This week we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes from 2021. This episode was first broadcast on 9 September.
To many people, the sight of two airliners hitting the twin towers in New York prompted an immediate question: who did this? To Jason Burke and Aimen Dean, the answer was obvious. Burke had already reported extensively on the terrorist network, travelling in Afghanistan as he sought to understand its motivations and command structure. Dean knew first hand what Osama bin Laden’s agenda was: he had met the terrorist leader twice, and trained as a bomb-maker in Afghanistan before turning and becoming a spy for MI6.
In this episode, the second of three examining the reverberations of 9/11 20 years on, Michael Safi asks Burke and Dean how al-Qaida developed the capacity for an attack that would change the course of history. And they reflect on the fallout from Bin Laden’s “catastrophic success”, controversial even to his peers, and how the organisation survived and adapted to remain a threat after two decades.
You can buy Aimen Dean’s book, Nine Lives: My Time As MI6’s Top Spy Inside al-Qaeda, here.
Photograph: Mazhar Ali Khan/AP
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