In an interview on 9/11

Now Lawrence Wright’s book, The Looming Tower.

I have just interviewed him for my show, actually. He is an old friend. This book has similarities with the first, but Lawrence is aware of how to tell a story, how to make it appeal to an audience. He lived in Egypt in 1969-1971 and then in Saudi Arabia where he wrote the book. The title is a quote from the Quran: ‘Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.’ He did five years of research and met over 600 people. It is a vast research on how we arrived at 9/11, the circumstances and the mindset. It has a huge scope. He studies the socio-economic background to 9/11 and the people who knew Osama. He had 6,000 pages of notes…

And does he draw any conclusions?

It’s not like the last few pages are the conclusions he comes to, but you get a kind of picture. He talks about the socio-economic dependency of women, and the hypocrisy you get in this part of the world. I would like him to have highlighted, or refuted, if that’s what he found, the influence of the political situation and why people would feel strongly enough to kill themselves for a cause, the relationship between the Arab world and the West, the Palestinian situation, Israel. But it’s more about the culture of hypocrisy that doesn’t produce the best. A culture that produces frustration rather than hope.

In an interview on Terrorism

Tell me about The Looming Tower.

This is a fantastic account of the origins of al Qaeda, the individuals who laid the foundations of the organisation and why they carried out 9/11. It is the best work on the origins and development of al Qaeda in the 1990s. He uses interviews conducted in the 1990s and he also uses captured documents and materials that he integrated after 9/11. The government started releasing documents after 2002 and I’m going to use a lot of them for my next book.

The other thing about Lawrence Wright is that he has a very compelling writing style. He shows in a very comprehensive way that the al Qaeda groups had a very coherent concept of what they hoped to achieve and that they were doing all this completely under the radar – only a handful of Americans knew what was going on. The fervour on the one hand and the ignorance on the other is startling.

And now you’ve chosen David Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla.

In an interview on Crime and Terror

You tell me that your next book, The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, was a difficult choice.

Yes, in that I could just have easily chosen Steve Coll’s excellent Ghost Wars. But, eventually, I went for this because it really does read like dramatic fiction. It is a history of radical Islamism and the road to 9/11. It also explores the failure of the CIA to share vital information with the FBI that might have allowed them to unravel the plot. Certainly for the administration side of al Qaeda there was a lot of information in Yemen that was never properly shared in terms of links to satellite phones that might potentially have led the FBI to uncover the plot.

That is always a problem, isn’t it? Even people who are meant to be on the same side because of factions and rivalry end up being detrimental to the bigger picture.

Absolutely. It’s funny, I like conspiracy theories but I really don’t believe in them. I am a great believer in the general incompetence of government. So there is this big problem within the intelligence community of the competition between the agents and their unwillingness to share information. And cultures of secrecy create opportunities that could be exploited by terrorists. My book is based around a bungled assassination attempt on Osama bin Laden in 1999, a flawed cover-up and the fall-out that ensues.

The Looming Tower is also exploring those kinds of themes – how terrorism and crime can flourish despite our attempts to stop it. There is a fantastically flawed and divisive hero, John O’Neill, who led the FBI’s fight against bin Laden, but resigned in August 2001 to go and work at the World Trade Centre. He died on 9/11. It was O’Neill who understood that al Qaeda has four distinct arms: intelligence, administration, planning and execution.

The book also has a great title – it is taken from a videotaped speech by bin Laden that was found on the computer of one of the members of the Hamburg cell. The cell would go on to bring down the towers. It is a quote from the fourth Sura of the Koran – ‘Death will find you, even in the looming tower.’ The final section of my book is called ‘Death will find you’.

In an interview on Al-Qaeda

Let’s take a closer look at Al-Qaeda. Your first choice is Lawrence Wright’s meticulously researched book, The Looming Tower, which is all about the men who shaped 9/11.

I remember reading this book quite a few years ago now and being impressed by two things. One is the detail and the contacts that Lawrence Wright had in writing this book, and second is the way in which it is written. The style is very accessible – it takes nothing for granted on the part of the understanding of its readership – and if anybody wishes to understand what Al-Qaeda is, where it came from and what it is trying to do, I think that this is the key book to read. It was written about events prior to 9/11 and 9/11 itself, so the book doesn’t go beyond that. But I suspect it is being updated, if it hasn’t already been, to coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

So how did Lawrence Wright manage to get such good contacts?

He has good contacts like I have good contacts. He has worked on them and established a reputation. He is an academic, and in a way academics in this particular field of terrorism and political violence have more acceptable credentials than journalists do. Also he is in America. I have interviewed many of the people that he has interviewed, like Ali Soufan, an Arab-American FBI agent – a key source – and people have talked to Lawrence Wright because they trust him and he is highly respected as an academic. They know that whatever they say won’t be abused.

You have met various people with links to Al-Qaeda. What is their response to what happened on 9/11?

They think that 9/11 was a legitimate attack in response to the sufferings that they, as Al-Qaeda supporters, believe America and Israel have inflicted on the Ummah – the Muslim community in general and certain parts of the Muslim world in particular. They draw upon what was happening in Iraq, what is happening in Afghanistan, the number of innocent civilians who have been killed by American raids and coalition raids on the ground. At the time, 9/11 was perceived by Al-Qaeda and its supporters as a legitimate attack on the great Satan – America.

In an interview on Egypt and America

Which brings us neatly to your third choice, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which traces the career of the new head of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, from his beginnings as a disciple of the American-educated Sayyid Qutb.

Lawrence Wright’s book is a marvellous study. It begins with the American education of this very famous Egyptian writer, who became the inspiration of the jihadists in Egypt. This was Sayyid Qutb, who was made a martyr by Nasser. Lawrence Wright goes right through the trial of the people who were accused of the assassination of Sadat, including al-Zawahiri, and then looks at the linkage between the Egyptian Jihad and Al-Qaeda. It is a very worthwhile book to read to try to understand the whole problem.

Egyptian militants were obviously a cause of concern for America’s relationship with Egypt. What did they do about it?

That’s a good question. Of course we supported Mubarak and we turned a blind eye to many of the repressions that he carried out, because it was the feeling at the time that he was helping to keep potential Al-Qaeda people in check. Egypt became used in a very infamous way as a spot for rendition for suspected terrorists sent there by the CIA, because of concern that the same interrogation techniques Mubarak employed would not be legal in the United States. It is a very controversial episode.