Other agencies around the world similarly received information that confirmed bin Laden was planning a major operation against US targets. MI6 had warned the Americans in 1999 that al-Qaeda was considering using commercial aircraft in ‘unconventional ways… possibly as flying bombs’. Egyptian President Mubarak claimed that his country’s intelligence service had penetrated al-Qaeda and warned of an attack using ‘an airplane stuffed with explosives’, although the target appeared to be the G8 talks held in spring 2001. An MI5 report on 6 July 2001 noted that ‘UBL and those who share his agenda are currently well advanced in operational planning for a number of major attacks on Western interests’, although it thought the most likely location ‘is in the Gulf States, or the wider Middle East’. Mossad sent warnings to their CIA counterparts over the summer of 2001 citing ‘credible chatter’ that their agents had picked up in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen — the CIA forced one paper who reported this to print a retraction. Even the Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil tried to pass on a warning, although this wasn’t taken seriously.
On 11 September 2001, two hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York; a third hit the Pentagon in Washington DC. A fourth was hijacked but was retaken by its passengers; it crashed in Pennsylvania killing all on board. There were 2,753 victims at the World Trade Center including 411 emergency workers; 184 died at the Pentagon, and forty were killed in the Pennsylvania crash. The world’s intelligence agencies had failed to read the signs in time. Everything would have to change.
The CIA’s DCI George Tenet refused to accept that the Agency had failed in its duty, blaming the FBI for the shortcomings that allowed the terrorists to enter the United States and get into position to hijack the aircraft. As far as he was concerned, the fact that he was able to present President Bush with a plan for retaliation within four days indicated that the CIA was on top of the situation, even if others were not.
Even while the attacks were continuing, the CTC was beginning to track down information from all their sources, and within hours Tenet told the president that the attacks ‘looked, smelled and tasted like bin Laden’. Four days later, Tenet’s plan, which included ‘a full-scale covert attack on the financial underpinnings of the terrorist network, including clandestine computer surveillance and electronic eavesdropping to locate the assets of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups’ and his ‘Worldwide Attack Matrix’, a plan for covert action in eighty countries, was presented to the president and his advisers at Camp David. On 17 September, Bush signed a Presidential Finding authorizing the CIA to hunt down, and if necessary, kill the leaders of al-Qaeda: ‘I want justice,’ he told reporters that day. ‘And there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that said ‘‘Wanted, Dead or Alive’’.’ (The CIA had requested this authority in July, but had not yet received it.) He also authorised an extra $1 billion funding for the Agency.
President Bush declared his War on Terror in a speech to Congress on 20 September, stating bluntly that ‘Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’ Among the rhetoric, he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, adding, ‘We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home. We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act and to find them before they strike.’ The phrase ‘war on terror’ was adopted around the world, although the British stopped using it, partly, as former MI5 head Elizabeth Manningham-Buller pointed out, because the 9/11 attacks were ‘a crime, not an act of war’.
The Taliban refused to hand bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leaders over to the Americans, leading in October to Operation Enduring Freedom, the invasion of Afghanistan. During the preparation for the war, the CIA worked inside Afghanistan, trying to create rifts between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, even proposing to assist a coup from within the Taliban if it meant al-Qaeda were handed over. When these efforts failed, the invasion was launched and within a few weeks, bin Laden was forced to flee to Tora Bora, in the east of Afghanistan, from where (probably with the aid of Pakistani intelligence, even though they were ostensibly assisting the Americans), he was able to escape into Pakistan. For a long time, it was believed he was dead until a video recording was released in late 2002.
Interrogation of detainees has always been a useful source of intelligence for spies across the centuries, but it was taken to a new level in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The arguments for and against ‘enhanced’ interrogation — using such techniques as waterboarding (where water is poured onto a cloth over a suspect’s face, making him believe he is drowning) and sensory deprivation — have been rehearsed many times: can evidence produced that way be trusted, or has the suspect said what he thinks the interrogators want to hear in order to prevent the torture from recurring?
The CIA was given wide latitude in its hunt for the terrorist suspects. José Rodriguez, who became head of the National Clandestine Service, in charge of the interrogations, defended their actions, pointing out, ‘We did the right thing for the right reason. And the right reason was to protect the homeland and to protect American lives.’ The CIA took over responsibility for the interrogations in early 2002 and began ‘rendition’ of the suspects — removing them secretly to ‘black sites’ in foreign countries, places where the Agency could have control over the interrogations without supervision from others in the US administration or the media. Abu Zubaida, believed at the time to be one of the senior members of al-Qaeda, was rendered to Thailand after his capture in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002, However, both George Tenet, in his book about his time as DCI, and Rodriguez maintain that they were careful to check the legality of their moves (what Rodriguez calls ‘get[ting] everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed’) before proceeding.
A series of techniques was approved in what became described as the ‘Torture Memo’, an eighteen-page document dated 1 August 2002 sent by the Assistant Attorney General to the CIA’s General Counsel. This set out in considerable detail the methods by which the processes would be applied, and how the use of them could not be classified as torture within the definition of Section 2340A of title 18 of the United States Code. (It would be further clarified by three memoranda in 2005 totalling 106 pages.) Speaking in April 2012, Rodriguez claimed: ‘This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist, on the detainee, so that he would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us.’
The FBI carried out the initial interrogation of Zubaida, during which he identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) as the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and revealed plans to attack American apartments with bombs, as well as an assault on the Brooklyn Bridge. According to Ali H. Soufan, the FBI officer in charge of the interrogation of Zubaida and other al-Qaeda members, Zubaida gave up nothing further of use during the enhanced interrogation — and indeed he and his Bureau colleagues refused to have anything to do with them.