[click]
[airplane engine whooshing]
[man] Holy shit!
Shit!
Holy shit!
[eerie music playing]
[man] I was the president's daily intelligence briefer
from January 4th, 2001 to January 4th, 2002.
I briefed him six days a week.
No matter where he was in the world, I was with him.
[camera shutter clicking]
Stand and recognize the President of the United States.
- Good morning. How are you? - Good morning, Mr. President.
[Morell] And I was with President Bush on the morning of September 11th.
The president and I were told about this plane
hitting the World Trade Center.
The assumption was,
this must've been a small-plane accident.
Thank you for standing up.
The president was reading a story about a pet goat.
- Are you ready, my butterflies? - [students] Yes.
LLP position, eyes on me. One, two, three.
- Get ready. - [students] "Park."
[teacher] Yes, "park."
- What do these two letters say? - [students] "R."
[teacher] Yes, "R." Sound it out.
- Get ready. What word? - [students] "Park." "Park."
Yes, "park." Read this word the fast way.
- Get ready. - [students] "Sound."
[sirens wailing]
Oh my God!
[reporter] Clearly something…
[Morell] I called the CIA operations center,
and they did have one piece of information for us,
which was that it was a large commercial jet.
[clicking]
[man] 9/11 is almost like one of these novels when they start,
"It was a beautiful, sunny day." You know, it started out like that.
Well, for me, it was yet another day, uh, you know,
of spending all night thinking about
what you're gonna do the next day.
You know, don't really sleep that well, ever.
[tense music playing]
[reporter] Some reports are that it was a small commuter plane
that crashed into the upper floors of one of the Twin Towers.
I had a TV screen up in the corner of my room.
I was looking at it, and it was a beautiful day, blue sky.
And there was this black hole in the tower.
[reporter 2] …90s. Have you…
I thought, "Wow, that must be the world's worst pilot, right?"
I mean, it's a beautiful day.
[phone ringing]
The phone rings on my desk. I pick it up, recognize the guy's voice.
He was an intelligence officer,
and we had been in the Angolan War together.
He started up,
"Hey, Chief, we have a problem." He says, "I'm in the World Trade Center."
He was in the other tower.
He said, "A 737-like commercial airliner
flew into the tower."
He said, "The problem is,
I was watching the control surfaces of the aircraft."
"The pilot purposefully flew the plane
into the tower."
And then he said,
"We've been struck. I'm evacuating my position."
[clicking]
[indistinct chatter]
- [man 2] Oh my God! - [woman] No!
[clamoring]
- [man] Oh my God! - [screaming]
- [sirens wailing] - [fire engine horns blaring]
[reporter] That's on purpose, Alfred. Somebody is doing this on purpose.
Oh my goodness. [gasps]
[Morell] The White House chief of staff went into the room with the President
and whispered in his ear that a second plane has hit.
America is under attack.
[heartbeat thumping]
[Morell] The president sat there for a few moments,
I think, not knowing quite what to do.
[teacher] Now, get ready.
[students] "The pet goat."
[teacher] Yes, the pet goat.
Get ready to read the story the fast way. Get ready.
[students] "The girl had a…"
[Morell] You can see him being stunned by it,
but also see his composure.
Later, he would say he didn't wanna scare the kids.
[students] "Fred says we will try…"
I'm standing there wondering if somebody's gonna fly a plane
into the school.
[boom, clicking]
[man] Director Tenet stated that we had threat intelligence
that terrorists wanted to fly a plane into CIA headquarters.
And I said, "That's fine, but we're not evacuating."
He said, "You have to evac."
"How about the people up in the… in the control center?"
"They could all die. People in CTC."
I said, "Well, they're all just gonna have to die."
[tense music playing]
[Black] Now we have to respond to a crisis, and, you know, like soldiers,
some of us aren't gonna be there at some point in the future.
[siren wailing]
[overlapping chatter]
[music intensifies]
[siren wails]
[Bennett] I remember our manager bringing us together and just saying,
"The director has ordered an evacuation of the building
except for the counterterrorist center."
"We know what we have to do,
and we're gonna do it."
[mysterious music playing]
[Storer] I turned to my colleagues and I said,
"Call the people in your life to take care of your dog
and lock up your house 'cause we're going to war."
"We're gonna have to go 24-7 immediately."
[Walder] There wasn't time to, like, process how you felt.
I remember some person crying and then kicking that person out
because they don't wanna listen to you cry and we have things to do.
So, like, at that moment, I really wasn't processing.
I was just, "Whatever I'm told to do, like, let's do it."
[clicking]
[man over radio] American 77 American, Indy radio check.
How do you read?
You never assume that's it.
This was not it. There was more.
The next attack. The next attack. When is the next attack?
How is the next attack gonna happen? Is it gonna look like this or different?
[man on radio] Trying to get ahold of American 77.
[man 2] 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] We could have another loose aircraft out there somewhere.
We're racing to see what else might be the target.
At the same time,
the FAA is trying to figure out what's going on with this aircraft.
[man] …everybody, know this now, American 77 may have been hijacked.
[Walder] It doesn't take long before we're hearing reports of another hijacking,
and we're trying to immediately figure out where is it going.
[man on radio] Third aircraft hijacked heading towards Washington.
- [siren wailing] - It's the real thing. Let's go!
[man on radio] This is Dulles Approach Control.
We're tracking a fast-moving primary heading towards the White House.
The White House has been advised.
[tense music playing]
We were looking at all the threat reporting
that you've ever looked at
that you just thought was flaky or aspirational,
now assuming any one of these things might come true.
[grim music playing]
[Storer] We were literally worried that terrorists were gonna
attack CIA headquarters and we were all gonna die.
I mean, I wasn't scared like I was a coward or anything.
It was just… it was a fact.
[mysterious music playing]
[Bennett] I was pregnant with my fourth child,
and I was in the bathroom throwing up.
My colleague was there.
She wanted to go to the bathroom in case we were blown up,
the building was blown up.
And I was just like, "Oh God."
[clicking]
[indistinct radio chatter]
[eerie music playing]
[man] Did you get ahold of American 77 by chance?
- [man 2] The guy hit the Pentagon. - [man] Jesus Christ!
[woman] Oh my God.
[man] Shut down all arrivals into National Airport.
[Shaeffer] Never did any one of us inside the Pentagon think
that our location was at risk.
To us, it was a fortress.
I felt the blast come from behind.
Immediately, I sensed that I was on fire.
[eerie music continues]
[siren wailing]
[Shaeffer] Everything was burning all around me.
I was clawing my way through.
I could finally see some glimpses of daylight.
And my adrenaline surged.
And I stood up, and I walked out what was a big punch-out hole.
[sirens wailing in distance]
[reporter] Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.
There is smoke pouring out of the Pentagon.
[foreboding music playing]
I had been burned on over 47% of my body,
and I had inhaled so much jet fuel and smoke,
I flatlined twice.
[siren wailing]
Among my branch, I was the only, sole survivor.
[clicking]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Morell] The president was, at that point, a prime target for terrorists.
The Secret Service decided it was not safe to go back to Washington,
but it wasn't clear where we were gonna go.
We needed to get in the air immediately.
We needed to get the President out of danger.
Early in that morning, somebody had called the White House,
said that there was a bomb on Air Force One.
What concerned the Secret Service the most was that the caller knew the call sign
for Air Force One, "Angel."
When we got to the airport,
Air Force One was ringed
by Secret Service agents with their automatic weapons out.
They were searching anything that anybody was carrying,
no matter who you were.
They searched my briefcase filled with top-secret documents.
I didn't fight them.
It was an extraordinarily steep takeoff.
[suspenseful music intensifies]
[Morell] We learned we were gonna be flying around the Gulf of Mexico
for quite some period of time.
FAA just shut down all aircraft takeoffs…
[Morell] As we were heading to Andrews Air Force Base,
I got up, and I looked out the windows,
and there was a jet fighter on the wingtip of Air Force One.
Should someone shoot a surface-to-air missile at Air Force One,
the job of those fighters was to put themselves between that missile
and the President of the United States.
[clicking]
[eerie music playing]
I was on the phone to the FAA.
[man] We got a phone call that came down to us saying
[Storer] We heard all air traffic was grounded,
but there was still some plane up in the air that wasn't accounted for.
[man] United 93, Cleveland.
[beep]
[man 2] We have a bomb on board.
I really can only express what was almost like an air of panic.
We realized there's more coming. There's another attack coming.
[man 3] He's reversing course over Akron. He's heading eastbound.
[man 4] About 25 miles out of Washington, D.C.,
headed in this general direction.
[Morell] People on flight 93 were getting reports about planes being hijacked.
Passengers didn't want flight 93 to become a weapon.
[beep]
[woman] Honey, are you there?
We're having a little problem on the plane.
[tense music playing]
[woman 2] Apparently, they've flown a couple of planes
into the World Trade Center already.
It looks like they're gonna take this one down as well.
[man 3 on radio] United 93, waving his wings.
They don't quite know what it means.
[Morell] The passengers on flight 93, they charged the terrorists
and had a fight in the cockpit with the hijackers…
[tense music continues]
…preventing it from becoming a weapon to be used against the US Capitol.
[woman on radio] United 93, have you got information on that?
- [man] Yeah, he's down. - [woman] When did he land?
[man] He… he did… he did not land.
[helicopter blades pulsing]
[clicking]
[somber music playing]
[Morell] I joined a small group of people
in the senior staff compartment of Air Force One,
and we were watching television.
Take two. Take two in two, one.
This is as close as we can get to the base of the World Trade Center.
You can see the firemen assembled here, the police officers, FBI agents,
and you can see the two towers.
A huge explosion now raining debris on all of us.
- We better get out of the way! - [screaming]
[woman] Oh my God! No!
[clamoring]
[sirens wailing]
[Morell] The president looked me in the eye,
and he said, "Michael, who did this?"
[foreboding music playing]
As an intelligence officer, you always have to know
what do you really know? What don't you know?
And based on those two things, what do you think?
Who was responsible?
Let's put everything on the table that we know about this
and whatever anyone wants to say.
[keyboard clacking]
[Storer] I was working with the FAA, trying to track some of the conspirators.
I really tried to focus on that information that was coming in.
- [beeping] - [man] American Airlines, flight 11.
[Storer] The team was able to receive the flight manifests.
[man] Flight 93.
[Storer] Those are the documents that show who was on the plane.
[Bennett] You know the terrorists are going to be on the plane manifests.
So we started trying to identify anyone with a name that we would recognize.
[man] Fifty-eight passengers and a crew of…
[man 2] Flight 11 with 81 passengers, nine flight attendants, and two pilots.
[Bennett] Do name checks with passports as they were scanned
and researching them against known terrorist groups,
narrowing down the likely suspects.
[tense music playing]
All of a sudden, an analyst burst into the room
holding a piece of paper and waving it
and saying, "I have a manifest from one of the airplanes."
[Storer] There was a name on that manifest that was suspected of being
a pretty major al-Qaida operative.
For years, that is the terrorist group that we knew was determined
to attack the United States.
That name, that moment, there's just no way that's a coincidence.
We knew immediately this was Osama bin Laden.
Okay, case closed.
This is an al-Qaida operation.
The president had been informed, of course.
Michael Morell was with him as a briefer.
And I told him, "Mr. President, I believe it is a non-state actor."
"I believe it is al-Qaida."
"I believe it is bin Laden,
and I would bet my children's future on that."
[McLaughlin] We had a video conversation with him
in which we gave our initial impressions of what had happened, who was responsible.
He said, "Rally a worldwide coalition."
"We will find them and destroy them."
[tense music continues]
And now it starts.
[mysterious music playing]
[suspenseful music playing]
[birds chirping]
[Bennett] As a kid, I loved puzzles,
especially the five-minute mystery kind of puzzles
where you had a little story and a handful of clues,
and you had to figure it out in, like, five minutes.
I liked the pressure.
Little did I know that that would be very helpful many years later.
[Storer] It does seem weird that I wanted to join the CIA after Vietnam.
There was protesting. People didn't think the CIA was cool.
But I knew that the analysts at the CIA did a lot more
than was the public perception.
They were trying to understand the world to really help the nation,
and I wanted to do that.
I was lucky as an undergrad to get an interview with the CIA,
and they accepted me.
[click]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Storer] In 1993, there was a small group
in the CIA focusing on bin Laden.
Mostly women.
[Bennett] When we first stumbled upon Osama bin Laden,
we learned that he was related
to a very wealthy and influential family in Saudi Arabia.
Throughout the 1980s,
he was this rich benefactor
helping the Afghans in resisting the Soviets.
[in Arabic] Allah has blessed us,
and we came to support our brothers in Afghanistan.
[Storer in English] This legend grew about these dedicated fighters
in the cave in Afghanistan trying to protect their country
from the evil Soviet Union, which invaded.
And the United States was also fighting against the Soviet Union.
So the feeling was that these are noble fighters.
[reporter] US support for the rebels totaled hundreds of millions of dollars,
one of the largest covert operations ever run by the CIA.
Allahu Akbar!
[reporter 2] It's over.
[reporter 3] The day no one thought would come.
[reporter 4] The era of Soviet military intervention
in other countries is now over.
[Bennett] Bin Laden was coming off this high of having won in Afghanistan
with this idea that this is the way
we're going to change the regimes in the Middle East.
He wanted to usher in a new Islamic empire.
He said he wanted to get the Western influence out of the region.B
[Bennett] Bin Laden hated America for intervening in the Muslim world
and for propping up these infidel leaders.
[Storer] Bin Laden saw the United States
as supporting everything that they believed was wrong.
Liberal democracy, that you don't have to be religious,
that women should have an equal role in society.
These are all things that were anathema to that fundamentalist movement
where bin Laden and his friends were.
So they had a meeting, and out of that,
bin Laden formed al-Qaida.
And that was 1988.
[Bennett] We followed this progression.
We had known that bin Laden was operating training camps and safe houses
against the Soviet Union.
When the war was over,
we discovered that he turned those camps
into training camps for Islamic militants
to go out and attack other countries.
We knew they had terrorist capabilities,
but we didn't know
to what extent they were gonna come directly after the US.
[click]
In 1992, there was an attack against US servicemen in Yemen.
We did some investigation,
and the little breadcrumbs led back to bin Laden.
[eerie music playing]
[Storer] And that's when I personally came to understand
that he was coming after us.
[clicking]
[reporter] Four Americans have been killed this morning
in explosions in Saudi Arabia.-
[reporter 2] It was a name that was surfacing from the CIA, Osama bin Laden.
210 people died in bomb attacks on US embassies.
[reporter 3] The worst acts of anti-US terrorism in years.
Osama bin Laden, possible mastermind of the East Africa bombings.
[reporter 4] Five American sailors were killed.
[reporter 5] The worst terrorist attack against a US ship in modern history.
[reporter 6] The prime suspect named Osama bin Laden.
I put dots on a map, and you could see it like in a belt all across the world.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Storer] It was almost everywhere.
It seemed to us the beginning of a new wave of terrorism.
[clicking]
[Black] In the months leading up to 9/11,
we had intelligence reporting
that al-Qaida had a threat against American targets.
We'd not seen a spike in reporting like this before.
All of the indicators were that something big was happening.
[Storer] We got reporting that people in bin Laden's network
were calling their mothers and telling them goodbye
and stuff like that.
I mean, something very serious was about to happen.
People we were following in Afghanistan were leaving the camps.
There was a public statement by bin Laden saying there would be a big surprise.
[in Arabic] Wherever you are, death will come for you.
[in English] They're talking Armageddon. This is gonna be bad.
[McLaughlin] We sent in the vicinity of 100 messages
to the FAA, Customs and Border Patrol
about potential for trouble with airlines and terrorists.
[Morell] Over the past five years,
we warned that the most likely targets would be
"national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol
and symbols of US capitalism."
"Terrorists are developing new ways to attack aviation targets."
Morning July 10th, the head of the al-Qaida section
walked into my office, and he said, "Chief, the roof's fallen in."
"Threat indicators are just off the chart."
"This country's gotta go on a war footing now."
[Morell] I briefed the president
about bin Laden planning multiple operations.
"Bin Laden attacks may be imminent."
"Spectacular attacks."
"History-changing attacks."
[Black] I remember walking into the head of the al-Qaida unit.
Against one wall were piles of paper,
and they were all stacked right next to each other.
I said, "What is all that paper on the floor?"
He said, "Oh."
"That's when we have the disaster and thousands of Americans are dead."
"We made a copy of every briefing,
every threat report, everything that we gave."
I said, "That's a lot of paper."
He said, "Yes, it is."
The frustrating thing about all of this reporting
was it was not clear about when,
where, or how.
[clicking]
[reporter] The second tower in the World Trade Center is teetering--
[man] Oh, there it goes! There it goes! There it goes! There it goes!
[reporter 2] The other tower of the World Trade Center
has just collapsed.
[siren wailing in distance]
It's no exaggeration to say that we woke up every day thinking,
"It's on us."
[Storer] You can't not feel responsibility
for not stopping an attack that occurred on your watch.
And so you can't help but, like, question yourself.
You know, just question yourself a lot.
[somber music playing]
[Morell] I got in my car and started driving home.
And it was on that drive that I broke down, and I started to cry.
And I cried all the way home.
It was our job.
Our number one job.
And we failed.
[in Arabic] Here is America,
struck by God Almighty
in one of its vital organsB
so that its greatest buildings are destroyed.
Praise be to Allah.
[somber music continues]
[siren wailing]
And I remember the thought I had was, "Nothing will ever be the same."
And it turns out it wasn't.
[tense music playing]
[Morell] We knew the Taliban government in Afghanistan
provided a safe haven to bin Laden.
I said something to the effect of, "Look, we just need to tell the Taliban
to give us bin Laden, or we will rain hell on them."
We did give the Taliban an opportunity to turn bin Laden over, and they refused.
[clicking]
On Saturday, President Bush wants to have a meeting of his war cabinet.
I walk up to the president,
who is talking to somebody from State Department,
encouraging him to give diplomacy a chance.
And the president said, "Fuck diplomacy. We're going to war."
I've asked the highest levels of our government to come to discuss,
uh, the current tragedy. We'll find those who did it.
We will smoke 'em out of their holes.
We will get 'em running, and we'll bring 'em to justice.
We're at war.
- [woman] How long do you visualize-- - [man] Thank you. We're stepping out now.
[Bush] The definition is, "Whatever it takes."
The meeting that followed was to decide what are we gonna do.
I didn't know whether CIA would be in the lead
or whether it would be the Defense Department.
The Department of Defense has military plans for almost everything.
That's what they do. They plan for war.
[man] The president turned to Donald Rumsfeld and said,
"How long, Don, before we can invade Afghanistan?"
And his response was, "Approximately six months."
Cofer Black, chief of counterterrorism, was sitting behind George Tenet.
He didn't have a place at the table, but Cofer's not afraid to speak up.
If you ever read much about General George Patton,
he will tell you half of leadership is theater.
I slid my chair a little closer to the table,
put my elbows on the table.
He turned to me. He looked me right in the eye.
I stared at him for five seconds,
and then I said very simply, "Mr. President…"
And I will not tell you what I said next,
but it very succinctly and graphically would translate to…
"If you'll let me do it, I'll have flies walking on their eyeballs
in six weeks."
He goes, "That's what I'm talking about."
And Bush said, "You're in charge," to Cofer.
[Berntsen] Donald Rumsfeld almost shit his pants.
The worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor,
he was supposed to be his big boy defending America,
and the whole thing just got handed off to an intelligence officer
who wasn't even a cabinet member seven seats away.
I want… I want justice.
And, uh, uh, there's an old poster out West,
as I recall, that said, "Wanted, dead or alive."
Close curtain, end of game.
[Berntsen] Cofer Black called me on the phone and said,
"They're going to invade Afghanistan,
and your name has been presented as the person that's gonna lead
the biggest part of it."
[mysterious music playing]
[Berntsen] I went home that night and I told my spouse
that I would be leaving for Afghanistan.
She didn't want me to go.
Her response had been,
"Let someone else do this one."
"No, I'm going."
"I will go no matter what."
"No matter what."
[tense music playing]
[clicking]
[Berntsen] I go to the office, and there was Hank Crumpton,
who was tasked to organize the deployment to Afghanistan.
We used the code name "Jawbreaker."
There were only about a half a dozen of us in what was a new unit.♠
[man] We started to assemble small teams.
Case officers, paramilitary officers, linguists, communicators.
[Crumpton] None of the CIA teams was bigger than eight people.
[McLaughlin] And we had 13 teams at the total.
[Crumpton] We would be sending in teams behind enemy lines
to work with our Afghan allies,
the Northern Alliance,
who were already fighting the Taliban to find, engage, and destroy al-Qaida.
[Black] I briefed the teams.
In a crisis like this, you've gotta hammer through to people,
"This is different."
His orders were very clear and very blunt.
Told us he wanted to have bin Laden's head brought back in dry ice.
He wanted bin Laden's head on a stick.
Cut his head off and bring it back in a box for the president.
This isn't a Walt Disney movie.
He could be specific, graphic, and very clear in his message to us.
[clicking]
[phone ringing]
[Storer] I was working with the operations side
on trying to track bin Laden all day long, every day.
And so, when he made an appearance on television,
it would be analyzed to death.
[tense music playing]
[Storer] Was this recently recorded? Was the backdrop new?
Is he saying something new? Can we tell by the backdrop where he is?
How did the recording get to Al Jazeera?
Can we find the couriers?
All that kind of analysis happened every time he spoke.
Where could he have gone?
We were going to war, full out, against bin Laden.
[clicks]
Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger
and called to defend freedom.
Whether we bring our enemies to justice
or bring justice to our enemies,
justice will be done.
[reporter] The president has clearly been preparing the nation for war.
[clicking]
We flew in on one helicopter, very heavy.
- There were ten of us. - [camera shutter clicking]
[Reilly] Just two weeks after the events of 9/11.
[tense music playing]
[Berntsen] Hank said to me, "There's an agreement between us and the military."
"You will send a CIA team on the ground,
and if they are alive after two weeks,
a special forces team will be permitted to join you."
I said, "How about they come with me when I set up?"
You know? "'Cause I'd like the additional guns."
He said, "That's the deal."
[tense music continues]
From the beginning, we're trying to find bin Laden,
doing everything possible.
We used a warlord to set up a meeting between us and the leading Taliban.
The Taliban were a radical Muslim movement who governed Afghanistan.
Their hatred of the West aligned with bin Laden,
so they gave al-Qaida safe harbor there.
[crowd cheering]
[Berntsen] In order to get bin Laden, we had to go through the Taliban first.
People from their intelligence service
agreed to come to the meeting under the principles of Pashtunwali.
One warlord will have sanctuary,
and both sides can come in and have an equal meeting there
and both be safe.
So I sent a team forward to do that.
Told them, "When you get there,
if these Afghans are cooperative,
do the deal with them."
"If they're not, kill them or kidnap them."
"Your choice."
Our guys asked them,
"Where is Osama bin Laden?"
And their answer was, "Osama who?"
That was kind of a mistake on their part.
Our guys drew weapons on everybody,
tied them up, gagged them, threw them in the vehicles,
and drove away with them.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Crumpton] By November,
there were approximately 410 Americans on the ground throughout Afghanistan.
The various teams were heavily outnumbered.
[Berntsen] I went over overhead photography with Hank Crumpton,
and we could see that at the Khyber Pass
and at other places of entry into Afghanistan,
there were traffic jams
of five and ten miles long.
It looked like every jihadist in the Middle East
was trying to come in to join the fight against the infidels,
us.
There was an inherent weakness to what we were trying to do
with the very limited resources that we had.
We were outnumbered by the enemy,
but we had air power.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Walder] Just before September 11th, I was briefed into an armed-drone program.
I remember asking, you know, "Am I gonna have to kill anyone with this?"
I didn't know how I felt. I was 22, maybe.
But I think after September 11th, um,
obviously, uh, I didn't feel as conflicted.
I was a junior in college. I went to a career fair,
and the CIA was at a table there.
Here's my resume.
They really honed in on this leadership position
that I had in my sorority.
I was a vice president in my house.
Sometimes it would be really difficult.
Sometimes you're expelling women for making really poor choices.
I was willing to sacrifice popularity and being liked
for the betterment of the entirety of my sorority,
and that spoke to sort of, I guess, my moral turpitude.
I don't know, but that's what they said.
I was placed in the counterterrorism center.
So with Jawbreaker, we started identifying targets,
and we would rely on a lot of intelligence
that we were getting from the ground folks.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Berntsen] Our team, the CIA team, is working with the Northern Alliance,
and we're running sources across enemy lines.
And I have people with what look like cell phones,
but, really, they're GPSs,
and they walk up to a building, they see it's a Taliban building,
and they mark it.
And then they mark another one. Then they mark another one.
And now, I send that report back to CIA and say, "Okay, Taliban at this building."
"Taliban in this facility."
We are targeting those individuals and taking them out.
- [pilot on radio] Ready when you are. - [pilot 2] Ready.
I think al-Qaida was like, "Does someone have a GPS up their ass?"
"Like, why are we all dying?"
I don't think they fully understood, right, what this was.
[suspenseful music continues]
That probably made the ground folks' jobs better.
[explosions]
[man on loudspeaker] Allahu Akbar! Allah!
I had the zone in Afghanistan which controlled the east,
and probably 95% of the al-Qaida in the country were in my area.
We had Afghan forces on mountaintops with radios all over the place
looking for bin Laden.
Finally, we got reporting that bin Laden was in Kabul.
We decided, "Okay, we're gonna make a push on Kabul."
We are outside of Kabul on the Shomali Plains.
Special forces teams came and joined us.
There's about 25 CIA or special forces
alongside 5,000 Northern Alliance on the Shomali Plains
standing against 15,000 Taliban and al-Qaida.
They outnumber us at least three to one, maybe four to one.
[Crumpton] The synchronization of the Northern Alliance with US air power
really was crucial to executing the plan.
[Berntsen] So we coordinated for air support,
set a date.
It was the ninth.
The Northern Alliance got ready to attack.
[tense music playing]
[Berntsen] At dusk, you could see headlights
of thousands of pickup vehicles.
Eight guys in the back, armed,
start coming out of the city
and start to crowd in on us
to be in a position to attack us.
Their intention is to kill everybody in the Northern Alliance
and kill the Americans, who they know are there.
They had a very, very large force.
But what we have that they don't have… air power.
[Reilly] Once the US air power was introduced,
having worked most of my career with the US military,
I knew what was coming.
I pushed half of my team to be right on the front line
with the Northern Alliance to the assault.
The Northern Alliance lined up and got ready,
and then the planes didn't come.-
They didn't come.
[gunshots]
[machine guns firing]
[tense music playing]
- [machine guns firing] - [Reilly] There was an artillery duel.
The Taliban were in bunkers and trenches.
They weren't well concealed.
[machine gun firing]
[Berntsen] There is no bases to go to.B
There's no place to protect yourself. You're exposed.
[machine guns firing]
Of course, I had to send messages back saying, "What the hell's going on here?"
Air assets are thousands of miles away.
Now we got 15,000 people right on top of us.
[eerie music playing]
I told our officers no one was allowed to surrender.
If you are going to be overwhelmed, you save the last round for yourself.
Because if not,
al-Qaida would torture you on video,
put that out all over the world, and you would suffer horribly.
And then unannounced comes all hell from the Air Force.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Berntsen] B-52s are bombing that front line.
AC-130 gunships are coming. Fighter aircraft are coming.
The Taliban positions couldn't withstand US air power.
[Berntsen] They actually just abandoned their positions and ran.
And then, as they collapse,
the Northern Alliance moves forward against their positions.
[clicking]
Since launching their breakout offensive last Friday,
US-backed anti-Taliban forces have made strikingly rapid progress.
Yesterday alone, more than 400 bombs were dropped on Afghanistan.
[reporter] Their commanders claim to have killed nearly 1,000 Taliban troops
in just two days.
We were all moving faster than anyone thought.
And so the Taliban, literally on their own, began evacuating the city.
I was told, "Look, the White House wants you to hold everybody back."
"We don't want you to go in."
"Stop five miles outside the city."
But we didn't do that.
[reporter] A small number of American troops is in Kabul tonight.
[reporter 2] Following a lightning-fast four-day advance,
anti-Taliban rebel forces now control the capital of Afghanistan.
[reporter 3] The departure of the Taliban could not have been
a more welcome development.
[Berntsen] People were accepting us, cheering for us.
The population turned on the Taliban.
They were beating 'em up and arresting them.
The Taliban had treated them terribly. They were monsters.
[cheering]
The expectation everyone had of this turning into some sort of quagmire
didn't come about.
In fact, Kabul had fallen by November.
It seemed to be working,
particularly when Kabul has fallen and no American troops are dead.
[Reilly] We toppled the Taliban with 300 soldiers on the ground.
It may have been less, to be honest with you.
[chuckles] The Taliban were crushed in 45 days, so…
It was a pretty successful operation.
[cheering and whistling]
[clicking]
[helicopter blades pulsing]
- [static crackles] - [man on radio] Now, I just talked to…
[indistinct chatter]
[reporter] One by one, the bodies of more than a dozen firefighters
are carried out of the rubble that was once the World Trade Center.
Three hundred forty-three of New York's bravest
are missing or confirmed dead.
For me, 9/11 feels deeply personal
because it happened at home.
The two towers were three blocks away from my high school.
I used to go during high school lunch break
to feel so cool and big
and go to the shopping center in the World Trade Center.
Many of the first responders
were the parents and siblings of kids I grew up with.
[Haq] We were still reeling from the emotional disaster that is 9/11.
Stories about recovered bodies.
What do you do with the abandoned cars?
But there's another piece of the puzzle of what 9/11 means.
In taking over Kabul, many civilians die.
[reporter] Week three of the air wars begun controversially.
Bodies in coffins on a Kabul street have led to fresh questions
about the accuracy of the American attacks.
Pictures from the Afghan capital are said to show the aftermath
of the latest raids.
Houses destroyed by a stray bomb. Lives shattered.
There was no room for that piece of the story
in the American conversation.
[reporter 2] On the issue of military involvement,
fully 80% of Americans,
according to most polls, favor it now.
Should US retaliate even if innocent people are killed?
Yes, 66%.
[somber music playing]
[Haq] The civilian casualties just disappear
because Americans were still wrestling with
thousands of Americans having been killed.
[Bush] We must defeat the evildoers.
We must round 'em up, and we must bring 'em to justice.
And that's exactly what we're doing in Afghanistan.
The fundamental question is, can you kill your way out of this?
People ask that all the time. "Can you kill your way out of this?"
And the answer is no
because some other people in some other country are gonna go,
"Did you just see what they did?"
And then you're gonna have more terrorism. Bombing more people isn't gonna stop that.
Unfortunately, that's how the US reacts to something like that.
I mean, I'm an analyst. I know what my country does.
When there's a Pearl Harbor or something like that, we go to war.
Whether it's a good idea or not, it's what we do.
[clicking]
[explosion]
[soldier] Go!
[tense music playing]
[Crumpton] By early December,
all the major cities in Afghanistan had fallen.
Al-Qaida really had no urban stronghold.
[Reilly] We had accomplished some aspects of the mission, no doubt,
but we did not bring bin Laden's head back on ice.
[Berntsen] Bin Laden got away. It's a big area.
It's hard. I gotta find out where he is.
[eerie music playing]
[radio chatter]
[Black] We had captured one of his radios,
and we had an expert familiar with Osama bin Laden's voice.
So he was listening to this short-range radio…
[indistinct radio chatter]
…and he heard Osama bin Laden telling his men,
"Hey, I'm sorry I brought you here. This is a disaster. It's all my fault."
This short-range radio had a range to it.
In the mountains, the range was less.
We got him.
[Storer] They moved to the mountains.
They had a stronghold in Tora Bora from back in the Soviet-Afghan days.
Whole tunnel network up there.
That's where the intelligence said that they had retreated to.
[Berntsen] Just called all my guys together and said,
"We're gonna send our people in there now."
That four-man team starts going up into the mountains with ten Afghans
with donkeys.
[tense music playing]
[Berntsen] And they get about half a day up,
and one of those donkeys was packed with an RPG.
And the RPG round goes off,
and it blows the donkey into about 20 pieces.
A couple Afghans died too, so they had to bring 'em down,
gotta bury them, and we gotta start over again.
They go back up the mountain,
very, very high, and they work their way in deep.
And they get to a position,
and they can see down from up on top up there.
[tense music continues]
[Berntsen] They had spotted him.
Bin Laden's got a thousand guys.
Tanks, armored vehicles, all sorts of stuff,
and they were down below our guys.
[Crumpton] We were outnumbered.
There was just no way that we could engage them
with the idea of capturing and killing all of them, including bin Laden.
[Berntsen] You can't do this
with small numbers of US forces and Afghan irregulars.
You need a battalion, 800 Rangers.
We need to drop them in up there.
I called Hank. He made the appeal.
I briefed this up the chain,
to Cofer, to the president, and I said,
"We need to have reinforcements, Rangers, Marines."
"We need help in the mountains."
I was very clear that this was a matter of hours.
Otherwise, we would lose a chance.
I'm trying to tell the military, "Okay, this is the time for you to come in
with massive force and end this thing."
And Secretary Rumsfeld reportedly said,
"Well, this doesn't have anything to do with us. This is a CIA operation."
We were not getting ground support. Where is the ground support?
Where are ground troops? Why are we not sending ground troops in?
We're like, "If we're not sending ground troops in, we're not gonna bomb."
[indistinct radio chatter]
[Walder] When you bomb something,
people that survive run away.
So you need more people there to scoop them up.
[indistinct radio chatter]
So either we don't drop any bombs, don't let them know we're there,
or rain down everything and bring the ground troops in at the same time.
And so that's what we thought the plan was going to be.
[Crumpton] General Mattis at Kandahar
with Marines, they could have deployed…
[tuts]
They just weren't willing to do that.
There was just a tremendous reluctance
to put in US military forces.
So their solution was just bomb the place.
No ground troops, we are gonna bomb.
All of us did not agree with what they were doing.
But what am I supposed to do when the orders are coming from the president?
That's the commander-in-chief.
[Crumpton] I really wasn't in a position
to question the… the president on… on the policy.
That's not a CIA officer's job.
And so I called Gary back and explained to him
that he has to go with what he's got.
[clicking]
[Berntsen] We had four Americans,
a thousand enemy down below.
If we didn't eliminate these people now,
every one of 'em that escaped the country was a potential pilot
to fly another airline into a building.
One of my guys was a combat controller.
Combat controllers call in airstrikes from the front.
I said, "Do it."
[eerie music playing]
He gets up on the line. He calls in B-52s, B-1s, F-15s.
These four Americans by themselves
did airstrikes for 56 hours.
[tense music playing]
[Reilly] They had a lot of cave systems.
And it takes a lot of bombing to close down a cave.
It was some of the heaviest bombing since World War II.
[Bernstein] Every aircraft in the US arsenal attacked those guys.
[Black] They brought out a BLU-82,
the largest conventional bomb that the United States has.
It's so big, they have to drop it off the back of a transport plane.
[tense music continues]
[eerie music playing]
After the BLU-82 and the bombings, we didn't hear anything after that.
If he's killed, cut off his head
and send it back, or his hands,
or if you can, if you'd rather take a blood sample,
then we can match DNA
because we needed forensic evidence that he was dead.
[Berntsen] We had people up there looking for pieces of him with Q-tips,
trying to get DNA.
We thought we had killed him.
[reporter] It's over in Tora Bora.
Al-Qaida's last stronghold has fallen.
[reporter 2] The Afghan militia were celebrating
what they were calling the final defeat of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida.
[speaking foreign language]
[interpreter] Our victories today have been very decisive, very important.
All the tunnels, all the caves of al-Qaida up on the mountain of Tora Bora
have been captured by our forces.
We're still trying to sort out who we have
and who we don't have and who's been killed.
Maybe he still is there. Maybe he was killed.
[reporter 3] The US is using ground forces, so if bin Laden is killed,
the Americans will be able to bring back proof he is dead.
[reporter 4] There are new unconfirmed reports that he may be dead.
[clicking]
About six months after that,
I was in the United States at a friend of mine's home
having dinner with him, and the television was on.
[eerie music playing]
He surfaced. There he was.
[in Arabic] We're almost close to 800.
The number of destroyed buildings and structures.
[reporter in English] We now know Osama bin Laden is alive.
[reporter 2] The world's most wanted is still around.
[Berntsen] The last thing the administration wanted to see.
[Storer] Once bin Laden left Afghanistan,
he could go anywhere.
And now what is he up to?
- [reporter] Attack in Madrid. - [reporter 2] London's worst attack…
[reporter 3] Deadly bombings in Bali.
[Walder] Bin Laden franchised himself.
You had branches of al-Qaida everywhere.
[Black] Bin Laden was in search of, "What's my next 9/11?"
Al-Qaida's capabilities are rebounding.
[in Arabic] I say to the American people that,
God willing, we will continue to kill you,
and we will continue the martyrdom operations.
[tense music playing]