Original subtitles

Ten years after the War on Terror began, the United States

was embroiled in a series of scandals.

It had finally found a trace of Osama bin Laden.

It's a dark night, it's a moonless night.

The covert operation is being followed live at the White House.

Everyone is very focused on what is happening,

and at one point we hear gunfire.

After that, there is about 20 minutes of silence.

It was the longest 20 minutes of my life.

And I remember talking to Bill McRaven,

who was head of Special Forces, saying, you know,

"Bill, what the hell's going on?"

McRaven came back and then said, "We have a Geronimo,"

which means that they had gotten bin Laden.

I think that's when all of us breathed a sigh of relief that the

mission had been accomplished.

Meeting on the technical issues in order to get the president on the air,

he's going to speak from the East Room.

Good evening.

Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world

that the United States has conducted an operation that

killed Osama bin Laden.

I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA,

to make the killing or capture of bin Laden a top priority.

I can remember the crowds gathering in front of the White House

and behind the White House

and they were yelling, "USA! USA! CIA! CIA!"

Something I thought I would never hear as director.

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

And thus ended a long chapter.

The problem, ultimately, is that terrorism is an ideology,

and it's very difficult to kill an ideology with weapons.

With bin Laden eliminated, al Qaeda was a shadow of its former self.

But other groups were about to take up the jihad, the holy war,

and continue to spread terror across the world.

On the morning of September 11th,

I was actually a high school student and like all Americans,

I was profoundly affected by this.

In 2006, I was an international relations student.

And the idea of joining the CIA

sounded really fascinating to me.

My name is David McCloskey.

I was a CIA analyst focused on the Middle East.

So the Arab Spring starts in Tunisia in protest of government

brutality and lack of, you know,

economic opportunity and it spread to Egypt, spread to Libya,

spread to Yemen, spread to Syria.

Most of these countries have significant numbers of people

who are in their 20s and 30s

who actually have educations but don't really have prospects

for jobs or for economic security going forward.

There was a switch flipping in the minds of many of these people.

It had been decades of family rule, really corrupt authoritarian politics.

This was a very virulent kind of political movement.

But we didn't really see the seeds of what was taking

place in the Middle East.

And the reason the CIA missed the Arab Spring

is that the CIA was not out in the streets

talking to the youth.

I think that was a mistake.

Everybody kind of stood aside,

hoping that the best things would happen

and as a result, there were a lot of failed states.

In a matter of months,

the Arab Spring brought down despots in Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo.

But it was in Syria where revolts turned into tragedy.

Bashar al Assad resisted pressure from the street.

His family had ruled the country with an iron fist for four decades.

The dictator sent in the army to quash all dreams of change.

And the uprising veered into civil war.

Barack Obama called for the ousting of Bashar al Assad

and secretly dispatched the CIA to support the opposition.

The challenge for the CIA in Syria after the civil war started

was to try to determine who their allies were.

Who they could work with, who they could trust, which groups had a

legitimate chance of succeeding.

But like many revolutions, there is no single leader, and so

Syria is extremely complicated.

The goal was to overthrow Bashar al Assad.

As France knew Syria extremely well, we began to work

very closely with the CIA.

But while giving our support to the Syrians, we always knew

there was a risk of certain

groups evolving in a negative way and turning against us.

At the time that I was handling the Syria account for CIA,

there was probably about

1,200 to 1,600 separate revolutionary groups.

All disconnected, disunified, and not working together.

Some were very secular.

Some were very religious.

Some were very political.

So our role was to try to

bring some sort of unity.

Over the months, the CIA realized

that the armed groups most able to seize power in Syria

had links to its worst enemy, Al Qaeda.

Terrorism finds its seeds in failed states.

When their countries fall apart,

that's when terrorism begins to raise its ugly head.

What we see happening were these old

Al Qaeda and Iraq networks

just sort of turning the flow the other way

to go into Syria.

You could see Al Qaeda and other Al Qaeda like groups

on the outskirts of these pro democracy movements

just waiting for their moment.

In the summer of 2013, two years after the start of the civil war,

an attack by Bashar al Assad's army

would give the jihadists an opportunity to extend their influence.

CIA officials are trying to get samples smuggles out of the country

so they could analyse it and figure out exactly what is being used.

We've got samples from animals, samples from human beings

and we have witness reporting.

The laboratory results are consistent.

Bashar al Assad used chemical weapons.

Obama had promised to respond militarily against the Syrian regime

if chemical weapons were used.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Obama had to make a very difficult decision.

Ten days ago, the world watched in horror as men, women, and

children were massacred in Syria

in the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21st century.

I will seek authorization for the use of force

from the American people's representatives in Congress.

Thanks very much.

By then, the Syrians believed that despite what President

Obama said, you know, we're going to look the other way.

And they were right.

They were right.

President Obama envisaged joint airstrikes

with the French and British,

but he suddenly informed President Hollande

that he decided to abandon the strikes.

The U.S. President had one fear, getting bogged down in

yet another endless conflict in the Middle East.

I thought that was a mistake.

If you establish a red line as a U.S. president and it is

crossed, you have to respond.

There are consequences of drawing a red line and doing nothing.

That's correct.

All of the people we're trying to work with, they lose confidence in us.

I think if we had substantially supported this that there

would have been an ability to bring it all together.

We didn't do that.

I think we missed an opportunity to support those who were

on the front lines of this fight

against the regime forces of the murderous Bashar al Assad.

At that point there was a shift because the Syrian

opposition groups found themselves

at odds with each other and the moderates gave way to

the fundamentalists.

Even when the CIA found groups that it believed it could work with

and it set up expensive training programs,

how to use weapons and how to communicate and how to organize,

often those same individuals,

they would quit and they would join Al Qaeda.

So many billions of dollars were just given away to our enemies.

Trained and armed, some of these groups, until then moderate,

joined the ranks of the jihadists.

Alongside fundamentalists from all over the world,

they took control of swathes of Iraq and Syria,

giving birth to a new monster, 13 years after

9/11 and two years after the

death of Bin Laden, Islamic State.

And there's an extraordinary situation by the middle of 2014

where a terrorist group

is in control of more territory than exists in the entire United Kingdom.

To see the Islamic State proclaim the establishment

of a caliphate in northern Iraq,

where of course I spent most of the first year of the war, to see that

was just terrible, frankly.

That was horrific.

We'd all sacrificed so much.

Carrying out summary executions, pillaging, and rape,

Islamic State unleashed a reign of terror across its territory.

Far more powerful, more dangerous, and wealthier than al Qaeda had

ever been, the group would spread its jihad across the globe.

The reason why we care so much about them

is because embedded in their ideology,

you need to strike, you need to have an external operations

capability to strike distant targets in the West.

In some ways, it's very bin Laden esque.

You have a small group of people who are very ideologically

motivated and who are ruthless.

And so penetrating those groups, getting access to their comms,

is not always possible.

And so you can be tactically surprised.

We had technical intelligence about Islamic State that the

Americans didn't have, but sadly, this intel couldn't prevent the

Paris attacks of November 2015.

Because that attack happened, you know, it's almost by

definition an intelligence failure

because we didn't have, the French government didn't have

somebody inside that operations cell

to provide the actionable intelligence that would

have allowed us to disrupt that kind of attack.

You could think about ISIS as a cancer that metastasizes,

because ultimately ISIS begins

to rely on lone wolves, people who act completely on their own.

The Europeans were certainly targeted.

The Americans were mentioned as targets as well,

but any country in the world with which ISIS had a grievance

could be a target for attack.

ISIS's disciples and its agents are going to other places around the

world to carry out acts in ISIS's name.

It's really hard to find and to stop,

and this becomes a full time occupation for the CIA

to try to locate and disrupt these ISIS cells around the world.

Fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks,

Islamist terrorism had become a worldwide scourge.

Its geographical scope was proof that the war on terror,

led by Washington and the CIA, had failed.

As a U.S. presidential election candidate,

Donald Trump was already promising to put an end to this fiasco.

Overseas, ISIS has carried out an absolute atrocity.

We cannot let this evil continue.

Our current strategy is a proven absolute failure.

Our new approach must be to halt the spread of radical Islam.

Days after swearing in as US president,

Trump ordered the CIA to change its priorities

and abandoned the fight to oust Bashar al Assad.

The new enemy that had to be eliminated was Islamic State.

Counter terrorism is a line of work.

You know, you just, you never take a break.

And what happened with ISIS is one of those stories

of a terrorist army that then the United States

kind of put an enormous amount of time, effort,

and resources into defeating. And we did it.

We helped to assemble a broad kind

of international coalition that goes and actually fights

against the Islamic State.

It's going to basically erode ISIS's territorial control

down to some small pockets inside Iraq and inside central Syria.

So that effort goes well.

I mean, it's bloody and horrific,

but the Islamic State is significantly diminished at the end of it.

We enabled them as well, again, with air power,

with logistics, with intelligence, surveillance,

reconnaissance, and all the rest of that.

And it was wonderful, frankly, to see the defeat of the Islamic State.

With the caliphate brought down, the CIA stepped up its efforts

to find its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.

The agency finally managed to track him down.

With US special forces hot on his tail,

the fallen caliph took his own life during an assault.

His residence was bombed flat

to prevent it becoming a place of pilgrimage.

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi is dead.

He died like a dog.

He died like a coward.

The world is now a much safer place.

Well, I'm not sure Trump ever fully understood what exactly was

going on in the Middle East.

I think by 2019, though, he was happy to take credit for what the

U.S. and associated forces

had done in destroying the ISIS territorial caliphate.

U.S. Special Operations Forces executed a dangerous and daring

nighttime raid in northwestern

Syria and accomplished their mission in grand style.

But he never understood that we had not destroyed ISIS.

ISIS terrorist capabilities continued. The caliphate, the territorial

control of ISIS, was eliminated, but not ISIS itself.

You have fortunately eliminated the organ

that seemed to be the base for the group. So you've denied them

their sanctuaries in Iraq and Syria,

but now they're spread everywhere.

Islamic state fighters dug in in certain parts Syria and Iraq.

Others moved to Afghanistan, where the 9/11 attacks had been fermented

20 years earlier. The United States had so far failed to

establish democracy there.

And even worse, the Taliban, which had never given up hope

of retaking the country,

was directly threatening the incumbent power backed by the CIA.

Donald Trump, in his first administration, decides that we're

going to end this campaign in Afghanistan once and for all.

So he strikes a deal with the Taliban, an agreement in which

the United States essentially commits to withdrawing its forces.

I thought the deal was a terrible agreement.

I thought it was a mistake from the beginning to negotiate between

the U.S. and the Taliban only,

and not to have the government of Afghanistan involved.

And in this agreement, the withdrawal of American forces was

scheduled for September 11th, 2021.

But...

As the date approached, CIA gave tactical warning

that the Taliban were ready to take over by force.

Without waiting for the symbolic date of September 11th,

or for the withdrawal of U.S. troops,

the Taliban launched their offensive.

Within weeks, they had taken the provinces one by one

before finally entering Kabul and seizing power.

It was the analytic determination of the U.S. intelligence

community that within a few months

of the U.S. withdrawal that the government would collapse.

The only thing that was a surprise was that the collapse came

just as rapidly as it did.

America's Afghan allies withdrew from the battlefield

and joined up with the people

they knew were going to win the war.

Totally not surprised.

The fact that the citizens of,

and the soldiers of the Afghan National Army

chose not to fight is a reflection of the fact

that there was more in common

with what the Taliban was and what it offered

than what we offer, the collective we.

I thought back to the beginning

when I was trying to negotiate with the Taliban

as the Taliban leadership was telling me at the time

that we would ultimately share the same fate

that the Soviets did.

20 years later, in fact, it turned out they were right

and the U.S. ended up leaving in an ignominious fashion.

The U.S. military made a hurried exit.

In their wake, tens of thousands of people tried to reach the

airport to flee the return of the fundamentalists.

But Kabul would be plunged into horror when a terrorist took

advantage of the panic to infiltrate the crowds.

13 American soldiers and 170 Afghan civilians were killed.

After 20 years of war, these images were seen around the world.

They came to symbolize a defeated America and its failure to

uphold the promise of freedom.

What a wasted 20 years.

Not doing anything except being there year after year after year.

We're just there.

No purpose, no strategy, just there.

And then we finally get out.

That describes Vietnam, too.

It describes Libya.

It describes Somalia.

It describes Iraq.

The fall of Kabul was, of course, a very dark time for the CIA,

but there was a moment of

bright hope a year later when the agency was able to locate

someone they'd been looking for for a very long time.

Ayman Zawahiri, the new leader of Al Qaeda, had been the

right hand man for bin Laden at the 9/11 attacks.

Zawahiri was hiding out in Kabul, pretty much in plain sight.

CIA figured out that he was there.

And then on one morning, early in the morning as he was getting

up to do his morning prayers,

Zawahiri walked out to the balcony of this high rise

and a CIA Reaper drone was waiting for him.

It was one of these specialty weapons that the CIA has cultivated

for just attacks like this.

Limited amount of explosive power,

would just kill Zawahiri alone.

The CIA could congratulate itself on this small victory.

But over more than two decades,

generations of combatants had been fed on jihadist precepts

and were now conquerors who knew how to wait for their moment.

While Afghanistan had just fallen into Taliban hands,

in Syria, Bashar al Assad, too,

had no option but to flee from the advancing opposition.

I was shocked.

And I continue to be shocked.

There's a shock factor to the reality that this guy is now,

you know, running the country.

And when you contrast that with his past, it's pretty wild.

He fought against the United States.

It was a scary moment because everyone was convinced

that this was essentially an al Qaeda

takeover of the country with disastrous consequences not just

for the region but for the world.

Al Jolani gave up his nom de guerre and returned to being Ahmed Al Sharaa.

The CIA knew the new strongmen of Syria well.

As one of the most wanted terrorists, the U.S. government had

put a price of $10 million on his head.

There are only two ways to get rid of a terrorist.

You either kill him or you make him a politician.

When you're running a country, you really can't be a terrorist anymore.

Ahmed Al Sharaa, who'd been in detention in Iraq when I was

the commander as a cell leader of al Qaeda,

five years, he then went to Syria.

After being released, he established the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

Al Sharaa was then the leader of one of the most powerful and

heavily armed jihadist groups in Syria, the Al Nusra Front.

It was at this time that he began to draw everybody's attention as one of

the most feared opposition leaders.

Even if we recognize that they were the most effective on the battlefield,

and were the most likely to succeed,

there's no end of reasons why we shouldn't have dealt

with Jabhat al Nusra.

Human rights, core values, conflict with Americans.

al Julani had sworn bai'at to bin Laden.

So, Jabhat al Nusra was hardcore al Qaeda.

After 13 years of civil war, in December 2024,

al Julani launched the decisive assault against

the regime in Damascus.

The democratic opposition, long supported by the CIA,

was no longer part of the picture,

as one of America's worst enemies brought an end to more

than 50 years of dictatorship.

Nobody believed that he would be able to be strong enough

to take over all of Syria.

It's been just a complete surprise to everyone,

I must say, including the CIA.

Late 2024, he seized control of the entire country.

And we witnessed this astonishing moment when the great

dictator Assad, the one we thought was president for life of Syria,

was forced to get on a plane with his family and evacuate

to Moscow, and this legendary jihadi leader taking control of

the government in Damascus.

Within 12 days, al Sharaa had brought down the regime.

The U.S. government and the CIA were faced with a fait accompli,

but would very soon,

despite his recent past, hold talks with this new important figure.

As a side event to the United Nations General Assembly,

Ahmed al Sharaa was invited to New York.

The former terrorist was greeted with great ceremony for having

freed Syria for more than half a century of bloody dictatorship.

Ladies and gentlemen, that boy was given the greatest honor of

his life to stand in front

of you and the free world today and introduce the hero,

the man that brought freedom back to Syria.

I have the honor to introduce you to the President of Syria,

His Excellency, Mr. Ahmad al Sharra

and to General David Petraeus.

[SPEAKING ARABIC]

I'd never met him before.

I'd found him to be very impressive.

He was very eloquent, he was thoughtful,

he could answer difficult questions in disarming ways.

As you know, Mr. President,

I spent over 37 years in the U.S. Army,

and I was a soldier, not a diplomat.

So I hope you'll forgive me if I speak with the directness

of the old soldier that I am

as I get the first question out of the way.

Please help us understand how you got from Al Qaeda in Iraq 20 years ago

to where you are today, Syria's head of state on stage in New York City.

He acknowledged, look, we were on different sides.

But now we all want to see a common objective achieved.

We wish you strength and wisdom in the difficult work ahead.

We obviously hope for your success, Inshallah.

And you're many fans, and I am one of them.

24 years after the 9/11 attacks, a former al Qaeda leader

was invited into the Oval Office.

The few rare photos show a warm encounter,

but the talks took place behind closed doors.

al Sharaa committed to fighting terrorism in exchange for the lifting

of the economic sanctions suffocating his country.

Well, at the end of the day, the new leader of Syria,

who would have been identified by

CIA years gone by as

an Islamist and a jihadist.

Turns out to be a rather reasonable fellow.

He shaved his beard, he ditched his camouflage fatigues

and put on a coat and tie.

That didn't mean he wasn't still a terrorist.

I can just say as of now, I still have my doubts

that he's really renounced terrorism.

I think what he wants is Western assistance

and he's prepared to say a lot of things to get it.

Now, al Qaeda became legitimate in Syria.

They are now ruling the country, but at the end, I believe

terrorism still exists.

Just because we don't talk about terrorism, it doesn't

mean terrorism went away.

We didn't talk about terrorism before 9/11.

It did not go away.

The war on terror is thought to have caused 7,000 American deaths,

along with those of

hundreds of thousands of civilians, soldiers, and

militiamen in other countries.

Contrary to the promises made in 2001 by George W. Bush,

the jihadist networks that threaten

the world have never been fully eradicated.

The war on terror is like the war on drugs, it's unwinnable.

How do you wage a war on terror?

And what do you do to yourself when you're waging that war?

9/11 changed everything.

We had to do things that were insane.

It all started with George W. Bush, and we never accomplished

what we said was our mission.

9/11 in some ways transformed not just the CIA, but the U.S.

government, and I think not necessarily for the better.

The global war on terrorism resulted in us taking our eye off

the ball in many ways against

two of the key threats to the United States right now.

The CIA realized only too late to what extent

the threat of its historical enemies,

Russia and China, had grown.

Spying on the Kremlin has therefore

been substantially increased in recent years.

And 20% of the agency's budget is now dedicated

to keeping an eye on China.

But beyond these two large dangers, around which the CIA has refocused,

another, more insidious danger lurks over the agency.

A threat on the inside.

The President of the United States himself.

He's had antipathy toward the CIA.

Significant damage has been done to the CIA

because of Trump's distrust of many of the people who are there.

President elect of the United States.

I worry about the future of the CIA.

You know, President Trump has said flat out, you know,

"I don't believe my own intelligence community."

He sees it as part of the deep state.

Anyone who isn't kind of adopting a partisan view

that's very much pro the administration

is seen as suspicious.

It's pretty clear he would prefer

an intelligence organization that is run by people

who are going to do everything he asks or never gonna question.

At the CIA, officers were essentially asked to swear

allegiance to Trump and they were asked these questions.

Who did you vote for in the 2024 election?

And what did you think of the January 6th

insurrection at the Capitol?

These questions were designed to weed out people who were not

100% Donald Trump loyalists.

We have the conditions for a catastrophic, systemic

intelligence failure as occurred

in the months and weeks before 9/11.

We are the United States of amnesia.