Geopolitics & World Affairs · August 2026
Corera and McCloskey were walking through the CIA's failure to penetrate al-Qaeda in the late 1990s, and the unclear authorities around killing bin Laden. Corera uses that gap to set up a point about authorship of the plot itself. McCloskey picks it straight up: the idea came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a freelance operator who was its principal architect.
Transcript
him. About
killing him, which will be really important. And there's a lot of kind of mud slinging that has happened in the last 25 years over, you know, were the authorities actually killed. Clear? Were they not clear? What was the CIA authorized to do? There's a lot of he said, she said about that. What does seem clear, though, from at least the agency's perspective, is that there weren't clear authorities in the late 1990s that would have allowed them to actually go and kill him.
Yeah. And so, without that penetration of al-Qaeda, the problem is they do not spot that something is brewing inside al-Qaeda, which is going to become 9-11. And so, here we go back to 9-11 and to bin Laden and his role in it, because it's very interesting, isn't it? Because even though this attack will be associated so closely with Osama bin Laden, 9-11 wasn't actually his idea.
The idea for 9-11 comes from a kind of freelance terrorist. It is the brainchild of a guy named Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, who is hereafter known as KSM. Spoiler alert, it's not going to go well for KSM. And I remember seeing his AK-47 on the wall at CIA headquarters in one of the, I think it was in a special activities division conference room. We actually have his captured AK-47 framed up on the wall. KSM is the principal architect of the attacks. Now, let's set him up briefly because his character is important. He is a highly educated engineer. Again, a running theme of some of these terrorist masterminds is they have engineering backgrounds, which
is interesting.
He's raised in Kuwait, but the family has roots in Pakistan. After secondary school in Kuwait, he actually enrolls in 1983 at Joan College, which is a small Baptist school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina.