394. Road To 9/11: Hijackers, CIA Failures, and America’s Darkest Day (Part 6)

How did the CIA fail to tell the FBI that known Al-Qaeda terrorists were already training inside the United States? Who was the calculated mastermind behind the scheme to hijack twenty commercial jets? What does new evidence tell us about how a Saudi official assisted the hijackers on US soil? In the final episode 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 untangle the tragic countdown and massive intelligence failures leading to September 11th. Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/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: Oli Ortega Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:25Speaker 03

  Welcome back to Empire with me, Anita Aron.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  And me, William Drumpel. And back for the finale, we have CNN's amazing national security analyst and the author of several books on al Qaeda, including The Zama Bin Laden I Know, and The Longest War. Peter Bergen, welcome back. We have a long and complicated story to tell today, but it's one of the most tragic and extraordinary stories of our age, really.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Now, Peter, you know, the last episode, we sort of left everybody with that vision of, you know, a blatant act of war against the US military. I think, as you put it, you know, the ship that wasn't meant to be sinkable, one of the most powerful symbols of of American muscularity, and it's attacked. And bin Laden must have been waiting for retaliation. I mean, and he ordered his camps to evacuate, expecting American retaliation. But what actually happens?

• 3:20Speaker 04

  Really, nothing, Anita. I mean, so the Clinton administration is, the the attack happens in October, the Clinton administration is in its last four months. And there's a little bit of a debate about who's responsible. CIA relatively quickly says it's al Qaeda. Then the Bush administration comes in and they sit on their hands for seven months, even though it's very clear that al Qaeda has done this. It's important to understand the Bush administration when they came into office. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, had been Gerald Ford, Secretary of Defense. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary, National Security Advisor, was a Sovietologist. These are people who lived and breathed the Cold War, and they could not understand that a guy like bin Laden, a group like al Qaeda, not supported by a state like Iraq,

• 4:01Speaker 04

  which they considered the main threat, could be a problem. I mean, they literally just, even though they were getting plenty of warnings that al Qaeda was a real problem, and, you know, US embassies have blown up in Africa, the coal have blown up, but they just, they couldn't get around their heads around the idea that a non-state actor, to use the jargon, was really going to be a threat to the United States.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And how did that failure of comprehension at the top play out when you've got all these specialists working away, producing the data, with or without the top guys realizing it? How, did they, did they stymie it? Did they not give it the resources that were needed?

• 4:40Speaker 04

  They, you know, so the CIA works for the policymakers and the CIA, they call them customers. They're customers at the White House. And the CIA, what is the job of the CIA? The CIA's job is to provide strategic warning to policymakers. You know, that is actually their central job. And they did a stellar job of warning the Bush administration throughout the spring and summer of 2001 that something very big was going to happen. And we know all that because of the 9/11 Commission, which Bush administration fought very hard not to allow to happen. And there was a series of warnings by the CIA, but bin Laden determined striking US, bin Laden threats are real, but you know, they're all highly classified. But you didn't really need access to classified information to know that something was brewing. I just, I completed my first book

• 5:25Speaker 04

  about bin Laden a week before 9/11. So I was, you know, fairly focused on the issue. So, you know, it gets to the weakness in the system, which is, you know, if the White House or the Commander in Chief, if he or she chooses to ignore something, the CIA can do the best job in history, and it doesn't really matter. And they did a great job of warning strategically that something was brewing during those several months before 9/11.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Because also, I mean, USS Cole may be smoking in harbor in Aden, but you know, that they're already task forces that have been, you know, meant to be looking into bin Laden, as you say, you know, you've got a book ready to roll. And we talked about John O'Neill in the last episode, you know, that tough talking New Yorker with many girlfriends on the side, all of whom he's going to marry, flashy suits, sort of, you know, sort of hitting the ground like, you know, he's hunting mobsters. I mean, how quickly does it become clear to, you know, that him, and how loudly does he shout that actually, you know what, stop looking anywhere, stop talking about anyone else, there's this one guy, it's bin Laden, it's al Qaeda?

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the FBI very quickly deploys to Yemen after the USS Cole was blown up. Jim, John O'Neill leads that task force. John O'Neill has pretty sharp elbows and Barbara Boudini, who's the American ambassador in Yemen, basically thinks that he is, you know, kind of pissing off their Yemeni hosts by kind of running this very, you know, like FBI tough investigation in Yemen, and it's very different culture. And yeah, the Yemenis have something to potentially, there are sympathizers to al Qaeda within the Yemeni power structure. There's a major tribal leader called Tariq Al Fadli, who's sort of a bin Laden associate. So there

• 7:12Speaker 04

  are people in the Yemeni power structure that, you know, wouldn't be happy about a big FBI investigation into what's going on in Yemen. And eventually Barbara Boudin expels John O'Neill from Yemen. And, you know, they have a very tense relationship.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  What's he done wrong? Is he interviewing people using coercive tactics? Or, I mean, are there rumors that they're torture or anything? Or is it just that he's rude?

• 7:36Speaker 04

  No, he's just, he's a hard charging guy who believes al Qaeda and bin Laden are major threats to the United States. And he's not, you know, he doesn't care if he tramples on local concerns about whatever they may be. And he's just, you know, he's a New Yorker, he's a, he's a guy from New York, he's in Yemen. It's a very different kind of culture, and it moves slowly, and it's a very poverty stricken country. And of course, it's bin Laden's ancestral homeland. And O'Neill isn't just, you know, he's, he's running an FBI investigation, he's not running a sort of Yemeni tribal kind of get together.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Now, meanwhile, while all this is going on, and there's the American ambassador in Yemen fighting with the FBI guy, the 9/11 hijackers have already arrived in America. Tell us about these two, Khalid Al Midaa and Nawaf Al Hamzi.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  Well, this is a very interesting story. So these guys are known to the CIA because they've attended a kind of a sort of 9/11 planning meeting. Now, of course, the CIA doesn't know it's a 9/11 planning meeting, but they are monitoring these guys. They meet up in Malaysia. The CIA understands that they are al Qaeda associates or something, and does something, while it's provided great strategic warning about the threat from al Qaeda, it does a big mistake from a tactical point of view, which is, it doesn't watch list Al Hamzi and Al Midaa, which would mean that they would be put on a State Department watch list, which would mean that they, you know, couldn't, you know, that they would be detained at an American border,

• 9:04Speaker 04

  or, you know, questioned. And they don't do that until August 25, 2001, very shortly before 9/11. Now, this is not some, I don't think it's some grand conspiracy, it's the cock up view of history rather than the conspiracy.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Which is almost always the real, the real reason, yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I, you can't use the word cock up in America where I'm sitting, because people don't know what you mean, but.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  You've got another British listeners.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Um. Anyway, so I think it's basically just a kind of one of like, a lot of people know that these guys have visas, the United States are right, sixty people in the CIA who have access to this information, but they just they just don't, they don't tell the FBI, they don't tell the State Department, and these guys arrive in the United States.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, just can we just run on it for one more second, because this is where all the conspiracy theories sort of start, you know, sparking off. Okay, so is it true, the CIA have been tracking these particular men for months. Is it true, you know, they wiretapped a phone number that belongs to them. Is it true that they've knocked on the FBI's door and said, these guys are dangerous, we need to do something about it. I mean, it is, you know, is that all, and you know, that they even give them a phone number, saying, look, here's a phone number that is being used by them. I mean, what more can, what more can they do? I mean, is all of that true?

• 10:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's true. I mean, it goes back to A, a certain amount of rivalry between the CIA and the FBI, and B, there was something, and this may be a little technical, but there was something called the wall between the CIA and the FBI before nine eleven. So CIA collects intelligence, FBI collects evidence for a criminal trial. These are two very different things. And so the CIA was actually not allowed to share a lot of intelligence information with the FBI, even though the FBI was conducting the investigation into Al Qaeda through its New York field office. So there was some structural issues about why there was, and there was this rivalry between two agencies, which is typical in bureaucracies. But yeah, there was information in the system that retrospectively was pretty, you know, these guys were Al Qaeda associates, they're in the United States, that was known

• 11:08Speaker 04

  to the CIA. The FBI only found out about it on August of twenty fifth, two thousand and one. So that was a big failure by the CIA. I don't think it was, there were some FBI, um, special agents who believe that the CIA were actually, these were assets of the CIA who were there trying to recruit. I don't see evidence for that. I just think it was a failure of communication.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  And these guys had come to America via an Al Qaeda conference in Kuala Lumpur, is that right?

• 11:36Speaker 04

  That is correct. And they barely spoke English. Now, this is actually something that is interesting. We now know, at the time, we didn't know what I'm going to say, which I think is interesting. There was a Saudi official who greeted them in California where they landed. He found them housing in his apartment building.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  This is interesting.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  He signed their lease. He provided them with money. He introduced them to the local community, had a party for them. We now know, what's so interesting is that you're both historians doing a history show. We, you know, it was only in twenty twenty four that we found out the Saudi official had recorded a videotape of the US Capitol, and he'd shown where the police posts were. He explained where the airport was, Reagan Airport.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Like doing a recce?

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Doing a recce. It's a, it's a, it's a casing videotape.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Unequivocally, it's not just a tourist shape, it's not just showing the sights of Washington.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's a casing video. He talks about the plan. He talks about the devils in the White House. He talks about the brothers, which is how they refer to themselves internally in Al Qaeda. Now, we only know about this because after nine eleven, he was living in Birmingham, the British police searches upon him, they found a bunch of interesting things, some of it kind of got lost, or then, and it was reintroduced into a civil case after. So anyway, the question, what was the Saudi support for these nine eleven hijackers?

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Because let's just quickly jump forward for one second, of the hijackers on the day, how many were actually from Saudi Arabia?

• 13:13Speaker 04

  Fifteen out of the nineteen. And there's a good reason for that, because if you're a Yemeni, it's hard to get a visa to the United States, they think, at that time, because they think you're coming just to stay and get a job. If you're a Saudi, they think you have money, you're going to go back. So fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, and of course, the Bush administration, Prince Bandar was the Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time. He'd spent twenty years being the ambassador. He was almost a member of the Bush family.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  There's a lot of business in common, a lot of oil in common.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  And they were friends. He was known as Bandar Bush. And so there could have been a much more aggressive effort to see what the Saudi connections were to this. And, and I think it was, it wasn't investigated thoroughly enough. It's not to say the Saudi government supported Al Qaeda, because Al Qaeda, of course, wants to overthrow the Saudi government at the time.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  There are elements in the Saudi administration and in the Saudi Foreign Office who are clearly sympathetic to this.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, and may well have supported in a meaningful way, the two hijackers that you've, Hamzeh and Midad.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  I've never heard this before, Peter. I know this stuff quite well, and it's new to me.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  In my new book, it's, it's, it's, I, all the presidents' wars, I outline it, but because it was new to me. I mean, I knew that there was this Saudi official in the picture, who had been helping these guys, but what we now know is like, he's got it, he's done a casing video. He also, by the way, he had calculations, an aeronautical expert looked at his notes that were found in his house in Birmingham. He had calculations for, for the descent of an aircraft, you know, going at two hundred miles an hour to hit a landmark fifty to seventy miles out. I mean, so there's a bunch, this guy seems to have been.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely in, right at the center.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  He's part of the conspiracy. And that's, you know, one of the great things about history is you find new, you find, you find new evidence.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Because at the time, I mean, the only name I sort of remember vividly is the man who was sort of behind this, the planning, the video, you know, the recce and everything. It's all attributed to a man who is known as KSM, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the guy who gets all the blame for being the brains behind this. Now, we should say who he is. He's the uncle of Ramsey Yusuf, who was one of, you know, that bomber that we were talking about in the World Trade Center in nineteen ninety three.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  First, first, first time around, yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. First time around, you know, and sort of then runs away and then, you know, is questioned, all of that, all of that. That's, so he's his uncle. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM, I mean, how, how does he fit into bin Laden's orbit? And now, looking back with that historian's lens and the journalist's eye that you had at the time, does he get too much credit? Were there others doing it? I mean, who is he? And, you know, what's he like?

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is well educated, as so many of these members of Al Qaeda are. He grew up in Kuwait, but he was not, he was actually Pakistani, and of course.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Pakistani, wasn't he? He's, he's not Arab at all.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  And so Kuwait doesn't give, like, you know, has a lot of guest workers, none of them get citizenship. So he was the uncle of Ramsey Yusuf, who was the mastermind of the first Trade Center attack in nineteen ninety three. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed comes to, comes to Afghanistan, meets with bin Laden in ninety six, they have a chat, talk about potential terrorist attacks. It's only really in nineteen ninety nine that bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have a serious discussion about what, what they're going to do. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has a very grandiose scheme where he's going to blow up ten airplanes in Asia, ten, ten American airplanes in Asia, ten in the United States. And bin Laden says, look, you know, kind of make this operation a little more tight. It's bin Laden suggests, you know, using commercial jets as sort of effectively flying bombs.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Does he use the phrase, why use an axe when you can use a bulldozer?

• 16:52Speaker 04

  Well, I think we do know he said that. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later would talk to US investigators. Also, he would talk to Yosri Fudhar, an Al Jazeera reporter, in some detail about all this, and freely admit his role in the attacks. He's sitting in Guantanamo, right? He still has not gone on trial, which is astonishing. We know the twenty fifth anniversary of nine eleven, the operational commander still has not been tried, in part because he was tortured while he was in CIA custody. So, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a, he, he, he is the operational commander. He's, there's no debate about that. He, you know, and they, they begin recruiting people to do, carry out the attack. They need muscle hijackers who basically don't know the targets, because

• 17:34Speaker 04

  they kind of keep all that information pretty tightly. And then they need people who can actually fly planes, who have some familiarity with the West, who might be able to speak some English. And they get lucky because Mohammed Atta and three of his buddies walk into the training camps and they've been living, Mohammed Atta, again, highly educated, doing his PhD in Germany, Egyptian.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And like so many of these, a sort of technical guy, like, these guys are all from engineering backgrounds and this sort of thing.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  Exactly right. All of them are engineers or doctors of the second, but engineering tends to be, and so Mohammed Atta comes in and he, he solves the issue they have, which is you can't, if somebody can't speak English and, you know, is Yemeni and like, they're not going to be able to go to flight school and learn how to fly planes into buildings. And so Mohammed Atta and three of his colleagues from Germany are recruited and they are the pilot.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  This is the Hamburg cell that we used to read about so much in the papers.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is the Hamburg cell. And they, they see themselves as part, you know, one question people have often is like, what is this to do with Islam? And just as Christianity has quite a lot to do with the crusades and pogroms in various places in Eastern Europe, this has something to do with Islam, which of course is a kind of, you know, for some people, that's not a comfortable kind of idea. But it's not to say this is a mainstream interpretation of Islam, but these people suddenly saw themselves as heroic religious warriors.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  But where, where, where do they get radicalized? Where do they get that, you know, the Hamburg influences, their educational influences? You know, someone might say, well, how, how, how is it that they bought into it completely wholesale? Who is doing the indoctrination stroke instruction? I mean, where does that all come from?

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Well, in the case of Mohammed Atta, you know, he grew up in Egypt. He, he goes to Germany to do his PhD. He may have been somewhat alienated from the West. I mean, there's a lot of questions of, you know, he wasn't a second generation.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  PhD, these guys are not, are not, not stupid. They are highly educated people.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and a PhD in Germany, they're not, you know, giving them away. So he, I think overall, you know, Anita, that is a super large question, because we, you know, from the crooked timber of humanity, not a straight thing is made, as.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  That's a problem. It's very nice.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, I'll remember the philosopher in a minute, but Isaiah Berlin used it. And so I've always, when I, people talk, when we think about jihadists and like, you know, there's no like. But often people have a personal crisis, the death of a father or mother, or they come and they're immigrants and they're not accepted, or whatever it is. And, you know, this kind of very extreme version of Islam can be a comfort and can be. So in the case of Mohammed Atta and some of these, his colleagues, that may be in some part of it.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Do you, but I mean, there's, in a sense, two interpretations. You've mentioned religion and Islam, and that's absolutely fair enough because they're using Islamic texts to justify all this. But the other theory that's always given, as well as alienation, is of course political. The humiliation of the Arab world, we've just done a series of whole succession of Arab losses and the way the Arab elites are in the view of the, of those outside powers selling out to the West. How far of that is part of the rhetoric here?

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I think, William, it's a great deal of it. I mean, and the two things are related. So for Bin Laden, you can't understand Bin Laden without, I mean, this is a religious zealot. You know, he memorized the Quran by the young age. He was fasting twice a week. He was deeply austere, you know, from the age of 17, he was, he was, you know, his idea of fun when he was a teenager was chanting religious songs about Palestine. So he, this is a guy who's very religious. Now, at the same time, that very much informed his political view, which is like, you know, when, when nine 11 happened, George W. Bush, the president at the time, said it was all about American freedoms. Well, in fact, Bin Laden had said a lot of things and very, none of them were about American freedoms.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  It was about US support for Israel, US support for Saudi Arabia, US support for Arab regimes.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  The quote I always remember, Peter, was when he said very explicitly that he watched the bombing of the towers in Beirut and the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982. And he thought, I will do the same to the towers in America.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think he learned from that and he, so the question of the, what is political? What is religious in some ways is mooted in a case for somebody like Bin Laden because he'd see no distinction between them.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Very good point.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  You know, there's no separation of mosque and state in his mind. But, but the point is, yes, it is political, it is religious and it is, you know, and Bin Laden, you know, so Bin Laden often would use the sword verse of the Quran, which incites, you know, attacks on polytheists and has a kind of caveat, which is if you pay taxes, you know, you're okay. But the point is, is that Bin Laden resorts to, would often resort to Koranic verses to justify his holy war. Now, and he couldn't, of course, you know, it's an extraordinary minority view, but it is not something that he just pulled out of nowhere. That, and he saw, you know, the prophet on his deathbed said that there be no two religions in.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Now, Peter, before these guys get to the United States, they have already undergone training. And I've been to the training camp in Afghanistan, to Mezainak. I went there not because it was a training camp, but because there's a very nice Khoshan archaeological site, which I was studying for my book, The Golden Road. But at the bottom of the hill is a cave where they were based, these guys, when they were being trained in Logar province, not so far from Kabul. And there's still a rocket in the wall unexploded, which is why we didn't hang around very long. Because it was attacked after, after the American attack on Afghanistan. And, and they, they wanted to see what was still there.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  So these guys have already gone through, it isn't just that they're sitting in Hamburg and then fly to the United States. These guys have already gone through a long training in Afghanistan.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they'd been, you know, they would practice like using, because they had small knives that they smuggle on the planes, but they would use, they would like kill goats with knives so that they could get used to killing things with these knives, as they would have to do when they hijack a plane. So, yeah, they were getting training. The muscle hijackers were going to, you know, really were to restrain the passengers. They were, you know, it was just like, they, it didn't require very sophisticated training. Then Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who we discussed, would, you know, they would have aviation maps that they would talk to about with the pilots. The pilot, the targets were closely held, they were not, Bin Laden was talking about a strike on the United States

• 24:24Speaker 04

  in a, in a general sense, and, you know, people were saying, you should stop talking about it because this is going to leak.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Stop tipping them off, yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  And where was Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at this point? Are they both in Tora Bura?

• 24:35Speaker 04

  They're living in Kandahar probably, I mean, you know, visiting Tora Bura, maybe visiting Kabul.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  I'm really interested in the hierarchy because, look, you've got sort of educated men, but you've also got Mullah Omar, who, you know, is, is, who is bending the knee to who at this point?

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Good question.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  You know, who's, who's in the hierarchy, who's, who's on top?

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Well, so Bin Laden has sworn byat, which is an oath of religious obedience to Mullah Omar for kind of tactical reasons. I mean, in fact, you know, Mullah Omar did not want Bin Laden to be doing, you know, giving incendiary interviews to Western media. He didn't really, he didn't want, you know, Afghanistan to be used for terrorist attacks against American targets. On the other hand, he was, you know, in, he, you know, he admired Bin Laden. But yeah, so in a sense, you know, Bin Laden was, you know, paying homage to Mullah Omar.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  But, but only lip service, because I mean, just the reason I ask is because Mullah Omar, like Bin Laden, you know, sort of wanted to be the man the West feared. And, you know, one of the very visible things that he did was when he destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. You know, I remember that, I remember it happening on screen in real time in front of our eyes.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  An extraordinary video that was, that was replayed all over the world, yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Horrendous, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, these sort of, you know, these amazing gifts from, you know, the ancient world being dynamited in front, and that's him. So I, I mean, I don't know whether there's a kind of a one-upmanship of, you know, hang on a minute, I'm the one they're going to fear, no, I'm the one they're going to fear. I mean, am I reading too much into that?

• 26:14Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, well, I think you're right. The Bamiyan Buddhas was a, I mean, I'm glad you reminded me of that. I mean, it was a bitter curtain raiser for the increasing radicalization of the Taliban. I mean, they'd been there for 1,500 years. And of course Buddhist culture is incredibly, as William knows well, is, you know, absolutely integral to, to kind of Afghanistan's history. And so blowing up those Buddhas, which was the most famous tourist site in Afghanistan, was really a sign the Taliban were becoming more radical and may have.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  And was that under the influence of Bin Laden or was this happening parallel?

• 26:44Speaker 04

  I, I, I think it might have been under the influence of Bin Laden because in Wahhabi culture, of course, any kind of images of a living being are not allowed.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  But that's not the culture of Islam in Afghanistan, because that's why they were still there.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  So that was, you know, that became, that was, that was a fairly big story because footage was taken of it, as you, as you've mentioned, Anita, and it showed, I think, the Taliban becoming, yeah, perhaps more under the influence of Bin Laden. But in terms of rivalry for who's the biggest, you know, I mean, you know, Mullah Omar had no interest in international jihad or like taking terrorism overseas.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  It was just his backyard and no further. Listen, we're going to take a break now, we're going to come back after the break. And we really ought to talk about, we talked about two hijackers arriving in the United States. There are more hijackers, as we all now know. So when do they get there and how do they get there? Join us after the break.

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• 29:34Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Now, Peter, we have to get the rest of the conspirators into the United States. There's two that have gone ahead that we've met, who've set up shop, as you've told us this extraordinary new piece of information, that they are greeted by a Saudi diplomat and shown around and even shown their targets by video by this Saudi diplomat, which is brand new information certainly to me. How do the rest of the plotters get into the US? And why aren't they picked up?

• 30:03Speaker 04

  Well, that's a great question. I mean, partly because 15 of the 19 are Saudi. So, you know, the Saudis, you know, the United States is an ally of Saudi. They don't attract a lot of attention. There's an Egyptian, there's a Lebanese. You know, they come, they're, you know, they come on short term visas. They, they don't attract attention. The interesting thing is the Bush administration had, you know, a lot of warning from the CIA that something was brewing. And they never sent up a flare saying, is there any members of al Qaeda in the United States? Should we be, you know, that never happened. In fact, Bush chose not to interrupt the longest presidential vacation in history in three decades in the summer of 2001. So they just, they couldn't absorb this as an issue.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  So, you know, the hijackers arrived in the United States completely normally. And, you know, all the kind of apparatus we now have, the TSA, which is the, you know, the looking for bombs and DHS and all these, like, it was easy, you could land at Boston Airport, you barely needed a visa. I mean, I mean, I'm not, I'm exaggerating slightly, but there was no, very little.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Homeland security.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  It was a different world. A lot of people listening now know about shoes taken off and scanning. I mean, it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Anybody could come in. It was, it was wide open. So they, you know, they took advantage of that.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  So the remaining recruits who come after the first two, you know, they're known as the muscle. You know, they, they are specifically, these 13 men are hired to contain the passengers while these train pilots get in, get into the cockpit and fly into their targets. And there's, you know, there's some, some of those details which we now know, which are very haunting that, you know, as they're, as they're waiting and preparing, you've got people like Mohammed Atta, who is a 27 year old man, let's remember, who writes this utterly, you know, joyless of forbidding, you know, edict for his funeral. You know, he says, you know, I don't want any women there. I don't want any of this there. Then you've got Ziyad Jarra,

• 31:59Speaker 03

  who's going to fly the plane that comes down in Pennsylvania, who's got a Turkish German girlfriend who he's on the phone to constantly. You know, a woman who thinks they are young love's dream and that they're going to get married and sort of go off into the sunset. On the morning itself, just posting her a farewell letter, no explanation, no nothing. This is not something that she has any idea that, you know, is going to happen. So, I mean, the reason I raise it is because these are not men from nowhere. They've got people who love them. They've got people who care about them. They've got, you know, they've got lives, they've got networks.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, you know, that was al Qaeda, you know, what? The fact you could recruit 19 men, young men to willing to die in this, you know, that was, you know, that was a real innovation, unfortunately, that al Qaeda was able to exploit. And, you know, they created this sort of cult of martyrdom in the camps. And people were, you know, they had a lot of volunteers. You wanted to be part of any martyrdom operation. And, you know, if you look at Mohammed Atta, you mentioned, who's the lead hijacker. He flew from Boston and he left in his car very specific religious instructions about what to do on the day of the raid. They referred to it as a raid. They use the Arabic term for a raid.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Razzia?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  Gazzia, exactly. And they referred to the operation as a gazzia. And, you know, it was about ritual religious washing. It was about the, the versions that they would be encountering in heaven after this. So they, they truly saw themselves as, you know, equivalent to the people who are fighting alongside the prophet in, in, in the 7th century AD. And that's the, that's the way that they conceptualize themselves. But yes, they had families. Ziyad Jarra, who you mentioned is a Lebanese, almost like a playboy. He, people liked him when he was in the United States. He would occasionally have a drink. You know, he was not some sort of religious zealot.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  But there was one sort of weirdo in, in the mix. Zacharias Musawi, tell us about him.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Well, so Zacharias Musawi was part of probably the second wave of hijackers. But like Zacharias Musawi is a French guy. He, he was training to fly planes, but he was acting erratically. And I think that he was sort of a throwaway for al Qaeda. He wasn't part of the main plot. And they, you know, they've sort of said, like, they sent him and if he could get something done, great. And if they didn't, it was fine. He got arrested. Relatively either.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  He applies to school under the fake name Zulayman Tango Tang, which you'd have thought might have attracted some.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Not making much of an effort. Yeah. Not making much of an effort, Masood in him. I mean, his bizarre behavior, that part of it, you know, Zulayman Tango Tang, did eventually catch the eye of the authorities because, as you say, Peter, he got arrested in August 2001. But while he was, you know, behind bars, there were so many, again, it's like these kind of clumsy bureaucratic roadblocks, people not peering on the phone or not sort of, you know, joining dots. It, it just meant that, you know, nobody placed him at the heart of or even in the periphery of what was about to happen until it was far too late.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, the FBI office in Phoenix wrote a memo saying, we're, we're seeing this interesting phenomenon of young Arab men taking flight school, flight lessons. And it's kind of strange and.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  They found it. They, they spotted it.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Yes. There's a classic kind of book about Pearl Harbor called Warning Decision by Roberto Walsetta. And she, you know, she wrote it in 1962 and she said, you know, the noise and the signals, the signals are very clear in retrospectively, but they're always in a bunch of noise. And so it's very easy for us to say retrospectively, this was obvious. But, and it, and for some people, it was obvious that something was brewing.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Peter, weeks before 9/11, you were reporting on al Qaeda. And you wrote a letter saying that you saw something awful this way comes. It's on the horizon. I mean, in, in your own words, tell us.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  In August 2001, I wrote a letter to a New York Times journalist, John Burns, warning of an imminent attack on the United States. First of all, you have to think about, understand the position of the New York Times quarter of a century ago. The internet was very much in its infancy. I'd met John Fisher Burns, who was, won three Pulitzer prizes. And so I wrote him a four page letter saying, here is why I think an attack is happening. Here is why I think one could responsibly write a piece saying this is, an attack is imminent.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Was this a proposal for a New York Times piece that you were writing?

• 36:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically that, that John would write and he quoted me in it. And, and, and the piece, I based it on the following sort of three pieces of evidence. One, there was a bunch of US embassies that were kind of closing for, in ways that were sort of unusual. And then two, bin Laden had released a two and a half hour videotape, which was really a distillation of his religious and political kind of philosophy and why he wanted to attack the United States. And this is very, the video was almost non-existent on the internet at the time. You had to go into these jihadist chat rooms with a password and it was on RealPlayer. Anyway, I, I had it all translated. I sent it all to John. And I said, the videotape, Bruce, they, this, they had a belief of a duty to warn. The videotape was part of this duty to warn. If you're going to kill a bunch of civilians, you need to explain why.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  And then finally, you know, I just, it just seemed as part of a pattern that I've already, we'd already seen in the USS Cole and the embassy attacks where al Qaeda would, would warn. So I wrote John this very detailed letter. He agreed that there was a story. He wrote a piece which was going to be in the September 9th New York Times, which didn't go in because of an editing dispute.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  The headline was, you know, bin Laden charts of violent future.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Who's the editor who spiked that piece?

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  Is he still in job?

• 37:41Speaker 03

  I mean, that dispute must feel very silly and minor now. I mean, my goodness.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Well, of course, they ran the piece on September 12th, a day later. Now, it was, the internet was in its infancy and they put the piece on the, on September 9th, on the website. And then they took it off, which they later admitted was a serious error. Because I think they were sort of embarrassed. But anyway, the bottom line is, the reason I tell the story is you did not need access to any special information to determine that something big was brewing. You just like, what we had to do, and I'm, I'm also a big believer, maybe preaching the cry here is like, what you need to know almost always is out there in the open.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  Classified information may have interesting tactical, like the content of somebody's conversation, the timing of a certain event. So, you know, obviously 9/11 did happen. I was going into the office at CNN to report on Akram Shah Masood's death. Masood was the last thing that stood in the way of the Taliban taking over all of Afghanistan. He's one of the most effective guerrilla commanders and, and also an amazing guy. I interviewed him in 1993. One of the most intelligent, sensitive.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Lovely guy. Yep.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Lovely guy. So al Qaeda knew 9/11 was happening. And they also knew this would pose problems for their Taliban posts. So they, killing Masood was, you know, kind of their gift.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Did you connect the two? Did you think that could be connected?

• 39:03Speaker 04

  I was going into CNN to say Masood would have been mortally wounded, something that they were keeping to themselves because it would be so devastating to the morale of his Northern Alliance army. Did I connect it? I mean, later, yeah, not at the time because 9/11 happens is like the biggest news story in like, in history in my lifetime.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  So Peter, while you are writing to John Burns and squabbling with sub editors for the New York Times, the hijackers are now finishing their courses. They're working, the, the muscle guys are working out in Florida gyms, shopping in Walmart. One of them's got a speeding ticket. But they're also buying airline tickets, all of them, for the same date, the 11th of September, 2001. And bizarrely, in retrospect, they're buying it online with credit cards under their own name.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. They were, they were living here freely under their own names. The speeding ticket is very interesting because like, you know. That wouldn't have been an opportunity to say, well, who are you and what are you doing? But it didn't, it didn't happen. They picked Tuesday because Tuesday is the day where the least amount of people travel in the United States. And that would be the least number of passengers on a plane. So the least amount of opposition. And they, you know, they, unfortunately, the plan went perfectly for them and unperfectly for the United States. Bin Laden thought that he didn't understand how many people would die. He thought that the Trade Center would collapse above the point of impact of the planes. He

• 40:41Speaker 04

  didn't know that it was going to bring down both buildings.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  So, I mean, we should revisit one, one man's name that we haven't talked about for a while, but you might remember John O'Neill, who we were talking about, you know, who sort of falls out with the powers that be, who has been like some kind of Cassandra warning, take this seriously, this is bad, this is dangerous. And he's a bit heavy handed in Yemen. And so he gets sort of drummed out. His new job is working at the World Trade Center. And that, I mean, this is, it's almost like a Greek tragedy for him because, you know, he's, this spat that he has with the powers that be means that he's passed over for promotion at the FBI.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  And just so that we, so we didn't rewrite history, is he actually kicked out because he's banging on about this Bin Laden guy too much? Is that actually why?

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Because he's being rude to Yemenis and being told off by his superiors, isn't it?

• 41:33Speaker 04

  So the, the, the, the moment where he, he gets fired or has to leave the FBI, he has a suitcase of classified material that he leaves somewhere, which is a huge.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Okay, that doesn't help.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I mean, he, he, I think he, you know, he had sharp elbows, he annoyed some people at the FBI. But the fact that he'd left this suitcase of classified information somewhere basically killed his career.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  So that, I mean, that's a rather ignominious end to a career which had its turbulence. But he, the job that he takes actually just seems like a dream come true. It's really lucrative. It's in the private sector. He is chief of security at the World Trade Center. And there's some really sort of dark moments because when he's leaving, you know, his leaving do from the FBI, somebody, one of his friends makes a joke, Peter, which is, you know, becomes sort of prophetic in the end. Do you remember what, what his friend Chris Isham said at his leaving?

• 42:31Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  So he, he sort of, you know, jokes to Chris Isham. He says, you know, I'm going to the World Trade Center, safest place in the world. And they have this conversation. And then I can't remember which one of them said it, but one of them says, at least they won't bomb it again. You know, because it's already been hit once. At least they won't try and bomb it again. So there is this kind of sort of, you know, foreshadowing of what happens. If it was fiction, you'd be told, go and rewrite that. It's not believable. It's too much of a coincidence.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  So we're now on the night of the 10th of September, 2001. In a daze in near Boston's Logan Airport, motel rooms in Newark outside Washington, 19 young men, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, make their final preparations. Among their belongings, investigators will later find a handwritten document of spiritual instruction for the operations last night. Purify your soul. Become, you are entering the happiest life.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  And in Afghanistan, Bin Laden's entourage has been told to move. The leadership scatters into the mountains. The man himself waits by a radio. In Florida, the President of the United States is preparing to read to schoolchildren in the morning. It's a photo call. It's usual. It's boring. And in Manhattan, John O'Neill, two and a half weeks only into his new job, his office, 34 floors above the plaza, is out on the town. He's happy. You know, he's free of the bureau at last. He's telling the people at the table about his exciting and lucrative new job.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  The city glitters. The towers stand lit against a September sky as they have for 30 years. And everyone in that bar assumes they always will. Everyone listening knows what the morning brings and everything that follows it. Now, this is the subject of another series that we now have planned. Join us for that. We're going to finish this story with what happens on September 11th, the succession of wars which follow it, and bring us up to the present with the return of the Taliban, not the happy ending that we would like to end on. But that is where the story rests at the moment. We'll be doing that later in the year. And join us for that. In the meantime, thank you, Peter. You've been

• 44:50Speaker 00

  absolutely extraordinary. It's really the sensation of watching history unfold and the what ifs that we've, that we've been going through. So many chances to stop this, none of them happen. So from Anita and me, thank you, everybody for listening. From me, William Dalrymple, goodbye.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  And from me, Anita Anan, goodbye.

• 45:14Speaker 06

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