Episode 12: 9/11 Rise of Heroes
The System Was Blinking Red
The most frustrating part about learning the story of 9/11 is the visibility of the threads that connected the hijackers to the financiers to the planners. The 9/11 Commission estimated the entire operation cost Al Qaeda $400,000 to $500,000 to bypass the multi-trillion-dollar intelligence operatus of the U.S. and its NATO allies.
Richard Clarke, a key official in the National Security Council, believed an Al Qaeda cell was operating in the U.S. during the summer of 2001. They even knew the names of some key Al Qaeda terrorists and their connection to other bombings but didn’t know if these high-value figures were in the U.S.
In addition, an FBI report from the Phoenix offices warned of foreign nationals taking multi-engine flight training, but that memo never reached the heights of the national intelligence apparatus at the FBI, National Security Council, or the White House.
The 9/11 Commission summed up the failure of imagination and coordination with the following statement: Most of the intelligence community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and severity of threat reports were unprecedented. Despite their large number, the threats received contained few specifics regarding time, place, method, or target. Most suggested that attacks were planned against targets overseas; others indicated threats against unspecified "U.S. interests."
The origin of the September 11 attacks can be traced to early 1996 when Osama bin Laden was presented with the idea of using planes to attack key American landmarks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) “presented a proposal for an operation that would involve training pilots who would crash planes into buildings in the United States.”
Bin Laden and Al Qaeda reviewed dozens of proposals for attacks from jihadists groups around the globe and decided to back KSM’s idea.
Britannica.com writes: KSM dreamed up the tactical innovation of using hijacked planes to attack the United States, al-Qaeda provided the personnel, money, and logistical support to execute the operation, and bin Laden wove the attacks on New York and Washington into a larger strategic framework of attacking the Un ted States in order to bring about regime change across the Middle East.
Bin Laden played a personal role in choosing the hijackers, including selecting Mohamed Atta, who was commanding a cell in Hamburg, Germany, as the lead hijacker.
In the early summer of 2000, four of the western-educated hijackers immigrated to the United States under Saudi student visas, which drew no red flags. Over the next months, they would train at flight schools in Oklahoma, Florida, and Arizona. Their training was funded by wire transfers through Dubai from KSM’s nephew.
The flight instructors at these schools generally found the students to be underwhelming and recommended they drop out of the various training programs. It appears from their reviews the trainees were not interested in flying the planes very well, and paid little attention to landing procedures. Only an FBI agent in the Phoenix office took note of the tips from local aviation schools and filed a memo, which was not seen by senior counter-terrorism officials.
Aside from the pilots, the muscle jihadists, who had been trained in hand-to-hand fighting and other hijacking techniques, arrived in the Spring of 2001. They joined gyms, supposedly to train, opened bank accounts, and rented apartments. They were visible, but nobody was looking for them.
By late June, senior counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke and CIA director George Tenet were "convinced that a major series of attacks was about to come", although the CIA believed the attacks would likely occur in Saudi Arabia or Israel. In early July, Clarke put domestic agencies on "full alert", telling them, "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, soon."
He asked the FBI and the State Department to alert the embassies and police departments, and the Defense Department to go to "Threat Condition Delta", which is its highest threat protection level.
Clarke later wrote: "Somewhere in the CIA there was information that two known al Qaeda terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in the FBI, there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States ... They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House."
According to the 9/11 Commission: The September 11 attacks fell into the void between the foreign and domestic threats. The foreign intelligence agencies were watching overseas, alert to foreign threats to U.S. interests there. The domestic agencies were waiting for evidence of a domestic threat from sleeper cells within the United States. No one was looking for a foreign threat to domestic targets.
In sum, the domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI's efforts.
The public was not warned. Time had run out.
