 Welcome, I'm Mark up to Grove, the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. What a pleasure it is to be back home among so many friends. I was telling members of the LBJ library staff and the LBJ Foundation staff, I'm like a bad cold, you can't get rid of me. Before we get started tonight, I have a few things by way of housekeeping. The first is I want to thank our generous friends, sponsors, St. David's Healthcare, the Moody Foundation, and Tito's Handmade Vodka. We very much appreciate your support of the Friends of the LBJ Library. Thank you. Later this week on March 1st and 2nd, the LBJ Library is participating in a citywide giving campaign, Amplify Austin. Our goal here at the library is to raise $5,000 for bus scholarships to provide LBJ library field trips to students from underserved Texas schools. This is a wonderful cause and we would ask that you consider making an online donation, however small, to help. Tonight we'll be treated to the premiere of Hulu's upcoming 10 episode series, The Looming Tower, based on Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, which will be sold in the lobby after the program. In a moment, Larry will come out to cue the episode and I will just warn you quickly, there is some very, very harsh language. You can all take it, I assure you, but I just wanted to give you a fair warning. Also, the credits will roll afterward and then you're going to see a preview of upcoming issues. After that, the screening will last 52 minutes and afterwards I'll moderate a conversation with Larry. Ali Soufan, the former FBI supervisory agent who was depicted throughout the series and was a pivotal player in this story, as you'll see. And actor Michael Stulbarg, who portrays Richard Clark, White House counter-terrorism officer. Michael is on a bit of a hot streak right now. He's had roles in three films that have been nominated for the Academy Award Best Picture, including The Shape of Water, The Post, and Call Me By Your Name. It's my pleasure to introduce our fellow Austinite Larry Wright, a renowned author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine. His book The Looming Tower, Alcada and the Road to 9-11 was published over a decade ago to international acclaim. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, the book spent eight weeks on the New York Times Best Seller's List and has been translated into 25 languages. Larry is an old friend of this institution. In 2006, he was on this stage to preview, rather, his one-man play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, which he later took to Manhattan for the New Yorker Festival. And he returned here in 2015 to discuss his best-selling book Going Clear, which he also later co-produced as a documentary for HBO. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our friend Larry Wright. Well, thank you so much. It's very meaningful for me to be here in Austin where I live and have been coming to this library. We moved here in 1980. We've been coming here and been members 38 years. So this institution and this city means a lot to us. I want to talk a little bit about, you know, The Looming Tower, the book really began on 9-11. You know, I was in our house trying to decide how to get into this story. If you remember back then, the planes were grounded and I couldn't get to New York. So I was reading obituaries that were streaming online and looking for some way to find a story to tell that would bring this vast human tragedy down to human level. And on the Washington Post site, I found an obituary for John O'Neill. And he was the head of counterterrorism for the FBI in New York at the time. And the obituary made him seem like something of a disgrace because he had taken classified information out of the office and he had been let go from the FBI. And he became the head of security at the World Trade Center. And so my reaction on reading that was, so he didn't get bin Laden, bin Laden got him. And how ironic. And the more I learned about John O'Neill who was played in this episode by Jeff Daniels, the more I realized that it wasn't ironic. It was Greek in its tragedy. His friends told him, John, you'll be safe now. They already tried to attack them. They did attack the World Trade Center in 1993. And he said, no, they'll come back to finish the job. So he instinctively placed himself at ground zero. Ali Safan came into my life indirectly when I was researching a movie I co-wrote called The Siege with Denzel Washington who actually held the job in the movie that John O'Neill held in real life. But Ali Safan was undercover and I heard about this young Lebanese-American FBI agent so I wrote a part that Tony Shalu plays in the film. And then just three years later, 9-11 happened and I began researching the book. And I got to meet Ali Safan. And come to realize what a great debt of gratitude the American people owe to him for being the one who uncovered the names of the hijackers, the one who unmasked Khaled Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of 9-11. There's so much more about Ali Safan that we can talk about later. But I wanted to give you a little bit of that background and hope you can appreciate this young French-Algerian writer or actor named Tahar Raheem plays Ali and I think he's just going to be a breakout role for him. All of these actors are terrific. I love them. And so I hope that you will come to appreciate them somewhat as much as I do. And I'll talk to you after this show but thank you so much for coming. Well, welcome and congratulations. Thank you. This is an extremely compelling premiere to the series and I can't wait to see the rest. I'm sure my audience agrees. Larry, let me start with you. You talked a little bit about the genesis of this book as you were queuing up the episode. How do you tackle a subject this big? When you're watching 9-11 play out, you get this idea to do this book, but where do you begin? Well, when I tell a story that's a complicated story, I always look for individuals who they don't have to be famous or even very attractive, but they have to be able to convey information to the reader or the viewer. And I call these donkeys. I know it sounds disparaging, but a donkey is a very useful beast of burden. He can carry a lot of information on his back and also he can take the reader or the viewer into a world that he's never been in before. And, for instance, John O'Neill, when I found that obituary, I didn't know if he was a hero or a goat, but I thought he's a hell of a donkey. He can take us into the world of counterterrorism and show us why it failed. And so he was the very first person I seized on. And then, you know, the other characters, the book itself uses O'Neill and Iman El-Zawahri, now the head of al-Qaeda, and Ben Laden and Prince Turkey Al-Faisal, who was the head of Saudi intelligence and worked with Ben Laden. And these interweaving biographies became the spine of the looming tower. So, as you were doing the research, what revelation most took you aback? Well, it involves Ali. You know, when I met Ali, I had a lot of questions about what did the intelligence community know about the plot. And Ali was a case agent for the USS Cole in Bombing in 2000. And while he was interrogating these figures in Yemen, he began to uncover information about a meeting in Malaysia and money that had flowed to Malaysia during a time when normally money comes to an operation. Why was it going out of the country? And, you know, there's a meeting in Kuala Lumpur and he suspected maybe this is where the operation was planned. And indeed, that was true. What he didn't know, couldn't have known then, is that at that meeting there were two future hijackers. And so he queried the CIA on three occasions, asking for information. Do you know anything about a meeting that was in Malaysia? And they said, no. You know, they spurned it. Not only did they know about it, they got the Malaysian authorities to surveil it. They got photographs of all the participants. And two of those people flew to LA in January of 2000, 19 months before 9-11. And the CIA found out about it in March of 2000. All of that time, they knew that Al Qaeda was in America. And they failed to tell the FBI, which was legally entitled to have that information, already had an indictment on bin Laden. Could legally follow them, clone their computers, whatever. You know, they could have disrupted the plot, but they were in the dark until it was too late. Ali, first of all, how does it feel to be a donkey? It's very hard. This dovetails nicely into something you said last night. Larry threw a party last night in and we had a chance to hear from Ali. And you said you were trepidatious about this story coming to the screen. But ultimately, you wanted to see it made because of accountability. Talk about that. What did you mean by that? One Larry and Alex talked to me about this. It was very awkward for me to be involved in a drama about 9-11. 9-11 is extremely important sacred event for me. I lost friends. And it's also more than that, it's also an indication of how we collectively failed the American people and this tragedy happened. So I prefer something like this to be a documentary rather than a drama. And I have to think about it. But also in the same time, I know that this story has been written, this story has been told. Everything that Larry said is part of not only his book but many documents that have been declassified over the years by the intelligence community and the folks who did this stated true to the story. So that was extremely important. That's number one. Number two, even though the story has been told, but it hasn't been shown to the American people and I think there's a big difference. And I felt that 16 years, 17 years after 9-11, we still don't have closure. And in order to do closure, we need to have understanding and we need to have clarity and we need to have characters like Michael and Jeff Daniels and people bring it to life so the American people can finally understand all the tragic events, the personalities, the institutional pickering that end up, we call it that tragic Tuesday of 9-11. Unfortunately, after all these years also, we never had an accountability on 9-11. The closest we get to an accountability is the CIA's own inspector general report where they pointed fingers at their own director and a few other people in the agency and required them to be held accountable for the 3,000 American death that took place on 9-11. The summary of this report has been declassified and has been published by the intelligence community and by the agency. So if we never had accountability because of that in a legal sense, we might have an accountability in a cultural sense, in a public sense. And I think that's what I hope this show is going to do because accountability is extremely important. You know, we thought if 3,000 Americans are murdered, we're going to have an accountability. But the people who are supposed to be held accountable gave the administration back then what they wanted. They gave them a false link about WMD and about war in Iraq and we end up going to Iraq. And if we never had an accountability because of the Iraq war, because of all the thousands of people who were killed from our side and actually, frankly, from the Iraqi side, the Iraq war messed up the whole Middle East. You just look at the map today. If we never had an accountability for that, we thought definitely we might have an accountability because of, you know, what torture? Because of the so-called in haste interrogation techniques. We are, after all, the United States of America. We fight for justice. We fight for human rights. We fight for the right thing. We are the shining city on the hill. But guess what? We never had an accountability for that either. So legally, we're not going to have an accountability. And I think a lot of countries are basically getting used to the fact that there is no accountability in America to include President Putin himself and look about the actions, their interference in our election, in our political system. So maybe if politicians don't want to do accountability, let us try to do an accountability. Let us show what happened to the American people. Let us change the world we live in. Let's change our mind about our system because if we don't change our mind, guess what? We're not changing anything about our future. Michael, congratulations. Not only on the Looming Tower, but on what has to be described as a breakout year. It's an astounding year for an actor. So congratulations on all that you have achieved this year. So clearly you picked the right projects and enhanced them. What led you to this one? Danny Futterman, our showrunner. I had known Danny in New York City as actors. We are contemporaries. We're the same age. And I got an email from him saying, there's a project I'm working on. We're thinking of you for playing this role. Mr. Richard Clark. And I had seen Mr. Clark interviewed on John Stewart's debut show. And he made a really, a really strong impression for me. He was a man who was coming out and telling the truth. And he was taking responsibility for our government's failure at a time when we all really needed to hear that. And I was kind of flabbergasted, because I didn't think of myself being right for the part. But I weighed it. And then I got another email from one of our writers, but Sheila Dorn, who had written for Lord Walk Empire, a show that I had been on before. And she also said, this is going to be something very special. Please consider this. She's throwing her two cents in as well. And then learning about the Looming Tower, the novel, learning about Larry, learning about Alex Gibney, learning about the cast that they were assembling, and the challenge that it was going to be. But Danny also said to me that, most likely you will get to say some of the things that Richard said in front of the 9-11 commission as well. And that kind of pushed me over the edge to think, wow, an opportunity to get to actually speak the things that our government, that people needed to hear. So I took a leap of faith. And I'm so, so glad that I did. We are too. Thank you. Clearly benefited the project. When you are choosing a role, any role, what goes through your mind? What are the factors that lead you to, you mentioned this role specifically, but generally speaking, what are the factors that go through your mind when you say, yeah, I've got to do this? You know, beggars can't be choosers, to be completely honest with you. And in a lot of ways, it's more along the lines of what comes towards me, what somebody else thinks I might be able to do. I had nothing to do with fighting for the role that I ended up playing and call me by your name, or in the shape of water, or in the post. It all just kind of fell in my lap. So I took these opportunities and I ran with them. Generally, if I have a choice in the matter, it's something that engages my mind, something that is obviously smart, more often with a sense of humor, because that's kind of how I see the world. And just something that sort of says, either you can do this, or you should do this, or I'm terrified to do this. All of those things kind of combined. Ideally, it would be a wonderful project to throw myself into. So I've just had a really, I've been really lucky this year. Larry, you work in many mediums. Unlike a lot of historians, you work easily on the stage. You have done many things relating to the screen, you've written books. What was the challenge in bringing this book to the small screen? Well, one thing is the small screen isn't as small as it used to be. There's a lot more expanse and the ability to tell a story in such a broad canvas wasn't present when I published the book. The first problem we faced was where to start. The book actually begins in Saeed Kuttev's journey to America in 1948. He was a man who went back to Egypt and wrote Malham Phil Tariq, this book called Milestones, that was the book that Ben Laden and everybody read. How often it always goes back to a book. Well, this was the mind count of the Islamist movement. And it was smuggled out of prison and it electrified a generation of young Muslims who were so alienated and disoriented in their own cultures. The story of the rise of Ben Laden and his boyhood and Zawahri, all of that is a prehistory and occupies about 300 pages that we don't deal with. One day I'd love to tell that story in this same form. I think it would be quite fascinating to talk about how these cultures diverged and came to collision in the way that they are now. So we decided that we should begin with the embassy bombings where you see this. And the reason was, for one thing, we knew that Ali was going to be a big part of it and this really introduces him to us. Also, Americans weren't aware of al-Qaeda until 9-11. And we wanted to show that we'd been under attack for three years before 9-11, beginning with the embassy bombings, which killed 224 people. Cold bombing where 17 sailors were killed. And that was in October of 2000. Right in the middle of the presidential campaign and not a single question about terrorism was raised in the presidential debates which shows you how distant that concern was from any American. It was happening somewhere else. And so when 9-11 happened on our shores, that's why it was so unsettling because where did this come from? Well, you know, a few people like Ali Soufan knew what was going on and were trying to protect us. And that's the story we decided we'd have to begin there and show the conflict of people inside these agencies with each other and also within their own agencies to be taken seriously because really in both the bureau and the agency, people were seen as kind of fanatics or, you know, off the deep end. The Alex station, you know, one of my CIA friends used to call it the island of lost toys. You know, they were discards from other departments that had been thrown in there. So nobody took it seriously except for the people that you see depicted in this and the war that they were fighting. Unfortunately, they were also fighting against each other. What did you make about Qaeda before 9-11? Well, you know, I was researching the siege. And so I had some unhappy experience. The movie came out in August of 1998. Well, it came out in November of 1998 but the trailers came out right after the embassy bombs. And there was another bombing that took place that same month that people don't hear very much about in Cape Town, South Africa. And it was of a planet Hollywood. Two people were killed, a little girl lost her leg and the radical Islamist group that claimed credit for it said they were protesting the siege which had, you know, only had heard rumors of the trailer in America which had not been, but two people were dead and the movie hadn't even come out yet. So I had been writing about, you know, an Islamist terror group and the movie when it came out in November was, there were protesters, there were pickets around the theaters. It was a box office failure. People were afraid to go to the movie and so I was very aware of the conflict internationally and also in my own country about radical Islam and where it was going. Ali, we see that harrowing scene of you arriving in Albania. What is it like to see your life flash before you on screen? Awkward. You know, weird in so many different ways when you're, you know, you're staring at aspect of your life and sometimes it's really doesn't bring some good memories, you know, but I think they stayed true to the story. You know, there's dramatization. I won't be jumping off roof. You know, if a guy running like this, I'll be like, okay, I'll wait for him on the other side of the block, right? But that's usual. But yeah, it's, you know, as you've seen in the first episodes, the very first hard drive with the Mabrok, the Albania operation, the East Africa Embassy bombings, all these things were basically, you can Google them and you'll see that these events actually took place and happened and yes, it was put to the public in a dramatized version, but the story is true. Is it a temptation to look at it and say, no, it didn't quite happen that way or you're getting this wrong? How do you suspend that impulse? Well, it's very difficult. I mean, you're talking about a drama and this is a game, you know, I mean, if you don't do a lot of drama, you know, the showrunners and, you know, the directors will be attacked. Oh, they didn't do much drama in it. You know, people are anticipating that. But one of the things that I really loved about this story is that it's stated true to the facts and that was extremely important. Definitely, somebody like me is going to look like, well, you know, this, this and that, but towards the end, these small little things probably will matter to me because that's my life, but does it really matter to an individual who's watching and trying to get the point of what really happened? I mean, you have an episode where you have to take years and years of operations, intelligence collections, pickering, you know, human beings fighting with each other and using their own institutions and the culture of their own institution as a tool in order to win their own personal battles. You have a lot of these things happening, but in the same time, you have to convey it all to a person who's going to watch everything in about 50 minutes. And I think the show did a phenomenal job in bringing the emotions out that existed at the time, a lot of it. While you all were watching the film, I was giving a tour of the library to our guests and showed a letter that Jacqueline Kennedy had written in LBJ, which informed Brian Cranston's portrayal of LBJ, but Michael, you have portrayed two real-life characters in the last year, one of whom is alive, Richard Clark, and you spent some time with him. How did the time you spent with Clark inform your portrayal of him? Larry hooked us up together. We connected, and we went out to dinner together. He was kind enough to let me record our conversation, so I would have his voice to listen to in the future, but there's so much out there on the Internet of him giving speeches in a number of different situations and testimony as well, so it's readily accessible. He has become even more of a public figure since that time, so there's a lot of information out there for him. Generally, his generosity made me feel relaxed a little bit more than I was going into the situation. I was in the middle of another job at the time, so I hadn't had the time to do the research I needed to do to ask him intelligent questions. So I was saying really stupid things to him. So basically, it was an opportunity to sit across from him, to listen, to ask questions if he brought up a subject that I hadn't thought about, to hear about his inspirations as a young man to get into government, what 30 years in government was like working under four presidents. Why he does what he does? All of that was stuff that I wouldn't have found necessarily in his book or on the Internet. It primarily took away a great sense of humor of someone who has had their hands in our foreign policy and our world for the last 30 years, and I'm very grateful. I had one thing big or small that said, yeah, I got it. I understand him now. No. I mean, he's a lot to take in. To be completely honest with you, he's lived lives, you know, the things he's done are things I could only imagine. And it did spark my imagination though to try to put myself in his shoes when he's out there having a hand in basically who lives and dies. That's an experience I've never had and it's amazing to sit across the table from somebody who has had such influence. So it's been a great challenge and he was very generous. Allie, Larry, front and center in this story is the dysfunction between the FBI and the CIA, much to the detriment of the nation, if not the world. We now live in an era where our Commander-in-Chief has put those agencies under attack. He's called our former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey, political hacks. What does that do to our standing abroad? When our intelligence apparatus is under siege in that manner, what is the threat to this nation? My feeling is the greater threat is to ourselves, not to our standing abroad. If there's a lesson that you might want to take in this series, it is divided we fail. You see the division, you know what happened. You can see that it might not have happened if we had been united, if we had been at one purpose. Now the intelligence community is reorganized and it's doing a far better job of cooperating with each other than on 9-11 and our relationship with foreign services is far much better than it was back then. But the division inside our country is profound. Maybe as great as it's ever been in modern history and the demonization of our intelligence community for partisan reasons is a way of sowing division which is aided and abetted by foreign agencies like the Russians and widening this chasm. Well, if there's a lesson that we should take from 9-11 in this series is that it's dangerous. It's dangerous to create that kind of division and when we do that we place ourselves at peril and so I fault the political people in our country who are attacking our intelligence agencies simply for partisan reasons because they're placing us in danger in doing that. Ali was 9-11, this might be a rhetorical question but was 9-11 a catalyst in seeing better cooperation between the FBI and the CIA? One of the things that I always say that this is not an issue and even what happened with the events that led to 9-11 an issue between the CIA and the FBI the people in the field were working closely together. There was something as you see happening on a headquarters on a headquarter level and people decided not to share information. When the CIA IG came out or the 9-11 commission came up they pointed fingers at specific people, not at an entire agency. I worked more with the CIA than probably with the FBI when I was in the field and these people are really ready at any second to lay their lives for the sake of this country. We never differentiate who's FBI and who's CIA when we're fighting the bad guys in Albania or in Nairobi or in Afghanistan or in Yemen, you call it. So we have to keep that in mind and I support what Larry said about all of us being attacked. After 9-11 I think the relationship is a lot better. I think there are a lot of things that have been implemented that kind of prevent individuals like Martin Schmidt for example to utilize institutional culture in order to create their own fiefdom inside any agency in the FBI or in the CIA. So we're a lot better, but also in the same time we see today all the heads of the intelligence agencies I don't know if you saw the hearing a few weeks ago sitting and each one of them saying yes, Russia interfered in our election in 2016. Yes, Russia is planning to interfere in the election of 2018. This is a DNI that's appointed by the current president a CIA director that's appointed by a current president the head of NSA, the head of FBI that's also appointed by the current president and each and every one of them when they said are you getting an instruction to basically retaliate against the Russians and each one of them said no. See we don't have deep state regardless of what the president tweets. What we have is intelligence agencies that gets their orders from the commander in chief and we are under attack today Al-Qaeda attacked us to divide us and they failed but the Russians attacking us to divide us and they are winning and we're not retaliating and we're not responding and we're not holding them accountable and they are not feeling the pain to stop and our intelligence agencies I believe can inflict a lot of pain on the Russians and others who are interfering or trying to interfere in our system but the commander in chief need to acknowledge that it's not a hoax and if they are not getting the orders they're not going to respond I know I'm pessimistic but I hope shows like this will make more people involved more people going back and figuring out what happened and how we can hold people accountable and I think we're in the LBJ library so maybe we should say we shall overcome I don't want this question to come off as though I'm asking if we have a bigger button but we clearly have a bigger military we spend more money on defense than other countries are our intelligence agencies discernably better than those of our enemies and our allies? I'll let you be a better... Absolutely man, we can smoke anyone we just need the orders I'll take a little bit of issue with it the capabilities that we have in one division in the CIA or the FBI is better bigger and more efficient than the capability a whole country has we're the United States of America we're the richest country in the world if you put all the militaries of the world together they are still smaller than our military we are the United States of America we can do it but we need the political leaders to give us instructions to do it and unfortunately in the last 15, 20 years we always get the wrong instructions you know instead of going after al-Qaeda let's go after Saddam you know instead of doing it the right way let's do Abu Ghraib and that's why we are in a debacle and we're going in a vicious cycle we will be inviting you back when we need a pep talk I am the wrong person for them you have a guy for a pep out there I'm just a donkey remember a donkey but not an ass I am independent by the way I'll take it as a Michael you are clearly a master film actor but it didn't come easy you started on stage and as I understand it it took you a while to adapt to screen acting talk about that process oh gosh yeah I couldn't get a TV job to save my life took me 13 years to get a small part on law and order in the meantime I was doing plays in New York that was my life blood it's still in my blood and yeah it was hard I guess I just had some growing up to do honestly and I didn't understand the craft and I had an opportunity to audition for the Coen brothers in 2008 for their film A Serious Man a small part in their film and it didn't cast me in that small part but they came back to me several months later and asked me to audition for the lead and for some reason they cast me in it and it changed my life and it gave me an opportunity to spend two months on a film set for the first time in my life because those two months that really just sort of gave me a kind of confidence they put confidence in me so I could just do the work in a way that I hadn't had the opportunity to do that before and really because they put their faith in me other people have put their faith in me and I've had opportunities now that I would never have had before so I just got lucky well deserved Larry, before we leave I have to ask, 9-Eleven was the most momentous event of this century what do you worry most about now? as you look around the world there are many we have diversity of threats maybe more threats than we can possibly put our mind to but if you just think about terrorism itself when 9-Eleven happened al-Qaeda was like 400 guys there are thousands now and we don't even think about al-Qaeda but they're in multiple countries there are many chapters of al-Qaeda there are progeny like ISIS and Boko Haram we're fighting against them but they're still proliferating and spreading and so many foreign fighters going back into Europe Russia it's a very dangerous world and the distraction just one tweet can capture the attention of the whole country and take our mind off of the fact that we're in a dangerous world and that we need to support the people that are trying to protect us and I worry oftentimes that we've forgotten who we are all the things you cited about torture and overgrave and we had two wars that we're still involved in and I know I'm dating myself when I think about this but I often reflect on what America used to be and the episode that comes to my mind is when I was in high school I took my girlfriend to the airport on a date in Dallas it's called Love Field but it was a place you could go when you didn't have any money to go to the movie and so we went to the airport and we walked out on the tarmac and then climbed up into a jetliner that we had decided had just come from Paris and we sat in the first class section and stewardesses as we called them then brought us a snack and then we walked up in the FAA tower high kids come on in and so we sat there and watched them landing the planes and that America's dead and terrorism killed it but if it's forgotten then we will have lost something precious and one of the reasons I wanted to do this series I felt so many young people 9-11 is not a part of their lived experience they don't know why we're in the fix we're in now they don't know about why we created the security state that we have why we're engaged in these prolonged wars why we have so much conflict they all sprang from the fear and the paranoia that gripped the country after 9-11 so our goal is to try to represent that progression but my secret goal is to try to remind people that you know who we are and where we came from and try to navigate back to that because if we don't find that America again then terrorists will have won the looming tower debuts on Hulu tomorrow night they will roll out the first three episodes and then the seven subsequent episodes will be rolled out week by week my congratulations to Larry Wright and to Alistair Barg and to Ali Soufan and please come back for Apostle Season 2 thank you very much