Oct 7, 2026 · 30 min · 9 segments
The Planners: The Road to September 11 (Part 1) On the evening of September 10, 2001, Mohamed Atta stayed in a nondescript chain hotel in Maine, making routine stops at a gas station and a Wal-Mart…
At twelve eighteen PM on February twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-three, a rental van explodes in the underground garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
It carries more than a thousand pounds of homemade explosive.
The blast tears open several levels of the parking structure and pushes smoke up the stairwells and elevator shafts.
Tens of thousands of people begin walking down in the dark.
Six die.
More than a thousand are injured, most of them from smoke.
The bomb was built by Ramzi Yousef, a young explosives expert who leaves the country that same night.
Prosecutors would later argue that he hoped the North Tower would fall into the South Tower.
It does not.
Yousef has an uncle.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, grew up in Kuwait, earned an engineering degree at a college in North Carolina, and now works for the Electricity and Water Ministry in Qatar.
During the autumn of nineteen ninety-two, he talks with his nephew by phone while the bomb is being built.
On November third, he wires six hundred and sixty dollars to one of Yousef's co-conspirators.
By his own account, that is all he does.
But the attack changes him.
KSM says it convinced him that the way to hurt the United States was to hurt its economy, and that New York was its economic capital.
They are planning what investigators will call the Bojinka plot: bombs on twelve American jumbo jets over the Pacific in two days.
The plot collapses when Philippine authorities discover Yousef's bomb-making operation.
Pakistani authorities arrest Yousef in Islamabad on February seventh, nineteen ninety-five.
KSM is already back at his desk in Qatar.
Everything we know about what KSM thought next comes from his own account, given in American custody after his capture in two thousand and three.
The nine eleven commission treated those statements with caution, and so will this series.
But the commission also named him the principal architect of the attacks, and his account is that the bombs had taught him their limits.
At twelve eighteen PM on February twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-three, a rental van explodes in the underground garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
It carries more than a thousand pounds of homemade explosive.
The blast tears open several levels of the parking structure and pushes smoke up the stairwells and elevator shafts.
Tens of thousands of people begin walking down in the dark.
Six die.
More than a thousand are injured, most of them from smoke.
The bomb was built by Ramzi Yousef, a young explosives expert who leaves the country that same night.
Prosecutors would later argue that he hoped the North Tower would fall into the South Tower.
It does not.
Yousef has an uncle.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, grew up in Kuwait, earned an engineering degree at a college in North Carolina, and now works for the Electricity and Water Ministry in Qatar.
During the autumn of nineteen ninety-two, he talks with his nephew by phone while the bomb is being built.
On November third, he wires six hundred and sixty dollars to one of Yousef's co-conspirators.
By his own account, that is all he does.
But the attack changes him.
KSM says it convinced him that the way to hurt the United States was to hurt its economy, and that New York was its economic capital.
They are planning what investigators will call the Bojinka plot: bombs on twelve American jumbo jets over the Pacific in two days.
The plot collapses when Philippine authorities discover Yousef's bomb-making operation.
Pakistani authorities arrest Yousef in Islamabad on February seventh, nineteen ninety-five.
KSM is already back at his desk in Qatar.
Everything we know about what KSM thought next comes from his own account, given in American custody after his capture in two thousand and three.
The nine eleven commission treated those statements with caution, and so will this series.
But the commission also named him the principal architect of the attacks, and his account is that the bombs had taught him their limits.
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