9/11: Rise of Heroes

In this episode, we will look back through time, on the 20th anniversary, at missed signals that led to the unimaginable tragedy of September 11th, 2001. And we will look at the heroes who prevented a greater tragedy on that day. 

We first look at Rick Rescorla, who foresaw the attack and led more than 2,600 Morgan Stanley employees to safety, even at the expense of his own life.

What If World History looks at the missed signals that would have uncovered the hijacking plot. And we will highlight the heroes who saved lives and comforted survivors.

And then we will imagine the success of Operation Trident, which will disrupt the plot and assassinate the leadership of Al Qaeda, including Osama Bin Laden. This will enable us to ponder a history in which the lives of millions of men, women, and children in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are altered forever.

Transcript

Introduction
Hello, my name is Mark Bouffard. Welcome to What If World History?

Like you, I share a passion for civilizations, cultures, and stories of the past. This show looks at the epic events that sewed the fabric of our history and sculpted the world we now know. And it imagines: What If they happened a little bit differently?

Would it change the outcome? What might the “new history” look like?

I invite you to explore the possibilities with me.

Before we begin, I’d like to take a quick minute to ask you to drop a review on the podcast in whatever app you are listening. You can also follow What if World History? on Facebook and LinkedIn. We are @spin_history on Twitter and hypothetical history on Instagram.

If this is your first time listening, we will explore events as they happened in our history, then we will envision an alternative timeline and show how it will shape a new future. Along the way, we will put you in the shoes of some of the key players through a series of Diaries.

Let’s take a trip.

Our episode today is:
9/11: Rise of Heroes
In this episode, we will look back through time, on the 20th anniversary, at missed signals that led to the unimaginable tragedy of September 11th, 2001. And we will look at the heroes who prevented a greater tragedy on that day. We will also ponder a history in which the terrorist threat is extinguished before the horrific attack. And as result, the lives of millions of men, women, and children in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are altered forever.

A Hero Shall Lead Them
Rick Rescorla
New York City
September 11, 2001

The windows on the 44th Floor of the South Tower shook as the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Rick Rescorla, a veteran of the UK and US military, felt the reverberation from the explosion sitting at his desk.

It’s hard to understand the mind of a soldier in times of peace. It often lays dormant waiting for the flip of a switch to ignite senses not often used and create a clarity few will ever achieve. For any soldier, it is easier to switch to war than it is to remain at peace.

Rescorla had known peace, but his life had known more war than most soldiers. From the age of 16, army life and its inherent adventures had taken him into the midst of conflict in the rocky hills of Cyprus, the high plateaus of Northern Rhodesia, and into the steamy jungles of Vietnam.

His gallantry had earned him the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, General Service Medal, and the Vietnamese Cross. In each of his deployments, the men under his command viewed him as the steady rock they clung to during the tides of battle. For the thousands of people who worked at Morgan Stanley, Rescorla would be their rock and their hero.

Few people in the world, let alone Manhattan, expected a terrorist attack of this scale, but Rescorla did. Ever since the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the 1993 World Trade Center basement bombing, he considered his building, company, and people prime targets.

History would prove him right.

Rescorla envisioned an air attack on the World Trade Center, probably an air-cargo plane loaded with explosives or chemical weapons.

As head of security for Morgan Stanley, he had spent years drilling the company’s occupants of twenty-two floors on how to leave the building quickly, calmly, and in an orderly fashion.

At a command from him, which would come over the intercom system, all employees were instructed to move to the emergency staircases. Starting with the top floor, they were to march downstairs in twos, so that someone would be alongside to help if anyone stumbled. The drill was practiced twice a year. A few people made fun of it and resisted, but Rescorla tolerated no dissent, demanding military precision and insisting on a clearly defined command system.

On this day, he ignored the address from the Port Authority for people to remain at their desks.

Instead, he snatched his bullhorn, clipped a walkie-talkie to his belt, and grabbed his cellphone. Over the next 30 minutes, he ordered, with great urgency and authority, more than 2,000 employees to take the stairs and exit the building. He never once raised his voice.

As Rescorla was evacuating his people, the second plane struck the South Tower 38 floors above his offices. He knew calm would carry the day, so he resorted to a trick he learned to mollify his platoon in Vietnam. He began to sing Cornish songs from his youth over the metallic speakers of his bullhorn.

The absurdity of the singing focused thousands of terrified and scattered minds making their way down the dark, smoky, crowded stairs of the South Tower. Above them burning fuel and melting metal slowly deteriorated the central support beams that carried the weight of the building.

He took a call from a lifelong army buddy who was checking in on the news of the plane crash. Rescorla told him. “Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse, and it’s going to take the whole building with it. I’m getting my people out of here.”

Rescorla took a minute to call his wife to let her know, "Stop crying. I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I've never been happier. You made my life."

By 9:50 a.m. most of the 2,687 Morgan Stanley employees had evacuated the building and safely exited the World Trade Center plaza. The last people to see him alive recall him running back up the tower stairs to conduct a final sweep of their offices to make sure they were completely empty.

At 9:59 a.m. the south tower, no longer able to support its weight, collapsed onto itself. In a hurricane cloud of dust and debris, it disappeared from the New York skyline. Rescorla’s remains would never be found.

But to thousands of fortunate employees and the thousands more family and friends, his memory will live on. Rescorla’s name will be remembered for the calm he provided, and the clarity in which he responded to the attack. And he will be remembered for his overwhelming need to save the lives of his people, even at the expense of his own.


Part 1: The System Was Blinking Red
The most frustrating part about learning the story of 9/11 is the visibility of the threads that connected the hijackers to the financiers to the planners. The 9/11 Commission estimated the entire operation cost Al Qaeda $400,000 to $500,000 to bypass the multi-trillion-dollar intelligence operatus of the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Richard Clarke, a key official in the National Security Council, believed an Al Qaeda cell was operating in the U.S. during the summer of 2001. They even knew the names of some key Al Qaeda terrorists and their connection to other bombings but didn’t know if these high-value figures were in the U.S.

In addition, an FBI report from the Phoenix offices warned of foreign nationals taking multi-engine flight training, but that memo never reached the heights of the national intelligence apparatus at the FBI, National Security Council, or the White House.

The 9/11 Commission summed up the failure of imagination and coordination with the following statement: Most of the intelligence community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and severity of threat reports were unprecedented. Despite their large number, the threats received contained few specifics regarding time, place, method, or target. Most suggested that attacks were planned against targets overseas; others indicated threats against unspecified "U.S. interests."

The origin of the September 11 attacks can be traced to early 1996 when Osama bin Laden was presented with the idea of using planes to attack key American landmarks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) “presented a proposal for an operation that would involve training pilots who would crash planes into buildings in the United States.”

Bin Laden and Al Qaeda reviewed dozens of proposals for attacks from jihadists groups around the globe and decided to back KSM’s idea.

Britannica.com writes: KSM dreamed up the tactical innovation of using hijacked planes to attack the United States, al-Qaeda provided the personnel, money, and logistical support to execute the operation, and bin Laden wove the attacks on New York and Washington into a larger strategic framework of attacking the Un ted States in order to bring about regime change across the Middle East.

Bin Laden played a personal role in choosing the hijackers, including selecting Mohamed Atta, who was commanding a cell in Hamburg, Germany, as the lead hijacker.

In the early summer of 2000, four of the western-educated hijackers immigrated to the United States under Saudi student visas, which drew no red flags. Over the next months, they would train at flight schools in Oklahoma, Florida, and Arizona. Their training was funded by wire transfers through Dubai from KSM’s nephew.

The flight instructors at these schools generally found the students to be underwhelming and recommended they drop out of the various training programs. It appears from their reviews the trainees were not interested in flying the planes very well, and paid little attention to landing procedures. Only an FBI agent in the Phoenix office took note of the tips from local aviation schools and filed a memo, which was not seen by senior counter-terrorism officials.

Aside from the pilots, the muscle jihadists, who had been trained in hand-to-hand fighting and other hijacking techniques, arrived in the Spring of 2001. They joined gyms, supposedly to train, opened bank accounts, and rented apartments. They were visible, but nobody was looking for them.

By late June, senior counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke and CIA director George Tenet were "convinced that a major series of attacks was about to come", although the CIA believed the attacks would likely occur in Saudi Arabia or Israel. In early July, Clarke put domestic agencies on "full alert", telling them, "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, soon."

He asked the FBI and the State Department to alert the embassies and police departments, and the Defense Department to go to "Threat Condition Delta", which is its highest threat protection level.

Clarke later wrote: "Somewhere in the CIA there was information that two known al Qaeda terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in the FBI, there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States ... They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House."

According to the 9/11 Commission: The September 11 attacks fell into the void between the foreign and domestic threats. The foreign intelligence agencies were watching overseas, alert to foreign threats to U.S. interests there. The domestic agencies were waiting for evidence of a domestic threat from sleeper cells within the United States. No one was looking for a foreign threat to domestic targets.

In sum, the domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI's efforts.

The public was not warned. Time had run out.

Part 2: A 300-Ton Missile
From the 9/11 Commission: At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the upper portion of the North Tower, cutting through floors 93 to 99. Evidence suggests that all three of the building's stairwells became impassable from the 92nd floor up. Hundreds of civilians were killed instantly by the impact. Hundreds more remained alive but trapped.

The FDNY response began within five seconds of the crash. According to Division Chief Peter Hayden, "We had a very strong sense we would lose firefighters and that we were in deep trouble, but we had estimates of 25,000 to 50,000 civilians in the World Trade Center complex, and we had to try to rescue them."

At 8:58, while en route, the NYPD Chief of Department raised the NYPD's mobilization to level 4, thereby sending to the WTC approximately 22 lieutenants, 100 sergeants, and 800 police officers from all over the city.

Also by about 9:00, transit officers began shutting down subway stations in the vicinity of the World Trade Center and evacuating civilians from those stations. Around the city, the NYPD cleared major thoroughfares for emergency vehicles to access the WTC. The NYPD and PAPD coordinated the closing of bridges and tunnels into Manhattan.

In the 17-minute period between 8:46 and 9:03 A.M. on September 11, New York City and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had mobilized the largest rescue operation in the city's history. Well over a thousand first responders had been deployed, an evacuation had begun, and the critical decision that the fire could not be fought had been made.

The 9/11 Commission goes on to detail: The second plane hit at 9:03, the hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower from the south, crashing through the 77th to 85th floors. What had been the largest and most complicated rescue operation in city history instantly doubled in magnitude.

The only survivor known to have escaped from the heart of the impact zone described the 81st floor-where the wing of the plane had sliced through his office-as a "demolition" site in which everything was "broken up" and the smell of jet fuel was so strong that it was almost impossible to breathe. This person escaped by means of an unlikely rescue, aided by a civilian fire warden descending from a higher floor, who, critically, had been provided with a flashlight.

BusinessInsider.com details another hero: 24-year-old Welles Crowther was an equities trader at Sandler O'Neill on the 104th floor. The man, who was a volunteer firefighter in his teens, made his way down to the 78th-floor sky lobby. Amid the smoke, chaos, and debris, Crowther helped injured and disoriented office workers to safety, risking his own life in the process. He directed survivors to the stairway and encouraged them to help others while he carried an injured woman on his back. After bringing her 15 floors down to safety, he made his way back up to help others." "Everyone who can stand, stand now," Crowther told survivors while directing them to a stairway exit. "If you can help others, do so."

The article quotes Ling Young, a survivor: “He's definitely my guardian angel because, without him, we would be sitting there, waiting until the building came down." Crowther is credited with saving at least a dozen people that day. His body was later recovered alongside firefighters in a stairwell heading back up the tower with the "jaws of life" rescue tool.

Another hero, Father Mychal Judge, was chaplain to the Fire Department. He prayed over bodies in the street and entered the North Tower lobby where he continued to pray over the dead and console the wounded.

The 9/11 Commission details: The emergency response effort escalated with the crash of United 175 into the South Tower. With that additional effort, communications, as well as command and control, became increasingly critical and increasingly difficult. Yet, first responders continued to assist thousands of civilians in evacuating the towers.

In Arlington, Virginia at 9:37, the west wall of the Pentagon was hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77. The crash caused immediate and catastrophic damage. All 64 people aboard the airliner were killed, as were 125 people inside the Pentagon (70 civilians and 55 military service members).

Inside the building, Colonel Paul Anderson thought the entire Pentagon had been lifted off its foundation. He opened exit doors and helped dozens of people get to safety, including a pregnant co-worker. He then ran towards the burning, gaping hole in the Pentagon to assist people there. Over the next 15 minutes, he carried a woman with a fractured hip to safety, rescued a woman pinned under a safe, and extinguished a man who was on fire, and carried him to paramedics.

One hundred six people were seriously injured and transported to area hospitals.

At 9:57, over the skies of Pennsylvania, the passengers of United Flight 93 were aware of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. And they knew their plane was a 300-ton missile traveling towards a target, probably the Capitol. Under the leadership of Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick, and Todd Beamer, who commanded “Let’s Roll”, the passengers stormed the cockpit. The plane then flipped over and sped toward the ground at upwards of 500 miles per hour, crashing in a rural field near Shanksville in western Pennsylvania at 10:10 a.m. killing all 44 passengers on board.

At 9:58, the South Tower collapsed in ten seconds, killing all civilians and emergency personnel inside, as well a number of individuals-both first responders, and civilians-in the concourse, in the Marriott, and on neighboring streets. The building collapsed into itself, causing a ferocious windstorm and creating a massive debris cloud.

The debris crashed through the lobby of the neighboring North Tower killing many inside, including Father Judge.

The North Tower collapsed at 10:28, killing all civilians alive on upper floors, an undetermined number below, and scores of first responders. The FDNY Chief of Department, the Port Authority Police Department Superintendent, and many of their senior staff were killed. Incredibly, twelve firefighters, one Port Authority officer and three civilians who were descending stairwell B of the North Tower survived its collapse.

In his book Two Hours that Shook the World, Fred Halliday writes: The events of September 11 2001 and their consequences are, by any standards, a global event: the explosions themselves killed people of many countries, including hundreds of Muslims, Pakistani and Arab professionals in the World Trade Center towers and the 200 Yemeni doormen and workers on the ground. The explosions were watched, with incredulity and fear, across the world.

The nation suffered the largest loss of life-2,973-on its soil from a hostile attack. The FDNY suffered 343 fatalities; The Port Authority suffered 37 fatalities, and the NYPD suffered 23 fatalities.

Many more thousands of lives would have been lost at the Pentagon or in Manhattan if it were not for the quick thinking, calm resolve, and foresight of heroes in and out of uniform who guided people to safety and gave them water to wash their debris-caked faces.

If 9/11 represented the worst of humanities’ compulsion to injure one another, it also showed our endless capacity for bravery, compassion, and resolve.


What If? Scenario
According to the 9/11 Commission: In May 2001, the drumbeat of reporting grew louder that "Bin Ladin’s public profile may presage attack." In early May, a walk-in to the FBI claimed there was a plan to launch attacks on London, Boston, and New York.

On June 25, Richard Clarke, who was a leader in the National Security Council, warned the White House that six separate intelligence reports showed al Qaeda personnel warning of a pending attack. The intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil and that they would consist of multiple, possibly simultaneous, attacks.

In late June, the CIA ordered all its station chiefs to share information on al Qaeda with their host governments and to push for immediate disruptions of cells. Clandestine operations against al-Qaeda-affiliated cells were launched involving 20 countries. Several terrorist operatives were detained by foreign governments, possibly disrupting operations in the Gulf and Italy and perhaps averting attacks against two or three U.S. embassies.

At home, the National Security Council arranged for the CIA to brief intelligence and security officials from several domestic agencies. On July 5, representatives from the INS, the FAA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, Customs, the CIA, and the FBI met with Clarke to discuss the current threat.

Better coordination after this meeting would have exploited two key mistakes Al Qaeda operatives had made. Two opportunities in late August that could turn the tide of history.

One of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid Mihdar, was identified by the CIA as a participant in a Yemeni meeting with terrorists who conducted the USS Cole bombing. In July 2001, he was allowed to return to the U.S. because the FAA did not have access to the CIA’s version of a no-fly list. In mid-August 2001, he was prioritized by the CIA as a potential threat.

After that, the FBI was able to get his passport and learned in late August of 2001 that he was in the country. However, his search was labeled an “Intelligence Operation” which meant the full weight of the FBI’s national network of criminal investigators were not allowed to search for him. Without crucial information from the CIA, he was not prioritized as a possible terrorist.

In our What If? scenario the claxon of intelligence alarms about an impending attack, has energized and galvanized the immense resources of the FBI, the INS, and the U.S. Marshall's service to find Mihdar, who was renting an apartment under his real name in New Jersey.

In addition, senior intelligence officials see the memo from the FBI’s Phoenix office about the "possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama Bin Laden" to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools. The agent noted that an "inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" were attending flight schools in Arizona.

This drives the National Security Council, with coordination of local law enforcement to comb the records of flight schools around the country for Arabic students. In a matter of days, the plans of KSM, Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda are laid bare before U.S. security services. And only daring, coordinated action in the US, Afghanistan, and Pakistan head off the largest attack on American soil in more than 150 years.


Operation Trident
Richard Clarke
Situation Room, White House
Washington D.C.
September 4, 2001

We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those that would do us harm...Winston Churchill

Seated at the long mahogany table that dominated the White House’s Situation Room, Richard Clarke, the nation’s top terrorism expert, watched a bank of high definition monitors. With him were the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the directors of the FBI and CIA, as well as the Attorney General, and of course, George Bush, President of the United States.

Their focus was on large monitors that were broadcasting wide view aerial footage of anti-terrorist operations underway across the country. Clarke watched as cordons were quietly set up in unassuming neighborhoods in San Diego, California, Falls Church, Virginia, and Hollywood, Florida.

It was 7 a.m. on the east coast and 4 a.m. on the west coast, as hundreds of agents, girded in tactical vests, helmets, and blast shields straddled the running boards of dozens of black Chevy Tahoe SUVs outfitted for high-speed insertions.

Radio chatter was kept to a minimum as the SUVs sped down the silent, dark streets in three different cities in two different time zones. Like a well-rehearsed recital of muscle and machine, more than three hundred elite units from the FBI, INS, DEA, and ATF stormed the buildings. In each city, units quietly and efficiently filed upstairs to apartments and punched open doors with large metal battering rams.

Flashbang grenades preceded the storm of soldiers into the apartments. Disoriented from the flash and eardrums ruptured from the small explosion, the would-be hijackers put up little resistance before they were inundated under a wave of muscle and A-4 assault rifles.

In less than 7 minutes, 19 of the most dangerous terrorists on American soil were trussed up in zip-tie handcuffs that provided little movement of both hands and feet. Less than an hour after the operation began, the terrorists, each in separate vehicles was spirited to naval or army bases near their target cities.

But the day’s operations had only just begun. More than 7,000 miles away Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, peered towards a dusty mountain road that led into the cave complex of Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

Massoud personally selected the 100 commandos that would strike a death blow to the global terrorist activities of Al Qaeda. Moving slowly up the rocky, uneven dirt road were five black Toyota SUVs accompanied by three white Toyota pick-ups. In the bed of each pick-up were a mounted PKM light machine gun and five fighters who swore an oath of allegiance to their leader, Osama Bin Laden, who was in one of the SUVs.

Using a laser guidance marker, Massoud glazed the front pick-up truck and radioed his special forces liaison that the target package was in sight. 4,000 feet above the road and rocky mountaintop were three Predator drones, each armed with 4 Hellfire missiles.

As one, each Predator fired two of their missiles at the lasered targets. The first explosion lifted the white pickup off the ground where it quickly disintegrated. In rapid succession, the remaining five Hellfire missiles exploded in a cacophony of misshapen metal, screams of anguish and twisted human remains.

Massoud led his men from their boulder-strewn cover, and the 100 commandos quickly surrounded the flaming wreckage of Bin Laden’s convoy. Miraculously, a few bodyguards had survived the initial explosions and were starting to shoot at the Northern Alliance with AK-47s. But concentrated fire soon put any resistance down.

The fighters walked among the burned husks of contorted cars and found the body of Osama Bin Laden in what was left of the third SUV. His height and features betrayed his identity even if his beard and hair had been burned away in the blast. Massoud took several pictures from his phone and sent them to his CIA contact. In a few minutes, they were broadcast on the monitors in the Situation Room.

A low round of applause went up from the occupants, but it was quickly stifled as the third component of Operation Trident kicked into gear.

A CIA operator watched an unremarkable four-story residential building in Karachi, Pakistan, from his perch in a steamy apartment across the street. He confirmed to Langley that the high-value targets were still in the building. That was not news since Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his nephew, Ramzi bin Al-Shibh, rarely left the building since they returned from Hamburg, Germany. Also with them was Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the Saudi paymaster for Al Qaeda’s operations.

A few minutes after his confirmation, a land-attack missile, fired from the waters of the Persian Gulf, slammed through the roof of the building and drove through the top three floors before exploding at ground level.

Even from across the street and protected by several stone walls, the CIA operator was lifted off his feet and thrown ten feet across the room. When he regained his senses, coughed out the cloud of dust, and positioned himself again at the window perch, the scene had changed dramatically. Where the building and its neighboring apartments had stood, was a mound of rubble 30 feet high that covered the entire city block.

The attack was not subtle, and there would be diplomatic repercussions, but it was effective. KSM and the masterminds behind a planned attack on the U.S. had been killed. Along with the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, the leadership of Al Qaeda had been decapitated in one well-coordinated operation that covered the globe.

It would only be with the clarity and perspective of history, that Clarke would realize how many lives they had saved on the day Operation Trident had succeeded.


What If? Aftermath
Most people think that Osama Bin Laden financed Al Qaeda from the reserves of his family’s vast wealth. But in reality, the Saudi Arabian government, along with international authorities, had frozen much of his assets. As a result, he had access to only a trickle of his family’s construction and real estate riches.

The CIA estimated that Al Qaeda’s operating budget, on average, was about $30 million per year. More than 95 percent of that budget was covered by donations and the use of front charities.

One of the reasons Bin Laden and his leadership were reviewing attack proposals in the Summer of 1996, was to create a big media event that would elicit millions in donations. To put it simply, 9/11 was meant as a fundraising and recruiting event that showcased Al Qaeda’s global reach and relevance.

But Al Qaeda’s leadership had just been snuffed out in a rain of missiles and explosions. And their one big event, hijacking airliners and using them as 300-ton missiles, had been foiled in pre-dawn raids across the U.S. Without donations and leadership, it would soon cease to exist.

History had changed. Without a provocation that would galvanize the world to take action against the Taliban, the U.S. and its coalition did not invade Afghanistan nor Iraq. The Taliban and Saddam Hussein remained in power during the years following September of 2001.

Instead of full-blown invasions, the U.S. used its considerable intelligence and remote war-making capabilities to support the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and the Kurds in Iraq. In both countries, the regime power base dwindled under the success of the revolutionary, anti-government forces, which led to their eventual downfall in 2010 in Afghanistan and 2012 in Iraq.

These low-intensity, high-value engagements saved the U.S. trillions of dollars and the lives of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who would have lost their lives in full-scale invasions and occupations of both countries.

In addition, millions of civilians, including women and children across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia would be spared from the full-scale horrors of war, destruction, and death. Not that life was easy in those regions, nor would it ever be, but the toll on the lives of local populations was greatly reduced through proxy fighting instead of full-blown U.S. invasions.

History can turn on seemingly random and trivial events. Sending a memo to the right person, sharing the name of an important target with your inter-agency colleagues, or even tracking communications from Hamburg to Kandahar.

On this 20th Anniversary of the September 11 attacks, let’s honor those who lost their lives and the heroes who prevented a greater tragedy. Our new history imagines a timeline where forever wars never start, but the fact is brave men and women have manned the front lines around the world for the past 20 years to keep us safer. And it is in their memory that we dedicate this episode.


Conclusion
Thank you for joining me, Mark Bouffard, on this trip. This show is produced by me, Mark Bouffard, and Beto McQuade. My script editors are Clint Buhle and my twin brother, Matt Bouffard. It is mixed and edited by Beto McQuade. The music you hear is Shane Ivers of silvermansound.com.

Don’t forget to review, like, and subscribe to this podcast. Check out our blogs on whatifworldhistory.com and follow us on your favorite social media channel.

This has been What If World History? In our next episode, we will look at the life of the world’s first child prodigy, Alexander the Great. And we ponder a timeline in which history’s greatest general lives past his twenties and unites the Middle East, Africa, and Asia under his progressive rule.