Advertisement 1

'Everything had changed': Former FBI anti-terrorism agent, diplomat recall 9/11 and its legacy

The anguished call came from a family member of a traveller hurtling to their doom on a day that would live in infamy

Article content

The anguished call came from a family member of a traveller hurtling to their doom on a day that would live in infamy.

“We got a call from a family member whose loved one was on one of the planes,” said Ken Gray, then a special anti-terrorism agent with the FBI.

“We were getting information even as the plane was being hijacked.”

Minutes earlier, Gray was at the FBI’s New Haven, Conn., office where the main preoccupation had been a new supervisor taking over the reins on a sunny late summer day.

Article content
Advertisement 2
Story continues below
Article content

Then, like so many others in the United States and around the globe, Gray and the new arrival became transfixed by the images on a TV screen beaming images of a stricken World Trade Center.

“I was talking with him and the two of us went into the conference room, and when we saw the second plane hit we knew it wasn’t an accident but an attack on the U.S.,” he said.

“I knew we were at war . . . everything had changed.”

Gray said he called in another special agent to watch the cataclysm unfold, telling him “he was going to have to make some decisions.”

The agents set out to make a game plan, though without knowing if there’d be more attacks. There were: the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., was targeted, as was another passenger jet, which was hijacked but forced by rebellious passengers to crash into a Pennsylvania field.

Gray’s previous 24 years as an anti-terrorism agent had reached a climax, he said, and one that would remain at a high pitch for some time.

“I was living this on a daily basis,” said Gray, now a senior lecturer at the University of New Haven.

The veteran investigator still recalls reading the internal documents warning of an impending major terrorist attack on U.S. interests in the weeks leading up to 9/11.

Article content
Advertisement 3
Story continues below
Article content

“I had been working on the al-Qaida threat before then, the chatter was there,” he said.

But after a series of overseas attacks by al-Qaida in Kenya and Yemen, it was thought the fresh threats were directed at U.S. targets abroad, said Gray.

“There was a failure to put together the picture because different agencies had different responsibilities — the CIA was trying to recruit sources and feared the FBI would arrest those people (prematurely),” he said.

“If there had been a closer relationship between the FBI and CIA, this particular plot could have been averted. It was an intelligence failure.”

Gray said his office took part in scouring for evidence in the wake of the attack, searches that yielded fragments of the attackers’ fake passports and, in Pennsylvania, box cutters used by the hijackers.

It was the beginning of a new era for the FBI that would become far more focused on the terrorist threat, he said.

“Terrorism was important but it wasn’t our primary focus, but all of a sudden resources were taken from criminal matters to support counter-intelligence and counterterrorism,” he said.

Advertisement 4
Story continues below
Article content

The Department of Homeland Security was created, bringing 22 existing agencies under its wing to become the largest federal body in the U.S.

Probably the most publicly noticeable security measures are encountered by air travellers, said Gray, though trains, buses, borders and immigration screening have also been significantly affected.

Since 9/11, law enforcement has come under fire for allegedly encouraging or entrapping potential suspects to enter into terrorist plots.

Gray bristles at the accusation.

“When the bureau becomes aware of someone talking about carrying out an act of terrorism the bureau has to be able to address those types of threats, and one way is putting people in contact with informants,” he said.

He said since 9/11, those efforts have been successful in preventing any more major terrorist attacks of a scope anywhere near those of Sept. 11, 2001, the most lethal terrorist operation in history.

One reason it hasn’t been repeated, aside from the increased vigilance, is the sheer difficulty in carrying out such an assault, much less repeating it, he said.

Advertisement 5
Story continues below
Article content

“We thought it’d be a continuous stream of attacks of the scope of 9/11 but that didn’t occur,” said Gray.

The threat from extremists remains to the U.S, Canada and Europe, he said, posed mainly from those already living in those countries who are inspired by al-Qaida and more recently by its offspring, the Islamic State.

And he notes domestic terrorism, identified by U.S. security authorities as coming mainly from the extreme right, has posed a major menace in more recent years.

Jeff Treistman was a graduate student at the University of Colorado on Sept. 11, 2001, when a roommate woke him to witness the terrorist attacks on TV.

The currents unleashed swept him into the so-called War on Terror that would morph into a drawn-out occupation of Afghanistan and overspill disastrously into the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“My generation has been profoundly shaped by 9/11,” says Treistman, 41, an assistant professor of national security at the University of New Haven.

What he saw from the heavily defended Green Zone in Baghdad as a young diplomatic adviser for Iraq’s deputy prime minister from 2006 to 2008 soured him on much of 9/11’s aftermath.

Advertisement 6
Story continues below
Article content

“I never had faith in what was happening in Afghanistan and I was certainly exasperated by Iraq,” said Treistman.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq — another byproduct of 9/11 — was conducted under spurious concerns over national security that led to violence killing hundreds of thousands of people and uprooting millions more.

Efforts to win hearts and minds in both countries were doomed to fail, said Treistman, who recalled one exchange with Iraqi officials.

“One meeting with my military counterparts dealt with repaving some streets and removing trash, and I thought ‘this is how we’re going to win a war?’ ” he said.

Nation-building and relatively gentle pacification that imposes an alien culture hasn’t worked and won’t, he said.

One approach that’s proven successful, said Treistman, is bludgeoning a population without regard to human rights, something that worked for the Russian military in Chechnya and against the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

But western governments don’t have the stomach for that, he added.

Even so, a study released last week by Brown University estimated the number of people killed in the U.S.-led war on terror unleashed after 9/11 at nearly one million people — what it calls a conservative figure — while costing more than $8 trillion.

Advertisement 7
Story continues below
Article content

While Canada avoided direct involvement in the Iraq war, it was drawn into the conflict in Afghanistan and has encountered the same frustrations as the U.S., said Treistman.

“We were all in the same boat, together in the Bonn agreement in 2001,” he said, referring to the pact to establish government and nation-building in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s fall that year.

He fears a renewed focus on a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as a hub of international terrorism will turn a blind eye to extremists he calls “rational actors” dramatically shifting their tactics.

“We are falling back into that mode of thinking,” he said. “(Preventing) 9/11 was a failure of imagination.”

BKaufmann@postmedia.com

Twitter: @BillKaufmannjrn

Article content
Comments
You must be logged in to join the discussion or read more comments.
Join the Conversation

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.

Latest National Stories
    This Week in Flyers