9/11: a paradigm shift but not a tech shift

The only innovative aspect of the al-Qa'eda attacks was the human imagination: the conception of how terrorism could be taken to unprecedented lengths

Because of my age—I was nearly 24 when the twin towers fell—the al-Qa’eda terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were a watershed in my life and awareness of public policy. I had grown up with the ever-present threat of Irish Republican terrorism, though, living in the North East of England, the risk of physical harm was low. I noticed small things, like the removal of litter bins at railway stations, and there was the sense of shock at outrages like the bombings in Enniskillen, Warrington and Omagh, but it was, for a young person in England, in the background.

9/11 changed all that. I wrote a year ago about how that day felt and how the world seemed to be so different afterwards, and in January this year I analysed the way on which the United States-led coalition in the years afterwards framed the conflict in which we found ourselves as “the war on terror”. Yesterday, however, I was back on my previous familiar turf of House of Commons select committees, in the audience for an evidence session of the Foreign Affairs Committee. FAC is conducting an inquiry into the UK’s international counter-terrorism policy, and began taking oral evidence last September.

I have some residual skin in the scrutiny game here: in 2008/09 I was clerk of the Home Affairs Committee’s counter-terrorism sub-committee, chaired by then-Conservative MP for Newark, Patrick Mercer. It was a different age, of course: the Labour government had published a new and meant-to-be-comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy, snappily titled CONTEST, in 2003, and had issued a revised version known as CONTEST 2 in 2009. It was a short, focused inquiry and we were hemmed in by secrecy, but, re-reading the report 15 years on, I think we carried out a useful piece of scrutiny work at a time when the government was still feeling its way in the years after the London bombings of 7 July 2005. The final paragraph is not a bad summation:

The Government’s counter-terrorism strategy is an important component of efforts to make the UK safer, and we welcome its latest iteration as a vital part of an overall security strategy. Co-ordination across government in these issues is very difficult to achieve, and different countries have approached it in different ways. After a slow start, much has been done to improve the UK’s counter-terrorism structure, most notably the workings of OSCT and the Counter-Terrorism Units. This is impressive. We note that there is still much work to be done in these areas to make the UK’s arrangements more efficient and effective. We are under no illusions that the threats facing us have lessened significantly, nor that they will lessen in the immediate future. It has been said that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”. We agree.

The witnesses at the Foreign Affairs Committee meeting yesterday were Sir Alex Younger, who was chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (known in Whitehall as “C”) from 2014 to 2020, and then Professor Ali Ansari, founding director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at my own University of St Andrews. Younger was head of counter-terrorism at SIS 2009-12, which covered the period running up to the London Olympics, so he has particular expertise, while Ansari spoke at length, fluently and excellently about the Islamic Republic of Iran, its approach to the West and its use of proxy groups like Hamas and Hezbollah across the Middle East.

There was a lot to absorb and reflect on from the two-hour session, but what I wanted to consider here was a remark that Younger made about 9/11. He was a 10-year veteran of SIS by then, and he told the committee that the al-Qa’eda attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (not forgetting United Airlines Flight 93, brought down by passengers in rural Pennsylvania but believed to be destined to target the United States Capitol) were “paradigm-changing”. That made me stop and think.

Of course, 9/11 did transform global politics and radically shifted the foreign policy priorities and imperatives of the US government and its allies. I bought a book last year called Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History, by Jeff Nussbaum, the title of which is self-explanatory: one of the most fascinating is a speech which Dr Condoleezza Rice, then President George W. Bush’s national security advisor, was due to deliver on that day of days, Tuesday 11 September 2001.

It is a fascinating snapshot of a lost world, the ultimate what-might-have been. It is the most accurate blueprint we have of what George W. Bush’s foreign policy was supposed to look like before Osama bin Laden wrenched the steering wheel from his hands. Nussbaum also wrote about it for The Atlantic last September. Rice, whose background was as a specialist on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, wanted to use the annual Rostov Lecture on International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies to talk about America’s relationship with Russia. As she had said to her executive assistant, “let’s take a shot at 10 years of calling it the post-Cold-War era” and move policy onwards, and she intended to include remarks on missile defence and its role in the US/Russia relationship.

The speech made a reference to supporters of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as guilty of “a failure to recognize that the tectonic plates of history really have shifted”: Rice wanted the US to withdraw from the treaty (which it formally did in December 2001). But any threat from Islamic extremism or non-state terrorist actors hardly featured. She showed the perspective she took on that danger:

We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released in the subway, [but] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of mace and then decide to leave your windows open?

The fact that Islamic extremism barely registered on the Bush administration’s radar makes the impact of 9/11 all the more powerful. In that sense, then, Younger is quite right about a paradigm shift from a great-power rivalry with Russia to a near-obsessive focus on eliminating a global terrorist threat which made international borders almost irrelevant. It led, of course, first to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, where al-Qa’eda had trained, and then to the conflict in Iraq from 2003 onwards. I’ve written about Iraq before: while I absolutely accept that the motivation for military action against Saddam Hussein was duplicitous and misleading, I think there were benefits from what happened and I am still willing to defend some aspects of what the US called Operation Iraqi Freedom and what the British, with characteristic prosaicness, Operation Telic. It is undeniable that we are feeling the geopolitical effects not only of 9/11 but of how the US-led coalition responded today.

And yet… it is interesting that the innovation which caused this paradigm shift, the new factor which shifted foreign and security policy from that day to this, was not one of technology, nor of resources, nor of opportunity. All that changed, in truth, was imagination, the conception in the minds of al-Qa’eda’s leaders of what could be achieved in causing harm to America. They essentially scaled up their ambition.

All four airliners which were hijacked on 9/11 were internal flights, three bound for Los Angeles International Airport and one for San Francisco, chosen because their distant destinations meant they would be carrying more fuel. At that time, security at airports, especially for domestic journeys, was much less stringent than it was forced to become. Passengers had to walk through a metal detector which would identify guns or knives, but that was the limit, more or less, of any screening. Moreover the security of airport infrastructure was lax, and in May 2000, undercover agents had managed to bypass the checks at two American airports and make their way unescorted to the departure gates.

This made it possible, then, for the hijackers to get on to the aircraft armed with a variety of crude but sufficiently effective weapons like boxcutters, utility knives, multi-function hand tools and irritant chemical sprays. These were not in isolation especially fearsome, but they were more than adequate to allow groups of determined men to seize control of the aircraft. Some hijackers made reference to bombs but none was found.

Hijacking an aircraft was not a novel form of violence. The first aerial hijack in history is believed to have taken place in 1919 when a Hungarian geologist and former spy, Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, was denied a passport and took control of a plane at Mátyásföld Airfield nera Budapest in a desperate attempt to flee the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, it was a tried and tested chapter in the terrorist playbook, with 362 hijacks taking place between 1968 and 1972. One of the most famous, perhaps, was the seizure of Air France Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris on 27 June 1976 by two terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–External Operations and two Germans from the Revolutionary Cells: the aircraft was diverted to Benghazi in Libya, where it refuelled, and then flew to Entebbe in Uganda. On 4 July, the plane was stormed by Israeli special forces.

Hijacking, therefore, was an established aspect of terrorist tactics. The al-Qa’eda operation did not require impossibly substantial resources, either. The original plan was devised by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1996 and presented to Osama bin Laden, who eventually authorised it late in 1998 or early in 1999. By 2000, recruits had begun taking flying lessons in the United States, though one, Hani Hanjour, already held a commercial pilot’s licence. Some trained in Arizona, some in Minnesota and others in southern Florida. The final arrangements, including target selection, were agreed in July 2001. Again, there was nothing about this part of the preparation which was revolutionary or even especially demanding in terms of resources or access.

The would-be hijackers were not even supernaturally skilled at evading detection or surveillance. The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had briefed President Bill Clinton in December 1998 that Osama bin Laden might be planning to use hijacking to strike at the United States. Throughout the spring and summer of 2001, various organisations in the US intelligence community found evidence to suggest that al-Qa’eda intended to hijack commercial aircraft as part of terrorist attacks on the American homeland. Nor were the Americans the only ones uncovering intelligence. Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of SIS from 1999 to 2004, later said “the fact that a large-scale terrorist event occurred was not a surprise”, while Baroness Manningham-Buller, director general of MI5 2002-07 but at the time of the 9/11 attacks deputy director general, has confirmed that “we had prior intelligence that summer of al-Qa’eda planning a major attack” (though she stresses the location was not known).

Let me just summarise that: al-Qa’eda’s plan was to exploit lax security to undertake a series of hijackings, a long-established terrorist tactic, it arranged for recruits to be at least partially trained as pilots in normal civilian flight schools, and in making these preparations they had not wholly escaped the attention of not only US intelligence but the security organisations in Britain, Israel and Algeria. The intention was almost laughably simple: to take control of large, heavily fuelled commercial airliners and fly them into high-value targets or targets which would result in mass casualties in the continental United States. No new tech, no new strategy, no new tactics; no unachievable expenditure of resources nor any reliance on a complete avoidance of detection.

What was new about 9/11, then? How did Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda, the network he and others had established in 1988, achieve this “paradigm change” that Sir Alex Younger was talking about at the Foreign Affairs Committee meeting yesterday? If you will forgive momentary levity, all that happened was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed thought big. He drew together a number of existing techniques and practices, and imagined a large-scale use of airliners as kamikaze weapons which would cause huge explosive damage to civilian and governmental targets.

The 9/11 attacks evolved from the Bojinka plot, a three-pronged operation conceived by Mohammed and his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who had been responsible for the 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center. One element of the Bojinka plot, planned for January 1995, was to crash an airplane into the headquarters of the CIA in Virginia in a decapitation attack against America’s external intelligence service. Once that intellectual threshold had been crossed, the shocking events of 9/11 were simply a matter of scaling up.

As soon as you have conceived the idea of using hijacked airliners as flying bombs, some targets become obvious. The White House, major federal government departments (the Pentagon being surely the most distinctive and identifiable) and the seat of the legislature, the Capitol, are the self-selecting targets in terms of damaging American capability, political power and prestige. If you are thinking more in terms of the sheer scale of devastation and the prospect of maximum civilian casualties as well as profound disruption and impact, then skyscrapers, a symbol of Western capitalist wealth and dominance, simply suggest themselves. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, the North Tower (1 World Trade Center) and the South Tower (2 World Trade Center), built in Manhattan between 1966 and 1975, were perfect targets. Although they were only briefly the world’s tallest buildings, from 1971 to 1973, before being overtaken by the Sears Tower in Chicago (itself surpassed in 1998 by the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, they were iconic and totemic. So the 9/11 attacks focused on the twin towers, the Pentagon and, it is believed, the Capitol.

The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, comfortably the bloodiest terrorist operation in recent history and surely the most famous—can we say iconic?—ever carried out. Like the collapse of communism in eastern Europe a decade before, it changed the course of global history for my lifetime. It made Western security policy as it had existed on 10 September 2001 effectively irrelevant, reframed our notions of threat and challenge and reordered the world. But it did not come about because of the invention of the wheel, or high explosives, or powered flight, or the ballistic missile. It simply took a human brain, initially that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and a conceptual ambition and reach. How could you use commonly available resources and tactics to cause unprecedented and devastating damage to your enemy? 9/11 was the answer. It was, in some ways, simply an example of evil genius. That, for me, makes it all the more chilling.