Historic D.C., hidden in plain sight

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Washington, D.C. holds a lot of nearly hidden history


• A tennis court occupies the site of the execution of Lincoln assassination conspirators


• A present-day parking garage once hosted a historic Beatles show

Washington (CNN) -- Ordinarily, I'm not a fan of vandalism.

But years ago I spotted some graffiti in Washington that struck a chord. Someone had spray painted the symbol for anarchy -- a circled "A" -- on a Chinatown grocery store.

And I wondered: Did they know?

Did they know that that building, a century earlier, had been Mary Surratt's boarding house? Did they know that conspirators had gathered there to plot the kidnapping and assassination of an American president? Did they know that the site had played a role in the biggest act of anarchy in this country's history?

Was the graffiti just accidentally appropriate? Or could punks with paint be profound?

I don't know the answer, of course. But I know that this city is teeming with people who, like me, relish its hidden history.

Washington is a town of majestic monuments and memorials. And those are worth visiting. But if you limit your sightseeing to the obvious -- if you ignore the obscure -- you'll miss the good stuff.

That is what I had in mind when I asked historians and history buffs to show me places -- off the beaten path -- that have stirred their love of history and this great town.

WASHINGTON COLISEUM: "I Saw Them Standing There"

Four boys, in dire need of haircuts, come to town, looking to conquer it.

The British tried it once before, in 1814. Burned the city. It left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

But this time, they try soft diplomacy. A little twist and shout. A little ditty about wanting to hold your hand.

And it works.

Improbable as it sounds, it happened in a barrel-shaped architectural ruin just north of the Capitol on 3rd Street NE.

Shortly after 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 11, 1964 -- two days after appearing on "The Ed Sullivan Show" -- the Beatles took the stage in Washington Coliseum. It was the Beatles' very first stage concert in the United States.

Critics later say the concert is as singular moment in rock history -- a moment when the early Beatles seemed even more joyous than their shrieking teen-age fans.

Richard Layman, who fought to preserve the Coliseum, cherishes this place for many reasons. Built in 1940 and 1941, the building served as an ice rink, sports arena, worship hall, trash transfer station and parking garage. Nation of Islam leaders Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed spoke here. It hosted numerous professional sports teams, and was home to the Ice Capades.

For Beatle devotees, this is a shrine.

They still have ticket stubs, and remember whether they paid $2, $3 or $4. They gush about how Paul smiled at them.

An age of innocence? Not exactly. The Russians threatened us from outer space. The pains of segregation and integration were rocking the country. And, just three months earlier, an assassin felled the leader of the free world.

But for about 35 minutes on a cold February night in 1964, four boys from Liverpool entered a converted ice rink and warmed a generation's heart.

COURTROOM DRAMA: Last act of the Civil War

The man, a tavern owner, took the witness stand.

"I was acquainted with John Wilkes Booth," he said. "Booth came into my restaurant [adjoining Ford's Theater] on the evening of the 14th of April."

Booth "walked up to the bar, and called for some whiskey, which I gave him; he called for some water, which I also gave him; he placed the money on the counter and went out. I saw him go out of the bar alone, as near as I can judge, from eight to ten minutes before I heard the cry that the President was assassinated."

Peter Taltavul spoke those words, in this room, just one month after Lincoln died.

By then, authorities had already tracked down Booth, cornered him, and killed him. And they had rounded up eight people who they believe had assisted him.

They convened a military commission to conduct the trial in the third floor of what was then a federal penitentiary. The co-conspirators, they reasoned, were not "civilians," but were "enemy belligerents." The nation was seeking justice and vengeance, and it would come swiftly.

On July 6, 1865 -- less than three months after the assassination -- the commission found all eight conspirators guilty. It sentenced four to hang, and four to prison terms. The condemned were hanged the next day.

A year later, the Supreme Court would rule that a defendant could not be tried by military commission when civilian courts were functioning. But it was too late.

The penitentiary is now closed and largely demolished. The land is part of Fort McNair at the southernmost point of Washington.

Visitors -- mostly lawyers and Civil War buffs -- are frequently overwhelmed when they enter the room, said Susan Lemke, a special collections librarian who has accumulated artifacts related to the trial. "There's no substitution for actually witnessing or being in the middle of a historic site like that," she said.

THE GALLOWS: Where generals "serve," conspirators hanged

Michael Kauffman is struck by the incongruity of it all.

On the edge of a Fort McNair tennis court, where generals now casually toss their gym bags, Abraham Lincoln's death was avenged.

Here in this spot, near the penitentiary room where the sentences were handed down, on a miserably hot day in July 1865, Union Army Capt. Christian Rath raised his hands and clapped three times. On the third clap, soldiers knocked supports out from under a gallows, and four prisoners fell. Their bodies jerked violently at the ends of their ropes. The prisoner in the dress appeared to die instantly. But one of her three accused accomplices writhed for five minutes before surrendering his ghost.

"I am one of those people who think that if you really want to understand history, you have to go to where it happened," says Kauffman, an expert on the Lincoln assassination.

So Kauffman leads me to this empty tennis court. It is drizzly and cold, and there is little here to evince the images and emotions of that hot July day. The penitentiary's tall wall has been demolished, and a building prominent in photos of the hanging has been altered almost beyond recognition.

Almost.

Kauffman shows me the place where the wall met the building. And in my mind's eye, the gallows fall into place.

"There's this strange sort of excitement that you get when you've read about something, and you visualize it, and you think you know all about it. And then all of a sudden you go there and it's right in front of you. It surrounds you. And it's always somehow different from what you had imagined," Kauffman said.

Different, to be sure. But more real than ever.

CHADWICKS: Where the U.S. was shaken, and stirred

It is known as "The Big Dump."

On June 16, 1985, CIA officer Aldrich Ames walked into Chadwicks, a Georgetown pub, with two shopping bags full of classified information and, over lunch, gave them to a Soviet diplomat.

"In those bags was every piece of paper he could get his hands on that revealed almost all of our operations in the Soviet Union," said Peter Earnest, a former CIA official who is now executive director of the International Spy Museum in D.C.

Five to seven pounds of secrets.

The enormity of the breach became known only after the Soviet Union began rounding up some of the United States' most valuable assets in Russia. At least 10 were executed.

The CIA launched a hunt for a possible mole. It compiled a list of 190 CIA officers with access to relevant classified information, and culled it to 28. And in 1994 -- nine years after the Big Dump -- Ames and his wife were arrested.

Earnest says he doesn't "romanticize" the Chadwick's site, but says "the repercussions of what he did ripple through the government today -- the need to have more polygraphs, the concerns about our records ... the nature of the questions asked."

It's also a waypoint in the Spy Museum's bus tour, which notes the role that Ames' "high-maintenance" wife Rosario played in his betrayal of his country.

Tour guides note that after Ames was arrested, FBI agents who eavesdropped on their conversations made an astonishing comment: They were so disgusted with Rosario's constant badgering about money, her criticisms of Ames and her treatment of their son that although they could never forgive Ames for spying, they said, they would have understood if he had killed his wife.

ALEXANDRIA SLAVE PEN: From slave to freeman

"PRICE, BIRCH & CO," the sign read. "DEALERS IN SLAVES."

The sign is long gone, but the building, known as the "Alexandria Slave Pen," still stands in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the river from Washington.

"I often tell my students, 'You've gone into towns where you just see row after row of car dealerships. Duke Street was that -- but slave dealerships,'" says Chandra Manning, associate professor of history at Georgetown University.

In 1861, the slave trade was thriving when Virginia seceded from the union. But on May 24 of that year, the Union Army's First Michigan Infantry marched into town, and one of the first things it did was liberate the slaves.

Ironically, the slave pen became a refuge for runaway and freed slaves seeking the protection of the Union Army.

Today, 1315 Duke Street is home to the Alexandria branch of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization. A historical marker stands outside, and there's a small museum in the basement.

But Manning believes most passersby have no idea about the building's horrific past.

Most, but not all.

"If you're walking with me," Manning says, "you have no choice but to know what happened here."

THE FORGOTTEN CRASH: History lost and relived

On a fog-shrouded evening on the penultimate day of 1906, a dead-heading train roared down this stretch of tracks near Washington's Catholic University, coming upon a slower passenger train heading the same direction on the same track. There was no time to stop.

Railroad workers have an antiseptic -- but descriptive -- word for what happened next: Telescoping.

The massive steel engine of the speeding train plowed through the flimsy wooden passenger car of the slower train, killing and dismembering its occupants. It plowed through the next car as well, and the one after that. When the trains came to a stop, cinders and soot from the locomotive's fire box rained down on the splintered wooden planks, clothing, Christmas gifts and human remains. Fifty-three people died, and more than 70 were injured.

Today, the "Terra Cotta" crash is all but lost to history. Every day, thousands pass the site, where there isn't even a hint of the horror that happened.

But Richard Schaffer, a D.C. firefighter who spent 10 years researching the crash, says Terra Cotta nonetheless changed railroading. It hastened the conversion of passenger cars from wood to steel and led to improvements in railroad signaling. That happened, he says, because the crash happened on "the route to Congress."

There's a saying, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

History rhymed in June 2009 -- nearly 103 years later -- when a D.C. Metro subway train plowed into another subway train. The cars telescoped, killing nine and injuring dozens.

"The irony was it was practically the same location and practically all the same problems, human error, signaling problems, construction quality of the trains," Schaffer said.

Both wrecks deserve to be remembered.

"If you forget what's happened before you," Schaffer says, "you don't have a foundation to live upon."

CONGRESSIONAL CEMETERY: The last hurrah

Can there be any doubt what happens here when the sun goes down?

Can there be any doubt that, when the gates close and the last visitor leaves this historic burial ground, band leader John Philip Sousa reaches for his baton, Civil War photographer Mathew Brady tweaks his camera, and J. Edgar Hoover tries to keep the whole mess under control?

This is Congressional Cemetery, where Washington's political and social establishment rests in eternal peace. In the 1800s, its heyday, this was the site of grand funeral processions. Tens of thousands of Washingtonians would gather to watch soldiers carry fallen leaders down a slate path to graves or crypts.

"I'm sure there are quite a few secrets buried here," says Abby Johnson.

Abby and her husband Ronald, professors of literature and history respectively at Georgetown University, take me to the "Public Vault," a crypt the size of a one-car garage. Built in the 1830s, the vault was used to store the bodies of public officials until the ground thawed, or until they were moved to other locations.

You need a skeleton key, of course, to get inside.

Dolly Madison slept here. As did three presidents: William Henry Harrison (1841), John Quincy Adams (1848), and Zachary Taylor (1850). Harrison's three-month stay was three times longer than his presidential term. All the presidents' bodies have since been moved to their home states.

Today, Congressional Cemetery, which boasts of being "in the shadow" of the U.S. Capitol, is overshadowed by a more prominent cemetery -- Arlington. But the Johnsons are devoted to keeping Congressional's memory alive. At least as long as they are alive. And then maybe, just maybe, beyond.

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Algerian standoff ends; 23 hostages dead

(CBS News) LONDON - Four days after it started, the standoff between Algerian forces and al Qaeda-linked militants in the Sahara Desert is over. Algerian special forces stormed a remote natural gas complex where hundreds of workers had been held captive. Algerian officials say 23 hostages are dead, including one American. About 32 militants are reported to have been killed.

Some of the hostages were able to escape from the gas plant before Algerian special forces launched their final assault.

State media reported that a number of foreign hostages survived, including at least two Americans. But in the chaos, it's not yet possible to get the exact figures.

At least one American dead in Algerian hostage crisis
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U.S. military aircraft evacuated some survivors to a NATO airbase in Sicily.

Pictures of the siege show gunmen rounding up hostages. One BP worker said terrorists told him: "'You have nothing to do with this. You are Algerians and Muslims. We only want the foreigners.'"

BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley said 14 of its 18 foreign employees at the plant were safe.

"We are not able to confirm the circumstances of four of our employees," he said. "Tragically, we gravely feel that we will be seeing fatalities from this group."

Algerian troops discovered a cache of heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, and grenades. Hostages said the explosives were wired around their necks.

Local media have have identified Abdul Rahman al-Nigeri as the leader of the attack. He's a lieutenant of Moktar Belmoktar, head of an al Qaeda-linked group based in North Africa.

The Algerian state oil company running the plant said the attackers had the entire refinery booby-trapped and that it would be days before the clearing-out process is complete.

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Algeria Hostage Crisis Over, One American Dead

After the Algerian military's final assault on terrorists holding hostages at a gas complex, the four-day hostage crisis is over, but apparently with additional loss of life among the foreign hostages.

One American, Fred Buttaccio of Texas, has been confirmed dead by the U.S. State Department. Two more U.S. hostages remain unaccounted for, with growing concern among U.S. officials that they did not survive.

But another American, Mark Cobb of Corpus Christi, Texas is now confirmed as safe. Sources close to his family say Cobb, who is a senior manager of the facility, is safe and reportedly sent a text message " I'm alive."

Inside Algerian Hostage Crisis, One American Dead Watch Video

American Hostages Escape From Algeria Terrorists Watch Video

In a statement, President Obama said, "Today, the thoughts and prayers of the American people are with the families of all those who were killed and injured in the terrorist attack in Algeria. The blame for this tragedy rests with the terrorists who carried it out, and the United States condemns their actions in the strongest possible terms. ... This attack is another reminder of the threat posed by al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups in North Africa."

According to Algerian state media, 32 militants are dead and a total of 23 hostages perished during the four-day siege of the In Amenas facility in the Sahara. The Algerian Interior Ministry also says 107 foreign nationals who worked at the facility for BP and other firms were rescued or escaped from the al Qaeda-linked terrorists who took over the BP joint venture facility on Wednesday.

The Japanese government says it fears "very grave" news, with multiple casualties among the 10 Japanese citizens working at the In Amenas gas plant.

Five British nationals and one U.K. resident are either deceased or unaccounted for in the country, according to British Foreign Minister William Hague. Hague also said that the Algerians have reported that they are still trying to clear boobytraps from the site.

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NASA planet-hunter is injured and resting

Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter

(Image: NASA/Kepler mission/Wendy Stenzel)

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope has put its search for alien Earths on hold while it rests a stressed reaction wheel.

The injured wheel normally helps to control the telescope's orientation, keeping it pointed continuously at the same patch of sky. Kepler stares at the thousands of stars in its field of view to watch for the telltale blinks that occur when a planet crosses in front of its star. It has found nearly 3000 potential planets outside our solar system since its launch in 2009, transforming the field of exoplanet research and raising hopes of someday finding alien life.

When it launched, Kepler had four reaction wheels: three to control its motion along each axis, and one spare. But last July, one wheel stopped turning. If the spacecraft loses a second wheel, the mission is over.

So when another wheel started showing signs of elevated friction on 7 January, the team decided to play it safe. After rotating the spacecraft failed to fix the problem, NASA announced yesterday that they're placing Kepler in safe mode for 10 days to give the wheel a chance to recover.

The hope is that the lubricating oil that helps the wheel's ball bearings run smoothly around a track will redistribute itself during the rest period.

The telescope can't take any science data while in safe mode. But if the wheel recovers on its own, Kepler's extended mission will run until 2016, leaving it plenty of time to make up for the lost days.

"Kepler is a statistical mission," says Charlie Sobeck, Kepler's deputy project manager at NASA's Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California. "In the long run, as long as we make the observations, it doesn't matter a lot when we make the observations."

Despite the high stakes, the team doesn't seem too worried.

"Each wheel has its own personality, and this particular wheel has been something of a free spirit," Sobeck says. "It's had elevated torques throughout the mission. This one is typical to what we've seen in the past, and if we had four good wheels we probably wouldn't have taken any action."

"I prefer to picture the spacecraft lounging at the shore of the cosmic ocean sipping a Mai Tai so that she'll be refreshed and rejuvenated for more discoveries," wrote Kepler co-investigator Natalie Batalha in an email.

The team will check up on the wheel on 27 January and return to doing science as soon as possible.

There are two exoplanet missions currently being considered for after Kepler is finished, says Doug Hudgins at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. One, TESS (Terrestrial Exoplanet Survey Satellite), would scan the entire sky for planets transiting the stars nearest to the sun. The other, FINESSE (Fast Infrared Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey Explorer), would take spectra of planets as they passed in front of their stars as a way to probe their atmospheres.

The missions are being evaluated now, and NASA will probably select one this spring, Hudgins says. The winner will launch in 2017.

If Kepler goes down with its reaction wheel, that won't affect which mission wins, he adds. "That's a straight-up competition based on the merits of the two concept study reports."

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Cycling: 'I want to compete again,' Armstrong says

 

LOS ANGELES: Disgraced US cyclist Lance Armstrong said in an interview aired Friday that he wants to take part in competitive sports again, even after being banned for doping and stripped of his honors.

"Hell, yes. I'm a competitor. It's what I've done my whole life. I love to train. I love to race," Armstrong told Oprah Winfrey. "Not the Tour de France, but there's a lot of other things I could do. I deserve to be punished. I'm not sure that I deserve a death penalty."

- AFP

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American among those killed in Algeria hostage crisis

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: 18 attackers "neutralized," Algerian Press Service reports


• Algeria says 12 hostages were killed in the wake of a military operation


• Terrorists are "entrenched" in a gas refinery with captives, APS says


• The U.S. rejects a reported prisoner exchange offer voiced by a jihadist spokesman

(CNN) -- After three days of chaos, drama and an unknown number of deaths, Algerian special forces troops were holding their fire Saturday in the hostage crisis at a gas facility in the nation's remote eastern desert.

Survivors described harrowing escapes from Islamic militants who attacked the site early Wednesday. Some invented disguises, others sneaked to safety with locals, and at least one ran for his life with plastic explosives strapped around his neck.

Yet others didn't make it -- either because they were killed or were still being held.

Algerian troops staged a military offensive that some nations criticized as endangering the lives of the hostages.

On Friday evening, they were trying a different tack, the state-run Algerian Press Service reported.

"The special forces ... are still seeking a peaceful settlement before neutralizing the terrorist group currently entrenched in the refinery, and free a group of hostages who are still detained," it said.

It was not clear how many hostages were seized by the Islamist militants and how many were being held. Thursday's military operation ended with 650 hostages -- including 100 foreigners -- freed, while at least 12 Algerian and foreign workers were killed, the Algerian Press Service reported in what it said was a "provisional toll."

In addition, 18 of the attackers were "neutralized," APS said.

The dead include one American, identified as Frederick Buttaccio, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said, as well as one French and a Briton.

At least 30 foreign workers were unaccounted for, according to the official media report.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday that "significantly" fewer than 30 of his countrymen remained hostage. There could be as few as three Americans still being held, two U.S. officials said earlier this week.

The fate of eight workers with Norway's Statoil, some of them Norwegians, was unclear, the company said. The same was true for the 14 Japanese unaccounted for, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters in Tokyo. And Malaysia's state-run news agency, citing its foreign ministry, reported Thursday two of its citizens were held captive.

A spokesman for Moktar Belmoktar, a veteran jihadist who leads the Brigade of the Masked Ones -- a militant group associated with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb -- reportedly offered to free U.S. hostages in exchange for two prisoners.

The prisoners are Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who orchestrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman jailed in the United States on terrorism charges, the spokesman said in an interview with a private Mauritanian news agency.

Asked Friday about the offer, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland rejected it, restating U.S. policy of not negotiating with terrorists.

Opinion: Algeria situation is a wake-up call for the U.S.

"This is an act of terror," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday. "The terrorists ... are the ones who have assaulted this facility (and took) hostage Algerians and others (from) around the world who were going about their daily business."

A dangerous escape

The incident began when the militants -- apparently angry about Algeria's support in a rout of their comrades in neighboring Mali -- targeted the gas field, which is operated by Algeria's state oil company in partnership with foreign companies.

At the start of the siege, the militants gathered the Westerners into a group and tied them up, survivors said.

The kidnappers were equipped with AK-47 rifles and put explosives-laden vests on some hostages, a U.S. State Department official said.

Some escaped by disguising themselves, according to Regis Arnoux, who runs a catering firm at the site and had spoken with some of his 150 employees who were freed. He said they all were "traumatized."

Some Algerian hostages were free to walk around the site but not to leave, Arnoux said. Still, a number of them escaped, he said.

As the Algerian military launched its operation Thursday, the militants moved some hostages, according to one survivor's account.

With plastic explosives strapped around their necks, these captives were blindfolded and gagged before being loaded into five Jeeps, according to the brother of former hostage Stephen McFaul.

McFaul, with the explosives still around his neck, escaped after the vehicle he was in -- one of several targeted by Algerian fighters -- crashed, his brother told CNN from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

"I haven't seen my mother move as fast in all my life, and my mother smile as much, hugging each other," Brian McFaul said upon his family hearing his brother was safe. "... You couldn't describe the feeling."

McFaul said the other four Jeeps were "wiped out" in an explosion, and his brother believed the hostages inside did not survive.

Nations mobilize to help citizens caught up in crisis

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, speaking in London, said the United States was working round the clock to ensure the safe return of its citizens.

Those freed include some Americans, while other U.S. nationals were unaccounted for, U.S. officials said.

The United States was evacuating 10 to 20 people caught up in the crisis, a U.S. defense official told CNN on Friday. They were to be taken to U.S. facilities in Europe, where their condition would be assessed, the official said.

Britain has sent trauma experts and consular affairs officers who can issue emergency passports to a location about 450 kilometers (280 miles) away from the plant, a Foreign Office official said, so they'll be "as close" as possible to the scene.

BP, which helps operate the gas field, said Friday that a "small number of BP employees" were unaccounted for. The same held for some workers with Statoil, though nine others with the company -- including five who escaped -- were safe. Four Norwegians and a Canadian with that oil firm were in an airport hotel in Bergen, Norway, after being taken from Algeria, Statoil spokeswoman Sissel Rinde said.

Both BP and Statoil -- two of the foreign companies with In Amenas operations -- were pulling their personnel out of Algeria, which is Africa's largest natural gas producer and a major supplier of natural gas to Europe.

BP said it had flown 11 of its employees and several hundred staffers from other companies out of the North African country Thursday and was planning another flight Friday.

Mark Cobb, a Texan who has a LinkedIn profile identifying him as general manager for a BP joint venture out of In Amenas, told CNN he had escaped on the first day and was safe.

A U.S. military C-130 plane flew 12 people who were wounded in the ordeal out of Algeria on Friday, a U.S. defense official said. None of them were Americans, though efforts continue to evacuate freed Americans.

There is so much conflicting information on safety of the hostages.
Yoshihide Suga, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary

Three workers for a Japanese engineering company that was working on the site have been contacted and are safe, said Takeshi Endo, a senior manager for JGC Corp. But the company had not been able to contact 14 others, he said.

France's foreign ministry said that, in addition to one death, three of its citizens were rescued.

Japan 'terribly disappointed' in Algerian military operation

Algeria faces tough questions from governments of the kidnapped nationals over its handling of the crisis. Neither the United States nor Britain, for instance, was told in advance about Algeria's military operation Thursday.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said his nation's officials had urged Algeria's government to avoid exposing hostages to danger. "We are terribly disappointed about the Algerians' military operation," Suga said.

Japanese Vice Minister Shunichi Suzuki summoned Algeria's ambassador Friday to express Tokyo's concern.

U.S. officials made a similar plea to the Algerians, urging them to be cautious and make the hostages' safety their first priority, an official in President Barack Obama's administration said.

A senior U.S. official said American officials did not trust information they got from the Algerians, "because we hear one thing and then we hear something else."

But Algeria acted out of a sense of urgency after noticing hostages being moved toward "a neighboring country," where kidnappers could use them "as a means of blackmail with criminal intent," Communications Minister Mohamed Said told state television.

Algerian troops fired on at least two SUVs trying to leave the facility, Algerian radio said. And a reporter saw clashes near the site, according to the Algerian Press Service and radio reports.

"There were a number of dead and injured, we don't have a final figure," the communications minister said of casualties following the operation.

Belmoktar, the man behind the group claiming responsibility for the attack and kidnappings, is known for seizing hostages.

French counterterrorism forces have long targeted Belmoktar, an Algerian who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan in his teens. Libyan sources said he spent several months in Libya in 2011, exploring cooperation with local jihadist groups and securing weapons.

The militants said they carried out the operation because Algeria allowed French forces to use its airspace in attacking Islamist militants in Mali. Media in the region reported the attackers issued a statement demanding an end to "brutal aggression on our people in Mali" and cited "blatant intervention of the French crusader forces in Mali."

Latest on the Mali situation

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the Algerian hostage situation "confirms the gravity of the terrorist threat and the necessity to fight it with a determined and united front."

That sentiment was echoed by Clinton, the top U.S. diplomat. She stressed the need for a concerted, international effort to address terrorist and other threats around Africa.

"It is absolutely essential that, while we work to resolve this particular terrible situation, we continue to broaden and deepen our counterterrorism cooperation," she said Friday. "It is not only cooperation with Algeria, it is international cooperation against a common threat."

CNN's Barbara Starr, Laura Smith-Spark, Mike Mount, Joe Sutton, Elwyn Lopez, Frederik Pleitgen, Dan Rivers, Mitra Mobasherat, Saskya Vandoorne, Laura Perez Maestro, Junko Ogura, Dheepthi Namasivayam, Saad Abedine, Elise Labott and Tim Lister contributed to this report, as did journalists Peter Taggart from Belfast and Said Ben Ali from Algiers.

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At least one American dead in Algerian hostage crisis

Updated at 6:41 p.m. ET

An American in the Algerian hostage standoff in the Algerian desert has been killed, CBS News has learned.

Fredrick Buttaccio from Katy, Texas near Houston, was an employee of the oil company BP. It is unknown how he died, but U.S. government sources tell CBS News his body has been recovered and his family has been notified.

Meanwhile, a U.S. military plane has landed in Amenas, Algeria to pick up nine passengers - one American and eight foreign nationals - to be transported to Landstuhl, Germany, a military source told CBS News.

The flight, which contains an air medical evacuation team, was expected to have departed Algeria by Thursday afternoon.

It's not clear exactly how many total casualties have resulted from the fighting, but Algeria's state news agency reported that 12 foreign and Algerian workers had died since the start of the operation, citing an unidentified security source. That information could not be independently confirmed.

As CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reported, the freed hostages told of how they fled in the confusion as the Algerian army attacked. Many were injured, some badly. One person said: "It happened so fast."

But it hasn't ended quickly, reported Phillips. The Algerians say they've freed nearly a hundred foreigners. And as they were being bused away, many thanked their rescuers. "They kept us all nice and safe and fought off the bad guys," said another person.

Also, more detail of the ordeal has emerged with the freed hostages. Some say they had explosives hung around their necks as they were placed in a convoy of vehicles by their captors. When the cars began to move, the Algerian Army units surrounding the site feared the captives were being taken out of the compound -- and opened fire.

The al Qaeda-linked Masked Battalio, led from afar by Moktar Belmoktar, may still be holding some of the roughly 30 foreigners still unaccounted for.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not get into specifics on the crisis Friday afternoon, but described it as an "extremely difficult and dangerous situation" and called on the Algerian government to "preserve innocent life" in their efforts to fully resolve the crisis. Clinton spoke after the State Department said that Americans were still being held hostage.

The desert siege erupted Wednesday when the militants attempted to hijack two buses at the plant, were repulsed, and then seized the sprawling refinery, which is 800 miles south of Algiers. They had claimed the attack came in retaliation for France's recent military intervention against Islamist rebels in neighboring Mali, but security experts have said it must have taken weeks of planning to hit the remote site.

Since then, Algeria's government has kept a tight grip on information about the siege.

The militants had seized hundreds of workers from 10 nations at Algeria's remote Ain Amenas natural gas plant. The overwhelming majority were Algerian and were freed almost immediately.

Algerian forces retaliated Thursday by storming the plant in an attempted rescue operation that left leaders around the world expressing strong concerns about the hostages' safety.

Militants claimed 35 hostages died on Thursday when Algerian military helicopters opened fire as the Islamists transported the hostages around the gas plant. While Algerian officials acknowledged some hostage deaths, the number could not be independently confirmed.

On Friday, trapped in the main refinery area, the militants offered to trade two American hostages for two prominent terror figures jailed in the United States. Those the militants sought included Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh who was convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks and considered the spiritual leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist convicted of shooting at two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

But U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said there would be "no place to hide" for anyone who looks to attack the United States.

"Terrorists should be on notice that they will find no sanctuary, no refuge, not in Algeria, not in North Africa, not anywhere," Panetta said Friday.

Workers kidnapped by the militants came from around the world -- Americans, Britons, French, Norwegians, Romanians, Malaysians, Japanese, Algerians.

A high-resolution satellite image of the Amenas gas facility taken on Dec 7, 2012.

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GeoEye Satellite Image

World leaders have expressed strong concerns in the past few days about how Algeria was handing the situation and its apparent reluctance to communicate.

Terrorized hostages from Ireland and Norway trickled out of the plant. BP, which jointly operates the plant, said it had begun to evacuate employees from Algeria.

A U.S. military C-130 transport plane flew a number of people including former Ain Amenas hostages from the Algerian capital of Algiers to a U.S. facility in Europe, a U.S. official said. He declined to be specific about the destination, their nationalities or the extent of the wounds that he said some had.

A flood of foreign energy workers were being evacuated from the North African nation amid security concerns.

BP evacuated one U.S. citizen along with other foreign energy workers from Algeria to Mallorca and then London. The oil giant said three flights left Algeria on Thursday, carrying 11 BP employees and several hundred energy workers from other companies.

A fourth plane was taking more people out of the country on Friday, BP said.

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Armstrong's Lowest Point Was Quitting Livestrong

Lance Armstrong, 41, said tonight that the lowest point in his fall from grace and the top of the cycling world came when his cancer charity, Livestrong, asked him to consider stepping down.

After the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a report in October 2012 alleging Armstrong doped throughout his reign as Tour de France champion, Armstrong said a second installment of an interview with Oprah Winfrey, his major sponsors -- including Nike, Anheuser Busch and Trek -- called one by one to end their endorsement contracts with him.

"Everybody out," he said. "Still not the most humbling moment."

Then came the call from Livestrong, the charity he founded at age 25 when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

"The story was getting out of control, which was my worst nightmare," he said. "I had this place in my mind that they would all leave. The one I didn't think would leave was the foundation.

"That was most humbling moment," he said.

Armstrong first stepped down as chairman of the board for the charity before being asked to end his association with the charity entirely. Livestrong is now run independently of Armstrong.

"I don't think it was 'We need you to step down,' but, 'We need you to consider stepping down for yourself,'" he said, recounting the call. "I had to think about that a lot. None of my kids, none of my friends have said, 'You're out,' and the foundation was like my sixth child. To make that decision, to step aside, that was big."

George Burns/Harpo Studios, Inc.

Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: How Honest Was He? Watch Video

Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: Doping Confession Watch Video

In the first part of the interview, broadcast Thursday, Armstrong admitted for the first time that his decade-long dominance of cycling and seven wins in the Tour de France were owed, in part, to performance-enhancing drugs and oxygen-boosting blood transfusions.

He told Winfrey that he was taking the opportunity to confess to everything he had done wrong, including for years angrily denying claims that he had doped.

READ MORE: Armstrong Admits to Doping

WATCH: Armstrong's Many Denials Caught on Tape

READ MORE: 10 Scandalous Public Confessions

Armstrong said in the interview that he stopped doping following his 2005 Tour de France victory and did not use banned substances when he placed third in 2009 and entered the tour again in 2010.

Investigators familiar with Armstrong's case, however, told ABC News today that Armstrong did not come completely clean to Winfrey, and that they believed he doped in 2009.

They said that Armstrong's blood values at the 2009 race showed clear blood manipulation consistent with two transfusions. Armstrong's red blood cell count suddenly went up at these points, even though the number of baby red blood cells did not.

Investigators said that was proof that he received a transfusion of mature red blood cells.

READ MORE: Lance Armstrong May Have Lied to Winfrey: Investigators

If Armstrong lied about the 2009 race, it could be to protect himself criminally, investigators said.

Federal authorities looking to prosecute criminal cases will look back at the "last overt act" in which the crime was committed, they explained. If Armstrong doped in 2005 but not 2009, the statute of limitations may have expired on potential criminal activity.

The sources noted that there is no evidence right now that a criminal investigation will be reopened. Armstrong is facing at least three civil suits.

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Matching names to genes: the end of genetic privacy?

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Are we being too free with our genetic information? What if you started receiving targeted ads for Prozac for the depression risk revealed by your publicly accessible genome? As increasing amounts of genetic information is placed online, many researchers believe that guaranteeing donors' privacy has become an impossible task.

The first major genetic data collection began in 2002 with the International HapMap Project – a collaborative effort to sequence genomes from families around the world. Its aim was to develop a public resource that will help researchers find genes associated with human disease and drug response.

While its consent form assured participants that their data would remain confidential, it had the foresight to mention that with future scientific advances, a deliberate attempt to match a genome with its donor might succeed. "The risk was felt to be very remote," says Laura Lyman Rodriguez of the US government's National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Their fears proved to be founded: in a paper published in Science this week, a team led by Yaniv Erlich of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used publicly available genetic information and an algorithm they developed to identify some of the people who donated their DNA to HapMap's successor, the 1000 Genomes Project.

Anonymity not guaranteed

Erlich says the research was inspired by a New Scientist article in which a 15-year-old boy successfully used unique genetic markers called short tandem repeats (STRs) on his Y chromosome to track down his father, who was an anonymous sperm donor. Erlich and his team used a similar approach.

First they turned to open-access genealogy databases, which attempt to link male relatives using matching surnames and similar STRs. The team chose a few surnames from these sources, such as "Venter",and then searched for the associated STRs in the 1000 Genomes Project's collection of whole genomes. This allowed them to identify which complete genomes were likely to be from people named Venter.

Although the 1000 Genome Project's database, which at last count had 1092 genomes, does not contain surname data, it does contain demographic data such as the ages and locations of its donors. By searching online phonebooks for people named Venter and narrowing those down to the geographic regions and ages represented in the whole genomes, the researchers were able to find the specific person who had donated his data.

In total, the researchers identified 50 individuals who had donated whole genomes. Some of these were female, whose identity was given away because of having the same location and age as a known donor's wife.

Matter of time

Before publishing their findings, the team warned the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other institutions involved in the project about the vulnerability in their data. Rodriguez says that they had been anticipating that someone would identify donors, "although we didn't know how or when".

To prevent Erlich's method from being used successfully again, age data has been removed from the project's website. Erlich says that this makes it difficult, although not impossible, to narrow the surnames down to an individual.

"The genie's out of the bottle," says Jeffrey Kahn of Florida State University in Tallahassee. "It's a harbinger of a changing paradigm of privacy." A cultural zeitgeist led by companies such as Facebook has led to more information sharing than anyone would have thought possible back in 2002 when HapMap first began, he says.

Recurring problem

This is not the first time genome confidentiality has been compromised. When James Watson made his genome public in 2007, he blanked out a gene related to Alzheimer's. But a group of researchers successfully inferred whether he carried the risky version of this gene by examining the DNA sequences on either side of the redacted gene.

While someone is bound to find another way to identify genetic donors, says Rodriguez, the NIH believes it would be wrong to remove all of their genome data from the public domain. She says that full accessibility is "very beneficial to science", but acknowledges that the project needs to strike a careful balance between confidentiality and open access.

It is especially pertinent, says Kahn, because genetic data does not just carry information from the person from whom it was taken. It can also reveal the genetic details of family members, some of whom might not want that information to be public. A relative's genome might reveal your own disease risk, for example, which you might not want to know or have an employer learn of. While laws prohibit health insurers and employers from discriminating against people based on their genetic data, it would not be difficult to give another reason for denying you a job.

An individual's relatives could not prevent that individual from learning about themselves, says Rodriguez, but researchers should encourage would-be genome donors to discuss the risks and benefits with their families.

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Cycling: "One big lie" Armstrong says of 7 drug-fuelled Tours

LOS ANGELES: Lance Armstrong admitted his seven Tour de France titles were fuelled by an array of drugs, reversing years of denials in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey broadcast Thursday.

Attempting to explain his drug-tainted past, Armstrong sat down with Winfrey for his first interview since being stripped last year of his record seven Tour titles and banned from sport for life.

It was recorded on Monday in Austin, Texas, and was to be aired in two segments on Thursday and Friday on Winfrey's OWN television channel.

"I know the truth. The truth isn't what was out there, the truth isn't what I said... This story was so perfect for so long... you overcome the disease, you win the Tour de France seven times, you have a happy marriage, you have children. I mean, it's just this mythic, perfect story," Armstrong said.

"And it wasn't true."

In an opening series of "yes" or "no" questions, Armstrong admitted using blood-boosting EPO, blood doping transfusions and testosterone or human growth hormone.

Armstrong told Winfrey he didn't believe it was possible to win the Tour in the years he raced without doping, and challenged the characterisation of the doping program on his US Postal Service team as the most sophisticated ever.

Hours before the kickoff, Armstrong saw another accolade withdrawn as the International Olympic Committee said it had asked him to return the cycling time-trial bronze medal he won in 2000.

The International Cycling Union last year upheld the US Anti-Doping Agency's ban of Armstrong, and the revocation of his cycling results from August 1998, but the IOC waited for three weeks to see if Armstrong planned an appeal.

While Winfrey confirmed on Tuesday reports that Armstrong had admitted using banned performance enhancers in their talk, little else was known of what he would reveal.

Speculation swirled as to whether he had implicated others -- notably members of the sport's world governing body -- amid allegations of complicity and cover-up.

The difficulty of untangling the doping web in cycling was again clear when the IOC's move recalled the 2000 Olympic time-trial medallists.

Abraham Olano of Spain, who was fourth, could inherit the bronze after finishing fourth in a race won by Armstrong's ex-US Post Service team-mate Viasheslav Ekimov, with Germany's Jan Ullrich taking silver.

Ekimov is now general manager of the Katusha cycling team that were dropped from the elite ProTeam list for this season because of their ambivalent stance on doping, and Ullrich eventually served a two-year ban for doping.

Some have speculated that Armstrong might attempt to rationalize doping as standard procedure in the years of his cycling career.

Certainly his admission, and his choice of the famously sympathetic Winfrey as confessor, are an about face after years of aggressive denials and often vitriolic attacks on those who doubted him.

"No one could have imagined only a few weeks ago that Lance Armstrong would make his confession publicly, that he would confess in public to having been doped," Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme told reporters in Paris.

"It's obviously something very important but I can't say more than that ... For us, Lance Armstrong is already in the past."

This week's exercise, however, is about the future, with Armstrong reportedly seeking a way back into sports and those in cycling wondering just who will be implicated in his revelations.

-AFP/fl

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