Historically High - 9/11: Part 1

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

This week on Historically High, we begin our two-part deep dive into September 11 by pulling back the curtain on everything that led to that fateful Tuesday morning. To understand how four commercial airliners were turned into guided missiles, you have to rewind decades. We start in the brutal, scorched valleys of the Soviet-Afghan War, tracking how the mujahideen resistance gave birth to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. From there, we trace the rise of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bloody trial runs that the world largely brushed off—from the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa to the suicide strike on the USS Cole—and the tactical evolution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s deadly "planes operation." We break down how al-Qaeda slipped hijackers into American flight schools right under the nose of U.S. intelligence, the bureaucratic blind spots that let them train in plain sight, and the chilling final logistics locked in place on September 10, 2001. Light up, settle in, and join us as we connect the geopolitical fuse that was lit years before the towers fell. Thanks for listening and don't forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating, and write a review! You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh for bonus content and exclusive perks. Follow us on social media: @Historicallyhi on X/Twitter and @historicallyhighpod on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome back to class on this wonderful September day, wherever it is. I hope it's nice and clear blue skies and everybody's happy because unfortunately a topic that we've been... You will not be happy. We've been dodging this for four years. Every September 11th that comes and passes is kind of a, yeah, we'll get to it next year. This being the 25th anniversary. I've thought most of the week about how to start this because this isn't something that we've ever really handled before. Uh-uh.

It's, uh, yeah, there is some some trepidation, a little bit of dread to doing this episode just for a variety of factors. One, it is the single largest historical event that occurred within our lifetimes. you have to try to reconcile how you viewed things as a teenager and how you were seeing it then versus when you see the footage now because there are things that I remember seeing and I remember exactly where I was. Where were you? But I remember I had just walked into a sophomore year.

It was first class of the morning. It was no, it wasn't because time change. So it would have been, time change no well I'm thinking the time if it's happening it this time

in this part of the country it's a different time in another part of the country time zones those things it's fair I forget about those sometimes yeah I was in

I want to say Econ and someone turned on the TV and the first building was already had already been hit and then the second one there was a weird and people are just watching this and you don't really know

how to comprehend it because first of all yes it is in your country but being very far removed from New York it's I don't know like you're watching it on TV and you're just like whole shit is this like really happening you don't have a way of like

comprehending it I feel like but now watching it as an adult and watching the footage and then feeling that weird fucking need to back up 10 seconds and watch it again. And then do it. You're just like, oh, fuck. Like those people that are down on the street that are witnessing this stuff happen,

of course there's all of this confusion. You're like, how, just get the fuck out of it. They were like, they didn't know what was going on. Because why would they know what was going on? Nothing like this had ever happened. No, everything was weird that day. Everything was out of the ordinary. I was, I think, in sixth, yeah, I was in sixth grade.

Mr. Healy's class. And I remember getting ready. And I remember watching on the TV, the first plane had hit the tower and seeing it smoking and thinking, wow, this is going to be a weird day. I wonder what it's going to be like at school. That's even pre-going to school. Yeah. I walked into it and I was just like when someone had, it wasn't even on the TV yet.

That's what made me so mad was because my mom's like, yeah, you still got to go to school, whatever. So I immediately, I think that was my first thought was how can I wrangle this. national tragedy and to me not having to go to school today. We did get to go home. We didn't. Oh, really? They kept us in and when we got to school. Small town, baby. Why isn't the TV on?

Small town is a lot easier to organize to get people home. For them, it was, I remember all the teachers saying, hey, we're not going to watch this today. We're just going to have a regular day. And I was pissed because I wanted to see what was going on and updating it. But now that I can look back at that as an adult, I can understand why that happened. Because that was a bunch of adults that didn't have. any answers. Yeah.

And you're putting a group of elementary school kids watching a national tragedy happen that are going to have so many questions. Yeah. And they're all going to be directed at the adult who has to try to make a sense of something that they have no, they're just as lost as everyone else. Yeah. It's their first time with this terrorist attack too. And I do think, I'm sure that we've talked about it in many other episodes,

we get kind of a sense of it can never happen to us because it really has. hasn't ever happened to us. We have these two great allies on each side of the Atlantic and the Pacific. General Atlantic and Admiral Pacific. They keep so much out of this country as far as people being able to attack us that we get really comfortable. And even when we do get hit, we got hit in Hawaii during Pearl Harbor. And at that point, that wasn't even a U.S. state. We just had permission to use to establish a naval base there. 95, maybe 97. percent of Americans had probably never set foot on Hawaii. More than that.

99.9.9. It's a 99.9. Besides our military folks, probably not a whole lot. I mean, there was probably some travelers. Well, in the 40s, they probably weren't going on Hawaiian vacations. Yeah. Yeah. So 99.9% of the world had no idea. They didn't understand. They knew Hawaii existed, but that was about it. Everybody knew about the Twin Towers. It's New York.

Yeah. it just it defies logic that that could have happened but it is something that happened and it's something that for the first quarter of this century we don't even maybe it's just me but i don't even really make the connection until you really sit back and look at it and think oh well this is because of this yeah it's good that we waited to do this episode because our prep is a lot better than it was within the first year or two. And the thing with this episode is we are coming into this with zero expectation on having a clue how long this is going to be. Our initial thought is this thing is going to have to be a two-parter. We can't do a full four hour episode because then we just start dropping off toward that last hour and we don't do it justice. So we're going to go and split it up. And because we dumpster dive into information like a bunch of fucking cracked out raccoons, we're not just going to be talking about the day of.

We're going to be talking about all of it. Who the fuck is al-Qaeda? Who's bin Laden? How did he get into that position? How long did this like planning take place? How did this even happen? What was the failure from the intelligence apparatus of the United States? Could it have been prevented?

Are there conspiracies behind it? Yes, there are. Do it even make sense? The fuck they don't. We're going to kind of cover anything and everything that we can think of. And so it is going to be a while. we hope you guys have some trust in us that we're going to try to do this thing justice

but this is a very complicated topic for us I don't know why so much because there's I mean I do and I don't it's it's here it's our home we got hit but 25 being removed 25 years but also looking at so many other tragedies in history

it's I don't know I just I guess I have conflicting feelings Well, that's what it's got to be. We try to have fun. We try to make light of some pretty dark times in history and some pretty bad things that happened to other people. And it would be pretty hypocritical for us not to try and find a little bit of humor in this too. Because even though this is something that hits home, we still have to be able to cover it in the same way. And I do think that you and I, I think a good majority of people, try to use a little bit of humor to mask emotions. Oh, yeah. This one I think is going... Gallow's humor, 100%. It's... This one's going to range the full spectrum of emotion.

You got to... This is a you got to laugh or you're going to cry. And chances are we're going to laugh and we will cry during this episode. Yeah, I guess there's nothing really left to say. Go to Patreon. I even feel bad to doing this. Go to patreon.com slash historically high for bonus content. We will have something related to this most likely two-parter episode.

So we'll let you know about that kind of toward the end. Ratings, keep them coming. Five stars. Thank you so much for contributing. We love reading your reviews and keep those description numbers coming. So 8.30, it's probably time to get into this. All right, let's do it. All right, sir.

Where do we want to kick off? Because we got to go back. Yeah, we got to go back a very long time. And I don't know if this is dispelling miss. I don't know if it's reinforcing beliefs. but we have to learn where the, not the mastermind, not the architect of the 9-11 plot, but kind of the face. The financier and the, yeah, the front-facing member of this. And this whole thing comes out of the Cold War.

All of this buildup, it's, things seem like they're isolated incidents, that they just happen without cause or anything like that. But, I mean, it is all just a big, fucking nasty bird's nest of history. Well, it's so tough to kind of get into this now because we've covered countries that hate each other. We've covered states that hate each other. We've covered the north and south of a country that just doesn't want to get along. This is a terrorist organization that is. kind of a grassroots terrorist organization that was born out of an

extreme sect of Islam, that we kind of see people maybe be hanging the shingle on every single version of Islam. Same thing as Christianity. There's a million different sects. There's a million different beliefs. Osama bin Laden

was born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia. He was born into a family who grew in well, as a construction family, I want to say his dad had like 50 children and like 10 wives. 50, I want to say 56. So the money that he had, again, kind of being the financial backing for, and again, this money also gets him in with the Taliban. There are very distinct players in this and we'll try to do our best to kind of parse them out because I think in some situations,

whenever we're talking about 9-11, it's either Taliban, it's either Al-Qaeda. It's either Al-Qaeda. It's they all are different entities at one point or another working within each other together. We're going to try to go ahead and get that sorted. But anyway, Muhammad bin Laden had immigrated to Saudi Arabia from Yemen in like the 1930s. And he started just as like a day labor for oil companies, which again are going to be the most prominent industries there. He ends up finding his own construction company in the 50s or in 1950. And he ends up basically making it rich. by winning the personal trust of King.

I'm going to fucking butcher some of these names. I apologize now. King Abdulaziz and King Saud. And he basically did this by building these complex, you know, engineering projects, always ahead of schedule and always under budget. So that's the kind of guy that you're going to keep going back to if you need to hire someone.

Definitely, I don't know if he does pools or not or anything like that. He was so trusted by the Saudi royal family. that they gave him contracts to undertake renovations in Mecca and Medina. Yeah, dude. The Crown Jewel of the family business was a permanent exclusive monopoly granted by the Saudi Crown to renovate and expand the three holiest shrines. It was in Mecca, the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, and the Al-Aqa, I'm again pronouncing this horribly, Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Aloxa, I think. Now, if you have the monopoly on the three, the three fucking sites, your name and your wealth is just going to explode. And so, yeah, you got to have a lot of money, though, when you have 56 kids. Well, you also had at least. Oh, 54 kids. I'm sorry. From what my research says, it was Osama's, uh, uh, Osama's father's 10th wife

that ends up producing Osama he was the 17th child of approximately those 54 and I mean when you have that many children and you had that much money I think a lot of his brothers and sisters at least up to that point were being shipped out of country

for their education. It showed a picture of the family of course not all of them because they don't have that white angle of a lens back then but they don't have a fish eye yeah it's not a panoramic the iPhones have now no but it shows a picture and these are when you're looking at it

because the Middle East is going through a transitionary period where Western culture is kind of the fad. You have women that aren't having to wear burkas, they're going to school, you have like progress. Not in Saudi Arabia. Not in Saudi. It wasn't. That must have been outside the picture then because they were all wearing like normal

like Westernized clothing, stuff like that. So the family picture must have been outside of that. Muhammad ends up dying in a plane crash in 1967. Isn't that ironic? a plane crash bin Laden's father died in a plane crash I don't think it's that ironic did it hit a building

I didn't look that far into it and I doubt it so the estate is divided among the 54ish children Osama's share of the family fortune it kind of gets debated by different intelligence agencies while they said he had like a $300 million war chest

they're thinking it was much much lower but he still had enough to make him a major financial player and kind of whatever he wanted to get into. When Chris uses the word financier, that's not just coming out of his pocket. That's him being able to fundraise through Emirati. Just a lot of like donors in the Gulf, like the Persian Gulf and everything that he had.

And also he was receiving like an annual dividend of either between one and seven million from the family conglomerate. So he was also continually, even after his father gave out that, you know, it was divided the estate or whatever, he was still making money. He was educated within the kingdom. He was educated in Saudi Arabia, including his university years. He would end up being mentored by this Jordanian scholar named Abdullah Azam. And Azam had actually fled the West Bank following the six-day war with Israel. So Azam was kind of pushing.

him into these different religious sort of sex of this Sunni Islam. Wahadi was kind of like the baseline version of Islam that was being taught in Saudi Arabia. All of the clerics and everything like that that worked with the royal family followed this Wahadiism. But he was being pushed towards something called Salafism. And this is just rejecting any sort of later theological. innovations of Islam. You're arguing for this literalist, puritanical interpretation of what the Quran and the Hadith said. Those are the fundamentalist, I believe. Is that correct? More to the side of fundamentalism? Because I believe that's the strict following of it,

isn't it? Yeah, he kind of falls into this form of Salafism, though, that wasn't founded until the 18th century, which seems weird to be an absolutist and say that that doesn't happen and rejected these later interpretations. What's weird is that would usually be the core beginning portion of it and then it would kind of adapt its way from there? Is it kind of the same version? I'm just trying to kind of get a comparison that I understand. Kind of between looking at the King James version,

which most people follow as far as the Bible goes, but then looking at like the first, what's it called the Old Testament? Yeah, the Old Testament's in King James version. There's a lot of stuff taken out of it, though, isn't it? Uh, there's a bunch of different versions. I think the King James is probably the most, like, widely accepted. But there are other versions that are out there that take from. But I thought the King James version is the one that softened, like soften the shit.

Like it wasn't like the vengeful. Oh, brother. Played God and everything like that. King James Old Testament's nasty too. Is it? It's, it's, it's, it's, I don't take out any of the daughter, father rape or like any of that. Noah? Are you talking about Noah's Ark?

Yeah, when they got him drunk. Yeah. Yeah. But it is more kind of the fundamentalist belief as far as where he was with the Salafism. It starts to morph into this kind of jihadist. He believed that there needed to be an armed offensive that was basically like the personal religious obligation for all Muslims. He viewed all of these other non-conforming Muslim states and governments as apostates and targets. is somebody who needed to be taken out because they had accepted far too much Western belief

that they weren't sticking true to Islam. So even other Muslim countries he wanted to take over. Okay. So what is the term, just so we're getting it clear, what's the term as we're using it as far as jihad goes? What's, oh, or bin Laden's term? Yes. Bin Laden's term is offensive. bin Laden's term is an offensive martyrdom that it's kind of been co-opted by bin Laden as that,

but I believe that jihad is like a righteous defense, isn't it? Or was believed as a righteous defense? So he believes in jihad what they would consider by the sword, because there's jihad by the tongue, by wealth, and then there's also by the sword. So that's the physical or armed combat portion of it. So again, those terms that we just have in our heads, to mean something, mean very different things, and then again, can be co-opted.

And we're not saying this to be like, oh, this or that or anything like that. What we're saying is to have an understanding of the differences of who's doing this. You need to know what they're viewing these terms as. Kind of in the same way, you try to figure out what sexual relations mean or is means. His version of jihadism was to take out other Muslims as well. Like this was a... He felt that like some of them have been... Western eyes are too soft on Western civilization or it adopted too many

what concessions toward the evils or excesses of Western culture? Not just that everybody was more relaxed, just the fact that they had, they didn't believe in the type of Islam that he did. Yeah. And he felt that they were weak. And as far as that goes, the majority of both the Sunni and Shia scholars completely disagree with bin Laden's beliefs. They view the theology is this weird.

fringe distortion of the religion. And there's certain times where bin Laden just has these reversals. He's, his family was given uncalculable amounts of wealth in Saudi Arabia. But we're going to come to a time where Saudi Arabia isn't agreeing, conforming to what bin Laden believes. So bin Laden turns his back on Saudi Arabia. Well, he gets fucking disowned. And I'm not, I'm jumping forward in 93. We're going to go back to establish history as far as like the, how we find ourselves

in Afghanistan, all that kind of stuff. But in 93, basically due to, and we're either going to say Osama bin Laden, it's not referring to his father anymore, it's just him. Due to bin Laden's pretty extreme opposition to like the Saudi royal family into the presence of like US troops there, the westernization or whatever it is that is happening there. his family publicly disowns him in 1993. So the Saudi government strips him of his citizenship in 94

and then systematically forced the Saudi bin Laden group to liquidate his shares and freeze his bank accounts. Now he still has money, but at this point, the piggy bank's been closed off to him. Tid dried up. That source of revenue. Again, he has other ways of getting funds throughout Persian Gulf and other contacts and everything.

So December 1979. Going back again. Yeah, we're back to 79. The Soviets invade Afghanistan. This is the kickoff to the Soviet Afghan war. Also in 1979, you have the Iranian Revolution, where they, I believe, they kicked out the puppet that we put in and went with more of a hard line following of religion.

So needless to say, Stuff is in flux in the Middle East as it, I guess, usually is. Well, and I don't know quite, well, it'll be interesting to get into the Soviet-Afghan War. I wish we'd have done it first, so we had a little bit. But, hey, 9-11 sneaks up on you every year. I believe that this might have been a little bit of a power play for the Soviets. And this would kind of be known as like the Soviets Vietnam because they just can't get out of this quagmire, which I can say as a U.S. citizen that it does seem to be harder to get out.

of Afghanistan in most places. And at this point, the invasion of Afghanistan is just more than Ronald Reagan can possibly bear because it's, again, it's encroachment on another territory that was not claimed or does not have, you know, it's not a satellite state of the Soviet Union or anything like that. So in 1980, the CIA launches what's called Operation Cyclone. And fucking phenomenal name, by the way, pretty good. As far as rankings of operational names, pretty dope. So what this includes is basically funneling a fuck ton of weapons and cash to anti-Soviet Afghan rebels.

Now, this is the Mujah Hadin. So this is like Rambo what, three or like Rambo 2? I can't remember which one he's playing the game and he has to pick up the sheep, carcass, or pelt from the horse and throw it over. It's Rambo 3 or 4. I don't think I saw anything past 2 maybe. Okay. So the Mujahideen is essentially the anti-Soviet Afghan rebel fighters. And the CIA director at the time, Bill Casey, basically pledges kind of on the low-low to the secret allocation and the guy that's going to be running this secret operation cyclone. He's like, I'll pledge you a billion dollars a year to beat the Russians back. And this was going to be money that was coming from the United States, like slush funds for black ops. But then was also going to be matched dollar for dollar. by the Saudis, I believe, right? Yeah, the Saudis were in it because they were fearful that if the Soviets continued their march through the Middle East,

that they were going to run into that situation again. As far as Casey kind of explaining this to the CIA, they had to try to keep their hands clean. And so all of these weapons and all of the funding, it was being basically middlemaned through to the mujahdin or Jesus Mujahideen Mujahideen through Pakistani intelligence through the ISI

and the numbers that I got were just for approval between 20 and 30 million is what was pledged by the United States and given in 1980 by the late 1980s it was $600 million a year

yeah that was how far we had gone in a decade in doing so for supposedly a unknown clandestine keeping our hands free of anything now how we also distance ourselves if we're sending over weapons and stuff we can't be sending over m16s and american manufactured military hardware so how this goes about is this is actually really fascinating to me so what they're doing is they are purchasing this is right after china and

the soviet union have had the falling out so china has been manufacturing all of these like AK-47 variants. Egypt apparently was big with the Soviet Union early on, but then defected over to the West. They had been huge about manufacturing AKs. And so we went to all these countries. I think Poland was one that we also went to that was kind of shuffling them under the table, even while they were still part of the Eastern Bloc. And we're buying up all of this Soviet-esque hardware, because then we can simply say, we didn't supply them arms or anything like that. They're just getting this off of the Soviet troops that they beat and they're raiding Soviet stockpile. So it gives us that separation to take any of the blame for anything that's going on there.

Yeah, the CIA officers only getting as close to Afghanistan as Islamabad and Pakistan. So they're not in country necessarily, except for the Mujahideen fighters are going through training camps that are run by CIA officers. What are you talking? So yeah, I mean, they would be flying in the weapons into Pakistan, loading them then onto different planes, or sorry, into Saudi Arabia, loading them onto different planes, flying those into Pakistan, into Islamabad and other places, and then moving those.

The fucking, in Afghanistan, the rebels, I want to say no shit. They bought something like a couple thousand mules from Argentina and like pack animals, because they couldn't, there were no roads. There wasn't a huge road system to go ahead and reach all of these Afghani freedom fighters.

And so they're having to send all this stuff in on like mule back and everything. I would figure that Afghanistan probably would have to have a ton of those already, right? Just because it's such a mountainous terrain? Maybe not. It depends on essentially if that animal is native and if there was a reason to breed that specific type of animal.

Yeah. So the Mujahideen are I wouldn't call it necessarily neck and neck. The Soviets seem to be getting the better of them, but it's because their air superiority is pretty much second to nut. Well, I guess, one of two. It's one of none because there is no Air Force on the other sign. Those Heinz, remember those helicopters,

did you ever remember seeing those? They were called Heinz. And they're the ones that you see in like old Cold War movies like that, where the helicopter is not it looks like a bubbly Apache kind of they're super fucking cool looking but they were big they were they were big and they were like there were gunships and so those those things would just dominate because they could get anywhere that these freedom fighters these afghan fighters were going yeah they showed them in the documentary yeah okay um not only do you the Mujahideen over there

fighting against the Soviets, but you have a presence that I think maybe I have even messed up and said something on this, but you have bin Laden who believes in this jihad and believes in fighting for Islam and fighting against the

godless Soviets, moving into Afghanistan is a little bit of a financier. As far as getting money to some of these other Muslim fighters that are coming in looking for this jihad that bin Laden is kind of believing into. He wasn't a direct beneficiary of CIA involvement, but at the same time, he was operating

something called Makatab al-Khadiamat, which was basically known as the Services Bureau. It was funneling in all of these other Arab fighter volunteers that were fighting from basically all around the Arab world. This was like a full religious experience to come try to beat off the communists. which I understand. He had kind of created his own private military contractor type company. He was the head of it and he was building up these forces. In I think it was August of 88,

this is when bin Laden officially found or founds al-Qaeda, which means the base in Pakistan to organize the foreign Arab volunteers that had started coming in. You've got to have an origin, though, for bin Laden. bin Laden puts his fighting stamp on the Soviet Afghan war in such an interesting way because by 84 he had moved out of kind of the facilitator role and did begin fighting. They set up a base near Jaji and Pekita and it's kind of like a oddly enough a border city between or with Afghanistan and Pakistan. So very far into the country. and there's this big mythologized legend that comes out of this 1987 Battle of Jodji

where there's this very poorly organized Muslim defense that's being put up militarily insignificant battle heavy heavy casualties on bin Laden's side but they were able to hold back the Soviets from taking Jaji Now, bin Laden is able to spin that into him leading these brave Muslim warriors into battle and being able to defeat the Soviets. And when you start talking about all of these different kind of myths that go into these figures, he has a quote-unquote win on the battlefield in a very insignificant fight that he did a real ham-handed job. He's trying to establish himself as the patent of Pakistan.

It kind of seems like that, yeah. Yeah, he's the guy. And I believe that Al-Qaeda was the name of the base that they had found in near Jaji, and they had just carried that through. This was just kind of Bin Laden in a couple close associates that were again funded through. Some of Bin Laden's wealth and his able to go ahead and fundraise. The tides of the Soviet-Afghan war had actually changed about a year before that in 1986 Because eventually the Mujahideen got what they had been begging for

And that was the Stinger anti-aircraft missile And to watch a video Of these things being fired from shoulder Which I felt was pretty insane that this was being fired off of a rocket launch and some dude had on his shoulder And just royally fucking up Soviet air superiority

because as these helicopters are landing on the Soviet side you just see these guys again with these shoulder-mounted rockets

just unleashing holy hell and I don't know the accuracy of these things but I mean they lock onto like a thermal

signature so I I went way too far into this because this it fed me just a tidbit of information

that I was like oh god damn it how to find out So with these Stinger missiles, they are a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile. So basically the introduction that the Mujahideen, you know, the introduction to the Soviets that these guys had these missiles now, was I think they were out near an air base that the Soviets had, which would have been completely safe territory for them, usually because they had complete air superiority. And these three helicopters are flying, and they just pop, pop, pop, take out these helicopters.

helicopters. And as soon as that happened, they're just like, oh, fuck. And at that point, they were losing, I think they said something like one aircraft per day. That's so fast. I know. And if you really think of it, you're like, that doesn't sound, but 365 air, like, and this is again, this isn't something like they're pouring every single resource into, but they're being made to look very badly by essentially the locals. So with these missiles, now eventually the CIA ends up shipping an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 steer missiles to the Muzidin factions during this. Now, eventually this conflict is going to end, and we'll talk about that. There's going to be a situation where not all of these are used.

In fact, probably between like 400 and 1,000 of these live missiles were unaccounted for after this thing ended. you are talking about something that can lock on to a fucking aircraft and fire. Those could either be kept by warlords sold on the black market. You can take down commercial airliners with those. Now, the only saving grace in that is that the thermal batteries that were in there were degraded, like they would degrade pretty quickly, not quickly enough. But by like they said the late 90s, none of them wouldn't be useful.

Got to hope. I wonder if that was a calculation for going into Afghanistan. Like how many of those did we leave over there? Oh, they're all duds by now. Oh, buddy. We tried to get like buyback programs to try to get these back and everything. Like here's the thing. We do so many things correct in this country.

And not all of them. It's like Wolverine. I'm the best of doing what there is and what I do. It's not very nice. It's a situation. And I heard this on, I think the documentary me and you both watch that guy. He's talking. He says, we're really good at fighting wars.

We're not super great at the immediate aftermath of figure out what to do after. And this just is one of those situations where it's like you had to provide all of these for them to be able to get the Soviets out of there. But you weren't thinking far enough to be like, well, what happens after the Soviets leave? What are we doing with this place after? And I guess we'll get to that a second because we're not quite there yet. The reason that the relationship with Afghanistan was extremely interesting was the U.S. and the CIA were working inside of Afghanistan with these seven Sunni parties of this collective Mujahideen. They were known as the seven sisters.

Some of them were more moderate. Some of them were far more extremist hardliners. Everyone with the common goal of driving out to Soviets. That's kind of what it had to be at that point. And then the day comes when the Soviets go ahead and start just dropping their weapons and starting to pull out of Afghanistan. February 89, right? Was that the day or the month? Yeah.

And just as you were talking about, this wasn't a situation where U.S. leadership is like, okay, looks like you guys won. Great job. It was great hanging out with you seven sisters. We're going to go ahead and pack up all of our shit. and then we're going to start talking about peace talks inside of this country and we're going to try to facilitate a nice transfer. Well, no, it wasn't like that. No. Oh, okay. I was going to say, I thought you were going to say, what?

No, we weren't over there trying to broker peace for a peaceful Afghanistan because our sole mission and our sole intent to be over there was to stop Afghanistan for being communist. After it's not going to be communist, we don't really care what happens over there. Well, technically, we're not really over there. So after the Soviet military completely withdraws or withdraws from Afghanistan, the U.S. continues to fund the Mujahideen to overthrow like the remaining communist puppet government. They got to finish the job. It's like you've driven out the forces. Now you've got to go ahead and make that change in management.

It's going to be that regime change. Well, in August of 1990, do you think before that? Is this when the Civil War kicks off in the 7th? sisters turn it into a battle royale? That is going to be, let's see, that's going to be starting in like 92. Okay. So in August of 1990, Iraq invades Kuwait. Oh, yeah, okay.

I see where we're going now. And bin Laden offers a army of holy warriors to Saudi Arabia who rejects him instead choosing to deploy half a million U.S. troops on Saudi soil. I had no idea that's how many troops we had over there. I don't, it wasn't all just US. I thought it was the group. Coalition. Yeah, coalition.

It might have been. And I don't know if we'd never had, maybe that was the approval of it. And this basically is a huge slap in the face, according to bin Laden, because he views this military presence near their Mecca, near Medina, as this unforgivable occupation. And in case he wasn't already before, this is kind of the time when he just. flips the switch and goes violently anti-American. We have Christians walking around the two holiest cities. With weapons and all that kind of stuff. Never mind that the option that he gave the Saudi royal family is probably the greatest

fighting force on earth or this slap-dig group of jihadist freedom fighter, al-Qaeda members that he had put together. I don't know how he thought that that was going to be a choice because such a Saudi Arabia first and foremost cares about their money and protecting their stuff. So I'm going to go with the guys that supplied the Stinger missiles as opposed to the guys that were trying to sneak Stinger missiles into their pockets. No, exactly. In early 91, this is when they start kind of breaking up these radical Afghan warlords. Kind of several of those groups of the Seven Sisters publicly back Iraq during the Gulf War.

Now, this completely alienates America and the Saudi financial backers that were helping, still helping. helping these groups, the previous Mujah Hadin, whatnot. So September of 91, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which was in free fall at that point, they both agreed to stop backing their proxies in Afghanistan. So it's like, hey, we know you're still fucking around Afghanistan. They're like, what us? And they're like, yeah, you would only know that if you're fucking around Afghanistan. They're like, all right, you caught us.

So they agree to do that. And in January of 92, this is when the U.S. officially cuts off all funding. That's when Operation Cyclone effectively ends. April 92, the communist government and Kabul collapses. So it lasted a little bit. They were able to hang on for a bit. And this is what instantly throws Afghanistan into this multi-faction, just brutal civil war between these previously allied Mujahideen's seven sisters. And everyone's like, there's a power vacuum, who's going to fill it?

And shockingly enough, Pakistani, the ISI gets in there again. And they're finding, if we support some of these hardliners, maybe this lines up a little bit. Maybe these guys are going to be better neighbors than some of these other, I guess, progressive Islam leaders. They start to see just how far these extremists are taking the war. And they're like, well, if they do that to their own people, maybe we should be looking somewhere else. and you get them to look at this Mullah Muhammad Omar. He was just a former low-level kind of a quiet Mujahideen fighter.

He was a village Mullah, kind of like a religious leader in the area. He was down in Kandahar, right? I believe so. He was the one-eyed dude, right? Yeah. Yeah. The ISI is looking at him and like, hey, he seems to have a pretty good following. And this is where you get the beginnings of the Taliban that are form.

under Muhammad Omar. So it means students in Pashto, correct? I don't know if I pronounce that language correctly, but that's what it means is students. Sounds good. He was much more reliable than all of these other favorite sisters because he was a little bit more predictable. And by 1996, the Taliban had taken full control of Kabul.

Yeah, it was... The Civil War was crazy, man. they're all supplied with Soviet and you know American weapons Everything that we left over there They're just like okay well you can still use this Just turn on each other Kabul is completely destroyed

These warlords that are even taking over Certain factions and sections of the city Like goddamn Batman villains They're setting up these arbitrary checkpoints Every few miles robbing raping extortion All of that kind of stuff The company is like lawless at this point

It's whoever's section you're in basically and when this guy ends up coming and creating the Taliban, the Taliban's initial pitch to the population for why they should be the ones to be in control. It's simple, it was highly effective after all the chaos, and it was completely non-political. It just said, what we're going to do is we're going to restore law, order and justice under strict Islamic law. They just went around at that point and started hanging these corrupt warlords from the barrels of old Soviet tanks. It paints a picture. Well, and the Taliban, the reason they were able to do this is the Taliban were able to get access or they were the closest ones or had control of these old Soviet-like weapons caches.

And if you control the most arms or tanks and shit like that, you're going to be kind of hard to beat. And it was just like you said, this was grassroots effort. This was a groundswell. This wasn't followers of the seven sisters that were deeply embedded with them. These were the people that were on the fringes that were like, well, is this really? what we want to do with our country. And the Taliban makes all of these promises. They restore this hardline version of Islam.

While at the same time, anybody outside of Afghanistan has to be looking at that situation. We're like, well, shit, those guys are a little too extremist. And I mean, again, this is the group that was chosen by the ISI so they could reestablish and secure those trade routes in Central E. Again, it's all about trade money and all that kind of shit. But it was September of 96th. That was, I think, the fall of Kabul.

that's when the Taliban actually captured the capital city and at that point they declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and that's when they imposed a like you said a just brutally strict fundamentalist regime girls not allowed to go to school not allowed to show themselves in public real boys club over there yes this was a full full burqas women getting whipped in the street and all that shit horrific stuff back to I guess still horrific stuff

Osama or wow Saddam being in Kuwait at that point in time was the the first Gulf War of this happening during Bush Seniors time. And again, this is a little bit of foreshadowing. And we'll do a whole Gulf War episode. We're going to get more Bush. I don't know about you, but I love Bush. Basically, the coalition just trims Saddam's Bush. At the same time, inside of Saudi Arabia, you have been Laden still talking poorly about the coalition being there and starting to kind of turn some heads as you were talking about and alluding to earlier as far as like, okay, well, this guy's stepped over his line a little bit too far. in 1991, they take his passport and effectively put him under house arrest.

He would end up fleeing to Sudan in Africa the following year and trying to rebuild this Al-Qaeda infrastructure in Africa with pretty little success. Saudi Arabia, as you were talking about along with his family, not only strips him of his name and his family money, but also his citizenship in 1994. So Saudi Arabia has pulled a pretty hard about face on someone who came from a family that was held in very high regard, who I'm sure is probably... I mean, in 54 kids, then are all going to be first round picks, buddy. If you only have one bad kid out of 54 kids, I seriously doubt that that was the only bad one, and I'm just going off the law percentages at that point. Back in the late 80s, Osama bin Laden met kind of this free agent terrorist name Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

We're just going to call him KSM because it's a mouthful to say the name. This was some of their first interactions happened inside of Afghanistan. As far as a friendship, don't really know. Just kind of one of their first meetings happens there. In 1993, a person named Ramsey Yousef exploded a van packed with explosives below the North Tower of the World Trade Center. His plan in this was to collapse the North Tower into the South Tower. He got as far as detonating the bomb. It ends up killing six.

It injures about 7,100 people. Or it injures right around 1,000 people. Sorry, that was a greater than sign. This is the number that gave me pause. Because if you think about how this all goes, logically, if you do explode the North Tower, you have a 25% chance of collapsing this thing potentially into the South Tower, correct?

If you're just doing it in the middle and hoping you're, you know, like a game of Jenga. No, but if you're planning it like this, you've planned demolition, you're parking the van on, fuck, I don't know why I know this, you're parking the van on a certain side. It's like a chombed in a tree. Yeah. You're trying to go ahead and weaken that side to cause it to fall. I remember the story from this they're talking about is they're, because they find him, and as they're marching him away from it and everything, they look at him and they go, look back.

He looks back and he's still standing. And he looks at him and he goes, if I would have had more money. it wouldn't be. So the scariest number about that, that day when that truck explosion goes off, there were about 50,000 people evacuated. Had he had the more money that he wanted and the more explosives and had that happen,

we're talking about an event that would have been 20 to 25 times the size of casualties of 9-11? Yeah, it's a different situation because you have some time when a lot of people are able to get out. But if the idea is to knock one into the other. 100%. I mean, just the thought of losing even, I mean, say they get 20,000 people out of the building before that happens. It's a potential 30,000 people, loss of life through this first time.

Now, this is where we're going to start to play a little bit of, Yeah, I guess we're going to start to play a little bit of the connect the terrorist dots here So Ramsey Yousef was a follower of a gentleman named the Blind Sheikh Mohammed Rahman And Ramon was blind since birth And if we could take the whole terrorist aspect out of it Raman looks bad as hell in a set of aviator glasses This guy looks cool I'd be terrifying if you took him off

Probably I think his eyes. were pretty messed up. Like, I think when he did take him off, he looked like the guy from Mr. Deeds. Like, I think they were kind of everywhere. Rahman had worked with Bin Laden during the Soviet Afghan war. And Rahman had also spent some time in Egypt.

He was actually the guy that declared the fatwa on Anwar Sadat, the leader of Egypt at the time. Why do you call him? He looks just like Anwar Sadat. Do you like his politics? No, he looks just like him.

So, So, Rahman had had a little bit under his belt. He was connected to bin Laden. Also, to keep playing this game of Connected Dots, KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is the uncle of Ramsey Youssef. Now, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wasn't the architect of this plane. This falls mostly on Ramsey Yousef, his nephew's shoulders. KSM had been a part of the plot in wiring money towards a co-conspirator of the World Trade

Center bombing. just kind of a mix of understanding of like these guys all work together these are independent terrorist organizations they cross paths quite a bit by 1996 real quick before you get to that part because I got something before it because this is a big reveal right here so kind of jumping over to bin Laden so in May of 96 just a few months before the Taliban actually took Kabul bin Laden gets expelled from his from the Sudan under a ton of international pressure because they're looking for him and everything and he lands in Afghanistan basically exiled kind of broke and only with like a few dozen followers he has his citizenship where he's from taken away and everything he's homeless and um mullah Omar and bin Laden didn't know each other very well initially kind of quickly realized that they need each other strictly for the fact that bin Laden had connections and everything. And what the Taliban gets out of this is bin Laden still does have money. So he's able to still generate some wealth, but also the deep connections to those donors in the Persian Gulf. He ends up being able to fund Omar with cash, build the infrastructure,

and also because he was good at establishing these camps, would let them use his highly trained Arab Brigade to fight alongside like the Taliban fighters against their enemies, which were called the Northern Alliance at that point. Now, what Al-Qaeda got was sovereign protection, basically. He was given land to build massive state-of-the-art at the time terrorist training camps. There were ones called Mess Aeneck and then Tarnak Farms. And he would just basically process thousands of recruits without having to worry about any type of like foreign police or any type of other military like interruptions. So he's finally at this point,

once he goes back in there, now he has money and room to build shit. And you say highly sophisticated training centers, this wasn't like an Olympic training center. No, no, no. But in order to be able to train people to shoot, I mean, just the effectiveness of being able to have someone hit a target is understated in common.

combat. Yeah, absolutely. You're not just having guys that are just like, and just like firing, you know, pray and spray. What do you mean? Are you talking about the videos of the guys doing the monkey bars that we saw after 9-11 happened? Yeah, that too. 1996, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ends up pitching this new plan that he's come up with to bin Laden. Maybe one of the most not-so plans that I've ever heard.

This falls into the movie realm pretty quickly. So KSM's plan was to take over five airliners over the ocean and to explode nine of them. I mean 10 planes then? You said five. Oh, 10, yeah. 10 planes over the ocean, explode nine of them. And on the last one, KSM would personally take this to an airport. flight, all of the males would be killed. And once this airplane lands, KSM would stand at the top of

the steps and he would give this grand speech. And it was to reject Israel's power over the United States and basically lay out that he is there to show the United States that they are not as powerful as they thought. I mean, if that doesn't sound insane enough that nobody would just like pick him off as soon he stepped out of that airplane or anything like that, the fact that he thought that he was going to be able to take over 10 airliners and down nine of them and then it was just going to land safely in airports, nuts. Of course, bin Laden's like, hey, that's a great idea, man. That's pretty cool.

I like it. Not right now. We're kind of in some other things. I've got some fingers in some other pots right now. But if you want to pledge some loyalty, maybe you and I can do some business here. You just need to pledge loyalty, become a member of Al-Qaeda. And KSM still kind of being this free agent freelancer, is like, no, you haven't really earned that from me yet. I'm a lot higher up on the pecking order than you are.

And so bin Laden, not to impress KSM, but kind of starts on a trail of making a name for himself. So there becomes this friction within the Taliban because a bunch of these high-ranking Taliban officials don't like bin Laden. and they basically argue that, hey, we're basically harboring a global terrorist, and it's destroying our chances for any legitimate recognition of what we're trying to do in our governance over Afghanistan. The UN's not going to fucking seat us or even consider us if we're hiding bin Laden. And so Omar repeatedly refuses to hand bin Laden over to the West, and there's this traditional code of hospitality called. called Pashton Wally and basically dictates that a guest who seeks refuge must be protected at all cost. I think it's kind of similar.

I don't think it. I don't know if it's the same thing. Don't fucking crucify me. But remember the movie about Chris Latrell, Walberg plays in the sniper one where he, the four guys end up trying to get dropped into like Afghanistan or something like that. And he's the only one that makes it back and he gets protected by the village because he's a guest. I'm unfamiliar. The only Latrell I know is pretty well.

Okay. So anyway, bin Laden deliberately ends up using this protection that he has under this to start kind of the proto planning after speaking to KSM for 9-11. Now, he knows that an attack of that scale is going to bring everything from the United States, including a military invasion, that would completely destroy the Taliban. But he hides the full scope of this from Omar until it's too late to stop. I think bin Laden has this belief because he saw kind of, I want to say it was, it wasn't over in Chechnya. There was a point in time where the United States being over and it could have possibly been during the Gulf War, where they start to take a little bit of a beating and they back off. And bin Laden has it in his head that the United States is a paper tiger.

If you can hit them once and you can black their eye, they're never going to. to try to come after you, which is an insane thing. One of the biggest misreads in the history of misreads. So Bin Laden starts to get the United States and his crosshairs.

You've seen what we've done just against the threat of communism, right? And they didn't do shit in the country. Wasn't even our fight. They didn't offend us whatsoever. You think if you hit us, it's just going to be like, no, we're fine. So in 1996, bin Laden declares a fatwa against the United States.

Declaration of war. He's saying, if you see any Americans overseas as a Muslim, it is your duty to kill them. He's going to do the same in 1998, except for this time he's going to add in Israel at this point in time. August 7th, 1998, Al-Qaeda. Before we get to that, because this is their first big, this is their coming out party. Let's take a bathroom break. Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it.

If you want to keep up with this, our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram, which is historically high pod, P-O-D. You can also head over to it's Twitter, it's X, it's Twitter. It's Twitter. come on at historically high, and that's high, H-I-like, hi. If you have any recommendations, you want to get to us, just want to reach out and say hello. You can hit us up on our email at historically high podcast, H-I-G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-Sat. All right, and with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. Okay, so we come to the 1998 embassy bombings. Now, the Taliban is fully fucking aware of this.

and that's what I want to make clear here is we're trying to make the delineation, but at this point I think there comes a point where the Taliban just kind of realizes that their strict adherence to their religion in all of their governmental and societal programs isn't necessarily going to attract the U.S. There's still a lot of bad stuff going on inside Afghanistan.

It's just state sanction now. Instead of a civil war type setting, we have the state sanction beatings in the streets and just some real bad shit. August 7th, 1998. Al-Qaeda simultaneously lights off two truck bombs at U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. And I got to say, Nairobi, Kenya in the running for maybe one of the best names of a place.

Nairobi is such a cool name. Yeah. Unfortunately, what happened, they're not so cool, because in Nairobi, the bombing, in front of the U.S. embassy killed 213, and the bombing in Dar es Salaam killed 11. Now, the intent with this was to kill Americans, U.S. citizens within their embassy on foreign soil. Only about 12 Americans total were killed.

This was Kenyans, and these were Tanzanians, that were killed in these blasts of the majority. And in response to this on August 20th, so we didn't wait too long for a response about 13 days, send a shitload of cruise missiles over to some of the training sites in Afghanistan and also to this pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, which was bad on intelligence because they believed that this pharmaceutical company was directly funding Al-Qaeda. Turns out they had dick for ties with Al-Qaeda. So they just bombed and blew up a pharmaceutical company that I want to say was responsible for 30% of the pharmaceutical output inside of Kenya. Just blew that up. The other problem was we did end up blowing up two of their training facilities,

but the amount of cruise missiles that we sent over there was so great and some of them were faulty that they were finding cruise missiles unexploded ordinances out in the desert and bin Laden has this brilliant idea to speak with China say hey China we know that you guys like technology you're not a real big fan of the West either would you like to come over and purchase some of these

cruise missiles and maybe start to reverse engineer them and figure out how to build these bin Laden publicly comes out and says that they have these unexploded cruise missiles and I believe spends the $10 million that he receives from China into basically trying to get chemists to start like Frankenstining the heroin that's in Afghanistan to send over to the United States to just start killing people through a heroin epidemic basically.

So we gave him a $10,000 bonus or a $10 million bonus by sending over too many cruise missiles that didn't all explode. But that's the reaction. That was what happened. They killed a fair amount of people in the training facility and unfortunately a large pharmaceutical factory that only hurt the Kenyans. But it was the response. And this is at a time where I think Bush takes so much.

And I'm not saying it's not deserved. Do you know what the message for that date is as well? That date was eight years to the day that the U.S. troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War. So that was also the message that was sent by that too. Nice little messaging there. Bush. Obviously, when you say 9-11, whose fault is

that Bush kind of takes the blame? And I'm not saying that that's wrong. But Clinton did not give bin Laden the respect that he had deserved. And the response with the cruise missiles seems I don't know, I guess, like,

a band-aid that you can put on it. But at the same time, also under Clinton's watch, October 12, 2000, you have the USS Cole that is refueling in Yemen. There's a suicide boat that approaches on the port side of the ship. I believe it gets to kind of the area where the mess hall is on the inside of the ship. And this boat is just packed with C-4. The suicide bombers detonate. and the explosion created a 40 foot by 60 foot gash in the side of the USS Cole. That's a pretty big hole in a boat.

Killed 17 soldiers, injures 37 more. It detonated right because it was midship, so like right in the middle. And they said that's right where one of the cafeterias was. Wow. Yeah. This filled out Kata Camps. This was another punch to the face of the great, evil west that brought more people onto this religious jihad front with al-Qaeda they're they're

escalating it so u.s. embassy is outside of the country they're just creating like little trying to figure out where the holes are the gaps are what they can do and it ends up proving that they can coordinate these highly synchronized mash casualty attacks across you know international borders and they don't operate like as this loose collection of like cells or anything like that. They basically spent years before the embassy bombing, setting up like a clean commercial front company in Nairobi. They were exporting, I think, like fish and diamonds to legally import bomb-making chemicals without triggering suspicion. So they're not just trying to ship the fucking bombs down there and then do a haphazard thing. this is like and I think this is kind of the thing that captured me most this episode is again the lack how long this took to plan and how many times there were that an alarm bell didn't get raised about this because if you think this is sophisticated setting up a commercial business for you know this kind of stuff it's going to get much more sophisticated leading up to the actual 9-11 of

that. Sophisticated for a terrorist organization. They're running this like a business. When these new fighters are showing up to these camps in Afghanistan, they're essentially given like intake forms. Like how far are you willing to go? Why are you here? Why do you believe that you should be a part of Al Qaeda?

And getting all of the information that they can as far as are you willing to die for your cause. And they're able to start parsing out kind of. maybe some people that are rising to the top because, again, just to put a bow on this whole USS coal thing, you're going to be shocked by the actions that were taken by the United States and Bill Clinton to retaliate for the USS Cole. Do you know what they were? No, because there were not.

They didn't do anything. Because we were in the middle of trying to figure out this transition. We were in an election year. It's in October, so you're talking about later in the year a month before the elections. And then you fall into that, that period of a, God damn it, what's it called? Not dead bird. Oh, fuck. I know what you're talking about between the election and the time of the transition of power.

Yeah. Lame duck. Not dead bird, lame duck. And there was really... The Deshawn Watson throw. There was really no real response to this. Prior to the USS Cole in 1999, Bin Laden and KSM had agreed to kind of this whittled down version that would become known as the Plains Plan. And this whittledown version of the original plan sees KSM given operational control.

And this brings KSM to pledge allegiance to Al-Qaeda. Now, it's not to say that we weren't chasing bin Laden for a very long time because there was something that was established in 1996 called Alex Station. Alex Station was established within the CIA Counterterrorism Center. It was the first ever CIA unit that was created to track a single individual. This was solely for bin Laden. And this was actually kind of this odd fusion kind of station where there were analysts coming from the CIA that were running this. This guy named Michael Shire, Schoyer. It's crazy that the American name is giving me just as much trouble is that.

is that, Shire. Muslim names. And then there was also people from the FBI that were working inside of this Alex station too. And they were, I think, kind of hoping that maybe having this connection together that both sides would benefit. It turns out that the CIA and the FBI worked together like, I don't know, like

balloons and spikes. It just, it doesn't happen. One way that I heard it explained. Like lemon tuna fish? That's a delicious combo. is it's almost like the CIA were the robbers. It's a fucking,

it's a rivalry, man. Yeah. It's a cross town rivalry. It's the fucking Cubs and the socks. It's the Mets and the Yankees. It's. Alex Station was so hot. What are you doing on our turf, CIA?

They were so hot on bin Laden that people within the CIA started calling Alex Station the Manson family. Because they were so weird in just trying to push to get bin Laden. and Shire or Shoyer had put up multiple different scenarios to where they could get Bin Laden. One of them included having local villagers kidnap Bin Laden, wrap him up in a carpet, throw his ass in a waiting helicopter, load him onto a plane, and bring him over to the United States and try it. I mean, that doesn't rise to a Castro-esque, we're going to make explosive seashells or we're going to poison his wetsuit. if he's an international terrorist and one of these other countries also has enough on him

to try him and they can even take care of him. True, yeah. There are these certain situations. Are we talking in the way that just makes the way we operate a problem? We're just like, eh, just do this. So much of this is fucking hindsight. That's why you feel like that.

It is. Also at the same time, they have opportunities. This is the fucking, would you strangle the baby Hitler? Of course you would fucking strangle baby Hitler. Yeah. you get these different pieces of intelligence talking about what bin Laden's going to be and Alex station is passing that along to the CIA and saying, hey, run this up to flagpole.

Let's see if we can get him. And there's times when he's meeting with like Emirati rich people or Emirati, whoever is over in the UAE that's very important that Ben Laden is in the Emirati. And they're saying, the Illumar Amirati. They're saying, yeah, we can fire some cruise missiles over there. But if we kill these Emirates, then we have a problem with the UAE. And guess what? They have a whole lot of oil that we really like. Also, we can never get him in a certain amount of time

because it's not like you can just be like he's here. He's going to be here for an hour. You have to know further ahead of time because firing these cruise missiles is going to take a minute to get there. And also at the same time, this is a small group that's doing this. Yes, this person is wanted. But depending on the scale of what they've done or anything like that,

that's what's going to dictate the response. Yeah. They have to have like stone cold 100% factual, like actionable data to do something. We almost got really lucky with the response to the embassy bombings. Oh, the 57 cruise missiles. They missed him by like an hour, right?

Yeah. Very, very close to him just not being a problem anymore. Some of the future hijackers, in fact, most of them were kind of handpicked by bin Laden himself. self. Two of these that we're going to talk about because this is, it just falls into this weird CIA trap.

A guy named Khaled al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hasmi. So they were chosen directly out of camps by bin Laden. They also kind of had this group of four called the Hamburg cell that falls into Al-Qaeda's lapse. I think that was in November of 99? Yeah, when they get there, one of the things that bin Laden knows that he needs and that KSM knows that he needs is somebody who can go over and has an understanding of how the West does things. This Hamburg cell, this group of four that comes over was living and studying in Hamburg, Germany. So while you don't have the full Western influence of the United States, you have these Muslim men that are living inside of Germany and kind of have a little bit of an understanding.

part of the reason that KSM has such a hate for the United States and we should have mentioned this earlier when we introduced him KSM actually spent a fair amount of time in the United States he went to college for some reason this small college in North Carolina before he transferred to North Carolina A&T I believe like a or A&M maybe somewhere over there

but he's in like rural North Carolina as a full-fledged Muslim man and all of the garb taking just all sorts of shit from the Americans that are there because he doesn't look like everybody else he's being treated very poorly he kind of decides that the way that he was treated in the West

they needed to pay for it so he had an introduction he'd understand how things were going on in the United States just based upon what he had seen so he knew that in order to blend in just as he was trying to do over there you needed to be able to speak English, you needed to have some understanding of Western culture.

Well, and this also, a lot of this is kind of luck, too, because these four, you know, radicalized, you know, highly educated guys living in Germany, border train to Pakistan, they're intending to travel to Chechnya to fight against the Russians initially. And while they're in Pakistan, there's like an al-Qaeda recruiting officer

or something like that are an operative that ends up finding him, convinces them that they're going to be wasting their skills in traditional, like, you know, trench warfare type stuff in Chechnya and actually sends them to Bin Laden's headquarters in Kandahar. It also turns out that the Muslim fighters in Chechnya were also like, hey, we got enough. I know you guys all want to come over here for your jihad and all that kind of stuff, but we're full. We got enough to handle the Russians. These four men, Mohamed Atta, you're going to hear a lot about him.

I'm sure that that name rings a bell for pretty much everybody that remembers this. Marwan Al-Shihe, Ziajara, and Ramsey Ben-Al-Shib. Now, you have three gentlemen in Atta, Al-Shehi, and Jara, that are able to obtain visas to the United States. Ramsey Ben-Al-Sheb, I believe, was Yemeni. He had a very hard time. I think he tried four different times for a visa and got denied all four of those times. So he wasn't going to be able to travel over to the United States,

but he remains kind of this key coordinator still in Germany to where he is funneling this information from KSM over to the jihadists in the United States. He's going to handle the fucking logistics portion of it, I guess. And this group of people is, they're so kind of diametrically opposed because Zia Jara had a girlfriend. He had a long-term girlfriend that he was very, I guess in love with in Germany. Mohamedata, completely on the other side of the spectrum. This guy was certifiably nuts.

And I don't know if you want to call him just the most religious man in the world, but he had a lot of very, very weird proclivities. So he, I believe, one of his term papers that he was writing over there was something that they had looked at. And I guess at the top he had dedicated it to Allah, which, I mean, I guess you can do that on a college paper. It's not going to get you more points. with the professor probably.

But they said that his kind of his fundamental beliefs in this paper were good, but they wanted to pair him up with this female professor to try to flush it out and make it as good as it could be. After two weeks, Atta basically said, I understand that my grade's on the line for this, but I can't work

with a woman anymore. Atta had all of these other weird proclivities to where, like, he was Egyptian. And when there would be like belly dancing on TV, he would just get up leave the room. He wrote out a will, which I'm sure if you were planning on going over and dying a will,

it'd probably be something you'd want to put in there. And in his will, he was talking about the cleaning of his body before he is buried, and that whoever is tasked with cleaning around his genitals has to be a male. And not only does he have to be a male, he has to wear gloves so they can't come in contact with his dead genitals. Of course, standard operation procedure, right? Yeah, a very, very odd guy. but a very militant guy.

Well, this is why the guy gets picked is the tactical commander of what Al-Qaeda internally calls the planes operation. You're not fucking clever. Planes operation. And that was when, I think he, in early 2000,

is when they all met with Bin Laden personally, and that's kind of when they were given their assignments. Bin Laden and KSM put these guys, they've been studying ways to bypass like Western security agencies and everything. So they put these guys on this really specialized tract designed to do exactly that. So basically they need to continue to establish, I guess, like a clean slate or something that's not going to draw the wrong type of attention.

So they order them back to Germany, shave their beards, adopt Western clothing, and begin to act like ordinary, you know, international students. they're strictly forbidden from contacting known extremist mosques or cells and because they did have valid European student visas and clean passports with like no records of travel to militant zones the three that you discussed before applied for and received their U.S. tourist visas and business visas in the spring of 2000. Atta Al-Shahee and Jara. Yep.

So by June of 2000, Atta and Shahi arrived in Florida. they had bypassed traditional military training camps to learn how to fly and instead just enrolled directly at this place called Huffman Aviation. It was a commercial flight school in Venice, Florida and just used the thousands of dollars of funds that were wired directly to them by KSN

to bounce through all these fucking accounts to clean it or whatever to be able to pay for this. And I looked in this and I was like, why would they try to come train here? to like because my mindset is like the least amount of time you're leaving a paper trail here

that's what it feels like you would want to try to do but you would maybe think about like why aren't you guys training just in Europe if you're already established and all that kind of stuff apparently it's much there's a huge abundance of these like private flight schools in the United States way more than anywhere else first in flight brother we're going to have the most

training schools when we invented it and they it was I guess harder to be able to do that kind of stuff because there was less condensed like flight zones in Europe. So like you couldn't go on like long distance flights or anything like that, like really long distance flights. Well, if you think about it, flying from New York to San Francisco would be like flying from the tip of Norway all the way down to like the southern tip of Greece.

Like that's just the sheer size of this country allows you to be able to do more of that. And the other thing, too, is they could, like, spread out further to go to different fucking flight schools and do that kind of shit. So it wasn't drawing attention that there were multiple guys signing up at the same time with, you know, last names, the jaddi, yada, something that wouldn't show up, you know, on a list. They could try to kind of, like, spread it around. So much of this is not only them being able to stay under the radar and get these visas,

at that point in time, our national security looks so different. So one of the reasons that the breakdown is going to be, so there's going to be four pilots, there's going to be 15 what they call muscle hijackers. 15 of these are Saudi, two of them are Emirates, one of them, Atah's Egyptian, and then there's one that's Lebanese. The reason why there's 15 Saudis is because we had such a relationship with Saudi Arabia that in order for a Saudi citizen to get a visa and have a clean record, it only took you going as a Saudi resident to one of these recognized travel agencies and paying them money and they would procure you the visa.

You wouldn't have to interview with any state officials or anything like that. That's how much we wanted oil at the time. Yeah, I guess there was that tradeoff of knowledge or whatever you want to call it. Well, I mean, nowadays we just charge, what is it, a hundred thousand dollars? for fucking U.S. citizenship now. Just get in that way. But it was so easy for Saudi citizens

to get into the United States that that's where you see the overwhelming amount of them coming from. In January 2000, we had maybe the best shot at trying to break this before it happens.

There was an Okeda summit that was held in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. And this was actually picked up by Alex station. They were able to get cameras over there using the, I believe it was the Malaysian station of the CIA

and they have pictures of this meeting happening at this resort. And when they're getting these pictures, they recognize that El Hamsey, Woff El Hamsey that's there, or Hosmi, that's there, has a U.S. visa. And

he's meeting with al-Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur. Now, he's traveling with this guy named Khalid al-Madar, and al-Hasmi and al-Midhar are being watched by that CIA station. They say, hey, keep an eye on and make sure they don't go anywhere. All of a sudden, they just take this quick trip over into Thailand. And the CIA in Malaysia tells the Thailand station, hey, these guys are, they know for sure that al-Hasmi is there.

They don't really have an idea. of who Al-Midar is yet. So keep an eye on them, make sure that they don't go anywhere. Eventually, Al-Hasmi and Al-Midar get on a plane, and they fly, I believe, from Thailand into Los Angeles. And as far as Alex Station knows, Al-Hasmi is on the plane. They don't know about Al-Midar yet.

Alex Station had failed to pass along the flight info with Al-Hazmi coming in because the CIA officials saw him on the flight log. They know that he comes into the country. One of the FBI agents that's working in Alex Station tries to draft this explanation of Al-Hasmi being in the United States, being a member of Al-Qaeda, and having this visa to send it over to the FBI. One of the CIA operatives that are working in there, one of the analysis is, hey, don't send that yet.

we have some more research that we need to do on this guy before you alert the FBI. FBI guy goes, okay, we'll hold off on that. A couple hours later, the CIA analysis or analysis. I just want to make it clear. You're talking January 2000. Yeah. Okay. I did hear you.

I just want to set the stage of saying there was stuff as far back as a year and nine months. Yeah, this is still Clinton presidency. And this guy has a dedicated. department on him. Yeah, that's picking up this al-Qaeda operative that's coming into the United States. The CIA, I don't know why I can't say the word, analysis, says that the FBI is aware that Al-Hasmi is in the United States.

Turns out the FBI had no idea. There also is, this isn't like when Adam was saying, bin Laden declares the fatwa. This isn't just like him in his office, like Michael Scott coming off, being like, I declare fatwaugh and no one else knows about it except everyone in the cave. This is him also going on like fucking making his home movies and sending him out and all that kind of shit. And so United States intelligence is very aware that this guy has declared war and that he would

very much like to conduct an operation to do something within the United States. So this isn't like, what? When did this? Like, this is something that they know that this person is working toward.

So, yeah. This pass-off that fails to happen between Alex Station and the CIA. The drop baton without anyone going back for it. It opens the door to so many different things. as far as that goes, stuff gets a little bit more blurry here too

because them not passing along the flight info to the FBI or the State Department to put them on a watch list doesn't happen until 2001. And this isn't blurry like, oh no, this is pissing in your own face blurry. And this isn't confirmed. There's a lot of information out on this. This is a theory that I had heard that makes a whole lot of sense. It also doesn't hurt that it was a,

former member of the CIA that was explaining it this way. Putting a lot of trust in the CIA, my man. I am, but it just, it's a very like, yeah, this makes sense. The FBI wants to, or the FBI works inside of the United States. So when there's ever maybe a foreign asset or something like that in the United States that the FBI can use, they're going to surveill him, they're going to go over and say, hey, would you like to be a CIA or an FBI asset? We know about what you're doing.

Good evening, sir. We're from the FBI. We'd like to talk to you about being an informant. May we enter? If you can work inside of this country and help us break some stuff up and make some arrest, that would be great. On the other side of the coin, you had the CIA who works in this international intelligence and maybe doing some more unsavory things behind the scenes. If the CIA... I think everyone's doing unsavory things behind the scenes. Fair. Yeah. Just not all internationally.

If the CIA can get a hold of El-Hasme and say, hey, We know who you are. We won't take you in. We won't turn you over to the FBI. If you want to go back over to the Middle East and start meeting with Al Qaeda and maybe be a person on the inside as CIA informant. So it's a fight over an asset? Kind of. Okay.

A little bit of... It's beef over a fucking toy. We don't want the FBI to have him because that's going to be a win for them. We believe he can be more valuable overseas. The FBI is saying, well, we should have known about this because this is a foreign national terrorist that has a visa. and is living in the United States, we'd like to keep some surveillance on him. And this push and pull back and forth

from the CIA and the FBI is just where this ball gets dropped because they have so many shots at trying to find these two guys. Al-Hasmi and Ami Dara's plane ends up landing at L.A.X, like I said, and the pair, they're there for, I believe it's like a week or two.

The pair end up meeting this Saudi National in, I don't know, a crazy weird way that doesn't make any sense. He's from San Diego. They just meet him at a cafe in L.A. And this guy's name is, I can't believe I've been looking for it. Oh, Omar Albuyumi. So he's kind of an interesting figure in this because there's the connection that's being made in a court of law as the, you know, the,

Victims of 9-11 and their families are suing the country of Saudi Arabia for, I believe, a trillion dollars, stating that they believe that Saudi Arabia not only had knowledge of this, but was also funding it. So Omar Al-Bayumi ends up meeting with Al-Hamsi and Al-Midhar in this cafe. They say it's a chance meeting. They say that, you know, it was just fate. Alba Yumi walks in and he hears these two people speaking a language that he recognizes and comes over and starts speaking to them immediately. They become fast friends. Alba Yumi helps them relocate to San Diego.

He finds them an apartment that is very close to his own. He actually co-signs on the lease and pays their security deposit. He throws them a welcome party and invites other members of the Muslim community over to meet them and in great. them into the community, like I said. He also takes them to, I believe it's the mosque that he practices at. And the interesting thing about this is the Imam, which is like the prayer leader, that Al-Baiumi introduces the two hijackers to, has an assistant that's an FBI asset. he has an associate within this mosque of the imam that just got introduced to these two terrorists

doesn't he don't they room and board with him for a little bit as well that was in that documentary they do room with someone he wasn't an agent he was someone who was an informant that passed along information but he never had anything to say because one of them had gotten a job and they were just going about like they were going to establish routes there. But again, that's still just the crossover on that is pretty nuts. He was an FBI informant. The FBI didn't get the knowledge from the CIA that they had these

two nationals, these two hijackers. Had the FBI known that and had they known who they were dealing with, probably would have kept a little better eye on it. them, right? Yeah, because the names would have been rung a bell when that guy within there is like these two new guys came in. Yep. And these are their names and it would have been like those are the guys that the CIA told us are, or one of them at least, is a known member of Al-Qaeda. They were that close. Had they been able to pass along that intelligence and that knowledge, it would have been probably a little bit different story. But excuse me, there again, we're talking about two hijackers at 19.

So there are some unresolved kind of questions about Alba Yumi. He was working for, I believe it was the Saudi air. It had something to do with the Saudi Air Force. He wasn't here just to sightsee. Or maybe he was, but he was sending those sites. back home. I believe that he had come over as actually a college student and he was being paid to be over here. They've gone back and they've researched some of his bank records, obviously, because of this court case and that he's been arrested in recent years. And they found a very distinct bump in

pay that he was getting from this stipend or whatever from the months when Al-Hasmi and Al-Madir were in San Diego. They've also gone through and done a search of some of his belongings and they found that he was quite the videographer which I mean in 2000 you don't have a camera on your phone so if you're going to be filming and recording something you're probably going to be

doing that with a larger camera in 2000 yeah 2000 was the time when it was the mini cassettes so you could still do with a handheld still much more obvious than just a cell phone

I had an uncle that made homemade porno, and I guess that's his setup. Didn't we see him last week? You know who you fucking are. So in searching Albuymi's stuff, they end up finding a whole lot of recordings, a whole lot of places in Washington, D.C. They see about an hour and a half's worth of footage of the U.S. Capitol building, focusing a lot on the entrances and exits, the streets around it, kind of interesting if you are maybe working for looking for some targets.

I'm not saying that Alba Yumi was a part of this. I am saying that if I was the one that had to bet on this, I would say that Alba Yumi was certainly a part of it. As far as his full-on connection to the Saudi royal family and the country goes, I can't really say that it would have been something I think that the country would have sponsored. And again, I will never make an excuse for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia does horrific things. I don't know if they were involved as far as officially in the government as much it was it was just a lot of rich Saudis who were paying bin Laden.

Any any contribution to this regardless of what scope you meant to have that contribution in is still fucking contribution. Yeah, absolutely. Um, June 2000, as you were talking about, Atta arrives. And, oh, to finish up Midar, Amidar, and Al-Hasmi, they both end up trying to enroll in flight school. And apparently, they're both really, really bad. They aren't really the flying type. They kind of get moved over into more of a hijacker type role because that's more of where their skills are suited to. It's literally either the pilots or the muscle, as they say, basically the people that are supposed to handle crowd control.

Yeah. So in June 2000, like you were talking about, Ata arrives in the United States. He ends up moving to Florida. He goes to that Air Force Base or the Huffman Aviation singularly by himself. In the summer, Al-Shehehe and Jara end up arriving. Honey-Hun Jor also arrives. He begins flight training in Arizona. You have Jara.

in Al-Shahey, going to a different separate aviation facility in Florida, but still in kind of a close area. Yeah. One of the kind of odd things being told, hey, you have to blend in, there was a little while, I believe that Jara was living with the people that were running the aviation school. Like, he was, he was normal enough and could blend in. They also said that he did something that I actually think might have been counting. to him blending in.

He became a massive Florida Marlins fan. And this was at the time when the Florida Marlins were probably drawing like three, 400 people to games. So being a Florida Marlins fan would actually probably be more suspicious. Shouldn't know. But this was all a part of the blending in that they're told to do. Jara picks up a paper every once in a while. He figures out how baseball works.

He looks at the box score. He sees what happens. He's able to go and talk to the Americans. and kind of fly under the radar because he looks like he's trying to assimilate. When they get over there, these guys are getting driver's licenses. They are setting up bank accounts in their own names.

A lot of the documents that they got in on were just straight, legitimate documents, and they weren't trying to go under Ailes. That's what I'm saying is there was so much attention to how to bypass the suspicion of just, like, not establishing a paper trail. Like, no, do with the things that people would be setting roots down would try to do.

and between July 2000 and December 2000, this is when the pilot hijackers are practicing, you know, touch and go landings in Florida, things like that. Between June and September, I think KSM's financial manager in the Emirates wired over $110,000

in increments directly to like bank accounts that were opened by Ata and then Al-Shahi in Florida to cover the flight school tuition, living expenses, all that shit. By December 20 or, 20, sorry, December 2000, Atten al-Shahee, had passed their commercial pilots exam and earned their commercial licenses. And then also in that same month, that's when Honey, I think it's Hajur,

who already actually had a commercial license from a previous U.S. visit. That's when he reentered the U.S. and joined, and he was going to be the fourth pilot. Honey Hondur was such a bad pilot that when he continued his training, in Arizona when he gets back to the United States, they were so unconvinced that he was an actual certified pilot by the FAA, that they had to call up and confirm that he didn't just fake this. It was how bad he wasn't flying.

And you also get, this is where a lot of kind of the mythology and the stories come. Some of these guys, Al-Midar and Al-Hasmi, when they were going through flight school, before they washed out, they were telling their instructors, they're like, yeah, I'm not super worried about the taking off or the landing. I'm more worried about like flying this thing at cruising altitude.

When are we going to get to the big ones? Like, no, he literally, they're like, I want to fly like the Boeing 727s. When do we get? No, I don't tell me how to land and take off the small ones. Just get me in the air with the big one. So, I mean, I don't know how normal that is to hear. at a flight school, but I have to assume that that stood out pretty, pretty wide.

Yeah, a little bit, right? I would hope, at least. While they're working and going through this training, KSM had started a while back, and kind of the reason that he was able to understand that he needed to send Al-Midar and al-Hasmi to San Diego was he was going to, like, flea markets in Pakistan, like, buying. a phone book from Southern California that was being sold over in Pakistan at these markets.

Like a pair of fucking Levi's or something? Yeah, he's going through and he's looking for these flight schools in kind of the general area or looking for if there's a strong Muslim community in the phone book. I want to say it's Al-Hasmi actually gets his name into a phone book, so he

he's finally somebody because he gets his name into the phone book. But it's during this time, KSM is not only collecting that information, he's getting old U.S. movies of hijackings. He's going through and he's watching these movies. I looked, I couldn't find out what movies they were. Off the top of my head, I'm probably going to assume Conair, Air Force One.

What other hijacker movies can you think of? Yeah, I can't really. Here's the thing. And we might get it, let's try not to branch from this, but before this happened, before 9-11 happened, a hijacking was when someone took over the plane, made the plane land, and then asked for ransom for the hostages.

That's what the hijackings were. There was never a thought that someone would hijack a plane and suicide fucking bomb it into a bit. That wasn't a thing. It was like, oh, who am I trying to? It was D.B. Cooper. Yeah. type shit is what and hijackings had happened and everything but they weren't violent and like people

usually didn't get hurt it was just like i'm taking over this plane so you it was a bargaining chip yeah and this is why the cockpit doors were just simple balsa wood or plywood that maybe had a little latch on it and sometimes they were just left open weirdly enough i am old enough to actually earned a pair of fucking wings from flying as a kid because i got to walk up into the cockpit in flight. And the captain is just like, hey, look out the front of the plane. I was like, oh, and then you get handed a pair of wings,

walk back to your seat, the next kid would go up. Did you get to, were you old enough that you got to slap the flight attendant on her ass when you walked by or no? No, I was a fucking gentleman. Okay, so not that old. I didn't feel that confident.

The wings, was I a pilot at that point? Was that captain? Was that allowed? No. But, yeah, and... So part of that strategy that you're talking about, was there was actually a push to reinforce cockpit doors

and there was actually a pushback from the aviation community that said, well, if we make it so we can't get it in and out of the doors, they're just going to slash the stewardess's throat or whoever they're holding hostage. They were so much more concerned about making sure that nobody out in the plane got killed by these hijackers. Whose family could turn around and sue? Well, I think it's just more because,

Because like you're saying, there was never an attempt to take the plane over and try to fly it anywhere. It was always just to try to appease the hijacker. Putting myself in that situation, you would have to assume someone would have to feel competent enough to fly the plane in the pilot spot. Exactly. And that thought never entered your mind. Yeah. It just, it wasn't something that was out there. So his KSM is watching these movies.

He's going through and he's editing out scenes that have uncovered women in them. And then he's sending them out to these different. training facilities to kind of show them like, hey, Osama, this is what we're looking for, this kind of a takeover, anything like this. They're using them as study materials. While these guys are training, they're taking cross-country flights. They're sitting in first class. They're scoping everything out. They're looking at the routines as far as when pilots are coming in and out of the cockpit. So that comes between April 2001 and June 2001, so we're kind of going forward to. This is when the remaining 15 hijackers

arrive in the U.S. So these are the ones again, we keep calling the muscle hijackers. So they're primarily younger guys recruited basically for their physical strength and none of these guys were big, but to basically overpower the flight crews and controlled passengers. So. I believe they said

it was like they were between 5-5 and 5-7. Big for them. And also, what's bad shit insane about this is we've talked about like the box cutter situation. Uh-huh.

Like, you used to be able to have a four-inch fucking blade. Four-inch blades are fucking huge. Yeah, most pocket knives I think are only three inches.

And a fucking box cutter is a razor sharp. You can get slat-like. And then they're also, they used to allow pepper spray coming through. So these guys are walking through security,

which I also don't know why a bunch of guys with pepper spray and box cutters doesn't just like raise just a little bit, but they allowed that stuff. I fucking can't get into it. But anyway.

That's, No, no, no, that's my contention. If you see somebody with a pocket knife, okay, that guy carries that around all the time. How many people are just walking around with box cutters in their life? And these guys were wearing, because there's footage of them going through security

and button up shirts. These aren't fucking construction workers or day laborers or anything like that. They would have it for opening fucking boxes. But so you have these guys that not only are, when they're taking these cross-country flights, they are sitting in the seats or near the seats or different seats to kind of get an eye on, like you said, the path of the flight attendants,

when the captains are coming and going, what the access, how long the doors are being open, and then strategizing and saying, this is where we need to sit to get instant access to that, but then to push the crowd back or to start pepper spraying out to force people back, and then just simply control the cockpit door because that's what we're doing. These people, based on the videos we've seen, they think that we're simply just going to land the plane somewhere else, ransom for their money and then disappear. They have no idea that's what we're

doing completely the opposite of that. It was kind of new territory. It was something that hadn't even really hit the mind of the flight community that these things would be hijacked and used

as bombs. These are full cross-country flights, too. And that I think is going to play maybe the biggest role in this. is the hijackers aren't targeting local routes. They're not targeting a quick Boston to New York flight on a small plane. You want to say the fucking horrible reason for that? Not enough fuel.

Not enough fuel. They're targeting Boeing 757s and 767s that are flying cross-country. They're picking them up out of places like Boston. They'll fly out of New Jersey. They'll fly out of Dulles, I believe, in Washington. or in Virginia. And they're looking for the biggest bang for their buck with some of these having 10,000 gallons of jet fuel on them

when they're making their impact. And if you can't smuggle a bomb onto a plane, a plane or a jet that's packed with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel. That does more damage than any bomb. You could have smuggled onto that plane. Yeah, they're looking to fly bombs at this point. As you were talking about spring 2001, the muscle begins to enter.

They are settling in areas of Florida. There was a large Arabic community in New Jersey that they were trying to assimilate in, and then in Virginia. While they're over there, A, because they have to pass time somehow and B, because they're supposed to stay in shape, they're all getting gym memberships. They're all going and working out to try to stay in shape. It's something that you don't think about, but this militant lifestyle that they were living in, they need to be able to keep up.

Because at this point in time, not everybody's let in on this. And at this point in time, none of these hijackers know exactly what's going to happen. And part of that is because they're trying to keep all of these cells so independent that they've cross-trained them. When they're over in Afghanistan and they're at these al-Qaeda training bases, they're teaching them how to fire guns, they're teaching them how to run a truck bomb. They're teaching them all these different skills. so on the off chance that they get picked up

and they're like, well, what are you trained in? And you tell them everything. You're not going to lead them down a path of being like, okay, we have to watch aviation because these guys are being trained as to how to take over a plan. You're going to do your best not to talk or tell them what you're trained or anything like that,

but if it happens to come up. Well, but if nobody knows the plan, nobody can tell the plan. No, exactly. It was just trying to keep them insulated to the point of like they didn't know. Obviously, the Hamburg, knew who they were. They knew that they were over in the country. But a lot of these hijackers that

didn't know each other were kind of sequestered to try to keep a little bit of anonymity just in case one of them gets picked up. They can't say, well, we have somebody that's in New Jersey. We have somebody that's in Virginia. In July of 2001, Ada actually slips out of the United States to go to Tarragona, Spain for this face-to-face summit with Ramsey bin al-Shib, who, was al-Qaeda's primary coordinator for it. And he basically carries a message from bin Laden demanding that the attacks be carried out as early as June or July of 2001. And Ada basically is like, can't do it.

The flight training of logistics, they're not finalized yet. And despite not having the date locked down, it was during this meeting that Ada confirmed what the final targets would be. It was going to be the World Trade Centers. for financial power as the symbol of financial power. The Pentagon is the symbol of military power and either the U.S. Capitol or the White House as the symbol of political power.

And that was a very tricky part of it, was Atta was pushing saying, the White House is a pretty small target in comparison to the U.S. Capitol to hit. That's going to take a hell of a lot of accuracy to be able to strike the White House. The Capitol is going to offer a much larger, broader target to where wherever you hit in there.

I mean, it's the Capitol building, so there's going to be somebody important in there. Your chances of important collateral being in the Capitol are going to be way better. But also it kind of seems like Atta was leaving it open to saying, hey, if we can get the White House, that would be great. But if we can't get the White House, we're lined up to hit the Capitol. And Atta at that point in time, being kind of the head of what's going on, at this point, when he's over in Spain with fucking the guy that he's meeting over

there. Ben al-Shib. Yeah, Ben-Al-Shib. They don't have a date picked out. They are, as you're talking about, he's saying five more weeks, six more weeks. Bin Laden is pushing Al-Shayib to say, no, ASAP.

Tell Atta ASAP. And Ada has to tell him, I'm on the ground floor of this. I'm seeing what's going on. I'm talking to all of the other pilots. They're over there. We're still getting all of this flight simulator training. And honestly, I'm not sure that everybody's in on it.

And the reason that he's saying this is because Zayajara, the guy that has the girlfriend back in Germany, has made multiple trips home. He's made multiple trips home to see her and to spend time with her. And he says to keep up the illusion, well, he ends up taking a fourth trip back to Germany. and before Atta leaves, he drives... Why did I lose it again? Al-Shib? No, Jara.

To the airport, and Jara has a one-way ticket. Every other time Jara has traveled back to Germany, he's always had a round-trip ticket. So Jara gets over there, and he basically was told, before he left by Atta, we need everybody here. This is your calling.

This is why we need. need you. You can't back out on this, basically. For an insurance policy, KSM ends up sending this guy name Zecharias Musasi or Musawi. Musawi is potentially this backup that they had. And Musawi sent to the U.S. is training in Minnesota at a flight school. he's very, very over-eager. He's talking about skipping these small prop planes

just like the other guys and going straight into the commercial liners. His English is so poor that the flight instructors are saying, well, it's probably not going to work out. Apparently being a pilot, kind of the international... Language is English.

Yeah. Depending on where you are. Like, is that our call? Because we invented flight, We're just like dibs on the international flight language. Yes. It's very weird how that becomes the international language. We were first, so we get to use ours.

Musasi is over there, like I say, is this insurance policy for Jar. Now, Jara does return. Jara is fully committed to the cause, and he does come back. While Musawi is in Minnesota, he ends up, like I say, kind of rubbing people the wrong way. in August 16th of 2001, Masawi gets arrested by the FBI and INS. He gets charged with an immigration violation. His laptop gets seized,

a bunch of other flight training manuals for these big airliners, these 757s and 6667s, the ones that he's not even close to training on are found in his possession, and they say we need to get into a laptop. We need to figure it out. And their search warrant to go into the laptop is turned down.

It's turned down because he is a foreign national, and it would be crossing a few international lines and understandings between his home country to go in and search his personal assets. So we had an al-Qaeda step-in plane hijacker in custody on August 16, 2001. And potentially the main key that we would need if he's emailing back and forth with al-Shayib or anybody in al-Qaeda's organization would be on that computer. So jumping back just a little bit, between May and July of 2001, the CIA director,

George Tenet, he had issued like a bunch of internal warnings that there was all this intelligence chatter that was an all-time high indicating this massive Al-Qaeda strike that was imminent. They didn't know when. They didn't know what the location was going to be. August 6th, so just a few days prior to what you were talking about while he was at his ranch, Shannon Crawford, GW, was given a what's called a PDB, the presidential daily briefing, and it says bin Laden determined to strike in U.S. And it explicitly noted that Al Qaeda wanted to bring the fight to American soil and mention this pattern of building surveillance and patterns that were consistent in preparation for hijackings.

Feels like it would be important to look into. I mean, again, there was an FBI agent in Phoenix that sent this internal memo to his headquarters, warning that there was an unusually large number of radical individuals that were enrolling in civil aviation schools. And he recommended profiling flight schools nationwide, and the memo was shelved and never acted upon. So there are,

are so many differing. It's not just like one guy that's got like from this department that's just like and they're like settle down Manson family or whatever. Alex station. Yeah. You're getting stuff from from all over. And then again, you come to that arrest of him. And it's like the laptop sits unexamined until after September 11th.

So by early September, we have all 19 hijackers fully integrated. into the country. The four pilot leaders at Al-Shahi, Hanjor, and Jara had completed their flight tests, and they at this point kind of positioned their muscle teams and near the respective departures of Boston, Newark, and D.C. Do you remember the message that Ata sent Al-Shayib for the date? Did he tell Al-Shayib in kind of a code that the date would be two sticks, a slash, and a lollipop.

I can't remember that. And that was 11-9 was the explanation. And seeing as, again, we're one of the only countries in the world that throws the month before the day. I mean, yeah, that makes sense. 9-11 ends up being chosen right around that same time. And they think that 9-11 was chosen kind of late August, early September. As I think they said, between August 28th and September 4th, each of the tickets had been purchased.

Yeah, so September 5th is when Atta and Alshahy purchased their flight tickets. September, and the same day they buy, uh, Jara buys the one for Flight 93. And then September 7th is when Hanjor ends up paying for the first class ticket for Flight 77. September 7th is also when Atta and Alshayi traveled to Baltimore to handle like the, some last minute like banking shit or something like that. You know what that was? Huh. These guys were so devout to the cause that they ended up wiring back to the benefactors

who are Al-Shayib or whoever it was that sent it over like $26,000 in unspent funds. They didn't even like think about keeping that in a bank account or going and blowing it or anything like that. They went ahead and sent it back. That's just fucking fanat. That's why fanatism is fucking insane, dude. out of the reason why otta was talking about these five weeks and it makes total sense because otta needs to look at flight schedules because he needs to get four flights that are going cross country from differing airports i don't know if logan um uh shit dullis or the one in new jersey were chosen specifically because they have the most internet or cross country flights or what but you need to find it in a certain window of time that as plane one gets

hijacked, plane four is already in the air or doesn't have any time to scramble jets to try to take these things down. So Aughton needs to figure out from three different airports, four flights that are all leaving in a similar window of time, that are all going cross country,

that excuse me, all have seats on, that are the correct planes. Yeah. There's so much that goes into that planning to be able to nail it exactly. And again, I'm not giving the guy credit. I'm just saying that's a pretty heavy task.

That's what I'm saying is there were so many parts and it had to be so sophisticated. But there were so many opportunities to all you had to do was fucking throw one. This was a paper tiger of a plan. If you were able to fucking find the page to fucking punch through. And there were so many fucking opportunities. Just to kind of like, again, set the timeline. So September 8th, that's when two of the muscle. because I guess they were brothers,

checked into a hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts to ready for the Boston one. And then September 9th, there was a state trooper in Maryland that pulled over Jar for driving 90, and he just got the standard $90 speeding ticket, which I'm not putting anything on that guy. I'm just showing like,

there were fuck-ups that were, like, happening. Do you think they paid the ticket? They sent the money back? But they'd send it back. No, they didn't. You don't think they paid the ticket? the ticket? You didn't pay it right there. It was you had to go take it to the courthouse

and shit. I'm just thinking just hand cops cash? I think sometimes you can. No, I don't think you can. This is that altitude. Do you really want to? This is that altitude curvature. No, the guy in the comments got me. He understood the ship disappears over the horizon. Don't know where it goes.

It has to be over the horizon, so it has to drop off. Also, that might have been information. So you're talking about the curvature going away from you, not side to side. You meant side to side when we had that talk No, I was talking about looking straight out in front Okay

I believe the information that I had gotten about it Was from an old Top Gear episode The old British Top Gear But you know, who's to say Who's to say? There's no way of knowing At this point Ata is in Portland, Maine

Kind of leading up to the night before I guess Dumbest shit I've ever heard Why? The night before They drive up to Portland, Maine and eat like Pizza Hut and hang out and then in the morning

a pre-dawn flight from Portland, Maine back down to Boston to be there in time does that why take that risk? I don't know, man. Pizza's not that fucking good.

Al Shahee and his team are a state of Boston hotels Hanjor and them are in another one called the Herndon Motel. and then Jara is at a Newark Days Inn. You don't want to spend your last days on Earth and a days in. Fuck, fuck these guys.

No, I'm just saying that's the other thing, is they were so devout that they weren't going to piss away that $26,000 on great accommodations. They were in these hotels for days leading up to this, like not leaving, not doing anything else, but a couple interesting stories. like the trip up to Maine to go eat pizza and do whatever they did in Maine. I believe it was one of the motels that they were staying at in Boston that they went back and researched and looked at the call logs coming from the motel.

And the night before they were calling trying to get prostitutes. They were trying to get sex workers to come over the night before they go and do this. Now, this is kind of an interesting train of thought because as they're going to become martyrs, and they're going to complete their jihad, they will be washed away of all of their mortal sins, everything that happens because of what they do. I wonder if that's just like, hey, we know where we're going, we know we're going to die,

let's go out with a bang. Because there's other stories about them being down in California, or down in Florida, in attending a strip club and spending money and all that kind of stuff. I don't really believe that that's true. God, can you imagine if like, they ended up getting some sex workers, and the sex workers are like,

this is kind of fucking weird. Bad for them. And then they just walk out, and they're just like, well, we know, call the cops, because this is kind of suspicious,

make an anonymous tip. Yeah, that could have, I mean, any of that could be... So many fucking opportunities. Could have been possible. As Chris was talking about with the dry runs,

so just to lay it out, um, American Airlines, Flight 11 is going to be from Boston to L.A. You're going to have Muhammad Atta, Abdul Abziz, Al-Amari. I'm not going to name all these. He has... I wouldn't.

So it's the pilot and four guys. Most of them are the pilot and four guys. I don't like fucking saying these guys' names, not only because I can't pronounce them because fuck these guys. Yeah, no, they don't deserve the credit. But to lay it out, you're going to have, like I say, American Airlines, Flight 11. You're going to have four muscle. You're going to have one pilot, Mohammed.

United Flight 175 is going to go from Boston to Los Angeles. That's Marwan Al-Shihihi is going to be the pilot for muscle. American Airlines Flight 77 is going to go from Dulles in Virginia to Los Angeles. Hanjah is going to be that pilot for muscle. United Flight 93. It's going from Newark, New Jersey to San Francisco. Ziajara is going to be the pilot. they only have three muscle on this plane.

Now, I'm saying that because Flight 93 is something that's extremely important. And it's kind of the only small ray of light in something. I still firmly believe had they had even more guys than four, Flight 93 would have still gone down the same way. And I mean that in like the heroic sense, that I feel like those people that were on there judging by the last communications and everything, it was just like, what's the option? Yeah, it just begs the question. And also, I think that they were in the air for a fair amount of time. So they may have had more time to act. But three muscle only helps that case. I mean, it only makes it easier, which is a great thing that happened.

Still horrific what happened. The only silver lining in that situation. Yeah, I believe they said that originally they were aiming for 20, but one of them got picked up in customs and sent back. So they just decided to roll with 19. That's where you get the odd number. That's why Jara ends up with three. All right. That's where we're going to end it for part one, right?

Yeah, yeah. I think that this is important to just kind of lay out where all this happened. This episode to me is so important because for a... very long time. I would probably say, I don't know, six months after this happened, you watch a lot of it, you're still kind of in shock, you're watching the country heal, you're watching movements happen towards Afghanistan, and then there's a certain amount of time where you just kind of put it in a compartment, and you're dealing with what's going on in Afghanistan, and you don't really get a lot of answers because it's all so fresh. Yeah.

And to go over this after 25 years of them being able to go through and reconstruct all of this and be able to provide an explanation as to what radicalized bin Laden. What were these guys doing? How close were we to being able to catch these guys and not knowing it? And again, I'm leaning more towards the government story on this. I'm not saying the conspiracy theories aren't kind of tantalizing, but all. also at the same time for me, they don't hold a ton of weight when it comes to what happens because it just there is this backstory. Yes.

There is this understanding that this was how much planning went into this from Al-Qaeda to say that this was a false flag operation or anything like this. We have this background. And I understand that that's done by the FBI and the CIA and all these investigators so they can mold this to be how they wanted to look. but at the same time, this is a legitimate backstory. This explains a whole lot of how 9-11 happened. And this is very important because for so long,

you just only focus on what happened on September 11th. And you don't go back and try to say, well, why? Yeah. How did it happen? Yeah. And then that makes sense of how all the stuff that happens in the aftermath, why it's put into place. Like you just said, there comes a time when,

something happens and you stop first and you're like, it wasn't always like this. Why is this like this? Like, when did this happen? And then you trace it back to something that came out of 9-11. And then you also get people going through TSA and bitching about taking off their shoes and cursing I-11. That wasn't 9-11. That was something that happened after 9-11. That was some idiot that was trying to light a shoe bomb on a plane. Yeah.

You also have the whole idea behind the fluids. Well, the reason we have to do that with the fluids is because they were trying to sneak fluid accelerants onto an airplane, liquid explosives onto an airplane. But the only reason that we may have found that was because TSA was, I guess, not the shoe bomber. I think the shoe bomber had made it through TSA. But what comes out of 9-11 found enough in the beginning to be like, okay, this is important. And then as time goes on and you start to really think back and look at it, you're like, well, that's great. We haven't had a terrorist attack in a very long time.

it must be because of all these things that are put in place. And then you realize that there wasn't a whole lot before that. This was just one massive act that happened that now puts everybody on guard. And we slowly see the rolling back of privacy. We slowly start to see the encroach. Under the guise of safety. Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, some of it is legitimate. Some of it works. But it's like any bill that gets passed through Congress, you hear about the good stuff, but there's a lot of other stuff that's passed in there that you never hear about. Here's the deal, guys. We're not going to make you wait the entire week to get part two. We're actually going to launch part two on Friday. On 9-11.

Yep. So if you're listening to this during the regular release date, wait a couple days and you'll get the last part of it, and then also still a bonus Patreon episode on there. So, yeah, we will, you'll hear from us in a couple days. Later. Peace.