The World

Bin Laden had lost his family income and was living on subscriptions from Saudi backers when he got Omar’s invitation. He arrived on a private plane with wives and 300 mujahedin. Backed by Omar, now calling himself Amir al-Mu'minin, and Haqqani, justice minister, bin Laden declared war on the USA and started to train al-Qaeda volunteers. As Clinton secretly ordered his capture or assassination, Omar helped bin Laden set up headquarters, where he now considered a long-time ambition: an attack on American skyscrapers. In 1999, a trusted Pakistani henchman proposed a spectacular attack by suicidists piloting jet planes^* into the Twin Towers, the prestigious Manhattan skyscrapers with which he was familiar because they had been abortively attacked by his nephew seven years earlier.

Suicide bombers had been invented by the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers,^* quickly copied by jihadis. Bin Laden grasped the power of attacking the homeland: ‘to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting’. Although a US commando attack on al-Qaeda camps was cancelled, Clinton ordered missile strikes – just missing bin Laden, who was already personally selecting his team of suicidists, in particular a cell from Hamburg who spoke English, nineteen of whom were now dispatched to learn aviation in American flight schools. ‘I was responsible for entrusting the nineteen brothers with the raids,’ bin Laden later bragged. Fifteen of the nineteen were Saudi. Its date was chosen for the defeat of the Ottomans outside Vienna in 1683.

Although the CIA and FBI realized that bin Laden was planning an American attack, and although the two agencies collected shards of intelligence, including the bizarre revelation that there were Arab pilots who were only interested in studying take-off but not landing, they were, with a few stellar exceptions, too competitive to share information and too unimaginative to grasp the scale of bin Laden’s ambition.

Three months after Putin’s warning, on 11 September 2001 George W. Bush was listening to children reading The Pet Goat in a Floridian school when his chief of staff interrupted to whisper in his ear: ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’

As Bush arrived at the school, nineteen mass murderers had seized four jet planes, filled with innocent civilians; at 8.46 a.m., the first plane, controlled by five terrorists, flew into the 110-storey North Tower of the World Trade Center; Bush was informed that a small plane had accidentally crashed into the tower; he then entered the schoolroom. At 9.03 a.m., the second plane flew into the South Tower. As terrified people jumped from the higher storeys, with the world watching on live TV, the towers collapsed – a vision of live pandemonic apocalypse. At 9.37 a.m. a third plane dived into the Pentagon in DC. Each plane was the scene of desperate yet unknown despair and heroism; in a fourth plane, assigned to the White House or the Capitol, brave passengers, after wishing loved ones goodbye in heartbreaking messages, cried ‘Let’s roll!’ and attacked the terrorists, who in the ensuing struggle crashed the plane into a Pennsylvanian field at 10.03. Altogether 2,977 were killed, as well as all the terrorists. Bin Laden had laid the bait, and already American potentates were considering whether to hit not just bin Laden and the Taliban but also Saddam Hussein. That afternoon, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wondered if intelligence was ‘good enough to hit SH at same time. Not only OBL … Need to move swiftly … Go massive … Sweep it all up. Things related or not.’

Amid panic and fear in the heartland, the fifty-five-year-old Bush, converted to his new mission, turned to his experienced vice-president Dick Cheney, a midwestern Yalie with a snarl who, as Bush senior’s defence secretary, had supervised Desert Storm before making money chairing the oil service company Halliburton. ‘I can hear you,’ Bush told Americans through a bullhorn at a Ground Zero stinking of fire and death. ‘So will the people who knocked down these buildings.’ Soon afterwards he warned the Taliban to ‘hand over the terrorists, or … share in their fate’. Cheney, the most powerful vice-president in US history, devised new domestic powers making it easier to find terrorists and unleashed the CIA to hunt them across the world and foil more atrocities. As he sanctioned the ‘rendition’ (seizure), ‘enhanced interrogation’ (torture) and imprisonment of suspects in secret ‘black prisons’ lent by sympathetic powers, Bush declared a worldwide War on Terror that encompassed a global anti-terror campaign and two land wars.