The Longest War (8 page)

The depth of feeling that burns inside bin Laden about his holy war could be seen during the January 10, 2001, wedding ceremony of his son Muhammad, where one of his youngest sons, then aged eight, made a short speech captured on video in which he declaimed, “I stand for a jihad against the infidels today and shall do so until eternity.
Jihad is in my mind
, heart and blood. No fear, no intimidation can ever take this feeling out of my mind.” Indoctrinating his eight-year-old boy to believe that holy war is what gives meaning to his young life says much about how the al-Qaeda leader views the world.

Bin Laden’s fanaticism burned so hot that he was even prepared to sacrifice his own kids in the service of his jihad. About a year before 9/11, bin Laden gave a lecture about “the joy of martyrdom” to a group of al-Qaeda fighters, after which he excitedly gathered a number of his sons around him, saying, “
My sons
, there is a paper on the wall of the mosque. This paper is for men who volunteer to be suicide bombers. Those who want to give their lives for Islam must add their names to the list.” Omar bin Laden recalled, “That’s when one of my youngest brothers, one too young to comprehend the concept of life and death, got to his feet, nodded reverently in my father’s direction, and took off running for the mosque.”

A further component of the al-Qaeda leader’s thinking is explained by the Libyan Noman Benotman, who says that, based on his dealings with bin Laden and others in al-Qaeda stretching back decades, they have an ultrafundamentalist view of who has “immunity” from being killed during the course of a holy war. “They believe the
only way to get immunity
to your life is to be a Muslim,” says Benotman. Bin Laden firmly believes that all non-Muslims are fair game in his jihad.

This helps explain the seeming paradox that the mastermind of 9/11 is described by so many of his family, friends, and acquaintances as a humble, empathetic, if religiously zealous man: because they are, of course, all Muslims, whom bin Laden generally treats with respect, a respect that he will not accord to non-Muslims. He has taken to heart
the Koranic injunction
, “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends.” And he has gone a significant step further when he says, “
Every Muslim
, from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians. This is part of our belief and our religion.”

It was this blinding hatred and thirst for revenge that propelled forward bin Laden’s plans to attack the United States.

T
his was the exchange between John Miller, the ABC News correspondent who had interviewed bin Laden in Afghanistan in May 1998, and ABC anchor Peter Jennings at 10:29
A.M
. on September 11, 2001.

MILLER: The north tower seems to be coming down.

JENNINGS: Oh, my God.

MILLER: The second—the second tower.

JENNINGS: (A very long pause.) It’s hard to put it into words, and maybe one doesn’t need to. Both trade towers, where thousands of people work, on this day, Tuesday, have now been attacked and destroyed with thousands of people either in them or in the immediate area adjacent to them.

CIA analyst Gina Bennett
knew who was responsible as soon as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. In August 1993, while working at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the small intelligence shop inside the State Department, Bennett had authored a paper that was the first warning of the threat posed by a man named “Osama Bin Ladin,” who was “enabling hundreds of jihadists and training even more” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, and Yemen. She also fingered him as the possible sponsor of the bombing of
the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, an attack that killed six and was the first time that a group of Islamist terrorists had struck in the United States. Bennett wrote an analytic assessment that same year noting that bin Laden had “established an organization called al-Qa’ida in the 1980s.” This was many years before the name of bin Laden’s terrorist group became public and was a term that was then unknown even to many of the foot soldiers in his training camps.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bennett was doing “something very typical, vomiting with
morning sickness
.” She was three months pregnant with her fourth child, something that she had yet to tell her coworkers about, and was at her desk at the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) at the CIA. As something close to panic set in, Agency managers told everyone to evacuate—everyone, that is, but those in the CTC who would remain in the building doing their jobs; after all, there was no one group in the government who knew more about the source of the 9/11 threat.

Bennett and her colleagues tracking al-Qaeda were well aware that the CIA was a potential target. During the mid-1990s, Abdul Hakim Murad, an al-Qaeda associate, had
developed a plan
to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. The CTC officials also knew that one of the hijacked jets was heading toward Washington, D.C. (it was the plane that would eventually crash into the Pentagon). One of Bennett’s most valued colleagues, Barbara Sude, a precise, careful analyst with a doctorate from Princeton in medieval Arabic thought, was at her desk. Only a month earlier the
memo that Sude had coauthored
warning “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” had been briefed to President Bush at his ranch in Texas.

Sude knew that the CIA was a likely target but remained in the CTC offices on the ground floor of the Agency, preparing to write the avalanche of reports about al-Qaeda she knew were likely to fill her coming days. Chuckling, she remembers, “
I told my boss
, well, let me go to the restroom first before I have to write in case I get trapped in the rubble. I didn’t want to not have gone to the bathroom beforehand.” Sude recalls the moment the World Trade Center towers started collapsing: “I will never forget when my colleague comes up, his face ashen.” But there wasn’t much time to focus on anything but the task at hand: “Policy-maker appetite became insatiable for everything about al-Qaeda. … They didn’t know as much as they realized they needed to know.”

Like Gina Bennett, FBI Special Agent Daniel Coleman had also been
tracking Islamist terrorists since the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center. And three years later he became the first official from the Bureau to be attached to a small, new CIA unit dedicated to tracking bin Laden. Walking around the streets of lower Manhattan near his FBI office, Coleman, a portly gentleman in his early fifties, wearing glasses and a tan raincoat, might have been mistaken for an auditor at one of the big banks. But Coleman, who comes from a long line of New York City cops going back to his great-grandfather, knew more about al-Qaeda from the inside than anyone else in government. “
I’m the kind of guy
who gets into the back room of everything, reads everything, and tries to remember everything,” Coleman explained. As a result of a highly retentive memory and the fact that he had spent many, many hours
debriefing the first defectors
from al-Qaeda—Jamal al-Fadl, L’Houssaine Kherchtou, and Ali Mohamed—Coleman had an encyclopedic understanding of the terrorist organization.
In December 1995
, Coleman had even opened the first counterterrorism case against an obscure Saudi financier of terrorism named Osama bin Laden.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Coleman was at his office at 26 Federal Plaza, a block away from the Trade Center. When the first plane crashed, Coleman hoped it was an accident, “but after the second building got hit I thought, ‘Oh God almighty!’ I was pretty certain who had done it.” Coleman rushed down Broadway toward the Trade Center, looking to interview witnesses, when “all of a sudden this cyclone comes up the street and I hear this noise and it was the loudest noise I have ever heard in my life, and I’m like, okay, what was that? It was incomprehensible. I didn’t know what it was, all these papers. This cloud was coming.” This was the debris cloud from the South Tower imploding and collapsing, the first building to do so, at 9:59
A.M
.

Almost immediately an important clue was found near the Trade Center. Someone picked up a passport that had fallen to the street shortly after the first hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 11, had crashed into the twin towers. It was turned in to the FBI that day. The passport belonged to Satam al-Suqami, a Saudi law student, who had entered the United States a few months earlier and who would turn out to be one of the hijackers. Coleman remembers that Suqami’s passport was only partially burnt and
smelled strongly of kerosene
.

Analysts at the CIA quickly realized with something close to horror that two men they had previously tagged as al-Qaeda associates, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were on American Airlines Flight 77, which had
crashed into the Pentagon shortly after 9:30
A.M
. Barbara Sude recalls that Mihdhar’s name “
came up right away
.”

Bennett, Coleman, and Sude, who had put themselves into harm’s way on September 11, were three of perhaps a few dozen U.S. government officials who understood the true scope of the al-Qaeda threat before it materialized so spectacularly in New York and Washington. Most of those officials were concentrated at the CIA or at the New York field office of the FBI, which had been investigating Islamist extremists since the early 1990s, or were part of the small counterterrorism group at the National Security Council. Otherwise, much of the rest of the government, including almost all of the top national security officials in the Bush administration, had no idea about the true scale of the al-Qaeda threat until they were evacuating their offices on the morning of 9/11.

After the 9/11 attacks no Bush administration official took responsibility, apologized, resigned, or was fired for what was the gravest national security failure in American history. The first and only official to offer an apology was counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, who, when he appeared as a private citizen in 2004 before the 9/11 Commission, opened his remarks by addressing the families of victims sitting in the audience, saying, “Your government failed you. …
And I failed you
.”

In contrast, following Pearl Harbor, to which 9/11 has often been compared, Admiral Husband Kimmel, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, who had been warned of a possible Japanese attack, was
immediately relieved
of his command and demoted; a year later he retired. The Roosevelt administration also quickly investigated what had happened at Pearl Harbor. Within seven weeks of the attacks, the Roberts Commission, which had been appointed by President Roosevelt, issued its
first congressional report
. It was one of
nine
official inquiries
into Pearl Harbor convened in the middle of World War II. By contrast, the Bush administration thwarted congressional efforts to investigate 9/11, and only reluctantly
acceded to an investigative commission
more than a year after the attacks, following intense public pressure from the victims’ families. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed improbably in May 2002 that he wanted to avoid the “
circus atmosphere
” that would come with establishing a separate investigatory body.

Once it was set up, the 9/11 Commission largely focused on the structural failures of agencies within the U.S. government. The commission was a bipartisan
panel, and by examining the very real problems of particular government institutions it was able largely to skirt the wider policy failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations’ handling of the al-Qaeda threat, subjects that were politically too hot to handle.

What does the historical record tell us about the culpability of the two American administrations sitting in the White House in the years before 9/11 in failing to counter the gathering al-Qaeda threat? In the winter of 2001, Richard Shultz, an American historian of Special Forces, was tasked by the Pentagon to find out why elite counterterrorism units, such as Delta Force, were not deployed to hit al-Qaeda before 9/11; after all, that was supposed to be their main mission. In a
public version of his report
, published under the apt title “Showstoppers,” Shultz found that the “great reluctance in the Pentagon”—as General Peter Schoomaker, their commanding officer put it—to deploy Special Operations Forces arose from several factors. First, terrorism was generally seen as a crime until 9/11, and so the Pentagon saw terrorism as something that fell under the purview of the CIA and found it convenient to assume (wrongly) that the military did not have the statutory authority to engage in fighting terrorism.

A second key “showstopper” was the tendency by the Department of Defense to recommend “big footprint” operations involving as many as several hundred soldiers to take on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. That made those operations nonstarters for President Clinton, who was looking for small-unit insertions, not mini-invasions of Afghanistan. Michael Scheuer, then the head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA, recalls that “
Clinton wanted a rapier
and they brought him a battle axe.”