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

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2:26Anita:Welcome back to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Drimple. 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. 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 American muscularity and its attack.

3:10Anita:And bin Laden must have been waiting for retaliation. I mean, he ordered his camps to evacuate expecting American retaliation. But what actually happens? Really nothing, Anita. I mean, so the Clinton administration is, 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.

3:45Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, had been Gerald Ford, Secretary of Defense. Condoleezza Rice, the 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, 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 had blown up, but they just couldn't get 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.

4:23And 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? Did they stymie it? Did they not give it the resources that were needed? 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.

5:06And we know all that because of the 9-11 Commission, which the Bush administration fought very hard not to allow to happen. And there was a series of warnings by the CIA. Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S. Bin Laden, threats are real. But, you know, they were all highly classified. But you didn't really need access to classified information to know that something was brewing. I completed my first book about bin Laden a week before 9-11, so I was fairly focused on the issue. So it gets to the weakness in the system, which is 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.

5:43And they did a great job of warning strategically that something was brewing during those several months before 9-11.

5:49Anita:Because also, I mean, you know, USS Cole may be smoking in Harbour and Aden, but you know, 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 he's hunting mobsters. I mean, how quickly does it become clear to him and how loudly does he shout that actually, you know what, stop looking anywhere or stop talking about anyone else.

6:28Anita:This is one guy. It's Bin Laden. It's Al-Qaeda. Yeah. So, the FBI very quickly deploys to Yemen after the USS Cole was blown up. 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 a very different culture. And 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.

7:13So there 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 Bodine expels John O 'Neill from Yemen. And, you know, they have a very tense relationship. What's he done wrong? Is he interviewing people using coercive tactics or, I mean, other rumors that they're torture or anything? Or is it just that he's rude? No, he's a hard-charging guy who believes Al-Qaeda and bin Laden are a major threat to the United States. And he doesn't care if he tramples on local concerns about whatever they may be.

7:47And he's a New Yorker. 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, he's running an FBI investigation. He's not running a sort of Yemeni tribal kind of get together. 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-Middiar and Nawaf al-Khamsi. Well, this is a very interesting story.

8:25So 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-Hamsi and al-Madar, which would mean that they would be put on a State Department watch list, which would mean that they would be detained at an American border or questioned.

9:08And they don't do that until August the 25th, 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 view. Which is almost always the real reason. Yeah. You can't use the word cock-up in America where I'm sitting because people don't know what you mean. You've got another British listeners. feet of that way. Anyway, so I think it's basically just a kind of one of, like, a lot of people know that these guys have visas to the United States, 60 people in the CIA who have access to this information, but they just don't tell the FBI, they don't tell the State Department, and these guys arrive in the United States.

9:51Anita:Yeah, I mean, can we just turn 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've 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, 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. Oh, what more can they do? I mean, is all of that true?

10:24Yeah, it's true. I mean, And 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 9-11. 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 were some structural issues about why there was – and there was this rivalry between two agencies, which is typical in bureaucracies.

11:02But yeah, there was information in the system that retrospectively, it was pretty – you know, these guys were al-Qaeda associates. They're in the United States. That was known to the CIA. The FBI only found out about it on August of 25th, 2001. So that was a big failure by the CIA. I don't think it was – there were some FBI special agents who believe that the CIA were actually – these were assets of the CIA who they were trying to recruit. I don't see evidence for that. I just think it was a failure of communication. And these guys had come to America via an al-Qaeda conference in Kuala Lumpur.

11:37Is that right? 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. This is interesting. He signed their lease. He provided them with money. He introduced them to the local community. He had a party for them. we now know that what's so interesting is that you're both historians doing a history show we you know it was only in 2024 that we found out the saudi official had recorded a videotape of the u.s capitol and he'd shown where where the police posts were he explained where the airport was reagan like like doing a recce doing a recce It's a casing videotape.

12:34Unequivocally. It's not just a tourist shape. It's not just showing the sights of Washington. Yeah, 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 themselves internally in Al-Qaeda. Now, we only know about this because after 9-11, he was living in Birmingham. The British police searched his apartment. They found a bunch of interesting things. Some of it kind of got lost. And it was reintroduced into a civil case. after so anyway the question what was the saudi support for these 9-11 hijackers because let's just quickly um jump forward for one second of the hijackers on the day how many were actually from saudi arabia 15 out of the 19 and there's a good reason for that because if you're a yemeni it's hard to get a visa 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 15 of the 19 hijackers and of course the bush administration prince bandar was the Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time.

13:31He spent 20 years being the ambassador. He was almost a member of the Bush family. There was a lot of business in common, a lot of oil in common. 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 I think 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. There are elements in the Saudi administration and in the Saudi Foreign Office who are clearly sympathetic to this.

14:04Yeah, and may well have supported in a meaningful way the two hijackers that you've, Hamzi and Midar. I've never heard this before, Peter. I know this stuff quite well, and it's new to me. In my new book, it's all the president's wars. I outline it because it was new to me. I mean, I knew that there was a 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 uh calculations uh an aeronautical expert looked at his notes that were found in his house in birmingham he had calculations for the for the descent of an aircraft uh you know going at 200 miles an hour to hit a landmark 50 to 70 miles out i mean so there's a bunch this guy seems to have been absolutely in right at the center he's part of the conspiracy and that's you know one of the great things about history is you find new evidence.

14:58Anita: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 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 Ramzi Youssef, who was one of, you know, that bomber that we were talking about in the world trade center in 1993 first first first time around yeah yes exactly first time around you know and sort of then runs away and then you know his question all of that all of that that so he's his uncle so Khalid Sheikh Mohammed KSM I mean 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 and whether others is doing it I mean Who is he and what's he like?

15:50Well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is well-educated, as so many of these members of al-Qaeda are. He grew up in Kuwait, but he was actually Pakistani. He's a Pakistani, wasn't he? He's not an Arab at all. And so Kuwait has a lot of guest workers. None of them get citizenship. So he was the uncle of Ramzi Youssef, who was the mastermind of the first Trade Center attack in 1993. Hillary Mohammed comes to comes to Afghanistan meets with bin Laden 96. They have a chat talk about potential terrorist attacks. It's only really in 1999 that bin Laden and college. Sheikh Mohammed have a serious discussion about what what they're going to do.

16:31Allah Sheikh Mohammed has a very grandiose scheme where he's going to block 10 airplanes in Asia, 10 American airplanes in Asia, 10 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.

16:50Anita:Does he use the phrase, why use an axe when you can use a bulldozer? Well, I think we do know he said that. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later would talk to U.S. investigators. Also, he would talk to Yossi Fouda, 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 25th anniversary of 9-11, 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 is the operational commander.

17:25There's no debate about that. You know, they begin recruiting people to carry out the attack. They need muscle hijackers who basically don't know the targets because 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. And like so many of these, a sort of technical guy.

17:58Like these guys are all from engineering backgrounds and this sort of thing. Exactly right. A lot of them are engineers or doctors at the second, but engineering tends to be. And so Mohammed Atta comes in and 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. This is the Hamburg cell that we used to read about so much of the papers. Yeah, it is the Hamburg cell.

18:35And they see themselves as part, you know, one question people have often is like, what does this 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 certainly saw themselves as heroic religious warriors.

19:04Anita:But where do they get radicalized? Where do they get, you know, the Hamburg influences, their educational influences? You know, someone might say, well, how is it that they bought into it completely wholesale? who was doing the indoctrination stroke instruction. I mean, where does that all come from? Well, in the case of Mohammed Atta, you know, he grew up in Egypt. 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. PhD, these guys are not stupid. They are highly educated people. Yeah, and a PhD in Germany, they're not giving them away.

19:44So 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. That's not a problem. It's very nice. Yeah, it's, I'll remember the philosopher in a minute. But Isaiah Berlin used it. And so I've always, when 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 their father or mother. or they come and they're immigrants and then i'll accept it or whatever it is and you know this kind of very extreme version of islam can be a comfort and can be uh so in the case of baham and some of these his colleagues that that may be in some part of it do you but i mean there's in a sense two interpretations you've mentioned religion and islam and and and that's absolutely fair enough because they're using islamic text to justify all this but um the other theory that's always given as well as alienation is of course political the the the humiliation of the arab world we've just done a series of whole succession of uh arab losses uh and the way the arab elites are in the view of the uh of those outside power selling out to the west how far of that is part of the rhetoric here well i mean i think really it's it's a great deal of it i mean and the two things are related so so for bin laden you know you can't understand bin laden without i mean this is a religious zealot.

21:09He memorized the Quran at a young age. He was fasting twice a week. He was deeply austere. From the age of 17, his idea of fun when he was a teenager was chanting religious songs about Palestine. So this is a guy who's very religious. Now, at the same time, that very much informed his political view, which is like when 9-11 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 none of them were about American freedoms. It was about US support for Israel, US support for Saudi Arabia, US support for Arab regimes.

21:45The quote I always remember, Peter, was when he said very explicitly that he watched the bombing of the towers in Beirut in the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982, and he thought, I will do the same to the towers in America. Yeah, I think he learned from that. So the question of 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. But 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 as a kind of caveat, which is, if you pay taxes, you know, you're okay.

22:32But the point is that Bin Laden would often resort to Quranic verses to justify his holy war. And he couldn't, of course. It's an extraordinary minority view, but it is not something that he just pulled out of nowhere. And he saw the prophet on his deathbed said that there'd be no true religions. 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 Kushan archaeological site, which I was studying for my book, The Golden Road.

23:09But 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 the American attack on Afghanistan, and they wanted to see what was still there. 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. Yeah, and they would practice using, because they had small knives that they smuggled on the planes, 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 the planes.

24:00So yeah, they were getting training. The muscle hijackers were going to really were to restrain the passengers. They were, you know, it was just like they didn't require very sophisticated training. Then Hala Sheikh Mohammed, who we discussed would, you know, They would have aviation maps that they would talk to about with the pilots. The targets were closely held. Bin Laden was talking about a strike on the United States in a general sense. And people were saying, you should stop talking about it because it's going to leak.

24:30Anita:Stop tipping them off, yeah. And where was Bin Laden and Khan Sheikh Mohammed at this point? Are they both in Tora Bora? They're living in Kandahar, probably. I mean, visiting Tora Bora, maybe visiting Kabul. 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, who is bending the knee to who at this point? Good question. You know, who's in the hierarchy? Who's on top? Well, so bin Laden has sworn by that, 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.

25:12He didn't want Afghanistan to be used for terrorist attacks against American targets. On the other hand, he admired bin Laden. But yeah, so in a sense, bin Laden was paying homage to Mullah Omar.

25:30Anita:But only lip service homage. Because the reason I ask is because Mullah Omar, like bin Laden, sort of wanted to be the man the West feared. And one of the very visible things that he did was when he destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. I remember that. I remember it happening on screen in real time in front of our eyes. An extraordinary video that was replayed all over the world. Horrendous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. These amazing gifts from the ancient world being dynamited in front. And that's him. So, 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.