53. Bin Laden vs the CIA: The Great Escape (Ep 3)

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 RestisClassified.com.

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist Crusaders Alliance and their collaborators, to the extent that the Muslims' blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies.

The presence of the USA Crusader military forces on land, sea and air in the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger.

threatening the largest oil reserve in the world.

The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets.

The free man does not surrender leadership to infidels and sinners.

My Muslim brothers of the world, your brothers in Palestine and in the land of the two holy places are calling upon your help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy, your enemy and their enemy, the Americans and the Israelis.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarkey.

And thank you, David, for making me read those slightly chilling words from Osama bin Laden and his fatwa declaring war on the US.

I should definitely say those were his words and not mine, in case anyone is just tuning in.

Not the way I normally start the day.

It's not career in prose for those squirrels listening to the podcast.

I also think, Gordon, it's not his poetry, so it's a step above that.

But we'll get there.

You didn't inflict that on me, which you've threatened to do many times.

I have.

But in case anyone's wondering why we're talking about Osama bin Laden, we are in the middle now of this remarkable story, which looks at how Osama bin Laden made the move from being a kind of rich kid helping out fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s into a kind of terrorist cult leader.

And we've seen how he's created a group called Al-Qaeda or the base with a compound in Sudan and how he'd begun to set his sights on the US.

We left last time with him forced out of Sudan and returning to Afghanistan.

And this time, David, we are on the road to 9-11, aren't we?

And I think we're also looking at the crucial question of whether the US could have got to him beforehand.

Yeah, this is, I think, going to be an episode of missed opportunities, Gordon, on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency to find and to stop Osama bin Laden.

But it is May of 1996, shortly after Gordon Carrera's 50th birthday, and Osama bin Laden has been booted from Sudan.

He is on a plane to Afghanistan.

He has his 15-year-old son.

He has two top al-Qaeda military commanders with him.

He is returning, Gordon, in many respects, to a place that made him and really built up the image of the terrorist leader that he is becoming in the mid-90s.

He has not been in Afghanistan in five years.

He is returning there.

Looking back on this period of his life, it all seems to make so much sense that he would return to Afghanistan.

But he's going there under an arrangement with the Taliban that has not been totally worked out when he arrives.

Yeah, and we should say the Taliban have effectively just taken power or they're taking control of Afghanistan, aren't they?

The kind of religious fundamentalist students.

I mean, that's how they started the Taliban, but fighters who, after the civil war, after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, they've been the movement which has swept to power and a very puritanical group who have something but not everything in common with bin Laden, I guess.

Yeah, they're on a similar no-fun bus to Osama bin Laden.

I think I would say, as you said, it's a religiously zealous, puritanical, very kind of law and order group that has risen to some measure of popularity with the Pashtun population, in particular in Afghanistan, because they are seen as an answer to a lot of the chaos and deprivation of the civil war that has wracked the country really since Osama bin Laden left in the early 90s.

So in some respects, the Taliban...

They ban things like, you know, you cannot have pork.

They don't allow chess.

They don't allow VCRs.

They don't allow kite flying famously.

So in some respects, they're sort of a perfect match with Osama bin Laden.

And I think this second journey into Afghanistan is really going to be the apogee of bin Laden's personal power and influence because he is going to take some of that playbook from Sudan of kind of running this pretty independent jihadist group, almost a camp, right?

A big camp for his followers.

He's going to turn Afghanistan into that.

It's It's going to be a very permissive sanctuary for him and Al-Qaeda for the next few years.

But, Gordon, unlike in Sudan or unlike his first stint in Afghanistan during the Soviet jihad, bin Laden doesn't have as much money as he used to.

And critically, for this phase of the story, which is going to take us from 1996 right up to 9-11, propaganda is going to be really, really important for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's fundraising.

Really important.

So the family cash has dried up, basically.

All the shares and investments, he's no longer able to do any kind of day trading with his shares and pull in extra money.

All the day trading from the Sudan stint is gone.

These days are over.

Penny stock trading is done.

So now he is presenting himself as this kind of figure, this jihadist leader, in order to get the money in from supporters.

In a sense, it's going back to his idea of being a link person, as he was in the 80s, between the people in the Gulf who've got money and people who are interested in supporting this notion of jihad.

Is that right?

That's right.

Well, and he also needs the public exposure to generate cash for al-Qaeda to keep the organization going.

And so, in August of 1996, he issues his now infamous declaration of war against the Americans, occupying the land of the two holy places, which is Saudi Arabia.

And that is, of course, the fatwa that you read from at the start of this episode.

And it is a watershed moment for bin Laden and al-Qaeda because he really publicly formalizes the war that I think he believes he's been fighting now for several years throughout the 1990s and goes public with it, basically telling the CIA, telling the United States that he and Al-Qaeda are coming for them.

And so in that declaration of war, he celebrates the American withdrawal from Beirut in the 1980s during the Civil War, withdrawals from Somalia and Yemen, which I think bin Laden feels some measure of responsibility for himself.

He hits, you know, the sort of oldie, but the goodie of castigating the presence of U.S.

troops on the soil of Saudi Arabia.

He attacks Israel for seizing Palestinian territory in the 1967 war.

And he demands that all Muslims help to forcibly expel Americans and Jews from Islamic lands.

And the publication of this declaration of war really starts to drive a tremendous amount of media exposure for Osama bin Laden and for al-Qaeda, who I think it's fair to say for much of the early to mid-1990s were really off the radar of the Central Intelligence Agency and most Americans.

That's changing in 1996.

Yeah, because he had a few tiny bits of media exposure, I think, when he was in Sudan.

But suddenly you get this sense of someone who is reaching out to the international media and trying to build his reputation very deliberately.

I mean, I find it fascinating because he is drawing attention to himself as a terrorist leader.

He's basically saying to everyone, come look at me, I'm the guy who's declaring war on America, I'm the one who's doing it.

There is no sense of someone who is hiding or looking to be covert in what he's doing or focusing on the action.

It's about the rhetoric and about presenting himself in that way, which I guess goes back to his self-image, it goes back to the fundraising.

But it's really interesting, I think, as someone who's also understanding how to use the media.

I mean, he invites, I think, newspaper editors, I think Abdul Bariatwan from an Arabic newspaper who I know a bit, who's based in London a lot, you know, he goes out to see him, doesn't he, around this time?

And he's inviting people.

Oh, absolutely.

And that editor of the Arab language newspaper that you just mentioned, he goes and visits bin Laden out in this cave complex at Tora Bora, which, by the way, listeners, that is going to be a cave complex you will want to note down in your bingo cards for this series.

And Osama bin Laden gives an interview.

And interestingly enough, I mean, to give you a sense of what bin Laden's day-to-day, or what's the nitty-gritty of being with bin Laden like at this time, that editor says that when he visited bin Laden in Tori Bora, he was served a meal of rotten cheese, potatoes soaked in cottonseed oil, half a dozen fried eggs, and bread caked with sand.

The editor got diarrhea

and insect bites, but he said that he found Osama bin Laden to be likable, to be a good listener, even if he went on, you know, a murderous tirade against the Americans, and said that Osama bin Laden's war was so comprehensive that Osama told this editor that he wanted to defeat America even when it came to agriculture.

And he boasted that he had managed to produce sunflowers bigger than any American sunflower.

And listeners who have joined us for the first two episodes of the series will remember that in Sudan, bin Laden also owned a sunflower farm.

So, sunflower is also a theme of the Osama bin Laden years in the 1990s.

And bin Laden gives some other big interviews as well.

So, he gives an interview to CNN, also in Tora Bora, which airs in May of 1997.

He gives another one to ABC.

Yeah, John Miller from ABC, famously.

That's right.

Who goes on to be a senior kind of NYPD and FBI official, amongst other things, and goes to meet him and there's people firing guns.

There's a lot of drama to these interviews as well, which I find fascinating.

They're deliberately people who are around bin Laden who are kind of creating this image of the terrorist mastermind firing guns and but also as the kind of ascetic who is, as you said, eating rotten cheese in the desert despite his rich background.

It's all carefully constructed, this image.

I mean, one amusing aside is that my friend and former colleague Frank Gardner actually met with bin Laden's representative in London to discuss going out there to do an interview.

Bin Laden had this office, we mentioned it last time, a kind of media office in London where journalists could go and negotiate an interview.

And then they'd be told you have to go through this kind of complicated route through Pakistan to get there and get rid of your phone on the way so you're not tracked.

But it was something you could kind of arrange as an interview, although Frank, as I think he's written and said about, wasn't allowed to go in the end for various reasons.

So he was slightly disappointed to have met the chance to meet Bin Laden.

But yeah, quite a few people do from the West.

And I think they don't know quite what to make of him, do they?

Yeah.

Here's this guy saying, I am declaring war on America.

And he's sitting in a kind of cave.

It's a bit of a bizarre statement.

It's a bizarre statement, isn't it?

Guy in a cave.

Hard to put it in context.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's strange.

No, I mean, it is interesting, though, because he has already attacked America a few times.

And so he's demonstrated a willingness and an ability to do this, right?

At least American interests in Africa or the Middle East.

And he is hitting, I think, in these interviews, a track of sort of greatest hits, right?

And we should note here that later on, especially post-9-11, there will be a line of thinking that says bin Laden sort of hates us.

because we have freedoms and he hates us for our Western morals.

And interestingly, I mean, Bin Laden is very consistent on this.

He famously, when he visited Britain, found your society, Gordon, to be morally degenerate.

But he's not mentioning any of that here as justification for this war.

It is all about the American presence in the Middle East and its support for Israel and other regimes in the Middle East that he considers to be sort of apostates, right?

And really, in this time, though, and I think this is why a lot of the media coverage maybe sails over everybody's heads, is he's still really seen as a financier of terror groups.

He's not seen as the kind of bigwig or operational commander or the inspiration for attacks.

He's seen as a moneyman, right?

But in 1997, now we should note, Afghanistan is in the tail end of its civil war here, but when he arrives, the Taliban don't even control Kabul.

But by 1997, that changes.

The Taliban have taken the capital.

And there are only three governments in the world that recognize the Taliban at this point in time.

One of them is Saudi Arabia.

And so we see here, again, similar to Sudan, that Osama bin Laden's forays into the media, open declaration of war against Saudi's principal security ally and the guarantor of the royal family's security, he's threatening that again.

And the Saudis don't like this, clearly, and start to apply some pressure on the Taliban to get this guy to shut up.

So the Taliban move Osama bin Laden Laden to Kandahar, ostensibly for his safety, but also to have more control.

There's maybe 250 or so people with him at this point in time.

This roving band of al-Qaeda members, his massive family.

He is offered the use of a cluster of well-equipped buildings in Kandahar City or a very rustic rundown facility.

outside called Tarnak Farms, which was a former Soviet agricultural station that had been destroyed in the war and did not have plumbing.

And which option do you think Osama bin Laden took for his headquarters, his villain's lair?

I'm going to buy the farms.

The decrepit farms.

That's right.

We should say that bin Laden, you do have to appreciate the consistency of the man amid all of the evil because he's not living like a king in private and giving this rustic kind of, you know, man of the people vibe to the press.

He's consistent, right?

I mean, he's truly living this way.

So at Tarnak Farms, Osama bin Laden turns that base into a compound.

There's about 80 buildings.

There's a mosque.

There's a training camp for new recruits.

I think a lot of people who, like Gordon, were turning 50 in the mid-90s were probably accustomed to

seeing videos of jihadists on jungle gyms kind of running around and doing phys ed.

Again, which looks slightly comic.

This is what you're imagining, right?

Or these facilities in Afghanistan in the late 90s.

It's quite a bureaucracy, isn't it?

I mean, we talked about it last time.

Again, it's structured like a company in some ways, with a bureaucracy with committees, membership lists, oaths, all that kind of stuff it's very very structured yeah they're big on paper in al-Qaeda a lot of paper big on paper i mean they've got committees for military affairs pr finance legal media administration there's a farming committee in afghanistan sunflower farming yeah the sunflower subcommittee osam bin laden has deputies who handle all of these details and listeners will note from our first episode that when al-Qaeda was formed its members were swearing allegiance to God.

And this is starting to change in the late 1990s.

Members are swearing bayat, which is a loyalty oath, to bin Laden personally when they join al-Qaeda.

For all of its jihadi fun camp vibes, it's not a democracy, right?

Osama bin Laden is exercising really strict control over al-Qaeda in these years.

Yeah, so those kind of cult leader vibes are growing, aren't they, around bin Laden?

Whether it's the oaths and whether it's the media interviews, it's this sense that he is this prince-like figure.

almost a kind of spiritual leader as well, even though he didn't have much spiritual training.

He's really trying to turn himself into something different now at this point.

And this is probably a good point in the story to talk a little bit about his own personal charisma, because if you listen to the fatwa that you read, Gordon, or you watch some of the videos that have become very well known, these interviews from the 1990s or much later when he's in hiding, a lot of his public speeches that get disseminated by video.

I don't think we have a great appreciation in the West for how personally charismatic he could be.

And it is interesting that a lot of the followers, a lot of the people who are with him in Afghanistan in this period describe their first meeting with Osama bin Laden as a spiritual experience, right?

It is really true sort of cult leader vibes.

He is bringing people into his aura and into al-Qaeda in part by virtue of his own abilities as a recruiter.

and a charismatic leader and judge of people.

He's kind of turning al-Qaeda in this period into a kind of jihadi club med in Afghanistan, where there are a lot of people around him.

There's a lot of PE, there's a lot of sunflower farming, and there's a lot of sort of, you know, embryonic terrorist plotting mixed in.

And his family, because we know you're very interested in his wives and kids, David.

So the family are there, aren't they, as well?

Oh, that's right.

Yeah.

Listeners of the first few episodes will remember that Gordon Carrera, especially if you watched on video, is sort of rolling his eyes anytime I would talk about polygamy or Osama bin Laden's finances.

So, I mean, we're just, Gordon and I are

agreeing to disagree on what's interesting here.

Although I think we can both agree, Gordon, that it is interesting that Al-Qaeda was playing a lot of volleyball in this period.

Volleyball also featured as kind of Al-Qaeda's sport of choice in the mid-1990s, presumably in scenes just like in Top Gun.

I would imagine it's very much like the Top Gun volleyball scene where Al-Qaeda guys are well-oiled and kind of, you know, in a really rough and dumb volleyball game for high stakes at Tarnak Farms.

Bin Laden also apparently played soccer in this period, but he had really consistent back pain, which forced him to walk with the cane.

So the soccer was a little harder.

I don't exactly know how he was able to manage volleyball with that either, but I guess he liked it.

There's also more horse stuff, Gordon.

Bin Laden takes his family out on massive horseback riding excursions.

He's teaching his wives to use guns.

He is also, we should note,

very personally sort of miserly, right?

So when his son Saad asks for a gift so he can get married in this period, Osama refuses to give him a gift, tells his son to basically take a plot of land, farm it, save the money, and then get married later on.

He's not abusive to his family.

There seems to be no indication of that, at least in the sort of more traditional forms, but he's not particularly generous either.

And in this period, the Taliban give him a parcel of land.

up in the Toribora mountains, and he sort of splits his time between Tarnak Farms and Tora Bora.

Now, just from the family standpoint to round this out, Gordon, he's got three wives and a dozen kids with him there in 1996, right?

So they are all at this massive compound and heading up to Tora Bora for weekends in the mountains.

Now, Osama bin Laden is doing a lot of reading in this period.

He's reading about America.

He's reading a very strange collection of books about America, I would say.

He has on his shelf in the late 1990s a book of undetermined origin about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's alleged plan to control the world.

He's got copies, I think as all good jihadi terrorists should, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is one of Hitler's favorites, sort of essentially a fabricated story that is very anti-Semitic.

And I think for him in this period, it's fair to say that the line between his fantasies and reality is perhaps getting harder and harder to discern.

And then, Gordon, in 1998, I think there is a kind of important theological addendum to the fatwa that you so eloquently read at the beginning of this episode, which is that al-Qaeda releases a message that essentially says it is an individual duty for every Muslim to kill Americans wherever they may be found.

And Osama bin Laden cites this verse from the Quran that says, quote, kill the unbelievers wherever you find them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them.

And what's interesting is he actually makes this point in some of his interviews, doesn't he?

He says, there is no distinction between the American military or civilians.

Yeah, they are all the same.

They are all to be targeted.

And I mean, that is a very significant statement because it's an indication of his intent, not just to target the U.S.

military, as maybe we've seen in some of the previous attacks or U.S.

officials, but actually go after U.S.

civilians.

So he's issuing that warning at this point.

I think in the early 90s, there actually are some statements from Bin Laden that indicate he was concerned about civilian casualties or perhaps more so or drew some distinction between civilian and military targets.

By the late 1990s, there's no distinction in his mind whatsoever

between those.

And so he's really laid out, I mean, he's not a religious scholar with any formal training, but he has, I think, really laid out a kind of formal theological justification for the war that he has already announced.

The question is, he's making these statements.

He's saying all these things quite publicly in interviews and elsewhere.

What's the U.S.

doing about this?

What's the CIA doing?

Because there is this guy making quite clear his intent is to kill Americans.

Well, well listeners will recall that there is a group in cia called alex station led by a zealous gentleman named mike schoyer and his manson family who are watching osama bin laden very very closely in this period and who are seeing his public profile rise and are increasing the amount of time energy and collection importantly that is being expended on him.

And in the summer of 97,

the Americans get a break.

So there's been an interrogation of a defector from al-Qaeda that has generated, I think, one of the first kind of maps of the organization, that bureaucratic structure, who's actually in it, where are they?

What are they doing in Afghanistan or around the world?

And that leads to technical collection on Al-Qaeda, phone taps on the organization, including the CIA probably beginning to listen in on Osama bin Laden's satellite phone calls.

Surely the NSA.

You're giving the CIA credit for the money.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah, no.

I just kind of do that naturally.

Naturally, just to our friends at the NSA and in the signals intelligence community.

I apologize to my friends at the NSA.

But this is actually a very interesting point because he is calling London, I think, with this satellite phone.

He's calling all his contacts.

This is his main modem communication.

The people, when they go interview him, see him using it.

And it becomes one of the great kind of intelligence gathering advantages that the US and the UK have is that they are in his satellite phone communications, calls to his mother, all the the kind of plotting he's doing.

Interestingly enough, there's a kind of big thing in the media actually about the fact that at some point he realizes they're listening into him and stops using it.

And for a long time, actually, people from the signals intelligence world would have a massive go at the media and say, it's because you exposed the fact we were listening to his calls.

And actually, I think that's not entirely true.

I think he worked out that they were listening to his calls.

All the media did was report he uses a satellite phone.

But there was a lot of media bashing around it because it was actually a real insight into what he was doing, which I think switches off soon after this period around 98.

And they lose that insight.

Well, and I think it's this period of collecting on his calls and on al-Qaeda more broadly that starts to flip the switch from the CIA's standpoint, from, oh, this guy's kind of a financier of international terrorism to, oh, wait a minute.

He's actually the leader of this group and he has his hands in the operational planning.

He's directing the operational planning, right?

That's the change here.

And so, what happens is in 1997, the CIA begins planning to try to actually render Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan to the U.S., where he might be put on trial.

Now, we should introduce a major CIA character at this point.

It's George Tennant.

He's the director of Central Intelligence in 1997.

He has just been confirmed in July of that year.

He's a very gregarious, hardworking, politically astute man of D.C.

who is sort of famous for chomping on cigars.

Although I think by this point, he'd had a heart attack and had given up smoking them, but he just sort of chomped on them.

He's the son of Greek immigrants, and he's basically been a kind of perpetual staffer in D.C.

in increasingly important roles in Congress, in intelligence oversight, on the Hill, and then in the White House, right?

He is a people person, par excellence.

He's very charming.

He's very blunt and direct.

I didn't overlap with him at the CIA, but there are stories upon stories of him just sort of wandering around headquarters, meeting people, sitting down at cafeteria tables.

I think he's one of the most important directors of the agency in its modern history.

And the plan that gets cooked up in 1997 is to use Afghan tribesmen who are assets left over from the days of the Soviet invasion.

Their code name, we love a good cryptonym, Gordon, on the rest is classified.

And you might have a different way of pronouncing this.

When I look at this word, I see trodpints.

Trodpints or trodpints?

Trodpints.

It's a weird one.

Yeah.

It's not the best cryptonym we've heard on this program.

They had been known as GE, the digraphic of GE Sr.

during the Soviet days, but they're the trod pints at this point.

A CIA official in his memoir describing this group said their fighting record was, quote, undistinguished.

But they were supplied with weapons, cash, vehicles, and como equipment.

Essentially, it's also a sign of just how kind of hollowed out the CIA has become in Afghanistan by this point: is that we have this group of crappy tribesmen who are going to be called upon to go after Osama bin Laden.

And the plan that they cook up is to actually send this group to Tarnak Farms, to this compound, to kidnap Osama bin Laden.

And Gordon, maybe there with this operational planning getting underway, we should take a break.

When we come back, we'll see how the CIA and the Trod Pints attempt to snatch up Osama bin Laden.

See you after the break.

Welcome back.

We're looking at this curiously titled Trod Pints plan in which the CIA is looking to capture Osama bin Laden using Afghan tribesmen.

Slightly mad plan, perhaps.

To kidnap him and put him on a shipping container and then ship him back like a bit of cargo.

Is that right?

Well, it's actually even crazier than that.

George Tennett, the CIA director in his memoir, wrote that the plan was literally that Osama bin Laden would be kidnapped by rolling him up into a rug that appears in the memoir.

So they were going to roll him up in a rug.

The Trod Pints were going to enter this AD building compound, take him to a cave outside Kandahar.

And then the plan was they would hide there for a month or so so that the American role would become less obvious.

Some of Bin Laden would then be taken to Pakistan, flown to the U.S., essentially inside a shipping container, which would be fitted into a C-130.

Tariffed on the way in.

Tariffed.

What is the tariff from Pakistan?

That's a tariff rate on the Pakistani carpet containing a jihadi terrorist.

Yeah, exactly.

What are you going to pay on this cargo?

Yeah.

Well, and he's going to be seated in a dentist chair that they had purpose-built for for a tall guy because bin Laden's about six foot four.

There'd be a medic that would go along.

There would be an FBI special agent who would read him his rights when he landed.

But the big question, Gordon, as if everything we just said doesn't raise a number of big questions, was

what do you do with Osama bin Laden when he arrives?

You know, is he going to be indicted in the United States?

What would the count be?

What's the charge?

So the CIA is well within its rights to render fugitives from abroad, but there's a presidential ban in case anyone is applying the sort of post-9-11 lens to this.

At this point in time, the CIA doesn't have authorization to just kill the guy, right?

There's a presidential ban on assassinations, which has been in place since the Ford administration.

And it means that the CIA and the Trodpins have to be sure that the operation doesn't turn into an assassination hit.

And there is, I think, something, Gordon, which listeners might remember from our first couple episodes on Team Alpha's experience in Afghanistan in the days after 9-11, which is Afghan spray and pray, which is when Afghan fighters will just start to fire their gun all over the place in the middle of a battle, kind of come what may.

And I think the fear on the part of the CIA officers who are planning this is that they're going to end up with Osama bin Laden dead.

And then you're going to have CIA officers who could actually be in legal jeopardy because they have conducted an assassination without any any kind of legal authorization from the White House to do so.

Now, a CIA group, probably inside the Directorate of Operations outside of Alex Station, reviews the plan.

They give it a 30% chance of success.

Which seems high to me.

Maybe seems a little high.

Yeah, I agree.

Mike Scheuer, the head of Alex Station, obviously doesn't agree with that.

But George Tennett, the CIA director, is briefed on the operation.

He decides to scrap it, turn off the raid.

And I think it's interesting, actually, again, as as a measure of how little influence Scheuer has in this period, because for some reason, this plan is briefed all the way up the chain of the Directorate of Operations, and it gets to tenant.

And I mean,

Scheuer's an analyst.

Schoyer is an analyst running this operational unit.

He's cooking up this plan, and it gets briefed all the way up only to get rejected.

Also, by the way, I mean, Clinton does not see the plan, but the White House, the team at the National Security Council from from the policy side, kind of have an open disdain for it, right?

Because it's basically a frontal assault by poorly trained Afghan tribesmen on a massive walled compound.

And I've spoken to Shoya, and this is not the only one of his plans that gets rejected, and he is very bitter about this and the others.

We might come back to some of the others later.

So this one gets rejected.

Actually, it might have been one of the last chances when it was relatively straightforward to get to bin Laden because they knew where he was.

He was at Tarnak Farms.

He seemed to be based there and they knew where he was.

because it's at this point he kind of starts to go off the radar much more, both his satellite phone and his own personal movements.

It changes.

And I guess the crucial reason is because he knows he's got something big in store.

He is about to launch the real first salvo of his war on the United States and it's coming and he knows it.

And so he's going to ground.

This game of cat and mouse that's gone on for a couple years after he's openly declared war on America is about to come to an end.

And it comes to an end on August 7th of 1998.

In the morning, two teams of suicide bombers roll through Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Some of the bombers have sworn fealty to Al-Qaeda.

Others had never met Osama bin Laden.

But they've all been living quietly in East Africa since they had been trained in Afghanistan a few years before.

So they've been helped by al-Qaeda operatives flown in from Afghanistan to help manufacture the bombs.

And shortly before 10.30 in the morning, a truck bomb goes off outside the U.S.

Embassy in Nairobi.

It wrecks the embassy, the building next door, a bank a little further away.

There are 213 dead, including 12 Americans.

Osama bin Laden himself had chosen the target years before,

but he's kind of delegated the details to his field commanders.

He'd picked Nairobi because he thought it was a hub for U.S.

troops going in and out of Somalia.

He'd been shown photographs of of the embassy and Osama bin Laden had picked the spot to point the truck bomb.

His hands are all over this, quite literally.

The bomb goes off on a Friday morning.

It had been timed, so in theory, observant Muslims should be at the mosque in prayer.

So I guess in bin Laden's kind of twisted world, the Muslims who are not praying are worthy of death.

And then nine minutes later, there's another explosion in Dar es Salaam.

in Tanzania, killing 11.

No Americans die.

By sheer luck, an embassy water tanker is actually parked between the truck bomb and the building and it absorbs most of the impact.

The thing about this is that most of the people killed, by far the majority, more than 200 of the people killed, are Africans.

Yeah.

Not Americans.

I mean, he's targeted American embassies, but the result is he's killed innocent Africans.

I mean,

it's tragic and shocking and absurd, but it's also a real wake-up call, isn't it, for the United States that someone is willing to carry out such carnage with no warning against the United States.

In that last episode, Gordon, we did a brief run-through of kind of the mental model and the ideology of Osama bin Laden.

And I think this is a great example of how he believes that innocent Africans, Muslims, just random people who happen to be walking by these embassies on this Friday morning, I think he would say that those deaths are regrettable, but justifiable, right?

They're justified because unless Osama bin Laden, in his view, conducts these sort of attacks, America will continue to encroach on the Islamic world.

And so I think what he would say is he's killing human shields that the Americans have sort of taken in order to limit death in the future, right?

I mean, it's crazy.

But that's how I think in his brain, he justifies the fact that one of, you know, really the opening mass casualty attack in his war on the United States.

kills 212 Africans

and only 12 Americans.

And it's pretty clear, pretty quickly, isn't it, that it is bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

I think there's someone who was supposed to be involved in it, is captured in Kenya.

They get phone numbers.

Very quickly, it's clear that it's bin Laden that's behind this and al-Qaeda.

And then the question becomes, you know, what do you do about it?

I think within about a week, it's clear that the CIA knows it's Osama bin Laden.

We should note that it's not like on the day of he's claiming credit, but between some of the arrests that had taken place in Kenya and Tanzania and some analysis of the phones that had been collected, the CIA knows within a week that it's al-Qaeda and it's Osama bin Laden.

Now, Bill Clinton wants to respond.

He is in the middle of publicly acknowledging his affair with Monica Lewinsky at this point.

He's on vacation in Martha's Vineyard, sleeping on the couch, probably apologizing to Hillary.

I mean, I actually think Peter Bergen in his book on this period writes that Clinton was actually sleeping on the couch in Martha's Vineyard.

This becomes a big part of the story, doesn't it?

Because the pressure is on to do something, but this film had come out in the summer called Wag the Dog, which is actually, it's a great film, which was all about a president trying to distract from his affair by launching a military operation.

And so he's caught in the domestic politics.

And it's the kind of eternal tragedy of Bill Clinton, that someone who was a talented politician on one hand, the fact that he couldn't kind of keep it in his pants really did undermine his presidency.

And this is a good example of it, isn't it?

Because everyone is seeing his response through the lens of the Monica Lewinsky story and his affair with the intern.

I suppose, though I will note that I don't think that there were many other good options.

I mean, we'll talk about how we respond here because, I mean, basically, the options are we need to fire cruise missiles at al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan, training camps.

The CIA and the NSA, Gordon, have intercepts suggesting that Osama bin Laden is going to visit some of these camps the next day.

There's some debate on the quality of that intel, but Clinton has to authorize launching these strikes on the 20th of August if he wants to kill Osama bin Laden.

Because, you know, listeners to this podcast, if you are under a certain age, you will be forgiven for not knowing that at this point in time, we do not have a constant stay-a-drone capability over Afghanistan or Pakistan.

There's a delay in launching these cruise missiles to hitting the target, right?

And you need to know where someone's going to be hours from when you launch.

You can't watch it.

You can't do it in real time.

So, targets get picked.

There's these training camps.

There's a tannery owned by Osama bin Laden and a Sudanese factory that's linked to him that's supposedly producing VX, VX, nerve agent.

Clinton basically says don't bomb the tannery and he authorizes the other strikes.

The U.S.

Navy fires 75 cruise missiles at 750,000 a pop.

So the cost of these strikes is a cool $56.2 million

in 1998 money.

Destroys Al-Qaeda training camps in eastern Afghanistan, which sounds cool, but they're actually built out of like mud and crappy wood.

So it's really nothing.

Bin Laden is not there.

He may have heard rumors of U.S.

diplomatic personnel being evacuated.

He might have just not been there.

But you have something to say, Gordon.

Yeah, no, I have something to say.

I mean, scoop.

Well, no, I don't have a scoop.

I just remember this.

In Sudan, they hit this kind of, what was supposed to be a chemical weapons factory, and it turns out to be a pharmaceutical factory.

I mean, that was bad intelligence.

I mean, this is a significant pharmaceutical factory for Sudan, which gets taken out by American cruise missiles.

Bad intelligence.

But also, the result of all of this is, I think, think, it's not just missing bin Laden, but it becomes a propaganda coup for bin Laden, doesn't it?

Because the Americans have fired these expensive missiles.

They've missed him.

He's eluded them.

They've hit a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.

So the kind of mythology that bin Laden is building about himself is only going to grow as a result.

This becomes a kind of plus for bin Laden rather than any damage to him and al-Qaeda.

That's right.

And I mean, we should also note another theme here of the Osama bin Laden story will be that you cannot trust the Pakistanis.

Because, I mean, a bunch of former CIA officials will basically come out and say in their memoirs that they think that bin Laden may have been tipped off by sources inside Pakistan, that these strikes were coming.

Because the missiles are going to fly over Pakistan, aren't they?

I think to go into Afghanistan.

So the U.S.

feels it has to warn the Pakistanis that the missiles are going to kind of overfly.

And that's where the risk is because of the potential relationship there between Pakistani intelligence.

That's the allegation.

I mean, the strikes kill 33 al-Qaeda members.

But again, those timber and mud hut camps are rebuilt within maybe a week, right?

So other than setting back the Sudanese pharmaceutical industry by several decades, the strikes accomplish almost nothing.

And you're right, Gordon.

It's not just that they don't accomplish any military objective or kill Osama bin Laden, but they turn him into a global celebrity.

Biographies of Osama bin Laden begin to go on sale in Pakistan and sell out instantly.

Osama in that period actually becomes a very common name for sons in Pakistan, because I think bin Laden is seen at this point as a fighter.

He is on the front lines of the fight against the infidel Americans who have stuck their fingers into the Middle East.

Interestingly, the strikes also cement the Taliban's determination not to hand Osama bin Laden over.

The Taliban see the missile strikes as a violation of their sovereignty.

And also, I think, feel honor-bound by these sort of Pashto, Pashtunwali tribal codes to offer offer hospitality to visitors, to offer asylum.

And, you know, it's complicated, but it basically, I think, hardens the Taliban to saying, well, we're not going to turn this guy over, right?

We're not going to kowtow to your pressure.

And the Saudis had been pushing the Taliban kind of quietly.

There were visits from Saudi intelligence officials, very senior Saudi intelligence officials throughout a lot of this period to try to go to Kabul and try to convince the Taliban to just hand bin Laden over.

Because I think at this point, the Saudis would have been willing to take him back,

take him off the table.

And the Taliban basically say, pound sand, and the Saudis will break off diplomatic relations.

But privately, the Taliban are furious at bin Laden.

And Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, actually visit Osama at his compound, and he tells him to leave.

And Osama bin Laden, I guess, convinces Mullah Omar to let him stay, kind of arguing that, look, if you give in to the Americans, if you give in to the Saudis, the decision is going to be un-Islamic.

And bin Laden in 98 is granted a reprieve of another year and a half, which is going to turn out to be a pretty crucial year and a half, to stay in Afghanistan and kind of figure things out.

Now, the Saudis, I've written in the notes, they send one more Hail Mary, which I guess wouldn't be the right term, send up a Hail Mary pass to try to get Osama to come home.

They send his mother to Afghanistan to see if she can convince him to come back.

She brings chocolates, which apparently Osama's children have never seen before, but Osama, of course, refuses to go back home.

It would have perhaps somewhat dented his image as global jihadist leader if his mother says come home and he comes home.

If you're convinced by your mother, he's close to his mother.

He respects his mother.

Yeah, but I still think that would be a bit weird.

So I don't know what they were thinking with that.

But yeah, didn't work.

That's right.

And now, Gordon, we have the nexus of the future of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's wives.

So you cannot prevent me from speaking about his marital choices in this part.

So bin Laden is realizing that the writing is on the wall and that he is going to have to find someplace to go after Afghanistan on his sort of itinerant global ways.

And he wants to go to Yemen next.

He's got family connections in Yemen.

I'm sure the Saudis will love him being right on their doorstep.

But he needs to ensure tribal protection.

Listeners will recall, if you're tracking how many wives does Osama bin Laden have with him at any point in time, he believes that he's permitted up to four.

Right now, in the late 90s, he has three.

One of them left him in Sudan, divorced him, and took her three children.

So he's short one potential wife, Gordon.

And he is looking for a wife to cement these sort of blood ties with a tribe in Yemen.

He is looking for a very pious teenager.

And they find one.

They find a 16-year-old in Yemen.

Osama bin Laden dispatches a bodyguard from Afghanistan with a $5,000 dowry.

Feels like he could have probably afforded a little bit more.

They are married in 2000 in Kandahar.

Her name is Amal, and she is younger than many of Osama bin Laden's children.

The other wives are very frustrated with this.

Thank you for the update on Osama bin Laden's marital statement.

You're welcome, Gordon.

What about the CIA, though?

This is the thing.

I'm not interested in talking about the CIA here, Gordon.

The rest is classified, not the rest is like family messages.

Could we get back to the CIA and what they're doing?

Because surely now the previous plan was vetoed, the missiles have missed.

You'd think the CIA would be kind of putting everything into this plan to go after it.

But it still feels like they're cooking up plans, aren't they?

But they're not getting put into action, really.

I find it's kind of bizarre at this period.

What did Trump say in the debate concepts of a plan?

I think

that's what the CIA is going to.

I mean, obviously, there's a tremendous amount of pressure building inside the CIA and at the White House to do something, right?

Yeah.

But

there really are nothing but bad options at this stage.

Now, George Tennett, the CIA director, begins writing letters to the White House asking for more funding for the counterterrorism mission.

Tenet wrote in his memoir that, quote, the fact is that by the mid to late 1990s, American intelligence was in chapter 11, just bankruptcy.

And neither Congress nor the executive branch did much about it.

Budgets had declined, as we mentioned last time, but the counterterrorism resourcing is starting to kind of pick up in the late 90s.

And Tenet writes a letter to the agency workforce in 1999, the title of which is We Are at War.

I mean, bin Laden has already declared war on the United States in 1996.

Tenet basically says we need to listen to this guy.

We are at war with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

And Tenet deputizes a man named Kofer Black, who is then the the chief of CTC, the Counterterrorism Center, to come up with a plan.

Yeah.

So Kofer Black, I mean, people who listen to our very first episodes, some of our earliest ones on the CIA in Afghanistan will remember him.

He's a very colorful character.

Deep, growly, gravelly voice, slightly Atlantic, mid-Atlantic accent, tough talking as well.

Interestingly enough, the thing about Kofer Black, and I've kind of met him a few times, is that he'd actually had some run-ins with Bin Laden even earlier in the 90s because he'd been in Khartoum as a head of station when bin Laden was in Sudan and he'd had some of bin Laden's operatives tail him out of the embassy so he kind of had this experience but he's a tough aggressive talking operator so you can see why he's the right person to put in charge of the counter-terrorist center and charge of this plan and yet when I look back on it now you still see that you know there's plans there's memoranda there's notifications there's all these things

but they're never actually executed they never actually kind of pull the trigger on anything, do they?

I'm a little bit of two minds on this because I agree with you that the theme of this episode really is a series of missed opportunities to get Osama bin Laden prior to 9-11.

Yeah.

But we should also note that once Tenet and the CIA

understand that Osama bin Laden is coming.

for us, in particular after the East Africa bombings, there is a push to improve our collection and our understanding of al-Qaeda pretty significantly.

I mean, there's a bunch of human sources who get recruited in this period.

There's a lot more technical collection.

Alex Station is beefed up to more than 40 people.

There's a bunch of connections with foreign partners on Al-Qaeda that hadn't existed before.

I mean, interestingly, there's a PDB, President's Daily Brief, in December, December the 4th of 1998, which is titled, quote, Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack U.S.

Aircraft and Other Attacks.

And so there's a lot of strategic warning, I think you could say, about what al-Qaeda is up to.

And yet there's an inability, I think, to translate that into

practical efforts and operations to stop these attacks and to stop al-Qaeda from ultimately carrying out 9-11.

Yeah, there's a kind of memorandum of notification authorizing the CIA to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Yeah, and this is Christmas of 98.

Yeah, so they've got a bit more authorization.

And yet, when you talk to the Mike Shuias of this world, which I did kind of years ago, there is an anger there that there were opportunities to potentially capture or kill him, but there was always a reason not to.

So, you know, he will say there was one time they thought he was going to be in a particular place and they had some intelligence, but then it was opposite a mosque, and the worry was that, you know, shrapnel from a missile strike might hit the mosque and anger people.

Another time, Bin Laden was thought to be out hunting with some people who were actually from a royal family, linked to a royal family in the Gulf.

And again, the thought was, oh, there are kind of diplomatic reasons not to do it.

So if you listen to the Mike Shories of this world, there is a kind of deeper abiding sense that what was happening was he was offering plans, which are going up through Tenet to the White House.

And somewhere along the line, someone was saying no.

Now, there was always a reason that it was too risky or it wasn't going to work or it would cause diplomatic offense to another country.

It might cause outrage.

So you do get a sense that even though George Tenet said, we're at war with al-Qaeda, in terms of the actual willingness to take risks to do it, just not quite sure it's followed through when I look back at that period.

I guess in one sense, we do need to remember that this is all happening prior to 9-11.

Yeah, hindsight.

Osama bin Laden is considered to be a threat to U.S.

national security.

There has been an effort inside the counterterrorism center to do more, right?

But we do not have the shadow of almost 3,000 dead Americans cast over this story yet.

I do think it's also important, important, Gordon, to note that in that memorandum of notification, which is essentially a covert action finding that is going to authorize the CIA to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, there is a deep and still ongoing disagreement, I think, over what authorities the CIA actually had in this period, right?

What could the CIA legally do against Osama bin Laden?

And I think that Scheuer, again, is the head of Alex Station, Kofer Black, the head of the counterterrorism center, George Tenet, the CIA director, has said that we didn't actually have authorization to go out and just kill bin Laden.

There's a line in Tenet's memoir where he says he was told by the Attorney General, Janet Reno, that an attempt by the CIA to kill bin Laden would have been illegal.

And I think really in this period, the CIA believed that it had justification to kill him only if it judged that capture wasn't feasible during the operation.

So there's a lot of ambiguity.

Your best sort of hammer at this point are those trodpints, that Afghan militia, which you kind of figure is going to result probably in maybe their deaths or in Osama bin Laden's death or the death of his family members if they go and assault him somewhere.

He's also moving around a lot more in the sort of post-East Africa 98, 99, and 2000.

So he's a harder target.

And there was a kind of inching forward of these plans to kind of do more.

And it just was never clear enough.

There was never enough weight given.

I think maybe there weren't even appropriate or useful levers to really get him in this period.

You sort of have to disrupt the Afghan sanctuary in this stage.

And it was never going to be on Clinton's bingo card to invade, right?

I mean, they were not going to invade Afghanistan.

And in this period, I think it's probably fair to say there was never even a consideration of using a U.S.

Special Forces team to go in and actually get bin Laden.

But I think in retrospect, you say maybe something like that should have been considered.

December of 98, the CIA gets tipped off that Sam bin Laden is going to be at a guest house in Kandahar.

You know, should we fire a cruise missile?

Clinton doesn't want to.

There's worries about collateral damage.

Mike Schauer goes bananas.

You mentioned that falconing.

incident, Gordon, and this is in early 1999.

Sam bin Laden is apparently going out to visit this desert hunting camp.

The CIA has an asset at the camp who can tell the CIA when Sam is coming for dinner, but they see this group of what they think are maybe Emirati royals.

And so there's concern that what if we kill members of the royal family?

They don't do it.

There were a number of instances where I think particularly if someone in the White House had said, we need to kill this guy, history might have been totally different.

Who said no is an interesting question because I remember talking to Richard Clark, who was the kind of counterterrorism advisor to President Clinton and then President Bush.

And he would say, well, the CIA would bring these plans up to the White House.

And they'd be like, these guys, meaning Mike Schura and Alex Descher, come up with these plans.

But when they got briefed up to the White House, they'd go, but they're kind of nutty plans and they probably won't work.

And then they'd go back to Scheuer and say, well, the White House has said no to you.

So whether it was the CIA leadership or the White House saying no, or quite how that happened is a little bit unclear.

But the result is, I guess, Scheuer gets increasingly angry, doesn't he?

And furious at these missed opportunities and saying that officials would have blood on their hands.

He's basically writing emails and memos that are going around the seventh floor at Langley, which is frowned upon in a bureaucracy.

Essentially saying, look, yeah, if the American people find out later that we've missed all these opportunities, you will quite literally have blood on your hands.

Unsurprisingly, he is relieved of his command of Alex Station.

And

he's told he'll get a cash award and a medal.

And Scheuer apparently says, if you try to to give me medal and a money, they'll be back on your desk if I don't shove them up your ass, which is exactly the kind of person that Mike Scheuer was.

He is then sent to a job in the CIA library where he quietly works on a lengthy report on Osama bin Laden.

And it is now a book called Through Our Enemy's Eyes,

which some of this is drawn.

Yes.

He wrote it anonymously while still a CIA officer and had it published.

That's when I first met him and interviewed him when he was writing that book.

But yeah, so he's ignored it.

But al-Qaeda and bin Laden are still plotting.

And I guess the key thing here in this period is we're heading towards 9-11 and the CIA is looking at all these plans.

But al-Qaeda is plotting and it's plotting bigger and bigger things.

There's a plot to bomb LA airport in 1999.

I remember there was a New Year's Eve plot linked to Jordan, I think, to do something huge there.

And then there's, I think, a particularly significant one against the USS Cole, a warship in Aden in Yemen, isn't it?

Which actually killed 17 Americans.

I mean, 17 American sailors killed in this.

I mean it is yet another sign that bin Laden is absolutely determined to do something spectacular.

But still there's no kind of retaliation.

There's nothing happening.

When you look back on it now, you look at this kind of growing tide of attacks and ever more ambitious attacks and you can sense something building, can't you?

That bin Laden is building towards trying to do something more ambitious.

Now, I know that's hindsight, but now looking back, it feels very ominous, doesn't it?

It does.

And I think, in particular, the lesson that bin Laden will take away from the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen is that the Americans are weak.

They're not going to do anything.

Because, I mean, that one, unlike East Africa, 17 American sailors die.

There's a hole the size of a house blown inside of this destroyer while it's refueling at port in Yemen.

And there's no retaliation.

The CIA knows shortly after

that al-Qaeda is involved and nothing happens, right?

I mean, literally no reaction to it.

So I think bin Laden's takeaway from really the opening salvos of his war is that he's getting what he wants, right?

The United States is a paper tiger.

And if he does something really big, it will eventually flee the Middle East, which is exactly what he wants.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And so I think with Osama bin Laden eluding the CIA and planning something spectacular.

Let's end there.

And when we come back next time, we'll see how all of this leads to 9-11.

But Gordon,

if listeners cannot wait and want to binge listen the conclusion of this series, you don't have to wait.

You can become a member of the Declassified Club.

You can become a secret squirrel.

And you can get access to all of that now.

If you want to join, and we highly encourage it, you can go to therestisclassified.com and binge listen to Gordon and I to your heart's content.

That's right.

But for those who don't sign up, see you Wednesday for the next episode.

We'll see you next time.