[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!
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]