Omar Abdel-Rahman (the Egyptian “blind sheikh”) visits the anti-Soviet front in Afghanistan for the first time, meeting with Palestinian leader Abdullah Azzam and a young Osama bin Laden.
Within a year, the two main Egyptian radical Islamic ideologues, the blind sheikh and Ayman al Zawahiri were exiled from their home countries, Zawahiri first escaping to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and then going to Peshawar. Abdel-Rahman was the most likely culprit behind the assassination of Azzam, ostensibly part of a power struggle, before he found his way to the United States – on still mysterious visas – where he was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Zawahiri, on the other hand, the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, would forge an alliance with Azzam and join bin Laden (and still amazingly still hides today, there or in Pakistan).

A Japanese doomsday cult organization, Aum Shinrikyo, plants sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 and injuring some 5,700. A similar attack occurs nearly simultaneously in the Yokohama subway system.
President Clinton would later paint a bleak future if nations did not cooperate against “organized forces of destruction,” telling the audience that only a small amount of “nuclear [yellow]cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did.” Effectively dealing with proliferation and not letting weapons “fall into the wrong hands”, he said, was “fundamentally what is stake in the standoff we’re having in Iraq …”
He asked Americans to “think about … the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.”
The Aum Shirikyo attack will forever solidify President Bill Clinton’s view of the WMD threat of terrorism. Less than a month later, Ayman Al-Zawahiri would write to al Qaeda operational chief Mohammed Atef: “We only became aware of them [biological and chemical weapons] when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials. …” (Quoted in Alan Cullison, “Inside al Qaeda’s Hard Drive,” Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 294, No. 2, 2004.)

Hail Caesar! Bill Clinton nominates George Tenet to be the director of the CIA, and all of Washington celebrates. Somehow miraculously, a man who was Deputy Director of the Agency since July 1995, and who had served before that as White House NSC senior director for intelligence programs, and before that was as Senate intelligence aide, is portrayed as a breath of fresh air who would reinvigorate the Agency. But Tenet’s trick, in an easily manipulatable Washington, is his relations with the news media. And of course, a stark contrast with Clinton’s two earlier CIA directors – John Deutch and James Woolsey.
The news media then gushes as Tenet installs an all-star team and intelligence “legends” — Jack G. Downing, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, John McLaughlin. Of Downing, Tenet say: “His very presence on the team conveyed the notion that we were getting back to the basics of uncovering secrets to protect the nation.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 18) Back to? He as much guided the CIA before being director. And what did it all produce? 9/11, WMD, misreading of Iraq, and on and on…

The CIA produces a report on Osama bin Laden’s attempts to acquire uranium. It is based upon the interrogation of Jamal al-Fadl, a defector from bin Laden’s camp in Sudan. Al-Fadl claims to have personally been involved in missions to Angola and Tanzania to acquire the radioactive materials, and even to have worked on behalf of bin Laden to purchase Russian “loose nuke” materials or warheads on the open market.
The intelligence about al Qaeda’s WMD pursuits is electrifying in the secret corridors of power for two reasons. One because it is Washington’s obsession, and two, because WMD triggers covert authorities – including the authorization to use lethal force in apprehending bin Laden and a list of targeted associates – that are otherwise unavailable in going after state and non-state actors. If the target is killed in the process of capture, the CIA is covered by the new presidential authority.
In June 1998, based upon information from al-Fadl, who is first interrogated in Frankfurt until he is taken in witness protection in New Jersey, the CIA mounts an operation to collect a soil sample from an area close to al Shifa in Sudan, where al-Fadl claims that al Qaeda is using a pharmaceutical plant as cover to develop chemical weapons. After the African embassy bombings in August 1998, WMD plays an outsize role, the Clinton administration deciding to attack al Shifa as part of its retaliation.
Bin Laden’s entities in Sudan, George Tenet later wrote, were “not only were part of the terrorist financial network but also had possible connections with al-Qaeda attempts to obtain chemical and biological weapons.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 115)
“They were willing to do what needed to be done, and pay whatever it would cost, to get their hands on fissile material,” Tenet wrote. “In the face of such steely resolve, the only responsible course of action would be to do whatever was necessary to rule out any possibility that terrorists could get their hands on fissile material.” (p. 261)

Anthony Lake, Bill Clinton’s first National Security Advisor, withdraws his name from nomination to be CIA director, issuing a stinging statement about his withdrawal. He says that Washington had gone ‘haywire’ and decried the “gotcha” atmosphere that had taken over Washington, favoring partisan politics over policy.
Lake’s nomination came under fire from Republicans in Congress, though the specific indictment against him is that he was responsible for allowing Iran to funnel arms and assistance to Bosnian Muslims, who were fighting Serbian forces. It isn’t necessarily the first nomination to go awry over politics – “nannygate” had already become a syndrome – but it highlights a breakdown in the bipartisan consensus over foreign policy.
Without the Cold War as an organizing principle, there were deep divides over America’s role in the world. But the partisan politics of the 1990’s (and beyond) obscured that there was a debate to be had, and perhaps also blinded the United States to the full dimensions of its humanitarian crusade in the former Yugoslavia, that is, that there was a Muslim angle that reached into the Middle East, and that indeed many al Qaeda veterans and radical Islamists were exercising their global ambitions by fighting in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania.

Iraq uses chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in the village of Halabja, killing perhaps thousands.
Saddam Hussein had begun the “Anfal” campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq a month before, eventually killing over 100,000 civilians and destroying over 1,200 Kurdish villages. Since the end of the monarchy in 1959, the Kurds have opposed Baghdad rule of their northeastern homeland.

The CIA briefs National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that its “preliminary judgment” is that a “strong circumstantial case” can be made that al Qaeda was behind the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, but that it lacked “conclusive information on external command and control” of the attack.
A week later, Roger Cressey on the NSC staff writes to Deputy National Security Advisor Hadley that while the investigation was continuing, “we know all we need to about who did the attack to make a policy decision” regarding retaliation. His boss, Richard Clarke meanwhile writes to Rice and Hadley that the Yemeni prime minister said that while Yemen was not saying so publicly, he was 99 percent certain that bin Laden was responsible. The Bush administration, nevertheless, has no interest in another cruise missile attack ala Clinton – swatting at flies – the principals increasingly seeing Clarke (and CIA director Tenet) as advocates for what they consider to be insufficient and failed policies.

President Clinton receives an update memo on U.S. covert action efforts against Osama bin Ladin, including new contact in Afghanistan, new eavesdropping equipment inside the country, and an increase in human intelligence sources. He writes in the memo’s margin after reading the update that the United States “could surely do better.” (911 Commission, p. 187)

The first clandestine CIA team operates inside Afghanistan (March 13-21), making contact with Ahmed Massoud, the leader of the so-called “Northern Alliance” that is fighting the Taliban.
George Tenet later writes: “Five times in the two years prior to 9/11, CIA teams deployed to the Panjshir Valley of Northern Afghanistan to meet with various tribal warlords, and particularly with Ahmed Shah Masood … We bolstered Masood’s intelligence capability against bin Ladin and al Qaeda.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 207)

Ignoring an international outcry, the Taliban blow up two giant 1,500 year old statues of Buddha – carved into the cliffs above Bamiyan now we notice. Ignoring an international outcry, the Taliban blow up two 2,000-year-old Buddhist statues in the cliffs above Bamiyan, west of Kabul.
Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, declared that the statues were “idols” and order their destruction. Taliban soldiers at first fire bullets and artillery at the statues, finally attaching demolitions. “Muslims should be proud of smashing idols,” Omar said. “It has given praise to Allah that we have destroyed them.”