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

14:13David:Kofor Black famously goes -

14:13Gordon:I'm a junkyard dog who's off the leash.

14:15David:Yeah. And he famously goes and tells Gary Shran, who he's sending to Afghanistan, I want you to bring me back bin Laden's head in a box on dry ice. So suddenly, now you can go kill him.

14:25Gordon:Covert action is policy. So the failure of policy here via the covert action mechanism at the CIA is that you did have opportunities. I mean, there's a famous opportunity in the late 1990s where the CIA knows that bin Laden is attending a meeting. they know in advance and he's attending a meeting with essentially i believe it's emirati shakes shakes potential financiers and the decision is made to not fire a cruise missile

15:02David:because you're going to kill the emirati because you're going to kill these shakes

15:05Gordon:yeah now you could argue tell you're blue in the face that maybe at the in the moment that made sense, but it is completely true that the gloves weren't off. So that was an opportunity. Schoyer's Alex Station throughout the late 1990s had come up with various plans.

15:25David:Some more credible than others. Rolling him up in a rug.

15:29Gordon:To actually go and try to capture Bin Laden and bring him to the US and try him. But I think it's true that if you had had a really aggressive covert action finding in the latter years of the Clinton administration, you probably wouldn't have had 9-11 because one or more of those opportunities would have actually been taken or the existence of a much more muscular finding would have led to resourcing and people and targeting opportunities that haven't even been created. Yeah. And the Bush administration is, as we talked about previously, was looking at other stuff and was slow to get in on this as it took over.

16:12David:So I think that is one of the issues. Yeah. Some of the more contentious, but maybe more interesting missed chances or kind of the nature of what the 9-11 Commission calls the management failures, really operational failures to

16:30Gordon:potentially unravel the plot. It's worth going into these in some detail because we've talked about a few of them throughout the series. the commission highlights 10 points in in the sort of run up to 9-11 where there were these quote-unquote management failures now what the commission is careful to do is not to assert that had these had these dots been connected or had organizations shared information fluidly they're careful not to then make the case that 9-11 would have been prevented yeah but they do identify these as missed opportunities. And the first one, I mean, essentially, we won't go through all 10 here.

17:13Gordon:We've kind of synthesized it, but they essentially all boil down to information sharing between the CIA and the FBI. The first batch of this is in early 2000, about 18 months before 9-11, that critical point where the CIA doesn't watch list Khalid al-Madar, one of the Saudi operatives, or notify the FBI when it learns that he has a valid U.S. visa. He's then lost in Bangkok. He's not tracked onward to the U.S. And then in March, the U.S. does not watch list his operative counterpart, Nawaf al-Hazmi, or notify the FBI when it learns he holds a U.S. visa and has flown to Los Angeles. We have that weird set of interactions inside Alec Station where it's possible that the CIA intentionally didn't share information with the FBI because they wanted to pursue an opportunity to pitch these guys, or they just don't share because they want to keep the FBI out of their business, or there's some kind of internal snafu and communication problem.

18:21Gordon:But something definitely goes wrong. Something goes wrong. So that's kind of missed opportunity one. There's another set of potential missed opportunities in May of 2001 when another CIA officer reviews that same cable traffic, but again, doesn't notify the FBI about Midar's visa or Hazmi's US travel. Then we get to the summer of 2001. An FBI analyst who is detailed to the CIA is asked to go back and look at that same cable traffic, that exact same sequence from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to the US. on July 24th, 2001, she finds the cable on Midar's visa. And then a week later, which gives you some sense of the urgency here.

19:11Gordon:It's not that, you know, she's kind of doing this in her spare time. A week later, she finds the one on his destination. And then in late August, weeks later, she found the March 2000 cable showing that Hazmi had flown to LA. And at this point, this FBI analyst who's detailed to the CIA says, oh, these two guys either are in the U.S. or had been in the past. So next day, this FBI analyst and another FBI analyst go and meet with a rep from Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS, because they're trying to confirm where are these guys. And the INS rep confirms that Midar had entered the U.S.

19:58Gordon:on January 15th, 2000. He had left. And then he reentered on July 4th, 2001. Because remember, he went back home because he'd had a kid and he was feeling homesick. But he returns on July 4th, 2001. There's no record that Hazmi had ever left. So, really important data in this story. On August 22nd, 2001, just weeks before September 11th, the FBI finally knows that those two al-Qaeda linked operatives, Khalid al-Madar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, are in the U.S. Their names are added to the State Department's tip-off watch list two days later. This is 17 days before 9-11. But the tip-off watch list in 2001 is a border and visa watch list that is disconnected from airline booking systems.

20:48David:So it's international flights, effectively. Yeah. International entry, not domestic flight.

20:53Gordon:And it's also disconnected from the FAA's no-fly list, which means that these guys can get on board domestic flights because they have US driver's licenses and their true names.

21:03David:I mean, this is where I think a lot of the attention has, I think, rightly focused on whether there was a significant screw-up. And there are FBI people who are furious with the CIA about this. I mean, I remember interviewing a guy called Ali Soufan, who was an FBI agent. He was working on the USS Cole investigation, the bombing of the US naval ship off the coast of Yemen. He'd been pressing for information from the CIA about some of the people and the suspects in the meeting, and he was getting nothing. He says, the day after 9-11, the CIA turned up and said, here is the information you wanted.

21:38David:He says he went to the bathroom and he threw up because he was so shocked, disgusted at the fact that he'd not been passed this information. So I think the detail is important. And there is a question there about whether it's screw up of processes or whether, as I think some in the FBI would feel and others would feel, it was a cultural problem within CIA about being unwilling to share things with the FBI. And to me, it feels more like the latter rather than just a kind of bad processes, bit of slowness and a bit of a screw up. And I think that is a problem. I mean, we'll come back later to whether that would have made all the difference.

22:17David:Yeah. But I think that there was a problem there. Yeah.

22:20Gordon:Well, I mean, in any case, the FBI realizes that these guys are in the country. The last minute discovery isn't treated with any particular urgency inside the part of the FBI that has this information. because this ensuing search for Khaled al-Madar is treated as a low priority. It's handed off to a single junior special agent. It was his very first counterterrorism case. So this isn't like a, oh my gosh, high priority. These guys are here.

22:47David:We've got to chase them and throw everything at chasing them.

22:50Gordon:It's way down.

22:52David:I think that's the counter argument to that this is the missed opportunity, is that even if they'd known earlier, would it have led to a significant change in behavior and a break? question mark. Yeah.

23:05Gordon:Around the same time in the summer of 2001, there's another failure, which is linked to a man named Zacharias Moussaoui, who we introduced briefly.

23:13David:He was the kind of backup pilot that they thought they might need at one point. He goes for this flight training. And this is the bit where he's doing flight simulator training, isn't it? And it's seen as a bit suspicious by some people around him.

23:26Gordon:Yeah. And Moussaoui has been pegged as the 20th hijacker. But I think what he probably was, was the backup for Jara, the Lebanese guy who was having second thoughts with the girlfriend and was looking wobbly in the middle of 2001. So Moussaoui, though, is in touch with Ramzi bin al-Shib, the facilitator coordinator in Europe, and he's receiving$14 ,000 in wires. In any case, on the 15th of August 2001, the FBI office in Minneapolis opens up an investigation because the flight instructor at Moussaoui's school got really freaked out because he has this guy taking 747 flight lessons who says, like, I actually don't want to become a commercial pilot.

24:19David:Yeah.

24:20Gordon:And the instructor is like, OK, this is this is strange. Moussaoui is arrested on the 16th of August for overstaying his visa. And the FBI talked to him and they quickly realize that this guy's probably a jihadist. He's been to Pakistan, which is how you the gateway to the camps in Afghanistan. And the FBI. My special agent writes, Moussaoui was an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act. And he's arrested a month before 9-11. Not quite. Nearly a month. Now, here's the thing. The FBI can't open his laptop. There's a legal back and forth over the type of criminal warrant that the FBI has.

25:04Gordon:And the FBI eventually decides it doesn't have the legal grounding to search his laptop. A headquarters agent is complaining, he's saying to the Minneapolis field office, guys, he's saying, you've written your FISA request, your foreign intelligence surveillance request to get access to the type of warrant to get access to this laptop. He said, you wrote this to get people spun up. And the Minneapolis FBI supervisor says, you're damn right. And this is a direct quote. I'm trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center. Wow. So broadly in 2001, in the summer, you know, neither CIA nor FBI connect the presence of Midar, Hazmi or Moussaoui to the flood of general reporting about imminent attacks.

25:56Gordon:And it's interesting because there was a report that made it to George Tenet's desk at CIA in late August. that was titled Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly. And it was about Moussaoui. There's a cliche that has emerged in the years since 9-11 that it was a failure. It could be a failure of imagination, but also a failure to connect the dots.

26:15David:Yeah. So David, there is this talk about the failure to connect the dots. It's an interesting phrase. I mean, there were a lot of dots that were there. People learning how to fly, the Moussaoui stuff. people trying to get into the US. I guess, I don't know what you think, but part of me feels like they still would have needed more dots. You could connect those dots plausibly if you were one person looking at them all and go, we know Bin Laden wants to attack the US. We know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wants to use airplanes. Here's a guy learning how to fly, the Zacharias Moussaoui. here's some people who've come into the US, but it would take quite a lot to connect all of those and go, ah, that's the plot, wouldn't it?

27:04David:I think so.

27:05Gordon:And I think we'll probably return after the break to go deep on this question of what really could it have been prevented? And I think it's a helpful, for me, it's a helpful exercise to kind of split the questions up a bit and to say, well, there's a question of what's the nature of the intelligence failure, because there obviously was one. And then there's a question of given reality at the time,

27:28David:could it have been prevented?

27:30Gordon:I think my view of the first question, the failure, is that it has to be seen as a national failure, not just an intelligence failure. It is an intelligence failure, but it's more than that because it is a failure at the intelligence level. It is absolutely a failure of collection. And I think you could plausibly make the case that it is an analytical failure to do some of this dot connecting. And to share the information. And to share the information. It's an organizational failure between the CIA and the FBI. But it is also a massive failure of our nation's counterterrorism policy and the covert action authorities that go along with that.

28:15Gordon:I think from 1996, when bin Laden declares war, up to September 11, 2001. It is primarily, I think, because the intel feeds into the policy. For me, it is primarily a national failure to deal with an emerging counterterrorism threat.

28:33David:Yeah, I think that's right. It's a wider governmental failure. And we're not making a party political point because it crosses over from the Clinton administration into the Bush administration, this issue of whether enough drive had been put in to the need to confront Al-Qaeda when it had attacked the US multiple times when Bin Laden had signaled he wanted to attack the United States. And if you have the drive to some extent from the top, then you get the intelligence collection, then you get analysts being told, you need to be working hard on this to try and share information. So there's an intelligence failure there, but it's broader.

29:07Gordon:Well, it's not implausible that there could have been policy energy in either the Clinton administration or the Bush administration to deal with this. You have dozens of Americans dead in the 1998 embassy bombings, and you have 17 sailors dead on the USS Cole. So you already have, this isn't some distant threat. This is someone who's murdered Americans by the time we get to 2001.

29:32David:With that, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll look at this question about whether it could have been prevented and what the legacy was of 9-11 25 years on. See you after the break. This episode is brought to you by Atio, the A-I-C-R-M. Gary here from Goalhangers, the rest is football. Football moves quickly now, teams have more data than ever, but the real skill is knowing what actually matters. And it's exactly the same in business. The problem is work gets scattered across platforms. The info is there, but with so much noise, it's easy to drop the ball. That's why Atio is useful.

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32:54David:Welcome back to this, really the final part of our series on 9-11, 25 years on. I mean, the question, David, could it have been prevented? Should it have been prevented? What do you think?

33:05Gordon:I mean, impossible to answer, right? Because when you look back at dots, we all analytically go, well, someone should have connected these dots. But it's hindsight, isn't it? It is hindsight. So there's tremendous hindsight bias at play here. But I do think, as much as we can, it is useful to try to put ourselves in the shoes of the actual CIA counterterrorism analysts and desk officers and the FBI special agents who were, you know, involved in investigations at the time and in the casework on Al Qaeda. I think, you know, the 9-11 Commission looked at this and they're wishy-washy on. They never really say the plot would have failed if any of those quote unquote failures of management had been addressed.

33:49Gordon:But they do catalog all these missed opportunities along the way. Lawrence Wright in The Living Tower, which is a great history of many of these topics and Al-Qaeda and the run up to 9-11. Lawrence Wright makes the case that surveillance on Midar and Hazmi would have broken it open. And he says, for example, if Ali Soufan's team investigating the USS Cole bombing had known before August 2001 that these guys were in the US, they could have fought for authorities to surveil them, wiretap their apartments. And we do know where they are, of course. They're not hiding. They're not hiding.

34:33David:They're not hiding.

34:34Gordon:You could look at their contacts. You could map their network.

34:37David:And as soon as they're under surveillance, you start to see them moving together for the plot itself. To me, I do find that plausible. I find that idea that if the FBI had been told earlier about, and the right people in the FBI, I think that's also a point. People like Ali Sufam, people who are kind of really deep in Al-Qaeda operational investigation had been told about, you know, Hazmi and Midar, that it's possible at least. That, I think, is the one way in which it could have been stopped.

35:07Gordon:Well, I guess, I mean, it's helpful to pull the thread out further because Midar and Hazmi end up on flight 77, which is the plane piloted by Hanjur, Hani Hanjur, into the Pentagon. And I'm much more sympathetic to the view that early surveillance might have disrupted part of the plot. because in this telling like you in rights telling and i think what you're describing what you have to believe is that the fbi would patiently surveil these guys to watch the entire and and map the entire network long enough in the u.s and get to ata and then eventually you blow the whole thing wide open I'm a little skeptical of that for a couple reasons.

35:58Gordon:The first one is that we have a bit of a petri dish for what happens when the FBI gets information about Midar and Hazmi because it happened in August of 2001.

36:14David:And they moved slowly, you're saying.

36:16Gordon:It was seen as a low priority. It was given to a junior special agent. It wasn't really investigated. And to believe that the FBI would have behaved differently a year and a half earlier, you have to assume that either is going to get to exactly the right person at the FBI who decides to do this, or that somehow just having that information in the FBI's system for 18 months would have along the way generated a different response. Maybe. But we actually do have an example of, we know what happened when the FBI got the information. Nothing. Yes. Yes. And here's the other thing. We do have a kind of a sample of, which is we know how the FBI reacted to a tip off about a guy acting really weird who has jihadist sensibilities and who's taking flight training because they arrested Zacharias Moussaoui in August of 2001.

37:08Gordon:And I do think this is a difference in the way American law enforcement prosecutes or sort of investigates terrorism cases and perhaps just crime in general is there, maybe this has changed, but would there have been enough patience to sit and wait and watch and map the entire network? What we see with Moussaoui is that He's arrested for overstaying his visa. He's not surveilled for months. The FBI doesn't even get the authorities to get into his computer. And he's in prison, kind of just sitting there when 9-11 happens. So to me, the counterfactual on the FBI finding Midar and Hazmi, or understanding that Midar has made in the States in early 2000, and then running an investigation that unravels the whole thing.

38:12Gordon:What I think is more plausible is that the FBI may have unraveled one part of the plot.

38:21David:Which to be fair though, could have then disrupted, it could have led to a delay. I mean, you end up with, you don't know basically. You don't know whether it would have delayed the whole plot or whether the whole plot goes ahead without Hamzi and Medard. There are different possibilities there, which I think are quite hard to say it would have definitely stopped it or it wouldn't have stopped.

38:40Gordon:And what we can definitively say is if, for example, Desmedar and Hazmi had been deported or in early 2000, before they've ever been put in touch with Atta, they're arrested, the plot just loses two of its muscle. Yeah. And they bring in some other people. And they bring in other people. Yeah. Or they do it with 17 people instead of 19.

39:01David:So I think it's interesting because this gets us really to the aftermath. Because this question does, I think once you get to the period after 9-11, as I said, quite quickly the blame game began about whether it could have been prevented. I think you get the 9-11 commission. I remember watching the testimony, and this was kind of blockbuster hearings when Condi Rice was testifying, when Richard Clarke was testifying and said, we let you down, he said to the American people. He sat there and in his testimony, as the head of counterterrorism said, I'm sorry, we let you down. I think there was a feeling like you could sense everyone looking to blame someone else.

39:42David:I think that's the reality of where we got to in the years afterwards in terms of this responsibility and prevention question, is that it becomes quite politicized. Because if you're in the Bush administration, you're trying to downplay the warnings you got, or the sense you weren't urgent enough. You're from the Clinton administration, you're trying to downplay the fact you didn't have to go off Bin Laden. The CIA and FBI are kind of dueling about some of this. So it does become quite a politicized question, which means I don't think we ever quite get to the bottom of it. Do you think it could have been prevented?

40:11David:I think probably only with better collection and maybe more aggressive covert action. And I mean, that moves us on to the legacy, doesn't it? And the impact afterwards. Because you get a few things and you get attempts to put right some of the problems. So you get pressure for more information sharing, you get reform with the US intelligence community, you get a Department of Homeland Security to up your airline security. And for the CIA, you suddenly get, in Kofa Black's terms, the junkyard dog being led off the leash and being told, you go do whatever you want, go take out Al-Qaeda. And you get very aggressive.

40:48David:I mean, almost as I think a reaction to that sense of, did we fail? You then get a very, very aggressive posture, which is we have to do everything possible to stop this happening again, which of course leads into things and controversies for the CIA, like extraordinary rendition, torture, black sites, all these things. We have to get every scrap of intelligence in order to prevent that sense of failure, which people talked about in the wake of 9-11. So I think the kind of emotional impact on the US intelligence community was really palpable. And when you spoke to people over the years, I could see when I spoke to people the kind of sense of pain that they carried.

41:26David:Because your job, if you're an intelligence agency, is to provide warning and to stop these kind of things. So whether it was preventable or not, it was still a failure to stop something.

41:35Gordon:Absolutely.

41:35David:And I think that burden rested heavily on quite a few politicians and intelligence community people. and explain some of the actions in later years, including the 9-11 wars, as they're called.

41:47Gordon:Yeah. Well, this is why, I mean, in the first episode of the series, I said that I think 9-11 is sort of a hinge moment in American history. There is a pre-9-11 and there's a post-9-11. And when you look at the ledger of these 9-11 wars afterward, you see that in some ways, and I think Steve Cole has a great line on this, where he says it's actually easier to explain 9-11 than it is to explain what happened afterward. And I think that is absolutely true. Because when you go through it, there is just an absolute direct line from 9-11 to the conflicts that have shaped the last quarter century. The intelligence community, the Pentagon are basically rewired to fight - To fight a war on terror.

42:34Gordon:The intelligence community budget probably triples in the first decade after 9-11. It undergoes its largest reorganization since the 40s. We have conventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have troops in Syria, fight in Yemen and Pakistan. We conduct counterterrorism operations in over 78 countries in the years after 9-11. The numbers on the 9-11 wars are staggering. And there's been an effort at Brown University to actually come up with some of the human and economic costs associated with these conflicts. The direct death toll is somewhere between 905 and 940 ,000 people killed in direct military action.

43:22Gordon:It's obviously not just, that's not, those are everybody who's killed. The indirect death toll, maybe 3 million to 5 million from disease, starvation, collapse of infrastructure, 38 million people displaced. We have an American basing structure that gets set up afterward. We have bases in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Syria, the UAE. The economic cost of all of this, Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria, is$3 trillion. dollars. The total budgetary cost of the totality of these conflicts is$8 trillion.

43:58David:I mean, you can't explain, I mean, it defines American foreign policy for the years to come. Let's take another look at it though from the side of Al-Qaeda. I think this is kind of interesting to understand. If we go back to where we started, Bin Laden's idea was you cut off the head of the snake, you attack the US, it's a paper tiger, then it will withdraw its support for regimes in the Middle East, like the Saudi regime, and then this wave of radical Islam will sweep over the Middle East and lead to success from Al-Qaeda. Didn't work out that way. The opposite. Yeah, the opposite happens. Although, I mean, you're right, it doesn't work.

44:35David:That strategy ultimately fails. 9-11 and then the US reaction to 9-11 by launching some of the wars does create a wave of radicalization. It's true, both in the Middle East, waves of jihadism, and in Western countries, including the UK, which do to some extent fuel the Al-Qaeda ideology and support for Al-Qaeda. Because you go from Al-Qaeda being, frankly, a few thousand people in the camps in Afghanistan to a period where jihadism is, there's waves of it in Iraq, in Syria. You end up with ISIS, which takes over a large chunk of Syria. You end up with attacks in London, in Paris, in Madrid in the following years.

45:16David:So there is a sense in which the overall strategy fails for Bin Laden, but it does fuel a conflict between the West and to some extent, jihadist radicalism, or Islam as he wants to put it, which will be bloody and awful, but ultimately which al-Qaeda's ideology doesn't win.

45:36Gordon:Right. I would argue you probably don't get 9-11 unless al-Qaeda has sanctuary in Afghanistan to bring people in, to train them, to actually do the operational planning. You need some kind of sanctuary. They have it in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and then the subsequent effort to basically dismantle the military and pieces of the state leads to the collapse of the state. In Iraq. And the rise of a Sunni insurgency that has an Al-Qaeda franchise inside of it that then all of a sudden has some kind of safe haven. And then when Syria collapses... They move into that. The franchise in Iraq that had been seeded with people from Syria and elsewhere, those lines, those sort of supply lines that were going through Syria and Iraq come back into Syria.

46:29Gordon:And so you have this sort of domino effect in many ways, and this kind of complicated intermingling of the way the US has intervened militarily in the region, the rise of these Al Qaeda franchises, and the fact that you have a large number of young men who decide to go and fight, be it in Iraq or be it in Afghanistan or be it in Yemen. Or I mean, there's a mini insurgency in Saudi Arabia itself in 2002 and 2003. None of that happens without 9-11. None of it happens without 9-11.

47:07David:Although it is interesting to say that Al-Qaeda itself will get pummeled. It will lose its sanctuary in Afghanistan. It will go into the tribal areas of Pakistan. We talked about this in other episodes. And of course, the leaders of Al-Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself is going to get captured. and eventually bin Laden himself will be killed a decade later. It takes a long, long time, as we talked about in our CIA versus bin Laden series. But ultimately, al-Qaeda is a hugely diminished force now, 25 years on. There's still a bit left out there. But I guess jihadist radicalism hasn't died and that force is still there, but not in the way that bin Laden wanted.

47:48Gordon:And by one measure, I think the ledger we just gave of the human and economic cost of the 9-11 wars is striking. There is another argument to be made, not so much an argument, but just a statement of fact, that there hasn't been a massive terror attack on the scale of 9-11 on American soil since then.

48:10David:Yeah, we've come close. Operation Overt, the liquid airline was designed to be on the scale bigger than 9-11, 10 airliners going transatlantically. So it's been close, but the counter-terrorist machine has picked up.

48:22Gordon:Yeah. And I think eventually the CIA crafted, I think, a vision for what the defeat of Al-Qaeda as an organization looked like. It took a while. It took probably 10 years after 9-11 to finally get there. But the combination of just relentless CT operations, the drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan eventually, I think, led to this kind of Al Qaeda central, the thing that had plotted and designed 9-11. Being decimated. Is decimated. And it's worth, I mean, you mentioned bin Laden. You know, he's killed in 2011 in a raid. I mean, it's worth rounding out some of the other characters from the story because KSM, Khalid J.

49:08Gordon:Mohammed, he's captured in March of 2003.

49:10David:And we should say he is still in Guantanamo Bay. And I've been to Guantanamo a number of times and nearly covered some of his trials, but his trial keeps on getting delayed. So he's not quite been, if you like, justice in terms of him being brought to justice. But he's still there.

49:27Gordon:Ramzi bin al-Sheib, that coordinator, one of the members of the Hamburg cell who didn't get a visa to come to the US. He's captured in September of 2002 in Karachi. He's in Gitmo. There's a few of KSM's other facilitators who are involved in the plot, likewise in Gitmo. So you do have this organization that eventually is defeated, but it's coming in the context of a much broader about face really in US foreign and defense policy that happens in the wake of 9-11.

49:59David:Okay, so that's the US in the world, Al-Qaeda in the world. Let's finish by just talking a little bit about what it does to the US itself. I mean, it changes US politics. It changes US culture. it creates a kind of sense of fear, I think, which pervades. I mean, it changes something. I mean, as an outsider, but someone who spent a lot of time in the US, it changed the American psyche, I think, in a really profound way. You go through that period in the 90s where the US is the kind of lone superpower. It's one. It can afford to be comfortable. It's never been attacked really on its homeland. The closest is Pearl Harbor, which is not within the continental homeland.

50:40David:And then suddenly, in a way that other countries had experienced terrorism, well, not necessarily on the scale of 9-11, but for the US, I think the nature of it was a shock to the system, which had kind of really profound ripple effects politically, socially, culturally in the coming years. Yeah.

50:59Gordon:Look at polling in recent presidential elections and just over half of Americans will say they're very or somewhat worried that they or a member of their family would be victims of terrorism. I mean, that's absolutely not going to be the case in the late 1990s prior to 9-11. I think it really did. It created a national mood of fear, a desire for revenge. I think a sense that we are at war with a very amorphous enemy that we can't - The war on terror. ... quite pin down or defeat. Yeah. A sense in some quarters of a kind of civilizational threat. It's probably hard to imagine Trump proposing, for example, his ban on immigration from certain Muslim countries without 9-11.

51:42Yeah.

51:43David:The link into populism is interesting because you get 9-11, then you get the things like the Iraq war, which is partly a reaction, very much I think wouldn't have happened without 9-11. And then you get the kind of anti-Iraq war feeling and the anti-interventionism which fuels some elements of populism on the left and right, kind of changes US politics. It's kind of interesting and complicated how it feeds through. I find it quite hard to disentangle actually because it's just everywhere.

52:11Gordon:Yeah. I also think, and I looked very recently, I mean just earlier this year at the capture of Nicolas Maduro, for example, in Venezuela, or frankly, even the sort of intelligence and targeting that went into helping the Israelis kill the supreme leader of Iran. That surveillance kind of intelligence manhunting apparatus that the U.S. is using all around the world now probably doesn't exist without 9-11 either. So you have this really beefed up kind of intelligence and security apparatus inside the state that a lot of debate in the intervening years about whether in some cases, let me talk about the Snowden revelations, whether in some cases that thing is intervening or impeding American civil liberties.

53:01Gordon:But the reality of it is that this machine that has been built up is being used. And it's being used outside of the context of the 9-11 wars now because it's a capability that the US intelligence community has built.

53:17David:I mean, the CIA gets militarized to some extent, doesn't it? Drone strikes and detainee and interrogation programs. It becomes a different organization because of 9-11. And that, even as some of the threats change, that lives on. And I think so many of the things, because it is now 25 years on, it is starting to recede. It's receding from memory for a lot of people. And yet the kind of legacy of it is so persistent in areas, even where as the terrorist threat fades, the things it created, whether it's populism or whether it's a different CIA, they live on.

53:49Gordon:You think like a political issue like immigration in the US. Immigration is probably not the national security battlefield that it is today without 9-11. We talked in the series, immigration prior to 9-11 is kind of seen as travel facilitation in a lot of ways. The security measures that are taken at the border at airports or whatever, they're pretty thin. And that becomes beefed up. It becomes a political issue. It gets connected to, rightly in some cases, but it gets connected to the issue of terrorism and counterterrorism. And so you see the language and themes of the war on terror get integrated into US politics, even at the domestic level.

54:31David:I think there is this interesting question about whether the US overreacts to 9-11. And I think some people say that. I think it slightly misses the emotional impact that 9-11 had on the US. And it's only if you can understand that emotional impact that you understand why it did act the way it did afterwards. But certainly, I think there is a degree to which, you talked about the costs, financially, militarily, there's a kind of imperial overstretch to some extent. There's a desire to reshape the world, I think driven partly by the insecurity of the Bush administration having missed it and allowed it to happen.

55:11David:Yeah, it does something to America. It's not the same America that it was before 9-11.

55:16Gordon:No, and I think one of the ways you can see that, just how deep it gets into the American psyche, is if you look at entertainment, you look at sports, you look at fiction, it infects the national mood. Spy thrillers after 9-11 start to be more counter-terrorism Middle East focused, right? You have television programs like Homeland or 24. They speak the language of the war on terror, right? I mean, Bruce Springsteen. The Rising. Releases an entire album. Which great album. Great album. But about 9-11, you know? And even in something that seems as maybe as distant from national security as architecture, we have all those Jersey barriers and bollards to prevent car bombs.

55:59Gordon:The way buildings are designed, the entrances that people use to walk in, how we enter not just government buildings, but any big commercial building has totally changed.

56:10David:I mean, I suppose as we finish, I mean, for both of us, it kind of affected our careers, didn't it? I mean, for me, I shifted from really just covering the US to covering national security in 25 years on. I'm still doing that. And for you, I mean, you end up at the CIA being an analyst of jihadist groups and the kind of groups which grew out of 9-11, the reaction to 9-11. So in a way, we're both examples of people whose careers have been shaped by this one event.

56:35Gordon:Yeah. Frankly, the seat that I took at CIA may not have existed, may not have ever been resourced or funded had 9-11 not happened and the CIA not exploded in its hiring and recruitment in the years afterward. I mean, I do think that it is, for me, the 25 years since, it has been an era of strategic drift in some ways for the U.S. and it feels like off potential off ramps in this conflict weren't taken maybe for understandable reasons to your point on the national psyche and mood totally changing after 9-11 but as we look back on it i i do think that there are points where it may have been more in america's national

57:24David:interest to have you know essentially declared victory and moved on and done and you know there is this argument that actually the shift to a more dangerous Russia and particularly the growth of China as a kind of national security issue were missed because of the focus post 9-11 on counterterrorism as the dominating threat. And you talk to all the people in MI5 or whatever, and they'll say, well, we didn't have the resources to look at Russia or look at China because everything was about terrorism. So I think it does, it consumes us, doesn't it?

57:54Gordon:Yeah, it does. I think maybe among the deepest impacts is the fact that 9-11 itself, certainly, but maybe more so the response to it. I think it convinced a lot of Americans that the government and its institutions couldn't be trusted to lead on the global stage. And I think in some ways it has contributed, 9-11, the sort of pre-9-11, post-9-11, has contributed to a a sense that we've lost something as a nation. We're not as good as we used to be. It was better before 9-11. And now because of the attacks and because of the response, it's worse. So there's some sense that this kind of amorphous force has stolen away some of our greatness.

58:43Gordon:So I think for me, 9-11 most profoundly is this kind of the post 9-11 an era is an era of America having a profound sense of post-traumatic stress that we're still dealing with today.

58:57David:I think that's right. I think that's the right place to end this 25 years on. Hard to believe, but it is 25 years. Thank you for joining us on this journey. It's difficult at times to talk about such a dark day, but I think it has illuminated many of the issues, both behind the plot and the aftermath. So thank you for joining us. Reminder, do join the Declassified Club if you want to hear more from us, including those bonus episodes related to this. But yeah, thank you and see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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