S4 Episode 6 - "Ground Zeroes"

We will not rest in our efforts to find who is responsible for this outrage, to pursue them and to punish them. Anyone who attacks one American attacks... every American and we protect and defend our own. I'm not sure anything went wrong with the security plan. What went wrong is that we lost a lot of wonderful people and we had a lot of people injured. In June of 1996, a bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 American soldiers stationed in the kingdom. The attack took place at an outpost in Tehran.

on the east coast one of the u.s military installations soon to be condemned in bin laden's fatwas Secretary of Defense William Perry arrived in Dahrang days after a bombing left its threatening mark. The FBI's chief of counterterrorism, John O'Neill, flew to the kingdom to investigate the murders. What O'Neill found was the first of many instances where the full story of Osama bin Laden's activities and connections was off limits.

Harry brought a three-pronged message pointed straight to the perpetrators. Increased security, anti-terrorism readiness and a firm commitment to Saudi-US relations. O'Neill went to Saudi Arabia himself to convince King Fahd to get the Saudi authorities to cooperate. But that was a lost cause, because Saudi officials interrogated the principal suspects themselves.

while the FBI was relegated to collecting material evidence from the bomb site. For O'Neill, who became obsessed with capturing bin Laden and increasingly frustrated by his own country's behavior on the subject, all of the answers... All of the clues allowing us to dismantle bin Laden's organization, O'Neill said, can be found in Saudi Arabia. But these clues would be ignored. Why?

asked his French interviewers. What was the reason? Only one, said O'Neill. Corporate oil interests. America needed a, quote, secure and stable Saudi Arabia. And so there was to be zero pressure on our business partner. Nonetheless, O'Neill kept a tab on bin Laden after a series of bombings in Africa in 1998, an attack on a U.S. destroyer in 2000,

all the way up to September 2001, when O'Neill left the FBI for a new position, Director of Security at the World Trade Center in New York. On the 11th of that month, When a plane hit the North Tower, John O'Neill made it out, only to run back inside to help others escape the collapse. That is how John O'Neill died.

O'Neill was disillusioned with his bureau when he died. His last thoughts on the hunt for bin Laden were that, since George W. Bush's election, quote, the FBI was even more politically engaged on the issue. The kingdom, O'Neill said, has much more pressure on us than we have on them.

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 4, Episode 6. Ground Zeroes. Last episode, we wandered to the four-year stretch between 1992 and 1996, often called the Afghan Civil War, and Kabul, previously isolated from the violence.

The Pakistani government helped organize a group of madrasa students from Afghanistan's border regions with Pakistan. These pious and violent Taliban led by the charismatic and one-eyed cleric Mullah Omar, restored order across the country, beginning with Kandahar in the South in 1995. The Taliban takeover of Kabul and then the whole country in autumn of 1996 shocked the world. Their unprecedented implementation of strict Sharia was brutal and systematic.

Yet increasingly, the Taliban found themselves able to activate new revenue streams. Drug running and potential oil and gas deals gave their regime a sense of stability. That Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also supported them did not hurt either. On top of their agenda was a pipeline, the subject of a bidding war between the Argentinian energy giant Brightus.

and its American competitor, Unical. Now, in the late 90s, with the millennium fast approaching, what lay in store for the Taliban? And what about Afghanistan's latest high-profile resident?

Osama bin Laden. He had arrived in 1996 amidst a tussle with the Americans after they got him kicked out of Sudan. What were the Americans to do about possible threats? Like Osama. One night in early 1998. writes ABC News anchor John Miller, quote, A friend summoned me to a bar on Manhattan's Upper East Side to introduce me to a new name, Osama bin Laden. My friend told me the FBI had just learned an awful lot about bin Laden.

They believed he was behind the attacks on the U.S. military in Somalia. They believed he had financed and supported World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef's plot to blow airliners out of the sky. He said there was a bin Laden plot to kill President Clinton and even the Pope. When Mullah Omar disclosed in early 1997 that Osama bin Laden was in fact staying in Afghanistan as a guest of the Taliban, bin Laden had already been operational there for a whole year.

To keep himself connected to associates across the world, bin Laden had teamed up with a Yemeni, Ahmed al-Hada, a comrade from the anti-Soviet days. Hadda offered to make his own home in Yemen one of bin Laden's bases of operation. Bin Laden took Hadda up on his offer, writes the journalist James Bamford.

And his house in Yemen quickly became the epicenter of bin Laden's war against America. A logistics base to coordinate his attacks, switchboard to pass on orders, and a safe house where his field commanders could meet. to discuss and carry out operations. Between 1996 and 1998, bin Laden and his top aides made a total of 221 calls to the Yemeni Operations Center's phone number.

Al-Hadda's son-in-law, a man named Khalid al-Midhar, was also interested in bin Laden's jihad. But we'll hear more about him later. ABC's John Miller, meanwhile. linked up with bin Laden's media manager, based in the United Kingdom. From London to Islamabad, and from Islamabad to Peshawar, Miller and his reporting team made their way to bin Laden's remote Afghan base. Flanked by his military chief,

Mohammed Attaf, and his chief strategist, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden made a theatrical entrance. As he entered the journalist's presence, his soldiers fired hundreds of AK-47 rounds into the air. Despite the chaos of the scene, his eyes were calm, fixed, and steady. Bin Laden wore a military jacket with no labels, in addition to more traditional garb. The journalist Miller, nervous.

cracked a joke to the translator, quote, tell Mr. Bin Laden that for a guy who comes from a family known for building roads, he could sure use a better driveway up this mountain. The translator was aghast and declined. to translate the joke. With a prestigious TV network at his disposal, bin Laden seized the opportunity. He told the ABC journalists that, quote,

Our battle with the Americans is larger than our battle with the Russians. We predict a Black Day for America and the end of the United States as United States, and that they will retreat from our land and collect the bodies of their sons back to America, Allah willing. Bin Laden dismissed fears of being captured or killed by the Americans, instead condemning American treatment of Palestinians and the people of Iraq. The American-led sanctions, he said,

resulted in the death of more than one million Iraqi children. All of this is done in the name of American interests."

As the war between Orthodox Bosnian Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks intensified, the conflict attracted foreign fighters, Mujahideen, to come and defend their Islamic brethren. They included forces financed by Saudi Arabia, who brought with them their more radical Islam. Through the mid-90s, Islamic warriors who had cut their teeth fighting the Soviet Union or President Najibullah in Afghanistan, they were making their way to new battlegrounds.

It is no surprise that a great many of them swiftly emerged as the vanguard of Muslim volunteers in Bosnia, writes Peter Dale Scott. Bosnia had declared its independence from Yugoslavia in April 1992, the month of Kabul's downfall. For centuries, Muslims, Serbs and Croats had lived here together. Now they had to choose a future. Half the Yugoslav republics had gone for independence, and it was time for the Bosnians to decide. These blooded veterans of the Afghan war

were now furnishing professional aid in Europe to the inexperienced Bosnian army. And with the jihad in Afghanistan now in the rearview mirror, Bosnia became the cause celeb of the radical Islamist world. Al-Kifa Center in Brooklyn, as well as other American affiliates, recruited in America for the Bosnian Jihad. One convicted terrorist claimed that in December 1992,

the Saudi embassy had given him $150,000 to set up a Bosnian operation. According to another, further support from Bosnian jihadists may have come from the US military itself. The Bosnian's enemy, after all, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, was no friend of America. After the war, Saudi aid organizations stepped in to shore up a state led dry by the conflict.

their cash helping rebuild the country, villages, schools, and above all, mosques. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 2005 London Underground bombing, and other attacks were organized by men. who had gone to fight in Bosnia. The Balkans was by no means the only jihadi hotspot in the world. The Philippines, for example, where familiar faces from the Afghan jihad...

turned up in the form of the Abu Sayaf group. A Filipino television crew made a potentially deadly decision to secretly keep a camera rolling to record a kidnapping in progress. There were many times that I thought this is really bad. Marched through the jungles of the southern Philippines by Abu Sayef, the crew had been tricked into thinking they were about to get an interview with the head of the bloodthirsty group.

Instead, they became the group's prey. Not to be confused with the Afghan, Abdul Rasul Sayaf. The group's founder was the Filipino, Abdurayak Abdubakar Yanyalani. who had fought in the anti-Soviet jihad and there reportedly made friends with fellow jihadi Osama bin Laden. After the Afghan coalition split up, the Sayyaf fighters settled in the southern Philippine islands.

where Muslim separatists, the Moros, had long waged war against the central government based in Manila. The Filipino Muslim leader of the Abu Sayyaf group, writes John Cooley, recruited veterans of the Afghan jihad to the Philippines. And these fighters, in turn, organized, quote, Filipino-Islamic radicals in southern areas, many of them dropouts from high schools and universities in the southern Philippines.

This small group of several hundred guerrillas, at first affiliated with the Moro rebels, but eventually split from them and began hoisting the flag of Abu Sayyaf. The Philippines were a great place for the Abu Sayyaf group to do business, writes John Cooley. In 2000, at what was probably a career peak, Abu Sayyaf received at least $25 million in ransom money. A jihadist Lufthansa score, if ever there was one. A year before cess.

There was a company that refused to pay ransom, and all seven of the hostages were beheaded. The website for the U.S. Director of National Intelligence now describes the Syoff Group. as, quote, the most violent of the Islamic separatist groups operating in the southern Philippines. Under popular pressure, the military decided to arm the population so that they could defend themselves against the Islamists.

They were called patriots, and there were as many as a quarter of a million at the height of the crisis. Just as destructive as Bosnia or the Philippines was the dirty war in Algeria, where long-standing one-party politics crumbled into a civil war between a military regime and an Islamist opposition, which would last over a decade. The Islamists formed a large bloc.

The Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, headed by two charismatic leaders, Abbasi Madni and Ali Belhaj. Crowds flocked to hear his religious discourse tinged with political aims. For him... As they had elsewhere, veterans of the jihad in Afghanistan flocked to Algeria to join the Islamist Front, which directed so much violence against the population It lost any support it once had. As many as 200,000 people died over the course of Algeria's dirty war. His message was simple and easily accessible.

that the Islamic State should replace the Constitution. And his thousands of fans adored him. In Azerbaijan, ex-Iran Contra player Richard Seekert was organizing ex-Afghan Mujahideen. Afghan drug money helped Islamist fighters in Azerbaijan unseat an elected president. This was also the case in Kosovo, the breakaway republic from Serbia. that became the battleground of a NATO war in the late 1990s.

for the rebels to advance. Military groups like the Kosovo Liberation Army, largely composed of ethnic Albanian Muslims, also had ties to terror networks tracing their origins back to the Afghan jihad. Mainstream accounts of the Kosovo War are silent about the role of al-Qaeda in training and financing the KLA, writes Peter Dale Scott.

The first Interpol arrest warrant against Osama bin Laden was not issued by the United States. but by the government of Libya in April 1998. The warrant from that time, write Broussard and Dasguier, proves that two years after the attack against American military installations, the US was still not openly pursuing Osama Bin Laden. Why was Colonel Gaddafi's government the only one officially sounding the alarm on Bin Laden? Well, as we've seen elsewhere,

Libyans who had fought with the Mujahideen, flush with weapons and cash, pledged allegiance to Osama, and by the thousands declared war against their own country's government. In a pattern familiar to us by now, The British Secret Service worked in cooperation with Osama bin Laden's Libyan allies. Former British Secret Service agent David Shailer revealed that MI5

had organized an operation to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in November 1996 with the support of the Afghan-trained Libyans. The failed operation was meant to attack Gaddafi's motorcade during an official trip. This is why the first Interpol warrant targeting bin Laden, with Libya's name on it, was kept secret. it would have led to a very uncomfortable example of the West once again allied with bin Laden's associates against yet another common enemy.

It is a government which has the backing of the people. It controls nearly all of Afghanistan. There are reports that others are also in touch with the Taliban and they have the support of all of the people of Afghanistan. Although the Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan in 1996, there was one final frontier left for them to conquer. The northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, the country's fourth largest.

and located just south of the borders of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In August 1998, after a gruesome, stalemated battle that had carried over from the year before, the Taliban finally broke into Mazar's city center. And with the Taliban at their doorstep, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan moved to seal their borders off. What followed in Mazar-i-Sharif?

was one of the worst episodes of slaughter in the country's history. The Taliban closed off the city and commenced a massacre, primarily directed at the Hazara ethnic minority. Blood stained the walls of shops and residential compounds. For at least three days, bodies lay where they fell, on the orders of the Taliban commander who took charge of the city, witnesses said.

It was not until the bodies began to rot and stink in the dry summer heat, threatening disease, that the commander allowed burial of the dead. By then, stray dogs were feeding on them. The Hazaras, noted Human Rights Watch, were particularly targeted in part because of their religious identity. During the house-to-house searches, scores and perhaps hundreds of Hazara men and boys were summarily executed.

apparently to ensure that they would be unable to mount any resistance to the Taliban. Also killed were eight Iranian officials at the Iranian consulate in the city and an Iranian journalist. Although the Taliban has denied responsibility for the killings of the diplomats and the journalists in August 98, the issue still remains live for the Iranian government. As recently as August 2022,

Iran asked for the Taliban to investigate the Mazar-i Sharif murders. In America, however, the massacre got comparatively little attention.

The day before the Taliban rolled into Mazar-i-Sharif, a pair of bombs went off in Africa. in the city of Nairobi, had for years been a potential target. Last episode, we mentioned the Al-Qaeda trainer Ali Muhammad, the one-time Green Beret who worked as an FBI informant and CIA asset. Ali, in particular, had studied the Nairobi facility, writes Peter Dale Scott. In 1993, Mohammed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver Airport.

when he inquired after an incoming al-Qaeda terrorist who turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports. Scott writes, Mohammed immediately contacted the Mounties to make a phone call to the United States. And the call to Mohammed's FBI handler, secured his release. The encounter took place before Muhammad flew to Nairobi, photographed the U.S. Embassy in December 1993, and delivered the photos to bin Laden.

According to Ali Muhammad's negotiated confession years later, Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber. End quote. The American government has maintained that Ali Muhammad was working as a double agent and deceived his handlers about what he had really been up to. Because five years after he had checked out the American embassy in Nairobi as a suitable bombing target, That attack was carried out.

back one glance and I saw a very big luminous white cloud floating upwards and then I just had a loud bang and I felt myself lifted up. floating. Then I went, I think I was dropped somewhere. I don't know where it was. On the morning of August 7th, 1998, two bombs went off in East Africa. It was the eighth anniversary of the arrival of U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. One explosive went off at the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It killed 11 people.

all of them Africans. The toll in Nairobi was far higher. Journalist Lawrence Wright reported, The face of the embassy had sheared off in great concrete slabs. Dead people still sat at their desks. The tar-covered street was on fire, and a crowded bus was in flames. Next door, the Ufundi building, containing a Kenyan secretarial college, had completely collapsed. The toll was 213 dead. 4,500 were injured, more than 150 of them blinded by the flying glass. The ruins burned for days. End quote.

Each and every participant in the embassy bombings had a connection to Afghanistan, whether by recruitment or training. They had varying allegiances to the bin Laden group. some of whom had never met or known the man himself. Though the majority of the victims were not American citizens, both the bin Laden group and the United States considered the attack the most successful of its kind against America since the bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon a decade and a half earlier.

The reaction inside of Washington was severe. After all, the CIA had a dedicated bin Laden unit, the Alex Station, and Clinton's CIA director, George Tenet. had been sworn in on promises of preventing exactly this kind of surprise. One of the bin Laden unit's female analysts confronted Tenet, writes Steve Cole.

You are responsible for those deaths because you didn't act on the information we had when we could have gotten him. George Tenet was aware that the agency knew where bin Laden was. He also knew there was a plan to raid bin Laden's compound. Why had Tenet never recommended the idea to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and President Clinton, asks Steve Cole. That question, however, didn't seem to trouble President Clinton.

A week after the attacks, Clinton was told that American intelligence believed bin Laden and his organization were behind the bombings. Three days after that meeting, President Clinton briefed the country, live on television, about his affair. with an intern, which he had lied about. Another way of looking at the situation. President Clinton needed a way to look awfully presidential. Uninterested in the particulars of Afghanistan.

or how the Bin Laden group came to blow up so many people, and with nowhere near enough clout to actually invade some place with American troops, the Clinton team elected to respond to the bombings with cruise missile attacks, scheduled The intel on the Afghan targets was weak. Islamic militant leaders, with whom bin Laden was supposed to meet, were warned of the attack ahead of time.

U.S. intelligence later said that Pakistan's ISI chief had given the Taliban a heads-up. The missiles killed 21 and wounded dozens, none of whom were Osama bin Laden. The second cruise missile attack in Sudan, which we mentioned back in Season 1, dealt much more damage. These missiles struck the Al-Shifa Industrial Facility, a chemical plant in the capital, Khartoum.

Al-Shifa was portrayed in CIA intel as a potential chemical or nuclear production site. The reality was different. Al-Shifa was a medicine factory. These are the remains of the El Shifa factory in Khartoum, targeted by cruise missiles and where, according to the White House, deadly chemicals were made for use with nerve gas.

But it's also where engineer Tom Carnaffin worked for four and a half years. It was just unsuitable because there was no airlocks or anything like that that would actually have given the safety required for doing that sort of work. So it wasn't a suitable place for making chemical weapons in. At the moment when the U.S. wanted its hands on bin Laden now, it couldn't touch him. In fact, it was known within the CIA that among Pakistanis...

and even some of the Saudis with whom the Americans were dealing. As Steve Cole puts it, some of them regarded the Taliban and bin Laden as comrades and heroes, now more than ever.

In late 1998, Clinton signed off on a memorandum authorizing either the capture or assassination of Osama bin Laden. The CIA's ALEC station assisted by increasingly high-quality surveillance tools, now had eyes on bin Laden pretty much all the time. Act One had now ended, as Broussard and Dasquier put it. The American administration stopped all direct relations with Kabul for only six months.

For the time being, the Unicow oil project had collapsed. In the United States, the Feminist Majority Foundation, backed by public figures such as First Lady Hillary Clinton, intensified its campaign against Unicow. accusing the company of supporting a dictatorship whose social policy included subjugation of women. The company gradually pulled its teams out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and closed its offices there, the French journalists continue.

In Washington, the State Department's Bureau of South Asian Affairs expressed regret at the unfortunate turn of events. But no one lost sight of the enormous opportunities waiting in Afghanistan. The idea... of favoring a more moderate Taliban regime gained ground. In February of 1999, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot and several colleagues flew to Pakistan to personally meet with the Taliban.

He showed them proof of Osama bin Laden's culpability in the attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, write Broussard and Dasquier, gave them a letter that officially requested bin Laden's extradition, and hinted that they would be quote-unquote economic rewards if the Taliban cooperated. Clinton attempted to bring the Taliban to the table over bin Laden.

by freezing the Taliban's American assets. And after this stick came the carrot, a meeting with the current Pakistani prime minister, the husband of Benazir Bhutto, who promised that the ISI director himself would head to Kandahar and pressure the Taliban into handing over bin Laden, according to Broussard Ndaskier. Talks with Mullah Omar began to bear fruit on certain side issues, such as closing down some of the training camps.

But along came a spider. In a replay of the military coup by General Zia decades earlier, the Pakistani army's chief of staff pushed out the civilian leadership and assumed power. scuttling these talks. The leader of this coup will become a very important name, Pervez Musharraf. Dear brothers and sisters, your armed forces... have never and shall never let you down. Inshallah. We shall preserve the integrity and sovereignty of our country to the last drop of our blood.

When Musharraf took power, report the Frenchman, he canceled a top-secret mission that was being planned with the U.S. to send commandos using ISI intelligence into Afghanistan to capture bin Laden. Toward the end of 1999, yet another operation was in play. The CIA's head of Alec Station took a trip to Afghanistan to see an old friend, Ahmed Shah Massoud.

In the Panjshir Valley, Massoud's people and the CIA hashed out terms for a new joint project. The agency wanted Bin Laden, and Massoud still wanted to run Afghanistan. Maybe they could resurrect.

It was around this time, in December 1999, writes James Bamford, that the NSA picked up on a certain phone call. to a certain man named Khalid al-Midar. And Midar, as we mentioned earlier, was the son-in-law of Ahmed al-Hada, the man running ops in Yemen via sat phone for Osama bin Laden. According to the NSA Intercept, the topic of Midar's call was an upcoming meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The CIA had customs officials in Dubai make a photocopy of Midar's passport before letting him continue on to Malaysia. Bamford continues. What was striking was that Midar's Saudi passport contained a valid multi-entry visa for the United States. And his visa application, faxed from the American embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, showed Midar's destination was New York.

Doug Miller, one of the three FBI employees at Alec Station, took one look at the faxes and became instantly alarmed. A possible terrorist, whose travel was arranged by bin Laden's ops center. was on his way to a secret meeting and would soon be heading for America's largest city. At 9.30 a.m., Miller started picking out a message to alert his superiors at FBI headquarters.

who could then put Midar on a watch list to bar him from entry to the US. But inexplicably, the message, known as a Central Intelligence Report, or CIR, was spiked. by Miller's CIA boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of Alex Station. At about 4 p.m., one of the CIA analysts assigned to Alex Station typed a note onto Miller's report.

Please hold off on CIR for now, per Tom Wilshire. Without Wilshire's approval, Miller could not pass on the information, even verbally. He had done everything by the book. A potential terrorist and member of bin Laden's group was headed for the U.S., and he was putting the FBI on notice so it could take action. There was no reason, Bamford writes, to kill the message.

On January 14th, nine days after Al-Midar had been flagged in Dubai, the Alec station chief reported to others that the search for Midar was continuing. In fact, it had been over for days. notes Bamford. The next day, FBI agent Doug Miller sent an email to the deputy station chief asking what had happened to his report warning of Midar's travel to the U.S. He never received a response.

In fact, ProPublica reports, the CIA did not alert the FBI for more than a year after it learned the terrorists had entered the United States using their real names and Saudi passports.

It was that day, January 15, 2000, that Midar and Hazmi's plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport. Two weeks later, the pair were having lunch at a halal spot on Venice Boulevard in L.A. Their dining partner, reports Matthias Schwartz, was named Omar al-Bayoumi, a man with connections... at the local Saudi consulate and a salary funded by the Saudi defense ministry. Schwartz goes on. Al-Bayoumi, who later said he met the two young men by chance,

decided to take them under his wing. He helped them find an apartment in San Diego, co-signed their lease and lent them $1,500 for rent. He introduced them to a Yemeni friend he knew from a local mosque. who assisted them with errands, translation, and applications to take flying lessons. By May, the two newcomers were asking a prospective flight instructor whether they could skip single-engine Cessna planes and learn to fly.

commercial jets. A follow-up FBI investigation dubbed Operation Encore in 2007 found that Albayumi was just one part of a network that was, quote, created, funded, directed, and supported by the Saudi government and diplomatic personnel in the United States. We could see from a block away that Bayoumi was an intelligence guy. said the lead FBI agent on the Encore team. It's evident now that he was tasked with helping the hijackers, that he was running a clandestine operation.

Some former FBI investigators, ProPublica reports, have speculated that al-Bayoumi might have been asked to approach the hijackers as part of an American or Saudi intelligence operation. to recruit them. At the time, reports ProPublica, the CIA was trying desperately to develop sources inside al-Qaeda. Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clark later said that this was, quote, a possible failed CIA-Saudi spy mission on U.S. soil that went bad and eventually...

allowed the September 11th attacks to proceed unimpeded. Quote, What if al-Bayoumi was a Saudi spy who is investigating al-Qaeda at the request of the CIA?

One more interesting name comes up from this moment. While managing the two hijackers, ProPublica reports, the Saudi agent Bayoumi made a phone call to a Yemeni-American imam in San Diego. a man named Anwar al-Awlaki, who would later emerge as a leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Newer FBI documents, report ProPublica, suggest that Awlaki

might have played a more significant role in working with Bayoumi to help the hijackers. Years later, Aulaki was killed in Yemen by a drone strike, ordered by President Barack Obama. The CIA was not the only American agency interested in Midar and Hazmi. By March 2000, writes James Bamford, the NSA had been eavesdropping on their calls for months.

without passing on their location. They were living in the home of an FBI informant without the FBI knowing they were there. Midar and Hazmi were in touch with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. the bin Laden lieutenant running this new operation, which appears to have gotten off the ground sometime the year before. But Midar, whose wife was about to give birth, flew back to Yemen to be with her in June 2000.

abandoning Hazmi like a jilted lover, in the words of Bamford. And while he was home in Yemen, Midar was able to participate in another one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's plots. This one aimed directly at the American military, weeks before a hotly contested U.S. election, no less.

We inherited him and if the fact is that such people were instigated by the CIA and by the government of America in that time to go and fight the Soviets and Such people were called the heroes of independence And all of a sudden, they have changed now to terrorists. While Midar and his colleagues lunched and conspired, the U.S. once more started up official channels to the Taliban. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs

Carl Inderforth, met with the Taliban. Only a few days before, the UN Secretary General had organized a new diplomatic push to squeeze the Taliban on bin Laden and allow everyone to resume the pipeline project. In March, at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Taliban, quote, voiced support for a negotiated settlement, report Broussard and Dasquier. Things went even further the summer of 2000.

When Washington hosted the next round of talks, quote, the participants aimed to support a reform government in Kabul, bringing together Taliban and Northern Alliance leaders. They made such good progress in these talks. that the head UN diplomat decided to invite the two Afghan enemies to participate directly in these discussions. The good vibes between the Taliban and the US multiplied. At the exact same time,

the State Department hosted the Afghan, that is, Taliban, foreign minister during a conference of the Middle East Institute in Washington. Quote, The Afghan minister stated that religious leaders in his country had created a special investigative commission to look into bin Laden's involvement in the various attacks, and said that his eventual extradition was possible.

October 12, 2000. Suicide bombers riding a skiff. had punched a 40 by 60 foot hole in the side of the USS Cole, a state-of-the-art battleship that had been refueling in the port of Aden in Yemen. First, as you know, an explosion claimed the lives of at least four sailors on one of our naval vessels, the USS Cole, this morning. They were simply doing their duty. Midar, who had earlier in the year been living in San Diego.

and who was supposedly the target of a CIA manhunt, was later reported by authorities to have helped mastermind the operation, in which 17 American sailors were killed. We are rushing medical assistance to the scene. And our prayers are with the families who have lost their loved ones or are still awaiting news. Quote, the shockwave of the enormous explosion in the harbor knocked over cars on shore. Two miles away, people thought there was an earthquake.

In a taxi in the city, the concussion shook Fahd Alcuso, a member of the coal bomber's support team who was running late, writes journalist Lawrence Wright. Quote, he was supposed to have videotaped the attack. But he slept through the page on his phone that would have notified him to set up the camera. No matter. At least Midar would get a mulligan. An opportunity for another, even more widely publicized hit on America.

If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act. If their intention was to deter us from our mission of promoting peace and security in the Middle East, they will fail. Although the American security establishment had been warning of threats against the country around the year 2000, so-called millennium plots, there hadn't been anything like that. Until...

the USS Cole blew up in October 2000. The American presidential election that year didn't dwell too much on foreign policy or national security. Good evening from the Clark Athletic Center at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and I welcome you to the first of three 90-minute debates.

between the Democratic candidate for president, Vice President Al Gore, and the Republican candidate, Governor George W. Bush of Texas. I'm not so sure the role of the United States is going around the world and say this is the way it's got to be. I think one way for us to end up being... As we pointed out in season one, George W. Bush didn't campaign on America

as a quote-unquote world policeman. Would you go about as president deciding when it was in the national interest to use U.S. force? I would take the use of force very seriously. I think we've got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have... disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. And Al Gore, he didn't really talk about terrorism either, although both did have moments of silence at campaign events after the coal attack.

And both promised that they would enact swift retribution as president. As soon as we find out who is responsible, we will retaliate. And we will not rest until the perpetrators of that horrible and cowardly crime are brought to justice.

After the Supreme Court declared Bush president in November 2000, however, that swift justice never came. confessed their role and told investigators they were working for two top operatives of the Bin Laden Group, known to U.S. intelligence, reports Michael Isikoff. And, according to Isikoff, throughout the year 2001, Despite a steady drumbeat of warnings from various national security officials, emails from the NSC, briefings from counterterrorism officials, and so forth,

All about the possibility of another attack from the bin Laden group on American targets, there was little appetite for the discussion. This too was in spite of other Islamist Afghan war vets. who were making names for themselves with increasingly brazen action. The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, for example, announced in June 2001 that they had beheaded Guillermo Sobrero, a Californian who had been kidnapped the month before.

Guillermo Sabero's bones were discovered in the southern Philippines earlier this month. Surrounded by police and by other suspected rebels, the teenager spoke of seeing Sabero blindfolded and pleading for his life as a rebel prepared to kill him. In late July 2001, the NSA downgraded the likelihood of an imminent U.S. attack, while the FBI shortly thereafter issued a memo arguing in the other direction.

Bin Laden was mentioned in around three dozen different presidential daily intelligence briefings prior to the fall of 2001. At first, The coal attack did not bring down the talks happening between the Taliban and the outside world. It may have even sped them up. That same month, days after the coal attack, the UN negotiator could declare that, quote, for the first time,

The Taliban and the Northern Alliance were considering a peace process. In less than a month, however, things had collapsed. A stretch of diplomatic sniping disintegrated the talks. Russia had demanded harsher sanctions on the Taliban, while the U.S. had overreached at the U.N. Security Council, playing a retro strategy of banning arms sales to Afghanistan, except to American friends in the Northern Alliance.

So by December, everything was back to square one. But along came another spider. Lely Helms, niece of former CIA director Richard. and the Taliban's PR Wonder Woman, spun this crisis into yet another opportunity for her clients. The nature of that opportunity was the fact that President-elect George W. Bush, despite his tough talk,

was an oil man. Vice President Dick Cheney was the one-time chairman of Halliburton, one of the biggest energy concerns in the world. Bush's soon-to-be national security advisor was Condoleezza Rice. a decade-long bigwig of Chevron oil, where she used her influence in the ex-USSR to grease a deal between the oil giant and the president of Kazakhstan. This kind of administration would be, shall we say,

flexible on issues pertaining to energy, especially with Russia and China making progress in Central Asia. And so the Bush administration, thanks to the efforts of Lely Helms, reopened talks with the Taliban. There were murmurs of informal meetings between the U.S. officials and a senior representative from Gulbadin Hekhmachar's party, which had by now merged its forces with Osama bin Laden's.

These high-risk talks were assigned to Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, Christina Rocha, who was a former CIA agent from 1982 to 1997. coordinating relations between the CIA and Islamist guerrillas and supervising some of the deliveries of Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen. Starting in May 2001, Roca reopened her files and started up a dialogue.

with her old contacts." Summer 2001 was full of this kind of secret informal diplomacy to push the Taliban and the Northern Alliance into a coalition government that would extradite bin Laden. Said one high-placed diplomat from Pakistan, But once again, The talks broke down, with the Taliban complaining that the Western nations and their UN allies were giving these simple country mullahs the high hat. In one of the final meetings in Berlin,

A U.S. representative seemed to confirm this attitude in an ultimatum to his Taliban interlocutor. A U.S. official had threatened, either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold or we bury you. under a carpet of bombs. This reportedly drunken outburst, an offer the Taliban was not to refuse, was the first official threat of military action against Afghanistan in the 21st century.

Meanwhile, the deputy chief of Alex Station reviewed the cable traffic, showing the journey of Osama associate Nawaf Hasbi to Los Angeles. It seems astonishing, writes James Bamford. that he would not be interested in why Hazmi might have flown to Los Angeles and what he was doing in the U.S. But Hazmi's buddy, Midar, was placed on a CIA watchlist in August 2001.

although the government didn't make use of it to catch him. On Saturday, August 25th, Midar, who had by now returned from his USS Cole escapade in Yemen, visited William Patterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. where he purchased in the library plane tickets on a campus computer, while two days later, his friend, Hazmi, moved into his own new staging location with his associate, a man named Muhammad Atta.

The next day, on September 5th, 2001, the feds were conducting another fruitless search for Hazmi and Midar, using driver's license and passport info. Midar on that day. was at the American Airlines counter at Dulles Airport, paying for plane tickets with $2,300 in $100 bills.

Four days later, on the morning of September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud met with journalists at his headquarters in northern Afghanistan. Massoud's mind was on the battlefront as he was preparing to go visit his soldiers. then campaigning against the Taliban. Quote, the visiting reporter read out a list of questions while his colleague prepared to film, writes Steve Cole. About half his questions concerned Osama bin Laden. Masood listened.

and then said he was ready. The camera had been a bomb. The cameraman died instantly, and Massoud was mortally wounded. But the pretend interviewer had somehow survived. Massoud's bodyguards shot him to death before he could escape from a window. The attack was reportedly a gift organized by Bin Laden for the Taliban. The White House took Massoud's death seriously.

An American asset from all the way back, Massoud had been recently pitching himself as the CIA's best shot at taking out bin Laden. It was agreed to keep Massoud's Northern Alliance alive, even if its leader was dead. Then, on September 10th, 2001, the Bush team agreed to pursue, in Steve Cole's words, a covert war to overthrow the Taliban. That may have been the last shot Michael Jordan will ever take in the NBA

Maybe not. Good morning. Air Jordan is taxiing for takeoff. Legendary basketball great Michael Jordan is getting ready to return to the game he loves today, Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. From NBC News, this is Today with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. Live from Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza. On the morning of September 11th, by 7.35 a.m., Midar and Hazmi checked in for their flight from Dulles Airport. American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles.

The plan, which was rehearsed at least once beforehand, included 17 other hijackers across four different flights, including Flight 77. The other three planes, American Airlines Flight 11, United 175 and United 93 were also successfully hijacked. Richard Hack, thank you very much. We appreciate the book is called Hughes. We want to go live right now and show you a picture of the World Trade Center where I understand. Do we have it? No, we do not.

the beefy bulldog chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, was taking a briefing in his office when his secretary came in to let him know that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers in New York City. In these initial moments, this wasn't necessarily a big deal to him. Arguably, the killing of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a former and would-be future collaborator of the CIA, was a bigger problem in Langley than what was probably a private plane crashing in New York.

As Matt just mentioned, we have a breaking news story to tell you about. Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago. Apparently we have very little information available. But a few minutes later.

Kofor Black got a call from a CIA officer who was stationed in New York City. Hey chief, we've got a problem, the officer told Black. We've been struck. I'm evacuating my position. At 9.37, Midar and Hazmi's plane. hit its target, the Pentagon. Well, Aaron, there is a lot of confusion here at the Pentagon. It appears that something hit.

The Pentagon on the outside of the Fifth Corridor, on the Army Corridor, several Army officers I talked to reported hearing a big explosion, seeing shards of metal coming past their window. Inside the center of America's global military machine, the walls shook. Officers, agents, spooks, and secretaries all began evacuating, fearful that another strike might be on the way.

Against this current strode an older man. Silver hair, rimless glasses, beady eyes. He raced through smoke and jet fuel fumes to reach the crash site, reported the Washington Post. Once he was nearly there, an Air Force lieutenant colonel told him, you can't go any further. But the man's rank permitted him. His rank, in fact, was Secretary of Defense. And at this exact moment...

No one knew where he was. At first we thought Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been hit, a White House aide later said. We couldn't get a location on the Secretary of Defense. He would soon reappear. As the air cleared and the counterattack began, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld then issued a directive to his staff, revealed years later by a Freedom of Information Act request. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.

is unconfirmed, and of course speculation of a terrorist attack is unconfirmed, although that is what some Pentagon officials are saying. Let's go to President Bush right now. We'll be going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary of Rod Pace and Lieutenant Governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at...

at the Booker Elementary School for their hospitality. By midday on September 11th, things had calmed down within the agency, as it was determined that there were no more attacks coming. And at 3 p.m., George Tenet confirmed to George W. Bush, that the Bin Laden group, also referred to as Al Qaeda, had been responsible for the attack. I have spoken to the Vice President, to the Governor of New York, to the Director of the FBI.

And I've ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down. and to find those folks who committed this act. In his memoirs, published in 2006, the Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wrote of the September 11th attacks that, quote,

America was sure to react violently, like a wounded bear. If the perpetrator turned out to be Al-Qaeda, then that wounded bear would come charging straight toward us.

Musharraf was right. First, Secretary of State and former General Colin Powell phoned with a warning. Either Pakistan was with the U.S. or against it. And then, wrote Musharraf, In what has to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, Powell's assistant and good friend, Richard Armitage, told the head of Pakistan's ISI, not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists,

but that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age. Deputy Secretary of State Armitage said that he would soon have a list of what the United States wanted from Pakistan. The ISI chief made an unequivocal commitment that Pakistan would stand by the United States. That night, writes Ahmed Rashid, the policy that Pakistan would adopt toward Washington was summed up in the phrase first say yes and later say but good evening

Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. Our first priority is to get help to those who have been injured and to take every precaution to protect our citizens at home and around the world from further attacks. The functions of our government continue without interruption.

And the American economy will be open for business as well. The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities. to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them. Bush gave Operation Enduring Freedom his seal of approval. Within a week, boots would be on the ground in Afghanistan.

While CIA Director George Tenet was telling President Bush that Al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on Tuesday morning, the Deputy Chief of Alex Station, Richard Blee, was on the phone to Afghanistan, speaking to a high-ranking leader of the Northern Alliance. The leader began to ask Blee about what weapons the U.S. could send to support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban.

Blee cut him off. Quote, This is a tragedy for my country, but it is going to change your country forever. This is now much beyond you. Consult your leaders, because this is going to come in ways, in scope, and in scale that you cannot imagine.