Laden, who comes off as just another wealthy venture capitalist. But Mohammed, alas, was looking for adventure capital. As the 9/11 Commission Report put it, “No one exemplifies the model of the terrorist entrepreneur more clearly than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks... Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safe house, KSM applied his imagination, technical aptitude and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes. These ideas included conventional car bombing, political assassination, aircraft bombing, hijacking, reservoir poisoning, and, ultimately, the use of aircraft as missiles guided by suicide operatives... KSM presents himself as an entrepreneur seeking venture capital and people... Bin Laden summoned KSM to Kandahar in March or April 1999 to tell him that al-Qaeda would support his proposal. The plot was now referred to within al-Qaeda as the 'planes operation.'”
From his corporate headquarters in Afghanistan, bin Laden proved to be a very deft supply chain manager. He assembled a virtual company just for this project-exactly like any global conglomerate would do in the flat world- finding just the right specialist for each task. He outsourced the overall design and blueprint for 9/11 to KSM and overall financial management to KSM's nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who coordinated the dispersal of funds to the hijackers through wire transfers, cash, traveler's checks, and credit and debit cards from overseas bank accounts. Bin Laden recruited from the al-Qaeda roster just the right muscle guys from Asir Province, in Saudi Arabia, just the right pilots from Europe, just the right team leader from Hamburg, and just the right support staff from Pakistan. He outsourced the pilot training to flight schools in America. Bin Laden, who knew he needed only to “lease” the Boeing 757s, 767s, A32Os, and possibly 747s for his operation, raised the necessary capital for training pilots on all these different aircraft from a syndicate of pro-al-Qaeda Islamic charities and other Muslim adventure capitalists ready to fund anti-American operations. In the case of 9/11, the total budget was around $400,000. Once the team was assembled, bin Laden focused on his own core competency-overall leadership and ideological inspiration of his suicide supply chain, with assistance from his deputies Mohammed Atef and Ayman Zawahiri.
You can get the full flavor of the bin Laden supply chain, and what an aggressive adopter of new technology al-Qaeda was, by reading just one entry from the December 2001 U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia's official indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called nineteenth hijacker from 9/11. It reported the following: “In or about June 1999, in an interview with an Arabic-language television station, Osama bin Laden issued a... threat indicating that all American males should be killed.” It then points out that throughout the year 2000, all of the hijackers, including Moussaoui, began either attending or inquiring about flight school courses in America: “On or about September 29, 2000, Zacarias Moussaoui contacted Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, using an e-mail account he set up on September 6 with an Internet service provider in Malaysia. In or about October 2000, Zacarias Moussaoui received letters from Infocus Tech, a Malaysian company, stating that Moussaoui was appointed Infocus Tech's marketing consultant in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, and that he would receive, among other things, an allowance of $2,500 per month... On or about December 11, 2000, Mohammed Atta purchased flight deck videos for the Boeing 767 Model 300ER and the Airbus A320 Model 200 from the Ohio Pilot Store... In or about June 2001, in Norman, Oklahoma, Zacarias Moussaoui made inquiries about starting a cropdusting company... On or about August 16, 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui, possessed, among other things: two knives; a pair of binoculars; flight manuals for the Boeing 747 Model 400; a flight simulator computer program; fighting gloves and shin guards; a piece of paper referring to a handheld Global Positioning System receiver and a camcorder; software that could be used to review pilot procedures for the Boeing 747 Model 400; letters indicating that Moussaoui is a marketing consultant in the United States for Infocus Tech; a computer disk containing information related to the aerial application of pesticides; and a hand-held aviation radio.”
A devout Mormon, who grew up in Latin America where his father was a UPI correspondent, David Neeleman, by contrast, is one of those classic American entrepreneurs and a man of enormous integrity. He never went to college, but he has started two successful airlines, Morris Air and JetBlue, and played an important role in shaping a third, Southwest. He is the godfather of ticketless air travel, now known as e-ticketing. “I am a total optimist. I think my father is an optimist,” he said to me, trying to explain where his innovative genes came from. “I grew up in a very happy home... JetBlue was created in my own mind before it was created on paper.” Using his optimistic imagination and his ability also to quickly adopt all the latest technology because he had no legacy system to worry about, Neeleman started a highly profitable airline, creating jobs, low-cost travel, a unique onboard, satellite- supported entertainment system, and one of the most people-friendly places to work you can imagine. He also started a catastrophe relief fund in his company to help employee families who are faced with a sudden death or catastrophic illness of a loved one. Neeleman donates $1 of his salary for every $1 any employee puts in the fund. “I think it is important that people give a little,” said Neeleman. “I believe that there are irrevocable laws of heaven that when you serve others you get this little buzz.” In 2003, Neeleman, already a wealthy man from his JetBlue stock, donated about $120,000 of his $200,000 salary to the JetBlue employee catastrophe fund.
In the waiting room outside his New York City office, there is a color photo of a JetBlue Airbus flying over the World Trade Center. Neeleman was in his office on 9/11 and watched the Twin Towers burn, while his own JetBlue airliners were circling JFK in a holding pattern. When I explained to him the comparison/contrast I was going to make between him and bin Laden, he was both uncomfortable and curious. As I closed up my computer and prepared to leave following our interview, he said he had one question for me: “Do you think Osama actually believes there is a God up there who is happy with what he is doing?”
I told him I just didn't know. What I do know is this: There are two ways to flatten the world. One is to use your imagination to bring everyone up to the same level, and the other is to use your imagination to bring everyone down to the same level. David Neeleman used his optimistic imagination and the easily available technologies of the flat world to lift people up. He launched a surprising and successful new airline, some profits of which he turns over to a catastrophe relief fund for his employees. Osama bin Laden and his disciples used their twisted imagination, and many of the same tools, to launch a surprise attack, which brought two enormous symbols of American power down to their level. Worse, they raised their money and created this massive human catastrophe under the guise of religion.
“From the primordial swamps of globalization have emerged two genetic variants,” observed Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani-one is al-Qaeda and the other are companies like Infosys or JetBlue. “Our focus therefore has to be how we can encourage more of the good mutations and keep out the bad.”
I could not agree more. Indeed, that effort may be the most important thing we learn to do in order to keep this planet in one piece.
I have no doubt that advances in technology-from iris scans to X-ray machines-will help us to identify, expose, and capture those who are trying to use the easily available tools of the flat world to destroy it. But in the end, technology alone cannot keep us safe. We really do have to find ways to affect the imagination of those who would use the tools of collaboration to destroy the world that has invented those tools. But how does one go about nurturing a more hopeful, life-affirming, and tolerant imagination in others? Everyone has to ask himself or herself this question. I ask it as an American. I stress this last point because I think it starts first and foremost by America setting an example. Those of us who are fortunate to live in free and progressive societies have to set an example. We have to be the best global citizens we can be. We cannot retreat from the world. We have to make sure that we get the best of our own imaginations-and never let our imaginations get the best of us.
It is always hard to know when we have crossed the line between justified safety measures and letting our imaginations get the best of us and thereby paralyzing ourselves with precautions. I argued right after 9/11 that the reason our intelligence did not pick up the 9/11 plotters was “a failure of imagination.” We just did not have enough people within our intelligence community with a sick enough imagination to match that of bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We do need some people like that within our intelligence services. But we all don't need to go down that route. We all don't need to become so gripped by imagining the worst in everyone around us that we shrink into ourselves.
