The day history changed forever in Manhattan

Foley Square lies 900 metres from the World Trade Centre, at the southern tip of Manhattan. In between stands City Hall with its large park, the town hall where Mayor Zohran Mamdani now holds office. From Foley Square and City Hall, the ramps lead up to the Brooklyn Bridge, but also the narrow streets of old New York that lead to Wall Street, the heart of the global economy. It is here, within less than a kilometre, that twenty-five years ago the 21st century – which had only just begun – was completely reinvented. It is in this small corner of Manhattan that the history of the world in which we live today was written.

A quarter of a century on from the attack on America on 11 September 2001, if we were to tell a 25-year-old what happened that day, we should not begin with the Twin Towers or the Pentagon, which were struck by the hijacked planes. That is the epilogue. We must begin with Foley Square and its Federal Court, the place where, between January and July 2001, the trailer for the 9/11 horror film had already been written. But nobody had realised it. In Courtroom 318 of the old federal courthouse, the ‘United States v. Osama bin Laden’ trial had taken place over seven months, during which the entire history of an organisation – al-Qaeda – which had for years been threatening – to no avail – an attack on America, had been pieced together.

On 11 September, twenty-five years ago, I walked through much of a deserted Manhattan, paralysed and frightened as it had never been in its history; I entered Foley Square and passed in front of the Federal Court where, for months, as an ANSA correspondent, I had attended various hearings in the trial. But I did not even spare the courthouse a glance: like everyone else, in those moments of chaos, I failed to make the connection. I proceeded toward City Hall to look out over the ruins of the World Trade Center, just a few hours after the second tower had collapsed. Even in Foley Square, we were walking on a thick carpet of dust that reached our ankles and, further on, rose almost to our knees. The dust was mixed with millions of sheets of paper that, just moments before, had been in filing cabinets and on office desks, up there in the towers that no longer existed. Contracts, financial documents, confidential emails printed on paper – all scattered across the streets and as far as the Brooklyn Bridge. The sky, on a clear day, resembled that of a solar eclipse. People wandered about without face masks, with a handkerchief over their mouths, in a foul-smelling cloud that stung the eyes and dried out the throat. A cloud made of fused concrete, furniture, paint and carpet, particles from burnt-out computers, and chemicals. And molecules from 2,753 disintegrated people who, just a few hours earlier, had been in the Towers or on the two aeroplanes that had targeted them. Today, it is estimated that the number of deaths from illnesses developed as a result of breathing the air at Ground Zero for months has exceeded the number of victims on the day itself: for cancers alone, confirmed deaths number over 3,700, and the figure continues to rise.

It was a hellish scene that was difficult to comprehend at the time. But a quarter of a century later, despite the usual troublemakers still trying to cast doubt on the attack on America, the story is clear. It had already been outlined in broad terms less than a kilometre from the Twin Towers, during the trial of the fugitive bin Laden for the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (224 dead). A plot that was subsequently explored in greater depth by the FBI investigations led by Robert Mueller (who had only taken up his post as director on 4 September), by the 9/11 Commission, by countless journalistic investigations and by a number of seminal books, foremost among them those by Peter Bergen, Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright. And today, if one wishes to recount that day to Generation Z – those born in 2001 – one must begin with the 1980s. And with Afghanistan.

The story of 11 September 2001 begins when Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul in December 1979 to prop up a faltering communist regime. Moscow was counting on a lightning operation. It would turn out to be its Vietnam: ten years of war that would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was the mujahideen – the Afghan Islamic fighters, secretly armed and funded by Washington – who bled the Red Army dry. The operation is known as ‘Cyclone’, a name repeated everywhere, though the CIA has never confirmed it and serious historians do not use it. It began under Jimmy Carter’s administration and came to a head under Ronald Reagan’s: by the late 1980s, the United States was providing around 600 million dollars a year, a figure matched by the Saudis. But the money and weapons did not end up directly in the hands of the Afghans. They passed through the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, which decided to whom they should be delivered.

The symbol of the turning point is a weapon: the Stinger, a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile. Since 1986, the Americans have been sending hundreds of them. Until then, the dreaded Soviet Mi-24 helicopters had dominated the skies and mowed down the guerrillas. With the Stinger, a young man perched on a rock could shoot down multi-million-dollar aircraft. It was one of the factors that forced Moscow to retreat, a withdrawal that was completed in 1989. One could argue that the Stinger also contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall that year. There is a Hollywood film that helps to explain the unusual role played by the US in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It is called Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks as the Texan congressman who persuaded Congress to fund the secret war, and Julia Roberts as the wealthy Texan woman who drew him into the Afghan cause. A true story, however hard it may be to believe.

The theory that the CIA created bin Laden during those years, however, is a dark myth. It is a false story that dies hard, like other conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11. The dollars went to the Afghan mujahideen, not to the Arab volunteers who had flocked from across the Islamic world to fight the Soviet infidels. Bin Laden was one of them, the young scion of an extremely wealthy Saudi family in the property business. He and the ‘Afghan Arabs’ funded themselves, using capital from the Gulf and family money. No document proves any direct contact between Langley and bin Laden, who always denied having taken a single dollar.

It is true, however, that the anti-Soviet war created the environment in which the jihadists took root: the training camps, the international network of fighters, and the intoxicating ideology of a jihad that had brought a superpower to its knees. In 1988, whilst the Russians were packing their bags, bin Laden founded his organisation and called it ‘the base’, or Al-Qaeda in Arabic. America did not create the monster, but it did prepare the ground on which it grew.

Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, two events took place that the Trump Administration would do well to remember today, as they remain highly relevant. The first is the decline in American interest in Afghanistan. Once the Soviets had been defeated, Washington completely forgot about the Afghans, cutting off funding and losing sight of what was happening in Kabul and the surrounding area, including the rise of the Taliban movement led by Mullah Omar. A classic feature of American foreign policy in recent decades: special operations, military interventions, and then a failure to help with reconstruction – unlike what America did during the Marshall Plan era.

The second fact to bear in mind concerns the Gulf, the very part of the world where Donald Trump has now become bogged down. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Bin Laden, fresh from Afghanistan, presented himself to King Fahd in Saudi Arabia and offered his services: ‘Let my veterans defend the kingdom; do not call in the Americans.’ Riyadh chose the Americans. Half a million U.S. soldiers deployed to Saudi Arabia and, from there, in 1991, launched the First Gulf War against Iraq. For bin Laden, this was the original betrayal: infidel troops on the land that safeguards Mecca and Medina, invited by the House of Saud itself. His hatred was directed both against America and against the Saudi monarchy. He is expelled, takes refuge in Sudan, and has his citizenship revoked. The First Gulf War, too, like the invasion of Afghanistan, thus becomes a precursor to 11 September.

The 1990s were a time of mounting alarm. February 1993: a truck bomb explodes in the basement of the World Trade Center, killing six; the plan was to cause one tower to collapse onto the other. 1996: bin Laden declares war on America. 1998: he and his deputy, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, sign the fatwa against ‘Jews and Crusaders’. On 7 August of that year, exactly eight years after troops landed in Saudi Arabia, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up: 224 people were killed. October 2000: a rubber dinghy packed with explosives approached the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors.

President Bill Clinton tried to do just that. Following the embassy attacks, he ordered a missile strike in August 1998 against Al-Qaeda bases, and in December of that year he came within a hair’s breadth of bringing the matter to a close. Intelligence placed bin Laden in the Kandahar governor’s residence; the ships carrying the Tomahawks were in position; from the field, a CIA officer urged an immediate strike, arguing that there might not be another opportunity. The top brass held an emergency meeting and said no. The estimated number of civilian deaths—between two hundred and three hundred—and the proximity of a mosque carried more weight than bin Laden’s life. This was not an isolated incident. Between late 1998 and the summer of 1999, according to the 9/11 Commission, there were at least four opportunities to kill or capture him, all of which were missed.

What held Clinton back? He claims to have held back so as not to kill women and children and not to become like the enemy. The Commission will find in his favour, but the shadow remains of a decision linked to the sex scandal he was grappling with over his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The toxic atmosphere at the time may have held Clinton back, to avoid being accused of fabricating a war to distract public opinion from the scandal.

Also in the 1990s, the idea of turning commercial airliners into missiles began to circulate amongst jihadists. In 1995, in Manila, the Philippine police accidentally foiled a plot to blow up a dozen American aircraft over the Pacific whilst in flight and to crash one into a building. Behind that plot was the man who would go on to become the mastermind of 11 September: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an engineer trained in the United States and uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who had planted the first bomb beneath the Twin Towers in 1993. Around 1996, it was he who presented the plan for the suicide flights to bin Laden. The Al-Qaeda leader approved it and assigned the men who would carry out the attacks.

By the summer of 2001, the enemy was already within. In the preceding months, nineteen young men, fifteen of whom were Saudi nationals, had entered the United States on valid visas. They lived in the open, rented flats and opened bank accounts. Four of them took flying lessons at flight schools in Florida and Arizona: some instructors found them strange, but nobody reported them to the authorities. In reality, there were some warnings, but they went unheeded. In July, an FBI agent in Phoenix wrote that men linked to bin Laden might be undergoing pilot training at American schools, and requested an investigation. The memo ended up in a drawer. On 16 August, in Minnesota, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan origin, was detained after paying in cash to practise on a Boeing 747 simulator without knowing how to fly. Local officers suspected he was a terrorist and asked to search his laptop. FBI headquarters refused. One of them noted in a report the fear that this man might crash a plane into the Twin Towers. No one linked that name to the Phoenix memo, nor to the intelligence – held up at the CIA – that two al-Qaeda members were already in the country. On 6 August, a report with an unequivocal title had landed on the desk of the newly elected President George W. Bush: ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in the United States’. All the pieces are on the table. No one puts them together. America is distracted, still reeling from the euphoria of the New Economy, and focused on the challenges of globalisation. Bin Laden, the Taliban and their fanaticism are far away, in Afghanistan, off Washington’s radar and beyond its concerns.

Among the few dealing with them were U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and her deputy Patrick Fitzgerald, who, in the courtroom at Foley Square for many months during the first half of 2001, called witnesses to testify about Al-Qaeda’s structure, finances and ideology, and to paint a picture of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was still little known in America at the time. During those same months, the terrorists who had already entered the United States blended into their surroundings, took advantage of the freedoms of the very country they intended to strike, studied flight routes, trained and made their preparations. Finally, on a clear Tuesday morning, they boarded four aircraft armed only with box cutters and, within an hour, took a naive and distracted America by surprise, altering the course of 21st-century history.

The symbol of the turning point in Afghanistan is the Stinger missile. The Americans have been sending hundreds of them since 1986. However, it is incorrect to claim that the CIA created bin Laden.