True Spies Classic: Blinking Red | CIA
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Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back. You're joining us as we venture into the vaults to revisit some of your favorite episodes from our collection. We hope you enjoy this classic True Spies rendezvous. We think it's well worth catching up with. This is True Spies, the classics, from Spyscape Studios. Incoming transmission. Moving, moving, moving.

Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. You go into 2001, we're seeing this system blinking red. And from what we're seeing, that system blinking red is saying there's going to be attack in the United States. This is True Spies. Episode 22, Blinking Red. It's shortly before midnight in Washington, D.C. May the 1st, 2011. Unusually late for the president to be addressing the nation.

But what Barack Obama has to say can't wait. Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda. It was almost 10 years since the world had watched in horror as aircraft hijacked by al-Qaeda had brought the Twin Towers in New York crashing to Earth.

More than 13 years since al-Qaeda had issued a fatwa declaring a holy war on America and Americans, and almost 18 years since a young State Department intelligence official had first identified Osama bin Laden as a potential threat to the United States. My name is Gina Bennett, and what I do is a very complicated question. This is Gina Bennett's story.

Well, bits of it. Because there's a lot she can't say. I, for the most part, am a counterterrorism analyst in the U.S. intelligence community. I work for the CIA. I do mostly dissection of terrorist plots and targeting of facilities and people. Gina is too modest to add that there are a few people in her field in the CIA more senior than her.

She's been with the Agency for more than 20 years and encountered terrorism more than 30. And if there are few people senior to her, there are even fewer women. You'll hear a lot today about plots and bombs, and how with great skill and a certain measure of luck you may be able to stop them. You'll hear about the painstaking business of joining the dots, how you learn to spot the suspicious concealed within the mundane.

And you'll hear how it is to be a woman in what is still mostly a man's world. I found a job as a terrorism watch officer at the Department of State in their 24-hour intelligence watch office where information from around the world comes in instantly and you have to warn Secretary of State and talk to White House and things like that. So it was a very exciting place to begin a career at the age of 21.

The Cold War was nearly over, the Soviet Union about to collapse. Gina took a special interest in the Middle East. And in one short classified report, she included the name of a certain Saudi businessman living in Sudan. So in 1993, I wrote an article called The Wandering Mujahideen, Armed and Dangerous.

Gina was interested in the fallout from the 10-year war fought by insurgents in Afghanistan against their Soviet occupiers. In that, I wrote, among private donors to the new generation, Osama bin Laden is particularly famous for his religious zeal and financial largesse. Bin Laden's money has enabled hundreds of Arab veterans to return to safe havens and bases in Yemen and Sudan, where they are training new fighters.

Osama bin Laden. I'm sure you hadn't heard of him in 1993. Nobody had. Let's go back briefly. Afghanistan had been invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. For 10 years, a combination of local fighters and overseas volunteers who became known as the Mujahideen, all generously funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia, resisted the occupying forces. Eventually, in 1989, the Soviet troops withdrew.

By 1993, when Gina wrote her piece, Afghanistan was in the depths of a civil war and the foreign Mujahideen had mostly left. But Gina was seeing red flags. Her article argued there were perceptions that U.S. foreign policy was anti-Islamic

And this raised the likelihood of U.S. interests becoming targets for violence from these Mujahideen veterans. From my perspective, it was unmistakable when you started seeing young men showing up wearing Afghan, traditional Afghan garb in places like Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt and Sudan and Yemen and Egypt.

As far as the Philippines and Malaysia and Thailand, I mean, it was pretty clear too from those early days that they had a certain cachet because they had fought in Afghanistan and the Soviet Union had pulled out. During the 1980s, dozens of training camps had been set up in Afghanistan for these young fighters. Bin Laden himself built one, thanks to the work of people like Gina. We now know he had been an enthusiastic recruiter.

And he was successful. Fighting the Soviet infidel was clearly an attractive proposition. There was this one person who just kept coming up. His name back then was Abu Abdullah, which is just one of Osama bin Laden's many names. So when you see the same name repeated over and over again, as someone who is a facilitator, is a patron, a financier,

You got to figure out who that person is, right? That can't be coincidental. There's something going on. So that's really how I was piecing it together. Gina Bennett was the first person within the U.S. intelligence community, and therefore probably the first person in the world, to identify Osama bin Laden as someone the United States needed to watch. Her analysis has stood the test of time.

In concluding her 1993 report, she wrote this. U.S. support of the Mujahideen during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect U.S. interests from attack. And this. Afghan war veterans scattered throughout the world could surprise the U.S. with violence in unexpected locales.

But back in the early 90s, Afghanistan was no longer a U.S. foreign policy priority. Attention had shifted. A space had opened up. Precisely the kind of space that Gina and her counterterrorism colleagues fill. Our role is not to track with the rest of the national security apparatus. It's to look where everybody else isn't looking and to be aware and warn where other people aren't seeing the problems. Is this something you could do?

Do you have the patience, the resilience, the attention to detail, the confidence that somewhere in that haystack, there really is a needle? I used to just draw things on massive big pieces of paper, you know, where we heard something here, where we heard something there, and just start to see the picture of it. I'm a very visual thinker, and so I like to see things pictured on a map or, you know, some kind of flow. It's like...

Gina had other demands on her attention.

She was pregnant and she went into labor early in February 1993. Her article wasn't quite finished. I was lying in my hospital bed in an enormous amount of pain and my phone was ringing and I just wanted it to stop and nobody else was in my room so I picked it up.

And when I answered the phone and I was like, hello, my boss on the other end is yelling, your people did this, your people did this. And I had no idea what she was talking about. So I turn on the news and I saw the attack in New York and on the World Trade Center. It's an event that's largely forgotten now. It's been eclipsed by the enormity of 9-11.

But eight years before those two planes slammed into the World Trade Center, someone else had tried to bring the towers down. The name by which he's commonly known is Ramzi Youssef. On the 26th of February 1993, Ramzi Youssef and his accomplices parked a ammonium nitrate, I think the bomb was, laden inside, you know, like tons laden inside a truck, like a delivery truck that they had rented.

In a parking garage of World Trade Center 1, their plan was for the bomb to go off in the parking garage in just such a place that the garage would collapse and, you know, that would then break the structure above and so on with this idea that you would eventually get the building to topple over onto the other tower. And the other tower would come down too.

The very idea seemed fantastical in 1993. We know better today. Ramzi Youssef failed to bring the buildings down. But he did blast a huge crater in the North Tower, killing six people and injuring hundreds more. Final proof that the U.S. had a new enemy. We just had no idea that they were ready to strike so soon in the United States.

The counterterrorism teams began to dig. Their job not to solve this crime, but to prevent the next one. Yeah, well, Ramzi Youssef, of course, you know, as of 1993, when the World Trade Center bombing occurred, we didn't know a lot of his history. And that took some time to piece together, to understand who he was, where he had been, why he did what he did, who his broader network was.

You probably won't be surprised by now to hear that Ramzi Youssef had learned how to make bombs in Afghanistan. Getting the kind of training that you need to be part of an underground militant violent movement is invaluable. So knowing that Ramzi Youssef had been in a camp where he could receive not just bomb making training, but that kind of how do you live underground? How do you change your name? You know, just the clandestine tradecraft.

makes it a little bit more challenging because now you know some of the things that he knows how to do. Ramzi Youssef had big ideas. He had his eye on a number of other targets to include the Pope and Benazir Bhutto. Youssef had flown home to Pakistan the very same day that his truck bomb had ripped through the World Trade Center. He traveled a lot over the next couple of years. Destinations included Afghanistan, Thailand, and the Philippines.

And in the Philippines, he began to make plans. Plans to bring down planes. And, you know, a lot of what he was doing there was really experimenting with bomb-making materials. Ramzi Youssef wanted to design a bomb that could be assembled by someone after they were on board, rather than having to smuggle the finished article past security. He did a trial run on a flight out of Manila, bound for Tokyo. On the first leg, he left a device under his seat.

and then got off at a stopover. The bomb went off after the plane had taken off again, killing the man who'd taken his place, but miraculously, no one else. In the knowledge that it was possible to put a bomb together mid-air, Ramsey set the next plan in motion. He called it Bojinka. The Bojinka plot was to bring down 11 airliners traveling across the Pacific Ocean, again using this

nitrocellulose-based explosive device that Ramzi Youssef was creating while he was in the Philippines and had tested to a limited degree. A plan to bring down 11 airliners midair almost seven years before 9/11. Spooky, no? We know all this because in late December 1994, there was a fire in the apartment Ramzi Youssef had rented in Manila. The police recovered a computer hard drive that contained all the details.

They also learned that among Ramzi Youssef's accomplices in this plot to blow airplanes out of the sky was a man called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was actually Ramzi Youssef's uncle and the man who later acquired notoriety as the mastermind of 9-11. So, yeah, I think we were getting a preview with the Bojinka plot of what was to come. Ramzi Youssef's career as an international terrorist was nearing its conclusion.

It was brought to an end by a fellow plotter, a man called Ishtiaq Parker. Frustrated apparently by the loss of his hard drive, Ramsay had resorted to less refined methods. He met Parker in Bangkok and supplied him with two suitcases filled with explosives and told him to check them onto two separate flights to the United States.

But when he went to the airport, he just was struck by the number of families that were wandering around, hugging each other. You know, people saying goodbye to their loved ones or embracing their family with a great big hello. You know, you made it safely. I'm so happy to see you. And the idea of doing that to people, he just...

you know, lost his nerve. So he went back to Ramzi Youssef and he said, look, there's a lot of security at the airport. I couldn't get through. This is just not the right day to do this. Within a few days, Ramzi Youssef would be under lock and key. Parker had decided to turn him in. There was a $2 million bounty on Youssef's head. By now, the two men were back in Pakistan. Parker walked into the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and told agents there where they could find the World Trade Center bomber.

Rabzi Youssef was arrested at his guesthouse on February the 7th, 1995. As a longtime foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots of places, but nowhere as important to the world as China. I'm Jane Perlez, former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times.

On Face Off, the US versus China will explore what's critical to this important global relationship. I do see a potential Nobel Prize, Peace Prize for Trump. It sounds so ridiculous because we are in a Cold War. If we can't end

Back at the State Department, Gina Bennett still had her eyes on Osama bin Laden.

He'd been living in Sudan, but in 1996, his reputation as a troublemaker had become an embarrassment to the government there. The Taliban, who were now in control of most of Afghanistan, had offered him shelter. In 1996, I wrote a bit more about bin Laden in a memo in which I said, Afghanistan may be an ideal haven as long as bin Laden can continue to run his businesses and financial networks.

His prolonged stay in Afghanistan, where hundreds of Arab mujahideen received terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate, could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum. There had been other bomb attacks. One at a housing complex in Saudi Arabia had killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel.

The presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam, was particularly offensive to bin Laden. It seems likely now that al-Qaeda was not responsible for this, but Gina's memo described bin Laden nonetheless as an increasingly confident militant leader and a man emboldened by recent events, whether or not he was involved in them, and she underscored the danger he represented.

Even a bin Laden on the move can retain the capability to support individuals and groups who have the motive and the wherewithal to attack U.S. interests almost worldwide. Gina's prescience is remarkable. In early 1998, bin Laden was one of the five signatories of a fatwa published by an Arabic newspaper based in London.

The fatwa said that it was the individual duty of all Muslims to kill Americans in any country in which it was possible to do so. And then on August 7th, 1998, there were near simultaneous explosions outside the US embassies in Nairobi in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. More than 200 people were killed and several thousand injured. Finally, Osama bin Laden had the attention he was after.

A name once buried in classified State Department memos was now on the front page of the world's newspapers. Bin Laden, hidden away in Afghanistan, continued to make plans. He's feeling pretty secure, you know, and stable in that environment. That gives you time to do training, to plot, undisturbed. Gina and her colleagues had understood that al-Qaeda operated in two ways —

It carried out its own operations, but it also sponsored other groups in their individual endeavors. So we used to refer to this as, you know, bottom-up versus top-down plotting. Top-down being, you know, Al-Qaeda commanded, conceptualized, ordered, facilitated, supported, etc. Bottom-up being other groups with, you know, like-minded agendas, etc.

wanting to get a little bit of that Al-Qaeda largesse. There are certain things you look out for in terms of, is it a top-down? You know, it's where's the information coming from? Who is purportedly saying it or doing it? Just a lot of, you know, what most people would probably consider subtle indicators. For us are serious lights blinking red. By now, it was 1999. The new millennium was approaching.

And the press was full of dire predictions about Y2K, the computer bug that was supposedly going to bring the world to a standstill as 1999 turned into 2000. But the CIA, which is where Gina was now working, had a rather different focus.

We're beginning to understand that Bin Laden's group sees the millennial celebrations that are being planned all around the world as the celebration of the 2000th year of the birth of Christ, which wasn't immediately what we were thinking, you know, because we're thinking of it much more from a secular perspective. But that's the conclusion they drew. And, you know, by understanding

Understanding that, it began to make a little bit more sense, but it just looked like, look, they're planning these great big huge celebrations, let's do something spectacular. We're seeing them and we're like, oh, the system is blinking red. We are seeing top-down activity. We were absolutely convinced there was an Al-Qaeda-directed plot underway and looking closer and closer to fruition. And of course, our concern was that

Some of those millennial celebrations were going to look like fireworks and turn into explosions. So the lights are blinking. November is turning into December. Just a month to go. 6,000 miles from Washington, in Amman, the capital of Jordan, intelligence staff intercept a phone call from someone they know to be al-Qaeda. One phrase leaps out. The grooms are ready for the big wedding. It's al-Qaeda code.

The Jordanians are a step ahead of the terrorists and make a number of arrests. It becomes clear that the Radisson Hotel in downtown Amman was the target, a venue likely to be packed with Westerners as the fireworks went off. So that's one disaster averted. In the U.S., they breathe a sigh of relief, but they remain on high alert. With this very alert, vigilant alarm system, we are looking for

any indication of movement of suspected individuals, terrorists, just anything unusual, really. And, you know, vigilance is a really important thing, and a lot of people don't understand, you know, how you notice the anomaly, but when people are trained to notice the anomaly, they're golden. On December the 14th, a man drives off a Canadian ferry that's just docked at Port Angeles, a place few will have heard of in the American Northwest.

And there's just something about him. He's monosyllabic when asked where he's going. And the answer, Seattle, doesn't really make sense. If you start your trip on the Canadian mainland, why not drive straight there? Why the roundabout trip that would involve a total of three ferries? It was a female customs officer who noticed he was acting suspiciously.

And that's the kind of vigilance I'm talking about. It's like you can never let down your guard. She notices his behavior and finds it very unusual. She persuades the man to step out of the car and open the trunk. The space that usually holds the spare wheel is stuffed with bags of white powder. Another officer has hold of the driver. He can see that he's in big trouble, so he shrugs his coat off.

leaving it in the officer's hand and takes off. He makes it a couple of blocks. The officer's in hot pursuit. He hides under a parked car, but they find him so he takes off again. And then he tries to force his way into a car waiting at a traffic light. The customs officers take him down. The driver's name is Ahmed Rassam.

He's from Algeria, but he's been living in Montreal for the past five years. And he's been, yes, that's right, he's been to Afghanistan, to a training camp, to the same camp, in fact, where Ramzi Youssef had learned how to make bombs. The white powder is urea, a type of fertilizer. Ahmed Rassam is carrying the makings of a large bomb. He's also got a reservation for a hotel in downtown Seattle, not far from the Space Needle, Seattle's most recognizable landmark.

The mayor of Seattle cancels the city's impending millennium celebrations. He doesn't want fireworks turning into explosives. The true target doesn't emerge for several months. LAX, the airport in Los Angeles. That's where Al-Qaeda had been planning to celebrate the millennium.

because a customs officer in Port Angeles was on her guard, the people of Los Angeles were able to fly safely over the holiday. So, you know, you have this combination in many ways of vigilance, you know, being triggered,

by this individual who fits this whole profile of what we think a top-down attack by al-Qaeda might be. You know, that's pretty spectacular. Los Angeles, car bomb, Algerian, like it all matched. So the Jordanians had crashed the big wedding. The Americans had put paid to the LAX attack. Tempting at this point, perhaps, to go and watch the fireworks yourself. But just remember who your enemy is. They don't stop.

So neither can you. You know, you're seeing two very different plots. And at the same time, as we get closer and closer to the millennium, despite the disruption of both of these, it doesn't look like the system is not blinking red anymore. I mean, they still this still looks like a top down plot is being planned. So you begin to get this horrible sensation as December 31st approaches that you still haven't disrupted it.

And that's really the panic situation that we were in that last week of December was, we haven't stopped this. And then the turn of the year comes and goes. And nothing happens. A few days into the new millennium, President Clinton's National Security Advisor commends U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Just because we dodged a bullet doesn't mean there was no bullet to dodge, he said.

Terrorist cells were disrupted in eight countries in the last weeks of 1999. It was, he says, the largest U.S. counterterrorism operation in history. And she's too modest to take any credit, but Gina was right at the center of this effort. Although, ironically, successfully preventing terrorist attacks creates other problems. So here we are, working around the clock, trying to piece together the little bits of data. And then...

January 1st comes around and nothing happens. Nothing happens. And nothing happened the next day or the next day or the next day. And as the months go on and nothing happens, you start to realize that a lot of people, not just in this country, but around the world and, you know, intelligence services or security services around the world think that you are a little obsessed with bin Laden.

I had one former U.S. person actually tell me that we were like children thinking that he was the boogeyman. And, you know, it's frustrating. Obviously, you don't want terrorism to occur, but it's also so hard to persuade people that your vigilance is valid, that it's there for a reason and we're not the boy crying wolf.

It must be tough to carry on when everyone's pointing the finger and saying, "Really? Are you sure? Come on, live a little." And by everyone, I mean everyone. As the 9/11 Commission would later report, analysts within the CIA's bin Laden unit felt they were viewed as alarmists. Even within the CIA, it would be easier to give up, wouldn't it? Move on to the next target, find the next threat?

Or do you follow your gut and carry on chasing the ghost? What would you do? While Gina, as you would have probably gathered by now, is no quitter. She just got on with her job. And it wasn't long before Al-Qaeda found their next American target. Not in the U.S. itself, but on the other side of the world. Docked at the Yemeni port of Aden. A ship. The guided missile destroyer USS Cole.

In October of 2000, a small al-Qaeda cell from the Yemen area put a shaped charge in a small motorboat, like a plastic explosive type, in the hull of this fiberglass, small little fiberglass dinghy, and sped it out to the USS Cole. But Cole had stopped to refuel. She was due to be alongside for only four hours.

Below deck, sailors were lining up for lunch. And they rammed their little dinghy right into the side of the coal and it, of course, exploded. Blew open a hole in the ship, killed sailors, injured others. 17 crew members died. Another 39 were injured. The bombers had blown a huge hole in the side of the ship. In the words of one writer, it was left gaping open like a gutted animal.

What clearer illustration of the challenge that confronts a counter-terrorism analyst? And what clearer symbol of the vulnerability of a superpower, a multi-million dollar fighting machine bristling with weaponry and missile tracking devices, brought to its knees by two men in a dinghy with a homemade bomb? There's an intriguing postscript to the attack on the coal, because the subsequent investigation threw up some unexpected vindication for Gina and her colleagues.

Remember the system blinking red as the millennium approached? We're able to piece together that the actual millennial plot, the top-down plot, was in fact an al-Qaeda leadership-driven plan.

to use that same type of attack with the small watercraft, you know, laden with explosives to slam into a ship that was due to be in the port in Aden the week of the millennium. The target at the beginning of the year had been a different guided missile destroyer, USS The Sullivans, which had docked at Aden over the millennium period.

The would-be bombers had, however, got their sums wrong. They got the weight distribution wrong and they ended up, the little dinghy sank, so they weren't able to conduct the attack. This initial attempt to attack a United States warship was laughably incompetent. On discovering their boat wouldn't float, the would-be suicide bombers simply abandoned it. Five young locals out for some early morning fishing found it the following day. They couldn't believe their luck.

Atop of the range, outboard motor was there for the taking. It was heavy and they dropped it as they manhandled it onto the beach. And there was what looked like bricks of hashish stuffed inside the boat. They started throwing those around too until two men turned up in a truck and told them to stop. It was their boat and they wanted their motor back. Finders keepers, said the boys. It's ours now. There was some negotiation and eventually the youngsters agreed to give up their bounty. The hashish, of course, was explosive.

But before you laugh too loudly, you should know this. The two men who got it so badly wrong at the beginning of the year refined their method. And by the time the USS Cole tied up in Aden, they knew exactly what they needed to do. That took some time to piece together what that was all about and how it happened, who did it. And by the time you're figuring out those pieces, which are important, right? Because you're constantly looking at what's next. You know, what are they planning next?

So that's where our mind was going as we went into 2001, where again, by late spring, early summer, we're seeing that system blinking red again. But even now, even after the embassy bombings in East Africa, even after the attack on USS Cole, the counterterrorism experts had what Gina calls a cry wolf problem.

We had told the world, including the U.S., that the system was blinking red in 1999 and nothing happened. At the same time, we're seeing this system blinking red. And from what we're seeing, that system blinking red is saying in the United States, there's going to be attack in the United States, not just against U.S. interests. But the security community was divided. There was a body of opinion that believed al-Qaeda would from now on attack only military targets.

Many of those who died at the embassy bombings in 1998 had been Muslim, and bin Laden had been severely criticized for that by Muslims. There was a view that if al-Qaeda wanted to continue to attract finance, it had to stop killing civilians, American or not. So you have that. You have others who feel like we just are obsessed with bin Laden and are afraid of him, and so we really can't be trusted to be objective about when there's a threat and when there's not a threat.

You have this, you know, profound fatigue, really, among security apparatuses around the world with the United States saying, hey, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda. So it's a really tough battle. And then, of course, we have a new president at the time who isn't really read into any of this at this point. So it was a really difficult time to convince anybody that there was a real threat there.

You'll have your own memories of September the 11th, the day two passenger aircraft reduced the twin towers of the World Trade Center to a pile of dust and rubble. When a third plane tore a section out of the Pentagon building. When a small group of defiant passengers forced the hijackers of a fourth plane to crash in a field in Pennsylvania. When the counterterrorism community's worst fears were realized. God, it was a beautiful day. It was one of those rare moments

early fall kind of days in Virginia where the sky was crystal blue and the air was not humid. It wasn't cold, but it was just crisp and clean. You could almost smell fall coming and it was just glorious. And I remember my colleague and I were talking about the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud in Afghanistan. Massoud was an important player in Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, he was one of the leading Mujahideen commanders in the fight against Soviet occupation. By 2001, he was the only one still fighting the Taliban. And then, on September 9th, just two days before 9/11, he was killed in a suicide attack.

There's no question we had a sense of doom because of that. It was hard for us to believe that was a random thing. In other words, we believed al-Qaeda had successfully committed an assassination against one of the key former party leaders of the Afghan Mujahideen, who also happened to be our closest working partner in Afghanistan. So...

It was really hard not to feel like the other shoe was about to drop. So it's a beautiful day in Virginia. And, you know, the first thing you do as a warning analyst when you get to work is...

Start reading everything that has happened in the 12 hours that you've been gone or however many hours, eight hours, whatever it's been. So, you know, the morning is mostly just taking in information and trying to sort out which of it you have to pay attention to in the next hour or two or, you know, next day, whatever. And then shortly before nine in the morning...

There are reports of an aircraft flying into the North Tower, the World Trade Center. Now, at the time, it was like everyone knows, it was considered a collision. You know, there was no indication at the moment that it was intentional. So we are all trying to figure out how that could possibly happen. And then the next plane hits the South Tower just 17 minutes later.

And Gina understands immediately what's happening. You can't see that and think that was a coincidence. I mean, it's just not possible. So it's in that moment when we see the other plane hit that we realize exactly what this is. There's nobody in the counterterrorist center at that moment who didn't know what this was. This was the plot. This was the system blinking red. This was the attack. I mean, I did not see the first plane hit.

Because I was, you know, at my desk already plowing through my material for the day. But when the second plane flies straight into that building, I mean, I couldn't help but think about Ramza Yusuf. And there was just no way there was any other explanation. And this is what they have wanted. This is what they have been trying to do since, you know, 1993.

So, you know, we immediately go to what we have to do. We know what we have to do. Nobody has to ask us. We know immediately. You got to figure out who else, where else, what's next. Start building the case of, you know, who it was, how they did it. I mean, it's just gather, gather, gather again, those dots, those fragments of information. Because, you know, from our perspective, it's not about who done it. It's about what's next and how do we stop it?

It took the United States nearly 10 years to stop Osama bin Laden. They tracked him down to a house in a sleepy town in northern Pakistan and sent a team of Navy SEALs and Black Hawk helicopters to kill him. They took the body with them and buried it quietly at sea. Did Gina Bennett help to pinpoint the high-water compound in Abbottabad in which bin Laden was eventually run to ground? We'll never know. But when President Obama addressed the American people at that unusual hour of the night...

Gina and her colleagues got a special mention. Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who've worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice. I was in bed. I was asleep when Osama bin Laden was killed. And my son, my second son, woke me up.

and just said, congratulations, mom. I had no idea what he was talking about. And I went downstairs and I watched the president on the news like so many other Americans. And I didn't feel what I think what a lot of people think that you should feel at that particular moment. I wasn't elated or relieved or anything. I felt disappointed. I felt, I guess I had just wished that we could have ignored him

Gina's disappointment evokes the recommendation made once by a British prime minister, that of starving terrorists of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend. Gina agrees with her. You know, I'm of the belief that the one thing you can rob terrorists of is their influence. You can't stop them from attacking, but you can make it insignificant. And that bothers them even more because ultimately they're all narcissists.

And I remember the next day when I was chatting with a fellow targeter of mine who was elsewhere in the world. So we were chatting online and she's like, hey, this is a really bad day for Al Qaeda. And I said, well, yeah, it's a bad day, but it's not the worst day. And I mean, that was kind of unfathomable for somebody to say, you know, bin Laden had just been killed and it wasn't the worst day for Al Qaeda. And she's like, what are you talking about? Like, what's worse than this?

So this was a young 20-something-year-old, and I said, well, let me ask you this. Have you ever heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang? And she was like, no. And I was like, okay. Well, when one counterterrorism officer says to another counterterrorism officer in the United States, hey, have you ever heard of bin Laden? And that person says, no, that's the worst day for al-Qaeda, when they're no longer remembered. Gina is proud of what she's done, most of it she can't talk about.

But without her work, there would be no doubt to have been more embassy bombings, other USS Coles. Gina is also the mother of five children, the first born within days of the first attack on the World Trade Center. The last with the US deeply involved in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the middle of giving birth to her youngest child, Gina was simultaneously briefing National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the latest state of play.

In the 1980s and really through much of the 1990s, to be honest, most folks in counterterrorism in the intelligence community, certainly in foreign policy, Department of State and elsewhere, military, defense, they were men. Counterterrorism especially seemed to draw a lot from former military ranks, which again was naturally mostly men at that time too. Still is.

Which means that Gina has spent much of her career battling for recognition. I don't think I ever felt like I was taken seriously, not those first five to ten years. It wasn't really until I was older that I realized it wasn't just that I was a young person, it was also that I was a woman. And that became a little bit clearer as I started to gain that expertise over the course of years and still felt like I wasn't being taken seriously. Counterterrorism, or CT as Gina calls it,

isn't quite the man's world in the 21st century that it once was. She is one of the women responsible for that. But she's not alone. The band of sisters is one phrase that's been coined to describe them.

If you ask Gina about this, you better be ready for her answer. So there's a lot of names out there for the women in the CT community, the band of sisters, sisterhood, lots of different names. The bottom line is we do feel ourselves to be special, different, and it's not to denigrate or diminish the contribution of our male colleagues. But, you know,

When you have been in this apparatus, this national security apparatus, the CT community within it, like in my case for 32 years, you have been treated as special because you're a girl. You know, you think like a girl, you act like a girl, you cry like a girl, you throw like a girl, you hit like a girl. I mean, you have been diminished for being a woman for so many years. So, yeah, we're special.

We're so angry. We're so angry at bin Laden. We're so angry at what we know. We're so angry at not being taken seriously. I mean, we're so angry at so many things that you really do not want to mess with this sisterhood. Underestimate us at your peril. Thank you so much for tuning in to True Spies, The Classics.

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East Germany, January 5th, 1942. At the impregnable Nazi fortress, Kolditz Castle, the castle houses some of the war's highest-ranking British and French POWs. The Nazi regime believed it was impossible to escape.

Indeed, over two years into the war, no prisoner had escaped Kolditz. Not for long, anyway. There'd been a lot of attempts to escape from Kolditz and they'd been recaptured.

At midnight, the sentries posted at the castle's main entrance spot two officers exiting the guardhouse and approach them. In immaculate uniforms and speaking perfect German, the officers receive the sentry's salute and walk past, heading out of the castle. A few hours later, all hell has broken loose.