American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden (2025) s01e02 Episode Script
Gloves Are Off
[suspenseful music playing]
[helicopter whirring]
[reporter 1] He has a personal fortune
estimated at $250 million.
He lives in a cave
atop a range of mountains in Afghanistan.
From there, he controls a web
of financial, logistical,
and strategic assistance
to Sunni Islamic groups
engaged in what they consider a jihad,
or a holy war.
ABC's John Miller recently traveled
to Afghanistan for a rare interview
with bin Laden.
[Miller] The bin Laden interview
was a calculated risk.
Yes, we took chances. It was dangerous.
Journalists put pressure on themselves.
I have to get on the inside
with one of these people,
not just looking at
another propaganda video.
It was May 1998 in Islamabad.
We were thrown onto a flight
that led to buses,
the back of pickup trucks,
where there were no roads.
Finally, we get to the top
of this mountain.
Everybody points their rifles in the air
and starts shooting tracer rounds.
There's a little boy next to me.
He has an AK-47,
and he's firing it this far from my ear.
And I push the gun away,
and he brings it back,
and he finishes the magazine.
That was Osama bin Laden's son.
One of the fighters says,
"I have good news for you."
"Mr. bin Laden has agreed to answer
each one of your questions,
but we're not gonna translate
the answers."
And I said, "Well, how am I gonna ask
follow-up questions?"
He said,
"There won't be follow-up questions."
We begin our interview,
and we go through the questions.
"Did you finance plots
to blow up airplanes over Pacific routes
filled with passengers?"
"Assassinate the Pope in Manila?"
[speaking Arabic]
"Was there a plot
to kill President Clinton?"
[speaking Arabic]
[Miller] And I'm sitting there,
kind of nodding along with it,
wondering, "Well, what do we have?"
At the end of the interview,
I went back to our fixer in the back,
and I said, "What did he say?"
And he said, "He said a lot."
"We need to get the tapes,
and we need to get out."
[tense music playing]
[Miller] Once we got back to the hotel
and we had the main translations done,
it was groundbreaking, it was frightening.
[interpreter] We do not differentiate
between those dressed in military uniforms
and civilians,
they're all targets in this fatwa.
Holy shit. He was inserting a message.
He wanted the interview as his platform
to publicly declare war on America.
[interpreter] You will leave when the
bodies of American soldiers and civilians
are sent in the wooden boxes and coffins.
That is when you will leave.
This is a game-changer.
[music intensifying]
[clicking]
The U.S. reportedly had the chance
to capture Osama bin Laden but didn't.
Captured al-Qaida fighters say bin Laden
was at the Battle of Tora Bora.
The Washington Post reports he escaped
because the army
failed to send troops after him.
[Henry Crumpton] We had
bin Laden in our sights.
We needed to kill bin Laden in Tora Bora,
and we didn't.
And now we were pretty confident
bin Laden had escaped into Pakistan.
[Tracy Walder] I was a little angry
with the administration,
because you just let him go
from a place where we had him
relatively contained,
and we knew where he was,
to now basically
the Wild Wild West of Pakistan,
which is really impossible
to find people in.
And so
[laughing] A little angry, um, as well.
[Cofer Black] Could have
ended it and moved on.
Would have given some closure
to the survivors in New York.
This one was the best shot we ever had,
and, uh, I'm sorry we didn't take it.
I thought I killed him.
I thought I killed him.
I thought, "Well,
we're gonna have to get back at this."
"Probably won't be me, but someone else
is gonna have to get a shot at this."
Another Osama bin Laden propaganda video
surfaced today in the Arab world.
[in Arabic] We are close to approximately
800 destroyed buildings and high-rises.
[reporter 1] In this video, bin Laden
does not look like a man under attack
or running for his life.
[George W. Bush] He is not escaping us.
This is a guy who, three months ago,
was in control of a country.
Now he's in maybe in control of a cave.
He knows that we're on the hunt.
And I like our position better than his.
[reporter 1] With bin Laden still
unaccounted for, the hunt continues.
[reporter 2] The question remains,
where is bin Laden?
[tense music continues]
[Cindy Storer] There was concern that,
once bin Laden and other al-Qaida members
left Afghanistan,
he could go anywhere.
They could disappear across the border
into Pakistan, into Iran,
take flight and go wherever they wanted.
[woman] The problem is,
those possibilities are infinite.
He'd been evading our security
for years, even before 9/11.
We were tracking him since 1996.
So he wasn't stupid.
He understood what he needed to do
to keep himself safe.
So finally, we started thinking,
"Is there another way
we can look at this?"
The question isn't, "Where is bin Laden?"
It's, "Who might be with bin Laden?"
[Soufan] I was an FBI agent tasked
in investigating
al-Qaida attacks around the world
and interrogating its members.
The mission was not only
capturing Osama bin Laden,
but also preventing further attacks.
After bin Laden escaped Tora Bora,
U.S. forces were searching for any clues
that may lead us to him.
And in al-Qaida safe house,
there was a tape that they found
where bin Laden
was explaining the operation.
And every time he's explaining 9/11,
he points at the person
who's holding the camera,
and he says, "Mukhtar."
[in Arabic] In the dream, he saw Mukhtar.
[speaking Arabic]
"God bless Mukhtar."
[speaking Arabic]
[Soufan] In the same tape,
bin Laden's son,
who was a little kid at the time,
found a piece of a drone,
and he starts yelling, "Mukhtar,
Mukhtar, come and look at this one."
[child speaking Arabic]
The guy comes with the camera,
take it, look at it.
This tape made it clear that Mukhtar
was part of bin Laden's inner circle,
and he could be one of the few people
who knew where bin Laden was hiding.
So we're trying to figure out
who Mukhtar was.
We did not know what he looked like,
because he was never shown on tape.
We were only
working off his alias, "Mukhtar."
[Walder] We talk about
"bin Laden, bin Laden, bin Laden,"
but I felt that, at this point in time,
he was stationary,
that a lot of this work
was being delegated out to these henchmen.
They are the ones
who are doing all of his dirty work.
He had all the faces
of all his little lieutenants
that were all over the place.
Bin Laden was, of course, at the top.
After him was his deputy, Zawahiri.
Next in command
were a handful of lieutenants
that were also very close to bin Laden.
There was Abu Zubaydah,
who was suspected to be
bin Laden's chief operations guy,
and a mysterious operative
known only as "Mukhtar."
- [man calls out]
- [group] Allahu Akbar!
And so there was a lot of leads
that we were pursuing,
and in the midst of that,
we thought another attack was coming.
[speaking Arabic]
- [gunfire]
- [speaking Arabic]
When al-Qaida escaped from Afghanistan,
they didn't go into hiding.
They continued to plot and to plan.
[reporter] The country
remains on high alert
after U.S. intelligence heard
what they called "suspicious chatter."
[clicking]
[tense music continues]
[reporter 1]
A disturbing incident on board
an American Airlines jet this afternoon.
Officials say a flight attendant
discovered a passenger
carrying a bomb on the jumbo jet.
There is no doubt this man
intended to commit suicide
and take the plane down.
Enough explosives in his shoes
to trigger, quote, "a major disaster."
[Miller] Richard Reid,
the so-called shoe-bomber,
was al-Qaida's first effort
to rebound on another airplane
with another terrible attack.
Could you imagine if U.S. airliners
fell out of the sky?
[reporter 2] America is on guard
tonight in a whole new way.
[Storer] If you're talking
about a major corporation,
and one office gets wiped out
in an earthquake,
does that mean
the organization doesn't work anymore?
Does it mean they don't move
their headquarters elsewhere?
[bleeping]
They had bases all over the world,
and these plots were already in motion.
[Soufan] We felt like
we were at a dead end.
But then we got a lead on Abu Zubaydah.
[John McLaughlin] Abu Zubaydah was someone
who was in charge of logistics,
recruiting, planning operations.
[Walder] I view Abu Zubaydah
as bin Laden's right-hand man.
His operations guy.
Through a series
of intelligence breakthroughs,
we started to develop a pattern of travel
for Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan.
We were able to narrow his travel down to,
as I recall, about 17 locations.
And so, we made an unprecedented decision.
We decided we would try
and go after 17 locations at once.
[clicking]
[men shouting in Arabic]
[McLaughlin] When the raid occurred,
he escaped,
and was jumping from roof to roof,
and was wounded quite severely.
[man shouting in Arabic]
[Soufan] He was taken to a hospital,
and my partner and I were called in
to interrogate him.
Abu Zubaydah was badly injured.
One of the medic came over, and he said,
"If you wanna talk to him, you better
talk tonight 'cause he's septic."
"He's probably he's dead in the morning."
- [monitor bleeping]
- [siren wailing]
[steady bleep]
I told him, "Death is not an option.
Do anything you can to keep him alive."
[high-pitched, steady bleep]
[rhythmic bleeping]
In the hospital,
we continued to keep the interview going.
Everybody was shocked
that he was cooperating.
And he named an al-Qaida operative
who was planning an attack.
I said, "Oh. If I showed you a picture
of that guy, can you tell me if it's him?"
He said, "Sure."
My partner had a Sony device.
It looks like the Palm Pilot.
And on this device, he had photos
of all the most wanted terrorists.
And he went down there, like,
you know, hitting the stylus.
Passed it.
So I said, "Is this the guy?"
And he said, "No."
What I did not realize was that my partner
had zoomed in on the wrong photo.
So I said, "Oh, sorry."
I said, "Hey, Steve, you gave me
the wrong photo, dude."
He said, "By the way,
who the hell is he? Tell me."
He said, "This is Mukhtar."
So I looked at the picture.
Now, I'm very anxious.
I wanna see who the hell this Mukhtar is.
And it's a picture
of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,
also known as KSM.
He was a terrorist
we had been tracking for years.
I had no idea that KSM
was a member of al-Qaida.
I was totally shocked.
But that was nothing
compared to what happened next.
I said to Abu Zubaydah, "Since we're
on this, why don't we talk about him?"
He said,
"Yeah, he's the one who did 9/11."
A light bulb connected
all the things in my head together.
KSM had been
bin Laden's accomplice all along.
He was the architect,
the visionary, the mastermind of 9/11.
[Gina Bennett] Once Abu Zubaydah
revealed KSM's involvement in 9/11,
we realized KSM had been obsessed
with the World Trade Center for years.
[clicking]
[ominous music playing]
[explosion echoes]
[Storer] In 1993, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
pulled off this attack
on the World Trade Center in New York.
He works with a local cell.
They get the van,
they set up the explosives,
and then they put a bomb
under the World Trade Center.
He thought the structure would move enough
to shake and even topple.
He wanted it to fall down.
He said later
he wanted to kill 100,000 people.
If they just had
a little bit more explosives
and moved the truck
one inch to the right or left,
they might've toppled the building.
It was that close.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed just never rested
until he could bring those towers down.
[Miller] After the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center,
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,
he had a bag full of plots and ideas,
but he didn't have the money
to make it happen.
He finds his way to Afghanistan
and into al-Qaida,
and he finds his way back
to Osama bin Laden,
and he pitches this idea of,
"We'll target the World Trade Center,
to take care of that,
because we tried it before
and it's still standing."
But now the plan kept getting bigger.
"We'll target the Capitol.
We'll target the Pentagon."
"We will set America back on its heels
like no one has ever done."
If there was a keystone individual
in this whole plot,
it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Bin Laden was the inspiration
and the charismatic leader,
but Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
was the designer, the architect.
[Soufan] After 9/11, he went into hiding.
Through a series
of classified spy operations,
we learned that he was
in Rawalpindi in Pakistan.
That activated our operation to capture
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
[clicking]
[horns honking]
[reporter 1] CIA and Pakistani agents
hit the two-story villa hard,
bashing in doors
and sweeping up anything of interest.
Family members said
everyone was asleep when they came.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
was caught in his underwear.
It was his birthday.
[reporter 2] Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
is in American hands tonight.
[reporter 3] Al-Qaida's top planner
is now out of action.
[Morell] Bin Laden and KSM were close.
When we caught KSM,
we thought it might take us to bin Laden.
It was a very significant capture.
The most significant to date.
[Miller] This is the first time
the CIA had a serious lead on bin Laden.
And expectations were big.
[McLaughlin] The capture of Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed was very important,
because it disrupted
things he was planning,
and we learned from him about operations
that were plans in process.
What we learned
from all the intelligence that we gathered
was that bin Laden was
micromanaging the organization.
He was approving assignments.
He was deeply involved in attack planning.
He was very much
the active head of al-Qaida.
And their capabilities were rebounding.
I was concerned about additional attacks.
[clicking]
[crowd clamoring]
[reporter 1] A van full of explosives
detonated during Sabbath prayers
this morning.
A group that says it's tied
to al-Qaida claimed responsibility.
It felt like a ticking time bomb situation
'cause homeland
was absolutely on their list
of places they wanted to attack.
[clicking]
[Walder] I was sitting at my desk
in headquarters,
and I just heard, "Fuck you!"
They blew up a train in Spain.
[Bush] These are nothing
but cold-blooded killers. They
They do not value life
the way we value life
in the civilized world.
Bin Laden basically franchised himself.
You start to have these al-Qaida groups
happening everywhere.
There was only one al-Qaida on 9/11.
All of a sudden,
you have all of these groups.
[Walder] Like, "When's something
gonna happen next?"
"When's the next attack?
When's the next attack?"
[clicking]
[Morell] I was in London in a meeting,
and somebody walked into the room.
"Multiple attacks in London.
Dozens killed."
[reporter 1] A series of bombs exploded
in the London mass transit system
during the morning rush hour,
wounding more than 700.
[Miller] Bin Laden was creating this fear.
"You should be afraid
on your trains, on your buses,
in your streets, at your hotels."
[Storer] There was attack after attack,
and we knew that there could be
another attack at any time, anywhere.
[Bennett] He wasn't stopping
or slowing down.
We had to find bin Laden.
He was this cult of personality.
He was the key to everything.
[Morell] KSM provided us information
about al-Qaida as an organization.
But there was one thing
that he wouldn't talk about.
KSM was protecting bin Laden
as fully as he could.
[clicking]
After 9/11, one of the things
that happened pretty early
was discussion about doing what
came to be called
"enhanced interrogation."
The U.S. government
built a detention center
in our Guantanamo Bay military facility
on the island of Cuba.
They did that to interrogate prisoners
outside the civilian legal system.
Now, why wouldn't you interrogate them
on U.S. soil?
Well, because you wanna do some stuff
that wouldn't be allowed.
These were not soldiers. These were
the hardened top leaders of al-Qaida.
When you had them in your possession
and they refused to offer any information,
the thought was
that some coercive measures
might, uh help unlock
some of that information.
[door lock buzzes]
[Storer] The emotional atmosphere
in the office was revenge.
These people deserve whatever they get.
The gloves are off.
No holds barred.
[Soufan] Enhanced interrogation techniques
incorporate physical and psychological
pressure on the detainee.
These techniques include slapping,
insults, stress positions,
and sleep deprivation.
[McLaughlin] About 100 hours
of sleep deprivation
was a normal part
of interrogation techniques.
[loud guitar music blaring]
[Soufan] When a detainee was
not cooperating,
other enhanced interrogation techniques
were introduced
to decrease their resistance.
These include death threats,
cramped confinement,
and the infamous waterboarding,
where the detainee experiences drowning
and imminent death.
This is apeshit.
This has this has gone crazy.
We can't do this,
as as the U.S.
[Storer] Torturing someone
to get a piece of the puzzle
in order to stop attacks down the road?
No.
No. And I know as an analyst
that there's plenty of other sources
of information and ways to do that.
I went to my management and I said,
"I'm not gonna have anything
to do with that,
because I think
that this is morally wrong."
[Soufan] It's an issue between people
who wanted to do the right thing,
people in the field
who understand the field,
and people in Washington
who wanna be warriors behind their desks,
and the only fear they have
in the war on terrorism is a paper cut.
KSM, by the time he was arrested,
he was in charge
of all global operations for al-Qaida.
He knew exactly where bin Laden was.
How many cells did we take down
because of KSM? Zero.
He didn't give where bin Laden was.
So sleep deprivation, waterboarding.
For what?
To feel that we're tough?
Being tough is being successful.
Being tough is winning your war.
Being tough is not breaking shit
and being like in a bull in a china shop.
That's not being tough.
That's being stupid.
Unfortunately, what was going on
with the way we were executing
the war on terror,
I just decided
to get the hell out of the way.
I could not follow.
That's why I left.
[tense music playing]
This was a difficult decision
for anyone to have to make.
On the one hand,
it's not good to, you know, inflict
coercion on other human beings.
On the other hand, it's unethical.
If you don't get this information,
then you have the blood of hundreds,
thousands of Americans on your hands.
- [crowd whistling and applauding]
- [band playing]
You're torn between two things that are
right at some level, but in contradiction.
And, uh
most people who were at the CIA
at this time, their attitude is,
"We hope no one else
has to make such decisions in the future."
[clicking]
[Anderson Cooper] Five years since 9/11,
and Osama bin Laden is still wanted.
Officials say they're making the country
safer from an attack, but are they?
Bin Laden was like a unicorn.
A lot of people were claiming
to know where bin Laden was
because the reward for justice
on bin Laden was $25 million.
And we were left with
a lot of really bad sources
coming in and telling us
where he might be,
and we were running
down rabbit holes every time.
"Bin Laden is sick. Bin Laden is dead.
Bin Laden is on dialysis."
All of that
was in the intelligence stream,
but that's because they were
putting out enormous resources,
and nothing was close to panning out.
I had been following
these fragments of dots,
these clues that shift and disappear,
for so long,
and we haven't found him.
Though we never stopped looking
for bin Laden, the hunt basically stalled.
[Morell] It was a complicated situation.
There were plots against New York,
including plots against
the New York subway.
A plot to fly ten to 15 airliners,
blowing them up
over the continental United States.
[Miller] Bin Laden was in search of,
"What's my next 9/11?
What will exceed 9/11?"
[clicking]
[Morell] There was reporting
about al-Qaida's interest
in weapons of mass destruction,
most importantly in its interest
in acquiring nuclear weapons.
[Walder] He was looking
not just at radioactive material,
but then also crude toxins and poisons.
So, anthrax.
[McLaughlin] We knew that bin Laden
had met with nuclear scientists
in Pakistan,
and when they said to him,
"Look, the long pole in the tent
is obtaining
the nuclear explosive material,
enriched uranium and such,"
he had said to them,
"How do you know we don't have it?"
[man] It was a high priority
for the al-Qaida leadership
that it was being driven
by bin Laden personally,
and that there were real people
and real efforts around the world
associated with it.
They needed something
that was bigger and better than 9/11.
You can't repeat yourself
as a terrorist group.
You always have to move to the next level.
So the vision was what he described
as the American Hiroshima
where this bomb crowned their efforts
to defeat the United States.
[clicking]
[radio static crackling]
[in Arabic] People of America,
we'll continue to escalate
the fighting and killing against you.
That's our duty,
and our brothers are doing it.
[reporter 1] "I'm alive and I'm well."
That's the main message of a new videotape
from Osama bin Laden,
the first in nearly three years.
[reporter 2] A radical Islamic website
says a new video is coming from him,
timed to coincide with next week's
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
[reporter 3] If it turns out to be real,
that he's still alive
and secure enough to be making videos
[Bennett] It had been
six years since 9/11,
and we had no leads, nothing.
Every 9/11 anniversary,
the only thing you could think about
is that bin Laden is still out there.
That was just the knife in your back.
[Storer] We just wanted to stop it,
and it was so frustrating
that we couldn't.
It became obsessive.
People were working just all the time,
and yet we were constantly insulted.
We have an intelligence network
that is so dumb,
they could throw themselves
at the ground and miss.
[man] There's been
a complete intelligence failure here.
[Storer] The media was saying
we had failed,
and so other people had
to be brought in to run the center
because we were a bunch of failures.
The intelligence failures
that may have led
to the September 11th attacks
The commission itself is going to have to
sort through all of this finger-pointing
and come up with a report in July
saying who should've known what and when.
[clicking]
[Storer] People asking questions
as if we were guilty,
and of course we all felt guilty,
so that didn't help.
Whether there was anything else
you could've done or not,
you still
you question yourself all the time.
"Is there anything
I could've done differently?"
[reporter 1] The commission
investigating the 9/11 attacks
came out firing this morning.
[reporter 2] Specifically,
the CIA's handling of the al-Qaida threat
before September 11.
[Bennett] The only time I got angry
was really after the 9/11 Commission,
when they blamed us.
That made me angry.
[reporter 2] The Commission says neither
president had adequate intelligence.
How in God's name
are you supposed to imagine a threat
if the facts are being withheld from you?
[Bennett] Seeing
The 9/11 Commission Report
go on The New York Times Best Seller list,
knowing that it singled out
the handful of us
who had been trying,
you know, to the best of our ability,
to have them accuse us
of failing to imagine the attack,
failing to connect the dots,
it it was so painful,
and we couldn't
we couldn't defend ourselves.
[Storer] I've lived with that
for 20 years. [sniffles]
And it's only recently that
I've realized that it just doesn't matter.
[laughs] It doesn't matter what we did.
Unless we had said, "Date, time, place,"
and thwarted the attack,
we were gonna get blamed.
And
[sighs] So I did I did what I could,
and that's all you can do.
[clicking]
[tense music playing]
[reporter 1] Today, President Bush hosted
the man who will be president
in less than two and a half months.
When Barack Obama is sworn in
on January 20th,
he'll inherit a world of trouble.
But today, it was one gracious couple
welcoming another
to their new home and new life.
[reporter 2] What is the most urgent
threat when it comes to security
that Barack Obama has to deal with?
[Bush] The most urgent threat
that he'll have to deal with
is an attack on our homeland.
And I wish I could report
that's not the case,
but there's still an enemy out there
that would like
to inflict damage on America.
[man] Taking out bin Laden was about
cutting off the head of al-Qaida,
but it was also about the closest thing
that the United States was gonna get
to a victory in in the war on terror.
So when Obama comes into office,
he gives a directive
to double down on the bin Laden search.
What was prepared was a kind
of presidential directive to the CIA
that's like,
"I wanna do more to get bin Laden."
"I'm sure you're working on this,
but move this up the priority chain,
put more people on it,
put more resources on it,
and importantly,
I want regular updates about this."
[man] There was always
a challenge included
in every job that I took in Washington.
It was soon after I was sworn in
that I went to the Oval Office
to meet with the president,
and he said my primary task
as the director of the CIA
was to go after and get bin Laden.
[heartbeat pounding]
[Panetta] My first step was
to call the key people from the CIA
and basically say,
"Where are we? What's going on?"
[ominous music playing]
[Morell] Under President Obama,
I became deputy director of the CIA.
The CIA never stopped looking.
We followed every lead.
We were trying desperately
to figure out where bin Laden was,
and not getting closer.
I decided to appoint a task force
with no other responsibility
but to go after bin Laden.
Leon Panetta put an immense amount
of pressure on you to show progress.
[Panetta] When you're
an intelligence agency,
what you've gotta do is develop
as many possibilities as you can
that can open a door.
And one of those possibilities came to us
from one of our allied countries
in the Middle East.
[clicking]
[Morell] In 2009,
the Jordanians had in their custody
a physician named al-Balawi.
He was arrested because he was espousing
the views of a jihadist,
the views of al-Qaida.
[Bennett] He had been writing online
in support of al-Qaida's extremism.
He saw himself as a violent member
of the mujahideen,
someone who was going to fight
on behalf of his faith.
[Morell] The Jordanians
came to us and said,
"We think we would be able to turn him
and use him as an asset against al-Qaida."
"Are you interested?"
We said, "Absolutely."
[dramatic music playing]
[Morell] His incentive at this point
is not being in jail,
and if he delivers
significant al-Qaida leaders,
significant reward.
That resulted in the Jordanians
sending him to Afghanistan
to penetrate al-Qaida.
The agency has been called risk-averse
so many times in the past.
There's nothing risk-averse about it.
This was a big gamble.
And then
it was as if he just disappeared
into thin air.
Pfft!
Into the fog, into the ether.
He went dark.
[tense music playing]
[Miller] Did he just run away?
Did they figure out he was a spy
and kill him?
What happened?
A long time goes by.
First weeks, then longer.
[clicking]
[Morell] It took several months.
And then he reported back
that he is with al-Qaida's number two
Zawahiri.
They actually got film of him
being close to Zawahiri. It was crazy.
[Miller] This is
a potentially very big deal.
[Morell] This would be an opportunity
to get at the number two.
Maybe even more than the number two.
Bin Laden.
For us, that's a huge opportunity.
But before we would even think about
operationalizing this opportunity,
we wanted to meet him.
We wanted to make sure
that he was the real deal.
We set up a meeting in Afghanistan
at a place called Khost,
which is near the border with Pakistan.
[clicking]
[Walder] When you develop a source
in terrorist groups,
that's really hard to do.
You're basically asking someone
to flip on, like, their own blood.
It's near impossible.
[Morell] You can imagine
the thinking of the officers in Khost.
A guy who might have access
to the number two in al-Qaida
is coming to see you.
[radio chatter]
[Morell] Do you wanna put him
through multiple security screenings,
maybe turn him off?
Or do you wanna welcome him
with open arms,
make him feel like one of us?
[radio chatter continues]
[Bennett] Khost became
such a big operation.
And we were getting so close
to a real lead on where bin Laden was.
When he came into the base,
cars can't just drive up.
They're slowed down through checkpoints.
[Miller] You go all the way
to the end of the base,
and there is a small compound
where the core CIA people
are gonna meet with him privately.
[Panetta] He finally got
to where our CIA officers were,
and they all came out
because they'd been waiting
for this meeting, to greet him.
[Miller] He's considered
potentially the golden goose.
This guy could bring us to where
we've never been able to go before.
So they came out to the car.
This was something big.
This was a turning point.
[clicking]
[man] I am Dr. Abu Dujana al-Khorasani,
Jordanian.
The Jordanian
and the American intelligence services
offered me millions of dollars
to work with them
and spy on mujahideen here.
But Alhamdulillah,
I came to the mujahideen,
and I told them everything,
and we arranged together this attack.
We'll get you, CIA team.
Inshallah, we'll come to you
from unexpected ways.
[tense music playing]
This is for you.
It's not watch.
It's detonator.
You will be sent to the hell.
[music intensifying]
[dramatic theme music playing]
[helicopter whirring]
[reporter 1] He has a personal fortune
estimated at $250 million.
He lives in a cave
atop a range of mountains in Afghanistan.
From there, he controls a web
of financial, logistical,
and strategic assistance
to Sunni Islamic groups
engaged in what they consider a jihad,
or a holy war.
ABC's John Miller recently traveled
to Afghanistan for a rare interview
with bin Laden.
[Miller] The bin Laden interview
was a calculated risk.
Yes, we took chances. It was dangerous.
Journalists put pressure on themselves.
I have to get on the inside
with one of these people,
not just looking at
another propaganda video.
It was May 1998 in Islamabad.
We were thrown onto a flight
that led to buses,
the back of pickup trucks,
where there were no roads.
Finally, we get to the top
of this mountain.
Everybody points their rifles in the air
and starts shooting tracer rounds.
There's a little boy next to me.
He has an AK-47,
and he's firing it this far from my ear.
And I push the gun away,
and he brings it back,
and he finishes the magazine.
That was Osama bin Laden's son.
One of the fighters says,
"I have good news for you."
"Mr. bin Laden has agreed to answer
each one of your questions,
but we're not gonna translate
the answers."
And I said, "Well, how am I gonna ask
follow-up questions?"
He said,
"There won't be follow-up questions."
We begin our interview,
and we go through the questions.
"Did you finance plots
to blow up airplanes over Pacific routes
filled with passengers?"
"Assassinate the Pope in Manila?"
[speaking Arabic]
"Was there a plot
to kill President Clinton?"
[speaking Arabic]
[Miller] And I'm sitting there,
kind of nodding along with it,
wondering, "Well, what do we have?"
At the end of the interview,
I went back to our fixer in the back,
and I said, "What did he say?"
And he said, "He said a lot."
"We need to get the tapes,
and we need to get out."
[tense music playing]
[Miller] Once we got back to the hotel
and we had the main translations done,
it was groundbreaking, it was frightening.
[interpreter] We do not differentiate
between those dressed in military uniforms
and civilians,
they're all targets in this fatwa.
Holy shit. He was inserting a message.
He wanted the interview as his platform
to publicly declare war on America.
[interpreter] You will leave when the
bodies of American soldiers and civilians
are sent in the wooden boxes and coffins.
That is when you will leave.
This is a game-changer.
[music intensifying]
[clicking]
The U.S. reportedly had the chance
to capture Osama bin Laden but didn't.
Captured al-Qaida fighters say bin Laden
was at the Battle of Tora Bora.
The Washington Post reports he escaped
because the army
failed to send troops after him.
[Henry Crumpton] We had
bin Laden in our sights.
We needed to kill bin Laden in Tora Bora,
and we didn't.
And now we were pretty confident
bin Laden had escaped into Pakistan.
[Tracy Walder] I was a little angry
with the administration,
because you just let him go
from a place where we had him
relatively contained,
and we knew where he was,
to now basically
the Wild Wild West of Pakistan,
which is really impossible
to find people in.
And so
[laughing] A little angry, um, as well.
[Cofer Black] Could have
ended it and moved on.
Would have given some closure
to the survivors in New York.
This one was the best shot we ever had,
and, uh, I'm sorry we didn't take it.
I thought I killed him.
I thought I killed him.
I thought, "Well,
we're gonna have to get back at this."
"Probably won't be me, but someone else
is gonna have to get a shot at this."
Another Osama bin Laden propaganda video
surfaced today in the Arab world.
[in Arabic] We are close to approximately
800 destroyed buildings and high-rises.
[reporter 1] In this video, bin Laden
does not look like a man under attack
or running for his life.
[George W. Bush] He is not escaping us.
This is a guy who, three months ago,
was in control of a country.
Now he's in maybe in control of a cave.
He knows that we're on the hunt.
And I like our position better than his.
[reporter 1] With bin Laden still
unaccounted for, the hunt continues.
[reporter 2] The question remains,
where is bin Laden?
[tense music continues]
[Cindy Storer] There was concern that,
once bin Laden and other al-Qaida members
left Afghanistan,
he could go anywhere.
They could disappear across the border
into Pakistan, into Iran,
take flight and go wherever they wanted.
[woman] The problem is,
those possibilities are infinite.
He'd been evading our security
for years, even before 9/11.
We were tracking him since 1996.
So he wasn't stupid.
He understood what he needed to do
to keep himself safe.
So finally, we started thinking,
"Is there another way
we can look at this?"
The question isn't, "Where is bin Laden?"
It's, "Who might be with bin Laden?"
[Soufan] I was an FBI agent tasked
in investigating
al-Qaida attacks around the world
and interrogating its members.
The mission was not only
capturing Osama bin Laden,
but also preventing further attacks.
After bin Laden escaped Tora Bora,
U.S. forces were searching for any clues
that may lead us to him.
And in al-Qaida safe house,
there was a tape that they found
where bin Laden
was explaining the operation.
And every time he's explaining 9/11,
he points at the person
who's holding the camera,
and he says, "Mukhtar."
[in Arabic] In the dream, he saw Mukhtar.
[speaking Arabic]
"God bless Mukhtar."
[speaking Arabic]
[Soufan] In the same tape,
bin Laden's son,
who was a little kid at the time,
found a piece of a drone,
and he starts yelling, "Mukhtar,
Mukhtar, come and look at this one."
[child speaking Arabic]
The guy comes with the camera,
take it, look at it.
This tape made it clear that Mukhtar
was part of bin Laden's inner circle,
and he could be one of the few people
who knew where bin Laden was hiding.
So we're trying to figure out
who Mukhtar was.
We did not know what he looked like,
because he was never shown on tape.
We were only
working off his alias, "Mukhtar."
[Walder] We talk about
"bin Laden, bin Laden, bin Laden,"
but I felt that, at this point in time,
he was stationary,
that a lot of this work
was being delegated out to these henchmen.
They are the ones
who are doing all of his dirty work.
He had all the faces
of all his little lieutenants
that were all over the place.
Bin Laden was, of course, at the top.
After him was his deputy, Zawahiri.
Next in command
were a handful of lieutenants
that were also very close to bin Laden.
There was Abu Zubaydah,
who was suspected to be
bin Laden's chief operations guy,
and a mysterious operative
known only as "Mukhtar."
- [man calls out]
- [group] Allahu Akbar!
And so there was a lot of leads
that we were pursuing,
and in the midst of that,
we thought another attack was coming.
[speaking Arabic]
- [gunfire]
- [speaking Arabic]
When al-Qaida escaped from Afghanistan,
they didn't go into hiding.
They continued to plot and to plan.
[reporter] The country
remains on high alert
after U.S. intelligence heard
what they called "suspicious chatter."
[clicking]
[tense music continues]
[reporter 1]
A disturbing incident on board
an American Airlines jet this afternoon.
Officials say a flight attendant
discovered a passenger
carrying a bomb on the jumbo jet.
There is no doubt this man
intended to commit suicide
and take the plane down.
Enough explosives in his shoes
to trigger, quote, "a major disaster."
[Miller] Richard Reid,
the so-called shoe-bomber,
was al-Qaida's first effort
to rebound on another airplane
with another terrible attack.
Could you imagine if U.S. airliners
fell out of the sky?
[reporter 2] America is on guard
tonight in a whole new way.
[Storer] If you're talking
about a major corporation,
and one office gets wiped out
in an earthquake,
does that mean
the organization doesn't work anymore?
Does it mean they don't move
their headquarters elsewhere?
[bleeping]
They had bases all over the world,
and these plots were already in motion.
[Soufan] We felt like
we were at a dead end.
But then we got a lead on Abu Zubaydah.
[John McLaughlin] Abu Zubaydah was someone
who was in charge of logistics,
recruiting, planning operations.
[Walder] I view Abu Zubaydah
as bin Laden's right-hand man.
His operations guy.
Through a series
of intelligence breakthroughs,
we started to develop a pattern of travel
for Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan.
We were able to narrow his travel down to,
as I recall, about 17 locations.
And so, we made an unprecedented decision.
We decided we would try
and go after 17 locations at once.
[clicking]
[men shouting in Arabic]
[McLaughlin] When the raid occurred,
he escaped,
and was jumping from roof to roof,
and was wounded quite severely.
[man shouting in Arabic]
[Soufan] He was taken to a hospital,
and my partner and I were called in
to interrogate him.
Abu Zubaydah was badly injured.
One of the medic came over, and he said,
"If you wanna talk to him, you better
talk tonight 'cause he's septic."
"He's probably he's dead in the morning."
- [monitor bleeping]
- [siren wailing]
[steady bleep]
I told him, "Death is not an option.
Do anything you can to keep him alive."
[high-pitched, steady bleep]
[rhythmic bleeping]
In the hospital,
we continued to keep the interview going.
Everybody was shocked
that he was cooperating.
And he named an al-Qaida operative
who was planning an attack.
I said, "Oh. If I showed you a picture
of that guy, can you tell me if it's him?"
He said, "Sure."
My partner had a Sony device.
It looks like the Palm Pilot.
And on this device, he had photos
of all the most wanted terrorists.
And he went down there, like,
you know, hitting the stylus.
Passed it.
So I said, "Is this the guy?"
And he said, "No."
What I did not realize was that my partner
had zoomed in on the wrong photo.
So I said, "Oh, sorry."
I said, "Hey, Steve, you gave me
the wrong photo, dude."
He said, "By the way,
who the hell is he? Tell me."
He said, "This is Mukhtar."
So I looked at the picture.
Now, I'm very anxious.
I wanna see who the hell this Mukhtar is.
And it's a picture
of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,
also known as KSM.
He was a terrorist
we had been tracking for years.
I had no idea that KSM
was a member of al-Qaida.
I was totally shocked.
But that was nothing
compared to what happened next.
I said to Abu Zubaydah, "Since we're
on this, why don't we talk about him?"
He said,
"Yeah, he's the one who did 9/11."
A light bulb connected
all the things in my head together.
KSM had been
bin Laden's accomplice all along.
He was the architect,
the visionary, the mastermind of 9/11.
[Gina Bennett] Once Abu Zubaydah
revealed KSM's involvement in 9/11,
we realized KSM had been obsessed
with the World Trade Center for years.
[clicking]
[ominous music playing]
[explosion echoes]
[Storer] In 1993, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
pulled off this attack
on the World Trade Center in New York.
He works with a local cell.
They get the van,
they set up the explosives,
and then they put a bomb
under the World Trade Center.
He thought the structure would move enough
to shake and even topple.
He wanted it to fall down.
He said later
he wanted to kill 100,000 people.
If they just had
a little bit more explosives
and moved the truck
one inch to the right or left,
they might've toppled the building.
It was that close.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed just never rested
until he could bring those towers down.
[Miller] After the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center,
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,
he had a bag full of plots and ideas,
but he didn't have the money
to make it happen.
He finds his way to Afghanistan
and into al-Qaida,
and he finds his way back
to Osama bin Laden,
and he pitches this idea of,
"We'll target the World Trade Center,
to take care of that,
because we tried it before
and it's still standing."
But now the plan kept getting bigger.
"We'll target the Capitol.
We'll target the Pentagon."
"We will set America back on its heels
like no one has ever done."
If there was a keystone individual
in this whole plot,
it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Bin Laden was the inspiration
and the charismatic leader,
but Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
was the designer, the architect.
[Soufan] After 9/11, he went into hiding.
Through a series
of classified spy operations,
we learned that he was
in Rawalpindi in Pakistan.
That activated our operation to capture
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
[clicking]
[horns honking]
[reporter 1] CIA and Pakistani agents
hit the two-story villa hard,
bashing in doors
and sweeping up anything of interest.
Family members said
everyone was asleep when they came.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
was caught in his underwear.
It was his birthday.
[reporter 2] Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
is in American hands tonight.
[reporter 3] Al-Qaida's top planner
is now out of action.
[Morell] Bin Laden and KSM were close.
When we caught KSM,
we thought it might take us to bin Laden.
It was a very significant capture.
The most significant to date.
[Miller] This is the first time
the CIA had a serious lead on bin Laden.
And expectations were big.
[McLaughlin] The capture of Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed was very important,
because it disrupted
things he was planning,
and we learned from him about operations
that were plans in process.
What we learned
from all the intelligence that we gathered
was that bin Laden was
micromanaging the organization.
He was approving assignments.
He was deeply involved in attack planning.
He was very much
the active head of al-Qaida.
And their capabilities were rebounding.
I was concerned about additional attacks.
[clicking]
[crowd clamoring]
[reporter 1] A van full of explosives
detonated during Sabbath prayers
this morning.
A group that says it's tied
to al-Qaida claimed responsibility.
It felt like a ticking time bomb situation
'cause homeland
was absolutely on their list
of places they wanted to attack.
[clicking]
[Walder] I was sitting at my desk
in headquarters,
and I just heard, "Fuck you!"
They blew up a train in Spain.
[Bush] These are nothing
but cold-blooded killers. They
They do not value life
the way we value life
in the civilized world.
Bin Laden basically franchised himself.
You start to have these al-Qaida groups
happening everywhere.
There was only one al-Qaida on 9/11.
All of a sudden,
you have all of these groups.
[Walder] Like, "When's something
gonna happen next?"
"When's the next attack?
When's the next attack?"
[clicking]
[Morell] I was in London in a meeting,
and somebody walked into the room.
"Multiple attacks in London.
Dozens killed."
[reporter 1] A series of bombs exploded
in the London mass transit system
during the morning rush hour,
wounding more than 700.
[Miller] Bin Laden was creating this fear.
"You should be afraid
on your trains, on your buses,
in your streets, at your hotels."
[Storer] There was attack after attack,
and we knew that there could be
another attack at any time, anywhere.
[Bennett] He wasn't stopping
or slowing down.
We had to find bin Laden.
He was this cult of personality.
He was the key to everything.
[Morell] KSM provided us information
about al-Qaida as an organization.
But there was one thing
that he wouldn't talk about.
KSM was protecting bin Laden
as fully as he could.
[clicking]
After 9/11, one of the things
that happened pretty early
was discussion about doing what
came to be called
"enhanced interrogation."
The U.S. government
built a detention center
in our Guantanamo Bay military facility
on the island of Cuba.
They did that to interrogate prisoners
outside the civilian legal system.
Now, why wouldn't you interrogate them
on U.S. soil?
Well, because you wanna do some stuff
that wouldn't be allowed.
These were not soldiers. These were
the hardened top leaders of al-Qaida.
When you had them in your possession
and they refused to offer any information,
the thought was
that some coercive measures
might, uh help unlock
some of that information.
[door lock buzzes]
[Storer] The emotional atmosphere
in the office was revenge.
These people deserve whatever they get.
The gloves are off.
No holds barred.
[Soufan] Enhanced interrogation techniques
incorporate physical and psychological
pressure on the detainee.
These techniques include slapping,
insults, stress positions,
and sleep deprivation.
[McLaughlin] About 100 hours
of sleep deprivation
was a normal part
of interrogation techniques.
[loud guitar music blaring]
[Soufan] When a detainee was
not cooperating,
other enhanced interrogation techniques
were introduced
to decrease their resistance.
These include death threats,
cramped confinement,
and the infamous waterboarding,
where the detainee experiences drowning
and imminent death.
This is apeshit.
This has this has gone crazy.
We can't do this,
as as the U.S.
[Storer] Torturing someone
to get a piece of the puzzle
in order to stop attacks down the road?
No.
No. And I know as an analyst
that there's plenty of other sources
of information and ways to do that.
I went to my management and I said,
"I'm not gonna have anything
to do with that,
because I think
that this is morally wrong."
[Soufan] It's an issue between people
who wanted to do the right thing,
people in the field
who understand the field,
and people in Washington
who wanna be warriors behind their desks,
and the only fear they have
in the war on terrorism is a paper cut.
KSM, by the time he was arrested,
he was in charge
of all global operations for al-Qaida.
He knew exactly where bin Laden was.
How many cells did we take down
because of KSM? Zero.
He didn't give where bin Laden was.
So sleep deprivation, waterboarding.
For what?
To feel that we're tough?
Being tough is being successful.
Being tough is winning your war.
Being tough is not breaking shit
and being like in a bull in a china shop.
That's not being tough.
That's being stupid.
Unfortunately, what was going on
with the way we were executing
the war on terror,
I just decided
to get the hell out of the way.
I could not follow.
That's why I left.
[tense music playing]
This was a difficult decision
for anyone to have to make.
On the one hand,
it's not good to, you know, inflict
coercion on other human beings.
On the other hand, it's unethical.
If you don't get this information,
then you have the blood of hundreds,
thousands of Americans on your hands.
- [crowd whistling and applauding]
- [band playing]
You're torn between two things that are
right at some level, but in contradiction.
And, uh
most people who were at the CIA
at this time, their attitude is,
"We hope no one else
has to make such decisions in the future."
[clicking]
[Anderson Cooper] Five years since 9/11,
and Osama bin Laden is still wanted.
Officials say they're making the country
safer from an attack, but are they?
Bin Laden was like a unicorn.
A lot of people were claiming
to know where bin Laden was
because the reward for justice
on bin Laden was $25 million.
And we were left with
a lot of really bad sources
coming in and telling us
where he might be,
and we were running
down rabbit holes every time.
"Bin Laden is sick. Bin Laden is dead.
Bin Laden is on dialysis."
All of that
was in the intelligence stream,
but that's because they were
putting out enormous resources,
and nothing was close to panning out.
I had been following
these fragments of dots,
these clues that shift and disappear,
for so long,
and we haven't found him.
Though we never stopped looking
for bin Laden, the hunt basically stalled.
[Morell] It was a complicated situation.
There were plots against New York,
including plots against
the New York subway.
A plot to fly ten to 15 airliners,
blowing them up
over the continental United States.
[Miller] Bin Laden was in search of,
"What's my next 9/11?
What will exceed 9/11?"
[clicking]
[Morell] There was reporting
about al-Qaida's interest
in weapons of mass destruction,
most importantly in its interest
in acquiring nuclear weapons.
[Walder] He was looking
not just at radioactive material,
but then also crude toxins and poisons.
So, anthrax.
[McLaughlin] We knew that bin Laden
had met with nuclear scientists
in Pakistan,
and when they said to him,
"Look, the long pole in the tent
is obtaining
the nuclear explosive material,
enriched uranium and such,"
he had said to them,
"How do you know we don't have it?"
[man] It was a high priority
for the al-Qaida leadership
that it was being driven
by bin Laden personally,
and that there were real people
and real efforts around the world
associated with it.
They needed something
that was bigger and better than 9/11.
You can't repeat yourself
as a terrorist group.
You always have to move to the next level.
So the vision was what he described
as the American Hiroshima
where this bomb crowned their efforts
to defeat the United States.
[clicking]
[radio static crackling]
[in Arabic] People of America,
we'll continue to escalate
the fighting and killing against you.
That's our duty,
and our brothers are doing it.
[reporter 1] "I'm alive and I'm well."
That's the main message of a new videotape
from Osama bin Laden,
the first in nearly three years.
[reporter 2] A radical Islamic website
says a new video is coming from him,
timed to coincide with next week's
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
[reporter 3] If it turns out to be real,
that he's still alive
and secure enough to be making videos
[Bennett] It had been
six years since 9/11,
and we had no leads, nothing.
Every 9/11 anniversary,
the only thing you could think about
is that bin Laden is still out there.
That was just the knife in your back.
[Storer] We just wanted to stop it,
and it was so frustrating
that we couldn't.
It became obsessive.
People were working just all the time,
and yet we were constantly insulted.
We have an intelligence network
that is so dumb,
they could throw themselves
at the ground and miss.
[man] There's been
a complete intelligence failure here.
[Storer] The media was saying
we had failed,
and so other people had
to be brought in to run the center
because we were a bunch of failures.
The intelligence failures
that may have led
to the September 11th attacks
The commission itself is going to have to
sort through all of this finger-pointing
and come up with a report in July
saying who should've known what and when.
[clicking]
[Storer] People asking questions
as if we were guilty,
and of course we all felt guilty,
so that didn't help.
Whether there was anything else
you could've done or not,
you still
you question yourself all the time.
"Is there anything
I could've done differently?"
[reporter 1] The commission
investigating the 9/11 attacks
came out firing this morning.
[reporter 2] Specifically,
the CIA's handling of the al-Qaida threat
before September 11.
[Bennett] The only time I got angry
was really after the 9/11 Commission,
when they blamed us.
That made me angry.
[reporter 2] The Commission says neither
president had adequate intelligence.
How in God's name
are you supposed to imagine a threat
if the facts are being withheld from you?
[Bennett] Seeing
The 9/11 Commission Report
go on The New York Times Best Seller list,
knowing that it singled out
the handful of us
who had been trying,
you know, to the best of our ability,
to have them accuse us
of failing to imagine the attack,
failing to connect the dots,
it it was so painful,
and we couldn't
we couldn't defend ourselves.
[Storer] I've lived with that
for 20 years. [sniffles]
And it's only recently that
I've realized that it just doesn't matter.
[laughs] It doesn't matter what we did.
Unless we had said, "Date, time, place,"
and thwarted the attack,
we were gonna get blamed.
And
[sighs] So I did I did what I could,
and that's all you can do.
[clicking]
[tense music playing]
[reporter 1] Today, President Bush hosted
the man who will be president
in less than two and a half months.
When Barack Obama is sworn in
on January 20th,
he'll inherit a world of trouble.
But today, it was one gracious couple
welcoming another
to their new home and new life.
[reporter 2] What is the most urgent
threat when it comes to security
that Barack Obama has to deal with?
[Bush] The most urgent threat
that he'll have to deal with
is an attack on our homeland.
And I wish I could report
that's not the case,
but there's still an enemy out there
that would like
to inflict damage on America.
[man] Taking out bin Laden was about
cutting off the head of al-Qaida,
but it was also about the closest thing
that the United States was gonna get
to a victory in in the war on terror.
So when Obama comes into office,
he gives a directive
to double down on the bin Laden search.
What was prepared was a kind
of presidential directive to the CIA
that's like,
"I wanna do more to get bin Laden."
"I'm sure you're working on this,
but move this up the priority chain,
put more people on it,
put more resources on it,
and importantly,
I want regular updates about this."
[man] There was always
a challenge included
in every job that I took in Washington.
It was soon after I was sworn in
that I went to the Oval Office
to meet with the president,
and he said my primary task
as the director of the CIA
was to go after and get bin Laden.
[heartbeat pounding]
[Panetta] My first step was
to call the key people from the CIA
and basically say,
"Where are we? What's going on?"
[ominous music playing]
[Morell] Under President Obama,
I became deputy director of the CIA.
The CIA never stopped looking.
We followed every lead.
We were trying desperately
to figure out where bin Laden was,
and not getting closer.
I decided to appoint a task force
with no other responsibility
but to go after bin Laden.
Leon Panetta put an immense amount
of pressure on you to show progress.
[Panetta] When you're
an intelligence agency,
what you've gotta do is develop
as many possibilities as you can
that can open a door.
And one of those possibilities came to us
from one of our allied countries
in the Middle East.
[clicking]
[Morell] In 2009,
the Jordanians had in their custody
a physician named al-Balawi.
He was arrested because he was espousing
the views of a jihadist,
the views of al-Qaida.
[Bennett] He had been writing online
in support of al-Qaida's extremism.
He saw himself as a violent member
of the mujahideen,
someone who was going to fight
on behalf of his faith.
[Morell] The Jordanians
came to us and said,
"We think we would be able to turn him
and use him as an asset against al-Qaida."
"Are you interested?"
We said, "Absolutely."
[dramatic music playing]
[Morell] His incentive at this point
is not being in jail,
and if he delivers
significant al-Qaida leaders,
significant reward.
That resulted in the Jordanians
sending him to Afghanistan
to penetrate al-Qaida.
The agency has been called risk-averse
so many times in the past.
There's nothing risk-averse about it.
This was a big gamble.
And then
it was as if he just disappeared
into thin air.
Pfft!
Into the fog, into the ether.
He went dark.
[tense music playing]
[Miller] Did he just run away?
Did they figure out he was a spy
and kill him?
What happened?
A long time goes by.
First weeks, then longer.
[clicking]
[Morell] It took several months.
And then he reported back
that he is with al-Qaida's number two
Zawahiri.
They actually got film of him
being close to Zawahiri. It was crazy.
[Miller] This is
a potentially very big deal.
[Morell] This would be an opportunity
to get at the number two.
Maybe even more than the number two.
Bin Laden.
For us, that's a huge opportunity.
But before we would even think about
operationalizing this opportunity,
we wanted to meet him.
We wanted to make sure
that he was the real deal.
We set up a meeting in Afghanistan
at a place called Khost,
which is near the border with Pakistan.
[clicking]
[Walder] When you develop a source
in terrorist groups,
that's really hard to do.
You're basically asking someone
to flip on, like, their own blood.
It's near impossible.
[Morell] You can imagine
the thinking of the officers in Khost.
A guy who might have access
to the number two in al-Qaida
is coming to see you.
[radio chatter]
[Morell] Do you wanna put him
through multiple security screenings,
maybe turn him off?
Or do you wanna welcome him
with open arms,
make him feel like one of us?
[radio chatter continues]
[Bennett] Khost became
such a big operation.
And we were getting so close
to a real lead on where bin Laden was.
When he came into the base,
cars can't just drive up.
They're slowed down through checkpoints.
[Miller] You go all the way
to the end of the base,
and there is a small compound
where the core CIA people
are gonna meet with him privately.
[Panetta] He finally got
to where our CIA officers were,
and they all came out
because they'd been waiting
for this meeting, to greet him.
[Miller] He's considered
potentially the golden goose.
This guy could bring us to where
we've never been able to go before.
So they came out to the car.
This was something big.
This was a turning point.
[clicking]
[man] I am Dr. Abu Dujana al-Khorasani,
Jordanian.
The Jordanian
and the American intelligence services
offered me millions of dollars
to work with them
and spy on mujahideen here.
But Alhamdulillah,
I came to the mujahideen,
and I told them everything,
and we arranged together this attack.
We'll get you, CIA team.
Inshallah, we'll come to you
from unexpected ways.
[tense music playing]
This is for you.
It's not watch.
It's detonator.
You will be sent to the hell.
[music intensifying]
[dramatic theme music playing]