394. Road To 9/11: Hijackers, CIA Failures, and America’s Darkest Day (Part 6)

Empire: World History

In the final episode of 'Empire: World History' Season 394, hosts Anita Arnon and William Trimple are joined by CNN national security analys

Key takeaways

• The Bush administration's Cold War mindset prevented them from recognizing non-state terrorist threats like Al-Qaeda as a serious danger.
• Despite multiple high-level warnings from the CIA, strategic intelligence was not effectively communicated or acted upon by policymakers.

Main topics

• Intelligence failures before September 11th
• CIA-FBI communication breakdown

Notable quotes

"They did a stellar job of warning the Bush administration throughout the spring and summer of 2001 that something very big was going to happen."

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a somber reflection on how multiple missed opportunities—ranging from intelligence

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods, sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation, and that no longer needed. happen ever again, because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo, it records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards. I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With OnePress, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It Speaker 5 (0:52) also has Speaker 4 (0:52) a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud. which calls up details of hazy, long-gone conversations in seconds. Empire listeners can go to uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. That's uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. And use the promo code empire to get 10 % off any Plaud device. Speaker 2 (1:26) Welcome back to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And Speaker 4 (1:28) me, William Trimple. And back for the finale, we have CNN's amazing national security analyst and the author of several books on al-Qaeda, including the Zama bin Laden I know, and The Longest War. Peter Bergen, welcome back. We have a long and complicated story to tell today, but it's one of the most tragic and extraordinary stories of our age, really. Speaker 2 (1:52) Peter, you know, the last episode, we sort of left everybody with that vision of, you know, a blatant act of war against the US military. I think, as you put it, you know, the ship that wasn't meant to be sinkable, one of the most powerful symbols of American muscularity, and it's attacked. And bin Laden... must have been waiting for retaliation. I mean, he ordered his camps to evacuate, expecting American retaliation. But what actually happens? Speaker 1 (2:20) Really nothing, Anita. I mean, so the Clinton administration is, the attack happens in October. The Clinton administration is in its last four months. And there's a little bit of a debate about who's responsible. CIA relatively quickly says it's Al-Qaeda. Then the Bush administration comes in and they sit on their hands for seven months, even though it's very clear that Al-Qaeda has done this. It's important to understand the Bush administration when they came into office. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, had been Gerald Ford, Secretary of Defense. Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, was a Sovietologist. These are people who lived and breathed the Cold War, and they could not understand that a guy like bin Laden, a group like al-Qaeda, not supported by a state like Iraq, which they considered the main threat, could be a problem. I mean, they literally just, even though they were getting plenty of warnings that al-Qaeda was a real problem, and, you know, U.S. embassies have blown up in Africa, the coal have blown up, but they just, they couldn't get around, their heads around the idea that a non-state actor, to use the jargon, was really going to be a threat to the united states and Speaker 4 (3:23) how did that failure of comprehension at the top play out when you've got all these specialists working away producing the data um with or without uh the the top guys uh realizing it how did they did they stymie it did they not give it the Speaker 1 (3:39) resources that were needed they they you know so the cia works for the policy makers and the cia they call them customers they're customers at the white house and The CIA, what is the job of the CIA? The CIA's job is to provide strategic warning to policymakers. You know, that is actually their central job. And... They did a stellar job of warning the Bush administration throughout the spring and summer of 2001 that something very big was going to happen. And we know all that because of the 9-11 Commission, which the Bush administration fought very hard not to allow to happen. And there was a series of warnings by the CIA. Bin Laden determined a strike in the U.S. Bin Laden threats are real. And they were all highly classified. But you didn't really need access to classified information to know that something was brewing. I completed my first book about Bin Laden a week before 9-11. know, fairly focused on the issue. So, you know, it gets to the weakness in the system, which is, you know, if the White House or the commander in chief, if he or she chooses to ignore something. The CIA can do the best job in history and it doesn't really matter. And they did a great job of warning strategically that something was brewing during those several months before 9-11. Speaker 2 (4:49) Because also, I mean, USS Cole may be smoking in a harbour in Aden, but there are already task forces that have been meant to be looking into bin Laden, as you say, you've got a book ready to roll. And we talked about John O'Neill in the last episode, that tough talking New Yorker with... many girlfriends on the side, all of whom he's going to marry, flashy suits, sort of, you know, sort of hitting the ground like a, you know, he's hunting mobsters. I mean, how quickly does it become clear to, you know, him and how loudly does he shout that actually, you know what, stop looking anywhere else, stop talking about anyone else. This is one guy, it's bin Laden, it's Al-Qaeda. Speaker 1 (5:31) Yeah. So the FBI very quickly deploys to Yemen. after the USS Cole was blowed up. John O'Neill leads that task force. John O'Neill has pretty sharp elbows, and Barbara Boudini, who's the American ambassador in Yemen, basically thinks that he is, you know, kind of pissing off their Yemeni hosts by kind of running this very, you know, like FBI tough investigation in Yemen, and it's a very different culture. And the Yemenis have something to potentially... there are sympathizers to al-qaeda within the yemeni power structure there's a major tribal leader called tariq al-fadli who's sort of a bin laden associate so there are people in the yemeni uh power structure that um you know wouldn't be happy about a big fbi investigation into what's going on in yemen and eventually robert bodine expels john o'neill from yemen And, you know, they have a very tense relationship. Speaker 4 (6:28) What's he done wrong? Is he interviewing people using coercive tactics or, I mean, other rumors that they're torture or anything? Or is it Speaker 1 (6:35) just Speaker 4 (6:36) that he's rude? Speaker 1 (6:36) No, he's just he's a hard charging guy who believes Al Qaeda and bin Laden are a major threat to the United States. And he's not, you know, he doesn't care if he tramples on local concerns about whatever they may be. And he's just, you know, he's a New Yorker. He's a guy from New York. He's in Yemen. It's a very different kind of culture. And it moves slowly. And it's a very. poverty-stricken country. And of course, it's bin Laden's ancestral homeland. And O'Neill, he's running an FBI investigation. He's not running a sort of Yemeni tribal kind of get-together. Speaker 4 (7:07) Now, meanwhile, while all this is going on, and there's the American ambassador in Yemen fighting with the FBI guy, the 9-11 hijackers have already arrived in America. Tell us about these two. Khalid al-Midyar. Speaker 1 (7:22) and Nawaf al-Khamsi. Well, this is a very interesting story. So these guys are known to the CIA because they've attended a kind of a 9-11 planning meeting. Now, of course, the CIA doesn't know it's a 9-11 planning meeting, but they are monitoring these guys and they meet up in Malaysia. The CIA understands that they are al-Qaeda associates or something and does something. While it's provided great strategic warning about the threat from al-Qaeda, it does a big mistake from a tactical point of view, which is it doesn't watch list al-Hamzi and al-Madar, which would mean that they would be put on a State Department watch list, which would mean that they, you know, couldn't, you know, that they would be detained at an American border or, you know, questioned. And they don't do that until August the 25th, 2001, very shortly before 9-11. Now, this is not some, I don't think it's some grand conspiracy. It's the cock-up view of history rather than the conspiracy. Speaker 4 (8:18) Which is almost always the real reason. Speaker 1 (8:20) Yeah. You can't use the word cock-up in America where I'm sitting because people don't know what you mean. You've got a lot of British listeners. Speaker 1 (8:33) Anyway, so I think it's basically just a kind of one of like a lot of people know that these guys have visas to the United States. There are 60 people in the CIA who have access to this information. But they just don't tell the FBI. They don't tell the State Department. And these guys arrive in the United States. Speaker 2 (8:51) Yeah. I mean, can we just dwell on it for one more second? Because this is where all the conspiracy theories sort of start, you know, sparking off. Okay. So is it true the CIA have been tracking these particular men for months? Is it true? you know, they've wiretapped a phone number that belongs to them. Is it true that they've knocked on the FBI's door and said, these guys are dangerous, we need to do something about it? I mean, is that all? And, you know, that they even give them a phone number saying, look, here's a phone number that is being used by them. I mean, what more can they do? I mean, is all of that true? Speaker 1 (9:24) Yeah, it's true. I mean, it goes back to, A, a certain amount of rivalry between the CIA and the FBI, and B, There was something, and this may be a little technical, but there was something called the wall between the CIA and the FBI before 9-11. So CIA collects intelligence, FBI collects evidence for a criminal trial. These are two very different things. And so the CIA was actually not allowed to share a lot of intelligence information with the FBI, even though the FBI was conducting the investigation into al-Qaeda through its New York field office. So there were some structural issues about why there was, and there was this rivalry between two agencies, which is typical in bureaucracies. But yeah, there was information in the system that retrospectively was pretty, you know, these guys were... al-Qaeda associates that are in the United States that was known to the CIA. The FBI only found out about it on August 25, 2001. So that was a big failure by the CIA. I don't think it was... There were some FBI special agents who believed that the CIA were actually... These were assets of the CIA who they were trying to recruit. I don't see evidence for that. I just think it was a failure of communication. Speaker 4 (10:31) And these guys had come to America via an Al Speaker 1 (10:35) -Qaeda conference in Kuala Lumpur. Is that right? That is correct. And they barely spoke English. Now, this is actually something that is interesting. We now know, at the time, we didn't know what I'm going to say, which I think is interesting. There was a Saudi official who greeted them in California where they landed. He found them housing in his apartment building. This is interesting. He signed their lease. uh provided them with money he introduced them to the local community had a party for them Speaker 1 (11:07) We now know that what's so interesting is that you're both historians doing a history show. We, you know, it was only in 2024 that we found out the Saudi official had recorded a videotape of the U.S. Capitol and he'd shown where the police posts were. He explained where the airport was, Reagan Airport. Like Speaker 2 (11:30) doing a recce? Speaker 1 (11:31) Doing a recce. It's a casing videotape. Speaker 4 (11:34) unequivocally it's not just a tourist shape it's not just showing the sights of washington yeah