Arun Venugopal: Welcome back to The Takeaway, I'm Arun Venugopal. Tomorrow marks the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks and all these years later, there's a lot you may not know about the road to that day. A new eight-episode podcast from WNYC Studios and history called Blindspot: The Road to 9/11 aims to make sense of the decades of global events and foreign policy decisions leading up to that day and how, in many cases, the US missed or outright ignored obvious signs. For example, the decision to fund Afghanistan's Mujahideen and to send the CIA to train their soldiers to fight invading forces of the Soviet Union in the 1980s would later come back to haunt us.

Jim O'Grady: It turned Afghanistan into the Harvard Business School of jihad, where students learn the latest lessons about mounting an insurgency and where a great deal of personal networking led to dynamic future partnerships as in the most famous example of all blowbacks, which was just dating at this very moment. It involved a rich Saudi who'd studied economics and emerged from the Afghan war a hero to some in the Muslim world, Osama bin Laden.

Arun: That's a clip from the first episode of Blindspot: The Road to 9/11. The first two episodes are now available on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts and the voice you heard there is Jim O'Grady, a WNYC reporter and colleague and host of Blindspot: The Road to 9/11. Jim, great to have you here.

Jim: Same, Arun, it's great to be here.

Arun: All right, Jim. It's been 19 years. Why do we need to look back at the road to 9/11 now?

Jim: On the day, I was living in Staten Island and I rushed down to the waterfront, I was a reporter for The New York Times, and stood there with a bunch of other people watching the buildings burn trying to figure out what we were seeing. It was just so deeply disorienting. I remember a woman nearby said quietly, "The chickens have come home to roost," quoting Malcolm X. I'm sure she was not saying, "The United States is to blame for this attack." I think what she was getting at is there are large forces at play here.

She just had that sense and that's what we've been trying to figure out for 19 years. Shortly after the attacks, when nearly 3000 people have died, we're not so interested in looking at the intricacies of the United States' role in global foreign policy and propping up governments in Arab countries that extremists like Osama bin Laden object to, but now we can do that.

We take some of that larger, longer view in this story. Now we can explain the way the Afghan war which raged in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s was the perfect opportunity funded by the CIA for these radical jihadists to get to know each other and we trace the connections and the meetings and re-meetings that they have from the end of the Afghan war through the decade of the '90s until that morning of 9/11.

Arun: Who did you speak to for this project?

Jim: We did this in partnership with History, formerly known as The History Channel, and we worked off a video documentary that they aired a few years ago and their giant, impressive pile of 60 interviews with insiders, people from the CIA, the FBI, the White House at the time, Mujahideen, who slept on the ground with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and knew him for years.

A Mujahideen whose father, by the way, was a very influential preacher and would come to Brooklyn and raise money for the cause and who was later mysteriously assassinated in a bombing and who was involved in the debate about the forming of Al-Qaeda and in what direction it would take and whether it would attack the West. We talked to people who were there and who made these decisions that propelled this story and brought us to 9/11.

Arun: What are some of the most surprising things you learned about the road to 9/11 given that after 9/11, for years, really, we saw those images play over and over and over again to the point of either being numbed or traumatized, especially if you're really connected to it? What do you think all these years of distance have allowed you to see in that story that we didn't see early on?

Jim: Well, just how provisional it was. It didn't have to happen. There were plots going on that led up to 9/11. In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed and some of those people had associations with other people. Some of the funding came from Osama bin Laden. In 1998, the US embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi were bombed and the US in effectively lobbed cruise missiles at bin Laden and in some parts of the Arab world, he became a hero.

A few years after that, we go into this in crazy detail. The CIA felt like it had nine different shots where they could kill or kidnap Osama bin Laden and none of them were taken for reasons of politics or they weren't sure that the mission could go down and successfully.

All of the people in play that led up to this, all of the intelligence failures that allowed 9/11 to happen and also the successes, we tell the story of a major plot that would have killed thousands of people in New York City, the landmarks plot, and how it came so close to happening if not for an undercover agent who exposed it in the nick of time. All of these forgotten or untold stories, I was surprised all along the way while I was doing the research for this series.

Arun: I've been listening to the podcast and absolutely loving it, loving the insights you bring, but also just the characters, these crazy background characters, informants, bit players, some of them, but also the character of New York City itself, which is a very different place in 1990 when you begin your story, wasn't it?

Jim: Yes, I lived through New York City in 1990. I knew that there was a crime wave going on. I'd forgotten that there were these liberationist groups and sectarian groups from around the world that were bombing Manhattan embassies and various political sites to get attention for their causes. It created this busy chaos and chronic violence in New York City that, in a way, caused a smokescreen. It was hard to understand which was the petty bombing and which was the bombing or the assassination.

Is that the thing that's connected to a worldwide network that's going to grow and progress toward 9/11 or is that bombing over there? Is that the real threat? It was a tremendous difficulty for law enforcement at the time and we follow in their footsteps as they try to puzzle this out, this new threat, how significant it is or it isn't, who's behind it, why, and how to stop it. That's the New York City that gives rise to this story. New York City was a locus for this organizing of terror cells that would go on to do great damage.

Arun: Jim O'Grady is a WNYC reporter and the host of Blindspot: The Road to 9/11. Jim, thanks so much.

Jim: Thank you, Arun.

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