"We stood by while this happened"

How distracted were we by the corporate oil opportunities there? There's a whole narrative thread about [the U.S.-based oil company] Unocal going through your book. It seems like a sizable part of the story.

I think substantially distracted, especially in the period, crucially, that the Taliban finally took Kabul in the fall of 1996. That was the time when they really established themselves as a national force in Afghanistan and that was also the time when they started to impose their strictures and bizarre rules on large populations in Afghanistan that wanted nothing to do with them. Especially in Kabul, which really was not Taliban country. We stood by while this happened in part because there was a lobbying effort arguing persistently that the stability that the Taliban provided might present an opportunity to complete this oil pipeline. The Pakistanis wanted this to happen too. Our foreign policy at that time, around the 1996 election, emphasized the promotion of American trading interests and corporate interests abroad.

Was there someone specifically interested in this within the Clinton administration?

The policy was left to the middle levels of the bureaucracy because nobody high up really cared enough to have an opinion. It fell to the State Department, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, who was in charge of Afghan policy. In the first term, it was Robin Raphel. She in particular was close to Benazir Bhutto [then the prime minister of Pakistan] and accepted Benazir's argument about the Taliban -- and also wanted to promote this pipeline. She genuinely believed that it could create jobs and make things better there. And she was prepared to work with the Taliban.

Was this also why we didn't want to support Ahmed Massoud, the head of the Northern Alliance, who was fighting against the Taliban throughout this whole period?

It was a factor, but I think the disdain for Massoud was rooted in the failure of the pre-Taliban governments he'd participated in, and people's frustration with that history. People just thought this guy was a figure who belonged in the past, who had not been able to deliver the political stability he promised.

Meanwhile, Massoud issued many scary warnings about the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

He did, and particularly after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, and after bin Laden established himself, as the Taliban's shock troops and al-Qaida forces were battling side by side against Massoud. Massoud, as anybody would who's engaged in a day-to-day life struggle of this sort, had a pretty clear idea of what was going on with these guys. He watched them commit suicide before they would be taken as prisoners, he saw how they were being recruited out of Pakistani madrassas, he saw where the money was coming from. He was looking at it right across the street. He had a sense of the threat that no one else could have had.

Did CIA director George Tenet trust him? I was a little bit surprised by this, but Tenet seemed to have a pretty good grasp of the threat that bin Laden posed.

Yes, he did, but he was less confident on the issues involving Afghanistan itself. Two things constrained his willingness to act boldly in this area. One was that his own bureaucracy was conflicted about Massoud. The officers in his Near East division had a long history with Massoud -- they admired him, but felt that he was so independent he wouldn't be an active partner. And then he had a president who was not inclined to take risks. [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright was openly opposed to working with Massoud. Tenet would have to have been very confident to grab Clinton by the lapels and say, "You have to do this." He didn't do that at all.

What was the turning point when Tenet decided they should go get Osama? And why did they want him alive?

It unfolds in stages. The first big turning point is with the African embassy bombings in August of 1998. They had some evidence before that that bin Laden was involved in active operations and was not just a money guy, but it was the embassy bombings that made it clear to everyone that he was both capable and actively intending to hit American targets around the world. The second really scary event that gets everyone's attention -- especially Tenet -- was the millennium period. The winter of 2000. You remember, nothing happened. But the near misses, both the ones we knew about at the time and the ones we didn't know about at the time, scared the hell out of people.

Why did they want to arrest him and not just go shoot him? Despite these alarms, there was still not a sense of urgency, certainly not the degree of urgency within the Cabinet that we're used to today. People in the Cabinet really believed that law enforcement tools were the best way to attack terrorism. The Justice Department had successfully convicted Ramzi Yousef and a whole series of individuals who had carried out the African embassy bombings. They had confidence this approach could work and was consistent with American values and signaled to the world that we didn't regard these terrorists as political actors but as common murderers. That was the argument for that approach.

And Clinton -- the record shows -- was of divided mind. Although he was prepared to shoot bin Laden dead -- he proved that with the cruise missile attacks [in 1998].

What about this other attempt on Osama's life you describe? We had him in our sights, we were going to bomb his camp, but we didn't because of a certain plane we spotted.

Yes. This is in the first weeks of 1999, I think, and bin Laden is being watched by this group of paid agents. They follow him on this hunting trip into the southern Afghan desert and they start watching him from this overlook above this camp. And it's a really luxurious camp in the manner of Persian Gulf traveling parties. There are big fancy tents with generators and refrigerators and they're hunting with falcons for a bird called a bustard, which is apparently a big sport in that part of the world. So these agents report that they followed bin Laden to this camp and the CIA puts a satellite up and takes some pictures. Then they see a C-130 transport plane. They trace the plane to the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich, very close ally to the United States. They're important to the U.S., not just a moderate friend. This is a country that provides the only port calls for American aircraft carriers in the region, it pumps a lot of oil, it provides facilities for the U.S. Air Force and Navy, which at that time were trying to contain Iraq. So this was a very close friend. When that news came in that this was a UAE plane, the Clinton Cabinet must have blanched.

When you're reading the chapters describing 2001, after George W. Bush has entered the White House, it seems as though the new administration had a lot of information. How would you characterize how much the CIA knew in 2001 about bin Laden and his intentions? And Bush's attitude?

The Bush administration was pretty slow off the mark to recognize the threat, but they did recognize, by the summer of 2001, what they had on their hands. Some people have criticized them for wasting six months and I think that's a legitimate criticism. They did have this threat explicitly called to their attention when they came into office.

By the summer, though, the threat warnings about bin Laden were so severe that everyone from the president on down understood that this was really serious business. The difficulty was, as in the Clinton administration, that you could have a strategic warning in the sense that there is an enemy out there that intends to attack you, but there was no technical warning. They could never be certain when and where. They didn't have the sources or the informers or the access to al-Qaida to even make a well-educated guess. All they could do was press against every cell and militant that they could find and hope that by doing so they would disrupt some plot.

So you get this feeling going over the material, especially that summer, that they just know something's coming. It's not that they're just hearing this, they're hearing language and multiple, critical accounts saying, "Something spectacular is coming." Yet they can't get a grip on it. You hear the people who participated in this talk about it in very vivid language. Some of them describe the experience as fatalistic. They came to work every morning and thought, "Today something is going to really happen." They knew.

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