9/11: The Rise of Osama bin Laden (Ep 1)

Gordon Corera (0:08)

9-11 was the most devastating terrorist attack in history, but where did the plot come from? And when a freelance terrorist walks in with a plan to fly planes into American buildings, why did Osama bin Laden almost say no?

Welcome to The Rest Is Classified, I'm Gordon Corera.

David McCloskey (0:28)

And I'm David McCloskey.

Gordon Corera (0:29)

And today we begin a six-part series on the deadliest terrorist attack in history. The plot, the men who planned it, the intelligence machine that maybe could have caught them. In this series, David, we're going to really drill deep into the 9-11 plot, looking at how it was thought up, how it was financed, how it was staffed, how it was rehearsed. And alongside it, we're going to talk about people, primarily from the CIA or former organization and the FBI, who were trying to stop it.

David McCloskey (1:00)

I think 9-11 is one of those events that it really defines the end of an era and the start of another. You know, we have pre-9-11 and post-9-11. I mean, that's how apocryl this event is. And, you know, without 9-11, we don't have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We don't have military operations really all over the world, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. We don't have what might be $6 trillion of expenditure on those conflicts, the loss of 7,000 American lives, tens of thousands of allied soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of people killed throughout the Muslim world. So this is an absolutely massive turning point.

I think it's also true, and we'll explore this later in the series, that we may not have the tilt of populism and the political environment that allows for the rise of Donald Trump without 9-11 and the American response to it.

Gordon Corera (2:07)

That's right. I mean, the way in which it seeps into politics, but also popular culture are remarkable. I mean, on a personal level, I can remember the day and it really shaped my career for 25 years since I've been covering national security, and that is really because of 9-11.

But it is 25 years, which is amazing to think of. But there are still some questions still remaining about the plot. There's still ongoing litigation about whether there are other people, other states even, helping the hijackers. Questions about the intelligence failure. So we're going to also drill down into those, aren't we?

David McCloskey (2:41)

That's right. But maybe we begin with bin Laden himself, but first.

Gordon Corera (2:46)

So bin Laden himself. I mean, we did a series on Osama bin Laden last year, and 9-11 certainly doesn't happen without him. But I think one of the interesting things which we'll get into is it's not really just his plot. I mean, it's associated with him. But there are other people who are really coming up with the ideas and driving it. But he's going to play such an important role in making it happen, in building the organization, Al Qaeda, as we'll come to, which is behind it. And it's his ideology, his experience in organization, which is crucial, isn't it?

David McCloskey (3:18)

I think it's worth setting bin Laden up a bit. Bin Laden, he's born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia. He is the son, one of many sons of Muhammad bin Laden, who was a construction magnet, climbed out of poverty in a region of Yemen, actually, and has become, Muhammad bin Laden becomes the favored builder of the Saudi royal family. Now, he builds roads, he builds a massive amount of infrastructure across the kingdom.

He famously undertakes a renovation of the holy sites at Mecca and Medina, and really in a single generation, that family goes from Yemeni obscurity to really the heights of Saudi commercial power, and they're bound very tightly to the Al Saud ruling family.

Gordon Corera (4:06)

It's a big sprawling family, isn't it? The bin Laden's in which Osama is just one of many.

David McCloskey (4:12)

Yeah, he is one of many. He also, and this is important, I think, for his formation, he is on the marginal ends of this family.

Unlike many of his half-brothers and half-sisters, he will wind up being educated in the kingdom, in Jeddah. And his radicalization, we talked about this pretty extensively in our series on bin Laden. His radicalization, I think, really begins at a school that he attended called al-Dhagr, which means the haven. It's not a radical school. This is a place that many Saudi elites would send children to be educated. But bin Laden comes under the influence of a Syrian school teacher who, frankly, is, you know, he's well-liked by the students. He really has them participate in a lot of afterschool soccer games, Gordon, and he's popular. He's well-liked, he's charismatic, and bin Laden is drawn to him. And this Syrian school teacher really cultivates these afterschool prayer meetings and discussions. He's a very hard-line guy advocating a very militant strand of Islam. And, you know, bin Laden is really drawn to this because bin Laden, you know, in the accounts of his early life, he's shy, he's tall, he's unusually devout relative to many of his family members. He's academically unremarkable. He's also apparently a mediocre soccer player.