The video you are about to see
has never been seen by the public.
It was shot 20 years ago by FBI surveillance specialist
Rick Sutton from the 25th floor of the Bureau's
New York headquarters.
The voices are those of Specialist Sutton
and other FBI personnel.
At this point, Specialist Sutton is forced
to evacuate along with the entire Bureau.
The FBI office at 26 Federal Plaza,
the largest in the nation, empties.
It is 9:12 AM.
Despite losing their command center
and virtually all their resources,
these FBI agents must mobilize. Now.
September 11th, 2001
is primary day in New York City.
Public schools are just starting a new year.
The Yankees are on a roll
and will host the White Sox that night.
I was driving down through the city,
and I was singing along to the radio.
I was just approaching to enter the Lincoln Tunnel.
I was sitting at my desk at 26 Federal Plaza.
I heard a huge explosion.
My secretary started screaming, "World Trade Center!"
I saw this black smoke billowing from the north tower.
They interrupted the music to say a jetliner
had just crashed into the World Trade Center.
New York has seen nothing like this since 1945 when a B25
Bomber accidently flew into the Empire State Building.
And I was like, hit the siren,
throw the light up on the roof and jet down Broadway.
My phone rang in the car. It was my boss, Barry Mawn,
who was the assistant director of New York at the time,
and he said, "I'm going to the scene.
Meet me there." So, I made record time.
Going down the West Side Highway.
Red lights and siren.
The streets are teaming with panic and people evacuating.
It was a very chaotic scene.
My purpose was to get into the lobby of tower one
because that's where I was told the police department
and fire department
were meeting as the kind of initial mustering point.
I grab the first police officer I could.
I remember saying to him, "Hey, guy.
Where is the mobilization point?"
He said, "Pal, I have no fucking idea."
One note of concern here at the FBI already,
their field office in New York
is located very, very close to the World Trade Center.
I saw a huge Ryder yellow rental truck
parked in front of the building
and I said, "Oh, my God."
And we know the history or Ryder rental trucks
when it comes to truck bombs, and you know, IEDs.
It was a Ryder truck
that exploded in the underground garage
of the World Trade Center eight years earlier.
26th Federal Plaza is not safe at this time.
They did not know if it was a target.
If it was being targeted.
We all had the same goal, and that is to get out.
Everyone in the FBI office is immediately forced
to abandon their desks,
leaving behind computers, files, secure phone lines.
Virtually every tool they have to do their jobs.
And all the agents are unnerved.
What did we miss? Could we have prevented this?
And from all directions were your peers,
your FBI colleagues.
It was at that point we were instructed
to go to the playground in Chinatown
and that was our rally point for headcount.
The FBI has only a loose contingency plan for disasters
and the New York Office is already facing huge demands.
Locate and organize its agents,
rescue as many people as possible from the towers
and launch what they know will become a massive investigation.
But as they try to do all three, simultaneously,
minutes are ticking by.
The building was groaning louder and louder.
It was like the building was crying.
As you looked at it,
it kind of rumble, rumble, rumble,
rumble after it made it's left sway, right sway.
(groans)
Then it got louder and louder and the ground was moving.
And it made a slight like heave up.
Almost as if it was taking its last breath.
And all of a sudden, you can just hear this huge kaboom!
(yelling and screaming)
And I could just hear each floor dropping.
(shushing noises)
The ground just began to shake.
(yelling)
Oh, shit! Run! Run!
If the New York Office hadn't done a rollcall
that took the time it had...
the agents easily could have been inside the crash area,
if not inside the tower itself.
(yelling)
Is there an exit here?
Shut the gate! Turn off the gas!
(coughing)
What happened?
It collapsed. The top floors collapsed down.
I saw it blow, and then ran like hell.
Thank God, 69, but I can still run.
There's got to be firemen trapped back there, though.
I just remember staring at it and all I could say was,
the World Trade Center's gone.
Both of them, gone. It was empty space.
(blowing nose)
When it settled, you could hear in the background
the chirping that was so loud from the World Trade Center.
Almost like cicadas in the summer.
Except with a mechanical pitch.
It was the trackers on the firemen.
(Coughing)
It's the sound that the protection gear
makes when the fireman stops moving.
(coughing)
You got a spare mask?
Yeah. Come inside so I can look at your head.
I'm fine, really. You sure?
Thank you, yeah. Thank you, very much.
The world is in shock.
New York is paralyzed and the FBI,
whose mission has only become more urgent, is in disarray.
Agents are unable to communicate with
or even locate each other.
Instinctively, I turned and started running up
Vesey Street and I rand to where my office was.
My secretary, I don't think she recognized me.
Like everyone else, we look like,
you know, zombies, with little white dust on us.
I went into the bathroom and cleared my airways
and tried to clean up my face and hands the best I could.
A group of FBI agents had commandeered,
you know, a brokerage.
I think it was Morgan Stanley or somebody,
had an office across the street from the Trade Center.
Why don't you come with us, too.
This is no place to be now, pal.
Recognize the technology then,
telecommunication technology was much different.
There's a phone bank of six or seven payphones.
Had a cop stand by the phones so no one used them.
(yelling)
I'll find the other brother! Let's go!
Get these guys down to fresh air.
We opened the blinds,
I'm talking to Washington, and I said,
"What's going on there?" And they had the bad report
that the Supreme Court had just been hit.
It is becoming apparent no one anywhere
knows what's happening.
The only thing that's clear is the New York office
of the FBI must find out who did this.
Debris is falling from the sky.
All of the buildings in the immediate
area were being evacuated.
You have to have a nerve center.
We had to have a location
and we had to have one very quickly,
so I was given the assignment
to find a suitable forward command post.
We're not going to go anyplace which is identifiable
as being a law enforcement or the FBI.
And I said, it had to be large enough
to house a lot of people.
I want it secured
and I want it fairly close to ground zero.
The agents, they reluctantly said,
"Well, we could go to the 26th Street Garage."
At first, I was actually thinking
how the hell is this gonna work?
I was a little bit skeptical.
It's not going to be ideal.
The 26th Street Garage is the greatest untold story of 9/11.
Both, both Twin Tower buildings came down.
We made the decision to walk to the 26th Street Garage
and as we're walking over there,
we're still seeing hundreds,
if not thousands of people, still moving their way north.
But also, we saw hundreds of boats
coming from New Jersey over towards Manhattan,
trying to help people get off, and it looked Dunkirk.
That's when we first started hearing the military jets.
I knew it was war.
When we first got there,
SWAT was setting up command and control
and securing the area with razor wire.
They were arming those of us that were outside
to set up a perimeter.
We were given long arms, so shot guns and MP5s
and MP10s which looks like a little machine gun.
I remember walking up the ramp.
You know, you can smell oil and small brake fluid.
Opening the door to this massive space.
It wasn't so much the smells that bothered you.
It was the visual.
The garage where the cars are, where you get your oil changed,
where fenders hanging off,
you get the side light replaced.
It was hard to imagine this was going to be
the epicenter of the investigation.
As agents arrive on foot by the hundreds,
FBI logistic teams make space by towing out 500 cars.
It was a grease monkey location but, you know, ugly's okay.
No one is looking for the Waldorf Historia
in the middle of a crisis.
FBI teams are scouring the city for office equipment
and even buying it on their own credit cards.
People trying to put tables up so people
would have somewhere to work, get computers in there.
They had a number of tables lined up with folding chairs.
They set up the computers. They ran the lines.
Banks of telephones. Miles and miles of wire.
And it actually looked like a big hall of spaghetti.
I mean, there are wires hanging from all over the place,
but they were necessary because regular phones weren't working.
It was just logistically an overwhelming undertaking.
As were now seeing the 26th Street Garage take its form,
it was almost like an FBI baby being made in the womb
because everything that the full-grown
FBI mechanism had Downtown was now coming to form.
It was getting legs, it was getting arms,
it was breathing, it was starting to stretch out.
There were different areas for the bosses to sit,
for management to sit, for the case agents to sit.
Incredibly, within just a few hours,
the garage begins to function as an FBI command post.
The purpose of the garage
is not only just to act as a communications channel
but to digest all the information coming in.
The manifest for the planes,
they were obtained fairly quickly from the airlines
and started to be vetted out both through agency files,
FBI files and getting multiple hits on the subjects.
On 9/11, one of the passports of one of the hijackers
was found a block or so from one of the towers in the debris
and that was brought into the command center,
so you were, fairly early on, identifying
who the hijackers were but you wanted everyone else.
You know, we photographed everything,
including aerial mapping,
photographs of all of Ground Zero.
All of that information was funneled back to the garage.
I was involved with a lead group.
Any information that they found in the investigation,
whether it be the passport, the flight manifest,
any information that the lead investigators wanted
followed up on or needed,
the lead desk would pass out a packet.
You know, like "Mission: Impossible,"
you open it up and there's a picture of an individual
and in it would be how they're associated with the case.
They could have been in Mohamed Atta's address book,
or it could have been this is a number that one of hijackers
called 15 times in the first week.
Uh, so we would go out and pay a visit to that location.
The Boston office had found a briefcase at the airport,
and it had some information as to what they were going to do.
A handwritten letter was contained
in Mohamed Atta's briefcase
that was basically a declaration of,
"We who are about to die for the cause
remain strong and resolved."
It was that type of rhetoric, to sacrifice their own lives
for the purpose of freeing up the Arabic world
from the great Satan, the United States
and that same letter was recovered in Shanksville
during the crime scene search
and there was a third copy of that same letter found
so that was really a key piece of evidence that,
you know, linked all of them together as well.
Clues are coming in.
Names are going up. Charts are being made.
Whiteboards are being drawn. Lines are being connected.
And so that was broken down
initially in a handwritten whiteboard
but then as information was refined
and identified more specifically,
then it was memorialized in writing and charts
which served a very useful purpose
in terms of comparison of one flight against another.
Who was together? Who wasn't together?
Once we had the connection between the actual hijackers,
to now begin the process of doing a complete vertical,
a dissection, if you will, of that human being.
Their entire life. You know, where they were born,
where they were raised. Where they went to school.
When did they come to the United States?
Where did they stay? Pulling reams and reams
and reams of phone records and financial records.
How did they operate in the United States?
How long were they here?
You were able to see the fruits of your labor.
You were able to see all the information
that you were bringing actually come to fruition and form.
You were seeing links being made
based on work you had done.
The 9/11 investigation is already becoming the largest
and most complex in the Bureau's history.
It's all hand on deck, around the clock.
At the same time, the New York Office
is also responsible for thousands of other cases,
and they can't be dropped.
It didn't matter if you were on a Russian organized crime squad
or working the Gambino family
or you were following Russian spies,
you had undercovers out there whose lives were on the line
that you had to worry about.
You had handlers that needed to be talked to.
You had victims that needed justice.
It's very hard to tell an FBI agent
you need to switch this other thing off.
My shift, for example, was 6am to 6pm.
Nobody got days off. There were no days off.
We had a job to do, and we were going to do it.
You didn't want to leave.
At first, you wanted to just never pause
from the work that you were doing,
and you got the greatest comfort from being around
literally hundreds and hundreds of people
who felt the same way.
They were doing the same thing with that level of commitment.
After an 18-hour day,
I had a lot of difficulty falling to sleep.
That is when I would stop and think of what had occurred,
what the losses were to firemen, police
and that caused me a lot of anxiety, stress.
Just thinking about all that.
It's not the kind of work you can walk away from.
A lot of people, for a time, were working day and night
because the stakes were high on both sides.
As agents frantically begin to unravel the 9/11 plot,
another major threat emerges.
The second wave of attacks may be coming.
You're thinking, we've got to solve this case.
That synapse is firing, years of habit.
That's what they've been raised to do
but it was also crystal clear
that they had to stop the next thing.
What was the next thing? Where would the next thing be?
Is it possible that it could be bigger or worse?
We're all concerned.
Was this the tip of the iceberg?
Was there more to follow?
You had the Pentagon attack and, of course,
the plane that went down in Shanksville, Flight 93.
So that's four major, major attacks all in one.
What's to say there aren't five, six, ten, 12?
We have to find out whatever there is that one can find out
so that if there is another plot on the way,
whether today, tomorrow, next week, next month.
We stop it.
The clear assumption by federal lawmen
is that these terrorists had help from accomplices
who may still be in the United States.
What is not is clear is whether those accomplices
were only bit players in this historic assault
or whether they may still have still
to be launched terrorist plans of their own.
The dust was still rising.
There were two different mindsets.
There was a brand-new FBI director.
His name was Robert Mueller,
and he was a very exacting manager.
He asked a million questions.
Right after the World Trade Center attack,
Robert Mueller came to the garage to see me.
The director of the FBI
who will subsequently introduce the Attorney General,
but we are all very pleased and honored
to have the director of the FBI, Bob Mueller here.
A morning meeting with Director Mueller
in the days after 9/11 was not just a meeting.
It was a cross examination.
This is a group that, you can see,
turned this parking garage into a huge command post.
So, when you kind of think of that personality,
the ability to run that case from headquarters
for somebody who wanted to be that hands-on,
the way he was leaning.
You should know this is a great, hardworking group
that have been doing it every day
without a day off working 12 to 16 hours.
And he said that he was going
to take the investigation back to Washington.
With that, ladies and gentlemen,
the director of the FBI.
(applause)
Despite the fact that thousands of leads
are coming into the garage,
and agents are working them as fast as they can.
Three weeks ago, we were all doing something else.
The entire operation is one administrative decision away
from being shut down.
And within 24 hours, we all pulled together.
28 agencies.
I argued against that.
I said, "Director, you cannot run an investigation
out of Washington. You don't have investigators."
Disaster has produced any number of heroes.
He said, "I am aware of that so I'm going to take half
of your people down to Washington, DC."
Which I argued against.
So many heroes out there that we ought to applaud.
But he was the director. He was my boss
and he said that's the way it's going to happen.
He made that decision despite our best effort
to convince him not to.
And we will, we will bring these individuals to justice.
Now, let me introduce the Attorney General
of the United States, John Ashcroft.
New York had really strong feelings about this.
There were too many people dead.
There was too much history
and there had to be an element of we feel responsible
for this as well and we need to make it right.
When you think of the New York office of the FBI,
we did the World Trade Center Bomb.
We did the case of the Blind Sheikh.
We prevented all these other attacks.
We know all these players. We've prosecuted them in court.
We've obtained conviction. They're all doing life
and we don't want something this important to be handed off
to a bunch of people at headquarters.
By the morning of September 13th,
the garage is fighting two battles.
One against the terrorists.
Another to keep control of the investigation
and it's determined to win both.
They couldn't get together between Fort Meade and Langley
and the J. Edgar Hoover Building
but then when you went into that space at the garage,
who was there?
NSA, CIA, FBI, NYPD, the Defense Department.
Men and women from 16 intelligence agencies
and all the information was on the table.
They could literally yell it
across the room to the next guy,
all there, doing it the way they were supposed to.
They couldn't get it together in Washington,
but they could get it together in that garage.
More than 25 agencies begin working together.
They are outrunning Washington and determined to keep going.
So many others want to thank you
for the extraordinary response
to this extraordinary act of terror.
FBI Director Robert Mueller concedes.
The team in New York
will continue to be a major driver
in what is becoming an all-consuming investigation.
Let me introduce the Attorney General.
I was pretty frightened
when I first saw the building with the new occupancy.
Martha Stewart Studio and Test Kitchens are on the 9th floor.
There was the razor wire. I remember looking up
and seeing guns hanging over the rooftop.
You could see the guns clearly over the parapets.
This was warfare.
I thought, well, either we are a target,
or we are protected, and it was a terrifying
and yet comforting at the same time.
You knew who they were when they got in the elevator.
They were packing a weapon.
They were extremely serious about their jobs but friendly.
There were lots of people on that floor.
Very busy with computers and telephones ringing
and you can imagine what they had to,
they were trying to figure out who the heck did this.
The viable leads coming in, you know, trite expression,
drinking from a fire hose?
We were drinking from fire hoses
from every fire department in the nation, it felt like.
It was a flow that would not stop.
Keep in mind it was coming in, not only from New York,
but all over the country. All over the world.
I thought, God, these poor people working round the clock,
and I felt so sorry for them
because there was no place to buy food.
New York was basically shut down for a while after 9/11.
I thought, well maybe they'll allow me to bring down
everything that we make in the test kitchen.
Why not give it to these hardworking people
who are basically living on the second floor?
So, one day, Martha Stewart is coming up the ramp
and she said,
"I just want you guys to have something."
It was a standard size, you know, round,
birthday type of cake, layer cake.
And she said, "I just really appreciate all you people,
what you're doing."
So, we would take down food and,
and see the smiles and the,
and the weariness of the workers there on that floor.
Everybody thanked her
and she didn't try to decorate the garage either.
I would have loved to have made over that garage.
I probably would have made them some lounges
where they could have kitchens where they could eat.
I would have probably put better lighting in there.
It was a pretty dingy place.
You have to have some humor
to get your through these awful events.
They keep you sane,
so Martha Stewart was very, very nice.
As we were finding out about all of the skyjackers.
Our thought at the time was we have to identify
all of them and their links.
So, part of the installation at the garage was these secure,
classified phonelines and they proved to be vital.
It would ring several times a day
and I'd be on the phone with Ali Soufan,
one of the agents who was assigned over in Yemen.
On 9/11, I was in the embassy
in Sana'a investigating the "USS Cole."
Less than a year before 9/11, the "USS Cole,"
an American Destroyer, is refueling in Yemen.
The bomb was carried by a small boat
that helped the destroyer moor in the harbor.
The tiny fishing boat, the men on board waving and smiling
pulls up beside the destroyer and explodes.
The bomb rips a hole in the side of the warship,
killing 17 American sailors and nearly sinking the "Cole."
You see the attack on the "USS Cole."
This is critical because you start to see a picture
come into richer focus.
Who are the people who blew up the "Cole"?
Another one. Another plane just hit!
Oh, my God. Another plane has just hit.
It hit another building.
We were trying to call headquarters
and see what was going on in New York
and basically said you need to stay,
and I was really annoyed. I mean, you want us to stay.
The "USS Cole" can wait. You know, we're under attack
and the answer from headquarters
was it's not about the "USS Cole."
It's about what just happened here.
You go to the embassy and so and so
will give you what you need to know.
We started to identify a number of the individuals
that were on the various planes.
As we developed that,
we were able to send those names over to Ali Soufan
who was dealing with jailed extremists.
I went with my CIA colleague in his car back to the embassy.
We go to his office, and he gave me
a manilla envelope and I opened it
and I could not believe what I was seeing.
Khalid Mihdhar and Nawaf Hazmi, who are connected to people
who are involved in the "USS Cole,"
had been in the United States.
They were identified as hijackers.
Two people who were on the planes,
we're looking for them in Yemen.
Our government knew that they were in San Diego.
What Ali Soufan has just learned
but no one in the garage yet knows
is that the CIA has been tracking two of the hijackers
for nearly a year.
The CIA, however, had yet to process the information
and so failed to share it
with the FBI in time to locate the hijackers.
I just threw the file back on his desk.
The only thing I can do is just get out of his office,
straight to the bathroom across the hall
and puking my guts out
until one of my colleagues
came in and said, "Buddy, you okay?"
I remember, I just looked at him and said, "They knew.
They knew everything."
The CIA would also acknowledge failing to put the Al Qaeda
operatives on the terrorist watch list sooner.
Days after the attacks, the Yemenis reveal
that they too are hiding something extraordinary.
When he walked into the room, he wouldn't even look at me.
He literally took his chair and turned it towards the wall.
Ali Soufan is brought to meet a secret prisoner.
A terrorist whose alias is Abu Jandal.
He won't even recognize that I'm a Muslim.
He didn't believe me but a little bit by a little bit,
the relationship was a little bit better.
He start lecturing us a lot about Islam, about the world.
About Bin Laden. About revolutions.
The reason the Yemenis have been hiding Abu Jandal--
he is Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard.
Soufan shows Abu Jandal photos
of the World Trade Center attacks,
but he adds a lie--
that hundreds of Muslim Yemenis died in the towers.
Those people were on the planes that hit
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Those people murdered all these Yemenis.
So, he was totally taken back.
He put his head between his hands,
and he starts shaking and he said,
"I need five minutes."
So, we went out of the room.
We left him in the room, and I walked in again
and then he said, "I think the Sheikh one's crazy.
What do you want to know?"
I said, "We have a photobook. Some people probably you know,
some people I'm sure you don't know."
He identified Mohamed Atta.
He identified about seven people
who later were identified all as hijackers,
giving us their nationality,
their alias, and a lot of details about them.
That was significant.
This is the evidence we needed.
Bin Laden's bodyguard has now
given the FBI absolute proof,
connecting Al Qaeda to the World Trade Center attack.
We understand that it's really important to pass
this information to New York.
Kenny, it's Bin Laden. 100 percent.
When those first clues in Yemen
and Abu Jandal's revelations to Ali Soufan
come into the garage, you know,
the people who are piecing together
everything from everywhere say, okay.
This is big. This has meaning.
Seven of the hijackers
were identified as Qaeda operatives by the bodyguard.
The breakthroughs that occurred in those interviews
was really putting the key into the lock of the secrets of 9/11
and turning it.
Abu Jandal was that.
- Turning to what's now a sprawling
criminal investigation
of the coordinated suicide attacks,
investigators have made quick work
of identifying the skyjackers.
So, Abu Jandal was identifying people left and right
and all the information was coming straight to New York
and New York were acting upon this information,
putting wanted posters for some individuals
that we identified and following
on a lot of the leads that we were generating.
The board became a lot more refined as time went on.
As more information came in that
we could permanently affix up there
in terms of a flow chart.
You wanted to get back after you did your leads
and write up your investigation and document it
so that the case squad
could have that information as soon as possible
because something you're holding may be a missing piece
and you don't know it.
You don't know what you have. They know what they need.
This grind went on for, like, 60 days
before a day off, which is, you know, it was okay for me
'cause I was in the zone.
I wanted to be with my peers.
I wanted to be with other FBI agents.
The leads from 9/11
which is opening entire new books into Al Qaeda
that had never been cracked before
including the recruitment of English-speaking people
to come to flight schools.
In terms of connecting the dots,
who were these people who flew the planes
and how did they learn to fly?
With whom were they associated when they're in the country.
We realized pretty quickly
there's an awful lot of flight schools
that can teach you to fly a commercial airliner
and of those flight schools,
a lot of them had a lot of Mideastern males as students.
We need to know what else is happening.
Who else in involved?
Who else is a sleeper cell somewhere,
waiting for the instructions to attack?
Pull back, pull back. All the way to the green bar.
The thing that struck me so odd when I went into the garage
was that I smelled, like, gas and oil and rubber
and all the things that,
you know, would typically find in a garage
and you're among all these computer terminals
and FBI people setting leads and covering leads.
Leads are pouring in from all over the world
but one of the most critical
comes from inside the FBI itself.
We had been pushing to our management in Minneapolis
to let New York know
we had a subject who had to be connected to the attacks.
When I got to New York,
I immediately went to the garage ready to brief agents
and prosecutors on Mr. Moussaoui.
Zacarias Moussaoui is a French citizen.
He has been in flight school in Minnesota
until weeks before 9/11.
When the FBI is alerted to his strange behavior,
agents arrest him on immigration charges.
Zacarias Moussaoui was taking flying lessons,
but it raised concern by the instructor
is that he just wanted to know how to fly.
He really didn't want to learn everything there was
about manning an airplane.
This revelation about Moussaoui is conveyed to Ali Soufan
over in Yemen.
Soufan runs it past Bin Laden's bodyguard.
Abu Jandal identified Moussaoui.
Basically, he gave us a lot of things about him,
his involvement in Al Qaeda. His alias in Al Qaeda.
Now we know that this person wasn't only a crazy person
who said, "I wanna learn how to fly,
"but I just wanna take off.
I don't care about landing."
This guy is actually a member of Al Qaeda...
and worked for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Realizing the terrorist network in the US
is larger than anyone imagined,
the FBI puts even more pressure on Moussaoui.
Mr. Moussaoui was hostile.
We could tell he didn't like us.
We were going to go for broke on this interview
and so we said,
"We're aware that you're a member of a group."
When he heard the word group,
that really concerned Moussaoui.
His eyes kind of got wide. His jaw dropped.
That also fit our concern as to were there others out there?
Potential hijackers and/or potential support elements
that would create a second wave.
Or create other incidents.
I said, "Mr. Moussaoui, you're here with us in custody
"and you're going to remain in custody
"but your friends who are out there
"who are going to carry out this attack, they're not,
"and if people are hurt, you're going to be held
accountable by the United States government."
Everyone was in a high state of alert.
When's the next attack?
Obviously, we didn't prevent this one,
but can we prevent the next one?
The urgency, for sure,
was identifying co-conspirators,
was identifying anybody who might have been working
with Moussaoui to do the same thing.
Who might have been financing him,
who might have trained him.
Was Moussaoui going to be used in a terrorist plot after that?
I'm sure he was.
They didn't send him here for tourism, right?
They sent him for terrorism but again,
he was arrested before that happened.
That was very, very important in terms
of establishing a real concrete connection between Bin Laden,
Al Qaeda, and the hijackers as well.
We're working day and night.
We're interviewing people left and right, you know?
We're getting significant amount of information.
It's very important to pass it to New York.
However, some of this intelligence
is difficult to interpret.
In particular, the agents struggle
with intercepted Al Qaeda phone calls
about a mysterious figure linked to the attacks,
but still at large.
And there was all this chatter,
and part of the chatter was this guy, Mukhtar,
which was believed to be somebody that was involved,
but we didn't know who he was.
To chase down this lead,
Ali Soufan flies to a secret prison in Thailand.
He interrogates a captured Bin Laden associate
named Abu Zubaydah
When hearing about this Le Mukhtar,
the one who, whose brain flew away.
All the time, Le Mukhtar, Le Mukhtar
And I'm like, who is Le Mukhtar
who is this guy whose brain flew away?
Maybe he's Bin Laden because he went crazy after 9/11
doing something like this.
Soufan shows Zubaydah photos of known terrorists,
trying to trace the Al Qaeda network from the bottom up,
but Zubaydah is stunned.
So, he said, "Please, brother. Don't play games with me.
This is Mukhtar.
This is the one who did the plane operation."
The FBI analysts have been mishearing the name.
Lee Mukhtar is actually Mukhtar and Mukhtar
is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
someone the FBI thought they knew well.
I was like, whoa. Mukhtar.
Le Mukhtar. I was totally shocked.
Totally shocked because, honestly, at the time,
we didn't even know he was a member of Al Qaeda.
In an instant, Soufan makes a stunning connection.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef.
The mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack
in 1993.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, before joining Al Qaeda,
came to Abu Zubaydah,
and he wanted to do an operation in the United States,
targeting the World Trade Center
to follow up with what Ramzi Yousef started.
Destroying the buildings.
And his plot was to rent
Cessna planes and fly them into the two buildings.
Abu Zubaydah's response was like,
"So you break some windows.
"At least fill the Cessna planes with explosives
so they can do some damage."
So, KSM liked the idea.
Abu Zubaydah told him the only person
who will have a capability like this is Osama Bin Laden.
What he had done is he had taken all of Ramzi Yousef's
plans and kind of blown the dust off them
and brought them to Bin Laden and said,
"They're still good plans. We can still do bad things.
They just need the money behind them."
And that was the genesis of 9/11.
You know, New York will be very interested in KSM,
so I called on a secure line, Kenny, and I said
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was identified
as the mastermind of 9/11.
In brief, Barry just hung up with Ali,
and here's what he's provided.
Those details were put up on the board.
The board is finally complete.
There is now a clear line from the original
World Trade Center bombing
through Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
to Osama Bin Laden,
and the 2,978 murders on 9/11.
Our enemies are about to face the consequences.
On my orders,
the United States military has begun strikes
against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps
and military installations
of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
It was the best time that I ever saw
where law enforcement came together as one.
Good evening. It's three months to the day
since the murderous attack on America
and the US grand jury has issued
the first formal criminal charges in the case.
Attorney General John Ashcroft calls
the 30-page indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui quote,
"A chronical of evil."
That humble little building on the west side highway
was housing the most complex, important,
largest investigation in FBI history.
An extraordinary confession
from the suspected mastermind of 9/11 attacks.
According to the Pentagon, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
admitted responsibility for 9/11
and for a string of attacks and plots,
including plans to kill Presidents Clinton and Carter.
What was accomplished out of that garage
was nothing short of amazing.
Tonight, I can report to the American people
and to the world, the United States
has conducted an operation that killed
Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda.
One by one, the United State
dealt with those responsible for 9/11.
Zacarias Moussaoui pleaded guilty
to conspiring to kill Americans as part of the attacks.
He is currently serving a life sentence without parole.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
the mastermind of the attacks, remains at Guantanamo Bay.
His trial has yet to happen.
What began as an improvised response
to an emergency evacuation yielded extraordinary results.
And that was not just figuratively
but also quite literally the start of something.
It was a new model.
The structure that evolved in the 26th Street Garage
is known as the Joint Operation Center
In FBI parlance, the JOC.
And it has become the template
for counterterrorism activities.
Agencies cooperate closely, intelligence is shared quickly,
and there is constant vigilance.
I look at that warehouse
and I realize its whispered role in history.
There's no sign,
and nobody really knows what happened in there.
What went on after 9/11, it should forever be here
that the largest investigation
in the history of US law enforcement,
if not international law enforcement,
was run from this very rudimentary grease-lidden
on the floor, oil-slicked garage.
It's just an incredible feat. It really is.
In all the memories of the garage,
both stressful but also enlightened, like hopeful.
It was all the best of everybody
was here in the garage.
It was the investigators, support, the people.
And that's what was so great about you know,
everything in the garage was just work
and trying to solve this,
you know, most heinous crime ever, right?
Just unspeakable, really,
but everybody just sort of put aside the unspeakable
and got it done.
Putting aside the unthinkable and getting it done
is what FBI agents are trained to do.
Now, after two decades in Afghanistan,
American troops are out.
The threat based on history came true.
Government fell in an instant.
Taliban seized control.
We're never going to eliminate terrorism in our lifetime.
Just like the FBI's mission never ends.
They'll regroup, find new sources
and stay ahead of the terrorists
as they have for the past 20 years.
Preserving our safety in an increasingly complicated world.
One Sunday, I was walking up the street near my house.
There was this little church on the Upper East Side
and I remember walking and they were singing hymns
and I was like, they're happy. And they should be.
They should be not-- it's okay to be joyful
and sing in church.
And I remember feeling like taking a minute
and sitting outside and listening to the hymns.
'Cause it was, I think the first time
I was reconnecting with New York.
First time I was seeing my fellow New Yorkers
you know, being New Yorkers,
and singing a hymn.
You know?
And they were joyful inside the church,
so, for me, it was rewarding
'cause it was like, it's okay, you know?
Humanity is here.
It's gonna be okay.