60 Minutes - Sunday, August 20, 2017

Episode Date: August 21, 2017

A terrorist attack in Texas by two U.S. citizens shows how hard it is to prevent such an attack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It happened in Garland, Texas. Simpson and another terrorist opened fire at a conference center. Incredibly, an FBI undercover agent was on the scene. I can't tell you whether the FBI knew the attack was going to occur. I don't like to think that they let it occur, but it is shocking to me that an undercover agent sees fellas jumping out of a car, and he drives on. I find that shocking. You've seen drones before, but never like this.

A swarm of autonomous drones flying themselves. It's the start of a military revolution. Now it's looking at me. Machines operating on their own. It recognized you instantly. Using artificial intelligence to make decisions faster than humans and raising questions the Pentagon is only beginning to grapple with. So if the machine's better, why not let it make the decision?

This goes to the ethics of the question of whether or not you allow a machine to take a human life without the intervention of a human. Tell me about the night you got lost. What do you remember? It's a memory that's been within me for such a long time. Saru was just five years old when he got lost. And as depicted in the movie, he ended up on a train that took him 1,000 miles away. With no way to know how to get home. It's a ghost train. No one's on the train. And the train is hurtling down the tracks. It's hurtling down the tracks.

I was locked in the carriage. I couldn't open it. And you're five years old. And I'm five years old. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm David Martin. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment and more. Play it at play.it ISIS has claimed responsibility for this past Thursday's deadly terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, that killed and wounded people from at least 34 countries, including the United States. This year alone, the Spanish police have arrested more than 20 people with links to ISIS.

Here in America, 100 people have been arrested for ISIS-related crimes over the last three years. The FBI devotes significant resources to identifying potential terrorists and sometimes spends years tracking them. The terror attack in Garland, Texas two years ago was the first claimed by ISIS on U.S. soil. It's mostly forgotten because the two terrorists were killed by local cops before they managed to murder anyone. As Anderson Cooper first reported in March, we were surprised to discover just how close the FBI was to one of the terrorists. Not only had the FBI been monitoring him for years,

there was an undercover agent right behind him when the first shots were fired. The target of the attack was an event taking place in this conference center on May 3, 2015. A self-described free speech advocate named Pamela Geller was holding a provocative contest, offering a cash prize for the best drawing of the Prophet Muhammad, whose depiction is considered sacrilege by some Muslims. Security outside was heavy. There were dozens of police, a SWAT team, and snipers. More than 100 people were gathered inside, and the event was ending

when two terrorists drove up to a checkpoint manned by a Garland police officer and a school security guard. This grainy image shows both law enforcement personnel standing next to an unmarked police car seconds before the attack. Bruce Joyner, the security guard, was unarmed. It's like they pull up, stop, and the doors open. Do you remember seeing the weapon? Oh, yeah. Definitely saw the weapon, and that's when I locked onto his face, because he's got this smile. He was literally smiling.

Yeah, like, I got you. I got you. The two terrorists opened fire with automatic rifles. Joyner dove for cover but was shot in the leg. Officer Greg Stevens returned fire with his handgun. Police nearby ran toward the scene. And right here, motherfuckers just started shooting at this convention.

When this video was recorded by a passerby, both terrorists had been mortally wounded by Officer Stevens and were lying on the ground next to their car. They still shooting, man. A SWAT team shot them both in the head. Because they kept moving and they weren't sure there were explosives involved, they had to shoot them. How quick did all of this happen? Oh, it's a matter of seconds. I would say 20, 30 seconds. It's very quick. The next day, as the FBI picked through the crime scene, the evidence showed Garland police had prevented a massacre. The terrorists brought six guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, bulletproof and tactical vests, and Xerox copies of the black flag of ISIS.

They were identified as 31-year-old Elton Simpson and 34-year-old Nader Sufi. Just hours before the attack, they had sent this tweet, pledging allegiance to ISIS. But Simpson was already well-known to the FBI. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and moved to Phoenix, Arizona in middle school. He briefly played college basketball before dropping out and converting to Islam when he was 20. According to leaders of the Phoenix mosque he attended, Simpson was well-liked and soft-spoken. He was always asking questions, attending lectures. Osama Shami is president of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix.

Oh, mashallah. People here thought so much of the young Muslim convert who took the name Ibrahim that he was included in the mosque's promotional video in 2007. When you come together and you pray five times a day with the brothers, and you're reminded about the hereafter. But at the time of this interview, Simpson had already become interested in radical Islam. And the Phoenix FBI, which was investigating one of his friends, hired an informant, a Sudanese refugee named Dabla Dang, to check Simpson out. Their informant's inside the mosque? Yeah. I mean, the whole case with Elton Simpson was with an informant

that he was befriending Elton and taping his conversations. Dabla Deng spent three years pretending to be Simpson's friend and was paid $132,000 by the FBI. He taped more than 1,500 hours of their conversations and finally recorded him talking about traveling overseas to wage jihad. Simpson lied to the FBI about it and got three years probation. When he found out that this guy was spying on him and taping him and then finding out that the government was doing that,

I think something clicked in him. And the mosque, we couldn't do anything because we don't know what he did. He felt that the mosque had abandoned him. Yes. And he felt that a lot of people had abandoned him. And that's why he stopped coming to the mosque. He moved into this Phoenix apartment complex with Nader Sufi, whom he knew from the mosque. Sufi had just had a bitter breakup, and the pizza parlor he owned was going out of business. It was here, in this apartment, that Simpson and Sufi began closely following the rise of ISIS, reaching out to their supporters online and acquiring weapons for a terrorist attack. Simpson and Sufi knew what they were getting into, and I think they likely knew that they were going to die.

Seamus Hughes tracks the online activities of ISIS sympathizers in the U.S. He served at the National Counterterrorism Center and is currently deputy director of George Washington University's Program on Extremism, where he also trains FBI agents on how to identify American jihadis. Why is the Garland attack so significant? The Garland attack is essentially the first opening salvo when it comes to attacks in the homeland. Attacks in the United States. Attacks in the United States. These low-level attacks by ones and twos of people who are drawn to the ideology and decide to act.

You've got to make sense of it all. So what we do is we bring it all together and put it on a board and say who's connected to act. You've got to make sense of it all. So what we do is we bring it all together and put it on a board and say who's connected to who. Using an old-fashioned law enforcement tool, Hughes maps out ISIS's online tentacles into the United States. We have the two attackers, Sufi and Simpson. They're also talking to Mohammed Miski, who's an ISIS recruiter in Somalia. This is somebody in Somalia who they're talking to online? Yep, through an encrypted app, Shorespot. They're also talking to Junaid Hussein. And he's in Raqqa? He's in Raqqa. Raqqa is ISIS's stronghold in Syria. Hughes calls Junaid Hussein an ISIS rock star,

a British citizen who communicated online with English-speaking recruits worldwide. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike a year and a half ago. Miske, an American living in Somalia, tweeted this link about the Draw Muhammad contest in Garland, Texas, and direct messaged Elton Simpson, urging him to attack it. The most interesting part about this is we're in a hybrid time, right? Before, we used to be worried about these network attacks, think of 9-11 with the hijackers training for years and then coming over here. And then we had lone actor attacks, individuals who were kind of drawn to this and decided to act. Now we're in this weird moment in between where you have a number of individuals in Raqqa reaching

out to Americans in Ohio, New York and other places and saying, so here's the knife you should use. Here's the address of the local U.S. military officer. And do what you can. Do you think Elton Simpson would have launched this attack if it wasn't for people in ISIS overseas who were online whispering in his ear? I think the folks whispering in his ear was a big part of it. The FBI closed the case on Elton Simpson in 2014, only to reopen it several weeks before the attack because of statements he made on social media.

It speaks to a larger problem the FBI has, which is you have an individual who pops in your radar in 2006, but doesn't commit an attack until 2015. So do you want the FBI to watch this individual for nine years? After the attack, Phoenix FBI agents became convinced the two men hadn't acted alone and began investigating Elton Simpson's friends. They arrested this man, Abdul Malik Abdul Karim, a 43-year-old convert to Islam who grew up in Philadelphia, and accused him of funding the attack as well as training and

encouraging Simpson and Sufi. Witnesses at Abdul Karim's trial testified the three men watched ISIS execution videos together and discussed attacking a military base or the 2015 Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona. Abdul Karim denied taking part in any discussions about a terror attack and says he rejected his friend's growing radicalization. He was found guilty on multiple counts and sentenced to 30 years in prison. But his attorney, Dan Maynard, continued to investigate and uncovered new evidence. The FBI was much closer to the Garland attack than anyone realized. After the trial, you discovered that the government knew a lot more about the Garland attack than they had let on. That's right. Yeah. After the trial, we found out that they had had an undercover agent who had been texting with Simpson less than three weeks before the attack to tear up Texas, which to me was an encouragement to Simpson. cover posing as an Islamic radical. The government sent attorney Dan Maynard 60 pages of declassified,

encrypted messages between the agent and Elton Simpson and argued Tarab Texas was not an incitement. But Simpson's response was incriminating, referring to the attack against cartoonists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Bro, you don't have to say that, he wrote. You know what happened in Paris, so that goes without saying. No need to be direct. But it turns out the undercover agent did more than just communicate online with Elton Simpson. In an affidavit filed in another case, the government disclosed that the FBI undercover agent had actually traveled to Garland, Texas, and was present at the event. I was shocked. I mean, I was shocked that the government had turned this over.

I wanted to know, when did he get there? Why was he there? And this past November, Maynard was given another batch of documents by the government, revealing the biggest surprise of all. The undercover agent was in a car directly behind Elton Simpson and Nader Sufi when they started shooting. This cell phone photo of school security guard Bruce Joyner and police officer Greg Stevens was taken by the undercover agent seconds before the attack. The idea that he's taking a photograph of the two people who happened to be attacked moments before they're attacked is stunning. I mean, talk about being in the right or the wrong place at the right or the wrong time. The idea that he's right there 30 seconds before the attack happens is just incredible to me.

What would you want to ask the undercover agent? I would love to ask the undercover agent? I would love to ask the undercover agent, are these the only communications that you had with Simpson? Did you have more communications with Simpson? How is it that you ended up coming to Garland, Texas? Why are you even there? We wanted to ask the FBI those same questions, but the Bureau would not agree to an interview. All the FBI would give us was this email statement. It reads, There was no advanced knowledge of a plot to attack the cartoon drawing contest in Garland, Texas.

If you're wondering what happened to the FBI's undercover agent, he fled the scene, but was stopped at gunpoint by Garland police. This is video of him in handcuffs recorded by a local news crew. We blurred his face to protect his identity. I can't tell you whether the FBI knew the attack was going to occur. I don't like to think that they let it occur, but it is shocking to me that an undercover agent sees fellas jumping out of a car and he drives on. I find that shocking. That he didn't try to stop?

He didn't try to stop them or he didn't do something. I mean, he's an agent, for gosh sakes. If this attack had gone a different way and lots of people had been killed, would the fact that an undercover FBI agent was on the scene have become essentially a scandal? It would have been a bigger story. I think you would have seen congressional investigations and things like that. Lucky for the FBI and for the participants of the event, you're in Texas and everyone's a good shot there. The FBI's actions around this foiled attack offer a rare glimpse into the complexities faced by those fighting homegrown extremism. Today, the battle often begins online,

where identifying terrorists can be the difference between a massacre and the one that never occurred in Garland, Texas. I mean, people brag about stuff. People talk big. One of the difficulties for the FBI is trying to figure out who's just talking and who actually may execute an attack. That's the hardest part when you talk about this, right? There's a lot of guys who talk about how great ISIS is. It's very hard to tell when someone crosses that line.

And in most of the cases, you see the FBI has some touchpoint with those individuals beforehand. There had been an assessment, a preliminary investigation, or a full investigation. It's just very hard to know when somebody decides to jump. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. One of the biggest revolutions over the past 15 years of war has been the rise of drones, remotely piloted vehicles that do everything from conduct airstrikes to dismantle roadside bombs. Now a new generation of drones is coming, only this time they are autonomous, able to operate on their own without humans controlling them from somewhere

with a joystick. Some autonomous machines are run by artificial intelligence, which allows them to learn, getting better each time. It's early in the revolution, but the potential exists for all missions considered too dangerous or complex for humans to be turned over to autonomous machines that can make decisions faster and go in harm's way without any fear. Think of it as the coming swarm. And if that sounds like the title of a sci-fi miniseries,

well, as we first reported earlier this year, it's already a military reality. We saw it with our own eyes and captured it on camera. This swarm over the California desert is like nothing the U.S. military has ever fielded before. Each of those tiny drones is flying itself. Humans on the ground have given them a mission to patrol a three-square-mile area, but the drones are figuring out for themselves how to do it. They are operating autonomously, and the Pentagon's Dr. Will Roper says what you're seeing is a glimpse into the

future of combat. It opens up a completely different level of warfare, a completely different level of maneuver. The drone is called Perdix, an unlikely name for an unlikely engine of revolution. Roper, head of a once-secret Pentagon organization called the Strategic Capabilities Office, remembers the first time he saw Perdix, which is named after a bird found in Greek mythology. I held it up in my hands, about as big as my hand, and I looked at it and said, really, this is what you want me to get excited about? You know, it looks like a toy. Perdix flies too fast and too high to follow. So 60 Minutes brought specialized high-speed

cameras to the China Lake Weapons Station in California to capture it in flight. Very nice. Developed by 20 and 30-somethings from MIT's Lincoln Labs, Perdix is designed to operate as a team, which you can see when you follow this group of aid on a computer screen. We've given them a mission at this point, and that mission is as a team, go fly down the road. And so they allocate that amongst all the individual Pertix. And they're talking to each other? They are. By what? So they've got radios on, and they're each telling each other not just what they're doing, but where they are in space.

How frequently are they talking back and forth to each other? Many, many times a second when they're first sorting out. I mean, it looks helter-skelter. You want them to converge to a good enough solution and go ahead and get on with it. It's faster than a human would sort it out. Cheap and expendable, Perdix tries to make a soft landing. Nice. But it's no great loss if it crashes into the ground.

All units down, all units go. Perdix can be used as decoys to confuse enemy air defenses or equipped with electronic transmitters to jam their radar. This one looks like it has a camera. As a swarm of miniature spy planes fitted with cell phone cameras, they could hunt down fleeing terrorists. There are several different roads they could have gone down, and you don't know which one to search. You can tell them, go search all the roads, and tell them what to search for, and let them sort out the best way to do it.

The Pentagon is spending three billion dollars a year on autonomous systems, many of them much more sophisticated than a swarm of purdice. This pair of air and ground robots runs on artificial intelligence. I'm going to say start the reconnaissance. They are searching a mock village for a suspected terrorist, reporting back to Marine Captain Jim Pinero and his tablet. The ground robot's continuing on its mission, while the air robot is searching on its own. The robots are slow and cumbersome,

but they're just test beds for cutting edge computer software which could power more agile machines, ones that could act as advanced scouts for a foot patrol. I would want to use a system like this to move maybe in front of me or in advance of me to give me early warning of enemy in the area. This time, I'm the target. The computer already knows what I look like,

so now we'll see if it can match what's stored in its memory with the real thing as I move around this make-believe village. The robot's artificial intelligence had done its homework the night before, Tim Faltemeyer says, learning what I look like. We were able to get every picture of every story that you've ever been in. So how many pictures of me are there out there? When we ran this through, we have about 50,000 different pictures of you that we were able to get. Had we had more time,

we probably could have done a better job. So, because you've got 50,000 images of me, how certain would you be? Very. Now it's looking at me. It recognized you instantly. And so, what we reported today on our scores were about a 1 in 10,000 chance of being wrong.

While the robot was searching for me inside an auditorium at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia... This will give us a technological advantage. Lieutenant Commander Raleigh Wicks was watching from a missile boat in the Potomac River. What I was doing was I was turning over control of the weapon system to the autonomous systems that you've seen on the floor today. Had Wicks given permission to shoot, the missile would have struck my location using a set of coordinates given to it by the robots. They were controlling a remote weapon system. They were controlling where that weapon system. They were controlling where that weapon

system was pointing with me supervising. It will be about three years before these robots will be ready for the battlefield. By then, Captain Pinero says they will look considerably different. Will those robots, when they reach the battlefield, will they be able to defend themselves? We are looking into that. We are looking into defensive capability for robot, armed robots. Shoot back? Correct. This Pentagon directive states autonomous systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. What that means, says General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military's man in charge of autonomy, is that life or death decisions

will be made only by humans, even though machines can do it faster and in some cases better. Are machines better at facial recognition than humans? All the research I've seen says about five years ago, machines actually got better at image recognition than humans. Can a disguise defeat machine recognition? If you think about the proportions of a human body, there are several that are discrete and difficult to hide. The example that I will use as I look at you is the distance between your pupils is very likely unique to you and a handful of other humans. A disguise cannot move your eyes. So if I have a ski mask on, that doesn't help? Not if your eyes are visible. If you have to see, you can't change that proportion.

So if the machine's better, why not let it make the decision? This goes to the ethics of the question of whether or not you allow a machine to take a human life without the intervention of a human. Do you know where this is headed? I don't. Virtually any military vehicle has the potential to become autonomous. The Navy has begun testing Sea Hunter, an autonomous ship to track submarines. Program manager Scott Littlefield says that when you no longer have to make room for a crew,

you can afford to buy a lot of them. You could buy somewhere between 50 and 100 of these for the price of one warship. I've heard somebody describe this ship as looking like an overgrown Polynesian war canoe. Why does it look like it does? To be able to go across the Pacific Ocean without refueling, this hull form, the trimaran, was the best thing we could come up with. What is its range? We can go about 10,000 nautical miles on a tank of gas, 14,000 gallons.

Sea Hunter is at least two years away from being ready to steam across the Pacific on its own. Among other things, it has to learn how to follow the rules of the road to avoid collisions with other ships. When we went aboard, it had only been operating autonomously for a few weeks, and there was still a human crew just in case. When testing is done, this pilot house will come off, and the crew will be standing on the pier waving goodbye. From then on, this will be a ghost ship commanded by 36 computers running 50 million lines of software code.

And these lifelines will have to come off, too, since there's no need for them with no humans on board. It has a top speed of 26 knots and a tight turning radius, which should enable it to use its sonar to track diesel-powered submarines for weeks at a time. Many countries have diesel submarines. That's the most common kind of submarine that's out there. China? China has them. Russia? Russia has them. Iran? Iran has them.

North Korea? Yes. I think I get the picture. Yeah. But of everything we saw, tiny Perdix is closest to being ready to go operational, if it passes its final exam. Will Roper and his team of desert rats are about to attempt to fly the largest autonomous swarm ever, 100 Perdix drones.

This is one of the riskiest, most exciting things that's going on right now in the Pentagon. Risky not only because the swarm would be more than three times larger than anything Roper's ever done before, but also because 60 Minutes is here to record the outcome for all to see. Why are you letting us watch? A couple of reasons, David. When this first came up, I have to be honest with you. My first response was, it sounds like a horrible idea, right? It's just human nature. I don't want this to fail on camera, but I did not like the fear of failure being my only reason for not letting you be here.

And we also wanted the world to see that we're doing some new things. This time, the Perdix will be launched from three F-18 jet fighters, just as they would on a real battlefield. There they are. All right. A little piece of... A little piece of the future. Five, four, three... The F-18s are traveling at almost the speed of sound.

Mark release. So the first test for Perdix is whether they will survive their violent ejection into the atmosphere. Distance complete. 104 alive. That's 104 in the swarm, David. 104 alive. That's 100 swarm. There they are. You see them?

Look at them. Look at them. They flash in the sun as they come into view. Oh, there they go. As the Perdix descend in front of our cameras, they organize themselves into a tighter swarm. Imagine the split-second calculations a human would have to make to keep them from crashing into each other. Look at that. Everywhere you look, they're just coming into view. It does feel like a plague or locust. Yeah, so they're running out of battery. There are reams of data that still have to be analyzed,

but Roper is confident Perdix passed its final exam. One become operational as early as this year. I've heard people say that autonomy is the biggest thing in military technology since nuclear weapons. Really? I think I might agree with that, David. I mean, what we mean is the biggest thing is something that's going to change everything. I think autonomy is going to change everything. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. Saru Briarley is a 36-year-old man with a powerful story of loss and love. As a five-year-old child in India, he became impossibly lost in Calcutta, a sprawling, chaotic city of 14 million people.

He said he had no money, no one to help him, no clue how to get back home. That he survived is amazing enough. What happened next got Hollywood's attention. His story is now a movie called Lion, the English translation of his Indian name. But there would be no movie, no story, without Saru's memories, the recollections of a terrified little boy. It's hard to recall events from age five, but witnesses we talked to and documents we found support almost all that he remembers. As we reported last December,

Saru Brierley considers himself lucky to be alive. When you hear his story, we think you will understand why. Tell me about the night you got lost. What do you remember? I remember it so vividly. It's a memory that's been within me for such a long time. It began when Saru Briarley was five in his village in central India. He lived in a cramped one-room house made of cow dung and brick with his mother, two older brothers and younger sister. His father had abandoned them, leaving them penniless.

Do you remember being hungry? We're always hungry. We're always sort of having to sort of live a day at a time. You found more food at the train station than any place else? If I really wanted to sort of find food, the train station is the best place. It wasn't just myself. There was other beggars and people at the train station too.

Is that what you and your brothers were? We were beggars, yeah. He says his mother would often leave the children for days on their own so she could earn less than a dollar a day hauling rocks at construction sites. When I saw her eyes as a child, I know she's going through hardship. You remember thinking that, looking at your mother? You know, I'd see whilst I'm sort of sleeping or almost asleep next to my sister, and I could see sort of tears going down her eyes as well.

One night, Gudu, his oldest brother he idolized, wanted to scavenge at the big train station down the track. Saru says he begged to go with him. Reluctantly, his brother gave in. Saru remembers the station had a water tower and a pedestrian walkway. He also remembers he was exhausted. When they got there, it was late at night. And I just wanted to go to sleep. And my brother said, wait here, I'll be back. I ended up going to sleep on the bench. I'm not too sure whether it was like 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, two hours, three hours.

When he woke up, he remembers a train was there, but his brother was not. Saru thought he might be inside, looking under seats for coins and food. He didn't find him, but he did find a comfortable seat and fell back to sleep. When he woke up again, as depicted in the movie, the train was careening across India for hours and hours. Thunder! It's a ghost train. No-one's on the train. And the train is hurtling down the tracks.

It's hurtling down the tracks, and I just ran up and down, tears. I was locked in the carriage. I couldn't open it. I'm on this carriage, on this train, all by myself, locked as a prisoner. It's prisoner. And you're five years old. And I'm five years old. He thinks he was trapped more than a day. He ended up a thousand miles from home in the crowds and chaos of the main Calcutta train station.

More than a million people pass through here every day. I was panicking. My heart was going triple time. train station. More than a million people pass through here every day. I was panicking. My heart was going triple time. I'm calling out for my brother, my sister, my mother. Was no one paying attention to the little kid in the crowd? To them, it's like you're just another kid outside the train station. To make matters worse, he spoke Hindi. In Calcutta, people speak Bengali. He avoided the police because at home police arrested beggars. So he'd have to do what he'd learned from his brothers, survive on his wits and scavenge in a vast, unforgiving city threatening to swallow him up.

He slept alongside other street kids in the train station. But there were adult predators at night. Saru says he barely survived, perhaps for weeks, before a young man helped him and brought him to the police. A judge sent him to an orphanage. While the movie heightened the action for dramatic effect, we confirmed with the director of the orphanage that Saru told his story of being lost when they took him in. The social workers wrote his story in this log.

Five-year-old Saru didn't know his last name, didn't know his address, didn't know the name of his village. They put his picture on flyers, on TV, in the paper, but no one responded. He was declared a lost child of India. The woman who ran the orphanage told Saru a family in Australia wanted to adopt him. About six months after getting on that train, he got on a jumbo jet to Australia, where he met his new mom and dad, Sue and John Brierley. What was that like when he gets off the plane? Pretty incredible. Yes, it was. It was just so amazing.

He just had these incredible eyes and calmness about him. He seemed a little bit cautious, but he didn't seem fearful. They took Saru back to their home on the Australian island of Tasmania, where he had a toy-filled room as big as his house in India. His new mother put a map of India on his wall so he'd always remember where he came from. He virtually put his life in our hands from the first moment we met. You could feel that? Yes, yes, definitely. They saved you? They did, but they didn't know my past and what it'd been. And I only told them to the point of, you know, as much language as I had that I could describe things.

Slowly, as he learned English in school, he began to reveal his past. He remembered details of the station where he got on the train to Calcutta, the water tower, the pedestrian bridge. He remembered the dam where he would play in the river. Sue wrote it all down in this diary. Under the love and care of Sue and John, Saru thrived. He excelled at sports. He was popular at school. I was happy. I was comfortable getting the love that I've always sort of wanted. With your new life, did you think about your old life often? Of course I did.

Those memories came alive when I went to sleep. But sometimes in his waking hours, he would search the map of India, hoping to recognize something, hoping to find his mother. He said he feared she was anguished over losing him. How did you feel about that? Helpless. That's what I was at the end of the day. It couldn't do anything.

You think about it quite a bit. I was holding on to those memories, never to let go. Nearly 20 years after he went missing, he discovered he could use his memories like a mental map to find his way home. His discovery? Google Earth. It's just so massive, and this is what I've been sort of looking at. With Google Earth, he could get a bird's eye view of towns and landmarks. He calculated a search radius from Calcutta based on the speed of trains and the time he thought he was locked on board. Night after night, he would follow the tracks, looking for anything that would match his memory of the station

where he got lost. So out of all of India, all the train stations in all of India, you're looking for a water tower and a walkway over the train tracks. Basically, a needle in a haystack. One night, frustrated by hours, years of fruitless searching, he looked out farther than he ever imagined he could have traveled. All of a sudden, I come to this train station here, and I zoom down. It matched absolutely perfectly. The water tower is right there. The water tower is right there. There's the flyover bridge, pedestrian walkway. Farther on, he saw the dam where he played in the river. It all matched what he had told his adoptive mother, Sue, years earlier, down to the map they had drawn in the diary.

Many people don't remember younger than five, but yet you remember in such great detail. Why do you think that is? I reckon what it is is that I never went to school, so language wasn't really in me, you know. It was all visual. My visual senses were extremely heightened. He knew he had to go to India to try to find his mother.

At the airport, Sue gave him this photo. It's how he would have looked when his birth mother last saw him. And all of a sudden, you know, my emotions and everything just take over me, and I'm just in tears. It was almost like feeling, you know, before actually knowing, Mum, I'm coming home to see you. After 25 years, 16 hours on the plane and a four-hour drive, he was finally home. It was just as he'd remembered, the path he'd walked many times to his house.

But when he got there, it was abandoned. Your family's not there. What are you thinking? I thought they're dead. I thought the worst, all the worst thing that you could think of possibly was just going through my head. Saru, now an Aussie, stood out in the slum. He couldn't communicate. A man approached who spoke English. Saru said he was looking for the family that had lived in this house. The man told Saru to come with him. And I walked for about 15 meters just around the corner. And the man goes, this is your mother. And she walked forward and I walked towards her. Our eyes were locked together. What did you see in your birth mother's eyes when you looked in them for the first time in years?

The tears that I saw when I used to look at her and I can see that she's struggling. But this time it was tears of joy. We sent our cameras to his home village. His mother, Kamla, told us, when I saw him, I knew he was my Saru. He's now been back to India 15 times. He reunited with his sister and one brother, who both had moved to a nearby city, but his mother never left their village.

The movie shows the love between Saru and his oldest brother Gudu, who took him to that train platform 25 years before. Kamla told Saru his brother was killed on the tracks the very night Saru was lost. On that one night, your mother lost two sons. Yes. And I can't think, you know, what she went through. It's like one is just, you know, here it is, he's died. But the other one, he's just disappeared. Why did your birth mother decide to stay there in that very village? Because she felt that one day the son that she had lost will come back. And it was amazing because here I am determined to find my hometown and my family from one side of the world, oceans apart, and here's my birth mother

sitting there and waiting because she knew that one day her son would come back. And I'm so glad that she did. Saru is now helping his biological mother in India financially, but he considers Sue and John Brierley his mom and dad, and Australia his home. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.