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By CHRIS WHIPPLE - November 12, 2015
âThe Attacks Will Be Spectacularâ
An exclusive look at how the Bush administration ignored this warning from the CIA months before 9/11, along with others that were far more detailed than previously revealed.
Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.â The CIAâs famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.
By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIAâs counterterrorism center, âit was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.â âThere were real plots being manifested,â Coferâs former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. âThe world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.â The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.
But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly in such detail until nowâor been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.
The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called âthe Blue Sky paperâ to Bushâs new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threatââgetting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.â âAnd the word back,â says Tenet, ââwas âweâre not quite ready to consider this. We donât want the clock to start ticking.ââ (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that theyâd been warned.) Black, a charismatic ex-operative who had helped the French arrest the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, says the Bush team just didnât get the new threat: âI think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-leftiesâthey drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.â
MORE: How the Bush administration ignored a significant warning from the CIA months before 9/11
Well, this certainly won't help Jeb Bush.
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