187. 9/11: The Rise of Osama bin Laden (Ep 1)

9/11 was the most devastating terrorist attack in history, but where did the plot come from? And when a freelance terrorist walks in with a plan to fly planes into American buildings, why did Osama Bin Laden almost say no? Listen as David and Gordon begin their six-part exploration of how the 9/11 terror attacks came to pass, 25 years on. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David McCloskey?

  For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

• 0:25Gordon Corera?

  9/11 was the most devastating terrorist attack in history, but where did the plot come from? And when a freelance terrorist walks in with a plan to fly planes into American buildings, why did Osama bin Laden almost say no? Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Corera.

• 0:45David McCloskey?

  And I'm David McClosky.

• 0:46Gordon Corera?

  And today, we begin a six-part series on the deadliest terrorist attack in history. The plot, the men who planned it, the intelligence machine that maybe could have caught them. In this series, David, we're going to really drill deep into the 9/11 plot, looking at how it was thought up, how it was financed, how it was staffed, how it was rehearsed. And alongside it, we're going to talk about people, primarily from the CIA, your former organisation, and the FBI, who were trying to stop it.

• 1:17David McCloskey?

  I think 9/11 is one of those events that it really defines the end of an era and the start of another. You know, we have pre-9/11 and post-9/11. I mean, that's how apocryphal this event is. And without 9/11, we don't have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We don't have military operations really all over the world, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. We don't have what might be $6 trillion of expenditure on those conflicts, the loss of 7,000 American lives, tens of thousands of allied soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of people killed throughout the Muslim world.

• 2:02David McCloskey?

  So this is an absolutely massive turning point. And I think it's also true, and we'll explore this later in the series, that we may not have the tilt to populism and the political environment that allows for the rise of Donald Trump without 9/11 and the American response to it.

• 2:24Gordon Corera?

  That's right. I mean, the way in which it seeps into politics, but also popular culture, remarkable. I mean, on a personal level, I can remember the day, and it really shaped my career for the 25 years since I've been covering national security. And that is really because of 9/11. But it is 25 years, which is amazing to think of. But there are still some questions still remaining about the plot. There's still ongoing litigation about whether there were other people, other states even, helping the hijackers, questions about the intelligence failure. So we're going to also drill down into those, aren't we?

• 2:58David McCloskey?

  Well, that's right. But maybe we begin with bin Laden himself. But first, a massive thank you to our sponsor, HP.

• 3:10Gordon Corera?

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• 3:13David McCloskey?

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• 3:24Gordon Corera?

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• 3:36David McCloskey?

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• 3:41Gordon Corera?

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• 3:51David McCloskey?

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• 3:59Gordon Corera?

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• 4:17Gordon Corera?

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• 5:00Gordon Corera?

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• 5:36Gordon Corera?

  So bin Laden himself. I mean, we did a series on Osama bin Laden last year, and 9/11 certainly doesn't happen without him. But I think one of the interesting things, which we'll get into, is it's not really just his plot. I mean, it's associated with him. But there are other people who are really coming up with the ideas and driving it. But he's going to play such an important role in making it happen, in building the organisation Al Qaeda, as we'll come to, which is behind it. And it's his ideology, his experience in organisation, which is crucial, isn't it?

• 6:07David McCloskey?

  So I think it's worth setting bin Laden up a bit. So bin Laden, he's born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia. He is the son, one of many sons, of Mohammed bin Laden, who was a construction magnet, climbed out of poverty in a region of Yemen, actually, and has become, Mohammed bin Laden becomes, the favoured builder of the Saudi royal family. Now, he builds roads, he builds a massive amount of infrastructure across the kingdom. He famously undertakes a renovation of the holy sites at Mecca and Medina. And really, in a single generation, that family goes from Yemeni obscurity to really the heights of Saudi commercial power.

• 6:51David McCloskey?

  And they're bound very tightly to the Al Saud ruling family.

• 6:55Gordon Corera?

  And it's a big, sprawling family, isn't it? The bin Ladens, in which Osama is just one of many.

• 7:02David McCloskey?

  Yeah, he is one of many. He also, and this is important, I think, for his formation, he is on the marginal ends of this family. Unlike many of his half-brothers and half-sisters, he will wind up being educated in the kingdom, in Jeddah. And his radicalisation, we talked about this pretty extensively in our series on bin Laden, his radicalisation, I think, really begins at a school that he attended called Al Daghr, which means the haven. It's not a radical school. This is a place that many Saudi elites would send children to be educated. But bin Laden comes under the influence

• 7:44David McCloskey?

  of a Syrian schoolteacher, who frankly is, he's well-liked by the students. He really has them participate in a lot of after-school soccer games, Gordon. And he's popular. He's well-liked, he's charismatic. And bin Laden is drawn to him. And this Syrian schoolteacher really cultivates these after-school prayer meetings and discussions. He's a very hard-line guy, advocating a very militant strand of Islam. And bin Laden is really drawn to this. Because bin Laden, in the accounts of his early life,

• 8:23David McCloskey?

  he's shy, he's tall, he's unusually devout, relative to many of his family members. He's academically unremarkable. He's also apparently a mediocre soccer player. And, you know, he's, he's drawn to religion from an early age. So he prays more than is required. He fasts, he gravitates toward these kind of Islamic study circles while he's at school, which, which are becoming quite common in Saudi Arabia at that time.

• 8:54Gordon Corera?

  And then around him, I guess, in 1979, you have some crucial events, don't you, which are going to change particularly the Islamic world. And it's only in hindsight, I think, we understand how big these events are and which will, I guess, cause quite a deep shift in the Islamic world. I mean, one of those is in Saudi Arabia itself in 1979, isn't it?

• 9:14David McCloskey?

  1979, as we look back on it, really is a hinge year across the Middle East. And in Saudi, armed Islamist radicals actually storm the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which is Islam's holiest site. There's a long and bloody siege of the Grand Mosque. And this is a deeply formative event for Bin Laden. In 1979, there's also the Iranian Revolution. Now, Bin Laden is Sunni Muslim, but I think it shows that there is a sort of a deep power in political Islam that is coursing through the region at this time.

• 9:53David McCloskey?

  And there's an example in Iran of a Islamist movement on the Shia one that's taking power.

• 10:01Gordon Corera?

  And then at the same time in 1979, you have the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan, which is another big moment, isn't it? Because it's, that will draw together, and we'll get into this in more detail, a group of people who want to fight, from the Muslim side, fight off the Soviet invaders. So you have all these different things happening at the same time.

• 10:20David McCloskey?

  Yeah, and Bin Laden, you think about the formative years of his life, right? He's 22 in 1979. And I think these shocks register to him as the idea that Islam is sort of paradoxically both under assault and also on the march. So there's this kind of deep sense of grievance. There's a sense that his world is being threatened. And as we mentioned, in his sort of, his schooling at Al-Dager and the influence of this Syrian school teacher, you know, he's, he's sort of deeply drawn to this, this strain of kind of political and militant Islam.

• 10:59David McCloskey?

  Now, the idea fueling Bin Laden's convictions comes from an Egyptian writer and intellectual named Said Qutb. And Qutb traveled to the United States in the late 40s. And he'd come away from his experience there really repelled by the West.

• 11:16Gordon Corera?

  By Western materialism, isn't it? And individualism. He comes to hate that.

• 11:19David McCloskey?

  That's right. He sees a kind of moral emptiness in the West. Qutb goes back to Egypt and he builds out a really radical argument from this. And he says, look, you know, most supposedly Muslim governments throughout the Middle East are not truly Islamic at all, right? They're, they're, they're apostate regimes. They have gone back to this kind of state of pagan ignorance. And this is the, this is kind of the subtle but critical and, and really quite radical take that Qutb has, which is that believers, true believers, have a duty to wage jihad, holy war against these apostate regimes.

• 12:03David McCloskey?

  And not merely to do that in self-defense, because, you know, mainstream Islamic thought at this time, I mean, there's obviously a concept of jihad, but it is primarily a defensive one. And Qutb says, no, the right way to think about this is that you actually have to take the fight to these apostate regimes that are all around us. Qutb ends up being imprisoned in 1966. He's executed by the Egyptian state. Bin Laden, though, probably encounters the work of Said Qutb while he's at school in Jeddah. So these ideas about the sort of necessity and the imperative of jihad are swirling around him at the same time as he's seeing these massive shifts in the Islamic world.

• 12:46Gordon Corera?

  So those are the ideas, but the way in which he'll put things into action are really through Afghanistan. And so you have this period from 1979, Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. There is a desire and a call for Muslims to go and fight off the Soviets and to fight with the Mujahideen, as they're called, against the Soviet invaders. And Bin Laden himself will answer that call and will play a really interesting role, not necessarily as a fighter initially, but as a kind of organizer. Because after all, he's a, basically a young, rich kid who wants to get involved, doesn't he? That's his, that's his motivation. We've talked about his ideological motivation, but that's his kind of role at that point.

• 13:29David McCloskey?

  Yeah, it's worth saying that the idea of, of young, well-off Saudis or just more broadly Arabs going to Pakistan and then Afghanistan to support the Mujahideen in some way is not a particularly radical one.

• 13:46Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 13:47David McCloskey?

  There's, there's a lot of young people who are drawn to this.

• 13:49Gordon Corera?

  There's almost jihadi tourism, isn't it? People, people want to go, they want to show that they've been out in the hills and the mountains with the Mujahideen and, you know, maybe firing an AK-47 and then come back. It's the kind of thing, you get your pictures of it done. But Bin Laden's going to get more involved than that, isn't he?

• 14:04David McCloskey?

  Yeah, and so he ends up taking on a really critical role in helping to siphon Saudi and more broadly Gulf money to the Mujahideen cause. I think he sees his time there and he'll get deeper and deeper into the conflict. As, you know, as you said, it's kind of, for him, it's, it's a religious, almost rite of passage. And because of those ideas that we talked about, Qutb's, you know, ideology, I think Bin Laden sees it, again, he's very devout. He sees it as a religious imperative to go and help Muslims who are essentially being targeted, killed, massacred by the apostate Soviets. Now, the number of Arabs who actually did any meaningful fighting in Afghanistan is pretty small, right?

• 14:48David McCloskey?

  The far larger contribution which Bin Laden is involved in is the money, the propaganda, the myth of this kind of pan-Islamic army that is resisting the Soviet invaders. And despite the way that Bin Laden has tried to retell the history of this time, the military impact that he has and that other Arab fighters have is pretty limited. And the way that that funding and the way the support gets into Afghanistan is through Pakistan. And for a long time, Bin Laden actually didn't set foot inside Afghanistan. He was playing this kind of facilitator and financier role from Pakistan itself.

• 15:29David McCloskey?

  When he finally gets into Afghanistan and actually sees combat, it's at a place called Jadi in eastern Afghanistan. And this is an absolutely transformative experience for him. So in 1987, he and a few dozen Arab fighters hold off a Soviet assault at Jadi. The military significance, and we won't go into the full detail of it here, but the military significance of the battle is very small. Bin Laden's contributions as a commander are, I would say, counterproductive.

• 16:00Gordon Corera?

  Right.

• 16:01David McCloskey?

  Right? He's not.

• 16:02Gordon Corera?

  He's getting in the way more than anything else.

• 16:04David McCloskey?

  Right, he's, he's a rich Saudi kid who doesn't have any military experience, but who is, you know, sort of in this position where, I mean, quite literally, he and his comrades are engaged in military combat against the Soviets. It doesn't really go well for the Arab fighters. They take tremendous casualties, but they do hold off this Soviet assault and the mythological impact of that becomes enormous.

• 16:30Gordon Corera?

  Because it allows Bin Laden to present himself as a fighter, as a kind of war hero. And then out of this, and out of, to some extent, out of the mythology, Bin Laden's going to build something and he's going to build an organization and that will be called Al Qaeda, which means the base in Arabic. That will emerge in those late 80s years as a kind of form of organization for the first time, which Bin Laden is creating.

• 16:58David McCloskey?

  Peter Bergen, who's an American journalist and, and who actually interviewed Bin Laden in the late 1990s, has a wonderful book called The Rise and Fall of some of Bin Laden, which I would highly commend. And he really locates the kind of mythic birth of Al Qaeda out of this battle at Jadi. There are different stories about how the name Al Qaeda comes to be, but Bin Laden's men had called their camp there Al Qaeda, the base. And over time, that name seems to stick to this kind of broader enterprise that Bin Laden is trying to stitch together. There's a series of meetings that Bin Laden and, and, you know, his kind of cohort have throughout the summer of 1988. And in those meetings, he and the small group decide to take really what had kind

• 17:42David McCloskey?

  of been this disparate network and turn it into an organization. And they, they call it Al Qaeda Al Asghariya, the military base. And the purpose of Al Qaeda. Is, quote, "to lift the word of God and to make his religion victorious." And the notes from that meeting define Al Qaeda as an organized Islamic group. They lay out membership requirements. They describe the selection process for membership. And they say that, you know, here's, here's essentially the way that the best brothers, as they describe it, will get further military training. And it also specifies an oath of allegiance, importantly at this point, not to Bin Laden, but to the broader organization.

• 18:22Gordon Corera?

  There's often been this idea that the CIA was backing Bin Laden in these years. Not, not true. The CIA was backing other Mujahideen groups, but not so much directly Bin Laden. So there's not quite the direct relationship there, but-

• 18:35David McCloskey?

  There's no, we should restate, there's, there's no evidence-

• 18:38Gordon Corera?

  No evidence, no.

• 18:38David McCloskey?

  That CIA money or weapons ever made their way to Bin Laden.

• 18:42Gordon Corera?

  But collectively, the Mujahideen, backed by the CIA, certain groups of it, are going to succeed in inflicting such costs on the Soviet troops that they're going to be forced out of Afghanistan by 1989. So that is a victory for these groups, for the Mujahideen, but also for Al Qaeda, even though, as we said, they didn't play necessarily a big role. But it does leave this really interesting moment where you've had this group form, Al Qaeda. You've had all these, you know, radicals come to fight and get involved. And suddenly they've won. And the question is, what are they going to do next? You know, they've got a taste, I think, for jihad, for fighting.

• 19:25Gordon Corera?

  And now they're looking for an enemy after the defeat of the Soviets.

• 19:28David McCloskey?

  Well, he's got an organization.

• 19:30Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 19:30David McCloskey?

  So it's kind of, what do you do with this group of people who are dedicated to jihad, to fighting, you know, infidel invaders and apostates, wherever they might be? But who do you focus on? And it takes Bin Laden some time to work out an answer. And I, I think the first turning point for him is in 1990. Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, first Gulf War. And Bin Laden, who, again, is kind of fresh from what he sees as this massive kind of world-changing victory in Afghanistan, comes up with an idea that, I think, to me, sounds insane. He says, "I want to raise an army of veterans, of Arab veterans.

• 20:09David McCloskey?

  I want to use Al Qaeda and groups like it to defend Saudi Arabia against a potential invasion from Saddam."

• 20:16Gordon Corera?

  Which is mad, against Saddam Hussein, who had one of the largest armies in the world. And, you know, the idea of these-

• 20:22David McCloskey?

  And it just steamrolled over Kuwait.

• 20:23Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And that they're going to defend Saudi Arabia. And of course, what happens is the Saudi government saying, "No, thank you very much, young princeling, we're not really interested in you. We'll take the Americans' help." So American troops then come in to base themselves in Saudi Arabia and then-

• 20:38David McCloskey?

  Hundreds of thousands.

• 20:39Gordon Corera?

  Hundreds of thousands. And then to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And this, this angers Bin Laden, doesn't it? Because it's the combination of him being rejected and then Americans having come into what he sees as the Holy Land, you know, of Saudi Arabia and all these American troops coming in. And that is one of the first steps that leads him eventually into this conflict against the US, isn't it?

• 21:03David McCloskey?

  Well, we should say, I think, prior to the early 1990s, he has a kind of quietist anti-Americanism that would have been very on-brand-

• 21:12Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 21:12David McCloskey?

  -for a Saudi who happens to be fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, at this point, doesn't really understand America. I don't think he actually ever-

• 21:22Gordon Corera?

  He's been to Britain, actually.

• 21:23David McCloskey?

  Ever will. He's been to, he's been to Britain.

• 21:25Gordon Corera?

  Spent time here.

• 21:25David McCloskey?

  That's right. He's a big Arsenal fan.

• 21:27Gordon Corera?

  He went to the Arsenal, yeah.

• 21:28David McCloskey?

  He's a big Arsenal fan. But it does, it kind of, I think, the, the rejection by the Saudi royal family and then now the presence of hundreds of thousands of what he sees as infidels on the soil of the kingdom, turn that really quiet anti-Americanism into something that becomes closer to an obsession. And it, he starts to speak of it openly and for the Saudi regime that's hosting hundreds of thousands of American troops-

• 21:55Gordon Corera?

  It's awkward, yeah.

• 21:56David McCloskey?

  -for protection, it's very awkward.

• 21:58Gordon Corera?

  So that will lead to him going to Sudan, 1992. And there, again, you know, this interesting period where he's in Sudan, I think, for four years, where he's trying to keep Al Qaeda going, isn't he? He's trying to keep this sense of an organization going. He, he wants to do something with it, but it's not quite clear what it's going to be yet. They're, they're running businesses-

• 22:18David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Gordon Corera?

  But they're also still doing training camps. It's a, it's a weird mix in those years. But he's also starting to develop a sense of, maybe America is going to be my next enemy that I'm going to take on.

• 22:30David McCloskey?

  And it, it's really from Sudan that some of the first blows from Al Qaeda land against, against the US. So then, you know, in December of 92, we have these hotels in Yemen that are kind of being used as a waystation for US troops that are going onward to Somalia. Bombs go off there, probably linked to Al Qaeda. And then in 1993, we talked about this a little bit in the series we did on Black Hawk Down. It's likely that fighters that are sort of Al Qaeda-adjacent, linked to his network, are, are actually connected to some of the, the downings of Black Hawk helicopters-

• 23:04Gordon Corera?

  And the Battle of Mogadishu. Which is really interesting, isn't it? Because we talked about this in the series, how the Battle of Mogadishu leads to America effectively withdrawing. And Osama Bin Laden takes the lesson from that, which is, if you can inflict some blows on America, they will withdraw. And that becomes one of his ideas, which is America is a kind of paper tiger, is the way it's described, where if you can inflict some blows on it in the Middle East, then they will withdraw from the Middle East. And because they're supporting the Middle East apostate regimes, those regimes will then fall to the Islamist worldview and radicalism that he wants to impose.

• 23:48Gordon Corera?

  That becomes his thinking through the 90s, doesn't it?

• 23:51David McCloskey?

  Broadly, I think, yeah, paper tiger is the right way to think about it. He believes that America is casualty averse and soft. By 1994, he has become such a problem for the Saudi state. Because you imagine, the Saudi state is deeply connected to the United States of America.

• 24:07Gordon Corera?

  And to the Bin Laden family.

• 24:09David McCloskey?

  And to the Bin Laden family. And he is this, so this guy that wants to raise an army to push Saddam out. At this stage, Bin Laden is seen as a kind of financier-

• 24:22Gordon Corera?

  Financier and organizer.

• 24:22David McCloskey?

  Of, and organizer of these operations. But even so-

• 24:26Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 24:26David McCloskey?

  -that creates real problems for the Saudis. So they strip him of his citizenship, which is not a common thing to do.

• 24:33Gordon Corera?

  And he goes to Afghanistan.

• 24:34David McCloskey?

  And he goes to Afghanistan. We should say also, I mean, a lot of his investments in Sudan had gone poorly. He is connected, again, in kind of a financier organizer way to a, a plot to kill the Egyptian president. So creating all kinds of problems. The Sudanese are squeezed. He goes to Afghanistan.

• 24:51Gordon Corera?

  Where he's sheltered by the Taliban. The new rising Islamist movement engaging in a civil war in Afghanistan. They're going to eventually take over almost, almost all of the country. He's back in Afghanistan. He's got a base now in Afghanistan where he can run training camps and where he's going to start to issue increasingly aggressive calls for violence and action against the United States.

• 25:14David McCloskey?

  Namely declaring war against, against the United States.

• 25:17Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 25:17David McCloskey?

  So in August of 1996, he is, he's in Afghanistan. And he issues what is called the Declaration of War against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places. And it has the kind of melodramatic dateline from the peaks of the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan. And in it, he, there's a bunch of grievances that he, he throws out there. But the big one is that he demands that all Muslims help forcibly expel Americans and Jews from Islamic lands. You know, this is kind of the first time publicly that he has come out and said that America-

• 25:57Gordon Corera?

  Is my enemy.

• 25:57David McCloskey?

  Is my enemy. And again, you know, it's, it's worth resting for a moment on his ideas because it is, in some ways, kind of a, a crazy logic process. And he calls it, you know, we need to cut off the head of the snake. America is the head of the snake. And instead of actually fighting what he sees as the apostate regimes around the Islamic world, you need to go and you actually need to take the fight to America. And then they all crumble. Now, in February of 98, so a few years later, he goes even further. And he proclaims a kind of a fatwa, where he states that "it is basically any Muslim's duty to kill Americans, civilian and military alike,

• 26:40David McCloskey?

  anywhere on earth," which is a, a very expansive declaration.

• 26:46Gordon Corera?

  And what's amazing is he starts giving interviews, including to American journalists, you know, saying, "I'm declaring war on you. I consider all of you my enemy. We're going to kill you." And still at this time, it doesn't actually raise that much attention. People are just not taking him seriously, until August 1998, when Al Qaeda really strikes for the first time with two enormous truck bombs, almost simultaneously hitting two US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. And I mean, these are massive. I mean, more than 200 people are killed, most of them locals, not Americans. So, you know, already the first sign that actually, it's not just indiscriminate violence

• 27:30Gordon Corera?

  against American civilians and military, but against the, you know, Muslims are going to pay the, the biggest price for Al Qaeda's violence. And it's clear immediately that it's Bin Laden. I mean, he's acting on his intent at that point.

• 27:42David McCloskey?

  And the response directed against Bin Laden from those attacks, I think, will be very characteristic of how the US deals with him-

• 27:50Gordon Corera?

  Pretty limited.

• 27:50David McCloskey?

  In the late 90s, it's limited.

• 27:52Gordon Corera?

  Couple of cruise missiles. Far as it is training camps in Afghanistan.

• 27:55David McCloskey?

  Right. And when we say training camps, we are talking about mud hut structures-

• 27:59Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 27:59David McCloskey?

  Rustic infrastructure, the kind of thing that even if it is quote unquote destroyed, you know, can be built back in a matter of weeks. One, I mean, one of the missiles ends up targeting a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that's thought to still be an Al Qaeda-

• 28:10Gordon Corera?

  Bad intelligence.

• 28:11David McCloskey?

  You know, a kind of facility, which, which is, is totally incorrect. And those missiles miss Bin Laden probably just by a few hours. And then nothing else happens. The retaliation ends there. So again, I think it reinforces Bin Laden's idea that the Americans are sort of paradoxically the, the entity supporting every regime that he doesn't like in the Middle East, but are also kind of weak-

• 28:37Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 28:37David McCloskey?

  -at the same time.

• 28:38Gordon Corera?

  And then he keeps going. He strikes again in October 2000. Two suicide bombers guide a small boat packed with explosives. And that goes alongside a US destroyer, the USS Cole, as it refuels in Yemen. And it blows up a hole in the side of it. 17 American sailors killed, an attack on the US military. But again, you know, investigations, you know, the FBI starts investigating, CIA are looking at it. But no retaliation, really. And so by the turn of the century, what we have is Bin Laden hitting the United States, striking at it. The US not really hitting back that hard. And now Bin Laden plotting what will be his most dramatic and fateful attack. Let's take a break there.

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• 32:12Gordon Corera?

  Welcome back. So we've set up this idea of Osama bin Laden increasingly striking the United States, and talking about wanting to strike the United States, which does raise the question of what the US, and particularly the CIA, the FBI, the US intelligence community, is doing about it.

• 32:31David McCloskey?

  By the mid-1990s, there are a handful of people in the State Department, in the FBI, in the CIA, who are paying attention to him. And by early 1996, the CIA stands up a station that is specifically dedicated to hunting bin Laden. It is the agency's first virtual station, meaning it's not a station, you know, in the capital of a country. It's not London Station. It's not a station in Jordan. It's a virtual station in a really unremarkable and unmarked building in Northern Virginia. And it is named after the son of that station's first chief, Alec. So it is called Alec Station.

• 33:12Gordon Corera?

  And we should talk a little bit about that first chief. I mean, a guy called Michael Shoyer. I got to know Mike Shoyer a bit after 9/11, actually. Very intense guy, it's fair to say. I mean, and obsessive about bin Laden. And when I met him, he had a beard. He was quite zealous in his own way, and fierce about the idea that he'd been the one to see the threat from bin Laden, and had been trying to warn others about it, and he would feel ignored about it. An analyst by background, which I guess maybe that was some of the tension. Maybe he was seen, you're a former analyst, David, at the CIA. Maybe the operations guys, you know, didn't take him as seriously because he was an analyst.

• 33:54Gordon Corera?

  Or maybe it was his character partly, but that will become part of the story, won't it? Is some of the tension and the questions around whether others take the threat seriously that he's warning about.

• 34:05David McCloskey?

  Well, Michael Morell, who at the time was a senior analyst at the CIA, and who will rise to become the deputy director and the acting director, and we actually have an interview with him, because he was President Bush's PDB briefer.

• 34:19Gordon Corera?

  Daily briefer on 9/11.

• 34:21David McCloskey?

  On 9/11.

• 34:22Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, so we talked to him about that for the bonus.

• 34:23David McCloskey?

  That's right. And in his memoir, Michael Morell calls Shoyer a zealot.

• 34:28Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 34:29David McCloskey?

  And the Alec Station crew will become known inside the CIA as the Manson family.

• 34:35Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 34:36David McCloskey?

  So it is this kind of

• 34:37Gordon Corera?

  They're seen as a bit oddballs.

• 34:38David McCloskey?

  Weird subset of the agency at the time. I do think it is, your point about Shoyer being an analyst is really important, because if you're setting up a unit at the CIA, a task force, whatever it is, to go and do something operationally, in this case, which is targeting and maybe trying to kidnap or kill bin Laden, you would put, if you really believed in it, and you wanted it done, you would put a case officer

• 35:04Gordon Corera?

  A top case officer.

• 35:05David McCloskey?

  In charge.

• 35:06Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 35:07David McCloskey?

  You would not put an analyst in charge. The fact that he's an analyst is important to the story of kind of how does bin Laden keep getting away in the late 1990s. I think some of the plans that Shoyer will come up with are not treated with seriousness.

• 35:22Gordon Corera?

  Because he and the others are treated as those crazy guys, you know, over there in the corner. It's a bit like that, constantly going on about bin Laden, and that's part of the feel of it, isn't it? Quite female-heavy team as well around him. And also FBI agents, and this is part of the story, which we'll come to when it's the issue of where they're missed opportunities, FBI agents also embedded with that CIA team.

• 35:43David McCloskey?

  Yeah, which is very common now. I mean, I believe that the head of the Counterintelligence Mission Center at the CIA is an actual FBI special agent. So we have this integration between CIA and FBI now has become much more common. In the mid-1990s, this was a science experiment with two agencies that didn't really work well together.

• 36:08Gordon Corera?

  Did not like each other.

• 36:09David McCloskey?

  At all. And there are deep, structural, and organizational differences between the CIA and the FBI, our friends, the Thebes, which will definitely be a theme of this story. Now, all of this, you know, this kind of, the CIA beginning to notice bin Laden standing up Alec Station, this is all happening, I think it's important to say this, it's all happening in the context of a US intelligence community in the 1990s that is not in particularly good shape. There was what was called a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War.

• 36:39Gordon Corera?

  The budgets are being cut.

• 36:40David McCloskey?

  Budgets are cut. George Tenet, who's the CIA director and will be one of the main characters in this story, will later say that the CIA's budget declined by just about 20% in real terms in the 1990s, and a quarter of the workforce leaves.

• 36:56Gordon Corera?

  And morale is low as well, isn't it? 1994, you have Rick Ames discovered to be a CIA traitor. People in Congress are saying, maybe we should break this place up, you know, do we need it? So there's real pressure. And as you said, George Tenet is a really interesting character, because he's going to become CIA director, trying to kind of restore or even just maintain the capability of the CIA.

• 37:17David McCloskey?

  It's worth setting up Tenet for a moment, because he is such a character. So he's this really gregarious, hardworking, very politically astute, cigar-chomping guy, who's the son of Greek immigrants, and who has risen through this kind of labyrinth of different DC postings to become, including, you know, staffing roles at the White House and in Congress, to become what at the time was known as the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence. People person, very charming, very direct. He walks around headquarters and meets people. He sits down at cafeteria tables. I think he becomes one of the most important directors in the modern history of the agency.

• 38:00David McCloskey?

  And what he'll say in his memoir is that in the mid and late 1990s, if you were a really ambitious CIA officer who was trying to make your name for yourself, either in the analytical wing or in the operations wing, terrorism wasn't where you went.

• 38:17Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 38:18David McCloskey?

  Right? This is kind of a backwater in the mid to late 1990s. And it's happening again at a time where the intelligence community is in some ways on the ropes. Now, in the late 1990s, there are multiple and ultimately unsuccessful operations to go after bin Laden.

• 38:38Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, plans are put up, including by Mike Shoyer, who will later get very angry about some of these plans, where they think they've got intelligence where bin Laden is, but maybe he's with some Middle East sheiks, and so people say, no, we can't risk striking that target because we'll kill them. Other times, people say, well, the intelligence wasn't as good as maybe it was suggested. But what it means is that in this period, there are, there were attempts to go after bin Laden, but they never really follow through. And what you then get is a desire to maybe get more intelligence on the ground, and to do more to penetrate al-Qaeda, to get the understanding of what it's doing and what it's up to. And that's a key priority, but to be honest, it's not hugely successful, is it?

• 39:21David McCloskey?

  Yeah, remember, we did an episode over a year ago, I think, with a guy named Ned Bogan, who's a former CIA officer who had a lot of experience in the Counterterrorism Center. And I remember, I was very struck, because he said, you know, we didn't really have a sense or an order of battle of al-Qaeda, the organization, until after 9/11. So looking at, when you say al-Qaeda, I mean, even being able to fill out the upper rungs of the org chart

• 39:46Gordon Corera?

  What is it? Who's who?

• 39:48David McCloskey?

  At this point in time, is not really possible. There is, you know, there's an al-Qaeda defector who walks in.

• 39:53Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, there's a few of those.

• 39:54David McCloskey?

  And starts to provide some intelligence.

• 39:56Gordon Corera?

  And the Brits actually have an agent inside al-Qaeda, but no one at the very top. And that is important, isn't it? Because I think, I mean, we'll go back to this issue, and it will be a running theme of intelligence failure, question mark, around 9/11. Could it have been stopped? But arguably, this is, the roots of it is not having an understanding, a penetration of the heart of al-Qaeda, to know the plans that are being developed.

• 40:19David McCloskey?

  Yeah. And there are maybe as many as four attempts to actually capture bin Laden or to kill him in the late 1990s. Ultimately, they don't work, of course, been one of them, very famously. Involve the idea of actually using a team of Afghan tribesmen who were CIA assets to literally capture Bin Laden and roll him up in a rug.

• 40:43Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 40:43David McCloskey?

  Before putting him on a jet and sending him back to the US to be arrested. This is the late 1990s. We don't have armed drones yet.

• 40:51Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 40:52David McCloskey?

  So to target Bin Laden, there isn't some constant stare drone capability over Afghanistan in this period. You have to know where he's going to be hours.

• 41:01Gordon Corera?

  In a, where he's going to be in a few hours, so that if you launch a cruise missile at him, it's by the time it arrives, he's still going to be there.

• 41:08David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Gordon Corera?

  And they, they never quite have that intelligence. So this is the problem. Bin Laden's declared war on the United States. The US, some parts of the US is worried about Bin Laden, but they haven't got the penetration of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

• 41:22David McCloskey?

  There's also not a covert action or legal framework that is clear.

• 41:27Gordon Corera?

  About killing him.

• 41:27David McCloskey?

  About killing him.

• 41:28Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 41:28David McCloskey?

  Which, which will be really important. And there's been, there's a lot of kind of mudslinging that has happened over the last 25 years over, you know, were the authorities actually clear? Were they not clear? What was the CIA authorized to do? There's a lot of he said, she said about that. What does seem clear though, from at least the agency's perspective, is that there weren't clear authorities in the late 1990s that would have allowed them to actually go and kill him.

• 41:54Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And so without that penetration of Al Qaeda, the problem is they do not spot that something is brewing inside Al Qaeda, which is going to become 9/11. And so here we go back to, to, to 9/11 and to Bin Laden and his role in it, because it's very interesting, isn't it? Because even though this attack will be associated so closely with Osama Bin Laden, 9/11 wasn't actually his idea.

• 42:23David McCloskey?

  The idea for 9/11 comes from a kind of freelance terrorist. It is the brainchild of a guy named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is kind of hereafter known as KSM. Spoiler alert, it's not going to go well for KSM. And I remember seeing his AK-47 on the wall at CIA headquarters in one of the, I think it was in a special activities division conference room. We actually have his captured AK-47 framed up on the wall. KSM is the principal architect of the attacks. Now, let's set him up briefly because his, his character's important. He is a highly educated engineer.

• 43:06David McCloskey?

  Again, a running theme of some of these terrorist masterminds is they have engineering backgrounds.

• 43:12Gordon Corera?

  Which is interesting, yeah.

• 43:13David McCloskey?

  He's raised in Kuwait, but the family has roots in Pakistan. After secondary school in Kuwait, he actually enrolls in 1983 at Chauvin College, which is a small Baptist school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina.

• 43:28Gordon Corera?

  Wow.

• 43:29David McCloskey?

  And he, he does that to work on his English. He then transfers to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he pursues a mechanical engineering degree. KSM is already religious before he leaves home. And on campus in North Carolina, he's kind of squarely in this camp of what students there have remembered as the mullahs, which is a, a block of really conservative, largely bearded, you know, five times a day prayer, conservative guys who, inside their own little world, police, religious observance, they pray in makeshift apartment mosques, they

• 44:08David McCloskey?

  recruit new arrivals, new Muslim arrivals who are obviously total aliens in North Carolina at that time, sometimes even going and meeting them at the airport. And KSM is devout. I mean, one of his classmates at Chauvin remembers that KSM, for example, reproached him for eating pork.

• 44:28Gordon Corera?

  Do you think his time in the US, I mean, he does get a bit of harassment from, you know, others there. I mean, do you think this turns him against America, what happens to him there?

• 44:39David McCloskey?

  I do. I, you know, I think it plays a role. I, I, I believe he probably already had, you know, as, as we said Bin Laden did, this kind of.

• 44:46Gordon Corera?

  He's already religious. He's already a kind of.

• 44:48David McCloskey?

  He's already religious. There's already kind of a latent anti-Americanism. There's a, there's a disdain for American foreign policy in the Middle East that, that would all be, again, very common, very on brand for, for a Muslim of his, of his generation who's, who's grown up in conservative circles in the Middle East. But, you know, he's treated with pretty outright racial harassment and discrimination while he's, is in the States. I mean, there's some harassment that Terry McDermott, a, a writer who has a terrific book on the 9/11 hijackers and kind of planning team called Perfect Soldiers, talks about how, you know, KSM's old high school teacher would describe stories about garbage cans of water being propped up against doors.

• 45:29David McCloskey?

  So when KSM and his friends might open them, you know, disgusting water would spill everywhere. They'd get their shoes taken and thrown in the lake. And KSM returns from the States, really pretty sad, withdrawn, it was a bad experience, and with the belief that most Americans hate Arabs and, and KSM will link this to Israel. He says, you know, Americans don't like Arabs because America is, is in league with the Israelis.

• 45:57Gordon Corera?

  And then he goes, I mean, in what must be a bizarre kind of culture shift from, you know, Greensboro, from, from, you know, North Carolina, from the US, to Peshawar in Pakistan, and then into Afghanistan. And so he is going to be one of those, you know, jihadists, if we call them that, radicals, who is going to be attracted by the kind of, same thing as Osama Bin Laden, the fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets, the idea of this kind of great idealistic holy war.

• 46:25David McCloskey?

  He winds up doing at first really kind of menial administrative work for a cleric who had been one of Bin Laden's guides and spiritual mentors. KSM meets Bin Laden for the first time, probably in 1989, so at the tail end of the Soviet Jihad, but they're not particularly close. You know, there's not, there's not a deeper, poorer friendship. Now, KSM, I think, is temperamentally very different from Bin Laden. KSM is this kind of gregarious, outspoken showman, right? And even physically, they're very different. Bin Laden is famously, you know, he's very tall, he's lean, KSM is very portly.

• 47:09Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 47:09David McCloskey?

  He's bearded. I mean, if you see the picture from his capture in Pakistan, I mean, the guy is, he looks rumpled. He probably could have been, and actually was, an operations manager, right? I mean, he's, he had a, a day job for a while in the 1990s at Qatar's Ministry of Electricity and Water, while he was kind of moon, he was moonlighting, going around the Gulf and shopping ideas for various plots. KSM is really a kind of terrorist entrepreneur. And the 9/11 commission, when they, when they evaluate him and his personality, talk about him having this mixture of imagination, technical aptitude, and importantly, for

• 47:54David McCloskey?

  the plot, managerial skill, operational skill. So he thinks up all kinds of crazy ideas, right? Car bombings, assassinations, aircraft bombings, hijackings, how do you poison water reservoirs? So he's, it's, it's clear that KSM, I mean, unlike so many people who did the kind of jihadi tourism in Afghanistan and then just went home.

• 48:19Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 48:19David McCloskey?

  The mixture of, of KSM's own religious beliefs, his, maybe his time in the States, his time in Afghanistan in the eighties, he has really, without being under the influence of Bin Laden, adopted the same ideas, the same mentality about the, the nature of jihad and the connection between these violent acts and the, you know, Islamic world that he wants to help create.

• 48:45Gordon Corera?

  And I think this entrepreneur idea is an interesting one as well. And it's also the engineer in him. He kind of understands how things works and the mechanics. And you can see Bin Laden is this kind of ascetic ideologue who's doing the kind of propaganda and the big ideas. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM, is the guy who, who knows how to do things and get things done. At first, he's not actually a member of Al Qaeda. You kind of feel like he's slightly keeping a lot of his distance from Bin Laden because he can see that Bin Laden's a really interesting character, but he's more of a free agent. He's his own kind of independent operator in the jihadist world, you know, working with others, maybe looking for people who've got backing, but, and he's also got, going to develop plots separately from Al Qaeda.

• 49:30Gordon Corera?

  I mean, actually in one case with, with a member of his own family, with his, with his nephew.

• 49:34David McCloskey?

  Well, it, it is worth thinking about the early to mid 1990s. Al Qaeda's a brand, isn't really well known.

• 49:42Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 49:42David McCloskey?

  And so the idea that he would be swirling around in the same networks, but also feel enough independence to remain removed.

• 49:50Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 49:50David McCloskey?

  He doesn't need to. But the family connection you mentioned is, is really important because KSM's nephew is a guy named Ramza Youssef, who had been the mastermind behind the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center with this truck bomb, essentially, in one of the parking garages beneath the North Tower back in February of 1993. Now, that attack kills six, injures roughly a thousand. It doesn't, of course, bring down the tower, but KSM has this connection to this guy who

• 50:20Gordon Corera?

  He's doing something.

• 50:20David McCloskey?

  Is taking the fight.

• 50:21Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 50:21David McCloskey?

  You know, to, to the Americans. KSM plays a pretty minor role in that plot. He, he actually. Issues a single wire transfer to one of his nephew's co-conspirators. But again, he's got ambition, he's got this obsession, and he increasingly is directing his schemes in the same fashion as Bin Laden outward against, against the US and the West. The most notorious of those schemes, which he codenamed Bojinka, was a plan that he came up with in Manila in the mid 1990s to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific in a single coordinated way. There is this fascination that he'll have with

• 51:05David McCloskey?

  airliners that starts very early. And actually, as a test run, Ramzi Youssef, KSM's nephew, had planted a small bomb aboard a passenger jet, which actually kills a Japanese businessman before the plot is ultimately uncovered. And interestingly enough, that same cell had toyed with the idea of actually crashing an airliner into CIA headquarters at Langley.

• 51:29Gordon Corera?

  So the idea is already starting to bubble up. And I think you can see in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's ideas, the desire for something big and something dramatic. I mean, that's KSM, to some extent, the showman as well as the entrepreneur. And then in the late 90s, we're going to see, you know, Bin Laden is now back in Afghanistan, late 90s, you know, he's come back from Sudan. And at this point, KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Bin Laden will meet, maybe the first time they've met since the late 80s in Afghanistan. And perhaps, you know, the link is KSM's nephew, Ramzi Youssef is, is, you know, someone people are interested in because he's done these dramatic plots and tried to do things. But

• 52:08Gordon Corera?

  this is the point KSM starts to build the idea of 9/11, which he will in turn communicate to Bin Laden.

• 52:17David McCloskey?

  By 1996, Bin Laden's star is rising. You know, he's, he's issued, we don't yet have the embassy bombings of 1998 or the bombing of the USS Cole, but we do have the Declaration of War against the Americans that's come out in 1996. So more and more people in this kind of, you know, jihadist world are gravitating toward Bin Laden, seeing him as a potential, as a leader in the movement. And so KSM is drawn to him. So they meet in mid 1996. As you mentioned, I think, not on the basis of their own friendship or even KSM's notoriety, but on the basis of the fact that Ramzi Youssef is his, is his nephew.

• 53:01David McCloskey?

  And at that meeting in Afghanistan with Bin Laden in 1996, KSM will lay out a menu of terrorist operations. One of them will become 9/11. Now, to your point on KSM being a showman, the original plot, you could describe it as grandiose, I might call it insane. And we know a lot of this because KSM talked about the details of, of this meeting later with American interrogators. The plot, the original idea was not four airliners, it was 10. Now, in this scheme, nine of them would crash into targets on the east and

• 53:45David McCloskey?

  west coast of the US. And it was a very expanded list of targets, of course. It included the World Trade Center, also included the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, the tallest buildings in California and Washington State. Nine planes will go into those buildings. The 10th plane, KSM will reserve for himself. And his idea was, I'm going to hijack it, I'm going to order the killing of every adult male passenger onboard, I will land it at a US airport, and then come out of the plane and deliver a speech denouncing American support for Israel and for repressive Arab governments. And I think here we see, you could call it showmanship, you could also call it a serious

• 54:30David McCloskey?

  case of main character syndrome.

• 54:31Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 54:32David McCloskey?

  Because he basically has set up a horrendously evil and violent B-movie in which he's the star.

• 54:40Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 54:41David McCloskey?

  It's also worth reflecting on just how novel at the time the idea is. Because to that point, plane hijackings are much more about making a political statement, taking hostages. The hijackers want something. They're using the possession of the plane and the people on the plane to score a political point or to get something.

• 55:04Gordon Corera?

  We'd seen from the 70s onwards hijackings in which they say, fly me to this airport, and we want these prisoners released, you know, who are being held in another country. So it might be a negotiation, and we want to make a, you know, a big statement. That was some of the Palestinian hijackings. You've also seen some bombs on planes as well, but what you've never seen is the kind of jihadist suicide bomber on a plane.

• 55:27David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 55:28Gordon Corera?

  Combined, in this case, with what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wanted, which was also then his own personal theatrics of being the one, the only person notably not to kill himself, slightly selfishly, you know, perhaps.

• 55:40David McCloskey?

  He gets to deliver a speech.

• 55:42Gordon Corera?

  So he can deliver a speech. It's an evolution, but fundamentally quite a significant shift from the previous model of, of what plane hijackings would look like.

• 55:52David McCloskey?

  But beneath the surface, there were instances of, of planes being used as, as weapons. So there was a case where a disturbed gentleman in 1974 tries to hijack a DC-9 in Baltimore and wanted to fly it into the White House in an attempt to kill Nixon. And then there was a 1994 Air France hijacking when Algerian terrorists seized an airliner. The plot ends up being disrupted, but the French come out of it believing that the plan had been to actually fly it into the Eiffel Tower. So you have some little instances where planes are used as weapons. You also have a Tom Clancy novel, Dead of Honor, which

• 56:36David McCloskey?

  is published in August of 1994. And the book's climax, I remember reading this actually prior to 9/11 as, as a kid, the book's climax has an embittered Japan Airlines pilot who deliberately crashes a fully fueled Boeing 747 into the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress, kills the president, most of Congress, the cabinet, Joint Chiefs, the Supreme Court, and it ends up vaulting Jack Ryan into the presidency.

• 57:03Gordon Corera?

  The CIA analyst somehow becomes president. You're not suggesting that this Tom Clancy novel was an influence on KSM. I mean, the timing is interesting though, isn't it? There's no evidence for it.

• 57:13David McCloskey?

  There's no, there's no evidence for it. The point is that.

• 57:16Gordon Corera?

  It's in the air, this idea.

• 57:17David McCloskey?

  It's kind of in the air.

• 57:19Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 57:20David McCloskey?

  But the big picture at this point is hijackings have a political motivation and the terrorists want something. But you can kind of see this subtext in which a few people are starting to see airliners as potential weapons.

• 57:33Gordon Corera?

  And as we said, you know, we've seen before bombs on airliners, that's something we've seen. But of course, the advantage of using the airliner as a weapon is that the fuel onboard means you can get a pretty significant explosion. So it turns a plane into a missile, effectively, an explosive packed missile, which you can guide onto a target.

• 57:54David McCloskey?

  Yeah. So a, a fully fueled 767 holds about 11,400 gallons of fuel. And what this means is it has the, the chemical energy of hundreds of tons of TNT. And the crucial bit, though, is that if it impacts a structure, it will sustain a fire because there's so much fuel that, that could weaken the integrity of that structure. So it's basically, it's not really a missile, it's a massive fuel bomb.

• 58:24Gordon Corera?

  So that's the idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's come up with. He presents it to Bin Laden. But here's what's so interesting. Bin Laden's first response is, don't think so.

• 58:36David McCloskey?

  He does, I guess, what a lot of CEOs might do in meetings where a.

• 58:39Gordon Corera?

  A subordinate.

• 58:40David McCloskey?

  Comes up with a crazy idea and you're like, yeah, great idea, but. That's great, but maybe not now. You know, and this is 1996.

• 58:47Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 58:48David McCloskey?

  Bin Laden has, again, we don't have East Africa yet.

• 58:50Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 58:51David McCloskey?

  We don't have the coal. He's, he's just gotten to Afghanistan. So Bin Laden's political situation in 1996 is a little fraught. I mean, he, he's thinking also about, how do I keep this sanctuary?

• 59:01Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, it's a bit too dramatic and a bit too big. And I guess as well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an outsider. He's, he's not one of his subordinates, in a sense, which might make it easier for Bin Laden to have accepted it, maybe, or if it's Bin Laden's own idea. But you, you wonder if there's a bit of a sense in which he's a bit unsure about taking an idea from this other guy and this showman and this entrepreneur. So. You know, they're circling around each other, aren't they? But they're not quite intertwined yet as a, as a group.

• 59:33David McCloskey?

  I guess it's kind of like if a consultant pitches an idea from outside an organization. It's kind of easy to just say, yeah, maybe later, you know, interesting idea. And at Tora Bora in Afghanistan, which is where this meeting in 1996 happens. Bin Laden actually asks KSM to swear by it, to swear loyalty to, to him and to Al Qaeda, and to move his family to Afghanistan. And KSM says, no, I'm, I'm not going to. He wants to keep his independence, but I think there is, even though they don't know each other well, there's a mutual respect that both men have for each other. And I think this is crucial. There's a sense, even though they haven't consummated this yet, there's a sense that they could each use each other.

• 1:00:16Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And Bin Laden's star is going to arise as he starts to declare war on the US, as we said, as he takes the attack to the Americans with the embassy bombings. And I guess that shows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, actually, maybe this is the guy I should be working with. And so they're going to move closer together, aren't they?

• 1:00:35David McCloskey?

  It's interesting how KSM ingratiates himself into Bin Laden's circle. Because he, you know, through 1997 and 1998, KSM actually shuttles frequently between Pakistan and Afghanistan, visits with Bin Laden. He does things, you know, he actually, I mean, this is, this is a great influencing technique, right? And it shows how savvy he is because KSM realizes, well, if I want to set myself up well with the boss, a way to do that is by making myself invaluable to his lieutenants. So he does things like he fix, he actually fixes Al Qaeda computers in the late 1990s. He brings them news clippings and kind of word from the outside world.

• 1:01:18David McCloskey?

  He helps out on a freelance basis with media projects. So he, he does things in particular for Osama bin Laden's military commander that are seen as very useful. He's kind of, you know, he's, he's a useful guy, right? He's, he's seen as popular with the Al Qaeda rank and file in Afghanistan. He's seen as an intelligent manager, an operations guy. He's very, his personality is seen as very even keel. And KSM, I think, is deeply moved by the embassy bombings in 1998. And he is convinced by that act that Bin Laden is a very serious guy. He's really committed to striking America, which again, you know,

• 1:02:00David McCloskey?

  KSM's nephew had tried to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993 and hadn't succeeded. So there's this kind of family ambition here. And as the nineties go on, Bin Laden himself is, is in a different position. His, his sanctuary in Afghanistan is much more secure. He's becoming a jihadist celebrity. The fact that he's targeted by, that Bin Laden is targeted by the Americans.

• 1:02:23Gordon Corera?

  Raises his status.

• 1:02:24David McCloskey?

  And, and missed, yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:26Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And so that means that by the time we get to about the spring of 1999, that plot that KSM had come up with now suddenly looks more appealing to Bin Laden. So suddenly the kind of stars between them have aligned. And Bin Laden's going to summon Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to meet him in Kandahar and now say, let's do the airline plot. That idea you had back in 96, now I want to do it.

• 1:02:55David McCloskey?

  But he has some revisions. Bin Laden has some notes and he says, let's not do 10 planes. Right? That's too many. That insane speech you had, let's nix that.

• 1:03:06Gordon Corera?

  Because I'm the main character, Bin Laden, not you.

• 1:03:08David McCloskey?

  I think there is some of that here.

• 1:03:10Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10David McCloskey?

  This is not going to be.

• 1:03:11Gordon Corera?

  It's not all about you.

• 1:03:12David McCloskey?

  About you.

• 1:03:13Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13David McCloskey?

  But Bin Laden says, let's, let's do it. Let's make it happen. And it's at this meeting in the spring of 1999 that they come up with the menu of, of targets. The White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. But this will be a running theme throughout the planning. There's a disagreement over the prioritization of those targets. Now, by KSM's account, Bin Laden wanted to destroy the White House and the Pentagon. KSM himself, maybe for family reasons, had pushed for the World Trade Center.

• 1:03:46Gordon Corera?

  His nephew had tried to hit it.

• 1:03:47David McCloskey?

  Right. And all three of them, because it's, this is KSM, Bin Laden, and then Bin Laden's military commander, who were in this meeting, all three of them wanted to hit the Capitol. And this disagreement about the prioritization in particular of the White House versus the Capitol is not resolved in 1999. And in fact, it's going to run on throughout the life of the plot. The key point here is that the operation is approved. And within Al Qaeda, the plot now has a name and it is going to be called the Planes Operation.

• 1:04:16Gordon Corera?

  So there with the plot hatched, let's finish. And next time we'll look at how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed turns this idea of his into a plan. And crucially, how he goes about recruiting people, recruiting people who are able to live undercover in the West and who can be trained to fly planes into buildings. So do join us next time for that. But a reminder, of course, if you want to hear it straight away and the rest of this series, you can do so by being, coming a member of the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. And you'll also get access to some of the great bonus episodes we've got sitting alongside these series,

• 1:04:57Gordon Corera?

  including with Mike Morell, who was the CIA briefer of President Bush on the day of 9/11 itself. And I mean, the story he can tell about that day is absolutely remarkable. But otherwise, we'll see you next time.

• 1:05:09David McCloskey?

  We'll see you next time.

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