Lawrence Wright is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker whose most recent book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, has garnered a bevy of awards, including the 2007 Pulitzer
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for general nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.
Like Lukas before him, Wright is a master at illustrating the conjunction of characters and actions that fuels complex dynamics and conflict. The product of five years and hundreds of interviews, The Looming Tower was, in the words of the Lukas award judges, "an epic tale, part thriller, part tragedy, told through the lives of four men, the two leaders of al-Qaeda, the FBI's counterintelligence chief, and the former head of Saudi intelligence. This remarkable interweaving of their stories, never fully told before, sheds new light on everything from terrorist plots and CIA failures to the tumultuous cross-currents of modern Islam."
Of late, however, Wright has briefly put aside his writing to appear in a one-man play, My Trip to al-Qaeda, on stages scattered across the nation -- Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles, and, this week, New York's cavernous Town Hall.
Wright says he took inspiration for the play from British playwright David Hare's Via Dolorosa, a 1999 one-man production/reportage of Hare's trips to Israel and Palestine; and Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror, a look at the racial tensions between blacks and Hasidic Jews during the 1991 Crown Heights Riots. My Trip to al-Qaeda is Wright's journalistic Baedeker through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and, of course, back home in America.
While writing The Looming Tower, Wright says, "I intentionally kept the focus on the major characters, on the facts of what happened … A lot of the colorful, personal stuff was culled out." But, in fact, reporting on al-Qaeda was very personal for the 59-year-old author, in a way he had never before experienced in his years as a reporter.
In My Trip to al-Qaeda, Wright gives an intimate behind-the-scenes glimpse at the characters he met while researching his book -- how they reacted to him, and how he reacted to them. He lets us see what he saw and feel what he felt: A woman, unveiled, afraid on the streets of Riyadh, running from the religious police, while the writer sits helplessly in his taxi. (An unmarried couple sharing a car is a jailing offense.) Or the sight of the bear in Kabul's zoo, whose nose had been cut off by a Taliban warrior because the creature's "beard wasn't long enough."
At the same time, the play allows Wright -- and his audience -- to examine with the immediacy of drama the questions that have come to obsess him and our nation: Who are these people? Why did they attack America, and what becomes of our nation once terrorism hits our shores?
The play offers other benefits, too. Wright, a modest, understated man with wry sense of humor, admits that he has always "hated authors standing up and reading from their work, and Looming Tower would have been particularly impossible -- something that only friends and family would go to, because they had to." The one-man stage show has an entirely different effect.
As his play opens, Wright is standing near a desk piled with books, watching news clips on a screen behind him: the mujahideen in Afghanistan; the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen; and, finally, a shot of a plane screaming into the World Trade Center.
"People keep saying, 'It looks like a movie,' Wright, on stage, says of the scenes of September 11.
In fact, it looks like his movie, The Siege, which he co-wrote. In 1998, trailers of the movie provoked a radical Islamist group in South Africa to bomb Planet Hollywood in Cape Town, South Africa. (Bruce Willis was one of the movie's stars, and a co-owner of the restaurant chain.) Two people died and a little girl lost her leg. Wright describes the episode on stage: "The movie wasn't even out yet, but there was blood all over it." Muslims protested their depiction as stereotypical; the movie was a box-office failure. "Then in the month following 9/11," Wright declares with a sad hint of irony, "it was the most rented movie in America, making me the first profiteer in the War on Terror."
He took the attacks surrounding the movie personally: "[P]eople perished who would be alive if I had not written that movie," he says on stage. "That bomb in Cape Town was really aimed at me, at my imagination. And I need to know why."
Wright, unlike most Americans, has an intimate knowledge of the Middle East. He taught English in Egypt over three decades ago, learning Arabic and making life-long friends in the process. "The Egyptian people loved America then," he tells his audience. When Wright returned to Egypt in 2002 to research Ayman al-Zawahiri, the doctor and ideological leader of al-Qaeda, the yang to Osama bin Laden's charismatic (and moneyed) yin, he found it a changed place, electric with anger and bitterness.
In part, this anger stemmed from the tactics the Egyptian government had taken against Islamist radicals like Zawahiri. During the show, Wright presents a clip from the early 1980s: Zawarhiri had been convicted of smuggling guns used in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. Behind bars, packed in with other inmates, the young surgeon is articulate, proud, and defiant: "They put us in the dirty Egyptian jails … they whipped with electric cables, they shocked us with electricity! ... And they used wild dogs!" "Torture," comments Wright, "is a potent deterrent. Indeed, many of these prisoners were psychologically destroyed. But Zawahiri emerged … hardened, resolute, and bent on revenge…. He entered prison a surgeon. He came out of it a butcher."
Perhaps more shocking to Wright, upon his return to Egypt as a reporter, was the tremendous amount of hostility toward America harbored by the general public. Only five months had passed since 9/11 when he got there: "It was a very raw moment," he told me in an interview. Many nights, he would stay up late with old Egyptian friends and new sources, deep in conversations that turned into arguments. "I felt very unprofessional, but they were responding to me as an American, and they wanted to talk, and I really did too. It was unlike any reporting experience I had ever had. I couldn't do an interview without it turning personal. There was such a divide, and such a strong element of humiliation."
Humiliation is a word that reverberates in Wright's play -- it is, he believes a concept central to al-Qaeda's appeal to Muslims. "We look at history through a very different lens," he told me. In his communiqués, bin Laden frequently refers to the glory of 630, when Muhammad and his followers overtook Mecca. For bin Laden and radical Islamists, the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099 was just the start of a long line of attacks by the West meant to thwart Muslim hegemony. "Islamists think way back," Wright says -- back, for example, to the tipping point of September 11th, 1683, when Christian armies forced the Ottomans to retreat from Vienna. "We, on the other hand, tend to ignore history. We forget the lessons from World War II, even Vietnam."
America, in recent years, has also become the bete noire for many moderate Muslims who believe the United States is complicit in or responsible for more modern humiliations: our stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, our unconditional support of Israel, our apparent lack of interest in the plight of Palestinians, our willingness to support anti-democratic rulers in exchange for oil. They resent the image portrayed on Western television of Muslims as terrorists, and feel trapped between the radical Islamists and Washington.
In his play, Wright recalls a meeting of Egyptian physicians considering how best to help the Palestinians after the Israeli invasion of Jenin. Sending medical teams? A boycott of American goods? A woman stands up and asks: "What can I do, as an ordinary Egyptian, to help the Palestinians?" One of the panelists tells her: "Teach your children to hate America."
Wright: "I feel like I've been slapped. I've thought about this question and response a long time. What could the woman and the doctor do? Politically, they can't do anything in Egypt … They were paralyzed. And they were humiliated by their weakness. 'Teach your children to hate America.' The one thing you can do."
Humiliation is rampant in Saudi Arabia, as well, the land of plentiful oil and few jobs -- the oil industry provides only 20,000 jobs in the entire kingdom, many of which go to ex-patriots, according to Wright. The brother of one of the 9/11 hijackers who flew the plane into the Pentagon told Wright he had wanted nothing more than a job. "He trained to fly in Arizona, but when he returned to the Kingdom he couldn't get a job," Wright recounts on stage. He became depressed, then heard the call. Other hijackers' stories are similar. "Bin Laden speaks to them. 'Death is better than life in humiliation.'"
Wright met the hijacker's brother while he was (again) teaching. After September 11, Saudi Arabia had refused to give him a journalist's visa and so, instead, he got a job as a mentor to young reporters at the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah, Osama bin Laden's home town. (The Saudis' refusal, Wright said after winning the Pulitzer, "was the best piece of bad luck I ever had," because he wasn't viewed as a reporter while there.)
"Perhaps al-Qaeda can best be understood as an engine that runs on the despair of the Muslim world, especially its young men, whose lives are so futile and unexpressed," Wright says in My Trip. "We think of al-Qaeda as a terror organization, but from the point of view of those who join it, it's really a suicide machine." How long will this suicide machine last? How long will al-Qaeda be able to sell its message, "We love death"?
There is a range of possibilities, Wright told me. Al-Qaeda could "drown in its own excesses." Or, it could devolve, if bin Laden were caught and properly tried (ideally, he says, not in the United States but in other countries, such as Kenya and Tanzania, where Africans and Muslims were killed in his bombings). Al-Qaeda might crumble into gangs resembling the Mafia. "You see that trend already, with the opium smuggling, kidnapping, stealing oil shipments, poaching in Africa -- it's become an extremely profitable enterprise." The other possibility, of course, is that attacks come at an unpredictable rate, and life in the United States becomes more like that in Israel. "In this case, terrorism becomes a management problem."
Wright remains optimistic that we can effectively respond to terrorists. "It will be a long and bumpy ride," he warns, but it can be done. Al-Qaeda's strength is born out of despair. "To break al-Qaeda's hold over people," he told me, "can only be done through hope: jobs, political power, moderation. Those are the major elements that need to be in place for major progress to be achieved."
At home, Americans must begin to think and act differently, focusing not so much on the enemy outside, but on the darkness threatening our own society. "We can search ourselves, we can become a different country, and by example, show how best to respond to the terror." At the national level, our leaders have work to do: "One, we need to do a better job of policing, and to do that we need people who are native speakers of Arabic, Pashtu, Urdu, who understand the cultures." Wright points to Ali Soufan, a Lebanese-American FBI agent who was a member of I-49, the FBI's counterterrorism squad in New York. "On 9/11 he was one of eight Arabic speakers in the FBI," says Wright. "Now there are even fewer -- it's down to five."
Wright also stresses a revival of real diplomacy (particularly concerning Iraq), and a major reengagement with the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. "This time the Arabs are suing for peace. It's a pregnant moment in which we might achieve a regional settlement." So far, he argues, bin Laden has successfully used Israel as a recruiting tool. By resolving the crisis, by making a declaration against the settlements and vigorously helping the formation of a Palestinian state, "we could reduce Muslim grievances and start to restore America's integrity as an honest broker."
On stage, Wright warns his audience that, by failing to uphold American values --"our transparency, our system of justice, our freedoms" -- we have fallen into bin Laden's trap: "This was all part of a plan …a deliberate al-Qaeda goal. Bin Laden told his followers shortly after 9/11, 'I don't need to be on the television to terrorize the American. All I need to do is to make a statement and carry out an attack once again, and the Americans will terrorize themselves. They will constrict their precious civil liberties. They will eventually bring their society to a state that is not recognizable with what it was before September 11th.'"
It was, Wright tells me, perfectly predictable that there would be excesses after the attacks on September 11: that interrogations would lead to torture, that phones would be tapped, that civil liberties would be trammeled. To stop abuses like those at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to halt the daily incursions into our civil rights, Wright states, "would have taken fierce internal resistance. We did not have that fierce internal resistance."
One day, while Wright was working on his book, he got an unexpected visit at his home in Austin, Texas, from the Terrorism Task Force. The FBI agent asked about some telephone calls. "I check on my computer," he recalls in My Trip. "It belongs to a solicitor who represents several jihadis I've interviewed. They ask if I can identify a person named Caroline Wright. That's my daughter. She's not a terrorist. She went to high school with the Bush twins! But however the Terrorism Task Force got her name, she is now on the link chart as an al-Qaeda connection."
In many ways, Wright's play -- like his book -- is itself an example of the fierce internal resistance he invokes. It begs the audience to examine, to question, to think, to attempt to see life through another lens. It prompts us to act. Wright, on a mission, says he wants to perform before more audiences. There's been talk of a production in London. And there's always the possibility of a movie: Steve James of Hoop Dreams fame is interested. ("You know, Gore got an Oscar!" laughs Wright.)
Washington, D.C., meanwhile -- Ground Zero for decision-making on how we as a nation confront al-Qaeda -- is not scheduled for a production. Reports Wright: "We can't find a space."
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Text corrected from the original.
