anniversary of the attack, so in november, late november 2009 last year. If you could do this again, right now, do you have material that you didnt have at the time that you would put in this . Court there is yes theres the David Headley story. The story of the american pakistani guy who acted as a did a reconnaissance for the mission. And there are elements that have come to light about the pakistani side of the story since i made the film. You know im a free lancer so i will go on, retain an interest in all the stories i do but i cant put the kind of energy that i do when im production into stories that ive left behind me. So its a story id love to return to. At the moment i dont have the key elements which would allow me to make another film about it. But yes this is a story that will keep on revealing layer after layer after layer or keep on getting richer, and richer i think. You mentioned earlier a documentary on haiti. When does that run . And whos it for . Thatll be running thats again for channel 4 and for pbs frontline. And itll be running on the anniversary of the Haiti Earthquake january the 12th, 2011. How long was that . Court 2011, 2011 , yes 2011. 2011, yes. That sounds like Science Fiction doesnt it . Itll be an hour long film. And its about its an unusual angle on the haitian earthquake. My film is about the jail break, the mass jail break that took place during the earthquake. So not only did haiti lose 250,000 people in the quake, not only was this capital city wrecked. But all of the really hard core criminals and about 2 3 of the prison population escaped during the quake and you know it was launched on a society which was at its most vulnerable. How long did you spend in haiti . I just spent two months in haiti shooting that. Was it very hard to handle those prisoners . Yes, yes i spoke interviewed quite a few of them. On camera . Yes. Why would they do that . Well i asked them nicely. I mean one of them had been recaptured and the other five or six yes you have to track people down and you go theres always a way to find people. Theres always a way. Theres always a way to find people. So what has been the impact in your opinion of terror in mumbai the documentary . What are the kind of things that you hang your hat on because that has been aired both in london and the United States . Terror in mumbai personally it i hesitate to express it like this but i think objectives is its a kind of historic piece because weve never had the kind of material like to rival these phone calls. And you know when it gives you an inside seat, it gives you an inside view of the terrorist attack, we never had that before. You never heard the terrorist intimate conversations with their bosses. And the cctv and all that, you know that kind of stuff has been seen before but taken together with the other material i think it adds up to something unique not just an insight into the way the terrorists operate but also into the psychological relationship between the controllers and the gunmen. The controllers never shouted. There was never any hysteria. There was never even when the gunmen had been hit and were dying, they never raised their voices. There was complete calm. And i think thats strange and significant. I think it tells us a lot about the relationship between the you know i always kept thinking of children or youngsters who were groomed for abuse and the way the relationship is we are told its not consensual but theres a kind of normality that established itself between children you know young people who are groomed for abuse and the abusers. And theres a sort of relationship that sets in and i kept being reminded of that. I think, why would a young man like this let himself be sent to a certain death by this person sitting in an office miles and miles away . Why would they do that . The religious, the fanatical religious rhetoric wasnt really there. There was something else. And these were people who had been groomed and psychologically shaped so that what they were doing had become normal. This is what you did. It was normal. And to me that was the biggest horror. Dan reed, producer writer of terror in mumbai, thank you very much for your time. Thank you brian. For a dvd. Program, call. For free transcripts ordered it was your comments, visit us at a a. Org. Programs are available as podcasts. Q a is ten years old. Each q a interview from the last decade is Available Online at cspan. Org. Among the interviews youll find on our website documentarian on the scandal. And aaron wolf on his movie about how Corn Products have become a major part of the american diet. To see these and any other q a program, go to cspan. Org and search our video library. To mark the 10th anniversary of q a, were featuring one interview from each year of the series this week. Tomorrow at 7 p. M. Eastern becoming dr. Q, about coming to the u. S. As an illegal immigrant who could not speak english and eventually becoming a brain surgeon. Thats tuesday at 7 p. M. Eastern here on cspan. Coming up next on cspan, we look back at some of the public figures we lost this year. First, Washington Post editor ben bradlee is eulogized at the National Cathedral. Then a Memorial Service for former Reagan Press Secretary james brady, held at the museum. And later, the Funeral Service of former washington d. C. Mayor, marion barry. Now, the Funeral Service of Washington Post editor ben bradlee. He was eulogized at the National Cathedral by his children and journalists, including carl bernstein. This is about two hours