The Looming Tower: Retreading the Road to 9/11
By Jay Ogilvy
Contributor Perspectives offer insight, analysis and commentary from Stratfor’s Board of Contributors and guest contributors who are distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise.
We know both the story's climax and its end. Yet the 9/11 attacks, their lead-up and their aftermath are the subject of the new Hulu original series "The Looming Tower," based on Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same title. Creating suspense won't be that hard, even without the mystery of what happens next. As Wright told me, there's the viewer's perspective on the events unfolding, and then there's the characters' perspective. While the viewer knows the outcome — the horror of 9/11 and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden nearly 10 years later — the people in the story don't. And it is their stories that the series will follow.
It is Stratfor's general proclivity in making sense of the world to look past individuals to examine the fundamental geopolitical forces they express rather than drive. In this case, however, it's hard not to see the hatred between John O'Neill (played by Jeff Daniels), the FBI's top investigator, and then-CIA Director George Tenet (portrayed by Alec Baldwin) as essential to the institutional rivalry underlying the agencies' catastrophic intelligence failure.
We all know that there was a failure to "connect the dots" and prevent the tragedy of 9/11. The CIA knew that al Qaeda operatives were alive and well in the United States in the months leading up to the attacks. But on repeated occasions, when analysts were explicitly asked and could have shared crucial intelligence with the FBI, they failed to do so. And the reticence went both ways. We all know this.
So how will the writers and director and actors of "The Looming Tower" keep us glued to our screens for the 10-part series that kicks off with a three-episode pilot Feb. 28?
The Rollicking Role of John O'Neill
For sheer dramatic effect, the story has to center around O'Neill, the garrulous, glad-handing, sharply dressed Irishman who headed the FBI's quest to find bin Laden. He had multiple girlfriends, a fast lifestyle and a swaggering band of followers known as the Sons of John to do his bidding. But in his brash and incessant search for the al Qaeda leader, he made enemies.
Herein lies the kind of dramatic destiny that pervades great tragedies. Partly because of his monomaniacal insistence on the danger bin Laden presented and, absurdly, because of a temporarily lost briefcase that contained some classified information, O'Neill had to face the fact that his upward mobility in the FBI had come to an end. On the 20th anniversary of his enrollment in the bureau, the day his pension fully vested and mere weeks before 9/11, he left the agency he loved and took a job heading up security at the World Trade Center in New York. There he was literally crushed by agents of the man who had been his nemesis during his time at the FBI. How's that for tragic irony?
It shouldn't be hard to make a gripping story out of this drama even if we know the outcome. The essence of the story is not about its conclusion — already well told in several books and the hit movie "Zero Dark Thirty." It's surely not just about the horror of 9/11. It's about the lead up: the long years of festering Islamic rage; the rise of al Qaeda; the roles of figures such as current al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abdullah Anas, a former mujahid. It's about tensions among the Arabs and the Afghans; it's about the role of religion, the continuing frictions between Sunnis and Shiites, and the varying hatred of radicals from either sect toward the United States, modernity and the West.
Origins and Roots of Islamic Radicalism
Wright's book delves deeply into these issues. It goes all the way back to the origins, to the life and events that led Sayyid Qutb to write the seminal texts at the root of radical Islam. Even the word "radical" itself derives from "root," or "radix" in Latin; likewise, radical Islam goes to the root of Islamic belief — obedience, a complete and total obedience to the word of the Koran. Once there, if the imam suggests that the sublime ecstasy of martyrdom is attainable by strapping on bombs and marching into a public square to detonate them in hopes of killing the maximum number of infidels, well then a sufficiently radicalized follower is all in. This state of mind, heart and soul is hard for modern secularists to understand, so it needs to be communicated in a way that reaches not only intellectually to the mind, but also dramatically to the heart and soul.
I've written before about the natural affinity between television and terror and the way terrorists can exploit the medium. With this series, Hulu will turn the tables and use the medium to better comprehend the motivations and stories on both sides of the struggle.
Spy vs. Spy
At the heart of one side of that struggle lies the antagonism between the FBI and CIA. The rivalry is in part structural; the FBI's beat, after all, is mainly (though not entirely) inside the United States, while the CIA's is mainly (though not entirely) outside it. The competition between them flourishes not just because their beats occasionally overlap, nor because of a kind of collegiate team spirit, but much more insidiously because of each agency's deep suspicions of the other. Would sharing information sacrifice one agency's security to the other agency's moles? It's not just a matter of limitations — a lack of funding, of linguists and translators, or of adequately trained operatives at the CIA or the FBI. The real problem is a culture of secrecy that makes interagency sharing seem like a scandal rather than a standard procedure, a liability rather than an asset.
Take just one incident out of many detailed in Wright's book:
"Tom Wilshire, who was the CIA's intelligence representative to the FBI's international terrorism section at FBI headquarters, was studying the relationship between Khaled al-Mihdhar and Khallad, the one-legged mastermind of the Cole bombing. … 'Something bad was definitely up,' Wilshire decided. He asked permission to disclose this vital information to the FBI. The agency never responded."
Though he couldn't share what he knew with the FBI, he wanted to know what the FBI knew. On June 11, 2001 — precisely three months before 9/11 — representatives from both agencies held a multihour meeting in New York. When an FBI agent asked whether other surveillance photographs of two of the attack's plotters were available:
"(The CIA supervisor) refused to say. (An FBI intelligence analyst) promised that 'in the days and weeks to come' she would try to get permission to pass that information along. The meeting became heated; people began yelling at each other. The FBI agents knew that clues to the crimes they were trying to solve were being dangled in front of their eyes, but they couldn't squeeze any further information from (the CIA supervisor) or the two FBI analysts."
What-Ifs and the Roles of Individuals
What might have happened if the plot had been stopped? What peace might have loomed? What if the United States had never invaded Iraq and put Saddam Hussein in his grave? The thought of a less troubled Middle East, the thought of thousands undead, trillions unspent — it's enough to make you wonder.
And it all goes back to the actions of this one individual, bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire who financed the rise of al Qaeda and the assault on the World Trade Center. Wright wonders:
"One can ask ... whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it. The answer is certainly not. Indeed the tectonic plates of history were shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and the vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest."
The same might be said of a few individuals on the American side of the contest. Tune in and you will likely be swept up and moved, possibly changed, by a drama involving some very colorful individuals.
Jay Ogilvy joined Stratfor's board of contributors in January 2015. In 1979, he left a post as a professor of philosophy at Yale to join SRI, the former Stanford Research Institute, as director of research. Dr. Ogilvy co-founded the Global Business Network of scenario planners in 1987. He is the former dean and chief academic officer of San Francisco’s Presidio Graduate School. Dr. Ogilvy has published nine books, including Many Dimensional Man, Creating Better Futures and Living Without a Goal.
Stratfor
YOU'RE READING
The Looming Tower: Retreading the Road to 9/11
