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Episode: S4 Episode 6 - "Ground Zeroes"

Author: Blowback
Duration: 01:03:52

Episode Shownotes

The Afghan jihad spreads to Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_19
We will not rest in our efforts to find who is responsible for this outrage, to pursue them, and to punish them. Anyone who attacks one American attacks every American, and we protect and defend our own.

00:00:20 Speaker_18
I'm not sure anything went wrong with the security plan. What went wrong is that we lost a lot of wonderful people and we had a lot of people injured.

00:00:28 Speaker_09
In June of 1996, a bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 American soldiers stationed in the kingdom. The attack took place at an outpost in Tehran on the east coast, one of the U.S. military installations soon to be condemned in bin Laden's fatwas.

00:00:51 Speaker_31
Secretary of Defense William Perry arrived in Tehran days after a bombing left its threatening mark.

00:00:56 Speaker_09
The FBI's chief of counterterrorism, John O'Neill, flew to the kingdom to investigate the murders. What O'Neill found was the first of many instances where the full story of Osama bin Laden's activities and connections was off limits.

00:01:18 Speaker_31
Kerry brought a three-pronged message pointed straight at the perpetrators. Increased security, anti-terrorism readiness, and a firm commitment to Saudi-U.S. relations.

00:01:28 Speaker_05
Quote, O'Neill went to Saudi Arabia himself to convince King Fahd to get the Saudi authorities to cooperate.

00:01:35 Speaker_05
But that was a lost cause, because Saudi officials interrogated the principal suspects themselves, while the FBI was relegated to collecting material evidence from the bomb site.

00:01:46 Speaker_05
For O'Neill, who became obsessed with capturing Bin Laden and increasingly frustrated by his own country's behavior on the subject, all of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Bin Laden's organization, O'Neill said, can be found in Saudi Arabia.

00:02:04 Speaker_09
But these clues would be ignored. Why, asked his French interviewers. What was the reason? Only one," said O'Neill. Corporate oil interests. America needed a, quote, secure and stable Saudi Arabia.

00:02:21 Speaker_09
And so there was to be zero pressure on our business partner. Nonetheless, O'Neill kept a tab on Bin Laden after a series of bombings in Africa in 1998, an attack on a U.S.

00:02:33 Speaker_09
destroyer in 2000, all the way up to September 2001, when O'Neill left the FBI for a new position, Director of Security at the World Trade Center in New York.

00:02:47 Speaker_09
On the 11th of that month, when a plane hit the North Tower, John O'Neill made it out, only to run back inside to help others escape the collapse. That is how John O'Neill died.

00:03:02 Speaker_05
O'Neill was disillusioned with his bureau when he died. His last thoughts on the hunt for Bin Laden were that, since George W. Bush's election, quote, the FBI was even more politically engaged on the issue.

00:03:17 Speaker_05
The kingdom, O'Neill said, has much more pressure on us than we have on them.

00:03:47 Speaker_09
Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwin. And this is Season 4, Episode 6, Ground Zeroes.

00:03:56 Speaker_05
Last episode, we wandered the four-year stretch between 1992 and 1996, often called the Afghan Civil War. And Kabul, previously isolated from the violence, had been ground into dust.

00:04:11 Speaker_09
The Pakistani government helped organize a group of Madrasa students from Afghanistan's border regions with Pakistan.

00:04:18 Speaker_09
These pious and violent Taliban, led by the charismatic and one-eyed cleric Mullah Omar, restored order across the country, beginning with Kandahar in the south in 1995.

00:04:32 Speaker_09
The Taliban takeover of Kabul, and then the whole country in autumn of 1996, shocked the world. Their unprecedented implementation of strict sharia was brutal and systematic.

00:04:45 Speaker_09
Yet increasingly the Taliban found themselves able to activate new revenue streams. Drug running and potential oil and gas deals gave their regime a sense of stability. That Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also supported them did not hurt either.

00:05:01 Speaker_09
On top of their agenda was a pipeline, the subject of a bidding war between the Argentinian energy giant, Brightus, and its American competitor, Unicao. Now, in the late 90s, with the millennium fast approaching, what lay in store for the Taliban?

00:05:20 Speaker_09
And what about Afghanistan's latest high-profile resident, Osama bin Laden? He had arrived in 1996 amidst a tussle with the Americans after they got him kicked out of Sudan. What were the Americans to do about possible threats like Osama?

00:05:51 Speaker_05
One night in early 1998, writes ABC News anchor John Miller, quote, a friend summoned me to a bar on Manhattan's Upper East Side to introduce me to a new name, Osama Bin Laden. My friend told me the FBI had just learned an awful lot about Bin Laden.

00:06:09 Speaker_05
They believed he was behind the attacks on the U.S. military in Somalia. They believed he had financed and supported World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef's plot to blow airliners out of the sky.

00:06:19 Speaker_05
He said there was a Bin Laden plot to kill President Clinton and even the Pope.

00:06:24 Speaker_09
When Mullah Omar disclosed in early 1997 that Osama bin Laden was in fact staying in Afghanistan as a guest of the Taliban, bin Laden had already been operational there for a whole year.

00:06:37 Speaker_09
To keep himself connected to associates across the world, bin Laden had teamed up with a Yemeni, Ahmed al-Hada, a comrade from the anti-Soviet days. Hada offered to make his own home in Yemen one of bin Laden's bases of operation.

00:06:53 Speaker_09
Bin Laden took Hatta up on his offer, writes the journalist James Bamford, and his house in Yemen quickly became the epicenter of Bin Laden's war against America.

00:07:02 Speaker_09
A logistics base to coordinate his attacks, switchboard to pass on orders, and a safe house where his field commanders could meet to discuss and carry out operations.

00:07:14 Speaker_09
Between 1996 and 1998, Bin Laden and his top aides made a total of 221 calls to the Yemeni operations center's phone number. Al-Hada's son-in-law, a man named Khalid Al-Midhar, was also interested in Bin Laden's jihad.

00:07:33 Speaker_09
But we'll hear more about him later.

00:07:37 Speaker_05
ABC's John Miller, meanwhile, linked up with Bin Laden's media manager, based in the United Kingdom. From London to Islamabad and from Islamabad to Peshawar, Miller and his reporting team made their way to Bin Laden's remote Afghan base.

00:07:52 Speaker_05
Flanked by his military chief, Mohamed Atef, and his chief strategist, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden made a theatrical entrance.

00:08:01 Speaker_05
As he entered the journalist's presence, his soldiers fired hundreds of AK-47 rounds into the air, and quote, despite the chaos of the scene, his eyes were calm, fixed, and steady.

00:08:12 Speaker_05
Bin Laden wore a military jacket with no labels, in addition to more traditional garb.

00:08:18 Speaker_09
The journalist Miller, nervous, cracked a joke to the translator, quote, tell Mr. Bin Laden that for a guy who comes from a family known for building roads, he could sure use a better driveway up this mountain.

00:08:31 Speaker_09
The translator was aghast and declined to translate the joke. With a prestigious TV network at his disposal, bin Laden seized the opportunity.

00:08:43 Speaker_09
He told the ABC journalists that, quote, our battle with the Americans is larger than our battle with the Russians.

00:08:51 Speaker_09
We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States as United States, and that they will retreat from our land, Saudi Arabia, and collect the bodies of their sons back to America, Allah willing.

00:09:07 Speaker_09
Bin Laden dismissed fears of being captured or killed by the Americans, instead condemning American treatment of Palestinians and the people of Iraq. The American-led sanctions, he said, resulted in the death of more than one million Iraqi children.

00:09:24 Speaker_09
All of this is done in the name of American interests."

00:09:35 Speaker_06
As the war between orthodox Bosnian Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks intensified, the conflict attracted foreign fighters, mujahideen, to come and defend their Islamic brethren.

00:09:50 Speaker_06
They included forces financed by Saudi Arabia, who brought with them their more radical Islam.

00:10:02 Speaker_09
From the late 1980s through the mid-90s, Islamic warriors who had cut their teeth fighting the Soviet Union or President Najibullah in Afghanistan, they were making their way to new battlegrounds.

00:10:16 Speaker_05
It is no surprise that a great many of them swiftly emerged as the vanguard of Muslim volunteers in Bosnia, writes Peter Dale Scott. Bosnia had declared its independence from Yugoslavia in April 1992, the month of Kabul's downfall.

00:10:32 Speaker_29
For centuries, Muslims, Serbs, and Croats had lived here together. Now they had to choose a future. Half the Yugoslav republics had gone for independence, and it was time for the Bosnians to decide.

00:10:46 Speaker_05
These blooded veterans of the Afghan war were now furnishing professional aid in Europe to the inexperienced Bosnian army.

00:10:54 Speaker_09
And with the Jihad in Afghanistan now in the rearview mirror, Bosnia became the cause célèbre of the radical Islamist world. Al-Kifa Center in Brooklyn, as well as other American affiliates, recruited in America for the Bosnian Jihad.

00:11:11 Speaker_09
One convicted terrorist claimed that in December 1992, the Saudi embassy had given him $150,000 to set up a Bosnian operation. According to another, further support from Bosnian jihadists may have come from the U.S. military itself.

00:11:29 Speaker_09
The Bosnians' enemy, after all, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, was no friend of America.

00:11:38 Speaker_06
After the war, Saudi aid organizations stepped in to shore up the state, led dry by the conflict. Their cash helping rebuild the country, villages, schools, and above all, mosques.

00:11:51 Speaker_09
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 2005 London Underground bombing, and other attacks were organized by men who had gone to fight in Bosnia.

00:12:02 Speaker_05
The Balkans was by no means the only jihadi hotspot in the world.

00:12:08 Speaker_09
The Philippines, for example, where familiar faces from the Afghan Jihad turned up in the form of the Abu Sayyaf group.

00:12:17 Speaker_22
A Filipino television crew made a potentially deadly decision to secretly keep a camera rolling to record a kidnapping in progress. There were many times that I thought this is really bad.

00:12:31 Speaker_22
Marched through the jungles of the southern Philippines by Abu Sayyaf, the crew had been tricked into thinking they were about to get an interview with the head of the bloodthirsty group.

00:12:40 Speaker_07
Instead, they became the group's prey.

00:12:45 Speaker_09
Not to be confused with the Afghan Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the group's founder was the Filipino Abdurayak Abdubakar Yanyalani, who had fought in the anti-Soviet jihad and there reportedly made friends with fellow jihadi Osama bin Laden.

00:13:02 Speaker_09
After the Afghan coalitions split up, the Sayyaf fighters settled in the southern Philippine islands, where Muslim separatists, the Moros, had long waged war against the central government based in Manila.

00:13:15 Speaker_05
The Filipino Muslim leader of the Abu Sayyaf group, writes John Cooley, recruited veterans of the Afghan Jihad to the Philippines.

00:13:22 Speaker_05
And these fighters, in turn, organized, quote, Filipino Islamic radicals in southern areas, many of them dropouts from high schools and universities in the southern Philippines.

00:13:33 Speaker_05
This small group of several hundred guerrillas, at first affiliated with the Moro rebels, but eventually split from them and began hoisting the flag of Abu Sayyaf.

00:13:43 Speaker_09
The Philippines were a great place for the Abu Sayyaf group to do business, writes John Cooley. In 2000, at what was probably a career peak, Abu Sayyaf received at least 25 million in ransom money. A jihadist Lufthansa score, if ever there was one.

00:14:00 Speaker_26
A year before CES, there was a company that refused to pay ransom, and all seven of the hostages were beheaded.

00:14:07 Speaker_09
The website for the U.S. Director of National Intelligence now describes the Sayyaf group as, quote, the most violent of the Islamic separatist groups operating in the southern Philippines.

00:14:20 Speaker_07
Under popular pressure, the military decided to arm the population so that they could defend themselves against the Islamists. They were called patriots, and there were as many as a quarter of a million at the height of the crisis.

00:14:34 Speaker_09
Just as destructive as Bosnia or the Philippines was the dirty war in Algeria, where long-standing one-party politics crumbled into a civil war between a military regime and an Islamist opposition, which would last over a decade.

00:14:52 Speaker_07
The Islamists formed a large bloc, the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, headed by two charismatic leaders, Abbasi Madni and Ali Belhaj. Crowds flocked to hear his religious discourse tinged with political aims. For him, democracy was against Islam.

00:15:11 Speaker_09
As they had elsewhere, veterans of the Jihad in Afghanistan flocked to Algeria to join the Islamist front, which directed so much violence against the population, it lost any support it once had.

00:15:24 Speaker_09
As many as 200,000 people died over the course of Algeria's dirty war.

00:15:30 Speaker_07
His message was simple and easily accessible, that the Islamic State should replace the Constitution. And his thousands of fans adored him.

00:15:44 Speaker_05
in Azerbaijan, ex-Iran-Contra player Richard Siegert was organizing ex-Afghan Mujahideen. Afghan drug money helped Islamist fighters in Azerbaijan unseat an elected president.

00:15:58 Speaker_05
This was also the case in Kosovo, the breakaway republic from Serbia that became the battleground of a NATO war in the late 1990s.

00:16:07 Speaker_28
The bombs fell from 15,000 feet to right and left. Bomb by bomb, NATO is clearing a path for the rebels to advance.

00:16:16 Speaker_09
Military groups like the Kosovo Liberation Army, largely composed of ethnic Albanian Muslims, also had ties to terror networks tracing their origins back to the Afghan Jihad.

00:16:29 Speaker_09
Mainstream accounts of the Kosovo War are silent about the role of Al-Qaeda in training and financing the KLA, writes Peter Dale Scott.

00:16:41 Speaker_30
But the Colonel, or the Brother Leader as he's known in Libya, still likes to cut a controversial figure on the world stage.

00:16:50 Speaker_09
The first Interpol arrest warrant against Osama bin Laden was not issued by the United States, but by the government of Libya in April 1998.

00:17:00 Speaker_09
The warrant from that time, write Broussard and Asghier, proves that two years after the attack against American military installations, the U.S. was still not openly pursuing Osama bin Laden.

00:17:15 Speaker_09
Why was Colonel Gaddafi's government the only one officially sounding the alarm on Bin Laden?

00:17:21 Speaker_09
Well, as we've seen elsewhere, Libyans who had fought with the Mujahideen, flush with weapons and cash, pledged allegiance to Osama, and by the thousands declared war against their own country's government.

00:17:34 Speaker_09
In a pattern familiar to us by now, quote, the British Secret Service worked in cooperation with Osama Bin Laden's Libyan allies.

00:17:45 Speaker_09
former British Secret Service agent David Shailer revealed that MI5 had organized an operation to assassinate Colonel Qaddafi in November 1996 with the support of the Afghan-trained Libyans.

00:18:01 Speaker_09
The failed operation was meant to attack Qaddafi's motorcade during an official trip. This is why the first Interpol warrant targeting Bin Laden with Libya's name on it was kept secret.

00:18:15 Speaker_09
It would have led to a very uncomfortable example of the West once again allied with Bin Laden's associates against yet another common enemy.

00:18:29 Speaker_25
It is a government which has the backing of the people. It controls nearly all of Afghanistan. There are reports that others are also in touch with the Taliban and they have the support of all of the people of Afghanistan.

00:18:44 Speaker_05
Although the Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan in 1996, there was one final frontier left for them to conquer.

00:18:53 Speaker_05
The northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the country's fourth largest, and located just south of the borders of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

00:19:03 Speaker_05
In August 1998, after a gruesome, stalemated battle that had carried over from the year before, the Taliban finally broke into Mazar's city center. And with the Taliban at their doorstep, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan moved to seal their borders off.

00:19:20 Speaker_09
What followed in Mazar-i-Sharif was one of the worst episodes of slaughter in the country's history. The Taliban closed off the city and commenced a massacre, primarily directed at the Hazara ethnic minority.

00:19:35 Speaker_05
Blood stained the walls of shops and residential compounds. For at least three days, bodies lay where they fell, on the orders of the Taliban commander who took charge of the city, witnesses said.

00:19:47 Speaker_05
It was not until the bodies began to rot and stink in the dry summer heat, threatening disease, that the commander allowed burial of the dead. By then, stray dogs were feeding on them.

00:20:01 Speaker_09
The Hazaras, noted human rights watch, were particularly targeted in part because of their religious identity.

00:20:08 Speaker_09
During the house-to-house searches, scores and perhaps hundreds of Hazara men and boys were summarily executed, apparently to ensure that they would be unable to mount any resistance to the Taliban.

00:20:20 Speaker_09
Also killed were eight Iranian officials at the Iranian consulate in the city and an Iranian journalist.

00:20:28 Speaker_09
Although the Taliban has denied responsibility for the killings of the diplomats and the journalists in August 1998, the issue still remains live for the Iranian government.

00:20:38 Speaker_09
As recently as August 2022, Iran asked for the Taliban to investigate the Mazar-i-Sharif murders. In America, however, the massacre got comparatively little attention.

00:20:52 Speaker_09
The day before the Taliban rolled into Mazar-i-Sharif, a pair of bombs went off in Africa.

00:21:04 Speaker_05
The American embassy in Kenya, in the city of Nairobi, had for years been a potential target. Last episode, we mentioned the Al-Qaeda trainer Ali Mohammed, the one-time Green Beret, who worked as an FBI informant and CIA asset.

00:21:20 Speaker_05
Ali, in particular, had studied the Nairobi facility, writes Peter Dale Scott.

00:21:26 Speaker_05
In 1993, Mohammed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver Airport when he inquired after an incoming Al-Qaeda terrorist who turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports.

00:21:39 Speaker_05
Scott writes, Mohammed immediately contacted the Mounties to make a phone call to the United States, and the call to Mohammed's FBI handler secured his release.

00:21:50 Speaker_09
The encounter took place before Mohammed flew to Nairobi, photographed the U.S. Embassy in December 1993, and delivered the photos to bin Laden.

00:22:00 Speaker_09
According to Ali Mohammed's negotiated confession years later, bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber."

00:22:15 Speaker_09
The American government has maintained that Ali Mohammed was working as a double agent and deceived his handlers about what he had really been up to.

00:22:24 Speaker_09
Because five years after he had checked out the American embassy in Nairobi as a suitable bombing target, that attack was carried out.

00:22:44 Speaker_01
I looked back one glance and I saw a very big, luminous white cloud floating upwards. And then I just heard a loud bang. And I felt myself lifted up, floating. Then I went, I think I was dropped somewhere, I don't know where it was.

00:23:05 Speaker_09
On the morning of August 7th, 1998, two bombs went off in East Africa. It was the eighth anniversary of the arrival of U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. One explosive went off at the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

00:23:23 Speaker_09
It killed 11 people, all of them Africans. The toll in Nairobi was far higher. Journalist Lawrence Wright reported. The face of the embassy had sheared off in great concrete slabs. Dead people still sat at their desks.

00:23:42 Speaker_09
The tar-covered street was on fire and a crowded bus was in flames. Next door, the Ufundi building, containing a Kenyan secretarial college, had completely collapsed. The toll was 213 dead.

00:23:56 Speaker_09
4,500 were injured, more than 150 of them blinded by the flying glass.

00:24:09 Speaker_05
Each and every participant in the embassy bombings had a connection to Afghanistan, whether by recruitment or training. They had varying allegiances to the bin Laden group, some of whom had never met or known the man himself.

00:24:25 Speaker_09
Though the majority of the victims were not American citizens, both the Bin Laden group and the United States considered the attack the most successful of its kind against America since the bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon a decade and a half earlier.

00:24:47 Speaker_09
The reaction inside of Washington was severe. After all, the CIA had a dedicated bin Laden unit, the Alex Station, and Clinton's CIA director, George Tenet, had been sworn in on promises of preventing exactly this kind of surprise.

00:25:06 Speaker_05
One of the bin Laden unit's female analysts confronted Tenet, writes Steve Cole. You are responsible for those deaths because you didn't act on the information we had when we could have gotten him.

00:25:17 Speaker_09
George Tenet was aware that the agency knew where Bin Laden was. He also knew there was a plan to raid Bin Laden's compound. Why had Tenet never recommended the idea to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and President Clinton, asks Steve Cole.

00:25:33 Speaker_09
That question, however, didn't seem to trouble President Clinton. A week after the attacks, Clinton was told that American intelligence believed Bin Laden and his organization were behind the bombings.

00:25:45 Speaker_09
Three days after that meeting, President Clinton briefed the country, live on television, about his affair with an intern, which he had lied about.

00:25:55 Speaker_05
Another way of looking at the situation. President Clinton needed a way to look awfully presidential.

00:26:02 Speaker_05
Uninterested in the particulars of Afghanistan, or how the Bin Laden group came to blow up so many people, and with nowhere near enough clout to actually invade someplace with American troops, the Clinton team elected to respond to the bombings with cruise missile attacks, scheduled for August 20th.

00:26:22 Speaker_09
The intel on the Afghan targets was weak. Islamic militant leaders, with whom bin Laden was supposed to meet, were warned of the attack ahead of time. US intelligence later said that Pakistan's ISI chief had given the Taliban a heads up.

00:26:38 Speaker_09
The missiles killed 21 and wounded dozens, none of whom were Osama bin Laden. The second cruise missile attack in Sudan, which we mentioned back in Season 1, dealt much more damage.

00:26:52 Speaker_09
These missiles struck the al-Shifa Industrial Facility, a chemical plant in the capital Khartoum. Al-Shifa was portrayed in CIA intel as a potential chemical or nuclear production site. The reality was different. Al-Shifa was a medicine factory.

00:27:24 Speaker_23
These are the remains of the El Shifa factory in Khartoum, targeted by cruise missiles and where, according to the White House, deadly chemicals were made for use with nerve gas.

00:27:35 Speaker_23
But it's also where engineer Tom Carnaffin worked for four and a half years.

00:27:39 Speaker_00
It was just unsuitable because there was no air locks or anything like that that would actually have given the safety required for doing that sort of work. So it wasn't a suitable place for making chemical weapons in.

00:27:54 Speaker_05
At the moment when the U.S. wanted its hands on Bin Laden now, it couldn't touch him.

00:27:59 Speaker_05
In fact, it was known within the CIA that among Pakistanis, and even some of the Saudis with whom the Americans were dealing, as Steve Cole puts it, some of them regarded the Taliban and Bin Laden as comrades and heroes, now more than ever.

00:28:18 Speaker_05
In late 1998, Clinton signed off on a memorandum authorizing either the capture or assassination of Osama bin Laden. The CIA's ALEC station, assisted by increasingly high-quality surveillance tools, now had eyes on bin Laden pretty much all the time.

00:28:39 Speaker_13
The Taliban has got to go! Hey, hey! Ho, ho! The Taliban has got to go! Hey, hey! Ho, ho! The Taliban has got to go!

00:28:53 Speaker_09
Act One had now ended, as Broussard and Dasquier put it. Quote, the American administration stopped all direct relations with Kabul for only six months. For the time being, the Unacao oil project had collapsed.

00:29:09 Speaker_09
In the United States, the Feminist Majority Foundation, backed by public figures such as First Lady Hillary Clinton, intensified its campaign against UNICAO, accusing the company of supporting a dictatorship whose social policy included subjugation of women.

00:29:25 Speaker_09
The company gradually pulled its teams out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and closed its offices there, the French journalists continue.

00:29:33 Speaker_09
In Washington, the State Department's Bureau of South Asian Affairs expressed regret at the unfortunate turn of events. But no one lost sight of the enormous opportunities waiting in Afghanistan.

00:29:44 Speaker_09
The idea of favoring a more moderate Taliban regime gained ground. In February of 1999, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot and several colleagues flew to Pakistan to personally meet with the Taliban.

00:30:00 Speaker_09
He showed them proof of Osama bin Laden's culpability in the attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Wright, Broussard, and Dasquiai, gave them a letter that officially requested bin Laden's extradition, and hinted that they would be quote-unquote economic rewards if the Taliban cooperated.

00:30:23 Speaker_05
Clinton attempted to bring the Taliban to the table over Bin Laden by freezing the Taliban's American assets. And after this stick came the carrot.

00:30:33 Speaker_05
A meeting with the current Pakistani Prime Minister, the husband of Benazir Bhutto, who promised that the ISI director himself would head to Kandahar and pressure the Taliban into handing over Bin Laden, according to Broussard and Dasghaie.

00:30:47 Speaker_05
Talks with Mullah Omar began to bear fruit on certain side issues, such as closing down some of the training camps. But along came a spider.

00:30:58 Speaker_05
In a replay of the military coup by General Zia decades earlier, the Pakistani army's chief of staff pushed out the civilian leadership and assumed power, scuttling these talks. The leader of this coup will become a very important name.

00:31:16 Speaker_05
Pervez Musharraf. When Musharraf took power, report the Frenchman, he canceled a top secret mission that was being planned with the US to send commandos using ISI intelligence into Afghanistan to capture Bin Laden.

00:31:50 Speaker_09
Toward the end of 1999, yet another operation was in play. The CIA's head of Alex Station took a trip to Afghanistan to see an old friend, Ahmed Shah Massoud.

00:32:04 Speaker_09
In the Panjshir Valley, Massoud's people and the CIA hashed out terms for a new joint project. The agency wanted bin Laden, and Massoud still wanted to run Afghanistan. Maybe they could resurrect an old arrangement.

00:32:24 Speaker_05
It was around this time, in December 1999, writes James Bamford, that the NSA picked up on a certain phone call to a certain man named Khalid Al-Midar.

00:32:37 Speaker_05
And Midar, as we mentioned earlier, was the son-in-law of Ahmed al-Hada, the man running ops in Yemen via satphone for Osama bin Laden. According to the NSA Intercept, the topic of Midar's call was an upcoming meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

00:32:56 Speaker_05
The CIA had customs officials in Dubai make a photocopy of Midar's passport before letting him continue on to Malaysia.

00:33:05 Speaker_09
Bamford continues, what was striking was that Midar's Saudi passport contained a valid multi-entry visa for the United States. And his visa application, faxed from the American embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, showed Midar's destination was New York.

00:33:21 Speaker_09
Doug Miller, one of the three FBI employees at Alec Station, took one look at the faxes and became instantly alarmed.

00:33:29 Speaker_09
A possible terrorist, whose travel was arranged by Bin Laden's ops center, was on his way to a secret meeting and would soon be heading for America's largest city.

00:33:39 Speaker_09
At 9.30 a.m., Miller started picking out a message to alert his superiors at FBI headquarters, who could then put Midar on a watch list to bar him from entry to the U.S.

00:33:51 Speaker_09
But inexplicably, the message, known as a Central Intelligence Report, or CIR, was spiked by Miller's CIA boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of Alex Station.

00:34:05 Speaker_09
At about 4 p.m., one of the CIA analysts assigned to Alex Station typed a note onto Miller's report. Quote, Please hold off on C.I.R. for now, per Tom Wilshire. Without Wilshire's approval, Miller could not pass on the information, even verbally.

00:34:23 Speaker_09
He had done everything by the book. A potential terrorist and member of Bin Laden's group was headed for the U.S., and he was putting the FBI on notice so it could take action. There was no reason, Bamford writes, to kill the message.

00:34:49 Speaker_08
On January 14th, nine days after Al-Midar had been flagged in Dubai, the ALEC station chief reported to others that the search for Midar was continuing.

00:35:00 Speaker_09
In fact, it had been over for days, notes Bamford. The next day, FBI agent Doug Miller sent an email to the deputy station chief asking what had happened to his report warning of Midar's travel to the US. He never received a response.

00:35:18 Speaker_09
In fact, ProPublica reports, the CIA did not alert the FBI for more than a year after it learned the terrorists had entered the United States using their real names and Saudi passports.

00:35:32 Speaker_09
It was that day, January 15th, 2000, that Midar and Hasmi's plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport. Two weeks later, the pair were having lunch at a halal spot on Venice Boulevard in LA.

00:35:48 Speaker_09
Their dining partner, reports Mathias Schwartz, was named Omar al-Bayoumi, a man with connections at the local Saudi consulate and a salary funded by the Saudi defense ministry.

00:36:03 Speaker_05
Schwartz goes on. Al-Bayoumi, who later said he met the two young men by chance, decided to take them under his wing. He helped them find an apartment in San Diego, co-signed their lease, and lent them $1,500 for rent.

00:36:18 Speaker_05
He introduced them to a Yemeni friend he knew from a local mosque, who assisted them with errands, translation, and applications to take flying lessons.

00:36:27 Speaker_05
By May, the two newcomers were asking a prospective flight instructor whether they could skip single-engine Cessna planes and learn to fly commercial jets.

00:36:40 Speaker_09
A follow-up FBI investigation, dubbed Operation Encore in 2007, found that al-Bayoumi was just one part of a network that was, quote, created, funded, directed, and supported by the Saudi government and diplomatic personnel in the United States.

00:37:01 Speaker_09
We could see from a block away that Bayoumi was an intelligence guy," said the lead FBI agent on the Encore team. It's evident now that he was tasked with helping the hijackers, that he was running a clandestine operation.

00:37:17 Speaker_09
Some former FBI investigators, ProPublica reports, have speculated that al-Bayoumi might have been asked to approach the hijackers as part of an American or Saudi intelligence operation to recruit them.

00:37:34 Speaker_09
At the time, reports ProPublica, the CIA was trying desperately to develop sources inside al-Qaeda. Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clark later said that this was, quote, a possible failed CIA-Saudi spy mission on U.S.

00:37:52 Speaker_09
soil that went bad and eventually allowed the September 11th attacks to proceed unimpeded. Quote, what if al-Bayoumi was a Saudi spy who is investigating al-Qaeda at the request of the CIA? One more interesting name comes up from this moment.

00:38:19 Speaker_09
While managing the two hijackers, ProPublica reports, the Saudi agent Bayoumi made a phone call to a Yemeni-American imam in San Diego, a man named Anwar al-Awlaki, who would later emerge as a leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

00:38:39 Speaker_09
Newer FBI documents, report ProPublica, suggest that al-Awlaki might have played a more significant role in working with Bayoumi to help the hijackers.

00:38:51 Speaker_11
Years later, al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen by a drone strike, ordered by President Barack Obama. The CIA was not the only American agency interested in Midar and Hazmi.

00:39:13 Speaker_09
By March 2000, writes James Bamford, the NSA had been eavesdropping on their calls for months without passing on their location. They were living in the home of an FBI informant without the FBI knowing they were there.

00:39:29 Speaker_09
Midar and Hazmi were in touch with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Bin Laden lieutenant running this new operation, which appears to have gotten off the ground sometime the year before.

00:39:40 Speaker_09
But Midar, whose wife was about to give birth, flew back to Yemen to be with her in June 2000, abandoning Hazmi like a jilted lover, in the words of Bamford.

00:39:52 Speaker_05
And while he was home in Yemen, Midar was able to participate in another one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's plots. This one aimed directly at the American military. Weeks before a hotly contested US election, no less.

00:40:07 Speaker_24
Bin Laden existed in Afghanistan exactly 17 years before our government existed. We inherited him. And the fact is that such people were instigated by the CIA and by the government of America in that time to go and fight the Soviets.

00:40:25 Speaker_24
And such people were called the heroes of independence. And all of a sudden, they have changed now to terrorists.

00:40:32 Speaker_09
While Midar and his colleagues lunched and conspired, the U.S. once more started up official channels to the Taliban. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, Karl Inderfurth, met with the Taliban. Only a few days before, the U.N.

00:40:47 Speaker_09
Secretary General had organized a new diplomatic push to squeeze the Taliban on Bin Laden and allow everyone to resume the pipeline project.

00:40:57 Speaker_09
In March, at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Taliban, quote, voiced support for a negotiated settlement, report Broussard and Daskier. Things went even further the summer of 2000, when Washington hosted the next round of talks.

00:41:13 Speaker_09
Quote, the participants aimed to support a reform government in Kabul, bringing together Taliban and Northern Alliance leaders.

00:41:22 Speaker_09
They made such good progress in these talks that the head UN diplomat decided to invite the two Afghan enemies to participate directly in these discussions.

00:41:33 Speaker_05
the good vibes between the Taliban and the U.S. multiplied. At the exact same time, the State Department hosted the Afghan, that is, Taliban, foreign minister during a conference of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

00:41:48 Speaker_05
Quote, the Afghan minister stated that religious leaders in his country had created a special investigative commission to look into bin Laden's involvement in the various attacks and said that his eventual extradition was possible.

00:42:08 Speaker_19
I have just been meeting with my national security team. on today's tragic events in the Middle East, and I would like to make a brief statement. October 12, 2000.

00:42:18 Speaker_09
Suicide bombers riding a skiff had punched a 40 by 60 foot hole in the side of the USS Cole, a state-of-the-art battleship that had been refueling in the port of Aden in Yemen.

00:42:32 Speaker_19
First, as you know, an explosion claimed the lives of at least four sailors on one of our naval vessels, the USS Cole, this morning. They were simply doing their duty.

00:42:42 Speaker_09
Midar, who had earlier in the year been living in San Diego, and who was supposedly the target of a CIA manhunt, was later reported by authorities to have helped mastermind the operation, in which 17 American sailors were killed.

00:42:58 Speaker_19
We were rushing medical assistance to the scene. And our prayers are with the families who have lost their loved ones, our still awaiting news.

00:43:06 Speaker_05
Quote, the shockwave of the enormous explosion in the harbor knocked over cars on shore. Two miles away, people thought there was an earthquake.

00:43:15 Speaker_05
In a taxi in the city, the concussion shook Fahd Al-Quso, a member of the coal bomber's support team who was running late, writes journalist Lawrence Wright.

00:43:24 Speaker_05
Quote, he was supposed to have videotaped the attack, but he slept through the page on his phone that would have notified him to set up the camera.

00:43:33 Speaker_09
no matter. At least Midar would get a mulligan, an opportunity for another even more widely publicized hit on America.

00:43:42 Speaker_19
If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act. If their intention was to deter us from our mission of promoting peace and security in the Middle East, they will fail utterly.

00:43:58 Speaker_05
Although the American security establishment had been warning of threats against the country around the year 2000, so-called millennium plots, there hadn't been anything like that until the USS Cole blew up in October 2000.

00:44:13 Speaker_05
The American presidential election that year didn't dwell too much on foreign policy or national security.

00:44:21 Speaker_21
Good evening from the Clark Athletic Center at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and I welcome you to the first of three 90-minute debates between the Democratic candidate for president, Vice President Al Gore, and the Republican candidate, Governor George W. Bush of Texas.

00:44:38 Speaker_20
I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the way it's gotta be.

00:44:42 Speaker_20
I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, we do it this way, so should you.

00:44:50 Speaker_05
As we pointed out in Season 1, George W. Bush didn't campaign on America as a quote-unquote world policeman.

00:44:56 Speaker_21
would you go about, as president, deciding when it was in the national interest to use U.S. force? I would take the use of force very seriously.

00:45:05 Speaker_20
I think we've got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building.

00:45:13 Speaker_05
And Al Gore, he didn't really talk about terrorism either. Although both did have moments of silence at campaign events after the coal attack. And both promised that they would enact swift retribution as president.

00:45:25 Speaker_16
As soon as we find out who is responsible, we will retaliate. And we will not rest until the perpetrators of that horrible and cowardly crime are brought to justice.

00:45:35 Speaker_09
After the Supreme Court declared Bush president in November 2000, however, that swift justice never came.

00:45:43 Speaker_09
Quote, two of the coal bombers arrested by Yemeni security forces confessed their role and told investigators they were working for two top operatives of the Bin Laden group, known to US intelligence, reports Michael Isikoff.

00:45:57 Speaker_09
And, according to Isikoff, throughout the year 2001, despite a steady drumbeat of warnings from various national security officials, emails from the NSC, briefings from counter-terrorism officials, and so forth, all about the possibility of another attack from the Bin Laden group on American targets, there was little appetite for the discussion.

00:46:19 Speaker_05
This, too, was in spite of other Islamist Afghan war vets who were making names for themselves with increasingly brazen action.

00:46:27 Speaker_05
The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, for example, announced in June 2001 that they had beheaded Guillermo Sobrero, a Californian who had been kidnapped the month before.

00:46:38 Speaker_04
Guillermo Cerbero's bones were discovered in the southern Philippines earlier this month. Surrounded by police and by other suspected rebels, the teenager spoke of seeing Cerbero blindfolded and pleading for his life as a rebel prepared to kill him.

00:46:53 Speaker_09
In late July 2001, the NSA downgraded the likelihood of an imminent U.S. attack, while the FBI, shortly thereafter, issued a memo arguing in the other direction.

00:47:04 Speaker_09
Bin Laden was mentioned in around three dozen different presidential daily intelligence briefings prior to the fall of 2001. At first, the coal attack did not bring down the talks happening between the Taliban and the outside world.

00:47:24 Speaker_09
It may have even sped them up. That same month, days after the coal attack, the UN negotiator could declare that, quote, for the first time, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance were considering a peace process.

00:47:38 Speaker_05
In less than a month, however, things had collapsed. A stretch of diplomatic sniping disintegrated the talks. Russia had demanded harsher sanctions on the Taliban, while the U.S. had overreached at the U.N.

00:47:50 Speaker_05
Security Council, playing a retro strategy of banning arms sales to Afghanistan, except to American friends in the Northern Alliance. So by December, everything was back to square one. But along came another spider.

00:48:08 Speaker_09
Laylee Helms, niece of former CIA Director Richard, and the Taliban's PR Wonder Woman, spun this crisis into yet another opportunity for her clients.

00:48:19 Speaker_09
The nature of that opportunity was the fact that President-elect George W. Bush, despite his tough talk, was an oil man. Vice President Dick Cheney was the one-time chairman of Halliburton, one of the biggest energy concerns in the world.

00:48:35 Speaker_09
Bush's soon-to-be National Security Advisor was Condoleezza Rice, a decade-long bigwig of Chevron Oil, where she used her influence in the ex-USSR to grease a deal between the oil giant and the President of Kazakhstan.

00:48:50 Speaker_09
This kind of administration would be, shall we say, flexible on issues pertaining to energy, especially with Russia and China making progress in Central Asia.

00:49:00 Speaker_05
And so the Bush administration, thanks to the efforts of Lely Helms, reopened talks with the Taliban.

00:49:07 Speaker_09
There were murmurs of informal meetings between the U.S. officials and a senior representative from Golbadin Hekmatyar's party, which had by now merged its forces with Osama bin Laden's.

00:49:21 Speaker_05
These high-risk talks were assigned to Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, Christina Roca, who was a former CIA agent from 1982 to 1997, coordinating relations between the CIA and Islamist guerrillas and supervising some of the deliveries of Stinger missiles to the mujahideen.

00:49:42 Speaker_05
Starting in May 2001, Roca reopened her files and started up a dialogue with her old contacts, end quote.

00:49:50 Speaker_09
Summer 2001 was full of this kind of secret informal diplomacy to push the Taliban and the Northern Alliance into a coalition government that would extradite bin Laden.

00:50:02 Speaker_09
Said one high-placed diplomat from Pakistan, quote, we would try to convey to them that if they did certain things then gradually they could win the jackpot, end quote.

00:50:14 Speaker_09
But once again, the talks broke down, with the Taliban complaining that the Western nations and their UN allies were giving these simple country mullahs the high hat. In one of the final meetings in Berlin, a U.S.

00:50:28 Speaker_09
representative seemed to confirm this attitude in an ultimatum to his Taliban interlocutor.

00:50:34 Speaker_05
A U.S. official had threatened, either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.

00:50:44 Speaker_05
This reportedly drunken outburst, an offer the Taliban was not to refuse, was the first official threat of military action against Afghanistan in the 21st century.

00:51:02 Speaker_09
Meanwhile, the deputy chief of Alex Station reviewed the cable traffic showing the journey of Osama associate Nawaf Hasbi to Los Angeles.

00:51:12 Speaker_09
It seems astonishing, writes James Bamford, that he would not be interested in why Hasbi might have flown to Los Angeles and what he was doing in the US. But Hasbi's buddy, Midar, was placed on a CIA watch list in August 2001.

00:51:29 Speaker_05
although the government didn't make use of it to catch him.

00:51:33 Speaker_05
On Saturday, August 25th, Midar, who had by now returned from his USS Cole escapade in Yemen, visited William Patterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, where he purchased in the library plane tickets on a campus computer.

00:51:48 Speaker_05
While two days later, his friend, Hazmi, moved into his own new staging location with his associate, a man named Mohammed Atta.

00:51:58 Speaker_09
The next day, on September 5th, 2001, the Feds were conducting another fruitless search for Hasmi and Midar, using driver's license and passport info.

00:52:09 Speaker_09
Midar, on that day, was at the American Airlines counter at Dulles Airport, paying for plane tickets with $2,300 in $100 bills.

00:52:32 Speaker_05
Four days later, on the morning of September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud met with journalists at his headquarters in northern Afghanistan.

00:52:41 Speaker_05
Massoud's mind was on the battlefront as he was preparing to go visit his soldiers then campaigning against the Taliban. Quote, the visiting reporter read out a list of questions while his colleague prepared to film, writes Steve Cole.

00:52:55 Speaker_05
About half his questions concerned Osama bin Laden. Massoud listened and then said he was ready. The camera had been a bomb. The cameraman died instantly and Massoud was mortally wounded. But the pretend interviewer had somehow survived.

00:53:15 Speaker_05
Massoud's bodyguards shot him to death before he could escape from a window. The attack was reportedly a gift organized by Bin Laden for the Taliban.

00:53:26 Speaker_09
The White House took Massoud's death seriously. An American asset from all the way back, Massoud had been recently pitching himself as the CIA's best shot at taking out Bin Laden.

00:53:37 Speaker_09
It was agreed to keep Massoud's Northern Alliance alive, even if its leader was dead. Then, on September 10th, 2001, the Bush team agreed to pursue, in Steve Cole's words, a covert war to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan.

00:54:01 Speaker_15
That may have been the last shot Michael Jordan will ever take in the NBA.

00:54:08 Speaker_03
Maybe not. Good morning. Air Jordan is taxiing for takeoff. Legendary basketball great Michael Jordan is getting ready to return to the game he loves today, Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.

00:54:18 Speaker_02
From NBC News, this is Today with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, live from Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza.

00:54:43 Speaker_08
On the morning of September 11th, by 7.35 a.m., Midar and Hazmi checked in for their flight from Dulles Airport. American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles.

00:54:57 Speaker_05
The plan, which was rehearsed at least once beforehand, included 17 other hijackers across four different flights, including Flight 77. The other three planes, American Airlines Flight 11, United 175, and United 93, were also successfully hijacked.

00:55:17 Speaker_03
I have got to interrupt you right now. Richard Hack, thank you very much. We appreciate the book is called Hughes. We want to go live right now and show you a picture of the World Trade Center where I understand, do we have it? No, we do not.

00:55:31 Speaker_09
At 8.46 a.m., Kofor Black, the beefy, bulldog chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, was taking a briefing in his office when his secretary came in to let him know that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers in New York City.

00:55:47 Speaker_09
In these initial moments, this wasn't necessarily a big deal to him.

00:55:51 Speaker_09
Arguably, the killing of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a former and would-be future collaborator of the CIA, was a bigger problem in Langley than what was probably a private plane crashing in New York.

00:56:02 Speaker_27
As Matt just mentioned, we have a breaking news story to tell you about. Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago, apparently. We have very little information available.

00:56:15 Speaker_05
But a few minutes later, Kofor Black got a call from a CIA officer who was stationed in New York City. Hey, Chief, we've got a problem, the officer told Black. We've been struck. I'm evacuating my position.

00:56:36 Speaker_10
At 9.37, Midar and Hosni's plane hit its target, the Pentagon.

00:56:52 Speaker_17
Well, Aaron, there is a lot of confusion here at the Pentagon. It appears that something hit the Pentagon on the outside of the Fifth Corridor, on the Army Corridor.

00:57:03 Speaker_17
Several Army officers I talked to reported hearing a big explosion, seeing shards of metal coming past their window.

00:57:11 Speaker_09
Inside the center of America's global military machine, the walls shook. Officers, agents, spooks and secretaries all began evacuating, fearful that another strike might be on the way. Against this current strode an older man.

00:57:27 Speaker_09
Silver hair, rimless glasses, beady eyes. He raced through smoke and jet fuel fumes to reach the crash site, reported the Washington Post. Once he was nearly there, an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel told him, you can't go any further.

00:57:44 Speaker_09
But the man's rank permitted him. His rank, in fact, was Secretary of Defense. And at this exact moment, no one knew where he was. At first we thought Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been hit, a White House aide later said.

00:58:00 Speaker_09
We couldn't get a location on the Secretary of Defense.

00:58:05 Speaker_05
He would soon reappear as the air cleared and the counterattack began. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld then issued a directive to his staff, revealed years later by a Freedom of Information Act request. Go massive. Sweep it all up.

00:58:22 Speaker_05
Things related and not.

00:58:34 Speaker_27
All of this is unconfirmed. And of course, speculation of a terrorist attack is unconfirmed, although that is what some Pentagon officials are saying. Let's go to President Bush right now.

00:58:48 Speaker_20
We'll be going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary of Rod Page and Lieutenant Governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at at the Booker Elementary School for their hospitality.

00:59:01 Speaker_09
By midday on September 11th, things had calmed down within the agency, as it was determined that there were no more attacks coming.

00:59:09 Speaker_09
And at 3 p.m., George Tenet confirmed to George W. Bush that the Bin Laden group, also referred to as Al-Qaeda, had been responsible for the attack.

00:59:20 Speaker_20
I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI,

00:59:28 Speaker_20
And I've ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.

00:59:47 Speaker_05
In his memoirs, published in 2006, the Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wrote of the September 11th attacks that, quote, America was sure to react violently, like a wounded bear.

01:00:00 Speaker_05
If the perpetrator turned out to be al-Qaeda, then that wounded bear would come charging straight toward us. Musharraf was right. First, Secretary of State and former General Colin Powell phoned with a warning. Either Pakistan was with the U.S.

01:00:22 Speaker_05
or against it.

01:00:24 Speaker_09
And then, wrote Musharraf, in what has to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, Powell's assistant and good friend, Richard Armitage, told the head of Pakistan's ISI, not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age.

01:00:47 Speaker_09
Deputy Secretary of State Armitage said that he would soon have a list of what the United States wanted from Pakistan. The ISI chief made an unequivocal commitment that Pakistan would stand by the United States.

01:01:01 Speaker_09
That night, writes Ahmed Rashid, the policy that Pakistan would adopt toward Washington was summed up in the phrase, first say yes and later say but.

01:01:22 Speaker_20
Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.

01:01:35 Speaker_20
Our first priority is to get help to those who have been injured and to take every precaution to protect our citizens at home and around the world from further attacks. The functions of our government continue without interruption.

01:01:51 Speaker_20
and the American economy will be open for business as well. The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts.

01:01:59 Speaker_20
I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

01:02:16 Speaker_09
On October 2nd, Bush gave Operation Enduring Freedom his seal of approval.

01:02:23 Speaker_08
Within a week, boots would be on the ground in Afghanistan.

01:02:32 Speaker_09
While CIA Director George Tenet was telling President Bush that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on Tuesday morning, the Deputy Chief of Alex Station, Richard Blee, was on the phone to Afghanistan, speaking to a high-ranking leader of the Northern Alliance.

01:02:52 Speaker_09
The leader began to ask Blee about what weapons the U.S. could send to support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. Blee cut him off. Quote, this is a tragedy for my country, but it is going to change your country forever.

01:03:12 Speaker_09
This is now much beyond you. Consult your leaders, because this is going to come in ways, in scope, and in scale that you cannot imagine.