Retired Navy Commander Kirk Lippold, who commanded the USS Cole during al-Qaeda's 2000 attack on the vessel, has recalled making an eerily prescient warning at CIA headquarters just 20 minutes before the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Speaking on the "Fox News Rundown" podcast to mark the attacks' 25th anniversary, Lippold said he told a senior CIA official that America would likely only recognise the threat posed by Osama bin Laden after a catastrophic event killed hundreds or thousands on US soil. He was leaving CIA headquarters when the second plane struck the South Tower, an experience he says reinforced his belief that the US must confront terrorism aggressively rather than allow warnings to go unheeded.

Lippold had just briefed a CIA official on intelligence relating to the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in which suicide bombers killed 17 sailors and injured 37 others. He regards that attack, along with the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa, as part of a pattern of al-Qaeda strikes that went largely unanswered before 9/11, which ultimately killed nearly 3,000 people. Watching the Pentagon burn that day, he said, cemented his conviction that failing to confront terrorist groups and their state sponsors would continue to carry a heavy cost for the US.