192. 9/11: The War on Terror (Ep 6)

What was the nature of the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11? Could the attacks have been prevented? And what is the enduring impact, 25 years on, of that grim day in September 2001? Listen as David and Gordon reach the dramatic conclusion of their exploration of the 9/11 attacks. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠to see David, Gordon and special guest Anthony Scaramucci live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 5 September: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/scaramucci-vs-the-rest-is-classified-team-america/ ------------------- 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?

  Could 9/11 have been prevented? And if so, who was to blame for the intelligence failure? And what is the enduring impact 25 years on of that awful day on September 11, 2001? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

• 0:42David McCloskey?

  And I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:43Gordon Corera?

  And David, this is the final episode in our six-part series on 9/11. We've gone through the day itself last time, but this time we're going to look at this really important and to some extent, still argued over question, which is whether there was an intelligence failure and whether this could have been prevented. And then we're going to look at the legacy, the impact of that day. But first, a message from our sponsors, HP.

• 1:15Gordon Corera?

  This episode is brought to you by HP.

• 1:18David McCloskey?

  In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation. It's the gaps between systems. That's where information leaks.

• 1:29Gordon Corera?

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• 1:41David McCloskey?

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• 1:46Gordon Corera?

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• 1:57David McCloskey?

  With a team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes find technology that fits their needs and budget.

• 2:04Gordon Corera?

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• 2:22Speaker 02

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• 3:04Speaker 02

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• 4:47David McCloskey?

  Before we dive into some of the big questions we're going to grapple with in this episode, you were covering security and intelligence matters on 9/11 and spent a lot of time interacting with people in the security service. I mean, what was the feeling inside CIA in the immediate aftermath of the attacks?

• 5:10Gordon Corera?

  Well, there's always this question after any terrorist attack, actually, which is, did it come out of nowhere? Were these people on the radar? Could it have been prevented? I mean, that is always the question. We've talked about it in the context of 7/7, the London attacks, and the fact little bits were known about some of these attackers and therefore, should it have been stopped? So that question almost always comes up straight away. I think, though, what was different about 9/11 was just the scale of it and the scale of the shock and the sense of what was at stake with that question, including politically for the Bush administration. What did they know? So it's always asked, but the intensity then was enormous. And it's interesting, I was going back and I was looking at,

• 5:52Gordon Corera?

  I made a documentary about, I think, five years after 9/11, about the CIA. And I went and talked to people who'd been in the CIA at 9/11. It was fascinating to look back now at some of their comments because there were different views. I mean, I spoke to Kofa Black, who was the head of the Counterterrorism Center. And his attitude was like, after 9/11, I felt like a junkyard dog which had been unleashed. And so his attitude was like, now at last, we go get them. You know, and that was the kind of gung-ho attitude. There was Mike Shoyer, we've talked about him, who'd been head of Alex Station, the team after Bin Laden in the 90s. I interviewed him and asked him, what did I feel like? And he could remember this moment. He'd moved on from that job. He had a call from a friend who was still working on Bin Laden

• 6:37Gordon Corera?

  and said, turn on the television. And his attitude was, hell, we could have stopped this and we didn't, and we, the CIA, are going to take the blame. When, in his view, it was the politicians' fault. We'll come back to that. And then there was a third CIA officer, I talked to Melissa Marley, and she said, she remembers this sense of shock in the place and an immediate sense of failure. And she says she felt a sense of failure because there had been opportunities to stop Bin Laden and that that was the job of the CIA and hadn't succeeded at it. And she felt that, you know, even when Tenet addressed staff in the auditorium the next day, she felt like that question was hanging in the air, unacknowledged. Should we, could we have stopped this? So I think even in that, in three interviews,

• 7:22Gordon Corera?

  you've got three very different perspectives about the intelligence failure and the questions about, had something gone wrong? And if so, who was to blame?

• 7:30David McCloskey?

  Maybe first, to the issue of the intelligence failure. It's a big question. What is the nature of the intelligence failure here? So I think there has been a lot of ink spilled on this question in the last 25 years. You know, we have the 9/11 Commission. We have a book by the intelligence scholar Amy Zegard called Spying Blind. Bob Graham, the senator who chaired the congressional inquiry into 9/11, wrote a book called Intelligence Matters, which gets at this question. We also have the recollections of those inside the intelligence community. Michael Shoyer's memoir. Richard Clark, who'd been counterterrorism director at the White House. George Tenet, the CIA director. Michael Morell.

• 8:09Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 8:10David McCloskey?

  You know, so we have a lot of different perspectives on the nature of the failure. And I think the perhaps most obvious, but I would argue most important place to start, and it is a piece of the failure conversation, is that the American intelligence community in the late 1990s failed to penetrate the upper echelons of Al Qaeda. We failed to have well-placed sources or signals intelligence intercepts of Al Qaeda senior leadership in the run-up to the 9/11 attack. And we did not penetrate the plot.

• 8:49Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 8:50David McCloskey?

  We did not penetrate the plot. And that is not a failure of dot collecting or analysis. It's a collection failure that I think, obviously, I start sort of upstream because if you had that, 9/11 would have been prevented.

• 9:07Gordon Corera?

  Totally.

• 9:08David McCloskey?

  Clearly.

• 9:09Gordon Corera?

  If you're inside the operational planning, if you had the kind of intelligence we've talked about when, you know, Russia was going to invade Ukraine, where you know what the plan is and you know when it's going to come, you can, in the case of counterterrorism, you can disrupt it.

• 9:22David McCloskey?

  Well, like Operation Overt here with MI5, they were inside the airliner plot.

• 9:27Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 9:27David McCloskey?

  And it stopped it.

• 9:29Gordon Corera?

  I mean, we talked about how tightly held the planning was. So the truth is, you would have needed someone around Bin Laden, around Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an agent that the CIA had recruited, or MI6, or a partner. Or you'd have needed signals intercept of them or some kind of maybe technical bugging surveillance operation in Afghanistan.

• 9:51David McCloskey?

  Which, actually, realistically, now that we're talking about it, the signal is...

• 9:54Gordon Corera?

  It's harder.

• 9:55David McCloskey?

  You probably wouldn't have been able to break up the plot because these guys were not speaking in anything other than code over the phone. And they were using human couriers for the most sensitive transmissions.

• 10:06Gordon Corera?

  Bin Laden had used a satellite phone until around 98. Then, you know, kind of news of it leaks and he stops using it. So you're right, you'd have needed that agent at the top. I mean, so there is a kind of question, if you go upstream, as you say, which is, well, why didn't they have that? Or should they have done that?

• 10:21David McCloskey?

  When we did our series on the coast bombing, which was this, you know, Al Qaeda agent who ends up killing himself and seven other CIA officers at coast Afghanistan in 2009, you know, we talked in the wash-up for that episode about how, when these failures happen, it's kind of like a plane crash where there's a lot of different stuff that goes wrong, right? And you can point to a lot of structural and organizational factors that feed into the intelligence failure. So they're not the most proximate cause or the sexiest things to talk about, but they do play into the nature of the intelligence failure. And when the 9/11 Commission produced its report,

• 11:04David McCloskey?

  it organized these failures into four categories. It said there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. And I leave management last because it's kind of the operational side of things, and we'll come to that in a moment. Start with imagination.

• 11:20Gordon Corera?

  It's a weird one, this.

• 11:21David McCloskey?

  It is a weird one.

• 11:23Gordon Corera?

  Because that became the big thing, I remember, from the nine eleven commission, which was a failure of imagination to imagine that Al Qaeda could do this.

• 11:29David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Gordon Corera?

  I mean, the idea, you want intelligence as well as imagination, don't you? I don't know.

• 11:34David McCloskey?

  I've always found the line to be a bit galling, to be honest with you, because they bring up a good point, which is that this kind of attack was not entirely unprecedented. I mean, you had the USS Cole bombing the year before. You have Hezbollah in Lebanon using suicide truck bombs. So, you know, the commission's not entirely wrong that perhaps there could have been more clarity that this was a tactic that Al Qaeda could have used against the US. But the reason I find the line to be a bit of a throwaway is that it makes it sound like national security

• 12:12David McCloskey?

  bureaucracies or spy services need to somehow develop plans to stop all manner of potential hypothetical plots. To me, it feels less like a failure of imagination and more like a failure to actually crack open a plot by having a well-placed source inside Al Qaeda, or, as we'll come to, finding bits and pieces of the operation along the way.

• 12:38Gordon Corera?

  Which you might be able to piece together.

• 12:39David McCloskey?

  And linking them together and then unraveling it that way.

• 12:41Gordon Corera?

  I agree. It's less a failure of imagination than a kind of failure of illumination to illuminate the plot.

• 12:46David McCloskey?

  Yeah, that's right. Now, failure of capabilities, we talked about how

• 12:50Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 12:51David McCloskey?

  starved the American intelligence community was throughout the 1990s. You know, for resources, a lot of the workforce had gone away. I mean, again, it's a deep structural thing that I think does play a role in nine eleven. There's an organizational problem, which we'll come to in more detail on the way the CIA and the FBI interact with one another, that does, I think, directly feed in to the failure on nine eleven, which is that these two agencies were not particularly good at sharing information with each other. And it meant that in a world where transnational terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, who are, you know, moving people essentially from a foreign theater into the US, it creates an incredible

• 13:34David McCloskey?

  awkwardness and difficulty for a domestic, essentially law enforcement agency like the FBI, and a foreign intelligence service like the CIA to collaborate. They have different cultures, you know, different tribes, essentially, that that do complicate a fight like counterterrorism.

• 13:51Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And there's issues around information sharing about the wall between law enforcement information and intelligence. So I think, I think that is a, you know, it's a kind of capabilities, a culture, an issue. One of the things that's not there is whether, because I guess the Mike Shoyer point he made to me was that this, this was a political failure, which I'm not sure the nine eleven commission's category is quite fit into that. But his argument would be

• 14:16David McCloskey?

  It's policy.

• 14:17Gordon Corera?

  It's, it's policy because the White House weren't willing to take the risks to put in place some of those plans to go after bin Laden before 2001. And in 2001, the Bush administration was not really focusing on counterterrorism in the way that some people thought it should. So there's a kind of policy political question behind it, which

• 14:40David McCloskey?

  I think that's valid.

• 14:41Gordon Corera?

  I think it's valid.

• 14:42David McCloskey?

  The CIA didn't think it had the authorities, the covert action authorities, to go and kill bin Laden until the 17th of September 2001.

• 14:51Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 14:52David McCloskey?

  When it gets a finding that is perhaps the most aggressive possible covert action finding you could receive, and that feeds Kofa Black's

• 15:00Gordon Corera?

  Kofa Black famously goes

• 15:01David McCloskey?

  I'm a junkyard dog who's off the leash.

• 15:02Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And he famously goes and tells Gary Sharan, who's he's sending to Afghanistan, I want you to bring me back bin Laden's head in a box on dry ice.

• 15:10David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Gordon Corera?

  So suddenly, you know, now you can go kill him.

• 15:13David McCloskey?

  Covert action is policy.

• 15:14Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 15:15David McCloskey?

  So the failure of policy here via the covert action mechanism at the CIA is that you had, you did have opportunities. I mean, there's a famous opportunity in the late 1990s where the CIA knows that bin Laden is attending a meeting, they know in advance, and he's attending a meeting with, essentially, I believe it's Emirati

• 15:42Gordon Corera?

  Sheiks.

• 15:42David McCloskey?

  Sheiks.

• 15:43Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 15:43David McCloskey?

  Potential financiers. And the decision is made to not fire a cruise missile at that

• 15:50Gordon Corera?

  Because you're going to kill the Emirati Sheiks.

• 15:51David McCloskey?

  Because you're going to kill these Sheiks.

• 15:53Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 15:53David McCloskey?

  Now, you could argue, till you're blue in the face, that maybe in the moment that made sense, but it is completely true that the gloves weren't off. So that was an opportunity. Shoyer's Alex Station throughout the late 1990s had come up with various plans now.

• 16:13Gordon Corera?

  Some more credible than

• 16:14David McCloskey?

  Some more credible than others.

• 16:15Gordon Corera?

  Rolling them up in a rug.

• 16:16David McCloskey?

  To actually go and try to, you know, capture bin Laden and bring him to the US and try him. But I think, I think it's true that if, if you had had a really aggressive covert action finding in the latter years of the Clinton administration, you probably wouldn't have had nine eleven, because one or more of those opportunities would have actually been taken, or the existence of a much more muscular finding would have led to resourcing and people and, and targeting opportunities that haven't even been created.

• 16:50Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 16:51David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 16:51Gordon Corera?

  And, and the Bush administration is, I mean, as we talked about previously, was looking at other stuff and was slow to get in on this as it took over. So I think that is one of the issues. Yeah.

• 17:02David McCloskey?

  Some of the more contentious, but maybe more interesting, missed chances, or kind of the, you know, nature of the, what the nine eleven commission calls the, the management failures, really operational failures, to potentially unravel the plot. It's worth going into these in some, in some detail, because we've talked about a few of them throughout the series. The commission highlights 10 points in, in the sort of run up to nine eleven, where there were these quote unquote management failures. Now, what the commission is careful to do is not to assert that had these, had these dots been connected, or

• 17:47David McCloskey?

  had organizations shared information fluidly, they're careful not to then make the case that nine eleven would have been prevented.

• 17:53Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 17:54David McCloskey?

  But they do identify these as missed opportunities. And, you know, the first one, I mean, essentially, they, we won't go through all 10 here, we've kind of synthesized it, but they essentially all boil down to information sharing between the CIA and the FBI.

• 18:08Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 18:09David McCloskey?

  The first batch of this is in early 2000, about 18 months before nine eleven, that critical point where the CIA doesn't watch list Khalid Al Madar, one of the Saudi operatives, or notify the FBI when it learns that he has a valid US visa, right? He's then lost in Bangkok, he's not tracked onward to the US. And then in March, the US does not watch list his operative counterpart Nawaf Al Hasmi, or notify the FBI when it learns he holds a US visa and has flown to Los Angeles. We have that weird set of interactions inside Alex Station where it's possible that the CIA intentionally didn't share information

• 18:54David McCloskey?

  with the FBI because they wanted to pursue an opportunity to pitch these guys.

• 19:00Gordon Corera?

  Either operation.

• 19:01David McCloskey?

  Or they just don't share because they want to keep the FBI out of their business, or there's some kind of internal snafu

• 19:07Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 19:08David McCloskey?

  and communication

• 19:08Gordon Corera?

  But something definitely goes wrong.

• 19:10David McCloskey?

  Something goes wrong. So that's kind of missed opportunity one. There's another set of potential missed opportunities in May of 2001, when another CIA officer reviews that same cable traffic, but again, doesn't notify the FBI about Meir's visa or Hasmi's US travel. Then we get to the summer of 2001. An FBI analyst, who is detailed to the CIA, is asked to go back and look at that same cable traffic, that, that exact same sequence from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to the US. On July 24th, 2001, she finds the cable on

• 19:53David McCloskey?

  Meir's visa. And then a week later, which gives you some sense of the urgency here, it's not that, you know, she's kind of doing this in her spare time.

• 20:01Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 20:01David McCloskey?

  A week later, she finds the one on his destination. And then in late August, weeks later, she found the March 2000 cable showing that Hasmi had flown to LA. And at this point, this FBI analyst, who's detailed to the CIA, says, oh, these two guys either, you know, are in the US or had been in the past. So next day, this FBI analyst and another FBI analyst go and meet with a rep from Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS, because they're trying to confirm if these, where are these guys? And the INS rep confirms that Meir had

• 20:44David McCloskey?

  entered the US on January 15th, 2000, he had left, and then he re-entered on July 4th, 2001. Because remember, he went back home because he'd had a kid and he was feeling homesick. But he returns on July 4th, 2001. There's no record that Hasmi had ever left. So, really important date in this story. On August 22nd, 2001, just weeks before September 11, the FBI finally knows that those two Al Qaeda-linked operatives, Khalid Al Madar and Nawaf Al Hasmi, are in the US. Their names are added to the State Department's tip-off watch list two days later. This is 17 days before nine 11.

• 21:27David McCloskey?

  But the tip-off watch list in 2001 is a border and visa watch list that is disconnected from airline booking systems.

• 21:35Gordon Corera?

  So it's it's international flights effectively.

• 21:37David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Gordon Corera?

  International entry, not domestic flight.

• 21:40David McCloskey?

  And it's also disconnected from the FAA's no-flight list, which means that these guys can get on board domestic flights because they have US driver's licenses and their true names.

• 21:51Gordon Corera?

  I mean, this is where I think a lot of the attention has, I think rightly focused on whether there was a significant screw up. And there are FBI people who are furious with the CIA about this. I mean, I remember interviewing a guy called Ali Sufan, who was an FBI agent. He was working on the USS Cole investigation, the bombing of the US naval ship off the coast of Yemen. And he'd been pressing for information from the CIA about some of the people and suspects in the meeting, and he was getting nothing. And he says, the day after nine 11, the CIA turned up and said, here is the information you wanted. And he says, he went to the bathroom and he threw up because he was so kind of shocked, disgusted at the fact that he'd not been passed this information.

• 22:34Gordon Corera?

  So I think, you know, the detail is important. And there is a question there about whether it's screw up of processes or whether, as I think some in the FBI would feel and others would feel, it was a cultural problem within CIA about being unwilling to share things with the FBI. And to me, it feels more like the latter rather than just a kind of bad processes, bit of slowness and a bit of a screw up. And I think, you know, that is a problem. I mean, we'll come back later to whether that would have made all the difference.

• 23:05David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Gordon Corera?

  But I think that there was a problem there.

• 23:07David McCloskey?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, in any case, when the FBI realizes that these guys are in the country, the last minute discovery isn't treated with any particular urgency inside the part of the FBI that has this information because this ensuing search for Khalid Al-Madar is treated as a low priority. It's handed off to a single junior special agent. It was his very first counterterrorism case. So this isn't like a, oh, my gosh, high priority.

• 23:34Gordon Corera?

  These guys are here. We've got to chase them and throw everything at chasing them.

• 23:37David McCloskey?

  It's kicked way down.

• 23:39Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 23:39David McCloskey?

  You know.

• 23:39Gordon Corera?

  I think that's the counterargument to the, this is the missed opportunity.

• 23:43David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 23:43Gordon Corera?

  Is that even if they'd known earlier, would it have led to a significant change in behavior and a break?

• 23:50David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Gordon Corera?

  Question mark. Yeah.

• 23:52David McCloskey?

  Around the same time, in the summer of 2001, there's another failure, which is linked to a man named Zacharias Musawi, who we introduced briefly.

• 24:00Gordon Corera?

  He was the kind of backup pilot that they thought they might need at one point. He goes for this flight training and, you know, this is the bit where he's doing flight simulator training, isn't it? And it's seen as a bit suspicious by some people around him.

• 24:13David McCloskey?

  Yeah. And Musawi has been pegged as the 20th hijacker. But I, you know, I think, I think what he probably was, was the backup for Jara, the Lebanese guy who was having, you know, second thoughts about the girlfriend and was looking wobbly in the middle of 2001. So Musawi, though, is in touch with Ramzi bin Al-Shib, the facilitator coordinator in Europe, and he's receiving $14,000 in wires. In any case, on the 15th of August, 2001, the FBI office in Minneapolis opens up an

• 24:52David McCloskey?

  investigation because the flight instructor at Musawi's school got really freaked out because he has this guy taking 747 flight lessons who says, like, I actually don't want to become a commercial pilot.

• 25:07Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 25:07David McCloskey?

  And the instructor's like, okay, this is, this is strange. Musawi is arrested on the 16th of August for overstaying his visa. And the FBI talked to him and they quickly realized that this guy's probably a jihadist. He's been to Pakistan, which is how you, the gateway to the camps in Afghanistan. And the FBI special agent writes, Musawi was an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act. And they have him, he's arrested a month before nine 11, not quite, nearly a month. Now, here's the thing, the FBI can't open his laptop. There's a legal back and forth over the type of criminal warrant that the FBI has.

• 25:52David McCloskey?

  And the FBI eventually decides it doesn't have the legal grounding to search his laptop. A headquarters agent is complaining, is saying to the Minneapolis field office guys, he's saying, you've written your FISA request, your foreign intelligence surveillance.

• 26:07Gordon Corera?

  To get access.

• 26:08David McCloskey?

  Request to get access, particular type of warrant to get access to this laptop. He's like, you wrote this to get people spun up. And the Minneapolis FBI supervisor says, you're damn right. And this is a direct quote, I'm trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.

• 26:24Gordon Corera?

  Wow.

• 26:27David McCloskey?

  So broadly in 2001, in the summer, you know, neither CIA nor FBI connect the presence of Midar, Hazmi, or Musawi to the flood of general reporting about imminent attacks. And it's interesting because there was a, a report that made it to George Tennant's desk at CIA in late August that was titled Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.

• 26:53Gordon Corera?

  I mean.

• 26:54David McCloskey?

  And it was about Musawi. There's a cliche that has emerged in the years since nine 11 that it was a failure, it could be a failure of imagination, but also a failure to connect the dots.

• 27:02Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. So David, there is this talk about the failure to connect the dots. It's an interesting phrase. I mean, there were a lot of dots that were there. You know, people learning how to fly, you know, the Musawi stuff, people trying to get into the US. I guess, I don't know what you think, but part of me feels like they still would have needed more dots.

• 27:28David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Gordon Corera?

  You could connect those dots plausibly if you were one person looking at them all and go, you know, we know bin Laden wants to attack the US. We know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wants to use airplanes. Here's a guy learning how to fly, you know, the Zacharias Musawi. Here's some people who've come into the US. But it would take quite a lot to connect all of those and go, ah, that's the plot, wouldn't it?

• 27:51David McCloskey?

  I think so. And I think we'll probably return after the break to go deep on this question of what really could it have been prevented? And I think it's a helpful, for me, it's a helpful exercise to kind of split the questions up a bit and to say, well, there's a question of what's the nature of the intelligence failure? Because there obviously was one. And then there's a question of, given reality at the time, could it?

• 28:16Gordon Corera?

  Could it be?

• 28:17David McCloskey?

  Could it have been prevented? And, you know, I think my, my view of the, of the first question, the failure, is that it has to be seen as a national failure, not just an intelligence failure. It is an intelligence failure, but it's, it's more than that because it is a failure at the intelligence level. It is absolutely a failure of collection.

• 28:37Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 28:37David McCloskey?

  And I think you could, you could plausibly make the case that it is an analytical failure to do some of this dot connecting.

• 28:47Gordon Corera?

  And to share the information.

• 28:48David McCloskey?

  And to share the information. It's a, it's an organizational failure between the CIA and the FBI, but it is also, it is a massive failure of our nation's counterterrorism policy and the covert action authorities that go along with that. I think from 1996.

• 29:07Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 29:07David McCloskey?

  When bin Laden declares war up to September 11, 2001, it is a primarily, I think, because the intel feeds into the policy. So it's, for me, it is primarily a national failure to deal with an emerging counterterrorism.

• 29:20Gordon Corera?

  I, I think that's right. It's a wider governmental failure. And we're not just, we're not making a party political point because it crosses over from the Clinton administration into the Bush administration. This issue of, of whether enough, you know, drive had been put into the need to confront al-Qaeda when it attacked the US multiple times when bin Laden had signaled he wanted to attack the United States. And if you have the drive to some extent from the top.

• 29:43David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Gordon Corera?

  Then you get the intelligence collection. Then you get analysts being told, you need to be on, you know, you need to be working hard on this to try and share information. And I think, so it is a, you know, there's an intelligence failure there, but it's broader.

• 29:55David McCloskey?

  Well, and it's, it's not implausible that there could have been policy energy in either the Clinton administration or the Bush administration to deal with this. You have dozens of Americans dead in the 1998 embassy bombings and you have 17 sailors dead on the USS Cole. So you already have, this isn't some distant threat. This is someone who's murdered Americans by the time we get to 2001.

• 30:20Gordon Corera?

  With that, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll look at this question about whether it could have been prevented and what the legacy was of nine 11, 25 years on. See you after the break.

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• 32:52Gordon Corera?

  Welcome back to this, really, the final part of our series on 9/11, 25 years on. I mean, the question, David, could it have been prevented? Should it have been prevented? What do you think?

• 33:03David McCloskey?

  I mean, impossible to answer, right? Because when you look back at dots, we all analytically go, well, someone should have connected these dots.

• 33:11Gordon Corera?

  But it's hindsight, isn't it?

• 33:12David McCloskey?

  It is hindsight. So there's tremendous hindsight bias at play here. But I do think, as much as we can, it is useful to try to put ourselves in the shoes of the actual CIA counterterrorism analysts and desk officers and the FBI special agents who were, you know, involved in investigations at the time and in the casework on al-Qaeda. I think, you know, the 9/11 commission looked at this and they, they're wishy-washy on it. They never really say the plot would have failed if any of those quote-unquote failures of management had been addressed, but they do catalogue all these missed opportunities along the way. Lawrence Wright in The Living Tower, which is a great history of many of these topics

• 33:56David McCloskey?

  and al-Qaeda and the run-up to 9/11. Lawrence Wright makes the case that surveillance on Midar and Hazmi would have broken it open. And he says, okay, if, for example, if Ali Sufan's team investigating the USS Cole bombing had known before August 2001 that these guys were in the US, they could have fought for authorities to surveil them, wiretap their apartments.

• 34:28Gordon Corera?

  And we do know where they are, of course, they're not hiding.

• 34:30David McCloskey?

  They're not hiding.

• 34:31Gordon Corera?

  They're not hiding.

• 34:32David McCloskey?

  You could look at their contacts, you could map their network.

• 34:34Gordon Corera?

  And as soon as they're under surveillance, you start to see them moving together for the plot itself. I, to me, I do find that plausible. I find that idea that if, if the FBI had been told earlier about, and the right people in the FBI, I think that's also a point. People like Ali Sufan, people who are kind of really deep in al-Qaeda operational investigation had been told about, you know, Hazmi and Midar, that, that it's possible, at least. That, I think, is the one time, the one way in which it could have been stopped.

• 35:05David McCloskey?

  Well, I guess, I mean, it's helpful to pull the thread out further because Midar and Hazmi end up on Flight 77, which is the plane piloted by Hanjor, Haney Hanjor, into the, into the Pentagon. And I'm much more sympathetic to the view that early surveillance might have disrupted part of the plot. Because in this telling, like, you, in rights telling, and I think in what you're describing, what you have to believe is that the FBI would patiently surveil these guys to watch the entire, and, and map the entire network of the 19 operatives in the US and get to

• 35:47David McCloskey?

  Attah, and then eventually you blow the whole thing wide open. I'm a little skeptical of that for a couple of reasons. The first one is that we have a bit of a Petri dish for what happens when the FBI gets information about Midar and Hazmi, because it happened in August of 2001.

• 36:12Gordon Corera?

  And they move slowly, you're saying.

• 36:13David McCloskey?

  It was seen as a low priority, it was given to a junior special agent, it wasn't really investigated. And to believe that the FBI would have behaved differently a year and a half earlier, you kind of, you have to assume it either is going to get to exactly the right person at the FBI who decides to do this, or that somehow just having that information in the FBI's system for 18 months would have, along the way, generated a different response. Maybe? But we actually do have an example of, we, we know what happened when the FBI got the information.

• 36:45Gordon Corera?

  Yes, yes.

• 36:46David McCloskey?

  And here's the other thing, we, we, we do have a kind of a sample of, which is we know how the FBI reacted to a tip-off about a guy acting really weird who has jihadist sensibilities and who's taking flight training, because they arrested Zacharias Misawi in August of 2001. And I, this is, I, I do think this is a difference in the way American law enforcement prosecutes or, or sort of investigates terrorism cases and perhaps just crime in general, is there, maybe this has changed, but would there have been enough patience to sit and wait

• 37:30David McCloskey?

  and watch and map the entire network? What we see with Misawi is that he's arrested for overstaying his visa, he's not, he's not surveilled for months, the, the FBI doesn't even get the authorities to get into his computer, and he's in prison, kind of just sitting there when 9/11 happens. So to me, the counterfactual on, you know, the FBI finding Midar and Hazmi, or understanding that Midar and Hazmi are in the States in early 2000, and then running an investigation that unravels the whole thing, what I think is more plausible is that the FBI may have

• 38:15David McCloskey?

  unraveled one of the parts, one part of the plot.

• 38:19Gordon Corera?

  Which, to be fair, though, could have then disrupted, it could have led to a delay. I mean, you end up with, you don't know, basically.

• 38:26David McCloskey?

  You don't know.

• 38:27Gordon Corera?

  You don't know whether it would have delayed the whole plot or whether the whole plot goes ahead without Hamzeh and Midar. You know, there, there are different possibilities there, which I think are quite hard to say it would have definitely stopped it, or it wouldn't have stopped.

• 38:38David McCloskey?

  And what we can definitively say is if, for example, just Midar and Hazmi had been deported, or in early 2000, before they've ever been put in touch with Attah, they're arrested, the plot just loses two of its muscle.

• 38:53Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and they bring in some other people.

• 38:54David McCloskey?

  And they bring in other people.

• 38:55Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 38:56David McCloskey?

  Or they just, they do it with 17 people instead of 19.

• 38:59Gordon Corera?

  So I think, it's interesting, because, I mean, this gets us really to the aftermath, because this question does, I think, once you get to the period after 9/11, as I said, quite quickly the blame game began, didn't it? You know, about whether it could have been prevented. I think you get the 9/11 commission. I remember watching, you know, the testimony, and this was kind of blockbuster hearings, you know, when Condi Rice was, you know, testifying, when Richard Clark was testifying and said, you know, "We let you down," he said to the American people. You know, he, he, you know, he sat there and in his testimony, as the head of counterterrorism said, "I'm sorry, we let you down." And I think there was a feeling like you could sense everyone looking to blame someone else. And I think that's the reality of where you, where we got to in the years afterwards

• 39:44Gordon Corera?

  in terms of this responsibility and prevention question, is that it becomes quite politicized. Because, you know, if you're in the Bush administration, you're trying to downplay the warnings you got, you know, or the sense you weren't urgent enough. If you're in the Clinton administration, you're trying to downplay the fact you didn't have to go off Bin Laden. If, you know, the CIA and FBI kind of dueling about some of this. So it does become quite a politicized question, which means I don't think we ever quite get to the bottom of it.

• 40:07David McCloskey?

  Do you think it could have been prevented?

• 40:08Gordon Corera?

  Uh, I think, I think probably only with better collection, with better collection and maybe more aggressive covert action.

• 40:14David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Gordon Corera?

  And, and, I mean, that moves us on to the legacy, doesn't it? And, and the impact afterwards. Because what, you get a few things, and you get attempts to put right some of the problems. So you get, you know, pressure for more information sharing, you get reform with the US intelligence community, you get a Department of Homeland Security to up your airline security, and for the CIA, you suddenly get, in Cofa Black's terms, the junkyard dog being led off the leash and being told, "You go do whatever you want, go take out al-Qaeda." And you get, you know, very aggressive.

• 40:45David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 40:46Gordon Corera?

  I mean, almost as, I think, a reaction to that sense of, did we fail? You then get a very, very aggressive, you know, posture, which is, we have to do everything possible.

• 40:56David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Gordon Corera?

  To stop this happening again, which of course leads into things and controversies for the CIA, like extraordinary rendition, torture, black sites, all these things, like we have to get every scrap of intelligence in order to prevent that sense of failure which people talked about in the wake of 9/11. So I think the kind of emotional impact on the US intelligence community was really palpable. And when you spoke to people over the years, you could, you know, I, I could see when I spoke to people, the kind of sense of pain that they carried, because your job, if you're in an intelligence agency, is to provide warning and to stop these kind of things. So, you know, whether it was preventable or not, it was still a failure to stop something.

• 41:33David McCloskey?

  Correct, absolutely.

• 41:34Gordon Corera?

  And I think that, that burden rested heavily on quite a few politicians and intelligence community people, and explained some of the actions in later years, including, you know, the, the 9/11 wars, as they're called.

• 41:45David McCloskey?

  Yeah. Well, this is why, I mean, in the first episode of the series...

• 41:49David McCloskey?

  I said that, you know, I think nine eleven is sort of a hinge moment in American history. There is a pre nine eleven and there's a post nine eleven. And when you look at the ledger of these nine eleven wars afterward, you see that in some ways, and I think Steve Cole has a great line on this, where he says it's actually easier to explain nine eleven than it is to explain what happened afterward. And I think that is absolutely true because when you go through it, there is just an absolute direct line from nine eleven to the conflicts that have shaped the last quarter century. The intelligence community, the Pentagon are basically rewired to fight.

• 42:30Gordon Corera?

  To fight a war.

• 42:31David McCloskey?

  War on terror. The intelligence community budget probably triples in the first decade after nine eleven. It undergoes its largest reorganization since the forties. We have conventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have troops in Syria fighting Yemen and Pakistan. We conduct counterterrorism operations in over seventy eight countries in the years after nine eleven. The, the numbers on the nine eleven wars are staggering. And there's been an effort at Brown University to actually come up with some of the human and economic cost associated with these conflicts.

• 43:11David McCloskey?

  The direct death toll is somewhere between nine hundred and five and nine hundred and forty thousand people killed in direct military action. It's obviously not just, that's not, those are everybody who was killed. The indirect death toll, maybe three million to five million from disease, starvation, collapse of infrastructure, thirty eight million people displaced. We have an American basing structure that gets set up afterward. We have bases in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Syria, the UAE. The economic cost of all of this, Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria is three trillion dollars. The total budgetary cost of the totality of these conflicts is eight trillion dollars.

• 43:56Gordon Corera?

  I mean, you can't explain, I mean, you know, it defines American foreign policy for the years to come. Let's take another look at it, though, from the side of Al Qaeda. I think this is kind of interesting to understand. If we go back to where we started, Bin Laden's idea was you cut off the head of the snake.

• 44:11David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 44:12Gordon Corera?

  You, you attack the US, it's a paper tiger. Then it will withdraw its support for regimes in the Middle East, like the Saudi regime. And then this wave of radical Islam will sweep over the Middle East and lead to success from Al Qaeda. Didn't work out that way.

• 44:27David McCloskey?

  The opposite.

• 44:28Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, the opposite happens, although, I mean, it's, he gets, and you're right, it doesn't work. You know, that strategy ultimately fails.

• 44:35David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Gordon Corera?

  Nine eleven and then the US reaction to nine eleven by launching some of the wars does create a wave of radicalization. It's true, both, you know, in the Middle East.

• 44:45David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Gordon Corera?

  Waves of jihadism and in Western countries, including the UK, which, which, which do to some extent, fuel the Al Qaeda ideology and support for Al Qaeda. Because you go from Al Qaeda being frankly, you know, a few thousand people in the camps in Afghanistan, to a period where jihadism is, you know, there's waves of it in Iraq, in Syria, you know, you end up with ISIS, you know, which takes over a large chunk of Syria. You end up with attacks in London, in Paris, in Madrid in the following years. So there is a sense in which the overall strategy fails for Bin Laden. But it does fuel a conflict between the West and to some extent jihadist radicalism or Islam, as he wants to put it,

• 45:28Gordon Corera?

  which will be bloody and awful, but ultimately which Al Qaeda's ideology doesn't win.

• 45:34David McCloskey?

  Right. I would argue you probably don't get nine eleven unless Al Qaeda has sanctuary in Afghanistan to really, to, to bring people in, to train them, to actually do the operational planning. You kind of, you need some kind of sanctuary. They have it in Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq and then the subsequent effort to basically dismantle the military and pieces of the state leads to the collapse of the state.

• 46:02Gordon Corera?

  In Iraq.

• 46:03David McCloskey?

  And the rise of Sunni insurgency that has an Al Qaeda franchise inside of it, that then all of a sudden has some kind of safe haven. And then when Syria collapses.

• 46:16Gordon Corera?

  They move into that.

• 46:17David McCloskey?

  The franchise in Iraq that had been seeded with people from Syria and elsewhere, those lines, this, you know, sort of supply lines that were going through Syria and Iraq come back into Syria. And so you have, you have this sort of, you know, domino effect in many ways, you know, and this kind of complicated intermingling of the way the US has intervened militarily in the region, the rise of these Al Qaeda franchises and the fact that you have, you know, a, a large number of young men who decide to go and fight, be it in Iraq or be it in Afghanistan or be it in Yemen. Or, I mean, there were, there was a mini insurgency in Saudi Arabia itself in two thousand and two and two thousand and three.

• 47:01Gordon Corera?

  None of that happens without nine eleven.

• 47:02David McCloskey?

  None of it happens without nine eleven.

• 47:05Gordon Corera?

  Although it is interesting to say that Al Qaeda itself will get pummeled. It will lose its sanctuary in Afghanistan. It will go into the tribal areas of Pakistan. We talked about this in other episodes. And of course, you know, the leaders of Al Qaeda, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself is going to get captured. Uh, and eventually Bin Laden himself will be killed a decade later. Takes a long, long time, as we talked about in our CIA versus Bin Laden series. But ultimately, Al Qaeda is a hugely diminished force now, twenty five years on. There's still a bit, a bit left out there. But I guess jihadist radicalism hasn't died and it's still, you know, that, that force is still there, but not in the way that Bin Laden wanted.

• 47:46David McCloskey?

  And, I mean, by one measure, I mean, you know, I think the ledger we just gave of the human and economic cost of the nine eleven wars is, is striking. There is another argument to be made, not so much an argument, but just a statement of fact, that there hasn't been a massive terror attack on the scale of nine eleven on American soil since then.

• 48:07Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, though we've come close, you know, Operation Overt, the liquid airline. It was designed to be on the scale, bigger than nine eleven, ten airliners going transatlantically. So, you know, it's been close, but the counterterrorism machine has picked up.

• 48:19David McCloskey?

  Yeah, and I think eventually the CIA figured out a kind of, or crafted, I think, a, a vision for what the defeat of Al Qaeda as an organization looked like. It took a while, took probably ten years after nine eleven to finally get there. But the combination of just relentless CT operations, the drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, eventually, I think, led to, you know, this kind of Al Qaeda central, the thing that had plotted and designed nine eleven.

• 48:54Gordon Corera?

  Being decimated.

• 48:54David McCloskey?

  Is decimated and it's worth, I mean, you mentioned Bin Laden, you know, he's, he's killed in twenty eleven in a raid. I mean, it's worth rounding out some of the other characters from the story because KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he's captured in March of two thousand and three.

• 49:07Gordon Corera?

  And we should say, he is, he is still.

• 49:10David McCloskey?

  Still.

• 49:10Gordon Corera?

  In Guantanamo Bay, and I've been to Guantanamo a number of times, and nearly covered some of his trials, but his trial keeps on getting delayed. So he's not quite been, if you like, justice, uh, in terms of him being brought to justice, but he's still there.

• 49:24David McCloskey?

  Ramzi bin Al Sheeb, that coordinator, one of the members of the Hamburg cell who didn't get a visa to come to the US, he's captured in September of two thousand and two in Karachi. He's in Gitmo. There's a few of KSM's other facilitators who are involved in the plot, likewise in Gitmo. So, you know, you do have this organization that eventually is defeated. But it's coming in the context of a, a much broader about face, really, in US foreign and defense policy that happens in the wake of nine eleven.

• 49:57Gordon Corera?

  Okay, so that's, um, the, the US and the world, Al Qaeda in the world. Let's finish by just talking a little bit about what it does to the US itself. I think, I mean, it changes US politics, it changes US culture. It creates a kind of sense of fear, I think, which, which pervades. I mean, it changes something, I mean, as an outsider, but someone who spent a lot of time in the US, it changed the American psyche, I think, in a really profound way. You know, you go through that period in the nineties where the US is the kind of lone superpower, it's one. It can afford to be comfortable. It's never been attacked really on its homeland, you know, the closest Pearl Harbor, which is not, you know, within the continental homeland.

• 50:37Gordon Corera?

  And then suddenly, in a way that, you know, other countries had experienced terrorism, well, not necessarily on the scale of nine eleven, but for the US. I think that the nature of it was a, a shock to the system, which had kind of really profound ripple effects politically, socially, culturally in the coming years.

• 50:56David McCloskey?

  Yeah, look at polling and recent presidential elections and just over half of Americans will say they're very or somewhat worried that they or a member of their family would, would be victims of terrorism. I mean, that's absolutely not going to be the case in the late nineteen nineties prior to nine eleven. I think it really did, it created a national mood of fear, a desire for revenge, I think. A sense that we are at war with a very amorphous enemy that we can't.

• 51:22Gordon Corera?

  The war on terror.

• 51:23David McCloskey?

  Quite pin down or defeat, you know? A sense in some quarters of a kind of civilizational threat. It's probably hard to imagine.

• 51:33David McCloskey?

  Trump proposing, for example, his, you know, ban on immigration from certain Muslim countries.

• 51:38Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 51:38David McCloskey?

  Without nine eleven.

• 51:40Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, the link into into populism is interesting because you you get nine eleven, then you get the things like the Iraq war, you know, which is partly a reaction. Very much, I think, wouldn't have happened without nine eleven. And then you get the kind of anti-Iraq war feeling and the anti-interventionism, which fuels some elements of populism on the left and right, kind of, you know, kind of changes US politics. It's kind of interesting and complicated how it feeds through. It's almost, I find it quite hard to disentangle, actually, because it's it's just everywhere.

• 52:08David McCloskey?

  Yeah, I also think, you know, look very recently, I mean, just earlier this year, at the the capture of Nicolas Maduro, for example, in Venezuela, or frankly, even the sort of intelligence and targeting that went into helping the Israelis kill the Supreme Leader of Iran. That surveillance, kind of intelligence man hunting apparatus that the US is using all around the world now probably doesn't exist without nine eleven either. So you have this really beefed up kind of intelligence and security apparatus inside the state that, you know, a lot of debate in the intervening years about whether, in some cases, you know, we talked about the Snowden revelations,

• 52:53David McCloskey?

  whether in some cases that thing is intervening or, you know, impeding American civil liberties. But the reality of it is, is that this this machine that has been built up is being used and it's being used outside of the context of the nine eleven wars now because it's an existing, it's a capability that that the US

• 53:12Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 53:13David McCloskey?

  intelligence community has built.

• 53:14Gordon Corera?

  I mean, the CIA gets militarized to some extent, doesn't it? You know, drone strikes and, you know, kind of detainee and interrogation programs. It becomes a different organization because of nine eleven. And that, even as some of the threats change, that lives on. And I think so many of the things, because it is now 25 years on, it is starting to recede. It's, you know, receding from memory for a lot of people. And yet the kind of legacy of it is so persistent in areas, even where as the terrorist threat fades.

• 53:41David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 53:42Gordon Corera?

  The things it created, whether it's populism or whether it's a different CIA, they live on.

• 53:46David McCloskey?

  Believe it, you think like a a political issue like immigration in the US. Immigration is probably not the national security battlefield that it is today without nine eleven. We talked in the series, immigration prior to nine eleven is kind of seen as travel facilitation in a lot of ways. The security measures that are taken at the border, at airports, or whatever, they're they're pretty thin. And that becomes beefed up, it becomes a political issue. It gets connected to, rightly in some cases, but it gets connected to the issue of terrorism and counterterrorism. And so you you see the the language and themes of the war on terror get integrated into US politics, even at the kind of domestic level.

• 54:28Gordon Corera?

  I mean, I think there is this interesting question about whether the US overreacts to nine eleven. And I think some people say that. I think I think it slightly misses the emotional impact that nine eleven had on the US. And it's only if you can understand that emotional impact that you understand why it did act the way it did afterwards. But certainly, you know, I think there is, you know, a degree to which, you know, you talked about the costs, you know, financially, militarily, it, there's a kind of overstretched, imperial overstretched to some extent. There's a desire to reshape the world, I think, driven partly by the insecurity of the Bush administration, having missed it and allowed it to happen. Yeah, it it it does something to America. It's not the same America that it was before nine eleven.

• 55:13David McCloskey?

  No, and I think one of the ways you can see that, just how deep it gets into the American psyche, is if you look at entertainment.

• 55:21Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 55:21David McCloskey?

  Look at sports, you look at fiction. It infects the national mood. Spy thrillers after nine eleven start to be more counterterrorism, Middle East focused, right? You have television programs like Homeland or 24 that they speak the language of the war on terror.

• 55:39Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 55:39David McCloskey?

  Right? I mean, Bruce Springsteen.

• 55:42Gordon Corera?

  The Rising.

• 55:42David McCloskey?

  Releases an entire album.

• 55:44Gordon Corera?

  Which great album, great song.

• 55:45David McCloskey?

  Great album, but about nine eleven, you know? And even in something that seems as maybe as distant from national security as architecture, we have all those Jersey barriers and bollards to prevent car bombs. The way buildings are designed, the entrances that people use to walk in, how we enter government, not just government buildings, but any commercial, big commercial building is totally changed.

• 56:08Gordon Corera?

  I mean, I suppose as we finish, I mean, for both of us, it kind of affected our careers, didn't it? I mean, for me, I shifted from really just covering the US to covering national security. And 25 years on, I'm still doing that. And for you, I mean, you end up at the CIA being an analyst of jihadist groups and the kind of groups which grew out of nine eleven, the reaction to nine eleven. So in a way, we're both, you know, examples of people whose whose whose careers have been shaped by by this one event.

• 56:32David McCloskey?

  Yeah, frankly, the the seat that I took at CIA may not have existed, may not have ever been resourced or funded had nine eleven not happened and the CIA not exploded in its hiring and recruitment in the years afterward. I mean, I do think that it is, for me, the 25 years since, it has been an era of strategic drift in some ways for the US. And it feels like off potential off ramps in this conflict weren't taken, maybe for understandable reasons, to your point, on the national psyche and mood totally changing after nine eleven. But as we look back on it, I I do think that there are points

• 57:17David McCloskey?

  where it may have been more in America's national interest to have, you know, essentially declared victory and been done.

• 57:28Gordon Corera?

  And and, you know, there is this argument that actually the shift to a more dangerous Russia, and particularly the growth of China as a kind of national security issue, were missed because of the focus post nine eleven on counterterrorism as the dominating threat. You talk to people in MI5 or whatever, and they'll say, well, you know, we we didn't have the resources to look at Russia or look at China because everything was about terrorism. So I think it does, it consumes us, doesn't it?

• 57:51David McCloskey?

  Yeah, it does. No, I think maybe among the deepest impacts is the fact that nine eleven itself, certainly, but maybe more so the response to it. I think it convinced a lot of Americans that the government and its institutions couldn't be trusted to lead on the global stage. And, you know, I I think in some ways it has contributed, nine eleven, the sort of pre nine eleven, post nine eleven, has contributed to a a sense that we've lost something as a nation. We're not, we're not as good as we used to be. It was better before nine eleven and now because of the attacks and because of the response, it's worse.

• 58:35David McCloskey?

  So there's there's some sense that this kind of amorphous force has like stolen away some of our greatness. So I think, I mean, for me, nine eleven, most profoundly, is this kind of, the the post nine eleven era is an era of America having a profound sense of post-traumatic stress that we're still dealing with today.

• 58:55Gordon Corera?

  I think that's right. I think that's the right place to end this 25 years on. Hard to believe, but it is 25 years. Thank you for joining us on this, you know, journey. It's difficult at times to talk about such a, you know, dark day. But I think it has illuminated, you know, kind of many of the issues, both behind the plot and the aftermath. So thank you for joining us. Reminder, do join the Declassified Club if you want to hear more from us, you know, including those bonus episodes related to this. But yeah, thank you and see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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