Looming Tower!

Looming Tower!

Photo credit: Janet Donovan

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower – a Hulu original series – traces the threat of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in the late 1990s and how the rivalry between the FBI and CIA during that time may have inadvertently set the path for the tragedy of 9/11.  The Washington Post, in partnership with Hulu, held the premiere at their downtown offices.

“I spent five years working on the book and when it came out in 2006 many people approached me about doing a television show or a movie and, honestly, I wasn’t ready and I wasn’t sure the country was ready,” said Wright before the screening.  “9/11 is still an open wound and unresolved in American consciousness. I hope that my book made some contribution to understanding. In the interim, things have changed. The things that really have motivated me to decide to express this book in another form, are two things:  One, television changed. Television is not the same as it is now. We have 10 episodes with a tremendous budget and great actors and great directors telling a story that sprawls and we filmed in three different countries. That wasn’t the television of old, and so it’s a new medium that I thought would be a useful and expressive new medium for a new audience. And the second thing I wanted to say was that [with] that new audience, it began to dawn on me there was so many young people for whom 9/11 was, to them, what World War Two was to me. It was something that happened in their parents’ generation, and they don’t know why they live in the country they live in now. They don’t know what happened, they don’t have a narrative for it, they don’t know why we didn’t present it, and so what we hope to do here is to provide that narrative especially for a new generation in a form, a new form, the serial TV form that I think can be so expressive and carry so much more meaning than we were able to do in the past. I hope that we’ve come close to achieving those goals.”

Lawrence Wright

Lights come up, ‘real people’ show up on stage.  The Washington Post’s David Ignatius spoke with actors Jeff Daniels, Tahar Rahim, Peter Sarsgaard and Wrenn Schmidtthe show’s executive producers Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney and “The Looming Tower” author Lawrence Wright and with former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Ali Soufan.  The cast and producers gave a behind-the-scenes peek at the making of the show. “Let me first say what a pleasure it is to have everybody from this team here, especially my old friend Larry Wright who I’ve known for many years and I should say, also especially to have the real life Ali Suffan who you just saw portrayed on screen, but somebody who lived this fight in real life and who’s struggle is documented in the film. So it’s wonderful to have everybody here,” said Ignatius.

David Ignatius

“I want to start off with the book The Looming Tower.  It won a Pulitzer prize and is an absolutely seminal work on the history we’ve lived through,” he added.  “Right after 9/11 Al Qaeda was scattered and in disgrace and in repute by every country in the world, including every Muslim country, and from that moment Al Qaeda began to reconstitute itself. It’s a far larger organization today and far more sophisticated than it was before 9/11. And it’s in so many countries and it’s spawn, not just Al Qaeda but ISIS and other groups, have proliferated. So in that sense, and I think he would also take credit for polarizing America and the Muslim world, this has been his object from the very beginning and it’s striking to me how we’d take the bate. On the other hand, he’s provoked a crisis inside Islam that I don’t think he understood the dimensions of it.  It’s going to define that religion in the future, but I do not think it’s going to be defined on the terms that he would like for it to be.”

The Panel

David turned to FBI Supervisory Special Agent Ali Soufan, the real life former FBI special agent who lived this story.  “Ali, I want to ask you about the basic dynamic that runs through this series, which is the deep tension – the antagonism, sometimes bitter, bitter rivalry between the FBI and CIA.  “The situation today is a lot better, especially the restructuring of the intelligence community,” responded Ali.  “I think the FBI and the CIA have an excellent working relationship and they are on the same sheet of music. You’ve seen it today, for example, with all the intelligence chiefs talking about the Russians. You know, cyber attacks against the US. The CIA, the FBI, the NSA, everyone is basically on the same sheet of music on this.”  Quoting George Tenant, the CIA director during the events described here, wrote in his memoir: “While our cultures and missions may have been different, there was no difference in the heartfelt way CIA officers and FBI special agents try to protect the country. We were working together. We were in the same vehicle, we were, you know, debriefing the same sources, we were doing the same operations. It was that great.”

Jeff plays the person who is, in a sense, the dark hero of this story – an extraordinary FBI special agent in New York who was driven by this –  a swashbuckler. “So I wanna read you something that appeared in The Washington Post’s review of Larry’s book back in 2006 about the character that you’re playing,” Ignatius said directing the question to Daniels.  “Our reviewer said, ‘By all accounts O’Neill was a larger than life figure. – a Damon Runyon-esque person who J. Edgar Hoover reportedly complained dressed more like a mobster than a G-man.’  So my question is, how did you get your mind around playing somebody who looked like a mobster but was an FBI man and had this extraordinary, somewhat out of control personal life?”  Jeff Daniels responded that he had ‘no idea’  how to play a doomed terror expert.

Jeff Daniels (right)

“Well that was the reason to take [the role]. When I read the first episode, that’s all I read and committed. I had no clue as to how to do that, you know? I’d never played a character like that.  I loved the challenge of it,” responded Daniels. “and you’re going, ‘OK, I think I can do this.’ It really felt as we could make it because of all the research and then all the help you have from the other actors. So I didn’t have a clue what I was doing but it worked.”

“Alex Gibney and Dan Futterman, I want to ask each of you just to share with us what you take away from this story that you’ve been living with,” asked Ignatius. “Larry said that introducing tonight’s performance, that he thought this was the right time because 9/11 is receding. It’s possible now for us to talk about it. It was too painful a while ago. Also there are a lot of people who don’t really, they were so young, they don’t remember it, so Alex and Dan, tell us what did you take away from the project? What do you think the lessons were? Alex?

Alex Gibney (back row right)

Gibney: “Sure, one of the things that is so intriguing about this – and I worked with Larry on a film about his one-man play My Trip to al-Qaeda which was all about him writing The Looming Tower – and what attracted me about that and then particularly for this, was the idea of this story as an origin story. So much of our lives now are defined by the mess that has become the Middle East, and so much that we started, or that we were victims of and then reacted to, but if you look at the origin story, it’s galvanizing and simplifying in some essential way that allows you to better understand where we’re at in the present. That was one thing. I think the other thing was that framing this story as a kind of conflict between the FBI and the CIA sheds a lot of light on some of the issues that we’re dealing with right now, in terms of people in the government who should be working together to solve simple problems having a political or institutional agendas that are preventing them from doing that. For both those reasons, it seemed very present and also riveting in the sense that, as an origin story, you can understand it better than you could by trying to come at it in the present time.”

Dan Futterman (second left)

Dan: “I think that families of victims of 9/11 have been asking those kinds of questions for 17 years and we try to answer some of those questions, and when they’re not answerable we try to ask those questions again, loudly and clearly. I’ve been a fan of for a long time and telling these parallel stories of an acolyte and a mentor, but also telling the story of a Muslim American hero, an immigrant from Lebanon, a teenage immigrant from Lebanon who’d probably have a hard time getting into the country these days, and who is very possibly the most patriotic person I know. He uses this phrase all the time, ‘My country this, my country that.’   I don’t know anybody who does that, he’s talking about the United States, not about Lebanon. We tried to add in a story of a man who is trying to wrest his religion back from people who are trying hijack it. We added in, as he is doing that, an increasing devotional aspect which Tahar has possibly a little more than the real Ali Soufan, and it became an interesting thread to explore. It’s a parallel thread that John O’Neil has an increasing interest in Catholicism that he had left behind. Those are the things that interested me, whether those are the takeaways that people have, I don’t know.”

“Each of you made powerful points of the resonance of the story, 17 years ago or more, with what’s going on now. The centrality of Muslim Americans in the investigation, the difficulty of making our government work smoothly. I want to close this by coming back to Larry, whose book, I think, really has been a kind of benchmark in our debate about 9/11,” concluded Ignatius.  “Just to ask you whether you think we’re condemned to be in these cycles of reaction to the terrible violence that’s done to us, and then we fight back? We watched that in Iraq, we watched that in Afghanistan.Do you think there’s a way for the United States to escape that cycle? Just say a little bit about how you think that might be.”

Lawrence: “I’ve thought a lot about this, I don’t have an easy solution because it’s so tragic that we’ve done such a poor job of learning lessons. When we say, ‘Look what happened to us, we’ll never do that again’ and then we do it again. The pessimistic side of me says, ‘Yeah, we’ll finally stop doing it when we’re broke and our status in the world is diminished and we can no longer try to be a force for good in the world because we’ve been wasting ourselves on efforts that are going nowhere.’ That’s one way in which the scenario you’re talking about would come about. Another way would be for Americans to decide that, ‘Wait a minute, let’s stop and reappraise our role in the world. What we are capable of doing, and the effect of our presence.’  A lot of the time, we don’t know the powerful effect that America has in the rest of the world, and we don’t understand why we get this incredible blow back. When you’re out in the world, you see America on the horizon, but when you’re in America, you don’t see the world that way. I think another thing is you have to have a powerful exchange of cultures, and having students traveling, all this sort of thing, getting to know the world.  It’s so shocking to me, still, how little Americans know about the rest of the world, and the arrogance that we have about thinking that we can fix cultures that we totally don’t understand. That’s why we get into these fixes that we’re in. Educating ourselves about the rest of the world, assuming a more sober stance about what we can do. Then, finally, remembering who we are. I think one of the things about 9/11 is that fear took over our country, and we began to act out of fear. We lashed out, and more where we began to create a kind of security state that is very different from the America that we all grew up in. Young people don’t know about how America was before 9/11. The ordinary freedoms that we had. I remember going into high school, taking my girlfriend on a date to the airport. We didn’t have any money, but we walked out on the tarmac and we climbed into some airplane that had just flown in from Paris, and they served us a snack.  ‘Hey kids, come on in.’ That America is dead. Terrorism killed it, but if we forget that America, then I think in some vital way that terrorists have won.”

The Trailer:

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