54. Bin Laden vs the CIA: 9/11 (Ep 4)

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The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about, but that is in everyone's mind.

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible.

A single flight of planes, no bigger than a wedge of geese, can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.

The intimation of mortality is part of New York now in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarski.

And that was not Osama bin Laden, the subject of this series.

It was rather American novelist E.

B.

White, who was writing in 1949 in an essay entitled, Here is New York.

But David, it's kind of an uncanny kind of foretelling of those terrible events of 9-11, which we're going to be looking at, 9-11 itself, as well as its aftermath in this episode as part of our story of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the struggle between him and the CIA.

And we'd left the story last time with Osama bin Laden having attacked America, the CIA having come up with plans to try and stop him, but never having been able to execute them.

And then, of course, the kind of looming tower, as Lawrence Wright famously calls it in his book of 9-11, just ahead of us.

And so we're going to have a deeper dive this time, I think, into the attack, but particularly into the aftermath.

That's right.

And it's the summer of 2001.

Osama bin Laden is working feverishly on plans for the 9-11 attacks.

But interestingly, Gordon, the seeds for those attacks are planted almost from the moment that he arrives in Afghanistan in May of 1996.

And we talked about his Afghan sojourn in our last episode.

There is a man in May of 1996 named Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, KSA, K-S-M,

who comes to Osama bin Laden's house in Tora Bora, up in that kind of craggy cave complex.

They have a meeting in Osama bin Laden's study.

KSM is short, squat, pious, but very poorly trained in religion, had a past as an actor.

He will be well known, perhaps to many, for the picture taken of him after he is captured by American and Pakistani forces in 2002.

And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew is a man named Ramzi Youssef, who had masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

KSM and his nephew, Ramzi Youssef, have come up with a bunch of what I would describe as insane ideas for operations, bombing American planes, flying to Asia.

KSM actually says that they've tested smuggling a bomb onto a passenger jet and detonated it and killed a Japanese businessman.

They have an idea to fly a plane into CIA headquarters.

And in Toribora, Bora, Khaled Sheikh Mohamed, who, by the way, at this point is not actually a member of Al-Qaeda.

He is kind of a freelance terrorist who is showing up in part, I think, because of this propaganda blitz that Bin Laden is starting to benefit from in 1996.

He's kind of showing up on Bin Laden's doorstep, hoping, I think, for some funding and some bureaucratic support for this idea.

But KSM pitches Osama on a plot to crash planes into buildings.

And Osama is apparently kind of meh on this idea initially,

but later, one of Osama's trusted military aides will suggest that he reconsider this idea.

And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed comes back to Kandahar in 1999.

He formally joins al-Qaeda, swears by...

and oilty loath to Al-Qaeda and to bin Laden, and regurgitates this proposal for al-Qaeda members to fly small planes packed with explosives into the World Trade Center.

Now,

I find the obsession with the World Trade Center to be very bizarre.

I don't quite understand it, but he wants those buildings to fall.

I don't exactly know why,

but he's obsessed with that.

Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe it's a combination of being the tallest buildings and therefore a symbol of kind of American power and the World Trade Center symbol of American capitalism.

I don't know.

I agree.

It's strange, but it's clearly an obsession.

And he's now got an idea of how to do it using explosives and planes.

But someone bin Laden is the one who apparently suggests the idea that they use passenger jets.

And he says to KSM, you know, why use an axe if you can use a bulldozer?

So don't fly a small CENA into these packed with explosives.

Just fly the passenger plane right into them.

Now, KSM's idea is initially reminiscent to me of a B-grade 1990s action movie plot.

And the initial idea is to hijack 10 10 planes.

KSM will be on the 10th.

Nine will be flown into targets on the east and west coast.

And then on KSM's plane, after he has killed all of the adult male passengers, of course, KSM will emerge from the aircraft and give a big speech taking the U.S.

to task for supporting Israel.

This is the idea.

Now, Osama bin Laden at this meeting in Kandahar tells him, why don't you scale things back a bit and maybe don't make yourself the main character?

A little bit of competition there.

He doesn't like it.

Yeah, I think so.

I don't think he wants KSM taking responsibility for this.

So they pair back the number of planes they plan to hijack and they select the targets: the U.S.

Capitol, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center.

And I think Bin Laden also does give some leeway for additional targets to be added, but those are the big three that they're after.

Now, we are not, Gordon, in this episode, going to go into excruciating detail about the 9-11 plot.

I think we'll probably do that at a later series, kind of give the real nitty-gritty of how it worked.

And I think that question of whether there were intelligence failures, whether it could have been stopped, I mean, I think it is a really important question, but the detail is for another time.

What we will say, though, is that Osama bin Laden does take a personal role in selecting some of the suicide operatives, including this four, this kind of Hamburg cell who had lived in Germany.

And they arrive in Afghanistan in November of 99.

They train at some of these al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

The concept for the plan evolves to the point where they know that they need trained pilots.

And so, this group from Hamburg are going to fill that gap.

They know how to live in the West.

They speak English.

They can get visas.

And they are going to go in and out of these Afghan training camps under sort of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda's tutelage in the late 1990s.

Now, by May of 2001, all 19 of the hijackers are settled in the U.S.

And though the plans are technically, obviously, quite secret, Osama bin Laden really seems to have been unable to resist dropping hints that something big was coming.

And by the summer of 2001, there are rumors that are flying around this kind of jihadist community in Afghanistan, which, by the way, at this point is hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are in these kind of circles.

There's a buzz that a major operation is coming, right?

And Al-Qaeda military commander even tells journalists: in the next few weeks, we will carry out a big surprise and we will strike or attack American and Israeli interests.

Osama bin Laden at one point told some al-Qaeda members that the coffin business will increase in the United States, right?

So that's the summer, kind of June of 2001.

In late August of 2001, Osama bin Laden tells al-Qaeda leaders that there is a big operation coming soon.

And two weeks before the attacks, he orders Al-Qaeda's training camp shut down down because of an imminent martyrdom operation.

So as you can see from some of those rumors, not a lot of specifics in there about when it's coming, where, how it will happen.

But there is definitely something in the water.

And this is where this story intersects with the CIA and the U.S.

Yeah, because it's fair to say, you know, this is what's often called chatter, isn't it?

Low-level rather than specific intelligence, that sense that something's coming and it is going to be picked up in the us i mean the us are going to be aware that something is coming but you know one of the issues is it's come at a time when you've got a new administration in the u.s president clinton has left george w bush has taken over in january 2001 and i remember as a journalist covering this period the focus was on different kinds of threats, I think.

You know, they were talking about missile defense, I remember.

That was the kind of thing they wanted to talk about and to focus on.

And you get a sense that those kind of senior figures were about state power, not about kind of terrorist threats in terms of the way they saw the dangers to the United States.

So you definitely sense that something is lost in that shift of administrations.

Not saying that the Clinton administration was actually that aggressive in going after bin Laden, but just the sheer fact of a change of administration means, you know, it takes months to get everyone into place.

And they've got different priorities and they've got their own priorities.

And you do sense that even though you get threat reporting at this time and it's building up as we get through to the summer, it's not quite getting through.

Well, I think, I mean, the Bush kind of national security team, the most senior people like Cheney or Rumsfeld, they're tried and true cult warriors.

And I think probably come into the office with the standpoint that the biggest threats to the United States are from states, right?

The Russians, the Chinese, the Iraqis, right?

Not necessarily Al-Qaeda.

And it will be the case that in the first months of the Bush administration, there are 33 principals committee policy meetings, cabinet-level policy meetings held before the 9-11 attacks.

Only one is about al-Qaeda.

And George Tennant in his memoir will write that at the top tier, there was a loss of urgency, right?

So I think you do have holdovers from the Clinton team.

Tennant stays on as CIA director.

Richard Clark is the...

head of counterterrorism policy at the National Security Council.

He stays on for a while.

So you do have this sort of institutional connection in memory to the missed opportunities of the late 1990s.

But at the same time, I think the Bush team is just, frankly, not as focused on it.

So in March, George Tenet will send a request for greater authorities, which is essentially CIA asking for authorization to go run an operation to kill Osama bin Laden.

And the White House basically says, this is the spring of 2001, they don't want to actually run the process on that at that point in time.

And the authorities get sent back.

It's not that the Bush administration wasn't open to this idea.

I think, again, it's this sense of early days of administration, there's a lot going on.

They don't want to go halfway into a process and then stop it.

And so they basically tell Tennant and the CIA team, let's do this later.

And yet, at the same time, the intelligence community is getting absolute loads.

of credible information, intelligence coming out of Afghanistan, coming out of these al-Qaeda camps and people connected to them, and feeding it into the president's daily brief and to memos that go down to the White House.

It's actually really interesting now to look back at this, Gordon, years later and see how much strategic warning there was.

In April, there's a report titled Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations that gets circulated by the CIA.

On May 3rd, Bin Laden public profile may presage attack.

On May 23rd, the CIA raised the possibility that Al-Qaeda might hijack an aircraft to secure the release of another terrorist from a U.S.

prison.

In June, a PDB, bin Laden attacks may be imminent.

On July 3rd, the CIA reports that, quote, planning for bin Laden attacks continues despite delay.

So there's a sense that something is coming.

And yet, Gordon, I think we both agree that all of this information is, I guess, what I would call strategic warning.

Details of the plot.

It's not giving details of the plot.

So you kind of read all this and you say well what do i do with it yeah but also people would go well we know he wants to attack the united states he's already attacked the united states we know he's trying to plan stuff sure and surely there's loads of threat reporting which is coming in all the time so i also wonder a bit whether would you really pay attention to this you know this guy bin laden he's done all these attacks we know he's plotting we know he's going to do more if you don't have specific intelligence about 9-11 about something on that scale if you don't have the insight onto it it's hard to know what to do but i agree there is a lot of intelligence but not really a sense of urgency and of trying to do anything about it.

It's kind of pushed down the list, if you like, at this point in the summer, isn't it?

You've got the people in the CIA, Kofer Black at the Counterterrorist Center, who are kind of trying to literally bang their fists on the table, I think, at times with Kofer Black saying, we need to do something, but it's not quite cutting through.

Well, on July 10th, after all of this run of reporting, George Tennett takes the very unusual step of calling Condoleezza Rice, who is the National Security Advisor, and asks for a meeting that day.

Again, this is uncommon.

He goes down to the White House, I believe he takes Kofer Black with him, the head of the counterterrorism center, and Tennant basically briefs that, look, there are going to be multiple spectacular attacks, likely without any warning.

And the opening line of the briefing that he gives is apparently, quote, there will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months.

And Kofer Black piles on and says, we need to go on a war footing now.

Now,

this does seem to get that process going to give the CIA authorities to go after and kill bin Laden, the one that had kind of been shelved in the spring.

It gets that going,

but it's the summer in DC, right before a time when, I mean, in August, when a lot of this stuff is going to shut down, people will not be there.

The authorities, unfortunately, won't be granted until after 9-11.

And I think, frankly, even if they had been granted that day, it's unclear that history would have turned out any different.

But that drumbeat of reporting keeps coming.

And on August 3rd, the CIA circulates circulates a warning titled Threat of Impending Al-Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely.

And then on August 6th, there is the very famous, now maybe infamous PDB item that's been declassified with the title Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.

And what is fascinating though is that as the U.S.

is getting all of this warning in classified channels, Al-Qaeda is providing kind of strategic warning just via propaganda videos that are being released on internet chat rooms talking about how something big is coming.

And I will say that there is an entire chapter in George Tenet's memoir, which I would highly encourage everyone to read because it's a very interesting and detailed portrait of this time in American history.

And he has an entire chapter devoted to all of the threat reporting that's coming in during this period.

It's just a staggering quantity of intelligence that's coming in.

We've highlighted a lot of the very specific bin Laden and kind of U.S.

stuff, but there is a massive laundry list in his book about global attack plotting.

There's a fantastic line where he says, if you were getting confused, frustrated, or exhausted reading this litany, then imagine how we felt at the time living through it.

So I think there is this sense that there's just a fire hose they're drinking from and almost helpless to stop the big one from coming.

True.

And the CIA is clearly getting intelligence reporting and they're getting the chatter.

They've got some sources, maybe some assets in the camps in Afghanistan.

We know they've got people on the kind of outer fringes of al-Qaeda.

So they've got lots of sources.

And they're getting some of this, I think, from Middle East, kind of Gulf, allied intelligence agencies also.

I think, you know, providing warnings, all are saying something big is coming.

But what they've never done is penetrate the core of al-Qaeda.

They've never got inside the top-level planning, either in terms of intercepting their communications or actually having an agent in there.

And without that, you know, something big is coming because that's the chatter in the camps and elsewhere that the spies are picking up and the agents are picking up.

But you don't have the details of what it is.

And I think, as I said, we're not going to go into deep into the intelligence failure and what was missed and whether clues weren't put together.

But there is that sense in which there is another question about an intelligence failure, which is to not have the insight right into the planning itself.

Because then you're relying on putting together fragments and clues about who these hijackers are, where they might be moving.

And there's lots of detail on that, which is interesting in itself.

But there is a kind of failure to collect that really core intelligence about the plot itself.

That's right.

And I think we should think, and listeners should think about the intelligence failure on 9-11 as being a true national failure in many respects.

It's a failure of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA.

It's a broader policy failure.

It's not one thing.

Again, we won't go into massive details on any of this stuff, but the CIA fails to watch list two suspected al-Qaeda members who'd settled in San Diego under their true names, right?

The CIA doesn't tell the FBI about that, and both of those guys end up being hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashes into the Pentagon.

I mean, you can get deep into the detail of it, but there were like really interesting questions about why the CIA didn't alert the FBI and institutional rivalries, where they're going to try to recruit them, you know, all kinds of interesting things.

But there's a lot of these little indicators, aren't there, about people doing flight training, which just mean they never quite put the pieces together or collect the pieces to be able to kind of understand the plot.

And you note that CIA and the NSA effectively did fail to penetrate the upper echelons of al-Qaeda in that Afghan sanctuary.

And I mean, even this is a bit tedious, but there were underfunding of the IC, the intelligence community throughout the 1990s.

And then even things like there had been a massive plane crash, TWA Flight 800 in the U.S.

And there were these recommendations on aviation security that the Gore Commission had proposed that were not really implemented that may have made it much harder to hijack planes.

So it's a bunch of different things,

and we'll deal with that story in a really detailed way when we do a 9-11 series at some point down the line.

Now, Gordon, Gordon, Gordon, Gordon, I'm going back to the Bin Laden wives here for a second because it's in September of 2001.

Bin Laden is obviously having a massive week because they are getting ready for 9-11.

He is also getting another divorce.

And his first first wife, Najwa, who has been with him since the mid-70s, says she wants out.

She's had enough of this jihadi club med in Afghanistan, wants to return to her family in Syria.

He permits this.

He allows her to take only three of their children.

They have 11 children together.

And she will depart Afghanistan prior to 9-11 and never see Osama bin Laden again.

Now, that same week on the 4th of September 2001, the Bush national security team meets for the first time to discuss al-Qaeda.

And Richard Clark, who is the senior counterterrorism advisor at the White House, has sent Condoleezza Rice a personal note before the meeting, writing,

Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S.

What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier?

That future day could happen at any time.

It's a chilling thing to say, isn't it?

Just one week away.

So maybe at that moment, let's take a break and when we come back, we'll see how Bin Laden's triumph is

and becomes America's darkest hour.

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When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show now charlie's sober he's gonna tell you the truth how do i present this with a class i think we're past that charlie we're past that yeah somebody call action aka charlie sheen only on netflix september 10th

well welcome back it's september the 11th 2001 gorgeous fall morning autumn morning if you're british in new york and washington dc and those skies were very blue and very clear, weren't they, David?

Well, that's right, Gordon.

And the New York Yankees are going to play the Chicago White Sox that evening in the Bronx.

The Yankees are having really a phenomenal season in 2001.

They're going to play and lose in the World Series in seven games, but it is 8.46 a.m.

And through that brilliant blue sky comes American Airlines Flight 11 carrying 9,000 gallons of jet fuel traveling 490 miles an hour and it crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Now

people on some of the floors were not particularly panicked initially.

They're confused.

You know, is it a bomb?

Is it an earthquake?

In Afghanistan, members of al-Qaeda are trying to get a satellite signal.

Finally, someone tunes in a radio to the BBC Arabic language service, which is one of Osama bin Laden's, I think, preferred outlets.

And there's breaking news that a plane has struck the World Trade Center in New York.

The al-Qaeda members, you know, thinking, okay, this maybe is the big attack that we've all been hearing about all summer, cry out in joy.

And bin Laden sort of says, you know, wait, bin Laden, I think, really takes this first strike.

He's a religious zealot.

He sees this as a sign of God's favor, but of course he knows there's more to come.

And he holds up three fingers, indicating that there will be three more attacks.

The second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hits the South Tower.

At 9.03 a.m., it's traveling 600 miles per hour.

And I think at this point, Gordon, you could have assumed that the first one's an accident, terrible accident, something has happened.

When the second plane hits, everyone knows that it is an attack.

And George Tennant, the CIA director, is at Langley.

He begins assembling his staff in his conference room by about 9.15.

So just 10 minutes or so after that second plane hits.

And there is, of course, a feeling at this point that it is Al-Qaeda, right?

I've been no information, but a sense, I mean, given all of this threat reporting that we've been reading, that this is Osama bin Laden.

At 9:38 a.m., the third plane crashes into the Pentagon.

And when news hits Afghanistan of the Pentagon strike, bin Laden will hold up four fingers to his odd followers, suggesting that there is another attack coming.

But that final strike, intended for the U.S.

Capitol, is not going to materialize.

At 10 a.m., Tennett gives the order to evacuate CIA headquarters.

And his staff, his senior staff, sets up shop out on the printing plant, which is on the compound, but not in either of the main sort of buildings, just presumed to be safer from a plane strike.

Counterterrorism Center, which has a group up on the sixth floor, is exempted from this evacuation.

And Tennett, in his memoir, wrote, you know, Kofer Black had basically said, we can't evacuate the counterterrorism center fully.

And Tenet says, well, you know, they could die.

And Kofer Black apparently says, well, sir, then they're just going to have to die.

And Tennett apparently pauses and says, you're absolutely right.

And so there's a contingent of CIA counterterrorism officers who stay the entire day at Langley.

In New York, of course, it is absolute.

pandemonium.

There's actually a former FBI detailed to Alex Station,

who is in New York on 9-11 and will describe that he saw what looked like a tornado rushing up Broadway.

He tries to drive in the smoke.

He almost rolls into a subway entrance.

He eventually ends up abandoning the car and trying to go out and find the rest of his squad.

He walks inside, and this is Lawrence Wright in his book, The Looming Tower, wrote, quote, the cloud against the stream of fleeing people who were like ash-covered ghouls as if they had been exhumed.

The dust was a compound of concrete, asbestos, lead, fiberglass, paper, cotton, jet fuel, and the pulverized organic remains of 2,977 people who died.

The World Trade Center is going to burn for 100 days, and all during that time, there's going to be this incredibly acrid stench that penetrates the FBI field office in New York, this kind of awful reminder of our collective failure to stop the attack.

Yeah, I mean, it's unforgettable for anyone who was there or who witnessed it.

I was a journalist at the time, and I remember seeing actually the second plane go in live and thinking at first that it was a replay of the first plane going in, not really understanding it.

And then, I mean, I was trying to get out, and it took a few days to get out there.

But I remember driving, you know, and seeing still the smoke two or three days later when I finally got to the US, still coming up from the remains of the World Trade Center and then going down and seeing the Pentagon.

And so it was shocking, the idea that the American homeland could be attacked in that way and at that scale.

but it was also clear to a lot of people very quickly that it was al-Qaeda wasn't it I mean that was almost instant particularly within the CIA I think you know they started looking through those flight manifests they could see names in some cases names of people that they knew were al-Qaeda operatives I mean that's what's shocking on some of these planes and so very quickly there is an understanding that it is al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden who's behind this absolutely kind of devastating world-changing event and bin Laden is going to leave Kandahar, Afghanistan, for the mountains, I think, understanding that some response is coming.

Although we should note that I think Bin Laden thought he would get more cruise missile strikes.

And obviously, I mean, we should also say that he never thought

that these attacks would kill this many people.

I think in his wildest dreams, they did not think that the towers would fully collapse.

And I think it just, it exceeded what they had hoped for by a wide margin.

And it is interesting, isn't it, Gordon, that Bin Laden's stated strategic goal for conducting these kind of attacks in this kind of pattern that I think he

believes that he has seen throughout much of the 1990s is: I attack the United States and they pull back.

I attack them in Yemen.

I attack them in East Africa and they don't do anything, and they sort of back off.

Yeah, they fire a few missiles.

Right, they fire missiles, and that's it.

I think maybe at worse, he thought he was going to get a rehash of the air war over Kosovo, right?

I mean, he's going to get bombed, but the U.S.

isn't going to put a whole bunch of troops on the ground.

And it is interesting because later, when asked to explain 9-11, one of the Afghan Arabs who had actually served with bin Laden said the tactics took over the strategy because exactly the opposite is going to happen.

The U.S., the CIA, they're coming for Bin Laden.

And, I mean, really, right off the bat, Gordon Tennant, George Tennant, will tell Bush, look, this looks, smells, and tastes like bin Laden.

But once the CIA knows that al-Qaeda members are on those plane manifests, we know it's bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Yeah, and it's very interesting, I think, what's going on also in Washington here, because I think there's a famous meeting, and Cofer Black's sitting at the back of the meeting with the president's there.

And Cofra Black kind of says, We've got a plan, we can do this, we'll have flies walking over their eyeballs, I think is the famous quote.

Bush loves this language.

And the CIA, I think, takes the lead in responding to 9-11 and is very keen to do so.

I think partly is a reaction to the sense of failure.

The people who I've spoken to who are part of this will acknowledge they felt this sense that they'd let America down, that their job was to provide the intelligence and warning.

And so they are desperate to go on the offensive now, to take the lead.

And it's interesting, isn't it?

Because they do take the lead rather than, for instance, the Pentagon and it just being some missiles being flown or an air campaign and things being dropped.

It's the CIA which is showing the desire and the willingness to take the lead in going after bin Laden as a reaction, I think, emotionally.

to that sense of having failed to stop the attacks.

And of course, I mean, we covered some of what happens next in our early episodes we did about the horsemen who were sent there, the early CIA jawbreaker teams who go on the ground.

And that's a symbol of it.

It's the CIA who take the lead now to finally go after bin Laden and to be led off the leash, as Kofer Black would put it.

Also, it's just the reality that I think at that point, in the first weeks of September 2001, among all of the different bureaucratic components in the intelligence community and the defense establishment, it is probably the CIA that knows Afghanistan the best.

I mean, the Pentagon didn't really have a plan for a war in Afghanistan, really.

And the CIA has, although certainly in the 90s, a lot of that access is kind of diminished relative to the jihad in the 80s.

The new memo is going to authorize lethal action against al-Qaeda or any affiliated group.

On September the 17th, Bush is going to sign that finding.

It's going to give the CIA authority to go after bin Laden, to kill him.

And it is one of the most aggressive findings ever signed.

So the CIA is going to have kind of full authority to do what it wants at this point.

Now,

the first attempts to sort of deal with bin Laden after 9-11 9-11 are more threatening of the Taliban to hand him over, right?

This obviously doesn't pan out.

I think at this point, the Taliban thinks the Americans are not actually going to invade.

That turns out to be terribly wrong.

When the invasion begins, bin Laden will cut some deals with Afghan warlords and tribal elders out in eastern Afghanistan near Jalalabad, pay them off, give them some money, give them horses in some cases.

And Osama bin Laden and his associates basically creep out of the settled areas of Afghanistan just ahead of the U.S.

invasion.

Now, Kabul is going to fall on November 12th.

There's kind of, I think, a sense of elation in Washington over how quickly the Taliban is overthrown.

But

where is Osama bin Laden, right?

The perpetrator of the attack.

He sends his three remaining wives and a bunch of his young children across the border into Pakistan.

And at this point, now everybody thinks that he is hiding out in this particularly steep and treacherous mountainous area near the Afghan border with Pakistan, a place which listeners to the series should know well by now called Tora Bora.

And this is a particularly kind of jagged mountainous area.

It's a place he knows from his days in the Soviet jihad in the 80s.

And I think the assumption is that this might be his last stand in these kind of famous caves that have been built here by him.

I remember there were some kind of crazy images that pretending there were huge cave complexes, you know, like at a kind of bonvillen layer, you know, built into the mountains, which of course wasn't true.

But it was a very remote area and it was an obvious place to hide.

But quite quickly, they actually start to get a sense that he might be there, don't they?

I mean, the CIA and the special forces are on the ground, and I think they realize he's there pretty soon as he's holding up in the caves.

The CIA and NSA are monitoring radios that they think belong to him and other al-Qaeda members.

I think there's even a prediction made that this is kind of a last stand in Tora Bora.

It's almost suicidal.

And the U.S.

begins to bomb these cave complexes, fly predator drones overhead.

Al-Qaeda is sustaining significant losses.

They're running out of medicine, running out of cash.

Osama bin Laden is actually forced to borrow some money from a local and sympathetic cleric.

And although there is a massive bombing campaign from the air, on the ground, and this is, I think, hard to imagine today, but on the ground there are maybe less than 100 American and

God help me, Gordon, British special forces, is that right?

And a small CIA contingent.

I've spoken to some of the people who were there, actually.

I interviewed some years later, including some British SBS people.

The Special Boat Service to you you Americans.

Special Boat Service.

Yep, yeah, that's right.

One of the themes of this series has been people angry at missed opportunities.

And actually, this is a group which is also angry at missed opportunities.

I mean, they picked up some radios, I think, that bin Laden's people were using.

And at one point, I think they hear what they think is Bin Laden on the radio.

There are some possible sightings of him by these special forces teams.

And the crucial thing is that there's a question: well, what do you do about it?

There's small special forces teams there.

And the question is, do you carpet bomb the area, which might kill them, but more likely to flush them out?

But the risk is that you're on the border with Pakistan.

And so what they want is for U.S.

troops to be deployed to seal off the border.

So you kind of flush him out with the bombing.

Then you seal off the border, you know, with enough troops that you can hopefully capture him if he isn't killed.

And what's so interesting is

right at the top level in the U.S.

administration, they they decide to do the bombing part but not the troops part to seal off the border so there is these huge bombs which are dropped I think I mean someone said they literally changed the geography of the mountains there that with the size of these bombs which are being dropped on Tora Bora because they're convinced bin Laden is somewhere there in that cave complex but they don't seal that border and they don't put the troops there and people are angry about that when I've asked US military commanders about it they say well it's taken a while to get them there you know they come up with lots of reasons but it does seem like like another one of those missed opportunities, doesn't it?

I mean, I've seen accounts that suggest that there were more journalists at Tora Bora than Western soldiers.

So it was a very light on-the-ground footprint.

And we should say that up to this point in the war in Afghanistan, which is, you know, maybe a little over a month old, the U.S.

has largely relied on local allies and warlords for the troops, right?

I mean, it's a very advisory, kind of light footprint, right?

And that worked really well for capturing Kabul.

And so I think there is a bit here of like a don't fix what ain't broken approach of like we have made massive gains really quickly against the Taliban with this strategy.

Why change it up?

And of course, I mean, even here we can see, you know, this is a whole separate conversation, but you can already see some of this confusion.

around what the objective of this war is because taking Kabul, you've overthrown the Taliban.

Bin Laden's still running around, right?

And

the focus is maybe already starting to lag a little bit.

So, on the night of the 11th of December, Osama bin Laden is going to get away.

So, he and Al-Qaeda, they cut a ceasefire deal with a warlord on the U.S.

payroll.

And a group of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards actually hike out of Tora Bora into Pakistan, and they're arrested.

Osama bin Laden and his number two Ayman al-Zawahiri are not with them.

Those two have split up.

Sama bin Laden rides to the home of a trusted ally.

He's entrusted some cash, maybe up to $100,000 to this person.

He collects that.

He then rides by horse.

Remember, he is a quite accomplished horseman to the northeast into a place called Kunar province.

It's a very remote, mountainous, heavily forested region.

And Sama bin Laden there releases a video in which he says you know I am just a poor slave of God if I live or die the war will continue there's just this whole thing is dripping with wild west analogues horses escapes wanted dead or alive kind of stuff and he essentially disappears by the 4th of January 2002 Michael Morell, who at this point is George Bush's PDB briefer, and Mike Morell, remember that name because he will rise to become the deputy director of the CIA a decade later when we are still hunting bin Laden.

But he's briefing President Bush, I think, out at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in January of 2002.

And he briefs a report, an article, in which the CIA says we think that Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora and we think that he escaped.

And apparently George Bush goes nuts.

And Morrell in his book writes that he, quote, shot the messenger, me

yeah i mean what is astonishing is to think how close some of those special forces were to bin laden you know potentially even seeing him able to kind of listen to him on the radio just after 9-11 and then he's gone and if you were to say to people it would take another decade to get him people would have been astonished at that moment they would have been astonished that having come so close to him and yet he gets away he escapes and then how long it's going to take.

I think this is a really painful moment.

But there with Osama bin Laden on the run, having escaped Tora Bora, let's end.

Next time we'll come back and we'll see how the CIA's war with Osama bin Laden really shifts away from this moment of opportunity towards a decade-long manhunt with the trail initially going cold.

But Gordon, if our dear listeners do not want to wait any longer, you don't have to.

You can join our declassified club and get immediate access to this entire series right now.

In this next episode, as Gordon mentioned, we are going to go deep into the hunt for bin Laden to explain exactly how he was found.

But also, David, on Friday, club members will also get an extra treat because they'll get our kind of look at the film Zero Dark 30, which is the filmic treatment of this amazing episode of looking for bin Laden, then finally killing him.

And we'll be talking through, you know, our impressions of the film and what it tells us.

So that's for club members on Friday.

You're going to do an impression of James Gandalfini, right?

I am

CIA director Leon Panetta in the film.

You'll get Gordon's Gandalfini impression, too.

For everyone else, next week we'll continue the story on the trail of Osama bin Laden.

See you then.

See you then.