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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — The images from Kabul are demoralizing and depressing—unless you are sitting in the Kremlin, where they are certainly being viewed in a quite different light. Probably something close to giddiness and glee.

From Russian President Vladimir Putin’s perspective, this likely reinforces his view that President Joe Biden and his national security team are weak and naïve.  ‘This is Obama’s third term’, Putin must be thinking. And of course, the images of US helicopters desperately trying to evacuate thousands from Kabul also resonate in Kiev, Tbilisi, and probably Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius and beyond—think Taipei.  The appalling mismanagement of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will have consequences that will affect American credibility globally and linger well beyond the end of Biden’s presidency.

A first order consequence concerns Russia.

It is highly likely there was practical cooperation between the Kremlin and the Taliban in the preparation for the American withdrawal and this may have included direct support to Taliban forces. We don’t need to revisit the narrative of Russian bounties for dead American soldiers in Afghanistan, but the evidence of Russian energetic engagement with the Taliban in recent months is manifest and the fact the Russian embassy in Kabul is currently protected by Taliban fighters is significant.

For both Russia and the Taliban there was a clear shared strategic objective: Get the Americans and their allies out of Afghanistan and ideally in the most humiliating fashion possible.  The Russian-Taliban honeymoon may not last long, but for the moment it has served both sides well.

For over a decade and a half of his tenure as Russia’s president, Putin has been preaching the gospel that you can’t trust the Americans to back you in the long run or when the chips are down, but you can count on the Russia he leads (think the Russian intervention in Syria and support for Assad or their intervention—whether acknowledged or not—in Libya on the side of Khalifa Haftar among other examples). This messaging is important in current times and reinforces Putin’s narrative about the decline of the West and the waning relevance of western liberal systems of governance.

In recent years, Chinese President Xi Jinping has picked up the trumpet to echo this message that American power is in decline and that American security guarantees cannot be relied on in East Asia and beyond.

Putin has been Russia’s Czar for over two decades without meaningful interruption and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. He has seen US Presidents come and go and he has been quick to size them up and adjust his moves accordingly. He was genuinely scared of what George W. Bush might do in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the speed and efficacy of the US response made a deep impression on him.  He adjusted his approach to the US to one of partner and ally against Islamic extremism (Putin was also busy consolidating his control over the Russian Federation in the immediate post-Yeltsin period).

Putin also sized up then-President Barack Obama after Obama’s failure to act when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad blithely crossed the “no use of chemical weapons” red line.  That opened the door for the annexation of Crimea as well as the Russian military intervention in Syria (and later Libya). Joe Biden was Vice President at the time. Putin likely has a very good book on Joe Biden and was quite confident of what the end result for the US in Afghanistan would look like.  Putin may even have a better feel for Joe Biden than many realize, if any of the Hunter Biden material is true.  One leader’s assessment of another, matters in geopolitical relations. Putin has a high level of confidence in his ability to read his international opposition.

As recently as July 2021 President Biden said, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of the US embassy in Afghanistan.”  He went on to add, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”  President Biden made these statements knowing perfectly or should have known—from intelligence briefings and expert commentary—as well as historical precedent—that when the US announces a withdrawal of forces with a hard deadline, in this case 9/11, our adversaries use the time to prepare for their offensive military action. Our Afghan allies knew this as well and prepared accordingly.  Now the Taliban will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks in the US embassy in Kabul, probably with their ISIS and Al Qaeda friends as honored guests.  If you think the videos from Afghanistan have been troubling to this point, just wait for the anniversary celebrations.

Perhaps of more near term geopolitical significance, Putin will use the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan to support a narrative that Russia needs to defend its interests from the spread of Islamic extremism from Afghanistan by strengthening “security and counterterrorism” cooperation with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan. Does anyone want an excuse to get – and keep – those pesky Americans out of Central Asia and start rebuilding that corner of the Soviet Union?

Putin’s use of terrorism risk as justification for military action is well-rehearsed and goes back to the Moscow apartment bombings (which the FSB almost certainly organized) in September 1999, which Putin used both to consolidate political power and to justify the brutal military campaign in Chechnya. Putin is acutely aware of the risks of Islamic extremism spreading from Afghanistan to Central Asia, the Caucasus, and into the Russian Federation. In fact, Russian, Uzbek, and Tajik troops conducted exercises in July, which appear to have been designed to prepare to respond to cross border incursions from Afghanistan. This is only the first step in his plan for consolidation of Russian power and influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

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Some might ask – given the risk of the spread of Islamic extremism from Afghanistan to the Russian Federation – why would Putin would want to partner with the Taliban?  Those who ask this question are misunderstanding the depth of Putin’s enmity toward the United States and the West and everything for which we stand.  Putin views the world as a “zero sum” game.  What hurts the US must serve Russia’s interests. The debacle in Afghanistan clearly qualifies. A short-term deal with the Taliban is a risk with taking in Putin’s mind.  Putin plays on the superpower chessboard using the only tools he has at hand, military power, cyber and disinformation capability and US ineptitude and lack of strategic thought.  He has taken clever advantage of President Trump’s four years of thoughtless estrangement of US allies around the world.

Beyond the propaganda value and regional leverage our withdrawal has given adversaries like Russia and China, there is the impact of our withdrawal on the many nations among our allies who contributed to the Afghanistan mission. The images of Afghans clinging to a departing US Air Force C-17 and falling to their deaths will not fade easily. How easy will it be to assemble their support when we inevitably have to go in again to deal with a resurgent Al Qaeda, a globally ambitious Taliban, or an even more dangerous embedded ISIS in the hills of Afghanistan?

We should also consider the impact on Pakistan.  Pakistan has nurtured Islamic extremism in Afghanistan for decades.  While a part of the Pakistani security establishment partnered with the US effectively after 9/11, other parts simultaneously were nurturing relations with extremists including the Taliban. The “Great Game” is still being played in that part of the world, and neither the Pakistanis, nor the Indians or Chinese have forgotten it.

Pakistan also still certainly chafes from the US raid to kill bin Ladin in Abbottabad a little over ten years ago.  One wonders if the waning of US influence in Islamabad has opened the door for Islamic extremists to enter the security establishment there. Pakistan is a nuclear power and has in recent years, increased its development of tactical nuclear weapons. Does the Taliban now have a path to nuclear weapons?  This is an important question and it’s answer casts a shadow over our withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Biden Administration, for all its vaunted claims of “return to competence” in Washington, has fallen flat in its first serious challenge. One could argue that Biden’s capitulation on Nord Stream 2 and Putin’s mocking rejection in Geneva of charges of US election interference and cyberattacks on the US, foretold the debacle in Afghanistan. The challenge for the US now will be to manage the airlift of those Afghans who were willing to partner with the US and carefully look for opportunities to rebuild the credibility of US security guarantees around the world.

Taiwan and South Korea would seem good places to start.

At the same time, we need to recognize that Afghanistan will once again become the training ground for those who hope to replicate 9/11 attacks on the US. A strong and robust intelligence capability will be essential in mitigating that risk.

Read more expert-driven national security insight, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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The EU must quickly seal its external borders to stem the flow of migrants who are no longer welcome in the 27-member bloc, according to Slovenia’s interior minister, whose country currently holds the presidency of the EU Council.

Speaking at the ‘Sarajevo Migration Dialogue’ on Thursday, Interior Minister Ales Hojs said EU countries were preoccupied recently with the coronavirus pandemic, the fall of the government in Afghanistan, and now a migrant crisis on the Poland-Belarus border, which he said was a hybrid war waged by Minsk against the EU.

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“All three have additionally contributed to the increase in numbers of illegal migrants moving towards Europe and the Balkans, destabilizing the European Union,” Hojs told reporters.

The Slovenian minister said the current situation was similar to the 2015 influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, when the EU admitted over one million people across its borders.

This time the situation is different, Hojs said, warning that “there is no more ‘refugees welcome.’”

“I believe that external borders must be secured, even with fences if necessary,” Hojs said, saying that he supported a plan for Brussels to finance the building of fences to reinforce the bloc’s borders.

He said it was important to strengthen cooperation and partnership across the EU in order to better manage migration and maintain security.

Thousands of migrants have been trying to cross the Belarus-Poland border in an attempt to reach the EU. They have been stranded at barbed-wire fencing with Polish border guards repelling their attempts to cross. Warsaw has accused Belarus of orchestrating the crisis to destabilize the EU and “weaponize” migration in an effort to have sanctions lifted.

A spokesperson for Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko claimed on Thursday that Germany agreed to open a humanitarian corridor for 2,000 refugees on the border.

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When The Washington Post reported this week that CIA Director William Burns slipped into Afghanistan on Monday to meet with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, it was described as the highest-level face-to-face encounter between the Taliban and the Biden Administration.  WaPo cited anonymous sources for the information and the CIA offered no immediate comment on the reporting.  If the reporting is accurate, it doesn’t answer any immediate questions about why the President would dispatch the CIA director for such a meeting.

What we do know, is that the unexpected advances of the Taliban that have dominated the headlines over the past week and a half were initially blamed on an intelligence failure by many.  Early on, Cipher Brief Expert and former Acting Director of CIA John McLaughlin tweeted that “The ‘intelligence failure’ drumbeat is starting. People should be careful about the charge if they have not actually seen/read the intelligence…”

So, what intelligence did the US have that would have led to a different outcome in Kabul and throughout the country?

• The New York Times reported last week that “classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly.” The paper cited current and former US government officials, saying, “By July, many intelligence reports grew pessimistic, questioning whether Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital.”
• On August 15, The Wall Street Journal reported that administration officials said they knew that a “total capitulation of the Taliban was a possibility, and they planned their withdrawal efforts accordingly.” But they also cited an administration official, saying “it wasn’t so much a failure in intelligence in which the administration based its decision, but rather, a change in circumstances brought about by the swift U.S. withdrawal.”

But private sector analysts were watching as well. Here’s an inside look at what The Cipher Brief has been publishing since January with key outtakes from Cipher Brief Expert Tim Willasey-Wilsey:

Brief: January 25, 2021

“The Afghans themselves are also monitoring the Washington newsfeeds in forensic detail and will be encouraged by Sullivan’s statement. Recently, all too many conversations in Kabul have been about when to leave and which route to take. Some wealthier Afghans already have their money in Dubai and children in foreign universities. Some even have passports and property in the United States, UK or Germany. For those who are less fortunate, the discussions are about which route to take out. The Uzbekistan border is favoured because a visa costs just $30 and there is a variety of onward routes via Turkey or Russia to the West whereas the routes via Iran or Pakistan are more restrictive or liable to interference.”

Brief: March 11, 2021

“Saleh will advise Ghani not to take Taliban or Pakistani promises on trust. Instead, Ghani may decide to call Washington’s bluff. He may doubt that Washington is really willing to abandon Afghanistan on 1^st May with the risk of a rapid Taliban victory jeopardising all the hard-won advances in areas such as women’s rights and counterterrorism over the past 20 years. The spectre of Al Qaida re-establishing camps in Afghanistan would surely be too much for Biden and Blinken.”

“Even if there were no helicopters from the US Embassy roof, the TV pictures of the Taliban entering Kabul, and of Afghan refugees fleeing their advance could evoke memories of Saigon in 1975. The reimposition of Taliban curbs on women would provoke international opprobrium. And subsequent reports of AQ training camps being re-established in Afghanistan would bring back recent and painful memories. After all the blood and treasure expended in Afghanistan that would be a disastrous outcome.”

Brief: April 19, 2021

“The Afghan government may be able to hold on to power for a few years as the Najibullah administration survived after the Soviet departure. However, there is a danger that there will be a sudden dam-burst in confidence with senior officials and politicians leaving en masse and hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing westwards through Iran, Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics. As the Taliban re-enter Kabul, we could see disturbing scenes of retribution and, in time, the return of Al Qa’ida figures from their hiding-places in the tribal borderlands in Pakistan. Only then will people re-examine this decision and recognise that the Afghan deployments since 2014 have not been that onerous.”

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Brief: June 1, 2021

“According to my sources, the Taliban are convinced they can take Kabul “within days” of the NATO withdrawal and they believe the Afghan army is “in a shambles and demoralised”. Although the Taliban will not disrupt departing US troops (unless attacked) they are not willing to wait until September to continue their campaign against Kabul government forces.”

“But we should not take much comfort from the Najibullah example. The comparisons with today’s Afghanistan are misleading. Najibullah’s government was able to reach and supply all the major towns by military convoy. The Afghan army was deployed to protect towns and road communications. By contrast, in 2021, only the route between Kabul and Jalalabad is reasonably safe. Convoys cannot get through from Kabul to Kandahar, Kandahar to Herat, or Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif. The Afghan army is spread across the country in piecemeal district centres (often surrounded by Taliban-controlled countryside) and have to be resupplied by air. This is not a sustainable model.”

“Furthermore, a number of today’s Afghan leaders, officials and military officers have received offers to relocate to the United States, Germany and elsewhere. As the security situation continues to deteriorate, the gradual trickle of departures is likely to gather pace. In such circumstances, the government could implode quite suddenly.”

“To some, this may evoke images of the 1975 fall of Saigon with the big losers being the Afghans who remain, particularly the women, who face a future of uncertainty and anxiety. There could also be a migration crisis reminiscent of Syria in the last decade.”

Brief: June 28, 2021

“One key indicator is that Afghan security forces have begun to surrender to the Taliban. The procedure is quick and simple. Tribal elders are used to deliver a stark message to Afghan troops often holding positions in district centres. The message is often; “The non-believers are leaving Afghanistan. They are defeated. Your leaders are corrupt. You can surrender now, and we will protect you; or you can fight, and we will kill you.” Recently, the Taliban appear to have honoured their promise not to punish Afghan soldiers who surrender. News of this new-found leniency is likely to encourage other units to follow suit and lay down their arms. In several provinces, including in the north, the Taliban are tightening their grip on those cities which are still held by the government. The Taliban will soon be in a position to cut off food supplies and demand their surrender, possibly offering a similarly lenient dispensation to the population. Now that the Taliban possesses captured armoured vehicles and artillery, their ability to exert pressure on the cities is enhanced. In Kabul, a sense of panic has begun to grip the capital. There are desperate attempts to sell family homes but there are no buyers even when houses are on the market at one tenth of their previous value. Some families have departed to Tajikistan, conscious that several of the land border crossing-points with the Central Asian Republics have been captured by Taliban forces in recent weeks.”

Read also Putin’s Calculated Afghanistan Play from Cipher Brief Expert Robert Dannenberg

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As information emerges about Islamic State of Khorasan, or ISIS-K – the terrorist group that claimed responsibility for last week’s suicide attack that killed 13 US service members and more than 160 Afghans – there is an increased effort to predict how Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, may emerge once again as a breeding ground for terrorist groups.

A United Nations report released in June estimates that thousands of fighters from the region had already poured into Afghanistan.  Many of them are believed to be affiliated with either the Taliban – still seen as a terrorist organization – or al Qaeda or ISIS-K.

The New York Times reports that ISIS-K was created six years ago by members of the Pakistani branch of the Taliban.  There is a range of thought among experts as to what their ability to successfully carry out a terrorist attack in a Taliban-ruled area means for the terrorist threat moving forward. 

The Cipher Brief spoke with respected terrorism experts Bruce Hoffman, Mitch Silber and Colin Clarke to get their thoughts on the current risk of terrorist attacks against Americans both home and abroad. 

The Cipher Brief: If the United Nations Report issued in June is accurate, and there are thousands of fighters from the region who have poured into Afghanistan – many associated with known terrorist groups – is there any way that the administration can say ‘mission accomplished’ in terms of degrading terrorism’s presence in Afghanistan? 

Hoffman: No. As those numbers from the report released by the United Nations Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team highlight, Afghanistan is again becoming a jihadi magnet and will likely continue to be so into the future. The suicide bomb attacks outside the gates of Kabul International Airport last Thursday underscore the multiplicity of terrorist groups already present in that country.

In addition to ISIS-K, there is the Haqqani Network, al Qaeda and, of course, the Taliban. Terrorism thrives in conditions of chaos and instability which the terrorists hope to spread to other countries and eventually across regions.

Much as Salafi-Jihadi terrorists migrated from existing battlefields in South Asia back to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus in the 1990s; spread to East and West Africa in the early 2000s; blossomed during the Arab Spring to wage civil wars in Syria, Libya, and the Sahel, in the early twenty-teens; the same phenomenon is unfolding in Afghanistan.

Silber:  Frankly, I don’t think any of the four administrations can make the claim that the policy goal of making Afghanistan inhospitable to serve as a safe haven for Al Qaeda or other similarly oriented jihadist groups has been accomplished.  Certainly, at a number of times during the last twenty years, the threat that jihadist groups, most importantly — Al Qaeda — has presented, in terms of their ability to project a threat to the United States has been diminished, the degradation of the threat was only temporary.

The Cipher Brief: How confident are you that Al Qaeda and ISIS are unable to plan and execute attacks against the U.S. domestically? 

Hoffman:  The credulous Doha negotiations with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan and subsequently to the Taliban’s blitzkrieg across Afghanistan and then to the shambolic evacuation of our diplomats and citizens, has painted a huge target on America’s back. Like sharks in the water, terrorists will smell blood. As my Council on Foreign Relations colleague, Jacob Ware, and I wrote in War on the Rocks, in May, every time terrorism has forced the U.S. to withdraw from a conflict zone where it had committed ground forces, whether in Lebanon in 1984; Somalia in 1993; and Iraq in 2011, it has led to more terrorism worldwide, not less, and thus made the U.S. less safe.

At a time when our country continues to grapple with the COVID pandemic; when climate change is pulverizing the Gulf States with Hurricane Ida and California with worsening wildfires; when the January 6^th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building continues to smolder with incidents such as the bomb threat that paralyzed the area near the Library of Congress and Cannon House Office Building earlier this month; coupled with ongoing cyberattacks and peer competition from China and Russia and concerns over Iran’s nuclear aspirations; our terrorist adversaries may well conclude that the U.S. is sufficiently preoccupied or distracted by any or all of the preceding and therefore conclude that the time to strike the homeland is opportune. It would very unlikely entail a repeat of the catastrophic September 11^th 2001 attacks. But a terrorist strike along the lines of the 2019 shootings at Naval Air Station Pensacola; the 2017 suicide bombing of a concert venue in Manchester, England; the coordinated suicide attacks on London transport in 2005; the 2004 Madrid commuter train bombings; or any kind of significant lone wolf incident perpetrated in the name of some existing terrorist movement would likely re-create the widespread fear and anxiety that are terrorism’s stock-in-trade. Twice in the past three years, it should also be noted, members of al-Shabaab – perhaps al Qaeda’s least technologically proficient franchise – have been arrested both in the Philippines and in an undisclosed African country engaging in the same flight training that four of the 9/11 hijackers undertook before their fateful, history-changing coordinated attack.

Silber:  At this very moment, it is unlikely that Al Qaeda or ISIS-K have the infrastructure, resources, recruits and external planning ability to strike the United States based on statements by the IC and senior DoD officials to Congress.  However, without any, or only limited external pressure by the U.S. military as a result of the retreat from Afghanistan, these networks and capabilities can be reconstituted in the coming months and certainly groups like Al Qaeda have never given up their desire to strike the American homeland.

Clarke:  I think it is unlikely that AQ or ISIS will be able to attack the U.S. homeland.  We’ve spent the better part of the past two decades shoring up homeland defense. We’ve got CT tools now that we didn’t have twenty years ago. That said, the picture could look quite different 6, 12, 18 months from now. Both of those organizations are capable of regenerating an external operations planning capability. There is also the worry of inspired attacks.

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The Cipher Brief:  Some analysts have said that morale among terrorist or Islamic extremist groups is extremely high due to the circumstances surrounding the US pullout in Afghanistan, do you agree and if so what does that mean? 

Hoffman:  Yes. Of course. Both Sunni and Shi’a terrorist movements around the globe have applauded the Taliban’s re-conquest of Afghanistan and routing of the U.S. military. For Sunni Salafi-Jihadi terrorists, the events there this past month validate the strategy articulated by Usama bin Laden just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, when he described the ease with which al-Qaeda had been able to “bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat” from Afghanistan in 1989, and predicted that the same fate would eventually befall the U.S. And, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, a Shi’a terrorist organization, for instance, last week delivered a sermon where he described America’s “historic and humiliating defeat in Afghanistan as representing, “the moral downfall of America.”

Silber:  Jihadi chat rooms and online extremist networks are feeling like they have the wind behind them.  It took twenty years, but before the 20th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11 an Islamic emirate has been re-established in Afghanistan.  Suddenly, what seemed impossible has become possible and Islamist insurgencies all throughout the Middle East and South Asia can take inspiration by the determination of the Taliban in their efforts to overthrow a secular democratic government and replace it with an Islamist one.

Clarke:  I do expect morale to be high among terrorist and especially Islamic extremists given the turn of events we’ve seen in Afghanistan. We’re a week and a half out from the 20-year anniversary of 9/11, and Al Qaeda leaders are returning to Afghanistan (this is being displayed in AQ propaganda). We’ve seen al-Qaeda affiliates all over the globe congratulating the Taliban for their victory. I don’t want to overstate the case here, but I do believe that what has occurred in Afghanistan will be a serious boost for the global jihadist movement right at the same time the U.S. and its allies are shifting from counterterrorism to great power competition. There will be fewer resources and energy to deal with terrorists, right at the time we have major threats metastasizing in Afghanistan, potentially with both a reinvigorated al-Qaeda and a stubbornly resilient ISKP.

Read also Mike Leiter’s Why We’re Much Safer from Terrorism Now, Than We Were After 9/11 in The Cipher Brief 

Read also Why We Need a New National Defense Strategy (for terrorism) exclusively in The Cipher Brief 

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A pack of wild boars were rounded up and euthanized after one of the animals attacked a police officer in the streets of Hong Kong – the opening shot in a pitched battle between the feral hogs and the city’s law enforcement.

A group of veterinarians took seven wild boars into custody, euthanizing the beasts after knocking them out with dart guns in an area near the financial center of the city, according to a statement from Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department on Thursday.

The pigs were captured after one attacked a police officer last week, an act which reflects the city’s new policy toward the animals: stop them before they attack again.

The aggressive boar knocked down a police officer by biting his leg last week as the two faced off in a residential car park, the pig only losing the battle after falling off the building to its death. The wild boars are apparently “accustomed” to wandering back and forth along the roadway, begging for food from pedestrians and vehicles alike. Previously, the city had handled the population by capturing and sedating the animals, then relocating them to “remote areas,” according to the the department.

Hong Kong CEO Carrie Lam vowed to increase penalties for those citizens found feeding the boars, which have reportedly been responsible for some 30 attacks in recent years. While residents are warned not to feed the boars so as not to encourage population growth or disease outbreaks, the animals are a favorite among some visitors. Still, Lam insisted “we can’t simply sit on our hands while things deteriorate.”

Animal rights groups have responded with a protest letter against a policy of euthanasia, pointing out that most visitors do not feed the boars and arguing resources should be directed toward stopping the human activity rather than blaming all the boars. Allowing the boars to be captured and killed “ignores their right to live and considers their existence in urban areas as a capital offense,” the letter read.

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An official inquiry has found that Germany’s justice system was staffed with former Nazis for decades after the Second World War, At one point, three out of four top officials at the prosecutor’s office were former party members.

Released on Thursday, the 600-page report was compiled by historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling, and covers the Cold War period running from the early 1950s until 1974. The work was commissioned by the federal prosecutor’s office. 

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The researchers found that, at one point during the 1950s, roughly three in four top officials in the federal prosecutor’s office had been members of the Nazi Party. It took until 1972 before former Nazis were no longer in the majority in that office, and until 1992 before the judicial system had been fully purged of ex-members of the fascist party.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past,” the researchers said of the situation. 

Presenting the inquiry’s findings, state secretary at the justice ministry Margaretha Sudhof said the country has “long remained blind” to the presence of ex-Nazis in senior positions after the end of the Second World War.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” Sudhof commented. 

In a statement about the study’s publication, Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said she welcomed “the fact that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office is also grappling with its troubled past and is shedding more light on its own Nazi entanglements in the post-war period.”

The federal prosecutor’s office is Germany’s highest prosecutorial authority, responsible for pursuing those who violate international law and commit alleged crimes relating to state security. 

The latest study follows an earlier report published in 2016, which stated that in 1957 – more than a decade after the war had ended – 77% of senior officials in the justice ministry were former Nazis. At the time of that publication, then-Justice Minister Heiko Maas stated that the “Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it, and thereby created new injustice.”

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Just three days after restrictions were announced for unvaccinated Austrians, a provincial governor is pressing for a nationwide lockdown of all residents as Covid-19 infections continue to hit record highs.

“If no national lockdown is ordered tomorrow, there will definitely have to be a lockdown of several weeks in Upper Austria, together with our neighboring province Salzburg as of next week,” Upper Austria Governor Thomas Stelzer told lawmakers on Thursday.

That will mean at least two of Austria’s nine provinces will be in full lockdown mode just days after the nation created a two-tier society by locking down approximately two million unvaccinated Austrians.

“We must raise the vaccination rate. It is shamefully low,” Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said on Sunday, announcing that unvaccinated residents would only be allowed to leave their homes for “essential” purposes, such as to buy groceries or go to a doctor’s office.

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Police are now doing random checks for proof of vaccination on Austrian streets. Those unvaccinated residents who are found to be in violation of the lockdown order face steep fines of up to €500. Those who refuse to go through a vaccination status check will have to pay about three times as much.

Stelzer and other Austrian governors are scheduled to meet with Schallenberg and Health Minister Wolfgang Mueckstein on Friday, when a full lockdown will likely be considered.

New Covid-19 cases in the country passed the 15,000 mark for the first time on Thursday, far surpassing 2020’s daily high of 9,586, set when no vaccines were available. Upper Austria and Salzburg have been hit the hardest, putting hospitals at risk of bed shortages. With some 66% of its population fully vaccinated, Austria lags behind other Western European countries in terms of the Covid-19 vaccination rate.

While Austria is the first to impose a lockdown on the unvaccinated, other EU countries – including Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Greece – have imposed increasingly tight restrictions on people who haven’t accepted a Covid vaccine.

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Winston Churchill’s 04 June 1940 speech in which he vowed that he and his countrymen would “fight on the beaches “and would “never surrender” in the face of a seemingly inevitable Nazi invasion is rightly renowned as perhaps history’s most famous address by a wartime leader.  Less well known, however, is the cautionary tone the new Prime Minister struck in that same appearance before the House of Commons, as he sought to temper the joy and relief engendered by the seemingly miraculous extraction of the British army from the beaches of Dunkirk.  “We must,” Churchill warned, “be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.”  “Wars” he admonished, “are not won by evacuations.”

Shortly before the 2011 Abbottabad operation that killed Osama bin Laden, I was asked by my HQ, my views on mounting an assault on the target we knew as Abbottabad Compound 1, (AC1) given that we were not sure it sheltered the terrorist leader.  After expressing my 95% confidence that the Al Qaeda (AQ) leader was in fact, there, I allegorically added that we must strike as ‘you cannot leave Hitler in his bunker and end the war’.  I was fortuitously, right in my assessment that the murderer of so many innocents was present within AC1.  Sadly, however, his death did not bring our war with radical Islamic terrorism to a conclusion.  As was the case after Dunkirk, our enemy was unwilling to quit the field or to limit his unbounded war aims.

Likewise, we should have no expectation that the withdrawal of our forces from the Afghan theater of combat signals an end to the conflict with terrorists who started that war by attacking us on September 11, 2001.  We cannot unilaterally declare an end to the War on Terror by leaving Afghanistan – however much we might wish to do so – for the very simple reason that our enemies do not share that desire.  As former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta put it, “I understand that we’re trying to get our troops out of there, but the bottom line is, we can leave a battlefield, but we can’t leave the war on terrorism, which still is a threat to our security.”

The Taliban parading of the American-made weapons and accoutrements of their defeated foes was, in a manner akin to that of ancient Rome, intended not only to celebrate victory.  It was also meant to humiliate the vanquished.   Such triumphal demonstrations – and what will be a galling celebration of the anniversary of 9/11 as their own holiday to follow – will evoke enthusiastic responses from Islamic extremists and will draw many new adherents to the cause that lies at the core of Taliban legitimacy and belief.

As was the case when we left Iraq and later had to go back into the region to crush the ISIS Caliphate that metastasized in the wake of our departure, there is every prospect that the Taliban’s success will breathe new life into Islamic extremist groups.  And there is no reason to believe that the “new” and now much more heavily armed Taliban – an organization that refused to break with AQ over the course of a brutal twenty-year battle, will be any less receptive to working with Islamic terror groups than were their pre-9/11 forebears.

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“We are going to have to maintain very, very intense  levels of indicators and warnings and observstion and ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance] over that entire region to monitor potential terrorist threats”, said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley in a recent interview, adding it will not be easy.

As CIA Director William Burns said during Senate testimony in April, “Our ability to keep (the) threat…in check in Afghanistan from either al Qaeda or ISIS…has benefited greatly from the presence of U.S. and coalition militaries on the ground and in the air fueled by intelligence provided by the CIA and our other intelligence partners.” With the withdrawal of the American military, Burns said, “the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish.”

Much discussed ‘over the horizon’ intelligence collection against Afghan terror targets will not fill the void left by the loss of our ability to monitor and attack terrorist targets from in-country bases.  With Afghanistan bordered by countries unlikely to be willing to host a significant US presence, intelligence collection missions will now have to be launched from bases well beyond the horizon with all that implies for the quantity, quality and timeliness of intelligence collected.  Such operations will also be commensurately more expensive and difficult to mount.  Moreover, the intimate knowledge of our adversaries that we have painstakingly built over the course of nearly 20 years on the ground, began aging the moment we departed Afghanistan.  Absent an intelligence presence on the ground, our ability to collect on terrorist groups operating in and from that country will only degrade further as time goes on.

After acknowledging that we “could see a resurgence of terrorism out of the region in the coming 12-36 months”, Milley went on that we will, “as opportunities present themselves… have to continue to conduct strike operations if there’s a threat to the United States.”  However, as our pre-9/11 experience showed, such remote strikes can delay our terrorist enemies’ plans, but will not deter them from their intent to strike the US homeland.

As such, Secretary Panetta is undoubtedly correct in his conclusion that US involvement in Afghanistan is not over.  “We’re going to have to go back in to get ISIS,” Panetta said.  “We’re probably going to have to go back in when al-Qaeda resurrects itself, as they will, with this Taliban.”  And, as was the case with our operations to destroy ISIS’s so-called Caliphate after we precipitously left Iraq, there can be no doubt that should we have to go back into Afghanistan, our task will be greatly complicated by the manner in which we left that country, abandoning our allies and bases there.

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The US withdrawal from Afghanistan will have profound geo-strategic implications for America’s position in the region and in the world.  Our Chinese, Russian and Iranian adversaries will seize the opportunity to fill the void left in the wake of our departure.

The Taliban has already indicated it will engage with China, which covets Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.  Entry into a transactional relationship with the cash-strapped Taliban regime and granting access to Afghan mineral resources – and possibly use of Bagram Air Base – in exchange for financial aid and Chinese support for the Taliban in international organizations would suit Beijing, which would evince no concerns about human rights and the like.

For their part, Central Asian countries will look away from Washington and ever more towards their old masters in Moscow and a rising China to ensure their security and economic well-being.   Islamabad, while publicly celebrating the victory of their Taliban proxies and its role in guiding it, must at the same time worry that the extremism embodied by the victors will gain renewed traction beyond its frontier provinces with all that implies for the security of the Pakistani state.

Caught by surprise by Washington’s decision to leave and the conduct of the withdrawal, even our closest and oldest allies are questioning US resolve.  They will surely think twice before acceding to any future US request to join in joint operations.  Our decision to quit Afghanistan, and its messy execution, will also evoke questions about the validity of American assurances to other nations under threat from aggressors.  It will not have been lost on them that the withdrawal of American air, intelligence, planning expertise and logistical support ensured the collapse of an Afghan Army that was dependent on the US.

Our adversaries, too, will see the chaotic nature of our departure as well as the abandonment of Americans, allied citizens and Afghans to uncertain fates as signs of weakness and enfeeblement.   This possibility is particularly dangerous in that they could seize this moment of US distraction to engage in opportunistic adventurism that could include movement by China against Taiwan; a Russian attempt to resolve its impasse with Ukraine forcibly; stepped-up Iranian prosecution of its proxy war with Israel; or a further ramping up by North Korea of its nuclear program.  Any such eventuality would force the US to respond vigorously or risk further erosion of its international credibility.

Finally, the costs involved in remotely monitoring and trying to deter threats emanating from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan mean that we will be unable to shift intelligence and military resources away from the War on Terror to confront the threat posed by peer competitors to the degree we had hoped.

Aristotle is said to have pronounced, “You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.”  Likewise, the courage shown by so many – and the heroic conduct of US military and CIA personnel in particular – in seeking to extract American citizens from Afghanistan and to honor our obligations to Afghans who worked and fought alongside us for so long, cannot obviate the dishonor attendant to having left so many behind.  Bloody Taliban outrages and reprisals against the latter are a certainty.

It will not be long before Kabul’s new rulers recognize that the Americans now under their control, are potentially useful pawns in trying to extract diplomatic, financial and other concessions in exchange for their freedom.  The effectiveness of our efforts hereafter to extract our own people and our Afghan allies from the clutches of the Taliban and how we respond to any attempts to use them as leverage against us, will determine the depth of the stain on our national honor already attendant to the disastrous end of our Afghan campaign.

In that same famous speech, Churchill solemnly told his countrymen that: ‘The Battle of France is over: The Battle of Britain is about to begin.”  He went on that “we would be well advised to gird our loins for the continued warfare to come.”

As we approach the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, we should honor our sacred dead from that horrible day.  But we should likewise prepare ourselves for the battles with Al Qaeda and its murderous kindred of Cain that will surely come.

Recent polls would indicate that Americans support the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, if not the way in which it was conducted.  One wonders how those polled would have responded if the question had been ‘Do you support a withdrawal from Afghanistan even if it markedly increases the chance of terror attacks and atrocities directed at your fellow citizens at home and abroad?’  I fear we will find out soon enough.

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Poland’s procedure for appointing senior judges by the executive branch violates EU rules, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has said.

Tuesday’s ruling by the CJEU said the situation in Poland in which the justice minister, “who is also the Public Prosecutor General,” can “second judges to higher criminal courts” and terminate them at any time “without stating reasons,” infringes on the independence of the judicial branch.

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The EU court’s opinion was requested by a regional court in Warsaw, which was worried that the appointment and termination procedure compromised the presumption of innocence in cases adjudicated by minister-seconded judges.

The CJEU found “a number of factors” that could empower the justice minister to influence judges and thus “may give rise to doubts concerning their independence.” It said appointments and terminations of a judge should be made “on the basis of criteria known in advance and must contain an appropriate statement of reasons.” Under the current procedures, the criteria are not public at all and the minister doesn’t have to explain his or her decision to withdraw the secondment.

The European court also noted that while a judge has to consent to be seconded by the minister, the termination can be done without one, which “may have effects similar to those of a disciplinary penalty.”

The minister’s role as head of the prosecution is problematic in the context of judge appointments, since it calls into question the impartiality of prosecution and trial, the CJEU said.

Lastly, there is an issue with seconded judges’ involvement in disciplinary proceedings brought against other judges. They serve as deputies to the Disciplinary Officer for Ordinary Court Judges, also appointed by the minister of justice. The arrangement could cast doubt on “the imperviousness of the other members of the adjudicating panels concerned to external factors,” the EU court said.

The combination of factors gave the CJEU reason to believe that minister-seconded judges “are not provided with the guarantees and the independence which all judges should normally enjoy” in a member-state of the EU. The minister’s power “cannot be considered compatible with the obligation to comply with the requirement of independence.”

Considering the circumstances, the court added, “the presumption of innocence may be jeopardised” in cases presided over by judges such as these in Poland.

The disputed procedure is part of a sweeping reform of the judicial system, which put the conservative Polish government at loggerheads with the EU. The opinion is the latest blow dealt to Poland in the ongoing conflict.

Last month, the CJEU imposed a €500,000 ($568,000) per day fine on Warsaw for ignoring a previous order from the court in a case regarding a mining operation. Poland called the ruling part of a “political blackmail” campaign by Brussels.

READ MORE: Poland will be punished for challenging EU law primacy, European leader warns, as Warsaw claims Brussels is devoid of democracy

The EU and Poland have long been entrenched in conflicts over domestic policies which officials in Brussels say go against the union’s rules. Warsaw, among other things, has been accused of compromising the rule of law, discriminating against the LGBT community, and curbing freedom of the press. The Polish government says the EU is attempting to encroach upon its national sovereignty.

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Cipher Brief Expert Tim Willasey-Wilsey is a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London and a former senior British diplomat. From 1996 to 1999 he was senior advisor to the British government on overseas counterterrorism.  This piece was first published by RUSI in London.  The views do not represent those of RUSI.

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Analysis of openly available sources indicates that a British report shared with the US in December 1998 described an early stage of the 9/11 plot.

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Two extracts from Presidential Daily Briefs (PDB) are given some prominence in the 9/11 Commission report into the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. One is from a PDB delivered to President Bill Clinton on 4 December 1998, and the other is from a PDB given to President George W Bush on 6 August 2001. Both are presented inside a textbox and both contain intelligence ‘from a friendly government’ which provided the first and only significant suggestion that Al-Qa’ida (AQ) planned to hijack aircraft in the US.

Eight months after the attacks, under Congressional pressure, the Bush administration was obliged to reveal some details of the PDBs, and on 17 May 2002 the New York Times disclosed that ‘the report provided to the president on Aug. 6, which warned him that Mr. bin Laden’s followers might hijack airplanes, was based on 1998 intelligence data drawn from a single British source, government officials said today’. The British government was obliged to acknowledge that the intelligence came from British sources. The Guardian reported on 18 May that ‘The memo received by Bush on 6 August contained unconfirmed information passed on by British intelligence in 1998’. The Independent ran much the same story with additional detail.

Both PDBs quoted from one British report from December 1998. The key question is whether this report, with its significant deviations from what actually happened on the day, actually referred to the 9/11 operation. Subsequently published evidence points compellingly to this indeed being an early version of the 9/11 plan.

The heavily redacted British contribution was shown on pages 127 and 128 of the 9/11 Commission’s report. It reads:

‘On Friday December 4 1998 the CIA included an article in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) describing intelligence received from a friendly government about a hijacking in the United States.

‘SUBJECT. Bin Laden preparing to hijack US aircraft. Reporting [passage redacted] suggests bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Sheikh Omar Abdal Rahman,  Ramzi Yousef and Muhammad Sadiq Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gamaat Al-Islamiya (GI) saying that “as of late October the GI had completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of bin Laden but that the operation was on hold. A senior bin Laden operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit GI counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options – perhaps including an aircraft hijacking. GI leader Islambouli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during “the next couple of weeks” to free Abdal Rahman and the other prisoners according to what may be another source. The same source late last month said that bin Laden might implement plans to hijack aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.’

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In May 2002 the US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice issued a statement observing (correctly) that the report had mentioned ‘hijacking in the traditional sense’ with no indication that aircraft would be used as weapons of mass destruction. Her testimony to the 9/11 Commission made broadly the same point.

Indeed, even in late 1998, there was a profusion of threat reports of which the aviation strand was just one. The MI5 official history comments aptly that the Service was puzzled as to why there were so many more reports of threats than actual attacks: ‘Even the most reliably sourced intelligence received on this question usually consists of a snapshot of a proposed plan being discussed. Most of the reporting does not make clear how far advanced the plan is’ (Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 802–806). What MI5 did not realise at the time was that AQ operations could take up to three years from inception to execution.

Steve Coll writes that ‘Within the morass of intelligence lay ominous patterns. One was an interest by bin Laden’s operatives in the use of aircraft … yet at the counter terrorism security group meetings and at the CIA’s counter terrorist centre there was no special emphasis placed on bin Laden’s threat to civil aviation or on the several exposed plots where his followers had considered turning hijacked airplanes into cruise missiles’ (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 419–420).

Although the December 1998 report appears fragmentary, there were a number of aspects of particular interest. The first was the name Ramzi Yousef. Yousef had studied electrical engineering at Swansea Institute from 1986 to 1990 before exploding a massive bomb under the World Trade Centre in February 1993 and then planning the Bojinka Plot against airliners in the Philippines in 1994. Yousef had been arrested in Islamabad in February 1995 and sent to the US, where he was tried and imprisoned for life. He was an energetic and imaginative terrorist, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was also known to move in terrorist circles.

The aviation link must have struck a chord, too. The British were also interested in Hussain Kherchtou, who had been in Kenya at the time of the Embassy bombings and was himself a pilot. He later provided a debrief to the FBI. His story and his courtship by the British came into the public domain because of a subsequent US court case and a talkative FBI officer.

The Egyptian angle also would have provoked little surprise. On 19 November 1995 Egyptian terrorists had blown up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, killing 13 – only yards from the British High Commission compound with its exposed staff housing and kindergarten. The British had a miraculous escape that day.

The concern for the release of Sheikh Abdal Rahman, ‘the Blind Sheikh’, was consistent with the widespread devotion which the preacher inspired among Islamist radicals and particularly Egyptians. His imprisonment in New York for his part in Yousef’s attack on the World Trade Centre had caused significant distress among his many adherents, who all wanted his release.

The idea that AQ would strike the US had first surfaced in 1997 and felt like the logical next step. Only a month beforehand (in November 1998), AQ had attacked two US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people including 12 US citizens. These operations had served as a wake-up call for those who thought the AQ threat was being exaggerated, and some who even conceived of Osama bin Laden himself as a benign figure who had somehow got out of his depth.

There were also some puzzling elements in the report. The first was the rather outdated idea of hijacking an aircraft to demand the release of the Blind Sheikh. It felt more in tune with Palestinian terrorist methods of the 1970s, and it was already known that Ramzi Yousef had developed the idea of exploding full airliners in flight.

The involvement of Gama’at Islamiya (GI) seemed odd. Bin Laden was known to be close to Ayman Al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), with whom GI were usually at daggers drawn. At the time GI were conceived of more as domestic Egyptian terrorists compared to the internationalist EIJ. Indeed, GI’s most recent operation had been the Luxor Massacre of November 1997, which killed 56 foreign tourists.

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The name Islambouli carried great resonance. This was Mohammed Shawqi Islambouli, who had tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995. His brother Khalid had been one of the assassins of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981 and had been tried and executed in Cairo. However, although Mohammed was thought to be in Afghanistan, he was not then known to be close to bin Laden, let alone Al-Zawahiri.

The dates made little sense. On the one hand an attack seemed imminent, but on the other hand it was ‘on hold’. But such is the nature of counterterrorist reporting: small fragments of a much bigger jigsaw.

Nonetheless, the report was taken very seriously on its receipt in the US. President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke summoned his Counterterrorism Security Group. ‘To address the hijacking warning, the group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East coast airports. The CIA agreed to distribute versions of the report to the FBI and FAA to pass to the New York Police Department and the airlines. The FAA issued a security directive on December 8, with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers and more oversight of the screening process, at all three New York City area airports.’

Of course, when 9/11 happened nearly three years later, there were two very significant differences. Although aircraft were indeed hijacked, they were used as missiles rather than as bargaining chips, and the terrorists were mainly Saudi and not Egyptian. So what happened between December 1998 and September 2001 which could explain these changes?

The 9/11 Commission report (drawing on material from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) provides a fascinating section on AQ’s development of aviation methodology. Even before bin Laden had left Sudan in mid-1996, he had allegedly discussed the use of aircraft with Mohammed Atef: ‘(1) they rejected hijackings aimed at gaining the release of imprisoned comrades as too complex, because al Qaeda had no friendly countries in which to land a plane and then negotiate; (2) they considered the bombing of commercial flights in midair, as carried out against Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a promising means to inflict massive casualties; and (3) they did not yet consider using hijacked aircraft as weapons against other targets.’

So, why was the idea of a traditional hijacking still being discussed as late as December 1998? The answer must lie in the Egyptian jihadists’ determination to win the release of the Blind Sheikh. Mustafa Hamid, a journalist who was with bin Laden in Afghanistan, provides illuminating insight into the wrangling between EIJ and GI in Afghanistan. Hamid documents the tortuous process by which GI, with some reluctance, formed a union (‘The World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders’) with AQ, EIJ and others, but recounts how GI insisted on secrecy about their involvement. Hamid also describes GI’s determination to obtain the Blind Sheikh’s release and the involvement of one of their operatives in the African Embassy bombings (Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, p. 241 and pp. 263–266). So GI was indeed part of bin Laden’s group in Afghanistan and was involved in operations at the time of the December 1998 report.

However, bin Laden became increasingly irritated by the endless squabbling among the two Egyptian groups. Lawrence Wright, drawing upon a variety of sources, chronicles the disastrous attack on Luxor, which had the effect of alienating the Egyptian population from both groups. When on 23 February 1998 bin Laden’s second fatwa announcing the ‘World Islamic Front’ was published in an Arabic newspaper in London, GI were appalled, and some members tried to have Rahman pronounced emir instead of bin Laden. No wonder that Wright concludes that ‘bin Laden had had enough of the in-fighting between the Egyptian factions. He told both groups that their operations in Egypt were ineffectual and too expensive and that it was time for them to turn their guns on the United States and Israel’ (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, pp. 290–296). This may explain why the December 1998 report mentions the operation being ‘on hold’. Between December and the spring of 1999, the GI team and Islambouli must have been stood down.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, in March or April 1999, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) – who had hitherto allegedly been on the fringes of AQ – was summoned to Kandahar, where he discussed the aircraft plan with bin Laden and Mohammed Atef. Four operatives were chosen to begin work on the US project. However, ‘travel issues … played a part in al Qaeda’s operational planning from the very start. During the spring and summer of 1999, KSM realized that Khallad and Abu Bara, both of whom were Yemenis, would not be able to obtain US visas as easily as Saudi operatives like Mihdhar and Hazmi’. And so, the 9/11 plot developed with 15 of the 19 terrorists being Saudi nationals. Only Mohammed Atta was Egyptian.

KSM’s key involvement in the 9/11 plot makes it evident that there could not have been a second GI plot running in parallel, because KSM and Islambouli were close associates. Robert Baer and the 9/11 Commission report agree that KSM and Islambouli were working together in Qatar in the mid-1990s. For KSM it must have been difficult to abandon the rescue of his nephew, but he would have known that a traditional hostage release operation had none of the ambition or scale of bin Laden’s new thinking.

On 6 August 2001, only five weeks before the attacks, the December 1998 report featured once again in the PDB given to George W Bush at Crawford, Texas, entitled ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in US’. It began: ‘Clandestine foreign government and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US’, and concluded: ‘We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting such as that from a [redacted] Service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “blind Sheikh” Omar Abdal Rahman and other US-held extremists … Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.’

The PDB of 6 August caused some discomfort to the Bush administration and led to a National Security Archive page devoted to that one PDB (of which the December 1998 British report was just one constituent part).

The CIA Director George Tenet, who had been a tireless pursuer of the AQ threat before 9/11 and a regular correspondent with and visitor to London, regretted that more had not been done ‘to protect the United States against the threat. To cite two obvious and tragic failures, only after 9/11 were cockpit doors hardened and passengers forbidden from carrying box-cutters aboard US commercial airliners’ (George Tenet, At the Centre of the Storm, p. 205).

The British report of December 1998 was fragmentary, and while it was certainly ‘sensational’, it was not half as sensational as the actual events of that unforgettable and tragic day.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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