The Long Fuse - The Base - transcript
Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including The 9/11 Commission Report, court filings and trial testimony. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any person or agency depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims. No private victim is named beyond the public record, and people the Commission identified only by pseudonym keep those pseudonyms.

[0:07] The Record: Langley, Virginia. August, two thousand one. The Commission calls her "Mary". She was an FBI analyst on loan to the CIA's bin Laden unit. That summer, a CIA official the Commission calls "John" asked her to go back through the files from Kuala Lumpur, one more time. Not as an assignment. In her free time.

[0:30] The Record: She started on July twenty-fourth. That same day, she found a cable reporting that a man named Khalid al-Mihdhar held a visa to the United States. A week later, she found another: his visa application had listed New York as his destination.

[0:45] The Record: On August twenty-first, she found a cable from March two thousand. It reported that Mihdhar's companion, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had flown to Los Angeles in January two thousand. The cable had "noted with interest" that fact, seventeen months earlier.

[1:02] The Record: In the Commission's words, "She immediately grasped the significance of this information."

[1:08] The Record: The next day, August twenty-second, the immigration service gave her the dates. Mihdhar had entered the United States on January fifteenth, two thousand. And again on July fourth, two thousand one.

[1:21] The Record: Seven weeks earlier. He was here. Nobody yet knew where.

[1:26] The Record: To understand why those two names mattered, and why a cable could sit unread for seventeen months, the story has to go back twenty-two years. To a war.

[1:40] The Record: From Will Sigmon Media. This is The Long Fuse. Episode four. The Base.

[1:49] The Record: In nineteen seventy-nine, revolution in Iran brought a Shia theocracy to power. The Commission notes what that did to Sunni militants elsewhere: "Its success encouraged Sunni fundamentalists elsewhere."

[2:04] The Record: Next door to Iran, in Afghanistan, a Communist government had taken power in nineteen seventy-eight, and couldn't hold the country. At the end of nineteen seventy-nine, the Soviet Union sent in its army.

[2:17] The Record: The Afghans fought back. The resistance would last ten years, and it would win. And it drew in outsiders. In the Commission's words, "Young Muslims from around the world flocked to Afghanistan to join as volunteers in what was seen as a 'holy war'- jihad -against an invader."

[2:37] The Record: The largest numbers came from the Middle East. They came to be called the Afghan Arabs. Some were Saudis. Among them was a twenty-three-year-old named Usama bin Laden.

[2:51] The Record: The Commission sketches him in a few lines. He arrived in Afghanistan in nineteen-eighty. He was "the seventeenth of 57 children of a Saudi construction magnate." Six feet five, thin. He looked ungainly, the Report says, but was in fact athletic: a horseman, a runner, a climber, a soccer player.

[3:13] The Record: He had studied at King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia. By some accounts, he was drawn there to religious study, inspired by tape recordings of sermons by a Palestinian cleric, Abdullah Azzam. The Commission describes Azzam in four words: "a disciple of Qutb."

[3:33] The Record: If you heard the last episode, you know that name. The books had traveled.

[3:39] The Record: Among the volunteers, the young Saudi didn't stand out for his learning. He stood out for his money: access to part of his family's fortune. He took part in at least one battle. But in the Commission's words, he "became known chiefly as a person who generously helped fund the anti-Soviet jihad."

[4:01] The Record: What he understood, the Commission says, better than most of the volunteers, was organization. The war depended on an "increasingly complex, almost worldwide organization."

[4:14] The Record: There was money: a network of financiers, mainly in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, that came to be called the "Golden Chain". Donations flowed through charities. And there were people. Mosques, schools and boardinghouses served as recruiting stations in many parts of the world, including the United States.

[4:35] The Record: He and Azzam built a channel for those recruits. It was called the Bureau of Services, in Arabic Maktab al-Khidamat. It funneled volunteers into Afghanistan.

[4:48] The Record: There's a story many people believe about this period: that the CIA created bin Laden. The record doesn't support it. Saudi Arabia and the United States did pour billions of dollars of secret aid into the war, through Pakistan's military intelligence service, to the Afghan rebel groups. But the Commission is specific about the Arab volunteers. "But Bin Ladin and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States."

[5:22] The Record: What did that pipeline look like from the inside? We have one man's account of it, given under oath, years later, in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. You'll hear his name properly in a few minutes. For now, he's a young Sudanese man who came to the United States in nineteen eighty-six, on a student visa.

[5:42] The Record: He lived in Brooklyn. He worked in a grocery. And he volunteered at the Farouq Mosque, on Atlantic Avenue, where, he said, there was an office helping the Afghans in the war against Russia.

[5:54] The Record: He raised money from Muslims in New York. He recruited. A prosecutor asked him whether the mosque was part of something bigger. "It's part of Khidmat service in Peshawar." The Bureau of Services. Azzam and bin Laden's channel, with a branch in Brooklyn.

[6:11] The Record: Then the man who ran the office told him he was needed overseas. In his words: "He made the tickets and the visa for us and give us some money and I went with other people." Four of them.

[6:24] The Record: Karachi airport. Then Peshawar. Two nights in a hotel. Then a guesthouse, where they handed over their passports, their documents and their money, sealed in envelopes. And they were given new names. The reason, he said, was security. His was Abu Bakr Sudani.

[6:43] The Record: Then a training camp across the border. Small arms. Kalashnikovs. And the RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade, which he described as a weapon used against tanks and helicopters out to six hundred meters.

[6:57] The Record: They taught him the arithmetic. Aim ahead of a moving target. For a tank at twenty miles an hour, two hundred meters ahead. For a helicopter at two hundred miles an hour, two thousand.

[7:10] The Record: Later, inside Afghanistan, he testified, his group fired on six Soviet helicopters. They hit none.

[7:21] The Record: In April nineteen eighty-eight, Moscow announced it would pull its army out of Afghanistan within nine months. The war had been won. The question was what came next.

[7:33] The Record: bin Laden and Azzam agreed the organization they'd built shouldn't be allowed to dissolve. They established what they called "a base or foundation (al Qaeda) as a potential general headquarters for future jihad."

[7:46] The Record: In Arabic, al Qaeda. The base.

[7:51] The Record: By August nineteen eighty-eight, the Commission says, bin Laden was clearly its leader, its emir. It had an intelligence component, a military committee, a financial committee, a political committee, and a committee for media and propaganda. And an advisory council, a shura, made up of his inner circle.

[8:12] The Record: Not a band of volunteers anymore. An organization chart.

[8:19] The Record: We know how the base recruited its first members partly because one of them told a jury. February sixth, two thousand one. A federal courtroom in Manhattan. The case is the United States against Usama bin Laden and others, over the bombings of two American embassies in Africa. The witness is a Sudanese man named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl. He had been inside al Qaeda, had stolen money from it, and had gone over to the Americans.

[8:50] The Record: The prosecutor asked him about a meeting at a training camp near Khost, in Afghanistan. Al-Fadl said it was "Around area of '89." What follows is from the transcript, in his own English.

[9:04] The Record: "He said we going to make group and this is group that under Farook, and it's going to be one man for the group and it's going to be focussed in jihad and we going to use the group to do another thing out of Afghanistan."

[9:17] The Record: The prosecutor asked the name of the group. "Al Qaeda."

[9:21] The Record: Members were handed papers, he said: the group's agenda, the duties of its emir, its shura council. To join, you had to swear an oath of allegiance, the bayat. Asked what that meant, he said, "'Bayat' means you swear you going to agree about the agenda and about jihad, listen to the emir".

[9:43] The Record: That testimony was public. It was given in open court, in Manhattan, seven months before September eleventh. The structure of the base was not a secret. What it would do with that structure was another question.

[10:00] The Record: The two founders didn't want the same thing. bin Laden, the Commission says, wanted unchallenged control, and fighters ready to fight anywhere in the world. Azzam wanted to keep fighting in Afghanistan until it had a true Islamist government. And as a Palestinian, he saw Israel as the priority.

[10:21] The Record: The Commission doesn't claim to know what the dispute was really about. "Whether the dispute was about power, personal differences, or strategy, it ended on November 24, 1989, when a remotely controlled car bomb killed Azzam and both of his sons."

[10:37] The Record: The killers, the Report says, were assumed to be rival Egyptians. It was never established. What the record does establish is the outcome. bin Laden was left "indisputably in charge" of what remained.

[10:53] The Record: By then, the Soviet army had pulled out of Afghanistan. The war was over. The base remained.

[11:03] The Record: One more figure stood close to bin Laden when Azzam died, and he matters for the rest of this story. The Commission calls him "The most important Egyptian in Bin Ladin's circle": a surgeon named Ayman al-Zawahiri.

[11:17] The Record: He led a strong faction of a group called Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Many of his followers, the Report says, became important members of the new organization. Many people already thought of him as bin Laden's deputy. Years later, when their two groups merged, he was.

[11:38] The Record: One more man belongs in this decade, though he wasn't yet part of the base. He'd grown up in Kuwait, of a family from Baluchistan, the region that straddles Iran and Pakistan. In nineteen eighty-three he left Kuwait to study in America, first at a small Baptist college in North Carolina, then at North Carolina A and T, in Greensboro. In December nineteen eighty-six, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering.

[12:07] The Record: The Commission found that he apparently drew no attention for extreme beliefs while he was in the United States. Within months of graduating, he went to Pakistan, and into the Afghan war. By his own later account, he fought at the front for three months, then did administrative work for Abdullah Azzam.

[12:26] The Record: His name was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Much of what we know about these years comes from his own statements after his capture, made in interrogation, and the Commission warns that such statements are hard to assess. For now, it's enough to know he was there. He'll be back.

[12:47] The Record: Langley, August two thousand one. Mary and her colleague, whom the Commission calls "Jane", made a decision. In the Commission's words, "They decided that if Mihdhar was in the United States, he should be found."

[13:02] The Record: They divided up the work. Mary asked the bin Laden unit to draft a cable to put Mihdhar and Hazmi on the watchlist. Jane would handle the search inside the country.

[13:14] The Record: Next time: what the base did in its first years, a cleric in New Jersey, and a truck in a garage under the World Trade Center. But first, August twenty-fourth. Eighteen days.