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[soft dramatic music]
♪
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- My name is Michael Morell, and on September 11th, 2001,
I was President Bush's daily intelligence briefer.
♪
I briefed him six days a week
no matter where he was in the world.
♪
From April
to mid-July of 2001,
there was a significant increase in intelligence
reporting about al-Qaeda planning attacks.
♪
[rockets roaring]
Catastrophic attacks.
Multiple simultaneous attacks.
History-changing attacks.
[dramatic music]
♪
- We'd seen chatter before other operations.
♪
You know, they saw it around the millennium.
We saw it before the bombings in '98.
We knew they were planning something.
But they started using language we had never heard before.
They were calling it Olympic-sized.
Armageddon.
- There were real plots being manifested.
♪
The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption.
[soft dramatic music]
- It's early this Tuesday morning,
the 11th of September, 2001.
[upbeat music]
- From the heart of New York City...
- The first job of any government
is to protect the country and protect its people...
[soft dramatic music]
But you don't get credit for what you stopped
if you don't stop them all.
♪
And we were unable to stop the big one.
♪
- For us, there was a personal dimension in this.
♪
3,000 Americans had been killed.
The city I grew up in had been blown up.
There was an emotional piece of this
because we had woken up every day of our lives...
♪
Trying to stop what just had happened.
[dramatic music]
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- 20 years have passed since the United States
suffered the worst terrorist attack
in its history.
Four planes...
19 hijackers...
Nearly 3,000 killed.
An act that shook America to its core,
led to a 20-year war,
and left our legacy bruised and battered.
For the nation's premier spy agency,
9/11 was the nightmare scenario,
but it was no surprise.
♪
- We knew we were running out of time every single day.
Nobody knew when an attack might happen.
Could be at any moment, any day,
any moment. That was the feeling.
It felt like al-Qaeda was ready.
It just kind of felt like that.
♪
- The international terrorist network
was targeting Americans.
For the officers, analysts,
and covert operatives
of the Central Intelligence Agency,
the hunt for al-Qaeda and its leader,
Osama bin Laden,
started years before 9/11 and ended long after.
This is their story.
- People come to work at CIA because of the mission.
The mission is to collect information
that we can't get any other way to keep the country safe.
♪
- Pretty much every country I've visited
in one way or the other,
I used to smile and tell people,
"I was either causing trouble,
stopping trouble, or planning trouble."
♪
- A CIA case officer for 18 years,
Marty Martin recruited spies in the Middle East,
often undercover.
He grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana,
and became fluent in Arabic
while serving in special forces.
♪
- You would think, "What the heck?
"How can a guy from Louisiana operate in the Middle East
and kind of understand where they're coming from?"
Well, as a young boy in Louisiana,
one, we are a diversed culture in a lot of ways.
At the same time, we care about honor and family.
In the Middle East,
honor is a very important thing.
Family and tribe is very important.
♪
- In July, 1998,
Martin arrives at the CIA station
in Nairobi, Kenya.
His colleagues worry they and other Americans
are in the crosshairs.
- The operations officers there were strident in that
they felt like there was a threat from al-Qaeda there.
They even showed me how they would drive that truck
if they went to hit the embassy.
As I look back, I'll never forget
the looks on their faces when they told me,
"Marty, we are vulnerable here.
They are coming at us."
♪
- Massive explosions at two U.S. embassies
in East African countries this morning.
The United States embassy in Nairobi, Kenya,
has been heavily damaged.
♪
- The bombings were allegedly carried out
by members of al-Qaeda,
an international terrorist group
founded by Osama bin Laden.
- He's believed to run a vast terrorist network
from his headquarters in Afghanistan.
But who is this man?
Who is he, and what kind of man is he?
♪
- It's hard for me to remember when I first heard
the name Osama bin Laden.
I probably heard it when I was first working
on Afghanistan.
My name is Cindy Storer.
I was a CIA senior analyst on September 11, 2001.
♪
I was the only one looking at bin Laden
when I first came.
And I came across his name as early as 1982,
certainly, as someone who was part of the people
who were coming from overseas to work
and fight against the Soviets.
- [shouting indistinctly]. Allahu Akbar!
[rockets whoosh]
- He was a guy who had shunned the riches of Saudi Arabia
and the bin Laden family
and gone to the mountains of Afghanistan to fight,
and so, you know, that would engender
some sort of respect.
♪
- He was very devout. He lived very simply.
He kept the Koran by his bedside,
and as his myth grew,
people would talk about him, you know,
glowing when he prayed and things like that.
- Bin Laden joins Afghan forces
in a decade-long fight against a Soviet invasion.
He then returns to Saudi Arabia,
but after denouncing the royal family's
alliance with the U.S.,
he's stripped of his citizenship
and leaves for Sudan.
- Bin Laden was only just starting
to expand his reach when we saw him
as an emerging threat during his time in Sudan.
We characterized him as one of the most active
financial sponsors of Islamic fundamental terrorism.
- The U.S. pressures the Sudanese government
to kick him out, and bin Laden
is again a man without a country.
- No one knew exactly where he was gonna go,
so it was kind of a "Where's Waldo" going mystery,
if you will.
[dramatic music]
He ended up in Afghanistan,
which didn't surprise us at all.
He had a lot of friends who would provide
security and support.
♪
- Within months,
bin Laden issues a declaration of war
on the United States.
- Bin Laden had two objectives.
One was to drive the United States
out of the Middle East,
and the other was to depose
the leaders of Sunni Muslim countries,
who he saw as American puppets.
♪
- When they say they're gonna come kill you,
they're gonna come kill you.
♪
- To better understand
bin Laden's operations and associates,
Storer starts piecing together intelligence
and arrives at a startling conclusion.
- I was looking at these associations
that I'd drawn out
and how people related to each other,
and I was looking at accounting and how they would move money.
They even talked about moving money
from one line item on their budget
to another line item on the budget
to pay for somebody's medical care.
Then they were issuing paychecks.
And then I started going back and looking at all
of the information we had on them
over the years and realized
that this was a terrorist organization,
and it really was one of those eureka moments
where you've been working on something for a long time,
and all of a sudden you just go...
Like, everything snapped together.
♪
- Osama bin Laden
is more than just a financier of jihad.
He's the head of al-Qaeda, a terrorist network.
- Nobody wanted to believe it. [laughs]
That can't happen. Arabs don't work together.
People from all these cultures don't work together.
Their school systems stink.
They're not capable of critical thinking.
I mean, just a lot of crazy--
not really crazy for the time,
but a lot of assumptions that people were making.
[soft dramatic music]
- People were focused on nation-states.
There was not an appreciation across the organization
for al-Qaeda and bin Laden
and non-state actors in general.
- So trying to tell folks, you know,
"Not only do you have this group of people
"from all over the world who are working together,
"but that they're well-educated,
and they know what they're doing,"
yeah, that did not go over well.
- Bin Laden establishes his base
in Afghanistan after maneuvering his way
into the good graces of the Taliban.
- The Taliban has set up
a religious extremist government
that not only tramples on women's rights
and bans most modern pleasures,
it offers one of the world's last havens for terrorists.
- The most important factor
in a terrorist groups' ability
to conduct attacks is safe haven.
And that's what the Taliban provided.
So complete freedom of movement,
complete ability to train, complete ability to plan.
[rockets whoosh]
♪
- At the bomb site in Nairobi where the search for evidence
and the cleanup seems never ending,
there is no sense this morning that revenge is right,
only that it may be necessary.
- In the aftermath of those bombings
of embassies in Africa, what do we do?
We fiddle-faddle around. We sent firecrackers.
We sent, you know, a few missiles.
- Two weeks after the embassy bombings,
the United States struck back at bin Laden long distance,
dropping cruise missiles
on his alleged terrorist training camp
in eastern Afghanistan.
- The United States had tried to retaliate
and did no real damage,
and so, to his followers,
he looked like he had taken on
the United States and won.
- My fellow Americans, our battle against terrorism
did not begin with a bombing of our embassies in Africa,
nor will it end with today's strike.
- You gotta hit 'em in the effing nose, okay?
You hit them in the effing nose,
and if they don't go down, you hit them again.
President Clinton should have been asking us
every day, "Where is Osama bin Laden,
and what are you doing about it?"
No lawyers, no Janet Reno saying,
"You can't shoot the helicopter because that's assassination."
None of that.
You say, "This guy has bombed our embassies.
I want him dead."
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- The big high of this job that I will never forget
is the quality of the men and women
and what they meant to me.
♪
Someone once asked me,
"How'd you get through tough days?"
♪
'Cause I was surrounded by men and women
who were ready for it.
- George Tenet became director
of Central Intelligence in 1997.
A brash New Yorker and son of Greek immigrants,
he would become one of the longest tenured directors
at the CIA.
He spoke about the agency's successes and failures
in a rare interview in 2015.
- We knew that al-Qaeda was dedicated.
We understood that this was an organization
that was operating with a hub in Afghanistan
that operated in 60 countries.
We understood that they had an interest
in attacking the United States overseas
or inside this country.
[indistinct chatter]
- The CIA deserves both credit and blame.
They deserve credit for knowing
that a major attack was coming.
People say, "Oh, well, they didn't know
where the attack was going to be or when or how."
That's true, but you can't expect them to know that.
- Richard Clark
was the top counterterrorism official
at the White House, coordinating efforts
across all U.S. intelligence agencies,
including the CIA.
- It was not an intelligence failure.
9/11 was something that they had predicted in broad strokes.
What they failed to do was to actually act on their words
and do anything about it.
- I don't believe that Mr. Clark
has an accurate sense
of the sense of urgency that existed
at the Central Intelligence Agency
between the East Africa bombing and 9/11.
- By 1999,
as a new millennium approaches,
the CIA believes more terror attacks
against the U.S. are imminent.
♪
- There is not the slightest doubt
that Osama bin Laden,
his worldwide allies, and his sympathizers
are planning further attacks against us.
♪
We are concerned that one or more of bin Laden's attacks
could occur at any time.
- During the millennium threat period,
I told the President of the United States
to expect between 5 and 15 attacks
against American interests.
- Holiday travelers warned to be calm
but vigilant for millennium terror threats.
- Preparing for the worst.
The CIA believes that a bin Laden terror attack
for New Years is now likely. The U.S...
- The fury of technical operations
for a period of months was enormous.
- Arrests in Jordan last week have linked the threats
to exiled Saudi militant Osama bin Laden.
- 300 extra customs agents are on high alert this morning
at entry points across the United States.
- The arrest of 32-year-old Ahmed Ressam
has sent a chill through American law enforcement.
Now they fear terrorists have begun
selecting targets within the United States.
- Bill Clinton said, "Go on alert."
- Guys, let's go. Out, out.
- Pull out all the stops, do whatever you can
to stop this possible al-Qaeda attack
around the millennium.
- Just a few minutes ago, the ball dropped here
in Times Square, and revelers cheered
as the year 2000...
- Were there successful attacks
around the millennium? No, there were not.
♪
- What was really happening at the CIA
was that everybody had been stunned,
shocked by the extent of al-Qaeda planning
to carry out strikes at the turn of the millennium.
And so they had said, "What else are we missing?
What else is out there?"
And they redoubled their targeting
for collection of phones,
surveillance of individuals' homes.
- Major terror plots have been thwarted,
but the CIA is about to make one of its biggest mistakes.
♪
- On December, 1999, CIA, FBI,
and the Department of State received intelligence
on the travels of suspected al-Qaeda operatives
to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
♪
The CIA saw the Kuala Lumpur gathering
as a potential source of intelligence
about a possible al-Qaeda attack
in Southeast Asia.
♪
- These men, Khalid al-Mihdhar
and Nawaf al-Hazmi, are part of the group
traveling to Kuala Lumpur.
Al-Mihdhar is believed
to have ties to Osama bin Laden.
- The 4th of January, 2000,
CIA obtained a photocopy of al-Mihdhar's passport
as he traveled to Kuala Lumpur.
CIA suspected that al-Mihdhar was a terrorist
and knew he had a visa to enter the United States.
♪
- A suspected al-Qaeda terrorist
intent on traveling to the U.S.
♪
The CIA sets up surveillance, but the two men get away.
♪
The agency fails to put their names
on a travel watchlist.
♪
- It defies all understanding
that the CIA could know that these two people
were in the United States
and not immediately pick up the phone
and tell the FBI at a high level,
not immediately pick up the phone
and tell the National Coordinator for Terrorism.
- It was our responsibility at CIA
to tell the FBI that information
in a formal memo
so that they could be watch-listed.
They could be put on the no-fly list.
And we didn't do that. We failed.
- The CIA says it simply dropped the ball.
- Should they have been watch-listed?
- Yes, sir. We've acknowledged that fact.
- Two weeks after the meeting in Kuala Lumpur,
al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi
touch down at Los Angeles International Airport,
one step closer to the worst attack
on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
♪
- They have been recruited into the plan
that Osama bin Laden had authorized
to hijack airplanes, turn them into cruise missiles,
and fly them into targets in the United States.
♪
- We can never say, in retrospect,
if we had done X or Y, it would have stopped 9/11.
There's no way of knowing that.
We do know that there were many opportunities
that CIA either missed
or refused to participate in,
and maybe, maybe,
that could've stopped 9/11.
[dramatic music]
- If we'd been asleep at the switch, not warning,
not acting, not preventing people from being killed,
we live terrorism like we live no other issue,
no other issue.
No matter what anybody says,
they'll never understand how we live this issue.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- My first exposure to al-Qaeda was in 1997,
when I watched the first interview
with bin Laden to the West
where he issued his declaration of war
against the United States.
- [speaking Arabic]
- We declared a jihad,
a holy war against the United States government
because it is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical.
- Being young, obviously it felt like I was a target.
My name is Tracy Walder,
and I was a staff operations officer
at the CIA on September 11, 2001.
♪
- Tracy Walder joined the CIA straight out of college
in the summer of 2000.
She was thrown into the hunt for Osama bin Laden,
investigating terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
- I don't think that maybe we fully realized
or understood up until that point
how structured their training was
and how organized, quite frankly,
their training was.
♪
And I believe that in the upper echelons
of administration,
that al-Qaeda was very underestimated.
♪
I think that it was, "Uh, well, those people
"in that dirt farm,
"they won't be able to do anything huge anyway,
"so it won't be that difficult to get bin Laden,
"and they won't be capable
of this sort of large scale attacks."
♪
- Our top story this morning is the attack
on a U.S. ship in Yemen.
♪
- An explosion ripped through the USS "Cole,"
killing 17 sailors and injuring 39 others.
- The working theory among intelligence
and law enforcement officials
is that this was the work of Osama bin Laden.
- 17 Americans dead.
Investigators confirm it was al-Qaeda.
♪
- If their intention was to deter from our mission
of promoting peace and security in the Middle East,
they will fail utterly.
- Soon the burden will shift
from one U.S. president to another,
but there's confusion and delay.
♪
- Today in Florida, the race for the White house
became a race to the courthouse.
- I felt that every day that we didn't kill bin Laden,
that we didn't destroy the leadership,
the sands of time were running out on us.
- The divisive election that wrecked this country
for 36 days after November the 7th.
- The votes of a single county
that could determine the next president
of the United States.
- The Bush campaign is sending a clear message
that they are preparing for the presidency.
- Our hair is on fire.
- It's a Bush win
in the United States Supreme Court.
- The lights are blinking red as far as we're concerned.
- I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear...
- The Bush administration took this seriously...
- That I will faithfully execute
the office of President of the United States.
♪
- But like the Clinton administration,
they, too, ran out of time.
♪
- The new administration is settling in,
just coming to grips with the grave threat
posed by al-Qaeda.
A plot against the United States
is developing at the worst possible time.
- I think there were two people in the White House
who were responsible for making sure
that there was a sense of urgency,
and that's Richard Clarke,
who was the counterterrorism advisor,
and Condi Rice, who was the national security advisor.
They should have created a greater sense of urgency
on the policy side.
- There was nothing more that I could have done
to convey a sense of urgency
other than jumping out the window.
- We were looking for a more comprehensive plan
to eliminate al-Qaeda, but we weren't sitting still.
While that plan was developing,
we were continuing to pursue the policies
that the Clinton administration had pursued.
♪
- National security advisor Condoleezza Rice
is on the job just five days
when she receives a request from Richard Clarke.
♪
- I sent a memo saying,
"We need a urgent, high-level meeting
"to approve more aggressive action
"against bin Laden,
"because the intelligence is indicating
that they're planning major attacks against us."
♪
And I underlined "urgent."
I wanted that principal's meeting
the next week.
I got that principal's meeting, not in January,
but on September 4th,
a week before the attack.
- Rice insists the Bush administration
was working furiously in response
to the looming threat, but that the intelligence,
while dire, was far too vague.
♪
- Let me read you some of the actual chatter
that was picked up in that spring and summer.
"Unbelievable news coming in weeks.
"Big event.
"There will be a very, very, very, very big uproar.
There will be attacks in the near future."
Troubling, yes.
But they don't tell us when, they don't tell us where,
they don't tell us who, and they don't tell us how.
- What happens in the spring and summer
is the threat is starting to rise all over.
♪
[sirens blare]
♪
- If you were to chart our reporting on a graph...
♪
It would go like this,
and then, in July, it would spike like this.
- We needed to take advantage of the Afghan sanctuary,
take advantage of the discord that the Taliban had sowed
between them and the tribes of Afghanistan.
We needed to get inside the sanctuary.
♪
- We knew that's where the planning was occurring.
We knew that camps were there. We knew bin Laden was there.
We knew terrorists were there.
- I said, "Condi, I have to come see you."
It was one of the rare times in my seven years
as director where I said, "I have to come see you."
♪
- Tenet and his top counterterrorism aide
Cofer Black rush to the White House.
Their message is unmistakable.
♪
- There will be significant terrorist attacks
against the United States in the coming weeks or months.
The attacks will be spectacular.
They may be multiple.
Al-Qaeda's intention is the destruction
of the United States.
"What do you think we need to do?"
was the question.
Cofer responded by saying,
"We need to go on a wartime footing now."
♪
- That's what all of us had been saying for months,
that we needed decisions to put us on a war footing.
We couldn't make those decisions ourselves.
Those decisions had to be made by the president.
♪
- I think we've all asked ourselves,
"What more could have been done?"
♪
If we had known that an attack
was coming against the United States,
an attack was coming against New York and Washington,
we would have moved heaven and Earth to stop it.
♪
- There was never intelligence that indicated the attack
would be in the United States.
In fact, the intelligence
was frustratingly lacking in detail
on location, date, and method.
♪
- A few weeks before September 11th,
we started noticing that the training camps
were basically dead.
- The intelligence just dried up.
♪
What was a regular flow of intelligence
about a significant al-Qaeda attack
just was gone.
♪
- The CIA knows an attack is coming somewhere.
One of George Tenet's senior aides
goes to him with a warning.
- I'll never forget this till the day I die.
"They're coming here."
And the silence that followed was deafening.
You could hear a pin drop.
- What Tenet and the CIA don't know
is that, by early August,
19 men intent on hijacking commercial airliners
are already in the United States.
- I sent an email to Condi Rice, and I said,
"I want you to imagine that you were in the future"...
♪
"On the day when al-Qaeda has attacked,
"and there are hundreds of dead Americans
"in the streets of an American city.
"What would you wish
that you had done before?"
♪
"Well, that future day is coming,
and this is the period before."
♪
"This is the time when you can do something."
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- President Bush travels to Florida today
to talk education,
but he's getting a harsh lesson
about the deteriorating economy.
♪
- I was on Air Force One when it went wheels up
for what was to be a domestic trip to Florida.
♪
The PDB that morning
had the typical 10 to 12 items.
There was nothing in the book about terrorism.
I left his suite, and I was told
to join the motorcade, and we'd be soon heading
toward where the president was gonna do
one of his education events.
- I was having breakfast in downtown Washington.
- We understand that a plane
has crashed into the World Trade Center.
We don't know anything more than that.
We don't know if it was a commercial aircraft.
- The head of my security detail
came over to me to say
a plane had hit one of the towers
of the World Trade Center.
My instinctual reaction was,
"This is al-Qaeda. I've got to go."
- They were the only enemy we had who had said
that they were gonna do some sort of catastrophic attack.
- All of us were just quiet.
I think we all were just sitting at our desks,
absorbing sort of what happened.
- We all looked at each other and said, "This is it."
This is before the second plane even hit,
and, of course, we watched in horror
as the second plane flew in.
♪
- Another one, another plane just hit.
- [gasps] - Oh, my God.
Another plane has just hit that--yes,
that was definitely was like it was on purpose.
♪
- 60 on page 153.
Get ready for the beginning of that sentence.
Get ready.
students: She played with her boat in her house.
- Go on.
students: She played with her...
- Two things were racing through my mind
when the second plane hit.
One was, "This is al-Qaeda. This is bin Laden."
The second was,
"Is somebody gonna fly a plane into this school?"
♪
This is what we have been worrying about.
♪
This is the nightmare scenario.
♪
- Today, we've had a national tragedy.
♪
Two airplanes have crashed
into the World Trade Center
in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.
- At the White House,
Richard Clarke is in the situation room
coordinating the nation's emergency response
as the attacks unfold.
- What I had up on the TV screens
were the command centers,
and at one point, it became very clear
that the Pentagon had been hit.
The people I was talking to,
they had felt it, and then they smelled smoke.
- Oh, my goodness.
There is smoke pouring out of the Pentagon.
- One eyewitness is quoted saying
he thinks a plane crashed into the Pentagon.
♪
- Gentlemen, let's keep moving away from the building.
Let's get away from the building,
ladies and gentlemen.
- I was in the Canon Office Building
up on Capitol Hill.
The members scattered,
and I came out, jumped in the car.
I actually could see the smoke
from the plane having crashed into the Pentagon.
♪
- We knew there was an ongoing attack
that was targeting Washington...
♪
And we knew there was
another plane up that was headed this way.
♪
- There is a report of a large plane crash
in Western Pennsylvania,
80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
The plane is believed to be a Boeing 767.
♪
- Decisions were made to ground all the aircraft,
to get fighter jets up
to defend New York and Washington,
to institute the continuity of government system,
which we had prepared in case of a nuclear war.
♪
- At CIA headquarters,
there's concern they are the next target.
- We know they do multiple.
They've already flown a plane into the Pentagon.
We need to get the hell out of here
because we are the institutional knowledge.
- We decide to tell most of the workforce
to go home because we assumed
our building was a target.
♪
We assumed the Capitol was a target.
We assumed the White House was a target.
Cofer Black said, "The Counterterrorist Center
wants to stay." So we kept them there.
We said to Cofer, "They may die."
And he said, "Then they'll have to die."
- The president asked to see me alone.
The president looked me in the eye, and he said,
"Michael, who did this?"
I said, "Mr. President, I think when we
"get to the end of the line, we're gonna find
bin Laden, and we're gonna find al-Qaeda."
And I told him that I was so confident
in that judgment that I would bet
my children's future on it.
♪
- After an hour or so,
a young analyst came running in,
and this analyst had obtained copies of the manifests
of the plane that hit the Pentagon,
and the names of these two people
were on that manifest, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.
The two people we'd been looking for.
- Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar
were the two who had been in the Kuala Lumpur meeting,
the two who had shown up in Los Angeles,
the two who had been in the United States
for over a year,
and two of the people
who would die on 9/11 as hijackers.
- Since entering the U.S. in 2000,
the two men have been living under their own names.
Al-Mihdhar is even able to leave the U.S.
and enter again.
- During August 2001,
CIA had become increasingly concerned
about a major terrorist attack on U.S. interests,
and I directed a review of our files
to identify potential threats.
In the course of that review, the Counterterrorism Center
found that these two individuals
had entered the United States.
- 19 days before the attacks
and 19 months after first entering
the United States,
the CIA finally adds al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar
to the watchlist, but it's too late.
- The CIA knew
that two senior al-Qaeda terrorists
who had planned terrorist attacks
were in the United States.
So when the CIA says,
"Well, we didn't know where or when."
Yeah, that's right, but they knew who.
- It was a failure to not detect the presence
of these people in the United States
before August, yes.
It was a missed opportunity.
- On the night of September 11th,
Michael Morell flies back to Washington
with the president on Air Force One.
On final descent,
a military aid motions to a stunning sight:
an F-16 fighter jet
alongside the plane's left wing.
- The F-16 was so close,
you could see the pilot looking at us.
And in the distance,
you could see the still-burning Pentagon.
Then he said something to me that, to this day,
sends shivers up my back.
He said, "Their mission is, if somebody fires
"a surface-to-air missile at us on final approach,
"their mission is to put themselves
"between that missile
and the President of the United States."
That was surreal.
- Today our fellow citizens, our way of life,
our very freedom came under attack
in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
- Around 10:00,
I remember turning to my computer
and just typing one sentence.
"Nothing will ever be the same."
- Federal investigators are following
hundreds of leads tonight
to try to find out who was behind the attacks
and bring them to justice.
- If there is a gnawing concern
among federal investigators tonight,
it is this, "Have we accounted
for all the terrorist pilots?"
- The investigation into who caused all this
continues to point toward Osama bin Laden,
and there's no doubt the U.S. will retaliate
against whoever is responsible.
- There was a lot of pressure on CIA
in the aftermath of 9/11
because, frankly, no one else knew what to do.
- We had to unpack the threat matrix
that we were gonna report to the president the next day.
We had to make immediate decisions
on what actions had to be taken overnight
to stop the next range of terrorist attacks.
- I was sending teams of analysts around Washington
with maps to show people,
"This is what Afghanistan looks like.
Here are the countries that border it."
- On September the 12th, we saw the president
and told him that what we were gonna propose to do
was put CIA teams on the ground,
marrying up with the tribes,
create the ground for special forces to arrive.
We were gonna basically go after
al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
- CIA said, "We have a plan."
And that's when President Bush said,
"It's your war. Go get 'em."
[dramatic music]
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- On September 11, 2001,
I was assigned overseas.
I was on the other side of the world.
♪
Director Tenet wanted me to come back and to organize
and lead the CIA effort
against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
I, of course, said yes,
went home, told my wife, and started packing my bag.
♪
- A legendary spy and counterterrorism expert,
Hank Crumpton is a 24-year veteran
of the CIA's clandestine service.
He was just 10 years old when he wrote to the agency
explaining his desire to serve.
- Some kind soul wrote back on CIA letterhead and said,
"Thanks for your interest.
Please reapply when you're older."
And that's what I did.
- Now Crumpton would lead an historic campaign,
commanding special operations paramilitary forces
to crush the enemy.
♪
- The orders were pretty clear.
Our mission was to destroy al-Qaeda.
♪
- So on September the 15th, we show up at the Camp David,
essentially outline our plan to basically seal
the borders of Afghanistan, go after their leadership,
shut off their money, destroy al-Qaeda.
It was our plan. It was our direction.
The president was playing off our sheet music.
- Truly unprecedented for the president
to sign a covert action giving this kind of authority
and almost unlimited resources
to the CIA to execute a war.
Never in American history had that happened.
♪
We walked outside,
President Bush put his hand on my shoulder,
and he said, "Go get 'em." And I said, "Yes, sir, I will."
♪
- 16 days after we brief the president,
we put our first team on the ground
with a big metal briefcase full of cash, a lot of cash.
Our officers often slept
on millions of dollars of cash at night.
If you didn't want to cooperate with us,
you were more than likely to get a 2,000-pound bomb
down your throat.
[dramatic music]
♪
- Jawbreaker was the first CIA team
into Afghanistan after 9/11.
♪
That morphed into Team Alpha, Team Bravo,
followed by Charlie, Delta, Foxtrot, Echo.
They were all deployed
into various parts of Afghanistan,
teaming up with local allies on the ground.
♪
- People remember scenes of special forces operators
and CIA officers riding on horseback.
We're back in a different century
fighting this war.
So we had 100 CIA officers,
about 400 special forces operators.
There was never a general on the ground.
There was never a command structure
on the ground.
This was real counterinsurgency.
Within 90 days, this was all done.
♪
- The Taliban is overthrown,
and bin Laden is on the run,
cornered in some of the most forbidding terrain
on Earth.
- Somewhere between 300 and 1,000 al-Qaeda fighters,
probably including Osama bin Laden,
are trapped in the Tora Bora Mountains,
cut off from resupplies
of food, water, and ammunition.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- Tracy Walder is on night duty
at CIA headquarters,
monitoring drone footage in a top secret room
called The Vault.
Bin Laden may be within their grasp.
♪
- We had some interesting situations,
but that was, hands down, the most tense.
George Tenet was there to support us.
Tonight's the night that this is gonna happen.
We're gonna get him.
[gun booms]
- It's not just us.
So we've got tribals on the ground,
and we're calling in bomb attacks.
- People were leaving the caves.
We were thinking that bin Laden
was probably one of those people.
- Guys on the ground come to the realization,
the Afghan tribals aren't gonna get this done.
We need help.
Our guys consult with General Franks.
Tommy says it's gonna take weeks to get people up there.
♪
- We knew we could not successfully
capture or kill him
if there were no ground troops to sort of stop him.
That's when the situation devolved
into shouting, cursing, screaming.
♪
- Bin Laden escapes into Pakistan
and finds sanctuary in the tribal territories
on the border.
♪
The fighting in Afghanistan drags on,
and the president soon turns his focus to a pursuit
that would confuse the War on Terror
and cost thousands of lives.
- President grabbed me in the situation room and said,
"I want you to look into Iraq's role in the attack."
And I said, "I don't think Iraq had a role in the attack."
And he didn't wanna hear that.
He said, "Iraq, Iraq, look into it.
Find out if Iraq was involved."
♪
- The preoccupation with Iraq
would become a decade-long distraction
from the mission of eliminating al-Qaeda.
With the Bush administration shifting priorities,
a new team is created at the CIA.
- My name is Nada Bakos.
I was a CIA analyst after September 11, 2001.
♪
The whole reason for the formation of the team
that I was on is because the White House
had the question of whether or not
Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 and al-Qaeda.
This was backwards completely.
It's the complete opposite of how the CIA does analysis.
We were constantly running around
with hair on fire answering questions,
and you could tell that people
weren't getting the answers they really wanted.
- And as part of the president's daily brief,
we'd actually been asked to see if we could assemble
what might be said in a public case
about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
- Every chemical and biological weapon
that Iraq has or makes
is a direct violation of the truce
that ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
- Apparently I said,
"We can make this better. It's a slam dunk."
- Tenet says that phrase, "slam dunk,"
was later blown far out of proportion.
- Now, the way it was portrayed
was this was the seminal moment
in the president's life in terms of deciding
whether to go to war or not,
and it's not what happened at all,
since the decision to go to war had already been made.
What I wanted to convey is, it was probably a better way
for us to make a better public case,
and all I meant to say was that.
[dramatic music]
- President Bush turns to his secretary of state.
Colin Powell prepares to present evidence
about Iraq's failure to disarm
in a speech to the United Nations.
- Our team had a draft of Colin Powell's UN speech.
We reviewed it. We made changes.
We sent it back to the White House.
From that point, it was edited again,
and we didn't hear it
until Powell gave the speech at the UN.
- What I wanna bring to your attention today
is the potentially much more sinister nexus
between Iraq
and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
- It's drawing conclusions that weren't there.
It was drawing relationships that weren't there.
They plaster up a organizational chart
to make it look like all these entities
are connected when they're not.
- To draw a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda,
Powell points to a suspected terrorist
named al-Zarqawi,
showing a chart created by the CIA,
but the words "Iraq-linked" have been added
to the original title.
- To our horror, General Colin Powell
used that chart on the floor of the UN
to garner international
and, I think, domestic support for the war.
- Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network
headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden
and his al-Qaeda lieutenants.
- It was masterful how they used the information
and the language around trying to create this idea
in the public's mind that Iraq
had any connection to al-Qaeda.
Zarqawi was not connected to al-Qaeda,
didn't have anything to do with that.
He also wasn't working with Saddam.
- We felt that our trust was violated,
that something we had made was misused in this way.
How can an administration do that?
- You know, everybody was frustrated.
Why does our team exist?
- I started to wonder, you know,
"What's the point of my intelligence
if people are just gonna use it sort of however they want to?"
I don't think that that's right.
- So who added the words "Iraq-linked"?
- So I don't know.
Whomever changed the title, I truly don't know
the answer to that question.
- When our coalition ousted the Taliban,
the Zarqawi network...
- It's not clear who was behind it.
Powell says his speech was approved by George Tenet,
who sat behind him in a show of support.
And just six weeks later...
- U.S. forces in Kuwait
are positioning themselves for attack.
Now officially dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom.
♪
- The U.S. invades Iraq
based on the flawed convictions
that it has weapons of mass destruction
and significant ties to al-Qaeda.
- I think the Iraq War had a detrimental impact
on the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
We took our eye off the ball.
We did not finish the job in Afghanistan.
- The invasion of Iraq
not only thwarted our ability
to capture or kill bin Laden, but in my opinion,
exacerbated and led to the spread
and growth of al-Qaeda.
- As soon as we invaded Iraq, bin Laden won.
It's like we were playing by his playbook
and doing the things that helped him
fan the flames against the United States.
- The American public would have been angry
if there was another attack
and we didn't do everything in our power
to get information on future attacks.
- But at the same time, what you do matters.
Your actions matter.
Is it really these interrogation techniques?
Is that really the most effective thing?
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- Penetrating the inner core of a terrorist organization
like al-Qaeda is not an easy thing to do.
♪
In 2002, after the first phase of the Afghan War,
we started to collect intelligence that al-Qaeda
was coming back at us in a second wave of attacks...
[rockets whoosh]
But we didn't have the specifics.
- The hunt goes on for Osama bin Laden,
but a key lieutenant is in U.S. custody tonight.
The biggest catch yet.
- Abu Zubaydah, the highest ranking
al-Qaeda leader captured so far,
can expect tough questioning from U.S. officials.
- We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader
and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.
♪
- It's March 2002, six months after 9/11.
♪
Abu Zubaydah has been captured,
an apparent triumph that would lead to one
of the most controversial programs in CIA history.
- My name is Jose Rodriguez, and I was in charge
of the Enhanced Interrogation Program.
♪
Every day I was in the newspaper.
They described me almost as a torturer,
violator of laws.
- Jose Rodriguez. - Jose Rodriguez.
- Jose Rodriguez was the one who said,
"We need harsh techniques"
and went out and developed the program.
- More than a decade after leaving the CIA,
Jose Rodriguez remains the defiant face
of the Enhanced Interrogation Program.
- I am totally convinced,
you know, that the program worked well
and that we were the only answer
that the country had at the time.
We had captured Abu Zubaydah,
and we knew he was a senior person
in al-Qaeda.
He had come across our screen in relation
to the millennial plots of 2000.
- He was captured by Pakistani police,
CIA, and FBI agents at a house...
- Abu Zubaydah was severely wounded
when he was captured,
and we made a decision that we needed
to take him away from Pakistan and take him to our own site.
It became known as a black site.
♪
- FBI interrogators are also brought in.
One of the first to question Abu Zubaydah
is Special Agent Ali Soufan,
a Lebanese-American fluent in Arabic.
- There is something that they don't expect
when they are being interrogated by Americans.
They don't expect a person comes with them.
They have, like, tea. They have coffee.
They have cookies.
Sit down, talk, trying to know each other,
trying to build a rapport.
That scares them. That shakes them.
He was cooperating every time we talk to him.
- Once the FBI started to get involved
with questioning Abu Zubaydah,
the CIA's reaction was,
"Oh, my goodness, this is gonna take forever,
and it may never be successful."
The CIA's attitude in the spring of 2002
was still hair on fire.
- Abu Zubaydah gives the FBI
a critical piece of information
about another alleged terrorist.
He says this man, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
is not only a member of al-Qaeda,
but the architect of 9/11.
♪
- Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM,
was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.
This was a vital piece of the puzzle
that helped our intelligence community
pursue KSM.
♪
- The news about KSM is a breakthrough,
but CIA officials still believe
Abu Zubaydah is holding back.
Rather than continue to build a rapport,
the CIA steps in with a new plan,
to try to break him.
- We knew we had to do something different.
♪
- You have nudity, and then you have noise,
and you have sleep deprivation,
and it goes from one stage to another
until he decides to cooperate.
That was shocking to us at the time
because this is just--I mean,
I know, as a government, we do not torture.
- You've just killed 3,000 of our people.
Tough [bleep] if you have a problem with nudity.
Nudity works and works well because these cultures,
nudity is something that is not common,
and they feel very uncomfortable with it.
- We knew that Zubaydah had more information
that could save innocent lives,
and so the CIA used an alternative set
of procedures.
- CIA likes to call it enhanced interrogation.
It was torture.
♪
- The CIA isn't acting on its own.
It has full approval from the Bush White House.
This Justice Department memo
approves ten interrogation techniques,
including a facial slap, sleep deprivation,
insects in a confinement box, and the waterboard.
- Waterboarding is putting someone
in an incline with the face and body down,
and from a distance soaking up a towel with water.
So there is a feeling that you are suffocating.
- Suffocating, so somebody thinks they're about to die.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- That's a difficult thing to think about.
If somebody who's in U.S. custody--
the belief that their life is about to end.
- Hey, you know what? It's either us or them, okay?
So we needed to do whatever we needed to do
to get information out of them to protect the country.
- More than four months after his capture,
Abu Zubaydah is subjected to the techniques
on a near 24-hour basis for 19 straight days.
He later releases these drawings
depicting his experience.
He spends 11 days inside a confinement box.
During one waterboarding session,
he becomes completely unresponsive,
with bubbles rising through his open full mouth.
- An evaluation by the CIA's office
of medical services said AZ probably reached
the point of cooperation even prior
to the institution of enhanced measures.
- Another official says Zubaydah is blowing smoke
and deliberately exaggerating al-Qaeda's capabilities.
- As it turned out, Abu Zubaydah didn't know
anywhere near as much as the CIA thought he did.
- Abu Zubaydah had been tied
to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan,
but the CIA later determines
he was not a member of al-Qaeda.
- Abu Zubaydah has been held without charges
since he was captured in Pakistan.
Pentagon officials claim he's a threat
but admit he was never an al-Qaeda leader.
- The belief was that he was the number three
or number four in al-Qaeda, but he wasn't.
- Correct. Just as important, however.
- But the CIA was wrong about his role and his position.
- We didn't know exactly who was the chief of operations.
We thought it was either him or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
- There was no reflection
about whether this should continue.
Instead, the opposite happened.
This unsuccessful interrogation of Abu Zubaydah
using these techniques became a kind of springboard
to expand the program
and to apply it to other suspects
of different levels of knowledge.
- Over six years, from 2002 to 2008,
the CIA holds at least 119 detainees.
39 are subjected to enhanced interrogation.
- People will give you whatever you wanna hear
in order to have the pain stop.
So the most important thing in intelligence collection
is the reliability of the information,
and that didn't exist.
♪
- In 2009, two days after his inauguration,
President Obama signs an executive order
eliminating enhanced interrogation techniques.
- I can say without exception or equivocation
that the United States will not torture.
[applause]
- With that comes a new chapter
led by President Obama's
first CIA director, Leon Panetta.
- My view...
was that the United States
should stand by our values as a country.
Torture should not be part
of what we need to use to gather intelligence.
- He's entitled to his opinion.
We had a binding legal opinion
in writing that said that it was not torture.
- I hope no other director,
no other president, is ever faced
with the situation we were faced with
in those immediate years.
At a period of maximum danger to the country,
we did it by the numbers.
We gained information that I believe
saved thousands of lives.
I'm not gonna ever accept the use of the word torture
in front of what happened here.
- This week, the Senate Intelligence Committee
is expected to issue a long-expected report
on the CIA's interrogation practices
that were adopted in the aftermath of 9/11.
- Tactics used were more brutal
than previously thought.
- The report's most damning conclusion
is that the tactics were ineffective.
- In 2014,
the Democrat-led Senate Intelligence Committee
releases a report that concludes CIA's use
of its enhanced interrogation techniques
was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence
or gaining cooperation from detainees.
- I have long believed
some of these practices amounted to torture.
♪
- Republican Senator John McCain,
himself the victim of torture as a Vietnam prisoner of war,
was one of the program's fiercest critics.
- As the committee's report makes clear,
it produced little useful intelligence
to help us track down the perpetrators of 9/11
or prevent new attacks and atrocities.
♪
- Today, Abu Zubaydah remains in American custody
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He has never been charged with a crime.
- The bottom line
is that we saved American lives
and we protected the homeland
at a time of crisis
and despair.
♪
- Jose Rodriguez faced a criminal investigation
by the Department of Justice after ordering the destruction
of 92 videotapes
of enhanced interrogation sessions.
The CIA deemed his actions inappropriate.
He was given a letter of reprimand,
but was not charged with any crime.
- I think that historians
as well as the press will continue
to label it as torture.
As far as I'm concerned, I have no regrets at all.
I would do it all over again.
♪
[soft dramatic music]
- Our overarching goal remains the same,
to disrupt, dismantle and defeat
al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
and to prevent its capacity to threaten America
and our allies in the future.
- The president made clear that we continue
to go after bin Laden and bring him to justice.
- It's late 2009, more than eight years
since al-Qaeda attacked the U.S.
and changed the course of history.
The CIA doubles down on its hunt for bin Laden,
who is still at large.
[dramatic music]
Sarah Carlson would help close that chapter.
Her journey starts on 9/11,
when she's just a college senior.
- That is when my career in counterterrorism began.
This drive to protect runs very strong in my family.
All three of my brothers actually joined the military
after September 11th.
We wanted to hold those responsible accountable.
♪
- For the CIA,
the pursuit of bin Laden would come at a grave cost
suddenly and without warning.
- We set up a meeting
at a place called Khost, Afghanistan,
which was a base located near the border of Pakistan.
It was part of this effort by the CIA
to try to go after any possible lead
that might bring us
either to Bin Laden or to Zawahiri,
who is his second in command.
- The meeting is with Humam al-Balawi,
a Jordanian doctor
who claims to have information on al-Zawahiri,
but the asset turns out
to be a double agent seeking revenge.
♪
- He was not searched as he came through the gate
as he should have been.
- And when he pulled up and stepped out of the car,
he detonated a suicide vest.
- It was al-Qaeda taking the fight
to CIA...directly.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- We were called together into the hallway,
and the head of CTC announced to all of us
that the source conducted a suicide bombing
and that--excuse me.
And that seven CIA officers were killed.
Sorry, it's still hard.
And more were wounded.
♪
- I greeted their bodies when they came back to Dover,
and I remember going to each of the families,
and every family I talked to said,
"I hope you will not stop
"going after the goal
that our sons and daughters died for."
And I said, "You have my assurance."
♪
- You know, it's very difficult.
I had been involved in stopping so many attacks
and disrupting all these threats,
and, this one, you know, it made it very, very personal.
♪
- Getting bin Laden would make clear
that their death was not in vain,
so I established a task force at the CIA,
and I made clear to them that their responsibility
was nothing else,
nothing else but focusing on the hunt for bin Laden.
♪
- In late August, 2010,
the task force finally gives Panetta
the lead he's been waiting for.
In Pakistan, they've located bin Laden's couriers,
his only links to the outside world.
♪
- They followed the couriers to a town called Abbottabad,
which is near the capital of Pakistan.
♪
The couriers pulled into a compound,
and as soon as the individuals involved with the task force
saw the compound,
the house where they were going into,
the bells went off.
- Much larger than any other compound
in the neighborhood.
12- to 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire.
A third-floor balcony that had a privacy wall.
You have a balcony to look out.
Why did somebody build a wall so you couldn't look out?
♪
The hair on the back of my neck stood up,
and nobody said bin Laden might be there...
But everybody, including me, was thinking it.
♪
- It was soon after that that I immediately sat down
with the president.
- The president had two orders for Director Panetta and me.
First, find out what the hell is going on
inside that compound.
Number two, don't tell anyone.
It was the best-kept secret of my entire career at CIA.
- Even within CIA,
even within the Counterterrorism Center,
there was a very few number of people
who actually knew about the operation
before it happened.
My job and why I was brought in was to start assessing
and writing about and briefing about,
well, what if he's there?
♪
What's going to happen?
What will that retaliation look like if we capture him?
What will al-Qaeda do if we kill him?
♪
- And we continued to do surveillance,
and there were some interesting developments.
- There was an individual who, nearly every day,
would come out and pace
around the garden.
We called him the pacer. We did not know who he was.
We couldn't get a good enough look.
♪
- We followed the couriers when they made phone calls,
were able to intercept their phone calls.
We got a conversation with the courier
from a friend who had called him,
and he was asking the courier,
"What are you doing?
I haven't seen you for a long time."
And the courier said,
"We're doing what we did before."
Well, what they had done before
was to be couriers to bin Laden.
♪
- President Obama decides it's time
to bring in the military.
Together with the CIA, Admiral Bill McRaven
devises a plan,
a helicopter assault using Navy SEALs
to infiltrate the compound.
- Our hope was that we might get
that one piece of evidence that would make it 100% certain
that bin Laden was there.
♪
- At the end of the day, the president will tell you
that he was 50/50 about whether he was there or not.
♪
- On April 29, 2011,
President Obama greenlights the operation.
- I got word from the president
that it was a go,
and I remember calling Admiral McRaven
and saying, "I'm ordering you to proceed with this mission,
"to go in, get bin Laden, get the hell out.
"And if you go in and bin Laden's not there,
get the hell out."
♪
- We had set up an operation center in CIA.
The director's conference room had been turned
into our situation room.
♪
A lot of people monitoring all sorts
of intelligence feeds.
♪
- We sort of got real-time updates
on what was occurring.
The anticipation in the office and CTC
was, like, the highest you can possibly imagine.
It was like a palpable feeling of just waiting
to hear if he was there and then what would happen.
- I issued the order, and Admiral McRaven
gave the order to the SEALs. They got on the helicopters.
It's after midnight in Pakistan.
And as the helicopters approached the compound,
one of the helicopters just kind of started to shake.
♪
Thank God there was an experienced pilot
on that helicopter, and he was able to set it down,
and the tail of the helicopter
was up on one of the walls around the compound.
- When the helicopter crashed...
I was so worried for them.
They intentionally did this overnight
when people would be sleeping, you know, woke people up.
- And I remember
immediately calling Bill McRaven and saying,
"What the hell is going on, Bill?"
I said, "What the hell is going on?"
♪
[soft dramatic music]
It's one of those moments
where, you know, your stomach's in your mouth
and you're not quite sure what the hell is happening.
♪
- On a moonless night, two Black Hawk helicopters
carrying a team of Navy SEALs descend
upon Osama bin Laden's suspected hideout.
♪
One of the engine stalls,
and a chopper is forced to crash land.
♪
- Bill McRaven, to his credit, didn't miss a beat.
He said, "Mr. Director,
"we're going on with the mission.
"I've called in a backup helicopter,
and they're going to continue the mission."
Just like that.
And I said, "God bless you, Bill."
We heard gunfire
soon after they breached the walls.
- They were clearing the building
and looking for bin Laden,
and we were all just waiting with bated breath
to hear what had happened.
- There was about 20 minutes of silence.
The longest 20 minutes in my life.
And at the end of that 20 minutes,
Bill McRaven came on and said,
"I believe we have a Geronimo,"
which was the code word for locating bin Laden.
- They brought the body bag out with bin Laden in it.
You could see it.
And they put it on a helicopter,
and they were out of there.
- Finally, both helicopters arrived back at Jalalabad.
And it was at that point
that I think we all sighed in relief
that the mission had been accomplished.
- Tonight, I can report to the American people
and to the world
that the United States has conducted an operation
that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda,
and a terrorist who's responsible
for the murder of thousands of innocent men,
women, and children.
[cheers and applause]
[people chanting] U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.!
- We were walking back towards the West Wing,
and you could see that crowds were beginning to gather.
You could hear them yelling, "U.S.A., U.S.A.
CIA, CIA."
Something I never thought I would hear.
- It was a big moment for the country.
It was closure.
There was a wound opened on 9/11.
And that wound was closed on May 1st.
- You just think about how much
throughout the world people have suffered
at this man's hand.
It felt like justice was finally served.
- I felt obviously a lot of emotions thinking,
"Finally, finally, you got what was coming."
It was a good moment. Good moment.
But it also brought flashbacks of people
who sacrificed their lives along the way.
- I thought of all the people I knew who had worked on this.
There are 137 stars
carved in the marble of the CIA lobby,
one for each person at CIA
who has died in the line of duty.
Well over one third of those stars
have been carved since 9/11.
- I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum
where I can apologize to the loved ones
of the victims of 9/11.
To them who are here in the room.
I thought it was appropriate for someone
who is involved in 9/11
to turn around to the families who were sitting behind me
and to the families who were watching on TV
and say what someone should have said before.
We tried hard,
but that doesn't matter, because we failed.
And for that failure,
I would ask, once all the facts are out...
for your understanding and for your forgiveness.
♪
- You cannot go to the 9/11 Memorial
or the 9/11 Museum in New York without tears.
What comes to mind for me is sorrow...
♪
That we were unable to prevent the attack.
♪
- There were lots of things that I saw,
lots of things that I did, quite frankly,
that made me lose sleep at night.
I would have night terrors and things like that.
I feel a huge sense of responsibility
to the victims and to their families
that I should have stopped this.
I could have stopped this, and I know I'm just one person,
but I think a lot of us probably feel that way.
- In the beginning, I kept questioning,
why would I have PTSD? I wasn't in the military.
I think it's just collective trauma.
It's just the bombardment
of that kind of, you know, experience.
- We're humans,
and I do think, in the aftermath,
obviously we all lost loved ones along the way,
little brothers or sisters.
That makes that guilt, that PTSD, probably more severe.
♪
- I just found ways that I could sort of disconnect
and try to just calm my mind.
♪
For me, the best thing was just to separate myself
and to go into nature.
♪
- I struggle with PTSD every day and depression,
and every day since I left the agency.
20 years later. It's ridiculous.
- 20 years after 9/11, what I think about the most
is that if bin Laden were still alive,
he would probably think that he won,
that he created a global movement.
- Bin Laden was always playing the long game.
I don't believe that he ever intended
for the movement to die with him,
that he felt like he was beginning it.
- On September 10, 2001,
his movement was in one place
on the planet, Afghanistan.
Now it stretches from West Africa,
all across Africa to East Africa,
into the Middle East, into South Asia,
and into Southeast Asia
in the form of both al-Qaeda and ISIS.
♪
- We've got breaking news for you right now
from Afghanistan.
The Pentagon says there's been a suicide bombing
outside the Kabul Airport.
It is the deadliest day for U.S. forces
in Afghanistan in a decade.
The bombers struck late in the afternoon
at an airport entrance packed with people.
More than 100 were wounded.
An affiliate of ISIS
has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
♪
- 13 Americans killed in action.
♪
It is a bitter and bloody ending
as the last U.S. soldier leaves Afghanistan.
The longest war in U.S. history
has cost more than $2 trillion.
The human toll is staggering.
The lives of nearly 2,500 American service members
and tens of thousands of Afghans lost.
- I'm now the fourth American president
to preside over war in Afghanistan.
I will not pass this responsibility
on to a fifth president.
- I think we made a mistake
in invading Afghanistan
in the way that we did.
We were going after al-Qaeda,
not to take over a country.
- The war is over, but the War on Terror is not.
- Today, Taliban fighters
took control of the capital, Kabul.
Taliban fighters were seen rolling up the Afghan flag
inside the presidential palace.
- We lost the war in Afghanistan.
♪
The Taliban has won.
- The Taliban's swift return to power
means al-Qaeda could now reconstitute itself
in Afghanistan faster than U.S. government estimates
of two years.
- We forget the lessons
that come from attacks like 9/11,
and the tendency for us as a country
is to then focus on something else and move on.
We need to continue to pay attention
and be vigilant about attacks on our homeland.
♪
- If you allow the enemy to maintain a safe haven,
that gives them a platform to recruit,
to train, to plot, to plan.
We learned that lesson the hard way a long time ago,
and I hope we haven't forgotten it.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- One of the things that I sometimes worry about
in this country is that we have a short memory.
There are a lot of young people now
that were not alive when 9/11 happened,
don't really remember, you know,
all of the sacrifices that were made.
♪
Don't really understand
the impact of a country
that is suddenly thrown into war.
♪
It was a terrible day. We've just been attacked.
I thought I really have to get back
to my family in California.
You know, threw my luggage in the back of the car
and just started driving west.
It was a very strange and yet encouraging trip
across the country of patriotism,
and you could see people throughout the country
felt that they had personally been attacked.
♪
As we come together
on this 20th anniversary of 9/11,
it's an important moment
for a country that today is deeply polarized,
deeply divided over a lot of things...
♪
That we remember
that when this country was attacked...
♪
We pulled together.
♪
I hope we remember that deep down,
there is a fundamental spirit here
that can never, never be ended
by terrorists or by any enemy.
♪