#174 - Lawrence Wright: The 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: reflections on how they happened, and lessons learned and not learned

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, at the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe Now without further delay. Here's today's episode. My guest this week is Lawrence Wright. Lawrence is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for the New Yorker Magazine. He's written many books, including Going Clear, the Plague, America in the Time of COVID the End of October, God Save Texas, and several others. However, in this podcast to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9 11, we're going to focus specifically on the Looming Al Qaeda and The Road to 9 11, a book Lawrence wrote in 2006. The Looming Tower is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and it was named one of Time's Top 100 Books Books of All Time. Now, some of you may have read this book. I suspect many of you will have not. Regardless of whether or not you listen to this podcast in its entirety, I can't recommend the book highly enough. The book was also turned into a miniseries that played on Hulu about two years ago by the same title. In the months leading up to this date. I knew I wanted to deviate from my normal subject matter and speak very specifically about 911 for this week, but I didn't really know the right way to do it. I didn't know who to interview. There were a number of people I considered speaking with. But as I reflected on the first time I read the Looming Tower, I realized that Lawrence was indeed a great person to interview for this book, and I think that comes across in this interview. His research into this story is second to none. And this is really many stories. It's not just a story. Effectively, it's two major stories. The first is the story of how Al Qaeda came to be, which of course focuses on Osama bin Laden, but also his counterpart from Al Jihad, Ahmad Al Zawari. It also goes back further into the roots of radical Islam within Egypt. A parallel story to this is the story of the intelligence community, namely the CIA and the FBI and. And their failure to see what was happening before it was too late. Now, of course, it's not nearly as simple as that, and I'm deliberately being glib, but that's effectively what we discuss in this podcast. We go through these parallel stories and how they interweave. This podcast is over three hours, which took both Lawrence and I by surprise. I was not expecting it to be that long, but nevertheless, I suspect it speaks to the. The content that we were dealing with and the depth of Lawrence's research. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Lawrence Wright. Lawrence, thank you so much for coming over. I love being able to kind of interview people in person. So to have somebody that's from Austin and to be able to sit down with you is really exciting today.

Well, it's a pleasure to be out and about, even under the constrained circumstances that we find ourselves.

This is a topic that I think many of my listeners are going to kind of wonder, what does this have to do with longevity? Because that tends to be what I speak about. But as we sit here minutes away from effectively the 20th anniversary of certainly the most pivotal moment for many of us in our lifetimes, of course, you were also alive during some of the other pivotal moments in our history. I think for many of us, we just sort of can't believe how fast 20 years has gone by. So I kind of want to just start with maybe a silly question, but what do you remember of that morning, that Tuesday morning?

Where were you back then? I had breakfast with a bunch of colleagues that were learning Spanish. And so we would speak Spanish at breakfast. And every Tuesday after breakfast, I got in the car and NPR was on and they had reported one plane had hit the World Trade Center. And by the time I got home, the second plane had hit and I had written about terrorism already. So I was aware that this was probably a terrorist attack. It wasn't a surprise to me that it was a terror attack. Of course, it was an immense surprise that it was such a dramatic strike.

Had you heard much about Al Qaeda before this? Were they familiar to you?

Yeah, I had written a movie called the Siege with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis and Annette Benning. And it was about what would happen if terrorism came to America. That was the question I asked myself. And it already happened in London and Paris, of course, Tel Aviv, you know. So suppose it happened in New York, and this movie came out in 1998, and in August of 98, a couple of months before the movie actually opened, there was the first big strike by Al Qaeda against American embassies in East Africa. And 224 people were killed. And that was scarcely remarked. And I don't even think that during the elections, you know, the terrorism was mentioned. Campaigning had already begun. Well, midterms were underway, so it wasn't a central issue. It happened over there. We still had this sense of invulnerability in America, and I think that's why it was unnoticed. But there was another bombing that same month in Cape Town, South Africa, at a Planet Hollywood restaurant. And two people were killed. Two British tourists and a little girl lost her leg. And an Islamic group claimed credit, saying that they were protesting the trailers that had appeared in. In movie theaters for the siege. The movie hadn't even come out yet, and people are already dead. And that was a scarring experience for me, you know, that I didn't feel that my movie was responsible for people getting killed. But had the movie not happened, they probably be alive. And so terrorism touched me right off. And it's. You know, it was three years before 9 11. There was a lot of anger in the Muslim community about being depicted as terrorists because it was having spent a lot of time in Egypt and so on, I sensed that if you're going to make a plausible terrorist action, that would be the source of it. But there were pickets outside the movie theaters. I mean, and people don't like to go to the movie when there are pickets, so there's always another show. So it didn't do well. It was a bomb. And then after 9 11, it was the most rented movie in America. And I think it was because in the movie, yes, there is terrorism. Yes, it happens in New York, and it presages so much of what actually did happen. But it had an ending and, you know, it turned out all right. And I think after 9 11, people were desperate for something that would give them a little hope.

Yeah, I was talking to my wife this morning. She was so bummed she couldn't be here to meet you because she's such a fan. So we'll have to figure out a way to do something another time because she was really bummed to not be here. But I was talking about how it's not clear to me because I've never really talked about it with anybody else, what the impact is like collectively for the average person. So my story is like everybody else's, which is I can remember in crystal clarity every detail of that morning. I was a surgical resident at Hopkins. I was down in the pediatric Trauma bay. A kid had just been hit by a car. So I was tending to this kid, getting X rays, doing all the things he turned out to be totally okay, but just making sure he didn't have broken bones. And I remember a person, I remember who. They were walking in and saying, a plane just hit the World Trade Center. And I assumed it was like a Cessna that had hit the Trade center in the fog. So it was sort of like. My only thought was, oh, it must be a foggy day up in New York today or something. Didn't think anything of it. Kind of went right back to work. And then, of course, some odd 40 minutes later, second plane hits. All of a sudden, now the TV's on in the ER and we're all seeing what's going on. And then for the next 48 hours, none of us left the hospital because we were sort of waiting. Would there be survivors coming? Obviously there were none. But the part I never really understood is how much of a lasting impact it had on me. For reasons I can't explain. I didn't know anybody who died that day. I didn't even know any of the first responders or people who were traumatized as survivors. And yet for at least 10 years, I had horrible dreams about being on. Was it United 93, the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania? I had dreams of being in the cockpit as it was nose diving in the ground. You've spent time talking about this with people. Is that an experience that you've seen in the normal person who wasn't physically or directly touched by this?

In some ways, it's a generational divide. We're old enough for it to have deeply affected us personally. And I think every American was profoundly affected in one way or another. For one thing, there was this sense of invulnerability. It was a smug feeling about we exist in the world, but apart from it, things that happen out there in the rest of the world don't really touch us. We meddle in wars and so on, but it never comes to the homeland. And that was so punctured, it was so disillusioning. And you know, that we're a regular country and we're vulnerable. And that was shattering. And I don't think anybody who was cognizant at that age, I don't think anybody walked away feeling the same. Now it's interesting to me because, you know, the culture changed around that event, and young people don't know what America was before 9, 11. They only know the country that we've become. And I reflect on when I was in high school. I remember I took a date to the airport in Dallas. It's called Love Field, but not for that reason. But back then, when you didn't have any money and you wanted to entertain your date, it was a plausible place to go. And so we went, walked out on the tarmac where an American Airlines plane had flown in. And we decided he'd just come from Paris. So we sat in the first class compartment, and a stewardess, as we called him, then, served us a snack. And then we went up in the FAA tower and, you know, come on in, kids. And so we sat down and watched them, you know, landing planes. And that was America. There was a sense of freedom. And, you know, we talk a lot about freedom, but that was really freedom that you could. Teenagers, you know, just wander in and see things. And this unguarded feeling that Americans had that we were not threatened. And now the airport experience, if you can just compare that young people, even people in their, you know, mid-20s now, or even 30, don't really know America beforehand. They don't know that you could go in into an office building without having your picture taken, or you could go visit the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia without having to take off your belt and your shoes. You know, we've built up a security state, and we've been so deeply involved with the rest of the world in an antagonistic manner since then. And that has become normal. But it's an aberration in our history. And I would like for us to try to remember the country we were and aim to steer towards that. Because if you forget the memory, if you lose the memory of the country that we were, then I don't think we can ever get back to port.

It's funny you mentioned that story about being at Love Field. One of the memories I have is anytime my dad would travel, and I'm sure my parents will come up during this discussion because they're immigrants from Egypt, which plays such a central role in the story we're about to discuss. But it was not uncommon for my dad during flights. If he was going somewhere and he was returning to Toronto, which is where we live, he would spend most of the flight in the cockpit just playing patty cakes with the crew. Cause he was such an outgoing guy, and I'm not making this up, there were times when he would bring the entire crew home and prepare a meal for them. Cause he cooked. He owned a restaurant. So there were times when he would show up with eight random people from Air Canada who were coming to our house because they had a night layover in Toronto and they'd be coming over for dinner. I mean, think about that in the context of the world we live in today.

Yeah, we're not unique in that, but other countries have been putting up with this kind of defensiveness for a long time. And so it's a bigger challenge in America. And there's no doubt that we needed to be on guard and protect ourselves and ramp up our defenses. But the truth is, in trying to create security for us, we've created a security state that is such an abridgment of our freedom that we are doing to ourselves. We're doing it to protect ourselves, but at the same time, we're the ones that are holding the handcuffs. And it's an abridgment of our freedom in a profound way that I think that people who talk a lot about freedom don't really appreciate.

So how long after 9, 11, did the idea come to you that you were going to put in the type of profound research that ultimately led to the looming tower, which I think came out in 06?

That's right. It was immediate. I knew this was the story of our lifetime. It was not clear that day that it was Al Qaeda, but it was pretty clear to me. I mean, I had, in my movie the Siege, I depicted something like that kind of organization. And if you remember, the phones were out in Manhattan that morning because the cell tower had been destroyed.

I do remember that because I had, at the time, my girlfriend, who was an architect, lived in Manhattan, and I couldn't get a hold of her for a day and a half. And I had couple of friends from medical school who were residents there, couldn't get a hold of her. Very strange situation.

Yeah, it was unnerving. And so I sent an email to my editor at the New Yorker, David Remnick, and I said, put me to work. I'd been kind of straying from the reservation, working on movies and things like that. So that afternoon, the phones came back on, at least for the New Yorker, and we had a conference call with, I guess, about a dozen New Yorker writers. And, you know, like me, you know, scattered around. Jeff Toobin, I think was in the Bay Area, or Jeff Goldberg and Jane Mayer were both in Washington. And, you know, we're all checking in, you know, what do you want us to do? And what David asked us to do was to find stories, just, you know, human stories that can form part of a narrative that he would weave together. And I felt that a Handicap in Austin, you know. But somehow I found this young man named Kurt Yelsen. He was a reporter. He was supposed to have been on the top floor of the World Trade center at the Windows on the World restaurant on the 101st floor before a conference that his magazine, which was called Waters, it's an investment magazine. He had an appointment there at 9 o', clock, and he slept through the subway stop for the first time in his whole life. So he turned around, got off on the Chamber street exit, ran into the World Trade Center. The Trade Center's elevators were up a flight of escalators. So he ran up the escalators and into an elevator and. And There were like 200 elevators in the two towers and you had to change floors. So he ran into the elevator and an elevator operator was holding the door for this woman who was taking her time, you know, walking across the lobby. And Kurt was very anxious because he was late. And as she stepped into the elevator, he noticed that she had a rose tattoo on her ankle. And he thought to himself, oh, wow. And then the plane hit and the doors to the elevator accordioned and nobody knew what had happened. Was it an earthquake? The building had been bombed before by a precursor of Al Qaeda. So there was that. But Kurt stepped out of the elevator and he looked around in the lobby and there were objects lying there, concrete objects, some, he said, the size of an alarm clock and some, like a size of an office chair and just lying on the ground of the lobby. And it was eerie. And remember, he had to go up a flight, but he was confused and he saw daylight and went towards that. And it was a door that led to a patio. And he walked outside and there were hundreds of shoes on the ground and something else that he thought was luggage but turned out to be human torsos. And then something landed right beside him. And so he went back in, and his story of escaping the Trade center and making it home to Queens became the bookend of the New Yorker's Black issue. That's what got me started. It was, I gotta say, incredibly wrenching to hear his story and pasted it together over a number of interviews. And I would interview him and then my wife would type up the notes and a lot of weeping going on. But I knew from then that I was on the case and that whatever portion of my life was already spoken for. A couple of months later, I signed a contract, February, for a book that was supposed to be turned in a year later. And I scratched out February and wrote March or something. April I had no idea. I turned it in five years later. So I had no idea what I was getting into. But I just knew that I was going to go all the way to the end of this.

Those stories, by the way, are so interesting to me. I only know one, which is a friend of mine's ex wife was supposed to be on one of the four flights. I don't remember which one, but she missed the flight. So she overslept. She got to the airport but didn't get through security in time. So by the time she got to the gate, they had already shut the doors. I think the plane was even pulling away. So you have this moment where you're so upset, you in that moment can't imagine a greater tragedy. Right. Like whatever it is she was going to do, what an inconvenience to. Because it was a cross country flight. And then of course to realize that that saved your life. I mean those stories are.

What you don't hear is that somebody else may have gotten that seat. Yeah, exactly. So there's another side to those, right?

The person who would have only made that flight by standby or something. Well, your book is really two stories. It's really a book of two parallel stories that are each one very difficult to get through. If I'm going to be honest, I've read your book two and a half, three times basically. And it gets more frustrating the more you get through it because you pick up new things in it that just seem so difficult to swallow. But at least the way I sort of read the book is it's basically the history of Al Qaeda. How did this organization come to be? Because most people when they think of Al Qaeda, they of course think of Osama bin Laden. But there are more actors to it and there's a long history that goes back to Egypt. And as you and I were speaking a little bit before we sat down, so much of what you wrote about resonates with things I knew about my childhood because we used to go to Egypt every year. And then there's this parallel story that's perhaps the most upsetting part of the book, if that's possible, which is the story about the intelligence I remembered. Shortly after 9 11, Thomas Friedman wrote an article in the New York Times that said this was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination, implying that it's not that our intelligence community failed us, it's that we could have never imagined this. But I don't know that I can agree with that after reading your book one bit I think this was a catastrophic failure of intelligence. So maybe we'll start with the former. And it seems that a good enough place to start would be Said Ketb. So who is this character and why is he an important figure in the creation of Al Qaeda?

Said Qutb was an educator in Egypt and very cosmopolitan in his way and he was religious but he wasn't, you know, at the beginning fanatical. But he was a member of the Muslim Brothers which was outlawed in Egypt. And Nasser came into power in 1952 in the officers revolt. And looking around for partners he decided that maybe the Muslim Brothers could be co opted. So he tried to enlist Sayyid Qutb in his governance and Qutb signed on for a little bit. But the truth is, you know, the Muslim Brothers had a goal which was not to have a military dictatorship but an Islamic one. And they, you know, they never really came to an agreement. And Sayyid Qutb actually was. He wasn't thrown out of the country. Some friends arranged for him to get out of Egypt at a time when it was really difficult for him. And he got a job teaching in Greeley, Colorado at this little college. You know, I visited Greeley and I don't know how different it was in 1940s but when he first went there. But it's a town that reminds you of America as it used to be. You know, lots of green lawns, innumerable churches, you know, just scrubbed up Norman Rockwell type of town and clip hated it. He just thought it was the worst excesses of America. I mean, if only he knew. But he was shocked by the behavior of the women. He was very threatened by them.

I mean, imagine he'd gone to Vegas or something, right?

He did spend a little bit of time in New York which was interesting for him because his brother who was in Mecca came out of Mecca to interview, to allow me to interview him said that he had never met a Jew until he got to America and yet he hated them. You know, there was this, the unseen enemy and then suddenly he's in, you know, in Manhattan. You know, he's encountering Jews all over the place and then he goes to Greeley. It was a turning point for him. He came back and wrote a very influential article about how dangerous America was. And this was at a time when America was seen as the one non colonial power by the developing world and it was held in very high esteem. And yet that was an opening shot. Then came the revolution and Nasser reached out to Qutb to see if he could bring him into the government. And that didn't work out at all. They had totally different aims for the country. Nasser, not obviously a secularist, but probably. But he saw the powerful trend of Islam in the country and he wanted to tame it in some way. And he thought by co opting Sayyid Qutb he might be able to. And Qutb had written every Friday in the newspapers, not just in Egypt, but all over the Arab world. They would publish his commentaries on Islam and the Quran. So he was a figure of note.

And at the time, Egypt was mostly Sunni.

Egypt is divided into almost entirely Sunni Muslims and Christians. The Shiite minorities insignificant. But there is about a 10%, nobody really knows, but there's a smaller population of Christians. You know, like a lot of Islamic countries, there's little to choose from on the religious banquet. And you can be, you know, the option is to be more or less religious. And, you know, piety is how you advance in a deeply religious society as Egypt was and actually became much more so. When I lived there in 69 to 71, you know, my female students were not covered. Even at Cairo University it was rare to see women with head coverings. And I was teaching at the American University at the same time. Ayman El Zawahri was a medical student at Cairo University and he was part of an effort to get women to cover and to become more obviously religious. So it was a country in transition.

It's interesting. So you were there? My mom left Egypt when she was 22. And the day she flew out, it was her first time leaving the country was September 28, 1970. And so when she departed from Cairo, Nasser was the president and a young president. He was in his 50s when she landed in Copenhagen. On the news, Nasser was dead. And she was in such shock because Nasser was like kind of a God to her generation. And he seemed indomitable. It just seemed like this is a person who will be president of Egypt forever. So you were there exactly in the middle of that transition from Nasser to Sadat. What did it strike you as the implication of that was in terms of either the secularization of Egypt or the move towards this more religious state.

You have to understand what Nasser stood for in Egypt. He was the first Egyptian to rule over Egypt since 2,500 years or so. Yeah, at least 2500 before Cleopatra and all the Greeks who took over as the pharaonic figures. Even the king that they overthrew was Turkish. So, you know, suddenly you have an Egyptian not just an Egyptian. This glamorous, very handsome, compelling figure, extremely charismatic and an unusual figure in the Arab world. In fact, his appeal was so broad, Egypt essentially annexed Syria. It was the United Arab Republic, but the Syrians had very little. They just wanted to throw in their lot with the most powerful figure in the Arab world. So his sway was unbelievable. And it was so powerful that even the hideously mismanaged war against Israel in 1967, which. The Six Day War, you might as well call it the Six Hour War, because it was over as soon as the Israelis bombed the Egyptian airplanes. It was a catastrophe. And yet he survived that. So the idea that there would be a day without Nasser was just not something that occurred to Egyptians. And I remember when it happened, he was actually moderating a peace conference with the Palestinians at the time, and he had a heart attack. And I. You know, I had a cook who came to my apartment that morning, and he said, the people are like sand in the street. Remember the night that the news came out? I had not heard the news before. Hearing the ululating, you know, all over, just. It was eerie and. But because it wasn't a singular sound, it was like a vast sound. So as Americans, we were counseled not to go out. I don't think that anything would have happened to us. But the streets were weirdly empty, and Cairo always had a problem with pollution and noise. Suddenly, it was dead quiet. The atmosphere clarified. It was beautiful, but unsettling. And for three days, you just didn't see anybody. And then they had the funeral, and we went up on the roof. We lived in Zamalik, which was an island in the middle of the Nile. We were right across from the Russian news agency Novosti. So we were up on top of the roof, and you could see the parade forming. It started at the end of Zamalek. There was a revolutionary tower. It was actually. There's a story on that the CIA tried to bribe Nasser with $10 million, and he used it to build this tower, the revolutionary tower, on the island directly across from the Hilton, so that the Americans could see where their money went. So that's where the parade started, the funeral cortege. And they were going to cross the Cassa Rel Nio Bridge. There were, you know, all the dignitaries around the world, and, you know, what we could see was just a mass of uniforms and suits and stuff like that. But we could also see this immense crowd of people on the other side of the bridge, and they rushed in towards the cortege. And in the middle of the bridge. They met the mourning cairenes and the dignitaries. And in the front of the, the cortege there were police with batons beating a path through people. And the turmoil was so great that from where we were, which was a mile away maybe, you know, we could see the bridge trembling. And I, you know, I've often thought about how, you know, soldiers have to break ranks when they cross a bridge because of.

Right. Otherwise you get the Tacoma Narrows effect.

Yes. So I worried that the bridge might actually crack. But they beat their way all the way through the mobs and the streets. I thought, this country will never be the same. And it really has never been. I will qualify that by saying it has never been. Although it has always been ruled by military forces, military figures with the brief exception of the Muslim Brotherhood president. And then who becomes president is Anwar Sadat who was regarded as a joke in Egypt. He had been in the officers coup but he missed the revolution. He was at a movie, it was a double feature. But he missed the revolution. And that was a story that hung around Anwar Sadat. And people thought he was a fool and he wouldn't last. And he turned out to be a significant figure. You know, because of him, Egypt and Israel are at peace to this day. Everybody underestimated him, but he lived. You know, he had been in Nasser's shadow all that time. So it marked a turning point. And it was Sadat who expelled the Soviets. Up until that point, Egypt had been a kind of Soviet military base. The US And Egypt didn't have diplomatic relations. There were only a handful of Americans actually there when I was living there.

Now, four years prior to Nasser's death, he had Qutb executed. But you get the sense that was reluctant. I think he understood that that execution would make a martyr of him. And there's probably nothing worse that you could have done than have made a martyr of this man. Didn't he have Sadat then as either prime minister or vice president almost try to get Qutb to just ask for some sort of forgiveness so he could save face and not execute him?

Qutb was a hard case. You know, he would rather die than renounce his, you know, his stance. And he told Sadat that and, you know, he called their bluff. You know, it cost him his life but it also gave birth to this movement because once Qutb was dead, he became a symbol of the oppressiveness of the Arab regimes. You know, the dictatorships that spanned the entire of North Africa all the way to Turkey. And what was the Alternative. The only alternative that people could see was the Muslim Brotherhood or some other form of Islamism. So it was Qutb's death that inspired, for instance, Ayman Al Zawahiri. Ayman al Zawahiri, his uncle was Qutb's lawyer and had been his teacher. He was a dear friend of Qutb. And just before Qutb was hanged, he gave Zawahiri's uncle his Quran, which was incredibly treasured. So when. When Ayman al Zawahiri was 15, he started a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government. That'll show you the level of commitment that Al Qaeda was born in.

And there's something else that's very interesting that I remember, as I mentioned to you, so much of reading your book put into context so many stories that I had heard growing up that seemed at the time disjointed because they sort of lacked the clarity of the full arc. But one of them was how Sadat, upon immediately becoming president, basically freed many of the prisoners that Nasser had put away. So it seemed that Nasser had a much clearer understanding of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. And I guess the question is, what is it that Sadat hoped to gain by freeing these individuals?

Sadat, unlike Nasser, was very pious and he thought nobody was more pious than he. He called himself the first man of Islam. How about that? And he thought because he was religious that he would have standing with people in the Muslim Brotherhood. He totally underestimated the fanaticism that had grown up in those prisons and not just because of Sayyid Qutb, you know, but one of the things that radicalized Qutb was when he was in prison, soldiers came in and shot prisoners in their cells. You know, and his. His question to himself was, what kind of Muslim would do this to another Muslim? And his answer was, they are not Muslims. And so essentially he. There's a phrase in Arabic called takfir which is to expel someone for their disbelief. And he created the precedent that unless you believe, as I we do, you're not a real Muslim. And once that door was opened, it led to the idea of terrorism. You know, that's where Zawahiri and bin Laden got permission to become the terrorists that they became.

How far back does that precedent go? If you go back to Muhammad, where is the first sign that it's okay to kill someone if they don't believe what you believe?

Well, there's the question of killing someone. There was a lot of tribal warfare before Islam. And Islam was really in Part an effort by Muhammad to unify Muslims to stop fighting each other. And you know, Islam, one of the meanings is submission, you know, submit, accept your place. But that didn't stop a lot of the infighting. And in Saudi Arabia in particular, the Ikhwn were wildly fanatic tribesmen that the first king of Saudi Arabia enlisted in his battle. But then in order to subdue them, he had to bring in British warplanes and machine guns to shoot his own soldiers of the cross, so to speak. In modern era, it was bin Laden who looked out at in the Takfiri universe there was a kind of doctrine that came from some of the discourse that first of all you have to attack the near enemy, then the far enemy. And the far enemy being the west and the United States, but the near enemy being dictators like Mubarak and so on, the royal family in Saudi Arabia.

So the heretics, the Shia, the Jews, the west, those would be the four stated enemies.

Absolutely.

Basically in proximity.

Yes. But you know, first of all, tend your own house. Well, it was bin Laden who looked out and said, the far enemy is not far. America is right off our shores. There are bases in Saudi Arabia. You cannot call them the far enemy anymore. So that using the permission that he had been given to wreak havoc and kill people at will, Bin Laden turned on America.

So going back to the early 70s, so Zawahiri is in school, he's going through medical school. Sadat sort of saves face during the 1973 the Yom Kippur War. Sadat is sort of romanticized in the west, but what was the view inside Egypt of Sadat in the sort of mid to late 70s? Was he basically ostracized in the Middle east for creating peace with Israel? I mean, that can't have been popular with the other Middle Eastern nations. Correct.

It wasn't popular in Egypt either. Well, let me qualify that. There were people that were tired of strife and wanted to make peace. But you know, the rhetoric in the Middle in Middle east. The rhetoric in the Middle east at that point was that Israel had to be destroyed. And here was Amor Sadat saying, no, you know, we're going to make peace with Israel. First he had to demonstrate that he was willing to go to war because the Israelis were so complacent they didn't see a threat. And actually, I don't think Sadat doesn't get enough credit for the daring. You know, there was a kind of Maginot line that the Israelis had built. They'd taken all of Sinai along the Suez Canal, they built this sand fortress that extended a whole length. Cliffs of sand topped by artillery and little caves inside, you know, with machine gun emplacements and stuff like that. It looked really formidable. Sadat managed secretly to create this army, an invasion force. And how do they bring down that castle of sand? With fire hoses. It was amazing how the sand just melted away. But they had these high pressure fire hoses they'd gotten from Germany. And within a few hours, they had managed to cross the Suez Canal, which the Israelis thought was totally impossible. And it was kind of a mirror of the 67 war. And it wound up. Egypt was essentially defeated by Ariel Sharon's army, which surrounded them. But they had made the point. And at that point, Sadat was a real hero. He gave pride to the Egyptian people who felt so humiliated. And one of the things that he had to counter was the lessons that the Egyptians had drawn from the 67 war. And the Israelis, you know, the Israelis thought, well, we really are God's people. You know, look at this. You know, we were just before the war, we were digging trenches for mass graves in the public parks. And now, you know, we've, you know, conquered all of our Arab neighbors, you know, within six days. Just unbelievably thrilling. So what lesson did the Arabs, and particularly the Egyptians take, which is, we're not God's people. Why would he let this happen to us? And the answer was, we are not religious enough. And so that answer resonated with so many people. And that was, you know, the 67 war was a huge influence in driving people into radicalism. And that was something that Sadat didn't fully take into account. And, of course, eventually that radicalism would focus on him.

What did you describe him as? I thought that was just hilarious. He described himself as the first man of Islam. Yeah, the funniest concept ever. Because the reality of it is, as we drew close to the end of his life, he would completely turn around and say, no religion in politics. No politics in religion. He saw the damage that this religion was causing and said, we must separate this church and state. Is that ultimately what led to the fatwa being brought against him?

Well, peace with Israel was a part of it. There was also, you know, he was chiding. He was really pharaonic in his behavior, which is not unusual in people that rule over Egypt. But he derided women who were covered saying that they were wearing tents on their head. And that really offended a lot of Islamists.

And his wife, I believe, had pushed for the right for a woman to have a divorce. So they were really trying to bring modernity to Egypt, and it was ultimately the nail in his coffin.

It was a similar path that the Shah of Iran had gone down.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because the Shah was basically overthrown in 79. Or was it 78?

It was 79. And that year was a catastrophic one for Islam and for Muslim countries. It's the year that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It's the year the Shah was overthrown. And it was the year that Camp David peace accords were signed. And I should also say it was the year of the attack in Mecca, where radical Islamists took over the holiest place in Islam.

And Saudi Arabia needed the French to come and help.

Yeah, they don't like to admit this, and there's still no toll. We don't know how many people died. Hundreds or thousands. We don't know. But there were snipers up in the minarets and so on. And the. Underneath the plaza, there's a warren of rooms, and they stored weapons and food in there. So there were plans maybe to flood them out, but they were holding hostages. And we don't really know what happened, but what we understand or whatever. When I was researching this as carefully as I could, they bore holes in the plaza and dropped grenades down. So a lot of innocent people were killed, and then dozens were arrested and executed. But it was a trauma. On the scale of 9, 11 in Saudi Arabia. And out of that came a bargain between the royal family and the clerics, which was, you know, the royal family needed permission to attack the mosque. In Islam, it's so holy that you're not even supposed to mow the grass. You know, every living thing should be untouched. And here, you know, was a situation where totally out of control, thousands, maybe of people would be killed. And the royal family did not feel they could do this without a fatwa from the leading clerics. And in return, the royal family agreed to allow religious figures greater standing and more power within the society. So upon that, Saudi Arabia immediately became far more conservative and the clerics took control. And you began to see the religious police in the streets and so on. And that, you know, Saudi Arabia had been on a path not to liberalism, but a more stable society that was somewhat moderate but not fanatic. But there were people. Once the religious authorities acquired power, they used it. But they also became far more fanatical themselves.

The name of the organization that ultimately assassinated Sadat was Al Jihad.

Correct.

This was the 1/2 of what would become Al Qaeda?

Right. The American intelligence called it Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but in Egypt it's just called Al Jihad.

How much of a role did Al Zawahiri play in that?

In the assassination? It was a small role. He transferred some guns.

He was still a practicing physician.

Yeah, he was still a young man, but he had been able to organize police officers and soldiers and stuff like that into his cell. But he wasn't central to the assassination itself.

Of all the turmoil that we've discussed so far in the Middle east, the first one that is sort of ingrained in me is when Sadat was killed. So I remember that day very clearly. I was 8 years old and I remember it so well. One of my uncles was one of the generals standing with him. When he was shot, as you recall, everybody but Sadat realized what was happening and they all hit the deck and Sadat actually thought it was part of the parade. And he actually stood to greet these soldiers, who of course were.

I interpret that differently.

Yeah, I know you did. In the book, you thought he was standing to. To receive his execution. My uncle always said that he felt that Sadat actually thought it was part of the parade.

Well, who knows what thoughts were going through his mind. But it was chaotic. These guys jumped off the truck and began firing and throwing grenades, most of.

Which didn't go off, which was sort of a miracle. A lot more people would have died.

A lot of people would have been killed. I don't know why everybody on that reviewing platform wasn't dead, but they were. You know, they came for Sadat. And when I looked at the news footage and the stills of that.

The stills are harrowing. Yeah, yeah. He's standing in attention.

It looked to me like he was going to go out unintimidated.

And maybe you might be right.

That would have been part of his character. And of course, he. He was so vain. He had his new Italian made uniform and he didn't want to ruffle the lines of the uniform with a bullet for vest. So he was unprotected in that way.

You talk about how the men that were charged, and even not charged, basically the men that were imprisoned, following that, were tortured. And that out of that torture came a lot of the humiliation that ultimately fed what would become the terrorism we all learned about 20 years ago for the first time, many of us. What happened to those men and what did your research uncover about what that period was like following the assassination of Sadat? It wasn't long after. I mean, Mubarak would have been immediately instated as president.

Right. We don't understand clearly the role of humiliation in human affairs, but it's very powerful. And going back to the 67 war, the humiliation, I think, gave birth to this rise in radicalism in Egypt and elsewhere. And torture is deliberate humiliation. And we don't really know what happened to Zawari, although he was probably electrocuted and stripped naked and humiliated in every possible way, way that you can imagine. And you can emerge from that totally broken or you can emerge full of rage and willing to do anything to exact revenge. And, you know, I think that prison population was divided along those lines. There weren't people that weren't affected by it. You know, there were people, people that were either broken or turned into something else. And that something else became the seeds of Al Qaeda. That Al Qaeda really began as Zawahiri's organization. You know, it was Al Jihad. And when they got out, they were on a rampage. They were killing people as fast as they could. And they tried to kill the Prime Minister. They did kill some people. They accidentally killed this little schoolgirl named Shaima. This is a characteristic jihad action. So carelessly did they plan this assassination of the Prime Minister. They just put the bomb outside a girls school. And the only person killed was, you know, a schoolgirl. It could have been dozens of them. But the city, Cairo, was infuriated. And there were marches in the street and, you know, protests. And Zawahiri actually complained because he felt offended that they were subject to so much abuse. And yet it was pretty clear that Shema was a step too far for jihad. And actually one of the killers lives now in London. You know, he got political asylum because the fact that Egypt had a death penalty and the British would take in anybody who was under a death penalty. So Seamus Killer is living in London still. Last I talked to him, he was still there. Yeah.

Something else that you point out in the book that I thought was so fascinating because it's so obvious once you stated it, but I'd never really understood it, which was why couldn't the real resistance take place in Egypt? But you point out that the topography is not amenable to it. You can't really live away from the Nile. You basically, the moment you get too far off the Nile, you're in the middle of the desert. It's not amenable to guerrilla warfare. And the military had too strong a hold over the Nile from Upper Egypt all the way to the Delta and into the Mediterranean Sea. So basically, if they were going to create an army. They needed to do it outside of Egypt. And it seems that Zawahiri realized that in the mid-80s, if not the early 80s. Correct. And is that about the time that he left?

Yeah, he went to Afghanistan first as a medical doctor, answering a call that many heeded. And then he came back and he affected some Afghan outfits and so on. But he was very stirred by that. When the Soviets invaded, it was an electric alarm in the Muslim world, you know, that an Islamic country was being occupied by a secular government.

What was Russia's intention?

It's a really good question because, you know, you could say that they were trying to beat a path to the Mediterranean, but it's a. You know, it's a long way. It doesn't go directly there. So, you know, they might have done better going through Pakistan. And Pakistan was nominally allied with the United States, so that might have been problematic. But Soviet Union was an expansionist power. It was crazy. If you remember that period there, you know, there was a lot of turnover in the leadership. I think that there was confusion about who's in charge, and it didn't make any sense at all. And the Carter administration, Brzezinski was a national security advisor, and he saw that as a huge opportunity to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. And essentially, that's what we did. We supplied the mujahideen with weapons and then finally with Stingers, which brought down the helicopters. And that was. The Soviets didn't want to go mano a mano on the ground. So once they lost that air cover, they were essentially defeated.

Which now brings us to the other half of the Al Qaeda duo. Osama bin Laden. I think it's well known by many people who have paid attention to the stories of Al Qaeda that he came from. Unbelievable wealth, unbelievable privilege. But maybe for folks who aren't quite familiar with his lineage, who was Muhammad bin Laden and why did he have such an empire? What were the circumstances of Osama bin Laden's upbringing?

Muhammad bin Laden came from Yemen, and there are stories about how he got there, but essentially, I think the most credible is he kind of hitched a ride on a boat that took him up to Jeddah. And he was a laborer. He was blind in one eye. He was illiterate. He put himself to work as a handyman and then did some work for the Americans, were at that time working on Aramco, building up the Saudi oil reserves. And there were American companies in Saudi Arabia who were essentially beginning to build the kingdom itself, the roads, the hotels. And so on. So it was a good time to be in that business. And Muhammad bin Laden, the king didn't really trust the Americans.

Who was king then? Was it Faisal or was this before Faisal?

Before Faisal, I think it was Abdulaziz. When Mohammed bin Laden first got there, it was the first king of that lineage. I don't know if he built the whole palace, but the king was infirm. And if you remember in the meeting between Roosevelt, President Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz in the Suez Canal, Roosevelt gave him a wheelchair. So the king liked having the wheelchair, but he lived upstairs. So he got Muhammad bin Laden to build him a ramp so the car could drive him upstairs. So that was the display of the genius that Muhammad bin Laden had. And then there was a goal that had been from the very beginning of the kingdom to try to unify the two sides of Saudi Arabia. The western portion was divided by a mountain range. On the other side of it was the holy lands, Mecca and Medina and Jeddah, one of the major cities. But it was cut off by the Sarawat mountain range. And when Faisal became king, he was trying to get a contractor who would build a road that would unify the kingdom. The main contractors looked at this steep cliff face and just, it was daunting, you know, how would you do that? So Muhammad bin Laden, this one eyed, illiterate Yemeni laborer, gave a bid to the king which didn't turn out to be accurate, but you know, the king accepted. And so the legend is that he pushed a goat over the edge of the cliff and followed him down this cliff face, marking the path. And that's the path that this road. I drove down it, I drove up and down it, but it's very windy and oddly enough beset with chimpanzees. So you know, there are a lot of animals along the way, you have to be careful. But it's a two lane road that goes down. But that was one of the most important roads in history because it unified the kingdom and it made Mohammad bin Laden the most famous non royal figure in the kingdom, a real hero. And he took advantage of his celebrity. He had a lot of wives, 45 children, 52, I think bin Laden had 52 brothers and sisters, so maybe 53 total. Some of the wives he would marry on Friday and divorce on Sunday. So there was that kind of arrangement. Typically in Saudi Arabia under Islamic rules you're awarded four wives and the fourth wife is always a little bit of a threat to be discarded. And it was the fourth wife that was the mother of Osama and she was Syrian and she was an Alawite, which is the sect that Asad, the ruler of Syria, is to brought a part of some minority sect that is thought to be heretical inside Sunni Islam. So that was by itself a mark against Osama. And his father divorced her, but he arranged marriage for her and one of his trusted employees who actually Osama became close to. And they lived in a little house in Jeddah off a street that's called Macaroni street because there's a pasta factory nearby. That's where he grew up. He was always pious. It wasn't a conversion. He would play soccer and he would wear long pants. But he must have had some influence on these other kids because eventually they adopted his long pants strategy. And he would. Even when he was fasting, which he.

Did, he fasted two days a week.

Two days a week, emulating what he thought the Prophet did.

We're talking about bin Laden as a teenager.

Absolutely. He would make sandwiches for his soccer mates even though he wasn't eating them. And then, you know, they serve cakes and then play Islamic games. You know, guess the names of the prophets, companions and that sort of thing. Even though music is frowned upon, instrumental music is frowned upon in Saudi Arabia. He led this a cappella singing and I tried to get. He taped some of them and I tried to find some tapes of bin Laden singing, but I never could lay my hands on anything like that.

Did you have an insight as to why he was so pious?

I think that if you want to stand out in a very religious society like Saudi Arabia, you can become less religious or more. And in his environment, he was not going to become less religious. So I think he always had the idea that there was an achievement by becoming more of an authority. I mean, you have to bear in mind his father was an exceptional figure. He died in an air crash. And Bin Laden was young when that happened. But very few people in Saudi Arabia in all of history have achieved the kind of status that Muhammad bin Laden did, who is someone who is not in the royal family. That was exceptional. And I think that Osama, being the son of the fourth wife and then cast out of the inner spell, inner circle, when the father divorced his mother, he always wanted to distinguish himself. And there was a horde of other children around to compete against. Sama was adventurous. Some of the other sons were adventurous, but I think one of them died nearby here in central Texas. He crashed an ultralight plane in a power line. So it wasn't just Osama that was an adventurous type. But early on he was racing horses, drove very fast. Not professionally, but he liked to drive and he was careless. He had wrecks a lot but he had this kind of impunity around him and he liked to go out and camp in the desert by himself. He was forging an independent identity. Even as a very young man, he was drawn more deeply into Islam. In his school, apparently there was a. I think it was a gym teacher who was in the Muslim Brothers and he impressed Osama so that probably drew him more into Islamic politics and he met other people that would be important to him inside what was a secret cell of his Muslim Brothers in Saudi Arabia.

Do we know if he was influenced by Sayyid Qutb's writings?

Oh, yeah, there's no one who wasn't. You have to start with that. But Sayyid Qutb was a big figure. And when he was in the university there were lots of discussions about Qutb and there was another head of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt who had a bit of a contrary view. Sometimes Osama would take one perspective and sometimes the other. But they were essentially arguing over Qutb. He was a huge figure he might have met. No, I guess not. Because I would have asked Qutb's brother Muhammad if he'd ever met Osama but I don't think so.

So when did Osama first go to Afghanistan?

Well, the invasion.

Invasion 79.

He said he went as soon as he could. There's no evidence he went there in the first year or two but he might have been, but there's just no evidence of it. And he was inspired. He didn't stay long. He came back. But he became a conduit for money. He was a bundler. And Abdullah Azzam was the sort of godfather of the Arab participation in the war against the Soviets. And Bin Laden hooked up with him and Azzam just saw, you know, this tall, enigmatic Saudi with a lot of money and a lot of prestige and just saw him as a cash machine, which he was. I mean, he played a huge role in raising money for the war against the Soviets. And that was his main task for the most part until he actually moved to Afghanistan and decided to form an Arab wing of the war. And it was totally feckless. I mean, it was worse than feckless. It got in the way. You know, Afghan warlords complained about it. They didn't know what they were doing. Essentially they were just putting young men without any training at great risk and effecting no real Change in the war. But from the perspective of Saudi Arabia, here was a Saudi, not a prince, but a prince Ling in the sense that he was the son of the famed Muhammad bin Laden. And the idea that Saudis would actually go out and fight was really titillating. They weren't allowed to fight. There was a nominal army, but essentially there was no military.

What was the scale of this? So how many Muhajideen fighters were there?

I don't remember the exact number. There were fewer than 100, I would say. But you also have to bear in mind that young Saudi men would sometimes fly up from Saudi Arabia for a few days. They would be given a gun. They would go out and they would be not facing the enemy, probably, but they go out and shoot up a tree or something. And then they would go home and say that they had been, you know, they'd been fighting in Afghanistan and the.

US had no forces there. But the CIA was providing weapons to. To the Muhajideen. Correct?

Right. And they were also supplying money. And they would. Unfortunately, we landed on this guy named Hamut Gul, who was a general in touch with the Afghan warlords, and he would parcel out the money among these seven warlords. The CIA called them the seven dwarfs, but he picked the most radical of them. So the money that came from American taxpayers went to. To empower people that would later become allies of the Taliban.

Now the Taliban didn't exist yet. Correct.

The Taliban were kids in school. The Taliban, the word means students in Arabic and I guess in Urdu, and especially for young Afghan boys and Pakistanis as well. Parents didn't have any money. They would be sent off to these madrassas, many of them on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And especially after the Soviet invasion, there were a lot of orphans and there were a lot of families that were unable to provide for their kids. So they send the boys to these madrassas where their main task was to memorize the Quran in a language, Arabic, that they didn't speak. And oftentimes these boys would be abused, especially, you know, warlords and so on, would take advantage of them. And really, the Taliban came to power when there was a battle, a personal duel between these two Afghan commanders over a boy. That was when Mullah Omar, who had come to be the leader, who was a minor cleric, got on his motorcycle and began to organize. And that's where the Taliban arose. It's an odd culture because there's some pictures of these boys at the beginning as they began to form into a military force. But they put on cosmetics, they look very feminine. It was eyeshadow and lipstick and so on. And so there was a. It's hard to characterize it because I can't say that I understand it. But you know, there was, I think in terms of absenting women so much from society that these boys were sexualized. And once again, I think humiliation played a role and hard to quantify, but I think impossible to ignore.

And then the Northern alliance at this point is part of the Afghan government.

The government went through several iterations and coalitions and the Northern alliance was a Pashtu organization. So they would have been inside the tent of government.

So when did Zawahiri and bin Laden meet?

Nobody knows. I wish I tried really hard to find that out. And I asked many of Zawahiri's colleagues. Most people think that they met somewhere along the line in Jeddah where bin Laden lived and he was raising money for the mujahideen. And Zawahiri went there ostensibly to practice medicine at this Muslim Brothers coalition of doctors and so on. So it's totally plausible. It could have been shortly after that impishawar in Pakistan where bin Laden set up shop. So it's one of my great frustrations that I was never able to chronicle the moment when these two guys ran into each other and what they thought.

About each other as the Soviets ultimately withdraw, which is what, 89ish. On some level, I think, though probably not justified, Bin Laden feels like a bit of a hero.

Oh yeah, he glorified himself, although by.

All accounts he really hadn't done much.

He mucked it up really is what he did, and got a lot of kids killed and you know, just kids, young men. But in terms of victories, no, he had none. But what he did accomplish was to create a legend around himself and around the Arab mujahideen. And it's fascinating to me as a person that's always been intrigued by religious beliefs, you know, how these legends spread and how they fortified his image. You know, there was the idea that if you fell in battle, your body wouldn't putrefy and that green birds would come circle your corpse. And I remember I asked Jamal Khalifa, who had been bin Laden's best friend for much of his life and his brother in law and had been in Afghanistan with bin Laden. Really? Do you really believe? Oh, absolutely. I saw it with my own eyes. It can't be true, but it's hard to deny someone who speaks with such conviction. And so that was the kind of thing that young people not Just in Saudi Arabia, but throughout the Muslim world would be hearing the stories of these fighters. And they're mighty men and they live in caves and they fight these technological powers and they win. And they are our Muslim brothers and we should be doing the same thing. And not only we have to contribute however we can. So in the mosque and even in shopping centers, there would be cans for contributing to the effort. And so people did, you know, it was a very popular effort and Bin Laden was very central in his name and his identity became central to that. Cause I call him Saudi's first celebrity because there wasn't a category for Bin Laden, he wasn't royal. In Saudi Arabia, there's a true of other Muslim countries to some extent, but there's a prohibition on human forms. You're not supposed to have pictures of people or animals for that matter, but there are pictures of the king and princes all over the place. And I remember when I was there, there was a legal battle going on over the Starbucks image because it's like a human form. Yes. But finally in the courts they decided she's a mermaid. And so she's neither animal nor human, she's a mythological creature. So Starbucks was allowed to keep their logo, but that's how seriously it's taken. But here's Bin Laden. He's not nobody. He's Muhammad bin Laden's son, but that's not an unusual category. He has 20 something brothers, but there's nobody like him. He can go to the mosque and make a speech and people would pour out to hear him. He wasn't charismatic in the traditional sense, but he had a kind of ethereal air about him. He was enigmatic, intriguing, very handsome, very tall, had a kind of elegance about him. And that turned out to be a real pain in the ass for the royal family because they weren't used to having a rival power, someone who had a voice of authority. And Bin Laden, even at a very young age, was that person.

Now, I guess it would have been the summer of 1990 when Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.

Right.

And although I guess we wouldn't know it at the time, you could argue that was certainly one of the greatest factors that would ultimately lead to 911 though it wasn't. You can only know that in retrospect.

Right. And it's peripheral in that. I mean, we wouldn't understand it from our point of view because America and other allies rushed in to save Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was trying to keep that from happening. And so he went to the Minister of Defense and Said, I'll take care of this. I'll bring my Al Qaeda guys, which were several dozen maybe together with my father's earth moving equipment. We will enlist the people and we'll repel the million man Iraqi army. And the Minister of Defense just didn't laugh him out of the office. It wouldn't be polite, but he was not taken seriously.

The first time I heard this story by the way, was I had the privilege of meeting Prince Turkey, spending a week with him actually.

Really?

In Saudi Arabia.

I wanted to hear more of that.

Yeah. And he told this story which was how Bin Laden was adamant that he based on his victory in Afghanistan, which again means he believed his own hype.

I think so.

Right. Like he actually thought that he moved the needle in Afghanistan.

Well, he defeated the Soviets, so what would the Iraqis be by comparison? That was what was going on in.

His mind and the disconnect from reality. But how humiliated he was when not only was he not the one that was going to defend his country, but these filthy Americans were going to come in and do this, which included women, Jews, Christians and they were going to spend quite a bit of time there. Right. Even though it didn't take long to get Saddam Hussein to retreat, you still had to maintain no fly zones. You still had to maintain a military presence there.

I'll stop you a bit on that because we didn't need to stay in Saudi Arabia. There were other bases in Qatar and uae. We could have gotten them way, but the Saudis had very nice bases. But it was the lingering. I mean we promised we were going to leave when the war was over.

Yeah, that's a good point. It was promised that the US would leave. Why did they not?

They were comfortable. And I think probably the royal family felt happier having an American presence there because the Saudis have always been insecure about the, you know, they're sitting on this golden egg and everybody around the world wants a piece of it. So the Saudis suddenly they've got American military there and that's not the worst thing in the world in their opinion. But for Bin Laden and for other people, you know, there's a, there's a saying attributed to the Prophet which was, there shall be no 2 Religions in Saudi Arabia. Well, you know, there are more than two religions and there were at the time of the Prophet. But Bin Laden took this to mean only Sunnis of his particular stripe should live in the kingdom and everybody else has to be expelled. And it was such a huge thing to have half a million Americans and other nationalities, most of them not Muslim, living in their country, protecting. How humiliating, once again, is it that you have to turn to these other powers? We're not strong enough to do it ourselves. For bin Laden, that was a big motivating force. That's when he really sort of turned his attention to America.

And this is where, as he and Zawahiri are getting closer, there's a bit of a difference between them, which is at this point, Zwahri is still really focused on overthrowing Egypt, overthrowing what he views as these horribly immoral, corrupt Arab leaders. But bin Laden is thinking far beyond that already.

Yeah, it wasn't just as a worry. I mean, there were a lot of nationalist groups in the Arab world focused on changing their countries. And what Bin Laden did was to create a coalition and then redirect them to become an international terrorist group rather than just be stuck in their nationalist orbits. And Zawari was one of those people. Given his druthers, he would have just spent time trying to overthrow the Egyptian tyrants. And as you characterize the corrupt, ruthless leader, that was true. He was right about the nature of the rule, but he was wrong about the solution.

It's funny, I always talk to my parents about this stuff when Mubarak was entering his 573rd term as president and I would ask naively, as sort of a youngster, I was like, why can't Egypt have an actual democracy? Why do these elections have to be rigged? And my parents, for right or wrong. And you have to remember my parents have a very different view of Egypt. Right. So my mom views Egypt, fondly left, reluctantly, loved Nasser. My father, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get out. Despised Egypt, never looked back, hates everything about it and is the classic immigrant who wants to come to the west and just hates the corruption, hates the socialism of Nasser. Right. Nasser wanted to socialize the country, but they both agreed, full stop, that a country like Egypt had to be ruled by a strongman. Their view, again, I don't know if this is true, but their view was you could never take democratic principles and just lop them into an Egyptian society. It needs an iron fist to rule it. And Mubarak was the least bad option. That was basically the way they thought of him. What's your view of an autocratic leader of that era? I mean, do you think that my parents, in their assessment, were correct of Egypt?

I was wrong about Egypt. I thought it was ready for democracy and they had a parliament back during the era of the king. So there Was even though somewhat forgotten. But there had been deliberation, laws were passed. You know, it had the appearance of being a constitutional monarchy because the king was so indolent that he couldn't stir himself to do anything. My analysis was this is a sophisticated country. It's a country that is never going to dissolve. Like, you know, Iraq may fall apart. That's not going to happen to Egypt. It thinks of itself as eternal. And so it's always going to be one thing. It's always going to be the most significant Arab country and they know it. So I thought, well, yeah, I was.

All for you were very optimistic in 2011. I was, I read a lot of.

What you wrote and I had been affected. I went back to Egypt to make a speech or a couple of speeches. I spoke at the American University in Cairo where I used to teach and I spoke at Cairo University where Barack Obama went to make his famous outreach speech to the Muslim world. And I remember this was back during the election, this was before the Arab Spring started and during the primary season when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and were running for office. And I was asking the kids, if you were an American, who would you vote for? How many here for Hillary Clinton? All the girls in hijab raised their hand and how many for Barack Obama? A lot of other people. How many for John McCain? One guy from the embassy. But they were totally into the idea of democracy. They were excited by what they were seeing and that there could be revolutionary, non violent change was on their mind. And one young woman said in this very plaintive voice, what happened to us? I mean every Egyptian lives with the weight of history. You look at the pyramids and Egypt.

Was the center of civilization.

Absolutely. And it really was, I mean China, it was so powerful and so much art and then a long slide into being just a tourist kingdom. So what happened to us?

And also such an important pillar of science too. I mean that's the other thing I remember as a student, as a youngster, I was a, I hated school, I despised school, didn't do well in school or anything like that. Ultimately I turned that around. But a lot of it had to do with something my mom would say to me repeatedly growing up, which is, she would say because we're Coptic, right? So she would say, you know, we're defendants, we're descendants of the pharaohs. Like, you know, you are a pharaoh, science and engineering is in your blood. Your ancestors built pyramids. And she would just say these things which, when you're a kid you kind of start to believe it. After a while, it's like, well, maybe Mom's right. Maybe I am smarter than I think I am. But it's also. It's a society that does have a very scientifically literate population, like you would think this shouldn't be hard to do.

Well, when I was thinking about that question that she posed to me, that young woman, I thought when I was teaching in Cairo, Egypt was a part of what we call the developing world. You know, these were countries like India, South Korea, Singapore. So many of what these countries that became the Asian tigers, they roared past Egypt. And I thought the answer I gave her was her question made me think of my father and his generation. He had come out of the Dust bowl in Kansas, you know, broken farms, you know, just really poor. And he went on to become a banker in Dallas, small bank. But he spent seven years in wartime in World War II in Korea. And he and his generation built the most powerful country and economy in the history of the world. And I said, it takes a generation. And there are generations like that right now in South Korea, in India, and places like China that are making their country great. But it can't be done by an individual. And I think that's my argument against tyranny. It takes a generational commitment, and they have to have influence. They have to know that they are a part of an enterprise and they can't be suddenly ruled out. And that is the failure of tyranny, I think, is essentially, those kinds of people that would be transformative for a country are not given the chance to be the kind of leaders that they could be.

What role does religion play in this? And specifically, what role does Islam play in this? Is there something about Islam and its current level of maturity, which maybe is akin to Christianity a thousand years ago, that is standing in the way of the progress you speak of?

Well, Islam has many manifestations. And so it's different in Indonesia, for instance, the largest Muslim country, a far more successful country than Egypt or Saudi Arabia, Turkey also. But there are manifestations of Islam that are really, really harmful. People are encouraged to adopt a kind of submissive attitude. And of course, Islam means submission. So there's, you know, there's a literalism about it. And then if you're not, it's not. If you don't believe in it, you have tyrants who will beat you into submission. So there are two very powerful forces. You have dictatorships that are ruthless, justifying themselves on the basis of religion. And then you have actual religious texts that urge you to Be compliant and, you know, tyrants are quite adept at using those kinds of instructions. I don't think it's true that you can. Can't have a modern country or a democracy in an Islamic country. I think Tunisia has been struggling to do that and they've had some turmoil recently. But you see that they're actually that people in Tunisia want to have a democracy and they feel like they can be trusted with one. But it is. It's a blight on the Islamic world. And you have tyrants from Morocco all the way to southern China. And it's something that I hope that that religion outgrows at some point.

Yeah, I sometimes just wonder if it's really a timescale problem and we can't think about this in decades.

Well, I certainly think that's true because I've already spent decades hoping for change and just not seeing it blossom. Egypt is, when I was there, was far more secular, far more accommodating. When I was there, Soviets were essentially an occupying force. And the Egyptians really longed for a relationship with the West. They liked Americans, even though we were essentially Persona non grata. They liked the fact that we horsed around with people. We would talk to the help. We were democrats in person as in spirit. We liked being around people. Whereas the Russians in the news agency across the street, they were incredibly inspiring. I remember I used to. It was odd because I used to play doubles with one of these Soviet guys. I called us the big powers. But they would have these parties on Saturday night and you could hear them playing Teresa Brewer records. You know, put another nickel in, you know, and they would be sitting on a couch with their drinks, just sitting around glumly. And then at around one in the morning, they would spend spill out into the street all drunk and singing. It looked awful. But the Egyptians just hated them. It was a great time to be an American in Egypt, whereas after 911 it was entirely different. The governments were friendly, but the people were very upset with America. And it seemed odd to me because, I mean, you attacked us. A strong motivation for me was to go back to Egypt and find out what happened because I remember it so fondly. I just had a great time living in Egypt and teaching these young Egyptians and also Palestinians and Jordanians and some Africans.

And what's the answer you have.

You talked a little bit about your mom and how she believed in conspiracies and things like that. I asked this one Egyptian woman who was saying that The Americans did 911 to themselves. I heard that a lot. I Said, how can you believe something for which there's absolutely no evidence? You say that, but there's nothing you can point to that shows that there's any evidence or motivation. And she said, well, in Egypt, nobody's ever told us the truth. And so we have to try to imagine for ourselves what it is. So the question we always ask is, who benefits? And in this case, we think America has been waiting for the opportunity to attack the Arab world. And so you created this excuse for yourselves. Well, that was her thinking. And that's how conspiracies nurture themselves on these kinds of rationalizations that float above the world of truth and evidence.

By the same logic, obviously the CIA killed Kennedy because had to figure out a way to get into Vietnam. So let's go back to our good friend. It's the early 90s now. He's been humiliated by his own government, who have said, thanks, but no thanks. We're going to have the Americans help us out here. He goes to Sudan, of all places. What happens in Sudan? Why doesn't he end up just settling down in Sudan and living the rest of his years there?

Oh, I wish he had. At 92 to 96, al Qaeda became essentially an agricultural organization in Sudan. Bin Laden in Sudan probably was the largest landowner. He owned a considerable amount of property, and he would do jobs for the Sudanese government, you know, build highways and stuff like that, and they would pay him with land. Whenever I think about Sudan, I went there to try to understand that period in his life. And I was trying to penetrate Sudanese intelligence. And so I was, you know, recruiting, you know, some. Some names of people that I'd been given. And I finally, you know, got. Made some relationships, and they took me around and showed me bin Laden's house and so on. And this was a time when I had been traveling a lot and I had injured my back. And it was very painful to take those long airplanes flights. And I took one of those big exercise balls, you know, where you had to blow up and you'd have to unblow it when you left the country, but in order to ease the pain. And so one day, one of my Sudanese contacts knocked on my door at a hotel that called itself the Hilton. Ahmed was the intelligence agent, and he had this guy with him who was kind of plump and he had one of those conical Indonesian hats that Muslims where. So come on in. And, you know, Ahmed was very tired and he sat on the edge of my bed and his eyes were bobbing. And I said, ahmed, just lie down. So he Falls asleep and he leaves me with this Al Qaeda guy, you know, I got my ball and I give him the office chair that's in the room. And so who are you? He said, well, you can call me Luay. And that was frustrating. But I started asking him about bin Laden. He seemed to know everything and he, especially in Sudan, he knew all about Bin Laden's enterprises. He started raising seeds. He had for a while a bicycle importing company. Bikes are usually used in Sudan because the roads are all sand. But he had all these different enterprises. And this guy knew everything. But he also knew all about fighting the Arabs, mujahideen in Afghanistan. And yet I was at sea. I didn't really know who he was. And so I went back to the US and started triangulating and I found Muhammad Loy Bayazid, whose Al Qaeda name was Abarida Al Suri. He was the guy. He was the guy who took the notes at the founding of Al Qaeda in May of 1988. It's his handwriting. I didn't have any idea who I had. So I flew back to Sudan and he wouldn't see me. So then I began to court him and finally he agreed And I flew back and I said, loy, why didn't you see me last time? It means a lot of trouble to come to Khartoum. He said, well, I didn't know how seriously to take you. The first time we met, you were sitting on a balloon. That was my first Al Qaeda interview. It was a real triumph. But those years in Sudan, at least according to Loy, you know, they were kind of wonderful years for Al Qaeda because they weren't fighting anybody. Bin Laden still had money and he was generous in handing it out. They would have celebratory dinners and they had soccer teams, they played, you know, they had their own little League and, you know, people had dormitories and stuff like that. People got money to get married. It was. They were settling down. It was the US State Department that decided this can't stand. So they put pressure on Sudanese government to expel bin Laden and the Sudanese.

Government did that based on what?

He was a potential terrorist, funder of terror. Anyway.

What hard evidence did the State Department have at that time?

Really none. There were suspicions about that time the CIA had opened up an office on bin Laden or file.

In any case, this is before the creation of Alex Station.

That's where Alec Station came from, which was really the first sort of off campus in the US station. But it was off campus and ignored by the CIA. They called the people that worked there the island of lost toys. You know, there were people that were kind of pushed out of their own departments. And, you know, that was the team.

The original team, and that team was led by shore.

Michael Shawyer. Yeah.

And what is it that brought him to lead Alexstation? What was his conviction?

Well, Shawyer is a loose cannon, to put it well.

Certainly today he's about as off the rails as they come.

He wants to shoot Democrats.

Yeah. But at the time, what was his conviction about Al Qaeda?

Well, he was right about it.

Yeah.

You know, he was right that it was a terrorist organization that could strike America and intended to. He was right that they had reasons. I mean, I think you have to give Michael Shawyer credit for. For seeing into the mind of bin Laden and his followers and seeing how they looked at the world. It's so foreign. I mean, when 911 happened, the idea that a man in a cave in Afghanistan would attack America was comical. And Shawyer didn't think so. So he was not a prophet, but he was an analyst that could look at the tea leaves and see what could actually happen, and nobody took him seriously.

That's another beautiful parallel in your book. Right. Is we've gone through kind of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, al Jihad, al Qaeda. We haven't quite got to the point where Al Qaeda and Al Jahad become one entity, which will happen in the late 90s. But as we move to the intelligence side, which is the harder part, I think, to wrap one's head around, you also have these two parallels between i49 and Alex Station and these two personalities between Michael Scheuer and John O', Neill, which are both. Right. But because of their remarkable disdain for each other, tragically, both let this thing slip. So maybe let's now shift for a moment and talk a little bit about alex Station and i49, the CIA and the FBI, which by around this point in time, the mid-90s, are starting to kind of pay attention to this threat. Yeah.

When you're talking about it, I reflect on the fact that the siege was built on this same premise, that my mission was to write a movie about a woman in the CIA. That was the assignment. Annette Benning became the woman in the CIA. And what was the Soviet Union had fallen. What was the problem? And I realized the CIA had a real life enemy. It was the FBI. And so that's what the movie is about. So maybe I was already primed to see it that way. But, you know, I'd heard about the Antagonism. But as an American, I can't tell you how disappointed I am in our intelligence agencies and their failure to protect our country. That's their mission. But they got so caught up in their institutional and personal antagonisms that they allowed 911 to happen. And John O' Neill lived a big life. He was flamboyant. You would never think of an FBI agent. I mean, to me, FBI agents were kind of like Mormons in terms of their dress and their sober demeanor and so on, the stereotypes. John o' Neill wore these Gucci suits, and he had these transparent black suits, socks, and kind of, you know, almost ballet slippers. And he had an office that he had personally decorated. Most FBI offices or the furniture is all made in prisons. So all of that goes out and in comes, you know, this luxurious office. And he always has fresh flowers, and he has on his coffee table this book, tulips, the flower that drives men wild. I mean, this is not your typical FBI agent. And he set out, when he was assigned to New York station to conquer the city. He wanted to meet everybody of any importance, and he did. He gave his new secretary a Rolodex with all the names of the people that he wanted to meet in the next six months, and he went down that list. So he had tentacles in every part of the city. And he thought of himself as a sheriff. And he, you know, when the embassy bombings happened, the FBI was given the task of trying to find out, you know, this is a crime against America.

Yeah. We should probably take a moment to make sure people understand the difference in the mission of the organizations. Right. So the FBI is law enforcement. So think police. Right. They're the top police force. The CIA is intelligence. And it's easy to see, I suppose, how they can have different priorities. So let's use this example that you're going to talk about, which is the bombing of the American embassy in Kenya, which was 98.

Eight. Yeah.

Okay. Now, 224 people were killed, a number of them Americans.

More than 100 people were blinded by the flying glass. I mean, it was horrible, horrible tragedy.

When Americans are killed on foreign soil, is that clearly in the purview of the FBI? Yes, that is law enforcement.

They have to get permission from the country that they're going into.

But in a country like Kenya, which is an ally, this is a relatively straightforward request that the United States FBI would be able to go in there, conduct a criminal investigation and bring to justice people to stand trial in the United States. That is completely within the law.

That's the way it's supposed to work. The FBI being the world's premier policing organization, you know, it's supposed to be on the case. As it turned out, There were only six agents in the 50,000 member FBI who spoke Arabic. One of them was Ali Sufan, born in Lebanon. And it was during this period of time that Sufan began reading Al Qaeda literature and piecing together what was actually going on. And he's the one who wrote a memo that got to. He got o' Neill's attention that this was probably the mover behind that. And o' Neill had an eye for talent. And, you know, he reached out and just grabbed this young man and brought him in, put him on I 49 squad, somebody who would be his eyes and ears in the Arab world.

When did I 49 get formed?

I don't know. I'm not sure exactly when it was.

And was it specifically anti terror?

Yeah, that was. This goal. I 49 squad was made up a lot of people, you know, at the end of the Soviet Union, caused a lot of disruption in our intelligence agencies because guys on the i49 squad, some of them spoke Russian, some spoke Eastern European languages, Polish and so on. And they. And they. Their mission was to. To recruit people that were in the embassies in New York and so on, to try to. And then suddenly all that fell apart. And so there was. In the rubble of the absence of the Soviet Union, i49 squad was built up, enlisting a lot of people who had no experience in dealing with the Arab world.

There's a very interesting parallel between the transition in both human capital and military capital. We're going to talk about the USS Cole, but you're very deliberate in the way that you write about it, the way you write about the bombing, which is you describe in excruciating detail the strength and might of that ship, and you're deliberately vague about the skiff. That blows it up to demonstrate, I think, the enormous asymmetry that took place. The point being this USS Cole was an unbelievable warship for traditional warfare, and yet was defenseless against guerrilla warfare. And that basically means there was kind of this decade lag after the Cold War where the military industrial complex had not addressed, adopted to what the new warfare was. But I think what you're saying, which is you got six people that speak Arabic in the entire FBI, and the CIA also has their tentacles back in the Cold War. Well, that's basically the same thing, right? It's the human and intellectual skill set that's for the wrong war. And it seemed like it just took a while to catch up. Unfortunately, it didn't catch up. Right. I mean, I think that's part of the story.

It never did. And the Cole bombing was a very telling moment. October 20, 2000.

Amazing. Two weeks before the election.

Yeah. And this is not really remarked upon in the campaigns, but 19 sailors died. And the ship, you know, it was a stealth vessel, you know, but there was no hiding it. It was in the middle of Aden harbor in Yemen, which had no business being. I mean, Yemen is far from an ally. And the whole area was riddled with jihadis and people that were intent on doing harm to the US and there was this very appealing target, and there was a failed attempt to bomb it. The little skiff was overloaded with explosives and stuff sank. But then they pulled it off. And in some ways it prefigured 9 11. You know, that kind of imbalance of forces that you were talking about, you know, the coming out of the blue. Who would ever have expected. It was common. It's always been common in ports that little boats would come out and try to sell trinkets and stuff like that or deliver food. And so the sailors were used to seeing boats coming toward them, but they had no idea they were waving at the people that were about to kill them.

What was involved operationally for Al Qaeda to pull off the embassy bombing in Kenya and then the USS Cole? Because obviously they were prologue to 9 11. They were practice runs. They were never the end goal. Well, I mean, I guess you could argue Bin Laden's objective was to draw the US into.

Yeah, I think he thought after the embassy bombings that that would do the trick. And, you know, it was infuriating to him that we ignored it, so. And then the Cole bombing, the same thing. It had to be something more spectacular to get America interested in him.

The embassy bombing took place after Al Jihad and Al Qaeda had merged.

Yeah. And some of the operatives, some of the main operatives in the embassy and bombings were Zawahiri's men. Both of these were catastrophic events that for whatever reason, America was not prepared to pay any attention to.

Why do you think that is? With all the benefits of. With 21 years of hindsight, why is it that neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore, during their entire campaigns, including a campaign that included the explosion on the USS Cole, why was this not a priority?

If it had happened here, it would have been a different story, but it happened elsewhere. That's one of the reasons Americans were so vulnerable. Is our own hubris and the sense of isolation that we have historically always felt.

But why wasn't it enough that it had happened abroad? They were still US lives.

Yes, they were, and they should have been counted more dearly, but they weren't. It's similar with our wars, don't you think? You know, I mean, we have wars, people die sometimes there's a tribute to them in the paper and you see their pictures, but not often. And so it's cost of doing business. There's a gap between our role in the world and the people we think we are. And I think this was especially true before 9 11. The reason bin Laden attacked us is he felt surrounded. He felt America was encircling the Islamic world and they were under threat and that why would we do that? Well, obviously our goal would be to destroy Islam. And then there was at the same time this mandate he had in his mind that Islam has to rise again. You know, once it was the superpower, you know, it went all the way into middle Europe, into southern China. It was an expansionist power and that it should resume that role. So, you know, there was the sense of being threatened by the superpower and the feeling that Islam should replace it. And that was, I think, the dynamic that was driving him. And nobody, and I can't say nobody in America, but very few people in America would have imagined that such preposterous dreams would motivate somebody like bin Laden and actually be able to put into effect an attack on this nation that was seemingly invulnerable, that was so distant, how could you even reach it? And how could you touch it in a way that would make it suffer? Bin Laden wanted America to suffer and he also wanted to humiliate America because I think he understood the power of humiliation.

Now, going back to o' Neill and Shawyer, they agreed on one thing, which was Osama bin Laden was a really bad actor and needed to be taken seriously. In fact, you could argue that no two people believed it more than these two. One who headed the CIA's alexation which was in charge of anti terrorism, and the other I49, which was the FBI's response to that. But beyond that, they didn't see anything eye to eye. Fundamentally, o' Neill believed that bin Laden and other operatives of Al Qaeda should be brought to justice in the court of law in the United States. Shoyer and colleagues believed these people should be assassinated. An attempt was made to assassinate bin Laden in 1998 after the bombing in Kenya. It was a bit of a debacle. It didn't amount in anything.

Right.

Why is that? Was it failed intelligence?

Well, one thing, here's the thinking, you know, that was going on inside at that time. Clinton, White House, they hit us twice. Well, we should hit them back twice. This is the kind of thing you do with nation states, right? Parallel responses. So we'll bomb hit training camps in Afghanistan and we'll hit this factory in Khartoum that we think is manufacturing poison chemicals for Al Qaeda. Actually it was making veterinary medicines and it was one of the main factories in the whole country, a very poor country. And we killed a night watchman. You know, it just had nothing to do with any of it. But we bombed the camps in Afghanistan. Fingers crossed bin Laden would be there. Well, he wasn't. He was on the road to go there and then changed his mind and they went somewhere else. So it might have happened, but it didn't. But the point was, look what we can do. You hit us, we'll hit you back. Well, that's exactly what bin Laden wanted. The failure of imagination that you referenced there was a failure of imagination, but it was coupled with prejudicial ideas about who we're dealing with and a tremendous absence of knowledge about the cultures that they, you know, that our adversaries came from. So we just didn't understand and we couldn't understand their language. We didn't know what was going on. And so, yeah, it's not a surprise that our imaginations didn't rise to the task because we didn't know who we were dealing with. And we could not figure them out, nor did we really spend very much time worrying about it. Let's just deal with them as if it was Russia that did this and we'll strike them back proportionally. Clinton did have the idea, you know, he spoke to one of his military commanders about sending in ninjas, you know, drop rappel down from Cobra helicopters. And that sure surprised bin Laden. And on balance, it wasn't a bad idea. That was probably the right thing to do, go directly in there and you know, but you know, we were still in the remote control phase of our imperial rule. And I think that that's why, partly why we didn't take the embassy bombings seriously. That's not the way we do things. We send drones over or we send F16s or we send bombers over and we do it remotely. And we don't dirty our hands, we don't bloody our hands. And so I think people just thought it would be a nuisance. And that we would take care of it.

So as the planning for the coal bombing is underway, the planning for 911 is also underway. These were parallel, not serial, operations. Two men come to the United States January 15, 2000. Who are they?

These men are Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi. There's two Saudi guys, they scarcely speak any English at all. They had been in a meeting in Kuala Lumpur with the coal bombers. So coal bombers went off to do their thing and then they fly first of all to Thailand and then they fly into la. So how can they do anything? You know, they're in a country they don't understand. They don't speak English. You know, their mission is to go train as pilots, but they would not qualify because they couldn't even speak enough English to go into a class. So this is the first mystery. What are they doing here? As it happens that very day that they arrive, there is a Saudi figure named Bayoumi, Omar Bayoumi, who happens to be at the Saudi Consulate in LA talking to the Minister of Religious Affairs. That's kind of significant because, you know, they are the. As a result of the Mecca catastrophe, Saudis put IDs, imams and consulates all over the place. And they had a lot of authority. So anyway, Omar Bayoumi leaves the Saudi consulate and he goes to a Middle Eastern restaurant where he happens to overhear these two guys speaking in a Saudi accent. It's according to him and the Saudi government a total coincidence.

Do you believe that?

No, not at all. You know, the families of the victims of 911 are suing the Saudi government, trying to get more information about the people that are involved in that. And Bayoumi is one of the people that they have on their list of people to talk to. But Bayoumi is such a generous fellow that he offers to help them find a housing in San Diego where he has a place. And so he fronts them some money, he sets them up in San Diego, and Bayoumi and other people in his circle begin receiving money from the wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. ostensibly for an operation for the wife or, you know, these, you know. But it's significant. Thousands and thousands of dollars. Vayumi takes these two guys, Nawaf Al Hazmi and Mihdhar, to meet a cleric in this Saudi mosque in San Diego who was Anwar Al Awlaki, who later becomes the voice of radical Islam. We finally killed him in Yemen, but whether he was an Al Qaeda connection has never been established. But wouldn't it make sense?

What is Your thought on the money that was coming directly from the wife of the Saudi ambassador.

The Ambassador Bandar was very close to the Bush White House. He was sort of the dean of the diplomatic establishment. So there was a plausibility thing. How would you really see such a thing happening? From the ambassador himself. But it stands that, you know, these Saudis were getting money sent to them in San Diego by Bandar's wife, and now his daughter is the ambassador of the U.S. so, you know, that has never been, I think, satisfactorily accounted for. Another thing that's going on, you know, they arrived in January 15th. In March, the CIA finds out that they're in the U.S. probably Prince Turkey. You know, Prince Turkey told me that he had informed the chief of station in Riyadh, the CIA man in Riyadh, about that. So that's probably where it came from. So in March, this is 21 months before 9, 11, almost two years, the CIA knows that Al Qaeda is in America. And this is at a time when they say their hair is on fire about, you know, about al Qaeda, that we're under threat. They're going to the White House. And yet they know that al Qaeda is in San Diego. And moreover, Mihar's wife is in Yemen. She comes from a very Al Qaeda jihadi family. Her name is Hoda Alhada. The Alhada household, because it's such a hot spot. We've got wires. Yeah.

The CIA is listening to the phone calls.

14 occasions. The NSA is getting calls to this Al Qaeda house in Yemen from San Diego. Do you have to draw a picture?

What's more disturbing than this is that in October, after the Cole bombing, when Ali Soufan is questioning Kuso and the other suspects, he asks specifically. Well, he kind of, I think, through that questioning, comes to learn of the meeting that took place in Malaysia and asks explicitly on at least three occasions for information from the CIA about these two guys in the US and he is stonewalled.

It's not casual either. A request like that goes to the director of the FBI, who sends a letter to his counterpart, the director of the CIA, formally requesting information about, in this case, this meeting in Kuala Lumpur. Do you know anything about it? No, is the answer. No information. In fact, the CIA actually covered the meeting. They recruited the Malaysian police to take photographs and stuff like that. So they got pictures of the participants, and they hide this information from the FBI. And going back to the mission of each of these agencies, the story about the siege was who was fighting, they were fighting. Over who had control over terrorism in the United States. And in real life, the FBI won that battle. So they have the authority. CIA is not supposed to operate in our country, but the FBI has the authority, has a warrant on Al Qaeda and bin Laden and all his followers.

So how is this not in the clearest legal sense, obstruction of justice?

It is obstruction of justice. The CIA obstructed justice when Ali Safan was investigating the Cole bombing. They hid information about the planning, and they hid information about the Kuala Lumpur meeting. This is a murder investigation. 19 sailors.

So at this point, Michael Schur is gone. Correct. He has been relieved of his duties at Alex Station.

Yeah.

What led to that?

Well, he was relentless in pressing the agency and trying to get rid of bin Laden. There was a moment where he thought bin Laden might be at one of the camps in Afghanistan. And he said the reason that he might be there is that a lot of the royal family from the UAE was coming to bustard, hunting this endangered bird that is popular. And so let's bomb the camp and we'll kill all the princes. But we might get bin Laden. Well, that was the kind of thinking that Michael Scheuer was capable of.

Yeah. Which, again, the UAE is an ally. I mean, it would be hard to fathom.

Yeah. And we were just at that moment selling them a whole fleet of F16s. So there was a financial investment in not doing that as well, in addition to the absurdity of the scene. But that's the kind of thing that Shawyer would propose.

So who took over Alex Station when Shawyer was terminated?

I don't know if I'm supposed to say her name, but I can't remember it anyway, so I'm safe on that lore. But the woman that took over the station is an FBI villain. But she and Shawyer later married, so it was an office romance.

It was an extension of Shoyer. Anyway. Now, one of the things that's interesting about Alex Station is it had a number of I49 agents that sat within it physically. So these are FBI agents that are sitting inside Alec's station, but they were kind of handcuffed because they were privy to the information that the CIA had, but they weren't permitted to share it with their colleagues at FBI. One of the things that struck me as odd is that none of them broke rank.

Yeah.

You see an Edward Snowden a decade later, who goes completely rogue and decides for right or wrong, this is his conviction, this is what he's going to do about it. This is in the best interest of American lives. And yet, amazingly, none of the FBI agents sitting inside of Alec's station, who presumably saw what was happening, didn't think, I'm willing to jeopardize my job here and maybe face criminal charges to get information because they saw the wires coming in, they saw the requests repeatedly from the FBI, from Sufan, saying, who are these people? What happened in Malaysia? Why is money leaving to go to these people? Why is this money coming to the United States? I mean, did you ever get an insight into why the FBI people inside Alec's station were muzzled?

You know, there was a. It was more of a legal conceit they call the war. And the idea was that information should not travel from the intelligence world into the criminal one and vice versa. There was really no law. People thought it was a law, but it was a custom. And the FBI had its own intelligence division. And so it's like grand jury testimony. It's supposed to be sealed, kept pure and secret. But when you're faced with something like that, your only alternative is to break the law and there can be very serious consequences. And it's a lonely thing to do, but that's really the only thing you can do. What I can tell you is how broken those people are by what happened. They knew what was underway and they lost. Their boss, John o' Neill died as a consequence of their reticence to say anything. I'm not holding them responsible for 9, 11, but I do hold the CIA responsible for it. If they had been transparent with the FBI, if they had said, we have these Al Qaeda members in America, the FBI had the authority, they had the warrant, they had everything. They could follow them, they could tape them, they could clone their computers and they could arrest them. All these things that they could do, but they were kept in the dark. And of course the question is why?

How many people in the CIA were you able to interview?

They were actually working in the CIA. There was a moment where I think it's time has passed enough that I can say this. I wrote an article about, I'm in Al Zawahiri for the New Yorker and the CIA asked to talk to me. And so I was picked up by an FBI agent who worked at the CIA and driven to CIA headquarters and gone up the seventh floor and there was a conference room and I met with Alex Station. There were about 20 something people there. The meeting started off in Arabic and I said, kula hadah bakala Maharvi. You know, I used to speak. Everybody here speaks Arabic and they had Learned it in the last couple of years. I was impressed by that, but I was not impressed with their intelligence. You know, I was a reporter on the ground, you know, going around talking to people. People. And I wasn't trying to hide information from the CIA. I publish it. You know, it's not what I find out. I want people to know. So I didn't feel like I was betraying sources or anything like that by talking to the CIA. What I did want was a little bit of information from them in return. And what they confided was that bin Laden was alive at that time. There was a lot of talk. I'm guessing it was 2003. Might have been earlier than that, because I went to Egypt in. It must have been 2002. Bin Laden was keeping his head down. And so, you know, there was a lot of talk that maybe we got him or that he was sick. You know, intelligence agencies, at least My experience with American intelligence agencies is that they tend to trust information that has been stolen. In other words, wiretaps, stuff that people are saying, not knowing, supposedly that they're being listened to. Reporters have a different posture. We go out and talk to people and ask them what they're up to and why and where'd you come from? And those sorts of things you don't normally get on transcripts. And so they apparently taped my phone. One of my sources said he read a conversation I had came in on his laptop at the agency. It was a conversation I'd had with Zawahiri's cousin.

So the legal authority they had to tap your phone was because of who you were speaking to.

You're not supposed to tap Americans. If that had been a tap on my line or if I were talking to. As I had been to Zawahiri's cousin, they should say individual a. And so I'm not identified, but, you know, obviously I was. And I thought at the time, oh, those Egyptians, you know, they're on top of, you know, Zawahiri's cousin. They sent this as a gift to the CIA. And then I, a couple of years later, learned that American intelligence had been taping Americans and some reporters. And I, obviously, I had had a visit from. There's a terrorism squad even in Austin. You know, a couple of guys came over. They wanted to talk to me, and I thought they wanted advice because I had talked to FBI agents before to give them a little background on Al Qaeda. And I thought that's what this was. And one of them was from the fda, but he was on the terrorism squad. And he walked into my office and there are all these books on Al Qaeda and there's, you know, a whiteboard full of Arabic names. And, you know, he was terrified. His hands were trembling. What they wanted to know was about a call that I had made to England, and It was a 44201 number, and it just sounded like business number in London. And I said, surely you know who it is? But I looked on my Rolodex and it was a barrister who represented some jihadis. Then they said, did you know a person named Caroline Wright, who's my daughter, she was in college. And they thought it was Caroline calling this barrister to get to these jihadis. And I thought, this is our intelligence. And then as I started thinking about it, it was like, wait a minute, how do you know it's my line. How do you know that Caroline would. How do you know about Caroline at all? You wouldn't have gotten that if you hadn't been listening to the call. And I was really outraged as an American citizen, but also shocked by the level of incompetence. I mean, I was grateful they came to clear it up, I have to say. They at least did that. But the presumptions that they had were so absurd that I could see how we got ourselves into this fix. The two hijackers, the future hijackers in San Diego, the FBI, their line on what was going on is the CIA knew they couldn't operate in America, but the Saudis could. And so they struck a deal with the Saudis to try to follow these guys and turn them. Here they are in our clutches. We have an opportunity to penetrate Al Qaeda, which is not something the CIA had been able to do, although young men from all over the world were simply walking into the camps and becoming Al Qaeda members. But. But they thought that the Saudis would do them that favor. And then the two hijackers disappeared and the CIA lost them. It was then, in August of 2001, just a couple of weeks before 9 11, that the CIA went to the FBI to ask them to find these guys that they had lost. And it was too late. The FBI never did find them.

So Mohammed Atta is an interesting character. Of all the 911 hijackers, obviously he was the senior figure, but he was also such an interesting and unusual character. Right. It's hard to make sense of his motivation. An educated man, a pious man. But one of the things I've always struggled with is what is it that these guys believed was going to happen? You Go back to the story about the birds circling and the flesh not rotting. Do you believe every One of those 19 men believed they would be greeted in paradise by virgins? Do you think they literally believe that?

I think so. It may have not been the preponderant motive for them.

Although martyrdom seems to be the highest motivation. Right.

Martyrdom. Even if you're not going to paradise and getting the virgins and all of that, martyrdom has its appeal for. Especially for young men who have really little opportunity to make a dent in the world. And here you can go off and change history. All you have to do is sacrifice your life. So the martyrdom might be the carrot, but it might not be. It might just be that they wanted to prove a point and they wanted to go down in history.

And they have you talk about how terrorist organizations were allowed to legally operate inside of Germany, provided that they were foreign and not domestic terrorist organizations. That's almost an unfathomable statement. Can you help make sense of that?

Germany has a tortured history. Its problems with fanaticism on German soil have historically been a corrective. So you cannot very easily be a fascist in Germany. Now there are fascists in Germany, but it's sort of an underground thing. Other countries, there's this sense in Germany of implicit neutrality. We don't take positions on things like that. So if you are opposed to your government and you flee to Germany for asylum, what you do with, you know, in relation to your home country is your business, not ours. Just don't screw around with, you know, with our country. And that was. It's not just Germany. Europe was slow to awaken to the threat to their own countries, in part because in England, terrorists were actually brought into England because they were escaping the death penalty in Egypt, and they still live with subsidized rent and such a thing in London. One of my sources is a driving instructor in London, and he killed this little girl, Shaima, in Egypt in his attempt to kill the prime minister. That kind of mentality came about because people just didn't feel threatened. And I think to some extent that explains why these terror groups were allowed to grow up inside the borders, especially of England and Germany and Spain as well.

When did Atta come to the United States?

I don't remember the exact month. His cohorts had begun to assemble, and so I think he was one of the last to arrive. He was in Spain coordinating with some of the Spanish Al Qaeda guys. To what end, we're not really sure. But then he flew into America of Course, unlike the other guys, his English was pretty good.

So his English is good. He's one of the four pilots. How were they coordinating inside the us? What did they communicate by? Did they speak on cell phones? Did they use email? How did these 19 guys, organized in four groups, communicate?

Well, they did use email and cell phones. And what you have to understand, they weren't really hiding. Nobody, you know, the CIA knew that Al Qaeda was present and the Al Qaeda guys didn't know. The CIA knew that. So ostensibly they just lived openly. They had driver's licenses and stuff in their own names. Eventually the FBI would find that they were listed in the San Diego phone directory. So they weren't in hiding, they didn't feel threatened, and they took advantage of that freedom.

So after the election, Richard Clark, who's also a very important figure in your book, gets a demotion. Why is that? That was not clear to me in the book.

He had been under Clinton, the kind of terrorism czar. When the Bush administration came in, they didn't see the need for that. And their view was about the big picture. We're talking about China and Russia and so the people in their NSA and Secretary of State and Condi Rice and so on, they came from the old school. Clark told me that when he talked to Condi Rice to try to alert her to the danger of Al Qaeda, he had the feeling she'd never heard of the organization. It's hard to imagine that she didn't hear of it at all, but she clearly didn't take it seriously enough to take his counsel. And so he was pushed down the ranks. And Bush was, you know, I don't think he took it seriously until the Saudis threatened to break off relations with the US because of Israel. And that woke him up. He was very concerned about that. But then there was a CIA memo, I think it was dated August 6, 2001.

This is the PD. This is the Presidential Daily Brief that was titled Al Qaeda set to attack in the U.S. right.

And so it couldn't have been clearer. And this was about the same time the CIA lost those guys in San Diego. So suddenly things are moving and they're out of the CIA's control.

During the 911 Commission, when Condi Rice was asked about that memo August 6th. Right. So five weeks before 9 11, the president of the United States gets a briefing that says Al Qaeda is going to strike on U.S. soil. And of course, when Congress questioned her, it was sort of, why was this not taken seriously? Her response was, if I recall, something akin to this was dated. There was nothing new in here. This was speculative. There was no real intelligence. Am I remembering that correctly?

Yeah. Such dodges were characteristic of a lot of the people involved in this massive intelligence failure. I've asked people in the CIA, you know, people in high authority about those hijackers, for instance, and no, we didn't really know they were. I mean, it was just incompetence, actually, you know, we, you know, there were memos that we didn't read and you know, it was in, yes, it was in the memos, but you know, we never really came to the attention, attention of people in authority. And in other words, there's a fog, pixie dust thrown in your eyes. Whereas nothing could be more incendiary to very same people that are ringing the alarm bells saying al Qaeda is on the war path and is coming our way. And then they say, well, you know, we weren't really paying attention to that. And the memo never came to our attention. Bullshit. CIA was well aware by this time, you know, there was the embassy bombings, there was a coal bombing. There was. And then, you know, they become aware that Al Qaeda is in America now, so they're moving onto our soil. And that's the origin of that particular memo, is that CIA knows they're here and so they're obviously they're going to do an attack here.

Now, o' Neill said this to Condoleezza Rice before he was fired, forced to resign. And she seemed to indicate that this was not a high priority because it, I think in the words at least used in the dramatized version of this, this was swatting flies, right? This was what we've got a couple of Al Qaeda guys in this country. That's not strategic, that's not relevant. One of the things that's just so mind boggling to me about this story is how incompetence is. I mean, this is obviously a big part of this, but it's the personality conflicts that got in the way. I mean, another character in the story whose role is really quite sad is Barbara Bodine, then ambassador in Yemen, who did not get along with John o', Neill, which I guess you can't fault her for that. John o' Neill struck me just from everything I've read about him. And I know you did not have the ability to interview him, but you're doing, your report is based on interviews with everyone who knew him. He struck me as a love or hate guy. Is that a safe.

He was a polarizing fear.

Yeah. You either absolutely loved this guy or you absolutely hated this guy, but I never got the impression that anybody wouldn't think he was competent.

Yeah. Barbara Bodine seemed to have a thing about men and guns, and she was offended that the FBI came to Yemen with a bunch of armaments. Of course it was dangerous, and o' Neill was trying to take care of his people and they were authorized to carry weapons. But she was offended and made them give up their long guns.

And she kicked him out of Yemen. She did, which is another real setback in the investigation at the time.

Taking her side, I'm sure she perceived o' Neill as a swaggering misogynist, and she wasn't going to have any of that. And she felt that she had a role as the ambassador, cultivate a better relationship with the Yemenis. And here he was coming in, kicking up all this dust, alienating everybody with his American big footing. So enough of this. I can do without him. And it was a terrible blow for o'. Neill. And I think that in some ways led to his sort of disgrace at the end, where he had to go to a retirement conference and he took some papers out of the office he shouldn't have taken, but he was doing work in Florida at this retirement conference and then left his briefcase in conference room, and somebody took it. He got it back, and the only thing it was taken was like a silver cigar cutter. And the papers were still in there. But he turned himself in. And he had a lot of enemies inside the FBI, and they were not going to miss the opportunity to use this to get rid of him.

Now, he had many job opportunities after he left the FBI. One of them was a job in the government again. In the White House. Correct. Or at least that was something that Dick Clark hoped he would take. It's not clear that he would have been.

They wanted him to replace him.

Him.

He couldn't think of a better person. And o' Neill had lived above his means for many years. I don't know how he got away with it, but he was deeply in debt. And I think he was also deeply wounded by his experience with government. And so he wanted to get out and make some money. And there was money to be made for him with his experience. The job that he settled on was head of security at the World Trade Center. And I know that. And listen, when this whole adventure started for me by reading obituaries that were streaming online Right after 9 11, I was trying to find a way into the story, something that would humanize it. I was looking for people who died on 911 and see if I could find a narrative. And on the Washington post site, about six days after 9 11, I think, think, was this obituary of John O', Neill, the FBI head of counterterrorism, recently.

Retired, been on the job for a month.

It was more than that. It spelled out that he had taken classified information out of the office. I thought. I didn't know if he was a hero or a goat, but his life could tell us something about why we failed. He was the head of counterterrorism in New York. He's the guy that had the warrant on bin Laden. But instead of getting bin Laden, bin Laden got him. That was the way I looked at it.

It's one of those things, Lawrence, where if this weren't a true story, if you had written the looming tower as a fiction, I don't know that the editors would have let you end it the way you did.

Right.

I don't think they would have let you have John o' Neill actually die inside the World Trade Center a month after being forced to resign from the FBI because he was kicked out at the shins and not able to do his job.

I thought when I read that obit that it was a supreme irony, but I don't see it that way now. He told his colleagues, some of them said to him, john, you'll be safe now because they already hit the Trade center because they've been a bombing. Yeah. He said, no, they'll come back to finish the job. So I think he instinctively put himself at ground zero. And in that sense, I see it as a Greek tragedy. You know, he in some ways anticipated his fate and went to meet it. And he actually left the tower that day and went back inside to rescue people.

Yeah, that's the thing. He walked back into the building, as many Heroes did. If September 11th took place on December 11th, if the mission were postponed two months, do you think that would have been enough time for the FBI to figure it out? How close was the FBI to doing this? Despite the incompetence of the CIA, if not the outright negligence of the CIA.

It'S hard to calculate how much they could have done. But there's no reason to think that they couldn't have once alerted in August and given three or four months to work it out, no reason to think that they couldn't have tracked down the communications if the American intelligence community had been helpful to them.

Well, because, remember, the other thing that I always feel like they were so close to cracking was once they had the list, the CIA list of Suspected Al Qaeda operatives and the list of Arabs in flight schools. And they crossed that list. That was just a matter of time.

It seems like it. And, you know, there were several cases, like you mentioned, the flight schools in Arizona and Minnesota. You know, there were these weird things where, you know, these Arab would be pilots who wanted to learn how to fly but not how to land. You know, so those are really puzzling things. Now, of course, it was nothing like this had ever happened before. It seems crazy, but on the other hand, it had been envisioned.

But you'd think, like, all it would have taken would have been a handful of these guys show up on a cross list and that manifest gets sent to TSA or whatever was tsa. TSA back then. I don't know what it was called. But there would have been a watch list that said, because as you said, these guys are getting on airplanes with their real names. They had real id.

Well, also, one of the FBI agents in Phoenix actually wrote, I think this was a guy that did that. They could envision crashing into buildings. That's spookily prescient. And then there was secret. The 911 families had sued to get the 28 pages that had been suppressed in the 911 report. And we finally got them, although there's still some redaction in it. And in there, you see Saudis on airplanes doing trial runs, getting the ticket in the first class compartment and walking into the cockpit and, oh, I thought this was the bathroom. And then one of them was so provocative in his actions that they actually landed the plane to stop the flight, put down to the nearest airport, and, you know, had somebody come out and interrogate two, I think, Saudis. And they said, no, we're going to a party at the Saudi embassy. And they gave them a number in the Saudi embassy in Washington. Well, that's damning. And no wonder it was suppressed if you're trying to protect your relationship with Saudi Arabia. But it hasn't been explained. But these were clearly trial runs, and the CIA knew about them. That's why that was in the 911 report. This is intelligence that had been surfaced. So there was intelligence around that something was cooking. And even the CIA, George Tenet, was telling the White House, they're going to attack us. They're coming for us.

That's the thing with Tenet. I can't understand from your book. I got to be honest with you. I'm really conflicted and confused. On the one hand, he seems to be in lockstep with Richard Clark in saying this is a Big deal. And he seems incredibly frustrated with the Bush administration that they're not taking this more seriously. And he seems to believe that this is almost something they're doing out of spite, like whatever the previous president did, we're absolutely going to do the opposite. But at the same time, I think, how is it then that under your watch, your organization was so derelict?

He's never really been able to produce a credible answer. I've tried to imagine what was going through his mind if it's the case that he did seriously believe that Al Qaeda was a threat and that he had been striking a deal with the Saudis. You know, it was a risky deal, but, you know, one that had the potential for a huge payoff. And then it gets out of control. And just as it's getting out of control, he is dramatically shouting, pay attention. Al Qaeda's on the warpath.

So it's sort of like the arsonist who, as the house catches on fire, is actually the one that calls the firefighter.

Yeah, I think that's a fair comparison. I don't know what's going through. I want to be fair to him.

You were not able to interview him.

He wouldn't talk to me. And he's never really dealt seriously with this subject. It's not just George Tenet, but he's responsible. He was the person who oversaw the American intelligence community in one of his greatest catastrophes in our history. And not that it's been so sterling since then, but it was an unbelievable failure. And there are so many points. Yes, it's true, Monday morning quarterbacking and all of that, but I think I'm being fair enough to say the CIA knew what was going on. They hid the information from the FBI. Had the CIA been transparent and worked in tandem with the FBI, that 9, 11 would not have happened. I think the facts support that. So there's never been accountability for this. Not any. And in fact, George Tenet got the Medal of Freedom and all these other things. Accolades. I'm not saying that he belongs in prison, although I can understand why people might say, say that. But he should be held accountable, as should everybody in authority at that agency.

I wanted to ask you about that, which is, given all that we know today, has anyone inside the CIA been charged with a criminal offense for obstruction of justice?

No. No, they were promoted. People that knew about this were given plum assignments. I asked one of the directors, has anybody been held accountable? He said, well, yes, I've held people accountable. Well, who for what? And he wouldn't specify. But There was no evidence of it. I asked about. It was a question about torture and the two hijackers in San Diego and maybe one other thing. And I said, you know, this is a history of the CIA. Not all under your reign, but partly. Has anybody been held accountable? He quarreled with some of my facts without actually saying that they were wrong. And then I said, so in other words, nobody's been held accountable? And then he said, no, that's not true. I've held people accountable myself, but I don't know how to credit that. The most conspicuous people got promotions.

Yeah, I mean, let's just think about it through the lens of the family members of 9 11. So we had a 911 Commission. What came of that? For the family members, it was frustrating.

For the family members, it was presented as being the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then it came out that there were parts of the 911 Commission that were suppressed. The 28 pages, most notably. And of course, there were a lot of pages redacted.

And the 28 pages that were suppressed dealt primarily with the Saudi Arabia. Because again, I remember even at the time, one of the things that was odd was the Saudis being given air clearance to leave. How do you make sense of this? This is one that I have a hard time wrapping my head around, which is why would anybody inside of Saudi Arabia had wanted this? I'm talking about, not obviously, Al Qaeda, but I'm talking about anyone within the royal family, anyone within the Saudi intelligence community. Community. I mean, there's no doubt to me that Prince Turkey was a good guy. Right. This is a guy who I can't imagine there was any part of him that would want to see bin Laden and his organization succeed. So what's the explanation for how any of the Saudi good guys could have stood by and knowingly watched this happen? Or worse, supported it, financially or otherwise?

If we think about these things as an intelligence analyst, just imagine, here are the facts. Where are the Saudis in this? And why are they behaving like this? I think that the Saudis thought, for one thing, they gave us the information that Al Qaeda is in America. Perhaps, if the FBI's scenario is correct, that the CIA thought that they could turn these guys, they work out a deal with the Saudis where they're going to run these people. You know, they'll use them as potential recruits and they fund the bayoumis and other people that are sort of their supervisors. So they give them money to keep the operation going. And there's a certain ambition on the part of the Saudis to show how. What a great job they can do. And also, these are Saudis that are in America, and so they want to try to keep control on them. So I can envision that.

But does that explain how they would actually. How the ambassador's wife would send money to.

It would explain if Bayoumi, for instance, is a Saudi intelligence operative and his job is to oversee these guys.

Oversee them to prevent them from attacking.

On U.S. soil, oversee to penetrate their cell and understand what's going on.

I see.

And I don't know if the Saudis knew that they were planning to fly planes into buildings, but they were up to something, so what could it be?

I see. So that's a more plausible explanation, which is that, again, their failure of imagination was they had no idea that these Saudi kids could accomplish something as grand.

Especially given that pair, it's hard to imagine that they would take them that seriously. On the other hand, there they were.

I see. This makes a bit more sense. So going back to my analogy, they're not really acting as an arsonist. They're somebody who accidentally sets the house on fire, but then realizes, oh, I just set the house on fire, I better call, but I also better make sure I'm nowhere near this fire when they get here. I'm not going to stick around to say I was doing this and that.

One always hopes for whistleblowers and somebody to come clear the air and there are documents to surface. And none of that has happened so far. I may be wrong about all this. It could be simply incompetence, which explains so many things. But there were people like those FBI guys that they knew something was going on and they were alarmed. And they were also shut down when they tried to air their concern. So obviously it was important enough. And dozens of people in the CIA at high levels read these memos. So I long for the day when somebody comes up and says this is what actually happened. It hadn't happened so far in 20 years. And I think that the longing of the CIA is to bury it in institutional memory and have it never surface.

Richard Clark apologized to the family members of the 911 victims. How many other government officials apologized publicly?

I don't know of any. There was an awful lot of scolding going on. But what made Dick Clark's statement so cathartic is he took responsibility. Nobody else did that.

I always found it amazing that he became sort of a target of partisan hit jobs.

Yeah, I know.

Which is. I mean, I've read quite A bit about him. I obviously never had the privilege of meeting him, but never came across to me as a partisan guy. Actually served presidents of both administrations.

Yeah.

Served George H.W. bush before Clinton.

I mean, I was on Sean Hannity's show one time, and it seemed like one of the main things he wanted to do is attack Dick Clark. I wasn't prepared for it at all. I mentioned that incident where he said that Conde had dismissed Al Qaeda. And Hannity went off on Dick Clark. And I said, but he's been a wonderful public servant. I mean, you may think ill of him, but he's a master bureaucrat. And he was one of the ones that was, you know, ringing the alarm about Al Qaeda. We live in a culture that's just full of people that like to attack others. But Dick Clark, you can be puzzled over some of his actions. Like, he was the one who authorized the flights for the Saudis to leave the US And I'm sure that he envisioned, you know, retaliatory attacks on members of the Saudi royal family or bin Laden's family who were present here. And that's totally plausible. But was it a wise thing to do? I don't know.

What were the days after 9, 11, like for Ali Souffon?

Oh, God. It's hard not to think about who he was, you know, this young guy, an earnest immigrant, who is probably the most valuable person in the FBI at that point. He's in his 20s. He's been given, I think he was 26 when he became the lead agent for the coal bombing, huge responsibility. And he is deeply intelligent. And he is also totally conversant with Islam and with the politics of the Middle east, such that, you know, when he would interrogate Al Qaeda guys and they would bring up stuff about Islam, he'd pull out the Quran and say, show me where. Show me that in the Quran. And he could recite the Quran himself.

Yeah. In fact, during his interrogation of Abu Jindal, I mean, he basically won him over with his knowledge of the religion.

He knew how to interrogate people without torturing them. And in fact, during Guantanamo, when they started waterboarding, he called the director and said, I'm either going to arrest these people or I have to leave. And the director said, leave. We're not going to be a part of that. He's a seminal figure in our history in some ways. He's the guy that identified through his interrogations who the Al Qaeda people were. You know, he got the names, you know, through his skilled interrogation techniques and all the Time the CIA was hiding something from him, which was the meeting in Kuala Lumpur where the Cole bombers had been present and photographed and those.

Photographs and where tons of cash had been transferred.

Ali knew about the transfers, but didn't know why. And who. Who are these? But he was beginning to get some names from his interrogations. And so that was some of the stuff that was flowing up in his request to the CIA for more information. And he's flatly denied. Then 9, 11 happens, and all he can think about is he has to get back to America.

And of course, he's lost his mentor.

He lost John. So he gets on the plane, and then he's told by a CIA representative, no, you have to go back. Go back into your office in Yemen. And they give him a manila envelope. And in there are the pictures of the people that were at the Kuala Lumpur meeting. And there was one picture that he knew, and he knew that an al Qaeda operative, and this has been withheld from him. Had they given him just those photographs that he had asked for back when he was starting his investigation of the coal and began to piece together what had happened, the FBI would have been able to break open the case right there. And he went to the bathroom and threw up, and then he went to.

Work.

And that's when he got the names of the al Qaeda guys. And, you know, he essentially solved the crime from that office in Yemen. One man. And history could have been so different if the CIA had acceded to his request. And there was nobody better prepared to take advantage of it than Ali Sufan.

Lawrence, it's hard to believe this has been 20 years. I want to thank you for an unbelievable, unbelievable investigation. Just an amazing amount of research. It's hard to imagine what you had to do to write this book, how many trips you had to take into the lion's den, and at the same time, how infuriating it must have been to learn the set of events. I can't think of anything I've ever done in my life that would be so upsetting, I think, of anything I've ever done that's upset me in terms of learning that something happened or didn't happen or this person was incompetent and it led to this. The Dietary guidelines in the 1970s, none of that compares in some ways to this. But I also think that you've created a place in history for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be recognized. And I think the Ali souffans of the world are probably people who would not become household Names and look, I hope that as we sit Here at the 20th anniversary of one of the most consequential dates for most of us, that people will take time to go back and reflect on the history of that and reflect on the people who were trying to make a difference. I guess I'll close with one last question, which is, what do you think the future holds with respect to this type of asymmetric warfare, be it Al Qaeda or fill in the blank, Pick your favorite organization that operates in the same mindset. Is this something that is going to be part of our world for the next century?

I think so. There are innumerable terrorist groups around the world and in our own country, the white supremacists most notably. But al Qaeda set a template. A small group highly empowered by kind of judo moves of using technology against the countries that developed the technology. But now we have al Qaeda, which was on 9, 11, 3 or 400 guys. Now the estimates 30 to 40,000 members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates from Morocco through the Sahel up through Saudi Arabia to India to southern China. You know, there were al Qaeda groups all over the place. Their intentions haven't changed. They haven't been able to pull off the highly successful attack in America that would equal 9, 11, but many smaller attacks. And not just in America, but other countries, Many other countries, countries with technology. I especially worry about drones. Small groups can have a far greater influence and power. And then, you know, I've been writing about the pandemic. I worry that, you know, these kinds of episodes can be suggestive. There are groups like Aum Shinrikyo was a Japanese culture that really wanted to, you know, destroy much of the world with diseases or atomic bombs, you know, and a lot of very capable scientists were members of IT Atomwaffen division, one of the white supremacist groups. They have a philosophy of, you know, wanting to eliminate much of the population and so that it narrows down only to white people. And biological warfare is part of the, you know, the goal of some of those groups. It's dismayingly easy to create diseases. And, you know, I was talking to who's the guy in James Bond that creates all the weapons? Is it M? Is that the.

Oh, I'm not sure.

All right. I think it's M. Anyway, I talked to this American version of that, and he didn't show me the good stuff. But I asked him, and this was several years ago, what worries you? And he said, what really worries me is those high school kids that are now creating computer viruses. Will one day soon be able to manufacture biological viruses just as easily. And that day is on us now. So I worry about that a lot. And you know, I think, you know, we live in a hazardous world, a world that is constrained by a lot of loss of freedom. Because of that, we have to keep in mind the idea of freedom in the country that we used to be and hope that one day we can return to it. We also have to be sober minded about the challenges. And I don't think our children are going to live in a world without terrorism or our children's children. I think that terrorism is going to be a factor for a long time to come. And I don't finally know, given the proliferation of terror, how we're going to put brakes on it.

I mean, you can think of it from two standpoints, right? You can think. One of it is you reduce the drive for it, right? So what are the factors that are contributing to terrorism? What is the humiliation? What is the disenfranchisement of the individuals who go on to perpetrate these things? So what are all those things? What are the forces to reduce them? At the other end of the spectrum is the kind of offensive strategy which is how much better can our intelligence agencies be? Look, every person who has run For President since 911 has said, look at the success. We have not had another attack of this magnitude on US soil. Is there something to that? Is that presumably that's not been through a lack of effort on the part of Al Qaeda or others? Correct.

Well, we always tend to look over our shoulder at what happened in the past. And we have to keep in mind what's happening right now. The terrorists proliferate, they move around, they adopt new ideologies. There's a fluidity about this and I think we're going to, we're going to see eruptions of terror. Some will be of small magnitude. But you know, I've just been writing about, you know, the massacre in EL PASO In 2019, 23 Mexican Americans killed. This is the largest attack on Latinos in our history. And you know, it wasn't Al Qaeda, but it was terrorism. That idea is so seeded into our culture now. No doubt things change over time. You had school shootings, you know, for instance, that's diminished. But you know, the whole mass shooting thing started here in Austin with the UT Tower shootings in 1966. So in a way there was a wave that was created and emulators came along. And then currently it seems like school shootings have diminished as have drive by shootings so these memes get into our society, and I don't know how, other than being displaced by a new meme, that they get removed from the consciousness of people that want to do harm. But I do think that we are doing a better job of containing terrorism. And, you know, we're far more alert to it. But I do think that we, our intelligence agencies have to improve. The pandemic was a catastrophic intelligence failure. This was a national security threat. We've lost more than 600,000Americans. If a nation had attacked us and killed half a million of our citizens, we, you know, we'd. And totally on a different track. But we have to take new things into account. And when we're talking about our safety and security, it's not just terrorism, public health, the natural environment, global warming, all of these things. We have real challenges ahead of us, and so far, to date, we are not performing adequately to put them at rest.

I know I said that was my last question. I guess I have one more. In all of your research, have you come to believe that these relatively small terrorist organizations would have the capacity to acquire and actually utilize nuclear weapons?

I think nuclear weapons are kind of hard. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there were a lot of loose nukes, and Al Qaeda tried to get hold of a nuclear bomb, and it turned out to be a fraud. Nuclear weapons tend to be beyond the capacity of the people that we've dealt with in the past. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be people in the future who have that capacity.

But you're more. You would say biological weapons would be a far greater concern in terms of massive, you know, we're talking about on the scale of hundreds of thousands of weapons lives or millions of lives and some toxins.

Anthrax is a good candidate. I think we have to be really, really careful. Anthrax has come out of our own Fort Detrick, so we have to be always cautious. I think we can't live our lives in fear all the time. But you'd be nuts not to pay attention to the fact that there are dangers out there and there are people that want to cause harm. And I think we have to. It's the absence of unity in our community that threatens us the most now because we're not together on this. There are people that would cheer on such actions. And, you know, what kind of country have we become in that case? I seem to keep coming to a real down conclusion.

I was about to say I'm looking for an opportunity, optimistic way to close this out and I guess the only thing I would say is I hope that this week people can basically pause for a moment and sort of reflect on people who lost their lives, people who made sacrifices as a result of that. If nothing else, just to remember that. I mean, I'm not sure that there's something actionable I can do with that other than just be grateful and at the same time be sad. So simultaneously, I think, experience these two extreme emotions.

It occurs to me, though, that tragedies often have surprisingly good consequences, or, let's say, benefits for society. And, you know, if you look at our recent history in this country with 1918 flu, I would not say that we took advantage of that. We tended to forget about it. But then came the Depression, and in the middle of the Depression, we made ourselves into a different country. Stronger, more compassionate, more resilient. We could do that. And then World War II once again took a challenge and transformed our country. Since then, we had 911 and we invaded Iraq and tortured people in Guantanamo. So a tragedy is an opportunity.

Do you think we squandered this one?

I thought we squandered 911 terribly. And the consequences of what we did to ourselves after 911 are greater than what was done to us. The invasion of Iraq, the trillions of dollars we spent in Afghanistan, you know, just all of that, you know, inconsequential in terms of lives lost. But we made huge mistakes. But we're capable. We've shown ourselves to be capable of triumphing. And we've got another opportunity now. And I hope that we take the lessons that 911 have given us and Pandemic and try to make ourselves into that country that we once were and want to be again.

Lawrence, thank you so much for making a lot of time to talk about this. I know this is a book you wrote 15 years ago, so I'm sure sometimes it's not even top of mind, it's back of mind, given all the things you've written about since. But I appreciate you taking a trip down memory lane and pulling some of the cobwebs off what I think is one of the most remarkable things written.

Well, thank you and I appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you and your listeners.

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