The Rest Is Classified - 187. 9/11: The Rise of Osama bin Laden (Ep 1)

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

9/11 was the most devastating terrorist attack in history, but where did the plot come from? And when a freelance terrorist walks in with a plan to fly planes into American buildings, why did Osama Bin Laden almost say no? Listen as David and Gordon begin their six-part exploration of how the 9/11 terror attacks came to pass, 25 years on. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified Club at the rest is classified.com. 9-11 was the most devastating terrorist attack in history, but where did the plot come from? And when a freelance terrorist walks in with a plan to fly planes into American buildings, why did Osama bin Laden almost say no. Welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey. And today we begin a six-part series on the deadliest terrorist attack in history. The plot, the men who planned it, the intelligence machine that maybe could have caught them. In this series, David, we're going to kind of really drill deep into the 9-11 plot

looking at how it was thawed up, how it was financed, how it was staffed, how it was rehearsed, and alongside it, we're going to talk about people primarily from the CIA, your former organization and the FBI, who were trying to stop it. I think 9-11 is one of those events that it really defines the end of an era and the start of another. You know, we have pre-9-11 and post-9-11. I mean, that's how apoccal this event is. And, you know, without 9-11, we don't have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We don't have military operations really all over the world, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. We don't have what might be $6 trillion of expenditure on those conflicts. The loss of 7,000 American lives, tens of thousands of allied soldiers and hundreds of thousands of people killed throughout the Muslim world. So this is an absolutely massive turning point. I think it's also true, and we'll explore this later in the series, that we may not have the tilt to populism and the political environment that allows for the rise of Donald Trump without 9-11 and the American response to it. That's right.

I mean, the way in which it seeps into politics but also popular culture are remarkable. I mean, on a personal level, I can remember the day, and it really shaped my career for 25 years since I've been covering national security. And that is really because of 9-11. But it is 25 years, which is amazing to think of. But there are still some questions still remaining about the plot. There's still ongoing litigation about whether, you know, whether there are other people, other states even, helping the hijackers, questions about the intelligence failure. So we're going to also drill down into those, aren't we? Well, that's right. But maybe we begin with

bin Laden himself, but first, a massive thank you to our sponsor, HP. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation. It's the gaps between systems. That's where information leaks. It's the same in business. Leaders face a constant battle against strict timelines, mismatch tools,

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with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. That's NordvPN.com slash rest is classified. The links in the episode description. So Bin Laden himself, I mean, we did a series on Asama Bin Laden last year, and 9-11 certainly doesn't happen without him. But I think one of the interesting things which we'll get into is it's not really just his plots. I mean, it's associated with him. But there are other people who are really coming up with the ideas and driving it. But he's going to play such an important role in making it happen in building the organization, Al-Qaeda, as we'll come to, which is behind it. And it's his ideology is experience and organization, which is crucial, isn't it?

I think it's worth setting bin Laden up a bit. So bin Laden, he's born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia. He is the son, one of many sons. of Muhammad bin Laden, who is a construction magnet, was climbed out of poverty in a region of Yemen, actually, and has become, Muhammad bin Laden becomes the favored builder of the Saudi royal family. Now, he builds, he builds roads, he builds a massive amount of infrastructure across the kingdom. He famously undertakes a renovation of the holy sites at Mecca and Medina. And really in a single generation, that family goes from Yemeni,

obscurity to really the heights of Saudi commercial power. And they're bound very tightly to the Al-Saud ruling family. And it's a big sprawling family, isn't it, the bin Laden's, in which Osama is just one of many. Yeah, he is one of many. He also, and this is important, I think, for his formation. He is on the marginal ends of this family. Unlike many of his half-brothers and half sisters, he will wind up being educated in the kingdom, in Jeddah. And his radicalization, we talked about this pretty extensively in our series on Bin Laden. His radicalization, I think, really begins at a school that he attended called Al-Dagar, which means the haven. It's not a radical school. This is a place that many Saudi elites would send children to be educated. But bin Laden

comes under the influence of a Syrian school teacher who, frankly, is, you know, he's well liked by the students. He really has them participate in a lot of after-school soccer games, Gordon. And he's popular. He's well-liked. He's charismatic. And bin Laden is drawn to him. And this Syrian school teacher really cultivates these after-school prayer meetings and discussions. He's a very hard-line guy advocating a very militant strand of Islam. And, you know, bin Laden is really drawn to this because bin Laden, you know, in the accounts of his early life, he's shy, he's tall, he's unusually devout relative to many of his family members. He's academically unremarkable. He's also apparently a mediocre soccer player. And, you know, he's drawn to relation to

from an early age. So he prays more than it was required. He fast. He gravitates toward these kind of Islamic study circles while he's at school, which are becoming quite common in Saudi Arabia at that time. And then around him, I guess, in 1979, you have some crucial events, don't you, which are going to change particularly the Islamic world. And it's only in hindsight, I think we understand how big these events are and which will, I guess, cause quite a deep shift in the Islamic world. I mean, one of those is in Saudi Arabia itself in 1979, isn't it? In 1979, as we look back on it, really is a hingier across the Middle East. And in Saudi, armed Islamist radicals actually storm the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which is Islam's holiest

site. There's a long and bloody siege of the Grand Mosque. And this is a deeply formative event for bin Laden. In 1979, there's also the Iranian Revolution. Now, bin Laden is a Sunni Muslim, but I think it shows that there is a sort of a deep power in political Islam that is coursing through the region at this time. And there's an example in Iran of a Islamist movement on the other Shia that's taking power. And then at the same time in 1979, you have the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan, which is another big moment, isn't it? Because it's, that will draw together and we'll get into this in more detail, a group of people who want to fight from the Muslim side, fight off the Soviet invaders. So you have all these different things happening at the same time.

And bin Laden, you think about the formative years of his life, right? He's 22 in 1979. And I think these shocks register to him as the idea that Islam is sort of, paradoxically both under assault and also on the march. So there's this kind of deep sense of grievance. There's a sense that his world is being threatened. And as we mentioned, his sort of his schooling at Altagar and the influence of this Syrian schoolteacher, he's sort of deeply drawn to this strain of political and militant Islam.

Now, the idea of fueling bin Laden's convictions comes from an Egyptian writer and intellectual named Syed Khatub. And Khadzub traveled to the United States in the late 40s, and he'd come away from his experience there really repelled by the West. By Western materialism, isn't it? An individualism. He comes to hate that. That's right. He sees a kind of moral emptiness in the West. Kutub goes back to Egypt and he builds out a really radical argument from this. And he says, look, you know, most supposedly Muslim governments, throughout the Middle East are not truly Islamic at all, right? They're they're they're they're apostate regimes they have gone back to this kind of state of pagan ignorance and this is the this is

kind of the subtle but critical and and really quite radical take that kutab has which is that believers true believers have a duty to wage jihad holy war against these apostate regimes and not merely to do that in self-defense because, you know, mainstream Islamic thought at this time. I mean, there's obviously a concept of jihad, but it is primarily a defensive one. And Qutub says, no, the right way to think about this is that you actually have to take the fight to these apostate regimes that are all around us. Kutab ends up being imprisoned in 1966. He's executed by the Egyptian state. Bin Laden, though, probably encounters the work of Syed Kudab. while he's at school in Jeddah. So these ideas about the sort of necessity and the imperative

of jihad are swirling around him at the same time as he's seeing these massive shifts in the Islamic world. So those are the ideas, but the way in which he'll put things into action are really through Afghanistan. And so you have this period. From 1979, Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. There is a desire and a call for Muslims to go and fight off the Soviets and to a fight with the mujahideen, as they're called, against the Soviet invaders. And bin Laden himself will answer that call and will play a really interesting role, not necessarily as a fighter initially, but as a kind of organising. Because after all, he's basically a young rich kid who wants to get involved, doesn't he?

That's his motivation. We've talked about as ideological motivation, but that's his kind of role at that point. It's worth saying that the idea of young, well-off Saudis or just more broadly Arabs going to Pakistan and then Afghanistan to support the Mojahedin in some way is not a particularly radical one. There's a lot of young people who are drawn to this. There's almost jihadi tourism, isn't it? People want to go. They want to show that they've been out. out in the hills and the mountains with the Mujahideen and maybe firing an AK-47 and then come back. It's a kind of thing you get your pictures of it done. But Bin Laden's going to get more involved than that, isn't he?

Yeah. And so he ends up taking on a really critical role in helping to siphon Saudi and more broadly golf money to the Mujahidean cause. I think he sees his time there and he'll get deeper and deeper into the conflict. As, you know, as you said, it's kind of for him, it's, it's, it's, it's. a religious almost right of passage. And because of those ideas that we talked about, Kutub's, you know, ideology, I think bin Laden sees it, again, he's very devout. He sees it as a religious imperative to go and help Muslims who are essentially being targeted, killed, massacred by

the apostate Soviets. Now, the number of Arabs who actually did any meaningful fighting in Afghanistan is pretty small, right? The far larger contribution, which bin Laden is involved in, is the money, the propaganda, the myth of this kind of pan-Islamic army that is resisting the Soviet invaders. And despite the way that bin Laden has tried to retell the history of this time, the military impact that he has and that other Arab fighters has, is pretty limited. And the way that that funding and the way the support gets into Afghanistan is through Pakistan. And for a long time, bin Laden actually didn't set foot inside Afghanistan. He was playing this kind of facilitator and financier role from Pakistan itself. When he finally gets into Afghanistan and actually sees combat, it's at a place called Jaji in eastern Afghanistan.

And this is an absolutely transformative experience for him. So in 1987, he and a few dozen Arab fighters hold off a Soviet assault at Jaji. The military significance, we won't go into the full detail of it here, but the military significance of the battle is very small. Bin Laden's contributions as a commander are, I would say, counterproductive. Right. Right. He's not. He's getting in a way more than anything else.

Right. He's a rich Saudi kid who doesn't have any military experience, but who is sort of in this position where, I mean, quite literally, he and his comrades are engaged in military combat against. the Soviets. It doesn't really go well for the Arab fighters. They take tremendous casualties, but they do hold off the Soviet assault and the mythological impact of that becomes enormous. Because it allows bin Laden to present himself as a fighter, as a kind of war hero. And then out of this, and out of, to some extent, out of the mythology, bin Laden's going to build something and he's going to build an organization. And that will be called Al-Qaeda, which means. the base in Arabic. That will emerge in those late 80s years as a kind of form of

organization for the first time, which bin Laden is creating. Peter Bergen, who's an American journalist and who actually interviewed bin Laden in the late 1990s, has a wonderful book called The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, which I would highly commend. And he really locates the kind of mythic birth of al-Qaeda out of this battle at Jaji. There are different stories about how the name al-Qaeda comes to be. But bin Laden's men had called their camp there, Al-Qaeda, the base. And over time, that name seems to stick to this kind of broader enterprise that bin Laden is trying to stitch together. There's a series of meetings that bin Laden and, and his kind of cohort have throughout the summer of 1988. And in those meetings, he and the

small group decide to take really what had kind of been this disparate network and turn it into an organization. And they call it Al-Qaeda al-Sqaeda, the military base. And the purpose of al-Qaeda is, quote, to lift the word of God and to make his religion victorious. And the notes from that meeting define al-Qaeda as an organized Islamic group. They lay out membership requirements. They describe the selection process for membership. And they say that, you know, here's essentially the way that the best brothers, as they describe it, will get further military training. and it also specifies an oath of allegiance. Importantly, at this point, not to bin Laden, but to the broader organization.

There's often be this idea that the CIA was backing bin Laden in these years. Not true. The CIA was backing other Mujahideen groups, but not so much directly bin Laden. So there's not quite the direct relationship there, but... There's no evidence that CIA money or weapons ever made their way of bin Laden. But collectively, the Mujahideen back. by the CIA, certain groups of it, are going to succeed in inflicting such costs on the Soviet troops that they're going to be forced out of Afghanistan by 1989.

So that is a victory for these groups, for the mujahideen, but also for al-Qaeda, even though, as we said, they didn't play necessarily a big role. But it does leave this really interesting moment where you've had this group form al-Qaeda, you've had all these, you know, radicals come to fight and get involved, and suddenly they've won. And the question is, what are they going to do next? You know, they've got a taste, I think, for jihad, for fighting. And now they're looking for an enemy after the defeat of the Soviets. Well, he's got an organization.

Yeah. So it's kind of what do you do with this group of people who are dedicated to jihad, to fighting, you know, infidel invaders and apostates, wherever they might be? but who do you focus on? And it takes bin Laden some time to work out an answer. And I think the first turning point for him is in 1990. Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, first Gulf War. And bin Laden, who, again, is going to fresh from what he sees as this massive, kind of world-changing victory in Afghanistan, comes up with an idea that, I think, to me,

sounds insane. He says, I want to raise an army of veterans, of Arab veterans. I want to use al-Qaeda and groups like it, to defend Saudi Arabia against a potential invasion from Saddam. Which is mad against Saddam Hussein, who had one of the largest armies in the world and, you know, the idea of these... And it just steamrolled over Kuwait. Yeah. And they're going to defend Saudi Arabia. And, of course, what happens is the Saudi government saying, no, thank you very much, young princeling.

We're not really interested in you. We'll take the Americans help. So American troops then come in to base themselves in Saudi Arabia. Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. And then to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And this anger's Bin Laden, doesn't it? Because it's the combination of him being rejected.

And then Americans having come into what he sees as the Holy Land, you know, of Saudi Arabia and all these American troops coming in. And that is one of the first steps that leads him eventually into this conflict against the U.S., isn't it? Well, we should say, I think prior to the early 1990s, he has a kind of quiet. It would have been very on brand for a Saudi who happens to be fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Bin Laden at this point doesn't really understand America. I don't think he actually ever will. He's been to Britain, actually. He's been to Britain. Spent time here. That's right. He's a big Arsenal fan. He went to the Arsenal, yeah. He's a big Arsenal fan. But it does. I think the rejection by the Saudi Royal family and then now the presence of hundreds of thousands of

what he sees as infidels on the soil of the kingdom, turn that really quiet anti-Americanism into something that becomes closer to an obsession. And he starts to speak of it openly. And for the Saudi regime that's hosting hundreds of thousands of American troops for protection, it's very awkward. So that will lead to him going to Sudan, 1992. And there again, you know, this interesting period where he's in Sudan, I think for four years, where he's trying to keep al-Qaeda going, isn't he? He's trying to keep this sense of an organization going. He wants to do something with it, but it's not quite clear what it's going to be yet. They're running businesses, but they're also still doing training camps. It's a weird mix in those years.

But he's also starting to develop a sense of maybe America is going to be my next enemy that I'm going to take on. And it's really from Sudan that some of the first blows from al-Qaeda land against the U.S. So then in December of 92, we have these hotels in Yemen that are kind of being used as a way station for U.S. troops that are going onward to Somalia. Bombs go off there, probably linked to al-Qaeda. And then in 1993, we talked about this a little bit in the series we did on Black Hawk Down. It's likely that fighters that are sort of al-Qaeda adjacent linked to his network are actually connected to some of the downings of Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu. about Mogadishu, which is really interesting, isn't it? Because we talked about this in the series, how the battle of Mogadishu leads to America effectively withdrawing.

And Osama bin Laden takes the lesson from that, which is if you can inflict some blows on America, they will withdraw. And that becomes one of his ideas, which is America is a kind of paper tiger is the way it's described, where if you can inflict some blows on it in the Middle East, then they will withdraw from the Middle East, and because they're supporting the Middle East apostate regimes, those regimes will then fall to the Islamist worldview and radicalism that he wants to impose. That becomes his thinking through the 90s, doesn't it? Broadly, I think, you know, Paper Tiger is the right way to think about it. He believes that America is casualty, averse, and soft. By 1994, he has become such a problem for the Saudi state.

Because you imagine the Saudi state is deeply connected to the United States of America. And to the bin Laden family. And to the bin Laden family. And he is this, so this guy that wants to raise an army to push Saddam out. At this stage, bin Laden is seen as a kind of financier. Finan organizer of these operations. But even so, that creates real problems for the Saudis. So they strip him of his citizenship, which is not a common.

thing to do. And he goes to Afghanistan. And he goes to Afghanistan. We should say also, I mean, a lot of his investments in Sudan had gone poorly. He is connected, again, in kind of a financier, organizer way to a plot to kill the Egyptian president. So creating all kinds of problems. The Sudanese are squeezed. He goes to Afghanistan. Where he's sheltered by the Taliban, the new rising Islamist movement engaged in a civil war in Afghanistan. They're going to eventually take over almost all of the country. He's back in Afghanistan. He's got a base now in Afghanistan where he can run training camps and where he's going to start to issue increasingly aggressive calls for violence and action against the United States. Namely declaring war against the United States. So in August of 1996, he's in Afghanistan

and he issues what is called the Declaration of War against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places. And it has the kind of melodramatic date line from the peaks of the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan. And in it, there's a bunch of grievances that he throws out there. But the big one is that he demands that all Muslims help forcibly expel Americans and Jews from Islamic lands. You know, this is kind of the first time publicly that he has come out and said that America is my enemy. my enemy. And again, you know, it's worth resting for a moment on his ideas because it is, in some ways, kind of a crazy logic process. And he calls it, you know, we need to cut off the head of the snake. America is the head of the snake. And instead of actually fighting what he sees as the

apostate regimes around the Islamic world, you need to go and you actually need to take the fight to America. And then they all crumble. Now, in February of 98, so a few years later, he goes even further. And he proclaims a kind of a fatwa where he states that it is basically any Muslim's duty to kill Americans, civilian and military alike, anywhere on earth, which is a very expansive declaration. And what's amazing is he starts giving interviews, including to American journalists, you know, saying, I'm declaring war on you. I consider all of you my enemy. We're going to kill you. And still at this time, it doesn't actually raise that much attention. People are just not taking him seriously until August 1998, when al-Qaeda really strikes for the first time

with two enormous truck bombs, almost simultaneously hitting two US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dara Salam in Tanzania. And I mean, these are massive. I mean, more than 200 people are killed. most of them locals, not Americans. So, you know, already the first sign that actually it's not just indiscriminate violence against American civilians and military, but against them, you know, Muslims are going to pay the biggest price for al-Qaeda's violence. And it's clear immediately that it's bin Laden. I mean, he's acting on his intent at that point.

And the response directed against bin Laden from those attacks, I think, will be very characteristic of how the U.S. deals with him in the late 1990s. It's limited. A couple of cruise missiles. Cruise missiles. It is training camps in Afghanistan. Right. And when we say training camps, we were talking about mud hut structures, rustic infrastructure,

the kind of thing that even if it is quote unquote destroyed, you know, can be built back in a matter of weeks. I mean, one of the missiles ends up targeting a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. That's thought to still be a al-Qaeda, you know, a kind of facility, which is totally incorrect. And those missiles miss bin Laden probably just by a few hours. and then nothing else happens. The retaliation ends there. So again, I think it reinforces bin Laden's idea that the Americans are sort of paradoxically the entity supporting every regime that he doesn't like in the Middle East but are also kind of weak at the same time.

And then he keeps going. He strikes again in October 2000. Two suicide bombers guide a small boat packed with explosives. And that goes alongside a U.S. destroyer, the U.S.S. coal, as it refueled, in Yemen, and it blows up a hole in the side of it, 17 American sailors killed an attack on the US military. But again, you know, investigations, you know, the FBI starts investigating CIA looking at it, but no retaliation, really. And so by the turn of the century, what we have is bin Laden hitting the United States, striking at it. The US not really hitting back that

hard and now bin Laden plotting what will be his most dramatic and fateful attack. Let's take a break there. Welcome back. So we've set up this idea of Assad of bin Laden increasingly striking the United States and talking about wanting to strike the United States, which does raise the question of what the US and particularly the CIA, the FBI, the US intelligence community is doing about it. By the mid-1990s, There are a handful of people in the State Department, in the FBI, in the CIA, who are paying attention to him. And by early 1996, the CIA stands up a station that is specifically dedicated to hunting bin Laden. It is the agency's first virtual station, meaning it's not a station, you know, in the capital of a country.

It's not London station. It's not a station in Jordan. It's a virtual station in a really unremarkable and unmarked building in North Carolina. Northern Virginia. And it is named after the son of that station's first chief, Alec. So it is called Alec Station. And we should talk a little bit about that first chief. I mean, a guy called Michael Schoyer. I got to know Mike Schoer a bit after 9-11, actually. Very intense guy, it's fair to say. I mean, an obsessive about bin Laden. And when I met him, he had a kind of beard. He was quite zealous in his own way and fierce about the idea. that he'd been the one to see the threat from bin Laden

and had been trying to warn others about it and he would feel ignored about it. An analyst by background, which I guess maybe that was some of the tension, maybe he was seen. You're a former analyst, David, at the CIA. Maybe the operations guys, you know, didn't take him as seriously because he was an analyst.

Or maybe it was his character partly, but that will become part of the story, won't it? It is some of the tension and the questions around whether others take the threat seriously that he's warning about. Well, Michael Morel, who at the time was a senior analyst at the CIA and who will rise to become the deputy director and the acting director, and we actually have an interview with him because he was President Bush's PDB briefer. Daily briefer on 9-11.

On 9-11. Yeah, so we talked to him about that for the bonus for members. And in his memoir, Michael Morrell calls Schoyer a zealot. Yeah. And the Alex station crew will become known inside the CIA as the Manson family. Yeah. So it is this kind of weird subset of the agency at the time. I do think it is your point about Schoyer being an analyst is really important because if you're setting up a unit at the CIA, a task force, whatever it is, to go and do something operationally, in this case, which is targeting and maybe trying to kidnap or kill bin Laden.

you would put, if you really believed in it and you wanted it done, you would put a case officer. A top case officer. In charge. You would not put an analyst in charge. The fact that he's an analyst is important to the story of kind of how does Bidladen keep getting away in the late 1990s. I think some of the plans that Schoyer will come up with are not treated with seriousness. Because he and the others are treated as that are those crazy guys over there in the corner. It's a bit like that.

constantly going on about bin Laden. And that's part of the feel of it, isn't it? Quite female heavy team as well around him. And also FBI agents, and this is a part of the story which will come to when it's the issue of where they're missed opportunities, FBI agents also embedded with that CIA team. Yeah, which is very common now. I mean, I believe that the head of the counterintelligence mission center at the CIA is an actual FBI special agent. So we have this integration between CIA and FBI now has become much more common. In the mid-1990s, this was a science experiment with two agencies that didn't really work well together. Did not like each other.

And there are deep structural and organizational differences between the CIA and the FBI, our friends of the Feebs, which will definitely be a theme of this story. Now, all of this, you know, this kind of the CIA beginning to notice bin Laden standing up Alex station. This is all happening. I think it's important to say this. It's all happening in the context of a U.S. intelligence community in the 1990s that is not in particularly good shape. There was what was called a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. The budgets are being cut. The budgets are cut. George Tennant, who's the CIA director and will be one of the main characters in the story, will later say that the CIA's budget declined by just about 20 percent in real terms in the 1990s and a quarter of the workforce leaves. And morale is low as well, isn't it? In 1994, you have Rick Ames discovered to be a CIA traitor. People in Congress are saying, maybe we should break this place up, you know, do we need it? So there's real pressure.

And as you said, George Tenet is a really interesting character because he's going to become CIA director trying to kind of restore or even just maintain the capability of the CIA. It's worth setting up Tenet for a moment because he is such a character. So he's this really gregarious, hardworking, very politically. astute cigar-chomping guy who's the son of Greek immigrants and who has risen through this kind of labyrinth of different DC postings to become, including, you know, staffing roles, the White House and in Congress, to become what at the time was known as the DCI, the director of Central Intelligence. People person, very charming, very direct. He walks around headquarters and meets people. He sits down at cafeteria tables. I think he becomes one of the most important directors in the modern history

of the agency. And what he'll say in his memoir is that in the mid and late 1990s, if you were a really ambitious CIA officer who was trying to make your name for yourself, either in the analytical wing or in the operations wing, terrorism wasn't where you went. Yeah. Right? This is kind of a backwater in the mid to late 1990s. And it's happening again at a time where the intelligence community is in some ways on the ropes. Now, in the late 1990s, there are multiple and ultimately unsuccessful operations to go after Bin Laden. Yeah, plans are put up, including by Mike Sawyer, who will later get very angry about some of these plans where they think they've got intelligence where bin Laden is, but maybe he's with some Middle East shakes and so.

people say, no, we can't risk striking that target because we'll kill them. Other times people say, well, the intelligence wasn't as good as maybe it was suggested. But what it means is that in this period, there are attempts to go after bin Laden, but they never really follow through. And what you then get is a desire to maybe get more intelligence on the ground and to do more to penetrate Al-Qaeda to get the understanding of what it's doing and what it's up to. And that's a key priority. But to be honest, it's not hugely successful, is it? Yeah, remember we did an episode over a year ago, I think, with a guy named Ned Bogan, who's a former CIA officer who had a lot of experience in the Counterterrorism Center.

And I remember I was very struck because he said, you know, we didn't really have a sense or an order of battle of Al-Qaeda, the organization until after 9-11. So looking at when you say Al-Qaeda, I mean, even being able to fill out the upper rungs of the org chart at this point in time, is not really possible. There is, you know, there's an al-Qaeda defector who walks in. Yeah, there's a few of those. And starts to provide some intelligence. And the Brits actually have an agent inside al-Qaeda, but no one at the very top. And that is important, isn't it? Because I think, I mean, we'll go back to this issue and it will be a running theme of intelligence failure, question mark, around 9-11. Could it have been stopped? But arguably, this is, the roots of it is not having an understanding, a penetration of the heart of al-Qaeda to know the plans that are. are being developed. Yeah.

And there are maybe as many as four attempts to actually capture bin Laden or to kill him in the late 1990s. Ultimately, they don't work. Of course, been one of them very famously involved the idea of actually using a team of Afghan tribesmen who were CIA assets to literally capture bin Laden and roll him up in a rug before putting him on a jet and sending him back to the U.S. to be arrested. This is the late 1990s. We don't have armed drones yet.

So to target bin Laden, there isn't some constant stare drone capability over Afghanistan in this period. You have to know where he's going to be hours. Where he's going to be in a few hours so that if you launch a cruise missile at him, by the time it arrives, he's still going to be there. And they never quite have that intelligence. So this is the problem. Bin Laden's declared war on the United States. The US, some parts of the US is worried about Bin Laden, but they haven't got the penetration of bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

There's also not a covert action or legal framework that is clear. About killing him. About killing him. Yeah. Which will be really important. And there's been, there's a lot of kind of mud slinging that has happened over the last 25 years over, you know, were the authorities actually clear? Were they not clear?

What was the CIA authorized to do? There's a lot of he said, she said about that. What does seem clear, though, from at least the agency's perspective, is that there weren't clear authorities in the late 1990s that would have allowed them to actually go and kill him. Yeah. And so without that penetration of Al-Qaeda, the problem is they do not spot that something is brewing inside Al-Qaeda, which is going to become 9-11. And so here we go back to 9-11 and to bin Laden and his role in it, because it's very interesting.

interesting, isn't it? Because even though this attack will be associated so closely with this arm, bin Laden, 9-11 wasn't actually his idea. The idea for 9-11 comes from a kind of freelance terrorist. It is the brainchild of a guy named College Sheikh Mohammed, who is hereafter known as KSM. Spoiler alert, it's not going to go well for KSM. And I remember seeing his AK-47. on the wall at CIA headquarters in one of the, I think it was in a special activities division conference room. We actually have his captured AK-47 framed up on the wall. KSM is the principal architect of the attacks. Now, let's set him up briefly because his character is important.

He is a highly educated engineer, but again, a running theme of some of these terrorist masterminds is they have engineering backgrounds. Which is interesting, yeah. He's raised in Kuwait, but the family has roots in Pakistan. After secondary school in Kuwait, he actually enrolls in 1983 at Joan College, which is a small Baptist school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Wow. And he does that to work on his English. He then transfers to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he pursues a mechanical engineering degree.

KSM is already religious before he leaves home. And on campus in North Carolina, he's kind of squarely in this camp of what students there have remembered as the mullahs, which is a block of really conservative, largely bearded, you know, five times a day prayer, conservative guys who inside their own little world, police, religious observance, they pray in makeshift department mosques, they recruit new arrivals, new Muslim arrivals who are. We're obviously total aliens in North Carolina at that time, sometimes even going and meeting them at the airport. And KSM is devout. I mean, one of his classmates at Choen remembers that KSM, for example, reproached him for eating pork. Do you think his time in the U.S.? I mean, he does get a bit of harassment from, you know, others there? I mean, do you think this turns him against America?

What happens to him there? I do. I think it plays a role. I believe he probably already had, you know, as we said, bin Laden did this kind of latent. He's already religious. He's already religious. There's already kind of a latent anti-Americanism. There's a disdain for American foreign policy in the Middle East that would all be, again, very common, very on brand for a Muslim of his generation who's grown up in conservative circles in the Middle East. But, you know, he's treated with pretty outright racial harassment and discrimination. while he is in the States. I mean, there's some harassment that Terry McDermott, a writer who has a terrific book on the 9-11 hijackers and kind of planning team called Perfect Soldiers, talks about how, you know, KSM's old high school teacher would describe stories about garbage cans of water being propped up against doors.

So when KSM and his friends might open them, you know, disgusting water would spill everywhere. They'd get their shoes taken and thrown in a lake. And KSM returns from the states really pretty sad, withdrawn. It was a bad experience and with the belief that most Americans hate Arabs and KSM will link this to Israel. He says, you know, Americans don't like Arabs because America is in league with the Israelis. And then he goes, I mean, in what must be a bizarre kind of culture shift from, you know, Greensboro from, from, you know, North Carolina from the U.S. to Peshawah. in Pakistan and then into Afghanistan. And so he is going to be one of those, you know, jihadists, if we call them that, radicals,

who is going to be attracted by the kind of same thing as Osama bin Laden, the fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets, the idea of this kind of great idealistic holy war. He winds up doing at first really kind of menial administrative work for a cleric who had been one of bin Laden's guides and spiritual mentors. KSM meets bin Laden for the first time probably in 1989. So at the tail end of the Soviet jihad, but they're not particularly close. You know, there's not a deep rapport of friendship. Now, KSM, I think, is temperamentally very different from bin Laden.

KSem is this kind of gregarious, outspoken showman, right? And even physically, they're very different. And bin Laden is famously, you know, he's very tall, he's lean. KSM is very poorly. He's bearded. I mean, if you see the picture from his capture in Pakistan, I mean, the guy is, he looks ruffled. He probably could have been and actually was an operations manager, right? I mean, he had a day job for a while in the 1990s at Qatar's Ministry of Electricity and Water while he was kind of moonlighting going around the Gulf and

shopping ideas for various plots. KSM is really a kind of terrorist entrepreneur. And the 9-11 commission, when they evaluate him and his personality, talk about him having this mixture of imagination, technical aptitude, and importantly for the plot, managerial skill, operational skill. So he thinks up all kinds of crazy ideas, right? Car bombings, assassinations, aircraft bombings, hijackings,

How do you poison water reservoir? So he's, it's clear that KSM, I mean, unlike so many people who did the kind of jihadi tourism in Afghanistan and then just went home. Yeah. The mixture of KSM's own religious beliefs is maybe his time in the States, his time in Afghanistan in the 80s, he has really without being under the influence of bin Laden adopted the same. ideas, the same mentality about the nature of jihad and the connection between these violent acts and the, you know, Islamic world that he wants to help create. And I think this entrepreneur idea is an interesting one as well. And it's also the engineer in him is he kind of understands how things works and the mechanics. And you can see bin Laden

is this kind of ascetic ideologue who's doing the kind of propaganda and the big ideas. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed KSM is the guy who knows how to do things and get things done. At first, he's not actually a member of al-Qaeda. You kind of feel like he's slightly keeping, not his distance from bin Laden, because he can see that bin Laden's a really interesting character, but he's more of a free agent. He's his own kind of independent operator in the jihadist world, working with others, maybe looking for people who've got backing.

And he's also going to develop plots separately from al-Qaeda. I mean, actually in one case, with a member of his own family, with his nephew. Well, it is worth thinking about the early to mid-1990s, al-Qaeda as a brand isn't really well known. And so the idea that he would be swirling around in the same networks, but also feel enough independence to remain removed. He doesn't need to.

But the family connection you mentioned is really important because KSM's nephew is a guy named Ramza Yousef, who had been the mastermind behind the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center with, this truck bomb essentially in one of the parking garages beneath the North Tower back in February of 1993. Now, that attack kills six, injures roughly 1,000. It doesn't, of course, bring down the tower.

But KSM has this connection to this guy who is taking the fight to the Americans. KSM plays a pretty minor role in that plot. He actually issues a single wire transfer to one of his nephew's co-conspirators. But again, he's got ambition, he's got this obsession, and he increasingly is directing his schemes in the same fashion as bin Laden outward against the U.S. and the West. The most notorious of those schemes, which he codenamed Bojinka, was a plan that he came up with in Manila in the mid-1990s to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific in a single coordinated wave. There is this fascination that he'll have with airliners that starts very early. And actually, as a test run, Ramsey Yusef, KSM's nephew, had planted a small bomb aboard a passenger jet, which actually kills a Japanese businessman before the plot is ultimately uncovered.

And interestingly enough, that same cell had toyed with the idea of actually crashing an airliner into CIA headquarters at Langley. So the idea is already starting to bubble up. And I think you can see in Khali Sheikh Mohammed's ideas that the desire for something big and something dramatic. I mean, that's KSM, to some extent, the showman as well as the entrepreneur. And then in the late 90s, we're going to see, you know, Bin Laden is now back in Afghanistan, late 90s. You know, he's come back from Sudan. And at this point, KSM, Khali Sheikh Mohammed and bin Laden will meet, maybe the first time they've met since the late 80s in Afghanistan. And perhaps, you know, the link is KSM.

nephew, Ramsey Yusuf is, you know, someone people are interested in because he's done these dramatic plots and tried to do things. But this is the point KSM starts to build the idea of 9-11, which he will in turn communicate to bin Laden. By 1996, bin Laden's star is rising. You know, he's issued, we don't yet have the embassy bombings of 1998 or the bombing of the USS Cole, but we do have the declaration of war against the Americans that's come out in 1996. So more and more people in this kind of, you know, jihadist world are gravitating toward bin Laden, seeing him as a potential as a leader in the movement. And so KSM is drawn to him. So they meet in mid-1996, as you mentioned, I think not on the basis of their own friendship or even KSM's notoriety, but on the basis of the fact that Ramsey Yusuf is his nephew. And at that meeting, in Afghanistan with bin Laden in 1996, KSM will lay out a menu of terrorist operations.

One of them will become 9-11. Now, to your point on KSM being a showman, the original plot, you could describe it as grandiose. I might call it insane. And we know a lot of this because KSM talked about the details. of this meeting later with American interrogators. The plot, the original idea, was not four airliners. It was 10. Now, in this scheme, nine of them would crash into targets on the east and west coast

of the U.S. And it was a very expanded list of targets, of course. It included the World Trade Center, also included the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, the tallest buildings in California and Washington State, nine planes will go into those buildings. The 10th plane, KSM, will reserve for himself. And his idea was, I'm going to hijack it.

I'm going to order the killing of every adult male passenger on board. I will land it at a U.S. airport and then come out of the plane and deliver a speech, denouncing American support for Israel and for repressive Arab governments. And I think here we see... You could call it showmanship. You could also call it a serious case of main character syndrome. Yeah.

Because he basically has set up a horrendously evil and violent B movie in which he's the star. Yeah. It's also worth reflecting on just how novel at the time the idea is. Because to that point, plain hijackings are much more about making a political statement, taking hostages. the hijackers want something. They're using the possession of the plane and the people on the plane to score a political point or to get something. We'd seen from the 70s onwards hijackings in which they say, fly me to this airport, and we want these prisoners released, you know, who are being held in another country. So it might be a negotiation.

And we want to make a, you know, a big statement. That was some of the Palestinian hijackings. You've also seen some bombs on planes as well. But what you've never seen is the kind of. jihadist suicide bomber on a plane. Combined, in this case, with what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wanted, which was also then his own personal theatrics of being the one,

the only person, notably not to kill himself, slightly selfishly, you know, perhaps. He gets to deliver a speech. So he can deliver a speech. It's an evolution, but fundamentally quite a significant shift from the previous model of what plane hijackings would look like. But beneath the surface, there were instances.

of planes being used as weapons. So there was a case where a disturbed gentleman in 1974 tries to hijack a DC-9 in Baltimore and wanted to fly it into the White House in an attempt to kill Nixon. And then there was a 1994 Air France hijacking when Algerian terrorists seized an airliner. The plot ends up being disrupted, but the French come out of it believing that the plan had been to actually fly it into the Eiffel Tower. So you have some little instances where planes are used as weapons. You also have a Tom Clancy novel, Dead of Honor, which is published in August of 1994,

and the book's climax, I remember reading this actually prior to 9-11 as a kid. The books climax has an embittered Japan Airlines pilot who deliberately crashes a fully fueled Boeing 747 into the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress, kills the president, most of Congress, the cabinet, joint chiefs, the Supreme Court, and it ends up vaulting Jack Ryan into the presidency. The CIA analysts somehow becomes president. You're not suggesting that the Tom Clancy novel was an influence on KSF. I mean, the timing is interesting, though, isn't it? There's no evidence for it. There's no evidence for it. The point is that it's in the air, this idea. It's kind of in

the air. But the big picture at this point is hijackings have a political motivation and the terrorists want something. But you can kind of see this subtext in which a few people are starting to see airliners as potential weapons. And as we said, you know, we've seen before bombs on airliners. That's something we've seen. But of course, the advantage of using the airliner as a weapon is that the fuel on board means you can get a pretty significant explosion. So it turns a plane into a missile effectively, an explosive-packed missile, which you can guide onto a target. Yeah. So a fully fueled 767 holds about 11,400 gallons of fuel.

And what this means is it has the chemical energy of hundreds of tons of TNT. And the crucial bit, though, is that if it impacts a structure, it will sustain a fire because there's so much fuel that could weaken the integrity of that structure. So it's basically, it's not really a missile, it's a massive fuel bomb. So that's the idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's come up with. He presents it to Bin Laden. But here's what's so interesting. Bin Laden's first response is, don't think so.

He does, I guess, what a lot of CEOs might do in meetings where a junior comes up with a crazy idea. And you're like, yeah, great idea, but maybe not now. And this is 1996. Yeah. Bin Laden has, again, we don't have East Africa yet. Yeah. We don't have the coal. He's just gotten to Afghanistan.

So Bin Laden's political situation in 1996 is a little fraught. I mean, he's thinking also about how do I keep the sanctuary? Yeah. It's a bit too dramatic and a bit too big. And I guess as well, Carla Chek Mohammed is an outsider. He's not one of his subordinates in a sense, which might make it easier for bin Laden to have accepted it maybe or if it bin bin bin bin. Lardin's own idea. But you wonder if there's a bit of a sense in which he's a bit unsure about taking an idea from this other guy and this showman and this entrepreneur. So, you know,

they're circling around each other, aren't they? But they're not quite intertwined yet as a as a group. I guess it's kind of like if a consultant pitches an idea from outside an organization. It's kind of easy to just say, yeah, maybe later, you know, interesting idea. And at Toribora, in Afghanistan, which is where this meeting in 1996 happens, bin Laden actually asks KSM to swear Bayat, to swear loyalty to him and to Al-Qaeda and to move his family to Afghanistan. And KSM says, no, I'm not going to. He wants to keep his independence. But I think there is, even though they don't know each other well, there's a mutual respect that both men have for each other. And I think this is crucial. There's a sense, even though they haven't consummated this yet. There's a sense that they could each use each other.

Yeah. And Bin Laden's star is going to arise as he starts to declare war on the US, as we said, as he takes the attack to the Americans with the embassy bombings. And I guess that shows Khali Sheikh Mohammed actually maybe this is the guy I should be working with. And so they're going to move closer together, aren't they? It's interesting how KSM ingratiates himself into bin Laden's circle. Because he, you know, through 1997 and 1998, KSM actually shuttles frequently between Pakistan and Afghanistan visits with bin Laden. He does things, you know, he actually, I mean, this is a great influencing technique, right?

And it shows how savvy he is because KSM realizes, well, if I want to set myself up well with the boss, a way to do that is by making myself invaluable to his lieutenants. So he does things like he fix he actually fixes al-Qaeda computers in the late 1990s. He brings them news clippings and kind of word from the outside world. He helps out on a freelance basis with media projects. So he does things in particular for Osama bin Laden's military commander that are seen as very useful. He's kind of, you know, he's he's a useful guy, right? He's seen as popular with the al-Qaeda rank and file in Afghanistan. He's seen as an intelligent manager and operations guy.

He's very his personality, he's in his very even keel. And KSM, I think, is deeply moved by the embassy bombings in 1998. And he is convinced by that act that bin Laden is a very serious guy. He's really committed to striking America, which again, you know, KSM's nephew had tried to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993 and hadn't succeeded. So there's this kind of family ambition here. And as the 90s go on, bin Laden himself is in a different position. His sanctuary in Afghanistan is much more secure. He's becoming a jihadist celebrity.

The fact that he's targeted by the bin Laden is targeted by the Americans. Raises his status. And missed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so that means that by the time we get to about the spring of 1999, that plot that KSM had come up with now. suddenly looks more appealing to bin Laden. So suddenly the kind of stars between them have aligned and Bin Laden's going to summon

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed to meet him in Kandahar and now say, let's do the airline plot. That idea you had back in 96, now I want to do it. But he has some revisions. Bin Laden has some notes and he says, let's not do 10 planes, right? That's too many. That insane speech you had. Let's nix that. Because I'm the main character, Bin Laden, not you.

I think there is some of that here. Yeah. This is not going to be... It's not all about you, KSA. Yeah. But bin Laden says, let's do it. Let's make it happen. And it's at this meeting in the spring of 1999 that they come up with the menu of targets.

The White House, the capital, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center. But this will be a running theme throughout the planning. There is a disagreement over the prioritization of those targets. Now, by KSM's account, Bin Laden wanted to destroy the White House in the Pentagon. KSM himself, maybe for family reasons, had pushed for the World Trade Center. His nephew had tried to hit it. Right. And all three of them, because this is KSM, Bin Laden, and then bin Laden's military commander who were in this meeting.

All three of them wanted to hit the Capitol. And this disagreement about the prioritization in particular of the White House versus the Capitol, is not resolved in 1999 and in fact it's going to run on throughout the life of the plot. The key point here is that the operation is approved and within al-Qaeda, the plot now has a name and it is going to be called the Plains operation. So there with the plot hatch, let's finish

and next time we'll look at how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed turns this idea of his into a plan and crucially how he goes about recruiting people, recruiting people who are able to live undercover in the West, and who can be trained to fly planes into buildings. So do join us next time for that. But a reminder, of course, if you want to hear it straight away and the rest of this series, you can do so by becoming a member of the Declassified Club at the Restisclifier.com. And you'll also get access to some of the great bonus episodes we've got sitting alongside these series,

including with Mike Morel, who was the CIA briefer of President Bush on the day of 9-11 itself. And, I mean, the story he can tell about that day is absolutely remarkable. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.