393. Road To 9/11: Interviewing Bin Laden In The Caves of Tora Bora (Part 5)

What was it like to interview Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora caves? Who were the other terrorists behind the infamous 1998 fatwa? How did Monica Lewinsky derail the response to the East Africa embassy bombings? In Episode 5 of this series, Williams and Anita are joined by CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen, the producer of bin Laden’s first television interview, to discuss the terrorist leader’s declaration of war. Use code 'EMPIRE' to get an additional 2% - on top of the 10% discount - for orders placed before 8th September at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:16Speaker 00

  Eastern Afghanistan, March 1997. A three man TV crew is driven up freezing mountain roads. They have each been given a pair of glasses with blacked out cardboard as blindfolds. They're searched, stripped of their cameras, and left to wait in a mud hut.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  It's now past midnight. The doors open and in walks a tall, softly spoken man with an AK-47 and a camouflage jacket. His name is Osama bin Laden. He is here to deliver his first televised declaration of war against the United States.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  And one of the three men in that hut, the producer who made the interview happen, joins us on this podcast today. This is the story of Osama bin Laden's declaration of war, told by a man who had a front row seat to the action.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnn.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  And me, William Derempel. And welcome to our guest, my old friend, Peter Bergen, one of the great security journalists of his generation, CNN's national security analyst and author of a wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, which I just reread yesterday and which is just a spectacular summation of a long and complicated story. He's also the producer of the interview we just opened with, the first television interview Osama bin Laden ever gave to the Western press. He's also one of my eldest friends. So Pete, welcome.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Thank you, Willie.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Before we get going and get you up that mountain, Peter, properly, I'd love you to set the scene for us, because where we left bin Laden at the end of the episode, he was landing at Jalalabad in May 1996. He was broke, he was stateless, he was disowned. I mean, many in the State Department thought he was washed up. So Peter, can you remind us why bin Laden ended up in Afghanistan and why he chose to make the name now so familiar to us, the Tora Bora Caves, his base?

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Well, thanks for having me on. You know, Afghanistan for bin Laden was sort of the Medina of the 20th century. This is a man who believed that, modeled himself very explicitly on the Prophet. So when the Prophet was exiled from Mecca to Medina, you know, and began his war to kind of bring Islam to not only Saudi Arabia, but also the Middle East. Bin Laden, in his own mind, and this shows a certain amount of his hubris in a sense, he saw, he tried to replicate in many ways the life of the Prophet Muhammad. And so his exile from Sudan to Afghanistan resonated in his own mind as reminiscent of what the Prophet had done. And of course, the Prophet was not

• 5:03Speaker 04

  only a religious figure, he was also, he fought 27 different wars and conflicts, so he was also a major military leader. Bin Laden comes to Afghanistan, he doesn't really know what to expect. He had spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, he arguably spent more time in Afghanistan than many other countries in his life. But the Taliban had just taken over and he didn't really know what to expect. He lands in Jalalabad, he is greeted by a warlord called Yunus Kallus, who's a, not in the Taliban, but one of the Afghan warlords who fought the Soviets. And he gets a warm reception because bin Laden had really fought rather bravely against the Soviets during the 1980s war, despite some later kind of discussion that he was sort of a Gucci gorilla, really didn't participate in the fighting. And then very soon thereafter, the Taliban take over

• 5:46Speaker 04

  Jalalabad, but they give him kind of a hero's welcome and they, you know, they really see him as a genuine war hero. He sets up trouble in Jalalabad. In the end, it turns out to be a rather ideal place for him to launch his forthcoming holy war.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And why did he reach out to you, Peter? What's the, what's the process? I mean, you know, obviously this is an interview that most of the world's media would have been fighting and killing for, at least in retrospect. How, how did you, you were the person that actually fixed this up?

• 6:15Speaker 04

  I was living in New York in the early 90s. And so a group of guys who had trained in Afghanistan or supported the Afghan war effort, drove a van into the World Trade Center building, blew it up, hoping to bring both towers down. They didn't succeed, but they killed six people. So I went to my bosses at CNN and said, look, there's something happening in Afghanistan. We need to try and try and dig into it. And I didn't really know who was behind it, but this group had, was an organisation, organisations have leaders. Initially, I thought it was an Afghan warlord called Gulbuddin Hatanachar.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Who was held responsible for most of the nutty extremist stuff. He was throwing acid into schoolgirls' eyes and this sort of stuff. And we used to blame him for almost anything kind of very extreme at that time. So it was a very sensible attribution.

• 6:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was the only prime minister in history probably to be shelling his own capital on a daily basis at the time. So we went to Afghanistan, we made a documentary, it's fun, tried explaining about this phenomenon of the Afghan Arabs and potential, their potential for violence. And then in 96, the US State Department released a two page white paper, which was actually very useful. And it was full of information about this guy Osama bin Laden, who I'd never heard of, a financier of Islamic extremism is the way they kind of framed it. I then went back to my bosses at CNN, who like, you know, they'd obviously never heard of Osama bin Laden. And so I think this guy was responsible for the Trade Center attack in 93. That wasn't quite correct, but it was close enough. So we went there, I went with Peter Arnett, who was at the time the world's most famous foreign correspondent.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  This was the guy who made his name in the Gulf War, describing Scuds and American missiles.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, Peter was an old fashioned war correspondent. I mean, he ran to the sound of gunfire. He loved it. And also Peter Juvenal, who had gone in 75 times in, a British cameraman, 75 times into Afghanistan during the Soviet war, which was unbelievably dangerous.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Later to become the proprietor of the Ghandebak Lodge, our favourite watering hole in Kabul.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  I mean, war has its hotel, the Ghandebak Lodge was that hotel, great place. To answer your question, Willie, you know, I reached out, so many of the people that were supporting bin Laden lived in London. And they were basically Saudi dissidents, Syrian dissidents, and they, you know, they are, they knew bin Laden in to one degree or another. And they were, they had never dealt with the media or had very, and they really didn't understand how the media worked. And they were very concerned, were agents of the CIA, they were very concerned, will we give this guy a fair shake? And, and you know, they just, I spent weeks with them. And we mostly talked about the Quran, Saudi history, and you know, I was by that, by then about 33 and I, you know, I had developed patience, which, you know, which was very, you know, I spent a lot of time with these guys.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Peter, what did bin Laden, what was he seeing when he walked into his new home, the Tora Bora Mountains? What was there? How hospitable was it to human life? You know, what was, what was he walking into?

• 8:51Speaker 04

  For, for the son of a extraordinarily rich man, bin Laden really was like a survivalist. He loved taking, you know, 12 hour hikes in the mountains of Tora Bora. He lived like a medieval peasant in the, in the Tora Bora Mountains, much to the annoyance of some of his kids, who knew that he had a lot of money. At the time, he was kind of broke, but the point is that he actually chose this life. He, he lived in this like Bramshackle house, house is almost too kind of word, in Tora Bora, which is where he loved, sort of, he loved the mountain, alpine air. He would take his sons on 12 hour hikes around the mountains, which they hated, but he loved. And, you know, it, it was a place that he was very comfortable with because he had set this place up in the 1980s during the war against the Soviets. He knew these mountains like the back of his hand.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  And it's astonishingly beautiful, we should say. It's one of the most extraordinary places to walk around.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, the, the mountains rise to 14,000 feet. Willie, you've been there, I guess?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  And I think it's fair amount of time there. And it's on the Afghan Pakistan border. So it's an ideal place to sort of, you know, go back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, you know, bin Laden arrives there, he also has a bigger house in Jalalabad, which is a sort of relatively small city near Tora Bora. And this is where he kind of essentially resets his life. He spent five years in exile in Sudan. He's left with almost nothing and he doesn't really, really know what to expect with the Taliban.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  We should perhaps explain that Jalalabad had been the winter capital of the Afghan kings. And it's notably warmer than, than Kabul. It's a place that's quite sort of, I mean, it's quite a civilised place by Afghan standards. It's not, it's not that remote.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  It has a subtropical climate. And when we went there, we checked into the Zero Star Spingar Hotel, which you may have stayed at, Willie.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  I stayed there.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  That's where we waited around to, to get the go ahead to go on interview bin Laden.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Right. So while he's there, you know, sort of taking his reluctant sons on very long walks and eating, I believe, sort of a very, very basic diet of, you know, just bread, rice, you know, some fruit from time to time, living like a monk, as you say, you know, sort of this, this very religious and, and, you know, austere life. At what point does his path cross with Mullah Omar, who is also, you know, a big deal at this time?

• 11:07Speaker 04

  Mullah Omar was basically a village mullah. You know, he's well regarded by other of his colleagues because he was incorruptible, sort of led this very humble life. By 1994, he had styled himself the commander of the faithful and he had taken over much of southern Afghanistan. And he was a one-eyed cleric, he fought against the Soviets. He was extremely provincial. They saw Kabul as sort of Sodom and Gomorrah, a place of sin, you know, the longtime capital of Afghanistan. So Muammar, kind of, and Bin Laden, they sort of reach out to each other. Muammar is governed by ideas around Pashtun hospitality, which is extremely important for Pashtuns, he's part of the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  He also regards Bin Laden as a war hero. And, you know, he gives him protection. Now, that is not to say that the Taliban love Bin Laden universally. In fact, a lot of them don't. They, you know, they know he's complicating their quest for international recognition by his threatening statements against the United States. Quite a lot of them want Bin Laden to leave Afghanistan at a certain point. But Muammar is, you know, he's the commander of the faithful, it's a theocracy, and it's basically if he wants Bin Laden to stay, Bin Laden's going to stay.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  And this declaration of jihad that is made in front of your cameras, give us the immediate background on that.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  The background was, yeah, I reached out to these guys in London, spent a lot of time with them. Bin Laden had delivered a declaration of war in Arabic, but no one had paid any attention to it. And in Bin Laden's mind, he had a duty to warn if he was going to kind of attack civilians. And so he wanted to talk, his contact in London told me, you know, we were talking to CNN, BBC, Sixty Minutes, CBS. And in the end, they chose CNN. You know, we went there, we spent a lot of time in Pakistan, we had two of Bin Laden's associates with us. We checked into the Zero Star Spingar Hotel in Jalalabad, we waited and waited. At one point, that his media advisor came, he said, "Don't bring any of your equipment with us." And we, you know, we had a $50,000 camera and we had professional equipment, but this

• 13:12Speaker 04

  was an order for negotiation. And, you know, it's interesting that they would use a bomb and a camera to later kill Ahmed Shama Sood, the leader of the Taliban resistance. But so, they told us, "Don't bring anything with you, including your watches, just bring your clothes." So, one evening, a group of heavily armed men arrive in a van, we get in, they drive towards Kabul, then they drive up into the Tora Bora mountains, change of vehicles, blindfolds, searched very carefully, multiple levels of security, a lot of this sort of may have been for our, you know, kind of a little bit of security theater. But the point is, is that by the time we get to this mud hut in the middle of the night, I estimate it was midnight, I didn't really know much about Bin Laden compared to anybody

• 13:57Speaker 04

  listening to this, but I didn't even know, exactly know what he would look like.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Were there not pictures from the beginning? That, we're so familiar with that face, though.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Don't forget, he was a very fundamentalist Saudi Wahhabi, who do not take pictures. And at that time, there was maybe one, Robert Fisk had maybe taken a picture of him in 1993, in Sudan, but it was like, very limited. And so he walks in, and he's six foot four, I estimated, he is very rail thin, he carried himself like a cleric, he wasn't a table-thumping revolutionary, I knew enough about him to say that his, you know, his views on the United States were, you know, and Israel and most Arab regimes was very intense. But when he was talking, it was like he was reading the phone book, he was very kind of monotone. He spoke in Arabic and he had a very good translator with him, who I took to be some kind of Saudi cleric.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  He delivered, you know, this declaration of war against the United States.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  He was reading or he was just talking?

• 14:52Speaker 04

  He was talking, he was talking. And, and he'd spoken Arabic, he speaks English, you know, he grew up, look, he comes from one of the most lead families, he went to a school where he had an English teacher, Brian Fifield Shayler, who was an Oxford, recent Oxford graduate who taught in English, he spent a little time in Oxford when he was 17, two and a half months, on a kind of like exchange program type of thing. So he speaks English, but he did, you know, he didn't speak English to the degree that he wanted to do an interview, he wanted to be very clear of what he was going to say. So, some of the things he said in the interview, I frankly didn't understand, because we didn't, so he mentioned Aden. Well, it turned out, I many years later, that the, his men had bombed a hotel in Aden that was housing American soldiers who were on their way to Somalia to support Operation

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Restore Hope, which was feeding starving Somalis in 1993. So, the interview sort of came along, and, you know, he spent an hour with us, and he was, they were very kind of, you know, they did, he wasn't going to hang out. I mean, we had a cup of tea, took some pictures, and then he left. And I, you know, at the end of the interview, I think it was maybe like 3:00 in the morning or something, and again, I'm estimating, you know, I thought, but this is all very interesting, but how do you, how do you operationalize this from a mud hut at 6,000 feet in Afghanistan, which the Taliban are basically put back into the Middle Ages? There was no phone system, the only way you could communicate was through Thiria satellite phones, which were the very early satellite phones. A little over a year later, the US Embassy attacks in Africa happened, and then it was very clear that these guys could kill, you know, they didn't care about killing large

• 16:20Speaker 04

  numbers of civilians.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Did you ever get that feeling from the man himself? I mean, you know, sometimes people look back and they embellish an experience, and I know you're not that kind of person, but when you, when he walked in, did you feel that you were in the presence of somebody who was capable of such violence?

• 16:37Speaker 04

  No, no, I mean, they'd invited us, so I wasn't scared, I was like, you're, you're both journalists and writers and you work in this, so like, when you're in that situation, it's like, what you're asking is, am I getting what we need?

• 16:50Speaker 00

  You work for this, exactly.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  And they'd invited us, it was four years before they beheaded Daniel Kell.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Well, I was, I was thinking of that, I was thinking of exactly that, but, you know, you, you are excited, but you also have a spidey sense of, you know, I hate, I like, I fear, this, I mean, was there an emotional response you had to him walking in at all?

• 17:10Speaker 04

  I found him very hard to read, Anita. I found him hard to read, he wasn't like, there was no, A, there was like, very, it wasn't like there was a lot of small talk, there was just like, we did the interview, we did it, I mean, the people around him hung on his every word, there were maybe a dozen guys with weapons sort of outside the vision of the camera, and they filmed the camera, they filmed the interview on their camera, again, because of this concern about security. And, you know, the, I thought, wow, this guy's serious, he seems serious, the people around him are serious, but, you know, it's one thing to be serious, another thing to have capability. So, lots of people may have the intent to attack the United States, do they have the capability? And some people have the capability, but do they really have the intent? So, at that time, we didn't know, a bunch of things I now know, we didn't know that

• 17:53Speaker 04

  his men may have trained some of the fighters in the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, which, in which 18 American servicemen had died. At the time, it seemed like a bunch of threats. In fact, they invited me back in 1998, and I didn't go because I felt, okay, there's not much more to say, it's going to be the same set of threats. And, you know, John Miller of ABC News then went in 98 and did another interview with Bin Laden where he sort of said much of the same things.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Do you regret that now? I mean, this is one of the great interviews of the 20th century that you turned down.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  Well, no, but I don't regret it because we, I mean, basically, he'd said that, he, you know, our interview in 97 was the first televised interview, and a year later, John Miller did this interview, and Bin Laden said some of the same things, gave a little bit more access, they were a little more comfortable to the media at the time, but fundamentally, it was the same set of threats. And Bin Laden knew by then, in May of 98, the embassy attacks in Africa were just a few months away.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  And, and there is a real, I think, fascinating insight in your book, which is that he knows what he's doing when he's talking to the media, this is all part of a strategy and a plan, this isn't, you know, some vanity thing, there is, there is a plan here.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Well, so, I mean, look, CNN is going to be half of, many listeners to recall this, CNN was sort of the X or Twitter of the age. I mean, that was the most sophisticated way of communication at the time.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  It made its name in the Gulf War, and it was right in the lead at this point.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  I mean, now, the Bin Laden equivalent would just put a note, you know, would tweet about it. He went from somebody who was, you know, had very little experience with the media, and also, you know, from a religious point of view, rejected, you know, photographs, video, et cetera, et cetera. When he grew up, he was, there were no pictures in his house, there was no photographs, he wasn't photographed because of his religious beliefs. But anyway, that changed.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Peter, I've got a question. I'd heard from friends who were covering the Afghan conflict at this point, that these Arab Afghans, as, as we first knew them, were actually very scary, that people had been going in with the Taliban and with the Mujahideen before them, and were always well-treated because of this Pashtun ethic of hospitality, and, and, you know, you might be marched 40 miles over the mountains on a crust of bread, but they looked after you, and, and they didn't threaten you. The first we ever heard of the Arab Afghans was that they were not at all welcoming to Westerners, and regarded them as a threat, and occasionally used to take potshots at them. Did you find Bin Laden's people...

• 20:28Speaker 00

  Suspicious and hostile, I suppose.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  They weren't hostile, but I mean, really, that is absolutely true. They, they, they, they just generally did not like Westerners or particularly Americans. But, you know, in, in this context, they'd invited us to do an interview. They weren't friendly, they weren't unfriendly, they just, we did our thing and then we went back. When the interview aired, um, and, uh, in May of 97, it got virtually no attention because by that point, you know, Bin Laden hadn't really seemingly done anything.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  How funny, this crucial interview was ignored at the time. Low, low point on the news, below Monica Lewinsky or something.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  So this goes unnoticed. In February, 1998, Bin Laden merges operations with another name that's going to resonate a lot with people. Amin al-Zawahiri, this doctor from Cairo. And at this point, do people take notice? Because they sign this joint statement of intent, the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders. And in it is a radical fatwa, which declares that killing Americans and whoever helps Americans is actually a duty. It's, it's a blessing on, on the Muslim who does it. It's a fatwa, it's a religious edict. I mean, we should remind people, you know, they'll associate that word with Salman Rushdie, but it is a, it is a religious cause for the faithful to carry out this rule.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Um, so do people sit up when, when this is signed, when the word fatwa and this edict goes out?

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it got some coverage. You know, there were a very limited number of people in the US government looking at this question. They were in the New York field office of the FBI and then also at the CIA Bin Laden unit. He was still like not particularly well known. It's only with the embassy bombing attacks in August of 98 that you really suddenly he's, you know, there's a ton of media about him. But, you know, this does get to an interesting question, which is this, this fatwa is based in part on the, the Blind Sheikh, um, who is a graduate of Al Zawah University in Cairo, who is, which is the Vatican of Sunni thought. And Bin Laden is not a religious scholar at all, was Amin al-Zawahiri, he was, Zawahiri, he was a surgeon.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Important point, that, that these are both, these are both characters who for all that they're wrapping themselves in the cloak of Islam, neither of them are, are trained Islamic scholars in any way.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  No, not, they have no formal religious training. Bin Laden had remembered every verse of the Quran, which is a pretty impressive feat of memory since those 6,000 verses. But that said, they couldn't issue a fatwa, this, as a, because a fatwa is a religious legal, uh, ruling. Uh, you know, so it's a law-based religion. And so Sheikh Rachman was in an American jail at the time for a role in his terrorist conspiracies in New York City in the, in the mid 90s. And he says in this fatwa, you can essentially kill Americans and Jews on land, on sea. Uh, pretty much anywhere. And that, that I think is kind of the crucial religious authorization that Bin Laden thinks he needs for this holy war. And at this, they had their first and only press conference in May of 98.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Two of Sheikh Rachman's sons are there and they hand out this fatwa from their father. It's a press conference with about a dozen Pakistani reporters. And it's the only time Al Qaeda gave a press conference. And I think again, it's like their, their belief that they have a duty to warn, their belief that they need a religious imprimatur that is really, as it were, kosher, halal, uh, from a leading cleric. Um, and that's why they hold this press conference. And then a few months later, the embassies blow up. By the way, to blow up two American embassies within nine minutes with each, it's hard to blow up one American embassy to do not blow up two within nine minutes. This showed something very, very different.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  And now this is the thing that wakes up the agencies, isn't it? This is the moment that they suddenly put people onto this.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  More than 200 people get killed. Um, Kenya and Tanzania both have substantial Muslim populations. Um, and so it also indicated that Bin Laden didn't care. They, they timed the bomb, so it was Friday, that when a lot of people would be in the mosque if they were observant. Uh, but, you know, Bin Laden didn't care how many civilians he killed. And from that point forward, because most in previous terrorist attacks, there have been an effort to have what the famous terrorism scholar Brian Michael Jenkins said, you, you want a lot of people watching and not a lot of people dying. That's what he said in 75. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda wanted a lot of people dying and a lot of people watching, uh, which was kind of a new development. So it's now, you know, we have part for some listeners perhaps to recall,

• 24:55Speaker 04

  the terrorists actually tried to calibrate the violence, so it didn't turn people off, didn't turn off fence sitters, didn't turn off potential supporters. So you wouldn't just have, the IRA would call in warnings, right? If they're going to blow up a pub. Um, this, so this was a very different kind of terrorist group.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  Peter, I'm still sort of, you know, charmed by this idea that they, they had a media strategy. You know, that even these sort of three people who come from very different parts of the world and have very different attitudes to life. But they have this one sort of idea that the, the, this is a weapon, the media is a weapon. There's this famous ABC interview. And tell us, I mean, there's a, the B-roll story, tell us about the B-roll story.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Well, John Miller was the ABC News correspondent, he went over in 98. And, um, Amin al-Zawahiri had suddenly reappeared on the scene. Uh, and Zawahiri speaks pretty good English. Um, and John Miller said, you know, we can't just have just Bin Laden just talking. We need to have what's known as B-roll, which is kind of.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Just to cut away to something, yeah, yeah, right.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  And so, uh, Zawahiri said, you know, this, this is not Sam Donaldson, the White House correspondent on the White House lawn. But yeah, we'll, we'll try and get you some B-roll. And the B-roll turned out to be a bunch of guys shooting their weapons up on the mound. And so it later turned out to be with sort of a bit of a rent-a-crown crew. Uh, there weren't really necessarily members of Al Qaeda, but like local Pashtun tribesmen that are being sort of ragooned.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  It's something people do in that part of the world. I've been to dinners in the northwest frontier where after dinner, the after dinner entertainment is everyone takes AK-47s off a rack and just fires tracer into the air. That's, you know, that's equivalent of.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Okay, but it also does tell you a thing, which is, you know, give, give the public what they want. If this is what they want to see, we can, we can do that, no problem. You want some rockets? We can do that, you know?

• 26:36Speaker 04

  I mean, so there was a narrative that develops after 9/11 about madrassas. And I was like, I knew that was just total bullshit or total nonsense. Because, you know, like, you don't learn English in a madrass.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  This was my special subject. I did a whole, I, I, I did a whole series of articles on the madrassas, went to, uh, Al Qorakata, can all those madrassas in Karachi? And there was a complete lot of bullshit spoken about them.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, so they were, you know, I mean, Amin al-Zawahiri is from the most, well, you know, um, leading families in Egypt and is a, yeah. And Osama Bin Laden the same. So the fact these were all the kind of dispossessive, like the most, you know, kind of privileged group of men in the world and some levels at least from the Arab world. So, so, uh, yeah, so the fact that they had a strategy is not surprising.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Um, and they, they wanted to get their message out.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the, the media bit is one bit, but you, you've touched on the embassies. Uh, let's go to a break, join us after the break where we go into more detail about those, um, bombings, those synchronized bombings of embassies.

• 27:40Speaker 02

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• 28:08Speaker 05

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Welcome back. So we move from this world where Bin Laden is an obscure financier, uh, who's a one or two documents, uh, in, in Washington and named as a person who's helping, uh, the, the extreme elements. Uh, but now the world is waking up to what he's up to. There've been embassy bombings, uh, of surprising sophistication. Uh, and in retrospect, Peter's interview is an incredibly historic document already, because this is, uh, one of the very few sightings of a person who's becoming of great interest to the Americans. So let's cross the Atlantic. And Peter, could you introduce us to who in America is now on this case? Who's got a file on their desk saying Osama Bin Laden?

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Well, there are basically three or four key characters. And so one is Gina Bennett. Gina Bennett is a young analyst in the State Department who writes the first classified warning about Bin Laden in 1993. She's been following these Afghan Arabs and they kind of keep popping up in Egypt and Algeria and various different kind of low level conflicts. And it's a classified secret document, uh, that is now declassified, but it's surprisingly detailed and are very useful. But, you know, in, in life and just in general, it's like, you know, if it's, if something's too far ahead, people don't pay attention to it. And, and the CIA sets up a Bin Laden unit, the first time they've set up a unit devoted to one particular person, which opens in January of 96. It's run by Michael Shoya, who's a PhD in history.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  Even by his own account, he's an abrasive personality. He recruits mostly women because at that time, counterterrorism was also regarded as sort of like a second tier. Real guys did, you know, the Soviet Union or the Iraq or Iran. And Shoya liked having women working with him because they did more work, they didn't take cigarette breaks, they didn't tell war stories and they were better analysts.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Preach, preach. Anyway, carry on, yes, to go on.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  This sounds like Empire Pod to me.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  And then there was also the New York field office of the FBI led by John O'Neill. He and Shaw absolutely hated each other. They were both very strong personalities. At the time, there was quite a lot of rivalry between the CIA and the FBI.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Before we get into the rivalry, I mean, let's just give a little bit of background of O'Neill because I find him fascinating. So he's a Catholic, he's from Atlantic City. He grows up on this diet of crime dramas and, you know, gets hired into the FBI in 1976.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  He looks like somebody from a crime drama. He looks straight out of a 1970s sort of Sopranos style epic or something.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, he has that kind of gritty background as well because, I mean, he rises through the ranks, but at a great cost to his personal life. You know, he loses his wife and his two children. They leave him. And during the 90s, he is, I mean, actually, it's quite surprising. Involved simultaneously with three different women and he told them all, you know, he was going to marry him. So he's a colorful, we can say a colorful character.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Catholic education does strange things to the best of us.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Well, don't we know it. But the way he gets sort of sucked into this particular part of, you know, FBI counterterrorism is that he walks into the office one day and he's told that Ramsey Youssef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, has been located in Islamabad. So his very first day on the job, he's running the capture of this most wanted man without, you know, even unpacking his socks. He just hits the ground running. And the colleagues that he works with make exactly your observation, William, that he looks like a mob boss. You know, and he's working it as if, you know, he's chasing, you know, a rival mob boss. So, you know, there's this flamboyant personality that is now on the job.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  You said there were four characters and you've given us two of them, Gina and O'Neill. Take us to maybe Alex Station next.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so Alex Station was, Michael Shoyah is a historian by training. Yeah, Mike, Michael also was in, interestingly, they're all Catholics in this story. Gina was an observant Catholic, Shoyah and O'Neill may have been somewhat of a lapsed Catholic. But which actually it makes an interesting point, I think, which is that we in the West often underestimate the real role that religion plays in people's actual beliefs and actual actions.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  In most of the rest of the world, yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  And so, so Shoyah is a super intense, he looks like an Old Testament prophet. He's got a big beard. He arrives at work routinely at 3:30 in the morning. He is obsessed. In fact, inside the CIA, most of the people working for him are with him are women. And they have the nickname of the Manson family because they're regarded as being so kind of like, they need to find and get bin Laden. And of course, they turn out to be right. But there are some legal, CIA collects intelligence, the FBI collects evidence for a criminal trial. At the time, there was really, they didn't cooperate at all. And there was a lot of hostility personally between John O'Neill and Michael Shoyah.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  And tell us about Alex Station.

• 33:28Speaker 04

  So Alex Station was named after Michael Shoyah's son. And it's the first and only time the CIA set up a virtual station, not an overseas station, devoted at a particular individual. And so it combined both analysts and operators, which was also an innovation because in the CIA, there's a division between the operations side that does all the spy stuff and the analyst side who analyze everything. And they also tend not to, there are often a lot of tensions. But so by bringing them both together, you actually, that's a much stronger approach because you can mount operations based on the analysis that the analysts are producing. And it's actually a pretty fruitful way to go about things. But you've also got to remember, this is a very small group of people. It's a, you know, maybe a couple of dozen initially. It's not like a giant enterprise.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  And I mean, they're only sort of set up for a little while when you have these catastrophic strikes against US embassy property. So August 1998, on the 7th of August, which is incidentally the 8th anniversary of the American troops entering Saudi Arabia. There is this massive truck bomb that devastates the American embassy in Nairobi. I mean, the figures of those killed and injured are worth repeating. 224 people are killed, over four and a half thousand people are injured. And almost all of them are African, many of them are Muslim. Peter, what do we know about the attack, how it was carried out, who did it?

• 34:56Speaker 03

  And actually, most crucially, was there a direct order coming from somewhere?

• 35:00Speaker 04

  So they started thinking about it in 1993 and they started seriously planning for it. And they, you know, in the years, a couple of years before 98. So bin Laden said, and he may well have been right, that one of the reasons he selected Nairobi was that's where one of the top, the major CIA station in Africa was, was in that embassy. And in fact, two CIA officers were killed in that attack. You know, bin Laden set the strategy of the group, including the most important strategic decision, attacked the United States. He would leave it to people on the ground to sort of execute. He did come from a background in construction, so he would sometimes say, hey, this is a good place to park the truck bomb.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Which was a model which had been developed first by Hezbollah in Beirut.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  A hundred percent correct. So bin Laden took his analysis from the Marine barracks bombing in which 241 American service members were killed.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Very similar number of casualties, yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it was a massive trap home. And President Reagan, of course, pulled American troops out of Lebanon within months. And so bin Laden thought, well, if you apply enough pressure against the Americans, against these targets, they will pull out of the Middle East. That would turn out to be a misapprehension because from an American standpoint, okay, if an American embassy blows up overseas, obviously it's a big deal. However, it's not an attack on an American target in the United States, which produced a very different, and surprise attacks produced pretty strong reactions in the United States, as the Japanese learned after Pearl Harbor. So bin Laden had a terrible strategy and he didn't listen to people. He was, since he ran his al-Qaeda as a dictatorship, he didn't take advice.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  Because a lot of people said, hey, you know, maybe attacking the United States is not such a great idea. And we have a pretty good thing going in Afghanistan where we have a whole country, basically, to ourselves. We have the Taliban in charge, you know, you could be really interfering with this.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  But with the truck bombing, what is crucial, I guess, is that the guy, you know, the suicide bomber jumps from the truck at the very last minute and he runs and therefore, you know, he lives to be arrested. And then the FBI are all over him. And it's the first, am I right in saying the first full confession from somebody inside the al-Qaeda operation?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  It was a man called Al Ali. And as you say, he did, at last minute, he decided not to commit suicide. But I think he checked, he was like injured in the attack, he checked himself into a hospital and the FBI found him pretty rapidly and he gave a full confession, which is actually a very important point, which is all the CIA coercive interrogations that followed 9/11 were almost entirely unnecessary. What do the FBI do? They interrogate people. That's all they, that's what they do. How do you get somebody to say, to tell you what you want to know? You give them a Diet Coke, you treat them with some degree of respect. This CIA program of sort of coercive interrogating people, people who watch too many movies and that, you know, that they thought the way you get information was to like, you know, essentially torture people.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  But was it Alex Station? Was it all this sort of newly, you know, all right, sort of slightly dysfunctional group of people who are the people who are now, right, we're spearheading this. We want to talk to him and we want to find out. I mean, is it them who's doing it?

• 38:11Speaker 04

  In this case, it is the FBI. The FBI launches the largest criminal investigation in history at that point to look into the embassy attack. And they have, as you said, they need to, they had somebody rather quickly saying, you know, this is how it happened. And then another conspirator was arrested in Pakistan. His name was Mohammed Odeh. He also, you know, fairly quickly said what happened.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  What has Monica Lewinsky got to do with the failure of US intelligence before 9/11?

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Well, President Clinton is distracted by the Monica Lewinsky affair. And in fact, it puts him literally on the couch because at a certain point when Hillary Clinton has found out that this affair has been happening, she forces him to sleep on the couch. And he's sleeping on the couch in Martha's Vineyard.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  That's a very nice story. President of the United States hasn't got a bed at this point.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  Well, and it's distracted and not listening to briefings, one with things.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  Clinton was pretty focused on the bin Laden thing. And, you know, what's, in one of these great sort of like coincidences, the press, when they're on holiday with the White House press corps, when they're on holiday with the president, they don't have much to do. Usually there's what's known as a lid, meaning the news is not going to happen. And so they're actually watching the film Wag the Dog, which is about an American president who goes to war on false pretenses in Albania because he's having some peccadilloes in his personal life. And that is the, that is the moment when Clinton announces that he's sending cruise missiles to attack al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan and also a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  I remember it very well. I remember hearing it on the news, which was coming immediately after Monica Lewinsky.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, they'd literally been watching the movie just before Clinton announced these cruise missile attacks.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  What also happens is that, you know, you have the intelligence gathered, you have Clinton on the couch and you have the largest overseas deployment in FBI history. And there were literally hundreds of agents who were sort of sent to call out. And they're all answering to O'Neill and his New York office. I mean, he's the king of that particular castle, right?

• 40:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And O'Neill, you know, he is, I mean, you've already referenced his complicated personal life. I'm not sure how you could manage like three separate women you've all promised to get married to and be running these criminal investigations. He must have barely slept, but he, he was very effective. You know, he, you know, almost to a fault. At a certain point when they blew up, al-Qaeda blew up the USS Cole, he was such a hard charging guy that Barbara Bodine, who was the American ambassador in Yemen, basically declared him PNG, i.e. persona non grata. And he was expelled from Yemen. But he was, he was like, he was really on a jihad like Michael Shoyah, who was the equivalent of CIA to, you know, he really believed bin Laden was a threat.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  And was really out to try and either create a criminal case or in Michael Shoyah's case, capture or kill him.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  And Peter, I think this was the moment, the first moment that I had really focused on bin Laden. His name was now very much there in the, in the news, the way it hadn't been even a year earlier.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Exactly. I mean, There were thousands of media stories. I went back to Pakistan, you know, as a result, and actually was in touch with Abu Hafz, who was Bin Laden's number two. The only way to communicate was he would send me a fax from the Kabul Post Office and I would get it at my hotel in Peshawar or Islamabad and we would communicate that way, which was not a very efficient way to communicate. But I was at that point trying to get another interview. At a certain point Abu Hafz said, you know, sorry, we're, you know, that it's not a good time for us. The embassy attacks changed a lot of things. However, that said, you know, when the USS Cole was attacked in 2000, which is, uh, killed 17 American sailors, there was, you know, the Clinton administration didn't really respond, and nor did the Bush

• 41:50Speaker 04

  administration, which came in. And so Al Qaeda began to think they sort of had impunity. You know, the worst thing in life is to believe you're in propaganda and they believed that the United States was a paper tiger.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  The USS Cole, we should say, really was, you know, the pivotal moment where everybody woke up saying, you know, my God, if they, if they can reach this, they can reach anything. I mean, remind us why it was such a pivotal moment and such an audacious attack.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  So USS Cole was anchored off the coast of Aden, um, and it's the most advanced destroyer in the American Navy at the time. It has a reinforced steel hull. Two suicide bombers drove a small boat up to the ship, um, blew up a hole the size of a small house in the reinforced steel hull, killed 17 American sailors. So again, it sort of showed that these guys could, you know, mount these operations very long way from the home base.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  It also, it turns out, Peter, that, you know, that they'd been doing little sort of practice runs. You know, there was this plan that, you know, the millennium, we were all worried about Y2K, but for Al Qaeda, this was going to be, you know, the, the moment, the bloodbath would be unleashed.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  Well, that is a very good point. So they planned to blow up another American ship called USS The Sullivan's, which on January 3rd, 2000, around the time of millennium, and they, the, it was also near in Yemen area and the operation wasn't successful. They also planned to blow up Los Angeles International Airport during Christmas holiday season and the man responsible was arrested at the US Canada border. They thought he was a drug dealer, but it turned out he had a trunk full of explosives. Um, it eventually became clear that he was planning to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in the middle of Christmas.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  And they, and they only stopped him because he was really sweaty, as you say. They're like, oh, he's looking, he's looking sweaty like he's taking drugs across the border because that's what they're used to.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  US Customs Officer, female Customs Officer, she sort of said, this guy's sweating and he, um, you know, there's, it's like, it's December and he's sweating and why? And he, you know, she stopped him and then he ran, we ran out of his car and they found all these explosives. So the, this was, you know, another indication that Al Qaeda was planning to attack the United States. You know, the, the narrative of the nine 11 Commission, which did a lot of great work, was a failure of imagination. I don't completely buy that because as we've already discussed, group, a group associated with Al Qaeda had already attacked the Trade Center in February of 1993. And now we have this guy trying to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in the United States. So it's not, it's a failure

• 44:12Speaker 04

  of imagination in the sense that you can be given a lot of, you know, Stalin had a huge amount of intelligence. Hitler was planning to invade Russia and he just couldn't believe it.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Or, or Hitler had a huge amount of intelligence, but D-Day, exactly the same thing.

• 44:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So they, you know, it, it gets to this question of even if you develop great intelligence, have great information, if, if the person in charge won't believe it, it's sort of useless.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  We are now in a very different world from where we began this episode. Bin Laden, far from being an obscure financier, is now a name familiar around the world. And even Al Qaeda, the name of the group he operates is, uh, you could say a household name, uh, by this point.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Next time, we're going to be talking about the response to the USS Cole bombings. We follow nine 11, the hijackers who train in plain sight in America, the frantic summer of 2001, where repeated intelligence tip offs are ignored. Um, we're also going to follow John O'Neill, quite a character, because he's pushed out of the FBI at the time when one might think they need him most and he takes a new job, Chief of Security at, wait for it, the World Trade Center. Join us then.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Now, if you want access to that right now and ad free listening, then head to empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com and become a member now. You will not regret it.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  And goodbye from me, William Durham.

• 45:51Speaker 05

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

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