The Rest Is Classified - 192. 9/11: The War on Terror (Ep 6)

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

What was the nature of the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11? Could the attacks have been prevented? And what is the enduring impact, 25 years on, of that grim day in September 2001? Listen as David and Gordon reach the dramatic conclusion of their exploration of the 9/11 attacks. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠to see David, Gordon and special guest Anthony Scaramucci live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 5 September: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/scaramucci-vs-the-rest-is-classified-team-america/ ------------------- 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. Could 9-11 have been prevented? And if so, who was to blame for the intelligence failure? And what is the enduring impact 25 years on of that awful day on September the 11th, 2001? Well, welcome to the rest is class. I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey. And David, this is the final episode in our six-part series on 9-11. We've gone through the day itself last time. But this time we're going to look at this really important and to some extent still argued over question, which is whether there was an intelligence failure and whether this could have been prevented. And then we're going to look at the legacy, the impact of that day. But first, a message from our sponsors, HP.

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It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. That's NordVPN.com slash rest is classified. The links in the episode description. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't.

end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow, things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. Before we dive into some of the big questions we're going to grapple with in this episode, you were covering security and intelligence matters on 9-11 and spent a lot of time interacting with people in the security service. I mean, what was the feeling inside CIA in the immediate aftermath of the attacks? Well, there's always this question after any terrorist attack, actually, which is, did it come out of nowhere?

Were these people on the radar? Could it have been prevented? I mean, that is always a question. We've talked about it in the context of 7-7, the London attacks and the fact, little bits were known about some of these attackers and therefore could it, should it have been stopped. So that question almost always comes up straight away. I think, though, what was difference about 9-11 was just the scale of it and the scale of the shock and the sense of what was at stake with that question, including politically for the Bush administration, what did they know? So it's always asked,

but the intensity then was enormous. And it's interesting, I was going back and I was looking at, I made a documentary about, I think, five years after 9-11, about the CIA. And I went and talked to people who'd been in the CIA at 9-11. It was fascinating to look back now at some of their comments because there were different views. I mean, I spoke to Kofa Black, who was the head of the counterterrorism center, and his attitude was like, after 9-11, I felt like a junkyard dog which had been unleashed. And so his attitude was like, now at last, we go get them. And that was the kind of gung-ho attitude.

There was Mike Schoer. We've talked about him who'd been head of Alex station, the team after Bin Laden in the 90s. I interviewed him and asked him, what did I feel like? And he could remember this moment. He'd moved on from that job. He'd had a call from a friend who was still working on bin Laden and said, turn on the television. And his attitude was, hell, we could have stopped this and we didn't. And we, the CIA, are going to take the blame when in his view it was the politicians' fault.

and come back to that. And then there was a third CIA officer. I talked to Melissa Marley. And she said, she remembers this sense of shock in the place and an immediate sense of failure. And she says she felt a sense of failure because there had been opportunities to stop bin Laden. And that that was the job of the CIA and hadn't succeeded at it. And she felt that, you know, even when tenant addressed staff in the auditorium the next day, she felt like that question was hanging in the air unacknowledged.

Should we, could we have stopped this? So I think even in that, in three interviews, you've got three very different perspectives about the intelligence failure and the questions about had something gone wrong and if so, who was to blame. Maybe first to the issue of the intelligence failure. It's a big question. What is the nature of the intelligence failure here? So I think there has been a lot of ink spilled on this question in the last 25 years. We have the 9-11 commission.

We have a book by the intelligence scholar Amy Zegart called Spying Blind. Bob Graham, the senator who chaired the congressional inquiry into 9-11, wrote a book called Intelligence Matters, which gets at this question. We also have the recollections of those inside the intelligence community. Michael Schoier's memoir, Richard Clark, who had been counterterrorism director at the White House, George Tennant, the CIA director, Michael Morel. Yeah. You know, so we have a lot of different perspectives.

on the nature of the failure. And I think the perhaps most obvious, but I would argue, most important place to start, and it is a piece of the failure conversation, is that the American intelligence community, in the late 1990s, failed to penetrate the upper echelons of Al Qaeda. We failed to have well-placed sources

or signals intelligence intercepts of al-Qaeda senior leadership in the run-up to the 9-11 attack, and we did not penetrate the plot. We did not penetrate the plot. And that is not a failure of dot-collecting or analysis. It's a collection failure that I think, obviously, I start sort of upstream, because if you had that, 9-11 would have been prevented. Totally.

Clearly, right? If you're inside the operational planning, if you had the kind of intelligence we've talked about when, you know, Russia was going to invade Ukraine, where you know what the plan is and you know when it's going to come, you can, in the case of counterterrorism, you can disrupt it. Well, like, Operation Overt here with MI5, and they were inside the airliner plot. Yeah. And it stopped it. I mean, we talked about how tightly held the planning was. So the truth is, you would have needed someone around Bin Laden, around Khalid, Sheikh Mohammed, an agent

that the CIA had recruited, or MI6 or a partner. or you'd have needed signals intercept of them, or some kind of maybe technical bugging surveillance operation in Afghanistan. Which actually realistically, now that we're talking about, the SIGRT is... It's harder. You probably wouldn't have been able to break up the plot because these guys were not speaking in anything other than code over the phone, and they were using human couriers for the most sensitive transmission.

I mean, Bin Laden had used a satellite phone until around 98, then, you know, kind of news of it leaks and he stops using it. So you're right. You'd have needed that agent at the top. I mean, so there is a kind of question if you go upstream, as you say, which is, well, why didn't they have that or should they have done that? When we did our series on the coast bombing, which was this, you know, Al-Qaeda agent who ends up killing himself and seven other CIA officers at Coast Afghanistan in 2009, you know, we talked in the washup for that episode about how when these failures, happen, it's kind of like a plane crash where there's a lot of different stuff that goes wrong, right? And you can point to a lot of structural and organizational factors that feed into the intelligence failure. So they're not the most proximate cause or the sexiest things to talk about,

but they do play into the nature of the intelligence failure. And when the 9-11 commission produced its report, it organized these failures into four categories. It said there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. And I leave management last because it's kind of the operational side of things, and we'll come to that in a moment. Let's start with imagination. It's a weird one, this isn't it? It is a weird one.

Because that became the big thing, I remember, from the 9-11 Commission, which was a failure of imagination to imagine that al-Qaeda could do this. Yeah. I mean, the idea, you want intelligence as well as imagination, don't you? I don't know. I've always found the line to be a bit galling, to be honest with you, because they bring up a good point, which is that this kind of attack was not entirely unprecedented. I mean, you had the USS coal bombing the year before. You have Hezbollah in Lebanon using suicide truck bombs. So, you know, the commission's not entirely wrong that perhaps there could

have been more clarity that this was a tactic that al-Qaeda could have used against the U.S. But the reason I find the line to be a bit of a throwaway is that it makes it sound like national security bureaucracies or spy services need to somehow develop plans to stop all manner of potential hypothetical plots. To me, it feels less like a failure of imagination and more like a failure to actually crack open a plot by having a well-placed source inside al-Qaeda, or, as we'll come to, finding bits and pieces of the operation along the way, and linking them together and then unraveling it that way. It's less the failure of imagination than a kind of failure of illumination to illuminate the plot.

Yeah, that's right. Now, failure of capabilities. We talked about how star of the American intelligence community was throughout the 1990s. you know, for resources, a lot of the workforce had gone away. I mean, again, it's a deep structural thing that I think does play a rule in 9-11. There's an organizational problem, which will come to in more detail on the way the CIA and the FBI interact with one another, that does, I think, directly feed in to the failure on 9-11, which is that these two agencies were not particularly good at sharing information with each other. And it meant that in a world where transnational terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda who are, you know, moving people essentially from a foreign theater into the U.S., it creates an incredible awkwardness and difficulty for a domestic, essentially law enforcement agency like the FBI and a foreign intelligence service like the CIA to collaborate, they have different cultures, you know, different tribes essentially that do complicate a fight like counterterrorism.

Yeah, and there's issues around information sharing about the wall between law enforcement information and intelligence. So I think that is a, you know, it's a kind of capabilities, a culture, an issue. One of the things that's not there is whether, because I guess the Mike Schoyer point he made to me was that this was a political failure, which I'm not sure the 9-11 commission's categories quite fit into that. But his argument would be. It's policy. It's policy because the White House weren't willing to take the risks to put. in place some of those plans to go after bin Laden before 2001. And in 2001, the Bush administration was not really focusing on counterterrorism in the way that some people thought it should.

So there's a kind of policy political question behind it, which I think that's valid. I think it's valid. The CIA didn't think it had the authorities, the covert action authorities, to go and kill bin Laden until the 17th of September 2001. When it gets a finding that is perhaps the most aggressive possible covert action finding you could receive. And that feeds Kofa Black's. Kofa Black famously goes. I'm a junkyard dog who's off the leash. Yeah.

And he famously goes and tells Gary Shren, who he's sending to Afghanistan, I want you to bring me back Bin Laden's head in a box on dry ice. So suddenly, you know, now you can go kill him. Covert action is policy. So the failure of policy here via a covert action mechanism at the CIA is. is that you had, you did have opportunities. I mean, there's a famous opportunity in the late 1990s where the CIA knows that bin Laden is attending a meeting. They know in advance. And he's attending a meeting with essentially, I believe it's Emirati shakes, shakes, potential financiers.

And the decision is made to not fire a cruise missile. Because you're going to kill the Emeraldi shakes. Because you're going to kill these shakes. Yeah. Now, you could argue until you're blue in the face that maybe in the moment that made sense, but it is completely true that the gloves weren't off. So that was an opportunity. Sawyer's Alex station throughout the late 1990s had come up with various plans.

Some more credible than others. Rolling him up in a rug. To actually go and try to capture Bin Laden and bring him. to the U.S. and try him. But I think it's true that if, if you had had a really aggressive covert action finding in the latter years of the Clinton administration, you probably wouldn't have had 9-11 because one or more of those opportunities would have actually been taken or the existence of a much more muscular finding would have led to resourcing and people and and targeting opportunities that haven't even been created.

Right. And the Bush administration is, I mean, as we talked about previously, was looking at other stuff and was slow to get in on this as it took over. So I think that is one of the issues, yeah. Some of the more contentious, but maybe more interesting missed chances or kind of the nature of what the 9-11 Commission calls the management failures, really operational failures. to potentially unravel the plot. It's worth going into these in some detail. We've talked about a few of them throughout the series. The commission highlights 10 points in the sort of run up to 9-11 where there were these

quote-unquote management failures. Now, what the commission is careful to do is not to assert that had these dots been connected or head organizations shared information fluidly, they're careful not to then make the case that 9-11 would have been prevented. But they do identify these as missed opportunities. And, you know, the first one, I mean, essentially they, we won't go through all 10 here. We've kind of synthesized it, but they essentially all boil down to information sharing between the CIA and the FBI.

Yeah. The first batch of this is in early 2000, about 18 months before 9-11. that critical point where the CIA doesn't watch list Khaled al-Madar, one of the Saudi operatives, or notify the FBI when it learns that he has a valid U.S. visa, right? He's then lost in Bangkok. He's not tracked onward to the U.S. and then in March, the U.S. does not watch list his operative counterpart, Noa al-Hazmi, or notify the FBI when it learns he holds a U.S. visa and has flown to Los Angeles. We have that weird set of interactions inside Alex station where it's possible that the CIA

intentionally didn't share information with the FBI because they wanted to pursue an opportunity to pitch these guys or they just don't share because they want to keep the FBI out of their business or there's some kind of internal snafu and communication. But something definitely goes wrong. goes wrong. So that's kind of missed opportunity one. There's another set of potential missed opportunities in May of 2001 when another CIA officer reviews that same cable traffic, but again, doesn't notify the FBI about Midar's visa or Hosme's U.S. travel. Then we get to the summer of 2001. An FBI analyst who is detailed to the CIA is asked to go back and look at that same cable traffic, that exact same sequence from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to the U.S.

On July 24, 2001, she finds the cable on Midar's visa. And then a week later, which gives you some sense of the urgency here, it's not that, you know, she's kind of doing this in her spare time. A week later, she finds the one on his destination. And then in late August, weeks later, she found the March 2000 cable showing that Hasme had flown to L.A. And at this point, this FBI analyst who's detailed to the CIA says, oh, these two guys either are in the U.S. or had been in the past. So next day, this FBI analyst and another FBI analyst go and meet with a rep from immigration and naturalization service, INS, because they're trying to confirm where are these guys. And the INS rep confirms that Midarid entered the U.S. on January 15, 2000, he had left, and then he reentered on July 4th, 2001. Because remember, he went back home because he had kid and he was feeling homesick.

but he returns on July 4th, 2001. There's no record that Hasme had ever left. So, really important date in this story. On August 22, 2001, just weeks before September 11th, the FBI finally knows that those two al-Qaeda-linked operatives, Khaled al-Madar and Nawafal-Hasmi, are in the U.S. Their names are added to the State Department's tip-off watch list two days later. This is 17 days before 9-11.

But the tip-off watch list in 2001 is a border and visa watch list that is disconnected from airline booking system. So it's international flights effectively. Yeah. International entry, not domestic flight. And it's also disconnected from the FAA's no-fly list, which means that these guys can get on board domestic flights because they have U.S. driver's licenses and their true names. I mean, this is where I think a lot of the attention has, I think rightly focused on whether there was a significant scrub.

And there are FBI people who are furious with the CIA about this. I mean, I remember interviewing a guy called Ali Sufan, who was an FBI agent. He was working on the USS Cole investigation, the bombing of the U.S. naval ship off the coast of Yemen. And he'd been pressing for information from the CIA about some of the people in the suspects in the meeting. And he was getting nothing. And he says the day after 9-11, the CIA turned up and said, here is the information you wanted. And he says he went to the bathroom and he threw up because he was so kind of shocked, disgusted at the fact that he'd not been passed this information. So I think, you know, the detail is important.

And there is a question there about whether it's screw up of processes or whether, as I think some in the FBI would feel and others would feel, it was a cultural problem. within CIA about being unwilling to share things with the FBI. And to me, it feels more like the latter rather than just a kind of bad processes, bit of slowness and a bit of a screw-up. And I think, you know, that is a problem. I mean, we'll come back later to whether that would have made all the difference. Yeah. But I think that there was a problem there.

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

It's way down. Yeah. You know. I think that's the counter argument to the this is the missed opportunity. is that even if they'd known earlier, would it have led to a significant change in behavior and a break? Yeah. Yeah.

Around the same time in the summer of 2001, there's another failure, which is linked to a man named Zacharias Musa, who we introduced briefly. He was the kind of backup pilot that they thought they might need at one point. He goes for this flight training. And, you know, this is the bit where he's doing flight simulator trading, isn't it? And it's seen as a bit suspicious by some people around. Yeah. And Musawi has been pegged as the 20th hijacker. But I, you know, I think I think what he probably was was the backup for Jara, the Lebanese guy who was having, you know, second thoughts,

with the girlfriend and was looking wobbly in the middle of 2001. So Musawe, though, is in touch with Ramsey bin al-Shib, the facilitator, coordinator in Europe. And he, He's receiving $14,000 in wires. In any case, on the 15th of August, 2001, the FBI office in Minneapolis opens up an investigation because the flight instructor at Moussawe's school got really freaked out because he has this guy taking 747 flight lessons who says, like, I actually don't want to become a commercial pilot.

Yeah, why's the instructor's like, okay, this is strange. Musawi is arrested on the 16th of August for overstaying his visa. And the FBI talked to him and they quickly realize that this guy's probably a jihadist. He's been to Pakistan, which is how you, the gateway to the camps in Afghanistan. And the FBI special agent writes, Musawi was an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act. And he's arrested a month before 9-11. Not quite, nearly a month.

Now, here's the thing. The FBI can't open his laptop. There's a legal back and forth over the type of criminal warrant that the FBI has. And the FBI eventually decides it doesn't have the legal grounding to search his laptop. A headquarters agent is complaining is saying to the Minneapolis field office, guys, you've written your FISA request, your foreign intelligence, to get access. To get access.

A particular type of warrant to get access to this laptop is that you wrote this to get people spun up. And the Minneapolis FBI supervisor says, you're damp right. And this is a direct quote. I'm trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center. Wow. So broadly in 2001 in the summer, you know, neither CIA nor FBI connect the president. of Midar, Hasmi, or Musawi to the flood of general reporting about imminent attacks. And it's interesting because there was a report that made it to George Tenant's desk at CIA

in late August that was titled, Islamic extremist learns to fly. And it was about Musawi. There's a cliche that has emerged in the years since 9-11 that it was a failure. It could be a failure of imagination, but also a failure to connect the dots. Yeah. So, David, there is this talk about the failure to connect the dots. it's an interesting phrase I mean there were a lot of dots

that were there you know people learning how to fly you know the Masari stuff people trying to get into the US I guess I don't know what you think but part of me feels like

they still would have needed more dots you could connect those dots plausibly if you are one person looking at them all and go you know we know bin Laden wants to attack the US. We know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wants to use airplanes. Here's a guy learning how to fly, you know,

the Zachariahis Masawi. Here's some people who've come into the US. But it would take quite a lot to connect all of those and go, ah, that's the plot, wouldn't it? I think so. I think we'll probably return after the break to go deep on this question of what really could it have been

prevented. And I think it's a helpful for me, it's a helpful exercise to kind of split the questions up a bit and to say, well, there's a question of, what's the nature of the intelligence failure because there obviously was one. And then there's a question of given reality at the time, could it be prevented? Could it have been prevented? And I think my my view of the of the first question, the failure, is that it has to be seen as a national failure, not just an intelligence failure. It is an intelligence failure, but it's it's more than that.

Because it is a failure at the intelligence level, it is absolutely a failure of collection. And I think you could plausibly make the case that it is an analytical failure to do some of this dot connecting. And to share the information. And to share the information. It's an organizational failure between the CIA and the FBI. But it is also, it is a massive failure of our nation's counterterrorism policy and the covert action authorities that go along with that. I think from 1996 when bin Laden declares war up to September 11, 2001, it is primarily, I think, because the intel feeds into the policy. For me, it is primarily a national failure to deal with an emerging counterterrorism.

I think that's right. So why do governmental failure? And we're not making a party political point because it crosses over from the Clinton administration into the Bush administration, this issue of whether enough drive had been put in to the. the need to confront al-Qaeda. When it attacked the US multiple times, when bin Laden had signaled, he wanted to attack the United States. And if you have the drive to some extent from the top, then you get the intelligence collection, then you get analysts being told you need to be working hard on this to try and

share information. And I think, so it is a, you know, there's an intelligence failure there, but it's broader. Well, and it's not implausible that there could have been policy energy in either the Clinton administration or the Bush administration to deal with this. You have dozens of Americans dead in the 1998 embassy bombings, and you have 17 sailors dead on the USS Cole. So you already have, this isn't some distant threat. This is someone who's murdered Americans by the time we get to 2001.

With that, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll look at this question about whether it could have been prevented and what the legacy was of 9-11, 25 years on. See you after the break. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers, The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Think of some things that glow. Okay, fireflies, glow sticks, the northern lights.

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For more information about, Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerchuk.org slash rest is science. Welcome back to this, really the final part of our series on 9-11, 25 years on. I mean, the question, David, could it have been prevented? Should it have been prevented? What do you think? I mean, impossible to answer, right?

Because when you look back at dots, we all analytically go, well, someone should have connected these dots. But it's hindsight, isn't it? It is hindsight. So there's tremendous hindsight bias at play here. But I do think as much as we can, it is useful to try to put ourselves in the shoes of the actual CIA counterterrorism analysts and death officers and the FBI special agents who were, you know, involved in investigations at the time and in the casework on al-Qaeda. I think, you know, the 9-11 commission looked at this. And they're wishy-washy on. They never really say the plot would have failed.

if any of those quote-unquote failures of management had been addressed, but they do catalog all these missed opportunities along the way. Lawrence Wright in the Living Tower, which is a great history of many of these topics and Al-Qaeda in the run-up to 9-11, Lawrence Wright makes the case that surveillance on Midar and Hasme would have broken it open. And he says, okay, but if, for example, if Ali Sufant's team investigating the USS coal bombing had known before August 2001 that these guys were in the U.S.

They could have fought for authorities to surveil them, wiretapped their apartments. And we do know where they are, of course. They're not hiding. They're not hiding. They're not hiding. You could look at their contacts. You could map their network. And as soon as they're under surveillance, you start to see them moving together for the plot itself.

To me, I do find that plausible. I find that idea that if the FBI had been told earlier about and the right people in the FBI, I think that's also a point. People like Ali-Sufan, people who are kind of really deep in al-Qaeda operational investigation had been told about, you know, Hazma and Midar, that it's possible at least. That I think is the one way in which it could have been stopped. Well, I guess, I mean, it's helpful to pull the threat out further because, Midar and Hosmi end up on Flight 77, which is the plane piloted by Hanjur, Honey Hanjur, into the Pentagon. And I'm much more sympathetic to the view that early surveillance might have disrupted part of the plot. Because in this telling, like, you, in rights telling, and I think in what you're describing,

what you have to believe is that the FBI would patiently surveil these guys. to watch the entire and map the entire network of the 19 operatives in the U.S. and get to Ata, and then eventually you blow the whole thing wide open. I'm a little skeptical of that for a couple reasons. The first one is that we have a bit of a petri dish for what happens when the FBI gets information about Midar and Hasmi. because it happened in August of 2001. And they moved slowly, you're saying. It was seen as a low priority.

It was given to a junior special agent. It wasn't really investigated. And to believe that the FBI would have behaved differently a year and a half earlier, you have to assume it either is going to get to exactly the right person at the FBI who decides to do this, or that somehow just having that information in the FBI's system for 18 months would have along the way generated a different response. maybe, but we actually do have an example of, we know what happened when the FBI got the information. Yes.

Yes. And here's the other thing we do have a kind of a sample of, which is we know how the FBI reacted to a tip off about a guy acting really weird who has jihadist sensibilities and who's taking flight training because they arrested Zacharias Massawi in August of 2001. And I do think this is a difference in the way American law enforcement prosecutes or sort of investigates terrorism cases and perhaps just tribe in general is there maybe this has changed, but would there have been enough patience to sit and wait and watch and map the entire network? What we see with Musawi is that he's arrested for overstaying his visa.

He's not he's not surveilled for months. The FBI doesn't even get the authorities to get into his computer. And he's in prison, kind of just sitting there when 9-11 happens. So to me, the counterfactual on, you know, the FBI finding Midar and Hosmi or understanding that Mee Hasmeier in the States in early 2000 and then running an investigation that unravels the whole thing. What I think is more plausible is that the FBI may have unraveled one of the plight. One part of it. One part of the plot.

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

And what we can definitively say is if, for example, just Midar and Hasmi had been deported or in early 2000, before they've ever been put in touch with Atta, they're arrested. The plot just loses two of its muscle. Yeah, and they bring in some other people. And they bring in other people. Yeah. Or they just, they do it with 17 people instead of 19. So I think it's interesting because, I mean, this gets us really to the aftermath, because

This question does, I think once you get to the period after 9-11, as I said, quite quickly the blame game began, you know, about whether it could have been prevented. I think you get the 9-11 commission. I remember watching, you know, the testimony, and this was kind of blockbuster hearings, you know, when Condi Rice was, you know, testifying, when Richard Clark was testifying and said, you know, we let you down. He said to the American people, you know, he sat there and in his testimony as the head of counterterrorism said, I'm sorry, we let you down. And I think there was a feeling like

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

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

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

sense of pain that they carried because your job, if you're an intelligence agency, is to provide warning and to stop these kind of things. So, you know, whether it was preventable or not, it was still a failure to stop something. Absolutely. And I think that burden rested heavily on quite a few politicians and intelligence community people and explains some of the actions in later years, including, you know, the 9-11 wars, as they're called.

Yeah. Well, this is why, I mean, in the first episode of the series, I said that, you know, I think 9-11 is sort of a hinge moment in American history. There is a pre-9-11 and there's a post-9-11. And when you look at the ledger of these 9-11 wars afterward, you see that in some ways, and I think Steve Cole has a great line on this where he says it's actually easier to explain 9-11 than it is to explain what happened afterward. And I think that is absolutely true.

Because when you go through it, there is just an absolute direct line from 9-11 to the conflicts that have shaped the last quarter century. The intelligence community, the Pentagon, are basically rewired to fight a war on terror. The intelligence community budget probably triples in the first decade after 9-11. It undergoes its largest reorganization since the 40s. We have conventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have troops in Syria, fight in Yemen and Pakistan. We conduct counterterrorism operations in over 78 countries in the years after 9-11. The numbers on the 9-11 wars are staggering.

And there's been an effort at Brown University to actually come up with some of the human and economic cost associated with these conflicts. The direct death toll is somewhere between 905 and 940,000 people killed in direct military action. That's obviously not just that's not everybody who's killed. The indirect death toll, maybe 3 million to 5 million, from disease, starvation, collapse of infrastructure, 38 million people displaced. We have an American basing structure that gets set up afterward. We have bases in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Syria, the UAE, the economic cost of all of this, Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria is $3 trillion.

dollars. The total budgetary cost of the totality of these conflicts is $8 trillion. I mean, you can't explain, I mean, you know, it defines American foreign policy for the years to come. Let's take another look at it, though, from the side of al-Qaeda. I think this is kind of interesting to understand. If we go back to where we started, Bin Laden's idea was you cut off the head of the snake, you attack the U.S., it's a paper tiger, then it will withdraw its support for regimes in the Middle East. like the Saudi regime, and then this wave of radical Islam will sweep over the Middle East and lead to success from Al-Qaeda. Didn't work out that way.

The opposite. Yeah, the opposite happens. Although, I mean, it's, he gets, you're right, it doesn't work. You know, that strategy ultimately fails. 9-11 and then the US reaction to 9-11 by launching some of the wars does create a wave of radicalization. It's true, both, you know, in the Middle East, waves of jihadism and in Western countries, including the UK, which do to some extent fuel the Al-Qaeda ideology and support for Al-Qaeda. Because you go from Al-Qaeda being, frankly, you know, a few thousand people in the camps in

Afghanistan to a period where jihadism is, you know, there's waves of it in Iraq, in Syria, you know, you end up with ISIS, you know, which takes over a large chunk of Syria. You end up with attacks in London, in Paris, in Madrid in the following years. So there is a sense in which the overall strategy fails for bin Laden, but it does fuel a conflict between the West and to some extent jihadist, radicalism or Islam, as he wants to put it, which will be bloody and awful, but ultimately which Al-Qaeda's ideology doesn't win. Right. I would argue you probably don't get 9-11 unless al-Qaeda has sanctuary in Afghanistan to really to bring people in to train them to actually do the operational planning. You kind of need some kind of sanctuary. They have it in Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq and then the subsequent effort to basically dismantle the military and pieces of the state leads to the collapse of the state. in Iraq. And the rise of a Sunni insurgency that has an al-Qaeda franchise inside of it, that then all of a sudden has some kind of safe haven.

And then when Syria collapses, they move into that. The franchise in Iraq that had been seated with people from Syria and elsewhere, those lines, the sort of supply lines that were going through Syria and Iraq come back into Syria. And so you have this sort of, you know, domino effect in many ways. in this kind of complicated intermingling of the way the U.S. has intervened militarily in the region, the rise of these Al-Qaeda franchises, and the fact that you have, you know, a large number of young men who decide to go and fight, be it in Iraq or be it in Afghanistan, or be it in Yemen, or, I mean, there was a mini insurgency in Saudi Arabia itself in 2002 and 2003. None of that happens without 9-11.

None of it happens without 9-11. Although it is interesting to say that al-Qaeda itself will get pummeled. It will lose its sanctuary in Afghanistan. It will go into the tribal areas of Pakistan. We talked about this in other episodes. And of course, you know, the leaders of al-Qaeda, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself is going to get captured. And eventually bin Laden himself will be killed a decade later.

It takes a long, long time, as we talked about in our CIA versus bin Laden series. But ultimately, al-Qaeda is a hugely diminished force now, 25 years on. There's still a bit left out there. But I guess jihadist radicalism hasn't died and it's still, you know, that force is still there, but not in the way that bin Laden wanted. And I mean, by one measure, I mean, you know, I think the ledger we just gave of the human and economic cost of the 9-11 wars is striking. There is another argument to be made, not so much an argument, just a statement of fact, that there hasn't been a massive terror attack on the scale of 9-11 on

American soil since then. Yeah, look, we've come close, you know, Operation Overt, the Liquid Airlines was designed to be on the scale, bigger than 9-11, 10 airliners going transatlantically. So, you know, it's been close, but the counter-terrorist machine has picked up. Yeah, and I think eventually the CIA figured out a kind of, or crafted, I think, a vision for what the defeat of Al-Qaeda as an organization looked like. It took a while. It took probably 10 years after 9-11 to finally get there. But the combination of just relentless CT operations, the drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan eventually, I think, led to, you know, this kind of Al-Qaeda Central, the thing that had plotted and designed 9-11. Being decimated. And it's worth, I mean,

you mentioned bin Laden. You know, he's killed. And, you know, he's killed. And, 2011 in a raid. I mean, it's worth rounding out some of the other characters from the story because KSM, Khalidjah, Mohammed, he's captured in March of 2003. And we should say he is, he is still in Guantanamo Bay. And I've been to Guantanamo a number of times and nearly covered some of these trials, but his trial keeps from getting delayed. So it's not quite been, if you like, justice in terms of him being brought to justice, but he's still there. Ramsey bin al-Shib, that coordinator, one of the members of the Hamburg cell who didn't get a visa to come to the U.S. He's captured in September of 2002 in Karachi. He's in Gitmo.

There's a few of KSM's other facilitators who are involved in the plot, likewise in Gitmo. So, you know, you do have this organization that eventually is defeated. but it's coming in the context of a much broader about-face, really, in U.S. foreign and defense policy that happens in the wake of 9-11. Okay, so that's the U.S. and the world, Al-Qaeda in the world. Let's finish by just talking a little bit about what it does to the U.S. itself, I think. I mean, it changes U.S. politics. It changes U.S. culture. It creates a kind of sense of fear, I think, which pervades.

I mean, it changes something. I mean, as an outsider, but someone who spent a lot of time in the US, it changed the American psyche, I think, in a really profound way. You know, you go through that period in the 90s where the US is the kind of lone superpower. It's one. It can afford to be comfortable. It's never been attacked really on its homeland. You know, the closest Pearl Harbor, which is not, you know, within the continental homeland. And then suddenly, in a way that, you know, other countries had experienced terrorism, although not necessarily on the scale of 9-11, but for the US, I think that,

the nature of it was a shock to the system which had kind of really profound ripple effects politically, socially, culturally in the coming years. Yeah. Look at polling in recent presidential elections and just over half of Americans will say they're very or somewhat worried that they or a member of their family would be victims of terrorism. I mean, that's absolutely not going to be the case in the late 1990s prior to 9-11. I think it really did. It created a national mood of fear. a desire for revenge, I think, a sense that we are at war with a very amorphous enemy that we can't quite pin down or defeat, you know, a sense in some quarters of a kind of civilizational threat.

It's probably hard to imagine Trump proposing, for example, his, you know, ban on immigration from certain Muslim countries without 9-11. Yeah, the link into populism is interesting because you get 9-11, then you get the thing. like the Iraq war, which is partly a reaction very much, I think, wouldn't have happened without 9-11. And then you get the kind of anti-Iraq war feeling and the anti-interventionism, which fuels some elements of populism on the left and right, kind of, you know, kind of changes US politics. It's kind of interesting and complicated how it feeds through. It's almost, I find it quite hard to disentangle actually because it's just everywhere.

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

But the reality of it is that this machine that has been built up is being used. And it's being used outside of the context of the 9-11 wars now because it's an existing, it's a capability that the U.S. intelligence community. has built. I mean, the CIA gets militarized to some extent, isn't it? You know, drone strikes and, you know, kind of detainee and interrogation programs. It becomes a different organization because of 9-11. And that, even as some of the threats change, that lives on. And I think so many of the things, because it is now 25 years on. It is starting to recede. It's, you know, receding from memory for a lot of people. And yet the kind of legacy of it is so persistent

in areas, even where as the terrorist threat fades, the things it created, whether it's populism or whether it's a different CIA, they live on. You think like a political issue, like immigration in the U.S. Immigration is probably not the national security battlefield that it is today without 9-11. We talked in the series. Immigration prior to 9-11 is kind of seen as travel facilitation in a lot of ways. The security measures that are taken at the border, at airports or whatever, they're pretty thin.

And that becomes beefed up. It becomes a political issue. it gets connected to, rightly in some cases, but it gets connected to the issue of terrorism and counterterrorism. And so you see the language and themes of the war on terror get integrated into U.S. politics, even at the kind of domestic level. I mean, I think there is this interesting question about whether the U.S. overreacts to 9-11. And I think some people say that.

I think it slightly misses the emotional impact that 9-11 had on the U.S. And it's only if you can understand that emotional impact, the U.S. understand why it did act the way it did afterwards. But certainly, you know, I think there is a degree to which, you know, you talked about the costs, you know, financially, militarily. There's a kind of overstretch, imperial overstretch, to some extent. There's a desire to reshape the world, I think driven partly by the insecurity of the Bush administration, having missed it and allowed it to happen. Yeah, it does something to America. It's not the same America that it was before 9-11.

No, and I think one of the ways you can see that, just how deep it gets into the American psyche, is if you look at entertainment, you look at sports, you look at fiction, it infects the national mood, spy thrillers after 9-11, start to be more counterterrorism, Middle East focused, right? You have television programs like Homeland or 24, they speak the language of the war on terror, right? I mean, Bruce Springsteen. The Rising releases an entire album. Which great album.

Great album. But about 9-11, you know, and even in something that seems as maybe as distant from national security as architecture, we have all those jersey barriers and ballards to prevent car bombs. The way buildings are designed, the entrances that people use to walk in, how we enter not just government buildings, but any commercial building is totally changed. I mean, I suppose as we finish, I mean, For both of us, it kind of affected our careers, didn't it? I mean, for me, I shifted from really just covering the US to covering national security in 25 years on. I'm still doing that. And for you, I mean, you end up at the CIA being an analyst of jihadist groups and the kind of groups, which grew out of 9-11, the reaction to 9-11. So in a way, we're both, you know,

examples of people whose careers have been shaped by this one event. Yeah. Frankly, the seat that I took at CIA may not have existed, may not have ever been resourced or funded, head 9-11 not happened and the CIA not exploded in its hiring and recruitment in the years afterward. I mean, I do think that it is, for me, the 25 years since, it has been an era of strategic drift in some ways for the U.S. And it feels like potential off-ramps in this conflict weren't taken. Maybe for understandable reasons, to your point on, the national psyche and mood totally changing after 9-11. But as we look back on it, I do think that there are points where it may have been more in America's national interest to have,

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

Yeah, it does. I think maybe among the deepest impacts is the fact that 9-11 itself, certainly, but maybe more so the response to it, I think it convinced a lot of Americans that the government and its institutions couldn't be trusted to lead on the global stage. And I think in some ways it has contributed 9-11, the sort of pre-9-11 post-9-11, has contributed to a sense that we've lost something

as a nation. We're not as good as we used to be. It was better before 9-11, and now because of the attacks and because of the response, it's worse. sense that this kind of amorphous force has like stolen away some of our greatness. So I think for, I mean, for me, 9-11 most profoundly is this kind of, the post-9-11 era is an era of America having a profound sense of post-traumatic stress that we're still dealing with today.

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

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