Transcript for S4 Episode 6 - "Ground Zeroes"

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

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.

But these clues would be ignored. Why asked his French interviewers? What was the reason? Only one said O'Neill. corporate oil interests. America needed a quote secure and stable Saudi Arabia, and so there was to be zero pressure on our business partner. Nonetheless, O'Neill kept a tab on Bin Laden after a series of bombings in Africa in 1998, and attacked on the U.S. destroyer in 2000, all the way up to September 2001, when O'Neill left the FBI for a new position. Director of Security at the World Trade Center in New York. On the 11th of that month, when a plane hit the North Tower, John O'Neill made it out, only to run back inside to help others escape the collapse. That is how John O'Neill died.

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colvin. And this is Season 4 Episode 6.

The Pakistani government helped organize a group of madrasas students from Afghanistan's border regions with Pakistan. These pious and violent Taliban led by the charismatic and one-eyed cleric Mullah Omar, restored order across the country, beginning with Kandahar in the south in 1995. The Taliban take over of Kabul and then the whole country in autumn of 1996 shocked the world. Their unprecedented implementation of strict Sharia was brutal and systematic. Yet increasingly the Taliban found themselves able to activate new revenue streams, drug running and potential oil and gas deals gave their regime a sense of stability. The Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also supported them did not hurt either. On top of their agenda was a pipeline, the subject of a bidding war between the Argentinian energy giant brightest, and its American competitor, Unicao. Now, in the late 90s, with the millennium-fast approaching, what lay in store for the Taliban, and what about Afghanistan's latest high-profile resident Osama Bin Laden? He had arrived in 1996 amidst a tussle with the Americans after they got him kicked out of Sudan. What were the Americans to do about possible threats like Osama?

When Mullah Omar disclosed in early 1997 that Osama bin Laden was in fact staying in Afghanistan as a guest of the Taliban, bin Laden had already been operational there for a whole year. To keep himself connected to associates across the world, bin Laden had teamed up with a Yemeni, Akmed 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. Bin Laden took Hada up on his offer, writes the journalist James Bamford, and his house in Yemen quickly became the epicenter of Bin Laden's war against America, a logistics base to coordinate his attacks, switchboard to pass on orders, and a safe house where his field commanders could meet to discuss and carry out operations. Between 1996 and 1998, Bin Laden and his top aides made a total of 221 calls to the Yemeni Operations Center's phone number. Al-Hada's son-in-law, a man named Khalid Al-Midhar, was also interested in Bin Laden's jihad. But we'll hear more about him later.

The journalist Miller, nervous, cracked a joke to the translator, quote, With a prestigious TV network at his disposal, Bin Laden seized the opportunity. He told the ABC journalists that, quote, are battle with the Americans, is larger than our battle with the Russians. We predict a black day for America, and the end of the United States as United States, and that they will retreat from our land, Saudi Arabia, and collect the bodies of their sons back to America, allow willing. Bin Laden dismissed fears of being captured or killed by the Americans instead condemning American treatment of Palestinians and the people of Iraq. The American led sanctions, he said, resulted in the death of more than one million Iraqi children. All of this is done in the name of American interests and quotes.

As the war between Orthodox Bosnian Serbs and Muslim Bosniax intensified, the conflict attracted foreign fighters, Mujahideen, to come and defend their Islamic brethren. They included forces financed by Saudi Arabia who brought with them their more radical Islam.

From the late 1980s, through the mid-90s, Islamic warriors, who would cut their teeth fighting the Soviet Union, or President Najibullah and Afghanistan, they were making their way to new battlegrounds.

And with the Jihad and Afghanistan, now in the rear of Humir, Bosnia became the cause of the relic of the radical Islamist world. Al-Qifa Center in Brooklyn, as well as other American affiliates, recruited in America for the Bosnia and Jihad. One convicted terrorist claimed that in December 1992, the Saudi embassy had given him $150,000 to set up a Bosnia operation. According to another, further support from Bosnian jihadists may have come from the US military itself. The Bosnians' enemy after all, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, was no friend of America.

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

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

The Philippines, for example, were familiar faces from the Afghan Jihadi turned up in the form of the Abu Siaf Group.

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

Not to be confused with the Afghan, Abdul Rasul-Syaf. The group's founder was the Filipino Abdurayak Abdubak Aryan Yalami, who had fought in the anti-Soviet Jahad, and there reportedly made friends with fellow Jahadi, Osama bin Laden. After the Afghan coalition split up, the Siyaf fighters settled in the southern Filipino islands, where Muslim separatists, the moros, had long-waged war against the central government-based in Manila.

The Philippines were a great place for the Abu Siav group to do business, right, John Cooley. In 2000, at what was probably a career peak, Abu Siav received at least 25 million in ransom money. A Jihadist Lufthansa score, if ever, there was one.

The website for the US Director of National Intelligence now describes the siph group as quote the most violent of the Islamic separatist groups operating in the southern Philippines.

Justice 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.

As they had elsewhere, veterans of the Jihad and Afghanistan flocked to Algeria to join the Islamist Front, which directed so much violence against the population, it lost any support it once had. As many as 200,000 people died, over the course of Algeria's dirty war.

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

The first interpol arrest warrant against Osama bin Laden was not issued by the United States, but by the government of Libya, in April 1998. The war and from that time, right Prasard and Dosuke, proved that two years after the attack against American military installations, the US was still not openly pursuing Osama bin Laden. Why was Colonel Gadofi's government the only one officially sounding the alarm on Bin Laden? Well, as we've seen elsewhere, Libyans who had fought with the Majahadine, flush with weapons and cash, pledged allegiance to Osama, and by the thousands declared war against their own country's government. In a pattern familiar to us by now, quote, The British Secret Service worked in cooperation with Osama Bin Laden's Libyan allies. former British Secret Service agent David Schiller revealed that MI5 had organized an operation to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in November 1996 with the support of the Afghan trained Libyans. The failed operation was meant to attack Gaddafi's motorcade during an official trip. This is why the First Interpol Warrent, targeting Bin Laden, with Libya's name on it, was kept secret. It would have led to a very uncomfortable example of the West once again, allied with Bin Laden's associates against yet another common enemy.

What followed in Missouri Sheriff 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.

The Hazaris noted human rights watch were particularly targeted in part because of their religious identity. During the House to House searches, scores and perhaps hundreds of Hazaris men and boys were summarily executed, apparently to ensure that they would be unable to mount any resistance to the Taliban. Also killed were eight Iranian officials at the Iranian consulate in the city, and an Iranian journalist. Although the Taliban has denied responsibility for the killings of the diplomats in the journalist in August 98, the issue still remains live for the Iranian government. As recently as August 2022, Iran asked for the Taliban to investigate the Missouri Sheriff murders. In America, however, the massacre got comparatively little attention. The day before the Taliban rolled into Missari Sharif, a pair of bombs went off in Africa.

The encounter took place before Muhammad flew to Nairobi, photographed the U.S. embassy in December 1993, and delivered the photos to Bin Laden. According to Ali Muhammad's negotiating 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, and, quote, The American government has maintained that Ali Muhammad was working as a double agent and deceived his handlers about what he had really been up to. Because five years after he had checked out the American embassy in Nairobi as a suitable bombing target, that attack was carried out.

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 Darah Salam, Tanzania. It killed 11 people, all of them Africans. The toll in Nairobi was far higher. Journalist Lawrence Wright reported The face of the embassy had sheared off in great concrete slabs. Dead people still sat at their desks. The tar-covered street was on fire, and a crowded bus was in flames. Next door, the Ofundee building, containing a Kenyan-Secretary College, had completely collapsed. The toll was 213 dead. 4,500 were injured, more than 150 of them blinded by the flying glass. The ruins burned for days and quote.

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 marine barracks in Lebanon, a decade and a half earlier. The reaction inside of Washington was severe. After all, the CIA had a dedicated bin Laden unit, the Alec station, and Clinton's CIA director, George Tenet, had been sworn in on promises of preventing exactly this kind of surprise.

George Tenant 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 Tenant never recommended the idea to National Security Advisor Sandy Burger and President Clinton asked Steve Cole. That question however didn't seem to trouble President Clinton. A week after the attacks Clinton was told that American intelligence believed Bin Laden and his organization were behind the bombings. Three days after that meeting, President Clinton briefed the country live on television about his affair with an intern, which he had lied about.

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. The missiles killed 21 and wounded dozens. None of whom were Osama bin Laden. The second cruise missile attack in Sedan, which we mentioned back in Season 1, dealt much more damage. These missiles struck the Auschifa Industrial Facility, a chemical plant in the capital, cartoon. Alshifa was portrayed in CIA Intel as a potential chemical or nuclear production site. The reality was different. Alshifa was a medicine factory.

Act 1 had now ended, as Brissard and Dascade put it. Quote, the American administration stopped all direct relations with Kabul for only six months. For the time being, the Unicao oil project had collapsed. In the United States, the feminist majority foundation backed by public figures such as First Lady Hillary Clinton intensified its campaign against Unicao, accusing the company of supporting a dictatorship whose social policy included subjugation of women. The company gradually pulled its teams out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and closed its offices there. The French Journalists continue. In Washington, the State Department's Bureau of South Asian Affairs expressed regret at the unfortunate turn of events. But no one lost sight of the enormous opportunities waiting in Afghanistan. The idea of favoring a more moderate Taliban regime gained ground. In February of 1999, Deputy Secretary of State strobed Talbot and several colleagues flew to Pakistan to personally meet with the Taliban. He showed them proof of Osama bin Laden's culpability in the attacks in Nairobi and Dara Salam, right beside Andosuke. 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.

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 Masood. In the Panjir Valley, Masood's people in the CIA hashed out terms for a new joint project. The agency wanted Bin Laden and Masood still wanted to run Afghanistan. Maybe they could resurrect an older arrangement.

What was striking was that Midar's Saudi passport contained a valid multi-entry visa for the United States. And his visa application, facts from the American embassy in Jedis, Saudi Arabia, showed Midar's destination was New York. Doug Miller, one of the three FBI employees at Alex Station, took one look at the faxes and became instantly alarmed. A possible terrorist, whose travel was arranged by Bin Laden's Op Center, was on his way to a secret meeting and would soon be heading for America's largest city. At 9.30 AM, Miller started picking out a message to alert his superiors at FBI headquarters, who could then put Medar on a watch list to bar him from entry to the US. But inexplicably, the message, known as a central intelligence report, where CIR, was spiked by Miller's CIA boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of Alec Station. At about 4pm, one of the CIA analysts assigned to Alec Station, typed a note onto Miller's report. Without Wilshire's approval, Miller could not pass on the information, even verbally. He had done everything by the book, a potential terrorist, and member of Bin Laden's group was headed for the US, and he was putting the FBI on notice so it could take action. There was no reason Bamford writes, to kill the message. On January 14, nine days after Almedar had been flagged in Dubai, the Alex Station Chief reported to others that the search for Midar was continuing. In fact, it had been over for days, notes Bamford. The next day, FBI agent Doug Miller sent an email to the Deputy Station Chief asking what had happened to his report warning of Midar's travel to the US. He never received a response. In fact, Pro-Publica reports, the CIA did not alert the FBI for more than a year after it learned the terrorists had entered the United States, using their real names and Saudi Passports. It was that day, January 15th, 2000, that Medar and Hazmir'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. Their dining partner, reports Matthias Schwartz, was named Omar Al-Bayumi, a man with connections at the local Saudi consulate and a salary funded by the Saudi Defense Ministry. Schwartz goes on.

A follow-up FBI investigation dubbed Operation On Corps in 2007 found that Albayumi was just one part of a network that was, quote, created, funded, directed and supported by the Saudi government and diplomatic personnel in the United States. We could see from a block away that Naomi was an intelligence guy, said the lead FBI agent on the encore team. It's evident now that he was tasked with helping the hijackers, that he was running a clandestine operation. Some former FBI investigators, ProPublica reports, have speculated that Albayumi might have been asked to approach the hijackers as part of an American or Saudi intelligence operation to recruit them. At the time, reports ProPublica, the CIA was trying desperately to develop sources inside Al Qaeda. Former counterterrorisms are Richard Clark, later said that this was, quote, a possible failed CIA Saudi spy mission on US soil that went bad, and eventually allowed the September 11th attacks to proceed unimpeded. Quote, what if Al-Bayumi was a Saudi spy who is investigating Al-Qaeda at the request of the CIA? One more interesting name comes up from this moment. While managing the two hijackers, Republican reports, the Saudi agent by Yumi made a phone call to a Yemeni-American Imam in San Diego. A man named N.W.R. Al-Alaki, who would later emerge as a leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Newer FBI documents report pro-publica suggest that Al-Laki might have played a more significant role in working with Bayoumi to help the hijackers. Years later, Al-Laki 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 Huzmi. By March 2000, Wright's 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. Medar and Hazmi were in touch with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the bin Laden Lieutenant running this new operation, which appears to have gotten off the ground sometime the year before. But Medar, 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.

While Medar and his colleagues launched and conspired, the U.S. once more started up official channels to the Taliban. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, Carl Indefirth, met with the Taliban. Only a few days before, the UN Secretary General had organized a new diplomatic push to squeeze the Taliban on Bin Laden and allow everyone to resume the pipeline project. In March, at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Taliban, quote, voiced support for a negotiated settlement, report, bersarred and duskier. Things went even further, the summer of 2000, when Washington hosted the next round of talks, quote, the participants aimed to support a reform government in Kabul, bringing together Taliban and northern alliance leaders. They made such good progress in these talks that the head UN diplomat decided to invite the two Afghan enemies to participate directly in these discussions.

October 12, 2000. Suicide bombers, writing a skip, 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 Aiden in Yemen.

Meadar, 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.

No matter, at least Medar would get a Mulligan, an opportunity for another even more widely publicized hit on America.

After the Supreme Court declared Bush President in November 2000, however, that swift justice never came. 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 Isakov. and, according to Isakov, throughout the year 2001, despite a steady drumbeat of warnings from various national security officials, emails from the NSC, briefings from counterterrorism officials, and so forth, all about the possibility of another attack from the bin Laden group on American targets. There was little appetite for the discussion.

In late July 2001, the NSA downgraded the likelihood of an imminent US attack. While the FBI, shortly thereafter, issued a memo arguing in the other direction. Bin Laden was mentioned in around three dozen different presidential daily intelligence briefings prior to the fall of 2001. At first, the coal attack did not bring down the talks happening between the Taliban and the outside world. It may have even sped them up. That same month, days after the coal attack, the UN negotiator could declare that, quote, for the first time, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance were considering a peace process.

Laly Helms, niece of former CIA director Richard, and the Taliban's PR Wonder Woman spun this crisis into yet another opportunity for her clients. The nature of that opportunity was the fact that President-elect George W. Bush, despite his tough talk, was an oilman. Vice President Dick Cheney was the one-time chairman of Haliburton, one of the biggest energy concerns in the world. Bush's soon-to-be national security adviser was Condoleezza Rice, a decade-long big-wig of Chevron Oil, where she used her influence in the XUSSR to grease a deal between the oil giant and the President of Kazakhstan. This kind of administration would be, shall we say, flexible on issues pertaining to energy, especially with Russia and China, making progress in Central Asia.

There were murmurs of informal meetings between the U.S. officials and a senior representative from Gobadin Hechmachar's party. which had by now merged its forces with Osama bin Laden's.

Summer 2001 was full of this kind of secret informal diplomacy to push the Taliban and the northern alliance into a coalition government that would extradite bin Laden. Said one high-placed diplomat from Pakistan, quote, we would try to convey to them that if they did certain things then gradually they could win the jackpot and quote. But once again, the talks broke down, with the Taliban complaining that the Western nations and their UN allies were giving these simple country mullas the high hat. In one of the final meetings in Berlin, a U.S. representative seemed to confirm this attitude and an ultimatum to his Taliban interlocutor.

Meanwhile, the deputy chief of Alec Station, reviewed the cable traffic, showing the journey of Osama-associate Nauaf-Hazbi to Los Angeles. It seems astonishing, right James Bamford, that he would not be interested in why Hoss Me might have flown to Los Angeles and what he was doing in the US. But Hoss Me's buddy, Medar, was placed on a CIA watch list in August 2001. Although the government didn't make use of it to catch him.

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

Masood listened, and then said he was ready.

The White House took Masood's death seriously, an American asset from all the way back, Masood had been recently pitching himself as the CIA's best shot at taking out bin Laden. It was agreed to keep Masood's northern alliance alive, even if it's leader was dead. Then, on September 10, 2001, the Bush team agreed to pursue, in Steve Calls' words, a covert war to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan.

On the morning of September 11th, by 7.35 a.m., Medar, and Hazme checked in for their flight from Dallas Airport, American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles.

At 846 AM, Cofer 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. In these initial moments, this wasn't necessarily a big deal to him. Arguably the killing of Akbechama sued, 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.

Inside the center of America's global military machine, the walls shook. Officers, agents, spooks and secretaries all began evacuating. Fearful that another strike might be on the way. Against this current, strode an older man. Silver hair, rimless glasses, beady eyes. He raced through smoke and jet fuel fumes to reach the crash site, reported the Washington Post. Once he was nearly there and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel told him, you can't go any further. But the man's rank permitted him. His rank, in fact, was Secretary of Defense. And at this exact moment, no one knew where he was. At first we thought Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been hit, a White House aide later said, we couldn't get a location on the Secretary of Defense.

By midday, on September 11, things had calmed down within the agency, as it was determined that there were no more attacks coming. And at 3pm, George Tenet confirmed to George W. Bush that the bin Laden group also referred to as al-Qaeda had been responsible for the attack.

And then, wrote Musharif, in what has to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made. Powell's assistant in Good Friend, Richard Armitage, told the head of Pakistan's ISI, not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age. Deputy Secretary of State Armadage said that he would soon have a list of what the United States wanted from Pakistan. The ISI chief made an unequivocal commitment that Pakistan would stand by the United States. That night, rights Ahmed Rashid, the policy that Pakistan would adopt toward Washington was summed up in the phrase, first say yes, and later say,

On October 2, Bush gave operation in during freedom his seal of approval. Within a week, boots would be on the ground and Afghanistan. While CIA director George Tenett was telling President Bush that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on Tuesday morning. The deputy chief of Alec Station, Richard Blee, was on the phone to Afghanistan, speaking to a high-ranking leader of the Northern Alliance. The leader began to ask Blee about what weapons the US could send to support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. Blee cut him off. quote this is a tragedy for my country but it is going to change your country forever this is now much beyond you consult your leaders because this is going to come in ways in scope and in scale that you cannot imagine