The CIA pulled the plug on a mission to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at the last minute, and former President Bill Clinton says he was “scared” and “mad” when it happened.
Clinton dropped the revelation during a Sunday radio interview on WABC’s “Cats Roundtable” with host John Catsimatidis, explaining that he had personally authorized the agency to “take him out” before the September 11, 2001, attacks that claimed 2,977 American lives.
“I was scared, and I was mad because we tried to get him before, and the CIA at the last minute killed the plan that I think might well have succeeded,” Clinton said. “But they were afraid that if they missed, they’d kill a lot of innocent civilians. They didn’t want to run the risk.”
The former president made clear the decision to abort came from the CIA, not the White House. He said he didn’t second-guess the agency at the time, but his regret is evident more than two decades later.
“I wish we had done even more to get him. I always thought he was our biggest threat,” Clinton continued. “I wanted to get him, and I did what I could to do that.”
At the time of the scrapped mission, bin Laden’s deadliest attack on American interests was the August 7, 1998, bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa, which killed 224 people. The al-Qaeda leader was already on the radar as a serious threat, yet he remained free to plot the most devastating terrorist attack ever carried out on American soil.
Clinton also recounted watching the horror of 9/11 unfold from Australia, where he was overseas when the second plane struck the Twin Towers on live television.
“I immediately said that bin Laden did this,” Clinton recalled. “They all looked at me and said, ‘How do you know this?’ I said, ‘Well, because the only adversaries we have with the capacity to do this are Iran and bin Laden. And the Iranians wouldn’t do it because we could wipe them off the face of the Earth immediately. And bin Laden is holed up in a cave in Afghanistan.'”
He said intelligence briefings during his presidency had made clear that bin Laden sought to strike the American homeland directly. “I just knew it had to be him. I also knew that he had been planning to do what he did to hit us for a long time,” Clinton explained.
The former president’s comments arrive just days after the Trump administration released declassified Presidential Daily Briefs detailing intelligence warnings provided to both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations in the months and years before 9/11. Among those declassified records were reports indicating that bin Laden’s network had discussed hijacking U.S. aircraft and potentially using explosive planes against American cities.
The newly public documents have renewed scrutiny of what both administrations knew about the growing threat and what opportunities may have been missed to prevent the attacks.
