© AFP PHOTO / FILES This undated file picture shows former Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin speaking at an undisclosed place inside Afghanistan.

Former president Bill Clinton signed an order in August 1998 preventing the CIA from organizing a kill operation against al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to a new documentary.



The revelation is discussed by former CIA station chief Bob Grenier in the new Showtime documentary The Longest War, which was released Tuesday. Grenier, who was based in Islamabad, Pakistan, explained that the agency was permitted to engage in “lethal activity” against the terrorist leader but could not perform a strike with the explicit purpose of killing him under the terms of the Memorandum of Notification enacted by Clinton.

“We were being asked to remove this threat to the United States essentially with one hand tied behind our backs,” Grenier said. He also explained a specific opportunity that the CIA had to eliminate bin Laden using intelligence sourced from tribal networks in Afghanistan.

“Our tribal contacts came to us, and they said, ‘Look, he’s in this location now. When he leaves, he’s going to have to go through this particular crossroads.’ And so what they proposed was to bury a huge cache of explosives underneath those crossroads so that when his convoy came through, they could simply blow it up,” Grenier recounted. “And we said, ‘Absolutely not.’ We were risking jail if we didn’t tell them that.”



Clinton has previously acknowledged another instance in which he was in a position to kill bin Laden but claimed that doing so would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people in the Afghan city of Kandahar.

“I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I just didn’t do it,” Clinton said on September 10, 2001, in Melbourne.

A day later, the World Trade Towers were struck.

© AFP PHOTO/C-SPAN This image taken from C-Span television shows U.S. President Bill Clinton giving videotaped sworn deposition in the Paula Jones sexual discrimination suit. The tape was played during impeachment hearings in Washington, D.C.

Marty Martin, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, highlighted the consequential decision against killing bin Laden in the 1990s and tied it to events happened more than two decades later.

“The threat was real,” Martin said. “And if President Clinton had taken action and killed Osama bin Laden, there wouldn’t have been a 9/11, and if there wouldn’t have been a 9/11, there wouldn’t have been an Afghanistan, and if there wouldn’t have been an Afghanistan, there probably wouldn’t have been an Iraq. What would the world be like?”

Bin Laden was eventually killed during a U.S. operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. By that point, he had become a sort of symbolic figurehead for al Qaeda, which has been in steady decline.

Bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, is still presumed to be alive and leading the terrorist group. The U.S. killed a top al Qaeda leader, Qassim al Rimi, earlier this year in another decisive blow to the waning organization. Bin Laden’s son and presumptive heir, Hamza bin Laden, was also killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation.