Who Benefitted from 9/11? Putin and Russia Did

Early in his reign, Putin was keen to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban had put a stop to opium cultivation, which disrupted the heroin business for Semion Mogilevich and the Russian mob, Putin’s allies in his new government. Also, the Taliban was not down with the pipeline project, which the legitimate Russian economy needed. He pressured outgoing president Bill Clinton to move on them in 2000, to no avail. 

In late June 2001, an Indian magazine reported that a joint force was being planned, with Russian, US, and Indian forces combining to oust the Taliban.** 

In July 2001, at the Slovenian Summit where he met face to face with Putin for the first time, new president George W. Bush “looked the man in the eye…found him very straightforward and trustworthy…[and] was able to get a sense of his soul.” I happen to think Bush is savvier than popular reports about him indicate, but even so, Putin manipulating him is like the Viscount de Valmont seducing Cécile de Volanges: “It’s too easy. It is…She’ll be on her back before you’d unwrapped the first bunch of flowers.” A sense of his soul? Really? Putin is a master manipulator, willing and able to convey whatever he wants to convey while never backing down on his commitment to defeating the United States; he showed Bush only what he wanted Bush to see. 

A Fox News dispatch from 2002 reported that in August 2001, Putin had warned the Bush government of a plot involving suicidal hijackers planning to attack the U.S.** This was likely a case of Putin spinning the story after the fact, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he had some inkling of what was going down. Our intelligence services heard chatter, after all, which Bush famously ignored. 

Putin managed to be the first world leader to call the president after the 9/11 attacks—pledging his total support, of course.* 

On 12 September 2001, a Russian newspaper claimed that Russian intelligence knew who was behind the attacks and who had implemented them, and that Putin had warned Bush a few weeks in advance.** Again, this might have been nothing more than propaganda, portraying the new Russian leader as powerful and in the know, in stark contrast to the reeling Americans. 

The birthday of Felix Dzerzhinsky—founder of the Cheka, and Putin’s hero—was September 11. This is probably a coincidence, although Russians, like American neo-Nazis, do enjoy this kind of symbolism. 

Another Felix, Felix Sater, Donald John Trump’s erstwhile business partner, was a Confidential Informant for the FBI, and a good one: he helped the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden. How would a guy known for solid Russian mob contacts be able to find UBL, presumably an enemy of the Russians? Further, if the Russians knew where bin Laden was hiding, why did Putin not just relay that intel to Bush or Obama directly, since he was so eager to offer his support? Is there any reality in which Felix Sater knew where bin Laden was holed up, but spymaster extraordinaire Putin did not? 

In a 2018 New York Times piece about Bruce Ohr, one of the FBI’s top Russian mob experts, Ohr’s longtime deputy had this to say: “Until 9/11, organized crime was one of the main priority criminal programs at the Justice Department. Russian organized crime was a focus. Bruce knew a lot of the Russia stuff and traveled there.” In other words, 9/11 had the net result of taking the FBI’s focus away from the Russian mob. This means that the primary beneficiary of the worst terrorist attack on US soil was not Osama bin Laden or the forces of “radical Islam,” but rather the despotic leader of the same country that has been our greatest enemy since 1945—as well as his ruthless partners in the criminal underworld. 

In other words, the guy who came to power by covertly blowing up a few Moscow apartment buildings also benefited enormously when the towers fell.

I have to wonder if Putin was somehow behind the nuking of the WTC?