Last updated: 12/09/2011 | 23:24 |  

The attack on the World Trade Center, September 11 2011 (Getty Images)

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, former Defence Intelligence official Anthony Tucker-Jones recounts one of the worst intelligence failures in history

I was in the Old War Office Building when a colleague, who had just returned from the DISDO – or Duty Office – stuck his head round the door and said, “Have you heard a plane hit one of the American World Trade Center towers?” Logically it must have been a small sightseeing or photographic aeroplane that had suffered some sort of navigation error  – or it was one of those instances where the pilot had suffered a heart attack and lost control.

“Was it a light aircraft?” I asked. My colleague looked ashen faced and replied, “No, an airliner.”

On that fateful day, the first aircraft struck the World Trade Center north tower at 8.47am local time while the second smashed into the south tower 16 minutes later. By 10.30 am, before the world’s media, both towers had collapsed into a mass of shattered glass, concrete and steel.

If it’s terrorists they’ve gone and done it now and someone’s head is going to roll, I thought in response to my colleague’s reply. Behind the scenes, the US government had been expecting such a spectacular attack for almost ten years. Ironically, the UK had a good handle on Islamic militant groups because it had tolerated fundraising offices in London for so long and had a growing awareness of al-Qaeda.

On the morning of 11 September 2001 the world watched in horror and dismay as Islamist terrorists slammed two airliners into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and a fourth into rural Pennsylvania. Manhattan disappeared into a pall of choking smoke and dust, centred on what become dubbed “ground zero” – a term normally associated with the impact of a nuclear warhead. New Yorkers covered in choking dust staggered about their city in a daze of incomprehension and terror.

Less than an hour after the first New York attack, just outside Washington the third hijacked aircraft flew into the southwest side of the Pentagon at 9.38am. The attack was so precise many initially though the building had been hit by a missile. About 25 minutes later the fourth aircraft came down in Pennsylvania after the intervention of the passengers who had sought unsuccessfully to regain control of the aircraft.

Initially al-Qaeda had planned hijacking a total of ten aircraft with the intention of crashing them into targets on both coasts of America. These would have included nuclear power plants and tall buildings in California and Washington State. This could have been devastating but, as it was, just four planes had the desired affect. In total the 9/11 attacks are estimated to have killed 2,973 people – some 2,602 at the WTC, 125 at the Pentagon and 40 in Pennsylvania. Fifteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the UAE, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon.

America asked itself what had it done to inspire such an act of hatred by militant members of Islam? Internationally the fear and disgust was palpable, and the spectre of such outrages was to haunt every major city around the world for the next decade.

Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda (immediately named as Washington’s prime suspect) later said, “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all…” US forces discovered a videotape recorded in November 2001 containing this statement by bin Laden made during a meeting with a Saudi supporter in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. With these words he became America’s public enemy number one. What most Americans did not realise was that Washington had spent the previous four years trying unsuccessfully to kill him.

The international community immediately rallied to America. The very next day United Nation’s Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1368 and General Assembly Resolution 56/1 called for immediate international co-operation to bring the perpetrators to justice. They also called for much broader co-operation against global terrorism, and this was followed on 28 September 2001 by UNSCR 1373. Enacted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, it required every member state to undertake 17 measures against all those who support, directly or indirectly, acts of terrorism.

Also on 12 September, President George W Bush declared the attacks on the American homeland to be acts if war, and requested Congress provide the resources to fight the terrorists wherever they might be – in the shape of $20 billion. Congress’s response was to approve double this sum. The following day US Secretary of State Colin Powell confirmed that Osama bin Laden, believed to be hiding in Afghanistan was a key suspect.

Bin Laden’s complicity in the planning of 9/11 was confirmed by a videotape made in January 2000 obtained by the Sunday Times newspaper. This clearly showed 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah at bin Laden’s HQ at Tarnak Farms, near Kandahar airport, in Afghanistan. This was obviously a smoking gun.

Operation Enduring Freedom was born after British Prime Minister Tony Blair held a meeting with President Bush at the White House on 20 September. From the first news of the attacks, Blair was convinced it was the work of al-Qaeda and his immediate response was to offer his support to America. Britain’s intelligence chiefs, notably the head of the Security Service, Secret Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Headquarters flew to Washington for urgent talks with their counterparts.

British intelligence advice was that bin Laden was the only one capable of such an attack and that they did not believe any rogue states were involved. Blair was of the view that simply removing bin Laden from the picture would not be enough – he was right, as militant Islam was already much too well established around the world. To some, the spread of Saudi Wahhabism, which preaches a return to the pure and orthodox practice of the “fundamentals” of Islam, was seen as a threat to more moderate Muslim beliefs.

Blair wanted a long term strategy for dealing with “Islamic fundamentalism” – what he really meant was Islamic militancy. Bush told Blair that the focus would be Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan’s Taliban government. Washington demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden immediately – they refused.

For the very first time the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) invoked its mutual defence clause on 2 October 2001, whereby an attack on a member state is considered an attack on all. Five days later, the American and British-led Coalition began systematic air attacks on the Taliban.

At the same time, American forces tried to kill Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khalid Shaik Mohammed (architect of 9/11) and Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. The al-Qaeda and Taliban hit list was much longer than this, but they were the ones that really mattered, and the intelligence community naively hoped that by decapitating al-Qaeda the threat would somehow vanish.

This was too little too late. 9/11 was in fact the culmination of a decade of steadily spreading militant Islam, rather than the start. Memories were short, for few beyond the intelligence and law enforcement agencies recalled Ramzi Yousef’s dramatic, if ill-fated, truck bomb attack on the WTC on 26 February 1993; this had heralded the trans-national jihad against the United States. His attack predated bin Laden’s declaration of war on the American homeland by three and a half years. In that time militant Islam’s rise had gone unchecked.

In the aftermath of the 1993 attack, US Special Operations Command was granted a budget increase of almost 50 per cent, with $250m being spent on Predator and another $610m on the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles or drones in order to step up the so-called “war on terror”. After 9/11, the CIA’s counterterrorist efforts came under the scrutiny of a joint inquiry conducted by the US Senate Select and House Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence. To add to the indignity, the CIA’s Office of Inspector General was then required to endorse the inquiry’s scathing findings.

Damningly, the joint inquiry concluded that before 9/11 neither the US government nor the American intelligence community had a comprehensive strategy for dealing with al-Qaeda. The view was that the Director General Central Intelligence “was either unwilling or unable to marshal the full range of IC resources necessary to combat the growing threat to the United States”. In light of the evidence, the Office of Inspector General had little choice but agree with theses findings.

In particular, co-ordination failures between the CIA and the National Security Agency were identified. The latter was reluctant to share its signals intelligence with the CIA, which hampered the Counterterrorism Center’s efforts against al-Qaeda. It likewise stymied co-ordination between the CIA and US military.

The US military did not escape criticism either. The Pentagon was censured for being reluctant to conduct operations in Afghanistan or support or take part in CIA operations against al-Qaeda prior to 9/11. It was noted one of the reasons cited for this was the CIA’s failure to provide adequate intelligence to support such operations. As a result, the US Defense Department felt it could not put troops on the ground in Afghanistan or conduct cruise missile attacks on bin Laden-related sites, over and beyond the August 1998 strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan. Disagreements over replacing lost predator drones also needlessly hampered collaboration between the CIA and US military.

The US government’s inquiry concluded “that the CIA was reluctant to seek authority to assassinate bin Laden and averse to taking advantage of ambiguities in the authorities it did receive that might have allowed it more flexibility”. Although the US government wanted bin Laden dead as early as August 1998, it had not removed the ban on assassination and did not provide clear direction, or indeed authorisation, to the CIA.

This collective intelligence failure meant US efforts against al-Qaeda before 9/11 were insufficient and ill-co-ordinated. In the confusion, al-Qaeda planned and then executed the 9/11 attacks despite repeated warnings that such a strike was possible against the US heartland. After 9/11, America found itself at war in Afghanistan, and it was not until ten years later that Osama bin Laden was finally run to ground hiding out in Pakistan.

Anthony Tucker-Jones spent his career in the British intelligence community before establishing himself as a leading military historian and defence writer. In his latest book The Rise of Militant Islam he examines from an insider’s perspective how Western intelligence misinterpreted every landmark event on the road to 9/11. He will be appearing at the Appledore Book Festival on 30 September.