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not immediately agree to help KSM carry out his plan. But the two men met again in 1999 and now bin Laden was ready to carry out a plan KSM had sug- gested: hijack several planes at once and fly them into important buildings within the United States. Mohammed then began working out the details of getting terrorists under his command into the United States, with several of them learning how to fly commercial airplanes. KSM and bin Laden had united to carry out what they hoped would be the deadliest terrorist attack ever in the United States. In 2001, CIA director George Tenet didn’t know about the planning go- ing on thousands of miles from Washington, DC. But in that first year of the George W. Bush presidency, he and other US intelligence officials grew more worried about terrorist actions. A June report by his agency even warned that KSM was recruiting terrorists to send to the United States and carry out some kind of attack. During the summer, more intelligence poured in suggesting that al-Qaeda was planning something big, but Tenet and other officials didn’t know where or when. Soon though, the world would learn what KSM had been planning for so long, and the CIA would play a large role in the hunt to track him down.

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