The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

by Garrett M. Graff

Since the mid-1990s, two squads of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, known as I-49 and I-45, had been carefully tracking the rise of a terrorist group known as al-Qaeda. Even though his name was new to most Americans on September 11, the organization’s leader, Osama bin Laden, had been on the FBI’s radar for some time, having been added to its Ten Most Wanted list in June 1999 for his role in planning and financing the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In 1999, careful work by law enforcement intercepted an al-Qaeda plot to attack the United States during the Millennium celebrations, and in 2000, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 U.S. sailors. The State Department’s ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, Michael Sheehan, spoke angrily to military officials in 2000, frustrated at the Clinton administration’s lack of focus in combating the rise of bin Laden’s terrorist group, presciently exclaiming, “Does al-Qaeda have to hit the Pentagon to get your attention?”