Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) s01e01 Episode Script

[distant traffic noise]
[FAA traffic controller] American 11,
heavy traffic's orbiting
north of the field at 3,500 feet,
maintain 3,000, runway four right.
Cleared for takeoff.
[woman] What a beautiful,
beautiful Tuesday morning it was.
The sky was clear,
it was blue, not a cloud in the sky.
They call it "severe clear."
About eight o'clock,
American Flight 11 was fully fueled.
It was bound for Los Angeles.
It left Boston Logan Airport.
We know it was hijacked.
[ominous music plays]
[FAA man] American 11,
climb maintain level three five zero.
American 11,
climb maintain level three five zero.
American 11, Boston.
[tone beeps]
[FAA man 2]
This is Athens.
[FAA man] This is Boston, I turned
American 20 left. I was gonna climb him,
he will not respond to me now at all.
[FAA man 2] Looks like he's turning right.
[Bouchat]
Traffic controllers lost contact,
but the hijackers used the Hudson River
as its guide down to New York City.
[Ong] Number Three in the back.
The cockpit's not answering.
Somebody's stabbed in business class.
And I think there's Mace
that we can't breathe.
I don't know.
I think we're getting hijacked.
[man] What is your name?
[Ong] Okay. My name is Betty Ong.
I'm Number Three on Flight 11.
Our first class passengers are
Our first class galley flight attendant,
and our purser has been stabbed.
And we can't get to the cockpit,
the door won't open.
[woman] Have you guys called anyone else?
[Ong] No. Somebody's calling medical
and we can't get a doc
[signal beeps]
[ominous music plays]
In 2001, I was working
in the World Trade Center
in the South Tower, Tower 2.
I was located on the 101st.
We were there about four or five years,
I think, in that building.
I started working at the hotel in 1981.
It was called Vista International
and then it became
Marriott International Hotel.
I was hotel engineer.
Basically maintained the whole building.
And on the morning of September 11,
I arrived there about six o'clock,
as I usually do.
Usually about eight o'clock,
we have departmental meetings,
which is a brief meeting of what's going
to be on the agenda for the day.
And for this particular meeting,
my boss told us
that there were some guests
that was staying at the hotel,
and they had some issues with their room.
My boss wanted us
to really focus on these two guests.
The two ladies, their names were Faye
and Leigh Gilmore, from Chicago.
Leigh had MS.
It was very crippling to her.
That confined her to a wheelchair.
[no audible dialogue]
[Frederick] She advocated
for people who had disabilities.
And I told my boss
that I would go to the room
and make sure that the guest was happy
and make sure the guest had
everything they needed for that day.
[dial tone buzzes]
[man] American Airlines Emergency line,
please state your emergency.
[woman] Hey. This is Nydia
at American Airlines calling.
I am monitoring a call in which Flight 11,
the flight attendant is advising our reps
that the pilot, everyone's been stabbed.
- [operator] Flight 11?
- [woman] Yeah.
[operator]
Uh, we contacted Air Traffic Control.
They are going to handle this
as a confirmed hijacking,
so they're moving all traffic
out of this aircraft's way.
[woman] Okay.
[operator] He turned his transponder off,
so we don't have
a definitive altitude for him.
Uh, we're just going by
They seem to think that
They have him on a primary radar.
They seem to think that he is descending.
[ominous music plays]
[woman] I entered the lobby,
and to get to my 82nd floor,
I had to take two elevators.
So, first was the express elevator
to 78th floor, and then to 82nd.
And I came to my office
and I was so lucky,
because I had my desk just by the window
on the east side of the tower.
So I saw from my window
the East River, all bridges,
and far, far away, towards Europe.
The Division Chief was my title
in the Law Department
of the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey.
And the Trade Center was built
in the mid-late '60s, early '70s
by the Port Authority,
and so when it was finished,
they put their headquarters there.
It was a Japanese man
who was the main architect.
Ironically, he was afraid of heights.
And yet he built
these two behemoth buildings.
The power brokers in New York
wanted to build this center
for commerce and world trade,
including the Rockefellers.
So they came up
with the "World Trade Center."
When they were first built,
architecture critics didn't like them.
Common joke was,
"Welcome to New York,
home of famous buildings,
beautiful buildings,
like the Empire State Building
and the Chrysler Building,
and the boxes they came in."
But they grew on people, so to speak,
and they were much beloved.
On a given Monday through Friday,
you might have 70, 80 thousand people
just in that little 16-acre spot.
So it was kind of like
a city within a city.
[man] I was the assistant commissioner
at the New York City
Department of Investigation.
We were doing an operation
on the day of the attack.
We were at the World Trade Center
meeting up with,
basically a bad guy to take a bribe
who didn't want to pay his taxes.
We had a team of investigators
who were wired up,
and they were gonna meet him there.
[Boston FAA]
Is that American 11 trying to call?
[man] Put that phone up on that HAM
[Atta] We have some planes.
Just stay quiet and we'll be okay.
We're returning to the airport.
[Boston FAA]
American 11, are you trying to call?
[Atta] Nobody move.
Everything will be okay.
If you try to make any moves, you will
endanger yourself and the airplane.
Just stay quiet.
[ominous music plays]
[man] Hi, Boston Center, T.M.U.
We have a problem here.
We have a hijacked aircraft
headed towards New York,
and we need you guys to
We need someone to scramble some F-16s
or something up there to help us out.
[Powell] Is this real-world or exercise?
[Boston ATC]
No. This is not an exercise, not a test.
[Powell]
Okay. Hey, uh, hold on one second. Okay?
[Boston ATC] Yes.
[Powell] Hey, hey, hey, hey.
- Hey, seriously. Big time.
- [man] What?
[woman] What?
- [people exclaim]
- What was that?
[woman 2] Is that real-world?
Real-world hijacking.
[sirens blaring distantly]
[Glogowski] Quarter to nine in my office,
there was absolute silence.
Everybody was working on their machines.
And all of a sudden,
the silence was broken
by tremendous blast.
[man] And can I get your autograph also?
[airplane engine roaring overhead]
[loud crash]
[man 1] What the hell was that?
[man 2] Sounded like a plane crash.
[siren whoops]
- Yo! Close to ya.
- [man 1] Come to us! Come to us!
Come to us!
Come to us!
Hey, Beth! What is that?
Something Somebody hit
the World Trade Center? Or the
[man 1]
It's the Trade Center. Trade Center.
[man 3] Holy shit!
Shit!
[reporter 1]
This just in, you are looking at,
obviously, a very disturbing
live shot there.
That is the World Trade Center,
and we have unconfirmed reports
this morning
that a plane has crashed
into one of the towers.
[reporter 2] We're looking
There's no doubt
there was a huge explosion and fire.
Lots of black smoke
coming from that building.
Black smoke, again,
would indicate that the fire
is nowhere near under control.
[sirens blaring]
[Kern] I was up in my office,
at that point, on the 62nd floor.
At 8:46, there was suddenly
a loud bang and a crash,
and the building started shaking,
which I had never felt before.
Now, the engineers tell me
the buildings were designed
to sway in the wind
in hurricane-force winds.
They had to. They couldn't be rigid,
because they were too tall.
But this was different,
this was like shaking so much so
that a couple of my co-workers
lost their footing
and, like, fell to their knees.
And the shaking seemed to go on
for, like, 20 or 30 seconds.
When the shaking stopped,
I yelled to everybody
to get out and head for the stairs.
Don't waste time waiting
to find out what happened.
Get out first, find out later.
[reporter]
Thousands, tens of thousands of people
actually work inside those two buildings
in the heart
of New York's Financial District.
[Bouchat] I sat on the south side
of the South Tower,
I was as far away as you could be,
and I heard boom.
It was a very faint boom.
My co-workers who sat on the west
and the north side of the building
actually felt the heat
of the airplane parts
as they went past their windows,
and they said paper
on their desk became charred.
[interviewer] Did you have any desire,
at that point, to evacuate?
No. Thought hadn't entered my head.
In fact, my mother asked me,
"Are you leaving?"
Because Mom is asking, I said, "Sure."
[Green] We all thought that basically
it was some knucklehead
who's driving some Cessna
or some little thing
who just went out of the way
and hit the building.
We didn't realize at first
that it was a 757.
[Bouchat] I was packing my bag,
and I noticed Jim Berger walk past,
and he had earlier heard me say
that a bomb had gone off,
and he came by to tell us
that he had heard
that it was actually a plane
that had gone into the North Tower.
Tower One.
It went into the core
of the building, straight in.
So if you were at the 92nd floor
or above, there was no escape,
there were no stairs to come down.
[phone line rings]
[firefighter]
Fire Department 408. Where's the fire?
[man] Yeah. Hi. I'm on the 106th floor
of the World Trade Center.
We just had an explosion up here.
[firefighter] Okay. 106th floor?
- What building? One or Two?
- [man] That's One World Trade.
[firefighter] Keep the windows open
if you can and just sit tight.
It's gonna be a while
because there's a fire downstairs.
[man] We can't open the windows
unless we break them.
[firefighter] Okay. Just sit tight.
All right.
Just sit tight. We're on the way.
[man] All right. Please hurry.
[Bouchat] And what had started
as a beautiful, beautiful day
was now turning brown.
There was paper swirling
outside our window.
And at that point it's when Jim said,
"Time to go home."
And we thought,
"This is great. It's not even 9:00 a.m.
and we were headed home."
As I headed to the elevators,
Jim went down the corridor.
He was doing another sweep of the floor.
He went to make sure everybody knew
that it was time to go
and there was nobody left.
Jim did not make it out.
[sirens wailing]
[reporter] At this point, we do not have
official injury updates to bring you.
We are only now beginning to put together
the pieces of this horrible incident.
[Frederick] The building shook.
So we didn't know what that was.
Automatically, the alarms went off.
And when the alarms go off,
all the elevators, everything is disabled.
We knew it was bad.
We knew something was wrong.
So as I stood in the lobby,
I noticed a lady coming toward me.
She came from the Twin Towers.
And she was very, very badly burned,
and I said, "Oh my God."
Somebody yelled,
screamed to get a towel to cover her up
because her skin was, like,
really peeling bad.
And I found out later
that she was burned from the fuel.
[interviewer]
Must've come down the elevator shaft.
Elevators. Yes.
For some reason, the ladies popped
into my head, and I said to myself,
"You know, maybe I should go
and see if they're up there,
'cause I'm not sure."
Being that the elevator's disabled,
I went to the freight elevator,
got on, used the key, went upstairs.
As I open the door, they were there.
Three ladies waiting.
They were stuck up there.
One of the ladies, she bolted and ran back
in her room and locked the door.
- [interviewer] She was scared.
- Scared. Yeah.
So I ran after her
and I banged on the door and I told her,
"Excuse me, miss.
I don't know what's going on."
"I know it's something bad.
I don't know. I'm scared myself."
"We got to leave."
She started crying.
She told me, "Okay. I'll come with you."
[interviewer]
You eventually You got them to safety.
From there,
did you know what happened to them?
No. I did not.
[dramatic music plays]
[reporter 1] Planes, typically,
are not that close to these buildings.
Wind speeds at this point,
not tremendous at all.
- Flying conditions, near perfect.
- [reporter 2] Picture-perfect.
[Kern] There were already
people pouring in
from every floor above us
into the stairwells.
I decided I was going
to stand at the entrance
and count the people from my division
and make sure
all nine got into the stairwell.
I was the Division Chief,
so I felt they were my responsibility.
And the stairs were very crowded,
so they weren't moving fast at all.
At the 20th floor
is where we first saw a firefighter
going up as we were going down.
That meant the rest of the trip
we had to go single file,
because now Port Authority police
and firefighters
were coming up the other side
to try and get the building evacuated.
I was glad to see the firefighters.
- [horns honking]
- [emergency sirens blaring]
[man] This is Central. Be advised,
from our location I see heavy smoke
coming from the building
of the World Trade Center.
Send me just about anything
that you got in this direction, Kate.
[man] The morning of September 11th,
I wasn't actually supposed to be on duty.
I had worked a 24-hour shift Sunday night,
Monday day, September 11th being Tuesday.
The captain of Engine 24,
he had asked me
to pick up the shift for him.
[dramatic music plays]
The lobby glass was broken.
We walked in
and we could see cracks in the marble,
and I could see some dead bodies
near the elevators.
This was the jet fuel
that had come down the elevator shafts.
The order was, basically, we were gonna
have to walk up and fight this fire
and get as many people as we can.
And we started going up single file.
And we had lots of civilians
coming down single file, very orderly.
Eventually we got a guy
from the 90th floor that had seen fire.
So, that's when I knew
we had a very long climb to go.
[Bouchat] I made it very quickly down
to the 78th floor Sky Lobby.
It was packed with people.
About 400 were waiting on that lobby
to catch the express elevator
to the bottom.
I believe I got into one
of the last elevators
that made it to the lobby level.
[reporter] It's obviously
Something devastating has happened.
And again, unconfirmed report
that a plane has crashed
into one of the towers there.
We are efforting
- [man 1] Can you look out your window?
- [man 2] Yeah.
[man 1] Can you see a guy at 4,000 feet,
about five east of the airport?
Looks like he's
[man 2] Yeah. I see him.
[man 1]
Is he descending to the building also?
- [man 2] He's descending really quick too.
- [man 1] Well, that's
[man 2] 4,500 feet, now. He just
dropped 800 feet in, like, one sweep.
[man 1] That's another situation.
[Bouchat] We came up to street level,
and I was with three of my co-workers.
We found each other on the elevator.
And as we stepped off onto Liberty Street
we took about ten steps
and Ingrid yelled, "Run."
She doesn't remember why she said it,
but we ran down Liberty Street
towards Church Street in Zuccotti Park.
And the time was 9:03.
[sirens wailing]
I know that now, because at 9:03 is when
United 175 crashed into the South Tower.
[airplane engine roaring]
[explosion]
[Dries] Oh my God!
[woman screams]
Oh my God!
[reporter 1] Oh my goodness.
There's another one.
Oh my goodness. There's another one.
[reporter 2] This seems to be on purpose.
- [man 1] Another one hit the building.
- [man 2] Wow.
- [man 1] Another one just hit it hard.
- [man 2] Another one hit the World Trade.
- [man 1] The whole building came apart.
- [man 2] Holy smokes.
Come on! Come on!
[loud clamoring]
Come on! Come on!
Are you with me, John?
[man] I don't know.
[woman] Get down, everybody! Get down!
- [man 1] What happened?
- [man 2] What's happening?
[woman] Waiting for another explosion!
[overlapped shouting]
[man 1] Get back!
[man 2] Let's just get back.
[horn blaring]
[officer 1] Come on! Let's move!
- Let's move! Let's go! Move it!
- [officer 2] Come on!
Move it! Come on!
[firefighter 1] Second plane just
[radio crackles and cuts out]
[firefighter 2] DC01, go.
[firefighter 1] Second explosion
in Number Two World Trade Center
on the upper floors.
It's Number Two World Trade Center,
explosion on the upper floors.
[reporter] Now it's obvious, I think,
that there's a second plane
just crashed into the World Trade Center.
I think we have a terrorist act
of proportions that we cannot begin
to imagine at this juncture.
[Kern] You could hear people gasping.
It just felt like
the world was falling apart.
[Bouchat] Your brain is just trying
to make some sense of something
that was made no sense.
It was so unbelievable.
[Kern] And that was just the beginning.
[air traffic controller] Third aircraft
hijack, heading towards Washington.
Scramble Langley,
head them towards the Washington area.
[dramatic music plays]
[ominous music plays]
[man] The September 11, 2001 attacks
were the most consequential
terrorist attacks
in the history of mankind.
It's hard, I think, to reimagine
the sense of profound upheaval
dislocation, chaos, uncertainty
that existed on September 11th
in the hours after the attacks.
I mean, no one knew who had attacked us,
why they had attacked us,
or what attacks were coming next.
And this led to perhaps
the main question of that era,
which was, "Why do they hate us?"
The attacks on the Twin Towers
were just an opening salvo
in a sustained day
of attacks against targets
representing the symbols
of American power.
It was an operation carried out
by acolytes or followers
of Osama bin Laden.
Terrorism, I think, can best be defined
as violence or the threat of violence
designed to achieve
fundamental political change.
All terrorists see themselves
as reluctant warriors
cast on the defensive
against predatory aggressors.
So they feel they have no choice
but to use violence.
That was precisely bin Laden's conceit,
that terrorism could change
the course of history.
But the path to 9/11 began decades before,
really, at the heart of the Cold War
with the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan in 1979.
That's really where it all started.
[dramatic music plays]
I don't think anyone fully understood
that this was a remarkable
turning point in history.
And no one could have ever foreseen
that this would become
such a pivotal event
that would have such an effect,
not only on the rest of the 20th century,
but would determine the course
of at least the opening decades
of the 21st century as well.
[reporter 1] Soviet troops fought
pitched battles in the streets of Kabul,
the capital of Afghanistan, today.
[reporter 2] The Soviet Union
has sent tanks and helicopter gunships
to help crush the Muslim rebels.
I am a former CIA officer
involved in the Afghan resistance
against the Soviet occupation.
The American people, at that time,
would have been scrambling
to get their world atlas
to find out where the hell
Afghanistan was.
And why do we care?
Well, we cared, at least in Washington,
because the Soviet Union,
the other side
of the equation of a Cold War
that had been running
for decades at that time, since 1948,
for, you know, at a cost of,
you know, $10 trillion or more,
had moved outside its borders
in a very flagrant way.
And so the choice was,
for any American president,
any American administration,
you have to do something,
you have to respond.
The Soviet leaders have openly
and publicly declared
that the only morality they recognize
is that which will further their cause,
which is world revolution.
[Bearden] Ronald Reagan comes in
and he brings in a new director
of Central Intelligence,
and that's Bill Casey.
Bill Casey called me up
to his office and said,
"I want you to go to Afghanistan.
I'll give you a billion dollars a year."
"I don't want you
to get these guys to win."
"We don't want
to just fight to the last Afghan."
"We want you to go
and drive these guys out."
"And if a billion isn't enough,
I'll give you more."
The pressure was on
from that moment forward.
Absolutely no backing down.
By 1985, there was possibly
a million Afghans had been killed,
1.5 million had been wounded or maimed,
a million had been driven
into exile into Iran,
and two million across the border
into Pakistan.
Of a population
of about 13 million at the time,
that's like a third have either been
killed, wounded, or driven into exile.
The decision was made.
We're going to go into this thing.
So let's get on with it
and make it go away.
The United States was giving literally
billions of dollars in the crucial years,
'84, '85, '86, to the mujahideen.
[no audible dialogue]
[Rashid] The mujahideen were
essentially the Afghans who rose up
on the basis of Islam
to free their country
from Soviet occupation.
Jihad was essentially the Muslim struggle
against oppression, dictatorship,
authoritarianism, and non-Muslims
who wanted to conquer Muslim territory.
[Bearden]
One has to imagine the challenges
of delivering tens of thousands
of tons of ordnance,
and money, and other things
to the Afghans in this war.
On the Afghan side,
we had seven separate party leaders.
They were representing
both ethnic and tribal groups
and separated by being
fundamentalist or moderate.
The four fundamentalists included
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, The Dark Prince.
Always wore a black turban,
and everybody in the world, uh,
other than some of his commanders,
absolutely hated him.
[reporter] One man in particular appears
to have a reasonably strong following.
His name is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
a 33-year-old former engineering student
from Kabul University.
[no audio]
[Rashid]
He developed a very nasty reputation.
He spent time at Kabul University.
There was a very strong rumor, I remember,
that he was responsible
for starting the trend
to throw acid into girls' faces,
because women at that time
were not covered up.
They were in skirts and dresses
and going to the university.
[dramatic music]
Hekmatyar sentenced me to death
because I was writing against him.
[Hekmatyar, in Arabic] A time came
that we had no choice but to pick up arms.
We were facing war
and had no choice but to pick up arms.
The Soviets wanted Afghanistan
to turn into
another one of their satellite states.
That was their mandate.
This is where I started my struggle
to rescue the country.
It was all for the sake
of my religious duties.
My motivations were my beliefs,
and defending them.
Soviet troops arrived.
Some considered the presence
of Soviet forces in Afghanistan
a danger to their own
freedom and sovereignty.
The entire world felt danger.
All regional countries felt danger.
Iran, Pakistan, and Gulf countries
were all feeling danger.
Europe, America,
and the West in general felt danger.
They did not think
that Afghans would be able to resist.
But, contrary to their expectations,
the resistance began here.
[Bearden]
You're not interviewing these people
so that one of them
might marry your sister.
They do what was needed.
You had to work through that system,
then the goods would flow
to the commanders
who were doing the actual fighting
including Ahmad Shah Massoud.
I gave him $250,000 a month.
Pretty soon, these shipments
were coming in to Karachi Port
and moving through the system
and into Afghanistan.
The American effort moved
from a 100-year-old design
of an Enfield rifle
up until we were having crates of AK-47s,
82-millimeter mortars,
107 and 122-millimeter rockets,
free-flight rockets
that everybody loves so much,
recoilless rifles.
[gunshot echoes]
[dramatic music plays]
[Rashid] I remember very well in '88
crossing the border
and going into Afghanistan briefly
for a quick trip
with some foreign correspondents,
and seeing a huge column
of fighters coming out of Afghanistan,
heading into Pakistan,
saying that they were going
for R&R, rest and recuperation.
And I remember very well
being quite shocked
to find that these were mostly Arabs,
and Indonesians, and Filipinos,
and people from all over.
[Hekmatyar, in Arabic]
During a certain point,
a group of young Arabs joined the jihad.
Their number was not big.
They were a limited number of young men.
Their countries of birth
did not take the matter seriously.
The West did not mind
that they came and took part in this war.
There were a very small number of them.
They also had one or two outposts.
They called them al-Qaeda.
[intense music plays]
[Rashid] Osama bin Laden was a member
of a very modern family, the bin Ladens,
who were very big contractors
and businessmen in Saudi Arabia.
But he had this desire to do something
for Islam and to wage jihad.
And he arrived in Peshawar
with a lot of construction equipment,
which his family owned,
and he helped the mujahideen build tunnels
and ammunition dumps and things like that.
He was venerated very, very quickly
and supported by all those
who were supporting
the Afghan war against the Soviets.
[Bearden]
Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan.
He formed something
that would be al-Qaeda,
which was just a collection of his guys.
It never became a big issue
for CIA or anybody else.
[no audible dialogue]
[marching band playing]
[Hoffman] In the 1980s,
we were consumed with the Cold War,
and with the threat from the Soviet Union.
But behind the scenes, I think very poorly
understood and underappreciated,
what was occurring
was a fusion of politics and religion.
[speaking Arabic]
[reporter]
In the mosques throughout the countryside,
teachers call people to join the fighting
telling them why jihad
is obligatory for them.
[Hoffman] We failed to appreciate
how these calls on Muslims
from throughout the world
to come fight in Afghanistan
and also to give financial support
to the mujahideen, to the holy warriors,
was really transforming
the nature of terrorism.
[Rashid] In those days, the Afghans
were lobbying for the stinger missiles.
And so were American politicians
and CIA officials.
And, finally, President Reagan agreed
to give them a limited number
of stinger missiles,
which were the state-of-the-art missiles
to shoot down Soviet planes.
They were trained
to shoot these planes down
as they were landing at Soviet airports.
[Bearden] I brought stingers in,
and in September
we sent out our first team.
Just a hunter-killer group
outside of Jalalabad,
waiting for a flight
of Soviet MI-24 Deltas
to come in from Kabul flying to Jalalabad.
And our guys popped up
and boom, boom, boom.
The gunner fired
and went just like an arc across the sky,
trailing that white plume behind it,
and popped the first helicopter,
and then boom, boom, boom.
So after that,
the morale of the Afghan resistance
went from patiently waiting for martyrdom
to, you know, "Patience, my ass.
Let's go out and make some trouble."
It worked.
The Soviets never had a good day
from when we got the stinger in
until they left.
That was it. The war changed.
[reporter 1] The last Soviet soldiers
left Afghanistan after nine years of war.
Nine years of occupation and death.
At least 15,000 Soviets were killed,
along with many thousands
of Afghan rebels and civilians.
[reporter 2] On the tanks,
the soldiers waved and smiled and shouted.
They were leaving and they were relieved.
[Bearden] I actually had gone in
that morning to be on Afghan soil
for when the Soviets left.
It was purely symbolic, but I was there.
They left, I came back,
turned out my light that night,
and that was my message to the KGB,
a little over a kilometer away:
"Game over, guys. You lost."
[Rashid] It became a kind of common
assessment in the Muslim world
that Muslim armies,
led by the brave mujahideen,
had actually defeated the Soviets.
[Hekmatyar, in Arabic] My tears flowed.
Even when I was praying,
I was still crying.
For two days, I kept crying.
It was like I had achieved
one of my biggest dreams unexpectedly,
and before it was supposed to happen.
I achieved my biggest dream
that the last occupier soldier
had left the country.
I did not expect
that it would happen that soon.
I was sure. I believed that the Soviets
will be defeated in the country.
But not this soon.
That is how I felt.
[Bearden] Hekmatyar believed
that sooner or later I'd have him killed.
The last meeting I had
with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
you know, he said,
"You've come here to kill me."
And I said,
"No, engineer.
I'm not going to kill you today."
[fanfare playing]
[Hoffman] Remember what it was like
in the United States in the early 1990s.
We were triumphant.
President Bush, the first President Bush,
was inaugurating
what was gonna be a new world order
that would spread democracy
and the magnificence
of the Western liberal state
and capitalism throughout the world.
So we weren't paying attention.
I mean, we were fixated
on the world through our eyes.
One that was democratic,
that was also materialistic as well.
We failed to understand
and to comprehend the power of religion.
So we didn't understand what had happened
in Afghanistan was not the closing act
but a prelude to something
far more serious and more consequential.
Especially after Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait.
Iraq invaded Kuwait this morning,
a perfectly executed invasion
that caught the world by surprise.
The attack coming just hours
after Iraq broke off talks
with Kuwait over disputed oil fields.
[Hoffman] The United States and
United Kingdom, amongst other countries,
immediately responded to Saddam Hussein
and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait,
by dispatching warships
and ground forces to protect Saudi Arabia
and to safeguard
the rest of the Arabian Peninsula
from any attempt by Iraq
to expand its control
over the world's oil supplies.
[man] When I came to the FBI,
terrorist groups were something
that I was studying.
I was really interested in groups
like Hamas, groups like Hezbollah,
groups like PIJ,
Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
And this weird guy
who gives all these different interviews.
[interviewer] What are your future plans?
[interpreter] You'll see them
and hear about them in the media.
God willing.
[Soufan] Who is he? What's his intention?
And when you talk to people
in the US government at the time,
most of them tell you,
"Ah, he's just a financier."
"He finances Islamic causes
around the world."
But there was something
more sinister to him.
Osama bin Laden had a lot of difficulties
trying to explain to his followers
his religious justification
of fighting the United States.
After all, the United States
gave the mujahideen aid,
helped the Afghani people
defeat the Soviet communists.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait,
it was a wake-up call
for people like Osama bin Laden.
They said, "See? We told you."
"The United States wanted
to invade Muslim lands."
"They wanted to invade the lands
of the two holy places,
to steal the oil
and steal the wealth of the Muslims."
[Hoffman] This solidified
in Osama bin Laden's mind
that the United States was no different
from the Soviet Union
and was, through the ruse
of protecting Saudi Arabia,
attempting to subjugate Muslim peoples
and also to seize control of the Muslims'
most precious natural resource:
its oil and natural gas reserves
in that region of the world.
He portrayed himself as the lone man,
the person deeply devoted to his religion
who was standing up
against this cultural tide of homogeneity,
of Western influence and dominance,
and saying, "Enough!"
"We have our own beliefs,
our own way of living,
and we reject that,
and you are trying to impose it on us."
"Therefore, we have no choice
but to fight and to strike back."
[Soufan] He decided to declare jihad
on the United States.
He thought that this is his opportunity
to wake up the Muslim world,
and they need to start thinking about
defeating the other remaining superpower.
[dramatic music plays]
[police sirens wailing distantly]
[David Dinkins]
At approximately 12:15 p.m.
there was a large explosion
at the World Trade Center,
which caused the collapse
of several floors
in the basement of the parking level
beneath Tower One.
[reporter] They stream
from the stairway by the hundreds.
The joyful end of a two-hour journey
down the smoke-filled staircase,
staggering, coughing.
Five are known dead at this point,
more than 200 hurt in the blast
that rocked
the nation's second tallest building.
[Hoffman]
The first World Trade Center bombing
was really independent of al-Qaeda,
even though al-Qaeda had been formed
five years before.
That's not to say
it was completely unconnected to al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda was not involved
in any active sense.
Al-Qaeda, at that stage,
was still plotting and planning.
It was an operation carried out
by acolytes or followers
of the Blind Sheikh, Abdel-Rahman,
who bin Laden counted
as one of his spiritual mentors as well.
[Soufan] Omar Abdel-Rahman,
he was able to escape Egypt
and come to the United States,
because people in the US government
believed that this guy is on our side.
This guy fought against the Soviets,
helped to defeat the Soviets.
So there is no way he is gonna have
any animosity towards the United States.
They were wrong.
[Hoffman] We know that Ramzi Ahmed Yousef,
the mastermind behind the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center,
had sought to topple
one tower onto the other
with a view of killing 60,000 people.
He was thinking
on a vastly different scale
than terrorists had thought before.
And so was his uncle,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
[Soufan] At the very beginning,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
really wanted the World Trade Center down.
Ramzi Yousef, his relative,
when he got caught,
they put him on a helicopter, bringing him
to New York so he can go to jail.
They showed him the World Trade Center
and they said, "See? It's still up."
And he said,
"If I had more money, it won't be."
[Hoffman] What underscored, I think,
how serious
the 1993 World Trade Center attack was,
was the fact that it was not
an isolated one-off phenomenon.
Because the following June,
in June 1993, another plot was uncovered.
[man] Most of my career,
I was an NCIS special agent.
Went through the ranks
up to the deputy assistant director level.
And in that capacity,
my primary responsibility
was threat warnings
for the Navy, Marine Corps.
The cell that I was working against
was seeking to assassinate
Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt,
and blow up
the Holland and Lincoln tunnels,
plant bombs in those tunnels.
They were going to shoot the guards
at the federal building,
26 Federal Plaza,
drive a truck underneath with explosives
in it to blow up the Federal Building
and looking at other landmarks
in New York City to attack us.
[reporter] Members of a joint terrorism
task force seized barrels of evidence
and arrested eight people
in New York and New Jersey.
The suspects are said to be linked
to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.
[Soufan] They took the cell down
at the last minute.
And there is CCTV videos that were
put on trial as evidence, as exhibits.
And you see one guy praying
and next to him,
one guy literally mixing the bomb.
So they stopped them at the last minute.
[Fallon] We wound up
bringing to justice ten suspects.
[ominous music plays]
[Soufan] The FBI and other folks
in the intelligence community
start focusing on this jihadi threat.
And Osama bin Laden,
by then, was based in Sudan.
He was openly declaring jihad
and declaring war on the United States.
[Bearden] The Sudanese come
to the Americans, say, "You want him?"
And we said, "We don't have enough on him
to do anything, so no, we don't want him."
The Sudanese then came and said,
"How about he goes to Afghanistan?
And the Saudis and Americans said
"What a wonderful idea!"
"That's so far away. What kind
of trouble can he get into there?"
[dramatic music plays]
[Bearden] After we left
Afghanistan in 1989,
all of those parties that we dealt with,
the Seven Sisters,
began jockeying for position.
In effect, we walked away.
There was probably no thought given
to aftercare in the case of a victory,
and it was a failed state.
[speaking Arabic]
[Rashid] And so what we saw
was the withdrawal of the Soviets in '89,
and with no political settlement
inside Afghanistan,
it immediately led to the civil war.
Kabul was utterly destroyed
in the civil war.
[Soufan] When he went to Afghanistan,
there was a new group in Afghanistan
that was winning the battle
that took place after the Soviets pull out
among all the mujahideen
and all the different warlords.
That group was called the Taliban.
[ominous music plays]
[Rashid] They emerged as this force
which would do good,
and do better,
and bring peace to Afghanistan,
which essentially,
in the beginning, they did.
Because when they came to Kandahar,
they drove out all the petty warlords.
[man] Afghanistan in the 1990s was
It's hard to describe.
It was another world.
It was completely and utterly destroyed.
The Taliban
didn't let foreigners in very often.
I got lucky. I got a visa and I drove in.
I drove to the capital.
All the roads are blown up, cratered.
There are Soviet armored vehicles,
tanks overturned,
broken, rusty everywhere.
Like, all along the road to Kabul.
You know, the war had ended ten years
before and nobody cleaned it up.
I went to my hotel. The windows were gone.
There was no running water.
There was no electricity.
You just didn't see women.
Women were not allowed
to walk unaccompanied
you know, either by their husband
or a male member of their family, alone.
And so occasionally you would see a woman,
and if she were outside,
she had a head-to-toe burqa on
so you couldn't see her face.
And girls were banned
from going to school.
The Taliban were kind of the meanest,
toughest guys in town.
They brought the civil war to an end,
but they had imposed
this kind of draconian,
medieval kind of peace on the society.
The first night I got there,
there was a knock on my door
from one of the Taliban guys, and he said,
"We would like you to come tomorrow
to an amputation and an execution."
So I and a couple other reporters,
we went to the Kabul sports stadium,
and they brought us down
to the midfield on the soccer field.
I mean, the amputation
was a kind of warm-up act,
and they did that,
and cut off the guy's hand
right in front of everybody.
But then they brought the guy in
to be executed,
and it was, you know, it was like
It was like something out of a nightmare.
He was blindfolded.
They set him on midfield.
He apparently had murdered someone
in an irrigation dispute.
The family of the victim was there.
His family was there.
And his family, they were sobbing
and they were begging for mercy.
"Please spare him. Please spare him."
And the family of the victim
was saying, "No, no, no."
And the Taliban handed a rifle
to the brother of the victim.
And he walked out to midfield,
and all the while they're reading
the Qur'an into a loudspeaker.
The brother takes the rifle
and shoots the guy.
I mean, he kind of falls over,
they cart him off, and that was it.
And that's what it was like there.
[man, in Arabic] The rule
of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
in Afghanistan
lasted almost for about seven years
from beginning to end.
The people of Afghanistan
have some good memories of that period.
I personally have the memory
of security in my mind.
Security prevailed throughout Afghanistan.
Certainly no Afghan could have killed
another person at that time,
because of their personal animosities.
[reporter] The Muslim extremists,
known as the Taliban militia,
have not only trampled on women's rights
and banned most modern pleasures
since taking over most of Afghanistan,
they have made it a haven
for some of the world's
most dangerous terrorists.
[men singing in Arabic]
[gunshot]
[Rashid]
Osama bin Laden had done a great deal
for their ostensible leader, Mullah Omar,
in strengthening Mullah Omar's position.
Now what, of course, Mullah Omar
may have made him promise to do
was not to launch any attack
on the Americans from Afghan soil.
It was well known that Osama
wouldn't be sitting idly by doing nothing.
[Hoffman] On the eighth anniversary
of the deployment
of the first US troops to Saudi Arabia,
bin Laden launched simultaneous attacks
against the US embassies in East Africa.
[ominous music plays]
[police sirens wailing]
[crying]
[indistinct shouting]
[Hoffman] The fact they were simultaneous
attacks just ratcheted up that threat
that terrorists could strike
at more than one place at one time.
[Bill Clinton] These acts of terrorist
violence are abhorrent. They are inhuman.
We will use all the means at our disposal
to bring those responsible to justice
no matter what, or how long it takes.
[Soufan] We knew that al-Qaeda
is not just going to pack and go home.
They're going to try to do something else.
We had intelligence
that said they were planning
to bomb a few hotels in Jordan.
Also, they were planning
to assassinate the Pope, John Paul II,
when he was doing baptism
on the Jordan River,
and attack pilgrims coming
from Israel to Jordan on the land border.
So that was a huge plot,
and literally we took the whole cell down.
[interviewer] Do you expect, worry, that
there will be an incident of terrorism
before the first of the year?
We are on a heightened state of alert,
and we're doing a lot of work on this.
But I would say to the American people
they should go on about their business
and celebrate the holidays as they would.
[ominous music plays]
[anchor] Pentagon officials tell NBC News
that at least four US sailors were killed,
and as many as 30 more wounded
when a suicide bomber attacked
the US Navy Destroyer USS Cole.
[Fallon] A small boat, a skiff,
with two al-Qaeda members in it,
came about midship of the USS Cole,
when it was at a fuel dolphin
in Aden, Yemen.
Midship is about the midway point,
which happened to be
where the cafeteria was.
A huge explosion,
it did quite a bit of damage,
and 17 sailors were killed
that day in Aden, Yemen.
The system was already blinking red
that summer with threat warnings.
We were anticipating
some type of attack somewhere.
We didn't know in what form it would come.
We didn't know where it would be.
You're getting so much data.
So, you know,
if you get one thread of intel,
it could be an anomaly,
could be fabricated, could be false,
could be some overheard conversation,
and it might not be validated.
What we were seeing
was a tremendous amount of intelligence
that would be indications and warnings
that there was something going on.
[Hoffman] In any government,
there's always bureaucratic rivalries.
They often have deep historical roots.
They're often played out
on very personal levels.
Countering terrorism was something
done by a multiplicity of agencies
that did it well,
but didn't necessarily feel the need
to cooperate with one another.
You have to think about
the late 1990s in the United States.
We were enmeshed
in following every muscle movement
of the Monica Lewinsky
and President Clinton scandal.
This was a time when the profound fissures
between Republicans and Democrats
were developing in many different ways.
So we were very absorbed with what
was going on in the United States,
and oblivious
to some of these turf rivalries
between agencies or personal enmities
between key individuals.
And all along, you have in the background
bin Laden carefully, meticulously,
slowly putting together all the pieces
to implement what would be
a history-changing terrorist operation.
[ominous music plays]
[man] We have several situations
going on here. It's escalating big-time.
[dispatcher]
American dispatch, Jim McDonald.
[man] Indianapolis Center,
did you get a hold of American 77?
[dispatcher]
No. But we have an unconfirmed report
that a second airplane
hit the World Trade Center.
You know we lost American 11
to a hijacking?
- [man] American 11?
- [dispatcher] Yes. We were hijacked.
It was a Boston-to-LA flight.
And 77 is a Dulles-LA flight.
[air traffic controller]
American 77 was over
was just west
of Charleston, West Virginia.
We now believe
that aircraft may have been hijacked.
[Nasypany] He's heading
towards Washington.
Foxy, scramble Langley.
Head them towards the Washington area.
[man] Roger that.
[man] Indy, Indianapolis Center
was working this guy.
[woman] What guy?
- [air traffic controller] American 77.
- [woman] Okay.
[air traffic controller]
At flight level three five zero,
however, they lost radar with him,
they lost contact with him,
they lost everything,
and they don't have any idea
where he is or what happened.
[man] Our latest report the aircraft VFR
six miles southeast of the White House.
[woman]
Six miles southeast of the White House?
[Boston ATC] Yep. East. He's moving away?
[man] Yep. Aircraft is moving away.
- [woman] Moving away from the White House?
- [man] Yeah.
[Nasypany] The White House.
Get the fighters there. Jesus, Fox.
[woman] So there were approximately
16 of us in this staff meeting,
and when it got to me,
there was the loudest noise
I had ever heard.
And it got dark.
[ominous music plays]