Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSC and at ICE's Exchanges and Clearinghouses around the world. Now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
We've been struggling a bit here at the New York Stock Exchange about how to appropriately recognize the 20th anniversary of 9/11 this Saturday. After all, the tragedy unfolded just a few blocks from here at the site of the World Trade Center and also at the Pentagon and in the skies over Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Josh King:
It's true the NYSC lost two members of its family at Windows of the World that day, Tom Sullivan and Bob Sutcliffe and their names are indelibly etched on a plaque on our trading floor. But while histories will recall those here at 11 Wall Street thought that they might be next around 9/11 and for that reason, the streets around our building remain closed to vehicular traffic to this day, the real story for the NYSC came six days later on September 17th, 2001 when the Exchange reopened after a historic four day closing.
Josh King:
You see, all of the key telephone lines that brought data and information in and out of the Exchange, passed through trunk lines that ran beneath the World Trade Center and they were summarily buried beneath the hallowed tonnage of concrete, steel, glass and human remains.
Josh King:
The effort from that Tuesday of the attacks to the following Monday to reestablish connectivity for the market, and thus the very infrastructure of capitalism's economy was herculean. It was deserving and certainly needed to see the governor of New York, the mayor of New York City, the state's two senators and a crowd of first responders gather on our floor to ring the opening bell on September 17th, and thus signal to the world that capitalism couldn't crumble as tragically as the two skyscrapers did.
Josh King:
On that very day, Michael Gordon wrote the following lede in his story for the New York Times under the headline, After The Attacks, The Strategy: A New War and Its Scale. Gordon wrote, and I'm going to quote here, "When President Bush and his top aides talk about military action to end Afghanistan's support for terrorism, they are focusing on attacks to punish the Taliban and undermine their control of the country, not a full scale American occupation." That's what Gordon wrote.
Josh King:
Well, I guess the verdict of 20 years was a little different. As part of our two episode series looking back at 9/11 and what lessons it has for us going forward, you may have already heard our conversation with Michael Arad, the architect of the 9/11 Memorial and the meaning of that 10 acre parcel a few blocks away from here, and today we're going to expand the aperture considerably, casting our lens on the decade before the attacks and the two that followed, with the man who knows and knows more about Osama Bin Laden than perhaps any other American, my friend Peter Bergen, author of the new book The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden, out now from Simon & Schuster. Our conversation with Peter on the attack, the perpetrator, the war, and now the aftermath is coming up right after this.
Speaker 1:
In our time of greatest need, we want to thank the true heroes around the world for stepping up, for taking care of us, and keeping us safe. With your expertise, your commitment, your sacrifice, and your selflessness, we'll work together to create a brighter future and we thank you for reminding us what really matters. From all of us, thank you.
Josh King:
It was some time after Peter Bergen returned from producing the first television interview of Osama Bin Laden in 1997 that I met him in Washington, DC in my final year working at the White House. It was probably from him that I, like millions of others around the world, first heard Bin Laden's name uttered. I've been rereading Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies this week and both Peter's and Dick's books are reminders that few in government had heard Bin Laden's name much before that.
Josh King:
In the nearly quarter century since, Peter has written nine books, authored countless articles and appeared at multiple of whatever that number is on CNN, helping to explain for all of us, the threat of terrorism and the implications for national security. His books have been translated into 22 languages, he's the vice president for global studies and fellows at New America, and a professor at Arizona State University where he co-directs the Center for the Future of War.
Josh King:
Now, at this auspicious moment, when we memorialize, again, the nearly 3000 lives lost on 9/11, and the multiple of that lost and fractured by the 20 years of war that followed, Peter is out with what, when he pitched The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden to Simon & Schuster, might have felt like a coda on the global War On Terror, but now may just be an intermission with another new unknown act yet to come.
Josh King:
Peter, welcome Inside The ICE House.
Peter Bergen:
Well, thank you, Josh. Thanks for having me on.
Josh King:
The publication date for the Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden was August 3rd and you've been through the publicity tour process a dozen times, Peter. As a backdrop for your latest book, did August 2021 unfold as you expected it might?
Peter Bergen:
I mean, no. President Biden has done a number of effective things but his plan on Afghanistan was not one of them. The criticisms that have fallen are two baskets, one is execution, very few people can admire the execution [inaudible 00:06:24] but then there's also the border policy. I thought that it was possible that the Taliban might do very well. I didn't know that they were going to take over the entire country so quickly.
Peter Bergen:
Unfortunately, on 9/11, we're going to have a split screen of the names being read two blocks from the Stock Exchange at the Trade Center Memorial and potentially President Biden being there because, as you know, there's some opposition from quite a number of the families right now saying that unless they release more information about the Saudi aspect of 9/11, some families may boycott this.
Peter Bergen:
Leaving that aside, the split screen will be that and then, of course, the Taliban celebrating their great victory along with Al Qaeda and every other Jihadist group in Afghanistan will also be celebrating. That's going to be the split screen on 9/11, unfortunately. That's not something that anybody could have predicted.
Josh King:
I mean, we've seen footage now of a vacant embassy in Kabul, a shuttered airbase at Bagram, military material in various states of readiness left behind in Afghanistan, but beyond the government's property there is a larger legacy in terms of institutions that followed US forces into Kabul, like the American University in Afghanistan, where, as you've noted, thousands of students and graduates have been left behind.
Josh King:
This isn't what everybody is chattering about but it's a very real relic of our 20 year engagement. Tell us the story of that effort and what's left of it.
Peter Bergen:
Well, the American University in Afghanistan began 15 years ago and, of course, the story begins with the American University in Washington, DC, the American University in Beirut, interestingly, President [inaudible 00:08:11], the former Afghan president, attended the American University in Beirut. [inaudible 00:08:15] American University in Cairo as well. These universities have been centers of excellence and one was founded in Afghanistan.
Peter Bergen:
Interestingly, Josh, it has the highest percentage of Fulbright Scholars of any institution in the world, 11% of the students, which is an astonishing number, that become Fulbright Scholars. A lot of them now, of course, trapped in Afghanistan. You mentioned Jimmy Carter. Obviously, this is very different from the hostage crisis in the sense that the Iranians were never going to release these hostages who really were being held in the embassy until Reagan came into office but there are ...
Peter Bergen:
I mean, effectively, a lot of these students at the American University, they have a target on their backs, the Taliban attacked the university and killed more than a dozen people in 2016. They kidnapped two of the faculty, kept them for three years, an American and an Australian, and these students are pretty well known in their communities. It's a big deal to have gone to this university. It's the best university in Afghanistan.
Peter Bergen:
Of the 4000 alumni students and staff, only about 100 or 200 got out. There's a lot of them that remain and that's a microcosm of the larger situation, which the International Rescue Committee estimated that 300,000 Afghans had helped the United States in some shape or form. The New York Times performed its own analysis and came up with a 250,000 figure. The 120,000 plus that got out, that's great. Quite a number of them were Americans or other nationalities.
Josh King:
Before we look back at Osama Bin Laden, Peter, looking to the future of Afghanistan, a young man who was 12 years old at the time of the 9/11 attacks is 32 years old today. His name is Ahmad Massoud, the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud. I just want to play a little bit of footage that you produced in 1993, along with Richard Mackenzie where a little boy clings closely to his father's leg. Let's listen.
Speaker 4:
[Foreign language 00:10:06].
Speaker 5:
What about this one here? [crosstalk 00:10:21]. Ah, I see. Really cute kid.
Speaker 4:
[crosstalk 00:10:27].
Josh King:
This really cute kid, Peter, might be the future of Afghanistan. What does he have to say today?
Peter Bergen:
I had forgotten about that footage. Thank you for reminding me. He's 32. He went to Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point. He studied war studies at King's College, which is a great place to do an MA at.
Peter Bergen:
I communicated with him via email. He's in the Pangea Valley, leading the anti-Taliban resistance. He's got a very tough road to ... It's going to be tough. His father was one of the great commanders of the 20th Century, [inaudible 00:10:57], really contributed to the collapse of the Soviet effort in Afghanistan, was the main contributor. Also held off the Taliban, was assassinated by Bin Laden's men two days before 9/11, sort of [inaudible 00:11:08] for the 9/11 attacks.
Peter Bergen:
Ahmad Massoud is now leading the anti-Taliban resistance. He says he's trying to negotiate with the Taliban, it's really kind of fruitless, which is not surprising. The United States negotiated with the Taliban and didn't get anything from them really of any significance except they got what they wanted and we left.
Peter Bergen:
I think there's an armed resistance that's beginning. The difference is ... This reminds me, by the way, very much of ... On 9/11 itself, I was going into CNN to talk about the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, by Al Qaeda, and the Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Here, we have Ahmad Massoud, again, the son, the Taliban in control, again, 20 years later. None of this at all predictable.
Peter Bergen:
But they're gathering [inaudible 00:11:53] ... The Taliban are basically a rural pasturing movement from the south and the east. They are trying to impose their values on Tajiks and Hazaris and Uzbeks and other ethnic groups and people who live in Kabul. Most of Afghanistan doesn't particularly like these social customs and some of them are going to resist. The question is can they really take on the Taliban? The Taliban I think today is much stronger, unfortunately, than it was before 9/11 because just look at those pictures of Kandahar where ... It reminded me of ISIS rolling into Iraq in the summer of 2014. ISIS rolled in on these American military vehicles with the black flags flying, while the Taliban are rolling in on American military vehicles with their white flag flying. That's the visual difference only.
Peter Bergen:
They've got all these American weapons. They don't have the most sophisticated weapons but you don't need that in a war where your opposition is pretty lightly armed. The difference also is Ahmad Massoud, the son, doesn't have lines of communication to Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, which his father did, so it's hard to resupply money or arms or material, but one thing that might be useful for the agency, the CIA, is basically we're now blind in Afghanistan, doesn't mean we're completely blind because we have a national security agency, we can listen in on conversations, but our assets are gone, the CIA offices are gone, so you do have a lily pad here with this group in the Pangea Valley led by Ahmad Massoud, who can give you some visibility into what's going on on the ground.
Peter Bergen:
From an intelligence perspective, that may be useful but militarily, he faces a very steep hill to climb. That said, the Taliban have a habit of ... It's not like they're the world's smartest people. They're going to alienate other ethnic groups, I'm pretty confident of that. They may engage in ethnic cleansing or killing of westerners or allowing Jihadi terrorist groups. We may have just changed the equation of the United States or its allies may decide we're going to go back in.
Josh King:
If you think back to 24 years ago, I want to just play another brief clip because the next voice we're going to hear is that of the legendary Peter Arnett.
Peter Arnett:
Amidst these remote mountains of Afghanistan are the various hiding places of one of the world's most wanted men, Osama Bin Laden.
Speaker 7:
[Foreign language 00:14:22]. We declared a jihad, a holy war, against the United States government because it is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical.
Peter Arnett:
The US State Department calls him one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremism in the world.
Josh King:
You've recounted the story many times, Peter, but for our listeners, tell us one more time, how did you get that interview? What did it tell you as you made your way back to Washington?
Peter Bergen:
In February of '93, a group of men tried to bring down the Trade Center. They drove a van into the Trade Center basement and they blew it up and they killed six people at the end of February '93. Peter Arnett and myself and a couple of others went to Afghanistan to try and learn more about this group.
Peter Bergen:
In '96, we heard about Bin Laden. I went to my bosses at CNN and said can we go and interview this guy? They had never heard of Bin Laden. It was not like he was a household name but they realized that ... In our minds then, we thought that maybe he was behind the first Trade Center attack. That wasn't quite right but it turned out to be more or less right in the grand scheme of things.
Peter Bergen:
I spent a lot of time with his people in his orbit in London, people who worked with him, people who were his colleagues. They were very suspicious. It was their first television interview. They didn't really understand how the western media works. They were concerned we were agents of the CIA. They were concerned that we wouldn't give them a fair hearing.
Josh King:
You knew Bin Laden better than anyone but he was still very much, as you write, a Sphinx without a riddle when Navy Seals descended on his compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan on May 1st, 2011. What did the 470,000 files recovered there reveal more about the Sphinx?
Peter Bergen:
Well, you know, it's Bin Laden unplugged. He didn't expect any of these ... The 470,000 files included a lot of stuff, which was extraneous like his kids were watching cartoons, he, of course, wasn't linked up to the internet so his bodyguards would give him newspapers on thumb drives or bring PDFs or books to him on thumb drives, and so there was a lot of that material but there were 6000 pages of useful material, some of these memos Bin Laden would rewrite 50 times. Of the files, 6000 pages of useful material.
Peter Bergen:
What do they say? Well, they painted a portrait of Bin Laden's relationship with his family because some of these personal letters and they also explain how he was trying to micromanage what remained of his organization. The Trump administration released all of these in full. One of the most interesting finds was a 228 page diary journal that the CIA described as Bin Laden's journal. In fact, it was Bin Laden's family journal, which is even more interesting, because in the last several weeks of his life, Bin Laden was very concerned about the events of the Arab Spring and what he should say about them, because in his own mind, this was the most momentous event in the Middle East in centuries, yet he was not playing any role.
Peter Bergen:
Every night, his two oldest wives with PHDs, who he looked up to and who basically helped him write his speeches and do his thinking for them, they would have these family meetings before dinner or after dinner with also his two adult daughters taking notes and they would discuss what Bin Laden should say about the Arab Spring and they would also chew over the events of the day, because, first of all, there was the revolution in Tunisia and then the revolution in Egypt and then the revolution in Libya and then a revolution in Yemen where the Bin Laden family originates. They were very excited about these events and they were talking about it and they were interviewing Bin Laden about his views and then talking about this big speech that he was going to deliver.
Peter Bergen:
Bin Laden's big idea was that he would deliver a speech in which he would call for a council of religious scholars to advise the new governments. Of course, no one cared about this idea, and, of course, these scholars would all be Taliban style scholars but that was Bin Laden's big idea, that he would ... He did actually record this video or audio and it was released two weeks after his death by Al Qaeda and he made some very planned statements about how excited he was to see these revolutions and he called for this council of clerics to advise the new government.
Josh King:
Your book is divided into three parts, Holy Warrior, War With the US, and On The Run, which was certainly informed by that cache of documents that was seized in Abbottabad. Let's slide back for a minute to part one. Tell me about the journey of Mohammed Bin Laden and his brother Abdallah as they made their way from [inaudible 00:18:53] in Yemen to [Jetta 00:18:55] in Saudi Arabia. It's a good time to be in the construction business, given that Standard Oil, which after its breakup now comprises parts of Chevron, Exxon Mobil, BP, Marathon Petroleum, all New York Stock Exchange listed companies. It was beginning for prospecting around 1930 at the same time Mohammad was showing up in Saudi Arabia.
Peter Bergen:
Yeah. He had good timing. What he had done, which we actually visited, it's in the [inaudible 00:19:20] in southern Yemen, even today, it's pretty much medieval buildings, women live in ... They're very much living in [inaudible 00:19:30] and it's very old school.
Peter Bergen:
In the 1930s, there was nothing really to do there. Anybody with any kind of ambition left and some of them went to Egypt, some went to Malaysia, and some went to Saudi Arabia, which was just forming as the new Saudi kingdom in 1932. As you say, Standard Oil I think signed the first deal there maybe in '34, started prospecting and suddenly there's this huge gusher of wealth and Mohammad Bin Laden, who was a bricklayer by trade, was very adept about inserting himself and essentially became the king's builder, ingratiated himself with the Saudi royal family, became one of the richest men in the kingdom.
Peter Bergen:
On a business trip to Syria, he encountered a 16 year old girl when he was 50, he already had multiple wives, some of them he married and some of whom he divorced. He married this 16 year old, Alia Ghanem, from [Latika 00:20:21], which is on the coast of Syria, she's an [inaudible 00:20:23], interestingly, which is a heretical form of Shiism, if you're an orthodox [inaudible 00:20:27], but Mohammad Bin Laden didn't seem to mind. She was, obviously, very pretty and beautiful by everybody's description and a year later, out comes Osama Bin Laden.
Peter Bergen:
By the time Bin Laden is two, they divorce and Bin Laden is the only son of Mohammad Bin Laden from this one wife. At one point, Bin Laden describes his mother as a concubine really, not a real wife. He goes to summer school in the UK and he meets these Spanish girls and he unburdens himself. He's kind of a lonely guy, kind of a little withdrawn. He says that he barely ... He tells his own family that he barely knew his father, that he only had five meetings with his father, only one of which was substantial.
Peter Bergen:
Then his father was killed in a plane crash at age 10, that seems to have made a big impact on him, though, he barely knew his father and he became religious after that point and became a religious zealot, fasting twice a week, praying an extra set of prayers in the middle of the night.
Peter Bergen:
By the time he was 16 or 17, he was a full fledged religious zealot and got married to a cousin from Syria. She was 15, he was 17. Started having kids, started working the family business. Went to university, studied business and administration, dropped out, joined the family business and then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and that really was an inflection point that turned him towards, first of all, funding the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and he personally fought rather bravely against the Soviets, out of which emerged Al Qaeda.
Josh King:
His time at Oxford, those two and a half months studying English, he thinks the British people are morally degenerate and goes into this intense Islamic study, twice a week fasting, praying five times a day. Chart his course from here at age 14 to really age 31 and the Battle of Jaji against the Soviets in '87 when the idea of Al Qaeda is cemented in his head.
Peter Bergen:
He arrives in Pakistan at age 22. He's brought cash, within two weeks of the Soviet's invasion. He starts going back and forth from Pakistan with a lot of cash, helping the Afghan resistance. Of course, the main Afghan resistance is headquartered in Pakistan and he's giving them money. He doesn't go in until 1984 into Afghanistan with his family and people have said it's very dangerous, which it was, by the way. The Soviets had total air of superiority, they killed at least a million Afghans. It was extremely dangerous.
Peter Bergen:
1987, he decides to setup his own base in Afghanistan, which didn't make much sense because the Afghans were conducting a guerrilla warfare rather effectively against the Soviets. They didn't setup fixed bases. Bin Laden, and the people around him, they wanted to die. That's not a very effective military approach, generally speaking, sort of intentional death seeking but he setup this base, quite near a Soviet base, predictably, the Soviets came, including Soviet special forces, they attacked Bin Laden, he lost 13 of his men. He was rescued essentially by Afghans in the region. He retreated. The Afghans came in with 200 plus guys and they fought off the Soviets.
Peter Bergen:
They call the base in Jaji in eastern Afghanistan, they call it the base, which means Al Qaeda in Arabic and the name kind of stuck. By a year later, they had formal meetings [inaudible 00:23:45] in western Pakistan and over the course of days and meetings, they founded Al Qaeda as we know it today. Although, at the time it wasn't really focused on the United States, it had a more general purpose, basically, to take the experience they had fighting the Soviets and fight in other jihads and against the, then, socialist government in southern Yemen was the first. Bin Laden wanted to help the war against the Afghan communists who had replaced the Soviets.
Peter Bergen:
There were a whole series of jihads that he was interested in getting involved in. He didn't really have any military experience and the Afghans ... One thing the Afghans don't need a lot of help with is fighting. They always looked at Bin Laden as a money guy who didn't really know what he was doing militarily, which was very accurate.
Peter Bergen:
When US troops, including women, went into Saudi Arabia, this was another turning point for Bin Laden. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he was extremely angry about the 500,000 men and women of the US military that came to Saudi Arabia in order to defend it. His sort of latent anti-Americanism became real hatred of the United States.
Josh King:
When the battles of Afghanistan were behind him, Bin Laden comes to the Sudan. Talk about the level, and you mentioned it there, about what he thought about his ability as a war fighter versus a money man, this level of self-regard that is emerging, the sense that he is the general of his own mujahideen, using the millions that he got from his brother's death to prop up the Sudanese government embarking on this wave of entrepreneurial projects, eradicating the American infidels from Yemen and Somalia, the same ego that is going to be in tatters years later when he's holed up in Abbottabad.
Peter Bergen:
Yeah. I think that is one of the puzzles of the book and I can't unpack it completely but people are ... When he was in his early twenties and he was in a meeting with others, he would say very little, he would be almost monosyllabic, he had a number of mentors like Abdullah Azzam, who was this Palestinian cleric who was very inspirational to a lot of the Muslims around the world who came to try and get rid of the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Peter Bergen:
By the time he sets up Al Qaeda, he's 31, and then he moves to Sudan. He's suddenly one of the biggest businessman in the Sudan. After all, Sudan is an economic basket case and it was run by an Islamist government. No sane investor was going to put any money in. Bin Laden, by his own account, put 29 million dollars in and was really a big deal and he was rebuilding the main road between Khartoum and Port Sudan, he setup a tannery, a bakery. He had a million acre farm with 4000 laborers. He was a big deal.
Peter Bergen:
At least, publicly ... He did his first interview with the western press and he presented himself as a businessman to Robert Fisk of the Independent and also to Scott McLeod of Time magazine. Meanwhile, he was also secretly planning to attack American troops in Somalia. He sent people to Somalia to train Somalis. They certainly did train Somalis and it's quite possible the Black Hawk Down incident involved Al Qaeda training Somalis who brought down those American helicopters.
Peter Bergen:
All that was not known in the US government really. They understood that Bin Laden was a problem. One of the main characters in the book is Gina Bennett, who was a female, a young junior analyst at the State Department who began noticing these Afghan Arabs [inaudible 00:27:07] around Bin Laden, popping up in Bosnia and Algeria and joining armed groups. She wrote the first official, highly classified memo about Bin Laden in '93.
Peter Bergen:
That's when he really came on the radar of the US government. In '96, the State Department released a public paper just identifying him as a financier of Islamic extremism. Even then, only a relatively small group of people in the US government really were focused on him. You mentioned Richard Clarke. He was, of course, one of them, and there were people at the CIA and the people at the New York field office of the FBI, which is also not far from the New York Stock Exchange.
Peter Bergen:
One of the other, by the way, interesting characters in the book is Mary Galligan, who took over the 9/11 investigation. She eventually became the special agent in charge of the New York field office of the FBI, which, of course, is the most important office of the FBI in the nation. She ran the 9/11 investigation. When the Trade Center collapsed, they couldn't use the FBI field office just around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
I mean, this whole period, Peter, in 1996 I think is perhaps, for me, the most fascinating part of the timeline. I mean, he's jetting back to Afghanistan, he's thrilled to be back in the mountains of Tora Bora in this mud house that he makes for his family. Basically, you describe it as having his own little feudal kingdom that he could look out on. Meanwhile, so many thousands of miles away in the summer of '96, I'm planning Bill Clinton's famous train trip to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Josh King:
Take us into the situation room. You allude to it, Richard Clarke writes a lot about it, people like Tony Lake, Sandy Berger, Clarke, John O'Neil, they are wrestling with these institutions like the CIA and FBI that really are trying to get their arms around what this might represent but they're really not tooled up to do it.
Peter Bergen:
The CIA setup Alec Station, which was devoted to the Bin Laden subject and it was run by Mike Scheuer, who said Bin Laden is going to kill thousands of Americans. There were a number of times that Bin Laden ... We didn't have armed drones at the time, so basically it was cruised missiles initially and then it was surveillance drones and using Afghan tribal assets on the ground.
Peter Bergen:
The embassy attacks changed the whole view of this and one actually useful resource that I was able to draw on, the University of Virginia has the Miller Center, which is ... There is very useful oral histories of a lot of the key players in the Clinton administration.
Peter Bergen:
There was no debate after the embassy attacks in Africa killed 12 Americans and 200 Kenyans and Tanzanians, this guy was a real problem. The question was what to do about it? If you don't have ... Cruised missiles take six hours to get to their targets. By the time you've identified the target, checked with the White House, send the order to US naval ships in the Arabian Sea, and then they have to fly hundreds of miles, so it wasn't good enough to know where Bin Laden was right now. You had to know where he might be in six hours. That's hard intelligence to come by.
Peter Bergen:
Dick Clarke was really pushing, along with Michael Sheehan, who became head of NYPD counterintelligence, counter-terrorism, unfortunately, died relatively recently, they were really pushing the Pentagon and the CIA to develop an armed drone because they knew that that would be a game-changer.
Peter Bergen:
What did happen is that the surveillance drones began to get imagery of Bin Laden in real time. That actually helped the picture. But then, of course, 9/11 happened and then any debates who would pay for the armed drone [inaudible 00:30:55] hard to recall between the Pentagon and the CIA at the time about what happens if a drone crashes or whatever and who would pay for it. All that went out the window and the first armed drone flight, successful armed drone flight, took place in the months after 9/11.
Josh King:
We're not quite there yet in our timeline, Peter. The question, as you set it up, is what to do about it given what US military and government agencies have at their disposal in the very last final years of the 1990s. After the break, Peter Bergen, author of The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden and I talk about 9/11 and the aftermath, the death of the wanted man and what it all means 20 years on. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Peter Bergen, author of The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden and I were talking about the conspicuous rise of the Al Qaeda leader and Peter's encounter with the man on the plateau in the hills of Tora Bora, Afghanistan. The interview aired on May 10th, 1997. Probably not long before I met Peter in Washington, DC.
Josh King:
Peter, talk to us about Al Qaeda at that point as a business. It's tempting to dismiss it as radicals firing off their AK-47s in the desert but we're really talking about an MBA level organization.
Peter Bergen:
Yeah. I mean, they try to organize themselves along business lines. Bin Laden studied business administration at university. He went to a very good university in Saudi Arabia. He dropped out to work full-time at his family business. Obviously, his father was a great businessman. He built up one of the biggest construction companies in the world.
Peter Bergen:
I think he brought some of that to play when he setup his organization and the evidence for that is some of the documents that have been recovered in Afghanistan on the battlefields. For instance, Al Qaeda's bylaws I think ran to 36 pages and they included things like what your furniture allowance was, if you were married in Al Qaeda the loans they would give you for buying furniture, those loans I think you had to repay if you left the country. Very bureaucratic for how much money you get paid, depending on how many wives you had, how many kids you had, the vacation policy, a pretty generous one.
Josh King:
Let's talk about tracking the path of the 9/11 plot itself from I guess the issuance of the fatwa in [inaudible 00:34:19] in 1998 to the PDB given to President Bush on August 6th while he was on vacation in Crawford, Texas. You note that some of the credit given by writers like Lawrence Wright to al Zawahiri was misplaced and that it really took the US some time to wise up to the real threat, which got some momentum when Michael Scheuer was appointed to lead Alec Station.
Peter Bergen:
When I wrote my first book, al Zawahiri was a key player in all of this and now that I've looked at all the documents and seen a lot of ... There are a lot of memoirs of people who know both of them that have come out or people ... There's so much more information now. You mentioned the Sphinx without a riddle. There's so much we now know that we didn't know.
Peter Bergen:
I think there was an overestimation of al Zawahiri, Lawrence Wright and myself were both part of that overestimation. It wasn't surprising because in the videos after 9/11, Zawahiri was always by Bin Laden's side. In fact, the big idea of attacking the United States came from Bin Laden himself and Zawahiri had no role in the planning for 9/11 or any of the other major anti-American attacks.
Peter Bergen:
Zawahiri is an Egyptian and he was really focused on trying to overthrow the Egyptian regime, a subject that Bin Laden could care less about. Bin Laden really wanted to attack the United States in order to ... In his own view, that would lead to the fall of the Saudi royal family and the two things that he was preoccupied about were the Saudi royal family and the US influence on it. These were all Bin Laden's ideas. There's no evidence that Zawahiri played a big role in any of this.
Peter Bergen:
Now, of course, he's the leader of Al Qaeda and he's not been a very effective leader and he may not be doing very well. We haven't heard from him in quite some period of time.
Josh King:
You play an interesting role in that key moment in August of 2001, Peter, after analyzing this video of Bin Laden and sharing your thoughts with John Burns of the New York Times, the story doesn't run that Burns writes until after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Was the so-called editing dispute that you note, what was that? How might history have been any different had the story run?
Peter Bergen:
Well, you know, this is a really interesting story that I didn't completely unpack in this new book because I've unpacked it elsewhere. I found this two and a half hour video tape. Al Qaeda and the groups like it, they're all early adopters of whatever the current technology is because they're all a bunch of guys in their twenties, a lot of them, and they're middle class and so they put out this tape that was in these secret chat rooms, password protected, and on the tape, Bin Laden, I thought, made a lot of threats of the kind that indicated another attack was coming.
Peter Bergen:
I wrote John Burns of the New York Times, then the main foreign correspondent, a four page letter saying, "Hey, this is what I think is ... Here's why I'm concerned." I didn't have access to classified information, obviously, just what was out there publicly.
Peter Bergen:
He wrote a piece on the videotape, Bin Lade Charts A Violent Future, was the name of the piece. They ran it on their website on Saturday, two days before 9/11. They didn't put it in the newspaper because of an editing dispute. Then they didn't put it in the newspaper until after 9/11. Instead of it being page one, it was on page 26, because the thing had already happened. They've admitted this was a mistake, later. They then took down the piece that was on the website from the Saturday and I'm not ... Why they did that? Maybe they were embarrassed that they hadn't put it in the paper but they did, they took it down.
Peter Bergen:
Anyway, the reason I included that anecdote in the book at all was you didn't need access to classified information in the summer of 2001 to say, "Hey, something is up." If you had access to classified information, as the CIA did, I mean, the CIA did a very good job on strategic warning to the Bush administration. The Bush administration just didn't absorb it.
Josh King:
I mean, in the aftermath of 9/11, as we go on through the book, in the Manhunt, Peter, you've got General Jim Mattis and his 1000 Marines advancing on Tora Bora and the 10th Mountain Division stationed in Uzbekistan ready to go in but General Tommy Franks is relying on Afghan warlords to mix it up on the ground while American bombers drop a daisy cutter on Bin Laden's compound. How close did Americans come actually to getting him in those early years?
Peter Bergen:
They came very close at Tora Bora. They dropped 700,000 pounds of ordinance on Tora Bora and Bin Laden narrowly avoided being killed. In fact, I think he was wounded in the shoulder after the battle of Tora Bora. I say that because he released a videotape. He looked ashen and gray. He couldn't move his left side. He wrote his will at the Battle of Tora Bora. In his will, he advised his children not to join Al Qaeda. That's the frame of mind he was in.
Peter Bergen:
You mentioned the Jim Mattis book. This brings me back to a point that ... It's so great when you write a book like this, more and more information comes out that you wish you'd known earlier. I always was puzzled by Jim Mattis had at least 1000 Marines on the ground near Kandahar and a more gung ho commander, a more gung ho group of people would be hard to find.
Peter Bergen:
I knew that there had been some communication between Mattis and others about what to do about Bin Laden being at Tora Bora but in his new book, Jim Mattis says that he had a really fairly well developed plan to send in a large group of Marines into the Tora Bora area, which is quite far from Kandahar, several hundred miles, at least. They would setup observation posts. They would cut off lines of retreat and he presented that plan to the Pentagon and it just sort of died on arrival. It had always been a bit of a mystery to me about what these Marines could have done. Obviously, Tommy Franks, who was then the ground commander, he was very opposed to sending any additional American troops into Tora Bora.
Peter Bergen:
For some reason, he thought it would replicate the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Sending in several hundred Marines or Rangers into Tora Bora for the limited purpose of getting Bin Laden was not replicating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It never happened and it's one of history's great what ifs?
Peter Bergen:
The fact is that Tora Bora is up to 14,000 feet. I've been there on a number of occasions. Even if you send in a battalion of Rangers or whatever, it would still have not been that easy because landing helicopters there would be very hard. It was the middle of the winter. It's a mountainous region. There's lots of ways to escape. That said, the ...
Peter Bergen:
I went back to check this fact. The pile at the World Trade Center was literally still smoldering on December 12th, 2001 when Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora. It's the same day that Donald Rumsfeld is getting briefed on the Iraq war plan by Tommy [inaudible 00:41:06]. Literally the same day that Bin Laden escapes and literally the Trade Center is still smoldering.
Peter Bergen:
That I think says a lot about where their head was at and a missed opportunity. Senator Kerry, as you may recall, in the 2004 election tried to make this really an election issue. He was right. You know, Bin Laden suddenly reappeared during that election. Four days before that election, Bin Laden appeared in a videotape that he would have recorded in Pakistan. He's behind a desk. He's presenting himself as the elder statesman of jihadis, dressed in a gold gown. He's talking about the election.
Peter Bergen:
Karl Rove had a really interesting response to that because on one level, this would have seemed problematic. Bush had really let him go at the Battle of Tora Bora or not let him go but hadn't made a real effort to get him at the Battle of Tora Bora. Bush still polled better on terrorism than Kerry, even despite that, and Karl Rove said, "This has the feel of something that won't hurt us." Of course, as you recall, Josh, it was a close election.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Peter Bergen:
In 2004, this was all very fresh in people's minds.
Josh King:
Peter, 10 long years after Mattis and the Battle of Tora Bora, here is President Obama in the East Room of the White House, May 1st, 2011.
Barack Obama:
Good evening. 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, and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.
Josh King:
Peter, over the decade, we've read so many accounts of the raid and are going to revisit a lot of them this week as we come up to the 20th anniversary of 9/11 but based on what you've been able to reconstruct, before we get to the raid itself, given all of your perspective over the decades, what had become of the person known as the Pacer in the Abbottabad compound at that point as he was being surveilled.
Peter Bergen:
He had a lot of time on his hands. He was sending these very lengthy memos to his organization. He was running a business in the early 19th century, in the sense there was no phone, no telegraph, no internet. He was essentially communicating through hand-delivered messages. Sometimes they might get lost, sometimes people might just ignore them, sometimes they would take months for these messages to go back and forth but that's the way he was maintaining control of his organization. He was attempting to micromanage it. He was mixing [inaudible 00:43:38] who was a Yemeni American, prominent in Al Qaeda in Yemen, was [inaudible 00:43:43] leader of the group and Bin Laden said, "I don't know this guy" and nixed that appointment.
Peter Bergen:
Bin Laden told Al Shabaab in Somali, which was an Al Qaeda affiliate at the time, effectively, to not mention that it was really part of Al Qaeda because it would be bad for fundraising. They followed that advice.
Peter Bergen:
He had initially two of his wives and 12 of his kids and his grandkids around him, so that was ... He had a domestic setup. He was trapped. It was a prison in which he was also the warden, the chief warden. I went on the compound, the only outside observer to be allowed in by the Pakistani military that controlled it, two weeks before it was demolished. I went with my wife and we [inaudible 00:44:25] to get on and we knew ... My wife has spent time with the Pakistani military for a documentary with National Geographic. We were pretty well connected with them. I said I've come back for a third time, I said please don't waste my time on the third trip to Pakistan, you've said before I can get in.
Peter Bergen:
We had some ISI, which is the Pakistani military intelligence service control the compound. They, of course, are probably the most powerful force in Pakistan so I think they must have known that the compound was going to be demolished. They didn't tell me that but I think they for their own reasons wanted some independent observer to get in to see what was there.
Peter Bergen:
I got in and it allowed me to get a better sense of what happened that night, the night of the raid. You could see the evidence of a very violent operation that took place that night. I also got a better sense of how Bin Laden was living. Getting back to your original question. Each of this wives had their own little apartment with a very crude sort of kitchen and that was similar to how he lived in Sudan and also in southern Afghanistan, each of his wives had her own apartment, her own kitchen.
Josh King:
The deadliest terrorist attack on New York before 9/11 happened just across the street from where I'm sitting, Peter, when anarchists bombed the JP Morgan headquarters killing 30 people. That didn't stop Wall Street from becoming what it is today. You write at the end, you mentioned her at the beginning of our conversation, Gina Bennett asking a young CIA analyst if they knew what the Baader-Meinhof Gang was. In 40 years, will a future CIA analyst know what Al Qaeda was?
Peter Bergen:
Well, I mean, the Baader-Meinhof gang, obviously, didn't kill 3000 American civilians in the course of a morning. I think what Gina Bennett was trying to say to this young CIA analyst was over time, Bin Laden will become less important, and I think that's true. His ideas are fading. Obviously, the Taliban have a form of his ideas and are back in power, which was not predictable several months ago.
Peter Bergen:
Over time, I think Bin Laden will become less and less relevant. Most Muslims don't approve of suicide attacks because they've been so devastating in countries like Iraq and Pakistan, Afghanistan. His ideas linger on on the internet. He isn't going to go away entirely. Religious terrorism, the thing about religious terrorism is you believe that God is on your side. You can't really abolish God. You could abolish the Soviet Union and that really killed most Marxist terrorist groups around the world but you can't abolish God. It's a different matter.
Peter Bergen:
These ideas I think are going to be hard to completely destroy or they will fade away perhaps over time. Bin Laden is one of the few people ... One of the reasons I wrote the book is Bin Laden is one of the few people we can really say changed history. You can't explain why the French were at the gates of Moscow in 1812 without Napoleon, you can't explain the Holocaust without Hitler, in my view. Now, of course, Napoleon and Hitler had a far bigger influence on history than Bin Laden but he certainly set the course of foreign policy of the United States in much of the Muslim world for the first two decades of the 21st Century and that's no small feat. He changed America in ways that are unexpected I think.
Peter Bergen:
You can't draw a direct line from Osama Bin Laden to Donald Trump but I think you can say the following, Trump when he campaigned, ISIS had killed all these people in Orlando and San Bernardino and Americans were very concerned about terrorism as an issue. When he came up with the Muslim travel ban, which [inaudible 00:47:51] on the issue of terrorism since Omar Mateen, who carried out the Orlando attack, was born in Queens where Donald Trump was born, the Muslim travel ban was appealing to the vast majority of the public and voters and half of Americans. It was a very simple idea but if 9/11 hadn't happened, it would be a non-issue because terrorism would not have been ... People were concerned about terrorism because 9/11 is always in the background.
Peter Bergen:
I'm not saying there's a straight line from 9/11 to Donald Trump but I am saying there's a dotted line and, certainly, this Muslim travel ban would not have been the idea that would have had any political valence in the absence of 9/11, which was one of the hinge events of American history.
Josh King:
I'm sure, Peter, you've wrestled with questions like this before but now, 24 years after your first interview with Bin Laden, 20 years after 9/11, 10 years after his death, Peter Bergen has been and really continues to be Osama Bin Laden's explainer to so many of us. People should have paid more attention to that when that Peter Arnett special aired back in 1997 but given the lengths that Dick Clarke had to go through in his Chicken Little days, I guess my question is, after all of this, does Bin Laden need, does he deserve to have an explainer in 2021?
Peter Bergen:
Yeah. I'm teaching kids at Arizona State who weren't born on 9/11 and one of the brightest students in the class asked me, "What's the difference between Al Qaeda and the Taliban?" I said, "Well, that's a very interesting question." There's a lot to explain there. People who join the US military today, some of the Marines who were killed at the Kabul Airport were either not born on 9/11 or were literally babies.
Peter Bergen:
For me, the Korean War is something that happened in history and for so many young people today, 9/11 is an event not in memory but in history. I thought this was a good moment to try and explain who he was and what he did. That was part of the motivation for this.
Josh King:
Before we get to the index and acknowledgements in the Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden, Peter, the hardcover version of the book clocks in at 363 pages, 114 of which are devoted to sources and notes. Your final words are addressed to your son, Pierre, in which you write, "Now it's done. Finally." Are you done with Bin Laden? Are those 114 pages of notes a roadmap to some future Peter Bergen who wants to take up the mission that you've been on for a quarter century?
Peter Bergen:
I'm definitely done with the Bin Laden subject. 100%. My wife and I met in Afghanistan. She's from Louisiana. We are talking about writing a book about basically what just happened in Afghanistan. We have a lot of Afghan friends and we've been reporting from there for a long time and, unfortunately, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen of this particular debacle and trying to unpack that and also trying to remind people that there are a lot of things that went right in Afghanistan.
Peter Bergen:
Everybody knows the things that went wrong but back to the American University of Afghanistan, which we talked about at the beginning, all those kids, the Fulbright Scholars and the women who got an education and the future of the ... This is a very young country, I think 75% of the population is under the age of 25, a very vibrant, independent media, hundreds of TV stations and radio stations. All that is unfortunately about to be in the process of being destroyed, so trying to understand how that happened and the lessons that we can try and draw, that's really our next project.
Josh King:
Many stories continue to need to be written. Peter, thank you for joining us Inside The ICE House. Thank you for the truth and facts that you've shared with all of us for the last 25 years.
Peter Bergen:
Thank you, Josh and thank you for having me on.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Peter Bergen, author of The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden, out now from Simon & Schuster. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at ICE House at ICE.com or tweet at us at ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Stefan [Caprille 00:52:02], with production assistance from Pete Ash and Ian [Wolk 00:52:04] and Steven Romanchek.
Josh King:
I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange, thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
