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

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

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

This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own method sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation. And that no longer need happen ever again. because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo. It records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can

refer to afterwards. I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With One Press, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaude, which calls up details of hazy, long gone conversations in seconds. Empire listeners, and go to UK.plord.a.ai forward slash empire. That's UK.com. P-L-A-U-D.orgh forward slash empire.

And use the promo code Empire to get 10% off any plaud device. Eastern Afghanistan, March 1997. A three-man TV crew is driven up freezing mountain roads. They have each been given a pair of glasses with blacked out cardboard as blindfolds. They're searched, stripped of their cameras, and left to wait in a mud hut. It's now past midnight. The doors open and in walks a tall, softly spoken man with an AK-47 and a camouflage jacket. His name is Osama bin Laden. He is here to deliver his first televised declaration of war against the United States. And one of the three men in that hut, the producer who made the interview happen, joins us on this podcast today.

This is the story of Osama bin Laden's Declaration of War told by a man who had a front row seat to the action. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnain. And me, William Durimple. And welcome to our guest, my old friend Peter Bergen, one of the great security journalists of his generation, CNN's national security analyst, and author of a wonderful book,

The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, which I just reread yesterday and which is just a spectacular summation of a long and complicated story. He's also the producer of the interview we just opened with. The first television interview of Zama bin Laden ever gave to the Western press. He's also one of my eldest friends. So Pete, welcome.

Thank you, Willie. Before we get going and get you up that mountain, Peter, properly, I'd love you to set the scene for us because where we left bin Laden at the end of the episode, he was landing at Jalalabad in May 1996. He was broke. He was stateless. He was disowned.

I mean, many in the State Department thought he was washed up. So, Peter, can you remind us why bin Laden ended up in Afghanistan and why he chose to make the name now is so familiar to as the Tora Bora Caves, his base? Well, thanks for having me on. You know, he, you know, Afghanistan for bin Laden was sort of the Medina of the 20th century. This is a man who believed that a model himself very explicitly on the Prophet. So when the Prophet was exiled from Mecca to Medina, you know, and began his war to kind of bring Islam to not only Saudi Arabia, but also the Middle East, bin Laden in his own mind, and this shows a certain amount of his hubris, in a sense.

He tried to replicate in many ways the life of the Prophet Muhammad. And so his exile from Sudan to Afghanistan resonated in his own mind as reminiscent of what the Prophet had done. And of course the Prophet was not any religious figure. He was also he fought 27 different wars and conflicts, so he was also a major military leader. Bin Laden comes to Afghanistan. He doesn't really know what to expect. He had spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. He arguably spent more time in Afghanistan than many other countries in his life.

But the Taliban had just taken over, and he didn't really know what to expect. He lands in Jalalabad. He is greeted by a warlord called Eunice Carlos, who's not in the Taliban, but one of the Afghan warlords who fought the Soviets. And he gets a warm reception because bin Laden had really fought rather bravely against the Soviets during the 1980s war, despite some later kind of discussion that he was sort of a Gucci guerrilla who really didn't participate in the fighting. And then very soon thereafter, the Taliban take over Jalalabad, but they give him kind of a hero's welcome and they, you know, a, you know, they really see him as a genuine war hero. He sets up Cholp and Jalalabad. In the end, it turns out to be a rather ideal place for him to launch

his forthcoming Holy War. And why did he reach out to you, Peter? What's the, what's the process? I mean, you know, obviously this is an interview that most of the world's media would have been fighting and killing for, at least in retrospect. How did you guy, you were the person that actually fixed this up? I was living in New York in the early 90s. And so a group of guys who had trained in Afghanistan or supported the Afghan war effort, drove a van into the World Trade Center building, blew it up, hoping to bring both towers down. They didn't succeed, but they killed six people. So I went to my bosses at CNN and said, look, there's something happening in Afghanistan. We need to try and dig into it. And I didn't really know who was behind it, but this group was an organization.

Organizations had leaders. Initially, I thought it was an Afghan warlord called Guberdin, Hed Nacher. Who was held responsible for most of the nutty extremist stuff. He was throwing acid into schoolgirl's eyes and this sort of stuff. And we used to blame him for almost anything kind of very extreme at that time. So it was a very sensible attribution. Yeah, he was the only prime minister in history, probably to be shelling his own capital on a daily basis at the time. So we went to Afghanistan, we made a documentary. It's right to explain about this phenomenon of the Afghan Arabs and potential that potential for violence. And then in 96, the US State Department released a two-page white paper, which was actually very useful. And it was full of information about this guy,

Osama bin Laden, who I'd never heard of a financier of Islamic extremism as the way they kind of framed it. I then went back to my bosses of CNN who, like, you know, they'd obviously never heard of the Saam bin Laden and said, I think this guy was responsible for the trade center attack in 93. That wasn't quite correct, but it was close enough. So we went there. I went with Peter Arnett, who was at the time the world's most famous foreign correspondent. This was the guy who made his name in the Gulf War describing Scuds and American missiles, yeah. Peter was an old-fashioned war correspondent. I mean, he ran to the sound of gunfire. He loved it. And also Peter Juvenile, who had gone in 75 times in a British cameraman,

75 times into Afghanistan, during the Soviet War went, which was unbelievably dangerous. Later to become the proprietor of the Gandamak Lodge, our favorite watering hole in Kabul. Every War has its hotel, and the Gandemak Lodge was that hotel. Great place. To ask you a question, really, you know, I reached out, so many of the people that were supporting Bin Laden lived in London. And they were basically Saudi dissidents, Syrian dissidents. And they, you know, they knew Bin Laden in to one degree or another. And they had never dealt with the media or had very, and they really didn't understand

how the media worked. And they were very concerned where agents of the CIA, they were very concerned would we give this guy a fair shake. And, you know, they just, I spent weeks with them. And we mostly talked about the Quran, Saudi history. And I was by then, about 33. And I, you know, I had developed patience, which was very, you know, I spent a lot of time with these guys.

Peter, what did Bin Laden, what was he seeing when he walked into his new home, the Torabora Mountains? What was there? How hospitable was it to human life? You know, what was he walking into? For the son of an extraordinarily rich man, Bin Laden really was like a survivalist. He loved taking, you know, 12-hour hikes in the mountains of Tarabur. He lived like a medieval peasant in the Torebara Mountains, much of the annoyance of some of his kids, who knew that he had a lot of money. At the time, he was kind of broke. But the point is that he actually chose this life. He lived in this like Bramshackle house.

houses, almost do kind of word, in Toraborra, which is where he loved sort of, he loved the Mount Alpine Air. He would take his sons on 12-hour hikes around the mountains, which they hated, but he loved. And, you know, it was a place that he was very comfortable with because he had set this place up in the 1980s during the war against the Soviets. He knew these mountains like the back of his hand. And it's astonishingly beautiful, we should say. It's one of the most sort of extraordinary places to walk around. Yeah, the mountains rise to 14,000 feet, really You've been there, I guess, and I think it's a fair amount of time there. And it's on the Afghan-Pakistan border, so it's an ideal place to sort of, you know, go back and forth between Afghanistan and

Pakistan. So, you know, bin Laden arrives there. He also has a bigger house in Jalalabad, which is a sort of relatively small city near Tarabor. And this is where he kind of essentially resets his life. He spent five years in exile in Sudan. He's left with almost nothing, and he doesn't really know what to expect with the Taliban. We should perhaps explain that Jalalabad had been the winter capital of the Afghan kings and it's notably warmer than Kabul. It's a place that it's quite sort of, I mean, it's quite a civilised place by Afghan standards. It's not, it's not that remote. It has a subtropical climate and when we went there, we checked into the zero star Spingar Hotel, which you may have stayed at Willie. I've stayed there actually, yes.

That's where we waited around to get the go-ahead to go and interview bin Laden. Right. So, Owen, while he's there, you know, sort of taking his reluctant sons on very long walks and eating, I believe, sort of a very, very basic diet of, you know, just bread, rice, you know, some fruit from time to time. Living like a monk, as you say, you know, sort of this very religious and, you know, austere life. At what point does he's path cross with Mueller Omar, who is also, you know, a big deal at this time? Well, I was basically a village mullah. He's well regarded by other of his colleagues because he was incorruptible, sort of led this very humble life. By 1994, he had styled himself the commander of the faithful, and he had taken over much of southern Afghanistan. And he was a one-eyed cleric. He fought against the Soviets. He was extremely provincial.

They saw Kabul as sort of Sodom and Gomorrah, a place of sin, the long-time capital. of Afghanistan. So Mulah Omar kind of, and bin Laden, they sort of reach out to each other. Mullah Omar is governed by ideas around Pashtun hospitality, which is extremely important for Pashtuns. He's part of the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. He also regards bin Laden as war hero. And, you know, he gives him protection. Now, that is not to say that the Taliban love bin Laden universally. In fact, a lot of them don't. They know he's complicating their quest for international recognition by his threatening statements against the United States. Quite a lot of them want Bin Laden to leave Afghanistan at a certain point. But Mueller-Omar is, you know, he's the commander of the faithful. It's a theocracy. And it's basically, if he wants bin Laden to stay, bin Laden's going to stay. And this declaration of jihad that is made in front of your cameras, give us the immediate background on that. The background was, yeah, I reached out to these guys in London, spent a lot of time with them. Bin Laden had delivered a declaration of war in Arabic.

but no one had paid any attention to it. And in Bin Laden's mind, he had a duty to warn if he was going to kind of attack civilians. And so he wanted to talk, his contact in London told me, you know, we were talking to CNN, BBC, 60 minutes, CBS. And in the end, they chose CNN. You know, we went there. We spent a lot of time in Pakistan. We had two of Bin Laden's associates with us.

We checked into the Zero Star Spingar Hotel in Jalalabad. We waited and waited. At one point that his media advisor came, he said, don't bring any of your equipment with us. And we had a $50,000 camera and we had professional equipment, but this was not up for negotiation. And it's interesting that they would use a bomb and a camera to later kill Akhman Shah Masu, the leader of the Taliban resistance. But so they told us, don't bring anything with you, including your watches, just bring your clothes. So one evening, a group of having armed men arrive in a van.

We get in. they drive towards Kabul, then they drive up into the Torobara Mountains, change of vehicles, blindfolds, searched very carefully, multiple levels of security. A lot of this sort of may have been for our, you know, kind of a little bit of security theater. But the point is that by the time we get to this mud hut in the middle of the night, I estimated it was midnight. I didn't really know much about Bin Laden compared to anybody listening to this, but I didn't even know exactly know what he would look like. With the not pictures from the beginning, that, We're so familiar with that face, though.

Don't forget he was a very fundamentalist Saudi Wahhabi who do not take pictures. And at that time, there was maybe one, Robert Fiske had maybe taken a picture of him in 1993 in Sudan. But it was like very limited. And so he walks in and he's six foot four, I estimated. He is very rail thin. He carried himself like a cleric. He wasn't a table thumping revolution. I knew enough about him to say that his, you know, his views on the United States were, you know,

and Israel and most Arab regimes was very intense. But when he was talking, it was like he was reading the phone book. He was very kind of monotone. He spoke in Arabic, and he had a very good translator with him who took to be some kind of Saudi cleric. He delivered, you know, this declaration of war against the United States. He was reading or he was just talking? He was talking. He was talking.

And he spoke in Arabic. He speaks English. You know, he grew up. Look, he comes from one of the most lead families. He went to a school where he had an English teacher. who Brian Feifield Shela, who was in Oxford, recent Oxford graduate who taught him English.

He spent a little time in Oxford when he was 17, two and a half months on a kind of like exchange program type of thing. So he speaks English, but he didn't speak English to a degree that he wanted to do an interview.

He wanted to be very clear of what he was going to say. So some of the things he said in the interview, I frankly didn't understand because we didn't know. So he mentioned Aidan. Well, it turned out, I many years later that his man

had bombed a hotel in Aden that was housing American soldiers who were on the way to Somalia to support Operation Restore Hope, which was feeding, starving Somalis in 1993. So the interview sort of came along, and he spent an hour with us. And he was, they were very kind of, you know, he wasn't going to hang out. I mean, we had a cup of tea, took some pictures, and then he left. And I, you know, at the end of the interview was, I think it was maybe like three in the morning or something. And again, I'm estimating, you know, I thought, this is all very interesting.

But how do you, how do you operationalize this from a mud hut at 6,000 feet? in Afghanistan, which the Taliban had basically put back into the Middle Ages. There was no phone system. The only way you could communicate was through Theraya satellite phones, which were the very early satellite phones. A little over a year later, the U.S. embassy attacks in Africa happened. And then it was very clear that these guys could kill, you know, they didn't care about killing large numbers of civilians.

Did you ever get that feeling from the man himself? I mean, you know, sometimes people look back and they embellish an experience. And I know you're not that kind of person. But when he walked in, did you feel that you were in the presence of somebody who was capable of such violence? No, no. I mean, they'd invite us, so I wasn't scared. I was like, you're both journalists and writers and you work in this. So, like, when you're in that situation, it's like, what you're actually thinking is, am I getting what we need?

You work for this, exactly. And they'd invited us. It was four years before they beheaded Danny Pearl. Well, I was thinking of that. I was thinking of exactly that. But, you know, you are excited, but you also have a spidey sense of, you know, I hate, I like, I fear. I mean, was there an emotional response you had to him walking in at all? I found him very hard to read, Anita.

I found him hard to read. He wasn't like there was no, A, there was like very, it wasn't like there was a lot of small talk. There was just like, we did the interview, we did it. I mean, the people around him hung on his every word. There were maybe a dozen guys who were weapons sort of outside the vision of the camera. And they filmed the camera, they filmed the interview on their camera again because of this concern about security. And, you know, I thought, wow, this guy's serious. He seems serious.

The people around him are serious. But, you know, it's one thing to be serious, another thing to have capability. So, lots of people may have the intent to attack the United States. Do they have a capability? And some people have the capability, but do they really have the intent? So at that time, we didn't know a bunch of things that I now know. We didn't know that his men may have trained some of the fighters in the Black Hulkdown incident. Somalia, which 18 American servicemen had died. At the time, it seemed like a bunch of threats.

In fact, they invited me back in 1998, and I didn't go because I felt, okay, there's not much more to say. It's going to be the same set of threats. And John Miller of ABC News then went in 98 and did another interview with Bin Laden, where he sort of said much of the same things. Do you regret that now? I mean, this is one of the great interviews of the 20th century that you turned down. Well, no, but I don't regret it because we are, I mean, basically he said that he, he, he, he, You know, our interview in 97 was the first televised interview. And the year later, John Miller did this interview.

And Bin Laden said some of the same things gave a little bit more access. They were a little more comfortable to the media at the time. But fundamentally, it was the same set of threats. And Bin Laden knew by then in May of 98, the embassy attacks in Africa were just a few months away. And there is a real, I think, fascinating insight in your book, which is that he knows what he's doing when he's talking to the media. This is all part of a strategy and a plan. This isn't some vanity thing.

There is a plan here. Well, I mean, look, CNN is going to be half for many listeners to recall this. CNN was sort of the ex or Twitter of the age. I mean, that was the most sophisticated way of communication at the time. It made its name in the Gulf War and it was right in the lead at this point.

I mean, now the bin Laden of Givin would just put a note, would tweet about it. He went from somebody who was, you know, had very little experience of the media and also you know from a religious point of view rejected um me you know photographs video etc etc when he grew up he was there were no pictures in his house there was no photographs he wasn't photographed because of his religious beliefs but anyway that changed peter i've got a question um i'd heard from friends who were covering the afghan conflict at this point that uh these arab afghans as as as we first knew them

were actually very scary, that people had been going in with the Taliban and with the Mujahideen before them and were always well treated because of this Pashtun ethic of hospitality. And, you know, you might be March 40 miles over the mountains on his crust of bread, but they looked after you and they didn't threaten you. The first way you ever heard of the Arab Afghans was that they were not at all welcoming to Westerners and regarded them as a threat and occasionally used to take pot shots at them. Did you find bin Laden's people suspicious

and hostile, I suppose? They weren't hostile, but I mean, really, that is absolutely true. They just generally did not like Westerners or particularly Americans. But, you know, in this context, they'd invited us to do an interview. They weren't friendly. They went unfriendly.

They just, we did our thing, and then we went back. The interview aired, and in May of 97, it got virtually no attention because by that point, you know, Bin Laden hadn't really seemingly done anything. How funny. This crucial interview was ignored at the time. Low point on the news below Monica Lewinsky or something. So this goes unnoticed. In February 1998, bin Laden merges operations with another name that's going to resonate a lot with people.

Iman al-Zawahiri, this doctor from Cairo. And at this point, do people take notice? Because they sign this joint statement of intent, the world Islamic front for jihad against the Jews and crusaders. And in it is a radical fatwa which declares that killing Americans and whoever helps Americans is actually a duty. It's a blessing on the Muslim who does it. It's a fatwa. It's a religious edict. I mean, we should remind people, you know, they'll associate that word with Salman Rushdie, but it is a, it is a religious cause for the faithful to carry out this rule. So do people sit up when this is signed, when the word fatwa and this edict goes out? Yeah, it got some coverage.

You know, there were a very limited number of people in the US government looking at this question. They were in the New York field office of the FBI and then also at the CIA bin Laden unit. He was still like not particularly well known. It's only with the embassy bombing attacks in August of 98 that you really, suddenly there's a ton of media about him. But, you know, this does get to an interesting question, Anita, which is this fatwa is based in part on the blind Sheikh, who is a graduate of Al-Zar University in Cairo,

which is the Vatican of Sunni thought. And Bin Laden is not a religious scholar at all, was Amin Al-Zawari. He was Zawahiri. He was a surgeon. Important point. These are both characters who, for all that they're wrapping themselves in the cloak of Islam, neither of them are trained Islamic scholars in any way. No, they have no formal religious training.

Bin Laden had remembered every verse of the Quran, which is a pretty impressive feat of memory since those 6,000 verses. But that said, they couldn't issue a fatwa. Because a fatwa is a religious legal ruling. So it's a law-based religion. And so Sheikh Rachman base was in an American jail at the time for a role in his terrorist conspiracies in New York City in the mid-90s. And he says in this fatwa, you can essentially kill Americans and Jews on land, on sea, pretty much anywhere. That I think is kind of the crucial religious authorization that bin Laden thinks he needs for this holy war.

And at this, they have their first and only press conference in May of 98. Two of Sheikh Rahman's sons are there and they hand out this fatwa from their father. It's a press conference with about a dozen Pakistani reporters. And it's the only time al-Qaeda gave a press conference. And I think, again, it's like their belief that they have a duty to warn, their belief that they need a religious imprimato that is really, as it were, kosher, halal, from a leading cleric. And that's why they hold this press conference. And then a few months later, the embassies blow up.

By the way, to blow up two American embassies within nine minutes with each, it's hard to blow up one American embassy. To blow up two within nine minutes, this showed something very, very different. And now this is the thing that wakes up the agencies, isn't it? This is the moment that they suddenly put people onto this. More than 200 people get killed. Kenya and Tanzania, both have substantial Muslim populations. And so it also indicated that bin Laden didn't care.

They timed the bomb. So it was Friday when a lot of people would be in the mosque if they were observant. But, you know, bin Laden didn't care how many civilians he killed. And from that point forward, because most in previous terrorist attacks, there have been an effort to have what the famous terrorism scholar Brian Michael Jenkins said, you want a lot of people watching and not a lot of people dying. That's what he said in 75. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda wanted a lot of people dying and a lot of people watching,

which was kind of a new development. It's now, you know, if we have a part for some listeners, perhaps to recall, the terrorists actually tried to calibrate the violence. So it didn't turn people off, didn't turn off fence sitters, didn't turn off potential supporters. So you wouldn't just have, the IRA would call in warnings, right, if they're going to blow up a pub. So this was a very different kind of terrorist group. Peter, I'm still sort of, you know, charmed by this idea that they had a media strategy, you know, that even these sort of three people who come from very different parts of the world and have. very different attitudes to life. But they have this one sort of idea that this is a weapon, the media is a weapon.

There's this famous ABC interview. And tell us, I mean, there's the B-roll story. Tell us about the B-roll story. Well, John Miller was the ABC News correspondent. He went over in 98. And Emin al-Zawahiri had suddenly reappeared on the scene. And Zawahiri speaks pretty good English. And John Miller said, you know, we can't just have just been allowed and just talking.

we need to have what's known as B-roll, which is kind of... Just a cutaway to something, yeah, yeah, right. And so Zawahiri said, you know, this is not Sam Donaldson, the White House correspondent on the White House lawn, but, yeah, we'll try and get you some B-roll. And the B-roll turned out to be a bunch of guys shooting their weapons up on the mound, and so it later turned out to be with sort of a bit of a rented-ground crew. There weren't really necessary members of Al-Qaeda, but like local Pashtun tribesmen that are being sort of regooned do.

It's something people do in that part of the world. I've been to dinners in the Northwest Frontier, where after dinner, the afternoon entertainment is everyone takes AK47s off a rack and just fires Tracer into the air. That's, you know, that's equivalent of... But it also does tell you a thing, which is, you know, give the public what they want. If this is what they want to see, we can do that. No problem. You want some rockets?

We can do that, you know. I mean, so there was a narrative that develops up to 9-11 about madrasas. And I was like, I knew that was just total bullshit or total nonsense. Because, you know, like, you don't learn English in a madras. This was my special subject. I did a whole series of articles on the madrasas and went to a Korakata and all those madrasas in Karachi. And there was a complete lot of bullshit spoken about them. Yeah, yeah.

So they were, you know, I mean, Eman al-Zawahiri is from the most, you know, leading families in Egypt. Yeah. And Osama bin Laden the same. So, in fact, these were not the kind of dispossessed people of like the most, you know, kind of privileged group of men in the world in some levels, at least from the Arab world. So, yeah, so the fact that they had a strategy is not surprising. And they wanted to get their message out. Well, I mean, the media bit is one bit, but you've touched on the embassies. Let's go to a break.

Join us after the break where we go into more detail about those bombings, those synchronized bombings of embassies. Welcome back. So we move from this world where bin Laden is an obscure financier, who's a one or two. documents in Washington and named as a person who's helping the extreme elements. But now the world is waking up to what he's up to. There have been embassy bombings of surprising sophistication.

And in retrospect, Peter's interview is an incredibly historic document already because this is one of the very few sightings of a person who's becoming of great interest to the Americans. So let's cross the Atlantic. And Peter, could you introduce us to who in America is now on this case? Who's got a file on their desk saying Osama bin Laden? Well, there are basically three or four key characters. And so one is Gina Bennett. Gina Bennett is a young analyst in the State Department who writes the first classified

warning about bin Laden in 1993. She's been following these Afghan Arabs, and they kind of keep popping up in Egypt and Algeria and various different kind of low-level conflicts. And it's a classified secret document that is now declassified. It's surprisingly detailed and are very useful. But in life, and just in general, it's like, you know, if something's too far ahead, people don't pay attention to it. And the CIA sets up a bin Laden unit the first time they've set up a unit devoted to one particular person, which opens in January of 96. It's run by Michael Schoier, who's a PhD in history.

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

Preach. Anyway, Caroline is to go on. This sounds like Empire Pod to me. And then there was also the New York field office of the FBI, led by John O'Neill. He and Shora absolutely hated each other. They were both very strong personalities. At the time, there was quite a lot of rivalry between the CIA and the FBI. Before we get into the rivalry, I mean, let's just give a little bit of background.

Because I find him fascinating. So he's a Catholic. He's from Atlantic City. He grows up on this diet of crime dramas and, you know, gets hired into the FBI in 1976. He looks like somebody from a crime drama. He looks straight out of a 1970s sort of soprano style epic or something. Well, I mean, he has that kind of gritty background as well, because, I mean, he rises through the ranks, but at a great cost to his personal life.

You know, he loses his wife and his due children. They leave him. And during the 90s, he is, I mean, actually, it's quite surprising, involved simultaneously with three different women. And he told them all, you know, he was going to marry him. So he's a colourful, we can say a colourful character. Catholic education does strange things to the best of us. Well, don't we know it. But the way he gets sort of sucked into this particular part of, you know, FBI counterterrorism is that he walks into

the office one day and he's told that Ramsey Yusuf, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, has been located in Islamabad. So his very first day on the job, he's running the capture of this most wanted man without, you know, even unpacking his socks. He just hits the ground running. And the colleagues that he works with make exactly your observation, William, that he looks like a mob boss, you know. And he's working it as if, you know, he's chasing a, you you know, a rival mob boss. So, you know, there's this flamboyant personality that is now on the job. You said there were four characters, you've given us two of them, Gina and O'Neill.

Take us to maybe Alex Station next? Yeah, and so Alex Station was Michael Schoer is a historian by training. You know, Michael also was in, interestingly, they're all Catholics in this story. Gina was an observant Catholic, Schoya and O'Neill may have. been somewhat of a lapsed Catholic. But it's actually, it makes an interesting point, I think, which is that we in the West often underestimate the real role the religion plays in people's actual beliefs and actual actions. In most of the rest of the world, yeah. And so, so Shoya is a super intense. He looks like an Old Testament prophet. He's got a big beard. He arrives at work

routinely at 3.30 in the morning. He is obsessed. In fact, inside the CIA, most of the people working for him with him are women. And they have the nickname of the Manson family because they're regarded as being so kind of like, we need to find and get bin Laden. And of course, they turn out to be right. But there are some legal CIA collects intelligence. The FBI collects evidence for a criminal trial. At the time, there was really, they didn't cooperate at all. And there was a lot of hostility personally between John O'Neill and Michael Schoyer. And tell us about Alex Station. So Alex Station was named after Michael Schroyle's son. And it's the first and only time the CIA set up a virtual station, not an overseas station, devoted at a particular individual.

And so it combined both analysts and operators, which was also an innovation, because in the CIA, there's a division between the operation side that does all the spy stuff and the analyst side who would analyze everything. And they also tend not to, they're often a lot of tensions. But so by bringing them both together, you actually, that's a much stronger approach because you can mount operations based on the analysis, so the analysis, the analysis, the analysis, the analysis. analysts are producing. And it's actually a pretty fruitful way to go about things. But you've also got to remember, this is a very small group of people. It's a, you know, to maybe a couple of dozen initially. It's not like a giant enterprise. And I mean, they're only sort of set up for a little while when you have these catastrophic strikes against U.S. embassy property. So August 1998 on the 7th of August, which is, incidentally, the eighth anniversary of American troops

entering Saudi Arabia, there is this massive truck bomb. that devastates the American embassy in Nairobi. I mean, the figures of those killed and injured are worth repeating. 224 people are killed. Over 4,000-a-half thousand people are injured, and almost all of them are African. Many of them are Muslim. Peter, what do we know about the attack, how it was carried out, who did it? And actually, most crucially, was there a direct order coming from somewhere?

So they started thinking about it in 1993, and they started seriously planning for it. And they, you know, in the years, a couple of years before 98. So bin Laden said, and he may well have been right, that one of the reasons he selected Nairobi was that's where one of the top major CIA station in Africa was that was in that embassy. And in fact, two CIA officers were killed in that attack. You know, bin Laden set the strategy of the group, including the most important strategic decision, attacked the United States. States, he would leave it to people on the ground to sort of execute. He did come from a background in construction, so he would sometimes say, hey, this is a good place to park the truck bomb. Which was a model which had been developed first by Hezbollah in Beirut? 100% correct. So, Bernardin took in his analysis from the Marine barracks bombing, in which 241 American service members were killed.

Very similar number of casualties, yeah. Yeah, and was a massive truck home. And President Reagan, of course, pulled American troops. troops out of Lebanon within months. And so bin Laden thought, well, if you apply enough pressure against the Americans, against these targets, they will pull out of the Middle East. That would turn out to be a misapprehension because from an American standpoint, okay, if an American embassy blows up overseas, obviously it's a big deal. However, it's not an attack on an American target in the United States, which produced a very different, and surprise attacks produced pretty strong reactions

in the United States, as the Japanese learned after Pearl Harbor. So bin Laden had a terrible strategy, and he didn't listen to people. He was, since he ran it as his al-Qaeda as a dictatorship, he didn't take advice. Because a lot of people said in May, maybe attacking the United States is not such a great idea. And we have a pretty good thing going in Afghanistan where we have a whole country, basically, to ourselves. We have the Taliban in charge. You know, you could be really interfering with this. But with the truck bombing itself, what is crucial, I guess, is that the guy, you know, the suicide bomber,

jumps from the truck at the very last minute and he runs and therefore, you know, he lives to be arrested and then the FBI are all over him. And it's the first, am I right in saying the first full confession from somebody inside the Al-Qaeda operation? It was a man called Al-Aule and as you say, he did, he last minute he decided not to commit suicide, but I think he checked him, he was like injured in the attack and he checked himself into a hospital and the FBI found him pretty rapidly and he gave a full confession, which is actually very important point, which is all the CIA coercive interrogations that followed 9-11 were almost entirely unnecessary. What do the FBI do? They interrogate people. That's all they, that's what they do.

How do you get somebody to say, to tell you what you want to know? You give them a Diet Coke, you treat them with some degree of respect. This CIA program of sort of coercive and interrogating people. People have watched too many movies and that, you know, they thought the way you get information was to like, you know, essentially torture people. But was it Alex station? Was it all this sort of newly, you know, all right, sort of slightly dysfunctional group of people who are the people who are now, right, we're spearheading this. We want to talk to him and we want to find out. I mean, is it them who's doing it? In this case, it is the FBI. The FBI launches the largest criminal investigation in history at that point to look into the embassy attack. And they have, you know, they have, as you said, I need to, they had somebody rather quickly saying, you know, this is how it happened. And then another conspirator was arrested in Pakistan. His name was Mohamed O'Day. He also. fairly quickly said what happens. What has Monica Lewinsky got to do with the failure of U.S. intelligence before 9-11?

Well, President Clinton is distracted by the Monica Lewinsky affair, and in fact, it puts him literally on the couch because at a certain point where Hillary Clinton has found out that this affair has been happening, she forces him to sleep on the couch. And he's sleeping on the couch in Martha's Vineyard. That's a very nice story. President of the United States hasn't got a bed at this point. And it's distracted and not listening to briefings, I won with things. Clinton was pretty focused on the Bin Laden thing. And in one of these great sort of coincidences, the press, when they're on holiday with the media, the White House press corps, when they're on holiday with the president, they don't have much to do. Usually there's what's known as a lid, meaning the news is not going to happen.

And so they're actually watching the film Wag the Dog, which is about an American president who goes to war on false pretenses in Albania because he's having some peccadillos in his personal life. And that is the moment when Clinton announces that he's sending cruise missiles to attack al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan and also a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. I remember it very well. I remember hearing it on the news, which was coming immediately after Monica Lewinsky. They've literally been watching the movie just before Clinton announced these cruise missile attacks. What also happens is that, you know, you have the intelligence gathered, you have Clinton on the couch, and you have the largest overseas deployment in FBI. history and there were literally hundreds of agents who are sort of sent to call out and they're all answering to O'Neill and his New York office. I mean, he's the king of that particular castle, right? Yeah. And O'Neill, you know, he is, I mean, you've already referenced his complicated personal life.

I'm not sure how you could manage like three separate women you've all promised to get married to and be running these criminal investigations. He must have barely slept, but he was very effective, you know, he, but, you know, almost to a fault. At a certain point when they blew up, I'll kind blew up the USS Cole. He was such a hard charging guy that Barbara Bodine, who was the American ambassador in Yemen, basically declared him PNG, i.e. persona non grata. And he had, he was expelled from Yemen. But he was, he was, like, he was really on a jihad like Michael Schoyer, who was the equivalent of CIA to, you know, he really believed Dilan was a threat and was really out to try and either create a criminal case or in Mike Schoyer's case, capture or kill him. And Peter, I think this was the

moment, the first moment that I had really focused on bin Laden, his name was now very much there in the news, the way it hadn't been even a year earlier. Exactly. I mean, there were thousands of media stories. I went back to Pakistan, you know, as a result, and actually was in touch with Abu Hafts, who was bin Laden's number two. The only way to communicate was he would send me a fax from the Kabul Post Office, and I would get it at my hotel in Peshawar or Islamabad, and we would communicate that way, which was not a very efficient way to communicate. But I was at that point trying to get another interview. At a certain point, Abu Haft said, you know, sorry, we're, you know, that it's not a good time for us. The embassy attacks changed a lot of things. However, that said,

you know, when the USS Kohler was attacked in 2000, which is killed 17 American sailors, there was, you know, the Clinton administration didn't really respond, nor to the Bush administration, which came in. And so Al-Qaeda began to think they sort of had impunity. You know, the worst thing life is to believe your own propaganda and they believed that the United States was a paper tiger. The USS Cole, we should say, really was, you know, the pivotal moment where everybody woke up saying, you know, my God, if they can reach this, they can reach anything. I mean, remind us why it was such a pivotal moment and such an audacious attack. So USS Cole was anchored off the coast of Aden, and it's the most advanced destroyer in

the American Navy at the time. It has a reinforced steel howl. Two suicide bombers drove a small boat up to the ship. blew up a hole the size of a small house in the reinforced steel hull killed 17 American sailors. So again, it showed sort of showed that these guys could, you know, mount these operations very long way from the home base. It also, it turns out, Peter, that, you know,

they've been doing little sort of practice runs. You know, there was this plan that, you know, the millennium, we were all worried about Y2K, but for Al-Qaeda, this was going to be, you know, the moment the bloodbath would be unleashed. Well, that is a very good point. So they planned to blow up. another American ship called USS the Sullivan's, which on January 3rd, 2000, around the time of

Millennium, and it was also near in Yemen area, and the operation wasn't successful. They also planned to blow up Los Angeles International Airport during Christmas holiday season, and the man responsible was arrested at the US Canada border. They thought he was a drug dealer, but it turned out he had a trunk full of explosives. It eventually became clear that he was planning to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in the middle of Christmas. And they only stopped him because he was really sweaty, as you say. They're like, oh, he's looking, he's looking sweaty like he's taking drugs across the border because that's what they're used to. US customs officer, female customs officer, she sort of said, this guy's sweating and he, you know, it's like December and he's sweating and why.

And she stopped him and then he ran as sort of, we ran out of his car and they found all these explosives. So this was, you know, another indication that al-Qaeda was planning to attack the United States. the narrative of the 9-11 Commission, which did a lot of great work, was a failure of imagination. I don't completely buy that, because we've already discussed, a group associated with al-Qaeda had already attacked the Trade Center in February of 1993, and now we have this guy trying to blow up Los Angeles in the international airport in the United States. So it's not, it's a failure of imagination in the sense that you can be given a lot of, you know, Stalin had a huge amount of intelligence. Hitler was planning to invade Russia, and he just couldn't believe it.

Or Hitler had a huge matter. It's about D-Taday. Exactly the same thing. Yeah, yeah. So they, you know, it gets to this question of, even if you develop great intelligence, have great information, if the person in charge won't believe it, it's sort of useless. We are now in a very different world from where we began this episode. Bernardin, far from being an obscure financier is now a name familiar around the world. And even Al-Qaeda, the name of the group he operates, is, you could say, a household name by. this point. Next time, we're going to be talking about the response to the USS coal bombings. We follow 9-11, the hijackers who train in plain sight in America, the frantic summer of 2001 where repeated intelligence tip-offs are ignored. We're also going to follow John O'Neill, quite a character, because he's pushed out of the FBI at the time when one might think they need him most,

and he takes a new job. Chief of Security at, wait for it. the World Trade Centre. Join us then. Now if you want access to that right now and add free listening, then head to EmpirePoduk.com. That's Empowerpodukuk.com. I become a member now. You will not regret it. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arndon. And goodbye from me, William Durimple. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life?

You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siyah and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.