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

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

Lawrence Wright is the author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and was named one of Time's top 100 books of all time.  In this episode, released just before the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Lawrence and Peter discuss the book and the lasting impact of that day. Lawrence reflects on his personal experiences on that day and how he was first drawn into reporting on the attacks. Lawrence then discusses in detail the history that led up to 9/11 which is really composed of two parallel stories. The first story is of the growing discontent in Muslim countries, the roots of Islamic radicalism, and how two extremists, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, joined forces to create the global terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. The second story is about how interpersonal and institutional conflicts between the FBI and CIA led to a massive failure in intelligence and resulted in multiple missed opportunities to predict and prevent the attacks on September 11th, 2001. Finally, they reflect on what we should have learned from 9/11 and the future of terrorism.   We discuss: Lawrence and Peter recount their personal experiences on September 11th, 2001 [3:30]; How 9/11 changed the US into a security state and affected a generation [9:45]; Lawrence’s early coverage of 9/11 and how he knew it was going to be “the story of our lifetime” [14:45]; Egyptian politics and the foundation of radical Islam [22:45]; Anwar Sadat’s presidency, assassination, and the birth of the radical Islamic movement [33:00]; Aftermath of the Sadat assassination, and establishment of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan [50:15]; Osama bin Laden: Upbringing, involvement in the Soviet–Afghan War, and rise to celebrity status in Saudi Arabia [56:00]; How the Western intervention in Saudi Arabia impacted Arab nationalist’s hatred of America [1:15:30]; Theorizing on the role of the religion in holding back Islamic states from making progress towards democracy [1:20:30]; Bin Laden’s time in Sudan [1:32:30]; The CIA vs. the FBI: setting the stage for the failure of US intelligence [1:37:00]; The mistake by US intelligence of not taking the bombings of the US embassies and the USS Cole seriously [1:46:00]; Al-Qaeda in America: Losing the planners of the 9/11 attacks from our clutches and incompetence at the FBI and CIA [1:56:00]; Problematic policies in Europe, and a direct message warning of the 9/11 attacks [2:14:45]; The role of political infighting and personality conflicts that helped enable the 9/11 attacks and the lack of accountability [2:22:45]; What came of the 9/11 commission, the role of the Saudi government, and the trials of Ali Soufan [2:36:00]; Lessons from 9/11 and the future of terrorism [2:46:30]; and More.   Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/LawrenceWright  Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn

more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe. Now without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Lawrence Wright. Lawrence is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. He's written many books including going clear, the plague year, America, in the time of COVID, the end of October, God save Texas and several others. However, in this podcast, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9-11, we're going to focus specifically on the looming tower, Al-Qaeda and the road to 9-11. A book Lawrence wrote in 2006. The looming tower is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and it was named one of times top 100 books of all time.

Now, some of you may have read this book, I suspect many of you will have not. Regardless of whether or not you listen to this podcast in its entirety, I can't recommend the book highly enough. The book was also turned into a mini-ser series that played on Hulu about two years ago by the same title. In the month leading up to this date, I knew I wanted to deviate from my normal subject matter and speak very specifically about 9-11 for this week, but I didn't really know the right way to do it. I didn't know who to interview. There were a number of people I considered speaking with, but as I reflected on the first time I read The Looming Tower, I realized that Lawrence was indeed a great person

to interview for this book. And I think that comes across in this interview is research into this story is second to none. And this has really many stories. It's not just a story. Effectively, it's two major stories. The first is the story of how Al-Qaeda came to be, which of course focuses on Osama bin Laden, but also his counterpart from Al-Jihad, Ahman al-Zawari. It also goes back further into the roots of radical Islam within Egypt. A parallel story to this is the story of the intelligence community, namely the CIA and the FBI, and their failure to see what

was happening before it was too late. Now, of course, it's not nearly as simple as that, and I'm deliberately being glib, but that's effectively what we discuss in this podcast. We go through these parallel stories and how they interweave. This podcast is over three hours, which took both Lawrence and I by surprise. I was not expecting it to be that long. But nevertheless, I suspect it speaks to the content that we were dealing with and the depth of Lawrence's research. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Lawrence Wright. I love being able to interview people in person, so to have somebody that's from Austin and to

all this time with you is really exciting today. Well, it's a pleasure to be out and about even under the constrained circumstances that we find ourselves. You know, this is a topic that I think many of my listeners are gonna kind of wonder what does this have to do with longevity because that tends to be what I what I speak about but as we sit here minutes away from effectively the 20th anniversary of certainly the most pivotal moment for many of us in our lifetimes. Of course, you were also alive during some of the other pivotal moments in our history.

I think for many of us, we just can't believe how fast 20 years has gone by. So I kind of want to just start with a silly question. But what do you remember of that morning, that Tuesday morning? Where were you? Back then, I had breakfast with a bunch of colleagues that were learning Spanish. And so we would speak Spanish at breakfast and every Tuesday. After breakfast I got in the car and NPR was on and they had reported a one plane hit the World Trade Center. And by the time I got home the second plane hit it. And I hadn't had written about terrorism already. So I was aware that this was probably a terrorist attack. It wasn't

a surprise to me that it was a terror attack. Of course, it was an immense surprise that it was such a dramatic strike. Had you heard much about al-Qaeda before this? Were they familiar to you? Yeah, I had written a movie called The Siege with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis and it been in. And it was about what would happen if terrorism came to America? That was a question I asked myself. And you know, it already happened in London and Paris, of course, Tel Aviv, you know, so, suppose it happened in New York. And this movie came out in 1998.

And in August of 98, a couple of months before the movie actually opened, there was the first big strike by Al Qaeda against American embassies in East Africa. And 224 people were killed. And that was scarcely remarked. And I don't even think that during the elections, the terrorism was mentioned.

Campaigning had already begun. Well, midterms were underway. So it wasn't a central issue. It happened over there. We still had this sense of invulnerability in America. And I think that's why it was unnoticed. But there was another bombing that same month in Cape Town, South Africa, at a planet Hollywood restaurant. And two people were killed, two British tourists, and a little girl lost her leg. And an Islamic group claim credit

saying that they were protesting the trailers that had appeared in movie theaters for the siege. The movie hadn't even come out yet and people are already dead. And that was a scarring experience experience for me, you know, that I didn't feel that my movie was responsible for people getting killed, but had the movie not happen, they probably would be alive. And so terrorism touched me right off. And it's, you know, it's three years before 9-11. There was a lot of anger in the Muslim community about having, being depicted as terrorists because it was that having spent a lot of time in Egypt and so on. I sense that if you're going to make a plausible terrorist action, that would be the source of it.

But there were tickets outside the movie theaters. I mean, and people don't like to go to the movie when there were pickets. So, you know, there's always another show. So it didn't do well. It was a bomb. And then after 9-11, it was the most rented movie in America.

And I think it was because in the movie, there, yes, there is terrorism. Yes, it happens in New York. And it presses just so much of what actually did happen, but it had an ending. And you know, it turned out all right. And I think after 9-11, people were desperate for something that would give them a little hope. Yeah, I was talking to my wife this morning. She was so bummed she couldn't be here to meet you because she's such a fan, so we'll have to figure it a way to do something another time

so because she was really bummed to not be here. But I was talking about how it's not clear to me, because I've never really talked about it with anybody else, what the impact is like collectively for the average person, right? So my story is like everybody else's, which is I can remember in crystal clarity, every detail of that morning.

I was a surgical resident at Hopkins. I was down in the pediatric trauma bay, a kid had just been hit by a car. So I was tending to this kid, you know, getting X-rays, doing all the things. He turned out to be totally okay, but just making sure he didn't have broken bones. And I remember a person, I remember who they were walking in and saying, a plane just hit the World Trade Center. And I assumed it was like a sessna that had hit the Trade Center in the fog.

So it was sort of like, my only thought was, oh, it must be a foggy day up in New York today or something, didn't think anything of it kind of went right back to work. And then of course, you know some odd 40 minutes later second plane hits all of a sudden now the TV's on in the ER and we're all seeing what's going on And then you know for the next 48 hours none of us left the hospital because we were sort of waiting would there be Survivors coming obviously there were none But the part I never really understood is how much of a lasting impact it had on me. For reasons I can't explain, I didn't know anybody who died that day. I didn't

even know any of the first responders or people who were traumatized as survivors. And yet for at least 10 years, I had horrible dreams about being on, was it United 93, the flight that got, that crashed in Pennsylvania? I had dreams of being in the cockpit as it was nose diving in the ground. You've spent time talking about this with people. Is that an experience that you've seen in the, in the normal person who wasn't physically or directly touched by this? In some ways it's a generational divide. We're old enough for it to have deeply affected us personally. And I think every American was profoundly affected in one way or another. One thing there was this sense of invulnerability. It was a smug feeling about, we exist in the world, but apart from it, things that happen out there

in the rest of the world don't really touch us. We metal, you know, in wars and so on, but it never comes to the homeland. And that was so punctured. It was so disillusioning. And, you know, we're a a regular country and we're vulnerable. That was shattering. I don't think anybody who was cognizant at that age, I don't think anybody walked away

feeling the same. Now it's interesting to me because the culture changed around that event. And young people don't know what America was before 9-11. They only know the country that we've become. And I reflect on when I was like in high school, I remember I took a date to the airport in Dallas. It's called Love Field. But not for that reason. But back then, when you didn't have any money

and you wanted to entertain your date, it was a plausible place to go. And so we went, walked out on the tarmac, where an American Airlines plane had flown in. We decided he'd just come from Paris. So we sat in the first class compartment and asturidus, as we called them, then served us a snack.

And then we went up in the FAA tower. And you know, come on in kids. And so we sat down and watched them, you know, landing planes. And that was America. There was a sense of freedom. And, you know, we talk a lot about freedom, but that was really freedom that you could teenagers just wander in

and see things and this unguarded feeling that Americans had, that we were not threatened. And now the airport experience, if you can just compare that, young people, even people in their mid-20s, or even 30, don't really know America beforehand. They don't know that you could go into an office building without having your picture taken, or you could go visit the Liberty Bell and Philadelphia without having to take off your belt and your shoes. We've built up a security state, and we've been so deeply involved with the rest of the world in an antagonistic manner since then and that has become normal

but is an aberration in our history and I would like for us to try to remember the country we were and country we were and aims to steer towards that. Because if you forget the memory, if you lose the memory of the country that we were, then I don't think we can ever get back to Port. It's funny you mention that story about being at Lovefield. One of the memories I have is any time my dad would travel. And I'm sure my parents will come up during this discussion because they're immigrants from Egypt,

which plays such a central role in the story we're about to discuss. But it was not uncommon for my dad during flights. If he was going somewhere and he was returning to Toronto, which is where we live, he would spend most of the flight in the cockpit just playing patty cakes with the crew because he was such an outgoing guy. And I'm not making this up. There were times when he would bring the entire crew home and prepare a meal for them because he was, you know, he cooked the under restaurant.

So there were times when he would show up with eight random people from Air Canada who were coming to our house because they had, you know, a night layover in Toronto and they'd be coming over for dinner. I mean, like, think about that as well. That is in the context of the world we live in today. Yeah. We're not unique in that, but the other countries have been putting up with this kind of defensiveness for a long time. And so it's a bigger challenge in America. And there's no doubt that we needed to be on guard and protect ourselves and ramp up our defenses. But the truth is in trying to create security for us, we've created a security state that is such an

enrichment of our freedom that we are doing to ourselves. we're doing it to protect ourselves, but at the same time, we're the ones that are holding the handcuffs. And it's an abridgment of our freedom in a profound way that I think that people who talk a lot about freedom don't really appreciate. So how long after 9-11 did the idea come to you, that you were going to put in the type of profound research that ultimately led to the looming

tower, which I think came out in06? That's right. Oh, it was immediate. I knew this was the story of our lifetime. It was not clear that day, that it was al-Qaeda, but it was pretty clear to me. I mean, I had in my movie The Siege, I depicted something like that kind of organization. And if you remember, the phones were out in Manhattan

that morning because of cell tower of industrial. I do remember that because I had my, at the time my girlfriend, who was an architect, lived in Manhattan. And I couldn't get a hold of her for a day and a half. And I had a couple of friends from medical school who were residents there. Couldn't get a hold of her. Very strange situation. Yeah, it was unnerving. And so I sent an email to my editor at the New Yorker, David Remnick,

and I said, put me to work. I've been kind of straying from the reservation, you know, working on movies and things like that. So that afternoon, the phones came back on, at least for the New Yorker, and we had a conference call with the, I guess about a dozen New Yorker writers. And like me, you know, scattered around, Jeff Tuban, I think, was in the Bay Area,

or Jeff Goldberg and Jane Meyer, were both in Washington, and we're all checking in. You know what do you want us to do and what David asked us to do was to find stories. Just you know human stories that can form part of a narrative that he would weave together. And I felt that at a handicap in Austin, you know, but somehow I found this young man named Kurt Jelson. He was a reporter. He was supposed to have been on the top floor of the World Trade Center at the Windows on the World Restaurant, on the 101st floor before a conference that his magazine, which was called Waters, was an investment magazine. He had an appointment there at 9 o'clock and he slept through the

subway stop for his first time in his whole life. So he turned around, got off on the Chambers Street exit, ran into the World Trade Center. The Trade Center's elevators were up a flight of escalators. So he ran up the escalators and into an elevator and there were like 200 elevators in the two towers. And you had to change floors. So he ran into the elevator and an elevator operator was holding the door for this woman who was taking her time, you know, walking across the lobby and Kurt was very anxious because he was late. And as she stepped into the elevator, he noticed that she had a rose tattoo on her ankle, and he thought to himself, oh wow, and then the plane hit. And in the doors to the elevator accordion, and nobody knew what had happened. Was it an earthquake?

The building had been bombed before by a precursor of al-Qaeda. So there was that, but Kurt stepped out of the elevator and he looked around in the lobby and there were objects lying there, concrete objects. Some he said the size of an alarm clock and some like a size of an office chair and just lying on the ground of the lobby. And it was eerie. And remember, he had to go up a flight, but he was confused and he saw daylight and he went towards that.

And it was a door that led to a patio. And he walked outside and there were hundreds of shoes on the ground. And something else that he thought was luggage but turned out to be human torsos. And then something landed right beside him. And so he went back in and his story of escaping the trade center and making it home to Queens

became the bookend of the New Yorker's Black issue. That's what got me started. It was, I gotta say, incredibly wrenching to hear his story and paste it together over a number of interviews, and I would interview him, and then my wife would type up the notes, and we were a lot of weeping going on. And, but I knew from then that I was on the case

and that whatever portion of my life was already spoken for. A couple of months later, I signed a contract February for a book that was supposed to be turned in a year later. And I scratched out February and wrote March or something April. I said, and no idea. I turned it in five years later. So I had no idea what I was getting into, but I just knew that, you know, this was, that I was going to go all the way to the end of this. Yeah. Those stories, by the way, are so interesting to me. I only know one, which is a friend of mine's ex-wife was supposed to be on one of the four flights. I don't remember which one,

but she missed the flight. So she overslept, she got to the airport, but didn't get through security and time. So by the time she got to the gate, they had already shut the doors. I think the plane was even pulling away. And so you have this moment where you're so upset, like you, in that moment can't imagine a greater tragedy, right? Like whatever it is she was going to do, what an inconvenience to, because it was a cross-country flight. And then of course to realize that saved your life.

I mean, those stories are, you know, there's a part of the process. And what you don't hear is that somebody else may have gotten that seat. Yeah. And so there's another side of those. Right. The person who would have only made that flight by standby or something. Yeah. Well, your book is really two stories.

It's really a book of two parallel stories that are each one very difficult to get through. If I'm going to be honest, I've read your book two and a half, three times basically, and it gets more frustrating the more you get through it because you pick up new things in it that just seems so difficult to swallow. But at least the way I sort of read the book is, it's basically the history of Al-Qaeda.

How did this organization come to be? Because most people's basically the history of Al-Qaeda. How did this organization come to be? Because most people, when they think of Al-Qaeda, they of course think of Osama bin Laden. But there are more actors to it. And there's a long history that goes back to Egypt. And as you and I were speaking a little bit before we sat down, so much of what you wrote about resonates with things I knew about my childhood because we used to go to Egypt every year. And then there's this parallel story that's perhaps the most upsetting part of the book, if that's possible,

which is the story about the intelligence. I remembered shortly after 9-11, Thomas Friedman wrote an article in the New York Times that said, this was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination, implying that it's not that our intelligence community failed us, it's that we could have never imagined this. But I don't know that I can agree with that after reading your book one bit. I think this was a catastrophic failure of intelligence. So maybe we'll start with the former, and it seems that a good enough place to start would be

Said Ketub. So who is this character, and why is he an important figure in the creation of Al Qaeda? Said Ketub was an educator in Egypt, and very cosmopolitan in his way, and he was religious, but he wasn't, you know, at the beginning, fanatical. But he was a member of the Muslim brothers,

which was outlawed in Egypt. And Nasser came into power in 1952 and the officers revolt. And looking around for partners, he decided that maybe the Muslim brothers could be co-opted. So he tried to enlist side-could've been his governance. And Cuthub signed on for a little bit, but the truth is, you know, the Muslim brothers

had a goal which was not to have a military dictatorship, but an Islamic one. And they never really came to an agreement. And Sid could have actually was, it wasn't thrown out of the country. Some friends arranged for him to get out of Egypt at a time when it was really difficult for him. And he got a job teaching in Greeley, Colorado, at this little college.

No, I visited Greeley, and I don't know how different it was in 1940s, but when he first went there. But a town that reminds you of America, as it used to be, lots of green lawns, innumerable churches, just scrubbed up Norman Rockwell type of town and could have hated it. He just thought it was the worst excesses of America. I mean, it only he knew. But he was shocked by the behavior of the women. He was very threatened by them. I mean, imagine he'd gone to Vegas or something, right?

It's yeah, he did spend a little bit of time in New York, which was interesting for him because his brother who was in Mecca, came out of Mecca to interview, to allow me to interview him, said that he had never met a Jew until he got to America. And yet, he hated them. There was the unseen enemy, and then suddenly he's in Manhattan, encountering Jews all over the place. And then he goes to Greeley. It was a turning point for him.

He came back and wrote a very influential article about how dangerous America was. This was at a time when America was seen as the one non-colonial power by the developing world. And it was held in very high esteem. And yet that was an opening shot. Then came the revolution. And NASA reached out to see if he could bring him into the government. And that didn't work out at all. They had totally different aims for the country. NASA, not obviously a secularist, but probably, you know, but he saw the, you know, the powerful trend of Islam in the country and he wanted to tame it in some way and he thought by co-opting side, could to be might be able to. And Kutab had written every Friday in the newspapers, not just in Egypt, but all over the Arab world. They would publish his commentaries on Islam and the Quran.

So he was a figure of note. And at the time Egypt was mostly Sunni? Egypt is divided into almost entirely Sunni Muslims and Christians. The Shiite minorities, you know, insignificant, but you know, there is about a 10%. Nobody really knows, but you know, there's a smaller population of Christians. You know, like a lot of Islamic countries, there's little to choose from on the religious banquet.

And you can be, you know, the option is to be more or less religious. And you know, piety is how you advance in a deeply religious society as Egypt was, and actually became much more so. When I lived there in 69 to 71. You know, my female students were not covered. Even at Cairo University, it was rare to see women with head coverings and I was teaching at the American University at the same time, I'm in Elves of Watery, was a medical student at Cairo, and he was part of an effort to get women to cover and to become more obviously religious. So it was a country in transition. It's interesting. So you were there, you know, my mom left Egypt when

she was 22, and the day she flew out, it was her first time leaving the country, was September 28, 1970. And so when she departed from Cairo, Nasser was the president and a young president, he was in his 50s, when she landed in Copenhagen on the news, Nasser was dead. And she was in such shock because Nasser was like kind of a god to her generation. And he seemed indomitable. Like it just seemed like this is a person who will be president of Egypt forever. So you were there exactly in the middle of that transition from Nasser to Sedat.

What did it strike you as the implication of that was in terms of either the secularization of Egypt or the move towards this more religious state? You have to understand what Nasr stood for. In Egypt, he was the first Egyptian to rule over Egypt since 2500 years or so. Yeah, at least 2500. Before Cleopatra and all the Greeks who took over as the pharonic figures, even King that they overthrew was Turkish. So, you know, suddenly you have an Egyptian, not just an Egyptian, this glamorous, very handsome, compelling figure, extremely charismatic, and an unusual figure in the Arab world. In fact, his appeal was so broad, Egypt's essentially annex Syria. He was the United Arab Republic, but the Syrians had very little

they just wanted to throw in their lot with the most powerful figure in the Arab world. So his sway was unbelievable. And it was so powerful that even the hideously mismanaged war against Israel in 1967, which, you know, the six-day war, you might have well called it the Six-Hour War because it was over as soon as the Israeli's bomb, you know, the Egyptian airplanes, it was a catastrophe. And yet he survived that. So the idea that there would be a day without NASA was just not something that occurred

to Egyptians. And I remember when it happened, he was actually moderating a piece conference with the Palestinians at the time, and he had a heart attack. And I had a cook who came to my apartment that morning, and he said, the people are like sand in the street. Remember the night that the news came out? I had not heard the news before hearing the eulolating, you know, all over, just it was eerie.

But because it was not a singular sound, it was like a singular sound, it was like a vast sound. So as Americans, we were counseled not to go out. I don't think that anything would have happened to us, but the streets were weirdly empty, and Cairo always had a problem with pollution and noise. Suddenly it was dead quiet. it was dead quiet, the atmosphere clarified. It was beautiful, but unsettling. And for three days, you know, you just didn't see anybody. And then they had the funeral. And we went up on the roof. We lived in Zomalek, which was an island in the middle of the Nile. We were right across from the Russian news agency, Novosthi. So we were up on top of the roof and you could see the parade forming.

It started at the end of Zomalek. There was a revolutionary tower. It was actually, there's a story on that, the CIA tried to bribe NASA with $10 million, and he used it to build this tower, the revolutionary tower, on the island directly across from the Hilton, so that Americans could see where their money went. So that's where the parade started, the funeral cortege, and they were going to cross the Casa del Nile Bridge. There were all the dignitaries around the world.

We could see was just a mass of uniforms and suits and stuff like that, but we could also see this immense crowd of people on the other side of the bridge. And they rushed in towards the Cortesche. In the middle of the bridge, they met the morning kairines and the dignitaries. And in the front of the Cortesche, there were police with batons beating a path

through people. And the turmoil was so great that from where we were, which was a mile away, maybe, you know, we could see the bridge trembling. And I, you know, I've often thought about how, you know, soldiers have to break ranks when they cross a bridge because the- Right. Otherwise you get the decommuneros effect. Yes. So I worry that the bridge might actually crack, you know, but they beat their way all the way through the mobs and the streets. I thought this this country will never be the same and it really has never been. I will qualify

that by saying it has never been, although it has always been ruled by military forces, military figures with the brief exception of the Muslim Brotherhood President. And then who becomes President is Anwar Sadat, who was regarded as a joke in Egypt. He had been in the officer's coup, but he missed the revolution. He was at a movie. It was a double feature, but he missed the revolution. And that was a story that hung around Amor Sadat.

And people thought he was a fool and he wouldn't last. And he turned out to be a significant figure, because of him, Egypt and Israel are at peace to this day. Everybody underestimated him, but he lived, you know, he had been in Nasser's shadow all that time. Everybody underestimated him, but he lived, you know, he had been in NASA's shadow all that time. So it marked a turning point and it was Sadat who expelled the Soviets up until that point. Egypt had been a kind of Soviet military base.

The US and Egypt didn't have diplomatic relations. They were only a handful of Americans actually there when I was living there. Now four years prior to Nasser's death, he had Kutab executed. But you get the sense that he was, that was reluctant. I think he understood that that execution would make a martyr of him. And there's probably nothing worse

that you could have done than have made a martyr of this man. Didn't he have Sadat then as either Prime Minister or Vice President, almost try to get Kutab to just ask for some sort of forgiveness so he could save face and not execute him? Kutab was a hard case. He would rather die than renounce his stance. And he told Sadat that. And he called their bluff. It cost him his life. But it also gave birth to this movement.

Because once Kutab was dead, he became a symbol of the oppressiveness of the Arab regimes. The dictatorships that spanned the entire North Africa all the way to Turkey. And what was the alternative, the only alternative that people could see was the Muslim Brotherhood or some other form of Islamism. So it was Kuttab's death that inspired, for instance, Iman Elzawari. Iman Elzawari, his uncle, was Kutab's lawyer and had been his teacher. He was a dear friend of Kutab, and just before Kutab was hanged, he gave Zawari's uncle his Quran, which was incredibly treasured.

So when Iman Elzawari was 15, he started a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government. That'll show you the level of commitment that Al Qaeda was born in. And there's something else that's very interesting that I remember, you know, as I mentioned to you, so much of reading your book, put into context so many stories that I had heard growing up that seemed at the time disjointed, but like because they sort of lacked the clarity of the the full arc. But one of them was how Sadat upon immediately becoming president basically freed many of the prisoners that Nasr had put away. So it seemed that Nasr had a much clearer understanding

of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. And I guess the question is, what is it that Sadat hoped to gain by freeing these individuals? Sadat, unlike Nasser, was very pious, and he thought nobody was more pious than he. He called himself the first man of Islam. How about that? And he thought because he was religious that he would have standing with people in the Muslim Brotherhood. He totally underestimated the fanaticism that had grown up in those prisons. And not just because of Syed Kutub, you know, but one of the things that radicalized K cut up was when he was in prison, soldiers came in and shot prisoners in their cells.

You know, and his question to himself was, what kind of Muslim would do this to another Muslim? And his answer was they are not Muslims. And so essentially, he is a phrase in Arabic called Tak fear which is to expel someone for their disbelief. And he created the precedent that unless you believe as I we do, you're not a real Muslim. And once that door was opened, it led to the idea of terrorism.

You know, that's where Zawarri and Bin Laden got permission door was opened, it led to the idea of terrorism. That's where Zawahri and Bin Laden got permission to become the terrorists that they became. How far back does that precedent go? If you go back to Muhammad, where is the first sign that it's okay to kill someone if they don't believe what you believe? Well, there's the question of killing someone. There was a lot of tribal warfare before Islam. And Islam was really in part an effort by Muhammad

to unify Muslims, to stop fighting each other. And Islam, one of the meanings is submission, submit, accept your place. But that didn't stop a lot of the infighting in Saudi Arabia in particular, the Iqwan, where wildly fanatic tribesmen that the first king of Saudi Arabia enlisted in his battle, but then in order to subdue them, he had to bring in British warplanes and machine guns to shoot his own soldiers of the cross as to so to speak.

In modern era, it was been Laden who looked out at in the Tuck Fury universe. There was a doctrine that came from some of the discourse that, you know, first of all, you have to attack the near enemy, then the far enemy, and the far enemy being the West and the United States, but the near enemy being dictators like Mubarak and so on, the royal family in Saudi Arabia. So the heretics, the Shia, the Jews, the West, those would be the four stated enemies. Absolutely. And basically in proximity.

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

have been allowed and turned on America. So going back to the early 70s, so Zawahir is in school, he's going through medical school. Sadat sort of saves face during the 1973, the Yom Kippur War. Sadat is sort of romanticized in the West, but what was the view inside Egypt of Sadat in the sort of mid to late 70s? Was he basically ostracized in the Middle East for creating peace with Israel? I mean that can't have been popular with the other Middle Eastern nations correct? It wasn't popular in Egypt either.

Well, let me qualify that. There were people that were tired of strife and wanted to make peace. But, you know, the rhetoric in the Middle East, the rhetoric in the Middle East at that point was that Israel had to be destroyed. And here was Amor Sadat saying, no, we're going to make peace with Israel. First he had to demonstrate that he was willing to go to war because the Israelis were so complacent, they didn't see a threat. And actually, I don't think Sadat doesn't get enough credit for the daring. There was a kind of imaginable line that the Israelis had built.

They'd taken all of Sinai. Along the Suez Canal, they built the San Fortress, they'd extended a whole length, cliffs of San top by artillery and little caves inside, with machine gun emplacements and stuff like that. It looked really formidable. Sedat managed secretly to, you know, create this army and invasion force. And how do they bring down that castle of sand with firehoses? It was amazing how the sand just melted away, but they had these high-pressure firehoses they got from Germany and they within a few hours they had managed across the Suez

Canal, which the Israelis thought was totally impossible. And you know, just it was kind of a mirror of the 67 war. And it wound up Egypt was essentially defeated by Ariel Sharon's army, which surrounded them, but they had made the point. And at that point, Sadat was a real hero. It gave pride to the Egyptian people who felt so humiliated. And one of the things that he had to counter was the lessons that the Egyptians had drawn from the 67 war and the Israelis. The Israelis thought, well, we really are God's people. Look at this. Just before the war, we were digging trenches for mass graves in the public parks. And now, you know, we've conquered all of our Arab neighbors, you know, within six days, just unbelievably thrilling.

So what lesson did the Arabs, and particularly the Egyptians take, which is, we're not God's people. Why would he let this happen to us? And the answer was, we are not religious enough. And so that answer resonated with so many people. And that was, you know, the 67 war was a huge influence in driving people into radicalism. And that was something that, you know, Sadat into radicalism. And that was something that Sadat didn't fully take into account. And of course, eventually that radicalism would focus on him. What did you describe him as? I thought that was just hilarious. He described himself as the first man of Islam. Yeah. Yeah. The funniest concept ever. Because the reality of it is,

as we drew close to the end of his life, he would completely turn around and say, no religion in politics, no politics in religion, he saw the damage that this religion was causing and said, we must separate this church and state. Is that ultimately what led to the Fatwa being brought against him? Well, the piece with Israel was a part of it. There was also, you know, Israel was a part of it. There was also, you know, he was chiding. He was really foreign in his behavior, which is not unusual in people that rule over Egypt, but he derided women who were covered as it's saying that they were wearing tents on their head. And that really offended a lot of his almas. And his wife, I believe, had pushed for the right for a woman to have a divorce. So they were really trying to bring modernity to Egypt.

And it was ultimately the nail in his coffin. It was a similar path that the Shah of Iran had gone. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, because the Shah was basically overthrown in 79 or was it 70? It was 79 and that that year was a catastrophic one for Islam and for Muslim countries. It's the year that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It's the year the the Shah was overthrown and it was the year that Camp David piece of cords were signed. And I should also say it was the year of the attack in Mecca where radical Islamists took over the holiest place in his long. And Saudi Arabia needed the

French to come and help. Yeah, they don't like to admit this and there's still no toll. We don't know how many people died hundreds or thousands. We don't know how many people died, hundreds or thousands. We don't know. But you know, there were snipers up in the minarets and so on. And the underneath the plaza, there were, there's a war on of rooms and they stored weapons and food in there. So there were plans, maybe to flood them out, but they were holding hostages and we don't really know what happened, but you know what we understand or whatever, when I was researching this as carefully as I could,

they bore holes in the plaza and dropped grenades down. So a lot of innocent people were killed, and then dozens were arrested and executed, but it was a trauma on the scale of 9-11 in Saudi Arabia. And out of that came a bargain between the royal family and the clerics, which was, you know, the royal family needed permission to attack the mosque. In Islam, it's so holy that you're not even supposed to mow the grass. Every living thing should be untouched. And here, it was a situation where totally out of control, thousands, maybe, of people would be killed.

And the royal family did not feel they could do this without a fatwa from the leading clerics. And in return, the Royal family agreed to allow religious figures greater standing and more power within the society. So upon that Saudi Arabia immediately became far more conservative. And the clerics took control and you began to see the religious police in the streets and so on. And that, you know, Saudi Arabia had been on a path, not to liberalism, but you know, a more stable society that was somewhat moderate, but not fanatic. But there were people, once the religious authorities acquired power, they used it, but they also became far more fanatical than cells.

The name of the organization that ultimately assassinated Sadat was El Jihad, correct? This was the one half of what would become Al Qaeda. Right. The American intelligence called the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but in Egypt, it's just called Al Jihad. How much of a role did Al Zawar play in that? In the assassination. It was a small role. He transferred some guns.

He was still a practicing physician. Yeah. He was still a young man, you know, with, but he had been able to organize a police officers and soldiers and stuff like that into his cell. But he wasn't central to the assassination itself. Of all the turmoil that we've discussed so far in the Middle East, the first one that is sort of ingrained in me

is when Sadat was killed. So I, you know, I remember that day very clearly. I was eight years old, and I remember it so well. One of my uncles was one of the generals standing with him when he was shot. As you recall, everybody but Sadat realized what was happening and they all hit the deck. And Sadat actually

thought it was part of the parade. And he actually stood to greet these soldiers who, of course, were, you know, I, you know, I interpret that differently. I know you did. And the book you thought he was standing to, to receive his execution. Yeah. My uncle always said that he felt that Sadat actually thought it was part of the parade. Well, I mean, who knows what thoughts were going through his mind, but it was chaotic. You know, these guys jumped off the truck and that began firing and throwing grenades. Most of which didn't go off, which was sort of a miracle. A lot of people would have died. A lot of people would have been killed. I don't know why everybody on that reviewing platform wasn't dead. But they were, you know, they came for Sadat.

And when I looked at the news footage and the stills of that... The stills are harrowing. Yeah. He's standing in attention. It looked to me like he was gonna go out unantimidated. And you might be right. That would have been part of his character. And of course, he was so vain. He had his new Italian-made uniform, and he didn't want to ruffle the lines of the uniform

with a bulletproof vest. So he was unprotected in that way. You talk about how the men that were charged and even not charged, basically the men that were imprisoned following that were tortured. And that out of that torture came a lot of the humiliation that ultimately fed what would become the terrorism we all learned about 20 years ago for the first

time many of us. What happened to those men? And what did your research uncover about what that period was like following the assassination of Sadat? It wasn't long after I mean, Mubarak would have been immediately instated as president. We don't understand clearly the role of humiliation in human affairs, but it's very powerful. And, you know, going back to the 67 war, you know, the humiliation, I think, gave birth to this rise in radicalism in Egypt and elsewhere. And torture is deliberate humiliation and we don't really know what happened to

Sir Warrie, although he was probably electrocuted and stripped naked and humiliated in every possible way that you can imagine. And you can emerge from that totally broken or you can emerge full of rage and willing to do anything to exact revenge. And I think that at prison population was divided along those lines. They weren't people that weren't affected by it. They were people that were either broken or turned into something else. And that's something else became the seeds of al-Qaeda. That al-Qaeda really began as a Wafri's organization. It was Al-Jahad. And they were,

when they got out, they were on a rampage. They were killing people as fast as they could. And they tried to kill the prime minister. They did kill some people. They accidentally killed this little schoolgirl named Shema. This is a characteristic jihad action. So carelessly, did they plan this assassination of the prime minister? They just put the bomb outside a girl's school. And the only person killed was, you know, a school girl could have been dozens of them. But the city, the chirod, was infuriated, and there were marches in the street, and you know, protest. And it was a watery actually complaint because he felt defended that they were subject to so much abuse. And yet it was pretty clear that Shema was a step too far for Jihad.

And actually one of the killers lives now in London. You know, he got political asylum because of the fact that Egypt had a death penalty. And the British would take in anybody who Egypt had a death penalty and the British would take in anybody who was under a death penalty. So, Shema's killer is living in London. Still? Last I talked to him, he was still there. Something else that you point out in the book that I thought was so fascinating, because

it's so obvious once you stated it, but I'd never really understood it, which was why couldn't the real resistance take place in Egypt, but you point out that the topography is not amenable to it. You can't really live away from the Nile. You basically, the moment you get too far off an aisle, you're in the middle of the desert. It's not amenable to guerrilla warfare. And the military had too strong a hold over denial from upper Egypt all the way to the Delta and into the Mediterranean Sea.

So basically, if they were going to create an army, they needed to do it outside of Egypt. And it seems that Zawahri realized that in the mid-80s, if not the early 80s, correct? And is that about the time that he left? Yeah, he went to Afghanistan first as a medical doctor, answering a call that many heeded. And then he came back and he affected some Afghan outfits and so on. But I think he was very stirred by that. When the Soviets invaded, it was an electric alarm in the Muslim world.

You know, that an Islamic country was being occupied by a secular government. What was Russia's intention? It's a really good question because, you know, you could say that they were trying to beat a path to the Mediterranean, but it's a, you know, it's a long way. It doesn't go directly there. So, you know, they might have done better going through Pakistan and Pakistan was normally allied with the United States, so that might have been problematic. But Soviet Union was an expansionist power. It was crazy. If you remember that period, there was a lot of turnover in the leadership.

I think that there was confusion about who's in charge and it didn't make any sense at all. And Carter administration, Brzynski was a national security advisor and he saw that as a huge opportunity to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. And essentially, that's what we did. We supplied the Mujahideen with weapons and then finally with stingers, which brought down the helicopters. And that was, the Soviets didn't want to go which brought down the helicopters. And that was, the Soviets didn't want to go mono,

or mono on the ground. So once they lost that air cover, they were essentially defeated. Which now brings us to the other half of the al Qaeda duo, Sama bin Laden. I think it's well known by many people who have paid attention to the stories of al Qaeda that he came from

unbelievable wealth, unbelievable privilege. But maybe for folks who aren't quite familiar with his lineage, who was Muhammad Bin Laden and why did he have such an empire? What was the circumstances of Osama Bin Laden's upbringing? Muhammad Bin Laden came from Yemen and there are stories about how he got there, but essentially he I think the most credible is a kind of hitch to ride on a boat to took him up to jitta and he was a laborer. He was blind in one eye. He was illiterate. He put himself to work as a handyman and then did some work for, you know, the Americans were, you know, at that time working on a ramco building up the Saudi oil reserves. And there were American companies in Saudi Arabia who were essentially beginning to build the kingdom itself, you know, the roads, the hotels, and so on. So it was a good time to be in that business. And Muhammad bin

Laden, the king didn't really trust the Americans. Who was king then? Was it Faisal? Was this before Faisal? And I think it was Abdel Aziz when Muhammad bin Laden first got there. It was the first king of that lineage. I don't know if he built the whole palace, but the king was in firm. And if you remember in the meeting between Roosevelt, President Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz in the Suez Canal, Roosevelt gave him a wheelchair. The king liked having the wheelchair, but he lived upstairs. He got Muhammad bin Laden to build him a ramp so that Khar could drive him upstairs. So that was the display of the genius that Muhammad bin Laden had. And then there

was a goal that had been from the very beginning of the kingdom to try to unify the two sides of Saudi Arabia. The Western portion was divided by a mountain range. On the other side of it was the Holy Lands, Mecca and Medina, and Jidda, one of the major cities. But it was cut off by the Sarawat mountain range. And when Faisal became king, he was trying to get a contractor who would build a road that would unify the kingdom. The main contractors looked at the steep cliff face and just there was daunting. You know, how would you do that? So, Muhammad bin Laden, this one ideal literate,

humani laborer, gave a bid to king, which didn't turn out to be accurate, but the king accepted. And so the legend is that he pushed a goat over the edge of the cliff and followed him down this cliff face, marking the path. And that's the path that this road. I drove up and down it, but it's very windy. And oddly enough, beset with chimpanzees. So, you know, there are a lot of animals along the way. You have to be careful. But it's a two-lane road that goes down. But that was one

of the most important roads in history because it unified the kingdom and it made Muhammad bin Laden the most famous non-royal figure in the kingdom of real hero. And he took advantage of his celebrity. He had a lot of wives. 45 children? 52 I think. I think bin Laden had 52 brothers and sisters. So maybe 53 total. Some of the wives he would marry on Friday and divorce on Sunday. So you know, I think Ben Laden had 52 brothers and sisters, so maybe 53-total. Some of the wives he would marry on Friday and divorce on Sunday, so there was that kind of arrangement. But typically in Saudi Arabia and under Islamic rules, you're awarded four wives. And the fourth wife is always a little bit of a threat to be discarded. And it was the fourth wife that was a mother of Asama,

and she was Syrian, and she was an alawight, which is the sect that Assad, the ruler of Syria, is a part of a minority sect that is thought to be heretical inside Sunni Islam. So that was by itself a mark against Asama. And his father divorced her, but he arranged marriage for her and one of his trusted employees, who actually Asama became close to, and they lived in a little house in Jeddah,

off of street, it's called macaroni street, because there was a pasta factory nearby. That's where he grew up. He was always pious. It wasn't a conversion. He would play soccer and he would wear long pants. But he must have had some influence on these other kids, because eventually they adopted his long pants strategy.

And he would, even when he was fasting, which he did. He fasted two days a week. Two days a week, emulating what he thought the prophet did. We're talking about Ben Laden as a teenager. Absolutely. He would make sandwiches for his soccer mates, even though he wasn't eating them. And then they serve cakes and then play Islamic games, you know, guess the names of the Prophet's companions and that sort of thing. Even though music is frowned upon, instrumental music is frowned upon in Saudi Arabia, he led this acapella singing. And I tried to get a tape some of them. And I tried to find some tapes of, you know,

bin Laden singing, but I never could lay my hands on anything like that. Did you have an insight as to why he was so pious? I think that if you want to stand out in a very religious society like Saudi Arabia, you can become less religious or more. And in his environment, he was not going to become less religious. So he, I think he always had the idea that there was an achievement by becoming more of an authority. I mean, you have to bear in mind, his father was an exceptional figure.

He died in an air crash, but as Ben Laden was young, when that happened, but very few people in Saudi Arabia, in all of history, have achieved the kind of status that Muhammad Ben Laden did, who is in someone who is not in the royal family. That was exceptional. And I think that Osama being the son of the fourth wife and then cast out of the inner circle when the father divorced his mother, he always wanted to distinguish himself. And there was a hoard of other children around to compete against. You know, Sama was adventurous. Some of the other sons were adventurous, but I think he, you know, one of them died nearby here in central Texas.

He crashed an ultra-light plane in a power line. So it wasn't just a Sama that was an adventurous type, but early on, you know, he was racing horses drove very fast, not professionally, but you know, he was, he liked to drive, and he was careless. He had wrecks a lot, but he had his kind of impunity around him. And he'd like to go out and camp in the desert by himself. He was forging an independent identity, even as a very young man. He was drawn more deeply into Islam in his school. Apparently, I think it was a gym teacher who was in the Muslim brothers, and he impressed

Asama. So that probably drew him more into Islamic politics and he met other people that would be important to him inside what was the secret cell of the Muslim brothers inside of Arabia. Do we know if he was influenced by Said Kutab's writings? Oh yeah, there's no one who wasn't. You have to start with that. But side-cutter was a big figure. And when he was in the university, there were lots of discussions about

cutab, and there was another head of the Muslim brothers in Egypt who had a bit of a contrary view. Sometimes Osama would take one perspective and sometimes the other, but they were essentially arguing over Kutub. He was a huge figure. He might have met, no, I guess not, because I would have asked Kutub's brother, Muhammad, if he'd ever met Osama, but I don't think so. So when did Osama first go to Afghanistan? Well, the invasion, When did Osama first go to Afghanistan? Well, the invasion of the United States. In 1979, he said he went as soon as he could. There's no evidence he went there in that first year or two.

But he might have been, but there's just no evidence of it. And he was inspired. He didn't stay long. He came back, but he became a conduit for money. He was a bundler and Abdullah Azam was the sort of Godfather of the Arab participation in the war against the Soviets and Bin Laden hooked up with him. And Azam just saw this tall, enigmatic Saudi with a lot of money and a lot of prestige and just saw him as a cash machine, which he was. I mean, he played a huge role in raising money for the war against the Soviets. And that was his main task

for the most part until he actually moved to Afghanistan and decided to form an Arab wing Afghanistan and decided to form an Arab wing of the war. And it was totally feckless. I mean, it was worse than feckless. It got in the way. You know, Arab Afghan warlords complained about it. They didn't know what they were doing. Essentially, they were just putting young men without any training at great risk and affecting no real change in the war.

But from the perspective of Saudi Arabia, here was a Saudi, not a prince, but a prince lean in the sense that he was the son of the famed Muhammad bin Laden. And the idea that Saudis would actually go out and fight was really titillating. They weren't allowed to fight, there was a nominal army, but essentially there was no military... What was the scale of this? So how many Mohadjadin fighters were there?

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

And then they would go home and say that they've been fighting in Afghanistan. And the US had no forces there, but the CIA was providing weapons to the Mahadjitin, correct? Right. And they were also supplying money. And they would, unfortunately, we landed on this guy named Hummet Ghul, who was a general in touch with the Afghan warlords and He would parcel out the money among the seven warlords that CIA called them the seven dwarfs But he picked the most radical of them So the money that came from American taxpayers went to empower people that would later become Allies of the Taliban. The Taliban didn't exist yet, correct?

Taliban were kids in of the Taliban. The Taliban didn't exist yet, correct? The Taliban were kids in school. The Taliban, the word means students in Arabic, and I guess in Urdu, especially for young Afghan boys, and Pakistanis as well. The parents didn't have any money. They would be sent off to these madrasas. Many of them on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And especially after the Soviet invasion, there were a lot of orphans and there were a lot of families that were unable to provide for their kids so they send the boys to

these madrasas. Where their main task was to memorize a Quran in a language Arabic that they didn't speak. And oftentimes these boys would be abused, especially warlords and so on, would take advantage of them. And really the Taliban came to power when there was a battle, a personal duel between these two Afghan commanders over a boy. That was when Mullah Omar, who would come to be the leader who was a minor cleric, got on his motorcycle and began to organize.

And that's where the Taliban arose. It's a odd culture because there's some pictures of these boys, but it's beginning as they begin to form into a military force, but they put on cosmetics. They look very feminine, you know, with eyeshadow and lipstick and so on. So there was a, it's hard to characterize it because I can't say that I understand it. But, you know, there was, I think in terms of absenting women so much from society that these boys were sexualized.

And once again, I think humiliation played a role and it hard to quantify, but I think impossible to ignore. And then the Northern Alliance at this point is part of the Afghan government? The government went through several iterations and coalitions and the Northern Alliance was a Pashdu organization, so they would have been inside the tent of government. So when did Zawahri and Bin Laden meet? Nobody knows. I tried really hard to find that out, and I asked many of Zawahri's colleagues.

Most people think that they met somewhere along the line in Jeddah, where Bin Laden lived, and he was raising money for the Majahadin. And so, he went there ostensibly to practice medicine at this Muslim brothers coalition of doctors and so on. So it's totally plausible. It could have been shortly after that in Peshawar in Pakistan, where Ben Laden set up shop.

So, it's one of my great frustrations that I was never able to chronicle the moment when these two guys ran into each other and what they thought about each other. Is the Soviets ultimately withdraw, which is what, 89-ish? On some level, I think, though probably not justified, Ben Laden feels like a bit of a hero. Oh, yeah. He glorified himself. Although, by all accounts, he really hadn't done much. He mocked it up, really, is what he did. And got a lot of kids killed, and, you know, just I'm a kid, some young men. But in terms of victories, no, he had none. But what he did accomplish was to create a legend

around himself and around the era of Majahadin. And it's fascinating to me as a person that's always been intrigued by religious beliefs. You know, how these legends spread and how they fortified his image. You know, there was the idea that if you fell in battle, your body wouldn't putrify. And the green birds would come circle your corpse. And remember I asked Jamal Khalifa who had been been been Laden's best friend for much of his life

and his brother-in-law and had been in Afghanistan with Bin Laden. Really? Do you really believe? Oh, absolutely. I saw it with my own eyes. It can't be true, but it's hard to deny someone who speaks with such conviction. And so that was the kind of thing that young people in, not just in Saudi Arabia, but throughout the Muslim world would be hearing, you know, the stories of these fighters and

they're mighty men and they, you know, they live in caves and they fight these technological powers and they win. They are Muslim brothers and we should be doing the same thing. And we have to contribute however we can. And the mosque and even the shopping center, there would be cans for contributing to the effort. And so people did. It was a very popular effort.

And Ben Laden was very central in his name and his identity became central to that cause. I call him Saudis first celebrity because there wasn't a category for Bin Laden. He wasn't royal. In Saudi Arabia, there's a true of other Muslim countries, to some extent, but there is a prohibition on human forms. You're not supposed to have pictures of people or animals, for that matter, but there are pictures of the king and the princes all over the place.

And I remember when I was there, there was a legal battle going on over the Starbucks image. Because it's like a human form. Yes, but finally in the courts, they decided she's a mermaid. And so she's neither animal nor human. She's a mythological creature. So Starbucks was allowed to keep their logo, but that's how seriously it's taken.

But here's Ben Laden. He's not nobody. He's Muhammad Ben Laden's son, but that's not an unusual category. He has 20-something brothers, but there's nobody like him. He can go to the mosque and make a speech, and people would pour out to hear him. He wasn't charismatic in the traditional sense, but he had a kind of ethereal era about him. He wasn't charismatic in the traditional sense, but he had a kind of ethereal era about him. He was an enigmatic intriguing, very handsome, very tall, had a kind of elegance about him. And that turned out to be a real pain in the ass for the royal family,

because they weren't used to having a rival power. Someone who had a voice of authority and been loved and even at a very young age was that person. Now, I guess it would have been the summer of 1990 when Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. Right. And although I guess we wouldn't know it at the time, you could argue that was Certainly one of the greatest factors that would ultimately lead to 9-11 though it wasn't You can only know that in retrospect. Right, and it's peripheral and that I mean we wouldn't understand it from our point of view because America and other allies rushed into save Saudi Arabia. Ben Laden was trying to keep that from happening, and so he went to the Minister of Defense and said,

I'll take care of this. I'll bring my al-Qaeda guys, which were several dozen maybe, you know, together with my father's earth moving equipment, we will enlist the people and we will repel the million man Iraqi army. And the minister of defense just, he didn't laugh him out of the office, it wouldn't be polite, but he was not taken seriously.

The first time I heard this story, by the way, was I had the privilege of meeting Prince Turkey, spending a week with him actually. Really? I thought maybe you were more of that. Yeah. And he told this story, which was how Bin Laden was adamant that he based on his victory in Afghanistan,

which again means he believed his own hype. I think so. Right. Like he actually thought that he moved the needle in Afghanistan. Well, he defeated the Soviets. So what would the Iraqis be by comparison? That was what was going on in his mind. And the disconnect from reality, but how humiliated he was when not only was he not the one that was going to defend his country, but these filthy Americans were going to come in and do this, which included women, Jews,

Christians, and they were going to spend quite a bit of time there, right? This was even though it didn't take long to get Saddam Hussein to retreat, you still had to maintain no fly zones, you still had to maintain a military presence there. I've stopped you a bit on that because we didn't need to stay in Saudi Arabia. There were other bases and Qatar and UAE, you know, we could have gotten away, but the Saudis had very nice bases, but that it was the lingering. I mean, we promised we were going to leave when the war was over. Yeah, why says that's good point.

It was promised that the US would leave. Why did they not? They were comfortable. You know, and I think probably the royal family felt happier having an American presence there because the Saudis have always been insecure about their, you know, they're sitting on this golden egg and everybody around the world wants a piece of it. So the Saudis, suddenly they've got the American military there and that's not the worst thing in the world in their opinion. But for bin Laden and for other people, you know, there's a saying attributed to the prophet,

which was there shall be no two religions in Saudi Arabia. Well, you know, there are more than two religions and there were at the time of the prophet, but bin Laden took this to mean only Sunnis of his particular stripe should live in the kingdom. And everybody else has to be expelled. And such a huge thing to have half a million Americans and other nationalities. Most of them not Muslim, living in their country, protecting how humiliating once again living in their country, protecting how humiliating once again, is it that you have to turn to these other powers, we're not strong enough to do it ourselves, that, you know, for Ben Laden, that was, you know, a big motivating force. That's when he really sort of turned his attention to America.

And this is where, as he and Zawahir getting closer, there's a bit of a difference between them, right, which is at this point, Zawahir is still really focused on overthrowing Egypt, overthrowing what he views as these horribly immoral corrupt Arab leaders. But bin Laden is thinking far beyond that already. Yeah, it wasn't just Zawahir. I mean, there were a lot of nationalist groups in the Arab world focused on changing their countries. And what Ben Laden did was to create a coalition and then redirect them to become an international terrorist group rather than just be stuck in their nationalist orbits.

And the warry was one of those people. Given his brothers, he would have just spent time trying to overthrow the Egyptian tyrants. And as you characterize the corrupt, ruthless leader, that was true. He was right about the nature of the rule. But he was wrong about the solution. I always talked to my parents about this stuff. When Mubarak was like entering his 570 third term as president, right? And I would ask naively as sort of a youngster. I was like, why can't Egypt have an actual democracy? Like, why do these elections have to be rigged?

And my parents for right or wrong, and you have to remember, my parents have a very different view of Egypt, right? So my mom fused Egypt fondly, right? Left reluctantly, loved Nasser. My father, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get out. Dispised Egypt, never looked back, hates everything about it, and is the classic immigrant who wants to come to the West and just hates the corruption, hates the socialism of Nasser, right?

Nasser wanted to socialize the country, but they both agreed full stop that a country like Egypt had to be ruled by a strong man. Like their view, again, I don't know if this is true, but their view was you could never take democratic principles and just lock them into an Egyptian society. Like, it needs an iron fist to rule it

and Mubarak was the least bad option. That was basically the way they thought of him. What's your view of an autocratic leader of that era? I mean, do you think that my parents in their assessment were correct of Egypt? I was wrong about Egypt. I thought it was ready for democracy. And they had a parliament back during the era of the king. So there was, even though somewhat forgotten, but there had been deliberation laws were passed, you know, it had the appearance of being a constitutional monarchy because the king

was so indolent that he didn't, he couldn't stir himself to do anything. My analysis was, this is a sophisticated country. It's a country that is never going to dissolve, like, you know, Iraq made fall apart. That's not going to happen to Egypt. It thinks of itself as eternal. And so it's always going to be one thing. It's always going to be the most significant Arab country and they know it. So I thought, well, yeah, this is, I was all for the... You were very optimistic in 2011. I was. I read a lot of what you wrote.

And I had been affected. I went back to Egypt to make a speech or a couple of speeches. I spoke at the American University in Cairo where I used to teach and I spoke at Cairo University where Barack Obama went to make his famous outreach speech to the Muslim world. And I remember this was back during the election, this before the Arab Spring started. And during the primary season when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and you know, we're running for office and I was asking the kids, if you were an American, who would you vote for? You know, how many here for Hillary Clinton? All the girls in his job raised their hand, you know, and how many for Barack Obama,

you know, a lot of other people, how many for John McCain, one guy from the embassy, but they were totally into the idea of democracy. They were excited by what they were seeing and that there could be revolutionary non-violent change was on their mind. And one young woman said, and it's very plaintive voice, what happened to us? I mean, every Egyptian lives with the weight of history on shoulders. You look at the pyramids, and Egypt was the center of civilization. Absolutely. And it really was. I mean, China, it was so powerful and so much art,

and then a long slide into being just a tourist kingdom. So what happened to us? And also such an important pillar of science too. I mean, that's the thing. I remember as a student, as a youngster, I was a hated school, despised school, didn't do well in school or anything like that. Ultimately, I turned that around, but a lot of it had to do with something my mom would

say to me repeatedly growing up, which is she would say, because we're copdick, right? So she would say, you know, we're defendants, we're descendants of the pharaohs. Like, you are a pharaoh. Science and engineering is in your blood, your ancestors built pyramids. And she would just say these things, which when you're a kid, you kind of start to believe it after a while. It's like, well, maybe mom's right. Maybe I am smarter than I think I am.

But it's also a society that does have a very scientifically literate population. Like you would think this shouldn't be hard to do. Well, when I was thinking about that question that she posed to me, that young woman, I thought when I was teaching in Cairo, Egypt was a part of what we call the developing world. You know, these were countries like India, South Korea, Singapore, so many of what these countries that became the Asian Tigers, they roared past Egypt. And I thought

they answered I gave her was her question made me think of my father and his generation. He had come out of the dust bowl in Kansas, you know, broken farms, you know, just really poor. And he went on to become a banker in Dallas, small bank, but he spent seven years and more time in World War II and Korea. And he in his generation built the most powerful country and economy in the history of the world. And I said it takes a generation. And there are generations like that right now in South Korea and in India and places like the China that are making their country great. But it can be done by an individual. And I think that's my argument against tyranny. It takes a generational commitment.

And they have to have influence. They have to know that they are a part of an enterprise and they can't be suddenly ruled out. And that is the failure of tyranny, I think, is essentially those kinds of people that would be transformative for a country or not given the chance to be the kind of leaders that they could be. What role does religion play in this?

And specifically, what role does Islam play in this? Is there something about Islam in its current level of maturity, which maybe is akin to Christianity a thousand years ago, that is standing in the way of the progress you speak of Well, Islam is you know has many manifestations and so it's different in Indonesia for instance the largest Muslim country far more successful country than Egypt or Saudi Arabia Turkey also But there are manifestations of Islam that are really,

really harmful. People are encouraged to adopt a kind of submissive attitude. And of course, Islam means submission. So there's, you know, there's a literalism about it. And then if you're not, it's not, if you don't believe in it, you have tyrants who will beat you into submission. So there are two very powerful forces. You have dictatorships that are ruthless, justifying themselves on the basis of religion. And then you have actual religious texts that urge you to be compliant. And tyrants are quite adapted using those kinds of instructions. I don't think it's true that you can't have a modern country or a democracy in an Islamic country. I think Tunisia has been struggling to do that. And, you know, they've had some turmoil recently, but, you know,

you see that they're actually, that people in Tunisia want to have a democracy and they feel like they can be trusted with one. But it is, you know, it's a polite on the Islamic world and you have tyrants from Morocco all the way to southern China. And it's something that I hope that that religion outgrows at some point. Yeah, I sometimes just wonder if it's really a time scale problem and we can't think about this in decades. Well, I certainly think that's true because I've already spent decades hoping for change and just not seeing it blossom. Egypt is, you know, when I was there was far more secular, far more accommodating. When I was there, Soviets were essentially an occupying force. And the Egyptians really longed for a relationship with the West. They liked Americans,

even though we were essentially persona non grata. They liked the fact that we hoisted around with people we would talk to the help. We were, you know, we were, we were, Democrats in person as in spirit, you know, it is, you know, we, we liked being around people into it. Whereas the Russians in the news agency across the street, they were incredibly insular. I remember it was odd because I used to play doubles with one of these Soviet guys. I called this the big powers but They would have these parties on Saturday night and you could hear them playing Teresa Brewer

Records and put another nickel and you know and they were to be sitting on couch with their drinks Just sitting around and glumly and then it around one in the morning, they would spill out in the street all drunk and singing. It looked awful, but the Egyptians just hated them. It was a great time to be in an American in Egypt, whereas after 9-11 it was entirely different. The governments were friendly, but the people were very upset with America. And it seemed odd to me because I mean, you attacked us. A strong motivation for me was to go back to Egypt and find out what happened because, you know, I remember it so fondly, I just had a great time

living in Egypt and teaching these young Egyptians and also Palestinians and Jordanians and some Africans. And what's the answer you have? You talked a little bit about your mom and how she believed in conspiracies and things like that. I asked this one Egyptian woman who was saying that Americans did 9-11 to themselves. I heard that a lot. I said, how can you believe something for which there's absolutely no evidence? You know, you say that, but there's nothing you can point to that shows that, you know, there's any evidence or motivation. And she said, well, in Egypt, nobody's ever told us the truth. And so we have to try to imagine for ourselves what it is. So the question we

always ask is who benefits? And in this case, we think America has been waiting for the opportunity to attack the Arab world. And so you created this excuse for yourselves. Well, that was her thinking. And that's how conspiracies nurture themselves. You know, on these kinds of rationalizations that float above the world of truth and evidence. By the same logic, obviously the CIA killed Kennedy because they had to figure out a way to get into Vietnam. So let's go back to our good friend. It's the early 90s now.

He's been humiliated by his own government who have said thanks, but no thanks. We're going to have the Americans help us out here. He goes to Sudan of all places. What happens in Sudan? Why doesn't he end up just settling down in Sudan and living the rest of his years there? Oh, I wish he had. At 92 to 96, Al Qaeda became essentially an agricultural organization. And Sudan, Ben Laden, in Sudan, probably was the largest landowner. He owned a considerable amount of property, and he would do jobs for the Sudanese government, you know, build highways and period in his life and I was trying to penetrate Sudanese intelligence. So I was recruiting some names of people that I've been given. And

I finally got, made some relationships and they took me around and showed me Ben Laden's house and so on. And this was a time when I had been traveling a lot and I had injured my back and it was very painful to take those long airplane flights. And I took one of those big exercise balls, you know, where you've had to blow up and you have to unblow it when you left the country. But in order to ease the pain. So one day, one of my Sudanese contacts knocked on my door at a hotel that called itself the Hilton. Ahmed was the intelligence agent.

And he had this guy with him who was kind of plump and he had one of those conical Indonesian hats at Muslims where so come on in and you know Ahmed was very tired and he sat on the edge of my bed and his eyes were bobbing and I said I'm just light down so he falls asleep and it leaves me with this al-Qaeda guy. You know I got my ball and I give him the office chair that's in the room. So, who are you? And he said, well, you can call me Luey. And that was frustrating, but I started asking him about Ben Laden. He seemed to know everything.

And he, especially in Sudan, he knew all about Ben Laden's enterprises. He started raising seeds. He had a for a while a bicycle importing company, and our usually used in Sedan because of Rose Rolls-San. But he had all these different enterprises. And this guy knew everything. But he also knew all about fighting the Arabs, Majahaddin and Afghanistan. And yet I was at sea, I didn't really know who he was. And so I went back

to the US and started triangulating. And I found Muhammad Loay Bayazid, whose al-Qaeda name was Abu Rida al-Suri. He was the guy. He was the guy who took the notes at the founding of al-Qaeda in May of 1988. His. It's his handwriting. I didn't have any idea who I had. So I flew back to Sudan and he wouldn't see me. So then I began to court him, you know, and finally he agreed and I flew back and I said, oh, hey, why didn't you see me last time? It means a lot of trouble to come to Cartoum. And he said, well, I didn't know how seriously to take you. The first time we met, you were sitting on a balloon. That was my, my first al Qaeda interview, a real triumph.

But those years in Sudan, at least according to law, you know, they were kind of wonderful years for Al Qaeda because they weren't fighting anybody. Ben Laden still had money and he was generous in handing it out. They would have celebratory dinners and they had soccer teams. They played, they had their own little league and people had dormitories and stuff like that. People got money to get married.

It was, they were settling down. It was the US State Department that decided this can't stand. So they put pressure on Sudanese government to expel bin Laden and the Sudanese government did that. Based on what? He was a potential terrorist, a funder of terror anyway. What hard evidence did the State Department have at that time? Really none.

There were suspicions. About that time, CIA opened up an office on Bin Laden or a file in any case. This is before the creation of Alex Station? That's where Alex Station came from, which was really the first sort of off campus in the US station, but it was off campus and ignored by the CIA. They called the people that worked there, the island of lost toys.

You know, there were people that were, you kind of pushed out of their own departments and you know, that was the team, the original team. That team was led by... Sure. Michael Shorier, you know. Shorier. And what is it that brought him to lead Alex Station? What was his conviction? Well, Shorier is a loose cannon to put it. Well, certainly today he's about as off the rails as they come. He wants to shoot Democrats. Yeah.

But at the time, what was his conviction about Al Qaeda? Well, he was right about it. Yeah. You know, he was right that it was a terrorist organization that could strike America and intended to. He was right that they had reasons. He under, I mean, you think you have to give Michael Schoyer credit for seeing into the mind of Ben Laden and his followers

and seeing how they looked at the world. It's so foreign. I mean, when 9-11 happened, the idea that a man and a cave in Afghanistan would attack America was comical. And Shoria didn't think so. So he was not a prophet, but he was an analyst that could look at the tea leaves and see what could actually happen. And nobody took him seriously. That's another beautiful parallel in your book, right? We've gone through kind of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, El Jihad, El Qaeda. We haven't quite got to the point where El Qaeda

and El Jihad become one entity which will happen in the late 90s. But as we move to the intelligence side, which is the harder part, I think, to wrap one's head around, you also have these two parallels between I-49 and Alex Station and these two personalities between Michael Schoier and John O'Neill, which are both right, but because of their remarkable disdain for each other other tragically both

Let this thing slip so maybe Let's now shift for a moment and talk a little bit about Alex station in i 49 the CIA and the FBI which by Around this point in time the mid 90s are starting to kind of pay attention to this threat, you know? You know when you're talking about it I reflect on the fact that the siege was built on this same premise that My mission was to write a movie about a woman in the CIA that was the assignment and that bidding became the woman in the CIA and

and what's what was the Soviet Union had fallen? What was the problem? And I realized the CIA had a real life enemy. It was the FBI. And so that's what the movie's about. So maybe I was already primed to see it that way, but I had heard about the antagonism. primed to see it that way, but I had heard about the antagonism. But as an American, I can't tell you how disappointed I am in our intelligence agencies, and they're failure to protect our country. That's

their mission, but they got so caught up in their institutional and personal antagonisms that they allowed 9-11 to happen and John O'Neill lived a big life, you know, he was a Flamboyant you would never think of an FBI agent. I mean to me FBI agents were kind of like Mormons in terms of their dress and their sober demeanor and so on. These are stereotypes. John O'Neill wore these Gucci suits and he had these transparent black socks and kind of almost ballet slippers

and he had an office that he had personally decorated. Most FBI offices are, the furniture is all made in prisons. So all of that goes out in incomes, you know, this luxurious office. And he always has a fresh flowers and he has on his coffee table. This book tulips, the flower that drives men wild. I mean, this is not your typical FBI agent. And he set out when he was assigned to New York Station to conquer the city.

He wanted to meet everybody of any importance. And he did. He gave his new secretary a rolodex with all the names of the people that he wanted to meet in the next six months. And he went down that list. So he had tentacles in every part of the people that he wanted to meet in the next six months and he went down that list. So he had tentacles in every part of the city. And he thought of himself as a sheriff.

And he, you know, when the embassy bombings happened, the FBI was given the task of trying to find out, you know, if it was a crime against America. Yeah, we should probably take a moment to make sure people understand the difference in the mission of the organizations, right? So the FBI is law enforcement. So think police, right? They're the top police force. The CIA is intelligence. And it's easy to see,

I suppose, how they can have different priorities. So let's use this example that you're going to talk about, which is the bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya, which was 98. Eight. Okay. Now, 224 people were killed. Yeah. And number of them Americans. More than 100 people were blinded by the flying glass. I mean, it was horrible. So, when Americans are killed on foreign soil, is that clearly in the purview of the

FBI? Yes. That is law enforcement. They have to get permission from the country that they're going into. But in a country like Kenya, which is an ally, this is a relatively straightforward request that the United States FBI would be able to go in there,

conduct a criminal investigation, and bring to justice people to stand trial in the United States. Yeah. That is completely within the law. That's the way it's supposed to work. You know, the FBI being the world's premier policing organization, you know, it's supposed to be on the case.

As it turned out, there were only six agents in the 50,000 member FBI who spoke Arabic. One of them was Ali Sufahan, born in Lebanon. And it was during this period of time that Sufahan began reading al-Qaeda literature and piecing together what was actually going on. And he's the one who wrote a memo that got to, he got O'Neill's attention that this was probably the mover behind that. And O'Neill had an eye for talent. And, you know, he reached out and just grabbed this young man and brought him in, put him on I-49 squad. Somebody who would be his eyes and ears in the Arab world. When did I-49 get formed?

I don't know. I'm not sure exactly when it was. When was it specifically anti-terror? Yeah, that was his goal. I-49 squad was made up of a lot of people. At the end of the Soviet Union caused a lot of disruption in our intelligence agencies. Guys on the I-49 squad, some of them spoke Russian, some Eastern European languages, Polish, and so on. And their mission was to recruit people that were in the embassies in New York, and so

on to try to, and then suddenly all that fell apart. And so there was, in the rub know, the absence of the Soviet Union, I-49 squad was built up, and listing a lot of people who had no experience in dealing with the Arab world. There's a very interesting parallel between the transition in both human capital and military capital. We're going to talk about the USS Cole, but you're very deliberate in the way that you write about it, the way you write about the bombing, which is you describe in excruciating detail the strength and might of that ship. And you're deliberately vague about the skiff that blows it up.

To demonstrate, I think, the enormous asymmetry that took place. The point being this USS Cole was an unbelievable warship for a traditional warfare and yet was defenseless against guerrilla warfare. And that basically means there was kind of this decade lag after the Cold War where the military industrial complex had not adopted to what the new warfare was. But I think what you're saying, which is you got six people that speak Arabic in the entire FBI and the CIA also has their tentacles back in the Cold War, well, that's basically the same thing, right?

It's the human and intellectual skill set that's for the wrong war. And it seemed like it just took a while to catch up. Unfortunately, it didn't catch up, right? I mean, that's part of the story. It never did. And the coal bombing was a very telling moment, October 20th 2000. Two weeks before the election. Yeah.

And this is not really remarked upon in the campaigns. But 19 sailors died. And the ship, you know, it was a stealth vessel, you know, but there was no hiding it. It was in the middle of Aiden Harbor in Yemen, which had no business being. I mean, Yemen is far from an ally, and the whole area was riddled with jihadis and, you know, people that were intent on doing harm to the US. And there was this very appealing target. And there was a failed attempt to bomb it. The little skiff was overloaded with explosives and sank,

but then they pulled it off. And in some ways, it prefigured 9-11. That kind of imbalance of forces that you were talking about, you know, the coming out of the blue, who would ever have expected it, who is common, it's always been common in, you know, ports that little boats would come out and try to sell trinkets and stuff like that,

or deliver food. So the sailors were used to seeing boats coming toward them, but they had no idea, you know, they were waving at the people that were about to kill them. What was involved operationally for Al Qaeda to pull off the embassy bombing in Kenya and then the USS Col, because obviously they were prologue to 9-11.

They were practice runs. They were never the end goal. Well, I mean, I guess you could argue, Ben Laden's objective was to draw the US into you. Yeah, I mean, I guess you could argue, Bin Laden's objective was to draw the US into. Yeah, I think he thought after the embassy bombings that he, that would do the trick. And, you know, it was infuriating to him that we ignored it. So, and then the coal bombing, the same thing, it had to be something more spectacular to get America interested in him. The embassy bombing took place after El Jihad and Al-Qaeda had merged.

Yeah, and some of the operatives, some of the main operatives in the embassy and bombings were as a water easement. Both of these were catastrophic events that for whatever reason America was not prepared to pay any attention to. Why do you think that is with all the benefits of 21 years of hindsight? Why is it that neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore during their entire campaigns, including a campaign that included the explosion on the USS Cole? Why was this not a priority? If it had happened here would have been a different story, but it happened elsewhere. That's one of the reasons Americans were so vulnerable is our own hubris in the sense

of isolation that we have historically always felt. But why wasn't it enough that it had happened abroad? They were still U.S. lives. Yes, they were. And they should have been counted more dearly, but they weren't. It's similar with our wars, don't you think? I mean, we have wars, people die. Sometimes there's a tribute to them in the paper,

and you see their pictures, but not often. And so it's cost of doing business. There's a gap between our role in the world and the people we think we are. And I think this was especially true before 9-11. The reason Ben Laden attacked us is, you know, he felt surrounded. He felt America was encircling the Islamic world

and they were under threat and that why would we do that? Well, obviously our goal would be to destroy Islam. And then there was at the same time, this mandate he had in his mind that Islam has to rise again. You know, once it was the superpower, you know, it went all the way into middle Europe and to southern China. It was an expansionist power power and that it should resume that role. So there was the sense of being threatened by the superpower and the feeling that Islam should replace it. And that was, I think, the dynamic that was driving him.

And nobody, and I can't say nobody in America, but very few people in America would have imagined that such preposterous dreams would motivate somebody like bin Laden and actually be able to put into effect an attack on this nation that was seemingly invulnerable that was so distant. How could you even reach it? And how could you touch it in a way that would make it suffer? It's been a lot and wanted America to suffer. And he also wanted to humiliate America because I think he understood the power of humiliation.

Now, going back to O'Neil and Shoeiore, they agreed on one thing, which was Osama bin Laden was a really bad actor and needed to be taken seriously. In fact, you could argue that no two people believed it more than these two. One who headed the CIA's allocation, which was in charge of anti-terrorism and the other I-49, which was the FBI's response to that. But beyond that, they didn't see anything eye to eye. Fundamentally, O'Neill believed that Bin Laden

and other operatives of Al Qaeda should be brought to justice in the court of law in the United States. Shoeyer and colleagues believed these people should be assassinated. An attempt was made to assassinate Bin Laden in 1998 after the bombing in Kenya. It was a bit of a debacle. It didn't amount in anything. Right. Why is that? Was it failed intelligence?

Well, one thing here's the thinking, you know, there was going on inside at that time, Clinton and White House. They hit us twice. Well, we should hit them back twice, you know, there was going on inside at that time, Clinton and White House, they hit us twice. Well, we should hit them back twice, you know, we were, this is the kind of thing you do with nation states, right? You know, parallel responses. So we'll bomb training camps in Afghanistan and we'll hit this factory in Cartoon that we think is manufacturing poison chemicals for alkytah. Actually, it was making

veterinary medicines and it was one of the main factories in the whole country, very poor country. And we killed a night watchman. You know, I just had nothing to do with any of it. But we bombed the camps in Afghanistan. Fingers crossed Ben Laden would be there. Well, he wasn't. in Afghanistan, fingers crossed Ben Laden would be there. Well, he wasn't. He was on the road to go there and then changed his mind and they went somewhere else. So it might have happened, but it didn't. But the point was, look what we can do.

You hit us, we'll hit you back. Well, that's exactly what Ben Laden wanted. The failure of imagination that you referenced, there was a failure of imagination, but it was coupled with prejudicial ideas about who we're dealing with, and a tremendous absence of knowledge about the cultures that they, you know, that our adversaries came from. So we just didn't understand it, we couldn't understand their language. We didn't know what was going on. And so yeah, it's not a surprise that our imaginations didn't rise to the task because we didn't know who we're dealing

with, and we could not figure them out. Nor did we really spend very much time worrying about it. Let's just deal with them as if it was Russia that did this. And we'll strike them back proportionally. Clinton did have the idea. you know, he spoke to one of his military commanders about sending in ninjas, you know, and you know, dropped, rappel down from Cobra helicopters, and that's sure surprise been a lot. And on balance, it wasn't a bad idea.

That was probably the right thing to do. Go directly in there. But we were still in the remote control phase of our imperial rule. And I think that that's why partly why we didn't take the emissary bombing seriously. That's not the way we do things. We send drones over, we send F-16s or we in bombers over, and we do it remotely. And we don't dirty our hands, we don't bloody our hands. And so I think people just thought it would be a nuisance, and you know that we would take care of it. So as the planning for the coal bombing is underway, the planning for 9-11 is also underway.

These were parallel, not serial operations. Two men come to the United States January 15th 2000. Who are they? These men are a colloidal mid-Harrin no waffle, has me. There's two Saudi guys. They scarcely speak any English at all. They had been in a meeting in Kuala Lumpur with the coal bombers. So coal bombers went off to do their thing and then they fly, first of all, to Thailand and then they fly into LA. So how can they do anything? You know, they're in a country they don't understand.

They don't speak English. You know, their mission is to go train as pilots, but they would not qualify because they couldn't even speak enough English to go into a class. So this is the first mystery. What are they doing here? As it happens that very day that they arrive, there is a Saudi figure named Bayumi, Omar Bayumi, who happens to be at the Saudi consulate in an LA, talking to the Minister of Religious Affairs. That's kind of significant because, you know, they are the, as a result of the Mecca catastrophe, Saudis put these imams and consulates all over the place and they had a lot of authority.

So anyway, Omar Ba'yumi leaves the Saudi consulate and he goes to a Middle Eastern restaurant where he happens to, over here, these two guys speaking in a Saudi accent. It's according to him and the Saudi government, a total coincidence. Do you believe that? No, not at all. You know, the families of the victims of 9-11 are suing the Saudi government trying to get more information about the people that are involved in that, and Bayumi is one of the people that they have on their list of people to talk to. But Bayumi is such a generous fellow that he offers

to help them find a housing in San Diego where he has a place. And so he fronts them some money, he sets them up in San Diego. And Bayumi and other people in his circle begin receiving money from the wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. ostensibly for an operation for the wife or say, you know, these, you know, but it's significant thousands and thousands of dollars. Bayumi takes these two guys, Noah Fahazmi and Midhar, to meet a cleric in the Saudi mosque in San Diego who was Anwar al-Alauki, who later becomes the voice of radical Islam. We finally killed him in Yemen, but whether he was an al-Qaeda connection has never been established, but wouldn't it make sense?

What is your thought on the money that was coming directly from the wife of the Saudi ambassador? The ambassador Bander was very close to the Bush White House. He was sort of the dean of the diplomatic establishment. So there was a plausibility thing. How, you know, would you really see such a thing happening from the ambassador himself? But it stands that, you know, these Saudis were getting money sent to them in San Diego by Bandoor's wife. And now his daughter is the ambassador of the U.S. So, you know, that has never been, I think, a satisfactory accounted for. Another thing that's going on, you know, they arrived in January 15th, in March, the CIA finds out that they're in the U.S. Probably Prince Turkey, you know, Prince Turkey told me that

he had informed the chief of station in Riyadh of the CIA man and Riyadh about that. So that's probably where it came from. So in March, this is 21 months before 9-11, almost two years. The CIA knows that al-Qaeda is in America. And this is at a time when they say their hair is on fire about al-Qaeda, that we're under threat, they're going to the White House. And yet, they know that al-Qaeda is in San Diego. And moreover, Midhars' wife is in Yemen.

She comes from a very al-Qaeda jihadi family. Her name is Hoda al-Hada. They are al-Hada household. Because it's such a hotspot, we've got wires on it. We've got the phones. Yeah. The CIA is listening to the phone calls. NSA is getting calls to this al-Qaeda house in Yemen from San Diego. Do you have to draw a picture? What's more disturbing than this is that inusso and the other suspects. He asks specifically, well, he kind of, I think through that questioning comes to learn of the meeting that took place in Malaysia

and asks explicitly on at least three occasions for information from the CIA about these two guys in the US, and he is Stonewalled. It's not casual either. A request like that goes to the director of the FBI who sends a letter to his counterpart, the director of the CIA, formally requesting information about, in this case, this meeting in Kuala Lumpur. Do you know anything about it?

No is the answer. No information. In fact, the CIA actually covered the meeting. They recruited the Malaysian police to take photographs and stuff like that. So they got pictures of the participants. And they hide this inspiration from the FBI. And going back to the mission of each of these agencies, the story about the siege was who was fighting over who had control over terrorism in the United States. And in real life, the FBI won that battle. So they have the authority.

The CIA is not supposed to operate in our country. But the FBI has, the authority has a warrant on Al Qaeda and been lawd in and all this for all follows. So how is this not in the clearest legal sense obstruction of justice? It is obstruction of justice. The CIA obstructed justice when Ali Safan was investigating the coal bombing. They

hid information about the planning and the hidden information about the Kuala Lumpur meeting. This is a murder investigations. 19 sailors. So at this point, Michael Schurr is gone, correct. He has been relieved of his duties at Alex's station. Yeah, what led to that? well He was relentless in pressing the agency and tried to get rid of bin Laden There was a moment where he thought bin Laden might be at one of the camps in Afghanistan and one of the camps in Afghanistan. And he said, the reason that he might be there is that a lot of the royal family from the UAE

was coming to a bustered hunting, this endangered bird that is popular. And so, less bomb the camp. And we'll kill all the princes, but we might get Ben Laden. Well, that was the kind of thinking that Michael Schorier was capable of. Yeah, which again, the UAE is an ally. I mean, it would be that hard to fathom. Yeah, and we were just at that moment selling them, you know, a whole fleet of F-16. So, you know, there was a financial investment and not doing that as well as in

addition to the absurdity of the scene, but that's the kind of thing that Shorya would propose. So who took over Alex Station when Shorya was terminated? I don't know if I'm supposed to say her name, but if I can't remember it, anyway, I'm safe on that, Lord. But the woman that took over the station is an FBI of villain, but she and Shory are later married. So it was an office role, man.

It was an extension of Shory or anyway. Now, one of the things that's interesting about Alex Station is it had a number of I-49 agents that sat within it physically. So these are FBI agents that are sitting inside Alex Station, but they were kind of handcuffed because they were privy to the information that the CIA had, but they weren't permitted to share it with their colleagues at FBI. One of the things that struck me as odd is that none of them broke rank. You see an Edward Snowden a decade later who goes completely rogue and

Decides for right or wrong. This is his conviction. This is what he's going to do about it This isn't the best interest of American lives and yet amazingly none of the FBI agents sitting inside of Alex station Who presumably saw what was happening didn't think I'm willing to jeopardize my job here and maybe face criminal charges to get information because they saw the wires coming in. They saw the requests repeatedly from the FBI, from Sufon saying, who are these people? What happened in Malaysia? Why is money leaving to go to these people? Why is this money coming to the United States?

I mean, did you ever get an insight into why the FBI people inside of Alec Station were muscled? You know, there was a, it was more of a legal conceit. They called the wall. And the idea was that information should not travel from the intelligence world into the criminal one and vice versa. There was really no law. People thought it was a law, but it was a custom. And FBI had its own intelligence division. And so it was part of, it's like grand jury testimony.

It's supposed to be sealed, kept pure and secret. But when your face was something like that, the only alternative is to break the law. And there can be very serious consequences. And it's the only thing to do. But that's really the only thing you can do. What I can tell you is how broken those people are by what happened. They knew what was underway and they lost their boss. John O'Neill died as a consequence of their reticence to say anything. I'm not holding them responsible for 9-11, but I do hold the CIA responsible for it. If they had been transparent with the FBI, if they had said we have these I've kind of members in

America. The FBI had the authority, they had the warrant, they had everything they could follow them, they could tape them, they could you know clone their computers and they could arrest them. There were all these things, they could clone their computers, and they could arrest them. All these things that they could do, but they were kept in the dark. And of course, the question is, why? How many people in the CIA were you able to interview? They were actually working in the CIA. There was a moment where I think it's time has passed enough that I can say this.

I wrote an article about Imanel Zawari for the New Yorker and the CIA asked to talk to me. And so I was picked up by an FBI agent who worked at the CIA and driven to CIA headquarters and gone up to the seventh floor and there was a conference room and I met with Alex station. They were about 20 something people there. The meeting started off in Arabic and I said, Gullah Adaheindah, bekahdah Maud Maori? You know, everybody here speaks Arabic, and they had learned it in the last couple of years. It was, I was impressed by that.

But I was not impressed with their intelligence. You know, I was a reporter on the ground, you know, going around talking to people, and I wasn't trying to hide information from the CIA. I publish it. You know, it's not I mean what I find out I want people to know so I didn't feel like I was betraying sources or anything like that by talking to the CIA What I did want was a little bit of information from them and return and what they confided was it been loading was alive At that time there was a lot of talk to him.

What year was it? I'm guessing it was 2003. Might have been earlier in that, because I went to Egypt in, it must have been 2002. Ben Laden was keeping his head down. And so there was a lot of talk that maybe we got him or that he was sick,

and intelligence agencies, at least my experience with American intelligence agencies, is that they tend to trust information that has been stolen. In other words, wiretaps, stuff that people are saying, not knowing supposedly that they're being listened to, reporters have a different posture.

We go out and talk to people and ask them what they're up to and why and where do you come from. Those sorts of things you don't normally get on transcripts. They apparently taped my phone. One of my sources said he read a conversation I had came in on his laptop at the agency. It was a conversation I'd had with Zawarri's cousin. So the legal authority they had to tap your phone was because of who you were speaking

to? You're not supposed to tap Americans if that had been a tap on my line. If I were talking to, as I had been to Zawarri's cousin, they should say individual A. And so I'm not identified. But obviously I was, and I thought at the time, oh, those Egyptians, they're on top of Zawarares cousin, they sent this as a gift to the CIA and then I a couple of years later learned

the American intelligence had been taping Americans in some reporters and I obviously I had had a visit from There's a terrorism squad even in Austin You know a couple of guys came over. They wanted to talk to me and I thought they wanted advice because I had talked to FBI agents before to give them a little background on al-Qaeda. And I thought that's what this was. And one of them was from the FDA, but he was on the terrorism squad and he walked into my office and there are all these books on now Kaita And there's you know a quite board full of Arabic names and you know he was terrified He's his hands were trembling what they wanted to know was about a call that I had made to England

And it was a 4 4 201 number, you, and it just sounded like business number in London. And I said, you surely know who it is, but I looked on my roll of decks and it was a barrister who represented some jihadis. Then they said, did you know a person named Caroline Wright? Who's my daughter? She was in college. And they thought it was Caroline calling this barrister to get to these jihadis. And I thought, this is our intelligence. And then as I started thinking about it, it was like,

wait a minute, how do you know it's my line? How do you know that you know that the Caroline would how do you know about Caroline at all? You wouldn't have gotten that if you hadn't been listening to the call and I was really outraged as an American citizen But also shocked by the level of incompetence that I mean I was grateful they came to clear it up I have to say they at least did that, but the presumptions that they had were so absurd that I could see how we got ourselves into this fix. The two high-jackers, the future high-jackers in San Diego, the FBI, their line on what was going on, is the CIA knew they couldn't operate in America, but the Saudis could. And so they struck a deal with the Saudis

to try to follow these guys and turn them. Here they are in our clutches. We have an opportunity to penetrate Al Qaeda, which is not something the CIA had been able to do. All the young men from all over the world were simply walking into the camps and becoming al-Qaeda members. But they thought that the Saudis would do them that favor.

And then the two hijackers disappeared and the CIA lost them. It was then in August of 2001, just a couple of weeks before 9-11 that the CIA went to the FBI to ask them to find these guys that they had lost and it was too late. The FBI never did find them. So Muhammad Ahtaz is an interesting character. Of all the 9-11 hijackers, obviously he was the senior figure, but he was also such an interesting and unusual character, right? It's hard to make sense of his motivation, an educated man, a pious man, but one of the

things I've always struggled with is, what is it that these guys believed was going to happen? You go back to the story about the birds circling and the flesh not rotting. Do you believe every one of those 19 men believed they would be greeted in paradise by virgins? Do you think they literally believed that? I think so. It may have not been the preponderant motive for them. But the martyrdom seems to be the highest motivation, right?

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

and they wanted to go down in history. And they have. You talk about how terrorist organizations were allowed to legally operate inside of Germany, provided that they were foreign and not domestic terrorist organizations. It's almost an unfathomable statement. Can you help make sense of that? You know, Germany has a tortured history. It's problems with fanaticism on German soil.

It's historically been a corrective. So you cannot very easily be a fascist in Germany now. There are fascists in Germany, but it's sort of an underground thing. Other countries, there's this sense in Germany of implicit neutrality. We don't take positions on things like that. So if you're opposed to your government and you flee to Germany for asylum, what you do with, you know, in relation to your home

country is your business, not ours. Just don't screw around with our country. And that was, it's not just Germany. Europe was slow to awaken to the threat to their own countries, in part because in England, terrorists were actually brought into England because they were escaping the death penalty in Egypt. And they still live with subsidized rent and such a thing. In London, one of my sources is a driving instructor in London, and he killed this little girl, Shema in Egypt, and his attempt to kill the prime minister. That kind of mentality came about because

people just didn't feel threatened. And I think to some extent, that explains why these terror groups were allowed to grow up inside the borders, especially of England and Germany. It's Spain as well. When did Ata come to the United States? I don't remember the exact month. His cohorts had begun to assemble. So I think he was one of the last to arrive. He was in Spain coordinating with some of the Spanish al Qaeda guys.

To what end, we're not really sure. But then he flew into America. Of course, unlike the other guys, his English was pretty good. So his English is good. He's one of the four pilots. How were they coordinating inside the US? What did they communicate by? Did they speak on cell phones? Did they use email? How did these 19 guys organized in four groups communicate? Well, they did use email and cell phones. And what you have to understand, they weren't really hiding.

The CIA knew that Al Qaeda was present, and the Al Qaeda guys didn't know the CIA knew that. So, extensively, they just lived openly. They had drivers licenses and stuff in their own names. Eventually the FBI would find that they were listed in the San Diego phone directory. So, you know, they weren't in hiding. They didn't feel threatened. Then they took advantage of that freedom. So after the election, Richard Clarke, who's also a very important figure in your book, gets a demotion. Why is that? That was not clear to me in the book.

He had been under Clinton, the kind of terrorism's are. When the Bush administration came in, they didn't see the need for that. And their view was about the big picture. We were talking about China and Russia. And so the people in their NSA and you know the Secretary of State and Condi Rice and so on, they came from the old school. Clark told me that when he talked to Condi Rice to try to alert her to the danger of Al Qaeda, he had the feeling she'd never heard of the organization. It's hard to imagine that she didn't hear of it at all, but she clearly didn't take it seriously enough to take his counsel. And

so he was pushed down the ranks. And Bush was, you know, I don't think he took it seriously until the Saudis threatened to break off relations with the US because of Israel. And that woke him up. He was very concerned about that. But then there was a CIA memo. I think it was dated August 6, 2001. This is the PD. This is the presidential daily brief that was titled Al Qaeda set to attack in the US. Right. And so it couldn't have been clearer. And this was about the same time the CIA lost those guys in San Diego.

So suddenly things are moving and they're out of the CIA's control. During the 9-11 commission when Kandi Rice was asked about that memo, August 6th, right? So five weeks before 9-11, the president of the United States gets a briefing that says Al Qaeda is going to strike on U.S. soil. And of course, when Congress questioned her, it was sort of why was this not taken seriously. Her response was, if I recall, something akin to this was dated. There was nothing new in here. This was speculative. There was no real intelligence. Am I remembering

that correctly? Yeah. Such dodges were characteristic of a lot of the people involved in this massive intelligence failure. I've asked people in the CIA, you know, people in high authority about those hijackers, for instance, and no, we didn't really know. I mean, it was just incompetence, actually, you know, we, you know, there were memos that we didn't read. And, you know, it was, yes, it was in the memos, but you know, we never really came to the attention of people in authority. And in other words, there's a fog pixie dust thrown in your eyes, whereas nothing could be more incendiary to very same people that are ringing the alarm bells saying al-Qaeda is on the war path and is coming our way. And then they say, well, you

know, we didn't really pay an attention to that. And the memo never came to our attention. Bullshit. CIA was well aware by this time. You know, there was the embassy bombers. It was a coal bombing. There was, and then, you know, they become aware that al-Qaeda is in America. Now, so they're moving onto our soil. And that's the origin of that particular memo is that CIA knows they're here. And so they're obviously they're going to do an there here. And so obviously they're gonna do an attack here. Now, O'Neill said this to Condoleezza Rice before he was fired, forced to resign.

And she seemed to indicate that this was not a high priority because it, I think in the words at least used in the dramatized version of this, this was swatting flies, right? This was, what, we've got a couple of al-Qaeda guys in this country. That's not strategic. That's not relevant. One of the things that's just so mind-boggling to me about this story is how incompetence is, I mean, this is obviously a big part of this, but it's the personality conflicts that got in the way. I mean, another character in this story whose role is really quite sad is Barbara Bodine, then ambassador in Yemen who did not get along with John O'Neil, which I guess you can't fault her

for that. John O'Neil struck me just from everything I've read about him, and I know you did not have the ability to interview him, but you're doing, you're reporting is based on interviews with everyone who knew him. He struck me as a lover, hate guy. Is that the same? Oh, yeah. He was a polarizing guy. Yeah, you either absolutely loved this guy,

or you absolutely hated this guy. But I never got the impression that anybody wouldn't think he was competent. Yeah. Barbara Bodine seemed to have a thing about men and guns. And she was offended that the FBI came to Yemen with a bunch of armaments. Of course, it was dangerous. And Ovenil was trying to take care of his people. And they were authorized to carry weapons. But she was offended and made them give up their long guns.

And she kicked him out of Yemen, which is another real setback in the investigation at the time. Taking her side, I'm sure she perceived O'Neal as a swaggering misogynist, and she wasn't going to have any of that. And she felt that she had a role as the ambassador cultivate a better relationship with the Yemenis. And here he was coming in kicking up all this dust alienating everybody with his American big footing. So enough of this I can do without him. And it was a terrible blow for O'Neill. And I think that in some ways led to his sort of disgrace at the end where he had to go to a retirement conference. And he took some papers out of the office.

He shouldn't have taken. But he was doing work in Florida at this retirement conference and then left his briefcase in the conference room and somebody took it. He got it back and you know, the only thing it was taken was like a silver cigar cutter and the papers were still in there. But you know, he turned himself in and he had a lot of enemies inside the FBI and they were not going to miss the opportunity to use this to get rid of him. Now, he had many job opportunities after he left the FBI. One of them was a job in the government again in the White House, correct?

Or at least that was something that Dick Clark hoped he would take. It's not clear that he would have been able to replace him. He couldn't think of a better person. And O'Neill had lived above his means for many years. I don't know how he got away with it, but he was deeply in debt. And I think he was also deeply wounded by his experience with government. And so he wanted to get out and make some money. And there was money to be made for him. With his experience, the job that he settled on was head of security at the World Trade Center. And I know that, and this whole adventure started for me

by reading obituary's that were streaming online right after 9-11. I was trying to find a way into the story, something that would humanize it. I was looking for people who died in 9-11 and see if I could find a narrative. And on the Washington Post site, about six days after 9-11, I think, was this obituary of John O'Neill. The FBI had a counterterrorism. Recently retired, been on the job for a month. It was more than that.

It spelled out that he had taken classified information out of the office. I thought I didn't know if he was a hero or a goat, but his life could tell us something about why we failed. He was the head of counterterrorism in New York. He's the guy that had the warrant on bin Laden, but instead of getting bin Laden, bin Laden got him. That was the way I looked at it. It's one of those things, Lawrence, where if this weren't a true story, if you had written the looming tower as a fiction,

I don't know that the editors would have let you end it the way you did. Right. I don't think they would have let you have John O'Neill actually die inside the World Trade Center a month after being forced to resign from the FBI because he was kicked out at the shins and not able to do his job. I thought when I read that, Obert, that it was a supreme irony. But I don't see it that way. Now, he told his colleagues, some of them said to him, John, you'll be safe now

because they already hit the trade center. Because they've been a bombing. Yeah. He said, no, they'll come back to finish the job. So I think he instinctively put himself a ground zero. And in that sense, I see it as a Greek tragedy. You know, he, in some ways, anticipated his fate and went to meet it. And he actually left the tower that day and went back inside to rescue people. Yeah, that's the thing. He walked back into the building. As many heroes did.

If September 11th took place on December 11th, if the mission were postponed two months, do you think that would have been enough time for the FBI to figure it out? How close was the FBI to doing this despite the incompetence of the CIA, if not the outright negligence of the CIA? It's hard to calculate how much they could have done, but there's no reason to think that they couldn't have once alerted in August and given three or four months to work it out. No reason to think that they couldn't have tracked down the communications. If the American intelligence community had been helpful to them. Well, because remember the other thing that I always feel like they were so close to cracking was

once they had the list, the CIA list of suspected al-Qaeda operatives and the list of Arabs in flight schools and they crossed that list, that was just a matter of time. It seems like, and you know, there were several cases, like you mentioned, the flight schools in Arizona and Minnesota. You know, there were these weird things where, you know, these Arab would be pilots who wanted to learn how to fly, but not how to land. You know, so those were really puzzling things. Now, of course, it was, nothing like this had ever happened before.

It seems crazy. But on the other hand, it was nothing like this had ever happened before. It seems crazy. But on the other hand, it had been an invention. But you'd think like all it would have taken would have been a handful of these guys show up on a cross list. And that manifest gets sent to TSA or whatever. It was TSA, TSA back then. I don't know what it was called. but like there would have been a watch list that said, because as you said, these guys are getting on airplanes with their real names, they had a real ID. Well, also, you know, there was, you know,

there's one of the FBI agents in Phoenix, you know, actually wrote, I think this was a guy that did that, that's, you know, they could envision crashing into buildings, you know, that's spookily prescient. And then there was, you know, secret, you know, the 9-11 families had sued to get the 28 pages that had been suppressed in the 9-11 report.

And we finally got them, although there's still some redaction in it. And in there, you see Saudis on airplanes doing trial runs, getting the ticket in the first class compartment and walking into the cockpit. And oh, I thought this was a bathroom. And then one of them was so provocative in his actions that they actually landed the plane to stop the flight,

put down on the nearest airport and had somebody come out and interrogate to, I think, Saudis. And they said, no, we're going to a party at the Saudi Embassy and they gave them a number in the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Well, that's damning. And no wonder it was suppressed if you're trying to protect your relationship with Saudi Arabia, but it hasn't been explained. But these were clearly trial runs.

And the CIA knew about them. That's why that was in the 9-11 report. You know, this is intelligence that had been surfaced. So there was intelligence around that something was cooking. And even the CIA, you know, George T Tenet was telling the White House, they're going to attack us, they're coming for us. That's the thing with Tenet. I can't understand from your book. I got to be honest with you. I'm really conflicted and confused. On the one hand, he seems to be in lockstep with Richard Clark in saying this is a big deal and he seems incredibly frustrated with the Bush administration that they're not taking this more seriously and he seems to believe that this is almost something they're doing

out of spite. Like whatever the previous president did, we're absolutely going to do the opposite. But at the same time, I think, how is it then that under your watch, your organization was so derelict? visit then that under your watch, your organization was so derelict. He's never really been able to produce an incredible answer. I've tried to imagine what was going through his mind. If it's the case that he did seriously believe that Al Qaeda was a threat and that he had been striking a deal with the Saudis, it was a risky was a risky deal, but you know, one that had the potential for a huge payoff. And then it gets out of control.

And just as it's getting out of control, he is dramatically shouting, pay attention, Al Qaeda's on the warpath. So it's sort of like the arsonist who, as the house catches on fire, is actually the one that calls the firefighter. Yeah, I think that's the fair comparison.

I don't know what's going through. I want to be fair to him. You were not able to interview him. He wouldn't talk to me, and he's never really dealt seriously with this subject. It's not just George Tennant, but he's responsible. He was the person who oversaw the American intelligence community in one of his greatest catastrophes in our history, and not that it's been so sterling since then, but it was an unbelievable failure.

And there are so many points. Yes, it's true Monday morning, morning quarter backing and all of that. But I think I'm being fair enough to say the CIA knew what was going on. They hid the information from the FBI, had the CIA been transparent and worked in tandem with the FBI, that 9-11 would not have happened. I think the fact support that. So there's never been accountability for this. Not any.

And, you know, I, in fact, you know, George Dennett got the medal of freedom and, you know, all these other things accolades. I'm not saying that he belongs in prison, although I can understand why people might say that. But he should be held accountable as should everybody in authority at that agency. I wanted to ask you about that, which is given all that we know today, has anyone inside the CIA been charged with a criminal offense for obstruction of justice?

No, no, they were promoted. People that knew about this were given plum assignments. I asked one of the directors, has anybody been held accountable? He said, well, yes, I've helped people accountable. Well, who, for what? And he wouldn't specify, but there was no evidence of it. I asked about, it was a question about torture and the two hijackers in San Diego and maybe one other thing. And I said, you know, this is a history of the CIA, not

all under your reign, but, you know, partly, you know, has anybody been held accountable? And he quarreled with some of my facts without actually saying that they were wrong. And then I said, so in other words, nobody's been held accountable. And then he said, no, that's not true. I've held people accountable myself. But I don't know how to credit that. The most conspicuous people got promotion.

Yeah. I mean, let's just think about it through the lens of the family members of 9-11, right? So we had a 9-11 commission. What came of that for the family members? It was frustrating for the family members. It was presented as being the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then it came out that there were parts of the 9-11 commission that were suppressed at the 28 pages most notably. And of course, there were a lot of pages redacted. But- And the 28 pages that were suppressed

dealt primarily with the Saudis. So, because again, I remember even at the time, one of the things that was odd was, the Saudis being given air clearance to leave. Yeah. How do you make sense of this? This is one that I have a hard time wrapping my head around, which is why would anybody inside of Saudi Arabia had wanted this?

I'm talking about not obviously Al Qaeda, but I'm talking about anyone within the royal family, anyone within the Saudi intelligence community. I mean, there's no doubt to me that Prince Turkey was a good guy, right? This is a guy who I can't imagine there was any part of him that would want to see Ben Laden and his organization succeed. So what's the explanation for how any of the quote-unquote Saudi good guys could have stood by and knowingly watched this happen or worse supported it financially

or otherwise? If we think about, you know about these things as an intelligence analyst, just imagine here are the facts, where are the Saudis in this and why are they behaving like this. I think that the Saudis thought, for one thing, they gave us the information that Al Qaeda is in America. Perhaps if this FBI scenario is correct, the CIA thought to take it, turn these guys. They work out a deal with the Saudis where they're going to run these people. You know, they'll use them as potential recruits. And they fund the biomis and other people that are sort of, there are supervisors so they give them money to keep the operation going. And there is a certain ambition on

the part of the Saudis to show how, what a great job they can do. And also, these are Saudis that are in America and so they want to try to keep control on them. So I can envision that. But does that explain how they would actually, how the ambassadors wife would send money to know? It would explain if by you, me, for instance, is a Saudi intelligence operative. And his job is to oversee these guys.

Oversee them to prevent them from attacking on US soil? Oversee to penetrate their cell and understand what's going on. I see. And I don't know if the Saudis knew that they were planning to fly planes into buildings, but they were up to something, so what could it be? I see. So that's a more plausible explanation, which is that, again, their failure of imagination was they had no idea that these Saudi kids could accomplish something as a branch.

Especially given that pair. It's hard to imagine that they would take them that seriously. On the other hand, there they were. I see. This makes a bit more sense. So, going back to my analogy, they're not really acting as an arsonist. There's somebody who accidentally sets the house on fire, but then realizes, oh, I just set the house on fire. I better call. Right.

But I also better make sure I'm nowhere near this fire if I get here. I'm not gonna stick around to say I was doing this and that. One always hopes for whistleblowers and somebody to come clear of the air and their documents to surface that and none of that has happened. So far, I made me wrong about all this. It could be simply incompetence which explains so many things. But there were people like those FBI guys, and they knew something was going on, and they

were alarmed, and they were also shut down when they tried to err their concern. So obviously, it was important enough, and dozens of people in the CIA at high levels read these memos. So I long for the day when somebody comes up and says, this is what actually happened. It hadn't happened so far in 20 years. And I think that the longing of the CIA is to bury it in institutional memory and heaven never surface. Richard Clark apologized to the family members of the 9-11 victims. How many other government officials apologized publicly? I don't know of any. There was an awful lot of scolding going on, but would made Dick Clark's statement so cathartic, is he took responsibility? Nobody else did that. I was found it amazing that he became sort of a target of partisan hit job.

Yeah, I know. Which is, I mean, I've read quite a bit about him. I obviously never had the privilege of meeting him, but never came across to me as a partisan guy, actually. Actually served presidents of both administrations. Yeah, I would serve George HW Bush before Clinton. I mean, I was on Sean Hannity show one time. And it seemed like one of the main things he wanted to do is attack Dick Clark. I wasn't prepared for it at all.

I mentioned that incident where he said that Kondi had dismissed Al Qaeda and Hannity went off on Dick Clark. And I said, but he's been a wonderful public servant. You know, I mean, you may think ill of him, but, you know, he's a master bureaucrat. And he was one of the ones that was, you know, ringing the alarm about Al Qaeda. We live in a culture that just full of people that like to attack others. But Dick Clark, you can be puzzled over some of his actions. Like he was the one who authorized the flights for the Saudis to leave the US.

And I'm sure that he envisioned retaliatory attacks on members of the Saudi royal family or bin Laden's family who were present here. And that's totally plausible. But was it a wise thing to do? I don't know. What were the days after 9-11 like for Ali Sufah? Oh, God. It's hard not to think about who he was.

You know, this young guy, an earnest immigrant who is probably the most valuable person in the FBI at that point. He's in his 20s. He's been given, I think he was 26 when he became the lead agent for the coal bombing, huge responsibility. And he is deeply intelligent. And he is also totally conversant with Islam and with the politics of the Middle East. Such that, you know, when he would interrogate al-Qaeda guys

and they would bring up stuff about Islam, he'd pull out the Quran and say, show me where, show me that in the Quran. And he could recite the Quran himself. In fact, during his interrogation of Babujiindal, I mean, he basically won him over with his knowledge of the religion. He knew how to interrogate people without torturing them. And in fact during Guantanamo, when they started waterboarding, he called the director and said, I'm either going to arrest these people or I have to leave. And the

director said, leave, we don't want to, we're not going to be a part of that. He's a seminal figure in our history in some ways. He's the guy that identified through his interrogations who the alkyt of people were. He got the names through his skilled interrogation techniques. All the time, the CIA was hiding something from him, which was the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, where the coal bombers had been present and photographed. And those photographs were tons of cash had been transferred.

Ali knew about the transfers, but didn't know why. And who, who are they? And he was beginning to get some names from his interrogations And so that was some of the stuff that was flowing up in his request to the CIA for more information and you know He's flatly denied then 9-11 happens and All he can think about is he has to get back to America and of course he's lost his You know He lost John. So he gets on the plane. And then he's told by a CIA representative, no, you have to go back, go back into, you know, your office in Yemen. And they give him a Manila envelope. And in there are the pictures of the people

that were at the Kuala Lumpur meeting. And there was one picture that he knew. And he knew that, you know, there's an al-Qaeda operative. And this has been withheld from him. You know, had they given him that just those photographs that he had asked for, back when he was doing his, you know, starting his investigation of the coal and began to piece together what had happened. The FBI would have been able to break open the case right there. And he went to the bathroom

and threw up and he went to work. And that's when he got the names of the al-Qaeda guys. And he essentially solved the crime from that office in Yemen, one man. And history could have been so different if the CIA had listened, you know, exceeded to his request. And there was nobody better prepared to take advantage of it than all he's upon. Lawrence, it's hard to believe this has been 20 years. I want to thank you for an unbelievable, unbelievable investigation, just an amazing amount of research. It's hard to imagine what you had to do to write this book, how many trips you had to take into the lion's den, and at the same time, how infuriating it must have been to learn the set of events.

I can't think of anything I've ever done in my life that would be so upsetting, right? Like I think of anything I've ever done that's upset me that in terms of like learning that something happened or didn't happen or this person was incompetent and it led to this, you know, like the dietary guidelines in the 1970s, like none of that compares in some ways to this. But I also think that you've created a place in history for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be recognized. And I think the alleys of

the world are probably people who would not become household names and look, I hope that as we sit here at the 20th anniversary of one of the most consequential dates for most of us, that people will take time to go back and reflect on the history of that and reflect on the people who who are trying to make a difference. I guess I'll close with one last question which is, what do you think the future holds with respect to question, which is, what do you think the future holds with respect to this type of asymmetric warfare, be it al Qaeda or fill in the blank, you know, pick your favorite organization that operates in the same mindset? Is this something that is going to be part of our world for the next century?

I think so. I mean, there are innumerable terrorist groups around the world and in our own country, you know, the white supremacist and most notably. But Al-Qaeda set a template, a small group highly empowered by kind of judo moves of, you know, using technology against, you know against the countries that developed the technology. But now we have al-Qaeda, which was on 9, 11, three or 400 guys. Now the estimates 30 to 40,000 members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates from Morocco through the Sahel,

up through Saudi Arabia, to India, to Southern China, you know, there were al-Qaeda groups all over the place. Their intentions haven't changed. They haven't been able to pull off the highly successful attack in America that would equal 9-11. But many smaller attacks, and not just in America, but in other countries, many other countries. With technology, I especially worry about drones. Small groups can have a far greater influence and power. And then, you know, I've been writing about the pandemic. I worry that these kinds of episodes can be suggestive. There are groups like Olmshin Rikyo was a Japanese cult that really wanted to destroy much of the world with diseases or atomic bombs.

And a lot of very capable scientists were members of it. Adam Woffan Division, one of the quite supremacist groups, they have a philosophy of wanting to eliminate much of the population, and so that it narrows down only to white people. And biological warfare is part of the goal of some of those groups. It's dismayingly easy to create diseases. And, you know, I was talking to, who's the guy in James Bond that creates all the weapons? Is it him? Is that the... Oh, I'm not sure. All right, I think it's him. Anyway, I talked to this American version of that, and he

didn't show me the good stuff. But I asked him, this was several years ago, what worries you? And he said, what really worries me is those high school kids that are now creating computer viruses will one day soon be able to manufacture biological viruses just as easily. And that day is on us now. So I worry about that a lot. And I think we live in a hazardous world,

a world that is constrained by a lot of loss of freedom because of that. We have to keep in mind the idea of freedom and country that we used to be, and hope that one day we can return to it. We also have to be and hope that one day we can return to it. We also had to be sober minded about the challenges. And I don't think our children are gonna live in a world without terrorism or our children's children.

I think that terrorism is going to be a factor for a long time to come. And I don't, I don't finally know, given the proliferation of terror, how we're going to put breaks on it. I mean, you can think of it from two standpoints, right? You can think one of it is you reduce the drive for it. Right. So what are the factors that are contributing to terrorism? What is the humiliation?

What is the disenfranchisement of the individuals who go on to, to perpetrate these things? So what are all those things? What are the forces to reduce them? At the other end of the spectrum, right, is the kind of offensive strategy, which is how much better can our intelligence agencies be? Look, every person who has run for president since 9-11 has said, look at the success. We have not had another attack of this magnitude on US soil. Is there something to that? Is that presumably that's not been through a lack of effort on the part of al-Qaeda or

others, correct? Well, we always tend to look over our shoulder at what happened in the past. And we have to keep in mind what's happening right now. You know, the terrorists proliferate, they move around, they adopt new ideologies, there's a fluidity about this. And I think we're going to, we're going to see eruptions of terror. Some will be of small magnitude. But you know, I've just been writing about the massacre in El Paso in 2019. 23 Mexican-American skill. This is the largest attack on Latinos in our history.

It was now kind of, but it was terrorism. That idea is so seeded into our culture now. No doubt things change over time. You had school shootings, for instance, that's diminished. But the whole mass shooting thing started here in Austin with the UT Tower shootings in 1966. So in a way, there was a wave that was created and emulators came along.

And then currently, it seems like school shootings have diminished, as have drive-by shooting. So these memes get into our society. And I don't know how other than being displaced by a new meme, you know, that they get removed from the consciousness of people that want to do harm. But I do think that we are doing a better job of containing terrorism, and you know, we're far more alert to it.

But I do think that we, our intelligence agencies have to improve. The pandemic was a catastrophic intelligence failure. This was a national security threat. We've lost more than 600,000 Americans. If a nation had attacked us and killed half a million of our citizens, we'd been totally on a different track. But we have to take new things into account. And when we're talking about our safety and security, it's not just terrorism, public health, the natural environment, global warming, all of these things, you know, we have real challenges ahead of us. And so far to date, we are not performing adequately to put them at rest.

I know I said that was my last question. I guess I have one more. In all of your research, have you come to believe that these relatively small terrorist organizations would have the capacity to acquire and actually utilize nuclear weapons? I think nuclear weapons are kind of hard. When the Soviet Union collapsed, you know, there were a lot of loose nukes. And Al-Qaeda tried to get hold of nuclear bomb and it turned out to be a fraud. Nuclear weapons tend to be beyond the capacity of the people that we've dealt with in the

past. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be people in the future who have that capacity. But you would say biological weapons would be a far greater concern in terms of massive. You know, we're talking about on the scale of hundreds of thousands of lives or millions of lives. And some toxins, anthrax is a good candidate. You know, I think we have to be really, really careful. Anthrax has come out of our own Fort Dietrich.

So we have to be always cautious. I think we can't live our lives in fear all the time, but you'd be nuts not to pay attention to the fact that there are dangers out there and there are people that want to cause harm. And I think we have to, it's the absence of unity in our community that threatens us the most now because we're not, we're not together on this. There are people that would cheer on such actions.

And you know, what kind of country have we become in that case? I seem to keep coming to a real down conclusion. I was about to say, I'm looking for an optimistic way to close this out. And I guess the only thing I would say is I hope that this week people can basically pause for a moment and sort of reflect on people who lost their lives, people who made sacrifices as a result of that.

If nothing else, just to remember that, I mean, I'm not sure that there's something actionable I can do with that other than just be grateful and at the same time be sad. So simultaneously, I think experience these two extreme emotions. It occurs to me, though, that tragedies often have surprisingly good consequences or let's say benefits for society. And if you look at our recent history in this country, with 1918 flu, I would not say that we took advantage of that. We tended to forget about it, but then came the depression.

And in the middle of the depression depression we made ourselves into a different country Stronger more compassionate more resilient. We could do that and then you know, where were two once again took a challenge and transformed our country Since then we had 9 11 and we invaded Iraq and tortured people in Guantanamo. So a tragedy is an opportunity. Do you think we squandered this one? I thought we squandered 9-11 terribly. And the consequences of what we did to ourselves after 9-11 are greater than what was done to us.

The invasion of Iraq, the trillions of dollars we spent in Afghanistan, you know, just all of that, you know, in consequential in terms of the lives lost, but we made huge mistakes. But we're capable, we've shown ourselves to be capable of triumphant. And, you know, we've got another opportunity now. And I hope that we take the

lessons that 9-11 have given us in pandemic and try to make ourselves into that country that we once were and want to be again. Lawrence, thank you so much for making a lot of time to talk about this. I know this is, you know, a book you wrote 15 years ago, so I'm sure sometimes it's not even top of mind. It's back of mind given all the things you've written about since, but I appreciate you taking a trip down memory lane and pulling some of the cobwebs off. What I think is one of the most remarkable things written. Well, thank you and I appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you and your listeners. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring

you more in-depth, exclusive content without relying on paid ads. It's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. At that end, membership benefits include a bunch of things. 1. Totally kick-ass comprehensive podcast show notes that detail every topic paper person thing we discuss in each episode. The word on the street is, nobody's show notes rival these. Monthly AMA episodes are ask me anything episodes hearing these episodes completely. Access to our private podcast feed that allows you to hear everything

without having to listen to spills like this. The Qualies, which are a super short podcast that we release every Tuesday through Friday, highlighting the best questions, topics, and tactics discussed on previous episodes of the drive. This is a great way to catch up on previous episodes without having to go back and necessarily listen to everyone. Steep discounts on products that I believe in, but for which I'm not getting paid to indoors. And a whole bunch of other benefits that we continue to trickle in as time goes on. If you want to learn more and access these member-only benefits, you can head over to peteratiaemd.com forward slash subscribe.

You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, all with the ID, Peter Atiaemd. You can also leave us a review on Apple podcasts or whatever podcast player you listen on. This podcast is for general informational purposes only. It does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is formed.

The use of this information and the materials linked to this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have, and they should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Finally, I take conflicts of interest very seriously.

For all of my disclosures in the companies I invest in or advise, please visit peteratiamd.com forward slash about where I keep an up-to-date and active list of such companies. you