It's impossible to understand the events of 9/11 without understanding Osama bin Laden. Who was he? What was he hoping to achieve with the attack? How did the U.S. track him down? And what can we learn from that story now? Three women — a CIA analyst, an FBI investigator, and a scholar who read 6,000 pages of documents recovered from bin Laden’s compound after he was killed — recount how they came to know and understand Osama bin Laden.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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CIA analyst Gina Bennett was in her cubicle at the Counterterrorist Center on September 11th, 2001, going through the previous night's intelligence.
Gina Bennett: Which is what most analysts do in the morning when they first get to work. And we heard about the first plane.
ARCHIVAL News Coverage: It 's 8:52 here in New York. I'm Bryant Gumbel. You're looking at the World Trade Center. We understand that a plane has crashed ….
Gina Bennett: A number of us went into an office to turn on the television and see what the news was covering.
ARCHIVAL News Coverage: I was up on, uh, in my office on the northwest corner of the 82nd floor. I heard a noise, like a sonic boom almost, and then a blast.
Gina Bennett: And we were actually watching as the second plane hit.
ARCHIVAL News Coverage: Oh there’s another one. Another plane just hit right. Oh my God.
Gina Bennett: It was very clear the kind of plane it was. And that's when everyone just knew that that was the attack, that this was the beginning of— we didn't know how long or how many. But that was it.
ARCHIVAL News Coverage: Oh my goodness. There is smoke pouring out of the Pentagon.
Gina Bennett: As much as we all believed that it was al-Qaeda, that is not analysis. We had to have evidence, we had to keep an open mind and really look at the possibility of any number of perpetrators.
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And that meant spending many long hours in a windowless office in the weeks and months to come.
Gina Bennett: People were sleeping there. It was exhausting. There is just that sense of being in the longest day. And then there's also the repressed emotions, half of which are anger and determination to punish, to stop the next thing, to find out every last person involved. There's a whole set of emotions surrounding that, that are just palpable in this thick space.
The other set of emotions on the other side is this sense of what did we miss? Why, why couldn't we have stopped this? You're just torturing yourself with, with that sense of we could've, we could've, we could've.
Peter Bergen: How long did that all last for?
Gina Bennett: Years. I mean, honestly, I'm not sure it's over.
Bennett makes a good case. Who could have predicted that in the two decades following the 9/11 attacks the U.S. would wage various kinds of military operations against jihadist terrorists in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, in Pakistan, in Somalia, in Syria and in Yemen - at the cost of more than 6 trillion dollars?
And of course there’s also the deaths of more than 7 thousand American troops and also the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Syrians and Yemenis, who also died during the war on terror. All of this mayhem can be traced back to one man's strategic vision: Osama bin Laden.
I have what some people might think of as a somewhat old fashioned view of history; the idea that one person can change the course of human events. It's pretty hard to understand the Holocaust without Hitler. It’s also hard to explain why the French were marching on Moscow in 1812 without understanding Napoleon's outsized ambitions.
It's also impossible in my view to explain the events of 9/11 without understanding Osama bin Laden.
So who was bin Laden? How did the U.S. track him down? And what can we learn from that story now?I have spent more than two decades covering 9/11.And in the course of my reporting I was lucky enough to meet three women who, in very different ways, really came to understand what motivated bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Up next, you’re going to meet them.
I’m Peter Bergen. This is In The Room.
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Bin Laden became a religious zealot as a teenager.
While his half brothers were out doing typical teenage stuff, he was attending Islamic study sessions after school. He later told his family it was around this time that he first started thinking about jihad, or holy war.
But he really developed his jihadist chops after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Like some other Muslims from around the world, bin Laden felt compelled to join the Afghans in their fight against the Soviets.
He began using his powerful family connections and money to finance volunteer fighters and to build infrastructure like roads so they could get supplies and move around the country.
And he even fought the Soviets quite bravely himself on the battlefield.
During these years of the Soviet Afghan War he founded his organization, al-Qaeda, which means “the base” in Arabic.
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When intelligence analyst Gina Bennett first started hearing about bin Laden she was just beginning her career. She'd gotten a job right out of college as a typist at the State Department.
Gina Bennett: I alphabetized, I had to take an alphabetizing test. I am still a very good alphabetizer.
Bennett’s boss saw her potential and gave her a promotion which helped get her a job as a terrorism watch officer at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
She spent hours monitoring intelligence and the news to try to spot terrorism trends. That's how she first noticed this guy, bin Laden.
Gina Bennett: It was probably 1990, maybe as late as 1991. We didn't know that much about him. We heard a lot about his financial donations.
Peter Bergen: He was cropping up as what?
Gina Bennett: He seemed to be, I don't know how else to describe it, but like a mover and a shaker. You know someone who was savvy and realized that moving people around logistically, and not just the money piece, but how to get people moved from one place to the other. He seemed to have all the connections. It was his ability to have facilitated former fighters out of Afghanistan to multiple different countries. At least that's the sort of thing we were hearing. And it's like, well, how is this one person able to have tentacles like this in so many places?
The war in Afghanistan became a quagmire and eventually, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew.
Bennett and others she was working with started growing concerned that all these volunteer fighters — many of whom had been financed by bin Laden — had gained considerable battlefield experience fighting the Soviets and they were now leaving Afghanistan and joining other Islamist groups in countries like Algeria, Egypt, and the Philippines.
Gina Bennett: They were coming back with this cachet, you know. They had beat the Soviet Union. They had fought this holy war and so they had disproportionate influence, causing a more active extremist fervor to pick up. You know you saw that in the early 1990s across North Africa and Kashmir and even in Southeast Asia and elsewhere where we saw fighters returning after the Soviets pulled out.
Bennett was absolutely sure this was something she needed to follow, and she began digging deeper into bin Laden and his movement of self-styled holy warriors known as the mujahideen.
And then February 26, 1993 this happened…
ARCHIVAL 1993 News Coverage: We continue now our coverage of the terror that has struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Police say that it may in fact, have been a bomb, a massive bomb that caused an explosion to rip through the PATH train station below the Trade Centers just after noon today,
Ramzi Yousef drove a van packed with explosives into a basement garage of the World Trade Center-detonating the bomb.
Yousef had spent time training in one of bin Laden’s camps.
Bennett realized this holy war was spreading.
Gina Bennett: I was in the hospital. I had just had my first son by C-section three days earlier, so I was still, still very much in pain. My boss called me, she had also been very intimately involved in, tracking and researching the volunteers who'd gone to Afghanistan. And I turned on the television and I was like, oh my God. It's just shocking.
Peter Bergen: What did you think then?
Gina Bennett: My initial thought was, the sense of guilt of, you know, why couldn't we figure this out in time to stop it. Some of these fighters that went to Afghanistan had come from the United States and were returning to the United States. So, 1993 from my perspective, from the perspective of a number of my colleagues, was an early indicator of al-Qaeda's intent in the United States.
And in August 1993 Bennett wrote the very first US government report warning about bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
And she’d write several more over the coming years.
Gina Bennett: I was like a cop on the beat looking for a serial killer, having been very influenced by Pan Am 103 and the tragedy of that attack and so many Americans being killed.
ARCHIVAL 1988 News Coverage: Flight 103. Bound from London to New York, crashed soon after takeoff with 258 people on board tonight,
In December 1988, Libyan intelligence agents planted a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103…
ARCHIVAL 1988 News Coverage: The plane hit several houses and a gasoline station in Lockerbie.
The plane exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.
ARCHIVAL 1988 News Coverage: Witnesses say the fireball was hundreds of feet high.
Killing everyone on board. And also some people on the ground. Many who died were Americans, including a group of students from Syracuse University.
ARCHIVAL 1988 News Coverage:The students killed in the explosion were all participating in Syracuse's Foreign Study Program at the school's London Center.
ARCHIVAL 1988 News Coverage: It is the worst tragedy in the school's history.
Gina Bennett: So the students were only a year or two at most younger than me. And I was a terrorism watch officer, so that really struck me on a personal level.
Bennett helped pull together intelligence for the investigation.
Gina Bennett: And I think, you know, that for sure is when I realized this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to work my whole life just trying to prevent that from happening, you know, seeing the families, especially the parents mourning their children, having to look at the passenger manifests. So when I started seeing what I did, with al-Qaeda, and absolutely my stubbornness, my youth, the fact that policymakers really weren't ready to accept that this was a problem, I think I, you know, I really dug in. I was probably a bit obnoxiously tenacious and determined.
While Bennett was putting out those early warnings about bin Laden, bin Laden himself was busy planning the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.
Bin Laden usually left the details of the execution of a terrorist operation up to his team on the ground, but he himself was often very hands-on in the selection of the targets. That was the case for the attack in Nairobi.
ARCHIVAL 1998 News Coverage: Early this morning bombs exploded outside two of our American embassies in Africa. An explosion in Nairobi, Kenya killed and wounded scores of people. We have reports that several Americans are among the dead. Another explosion in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, also caused many casualties.
The blasts on August 7, 1998 killed 224 people including 12 Americans.
Mary Galligan: It was a very difficult investigation
Mary Galligan, the FBI Special Agent who would eventually lead the Bureau's investigation of 9/11, went to Tanzania.
Mary Galligan: It was a very eye-opening experience also of what someone would do or some group would do simply because we were Americans.
Galligan had spent her first 12 years at the FBI working on gangs and mobsters. She then moved onto the Domestic Terrorism Squad.
Mary Galligan: It was Animal Liberation Front, Environmental Liberation Front, white supremacist groups.
Galligan spent about six weeks in Tanzania, working on the investigation of the bombings. The FBI was now learning more and more about al-Qaeda and bin Laden and the threats they posed.
Mary Galligan: We were learning that this threat was not going to go away
Peter Bergen: At this point, what did you think about al Qaeda and bin Laden?
Mary Galligan: This coordinated attack concept was something that I don't think we as the FBI had thought about before.
Peter Bergen: Meaning that they attacked two American embassies simultaneously?
Mary Galligan: Right, doing that simultaneously, the fact that there was a group, or the word we would use — a cell — of individuals, that were involved in this. And I think for me, the other shocking thing that I became aware of that I had not known before is that concept of a suicide bomber, right? That there were people that were willing to carry out these attacks and give up their lives for this man, Osama bin Laden, this mission of al-Qaeda. So that meant that there were other individuals, right? And we did learn in the investigation that there were others who were not in Africa, but were part of it.
The second thing that we would learn after the bombings of the embassies, that they felt it was a success. And for the most part got away with it. Yes, we had trials in the U. S. and people were put in jail, but they looked at the response to those bombings as something that was, okay, we can deal with that. And therefore they continued on, to the USS Cole.
ARCHIVAL USS Cole News Coverage: Tonight the latest casualty figures are six dead, 11 missing and 35 wounded. But Navy officials predict that death toll will surely rise in what is the worst terrorist attack against a US Navy ship in modern history.
It was a despicable and cowardly act, we will find out who was responsible. And hold them accountable.
In Afghanistan, when bin Laden heard the news of the Cole bombing in Yemen, he fell to his knees thanking God for the attack.
But the FBI's investigation would be rocky with friction developing between the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen and the head of the FBI's team over how the investigation should be run. The FBI wanted to interrogate local suspects themselves; the US Ambassador wanted to be careful not to anger their Yemeni hosts who wanted to control the investigation.
Peter Bergen: Tell us about the Cole investigation.
Mary Galligan: The minute we left the airport, there was graffiti on walls all over that said ‘Death to the Americans. Death to the Jews.’ So to be in a country where, first of all, there's so many weapons per capita, to understand the history of Yemen, to know that bin Laden was born in Yemen, and the civil wars in Yemen. It was very scary.
John O'Neill, who at the time was the special agent in charge of the national security branch of the FBI in New York, led the investigation. John was a person who then would retire shortly before September 11th, 2001 and become the head of security for the World Trade Center.And he would die in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
He's in charge of the investigation of the USS Cole. And we're working that investigation out of the port of Aden where the attack had occurred.
Peter Bergen: As you probably recall, the U.S. never responded to that attack, despite the fact the FBI had concluded it was al-Qaeda. I mean, looking back, was that a mistake?
Mary Galligan: I think that attacking a U.S. warship and killing 17 sailors is an act of war and to not respond to an act of war is a mistake. I've heard all of the reasons why, in particular that this was a group, it’s not a country — how do you attack them? But I do believe that there was enough intelligence in the U.S. government at the time to try and retaliate against pockets of al-Qaeda.
Peter Bergen: So there was a lot of frustration, I think, amongst counterterrorism officials about the lack of response, which was really on, it happened during the Clinton administration, then the Bush administration came into office rather quickly in the aftermath of the attack, but neither administration responded.
Mary Galligan: No. And there was a lot of frustration, I know, with the FBI in particular because of the way that John O'Neill was treated by the ambassador. I mean there came a point where she did not like his investigative approach. John was my boss at the time and I had incredible respect for John. He was one of the few people in the administration that understood al-Qaeda, that understood who bin Laden was. He was trying to warn a lot of people about this threat. It came to a point where he and the ambassador couldn't work together anymore and she PNG'd him, persona non grata'd him out of Yemen and he wasn't able to return.
Peter Bergen: So she basically forced him out because he was kind of banging the drums about the al Qaeda threat in Yemen?
Mary Galligan: Yes.
Whether or not O'Neill’s ouster from Yemen derailed him from staying hot on bin Laden’s trail is up for debate.
But the fact remains that less than a year later, al-Qaeda would carry out the 9/11 attacks.
When the planes hit the World Trade Center, Galligan was in Oklahoma City, tying up some loose ends of the investigation of the bombing of the Federal Building there in 1995.
Right-wing domestic terrorists had killed 168 people, which until 9/11 was the most lethal terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
Mary Galligan: I was in Oklahoma. I had no idea how I was going to get back. So I did what I think any good agent would do. And I just said, I got it. I'm on my way back. And the Air Force National Guard got a plane ready for myself and the other agent.
The plane had pallets and pallets of blood on it. The people in Oklahoma were thinking, you're going to need a lot of blood in New York City because that's what we needed in Oklahoma City. That's the kind of injuries that they had. It would end up that we didn't need that blood in New York City.
That blood wasn't needed because once the towers collapsed there were so few survivors.
While she was flying on that plane to New York, Galligan was worried about her FBI colleagues and family members that she couldn't reach.
Mary Galligan: The thought process was, you know, how many people were killed? I knew that John O'Neill was missing. There were a number of other agents at the time who were missing. I was thinking about my brother. He was a pilot for United, and he flew out of both Boston and Newark, and he flew long trips, triple sevens. So where was he? I didn't know. It was a mix of personal and professional thoughts. And of course, who did it?
Peter Bergen: So you're on this big C-130, there are all these pallets of blood, you're flying from Oklahoma City to New York. When you come to New York, what happens?
Mary Galligan: So, I land at an Air Force base in New Jersey, and there is all kinds of security around the Air Force base, and there's two agents there to pick myself, and the other agent up, and they're driving us back up to New York City, and they're trying to fill us in, in the car, on everything that they know.
So the first thing they told us is we lost the use of our FBI offices. Not because the physical building was gone but we were a couple of blocks away from 9/11 and the air conditioning system had sucked in all of that debris and dust and we couldn't go into our offices. So we were working out of a garage on 26th Street and the West Side Highway.
The garage was literally a garage that would fix the FBI cars. They had cleared all the cars out and we were working out of there. And as we're driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, it would be the first time that it hit me of what really happened. Because the signs were flashing, New York City is closed, New York City is closed. And New York City is never closed.
Peter Bergen: This command center on the West Side Highway on West 26th Street. What did that look like when you walked in?
Mary Galligan: There were all kinds of wires hanging from the ceiling, just hundreds of wires. That garage had three phone lines in it on September 10th, 2001. And it had over 300 in it on September 11th, 2001. There were a lot of phone lines that were borrowed from the great citizens of New York City for the FBI to do their work. Of course we paid all those phone bills. But I think what people really have to remember about that day is we didn't have the computers we have today. The iPhone hadn't even been invented. So you're talking about hard cables you know, having to be plugged into these big, big clunky desk computers, satellite trucks outside connecting us to Washington, D. C. to Quantico. So the computers ran like the old, you know, very first computers that were on dial up, really, really slow. And that would become a very big issue in the case because the FBI collected more information on that investigation than they ever had done before. And how do you go through all that information would become a big challenge.
Peter Bergen: If I recall, there were 500,000 leads thereabouts. Each one of them you had to chase down. You did 170,000 interviews, and this is the largest criminal investigation in history. Give us a sense of the scale of this thing.
Mary Galligan: Every FBI agent in the country was working it. So you had leads in all kinds of offices that needed to be covered. We had to separate out leads that were directly attributed or could be connected to 9/11 and the 19 hijackers from all the other information that the FBI was getting.
So the FBI was getting all kinds of leads on illegal aliens, on people who they thought were committing crimes at the airport. We even had disgruntled girlfriends sending in postcards telling us that their boyfriend was Osama bin Laden and where we could find them. I share that because we had to find some humor in all of this. So we had to separate that so that we, the PENTBOM team, which is the name of the team that worked the 9/11 investigation, could concentrate on the 19 hijackers.
And we were given two edicts. Number one was: was another attack coming? Number two was: had there been another attack planned for that day? And so that's what the PENTBOM team started to work on and concentrate on.
Peter Bergen: So how are you managing all this?
Mary Galligan: There was an intake, which, you know, phone leads would come in, computer leads would come in, email would come in. And Director Mueller had said that the FBI would run down every single lead, which was a difference in what we would normally do. So what you would normally do is if, if a lead didn't seem credible, for example, if they said that there, and these were some of the leads we got, there were four suspicious men on the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. Normally, you wouldn't even run that down, because how could you? But Director Mueller said we would run down every lead, and we did. So we would send agents to that lead, to 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, to see if there were suspicious individuals there. So leads were coming in.
I like to make a joke and say I had no life. There was no difference between the weekend and the week, you just kept working. It came to a point where we would have to order people to take days off. The FBI brought in a psychologist to talk to us about what post traumatic stress syndrome was, which was not as talked about in 2001 as it is now. It was a constant fear about, is there another attack coming?
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It would take a decade to finally get bin Laden...here’s Gina Bennett.
Gina Bennett: I had my stints in supporting the hunt for bin Laden looking at the historical data, the historical links, you know, really dredging up anything that maybe we had missed on bin Laden's whereabouts.
Peter Bergen: Bin Laden was at the Battle of Tora Bora in December, 2001. He was sort of bottled up by some Afghan troops and a small number of US soldiers. Were you aware of the fact that he was at Tora Bora and then got away? What was that like?
Gina Bennett: Frustrating, I mean, very frustrating. Uh, I didn't for a minute, think he was gonna get away for 10 years, you know.
He got away, until May 1, 2011.
ARCHIVAL News Coverage, crowd chanting at a baseball game, 2011: They're chanting, USA, USA. That's because according to reports, Osama bin Laden has been killed
ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda.
Mary Galligan: It was relief because I just was glad that he finally was found and he was killed. We didn't have to anymore go through the, you know, is he still alive? Is he not? Is there another attack coming? Um, what struck me about the day that it came out that he had been killed was I never expected to see crowds, you know, gathering in Times Square and outside the White House.
[SOUNDS OF CROWDS CHEERING OUTSIDE WHITE HOUSE SLOWING FADING UNDERNEATH HER WORDS]
You know, the crowds that gathered in Times Square, there were firemen on fire trucks. It was such a symbolic victory, I guess you could say, for New Yorkers anyway, and Americans, that I was very surprised about that because you get to a very cynical point as an FBI agent where you think that most people don't appreciate what was put into the investigations, both before and after 9/11.
ARCHIVAL 2011 Press Conference: Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism, and he will take questions from you, uh, about, the events of last night.
I wanted to ask about the specific goal of the raid. Was there a consideration to try to take bin Laden alive, or was the mission to kill him onsite?
Gina Bennett: I was disappointed. I know it doesn't seem like the right response, but there was something in me that just felt that we took the easier path, that killing him was easier than ignoring him, than isolating him, than reducing his legacy to, you know, a postscript in the history books. It just felt to me like it was just going to add to his mythology, to his following, to even motivation for more revenge. It just, I don't know, I was just disappointed.
After bin Laden was killed while hiding in Pakistan, I was the only outside observer given access to his compound before it was demolished — apparently to avoid it becoming some kind of shrine. Accompanied by Pakistani military officials, I toured the compound for around two hours. I wasn’t allowed to take any photographs so I tried to take in as many details as I could.
Wandering around the compound I got a much better sense of how bin Laden and his family were living there; they certainly weren’t living large. The compound had no air conditioning in a part of the world that is pretty hot in the summer; their beds were just bits of wood hammered together and their walls had no decoration.
When I finally got into bin Laden’s 3rd floor bedroom, I found a bottle of “Just for Men” hair dye that bin Laden was using to dye his beard.
And it also gave me a sense of the ferocity of the US Navy SEAL operation in which bin Laden, bin Laden’s son, two of his bodyguards and one of the bodyguards’ wives were all killed; shards of broken glass littered the compound.
A deeper understanding about bin Laden also emerged from the documents that the SEALs were able to recover at the compound. These included internal communications, letters written by bin Laden’s family, including his wives and daughters and even the minutes they recorded of their family meetings.
Nelly Lahoud: And what's so valuable about this collection is that these were not meant for public consumption and that's why they reveal al-Qaeda secrets.
That's Nelly Lahoud.
Nelly Lahoud: I’m a professor of security studies at the U.S. Army War College, and I'm the author of The Bin Laden Papers.
The Bin Laden Papers is the title of her book. To write it Lahoud spent A LOT of time with all the documents recovered during the raid on bin Laden's compound.
Nelly Lahoud: We systematically went through all the text files, nearly 97,000 files. We were able to identify nearly 6,000 Arabic pages of al-Qaeda's internal communications.
And going through all those documents and communications Lahoud learned a lot about bin Laden's thinking.
Nelly Lahoud: He saw himself as the champion of Muslim causes around the world. We knew about this in his public statements and his private letters corroborate that. The plight of Muslims around the world was always on his mind. What he really wanted is to rid Muslims of dictators and bring, bring them down through jihad. And he was convinced that what stood in between was U.S. support for these regimes through U.S. military presence in Muslim majority states.
Peter Bergen: We get a pretty good insight into how bin Laden was as a person from these documents which in no way excuses his many crimes. I'm not suggesting that we're trying to humanize bin Laden here, but he was a man. So walk us through, kind of, what you learned about his relationships with his wives, his daughters, his family.The role of these wives and daughters in his thinking.
Nelly Lahoud: Well, Peter, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the man responsible for 9/11 was a great father, disapproved of corporal punishment, and was a devoted husband. The letters really paint a vivid portrait of family life in the compound. Bin Laden's third wife, Siham, and their two daughters, Maryam and Sumia, they were his anchor. They were heavily involved in drafting bin Laden's public statements. The daughters Maryam and Sumia were committed to the cause that their father had championed and it's clear from the letters that their input was a source of immense pride for the family.
Peter Bergen: You mentioned bin Laden was a devoted father, and, and of course he had grandkids in the compound. Paint a little picture of that for us.
Nelly Lahoud: So at the time of the raid, there were 16 people in the compound, nine of whom were children. These included bin Laden's children with his youngest wife, Amal, as well as his grandchildren. We discover, in the letters, that the bin Ladens tried really hard to provide a normal life in a clearly very abnormal setting. We know from the letters that the children were not allowed to play outside unsupervised because they didn't want the neighbors to hear, you know, children speaking Arabic in the compound.
We have a letter that is titled Daily Schedule, about what they did during the day. They started their morning at 6:30 with their first lesson. And I think the last lesson was at 2:30 and it was devoted to mathematics.They were being homeschooled.
There’s clearly a lot of love within the family. They all cared for each other. I didn't see any frictions that comes through the letters. And frankly, if I'm to take a guess here, if there were any problems with the wives, we would've probably found bin Laden much earlier.
Lahoud also learned a lot about how much bin Laden miscalculated about how the U.S. would respond to the 9/11 attacks.
Nelly Lahoud: When they decided on the 9/11 attacks, they didn't think that the United States would, would respond the way they did. They didn't consider a war. They didn't consider the response of the American people. What, really, bin Laden was convinced, is that the American people would take to the streets and replicate the Vietnam anti-war protest and demand that their government withdraw their, their military forces from the Middle East. And this is how you know, al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups could bring down the dictators of the Middle East.
Peter Bergen: And this seems to be an example of, uh, falling into the trap of believing your own propaganda. I mean, bin Laden really believed that the United States was sort of a paper tiger, and that if it, you know, apply enough military pressure, it would change its policies in the Middle East, pull out of the Middle East. And obviously the reverse happened. I mean, the United States got more involved in the Middle East than it had in any time in its history as a result of the 9/11 attacks.
Nelly Lahoud: You're absolutely right.
Peter Bergen: Did you find any evidence in the documents that suggested that he might have been aware of his own mistake here?
Nelly Lahoud: We find him in 2010 writing to his associates suggesting — though he continued to refer to the 9/11 attacks as victory — he admitted in one of the letters that the 9/11 attacks did not deliver the decisive blow that he had planned to achieve.
Peter Bergen: Bin Laden was concerned about the issue of Muslim civilian casualties caused by groups that are either allied to al-Qaeda or part of the wider jihadi movement. In these documents you see him mentioning this quite a lot and he was also concerned that al-Qaeda hadn't launched another major anti-American attack. So is it your impression from the documents that he was trying to relaunch al-Qaeda as kind of a kinder, gentler al-Qaeda and make a public statement about it and that also he was pushing hard to, kind of, get al-Qaeda back in the game and attack an American target?
Nelly Lahoud: No gentler al-Qaeda. We find in the letters bin Laden itching for international terrorism. In 2004, he was planning to derail trains in the United States and giving his associates, all sorts of um guidance, about how to go about it.
Peter Bergen: Did you come away from reading all these documents, liking him?
Nelly Lahoud: No, I didn't like him. What surprised me about him, what surprised me about reading all his papers is that I had the expectation that I would find something in the letters that would discredit him in the eyes of his supporters. That I did not find. Nowhere in the letters do we find bin Laden considering any deals that would compromise his jihadi principles. So on that basis, you can see why his supporters admired him and continued to follow him.
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ARCHIVAL 2011 9/11 Memorial Ceremony: We have asked their families to come here to speak the names out loud….
It's the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Mary Galligan says that she never works on 9/11. It’s her way of honoring the dead.
But beyond a set of commemoration ceremonies, why does bin Laden’s story still matter today? Here’s Gina Bennett again:
Gina Bennett:There's still an organization called al-Qaeda out there. They still look at everything he's said and done as motivation, as, as ideal as a set of ideals, as a script.
Peter Bergen: Al-Qaeda is clearly a shadow of what it once was. Ayman Al Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda that replaced bin Laden, was killed in a CIA drone strike. I guess there's one argument you could say, al-Qaeda is not doing particularly well. They haven't officially announced a new leader. And then there's another argument, which is jihadist ideology is pretty hard to expunge. And there are weak Muslim states where these groups, whether they're called ISIS or al-Qaeda or something else, can kind of establish a foothold. In Afghanistan, you've got this jihadist government.
How do you come down on the fact that Al Qaeda the organization is, you know, not doing particularly well? Jihadi ideology is still out there, there are still circumstances in which another group can form. How would you assess what, what the future looks like?
Gina Bennett: On 9/11, there were only a couple hundred people who identified themselves as al-Qaeda. So I don't know how to compare today's al-Qaeda to that al-Qaeda because I look at what a couple hundred people were able to do years ago, and when I look at al-Qaeda right now, that, that I think as a terrorism analyst makes me understandably very anxious. It's a much bigger organization. It's far more widespread. It has far more people and ideologues than it did then. Yes, you're right. It's in its own downswing. But as you also know, a movement versus a terrorist capability are not always in sync in terms of their up and their down.
Peter Bergen: I hear you. But I guess the counter argument is, you know, there are differences post 9/11, which are basically, United States’ offensive capabilities.
Things like the drone program, its defensive capabilities, places like the National Counterterrorism Center, where you used to work, DHS, TSA and then also kind of public knowledge, which is sort of a force multiplier for all this. We haven't had a major foreign terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. So surely that speaks to the ability of the United States to defend itself better.
Gina Bennett: Against tactics that we already know. Yes.
I posed a similar question to Nelly Lahoud.
Peter Bergen: Having spent so much, how many years of your life doing an intensive study of al-Qaeda bin Laden, are there any kind of lessons for today about the kinds of threats that we face now that you can draw from that study?
Nelly Lahoud: Oh, I mean, there is the obvious general one, which is, when you are trying to assess an adversary, don't just think of their strength, but also about their weaknesses, and the possibility of divisions within the enemy’s camp. I think that's a, that's a general observation.
Peter Bergen: That’s a great observation because I think so often when we are listening to our enemies, we should sometimes take their statements at face value, but, but not always.
Nelly Lahoud: Of course, I mean, you know, the United States should always be prepared, no doubt about that. But somehow there is this tendency as if the adversaries are always doing better than us.
Before 9/11 most senior U.S. officials greatly underestimated the grave damage that a relatively small terrorist group could inflict on the United States. But the shock of 9/11 changed that. In fact things went in the opposite direction, so much so that the fear of what these terrorists might do in the future helped to instigate the war in Iraq — a war that was predicated on the false assumption that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, which then might use those weapons against the U.S.
It's an old story — underestimating a threat from an enemy or overestimating the threat from a rival.
With evolving challenges from countries like Russia, Iran, and a rising China, hopefully U.S. policymakers have learned from the past two decades of the post-9/11 wars to correctly calibrate those threats.
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Be sure not to miss next week’s episode, where this story continues. We’ll hear from Admiral William McRaven, the architect of the raid that killed bin Laden.
CREDITS IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original. Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.
This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon with help from Holly DeMuth. Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow. Katie McMurran is our technical director. Our staff also includes Erik German, Laura Tillman, Luke Cregan, Jamila Huxtable and Sandy Melara. Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.
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Copyright 2023 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound recording copyright 2023 by Audible Originals, LLC
