Matthew Syed - Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking

On August 9, 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui, a thirty-three-year-old French Moroccan, enrolled at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. This facility, complete with a high-fidelity simulator, provided a comprehensive training program on how to fly commercial airliners. On the surface, Moussaoui seemed like any of the other men who wanted to learn how to fly jumbo jets. He was friendly, inquisitive, and seemingly wealthy. And yet over the course of two days, his instructors became suspicious. He paid for the bulk of the $8,300 course with $100 bills. He seemed unusually interested in the cockpit doors. He kept asking about flight patterns in and around New York.

The staff became so doubtful that two days after Moussaoui enrolled at the school, they reported him to the FBI in Minnesota. He was duly arrested. The FBI questioned him and applied for a warrant to search his apartment, but couldnt show probable cause. Crucially, they failed to connect what they knew about Moussaoui with the broader threat of Islamic extremism. Here was a man with a suspected immigration violation enrolling at a flying school, asking unusual questions, and paying in cash. Weeks later would be the biggest terrorist attack in history.

IN THE MONTHS AFTER 9/11, multiple investigations were launched to work out why such an audacious plot was not foiled by Americas intelligence agencies, a group totaling tens of thousands of personnel and in command of a combined budget of tens of billions of dollars. Many of these investigations concluded that the inability to prevent the attack represented a catastrophic failure.

The CIA came in for much of the severest criticism. This is the body, after all, that had been specifically created to coordinate the intelligence communitys activities against threats, especially those originating from abroad. From the time the attacks were approved by Osama bin Laden in late 1998 or early 1999, the agencies had twenty-nine months to thwart the plot. They didnt. Richard K. Betts, director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, called it a second Pearl Harbor for the United States. Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn, two leading intelligence experts, described it as the greatest debacle in the history of the CIA.

One might be tempted to concur, given the clues that had accumulated in the years before 9/11. Al Qaeda had broken its religious taboo on suicide bombing as early as 1993. Bin Laden, a Saudi-born son of a wealthy businessman turned religious zealot, constantly cropped up in raw intelligence reports about Arab terrorist groups. Richard Clarke, a former national coordinator for security under Ronald Reagan, said, There seemed to be some organizing force and maybe it was he. He was the one thing that we knew the terrorist groups had in common.

Bin Laden publicly declared war on the United States on September 2, 1996, saying in a recorded message that he wanted to destroy the oppressor of Islam. His strident message was gaining ground among disenfranchised Muslims. Half of terrorist organizations last less than a year, and only 5 percent survive a decade. Al Qaeda had longevity. It was an outlier.

The idea of an airplane being used as a weapon had been circulating for almost a decade. In 1994, an Algerian group hijacked a plane in Algiers and reportedly intended to blow it up over the Eiffel Tower. Later that year, Tom Clancy penned a thriller about a Boeing 747 being flown into the U.S. Capitol Building. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. In 1995, police in Manila filed a detailed report about a suicide plot to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.

In 1997, Ayman Al Zawahiribin Ladens deputyunderscored the intent of Al Qaeda by inciting a massacre of tourists in Egypt, an atrocity that left sixty-two dead, including children. One Swiss woman witnessed her fathers head being severed from his body. The Swiss federal police concluded that bin Laden had financed the operation. Unlike previous terrorist groups, Al Qaeda seemed committed to maximizing human suffering, including that of innocents.

In 1998, bin Laden went even further in his thirst for violence against the United States. In a widely published fatwa, he said, To kill the Americans and their alliescivilians and militaryis an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it. On August 7, simultaneous Al Qaeda bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killed 224 people and wounded over 4,000. The first was achieved with an explosive device containing more than 2,000 pounds of TNT.

On March 7, 2001, six months before the attack on the World Trade Center, the Russians submitted a report on Al Qaeda providing information on thirty-one senior Pakistani military officers actively supporting bin Laden and describing the location of fifty-five bases in Afghanistan. Soon after, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak warned Washington that terrorists were planning to attack President Bush in Rome using an airplane stuffed with explosives. The Taliban foreign minister confided to the American consul general in Peshawar that Al Qaeda was planning a devastating strike on the United States. He feared that American retaliation would destroy his country.

In June 2001, just a few weeks before Moussaoui enrolled at the aviation school in Minnesota, Kenneth Williams, an FBI analyst in Arizona, sent an email to colleagues. It said, The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and NY [New York] of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to attend civil aviation universities and colleges. He advised headquarters of the need to make a record of all the flight schools in the country, interview the operators, and compile a list of all Arab students who had sought visas for training. This was to become known as the legendary Phoenix memo. Yet it wasnt acted upon.

With so many pieces of evidence, critics were scathing that the intelligence agencies didnt identifylet alone infiltratethe plot. The joint senate committee concluded, The most fundamental problem is our intelligence communitys inability to connect the dots available to it before September 11, 2001, about terrorists interest in attacking symbolic American targets.

It was a damning assessment. Perhaps understandably, the CIA responded defiantly. They defended their record, arguing that it is easy to detect terrorist plotsbut only with the benefit of hindsight. They pointed to the research of the psychologists Baruch Fischhoff and Ruth Beyth who, before the historic trip of Richard Nixon to China, asked various people to estimate the probability of different outcomes. Would it lead to permanent diplomatic relations between China and the United States? Would Nixon meet with Mao Zedong at least once? Would Nixon call the trip a success?

The visit was a triumph for Nixon, but what was remarkable was how subjects remembered their estimates. Those who thought it would be a disaster recalled being highly optimistic about its success. As Fischhoff put it, Subjects reconstructed having been less surprised by the events than they really should have been. He called it creeping determinism.