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

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

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00:00:28.880 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

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00:00:41.960 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's

00:00:48.080 today's episode. My guest this week is Lawrence Wright. Lawrence is an author, screenwriter,

00:00:54.720 playwright, and staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. He's written many books, including

00:00:59.240 Going Clear, The Plague Year, America in the Time of COVID, The End of October, God Save Texas,

00:01:06.560 and several others. However, in this podcast, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9-11,

00:01:11.920 we're going to focus specifically on The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11,

00:01:17.140 a book Lawrence wrote in 2006. The Looming Tower is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general

00:01:25.240 nonfiction, and it was named one of Time's top 100 books of all time. Now, some of you may have

00:01:32.340 read this book. I suspect many of you will have not. Regardless of whether or not you listen to

00:01:36.920 this podcast in its entirety, I can't recommend the book highly enough. The book was also turned

00:01:41.940 into a miniseries that played on Hulu about two years ago by the same title. In the months leading

00:01:47.760 up to this date, I knew I wanted to deviate from my normal subject matter and speak very specifically

00:01:54.640 about 9-11 for this week, but I didn't really know the right way to do it. I didn't know who to

00:02:01.280 interview. There were a number of people I considered speaking with, but as I reflected on the first time

00:02:07.180 I read The Looming Tower, I realized that Lawrence was indeed a great person to interview for this

00:02:12.840 book. And I think that comes across in this interview. His research into this story is second

00:02:19.420 to none. And this is really many stories. It's not just a story. Effectively, it's two major stories.

00:02:26.520 The first is the story of how Al-Qaeda came to be, which of course focuses on Osama bin Laden,

00:02:33.620 but also his counterpart from Al-Jihad, Ahman al-Zawwari. It also goes back further into the

00:02:41.820 roots of radical Islam within Egypt. A parallel story to this is the story of the intelligence

00:02:47.660 community, namely the CIA and the FBI and their failure to see what was happening before it was

00:02:55.380 too late. Now, of course, it's not nearly as simple as that, and I'm deliberately being glib,

00:03:00.000 but that's effectively what we discuss in this podcast. We go through these parallel stories

00:03:06.140 and how they interweave. This podcast is over three hours, which took both Lawrence and I by

00:03:11.940 surprise. I was not expecting it to be that long, but nevertheless, I suspect it speaks to the content

00:03:18.180 that we were dealing with and the depth of Lawrence's research. So without further delay,

00:03:23.720 please enjoy my conversation with Lawrence Wright. Lawrence, thank you so much for coming over. I

00:03:33.260 love being able to kind of interview people in person. So to have somebody that's from Austin and

00:03:37.860 to be able to sit down with you is really exciting today. Well, it's a pleasure to be out and about,

00:03:42.700 even under the constrained circumstances that we find ourselves. You know, this is a topic that I think

00:03:49.120 many of my listeners are going to kind of wonder, what does this have to do with longevity? Because

00:03:52.440 that tends to be what I speak about. But as we sit here minutes away from effectively the 20th

00:03:58.660 anniversary of certainly the most pivotal moment for many of us in our lifetimes, of course, you were

00:04:06.060 also alive during some of the other pivotal moments in our history. I think for many of us, we just sort

00:04:11.340 of can't believe how fast 20 years has gone by. So I kind of want to just start with maybe a silly

00:04:16.500 question. But what do you remember of that morning, that Tuesday morning? Where were you?

00:04:21.680 Back then, I had breakfast with a bunch of colleagues that were learning Spanish. And so

00:04:28.940 we would speak Spanish at breakfast and every Tuesday. After breakfast, I got in the car and

00:04:35.020 NPR was on and they had reported that one plane had hit the World Trade Center. And by the time I got

00:04:42.420 home, the second plane had hit. And I had written about terrorism already. So I was aware that this

00:04:50.520 was probably a terrorist attack. It wasn't a surprise to me that it was a terror attack. Of course,

00:04:56.580 it was an immense surprise that it was such a dramatic strike.

00:05:01.820 Had you heard much about Al-Qaeda before this? Were they familiar to you?

00:05:05.480 Yeah, I had written a movie called The Siege with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis and

00:05:11.880 Annette Benning. And it was about what would happen if terrorism came to America? That was a

00:05:19.660 question I asked myself. And it already happened in London and Paris, of course, Tel Aviv. So suppose

00:05:27.240 it happened in New York. And this movie came out in 1998. And in August of 98, a couple of

00:05:35.460 months before the movie actually opened, there was the first big strike by Al-Qaeda against American

00:05:41.760 embassies in East Africa. And 224 people were killed. And that was scarcely remarked. And I don't

00:05:50.980 even think that during the elections, you know, the terrorism was mentioned. Campaigning had already

00:05:56.280 begun. Well, midterms were underway. So it wasn't a central issue. It happened over there. We still had

00:06:03.720 this sense of invulnerability in America. And I think that's why it was unnoticed. But there was

00:06:10.520 another bombing that same month in Cape Town, South Africa, at a Planet Hollywood restaurant.

00:06:19.100 And two people were killed, two British tourists and a little girl lost her leg. And an Islamic group

00:06:25.320 claimed credit, saying that they were protesting the trailers that had appeared in movie theaters for

00:06:32.820 the siege. The movie hadn't even come out yet. And people were already dead. And that was a

00:06:38.500 scarring experience for me, you know, that I didn't feel that my movie was responsible for

00:06:47.880 people getting killed. But had the movie not happened, they'd probably be alive. And so terrorism

00:06:55.480 touched me right off. And it's, you know, it was three years before 9-11. There was a lot of anger

00:07:04.760 in the Muslim community about having, being depicted as terrorists, because it was that having spent a lot

00:07:13.480 of time in Egypt and so on, I sensed that if you're going to make a plausible terrorist action,

00:07:19.280 that would be the source of it. But there were pickets outside the movie theaters. I mean,

00:07:25.420 and people don't like to go to the movie when there are pickets. So, you know, there's always

00:07:28.880 another show. So it didn't do well. It was a bomb. And then after 9-11, it was the most rented movie in

00:07:34.380 America. And I think it was because in the movie, there, yes, there is terrorism. Yes, it happens in

00:07:41.320 New York. And it presages so much of what actually did happen. But it had an ending. And, you know,

00:07:48.420 it turned out all right. And I think after 9-11, people were desperate for something that would

00:07:55.520 give them a little hope. Yeah, I was talking to my wife this morning. She was so bummed she couldn't

00:08:01.040 be here to meet you because she's such a fan. So we'll have to figure out a way to do something

00:08:05.660 another time. So because she was really bummed to not be here. But I was talking about how

00:08:10.640 it's not clear to me, because I've never really talked about it with anybody else,

00:08:15.220 what the impact is like collectively for the average person, right? So my story is like

00:08:21.620 everybody else's, which is I can remember in crystal clarity every detail of that morning.

00:08:27.000 I was a surgical resident at Hopkins. I was down in the pediatric trauma bay. A kid had just been hit

00:08:33.000 by a car. So I was tending to this kid, you know, getting x-rays, doing all the things. He turned out to

00:08:38.560 be totally okay, but just making sure he didn't have broken bones. And I remember a person,

00:08:44.420 I remember who they were, walking in and saying, a plane just hit the World Trade Center.

00:08:50.060 And I assumed it was like a Cessna that had hit the Trade Center in the fog. So it was sort of like,

00:08:58.140 my only thought was, oh, it must be a foggy day up in New York today or something. Didn't think

00:09:02.640 anything of it, kind of went right back to work. And then of course, you know, some odd 40 minutes

00:09:06.980 later, second plane hits. All of a sudden, now the TV's on in the ER and we're all seeing what's

00:09:12.200 going on. And then, you know, for the next 48 hours, none of us left the hospital because we

00:09:17.220 were sort of waiting. Would there be survivors coming? Obviously there were none. But the part I

00:09:23.460 never really understood is how much of a lasting impact it had on me for reasons I can't explain.

00:09:30.420 I didn't know anybody who died that day. I didn't even know any of the first responders or

00:09:35.720 people who were traumatized as survivors. And yet for at least 10 years, I had horrible dreams

00:09:42.900 about being on, was it United 93, the flight that got, that crashed in Pennsylvania. I had

00:09:50.440 dreams of being in the cockpit as it was nose diving in the ground. You've spent time talking about this

00:09:58.260 with people. Is that an experience that you've seen in the normal person who wasn't physically

00:10:03.160 or directly touched by this? In some ways, it's a generational divide. We're old enough for it to

00:10:10.420 have deeply affected us personally. And I think every American was profoundly affected in one way or

00:10:19.340 another. For one thing, there was this sense of invulnerability. It was a smug feeling about we exist in

00:10:26.220 the world. But apart from it, things that happen out there in the rest of the world don't really

00:10:30.880 touch us. We meddle in wars and so on, but it never comes to the homeland. And that was so punctured.

00:10:39.940 It was so disillusioning. And we're a regular country and we're vulnerable. And that was shattering.

00:10:49.460 And I don't think anybody who was cognizant at that age, I don't think anybody walked away feeling the

00:10:57.920 same. Now, it's interesting to me because, you know, the culture changed around that event. And young

00:11:04.940 people don't know what America was before 9-11. They only know, you know, the country that we've

00:11:11.080 become. And I reflect on, you know, when I was like in high school, I remember I took a date to

00:11:20.420 the airport in Dallas. It's called Love Field, but not for that reason. But back then, when you didn't

00:11:28.060 have any money and you wanted to entertain your date, it was, you know, a plausible place to go.

00:11:32.860 And so we went, walked out on the tarmac where an American Airlines plane had flown in, you know,

00:11:39.000 we decided he'd just come from Paris. So we sat in the first class compartment and a stewardess,

00:11:45.620 as we called them then, served us a snack. And then we went up in the FAA tower and, you know,

00:11:51.360 come on in kids. And so we sat down and watched them, you know, landing planes. And that was America.

00:11:57.520 There was a sense of freedom. And, you know, we talk a lot about freedom, but that was really

00:12:02.920 freedom that you could, teenagers, you know, just wander in and see things. And this unguarded

00:12:11.720 feeling that Americans had, that we were not threatened. And now the airport experience,

00:12:19.820 if you can just compare that, young people, even people in their, you know, mid-20s now,

00:12:26.240 or even 30 don't really know America beforehand. They don't know that you could go into an office

00:12:32.680 building without having your picture taken, or you could go visit the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia

00:12:37.720 without having to take off your belt and your shoes. You know, we've built up a security state

00:12:42.500 and we've been so deeply involved with the rest of the world in an antagonistic manner since then.

00:12:49.560 And that has become normal, but it's an aberration in our history. And I would like for us to try to

00:12:58.680 remember the country we were and aim to steer towards that. Because if you forget the memory,

00:13:06.540 if you lose the memory of the country that we were, then I don't think we can ever get back to port.

00:13:12.480 It's funny you mentioned that story about being at Love Field. One of the memories I have is anytime

00:13:16.700 my dad would travel and my, I'm sure my parents will come up during this discussion because they're

00:13:22.180 immigrants from Egypt, which plays such a central role in the story we're about to discuss.

00:13:26.980 But it was not uncommon for my dad during flights, you know, if he was going somewhere and he was

00:13:33.560 returning to Toronto, which is where we live, he would spend most of the flight in the cockpit,

00:13:39.280 just playing patty cakes with the crew because he was such an outgoing guy. And I'm not making this up.

00:13:46.100 There were times when he would bring the entire crew home and prepare a meal for them because he

00:13:51.200 was, you know, he cooked, he owned a restaurant. So there were times when he would show up with

00:13:55.660 eight random people from Air Canada who were coming to our house because they had, you know,

00:14:01.000 a night layover in Toronto and they'd be coming over for dinner. I mean, like think about how bizarre

00:14:06.740 that is in the context of the world we live in today.

00:14:09.260 Yeah. We're not unique in that, but other countries have been putting up with this kind

00:14:16.200 of defensiveness for a long time. And so it's a bigger challenge in America. And there's no doubt

00:14:23.160 that we needed to be on guard and protect ourselves and ramp up our defenses. And, you know, but the truth

00:14:29.600 is in trying to create security for us, we've created a security state that is such an abridgment

00:14:38.780 of our freedom that we are doing to ourselves. You know, we're doing it to protect ourselves,

00:14:43.660 but at the same time, we're the ones that are holding the handcuffs. And it's an abridgment of

00:14:49.360 our freedom in a profound way that I think that people who talk a lot about freedom don't really

00:14:54.280 appreciate. So how long after 9-11 did the idea come to you that you were going to put in the type

00:15:01.460 of profound research that ultimately led to the looming tower, which I think came out in 06?

00:15:08.240 That's right. It was immediate. I knew this was the story of our lifetime. It was not clear that day

00:15:17.960 that it was Al Qaeda, but it was pretty clear to me. I mean, I had in my movie, The Siege, I depicted

00:15:25.780 something like that kind of organization. And I, if you remember, the phones were out in Manhattan

00:15:32.740 that morning because the cell tower had been destroyed. I do remember that because I had my,

00:15:37.500 at the time, my girlfriend who was an architect lived in Manhattan and I couldn't get ahold of her

00:15:45.280 for a day and a half. And I had a couple of friends from medical school who were residents there,

00:15:50.740 couldn't get ahold of her. Very strange situation. Yeah. It was unnerving. And so I, I, I've sent an

00:15:56.560 email to my editor at the New Yorker, David Remnick, and I said, put me to work. I've been kind of

00:16:02.060 straying from the reservation, you know, working on movies and things like that. So that afternoon,

00:16:07.440 the phones came back on, at least for the New Yorker. And we had a conference call with him,

00:16:12.440 I guess about a dozen New Yorker writers. And, you know, like me, you know, scattered around Jeff

00:16:18.900 Toobin, I think was in the Bay Area or, uh, Jeff Goldberg and Jane Mayer were both in Washington.

00:16:25.820 And, you know, we're all checking in, you know, what do you want us to do? And what David asked us

00:16:33.400 to do was to find stories, just, you know, human stories that can form part of a narrative that he

00:16:41.040 would weave together. And I felt that a handicap in Austin, you know, but somehow I found this young

00:16:48.620 man named Kurt Yeltsin. He was a reporter. He was supposed to have been on the top floor of the

00:16:56.900 World Trade Center at the Windows on the World Restaurant on the 101st floor before a conference

00:17:03.420 that his magazine, which was called Waters. It was an investment magazine. He had an appointment

00:17:11.340 there at nine o'clock and he slept through the subway stop for the first time in his whole life.

00:17:18.300 So he turned around, got off on the Chamber Street exit, ran into the World Trade Center.

00:17:27.420 The Trade Center's elevators were up a flight of escalators. So he ran up the escalators and

00:17:33.520 into an elevator and there were like 200 elevators in the two towers and you had to change floors. So

00:17:42.320 he ran into the elevator and an elevator operator was holding the door for this woman who was taking her

00:17:49.940 time, you know, walking across the lobby. And Kurt was very anxious because he was late. And as she

00:17:57.380 stepped into the elevator, he noticed that she had a rose tattoo on her ankle and he thought to himself,

00:18:03.960 oh wow. And then the plane hit and in the doors to the elevator accordioned and nobody knew,

00:18:13.680 you know, what had happened. Was it an earthquake? The building had been bombed before by a

00:18:19.760 precursor of Al Qaeda. So there was that, you know, but Kurt stepped out of the elevator and he looked

00:18:27.140 around in the lobby and there were objects lying there, concrete objects. Some, he said,

00:18:34.820 the size of an alarm clock and some like the size of an office chair and just lying on the ground of

00:18:41.340 the lobby. And it was eerie. And remember he had to go up a flight, but he was confused and he saw

00:18:50.880 daylight and went towards that. And it was a door that led to a patio and he walked outside and there

00:19:00.620 were hundreds of shoes on the ground and something else that he thought was luggage, but turned out to

00:19:09.060 be human torsos. And then something landed right beside him. And so he went back in and his story

00:19:15.980 of escaping the trade center and making it home to Queens became the bookend of the New Yorker's

00:19:23.700 black issue. That's what got me started. It was, I've got to say, incredibly wrenching to hear his story

00:19:31.540 and pasted it together over a number of interviews. And I would interview him and then my wife would

00:19:38.680 type up the notes and we were a lot of weeping going on. And, but I knew from then that I was on

00:19:46.480 the case and that whatever portion of my life was already spoken for. A couple of months later,

00:19:54.380 I signed a contract February for a book that was supposed to be turned in a year later. And I

00:20:01.260 scratched out February and wrote March or something, April. I had no idea. I turned it in five years

00:20:07.740 later. So I had no idea what I was getting into, but I just knew that, you know, this was that I

00:20:12.880 was going to go all the way to the end of this. Yeah. Those stories, by the way, are so interesting

00:20:18.700 to me. I only know one, which is a friend of mine's ex-wife was supposed to be on one of the four

00:20:25.000 flights. I don't remember which one, but she missed the flight. So she overslept. She got to

00:20:32.060 the airport, but didn't get through security in time. So by the time she got to the gate,

00:20:38.000 they had already shut the doors. I think the plane was even pulling away. And so you have this moment

00:20:44.340 where you're so upset, like you in that moment can't imagine a greater tragedy, right? Like whatever

00:20:50.320 it is she was going to do, what an inconvenience to, cause it was a cross country flight. And then

00:20:56.820 of course, to realize that that saved your life. I mean, those, those stories are, you know,

00:21:01.600 they're, they're hard to process. And what you don't hear is that somebody else may have gotten

00:21:04.680 that seat. Yeah. And so there's another side to those. Right. The person who would have only made

00:21:10.340 that flight by standby or something, you know? Well, your book is really two stories. It's really a book of,

00:21:16.420 of two parallel stories that are each one very difficult to get through. If I'm going to be

00:21:24.860 honest, I've read your book two and a half, three times basically. And it gets more frustrating the

00:21:31.420 more you get through it because you pick up new things in it that just seems so difficult to swallow.

00:21:37.840 But at least the way I've sort of read the book is it's, it's, it's basically the history of,

00:21:42.740 of Al Qaeda. How did this organization come to be? Because most people, when they think of Al Qaeda,

00:21:47.940 they of course think of Osama bin Laden, but there are more actors to it. And there's a long history

00:21:52.920 that, that goes back to Egypt. And, and as you and I were speaking a little bit before we sat down,

00:21:57.680 so much of what you wrote about resonates with things I knew about my childhood when,

00:22:04.180 cause we used to go to Egypt every year. And then there's this parallel story that's perhaps the

00:22:09.840 most upsetting part of the book, if that's possible, which is the story about the intelligence.

00:22:15.660 I remembered shortly after nine 11, Thomas Friedman wrote an article in the New York times

00:22:22.160 that said, this was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of imagination,

00:22:28.480 implying that it's not that our intelligence community failed us. It's that we could have never

00:22:33.520 imagined this, but I don't know that I can agree with that after reading your book one bit. I think

00:22:40.160 this was a catastrophic failure of intelligence. So maybe we'll start with the former. And it seems

00:22:47.280 that a good enough place to start would be Saeed Khatoub. So who is this character and why is he

00:22:52.800 an important figure in the, in the creation of Al Qaeda?

00:22:55.600 Saeed Khatoub was a, an educator in Egypt and very cosmopolitan in his way. And he was religious,

00:23:06.160 but he wasn't, you know, at the beginning fanatical, but he was a member of the Muslim brothers,

00:23:12.500 which was outlawed in Egypt. And Nasser came into power in 1952 in the officer's revolt. And looking

00:23:22.600 around for partners, he decided that maybe the Muslim brothers could be co-opted. So he tried

00:23:30.360 to enlist Saeed Khatoub in his governance and Khatoub signed on for a little bit. But the truth is,

00:23:36.520 you know, the Muslim brothers had a goal, which was not to have a military dictatorship, but an Islamic

00:23:41.320 one. And they, you know, they never really came to an agreement. And Saeed Khatoub actually was,

00:23:48.360 he wasn't thrown out of the country. Some friends arranged for him to get out of Egypt at a time

00:23:54.000 when it was really difficult for him. And he got a job teaching in Greeley, Colorado at this little

00:24:00.360 college. You know, I visited Greeley and I don't know how different it was in 1940s, but when he first

00:24:10.040 went there, but it's a town that reminds you of America as it used to be, you know, lots of green

00:24:17.340 lawns, innumerable churches, you know, just a scrubbed up Norman Rockwell type of town. And

00:24:25.680 Khatoub hated it. He just thought it was the worst excesses of America. I mean, if only he knew.

00:24:32.800 And, but he, he was shocked by the behavior of the women. He was very threatened by them.

00:24:40.600 I mean, imagine he'd gone to Vegas or something, right? It's like, yeah, yeah.

00:24:43.800 He did spend a little bit of time in New York, which was interesting for him because his brother

00:24:49.740 who was in Mecca and came out of Mecca to interview, to allow me to interview him,

00:24:55.080 said that he had never met a Jew until he got to America. And yet he hated them. You know,

00:25:00.820 there was this, the unseen enemy. And then suddenly he's in, you know, in Manhattan, you know,

00:25:07.660 he's encountering Jews all over the place. And then he goes to Greeley. It was a turning point

00:25:13.840 for him. He came back and wrote a very influential article about how dangerous America was. And this

00:25:21.600 was at a time when America was seen as the one non-colonial power by the developing world. And it

00:25:29.140 was held in very high esteem. And yet that was an opening shot. Then came the revolution and Nasser

00:25:36.580 reached out to Kutub to see if he could bring him into the government. And that didn't work out at

00:25:41.720 all. They had totally different aims for the country. Nasser, not obviously a secularist, but

00:25:49.680 probably, you know, but he saw the, you know, the powerful trend of Islam in the country and he

00:25:55.660 wanted to tame it in some way. And he thought by co-opting Syed Kutub, he might be able to.

00:26:01.740 And Kutub had written every Friday in the newspapers, not just in Egypt, but all over the

00:26:08.820 Arab world, they would publish his commentaries on Islam and the Quran. So he was a figure of note.

00:26:16.740 And at the time, Egypt was mostly Sunni?

00:26:21.140 Egypt is divided into almost entirely Sunni Muslims and Christians. The Shiite minorities,

00:26:30.300 you know, insignificant, but, you know, there is about a 10%. Nobody really knows, but, you know,

00:26:36.760 there's a smaller population of Christians. You know, like a lot of Islamic countries,

00:26:42.480 there's little to choose from on the religious banquet. And you can be, you know, the option is

00:26:48.940 to be more or less religious. And, you know, piety is how you advance in a deeply religious society as

00:26:58.200 Egypt was and actually became much more so. When I lived there in 69 to 71, you know, my female

00:27:08.600 students were not covered. Even at Cairo University, it was rare to see women with head coverings. And

00:27:16.200 I was teaching at the American University at the same time, Iman El-Zawahri was a medical student at

00:27:23.580 Cairo University. And he was part of an effort to get women to cover and to become more obviously

00:27:30.580 religious. So it was a country in transition.

00:27:34.340 It's interesting. So you were there, you know, my mom left Egypt when she was 22. And the day she

00:27:42.700 flew out, it was her first time leaving the country was September 28th, 1970. And so when she departed

00:27:49.700 from Cairo, Nasser was the president and a young president, he was in his fifties. When she landed

00:27:55.320 in Copenhagen on the news, Nasser was dead. And she was in such shock because Nasser was like kind

00:28:06.220 of a god to her generation. And he seemed indomitable. Like it just seemed like this is a,

00:28:12.240 this is a person who will be president of Egypt forever. So you were there exactly in the middle

00:28:18.580 of that transition from Nasser to Sadat. What did it strike you as the implication of that was in terms

00:28:27.100 of either the secularization of Egypt or the move towards this more religious state?

00:28:34.500 You have to understand what Nasser stood for. In Egypt, he was the first Egyptian

00:28:42.660 to rule over Egypt since. 2,500 years. Yeah, at least 2,500 before, you know, Cleopatra and all

00:28:50.920 the Greeks who took over as the pharaonic figures. Even the king that they overthrew was Turkish.

00:28:59.000 So, you know, suddenly you have an Egyptian, not just an Egyptian, this glamorous, very handsome,

00:29:06.640 compelling figure, extremely charismatic, and an unusual figure in the Arab world. In fact,

00:29:15.240 his appeal was so broad, Egypt's essentially annexed Syria. It was the United Arab Republic,

00:29:21.820 but the Syrians had very little. They just wanted to throw in their lot with the most powerful figure

00:29:27.440 in the Arab world. So his sway was unbelievable. And it was so powerful that even the hideously

00:29:37.300 mismanaged war against Israel in 1967, which, you know, the six-day war, you might as well call it the

00:29:45.060 six-hour war because it was over as soon as the Israelis bombed the Egyptian airplanes. It was a

00:29:52.580 catastrophe. And yet he survived that. So the idea that there would be a day without Nasser was just

00:30:02.960 not something that occurred to Egyptians. And I remember when it happened, he was actually

00:30:09.660 moderating a peace conference with the Palestinians at the time, you know, and he had a heart attack.

00:30:16.060 And I, you know, I had a cook who came to my apartment that morning and he said,

00:30:23.820 the people are like sand in the street. Remember the night that the news came out,

00:30:30.020 I had not heard the news before hearing the ululating, you know, all over. Just, it was eerie.

00:30:38.800 And because it wasn't a singular sound, it was like a vast sound. So as Americans, we were

00:30:47.520 counseled not to go out. I don't think that anything would have happened to us, but it was,

00:30:53.180 the streets were weirdly empty. And Cairo always had a problem with pollution and noise. Suddenly it was

00:31:00.340 dead quiet. The atmosphere clarified. It was beautiful, but unsettling. And for three days,

00:31:08.800 you know, you just didn't see anybody. And then they had the funeral. And we went up on the roof.

00:31:18.360 We lived in Zmalik, which was an island in the middle of the Nile. We were right across from the

00:31:23.900 Russian news agency, Novosti. So we were up on top of the roof and you could see the parade forming.

00:31:34.080 It started at the end of Zmalik. There was a revolutionary tower. It was actually, there's a story

00:31:41.920 on that. The CIA tried to bribe Nasser with $10 million and he used it to build this tower, the

00:31:48.580 revolutionary tower on the island directly across from the Hilton so that the Americans could see

00:31:54.660 where their money went. So that's where the parade started, the funeral cortege.

00:31:58.540 And they were going to cross the Casarell Neal Bridge. There were, you know, all the dignitaries

00:32:06.140 around the world. And, you know, what we could see was just a mass of, you know, uniforms and

00:32:10.840 suits and stuff like that. But we could also see this immense crowd of people on the other side of the

00:32:17.540 bridge. And they rushed in towards the cortege. And in the middle of the bridge, they met the mourning

00:32:27.540 Kyrenes and the dignitaries. And in the front of the cortege, there were police with batons

00:32:35.640 beating a path through people. And the turmoil was so great that from where we were, which was

00:32:44.440 a mile away, maybe, you know, we could see the bridge trembling. And I, you know, I've often thought

00:32:51.500 about how, you know, soldiers have to break ranks when they cross a bridge because of...

00:32:56.000 Right. Otherwise, you get the Tacoma Narrows effect.

00:32:57.900 Yes. So I worried that the bridge might actually crack, you know, but they beat their way all the

00:33:04.020 way through the mobs in the streets. And I thought this country will never be the same. And it really

00:33:11.880 has never been. I will qualify that by saying it has never been, although it has always been,

00:33:19.180 ruled by military forces, military figures, with the brief exception of the Muslim Brotherhood

00:33:27.100 president. And then who becomes president is Anwar Sadat, who was regarded as a joke in Egypt.

00:33:34.580 He had been in the officer's coup, but he missed the revolution. He was at a movie. It was a double

00:33:41.020 feature, but he missed the revolution. And that was a story that hung around Anwar Sadat.

00:33:47.380 And people thought he was a fool and he wouldn't last. And he turned out to be a significant figure.

00:33:55.640 You know, because of him, Egypt and Israel are at peace to this day. Everybody underestimated him.

00:34:02.100 But he lived, you know, he had been in Nasser's shadow all that time. So it marked a turning point.

00:34:08.700 And it was Sadat who expelled the Soviets. Up until that point, Egypt had been a kind of Soviet

00:34:15.200 military base. The US and Egypt didn't have diplomatic relations. There were only a handful

00:34:21.360 of Americans actually there when I was living there. Now, four years prior to Nasser's death,

00:34:29.240 he had Khutub executed. But you get the sense that he was, that was reluctant. I think he understood

00:34:36.040 that that execution would make a martyr of him. And there's probably nothing worse that you could

00:34:41.200 have done than have made a martyr of this man. Didn't he have Sadat then as either prime minister

00:34:47.020 or vice president almost try to get Khutub to just ask for some sort of forgiveness so he could save

00:34:53.220 face and not execute him? Khutub was a hard case. You know, he would rather die than renounce his,

00:35:01.540 you know, his stance. And he told Sadat that. And, you know, he called their bluff. You know,

00:35:07.180 it cost him his life. But it also gave birth to this movement. Because once Khutub was dead,

00:35:15.460 he became a symbol of the oppressiveness of the Arab regimes. You know, the dictatorships that

00:35:21.660 spanned the entire North Africa all the way to Turkey. And what was the alternative? The only

00:35:27.880 alternative that people could see was the Muslim Brotherhood or some other form of Islamism.

00:35:33.300 So, it was Khutub's death that inspired, for instance, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Ayman al-Zawahiri,

00:35:41.560 his uncle, was Khutub's lawyer and had been his teacher. He was a dear friend of Khutub. And just

00:35:48.980 before Khutub was hanged, he gave Zawahiri's uncle his Quran, which was incredibly treasured.

00:35:57.360 So, when Ayman al-Zawahiri was 15, he started a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government.

00:36:05.180 That'll show you the level of commitment that Al-Qaeda was born in.

00:36:10.060 And there's something else that's very interesting that I remember,

00:36:12.960 you know, as I mentioned to you, so much of reading your book put into context so many stories

00:36:19.380 that I had heard growing up that seemed at the time disjointed. But like, because they sort of

00:36:24.240 lacked the clarity of the full arc. But one of them was how Sadat, upon immediately becoming

00:36:32.700 president, basically freed many of the prisoners that Nasser had put away. So, it seemed that Nasser

00:36:38.880 had a much clearer understanding of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. And I guess the question is,

00:36:46.040 what is it that Sadat hoped to gain by freeing these individuals?

00:36:52.500 Sadat, unlike Nasser, was very pious. And he thought nobody was more pious than he. He called

00:37:01.100 himself the first man of Islam. How about that? And he thought because he was religious that he would

00:37:07.540 have standing with people in the Muslim Brotherhood. He totally underestimated the fanaticism that had

00:37:15.580 grown up in those prisons. And not just because of Sayyid Qutb, you know, but one of the things that

00:37:22.100 radicalized Qutb was when he was in prison, soldiers came in and shot prisoners in their cells. You know,

00:37:29.080 and his question to himself was, what kind of Muslim would do this to another Muslim? And his answer

00:37:37.880 was, they are not Muslims. And so, essentially, there's a phrase in Arabic called takfir, which is to

00:37:47.240 expel someone for their disbelief. And he created the precedent that, you know, unless you believe as

00:37:55.080 I, we do, you're not a real Muslim. And once that door was opened, it led to the idea of terrorism.

00:38:04.180 You know, that's where Zawahiri and bin Laden got permission to become the terrorists that they

00:38:10.280 became. How far back does that precedent go? If you go back to Muhammad, where is the first sign

00:38:18.420 that it's okay to kill someone if they don't believe what you believe?

00:38:24.000 Well, there's the question of killing someone. You know, there was a lot of tribal warfare

00:38:31.140 before Islam. And Islam was really, in part, an effort by Muhammad to unify Muslims, to stop fighting

00:38:42.120 each other. And, you know, Islam, one of the meanings is submission, you know, submit, accept your place.

00:38:50.020 But that didn't stop a lot of the infighting. And in Saudi Arabia, in particular, the Ikhwan were wildly

00:38:59.080 fanatic tribesmen that the first king of Saudi Arabia enlisted in his battle. But then, in order to

00:39:06.640 subdue them, he had to bring in British warplanes and machine guns to shoot his own soldiers of the

00:39:12.740 cross, so to speak. In modern era, you know, it was bin Laden who looked out at, in the Takfiri

00:39:21.080 universe, there was a kind of doctrine that came from some of the discourse that, you know, first of

00:39:29.220 all, you have to attack the near enemy, then the far enemy. And the far enemy being the West and the

00:39:36.440 United States. But the near enemy being dictators like Mubarak and so on, the royal family in Saudi

00:39:43.140 Arabia. So the heretics, the Shia, the Jews, the West, those would be the four stated enemies.

00:39:51.040 Absolutely.

00:39:51.800 And basically in proximity.

00:39:53.560 Yes. But, you know, first of all, tend your own house. Well, it was bin Laden who looked out and said,

00:40:00.120 the far enemy is not far. America is right off our shores. There are bases in Saudi Arabia, you know,

00:40:07.160 you cannot call them the far enemy anymore. So that, using the permission that he had been given

00:40:13.660 to wreak havoc and kill people at will, bin Laden turned on America.

00:40:20.200 So going back to the early 70s, so Zawahiri is in school, he's going through medical school.

00:40:26.020 Sadat sort of saves face during the 1973, the Yom Kippur War. Sadat is sort of romanticized in

00:40:34.140 the West. But what was the view inside Egypt of Sadat in the sort of mid to late 70s? Was he

00:40:41.560 basically ostracized in the Middle East for creating peace with Israel? I mean, that can't have been

00:40:46.400 popular with the other Middle Eastern nations, correct?

00:40:48.760 It wasn't popular in Egypt either. Well, let me qualify that. There were people that were tired of

00:40:54.680 strife and wanted to make peace. But, you know, the rhetoric in the Middle East at that point was

00:41:04.620 that Israel had to be destroyed. And here was Amor Sadat saying, no, you know, we're going to make

00:41:10.840 peace with Israel. First, he had to demonstrate that he was willing to go to war because the Israelis

00:41:16.960 were so complacent, they didn't see a threat. And actually, I don't think, Sadat doesn't get enough

00:41:22.560 credit for the daring. You know, there was a kind of Maginot line that the Israelis had built.

00:41:30.180 They'd taken all of Sinai along the Suez Canal. They built this sand fortress that extended a whole

00:41:37.280 length, cliffs of sand topped by artillery and little caves inside, you know, with machine gun

00:41:44.160 emplacements and stuff like that. It looked really formidable. Sadat managed secretly to, you know,

00:41:52.300 create this army, an invasion force. And how do they bring down that castle of sand with fire

00:42:01.980 hoses? It was amazing how the sand just melted away. But they had these high-pressure fire hoses

00:42:07.980 they'd gotten from Germany. And within a few hours, they had managed to cross the Suez Canal,

00:42:14.920 which the Israelis thought was totally impossible. And, you know, with just, it was a kind of a mirror

00:42:21.240 of the 67 war. And it wound up, Egypt was essentially defeated by Ariel Sharon's army,

00:42:29.640 which surrounded them. But they had made the point. And at that point, Sadat was a real hero.

00:42:35.880 And he gave pride to the Egyptian people who felt so humiliated. And one of the things that

00:42:44.480 he had to counter was the lessons that the Egyptians had drawn from the 67 war and the Israelis. You know,

00:42:53.360 the Israelis thought, well, we really are God's people. You know, look at this. You know, we were,

00:42:59.580 just before the war, we were digging trenches for mass graves in the public parks. And now, you know,

00:43:06.260 we've, you know, conquered all of our Arab neighbors, you know, within six days. Just unbelievably

00:43:13.420 thrilling. So what lesson did the Arabs and particularly the Egyptians take, which is we're

00:43:20.340 not God's people. Why would he let this happen to us? And the answer was, we are not religious enough.

00:43:29.580 And so that answer resonated with so many people. And that was, you know, the 67 war was a huge

00:43:36.940 influence in driving people into radicalism. And that was something that, you know, Sadat

00:43:44.060 didn't fully take into account. And of course, eventually that radicalism would focus on him.

00:43:51.300 What did you describe him as? I thought that was just hilarious. He described himself as the first

00:43:55.260 man of Islam. Yeah. Yeah. The funniest concept ever, because the reality of it is, as we drew close

00:44:00.740 to the end of his life, he would completely turn around and say, no religion in politics,

00:44:06.320 no politics in religion. He saw the damage that this religion was causing and said, we must separate

00:44:13.540 this church and state. Is that ultimately what led to the fatwa being brought against him?

00:44:18.220 Well, peace with Israel was a part of it. There was also, you know, he was chiding. He was really

00:44:27.300 pharaonic in his behavior, which is not unusual in people that rule over Egypt, but he derided women

00:44:35.380 who were covered as saying that they were wearing tents on their head. And that really offended a lot

00:44:41.660 of Islamists. And his wife, I believe, had pushed for the right for a woman to have a divorce. So they

00:44:50.040 were really trying to bring modernity to Egypt. And it was ultimately the nail in his coffin.

00:44:57.360 It was a similar path that the Shah of Iran had gone on.

00:45:00.780 Yeah. I was going to ask you about that because the Shah was basically overthrown in 79 or was it 78?

00:45:06.180 It was 79. And that year was a catastrophic one for Islam and for Muslim countries. It's the year

00:45:15.200 that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It's the year the Shah was overthrown. And it was the year that

00:45:22.920 Camp David peace accords were signed. And I should also say, it was the year of the attack in Mecca

00:45:29.880 where radical Islamists took over the holiest place in Islam.

00:45:34.160 And Saudi Arabia needed the French to come and help.

00:45:37.920 Yeah. They don't like to admit this and there's still no toll. We don't know how many people died,

00:45:44.000 hundreds or thousands. We don't know. But there were snipers up in the minarets and so on. And

00:45:49.480 underneath the plaza, there's a warren of rooms and they had stored weapons and food in there.

00:45:57.180 So there were plans maybe to flood them out, but they were holding hostages. And we don't really

00:46:04.080 know what happened, but what we understand or whatever, when I was researching this as carefully

00:46:09.200 as I could, they bore holes in the plaza and dropped grenades down. So a lot of innocent people

00:46:17.220 were killed. And then dozens were arrested and executed. But it was a trauma on the scale of 9-11

00:46:26.600 in Saudi Arabia. And out of that came a bargain between the royal family and the clerics, which

00:46:35.160 was, you know, the royal family needed permission to attack the mosque. In Islam, it's so holy that you're

00:46:44.500 not even supposed to mow the grass. You know, every living thing should be untouched. And here, you know,

00:46:51.640 was a situation where totally out of control, thousands maybe of people would be killed. And the royal

00:47:00.180 family did not feel they could do this without a fatwa from the leading clerics. And in return, the royal

00:47:09.500 family agreed to allow religious figures greater standing and more power within the society.

00:47:17.080 So upon that, Saudi Arabia immediately became far more conservative. And the clerics took control.

00:47:24.640 And you began to see the religious police in the streets and so on. And that, you know,

00:47:31.040 Saudi Arabia had been on a path, not to liberalism, but, you know, a more stable society that was

00:47:39.420 somewhat moderate, but not fanatic. But there were people, once the religious authorities acquired

00:47:48.080 power, they used it, but they also became far more fanatical themselves.

00:47:54.400 The name of the organization that ultimately assassinated Sadat was Al-Jihad, correct?

00:48:00.060 Yeah.

00:48:00.320 This was the one half of what would become Al-Qaeda.

00:48:04.040 Right. The American intelligence called it Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but in Egypt,

00:48:09.900 it's just called Al-Jihad.

00:48:11.760 How much of a role did Al-Zawahri play in that?

00:48:15.140 In the assassination? It was a small role. He transferred some guns.

00:48:20.440 He was still a practicing physician.

00:48:21.820 Yeah. He was still a young man, you know, but he had been able to organize

00:48:26.940 police officers and soldiers and stuff like that into his cell. But he wasn't central to the

00:48:34.800 assassination itself.

00:48:36.480 Of all the turmoil that we've discussed so far in the Middle East, the first one that is sort of

00:48:41.980 ingrained in me is when Sadat was killed. So I, you know, I remember that day very clearly. I was

00:48:47.600 eight years old and I remember it so well. One of my uncles was one of the generals standing with him

00:48:55.880 when he was shot. As you recall, everybody but Sadat realized what was happening and they all hit the

00:49:04.060 deck. And Sadat actually thought it was part of the parade. And he actually stood to greet these

00:49:10.900 soldiers who of course were, you know-

00:49:13.560 You know, I interpret that differently.

00:49:15.640 Yeah, I know you did. In the book, you thought he was standing to-

00:49:19.120 To accept death.

00:49:19.900 To receive his execution.

00:49:21.060 My uncle always said that he felt that Sadat actually thought it was part of the parade.

00:49:28.440 Well, I mean, who knows what thoughts were going through his mind, but it was chaotic. You know,

00:49:35.040 these guys jumped off the truck and began firing and throwing grenades.

00:49:40.200 Most of which didn't go off, which was sort of a miracle. A lot more people would have died.

00:49:44.580 A lot of people would have been killed. I don't know why everybody on that reviewing platform

00:49:49.380 wasn't dead. But they were, you know, they came for Sadat. And when I looked at the news footage

00:49:56.580 and the stills of that-

00:49:58.200 The stills are harrowing.

00:49:59.460 Yeah.

00:49:59.740 Yeah. He's standing at attention as he's being shot.

00:50:02.140 It looked to me like he was going to go out unintimidated.

00:50:06.720 And you might be right.

00:50:07.900 That would have been part of his character. And of course, he was so vain. He had his new

00:50:14.260 Italian made uniform and he didn't want to ruffle the lines of the uniform with a bulletproof vest.

00:50:20.860 So he was unprotected in that way.

00:50:24.380 You talk about how the men that were charged and even not charged, basically the men that were

00:50:30.680 imprisoned following that were tortured. And that out of that torture came a lot of the

00:50:38.800 humiliation that ultimately fed what would become the terrorism we all learned about 20 years ago

00:50:46.760 for the first time, many of us. What happened to those men? And what did your research uncover

00:50:51.920 about what that period was like following the assassination of Sadat? It wasn't long after,

00:50:57.020 I mean, Mubarak would have been immediately instated as president.

00:50:59.980 Right. We don't understand clearly the role of humiliation in human affairs, but it's very

00:51:09.080 powerful. And going back to the 67 war, the humiliation, I think, gave birth to this rise in

00:51:16.420 radicalism in Egypt and elsewhere. And torture is deliberate humiliation. And we don't really know

00:51:24.820 what happened to Zawari, although he was probably electrocuted and stripped naked and humiliated in

00:51:32.160 every possible way that you can imagine. And you can emerge from that totally broken or you can emerge

00:51:42.440 full of rage and willing to do anything to exact revenge. And, you know, I think that that prison

00:51:53.080 population was divided along those lines. There weren't people that weren't affected by it. You

00:51:58.160 know, there were people that were either broken or turned into something else. And that something else

00:52:04.360 became the seeds of Al-Qaeda. That Al-Qaeda really began as Zawari's organization. You know, it was

00:52:12.400 Al-Jihad. And they were, when they got out, they were on a rampage. They were killing people as much,

00:52:19.520 you know, as fast as they could. And they tried to kill the prime minister. They did kill some

00:52:25.980 people. They accidentally killed this little schoolgirl named Shaima. This is a characteristic

00:52:33.760 jihad action. So carelessly did they plan this assassination of the prime minister. They just

00:52:41.720 put the bomb outside a girl's school. And the only person killed was, you know, a schoolgirl. It could

00:52:49.040 have been dozens of them. But the city, Cairo, was infuriated. And there were marches in the street,

00:52:58.500 you know, protests. And Zawari actually complained because he felt offended that they were subject to

00:53:06.860 so much abuse. And yet it was pretty clear that Shema was a step too far for jihad. And actually,

00:53:15.520 one of the killers lives now in London, you know, he got political asylum because of the, you know,

00:53:21.900 the fact that Egypt had a death penalty and the British would take in anybody who was under a death

00:53:28.340 penalty. So Shema's killer is living in London.

00:53:32.240 Still?

00:53:32.960 Last I talked to him, he was still there. Yeah.

00:53:36.860 Something else that you point out in the book that I thought was so fascinating,

00:53:40.280 because it's so obvious once you stated it, but I'd never really understood it, which was

00:53:45.780 why couldn't the real resistance take place in Egypt? But you point out that the topography is

00:53:54.320 not amenable to it. You can't really live away from the Nile. You basically, the moment you get too

00:54:02.060 far off the Nile, you're in the middle of the desert. It's not amenable to guerrilla warfare.

00:54:05.560 And the military had too strong a hold over the Nile from upper Egypt, all the way to the Delta

00:54:14.300 and into the Mediterranean Sea. So basically, if they were going to create an army, they needed to

00:54:21.260 do it outside of Egypt. And it seems that Zawahi realized that in the mid 80s, if not the early 80s,

00:54:29.380 correct? And is that about the time that he left?

00:54:31.440 Yeah. He went to Afghanistan first as a medical doctor, answering a call that many heeded. And

00:54:41.000 then he came back and he affected some Afghan outfits and so on. But I think he was very stirred

00:54:48.520 by that. When the Soviets invaded, it was an electric alarm in the Muslim world that an Islamic country

00:54:57.280 was being occupied by a secular government.

00:55:01.620 What was Russia's intention?

00:55:03.920 It's a really good question because you could say that they were trying to beat a path to the

00:55:10.540 Mediterranean. But it's a long way. It doesn't go directly there. So they might have done better

00:55:18.820 going through Pakistan. And Pakistan was nominally allied with the United States, so that might have

00:55:24.000 been problematic. But Soviet Union wasn't an expansionist power. It was crazy. If you remember

00:55:31.140 that period, there was a lot of turnover in the leadership. I think that there was confusion about

00:55:37.900 who's in charge, and it didn't make any sense at all. And the Carter administration, Brzezinski was a

00:55:45.400 national security advisor. And he saw that as a huge opportunity to give the Soviets their own

00:55:52.680 Vietnam. And essentially, that's what we did. We supplied the Mujahideen with weapons, and then

00:55:58.480 finally with stingers, which brought down the helicopters. And that was, the Soviets didn't want

00:56:04.320 to go mano a mano on the ground. So once they lost that air cover, they were essentially defeated.

00:56:11.160 Which now brings us to the other half of the Al Qaeda duo, Osama bin Laden. I think it's well known

00:56:20.480 by many people who have paid attention to the stories of Al Qaeda that he came from unbelievable

00:56:26.440 wealth, unbelievable privilege. But maybe for folks who aren't quite familiar with his lineage,

00:56:32.480 who was Mohammed bin Laden, and why did he have such an empire? What were the circumstances of

00:56:37.760 Osama bin Laden's upbringing? Mohammed bin Laden came from Yemen. And there are stories about how

00:56:44.980 he got there. But essentially, I think the most credible is that he kind of hitched a ride on a

00:56:50.900 boat that took him up to Jidda. And he was a laborer. He was blind in one eye. He was illiterate.

00:56:58.540 He put himself to work as a handyman, and then did some work for, you know, the Americans were,

00:57:04.400 you know, at that time working on Aramco, building up the Saudi oil reserves. And there were American

00:57:12.560 companies in Saudi Arabia who were essentially beginning to build the kingdom itself, you know,

00:57:19.880 the roads, the hotels, and so on. So it was a good time to be in that business. And Mohammed bin

00:57:26.320 Laden, the king didn't really trust the Americans. Who was king then? Was it Faisal? Or was this before

00:57:32.260 Faisal? Most before Faisal. I think it was Abdul Aziz when Mohammed bin Laden first got there.

00:57:37.940 It was the first king of that lineage. I don't know if he built the whole palace, but the king

00:57:43.180 was infirm. And if you remember in the meeting between Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, and King

00:57:49.660 Abdul Aziz in the Suez Canal, Roosevelt gave him a wheelchair. So the king liked having the wheelchair,

00:57:59.360 but he lived upstairs. So he got Mohammed bin Laden to build him a ramp so the car could drive him

00:58:07.640 upstairs. So that was the display of the genius that Mohammed bin Laden had. And then there was a

00:58:14.980 goal that had been from the very beginning of the kingdom to try to unify the two sides of Saudi Arabia.

00:58:22.460 The western portion was divided by a mountain range. On the other side of it was the Holy Lands,

00:58:31.080 Mecca and Medina, and Jeddah, one of the major cities. But it was cut off by the Sarawat mountain range.

00:58:40.700 And when Faisal became king, he was trying to get a contractor who would build a road that would

00:58:47.280 unify the kingdom. The main contractors looked at the steep cliff face, and just, it was daunting.

00:58:54.660 You know, how would you do that? So Mohammed bin Laden, this one-eyed illiterate Yemeni laborer,

00:59:02.580 gave a bid to the king, which didn't turn out to be accurate. But, you know, the king accepted.

00:59:08.660 And so the legend is that he pushed a goat over the edge of the cliff and followed him down this,

00:59:17.620 you know, cliff face, marking the path. And that's the path that this road, I drove down it,

00:59:24.640 I drove up and down it, but it's very windy. And oddly enough, beset with chimpanzees. So,

00:59:32.220 you know, there are a lot of animals along the way. You have to be careful. But it's a two-lane road

00:59:38.160 that goes down. But that was one of the most important roads in history, because it unified

00:59:43.660 the kingdom. And it made Mohammed bin Laden the most famous non-royal figure in the kingdom,

00:59:50.200 a real hero. And he took advantage of his celebrity. He had a lot of wives.

00:59:56.880 Forty-five children?

00:59:58.680 Fifty-two, I think. I think bin Laden had 52 brothers and sisters, so maybe 53 total.

01:00:04.040 Some of the wives he would marry on Friday and divorce on Sunday. You know, so, you know,

01:00:08.920 there was that kind of arrangement. But typically in Saudi Arabia, under Islamic rules, you're awarded

01:00:15.560 four wives. And the fourth wife is always a little bit of a threat to be discarded. And it was the fourth

01:00:24.320 wife that was the mother of Assama. And she was Syrian. And she was an Alawite, which is the sect that

01:00:35.800 Assad, the ruler of Syria, is a part of. It's a minority sect that is thought to be heretical

01:00:42.480 inside Sunni Islam. So that was, by itself, a mark against Assama. And his father divorced her,

01:00:52.300 but he arranged marriage for her and one of his trusted employees, who actually Assama became

01:00:59.240 close to. And they lived in a little house in Jeddah off a street that's called Macaroni Street

01:01:05.820 because there's a pasta factory nearby. That's where he grew up. He was always pious. It wasn't a

01:01:13.680 conversion. He would play soccer and he would wear long pants. But he must have had some influence on

01:01:20.320 these other kids because eventually they adopted his long pants strategy. And he would, even when

01:01:26.580 he was fasting, which he did- He fasted two days a week?

01:01:30.060 Two days a week, emulating what he thought the prophet did.

01:01:33.440 We're talking about bin Laden as a teenager.

01:01:36.360 Absolutely. He would make sandwiches for his soccer mates, even though he wasn't eating them.

01:01:44.000 And then, you know, they serve cakes and then play Islamic games, you know, guess the names of the

01:01:50.360 prophet's companions and that sort of thing. Even though music is frowned upon, instrumental music

01:01:57.160 is frowned upon in Saudi Arabia. He led this a cappella singing and I tried to get, he taped some of them

01:02:04.900 and I tried to find some tapes of, you know, bin Laden singing, but I never could lay my hands on

01:02:11.380 anything like that. Did you have an insight as to why he was so

01:02:15.120 pious? I think that if you want to stand out

01:02:20.840 in a very religious society like Saudi Arabia, you can become less religious or more. And in his

01:02:29.960 environment, he was not going to become less religious. So he, I think he always had the idea

01:02:36.540 that there was an achievement by becoming more of an authority. I mean, you have to bear in mind,

01:02:44.340 his father was an exceptional figure. He died in an air crash, but as, and bin Laden was young when

01:02:50.300 that happened. But very few people in Saudi Arabia in all of history have achieved the kind of status

01:02:59.240 that Muhammad bin Laden did, who is, you know, someone who is not in the royal family. That was

01:03:05.220 exceptional. And I think that Osama being the son of the fourth wife and then, you know, cast out of

01:03:12.320 the inner spell, inner circle when the father divorced his mother, he always wanted to distinguish himself.

01:03:20.620 And there was a, you know, horde of other children around to compete against. And Osama was

01:03:26.800 adventurous. Some of the other sons were adventurous, but I think he, you know, one of them died nearby

01:03:36.420 here in central Texas. He crashed an ultralight plane in a power line. So it wasn't just Osama that

01:03:43.420 was an adventurous type, but early on, you know, he was racing horses, drove very fast, not professionally,

01:03:52.560 but, you know, he was, he liked to drive and he was careless. He had wrecks a lot, but he had his kind of

01:04:00.020 impunity around him. And he'd like to go out and camp in the desert by himself. He was forging an independent

01:04:07.380 identity, even as a very young man. He was drawn more deeply into Islam in his school.

01:04:15.540 Apparently there was a, I think it was a gym teacher who was in the Muslim brothers and he

01:04:22.600 impressed Osama. So that probably drew him more into Islamic politics. And he met other people that

01:04:30.560 would be important to him inside what was a secret cell of his Muslim brothers in Saudi Arabia.

01:04:38.420 Do we know if he was influenced by Saeed Qutb's writings?

01:04:41.520 Oh yeah. There's no one who wasn't. You have to start with that. But Saeed Qutb was a big figure.

01:04:49.320 And when he was in the university, there were lots of discussions about Qutb. And there was another

01:04:56.640 head of the Muslim brothers in Egypt who had a bit of a contrary view. Sometimes Osama would take one

01:05:04.380 perspective and sometimes the other, but they were essentially arguing over Qutb. He was a huge figure.

01:05:09.840 He might've met. No, I guess not. Because I would have asked Qutb's brother, Muhammad,

01:05:16.120 if he'd ever met Osama, but I don't think so.

01:05:19.520 So when did Osama first go to Afghanistan?

01:05:23.720 Well, the invasion-

01:05:24.960 Invasion 79.

01:05:26.520 He said he went as soon as he could. There's no evidence he went there in the first year or two,

01:05:31.640 but he might have been, but there's just no evidence of it. And he was inspired. He didn't stay

01:05:37.380 long. He came back, but he became a conduit for money. He was a bundler. And Abdullah Azzam was the

01:05:45.480 sort of godfather of the Arab participation in the war against the Soviets. And bin Laden hooked up

01:05:54.120 with him. And Azzam just saw this tall, enigmatic Saudi with a lot of money and a lot of prestige,

01:06:03.860 and just saw him as a cash machine, which he was. I mean, he played a huge role in raising money

01:06:11.480 for the war against the Soviets. And that was his main task for the most part until

01:06:18.040 he actually moved to Afghanistan and decided to form an Arab wing of the war. And it was

01:06:27.400 totally feckless. I mean, it was worse than feckless. It got in the way. Afghan warlords

01:06:34.880 complained about it. They didn't know what they were doing. Essentially, they were just putting

01:06:39.720 young men without any training at great risk and effecting no real change in the war. But from the

01:06:45.960 perspective of Saudi Arabia, here was a Saudi, not a prince, but a Prince Ling in the sense that he was

01:06:54.000 the son of the famed Muhammad bin Laden. And the idea that Saudis would actually go out and fight

01:07:01.480 was really titillating. They weren't allowed to fight. There was a nominal army, but essentially,

01:07:09.880 there was no military- What was the scale of this? So how many Muhajideen fighters were there?

01:07:17.180 I don't remember the exact number. There were fewer than 100, I would say.

01:07:21.600 But you also have to bear in mind that young Saudi men would sometimes fly up from Saudi Arabia for a

01:07:30.640 few days. They would be given a gun. They would go out and they'd be not facing the enemy probably,

01:07:37.060 but they'd go out and shoot up a tree or something. And then they would go home and say that they'd been

01:07:42.300 fighting in Afghanistan. And the US had no forces there, but the CIA was providing weapons to the

01:07:49.280 Muhajideen, correct? Right. And they were also supplying money. Unfortunately, we landed on this

01:07:57.380 guy named Hamad Ghul, who was a general in touch with the Afghan warlords. And he would parcel out the

01:08:05.840 money among the seven warlords. The CIA called them the seven dwarfs, but he picked the most radical of

01:08:13.340 them. So the money that came from American taxpayers went to empower people that would later become

01:08:20.320 allies of the Taliban.

01:08:22.800 Now, the Taliban didn't exist yet, correct?

01:08:24.800 The Taliban were kids in school. The Taliban, the word means students in Arabic, and I guess in Urdu.

01:08:33.820 And especially for young Afghan boys, and Pakistanis as well, the parents didn't have any money. They

01:08:44.700 would be sent off to these madrasas, many of them on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

01:08:51.260 And especially after the Soviet invasion, there were a lot of orphans and there were a lot of families

01:08:57.200 that were unable to provide for their kids. So they send the boys to these madrasas, where their

01:09:03.300 main task was to memorize the Quran in a language, Arabic, that they didn't speak. And oftentimes,

01:09:11.120 these boys would be abused, especially, you know, warlords and so on would take advantage of them.

01:09:18.920 And really, the Taliban came to power when there was a battle, a personal duel between these two

01:09:29.740 Afghan commanders over a boy. That was when Mullah Omar, who would come to be the leader,

01:09:36.840 who was a minor cleric, got on his motorcycle and began to organize. And that's where the Taliban arose.

01:09:45.720 It's an odd culture because there's some pictures of these boys at the beginning, as they began to

01:09:53.060 form into a military force. But they put on cosmetics. They look very feminine, you know,

01:10:00.220 with eye shadow and lipstick and so on. And so there was a... It's hard to characterize it because I

01:10:07.240 can't say that I understand it. But, you know, there was, I think, in terms of absenting women

01:10:14.320 so much from society that these boys were sexualized. And once again, I think humiliation

01:10:21.620 played a role. And it's hard to quantify, but I think impossible to ignore.

01:10:29.560 And then the Northern Alliance at this point is part of the Afghan government?

01:10:34.980 The government went through several iterations and coalitions. And the Northern Alliance was a

01:10:41.220 Pashto organization. So they would have been inside the tent of government.

01:10:46.580 So when did Zawahiri and bin Laden meet?

01:10:50.520 Nobody knows. You know, I wish I tried really hard to find that out. And I asked many of Zawahiri's

01:10:57.440 colleagues. Most people think that they met somewhere along the line in Jeddah, where bin Laden

01:11:03.520 lived. And he was raising money for the Mujahideen. And Zawahiri went there, ostensibly,

01:11:11.220 to practice medicine at this Muslim Brothers coalition of doctors and so on. So it's totally

01:11:18.900 plausible. It could have been shortly after that, in Peshawar in Pakistan, where bin Laden set up shop.

01:11:27.820 So it's one of my great frustrations that I was never able to chronicle the moment when these two

01:11:33.640 guys ran into each other and what they thought about each other.

01:11:37.100 As the Soviets ultimately withdraw, which is, what, 89-ish?

01:11:42.320 Yeah.

01:11:43.040 On some level, I think, though probably not justified, bin Laden feels like a bit of a hero.

01:11:48.580 Oh, yeah. He glorified himself.

01:11:51.980 Although, by all accounts, he really hadn't done much.

01:11:55.040 He mucked it up, really, is what he did. And got a lot of kids killed. And, you know,

01:12:00.360 just kids, young men. But in terms of victories, no, he had none. But what he did accomplish was to

01:12:08.840 create a legend around himself and around the Arab Mujahideen. And it's fascinating to me as a

01:12:17.560 person that's always been intrigued by religious beliefs, you know, how these legends spread and

01:12:24.460 how they fortified his image. You know, there was the idea that if you fell in battle, your body

01:12:31.880 wouldn't putrefy. And that green birds would come circle your corpse. And I remember I asked Jamal

01:12:41.660 Khalifa, who had been bin Laden's best friend for much of his life and his brother-in-law and had been

01:12:49.880 in Afghanistan with bin Laden. Really? Do you really believe it? Oh, absolutely. You know,

01:12:57.380 I saw it with my own eyes. It can't be true. But it's hard to deny someone who speaks with such

01:13:05.740 conviction. And so that was the kind of thing that young people in, not just in Saudi Arabia,

01:13:13.240 but throughout the Muslim world would be hearing. You know, the stories of these fighters and their

01:13:18.480 mighty men and they, you know, they live in caves and they fight these technological powers

01:13:23.500 and they win. And, you know, they are our Muslim brothers and, you know, we should be doing the

01:13:29.540 same thing. And so, and not only, you know, we have to contribute however we can. So in the mosque

01:13:35.440 and even in shopping centers, there would be cans for contributing to the effort. And so people did,

01:13:41.800 you know, it was a very popular effort. And bin Laden was very central in his name and his identity

01:13:50.820 became central to that cause. I call him Saudi's first celebrity because there wasn't a category

01:13:59.040 for bin Laden. He wasn't royal. In Saudi Arabia, there's a, and true of other Muslim countries to

01:14:06.600 some extent, but there's a prohibition on human forms. You're not supposed to have pictures of

01:14:11.900 people or animals for that matter, but there are pictures of the king and princes all over the

01:14:18.020 place. And I remember when I was there, there was a legal battle going on over the Starbucks image.

01:14:25.980 Because it's like a human form.

01:14:27.500 Yes. But finally in the courts, they decided she's a mermaid. And so she's neither animal nor

01:14:34.820 human. She's a mythological creature. So Starbucks was allowed to keep their logo. But that's how

01:14:42.300 seriously it's taken. But here's bin Laden. He's not nobody. He's Mohammed bin Laden's son,

01:14:48.380 but that's not an unusual category. He has 20 something brothers, but there's nobody like him.

01:14:55.680 He can go to the mosque and make a speech and, you know, people would pour out to hear him.

01:15:00.180 He wasn't charismatic in the traditional sense, but he had a kind of ethereal air about him. He was

01:15:08.300 enigmatic, intriguing, very handsome, very tall. He had a kind of elegance about him. And that

01:15:16.880 turned out to be a real pain in the ass for the royal family because they weren't used to having

01:15:23.400 a rival power. Someone who had a voice of authority. And bin Laden, even at a very young

01:15:29.980 age, was that person. Now, I guess it would have been the summer of 1990 when Saddam Hussein

01:15:38.780 invades Kuwait. Right.

01:15:41.640 And although I guess we wouldn't know it at the time, you could argue that was

01:15:46.560 certainly one of the greatest factors that would ultimately lead to 9-11, though it wasn't,

01:15:53.660 you can only know that in retrospect.

01:15:55.940 Right. And it's peripheral in that, I mean, we wouldn't understand it from our point of view

01:16:02.260 because America and other allies rushed in to save Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was trying to keep that

01:16:10.420 from happening. And so he went to the minister of defense and said, I'll take care of this. I'll bring

01:16:17.520 my al-Qaeda guys, which were several dozen maybe, you know, together with my father's earth-moving

01:16:25.660 equipment. We will enlist the people and we will repel the million-man Iraqi army. And, you know,

01:16:32.900 the minister of defense just didn't laugh him out of the office. It wouldn't be polite. But he was,

01:16:38.540 you know, not taken seriously. The first time I heard this story, by the way,

01:16:43.820 was I had the privilege of meeting Prince Turkey, spending a week with him actually.

01:16:48.300 Really?

01:16:48.860 In Saudi Arabia.

01:16:49.480 I want to hear more of that.

01:16:50.580 Yeah. And he told this story, which was how Bin Laden was adamant that he, based on his victory

01:16:59.480 in Afghanistan, which again means he believed his own hype.

01:17:04.360 I think so.

01:17:04.980 Right. Like he, he actually thought that he moved the needle in Afghanistan.

01:17:09.320 Well, he, he defeated the Soviets. So what would the Iraqis be by comparison? That was what was

01:17:14.680 going on in his mind.

01:17:16.460 And the disconnect from reality, but how humiliated he was when not only was he not the one that was

01:17:26.420 going to defend his country, but these filthy Americans were going to come in and do this,

01:17:34.880 which included women.

01:17:36.120 And Jews and Christians.

01:17:38.340 And they were going to spend quite a bit of time there, right? This was, even though it didn't take

01:17:42.160 long to get Saddam Hussein to retreat, you still had to maintain no-fly zones. You still had to

01:17:48.980 maintain a military presence there.

01:17:51.360 I'll stop you a bit on that because we didn't need to stay in Saudi Arabia. There were other

01:17:56.700 bases in Qatar and UAE, you know, we, we could have gotten away, but the Saudis had very nice bases,

01:18:03.700 but that it was the lingering. I mean, we promised we were going to leave when the war was over.

01:18:10.220 Yeah. Why? So that's a good point. It was promised that the U S would leave. Why, why did they not?

01:18:15.680 They were comfortable, you know, and I think probably the Royal family felt happier having

01:18:21.400 an American presence there because the Saudis have always been insecure about their, you know,

01:18:27.680 they're sitting on this golden egg and everybody around the world wants a piece of it. So

01:18:32.960 the Saudis, suddenly they've got the American military there and that's not the worst thing

01:18:37.660 in the world in their opinion. But for bin Laden and for other people, you know, there's a,

01:18:44.020 there's a saying attributed to the prophet, which was there shall be no two religions in Saudi Arabia.

01:18:54.080 Well, you know, there are more than two religions and there were at the time of the prophet, but

01:18:59.720 bin Laden took this to mean only Sunnis of his particular stripe should live in the kingdom and

01:19:07.880 everybody else has to be expelled. And it was such a huge thing to have half a million Americans and

01:19:15.820 other nationalities, most of them not Muslim living in their country, protecting how humiliating once

01:19:23.920 again. Is it that you have to turn to these other powers? We're not strong enough to do it ourselves.

01:19:30.340 That, you know, for bin Laden, that was, you know, a big motivating force. That's when he really sort

01:19:36.700 of turned his attention to America.

01:19:39.720 And this is where, as he and Zawahiri are getting closer, there's a bit of a difference between them,

01:19:44.980 right? Which is at this point, Zawahiri is still really focused on overthrowing Egypt, overthrowing

01:19:52.300 what he views as these horribly amoral, corrupt Arab leaders. But bin Laden is thinking far beyond

01:20:00.280 that already. Yeah. It wasn't just Zawahiri. I mean, there were a lot of nationalist groups

01:20:05.420 in the Arab world focused on changing their countries. And what bin Laden did was to create a

01:20:12.040 coalition and then redirect them to become an international terrorist group rather than just

01:20:18.820 be stuck in their nationalist orbits. And Zawahiri was one of those people. Given his druthers,

01:20:25.820 he would have just spent time trying to overthrow the Egyptian tyrants. And as you characterize the

01:20:32.780 corrupt, ruthless leader, that was true. He was right about the nature of the rule, but he was wrong

01:20:40.160 about the solution. It's funny. I always talked to my parents about this stuff when Mubarak was

01:20:45.760 entering his 573rd term as president, right? And I would ask naively as sort of a youngster, I was

01:20:52.560 like, why can't Egypt have an actual democracy? Why do these elections have to be rigged? And my parents

01:21:01.120 for right or wrong, and you have to remember, my parents have a very different view of Egypt,

01:21:04.720 right? So my mom views Egypt fondly, right? Left reluctantly, loved Nasser. My father, on the other

01:21:12.980 hand, couldn't wait to get out. Despised Egypt, never looked back, hates everything about it,

01:21:19.960 and is the classic immigrant who wants to come to the West and just hates the corruption, hates the

01:21:27.200 socialism of Nasser, right? Nasser wanted to socialize the country. But they both agreed full stop

01:21:33.120 that a country like Egypt had to be ruled by a strong man. Like their view, again, I don't know

01:21:38.280 if this is true, but their view was you could never take democratic principles and just lop them into an

01:21:44.940 Egyptian society. Like it needs an iron fist to rule it. And Mubarak was the least bad option.

01:21:53.060 That was basically the way they thought of him. What's your view of an autocratic leader of that era?

01:22:00.560 I mean, do you think that my parents, in their assessment, were correct of Egypt?

01:22:04.420 I was wrong about Egypt. I thought it was ready for democracy. And they had a parliament back during

01:22:11.540 the era of the king. So there was, even though somewhat forgotten, but there had been deliberation.

01:22:19.400 Laws were passed. You know, it had the appearance of being a constitutional monarchy because the king

01:22:25.640 was so indolent that he couldn't stir himself to do anything. My analysis was, this is a sophisticated

01:22:34.420 country. It's a country that is never going to dissolve. Like, you know, Iraq may fall apart.

01:22:42.540 That's not going to happen to Egypt. It thinks of itself as eternal. And so it's always going to be

01:22:47.900 one thing. It's always going to be the most significant Arab country, and they know it.

01:22:51.980 So I thought, well, yeah, I was all for the-

01:22:55.320 You were very optimistic in 2011.

01:22:57.180 I was.

01:22:57.520 I read a lot of what you wrote.

01:22:58.680 And I had been affected. I went back to Egypt to make a speech, or a couple of speeches. I

01:23:03.800 spoke at the American University in Cairo, where I used to teach. And I spoke at Cairo University,

01:23:09.980 where Barack Obama went to make his famous outreach speech to the Muslim world. And I remember,

01:23:17.140 this was back during the election. This was before the Arab Spring started. And during the primary

01:23:24.320 season, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were running for office, and I was asking the kids,

01:23:33.660 if you were an American, who would you vote for? How many here for Hillary Clinton? All the girls in

01:23:39.580 hijab raised their hand. And how many for Barack Obama? A lot of other people. How many for John McCain,

01:23:45.700 one guy from the embassy? But they were totally into the idea of democracy. They were excited

01:23:51.640 by what they were seeing. And that there could be revolutionary, nonviolent change was on their

01:23:59.500 mind. And one young woman said, in his very plaintive voice, what happened to us? I mean,

01:24:08.580 every Egyptian lives with the weight of history on shoulders. You look at the pyramids and Egypt was

01:24:17.000 the- The center of civilization. Absolutely. And it really was. I mean, China, it was so powerful

01:24:25.660 and so much art and then a long slide into being just a tourist kingdom. So what happened to us?

01:24:34.480 And also, such an important pillar of science, too. I mean, that's the thing. I remember as a

01:24:39.500 student, as a youngster, I hated school. I despised school. Didn't do well in school or

01:24:44.520 anything like that. Ultimately, I turned that around. But a lot of it had to do with something

01:24:49.440 my mom would say to me repeatedly growing up, which is, she would say, because we're Coptic,

01:24:53.940 right? So she would say, you know, we're descendants of the pharaohs. Like, you know,

01:24:59.080 you are a pharaoh. Science and engineering is in your blood. Your ancestors built pyramids.

01:25:07.140 You know, and she would just say these things, which when you're a kid, like, you know, you kind

01:25:10.720 of start to believe it after a while. It's like, well, you know, maybe mom's right. Maybe I am

01:25:15.140 smarter than I think I am. But it is, it's also, it's a society that does have a very scientifically

01:25:21.620 literate population. Like, you would think this shouldn't be hard to do.

01:25:27.300 Well, when I was thinking about that question that she posed to me, that young woman,

01:25:33.520 I thought when I was teaching in Cairo, Egypt was a part of what we call the developing world.

01:25:41.260 You know, these were countries like India, South Korea, Singapore. So many of what,

01:25:48.680 these countries that became the Asian tigers, they roared past Egypt. And I thought, the answer

01:25:56.880 I gave her was, her question made me think of my father and his generation. He had come out of the

01:26:03.680 Dust Bowl in Kansas, you know, broken farms, you know, just really poor. And he went on to become

01:26:12.360 a banker in Dallas, small bank, but he spent seven years in wartime in World War II in Korea.

01:26:18.880 And he and his generation built the most powerful country and economy in the history of the world.

01:26:25.700 And I said, it takes a generation. And there are generations like that right now in South Korea,

01:26:32.260 in India, in places like China, that are making their country great. But it can be done by an

01:26:41.240 individual. And I think that's my argument against tyranny. It takes a generational commitment.

01:26:46.600 And they have to have influence. They have to know that they are a part of an enterprise and they

01:26:52.640 can't be suddenly ruled out. And that is the failure of tyranny, I think, is essentially those

01:27:00.980 kinds of people that would be transformative for a country are not given the chance to be the kind

01:27:07.580 of leaders that they could be. What role does religion play in this? And specifically,

01:27:13.120 what role does Islam play in this? Is there something about Islam in its current level of

01:27:19.780 maturity, which maybe is akin to Christianity a thousand years ago, that is standing in the way

01:27:25.960 of the progress you speak of?

01:27:28.220 Well, Islam is, you know, it has many manifestations. And so it's different in Indonesia,

01:27:34.780 for instance, the largest Muslim country, a far more successful country than Egypt or Saudi Arabia,

01:27:42.380 Turkey also. But there are manifestations of Islam that are really, really harmful.

01:27:48.720 People are encouraged to adopt a kind of submissive attitude. And of course, Islam means submission.

01:27:56.040 So there's, you know, there's a literalism about it. And then if you're not, it's not,

01:28:00.740 if you don't believe in it, you have tyrants who will beat you into submission. So there are two very

01:28:06.420 powerful forces. You have dictatorships that are ruthless, justifying themselves on the basis of

01:28:13.180 religion. And then you have actual religious texts that urge you to be compliant. And, you know,

01:28:20.440 tyrants are quite adept at using those kinds of instructions. I don't think it's true that you

01:28:27.600 can't have a modern country or a democracy in an Islamic country. I think Tunisia has been

01:28:35.180 struggling to do that. And, you know, they've had some turmoil recently. But, you know, you see that

01:28:40.780 they're actually, that people in Tunisia want to have a democracy and they feel like they can be

01:28:47.700 trusted with one. But it is, you know, it's a blight on the Islamic world. And you have tyrants

01:28:54.120 from Morocco all the way to Southern China. And it's something that I hope that that religion

01:28:58.860 outgrows at some point. Yeah. I sometimes just wonder if it's really a timescale problem and

01:29:04.380 we can't think about this in decades. Well, I certainly think that's true because I've already spent

01:29:10.640 decades hoping for change and just not seeing it blossom. Egypt is, you know, when I was there,

01:29:19.740 it was far more secular, far more accommodating. When I was there, Soviets were essentially an

01:29:26.820 occupying force. And the Egyptians really longed for a relationship with the West. They liked Americans,

01:29:34.560 even though we were essentially persona non grata. They liked the fact that we horsed around with

01:29:41.980 people. We would talk to the help. We were, you know, we were Democrats in person as in spirit.

01:29:48.600 You know, it is, you know, we liked being around people into it. Whereas the Russians in the news

01:29:55.240 agency across the street, they were incredibly insular. I remember I used to, it was odd because I used to

01:30:02.240 play doubles with one of these Soviet guys. I called us the big powers. But they would have

01:30:09.960 these parties on Saturday night and you could hear them playing Teresa Brewer records, you know,

01:30:15.340 put another nickel in, you know, and they would be sitting on a couch with their drinks, just sitting

01:30:20.580 around glumly. And then at around one in the morning, there was spill out into the street, all drunk

01:30:25.980 and singing. It looked awful. But the Egyptians just hated them. It was a great time to be an American

01:30:33.840 in Egypt. Whereas after 9-11, it was entirely different. The governments were friendly, but the

01:30:39.040 people were very upset with America. And it seemed odd to me because, I mean, you attacked us.

01:30:48.160 A strong motivation for me was to go back to Egypt and find out what happened because, you know,

01:30:56.040 I remember it so fondly. I just had a great time living in Egypt and teaching these young

01:31:03.600 Egyptians and also Palestinians and Jordanians and some Africans.

01:31:09.200 And what's the answer you have?

01:31:10.360 You talked a little bit about your mom and how she believed in conspiracies and things like that.

01:31:18.640 I asked this one Egyptian woman who was saying that the Americans did 9-11 to themselves.

01:31:27.200 I heard that a lot. I said, how can you believe something for which there's absolutely no evidence?

01:31:34.840 You know, you say that, but there's nothing you can point to that shows that, you know, there's any

01:31:41.540 evidence or motivation. And she said, well, in Egypt, nobody's ever told us the truth.

01:31:49.860 And so we have to try to imagine for ourselves what it is. So the question we always ask is,

01:31:56.520 who benefits? And in this case, we think America has been waiting for the opportunity to attack the

01:32:03.720 Arab world. And so you created this excuse for yourselves. Well, that was her thinking. And

01:32:09.400 that's how conspiracies nurture themselves, you know, on these kinds of rationalizations that

01:32:15.580 float above the world of truth and evidence.

01:32:19.440 By the same logic, obviously the CIA killed Kennedy because they had to figure out a way to get into

01:32:24.560 Vietnam. So let's go back to our good friend. It's the early 90s now. He's been humiliated by his

01:32:33.700 own government who have said, thanks, but no thanks. We're going to have the Americans help us out

01:32:38.840 here. He goes to Sudan of all places. What happens in Sudan? Why doesn't he end up just settling down

01:32:49.280 in Sudan and living the rest of his years there? Oh, I wish he had. At 92 to 96, Al Qaeda became

01:32:59.000 essentially an agricultural organization. And Sudan, bin Laden in Sudan probably was the largest land

01:33:06.780 owner. He owned a considerable amount of property. And he would do jobs for the Sudanese government,

01:33:14.400 you know, build highways and stuff like that. And they would pay him with land.

01:33:17.640 Whenever I think about Sudan, I went there to try to understand that period in his life. And

01:33:26.540 I was trying to penetrate Sudanese intelligence. And so I was, you know, recruiting, you know, some

01:33:36.300 names of people that I'd been given. And I finally, you know, made some relationships. And they took me

01:33:42.240 around and showed me bin Laden's house and so on. And this was a time when I had been traveling

01:33:48.960 a lot and I had injured my back. And it was very painful to take those long airplane flights.

01:33:56.760 And I took one of those big exercise balls, you know, where you have to blow up and you have to

01:34:00.700 unblow it when you left the country. But in order to, you know, ease the pain. And so one day,

01:34:08.140 one of my Sudanese contacts knocked on my door at a hotel that called itself the Hilton.

01:34:15.000 Ahmed was the intelligence agent. And he had this guy with him who was kind of plump. And he had

01:34:22.080 one of those conical Indonesian hats that Muslims wear. So come on in. And, you know, Ahmed was very

01:34:31.300 tired. And he sat on the edge of my bed and his eyes were bobbing. And I said, Ahmed, just lie down.

01:34:37.100 So he falls asleep and he leaves me with this Al-Qaeda guy. You know, I got my ball and I give

01:34:42.440 him the office chair that's in the room. And so, who are you? And he said, well, you can call me

01:34:48.960 Loay. And that was frustrating. But I started asking him about bin Laden. He seemed to know

01:34:55.260 everything. And he, especially in Sudan, he knew all about bin Laden's enterprises. He started raising

01:35:02.600 seeds. He had, for a while, a bicycle importing company. Bicycles are usually used in Sudan because

01:35:10.060 the roads are all sand. But, you know, he had all these different enterprises. And this guy knew

01:35:15.120 everything. But he also knew all about, you know, fighting the Arabs, Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

01:35:21.340 And yet I was at sea. I didn't really know who he was. And so I went back to the U.S. and started

01:35:28.940 triangulating. And I found Mohammed Loay Bayazid, whose Al-Qaeda name was Abarid al-Suri. He was the

01:35:37.800 guy. He was the guy who took the notes at the founding of Al-Qaeda in May of 1988. It's his

01:35:44.500 handwriting. I didn't have any idea who I had. So I flew back to Sudan, and he wouldn't see me.

01:35:54.260 So then I began to court him, you know. And finally, he agreed. And I flew back. And I said,

01:36:01.380 Loay, why didn't you see me last time? I mean, it's a lot of trouble to come to Khartoum.

01:36:07.640 And he said, well, I didn't know how seriously to take you. The first time we met, you were sitting

01:36:11.680 on a balloon. That was my first Al-Qaeda interview. It was a real triumph. But those years in Sudan,

01:36:21.160 at least according to Loay, you know, they were kind of wonderful years for Al-Qaeda because they

01:36:25.900 weren't fighting anybody. Bin Laden still had money, and he was generous in handing it out.

01:36:33.040 They would have celebratory dinners, and they had soccer teams. They played, you know,

01:36:38.540 they had their own little league. And, you know, people had dormitories and stuff like that. People

01:36:44.140 got money to get married. They were settling down. It was the U.S. State Department that decided this

01:36:51.320 can't stand. So they put pressure on the Sudanese government to expel Bin Laden, and the Sudanese

01:36:58.320 government did that. Based on what?

01:37:00.220 He was a potential terrorist, a funder of terror anyway.

01:37:05.220 Mm-hmm. What hard evidence did the State Department have at that time?

01:37:08.860 Really none. There were suspicions. About that time, the CIA had opened up an office on Bin Laden,

01:37:17.140 or a file in any case.

01:37:18.840 This was before the creation of Alex Station?

01:37:21.140 That's where Alex Station came from, which was really the first sort of off-campus in the U.S.

01:37:28.200 station. But it was off-campus and ignored by the CIA. They called the people that worked

01:37:35.060 there, the Island of Lost Toys. You know, there were people that were kind of pushed out of their

01:37:40.460 own departments. And, you know, that was the team, the original team.

01:37:44.960 And that team was led by Schor?

01:37:47.100 Michael Schorier, yeah.

01:37:48.460 Schorier. And what is it that brought him to lead Alex Station? What was his conviction?

01:37:53.900 Well, Schorier is a loose cannon, to put it.

01:37:58.180 Well, certainly today, he's about as off the rails as they come.

01:38:02.040 He wants to shoot Democrats.

01:38:03.880 Yeah. But at the time, what was his conviction about Al-Qaeda?

01:38:08.960 Well, he was right about it.

01:38:10.660 Yeah.

01:38:11.180 You know, he was right that it was a terrorist organization that could strike America,

01:38:17.640 and intended to. He was right that they had reasons.

01:38:23.480 I mean, you have to give Michael Schorier credit for seeing into the mind of Bin Laden

01:38:29.880 and his followers, and seeing how they looked at the world. It's so foreign. I mean, when

01:38:37.740 9-11 happened, the idea that a man in a cave in Afghanistan would attack America was comical.

01:38:45.280 And Schorier didn't think so. So he was not a prophet, but he was an analyst that could

01:38:53.300 look at the tea leaves and see what could actually happen. And nobody took him seriously.

01:38:59.660 That's another beautiful parallel in your book, right? Is we've gone through kind of the history

01:39:03.940 of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Jihad, Al-Qaeda. We haven't quite got to the point where Al-Qaeda

01:39:11.460 and Al-Jihad become one entity, which will happen in the late 90s.

01:39:16.300 But as we move to the intelligence side, which is the harder part, I think, to wrap one's head

01:39:23.580 around, you also have these two parallels between I-49 and Alex Station, and these two personalities

01:39:30.860 between Michael Schorier and John O'Neill, which are both right, but because of their

01:39:39.380 remarkable disdain for each other, tragically, both let this thing slip.

01:39:48.140 So maybe let's now shift for a moment and talk a little bit about Alex Station and I-49,

01:39:56.380 the CIA and the FBI, which by around this point in time, the mid-90s, are starting to kind of pay

01:40:04.720 attention to this threat, you know?

01:40:06.080 You know, when you're talking about it, I reflect on the fact that the siege was built

01:40:11.920 on this same premise, that my mission was to write a movie about a woman in the CIA.

01:40:19.020 That was the assignment. Annette Bening became the woman in the CIA. And then what was the...

01:40:26.620 Soviet Union had fallen. What was the problem? You know? And I realized the CIA had a real-life

01:40:34.100 enemy. It was the FBI. And so that's what the movie's about. So maybe I was already primed to

01:40:40.800 see it that way, but, you know, I'd heard about the antagonism. But as an American, I can't tell you

01:40:51.000 how disappointed I am in our intelligence agencies and their failure to protect our country. That's

01:40:59.360 their mission. But they got so caught up in their institutional and personal antagonisms that they

01:41:05.900 allowed 9-11 to happen. And John O'Neill lived a big life. You know, he was flamboyant. You would

01:41:14.920 never think of an FBI agent. I mean, to me, FBI agents were kind of like Mormons in terms of their

01:41:21.740 dress and their sober demeanor and so on, at least the stereotypes. John O'Neill wore these,

01:41:30.140 you know, Gucci suits. And he had these transparent black socks and kind of, you know, almost ballet

01:41:36.080 slippers. And he had an office that he had personally decorated. Most FBI offices or the

01:41:43.720 furniture is all made in prisons. So all of that goes out. And in comes, you know, this luxurious

01:41:49.960 office. And he always has fresh flowers. And he has on his coffee table, this book, Tulips,

01:41:57.600 the flower that drives men wild. I mean, this is not your typical FBI agent. And he set out when he

01:42:05.180 was assigned to New York station to conquer the city. He wanted to meet everybody of any importance.

01:42:13.640 And he did. He gave his new secretary a Rolodex with all the names of the people that he wanted

01:42:21.180 to meet in the next six months. And he went down that list. So he had tentacles in every part of the

01:42:26.640 city. And he thought of himself as a sheriff. And he, you know, when the embassy bombings happened,

01:42:39.340 the FBI was given the task of trying to find out, you know, if it was a crime against America.

01:42:47.480 Yeah, we should probably take a moment to make sure people understand the difference in the mission

01:42:53.820 of the organizations, right? So the FBI is law enforcement. So think police, right? They're the top

01:43:02.180 police force. The CIA is intelligence. And it's easy to see, I suppose, how they can have different

01:43:13.740 priorities. So let's use this example that you're going to talk about, which is the bombing of the

01:43:20.680 American embassy in Kenya, which was 98. Yeah. Okay. Now, 224 people were killed. Yeah. A number of them

01:43:28.460 Americans. More than a hundred people were blinded by the flying glass. I mean, it was a horrible,

01:43:34.600 horrible tragedy. So when Americans are killed on foreign soil, is that clearly in the purview of

01:43:43.280 the FBI? Yes. That is law enforcement. They have to get permission from the country that they're going

01:43:50.080 into. But in a country like Kenya, which is an ally, this is a relatively straightforward request that

01:43:57.940 the United States FBI would be able to go in there, conduct a criminal investigation,

01:44:02.640 and bring to justice people to stand trial in the United States. Yeah. That is completely within the

01:44:10.540 law. That's the way it's supposed to work. You know, the FBI being the world's premier policing

01:44:15.660 organization, you know, it's supposed to be on the case. As it turned out, there were only six

01:44:23.240 agents in the 50,000 member FBI who spoke Arabic. One of them was Ali Sufan, born in Lebanon. And

01:44:32.800 it was during this period of time that Sufan began reading al-Qaeda literature and piecing together what

01:44:43.560 was actually going on. And he's the one who wrote a memo that got to, he got O'Neill's attention that

01:44:51.720 this was probably the mover behind that. And O'Neill had an eye for talent. And, you know,

01:44:58.960 he reached out and just grabbed this young man and brought him in, put him on I-49 squad.

01:45:03.720 Somebody who would be his eyes and ears in the Arab world. When did I-49 get formed?

01:45:09.700 I don't know. I'm not sure exactly when it was. And was it specifically anti-terror?

01:45:13.740 Yeah. That was his goal. I-49 squad was made up of a lot of people, you know,

01:45:18.780 the end of the Soviet Union caused a lot of disruption in our intelligence agencies because

01:45:24.120 guys on the I-49 squad, some of them spoke Russian, some spoke Eastern European languages,

01:45:30.340 Polish and so on. And their mission was to recruit people that were in the embassies in New York and

01:45:37.380 so on to try to, you know, and then suddenly all that fell apart. And so there was a, in the rubble

01:45:43.060 of, you know, the absence of the Soviet Union, I-49 squad was built up of enlisting a lot of

01:45:50.140 people who had no experience in dealing with the Arab world. There's a very interesting parallel

01:45:55.320 between the transition in both human capital and military capital. We're going to talk about the

01:46:04.380 USS Cole, but you're very deliberate in the way that you write about it, about the way you write about

01:46:09.640 the bombing, which is you describe in excruciating detail, the strength and might of that ship.

01:46:18.820 And you're deliberately vague about the skiff that blows it up to demonstrate, I think the enormous

01:46:27.120 asymmetry that took place. The point being this USS Cole was an unbelievable warship for traditional

01:46:36.460 warfare and yet was defenseless against guerrilla warfare. And that basically means there was kind

01:46:44.700 of this decade lag after the cold war where the military industrial complex had not adopted to what

01:46:51.340 the new warfare was. But I think what you're saying, which is you got six people that speak Arabic in the

01:46:57.080 entire FBI and the CIA also has their tentacles back in the cold war. Well, that's basically the same

01:47:05.720 thing, right? It's the human and intellectual skillset that's for the wrong war. And it seemed like it

01:47:13.940 just took a while to catch up. Unfortunately, it didn't catch up, right? I mean, I think that's part

01:47:18.480 of the story. It never did. And the coal bombing was a very telling moment. October 20th, 2000.

01:47:26.380 Amazing. Two weeks before the election.

01:47:28.240 Yeah. And this is not, you know, really remarked upon in the campaigns, but 19 sailors died and the

01:47:38.200 ship, you know, it was a stealth vessel, you know, but there was no hiding it. It was in the middle of

01:47:45.160 Aden Harbor in Yemen, which had no business being, I mean, Yemen is far from an ally and the whole area

01:47:52.420 was riddled with jihadis and, you know, people that were intent on doing harm to the U.S. And there was

01:47:59.200 this very appealing target. And there was a failed attempt to bomb it. The little skiff was overloaded

01:48:07.580 with explosives and sank, but then they pulled it off. And in some ways it prefigured 9-11, you know,

01:48:16.860 that kind of imbalance of forces that you were talking about, you know, the, you know, the coming

01:48:22.120 out of the blue, who would, who would ever have expected it. It was common. It's always been common

01:48:28.000 in, you know, ports that little boats would come out and try to sell trinkets and stuff like that,

01:48:33.260 or deliver food. And so the sailors were used to seeing boats coming toward them, but they had no

01:48:40.740 idea, you know, they were waving at the, at the people that were about to kill them.

01:48:45.780 What was involved operationally for Al Qaeda to pull off the embassy bombing in Kenya and then the

01:48:52.740 USS Cole? Because obviously they were, they were prologue to 9-11. They were practice runs. They were

01:48:59.900 never the end goal. Well, I mean, I guess you could argue bin Laden's objective was to draw the U.S.

01:49:06.820 into. Yeah, I think he thought after the embassy bombings that he, that would do the trick. And,

01:49:11.200 you know, it was infuriating to him that we ignored it. So, and then the coal bombing,

01:49:16.080 same thing. It had to be something more spectacular to get America interested in it.

01:49:20.980 The embassy bombing took place after Al-Jihad and Al-Qaeda had merged?

01:49:27.240 Yeah. And some of the operatives, some of the main operatives in the embassy bombings were the

01:49:32.620 Wahre's men. Both of these were catastrophic events that for whatever reason, America was not prepared

01:49:40.660 to pay any attention to. Why do you think that is? With all the benefits of, with 21 years of

01:49:45.780 hindsight, why is it that neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore during their entire campaigns,

01:49:55.780 including a campaign that included the explosion on the USS Cole, why was this not a priority?

01:50:02.300 If it had happened here, it would have been a different story, but it happened elsewhere.

01:50:05.800 That's one of the reasons Americans were so vulnerable is our own hubris and in the sense

01:50:11.580 of isolation that we have historically always felt. But why wasn't it enough that it had happened

01:50:17.080 abroad? They were still U.S. lives. Yes, they were. And they should have been counted more dearly,

01:50:22.420 but they weren't. It's similar with our wars, don't you think? You know, I mean, we have wars,

01:50:28.040 people die. Sometimes there's a tribute to them in the paper and you see their pictures, but not often.

01:50:33.720 And so it's the cost of doing business. There's a gap between our role in the world and the people

01:50:42.720 we think we are. And I think this was especially true before 9-11. The reason bin Laden attacked us

01:50:49.180 is he felt surrounded. He felt America was encircling the Islamic world and they were under threat.

01:50:58.500 And that why would we do that? Well, obviously our goal would be to destroy Islam. And then there was,

01:51:06.220 at the same time, this mandate he had in his mind that Islam has to rise again, you know,

01:51:13.560 once it was the superpower. You know, it went all the way into middle Europe and to southern China.

01:51:20.760 It was an expansionist power. And that it should resume that role. So, you know, there was the

01:51:29.120 sense of being threatened by the superpower and the feeling that Islam should replace it.

01:51:33.960 And that was, I think, the dynamic that was driving him. And nobody, and I can't say nobody in America,

01:51:42.260 but very few people in America would have imagined that such preposterous dreams would motivate somebody

01:51:50.680 like bin Laden and actually be able to put into effect an attack on this nation that was seemingly

01:51:59.220 invulnerable, that was so distant. How could you even reach it? And how could you touch it in a way

01:52:04.980 that would make it suffer? It's what bin Laden wanted America to suffer. And he also wanted to

01:52:13.020 humiliate America because I think he understood the power of humiliation.

01:52:18.620 Now, going back to O'Neill and Schoyer, they agreed on one thing, which was Osama bin Laden

01:52:25.580 was a really bad actor and needed to be taken seriously. In fact, you could argue that no two

01:52:33.660 people believed it more than these two. One who headed the CIA's Alex station, which was in charge

01:52:41.320 of anti-terrorism and the other I-49, which was the FBI's response to that. But beyond that,

01:52:46.980 they didn't see anything eye to eye. Fundamentally, O'Neill believed that bin Laden and other operatives

01:52:53.820 of Al-Qaeda should be brought to justice in the court of law in the United States. Schoyer and colleagues

01:53:00.480 believed these people should be assassinated. An attempt was made to assassinate bin Laden in 1998

01:53:07.540 after the bombing in Kenya. It was a bit of a debacle. It didn't amount in anything.

01:53:13.820 Why is that? Was it failed intelligence?

01:53:17.060 Well, one thing, here's the thinking that was going on inside, at that time, Clinton and White House.

01:53:24.160 They hit us twice. Well, we should hit them back twice. This is the kind of thing you do with nation

01:53:30.740 states, right? Parallel responses. So we'll bomb training camps in Afghanistan, and we'll hit this

01:53:39.380 factory in Khartoum that we think is manufacturing poison chemicals for Al-Qaeda. Actually, it was making

01:53:46.900 veterinary medicines, and it was one of the main factories in the whole country, a very poor

01:53:52.640 country. And we killed a night watchman. It just had nothing to do with any of it. But we bombed the

01:53:59.620 camps in Afghanistan. Fingers crossed bin Laden would be there. Well, he wasn't. He was on the road

01:54:06.900 to go there and then changed his mind, and they went somewhere else. So it might have happened, but it

01:54:11.700 didn't. But the point was, look what we can do. You hit us, we'll hit you back. Well, that's exactly

01:54:19.580 what bin Laden wanted. The failure of imagination that you referenced, there was a failure of

01:54:25.620 imagination, but it was coupled with prejudicial ideas about who we're dealing with and a tremendous

01:54:34.660 absence of knowledge about the cultures that our adversaries came from. So we just didn't

01:54:40.920 understand, and we couldn't understand their language. We didn't know what was going on.

01:54:44.900 And so, yeah, it was not a surprise that our imaginations didn't rise to the task because

01:54:50.320 we didn't know who we were dealing with, and we could not figure them out. Nor did we really spend

01:54:55.520 very much time worrying about it. Let's just deal with them as if it was Russia that did this,

01:55:00.960 and we'll strike them back proportionally. Clinton did have the idea, you know, he spoke to one of

01:55:07.960 his military commanders about sending in ninjas, you know, dropped rappel down from Cobra helicopters,

01:55:15.580 and that sure surprised bin Laden. And on balance, it wasn't a bad idea. That was probably the right

01:55:22.000 thing to do, go directly in there. And, you know, but, you know, we were still in the remote control

01:55:27.960 phase of our imperial rule. And I think that that's why, partly, why we didn't take, you know,

01:55:34.960 the embassy bombing seriously. That's not the way we do things. We send drones over, or we send F-16s,

01:55:42.200 or we send bombers over, and we do it remotely. And we don't dirty our hands. We don't bloody our

01:55:48.000 hands. And so, I think people just thought it would be a nuisance, and, you know, that we would

01:55:54.580 take care of it. So, as the planning for the coal bombing is underway, the planning for 9-11 is also

01:56:02.680 underway. These were parallel, not serial operations. Two men come to the United States

01:56:09.860 January 15th, 2000. Who are they?

01:56:13.960 These men are Khaled al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. There's two Saudi guys. They scarcely speak any

01:56:20.980 English at all. They had been in a meeting in Kuala Lumpur with the coal bombers. So, the coal bombers

01:56:28.220 went off to do their thing, and then they fly, first of all, to Thailand, and then they fly into

01:56:35.500 L.A. So, how can they do anything? You know, they're in a country they don't understand. They

01:56:42.680 don't speak English. You know, their mission is to go train as pilots, but they would not qualify

01:56:49.560 because they couldn't even speak enough English to go into a class. So, this is the first mystery.

01:56:55.700 What are they doing here? As it happens, that very day that they arrive, there is a Saudi figure

01:57:05.020 named Bayoumi, Omar Bayoumi, who happens to be at the Saudi consulate in L.A., talking to the

01:57:13.140 Minister of Religious Affairs. That's kind of significant because, you know, as a result of

01:57:20.620 the Mecca catastrophe, Saudis put these imams and consulates all over the place, and they had a lot

01:57:27.440 of authority. So, anyway, Omar Bayoumi leaves the Saudi consulate, and he goes to a Middle Eastern

01:57:34.340 restaurant where he happens to overhear these two guys speaking in a Saudi accent. It's, according to

01:57:41.260 him, and the Saudi government a total coincidence. Do you believe that? No, not at all. You know,

01:57:47.780 the families of the victims of 9-11 are suing the Saudi government trying to get more information

01:57:55.780 about the people that are involved in that, and Bayoumi is one of the people that they have on

01:58:00.580 their list of people to talk to. But Bayoumi is such a generous fellow that he offers to help them

01:58:07.620 find a housing in San Diego where he has a place. And so, he fronts them some money. He sets them up

01:58:14.900 in San Diego. And Bayoumi and other people in his circle begin receiving money from the wife of the

01:58:24.200 Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., ostensibly for an operation for the wife or something. You know,

01:58:31.060 these, you know, but it's significant thousands and thousands of dollars. Bayoumi takes these two

01:58:38.700 guys, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Midhar, to meet a cleric in the Saudi mosque in San Diego who is Anwar al-Awlaki,

01:58:48.960 who later becomes the voice of radical Islam. We finally killed him in Yemen. But whether he was

01:58:55.920 an Al-Qaeda connection has never been established, but wouldn't it make sense?

01:59:02.280 What is your thought on the money that was coming directly from the wife of the Saudi ambassador?

01:59:09.360 The ambassador, Bandar, was very close to, you know, the Bush White House. He was sort of the dean

01:59:17.300 of the diplomatic establishment. So, there was a plausibility thing. How, you know, would you really

01:59:24.760 see such a thing happening from the ambassador himself? But it stands that, you know, these

01:59:33.480 Saudis were getting money sent to them in San Diego by Bandar's wife. And now his daughter is the

01:59:40.460 ambassador to the U.S. So, you know, that has never been, I think, satisfactorily accounted for.

01:59:49.340 Another thing that's going on, you know, they arrived in January 15th. In March, the CIA finds

02:00:00.020 out that they're in the U.S. Probably Prince Turkey. You know, Prince Turkey told me that he had

02:00:07.140 informed the chief of station in Riyadh, the CIA man in Riyadh, about that. So, that's probably where

02:00:14.480 it came from. So, in March, this is 21 months before 9-11, almost two years, the CIA knows that

02:00:23.740 Al-Qaeda is in America. And this is at a time when they say their hair is on fire about, you know,

02:00:28.880 about Al-Qaeda, that we're under threat, they're going to the White House. And yet, they know that

02:00:34.640 Al-Qaeda is in San Diego. And moreover, Midhar's wife is in Yemen. She comes from a very Al-Qaeda

02:00:43.640 jihadi family. Her name is Hoda Al-Hada. The Al-Hada household, because it's such a hotspot,

02:00:52.460 we've got wires on them. You've tapped the phone. Yeah.

02:00:55.280 The CIA is listening to the phone calls.

02:00:58.360 Fourteen occasions, the NSA is getting calls to this Al-Qaeda house in Yemen from San Diego.

02:01:07.900 Do you have to draw a picture? What's more disturbing than this is that in October,

02:01:16.480 after the coal bombing, when Ali Sufan is questioning Kuso and the other suspects,

02:01:27.140 he asks specifically, well, he kind of, I think, through that questioning comes to learn

02:01:32.360 of the meeting that took place in Malaysia and asks explicitly on at least three occasions

02:01:41.360 for information from the CIA about these two guys in the US. And he is stonewalled.

02:01:49.700 It's not casual either. A request like that goes to the director of the FBI, who sends a letter to

02:01:58.300 his counterpart, the director of the CIA, formally requesting information about, in this case,

02:02:05.360 this meeting in Kuala Lumpur. Do you know anything about it? No, is the answer. No information.

02:02:13.160 In fact, the CIA actually covered the meeting. They recruited the Malaysian police to take photographs

02:02:19.620 and stuff like that. So they got pictures of the participants. And they hide this information from

02:02:25.860 the FBI. And going back to the mission of each of these agencies, there was the story about

02:02:35.680 the siege was who was fighting. They were fighting over who had control over terrorism in the United

02:02:41.360 States. And in real life, the FBI won that battle. So they have the authority. The CIA is not supposed

02:02:49.180 to operate in our country. But the FBI has the authority, has a warrant on al-Qaeda and bin Laden

02:02:55.880 and all his followers. So how is this not, in the clearest legal sense, obstruction of justice?

02:03:02.840 It is obstruction of justice. The CIA obstructed justice when Ali Safan was investigating the coal

02:03:09.820 bombing. They hid information about the planning and they hid information about the Kuala Lumpur

02:03:15.980 meeting. This is a murder investigation. 19 sailors. So at this point, Michael Schur is gone,

02:03:24.220 correct? He has been relieved of his duties at Alex Station? Yeah. What led to that? Well,

02:03:30.360 he was relentless in pressing the agency and trying to get rid of bin Laden. There was a moment where

02:03:37.240 he thought bin Laden might be at one of the camps in Afghanistan. And he said, the reason that he

02:03:46.440 might be there is that a lot of the royal family from the UAE was coming to go bustard hunting. It's

02:03:52.540 this endangered bird that is popular. And so let's bomb the camp and we'll kill all the princes,

02:04:01.600 but we might get bin Laden. Well, that was the kind of thinking that Michael Schur was capable of.

02:04:06.800 Yeah. Which again, the UAE is an ally. I mean, it would be hard to fathom.

02:04:11.600 Yeah. And we were just at that moment selling them a whole fleet of F-16s. So there was a financial

02:04:17.480 investment in not doing that as well, in addition to the absurdity of the scene. But that's the kind

02:04:24.480 of thing that Schur would propose. So who took over Alex Station when Schur was terminated?

02:04:31.000 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,

02:04:37.140 Lord. But the woman that took over the station is an FBI, a villain, but she and Schur later married.

02:04:47.860 So it was an office romance.

02:04:50.920 It was an extension of Schur anyway.

02:04:53.620 Yeah.

02:04:54.300 Now, one of the things that's interesting about Alex Station is it had a number of I-49 agents

02:04:58.740 that sat within it physically. So these are FBI agents that are sitting inside Alex Station,

02:05:04.700 but they were kind of handcuffed because they were privy to the information that the CIA had,

02:05:11.100 but they weren't permitted to share it with their colleagues at FBI. One of the things that struck

02:05:16.940 me as odd is that none of them broke rank. You see an Edward Snowden a decade later who goes

02:05:24.860 completely rogue and decides for right or wrong, this is his conviction. This is what he's going to do

02:05:30.920 about it. This is in the best interest of American lives. And yet amazingly, none of the FBI agents

02:05:37.080 sitting inside of Alex Station who presumably saw what was happening, didn't think I'm willing to

02:05:43.920 jeopardize my job here and maybe face criminal charges to get information because they saw the

02:05:51.300 wires coming in. They saw the requests repeatedly from the FBI, from Sufan saying, who are these people?

02:05:59.100 What happened in Malaysia? Why is money leaving to go to these people? Why is this money coming to

02:06:05.680 the United States? Did you ever get an insight into why the FBI people inside Alex Station were muzzled?

02:06:13.160 You know, it was more of a legal conceit they called the wall. And the idea was that information

02:06:21.780 should not travel from the intelligence world into the criminal one and vice versa. There was really no

02:06:28.700 law. People thought it was a law. But it was a custom. And the FBI had its own intelligence division.

02:06:38.000 And so it was part of it. It's like grand jury testimony. It's supposed to be sealed, kept pure

02:06:44.620 and secret. But when you're faced with something like that, your only alternative, you know, is to break

02:06:52.380 the law. And there can be very serious consequences. And it's a lonely thing to do. But that's really

02:06:57.800 the only thing you can do. What I can tell you is how broken those people are by what happened.

02:07:07.840 They knew what was underway. And they lost their boss. John O'Neill died as a consequence of their

02:07:15.780 reticence to say anything. I'm not holding them responsible for 9-11. But I do hold the CIA responsible

02:07:25.860 for it. If they had been transparent with the FBI, if they had said, we have these al-Qaeda members in

02:07:33.680 America, the FBI had the authority. They had the warrant. They had everything. They could follow them. They could

02:07:40.160 tape them. They could, you know, clone their computers. And they could arrest them. There were

02:07:46.060 all these things that they could do. But they were kept in the dark. And of course, the question is,

02:07:55.380 why? How many people in the CIA were you able to interview?

02:08:00.660 They were actually working in the CIA. There was a moment where I think it's time has passed enough

02:08:08.680 that I can say this. I wrote an article about Ayman El-Zawahiri for the New Yorker. And the CIA

02:08:16.020 asked to talk to me. And so I was picked up by an FBI agent who worked at the CIA and driven to CIA

02:08:27.040 headquarters and gone up to the seventh floor. And there was a conference room. And I met with

02:08:31.520 ALEC station. There were about 20-something people there. The meeting started off in Arabic.

02:08:40.340 And I said,

02:08:41.360 You know, everybody here speaks Arabic? And they had learned it in the last couple of years.

02:08:49.520 I was impressed by that. But I was not impressed with their intelligence. You know, I was a reporter

02:08:55.740 on the ground, you know, going around talking to people. And I wasn't trying to hide information

02:09:02.540 from the CIA. I publish it. You know, it's not what I find out. I want people to know. So I didn't

02:09:08.880 feel like I was betraying sources or anything like that by talking to the CIA. What I did want was a

02:09:16.660 little bit of information from them in return. And what they confided was that bin Laden was alive.

02:09:23.300 At that time, there was a lot of talk. What year was that?

02:09:27.040 I'm guessing it was 2003. It might have been earlier in that because I went to Egypt in,

02:09:34.760 it must have been 2002. Bin Laden was keeping his head down. And so, you know, there was a lot of

02:09:41.240 talk that maybe we got him or that he was sick, you know. And intelligence agencies,

02:09:47.860 at least my experience with American intelligence agencies, is that they tend to trust information

02:09:55.280 that has been stolen. In other words, wiretaps, stuff that people are saying, not knowing supposedly

02:10:02.140 that they're being listened to. Reporters have a different posture. We go out and talk to people

02:10:08.600 and ask them what they're up to and why and, you know, where'd you come from? And, you know,

02:10:13.420 those types of things you don't normally get on transcripts. And so, they apparently taped my

02:10:19.340 phone. You know, one of my sources said he read a conversation I had, came in on his laptop at the

02:10:27.500 agency. It was a conversation I'd had with Zawahiri's cousin.

02:10:33.100 So, the legal authority they had to tap your phone was because of who you were speaking to?

02:10:37.880 You're not supposed to tap Americans. If that had been a tap on my line, or if I were talking to,

02:10:47.260 you know, as I had been to Zawahiri's cousin, they should say individual A. And so, I'm not identified.

02:10:55.620 But, you know, obviously, I was. And I thought at the time, oh, those Egyptians, you know, they're on top

02:11:03.100 of, you know, Zawahiri's cousin. They sent this as a gift to the CIA. And then I, a couple of years

02:11:11.340 later, learned that American intelligence had been taping Americans and some reporters. And I,

02:11:18.000 obviously, I had had a visit from, there's a terrorism squad, even in Austin. You know, a couple

02:11:25.960 of guys came over. They wanted to talk to me. And I thought they wanted advice because I had

02:11:30.540 talked to FBI agents before to give them a little background on Al-Qaeda. And I thought that's what

02:11:36.520 this was. And one of them was from the FDA, but he was on the terrorism squad. And he walked into my

02:11:43.200 office, and there are all these books on Al-Qaeda. And there's, you know, a whiteboard full of Arabic

02:11:48.840 names. And, you know, he was terrified. His hands were trembling. What they wanted to know was about a call

02:11:56.220 that I had made to England. And it was a 44201 number, you know, and it just sounded like business

02:12:05.740 number in London. And I said, surely you know who it is. But I looked on my Rolodex, and it was a

02:12:12.840 barrister who represented some jihadis. Then they said, did you know a person named Caroline Wright,

02:12:18.940 who's my daughter? She was in college. And they thought it was Caroline calling this barrister to get

02:12:26.200 to these jihadis. And I thought, this is our intelligence? You know, it was, you know. And then

02:12:32.620 as I started thinking about it, it was like, wait a minute. How do you know it's my line? How do you

02:12:41.620 know that, you know, that Caroline would, how do you know about Caroline at all? You wouldn't have

02:12:47.680 gotten that if you hadn't been listening to the call. And I was really outraged as an American

02:12:53.820 citizen, but also shocked by the level of incompetence. I mean, I was grateful they came

02:13:00.040 to clear it up. I have to say they at least did that. But the presumptions that they had

02:13:05.440 were so absurd that I could see how we got ourselves into this fix. The two hijackers,

02:13:12.960 the future hijackers in San Diego, the FBI, their line on what was going on is the CIA knew they

02:13:22.180 couldn't operate in America. But the Saudis could. And so they struck a deal with the Saudis

02:13:28.520 to try to follow these guys and turn them. Here they are in our clutches. We have an opportunity

02:13:34.420 to penetrate al-Qaeda, which is not something the CIA had been able to do. Although young men

02:13:40.500 from all over the world were simply walking into the camps and becoming al-Qaeda members. But they

02:13:46.880 thought that the Saudis would do them that favor. And then the two hijackers disappeared and the CIA

02:13:55.300 lost them. It was then in August of 2001, just a couple of weeks before 9-11, that the CIA went to

02:14:04.260 the FBI to ask them to find these guys that they had lost. And it was too late. The FBI never did find

02:14:11.820 them. So Muhammad Atta is an interesting character. Of all the 9-11 hijackers, obviously he was the

02:14:22.560 senior figure, but he was also such an interesting and unusual character, right? Like it's hard to make

02:14:28.560 sense of his motivation, an educated man, a pious man. But one of the things I've always struggled with

02:14:39.140 is what is it that these guys believed was going to happen? You go back to the story about the birds

02:14:46.800 circling and the flesh not rotting. Do you believe every one of those 19 men believed they would be

02:14:52.920 greeted in paradise by virgins? And do you think they literally believe that? I think so. It may have

02:15:01.660 not been the preponderant motive for them. Although martyrdom seems to be the highest

02:15:08.400 motivation, right?

02:15:09.320 Martyrdom, even if you're not going to paradise and getting the virgins and all of that,

02:15:15.760 martyrdom has its appeal for, especially for young men who have really little opportunity to make a dent

02:15:22.520 in the world. And here you can go off and change history. All you have to do is sacrifice your life.

02:15:28.280 So the martyrdom might be the carrot, but it might not be. It might just be that, you know,

02:15:36.480 they wanted to prove a point and they wanted to go down in history and they have.

02:15:42.360 You talk about how terrorist organizations were allowed to legally operate inside of Germany,

02:15:48.160 provided that they were foreign and not domestic terrorist organizations.

02:15:52.340 That's almost an unfathomable statement. Can you help make sense of that?

02:15:58.440 You know, Germany has a tortured history. Its problems with fanaticism on German soil

02:16:07.100 has historically been a corrective. So you cannot very easily be a fascist in Germany now.

02:16:15.160 There are fascists in Germany, but, you know, it's sort of an underground thing.

02:16:20.040 Other countries, there's this sense in Germany of implicit neutrality. We don't take positions on

02:16:28.100 things like that. So if you're opposed to your government and you flee to Germany for asylum,

02:16:36.480 what you do with, you know, in relation to your home country is your business, not ours.

02:16:42.060 Just don't screw around with, you know, with our country. And that was, it's not just Germany.

02:16:47.860 Europe was slow to awaken to, you know, the threat to their own countries, in part because in England,

02:16:56.560 terrorists were actually brought into England because they were escaping the death penalty in

02:17:01.560 Egypt and they still live with subsidized rent and such a thing. In London, one of my sources is a

02:17:08.300 driving instructor in London and he killed this little girl, Shema, in Egypt in his attempt to

02:17:15.260 kill the prime minister. That kind of mentality came about because people just didn't feel threatened.

02:17:22.920 And I think to some extent that explains why these terror groups were allowed to grow up

02:17:29.300 inside the borders, especially of England and Germany and Spain as well.

02:17:34.460 When did Atta come to the United States?

02:17:36.460 I don't remember the exact month. His cohorts had begun to assemble. And so I think he was one of

02:17:45.180 the last to arrive. He was in Spain coordinating with some of the Spanish Al Qaeda guys. To what

02:17:52.340 end? We're not really sure. But then, you know, he flew into America. Of course, unlike the other

02:17:59.420 guys, his English was pretty good. So his English is good. He's one of the four pilots. How were they

02:18:07.560 coordinating inside the U.S.? What did they communicate by? Did they speak on cell phones?

02:18:13.140 Did they use email? How did these 19 guys organized in four groups communicate?

02:18:18.800 Well, they did use email and cell phones. And what you have to understand, they weren't really

02:18:25.000 hiding. Nobody, you know, the CIA knew that Al Qaeda was present. And the Al Qaeda guys didn't

02:18:32.480 know the CIA knew that. So ostensibly, they just lived openly. They had driver's licenses and stuff in

02:18:39.780 their own names. Eventually, the FBI would find that they were listed in the San Diego phone directory.

02:18:45.360 So, you know, they weren't in hiding. They didn't feel threatened. And they took advantage of that

02:18:52.160 freedom. So after the election, Richard Clark, who's also a very important figure in your book,

02:18:59.700 gets a demotion. Why is that? That was not clear to me in the book.

02:19:06.060 He had been, under Clinton, the kind of terrorism czar. When the Bush administration came in,

02:19:13.660 they didn't see the need for that. And their view was about the big picture. We're talking about

02:19:20.140 China and Russia. And so the people in their NSA and, you know, Secretary of State and Condi Rice and

02:19:27.660 so on, they came from the old school. Clark told me that when he talked to Condi Rice to try to

02:19:35.280 alert her to the danger of Al Qaeda, he had the feeling she'd never heard of the organization.

02:19:41.960 It's hard to imagine that she didn't hear of it at all. But she clearly didn't take it seriously

02:19:49.440 enough to take his counsel. And so he was pushed down the ranks. And Bush was, you know, I don't

02:19:58.680 think he took it seriously until the Saudis threatened to break off relations with the U.S. because of

02:20:06.160 Israel. And that woke him up. He was very concerned about that. But then there was a CIA memo. I think

02:20:14.460 it was dated August 6, 2001. This is the PD. This is the presidential daily brief that was titled

02:20:20.640 Al Qaeda set to attack in the U.S. Right. And so it couldn't have been clearer. And this was about

02:20:27.820 the same time the CIA lost those guys in San Diego. So suddenly things are moving and they're out of

02:20:36.640 the CIA's control. During the 9-11 commission, when Condi Rice was asked about that memo, August 6th,

02:20:45.380 right? So five weeks before 9-11, the president of the United States gets a briefing that says Al Qaeda

02:20:52.460 is going to strike on U.S. soil. And of course, when Congress questioned her, it was sort of why

02:20:59.600 was this not taken seriously? Her response was, if I recall, something akin to this was dated. There

02:21:06.940 was nothing new in here. This was speculative. There was no real intelligence. Am I remembering that

02:21:13.240 correctly? Yeah. Such dodges were characteristic of a lot of the people involved in this massive

02:21:19.620 intelligence failure. I've asked people in the CIA, you know, people in high authority

02:21:25.040 about those hijackers, for instance. And no, we didn't really know they were, I mean, it was just

02:21:31.760 incompetence, actually. You know, there were memos that we didn't read. And, you know, yes, it was in

02:21:37.260 the memos, but it never really came to the attention of people in authority. And in other words, there's a

02:21:42.260 fog, pixie dust thrown in your eyes. Whereas nothing could be more incendiary to the very same

02:21:49.500 people that are ringing the alarm bells saying Al Qaeda is on the war path and is coming our way.

02:21:55.940 And then they say, well, you know, we didn't, we weren't really paying attention to that. And the

02:21:59.860 memo never came to our attention. Bullshit. CIA was well aware by this time, you know, there was

02:22:06.760 the embassy bombers, there was a coal bombing. There was in, then, you know, they become aware

02:22:11.820 that Al Qaeda is in America now. So they're moving onto our soil. And that's the origin of that

02:22:17.520 particular memo is that CIA knows they're here. And so they're obviously, they're going to do an

02:22:24.040 attack here. Now, O'Neill said this to Condoleezza Rice before he was fired, forced to resign.

02:22:31.260 And she seemed to indicate that this was not a high priority because it, I think in the,

02:22:39.260 in the words at least used in the dramatized version of this, this was swatting flies, right?

02:22:44.020 This was what we've got a couple of Al Qaeda guys in this country. That's not strategic. That's not

02:22:49.940 relevant. One of the things that's just so mind boggling to me about this story is how incompetence

02:22:58.000 is, I mean, this is obviously a big part of this, but it's the personality conflicts that got in the

02:23:04.200 way. I mean, another character in this story whose role is really quite sad is Barbara Bodine,

02:23:10.520 then ambassador in Yemen who did not get along with John O'Neill, which I guess you can't fault her for

02:23:18.320 that. I can, John O'Neill struck me just from everything I've read about him. And I know you did

02:23:22.960 not have the ability to interview him, but you're doing, your reporting is based on interviews with

02:23:27.720 everyone who knew him. He struck me as a love or hate guy. Is that a safe? Oh yeah. He was a

02:23:32.700 polarizing figure. Yeah. You either absolutely loved this guy or you absolutely hated this guy,

02:23:37.800 but I never got the impression that anybody wouldn't think he was competent.

02:23:42.020 Yeah. Barbara Bodine seemed to have a thing about men and guns and she was offended that the FBI came to

02:23:52.020 Yemen with a bunch of armaments. Of course it was dangerous and O'Neill was trying to take care of

02:23:59.320 his people and they were authorized to carry weapons, but she was offended and made them give up their

02:24:07.180 long guns. And she kicked him out of Yemen. She did. Which is another real setback in the investigation

02:24:13.340 at the time. Taking her side. I'm sure she perceived O'Neill as a swaggering misogynist

02:24:21.140 and she wasn't going to have any of that. And she felt that she had a role as the ambassador to

02:24:29.360 cultivate a better relationship with the Yemenis. And here he was coming in, kicking up all this dust,

02:24:35.920 alienating everybody with his American big footing. So enough of this, I can do without him. And it was

02:24:44.900 a terrible blow for O'Neill. And I think that in some ways led to his sort of disgrace at the end

02:24:55.820 where he had to go to a retirement conference and he took some papers out of the office he shouldn't

02:25:01.140 have taken. But he was doing work in Florida at this retirement conference and then left his briefcase

02:25:08.400 in a conference room and somebody took it. He got it back. And, you know, the only thing that was

02:25:15.320 taken was like a silver cigar cutter and the papers were still in there. But, you know, he turned himself

02:25:20.720 in and he had a lot of enemies inside the FBI and they were not going to miss the opportunity to use

02:25:27.620 this to get rid of him. Now, he had many job opportunities after he left the FBI.

02:25:34.120 One of them was a job in the government, again, in the White House, correct? Or at least that was something

02:25:38.880 that Dick Clark hoped he would take. It's not clear that he would have been... Dick wanted him to replace him.

02:25:43.180 He couldn't think of a better person. And O'Neill had lived above his means for many years.

02:25:49.660 I don't know how he got away with it. But he was deeply in debt.

02:25:53.620 And I think he was also deeply wounded by his experience with government. And so he wanted to

02:26:00.640 get out and make some money. And there was money to be made for him. With his experience, the job that

02:26:07.160 he settled on was head of security at the World Trade Center. And I know that... And listen,

02:26:13.380 when this whole adventure started for me by reading obituaries that were streaming online

02:26:20.640 right after 9-11, I was trying to find a way into the story, something that would humanize it.

02:26:27.360 I was looking for people who died on 9-11 and see if I could find a narrative. And on the Washington

02:26:35.160 Post site, about six days after 9-11, I think, was this obituary of John O'Neill. The FBI,

02:26:42.660 head of counterterrorism. Recently retired, been on the job for a month.

02:26:48.160 It was more than that. It's spelled out that he had taken classified information out of the office.

02:26:54.880 I thought, I didn't know if he was a hero or a goat, but his life could tell us something about

02:27:01.820 why we failed. He was the head of counterterrorism in New York. He's the guy that had the warrant on

02:27:07.340 Bin Laden. But instead of getting Bin Laden, Bin Laden got him. That was the way I looked at it.

02:27:13.300 It's one of those things, Lawrence, where if this weren't a true story, if you had written

02:27:19.100 The Looming Tower as a fiction, I don't know that the editors would have let you end it the way you

02:27:25.320 did. I don't think they would have let you have John O'Neill actually die inside the World Trade

02:27:31.340 Center a month after being forced to resign from the FBI because he was kicked out at the shins and

02:27:40.400 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

02:27:49.720 that way. Now, he told his colleagues, some of them said to him, John, you'll be safe now because they

02:27:59.000 already hit the Trade Center because they've been a bombing. He said, no, they'll come back to finish

02:28:05.240 the job. So I think he instinctively put himself at ground zero. In that sense, I see it as a Greek

02:28:12.440 tragedy. He, in some ways, anticipated his fate and went to meet it. He actually left the tower that

02:28:23.480 day and went back inside to rescue people. Yeah, that's, that's the thing. He, he walked back into

02:28:30.620 the building as many heroes did. If September 11th took place on December 11th, if the mission were

02:28:41.620 postponed two months, do you think that would have been enough time for the FBI to figure it out?

02:28:47.680 How close was the FBI to doing this despite the incompetence of the CIA, if not the outright

02:28:57.360 negligence of the CIA? It's hard to calculate how much they could have done, but they, there's no

02:29:04.240 reason to think that they couldn't have once alerted in August and given three or four months to work it

02:29:11.020 out. No reason to think that they couldn't have tracked down the communications. If the American

02:29:16.900 intelligence community had been helpful to them. Well, cause remember the other thing that I always

02:29:22.940 feel like they were so close to cracking was once they had the list, the CIA list of suspected Al Qaeda

02:29:32.040 operatives and the list of Arabs in flight schools, and they crossed that list, that was just a matter

02:29:41.260 of time. It seems like it. And you know, there were several cases, like you mentioned, the flight

02:29:46.740 schools in Arizona and Minnesota, you know, there were these weird things where, you know, these Arab

02:29:52.940 would be pilots who wanted to learn how to fly, but not how to land. So those are really puzzling

02:30:00.220 things. Now, of course it was nothing like this had ever happened before. It seems crazy, but on the

02:30:06.620 other hand, it had been envisioned. But you'd think like all it would have taken would have been a

02:30:11.920 handful of these guys show up on a cross list and that manifest gets sent to TSA or whatever.

02:30:19.940 Was TSA TSA back then? I don't know what it was called, but like there would have been a watch list

02:30:25.160 that said you, cause as you said, these guys are getting on airplanes with their real names. They had

02:30:29.260 a real ID. Well, also, you know, there were, you know, there's one of the FBI agents in Phoenix,

02:30:36.340 you know, actually wrote, I think this was a guy that did that, that just, you know, they could

02:30:40.640 envision crashing into buildings, you know, that's spookily prescient. And then there was, you know, secret,

02:30:49.600 you know, the 9-11 families had sued to get the 28 pages that had been suppressed in the 9-11 report.

02:30:57.560 And we finally got them, although there's still some redaction in it. And in there, you see Saudis

02:31:04.400 on airplanes doing trial runs, getting the ticket in the first class compartment and walking into the

02:31:11.160 cockpit. And, oh, I thought this was a bathroom. And then one of them was so provocative in his

02:31:18.220 actions that they actually landed the plane to stop the flight, put down to nearest airport. And,

02:31:24.080 you know, I had somebody come out and interrogate two, I think, Saudis. And they said, no, we're,

02:31:29.280 we're going to a party at the Saudi embassy. And they gave them a number in the Saudi embassy in

02:31:33.880 Washington. Well, that's damning. And no wonder it was suppressed if you're trying to protect your

02:31:40.340 relationship with Saudi Arabia. But it hasn't been explained. But these were clearly trial runs.

02:31:47.080 And the CIA knew about them. That's why that was in the 9-11 report. You know, this is intelligence

02:31:56.060 that had been surfaced. So there was intelligence around that something was cooking. And even the

02:32:02.920 CIA, you know, George Tenet was telling the White House, they're going to attack us. They're coming

02:32:08.360 for us.

02:32:09.080 That's the thing with Tenet I can't understand from your book. I got to be honest with you. I'm

02:32:13.080 really conflicted and confused. On the one hand, he seems to be in lockstep with Richard Clark

02:32:19.220 in saying, this is a big deal. And he seems incredibly frustrated with the Bush administration

02:32:26.080 that they're not taking this more seriously. And he seems to believe that this is almost something

02:32:32.020 they're doing out of spite. Like whatever the previous president did, we're absolutely going to

02:32:36.340 do the opposite. But at the same time, I think, how is it then that under your watch,

02:32:42.560 your organization was so derelict?

02:32:45.900 He's never really been able to produce an incredible answer. I've tried to imagine what

02:32:52.300 was going through his mind. If it's the case that he did seriously believe that Al Qaeda was a threat

02:32:58.560 and that he had been striking a deal with the Saudis. You know, it was a risky deal, but you know,

02:33:05.080 one that had the potential for a huge payoff. And then it gets out of control. And just as it's

02:33:12.420 getting out of control, he is dramatically shouting, pay attention, Al Qaeda's on the war path.

02:33:19.840 So it's sort of like the arsonist who, as the house catches on fire, is actually the one that

02:33:25.280 calls the firefighter.

02:33:26.840 Yeah, I think that's a fair comparison. I don't know what's going through. I want to be fair to him.

02:33:31.860 Yeah. You were not able to interview him?

02:33:33.640 He wouldn't talk to me. And he's never really dealt seriously with this subject.

02:33:38.800 It's not just George Tenet, but he's responsible. He was the person who oversaw the American

02:33:45.040 intelligence community in one of his greatest catastrophes in our history. And not that it's

02:33:51.760 been so sterling since then, but you know, it was an unbelievable failure. And there are so many

02:34:00.380 points. Yes, it's true Monday morning quarterbacking and all of that. But I think I'm being fair enough

02:34:07.720 to say the CIA knew what was going on. They hid the information from the FBI. Had the CIA been

02:34:15.000 transparent and worked in tandem with the FBI, that 9-11 would not have happened. I think the facts

02:34:22.920 support that. So there's never been accountability for this. Not any. And in fact, George Tenet got the

02:34:33.060 Medal of Freedom and all these other things, accolades. I'm not saying that he belongs in

02:34:39.140 prison, although I can understand why people might say that. But he should be held accountable,

02:34:44.260 as should everybody in authority at that agency. I wanted to ask you about that, which is given

02:34:51.300 all that we know today, has anyone inside the CIA been charged with a criminal offense for

02:35:00.140 obstruction of justice? No, no, they were promoted. People that knew about this were given plum

02:35:05.540 assignments. I asked one of the directors, has anybody been held accountable? He said, well, yes,

02:35:13.560 I've held people accountable. Well, who? For what? And he wouldn't specify, but there was no evidence

02:35:20.620 of it. I asked about, it was a question about torture and the two hijackers in San Diego and

02:35:30.620 maybe one other thing. And I said, you know, this is a history of the CIA, not all under your reign,

02:35:37.120 but, you know, partly, you know, has anybody been held accountable? And he quarreled with some of my

02:35:43.980 facts without actually saying that they were wrong. And then I said, so in other words,

02:35:50.220 nobody's been held accountable. And then he said, no, that's not true. I've held people accountable

02:35:54.900 myself. But I don't know how to credit that. The most conspicuous people got promotions.

02:36:01.360 Yeah. I mean, let's just think about it through the lens of the family members of 9-11,

02:36:05.020 them, right? So we had a 9-11 commission. What came of that for the family members?

02:36:11.980 It was frustrating for the family members. It was presented as being the whole truth and nothing

02:36:18.080 but the truth. And then it came out that there were parts of the 9-11 commission that were

02:36:23.720 suppressed and the 28 pages, most notably. And of course there were a lot of pages redacted,

02:36:29.400 but- And the 28 pages that were suppressed dealt primarily with the Saudis that really,

02:36:34.720 because again, I remember even at the time, one of the things that was odd was, you know,

02:36:40.240 the Saudis, you know, being given air clearance to leave.

02:36:43.940 Yeah.

02:36:44.780 How do you make sense of this? This is one that I have a hard time wrapping my head around, which is

02:36:49.040 why would anybody inside of Saudi Arabia had wanted this? I'm talking about not obviously Al-Qaeda,

02:36:55.260 but I'm talking about anyone within the royal family, anyone within the Saudi intelligence

02:36:59.540 community. I mean, there's no doubt to me that Prince Turkey was a good guy, right? This is a guy

02:37:04.900 who I can't imagine there was any part of him that would want to see bin Laden and his organization

02:37:10.160 succeed. So what's the explanation for how any of the quote unquote Saudi good guys could have stood by

02:37:17.560 and knowingly watched this happen or worse supported it financially or otherwise?

02:37:23.840 If we think about, you know, these things as an intelligence analyst, just imagine, here are the

02:37:30.580 facts, where are the Saudis in this and why are they behaving like this? I think that the Saudis thought,

02:37:37.580 for one thing, they gave us the information that Al-Qaeda is in America. Perhaps if this FBI scenario

02:37:46.300 is correct, that the CIA thought that they could turn these guys, they work out a deal with the

02:37:53.520 Saudis where they're going to run these people. You know, they'll use them as potential recruits

02:38:00.720 and they fund the Bayoumis and other people that are sort of their supervisors. So they give them money

02:38:08.620 to keep the operation going. And there's a certain ambition on the part of the Saudis to show how,

02:38:17.260 what a great job they can do. And also these are Saudis that are in America. And so they want to try

02:38:23.700 to keep control on them. So I can envision that. But does that explain how they would actually,

02:38:30.020 how the ambassador's wife would send money to known- It would explain if Bayoumi,

02:38:36.740 for instance, is a Saudi intelligence operative. And his job is to oversee these guys.

02:38:42.880 Oversee them to prevent them from attacking on U.S. soil?

02:38:46.500 Oversee to penetrate their cell and understand what's going on.

02:38:50.500 I see.

02:38:51.420 And I don't know if the Saudis knew that they were planning to fly planes into buildings,

02:38:56.360 but they were up to something. So what could it be?

02:38:59.580 I see. So that's a more plausible explanation, which is that, again, their failure of imagination

02:39:07.140 was, they had no idea that these Saudi kids could accomplish something as grand.

02:39:13.800 Especially given that pair. It's hard to imagine that they would take them that seriously. On the

02:39:20.220 other hand, there they were.

02:39:21.900 I see. This makes a bit more sense. So going back to my analogy,

02:39:25.540 they're not really acting as an arsonist. They're somebody who accidentally sets the house on fire,

02:39:32.080 but then realizes, oh, I just set the house on fire. I better call.

02:39:38.360 Right.

02:39:38.620 But I also better make sure I'm nowhere near this fire when they get here.

02:39:42.380 I'm not going to stick around to say, I was doing this and that.

02:39:46.540 One always hopes for whistleblowers and somebody to come clear the air and there are documents to

02:39:52.360 surface that, and none of that has happened, you know, so far. I may be wrong about all this. It

02:39:58.420 could be simply incompetence, which explains so many things, but there were people like those FBI

02:40:06.780 guys and you, they knew something was going on and they were alarmed and, you know, and they were

02:40:13.620 also shut down when they tried to air their concern. So obviously it was important enough

02:40:20.340 and dozens of people in the CIA at high levels read these memos. So I long for the day when somebody

02:40:29.660 comes up and says, this is what actually happened. It hadn't happened so far in 20 years. And I think

02:40:36.320 that the longing of the CIA is to bury it in institutional memory and have it never surface.

02:40:41.620 Richard Clark apologized to the family members of the 9-11 victims. How many other government

02:40:49.600 officials apologized publicly?

02:40:51.620 I don't know of any. There was an awful lot of scolding going on, but what made Dick Clark's

02:40:58.080 statement so cathartic is he took responsibility. Nobody else did that.

02:41:04.280 I always found it amazing that he became sort of a target of partisan hit jobs.

02:41:10.180 Yeah, I know.

02:41:11.260 Which is, I mean, I've read quite a bit about him. I've obviously never had the privilege of meeting

02:41:15.180 him, but never came across to me as a partisan guy, actually. I actually served presidents of

02:41:20.880 both administrations.

02:41:21.780 Yeah, I was-

02:41:22.780 Served George H.W. Bush before Clinton. I mean-

02:41:25.900 I was on Sean Hannity's show one time and it seemed like one of the main things he wanted to do is

02:41:31.940 attack Dick Clark. I wasn't prepared for it at all. I mentioned that incident where he said that

02:41:39.180 Condi had dismissed Al-Qaeda and Hannity went off on Dick Clark. And I said, but he's been a

02:41:47.960 wonderful public servant. You know, I mean, you may think ill of him, but, you know, he's a master

02:41:54.060 bureaucrat and he was one of the ones that was, you know, ringing the alarm about Al-Qaeda.

02:41:59.100 We live in a culture that's just full of people that like to attack others. But Dick Clark, you can

02:42:07.940 be puzzled over some of his actions. Like he was the one who authorized the flights for the Saudis to

02:42:14.120 leave the U.S. And I'm sure that he envisioned, you know, retaliatory attacks on members of the

02:42:21.200 Saudi royal family or bin Laden's family who were present here. And that's totally plausible. But

02:42:28.260 was it a wise thing to do? I don't know. What were the days after 9-11 like for Ali Soufan?

02:42:34.540 Oh, God. It's hard not to think about who he was. You know, this young guy,

02:42:45.700 an earnest immigrant who is probably the most valuable person in the FBI at that point.

02:42:53.860 He's in his 20s. He's been given, I think he was 26 when he became the lead agent for the coal

02:43:02.420 bombing. Huge responsibility. And he is deeply intelligent. And he is also totally conversant

02:43:14.420 with Islam and with the politics of the Middle East. Such that, you know, when he would interrogate

02:43:22.000 the Al-Qaeda guys. And they would bring up stuff about Islam. He's pulled out the Quran and said,

02:43:28.340 show me where, show me that in the Quran. And he could recite the Quran himself.

02:43:34.720 In fact, during his interrogation of Abu Jindal, I mean, he basically won him over with his knowledge

02:43:40.160 of the religion. He knew how to interrogate people without torturing them. And in fact, during Guantanamo,

02:43:47.880 when they started waterboarding, he called the director and said, I'm either going to arrest these

02:43:54.920 people or I have to leave. And the director said, leave. We don't want to, we're not going to be a part

02:44:00.620 of that. He's a seminal figure in our history in some ways. He's the guy that identified through his

02:44:09.700 interrogations who the Al-Qaeda people were. He got the names through his skilled interrogation

02:44:18.420 techniques. And all the time, the CIA was hiding something from him, which was the meeting in

02:44:28.960 Kuala Lumpur, where the coal bombers had been present and photographed. And those photographs were-

02:44:35.700 Tons of cash had been transferred. Ali knew about the transfers, but didn't know why. And, you know,

02:44:42.420 and who, who are they? And he was beginning to get some names from his interrogations. And so that was

02:44:48.260 some of the stuff that was flowing up in his request to the CIA for more information. And, you know,

02:44:53.820 he's flatly denied. Then 9-11 happens. And all he can think about is he has to get back to America.

02:45:02.720 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

02:45:13.720 representative, no, you have to go back. Go back into, you know, your office in Yemen. And they give

02:45:21.960 him a Manila envelope. And in there are the pictures of the people that were at the Kuala Lumpur meeting.

02:45:29.640 And there was one picture that he knew. And he knew that, you know, there's an Al-Qaeda operative.

02:45:36.600 And this has been withheld from him. You know, had they given him that, just those photographs

02:45:43.760 that he had asked for back when he was doing his, you know, starting his investigation of the coal and

02:45:50.200 began to piece together what had happened, the FBI would have been able to break open the case right

02:45:55.840 there. And he went to the bathroom and threw up. And he went to work.

02:46:03.600 And that's when he got the names of the Al-Qaeda guys. And, you know, he essentially solved the crime

02:46:14.780 from that office in Yemen. One man.

02:46:19.400 And history could have been so different if, if the CIA had listened, you know, exceeded to his

02:46:29.640 request. And there was nobody better prepared to take advantage of it than Ali Subban.

02:46:34.960 Lawrence, it's hard to believe this has been 20 years. I want to thank you for an unbelievable,

02:46:49.520 unbelievable investigation. Just an amazing amount of research. It's hard to imagine what you had to do

02:46:56.620 to write this book. How many trips you had to take into the lion's den. And at the same time,

02:47:03.120 how infuriating it must have been to learn the set of events. I can't think of anything I've ever

02:47:09.420 done in my life that would be so upsetting, right? Like I think of, I think of anything I've ever done

02:47:14.420 that's upset me that in terms of like learning that something happened or didn't happen, or this

02:47:19.020 person wasn't competent and it led to this, you know, like the dietary guidelines in the 1970s,

02:47:24.280 like none of that compares in some ways to this. But I also think that you've created a place in

02:47:30.120 history for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be recognized. And I think the Ali Soufans of the

02:47:36.420 world are probably people who would not become household names. And look, I hope that as we sit

02:47:43.880 here at the 20th anniversary of one of the most consequential dates for most of us, that people

02:47:49.520 will take time to go back and reflect on the history of that and reflect on the people who were

02:47:55.800 trying to make a difference. I guess I'll close with one last question, which is what do you think

02:48:02.880 the future holds with respect to this type of asymmetric warfare, be it Al Qaeda or fill in the

02:48:11.200 blank, you know, pick your favorite organization that operates in the same mindset. Is this something

02:48:17.160 that is going to be part of our world for the next century?

02:48:23.120 I think so. I mean, there are innumerable terrorist groups around the world and in our own country,

02:48:29.740 you know, the white supremacists most notably. But Al Qaeda set a template, a small group highly

02:48:39.220 empowered by a kind of judo moves of, you know, using technology against the countries that developed

02:48:46.200 the technology. But now we have Al Qaeda, you know, which was on 9-11, three or 400 guys.

02:48:54.220 Now the estimates 30 to 40,000 members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates from Morocco through the Sahel,

02:49:01.540 up through Saudi Arabia to India, to Southern China, you know, there are Al Qaeda groups all over the

02:49:07.900 place. Their intentions haven't changed. They haven't been able to pull off the highly successful attack

02:49:14.660 attack in America that would equal 9-11. But many smaller attacks, and not just in America,

02:49:23.300 but other countries, many other countries. With technology, I especially worry about drones.

02:49:32.300 Small groups can have a far greater influence and power. And then, you know, I've been writing about

02:49:39.440 the pandemic. I worry that, you know, these kinds of episodes can be suggestive. There are groups like

02:49:47.680 Aum Shinrikyo was a Japanese cult that really wanted to, you know, destroy much of the world with

02:49:55.080 diseases or atomic bombs. You know, and a lot of very capable scientists were members of it.

02:50:01.260 Atom Waffen Division, one of the white supremacist groups, they have a philosophy of, you know,

02:50:09.080 wanting to eliminate much of the population so that it narrows down only to white people.

02:50:17.440 And biological warfare is part of the, you know, the goal of some of those groups.

02:50:23.180 It's dismayingly easy to create diseases. And, you know, I was talking to, who's the guy in James

02:50:34.380 Bond that creates all the weapons? Is it M? Is that the?

02:50:37.420 Oh, I'm not sure.

02:50:38.300 All right. I think it's M. Anyway, I talked to this American version of that,

02:50:42.440 and he didn't show me the good stuff. But I asked him, this was several years ago,

02:50:47.700 what worries you? And he said, what really worries me is those high school kids that are now

02:50:52.700 creating computer viruses will one day soon be able to manufacture biological viruses just as

02:50:59.240 easily. And that day is on us now. So I worry about that a lot. And, you know, I think, you know,

02:51:07.060 we live in a hazardous world, a world that is constrained by a lot of loss of freedom because of

02:51:15.160 that. We have to keep in mind the idea of freedom in the country that we used to be and hope that one

02:51:22.620 day we can return to it. We also have to be sober minded about the challenges. And I don't think our

02:51:29.960 children are going to live in a world without terrorism or our children's children. I think

02:51:34.600 that, you know, terrorism is going to be a factor for a long time to come. And I don't, you know,

02:51:40.580 I don't finally know, given the proliferation of terror, how we're going to put brakes on it.

02:51:47.080 I mean, you can think of it from two standpoints, right? You can think one of it is you reduce the

02:51:51.520 drive for it, right? So what are the factors that are contributing to terrorism? What is the

02:51:55.980 humiliation? What is the disenfranchisement of the individuals who go on to perpetrate these things?

02:52:02.420 So what are all those things? What are the forces to reduce them? At the other end of the spectrum,

02:52:07.920 right, is the kind of offensive strategy, which is how much better can our intelligence agencies be?

02:52:14.120 Look, every person who has run for president since 9-11 has said, look at the success. We have not

02:52:22.180 had another attack of this magnitude on U.S. soil. Is there something to that? Is that, presumably

02:52:28.360 that's not been through a lack of effort on the part of Al-Qaeda or others, correct?

02:52:33.020 Well, we always tend to look over our shoulder at what happened in the past. And we have to keep in

02:52:39.000 mind what's happening right now. You know, the terrorists proliferate. They move around. They adopt

02:52:46.720 new ideologies. There's a fluidity about this. And I think we're going to see eruptions of terror.

02:52:55.960 Some will be of small magnitude. But, you know, I've just been writing about, you know,

02:53:02.800 the massacre in El Paso in 2019. 23 Mexican-Americans killed. This is the largest attack on Latinos in our

02:53:13.340 history. And, you know, it wasn't Al-Qaeda, but it was terrorism. That idea is so seeded into our

02:53:23.580 culture now. No doubt things change over time. You had school shootings, you know, for instance.

02:53:30.020 That's diminished. But, you know, the whole mass shooting thing started here in Austin with the

02:53:36.300 UT Tower shootings in 1966. So in a way, there was a wave that was created and emulators came along.

02:53:46.200 And then currently, it seems like school shootings have diminished as have drive-by shootings. So

02:53:52.580 these memes get into our society. And I don't know how, other than being displaced by a new meme,

02:54:02.320 you know, that they get removed from the consciousness of people that want to do harm.

02:54:08.460 But I do think that we are doing a better job of containing terrorism. And, you know, we're far more

02:54:15.060 alert to it. But I do think that we, our intelligence agencies have to improve. The pandemic was a

02:54:23.640 catastrophic intelligence failure. This was a national security threat. We've lost more than 600,000

02:54:30.640 Americans. If a nation had attacked us and killed half a million of our citizens, we, you know, we'd been

02:54:37.800 totally on a different track. But we have to take new things into account. And when we're talking

02:54:44.240 about our safety and security, it's not just terrorism, public health, the natural environment,

02:54:50.860 global warming, all of these things, you know, we have real challenges ahead of us. And so far to

02:54:58.480 date, we are not performing adequately to put them at rest. I know I said that was my last question. I

02:55:05.520 guess I have one more. In all of your research, have you come to believe that these relatively small

02:55:13.240 terrorist organizations would have the capacity to acquire and actually utilize nuclear weapons?

02:55:19.800 I think nuclear weapons are kind of hard. When the Soviet Union collapsed, you know, there were

02:55:26.300 a lot of loose nukes. And al-Qaeda tried to get hold of a nuclear bomb and it turned out to be a fraud.

02:55:33.640 Nuclear weapons tend to be beyond the capacity of the people that we've dealt with in the past.

02:55:39.960 That doesn't mean that there couldn't be people in the future who have that capacity.

02:55:46.520 But you're more, you would say biological weapons would be a far greater concern.

02:55:50.680 In terms of massive, you know, we're talking about on the scale of hundreds of thousands of

02:55:56.200 lives or millions of lives.

02:55:57.200 And some toxins.

02:55:58.580 Yeah.

02:55:58.700 Anthrax is, you know, a good candidate. You know, I think we have to be really, really careful.

02:56:05.380 You know, anthrax has come out of, you know, our own Fort Detrick. So we have to be always cautious.

02:56:12.700 I think, you know, we can't live our lives in fear all the time, but you'd be nuts not to pay

02:56:18.800 attention to the fact that there are dangers out there and there are people that want to cause harm.

02:56:23.860 And I think we have to, it's the absence of unity in our community that threatens us the

02:56:30.060 most now because we're not, we're not together on this. There are people that would cheer on

02:56:37.320 such actions. And I, you know, what kind of country have we become in that case?

02:56:43.900 I seem to keep coming to a real down conclusion.

02:56:47.200 I was about to say, I'm looking for an optimistic way to close this out. And I guess the only thing

02:56:51.920 I would say is I hope that, that this week people can, can basically pause for a moment and sort of

02:56:57.220 reflect on people who lost their lives, people who made sacrifices as a result of that. If nothing

02:57:03.600 else, just to remember that. I mean, I, I'm not sure that, that there's something actionable I can

02:57:07.660 do with that other than just be grateful and at the same time be sad. So simultaneously, I think

02:57:14.500 experienced these two extreme emotions. It occurs to me though, that tragedies often have

02:57:21.400 surprisingly good consequences or let's say benefits for society. And, you know, if you look

02:57:28.480 at our recent history in this country with 1918 flu, I would not say that we took advantage of that.

02:57:38.700 We tended to forget about it, but then came the depression. And in the middle of the depression,

02:57:43.680 we made ourselves into a different country, stronger, more compassionate, more resilient.

02:57:48.980 We could do that. And then, you know, World War II, once again, took a challenge and transformed our

02:57:55.900 country. Since then, we had 9-11 and we invaded Iraq and tortured people in Guantanamo. So a tragedy

02:58:05.960 is an opportunity.

02:58:09.380 Do you think we squandered this one?

02:58:10.660 I thought we squandered 9-11 terribly. And the consequences of what we did to ourselves

02:58:18.660 after 9-11 are greater than what was done to us. The invasion of Iraq, the trillions of dollars we

02:58:26.560 spent in Afghanistan, you know, just all of that, you know, inconsequential in terms of lives lost. But

02:58:32.400 we made huge mistakes. But we're capable. We've shown ourselves to be capable of triumphing. And,

02:58:42.080 you know, we've got another opportunity now. And I hope that we take the lessons that 9-11 have given

02:58:48.800 us and pandemic and try to make ourselves into that country that we once were and want to be again.

02:58:55.300 Lawrence, thank you so much for making a lot of time to talk about this. I know this is,

02:59:01.440 you know, a book you wrote 15 years ago. So I'm sure sometimes it's not even top of mind. It's

02:59:06.520 back of mind given all the things you've written about since. But I appreciate you taking a trip

02:59:10.700 down memory lane and pulling some of the cobwebs off what I think is one of the most remarkable

02:59:15.280 things written.

02:59:16.580 Well, thank you. And I appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you and your listeners.

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The Peter Attia Drive - September 06, 2021

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

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