Original subtitles

Behind these walls is the headquarters

of the world's most famous intelligence agency.

Its full name has been reduced

to three mythical letters, CIA.

For decades, its spies have stolen the best kept secrets,

infiltrated foreign governments,

and operated in the interests

of the White House across the globe,

with a fundamental mission, to protect the United States.

But one extraordinary event would change its history.

9/11 created counter terrorism

in a scale that was unimaginable.

Although it was unable to prevent

the deadliest terrorist attack of the 21st century,

the CIA was entrusted with coordinating the response

and avenging America.

Now the mission of the CIA is not just to spy on people,

but to kill them in some cases.

From Afghanistan to Syria via Iraq,

the CIA has become the United States' top secret weapon.

Everything that the CIA does is classified.

The agency hunts down anybody

that America considers its enemy.

Even if it means losing its soul.

The CIA has committed crimes against humanity.

Crimes ultimately against the country itself.

We had to set up secret prisons. We had to do things that were insane.

Nobody talks about this. Nobody talks about this.

From 9/11 until today, CIA spies have worked in absolute secrecy.

Some of them agreed to reveal certain elements of their covert operations

in the shadow of America at war.

I know exactly where I was and what I was doing on 9/11.

We will all remember exactly where we were.

On the morning of 9/11, I was working in CIA headquarters

in Langley, Virginia,

and there was actually a TV above the doorway, above my head,

and there was the news.

A plane has crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

We were watching the TV and we see, you know, the live coverage

of the hole and the burning.

And just as we're kind of mentally processing that,

the other plane flies into the South Tower.

So we watched that live like so many people did.

On the afternoon of 9/11, we all knew the world had irrevocably changed.

We were at war.

The United States was in shock.

With almost 3,000 dead and 6,000 injured, the country which

thought itself impregnable suddenly discovered its vulnerability.

As a counterterrorism officer, on that day, you can't feel.

I mean, it's like a surgeon, you know?

If suddenly everything goes wrong in surgery

and your heart is open, you can't get emotional about it.

Now, I'm pretty practiced at this.

My whole life has been that way.

This is just absolute, not second nature, but nature.

The resolve of our great nation is being tested.

But make no mistake,

we will show the world that we will pass this test.

God bless.

Immediately following 9/11, the CIA is compelled

to make counterterrorism its first and foremost job,

not espionage.

And the counterterrorism division of CIA,

which was only a couple hundred people before 9/11,

is now a couple thousand people.

President Bush doubles the CIA's budget overnight.

It had been about three billion dollars.

It's now six billion dollars, and it's going up.

Within 24 hours, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center

triples in size.

And so everybody, literally everybody,

is up 24 hours a day just scouring through CIA files

and I didn't leave for the next four days.

If I need to sleep, I just sleep under the desk

for an hour, two hours.

We're talking about hundreds of people

working on terrorist groups.

Hezbollah, Aum Shinrikyo, communist groups, the Shining Path, you name it,

people are working on these issues.

We always do have to look at all of the possibility,

but, very quickly, we identify Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda is an Islamist terrorist organization which,

since the early 1990s,

has called for a holy war against the West,

an organization closely watched by the CIA,

and whose then leader and founder, Osama bin Laden,

a mega rich Saudi, was living underground in Afghanistan.

My name is Robert Grenier.

I was the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan

at the time of 9/11.

Where I had responsibility both for Afghanistan and for Pakistan.

It was on September 19th that we received a report

from a very well vetted agent.

He was well introduced within Al Qaeda, and he was with a

number of these fighters.

And bin Laden appeared.

He acknowledged that they were, in fact, responsible for the 9/11 attack.

And so we're going to have to respond to 9/11.

We're going to have to respond in a big way.

And that means destroying Al Qaeda, killing Osama bin Laden

and everybody around him.

Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime.

This group and its leader, a person named Osama bin Laden,

are linked to many other organizations in different countries.

The leadership of Al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and

supports the Taliban regime.

Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice

to our enemies, justice will be done.

One week after the attacks, George W. Bush announced that

America was at war, a war against terror,

without borders, with no time limit, and against anyone

who threatened the United States.

The first targets, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the fundamentalist

regime that ruled Afghanistan

with a fist of iron and was protecting Osama bin Laden.

George Bush says to his national security team,

"What are we going to do about this?"

And the head of the military says,

"We can have a plan in a few months."

And the CIA says, "We'll go tomorrow."

Cofor Black, then the head of counterterrorism,

brings a chart, a flip chart,

with pictures of bin Laden, al Zawahiri,

the known leadership of Al Qaeda.

And he's talking to the president, he's flipping this chart over,

and he says, "Bin Laden, dead!"

Throws away the picture.

"Zawahiri, dead!

There are going to be flies crawling across their eyeballs."

And George Bush loved this.

And so the war on terrorism against Al Qaeda

becomes a CIA operation from the start.

And it's after that briefing

that he goes out and tells the world,

"We're going to get Bin Laden dead or alive."

They used to put out there in the Old West a wanted poster.

It said, "Wanted, dead or alive." That's what we want.

On 9/11/2001, I was in Australia.

I was the CIA chief of station there.

Director George Tenet asked me if I would come back and

organize and lead the CIA

response against Al Qaeda into Afghanistan, and of course I said yes.

CIA paramilitary force at the time was incredibly small,

just a few dozen people.

One of my most important jobs was to recruit and build out what would be

a large support operation, and so that really was built from scratch

in a matter of days on the fly.

And fortunately, there was no lack of volunteers.

On the morning of 9/11, I was working on Afghans, actually,

and counterterrorism.

And my wife said, "You do realize you aren't going to

be working here for very long. You're going to end up in Afghanistan."

Director Tenet gave me very clear instructions.

"I want you to destroy the Taliban and capture or kill

any Al Qaeda that you can find."

J.R. Seeger and his team arrived in northern Afghanistan

to prepare the war.

But there were only eight of them.

They were among the first Americans to set foot on Afghan soil.

Their mission? To rally support among local factions opposed to the Taliban.

We went in on two helicopters. We basically looked like a

motorcycle gang with Kalashnikovs.

We didn't know how long we were going to be there.

So we brought what we could carry,

our laptops, some cameras, a small portable generator so

that we could generate power.

I had, like, one set of clothes and the rest in my bag was money.

Our job was to help the Afghans fight, to keep the Afghans

from fighting each other.

One of the ways to do that, one of the ways to lubricate

the relationship is through money.

I carried, in my bag, I carried a million dollars.

They bring in satchels of cash to do that and that becomes a

trend because we are making

alliances with warlords who have terrible human rights records,

but who don't like the Taliban.

And at that time, that was the main concern.

Who can help us figure out where the Taliban and Al Qaeda

are and wipe them out?

We've distributed maybe about three million dollars.

But at the end of the day, it's their fight.

They need to be the ones who are willing to liberate their own country.

The CIA team and their Afghan allies went on horseback into

the most remote parts of the country.

They were tracking Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

At the same time, the U.S. military was preparing to

massively bomb Afghanistan.

The CIA would take one last gamble to avoid war.

At the CIA, Bob Grenier believed that war would be a disaster

for all concerned, for the Americans and the Afghans.

And Grenier tried to come to a negotiated end

of the looming conflict.

What Bob was doing to engage with the Taliban was crucially

important because he needed

to find a way to determine if the Taliban would hand over

Al Qaeda, hand over bin Laden.

Robert Grenier knew he would have only one chance to convince

the Taliban to cooperate with the Americans.

An Afghan source would introduce him to Mullah Usmani,

the Taliban's second in command.

We sat down around a table.

So I said, "The Americans are going to come, the Americans are

going to attack you unless

you and I can find a way to avoid this."

And he said, "Look, this man, Bin Laden, we don't like him either.

We need to find a solution to this problem."

And he did something that was extraordinary.

I'd never seen this before.

He took off his turban and he put it on the table beside him.

And he said, "Tell me what I should do."

This was better than I could have hoped for.

Okay, good, good, we've got a common problem.

Let's find a solution.

So I said, "Okay, you have to make a public announcement.

"And you need to say, look, what bin Laden did is contrary to Islam.

"And then you, under your own recognizance,

"need to have your troops seize bin Laden

"and seize his key lieutenants,

"turn them quietly over to us."

And he got up out of his chair

and so I get up out of my chair, and he wrapped me in a big hug.

And so he said, "I'll do it. I'll do it."

I knew that the US military hostilities

were scheduled to begin.

And so I said, "Whatever action you're going to take,

"you need to do it very, very quickly

"and let me know what you're doing."

And so he said, "Okay, I will speak with you again."

Another day passed, and a day after that.

And it failed.

You know, the Taliban always said,

"The Americans have the watches, but we have the time."

And they knew from the outset

that one day the Americans would get tired and leave.

Bombs and bullets rained down on Al Qaeda positions

and the Taliban's military installations.

On the ground, Afghan factions allied to the Americans,

accompanied by the CIA, seized control of towns and cities

one by one, until finally taking the capital, Kabul,

two months after 9/11.

Kabul fell, to my surprise, within a day.

The only way to describe,

that I can give people a context,

if you've seen black and white video

from the liberation of Paris,

where the tanks are rolling in and the people are thrilled to see

the Allied forces arriving.

We actually had trouble getting through the crowds.

The Taliban, they just evaporated.

With the Taliban overthrown in a matter of weeks,

the next task was to flush out the man for whom this

war had been declared, Osama bin Laden.

The CIA set up camp in an old fortress in the north of the country.

There, J.R. Seeger's team interrogated prisoners who might be able

to put them on their enemy's tracks.

At the end of November, a Taliban leader came and said,

"We understand that we're losing.

We want to surrender to you guys with Al Qaeda fighters."

And they put them into an old fortress and housed

the Al Qaeda prisoners there.

And we were interrogating.

What is your name?

We had two officers there.

Mike Spann was one of them.

Mike Spann was part of the original Alpha team of eight of us.

And some of Al Qaeda fighters had taped pistols and hand

grenades to their chest and then

had wrapped that taped weapon with blood soaked bandages

so that it looked like they were wounded individuals.

And so when they decided to conduct the attack, Mike was down

inside the fortress and the gunfight ensued.

They responded and had a horrific fight for the next two days.

But when this was all going on, J.R. called me.

We tried to determine, is Mike alive?

But then someone in the Pentagon, in the press office,

made an announcement with no coordination with us

that this US citizen was missing, presumed dead.

Mike Spann's wife, Shannon Spann, was driving along the road.

She hears this radio announcement.

She pulls over and calls CIA headquarters.

And I remember telling Shannon that, yes, it was Mike.

There's a probability that he has been killed in action.

Mike was the first American casualty,

the first killed in Afghanistan in 2001.

In the lobby of CIA headquarters,

there's a memorial honoring the sacrifice made by its spies.

Each engraved star represents a member of the agency killed in action.

Mike Spann is now one of these stars.

48 CIA officers would die during this war.

In Afghanistan, the hunt for bin Laden was proving tougher than

bringing down the Taliban.

It took very few weeks for the key Taliban leadership to be

swept out of the way and

for Al Qaeda to go into exile, to flee to parts of the country

where they thought they might be safe,

eventually to the mountains of Tora Bora where they thought they might

be able to escape and some of the leaders eventually did.

We had a good understanding that the fallback was at Tora Bora

and then ultimately retreat to Pakistan.

So we understood that there was a likelihood

that if we did not capture or kill bin Laden

at Tora Bora or in the region, that he could escape.

Bin Laden had both assistance from the Taliban

and from elements inside the Pakistani government.

And that's how Bin Laden escaped us.

With the Taliban overthrown and Bin Laden in hiding,

the United States decided to stay in Afghanistan

to oversee regime change.

Tens of thousands of American soldiers were deployed,

as it was officially put, to establish democracy.

At the end of 2001,

Hamid Karzai was the CIA's choice

to be the new king of Afghanistan.

And everyone accepted that Hamid Karzai was America's man,

because he was the CIA's man.

He was one figure around whom we thought

general political support could be rallied inside Afghanistan.

And we, the CIA, clearly were very supportive of him.

It was a government fueled by and supported by the CIA's cash,

and corrupted by that cash.

We basically need, indeed, billions of dollars

to overcome the difficulties.

The reality is that the CIA conducts operations,

long term operations, all over the world and since forever.

So the fact that we were able to move so quickly after 9/11

was not because we were better or smarter

or anything like that.

It was that the resistance relationships we used in 2001

were relationships that we established in the 1980s

during the Soviet occupation.

Afghanistan had become familiar terrain

to the CIA during the Cold War.

When it faced off against its biggest enemy of the time,

the Soviet Union, the agency supported Afghan fighters

in repelling the Russian invasion.

American backing ended in late 1989

when a defeated USSR withdrew its troops from the country.

And at the end of the Cold War,

the CIA said, "Mission accomplished."

It all changes. The wall falls, the Soviet Union is dissolved,

and in the intelligence community,

there were serious questions

about whether or not we needed a CIA anymore.

The question then became, what is our mission now?

The agency's entire focus,

almost exclusively for 40 years,

was fighting this Soviet monolith.

Terrorism was just a very remote threat, a backwater of the CIA.

They were not prepared to certainly interdict or stop terrorist threats.

Then you had terrorist groups like Al Qaeda that grew up in the shadows.

And we, quite frankly, had very little understanding

and little awareness of a terrorist group like Al Qaeda.

And early in 1993, there's an attack on the World Trade Center.

Someone had driven a van with an explosive into the basement.

It blew up.

It was Al Qaeda.

It was the first time that the U.S. had been attacked on its

own soil since Pearl Harbor,

and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was just the beginning.

Five years later, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania

were hit by two simultaneous bomb attacks. 224 people were killed.

In October 2000, the warship USS Cole was struck by a suicide bomb attack.

17 U.S. Navy sailors died.

The CIA informed the authorities of the threat posed by this new enemy,

but its warnings went unheeded.

We start seeing these indicators of an Al Qaeda plot

being conceived and run out of Afghanistan that is big.

And I thought, okay, now we'll truly understand

we are at war.

We will get the authorities.

We will be able to go into Afghanistan and kill the enemy.

Tragically, that did not happen.

It wasn't acted upon

because the problem wasn't recognized at higher levels.

It wasn't recognized at senior leadership levels

and certainly not at political levels until much later.

So yeah, it was in some ways kind of shouting into the wind.

No one believes us.

I even had one colleague tell me

that I was turning bin Laden into a boogeyman

and I see bin Laden everywhere, every turn.

The CIA wasn't alone in hunting down Al Qaeda.

The U.S.'s counterintelligence agency, the FBI,

was also tasked with investigating overseas

whenever American citizens were involved.

My name is Ali Soufan.

During that time, I was working for the FBI.

And I always thought that CIA and FBI,

we were on the same team.

But I was wrong.

During its investigation into the attack on the USS Cole,

the FBI discovered Al Qaeda would be holding a top secret

meeting in Malaysia.

Unfortunately, we did not know anything about that meeting.

We asked our colleagues in the intelligence community,

"Do you know anything about a meeting in Southeast Asia?"

"Nope. No. We don't know what you're talking about."

So we start doing our own investigation,

checking phone numbers, calls.

We came up to identify phone numbers in Malaysia and in

Bangkok that were involved during that meeting.

"Do you know anything about these numbers?"

"We have no idea what you're talking about."

Please raise your right hand and repeat after me.

I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear.

I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear.

Now we have a new president.

The office of President of the United States.

The new president, George W. Bush, takes office in January of 2001

and at one point that spring in April,

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says,

"The United States faces no strategic threats in this world."

You know, it's spring, summer, early summer of 2001,

and seeing that same set of,

similar set of indicators of something brewing

in Afghanistan where Al Qaeda is headquartered.

That summer, George Tenet,

the CIA director, goes to the White House and he says,

"Al Qaeda is going to attack."

And the president doesn't take this seriously at all.

We're sending requests, we're asking questions,

and we were told, "We have no idea what you guys are talking about."

9/11 happens.

9/12, I was handed a folder.

In that folder were answers to all the questions we've been asking.

In this folder we realized two people who were in this

meeting in Malaysia were among the 9/11 hijackers.

They were on the planes that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Some people in our own government decided

to keep the FBI totally in the dark.

Yeah, that's correct.

That report was not shared.

So I think if we'd have done that, you know,

what might have transpired, I don't know.

So it was shocking.

And at the time, I left the secure room.

I went to the restroom and I, yep, I vomited. I threw up.

Unfortunately, the lack of action

led to the most horrific terrorist attack in history.

9/11 was the greatest intelligence failure in American history.

And so, what can you do?

You can't turn the clock back.

The inter agency war, which led the CIA to not sharing

crucial intel with the FBI, had drastic consequences.

But some among the president's inner circle would take

advantage of the tragedy to settle old scores.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Vice President

Dick Cheney and Secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld,

urged George W. Bush to take it out on Iraq.

What if the War on Terror were an opportunity to overthrow an

adversary who had resisted

the U.S. since the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein?

At the end of 2001, George Bush washed his hands of

Afghanistan and pivoted to Iraq.

And I can't remember exactly when, but early on, it was clear

that the administration's focus

had shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq.

Now the real bad guy is Saddam Hussein,

so we have to go and take care of him.

The Bush administration, they suddenly were very interested in

any threat information on Iraq and on Saddam.

I first heard about Iraq sometime in the fall of 2001.

It was posed as a question, you know, could they have an

alliance with Al Qaeda?

And I remember dismissing that out of hand because there was

simply no intelligence that indicated that.

The evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein

is almost non existent.

They really had nothing linking Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Then there's this supposition that because Saddam Hussein

was building weapons of mass destruction during the first Gulf War,

he must still be building these weapons in 2001.

We do know that Saddam Hussein had the intent and the capabilities

to cause great harm.

We know he was a danger, and we want to look at that.

The CIA is assigned to find out what is Saddam's arsenal

of weapons of mass destruction.

We had very little understanding of Iraq's weapons program.

We didn't know what was going on in Iraq.

We can look at satellite imagery, but we were very convinced

ourselves that if he hasn't done reconstituted programs,

he's doing it right now.

He's definitely doing this.

Most CIA analysts are convinced that Iraq probably has

a chemical weapons program.

They must have a program, because they did in the past.

And the spotlight was on what were we going to do.

CIA spies were sent in to trace all kinds of weapons of mass

destruction, be they chemical, biological, or even nuclear.

The teams on the ground inside Iraq were collecting all the

information that we could.

Up until that time, CIA had really seen no clear evidence.

The reality is that there was nothing, but we believed it.

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent.

Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions,

politely putting us on notice before they strike?

Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein

is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

The CIA's analysts for weapons of mass destruction are working

under the belief that it really

doesn't matter what the intelligence says, Bush is going to war.

George Bush tells Colin Powell, his Secretary of State,

that he, Powell, is going to have

to sell the case for war to the United Nations and to the world.

They ask Colin Powell, this sort of respected elder statesman

and military veteran, to try

to make the case for an invasion of Iraq, but Colin Powell has his doubts.

Powell was in a, what I will call, a perplexed state about what to do next.

As I remember, he came back from that meeting and one of the

first things he did when he got back to his office,

we had adjoining offices, and he said,

"I'm going to go to the United Nations

"and present the case for war with respect to Iraq.

"The reason I'm going is because they're putting me out as the

"person who is most influential with the American people.

"My poll ratings are roughly the same as Mother Teresa,

"somewhere around 71, 72 percent with the American people.

They're unprecedented."

And I looked at him and I said, "Okay, you're going when?"

He said, "Well, it's scheduled right now for the first week in February."

Ugh. It was the 29th of January, as I recall.

I said, "Wow, that's a really short fuse."

And he said, "Yep, and you're going to be in charge of putting

the presentation together."

Right there, I should have resigned.

Colin Powell came to the CIA, he came every day after work for

a week or a long weekend

sitting down with the analysts going over what he was going

to say to the world and as he should,

he tried to pin down all the sources, make sure it was correct,

that he wasn't overstating the case,

but ultimately he was lied to.

Then I find out, when we get to Langley, that George Tenet

will only put two analysts from

the 3,500 or so analysts that the CIA has

in front of me and in front of Powell.

I should have realized right away that this was a cooked

presentation, absolutely cooked.

George Tenet, the CIA director, keeps away from this meeting

CIA analysts who have voiced doubt,

CIA operations officers who have voiced doubt about the case for WMD.

He's stifling dissent.

And that is not the job description of the CIA director.

Colin Powell arrived in New York where he had the job of obtaining

the backing of the international community.

Despite hours and hours listening to CIA personnel,

he still had doubts about the presentation

that he had to give to the United Nations.

He wasn't opposed to war and was convinced

that Saddam Hussein was hiding things.

But what about inside his own government?

What if he was being manipulated?

Powell, the good soldier, decided to do his duty,

but on one condition.

There was the most dramatic moment in the cafeteria

when Powell reached the end for the first time

in all the rehearsals we had had,

first time without interruption.

And as he's wrapping up his final comments

about it being too long and such,

he says to George Tenet, "You stand by every word?"

Tenet said, "Yes."

And then Powell said, "Good.

You're gonna be sitting right behind me, in camera."

That came as somewhat of a shock

because you don't put the CIA director on camera.

And yet, you look at that presentation

for over an hour and a half,

there's George Tenet looking at you in the presentation.

But that was Powell's way of saying,

I think you're gonna share the blame with me.

The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the

threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world.

My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by

sources, solid sources.

These are not assertions.

What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based

on solid intelligence.

I remember, like most everybody else in the CIA,

watching Colin Powell's speech at the

United Nations with George Tenet sitting behind him

and I remember thinking he better be right

because he's really putting his entire historical reputation

on the line for this.

Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with

you what we know from eyewitness accounts,

we have first hand descriptions of biological

weapons factories on wheels and on rails.

The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who

supervised one of these facilities.

The supposition that Saddam has biological weapons that come

from an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball.

Yeah, Curveball.

And I was watching this on TV at CIA headquarters.

I said, "What the hell?"

How, wait, what?

That I have identified as Saddam Hussein's contempt

for the will of this council.

His contempt for the truth.

I mean that, I went back to my desk after watching that

and I just felt nauseous.

It was clear we were going to invade Iraq on false pretenses.

At the UN, few members believe the United States' arguments.

France and Russia even threatened to use their veto.

Washington decided to do without a vote

and go to war regardless, with only a handful of allies

and no support from the UN or the international community.

That are represented by this body.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Is it disappointing? Yeah.

Is it frustrating? Absolutely.

But it's not the job of the Central Intelligence Agency

to persuade our policymaker of one thing or another.

And so the war begins.