Hosted by Kate McCann and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
John McLaughlin
John McLaughlin was Acting Director of Central Intelligence from July to September 2004, after George Tenet's resignation, and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from 2000 to 2004. His CIA career spanned more than three decades. As deputy director he helped steer the agency through 9/11, the Iraq war, and the early stages of the intelligence community's reorganization. He retired from government in 2005.
He founded the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, which trains new CIA analysts in the history and craft of the analytic profession, and created the Senior Analytic Service, a career track letting analysts reach senior rank without moving into management.
He is now Professor of Practice and distinguished practitioner-in-residence at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where he teaches on American intelligence. He holds the National Security Medal and the Distinguished Intelligence Community Service Award, received INSA's William Oliver Baker Award in 2016, and was Oxford's Humanitas Visiting Professor for intelligence in 2015. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Diplomacy.
Episode Summary
Part Two of our two-part series marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 reunites former leaders of the US and UK intelligence services, both of whom were in high office on September 11, 2001. Former deputy director of the CIA John McLaughlin joins former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove and co-host Kate McCann to give the insider’s perspective on the intelligence world’s response to the attacks. McLaughlin details what the CIA knew beforehand, the immediate aftermath inside CIA headquarters, and the rapid attribution to al-Qaeda. He also discusses the power of the US-UK "special relationship," the surge in CIA resources after 9/11, the Bush administration's push toward the Iraq War, the effects of the global war on terror on American civil liberties, and why the war in Ukraine is the single most important geopolitical issue today.
In this episode:
(00:00) Emotion is a Luxury in Intelligence
(01:53) John McLaughlin Introduction
(03:03) Pre-9/11 Threats
(07:17) Why Was 9/11 A Surprise?
(14:13) Considering the "What Ifs"
(15:52) M16 Rushes to DC
(22:46) CIA on 9/11
(25:12) Post-9/11 Intelligence Overhaul
(34:16) Origins of the Iraq Focus
(47:17) Legacy of 9/11 in America
(57:42) One Decision: Importance of the Ukraine Conflict
(01:03:00) Takeaways and Wrap Up
Hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove (former MI6 Chief) and co-host Kate McCann (Political Editor at Times Radio).
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Transcript
COLD OPEN
[00:00] MCLAUGHLIN: Someone asked me the other day about the days after 9/11. Well, yes, we were upset, but when this sort of thing happens in the intelligence world, emotion is a luxury. Your first thought after we realized what had happened was, okay, that's it. That's what we've been expecting. Now what do we do? So you immediately start thinking, this can't happen again, we have to do something to prevent it. It hits you later emotionally, but in the heat of the moment, you just do your job.
INTRODUCTION
[00:28] MCCANN: Hello and welcome to One Decision, conversations about intelligence, statecraft, and the forces that drive world politics with people who've been in the room and on the ground. I'm your co-host, Kate McCann.
[00:41] DEARLOVE: Hello. I'm Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, and it's good to be with you, Kate, again. We haven't seen each other for a while.
[00:49] MCCANN: No, we haven't. It's great to see you. I've missed you.
[00:52] DEARLOVE: I miss you too. We always seem to have interesting visitors on the program and we have interesting conversations. I think this one is particularly important to me because it's the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and a former colleague from CIA will be with us.
[01:10] MCCANN: Yeah, I agree. This is fascinating for both of us because you were there at the time, and for me, this was the moment that really got me interested in politics. It's probably the reason I do the job that I do. We've got a really interesting interview for you today. It's the second episode of our two-part series marking the 25th anniversary of al-Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Part one, by the way, is really worth a listen with acclaimed journalist Peter Bergen. He's the author of a new book looking back on the war on terror. But to keep up with all of our content, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'd be really grateful if you could like this episode or drop us a comment on YouTube — that will help others find this show.
Let's get into it, shall we? Because on the evening of September 11, 2001, our guest predicted that nothing will ever be the same. And he had good reason to know what was coming for America and for the world. At the time, John McLaughlin was Deputy Director of the CIA, second only to George Tenet in the world of US intelligence. He would spend the next three years, the remainder of his time in the CIA, dealing with the fallout from 9/11, pursuing al-Qaeda, hunting bin Laden, supporting the US invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, and working to deter more terrorist attacks. And he's here to take us inside the CIA on 9/11 and in the months that followed. I'm delighted to welcome John McLaughlin to the podcast. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us. Welcome to One Decision, John. You were just saying before we started recording, you and Sir Richard have not seen each other for quite some time.
[02:43] MCLAUGHLIN: Thanks. Good to be with you.
[02:51] MCLAUGHLIN: I think so, about eight years maybe. But we spent a lot of time together 25 years ago. We did indeed. Actually for about four years that I was Deputy Director at CIA.
WHAT WAS CIA WORKING ON — SEPTEMBER 10, 2001?
[03:03] MCCANN: Should we go back to that time? Because we're obviously talking about 9/11 in the context of the anniversary. Take us back to September the 10th, 2001, the day before. What was the CIA working on at the time? What were the threats that you were really worried about? What was the biggest threat at that time?
[03:24] MCLAUGHLIN: Well, it may surprise some people to know that actually terrorism was the biggest threat we were working on and worried about. Although the actual timing and target of the 9/11 attacks was a surprise — no avoiding that. As Richard probably remembers, we were in the midst of what I would call strategic warning for at least — well, one could say years before then, but intensely during the summer before 9/11. We were having meetings with the Bush administration once a week to talk about how we could most effectively combat al-Qaeda. I can't tell you exactly what was going on the tenth, but we certainly had this on our mind. We were having briefings within the CIA at least once a week on what we had learned about potential attacks.
We had all kinds of clues. At that point we were actually hoping to locate two individuals in the United States who we knew to be al-Qaeda related — their names were al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar — and we had turned their names over to the FBI, and as far as we knew at that moment the FBI was looking for them. We subsequently learned there were problems that prohibited them from doing that. But anyway, if you had asked me on that day what is your principal worry, it would have been terrorism.
We were also working on things related to the Balkans, which had just been through wars and through a change of government in Serbia. And we were working on India-Pakistan because they had just a year or two before come off of the Kargil crisis. We were struggling with budget issues because our budget had been cut about 23% in the decade before. And as I remember, actually the morning of 9/11, I was chairing a meeting of our staff. The director was downtown at a meeting with Senator Boren, and I was chairing our morning staff meeting, and we were talking about principally budget issues and principally as related to counterterrorism. So that's a longer answer than I should have given you, but that's essentially where we were at that moment.
[05:42] DEARLOVE: I'm sure you recall our meeting in Bermuda in June. Did you attend that meeting? No, I was not at that meeting. Well, that makes sense, because you probably had to stay behind and look after CIA. But George was there and other seniors. But the whole topic of that meeting and discussion in Bermuda, which we organized because it was our turn as it were, was about the coming terrorist threat. You know, the noise in the ether which seemed to indicate something big was being planned. And that stays in my mind very, very graphically. Because I think it was the beginning or middle of June we had that meeting. That makes sense. And I'm glad you reminded me of that, because we had in May gone to the White House on an emergency basis to say we were seeing a dramatic uptick in threat reporting. We couldn't be terribly specific at that point. And about a month after the June meeting, we went to the White House again with a whole series of reports — hair on fire meeting — in which we, I think I recall, I was there in May, I was not at the White House meeting in July, but I've heard many accounts of it in which we basically said we have to go to war in Afghanistan in order to prevent what we think may be coming. So that June meeting makes sense.
WHY WAS 9/11 STILL A SURPRISE?
[07:17] MCCANN: John, you referenced the fact that obviously the attack — 9/11 itself — was a surprise. But obviously the context that you're both talking about is that al-Qaeda were very much on the radar, and there were these two people that you were hoping that the FBI were going to follow up. Why was it — and it's really the biggest question, I suppose, most people have about what happened on that day — why was it that the intelligence agencies were not more aware of the scale of the attack that had been planned? Is it to do with the way that things were in terms of technology back then, the way people communicated, the way people were intercepted? Why was it such a surprise?
[07:58] MCLAUGHLIN: I think we were expecting something of large scale. We used the term spectacular in our meeting with the White House in July. In terms of why we did not get information on the target and timing — I would have to say we had many sources that were giving us all of these clues that had us alarmed, but we did not have a penetration of the inner circle of planning on 9/11 itself, which was tightly held among a small group of people circulating around bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. So the truth of it is, as Richard knows better than anyone, it's hard to get that kind of precision without someone who's inside, deep inside, a particularly tightly held plot.
We had a lot of sources, we had a lot of good information, we had enough to argue for dramatic action, but we didn't have that penetration. One could go on at length about all of the other things that we didn't know at that time that were available that might have led us to a better conclusion. For example, the Phoenix memo from the FBI, which was a memo written in their Phoenix office that recounted Arabs in Phoenix taking flight lessons. They were alarmed, but it didn't get to us. There was a similar bit of information out of Minneapolis. There was an individual named Zacarias Moussaoui that we'd heard about. We knew he was taking flight lessons. We assumed the FBI knew. Turns out we knew but they didn't know, even though it was an FBI case. There's a weird story behind that. Essentially that's it though. We did not have the kind of inner-circle penetration that would have been necessary to learn about this, if that would have worked, given how closely it was held.
[10:22] DEARLOVE: I think I would endorse that judgment, John, because we all had bits and pieces and we had some good sources, but we didn't have anything which gave us a strategic overall picture. And you mentioned the bits that were not put together. There was also the stuff in Hamburg, which the Germans I don't think shared in a timely manner or it wasn't passed. So I think there were many reasons why we knew about the threat as a general threat, but we didn't know where, we didn't know when, we didn't know how. But I think one of the other rather historic ironies is the fact that the blind sheikh had, you know, tried to blow up the World Trade Center back in the nineties, hadn't he? And he put the bomb in the car park in the wrong place. I'm sure you recall that. So in a way one had this really bizarre historical indication of a target in New York, which also of course turned out to be the 9/11 main target — as well as the Pentagon, of course.
[11:50] MCLAUGHLIN: We had an interesting angle on the two individuals that we knew to be in the United States. We had watchlisted them — meaning, well, in those days, watchlisting did not mean what it means today. To be candid, we did not have an effective watchlisting system in 2001. In other words, to get someone labeled no-fly, there was not a procedure for doing that that was tightly observed — where there is today. That's been changed. But at that time we turned those names over to the FBI, and I've since learned, actually just recently as I've done more research to trigger my memory, that in the Department of Justice Inspector General report, it's recounted that the FBI took those two names to their New York office because there was some indication that they were going to be in the New York area. The FBI at that point was divided into a criminal section and a counterterrorism section. And the criminal section put their hands up and said, we want to do this. We want to go find these guys.
[12:43] MCLAUGHLIN: But the Bureau said, no, no, this is an intelligence case, so we can't turn it over to the criminal side of the Bureau. This is the so-called wall that existed between criminal reporting and intelligence reporting — since penetrated, eliminated, neutralized, whatever. As a result, the intelligence side got it, but got it as a routine case, which meant they had 30 days to deal with it. Well, 9/11 happened before they got to it. So there are so many what-ifs connected to this. Had these two individuals been found — well, I don't know what would have happened to them. We'll never know. But maybe we would have learned something from them, because they were among the people on the planes. They were among the hijackers in the end. They were on the plane that went into the Pentagon. But the whole issue of could it have been prevented — the only answer to that is we'll never know whether all of these clues would have added up. We do know that we prevented one potential hijacker from coming into the United States. That was Ramzi bin al-Shibh. And yet what we discovered after that is that they had a method for replacing people who were caught. So taking these two people out ahead of time — I'm guessing they had replacements coming in or in place. It's one of the many what-ifs.
DOES IT BOTHER YOU TO TALK ABOUT THE WHAT-IFS?
[14:14] MCCANN: Do you find it difficult talking about the what-ifs?
[14:17] MCLAUGHLIN: Well, not difficult. Certain questions will give me goosebumps all over my body, but fundamentally — and I'd be interested if Richard has the same feeling — as an intelligence officer, you almost come to think clinically about these things.
[14:45] MCCANN: Find it difficult, yeah.
[14:47] MCLAUGHLIN: Yes and no. Yes in that we don't know the answer to the what-ifs, but I also think about them clinically. As you noticed, I told you the what-if, but then I took it to the next step — I pursued that to find out, well, what would have happened. So you think about these things clinically. Someone asked me the other day about the days after 9/11. Well, yes, we were upset. We were emotional about it, but when this sort of thing happens in the intelligence world — perhaps in the military world as well — emotion is a luxury. Your first thought after we realized what had happened was, okay, that's it. That's what we've been expecting. Now what do we do? So you immediately start thinking, this can't happen again, we have to do something to prevent it. And you start going through your checklist of what you need to do. It hits you later emotionally, but in the heat of the moment, you just do your job.
[15:50] DEARLOVE: I agree with you, John. I think we were pretty clinical about the issue once it had happened. Obviously there was real regret that we hadn't had the intelligence to prevent it. But that was just a fact of circumstance at the time. And I think, John, you'll recall that I turned up in Washington, I think, within 36 hours of the attack. I wanted to mention this — one can't get out of your mind the tragedy of all of this. But in terms of what we were doing day to day —
[16:30] MCLAUGHLIN: This was a very emotional moment when Richard Dearlove showed up the day after in Washington. Now airspace is closed. To this day, I don't think George and I understand how you guys on a private plane got into Washington and showed up at our headquarters the day after 9/11. You were with Eliza Manningham-Buller — that's correct — who was then the Deputy of MI5. And I think, am I correct, that it was David Manning also from the Prime Minister's office? Manning was with us too.
[17:07] DEARLOVE: He was a diplomatic advisor and of course subsequently ambassador to the United States from the UK. But I think what in fact happened was I had been on a plane coming back from Sweden when the attack occurred. I was whisked from the airport straight to see the Prime Minister. And the Prime Minister said to me straight away, Richard, I want you to go to Washington. And I said, well, US airspace is going to be closed. And he said, I'll ring the president. So I went down to RAF Lyneham. The only aircraft available was a Lockheed TriStar with no seats in it — it was a big transport plane. I got hold of the commanding officer of RAF Lyneham, who was somewhat surprised, and said, well, I'm here on the Prime Minister's orders. I want that plane and I'm flying to the States. And he said, well, you can't, airspace is closed. And I said, well, we're going to take off and if we haven't got clearance by the time we get halfway we'll come back. So in the end he caved in. They strapped some seats in the back of the plane, literally. We got the crew out of bed and off we went. And then when we got close to the United States coast, we were intercepted by — I guess they were F-14s or something — and we flew down right over the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers. That really was quite emotional. And landed at Andrews Air Force Base. By which time you guys had a convoy of cars there to meet us. And we literally came straight to Langley. That's how the day unfolded. And I do remember those meetings, which were extremely professional. We put the emotion to one side and got on with the job. And I mean the first issue I think you and I were dealt with was attribution. And I think we agreed pretty quickly that this was bin Laden and al-Qaeda. And I know that the JIC in London put out a paper very rapidly after that to formalize our discussions.
[19:30] MCLAUGHLIN: You'll remember those hours and days graphically, and it was a very peculiar atmosphere of course in DC at the time. And you know, we were the only visitors, beginning and end of story. George and I often cite this as the special relationship come to life. People talk about it, but the truth of it is you guys showed up — the only people in the world other than Americans who showed up physically and offered to help in any way you could. It meant so much to us. Because at that point we were dealing with conflicting forces and pressures. On the one hand, the mission was there. It was instantly clear to us that it would be our responsibility to combat this, stop it, prevent it from happening, wrap them up. The president had said to us the previous day, I remember this at a video conference with him, form a worldwide coalition, we will find them and destroy them. Those are the words I remember from President Bush. So we knew what we had to do. At the same time, we were also experiencing — people weren't quite in blame mode yet, but we knew that was coming. And so we would have to deal simultaneously with that, including investigations which began almost immediately a week later, and at the same time doing the job. So it was just enormously meaningful that we knew we were not completely alone in this. Because frankly, the rest of the US government was not ready for this. CIA had been planning for this. We had a plan on the table. We had put together a plan at the end of the Clinton administration. We called it the Blue Sky Plan because Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, had said to us — and he was obsessed with stopping al-Qaeda, you know, we'd had the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, the USS Cole bombing in 2000 — he said, put together a plan of what you would do if you were unconstrained by resources. So we went to school on that and we had a plan. But no one else in Washington was prepared for this.
[21:57] MCLAUGHLIN: We had a hard time that summer just convincing people — understandably, I'm not blaming any of them, I'm saying it was hard for people to believe that a group not affiliated with a major state, a terrorist group, could inflict major damage on the United States. It was hard for people to conceive of that. We were asked in the middle of the summer, I think by the Defense Department, do you think this could all be deception? To divert us. And we did some research on what previous deception had looked like, working particularly with the National Security Agency, GCHQ, and we came back and said, this doesn't feel like deception to us. But that was the pre-9/11 climate in a way.
WHERE WERE YOU ON THE MORNING OF 9/11?
[22:46] MCCANN: John, can I just take you back slightly, because we've heard from Richard about how the immediate aftermath unfolded for him. But for you, where were you when you realized this attack was unfolding? How did you witness it?
[23:03] MCLAUGHLIN: I was running the morning staff meeting at CIA. George was downtown, the director. And I came out of the staff meeting at about the time the first plane hit, which as I recall was 8:46 AM. Like everyone else, I said, what is that? It didn't immediately register. I remember thinking roughly, that could be deliberate or an accident. And as that was going through my mind, at 9:03 the second plane hit. At which point I realized, okay, that's it. I remember those words came into my mind. That's it. That's what we've been looking for. Richard mentioned attribution. The strong feeling I had — and by that I mean the director was racing back from downtown in his car, we talked once — we said, this has got to be al-Qaeda, right? Right. But we didn't have concrete evidence of that until about ten o'clock that morning. We told most of the agency to go home because we assumed the CIA headquarters was a target. The Counterterrorism Center, which stayed behind, refused to go home, monitoring, reporting, and helping us understand what was happening. We moved to a little building adjacent to our headquarters building — a print plant that we had there — set up a quick phone network. And about ten o'clock an analyst ran in to see us. He had gotten access to the manifest of the plane that had hit the Pentagon. Don't know how he got it from the airlines, I guess. And he recognized the two names that I told you we were looking for. And so that was the clincher. Instantly suspected al-Qaeda. By ten AM we had what we judged to be firm evidence.
WHAT CHANGED AFTER 9/11?
[25:13] MCCANN: One of the things obviously that played out in the aftermath — you've mentioned some of this already — but the gaps in intelligence sharing, the gaps in sharing information, and there were significant changes that were made after this that contributed to the way that we do intelligence sharing today. There have been no big similar attacks in the UK or the US since then. What changed after 9/11 to mean that we are in the position we are today, 25 years on, where we can say we've not seen the like of this since?
[25:49] MCLAUGHLIN: Well, a lot of things changed. Some things changed right away. Resources flowed back to us. After 9/11, essentially we got whatever we needed. I would say before 9/11, the way I describe our counterterrorism effort was that we were intensely committed, but we were about 300 people spread-eagled across a dike, kind of plugging holes. After 9/11, our effort rose to about 2,000 just focused on terrorism very quickly. That's the first thing. Second thing, we got new authorities. We were authorized by the president in what we call a finding. Basically our covert action authorities come through a signed directive from the president. So we were authorized lethal authorities against certain terrorists. We'd never had lethal authorities before. And we were directed to capture terrorists. We had never been directed to do that before. Well, that's a whole other footnote I'll go into if you wish, but that's a rabbit hole. The point is we got authorities to be very aggressive against al-Qaeda, and in doing so, legal authorities. We were legally empowered to do so.
We had at the time of 9/11 somewhere between 70 and 100 recruited sources in Afghanistan, and we were working with five or six tribal networks that we had contact with for years prior, which we had worked in 1998-1999 in particular to revive those contacts and strengthen them. So we had an infrastructure in Afghanistan to work with. We had our plan, which the president authorized us to implement on September 17 after a meeting on September 15 at Camp David, where we all discussed what had happened — we being the national security team. And by Monday he said, okay, CIA, I want you first in, you've got a plan. And within 15 days after 9/11 we had two teams on the ground in Afghanistan working with the Northern Alliance.
Principly with Fahim Khan, who had taken over from Massoud — the historic leader of the Northern Alliance who had been assassinated. We began collecting information. Within a matter of weeks, special forces were in on the ground. They were able to direct military attacks at targets our intelligence sources could isolate. We went in and built relationships with tribal leaders. By November, Kabul had fallen, the Taliban were banished. Bin Laden was on the run. The United States and allies failed to get him as he crossed the border. That's a controversy that has been revisited many times. And after that we pursued al-Qaeda's leadership in the tribal areas and in the settled areas of Pakistan and the rest of the Middle East, Yemen. We thought they would go to Pakistan or Yemen and they did.
[29:17] MCLAUGHLIN: Working with the Pakistanis, who were very helpful in that period of time, we basically captured or killed the 9/11-era leadership of al-Qaeda within two or three years. Now they continued to plan and carry out attacks, but we managed to disrupt them significantly and stop attacks. The next attack I remember was in Madrid, the train bombing in which some of them got on a train with explosives in a backpack. We had them on the run, we kept them on the run, we captured them, we killed them, and we just kept them off balance. And that's the immediate sort of tactical response.
Strategically at the same time, new institutions were created in the United States — the National Counterterrorism Center, the DNI, which was maybe not essential but was another US response. But the National Counterterrorism Center was a good thing. We began fixing the watchlisting system so we got better at screening potential terrorists and stopping them before they did anything. The FBI-CIA wall came down. Allies like Richard worked hand in glove with us, as did other European services — the British though always hand in glove with us. Eventually some of the Middle Eastern services came around, particularly the Saudis after about 2004, worked closely with us. So a coalition was built broadly. Also our plan involved going after al-Qaeda in dozens of countries around the world. So all of our stations — this was their number one directive. And, you know, we were able to capture someone like Hambali, who I think his real name was Riduan Isamuddin, who was the one who carried out the Bali bombing in Indonesia, through a whole series of connections that we made through intelligence from other sources and from other countries and from detainees and so forth. That's really why we haven't been attacked again.
[31:43] MCLAUGHLIN: Although — what was it, 2006? There was a near miss — you guys stopped a plot in the UK, the Liquid Explosives plot, where they were planning to put together bombs that would have taken down planes over the Atlantic. So they were still trying through, and I left the government in early 2005. But I followed this, and they were still trying throughout the decade.
[32:00] DEARLOVE: And you had an attack. I remember there was the attack in London in July 2005. Yeah. It came out of Leeds, right? It was a group of radicalized British Muslims who attacked various buses and underground trains. And that was a pretty catastrophic event. But I agree, John, with your analysis. I think what people probably don't understand is that after 9/11, immediately after, I think you would agree, our assumption was that we were going to see other spectaculars around the world, particularly against symbolic strategic targets. And we were very worried that this was the beginning of something coordinated and much bigger than just 9/11, if that was possible. And in fact, the initiatives that you describe — of which the UK was certainly a significant part as well — I think prevented a lot of those things happening. And I think CIA in particular was very successful at keeping al-Qaeda on the back foot. They were under constant pressure after the event. And then of course the other aspect of this is it all took on a much more political complexion with events subsequently in Afghanistan and in Iraq — which I wouldn't describe necessarily as being caused by 9/11, but those events were intimately connected in a chronological chain. Certainly you and I lived through a good part of that. I mean, I retired in the summer of 2004. I think you were in office a year longer than me.
[34:12] DEARLOVE: About ten days later with the Prime Minister — what was striking already, and I think to an extent CIA were somewhat frustrated by this, was there was already an administration and DOD focus on Iraq, in addition to the focus on bin Laden. And I do remember being in a briefing at the White House where the briefer said something about Iraq with which I disagreed. You may have been there. And I had to interrupt the briefing and then had a private word with the president and with the Prime Minister, saying the UK view of that issue was somewhat different. We were being very tactful. I think that was probably the words I would have used. But I'd be very interested, John, in your observations as to how CIA reacted to the Iraq element as that grew in the minds of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Scooter Libby and others, who seemed to be looking very strongly in that direction at a pretty early stage.
[35:00] MCLAUGHLIN: Yes, at the meeting at Camp David on September 15 — that's the weekend after 9/11 — when the president went around the table and asked everyone to give their sense of what had happened and how it had happened, there were people in the room, principally from those you mentioned, who at least posed the question of could this have been sponsored by Iraq? And I recall our reaction was we have no reason to believe that is the case. But again this was symptomatic of the difficulty people had accepting that a group not associated with a state sponsor could carry this out. So you're right. That was in the atmosphere early on. And as they say, the rest is history. That's another long story.
WHY DID IRAQ BECOME THE FOCUS?
[36:28] MCCANN: John, can you explain for our listeners who were not maybe living through this in the same way that you both did — that would be almost all of them — why was there a focus on Iraq? Just on a very basic level, what was that about?
[36:47] MCLAUGHLIN: Well, people will debate that for years. All I can do is give you my personal take, which is — I try to do this without blaming anyone or anything, just again clinically describing it. There was an interest in the Bush administration from the beginning in what had happened to Iraq in the time that we were out of office, which was eight years, the Republicans. The first national security meeting they had was about Iraq. I happened to go to it because George was traveling or something and I ended up representing us. And I had to walk through an update on what had happened militarily in Iraq. Well, there were some real problems. Allied pilots — British, French, Americans — were flying missions in southern Iraq to protect the Shia from attacks by Saddam, and they were doing the same in northern Iraq to protect the Kurds. So there was an ongoing military engagement in Iraq. And of course there was widespread conviction that he had weapons of mass destruction.
I don't know that it would have happened without 9/11. I think the president — this is my personal feeling — the president having gone through 9/11, which changed his presidency completely and changed his outlook on priorities, I think came to the conclusion he couldn't take a chance of anything like that happening again. And that if there was any chance of that coming out of Iraq, it had to be neutralized. I can't prove this at all. But I think the fact that we had been initially — I emphasize initially — we, the United States, initially so successful in Afghanistan — I mean, think about it. We had banished the Taliban within a couple of months and we were wrapping up al-Qaeda — might have left the impression that, yes, this will be more difficult, but it's doable. I can't prove that at all. But it's a little bit like today, some people would say that, you know, Trump might have gone into Iran in part because he so easily went into Venezuela and accomplished what he wanted to do. It's a complicated question and I don't know that everyone will have a different view on that.
[39:52] MCCANN: No, I think it does help. I think any reflection like that is useful. I think there will always be people who believe that Iraq was the intention and the goal and that's where this was always heading, no matter what.
[40:14] MCLAUGHLIN: Well, you know, intelligence officers live in a gray zone. Other people are entitled or feel comfortable having absolute views of things. We live in a gray zone. And I would say, you know, there's some truth to both sides of that. I don't think Iraq was inevitable. I don't think it was caused by 9/11 or that 9/11 opened the path to it. But it's also true — two things can be true — it's also true that the administration was distressed about Iraq. You know, Colin Powell at the very beginning of the administration was not arguing for war, but was arguing that the sanctions regime, which was confining Saddam, was breaking down and he was calling for smart sanctions — sanctions that weren't as harmful to people in Iraq who needed medicine and other things that sanctions were inhibiting. So even among those who didn't favor war, there was a sense that the Iraq policy was dysfunctional and needed to be changed. And then there was the other side that said, well, there's unfinished business in Iraq, and people like Paul Wolfowitz — for whom I have respect because he's a sincere, smart person — believed that it would change things in the Middle East to have a democratic system there instead of the authoritarian system that existed. So yes, all of that was going on.
Would there have been an Iraq war without 9/11? I don't know. One of the things I did was oversee the efforts in Iraq by Charles Duelfer, who we sent as a former UN arms inspector for a year to determine the truth of WMD. Charles' final report said, I cannot find stockpiles of WMD. But he said, it's also true that Saddam was maintaining the expertise needed to restore the programs, and that the sanctions regime were breaking down, and that he probably would have tried to do that left alone. So the potential was there to move back in that direction. Had that been the national intelligence estimate instead, I've often thought that might have been cause enough for war. I don't know. We'll never know.
[43:06] DEARLOVE: John, I think two points I'd like to make. I mean, I certainly agree with you about Duelfer. I've met him subsequently in London and his book, The Search for Truth in Iraq, is by far the most definitive thing written about the inspection regime and the search for WMD. And I actually agree with his conclusions. And it's a pity that he wasn't the initial inspector. You'll remember that you and George went through a rather unsatisfactory experience with his predecessor. But the other thing which is crucial in terms of what you've said — and I sat through many meetings in London about this — is that the policy of containing Saddam had completely broken down. I remember Colin Powell in particular being keen for an alteration in the sanctions regime. And the fact that we were all thinking — and this is sort of co-terminous with 9/11 — what next in Iraq? I mean, the policy was not in a static place. It was about to change. And of course the Royal Air Force, the French Air Force and others were part of that containment regime where they were protecting the Kurdish and Shia populations on either side. And there was this big initiative on the part of Saddam to try to shoot down Allied aircraft, setting traps with Soviet missiles to which he had access at the time. So the situation as you've described it was extremely dynamic. And then 9/11 comes along and I guess it was inevitable that the two issues would to an extent coalesce, although they were separate. And I liked it when you said both explanations are possible. They aren't necessarily logically linked. There's no answer to those questions. And I think you and I know as well as many intelligence officers — we're always the victims of the benefit of hindsight, where people come along with very clear-cut views about what should have happened, but don't really realize at the time. And I remember I had this debate with Henry Kissinger when he was alive. And Henry said people just don't understand that you're forced to take decisions in the light of evidence which is available at the time, but you're judged afterwards for the evidence that wasn't available but would have allowed you to make a better decision. And I think this is a really crucial philosophical point when one looks at these big geopolitical issues.
[45:32] MCLAUGHLIN: That's something I've learned in my afterlife, because I've been teaching at Johns Hopkins for the last 20 years, and that's obliged me to take students on trips to study areas of conflict in the past. And one of the things I've learned during the research for those is the only way you understand what happened in the past is if you can figure out what people knew at that time, not what we know now. But to be clear with your listeners — I don't want anyone to think I'm justifying the Iraq war or saying it was all great. Not at all. I think it would have been overall probably better not to have had that war, at least the way it unfolded. But it is not hard to understand why the events of the time drove political leaders in that direction. Everyone has a judgment about it now, but I don't think we'll really understand the impact of that war for another 25 years or so, until we see what actually happens in Iraq. Some would say it's better now than it was under Saddam, but others would say it's not so great. So it has to play out more in history.
LEGACY OF 9/11 — CIVIL LIBERTIES, INTERVENTION, AND PUBLIC PERCEPTION
[47:17] MCCANN: Can we reflect a little on what happened? We've talked a bit about what happened with the CIA after 9/11 and some of the changes that were made to the intelligence gathering world. Can we talk a little bit about public perceptions and policy making in general? Because America — the American government post-9/11 — introduced the Patriot Act. And there was a huge conversation that began at that point about what the enemy looked like, who we should be afraid of, what we should be afraid of, what the threat looks like. And I just wonder now, given how far we are from 9/11 itself, your reflections on what that's meant over those past couple of decades for America as a country and for the UK as well. Where do we see ourselves in the world now? Is it still having an impact when we talk about Trump and forever wars, for example, and the way that last election was fought?
[48:22] MCLAUGHLIN: Well, isn't that the question. I have some thoughts on that. Let me go from the kind of inner issues to the larger issues. So inner issues — CIA gets more resources, the United States develops more policies to include the Patriot Act that are designed to combat terrorism. We create new institutions. And another important, very important thing for the United States — I don't know, I suspect this is true in Britain as well — but 9/11, over time, creates a kind of integration of effort between civilian intelligence like the CIA and military special operations that did not exist at the time of 9/11. We were not then authorized to work in harmony with special operations, which developed later in the course of the Afghan War and the Iraq War, and which persists today. You see it in things like Trump's move into Venezuela. That's the inner core of things.
Moving out beyond that — the larger question you're asking — is what's the effect, the inheritance over time, in a bigger way? I think is it fair to say that the United States has become more comfortable with intervention? Because prior to 9/11, the idea of without provocation intervening in Afghanistan was not on. After 9/11, okay, that's on. And then Iraq was on. And now things like Venezuela occurred, the Iran War. I can't draw a straight line there, but I think the United States lost in 9/11 its sense of invulnerability. In other words, up to that point, the United States assumed we've got two big oceans, that stuff happened somewhere else. But then it happened here. So we were left with a greater feeling of vulnerability that up till then we had been able to avoid.
[50:49] MCLAUGHLIN: There was a struggle with civil liberties, of course — this is what you were alluding to perhaps, in the Patriot Act. The tension between, on the one hand, the importance of maintaining all the elements of civil liberties to include privacy and such, pulling against the other objective, which is to prevent Americans coming under harm, losing their lives. So you're weighing on the one hand how to get that balance. I think we got it pretty well. The United States is still not a surveillance state. There are surveillance states in the world. We're not one of them. We're not perfect, but we're not a surveillance state. So that struggle went on. The one that typifies it was the decision by the president to carry out wiretaps without a warrant, on the theory that under Article II of the Constitution, which charges him with the defense of the United States, his feeling was that article gives me the authority to defend the United States, and this is something I have to do, because our National Security Agency — like your GCHQ — cannot, with all of the restrictions, be sure that it is catching communications that signal a coming attack. What this amounted to was not intruding on the private lives of Americans, but essentially what was happening was that you wanted to monitor foreign conversation that included an American, to find out whether we had anyone cooperating with foreign extremists. And he did that. That came to light by the New York Times, after which there was a great controversy, and then essentially the same authorities were put into law with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. So still doing the same thing, but with legal authorization. That was an example of how the administration chose keeping Americans safe is more important than ensuring that we're not intruding on someone's privacy at that moment. And then it worked out over time.
[53:13] DEARLOVE: John, it's interesting what you're saying, because I think the impact in the UK of 9/11, the follow-up in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other stuff that you and I are so familiar with, has made governments more cautious about foreign intervention and more legalistic as well. And in a way, we've almost had an opposite reaction here in the UK. And I think that if you look at the current government, they would be very, very nervous about taking any of these sorts of initiatives that were triggered in the aftermath of 9/11. And of course the other impact here in the UK has been the rise of identity politics and the whole question of the degree of cultural integration of our Muslim community politically. Anyway, that's not a question to discuss now, but it's certainly something that is significant and relevant. And I'm fascinated by what you're saying because that is quite a contrast with the UK. And you know, if we're looking at foreign ventures now, our attention is grabbed by what's happening in Ukraine, not really to the same extent the Middle East, even — you know, the war with Iran currently is paid less attention here in the UK than what's happening on a daily basis in Kyiv.
[54:40] MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I wish that was the case in the United States, because I personally think that the Ukraine War is the single most important thing going on in the international realm right now, with the greatest impact on everything and the potential to make long-range changes that aren't good. I don't know that it's made the United States more interventionist as a policy, but what got me thinking about this was a colleague of mine who worked on terrorism for many years, Paul Pillar, who said in an article he wrote reflecting on some of the controversies, that very few of the things that we did after 9/11 could have been done before 9/11 — and he meant politically, in terms of political leaders spending the capital to do them. He was trying to neutralize the argument that we just should have gone into Afghanistan and taken care of this. And his point was, yes, but that's obvious now. It was not politically conceivable before 9/11. After 9/11, all bets are off, handcuffs are off.
And I don't know that that's persisted as a policy. If you think about it, President Trump came to office pledging not to get involved in these things. So in a way his incoming instinct was, yeah, don't get involved in these foreign wars. But there he is, involved in one. Hard to generalize about it. And the other thing I would say is for a while we had an intelligence community that was socialized in war — as opposed to, in the United States, socialized in a traditional intelligence environment, which is recruit sources, report what they're learning, analyze that, deliver it to your national policymakers. But you know, we carve stars on the wall in our lobby when we lose an officer. And more than a third of them have been carved since 9/11. So we had an intelligence population socialized in war. Even the analysts were rotating through the combat zones.
ONE DECISION TO WATCH
[57:37] MCCANN: That must make such a difference to the psyche. I'd never thought about that element of it before. John, we could keep this conversation going, but we are running out of time. There is so much more to ask and we really appreciate you giving us your time today. So thank you so much. The thing that we ask all of our guests really is to look ahead from where we are now and ask them what is the one decision that they are looking at, watching out for, paying attention to. And it could be something in the next couple of weeks, it could be the next couple of months. What for you is the thing that you have an eye on at the moment in terms of foreign policy decision, government decision, something that you think we should be more aware of?
[58:18] MCLAUGHLIN: Definitely Ukraine. And the reason I say that is this is — everyone talks about the changing global system, international system, and all of that, moving away from the period of superpower dominance, moving away from the world that the UK and the United States created after World War II with all the rules and such, into what? Well, Ukraine is the clearest example we have of an aggressor moving across, breaking the rules, carrying out an attack on a country that did not invite that, did not provoke it, and persisting in it over now more than four years. And if we didn't have the Ukraine War, we would not have the alliance of autocracy that we now see between Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. We wouldn't have Iran helping to build drones inside Russia. We wouldn't have North Korean troops deployed to Russia to fight Ukraine. We wouldn't have the tightening relationship between Russia and China that we have today. And we wouldn't have the same coalescence that we're seeing, for example, in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which brought together Iran, India, Russia, China recently. We wouldn't have BRICS growing in number as the separation develops between North and South. I just see that as, from the standpoint of US interests, the single issue that most dramatically affects our long-term interests in remaining the preeminent power in the world. When you combine it with the loosening of our alliances, which is in part also reflected by Ukraine and by our shifting attention toward Asia.
Right now, if there was a single thing that we could do that would affect this war, two big factors. First, Putin is under real pressure in Russia for the first time that we've seen since this war. I mean, the elite is fed up with the war, public opinion is turning against the war. So he's under some political pressure. Not expecting a revolution, but he's under real pressure. And one of the ways he relieves that pressure is by dropping missile after missile after missile on Kyiv, because that allows Russian TV to show images that suggest Russia is still winning. So if we could organize an effort to increase Ukraine's air defense — and this is not impossible. I know it's probably very difficult to license Patriot interceptors for them to start making in any real time, but there's a lower grade of Patriot that they could probably manufacture if they were authorized to do so. And other countries in Europe have Patriots they're not using. And the South Koreans have a missile that is almost like a Patriot that they could provide that they aren't using. It just astonishes me that the international community has not come together to stop this war. And in a way it's a failure of US diplomacy, because I don't know that anyone else could bring it off. Even though Britain is very strong, the frontline states, the Baltics and Poland — very strong. But you need someone, the United States needs to be the driver of this, and we're not doing it. So that's the thing I'm focused on more than anything else. The Iran War, of course, is important, but it is what it is. And the president doesn't seem to be able to find a way out of it.
[01:02:31] MCCANN: John, thank you so much for giving us your time. It's been absolutely a genuine pleasure to hear your reflections. Thank you very much.
[01:02:38] MCLAUGHLIN: Well, it's been great to work with you, Kate, and wonderful to see Richard again. John, I really enjoyed our conversation. We were in the trenches together. I hope we'll see each other soon. Yeah. Hope so.
POST-INTERVIEW DISCUSSION
[01:02:51] MCCANN: I think you'll all agree that was a fantastic listen. So Richard, what struck you? What stood out for you?
[01:02:57] DEARLOVE: Well, what stood out for me is what a fair-minded and humane guy John is. I agreed with pretty much everything he said. He's got a really balanced, professorial view, in spite of the fact that he and I were so heavily involved in those events. He's obviously been very reflective. Talking to him for me was quite moving, because it brought back so much of what I remember from those hours and those days that we spent together. And I think he's a man of great wisdom and balance. And I think what he did say successfully was to put the event into context and to give you a feel for what it was like being in CIA, being in Washington during that extraordinary period. Unprecedented events as far as the United States was concerned. And I think he conveyed that. And I'm really pleased that we had that subsequent discussion, which covered some of the theoretical issues that he and I with our careers face, where we're judged by people with benefit of hindsight. And of course, at the time we had to take decisions in the light of what was happening and what we knew. And I think that came across very powerfully. So I'm thrilled that we could do that and have that conversation. And I think as an anniversary discussion, a lot of people — particularly those who were too young really to remember 9/11 — will have a much more graphic hold and feeling for the drama of those days and the extraordinary thoroughness and difficulties of the follow-up. And I think all of that was included in his comments. And John, thank you very much. I'm so thrilled that you agreed to do this. And I think that's an important podcast, not just for us as podcasters — historically it has value and really excellent content.
[01:05:04] MCCANN: I think that's totally right, Richard. And I actually think that's really important because what we're talking about here is a historical record of two men — yourself and John — who were both there at a time when many of the rest of us were not. Our recollections of it are completely different. Many people are really too young to recall it in the way that you guys do at all. But that feeling of — what really struck me listening to John talk about being there in the moment, watching the first plane hit the towers, watching the second one hit, and his first thought being, this is it, this is what we've been waiting for. And knowing in that moment — the rush of emotions and reactions you must have in that moment. And he described them, which range from: at some point there is going to be blame, we have a plan but nobody else does, the politicians were not on board, the money was not there. And I think the other thing that really struck me listening to him speak was how much it meant for you to have been there, and for the UK government, for Tony Blair to have said, go straight away, show support, physically be there in the room. How much that meant to the Americans at the time. And really I suppose that's what we're talking about when we talk about the special relationship. I think that really struck me. It's something you don't often think about.
The other thing in that conversation is the way that policy making and people's reaction to governments has changed. And I think he's entirely right that there are things that the American government did after 9/11 that it would never have had the political ability to do. It would never have had the space to do. And how that's changed the relationship with that government in the years since is really interesting to me. So I think that's one of the best episodes we've ever done. Certainly a conversation that I will always remember having and will want to listen back to. So hopefully you have all enjoyed listening to it too. As we always say, there's plenty more episodes. If you miss them and if you want to listen back, you can. We're always available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can subscribe to One Decision on YouTube so you won't miss out, and you can listen back. And you can also leave us your comments and your thoughts. We would really love them, including on this episode especially — on what it meant to you, if you were there at the time, if you experienced it as a policymaker or as a person. You can email us hello@onedecision.com. We read all of your comments and your emails, so do send them over to us. And you can check out onedecision.com for commentaries and explainers that you might have missed. I'm Kate McCann. I was joined by Sir Richard Dearlove today. Thank you very much for listening.
