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

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

How did the CIA fail to tell the FBI that known Al-Qaeda terrorists were already training inside the United States? Who was the calculated mastermind behind the scheme to hijack twenty commercial jets? What does new evidence tell us about how a Saudi official assisted the hijackers on US soil?  In the final episode of this series, Williams and Anita are joined by CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen, the producer of bin Laden’s first television interview, to untangle the tragic countdown and massive intelligence failures leading to September 11th.  Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/EMPIRE.   For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Oli Ortega Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Siaya 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. When WestJat first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion. Inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes your

on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at Westjet.com slash 30 years. Welcome back to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Trimple. 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 it's attacked. And bin Laden must have been waiting for retaliation. I mean, he ordered his camps to evacuate, expect. predicting 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. Donald Rumssel, the Secretary of Defense, had been Gerald Ford, Secretary of Defense. Conno Lisa 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, U.S. embassies have blown up in Africa, the coal had blown up, but they just, they couldn't get around their heads around the idea that a non-state actor, to use the jargon, was really going to be a threat to the United States. And how did that failure of comprehension at the top play out when you've got all these specialists working away producing the data with or without the top guys realizing it? Did they stymie it? Did they not give it the resources that were needed?

So the CIA works for the policymakers. And the CIA, they call them. 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. That is actually their central job. And they did a stellar job of warning the Bush administration throughout the spring and summer of 2001, that something very big was going to happen. And we know all that because of the 9-11 Commission, which the Bush administration fought very hard not to allow to happen. And there was a series of warnings by the CIA, bin Laden determined strike in the US, bin Laden threats are real, but, you know, they're all highly classified. But you didn't really need access to classified information to know

that something was brewing. I just, I completed my first book about bin Laden a week before 9-11, so I was, you know, fairly focused on the issue. So, you know, it gets the weakness in the system, which is, you know, if the White House or the commander-in-chief, if he or she chooses to ignore something, it doesn't, they, the CIA can do the best job in history, and it doesn't really matter. And they did a great job of warning strategically that something was brewing during those several months before 9-11. Because also, I mean, you know, USS Cole may be smoking in Harbour and Aden, but, you know, there are 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 a, you know, he's hunting mobsters. I mean, how quickly does it become clear to, you know, him and how loudly does he shout that actually, you know what, stop looking anywhere, I'll stop talking about anyone else. 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 has blown up. Jim, John O'Neill leaves 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. So there are people in the Yemeni power structure that wouldn't be happy about a big FBI

investigation to what's going on in Yemen. And eventually Robert Bodine expels John O'Neal 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, are the rumors that they're torture or anything? Or is it just that he's rude? No, he's just, he's a hard-charging guy who believes Al-Qaeda and bin Laden are major threats to the United States, and he's not, you know, he doesn't care if he tramples on local concerns about whatever they may be. And he's just, you know, he's a New Yorker. He's a, he's a guy from New York. He's, he's in Yemen. It's a very different kind of culture, and it moves slowly, and it's a very poverty-stricken country. And of course, it's bin Laden's ancestral homeland. And O'Neill isn't, just doesn't, you know, he's running an FBI investigation. He's not running a sort of Yemeni tribal kind of, uh, a 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-Midiyah and Nawaf al-Hamsi. Well, this is a very interesting story. So these guys

are known to the CIA because they've attended a kind of a 9-11 planning meeting. Now, of course, the CIA doesn't know as a 9-11 planning meeting. But they are monitoring these. these guys and 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 couldn't, you know, that they would be detained at an American border or, you know, questioned and 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. Which is almost always the real reason. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you can't use the word cock-up in America where I'm sitting because people don't know what you mean. You've got another British listeners, Peter, don't know.

Anyway, so I think it's basically just a, it kind of one of like, A lot of people know that these guys have visas, the United States, or 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. Yeah. I mean, can we just turn on it from 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 me? Is it true that they've wired up to phone number that belongs to me? 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. I mean, what more can they do? I mean, is all of that true? Yeah, it's true. I mean, it goes back to 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, wall between the CIA and the FBI before 9-11. So, CI collects intelligence, FBI collects

evidence for a criminal trial. These are two very different things. And so the CIA was actually not allowed to share a lot of intelligence information with the FBI, even though the FBI was conducting the investigation into Al-Qaeda through its New York field office. So there was some structural issues about why there was, and there was just rivalry between two agencies, which is typical in bureaucracies. But yeah, there was information in the system that retrospectively was pretty, you know, these guys were Al-Qaeda associates. They're in the United States. That was known 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 were there 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. Is 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 more. with money. He introduced them to the local community, had a party for them. We now know, what's so interesting is that you're both historians doing a history show. We, you know, it was only in 2024 that we found out the Saudi official had recorded a videotape of the US Capitol and he'd shown where the police posts were. He explained where the airport was, Reagan and... Like doing a recie? Doing a recie. It's a casing videotape. Unequivocally, it's not just a tourist shape. It's not just showing the sites 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 searches upon him. 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 of what was the Saudi support for these 9-11 hijackers? Because let's just quickly 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 in the United States at that 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. He 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 France. 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. Yeah, and may well have supported in a meaningful way, the two hijackers that you've Hamsey 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, but 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 do we now know is like he's got it, he's done a casing video. He also, by the way, he had calculations, an aeronautical expert looked at his notes that were found in his house of Birmingham. He had calculations for the descent of an aircraft, 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. Because at the time, I mean, the only name I sort of remember vividly is the man who was sort of behind this, the planning, the video, you know, the recies and everything.

It's all attributed to a man who is known as KSM, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the guy who gets all the blame for being the brains behind this. Now, we should say who he is. He's the uncle of Ramsey Yusuf, who was one of, you know, that bomber that we were talking about in the World Trade Center. in 1993. First time around, yeah. Yes, exactly. First time round, you know, and sort of then runs away and then, you know, his question, all of that, all of that. So he's his uncle.

So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KS.M. 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, you know, what's he like? Well, Halashek Mohammed is well educated, as so many of these members of Al-Qaeda are. He grew up in Kuwait, but he was not – he was actually Pakistani.

He's a Pakistani, wasn't he? He's not Arab at all. And so Kuwait doesn't give – has a lot of guest workers. None of them get citizenship. So he was the uncle of Ramsey-Juuf, who was the mastermind of the first trade center attack in 1993. Halli-Chang Mohammed 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 Khaled Sheikh Mohammed have a serious discussion about what they're going to do. Halachik-Mohemad 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 been allowed and suggests using commercial jets as sort of effectively flying bombs. Does he use the phrase? Why use an axe when you can use a bulldozer? Well, I think we do know he said that. Kala Sheikh Mohammed later would talk to U.S. investigators. Also, he would talk to Yosri Fuder and Al Jazeera reporter in some detail about all this and freely admit his role in the attacks. He's sitting in Kwanthama, 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, Kalachet Mohamed is a, he is the operational commander. He's, there's no debate about that. He, you know, and they, 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 that can actually fly planes who have some familiarity with the West who might be able to speak some English. And they get lucky because Muhammad Atta and three of his buddies walk into the training camps and they've been living,

Muhammad Atta, again, highly educated, doing his PhD in Germany, Egyptian. And like so many of these, a sort of technical guy. Like these guys are all from engineering backgrounds and this sort of thing. Exactly right. All of them are engineers or doctors at the second, but engineering tends to be. And so Muhammad 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, Muhammad 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. And they see themselves as part, you know, one question people have often is, like, what does this to do with Islam? And just as Christianity has quite a lot to do with the Crusades and pogrons 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. 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 Muhammad 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. So he, I think overall, you know, Anita, that is a super large question. Because we, you know, from the crooked timber of humanity, not a straight thing is made as... Is that 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 I, people talk, when we think about jihadists and, like, you know, there's no, like, But often people have a personal crisis, the death of the father, a mother, all they come and they're immigrants and they're not accepted or whatever it is. And, you know, this kind of very extreme version of Islam can be a comfort and can be. So in the case of Bahamadatta and some of these, his colleagues, that may be part of it. Do you, I mean, there's in a sense two interpretations. You've mentioned religion and Islam and that's absolutely fair enough because they're using Islamic text to justify all this. But, And the other theory that's always given as well as alienation is, of course, political. The humiliation of the Arab world. We've just done a series of a whole succession of Arab losses and the way the Arab elites are in the view of those outside power selling out to the West. How far of that is part of the rhetoric here?

Well, I mean, I think, William, it's a great deal of it. I mean, the two things are related. So for bin Laden, you can't understand bin Laden without. I mean, this is a religious zeal. You know, he, he memorized the Quran as a young age. He was fasting twice a week. He was deeply austere, you know, from the age of 17, he was, you know, his idea of fun when he was a teenager was chanting religious songs about Palestine. So he, this is a guy who's very religious.

Now, at the same time, that very much informed his political view, which is like, you know, when, when 9-11 happened, George W. Bush, the president of the time, said it was all about American freedoms. Well, in fact, bin Laden had said a lot of things, and very none of them were about American freedoms. It was about U.S. support for Israel, U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, U.S. support for Arab regimes. The quote I always remember, Peter, was when he said very explicitly that he watched the bombing of the towers in Beirut and the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982, and he thought, I will do the same to the towers in America. Yeah, I think he learned from that. And he, so the question of the, what is political, what is religious in some ways is mooted in a case. for somebody like bin Laden because he'd see no distinction between them.

There's no separation of Moskin state in his mind. 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 it has a kind of caveat, which is if you pay taxes, you know, you're okay. But the point is that bin Laden resorts to,

would often resort to Quranic verses to justify his holy war. And he couldn't, of course, you know, it's an extraordinary minority view, but it is not something that he just pulled out of nowhere. And he saw, you know, the prophet on his deathbed said that there'd be no true religions in this. 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 Mezaynuk. I went there not because it was a training camp, but because there's a very nice, Koshan archaeological site, which I was studying for my book, The Golden Road. But at the bottom

of the hill is a cave where they were based, these guys, when they were being trained in Loga 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 flight to the United States. These guys have already gone through

a long training in Afghanistan. Yeah, and they'd been, you know, they would practice like using, because they had small knives that they smuggle on the planes, but they would use, they would like kill goats with knives so that they could get used

through killing things with these knives, as they would have to do when they hijack the planes. So, yeah, they were getting training. The muscle hijackers were going to, you know, really were to restrain the passengers. They were, you know, it was just like they didn't require very sophisticated training. Then Hullochick Mohammed, who would be discussed, would, you know, they would have aviation maps that they would talk to about with the pilots. The pilots, the targets were closely held that were not.

Bin Laden was talking about a strike on the United States in a general sense. And, you know, people were saying you should stop talking about it because this is going to leave. Stop tipping them off, yeah. And where was Bin Laden and Kandashik Mohammed at this point? Are they both in Toribura? They're living in Kandahar, probably. I mean, you know, visiting Toribur, 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 Oma, who, you know, is, who is, 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 byat, which is an oath of religious. obedience to Mullah Omar for kind of tactical reasons. I mean, in fact, you know, Mullah Omar did not want bin Laden to be doing, you know, giving incendiary interviews to Western media. He didn't really, he didn't want, you know, Afghanistan to be used for terrorist

attacks against American targets. On the other hand, he was, you know, he, you know, he admired bin Laden. But yeah, so in, in a sense, you know, bin Laden was, you know, paying homage to Mullah Omar. But only lip service. Because I mean, just the reason I ask is because Mullah Omar, like Bin Laden, you know, sort of wanted to be the man, the West Fear. And, you know, one of the

very visible things that he did was when he destroyed the Bamian Buddhas. You know, 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. Absolutely.

You know, these sort of, you know, these amazing gifts from, you know, the ancient world being dynamited in front. And that's him. So, I mean, I don't know whether there's a kind of a one upmanship of, you know, hang on a minute, I'm the one they're going to fear. No, I'm the one they're going to fear. I mean, am I reading too much into that? Well, I mean, you're right. The Bamiam Buddhas was a, I mean, I'm glad you reminded me of that. I mean, it was a bit of a curtain razor for the increasing radicalization of the Taliban. I mean, they'd been there for 1,500 years. And of course, Buddhist culture is an incredibly

as William knows well is absolutely integral to, to kind of Afghanistan's history. And so blowing up those Buddhas, which was the most famous tourist site in Afghanistan, was really a sign the Taliban were becoming more radical. And was that under the influence of bin Laden? Or was this happening parallel? I think it might have been under the influence of bin Laden.

Because in Wahhabi culture, of course, any kind of images of a living being are not allowed. But that's not the culture of Islam in Afghanistan. And that's why they were still there. So that was, you know, that became, that was a fairly big story because footage was taken of it, as you've mentioned, Anita. And it showed, I think, the Taliban becoming perhaps more of the influence of bin Laden. But in terms of rivalry for who's the biggest, you know, I mean, you know, Mueller-Omar had no interest in international jihad or, like, taking terrorism overseas.

It was just his backyard and no further. Listen, we're going to take a break now. We're going to come back after the break. And we really ought to talk about. We talked about two of the hijackers arriving. in the United States. There are more hijackers, as we all now know. So when do they get there and how do they get there? Join us after the break. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Now, as historians, we spend a lot of time studying how societies change. And our relationship with emotion is no

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or simply check in with yourself. Therapy can help you move forward. Sign up and get 10% of bedhelp.com slash empire. That's better. HALP.com slash empire. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Think of some things that glow. Okay, fireflies, glow sticks, the northern lights. They're very cool. But what if we could replicate that glow inside our bodies and what if doing so could help us save lives? Because Cancer Research's UK scientists, they're investigating whether a special fluorescent dye that sticks to prostate cancer cells could tackle an ongoing challenge in the operating room, removing every single trace of cancer. Because when cancer cells

are glowing and easy to spot, surgeons can precisely remove them, leaving healthy cells untouched. Meaning there's less chance of the cancer returning and fewer nasty side effects. Cancer Research UK's vision is a world where everybody lives longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer, with breakthroughs like this leading to kinder, more effective treatments. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerachuk.org slash rest is science. Welcome back. Now, Peter, we have to get the rest of the conspirators. into the United States. There's two that have gone ahead that we've met, who've set up shop,

as you've told us, this extraordinary new piece of information, that they are greeted by a Saudi diplomat and shown around and even shown their targets by video by this Saudi diplomat, which is brand new information, certainly to me. How do the rest of the plotters get into the US? And why aren't they picked up? Well, that's a great question. I mean, partly because 15 of the 19 of Saudis. So, you know, the Saudis, you know, the United States is an ally of Saudi. They don't attract a lot of attention. There's an Egyptian. There's a Lebanese. You know, they come, they're, you know, they come on short-term visas. They, they don't attract attention. The interesting thing is the Bush administration had, you know, a lot of warning from the

CIA that something was brewing. And they never sent up a flare saying, is there any members of al-Qaeda in the United States? Should we be, you know, that never happened. In fact, Bush chose not to interrupt the longest presidential vacation in history in three decades in the summer of 2001. So they just couldn't absorb this as an issue. So, you know, the hijack has arrived in the United States completely normally. And, you know, all the kind of apparatus, we now have the TSA, which is the, you know, they're looking for bombs and DHS and all these. It was easy.

You could land at Boston Airport. You barely needed a visa. I mean, I'm not exaggerating. But there was no very little. security. It was a different world. A lot of people listening now know about shoes taken off and scanning them. It wasn't like that. It wasn't like that. Anybody could come in. It was wide open. So they took advantage of that. So the remaining recruits who come after the first two, you know, they're known as the muscle. You know, they are specifically, these 13 men are hired to

contain the passengers while these train pilots get in, get into the cockpit and fly into their targets. And there's, you know, there's some, some of those details. which we now know, which are very haunting, as they're waiting and preparing, you've got people like Mohamed Atta, who is a 27-year-old man, let's remember, who writes this utterly, you know, joyless of forbidding, you know, edict for his funeral.

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

Yeah. And yeah, that was al-Qaeda, you know, the fact you could recruit 19 men, young men to willing to die in this, you know, that was, you know, that was a real innovation, unfortunately, that al-Qaeda was able to exploit. And, you know, they created this sort of cult of martyrdom in the camps. And people were, you know, they had a lot of volunteers who wanted to be part of any martyrdom operation. And, you know, if you look at Mohammed Atta, you mentioned, who was the lead hijacker, he flew from Boston. And he left in his car. very specific religious instructions about what to do on the day of the raid. They refer to it as a raid. They use the Arabic term for a raid. Razia, exactly. And they referred to the operation as a gazia. And, you know, it was about ritual, religious washing. It was about the versions that they would be encountering in heaven after this. So they truly saw themselves as, you know, equivalent to the people who were fighting alongside the prophet in the 7th century AD. And that's the way that they conceptualized themselves. But yes, they had families. Zia Jara, who you mentioned is the Lebanese, almost like a playboy. People liked him when he was in the United States. He would occasionally have a drink. You know, he was not some sort of religious zealot.

But there was one sort of weirdo in the mix, Zacharias Musawi. Tell us about him. Well, so Zachos Misawi was probably a second wave of hijackers. But like, Zachos Misawi is a French guy. He was training to fly planes, but he was acting erratic. And I think that he was sort of a throwaway for Al Qaeda. He wasn't part of the main plot. And they, you know, they sort of said, like, they sent him.

And if you could get something done great. And if they didn't, it was fine. He got arrested. Relative either shortly. He applies to school under the fake name Zulayman Tango Tang, which you thought might have attracted some of it. Yeah, not making much of an effort. Yeah, not making much of an effort, a pseudonym.

I mean, his bizarre behavior, that part of it, you know, Zillaman Tango Tang. did eventually catch the eye of the authorities because, as you say, Peter, he got arrested in August 2001. But while he was, you know, behind bars, there were so many, again, it's like these kind of clumsy bureaucratic roadblocks, people not being on the phone or not sort of, you know, joining dogs. It just meant that, you know, nobody placed him at the heart of or even in the periphery of what was about to happen until it was far too late. Yeah, I mean, the FBI office in Phoenix wrote a memo saying we're seeing this. interesting phenomenon of young Arab men taking flight school flight lessons and it's kind of strange. They found it. They spotted it. Yes. There's a classic kind of book about Pearl Harbor called Warning and Decision by Roberto Wollstetter. And she, you know, she wrote it in

1962 and she said, you know, the noise and the signals, the signals are very clear in retrospectively, but they're always in a bunch of noise. And so it's very easy for us to say retrospectively, this was obvious. But for some people, it was obvious that something was brewing. Peter, weeks before 9-11, you were reporting on Al-Qaeda, and you wrote a letter saying that you saw

something awful this way comes. It's on the horizon. I mean, in your own words, tell us. In August 2001, I wrote a letter to a New York Times journalist John Burns warning of an imminent attack on the United States. First of all, you have to think about understand the position of the New York Times quarter of a century ago. The internet was very much

in its infancy. I'd met John Fisher Burns, who won three Pulitzer Prizes. And so I wrote him a four-page letter saying, here is why I think an attack is happening. Here is why I think one could responsibly write a piece saying, this is an attack is imminent. Was this a proposal for a New York Times piece that you were writing? Yeah, basically that John would write and he quoted me in it. And And the piece, I based it on the following sort of three pieces of evidence. One, there was a bunch of U.S. embassies that were kind of closing in ways that were sort of unusual. And then two, bin Laden had released a two and a half hour videotape, which was really a distillation of his religious and political kind of philosophy and why he wanted to attack the United States. And this is very, this video was almost non-existent on the internet at the time.

You had to go into these jihadist chat rooms with a password and it was on real player. Anyway, I had it all translated. I sent it all to John and I said the videotape, they had a belief of a duty to warn. The videotape was part of this duty to warn. If you're going to kill a bunch of civilians, you need to explain why. And then finally, it's just seen as part of a pattern that I'd already seen in the USS Cole and the embassy attacks where al-Qaeda would warn. So I wrote John this very detailed letter. He agreed that there was a story.

he wrote a piece which was going to be in the September 9th New York Times, which didn't go in because of an editing dispute. No. The headline was, you know, bin Laden charts of violent future. Who's the editor who spiked that piece? Is he still in job? I mean, that dispute must feel very silly in minor now. I mean, my goodness. Well, of course, they ran the piece on September 12th and day later.

Now, the internet was in its infancy, and they put the piece on the, on the, on the, September 9th on the website and then they took it off which they later admitted was a serious error because I think they were sort of embarrassed but anyway the bottom line is the reason I tell the story is you did not need access to any special information to determine that something big was brewing you just like we had to do and I'm also a big believer maybe preaching the choir here is like what you need to know almost always is out there in the open yeah you classified information may have interesting tactical like the content of somebody's conversation the timing of a certain event. So, you know, obviously 9-11 did happen. I was going into the office

at CNN to report on Akram Shah Massoud's death. Masoud was the last thing that stood in the way the Taliban taking over all of Afghanistan. He's one of the most effective guerrilla commanders. And also an amazing guy. I interviewed him in 1993, one of the most intelligent, sensitive lucky guy. So Al-Qaeda knew 9-11 was happening and they also knew this would pose problems for their Taliban posts. So killing Massoud was kind of their gift. Did you connect the two?

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

So, Peter, while you are writing to John Burns and squabbling with sub-editors on the New York Times, the hijackers are now finishing their courses. They're working, the muscle guys are working out in Florida, gyms, shopping in Walmart. One of them's got a speeding ticket. but they're also buying airline tickets, all of them for the same date,

the 11th of September 2001. And bizarrely, in retrospect, they're buying it online with credit cards under their own name. Yeah, they were living here freely under their own names. The speeding ticket is very interesting. Because, like, you know, that wouldn't have been an opportunity to say,

well, who are you and what are you doing? But it didn't happen. They picked Tuesday, because Tuesday is the, the day where the least amount of people travel in the United States. And there would be the least number of passengers on the plane, so the least amount of opposition. And they, you know, they unfortunately, the plan went, you know, perfectly for them and unperfectly for the United States. Bin Laden thought that he didn't understand how many people would die. He thought that the trade center would collapse above the point of impact of the planes.

He didn't know that it was going to bring down both buildings. So, I mean, we should revisit one man's name that we haven't talked about for a while. But you might remember John O'Neill who we were talking about, you know, who sort of falls out with the powers that be, who has been like some kind of Cassandra warning, take this seriously. This is bad. This is dangerous. And he's a bit heavy-handed in Yemen. And so he gets sort of drummed out. His new job is working at the World Trade Center.

and that I mean this is it's almost like a Greek tragedy for him because you know he's he's this this spot that he has with the powers that be means that he's passed over for promotion at the FBI and just so that we so we don't rewrite history is he actually kicked out because he's banging on about this bin Laden guy too much is that actually why he's being rude to Yemenis and being being told off by his superiors isn't it so the the the moment where he gets fired or has to leave the FBI he has to has a suitcase of classified material that he leaves somewhere, which is a huge... Oh, okay. That doesn't help. Yeah. And I mean, he'd, I think he'd, you know, he'd sharp elbows. He annoyed some people in the FBI.

But the fact that he'd left this suitcase of classified information somewhere basically killed his career. So, I mean, that's a rather ignominious end to a career, which had its turbulence. But the job that he takes actually just seems like a dream come true. It's really lucrative. It's in the private sector. is Chief of Security at the World Trade Center. And there's some really sort of dark moments because when he's leaving, you know, his leaving due from the FBI, one of his friends makes a joke, Peter, which has become

sort of prophetic in the end. Do you remember what his friend Chris Isham said at his leaving? I don't. So he sort of, you know, jokes to Chris Isham. He says, you know, I'm going to the World Trade Center, the safest place in the world and have this conversation. And then I can't remember which one of them said it, but one of them says, at least they won't bomb it again. You know, because it's already been hit once. At least they won't try and bomb it again. So there is this kind of sort of, you know, foreshadowing of what

happens. If it was fiction, you'd be told, go and rewrite that. It's not believable. It's too much of a coincidence. So we're now on the night of the 10th of September 2001. In a days in near Boston's Logan Airport in motel rooms in Newark outside Washington, 19 young men, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, make their final preparations. Among their belongings, investigators will later find a handwritten document of spiritual instruction for the operations last night. Purify yourself, become you are entering the happiest life. And in Afghanistan, bin Laden's entourage has been told to move. The leadership scattered into the mountains, The man himself waits by a radio.

In Florida, the president of the United States is preparing to read to schoolchildren in the morning. It's a photo call. It's usual. It's boring. And in Manhattan, John O'Neill, two and a half weeks only into his new job. His office, 34 floors above the plaza, is out on the town. He's happy. He's free of the bureau at last. He's telling the people at the table about his exciting and lucrative new job. The city glitters. The towers stand lit against a September sky as they have for 30 years.

And everyone in that bar assumes they always will. Everyone listening knows what the morning brings and everything that follows it. Now this is the subject of another series that we now have planned. Join us for that. We're going to finish this story with what happens on September 11th, the succession of wars which follow it, and bring us up to the president. with the return of the Taliban, not the happy ending that we would like to end on,

but that is where the story rests at the moment. We'll be doing that later in the year and join us for that. In the meantime, thank you, Peter. You've been absolutely extraordinary. It's really the sensation of watching history unfold of the what-ifs that we've been going through so many chances to stop this. None of them happen. So from Anita and me, thank you everybody for listening.

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