The hijacked planes which crashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon claimed 2,996 lives and injured over 6,000 more... but could the horror have been prevented?
SMOKE billowed into the September sky and fire rained down on to the busy New York streets below as a second passenger plane cruised towards the towers.

Meanwhile, in a hidden bunker half a world away, the man behind the attacks, Osama bin Laden, braced himself for the coming war - one he was fighting on his terms, not America's.
It was the day which continues to define a century, when the front lines were re-drawn in al-Qaeda's jihad against the West, and decades of American complacency came crashing down, taking 2,996 innocent lives with it.

But could the most devastating terror attack in world history have been prevented?

That's the question asked in The Looming Tower, a new Amazon Prime series, starring Peter Sarsgaard and Jeff Daniels, and based on the book of the same name.

In the original exposé, author Lawrence Wright shows how American security services routinely underestimated and ignored Osama bin Laden despite his sustained threats of violence against the West.
When they finally did wake up to the rising profile of al-Qaeda's leader, America's security services locked horns over how to deal with the threat, with the CIA and the FBI squabbling at the highest level.

Stubborn chiefs at the bureau, which operates on US soil, clashed with the personalities at the top of the CIA, which handles overseas investigations, and vital intel wasn't shared between the two groups.

Meanwhile, political distractions meant bin Laden's threats weren't listened to, and decades-old alliances obscured the truth of what America was really dealing with.

Then, in the months leading up to September 2001, a handful of warnings landed on desks in the White House stating that the US had become a serious target for al-Qaeda.

But this was too little, too late, and not enough to change the course of history.

Everyone knows what happened next.
The rise of al-Qaeda

It may seem unfathomable now but, until the late 1990s, few people had heard of Osama bin Laden and his Islamist group, al-Qaeda.

The organisation had grown from a rag-tag band of fantasists to a well-drilled, motivated and competent menace, right under the American government's nose.

But to understand the reason why nobody picked up on bin Laden's rise to power, you have to travel back in time to the searing deserts of the Middle East, where the Cold War was playing out in the sand-blasted cities of Afghanistan.

As tensions raged between the USSR and America, the two superpowers looked to proxy battlegrounds as a place to butt heads without pursuing a full-scale war.

In 1979, a civil war between the communist Afghan government and insurgent rebels became one of these battles, after the Soviet Union rolled their tanks over the border to support their government allies.

The rebels, a loose cluster of guerrilla fighters known as the mujahideen, were backed by the Americans in a bloody conflict which destabilised the volatile country and resulted in the deaths of up to two million civilians.

At the time, it wasn't unusual for America or the USSR to back each other's opponents in these proxy wars, but if the Americans knew who they would end up supporting, they would have thought twice.

In 1979, a 22-year-old Osama bin Laden left his native Saudi Arabia to join the US-funded mujahideen and take the fight to Afghanistan, on the same side as the US.

His time in the mujahideen, which he helped to fund by funnelling arms into Afghanistan, made him a well-known figure in the Arab world, and in 1988 he was renowned enough to form his own army: al-Qaeda.

A blind eye from America

At the time, the US government was aware that some of their allies on the ground in Afghanistan were Islamist fundamentalists, but most top bods were too busy worrying about Soviet expansion to give it much attention.

So they left bin Laden and his cronies to it in Afghanistan, happy to have support from his mujahideen soldiers against the Soviets despite their alarming Islamist tendencies.

Al-Qaeda only started to become a threat after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, when bin Laden offered the services of his fighters to defend Saudi Arabia from the marauding Iraqi army.

Saudi leaders declined bin Laden's offer, and instead chose to accept military aid from America.

This angered bin Laden, who believed that foreign troops had no business operating in the heart of the Muslim world.

Bin Laden's outspoken opposition to American involvement led to him being banished from his native Saudi Arabia, and his hatred of the West festered while he consolidated his influence in exile.

Eventually, in 1998, having operated out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan for the past few years, bin Laden declared a jihad to expel foreign troops from Islamic lands, calling on his loyal followers to kill Americans and their allies wherever they could.

By now, the fundamentalist leader was more powerful than ever, having allied himself with his old mujahideen comrades, originally armed by the Americans during the civil war against the Afghan government.

In August 1998, al-Qaeda's supporters answered the call to arms with the bombings of United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, which killed over 200 people and earned bin Laden a place on the FBI's most-wanted list.
Waking up to the threat

In December 1998, the director of the CIA realised that bin Laden's latest threats to carry out an attack on Western soil should be taken seriously, and intelligence that bin Laden's army was being trained to hijack aircraft was passed all the way up to the White House.

But the urgency was lost on a Clinton administration dealing with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the intelligence wasn't given the prominence hindsight shows it deserved.

These warnings were followed by a CIA brief to new President George Bush in June 2001 that an attack against America was imminent, and that bin Laden's aides had threatened to strike the US in the immediate future.

Then in August 2001 - less than a month before the attacks - the FBI warned that their information "indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country, consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attack".

But why did nobody act on these warnings?

That's the issue at the heart of The Looming Tower: how did bin Laden, a man hell-bent on destroying America, evade sophisticated US intelligence services for so long?

Peter Sarsgaard, who plays CIA boss Martin Schmidt in the series, told News.com.au: “I thought there was a real opportunity to try to think about the ways in which we are responsible.

"How did our behaviour precipitate this? How can we avoid it next time?

Bin Laden left unchecked

A key reason why bin Laden was left unchecked is down to infighting between the CIA and the FBI, both of which were looking into the threat from al-Qaeda but refused to cooperate on the investigation for fear that the other would muck it up.

Both organisations essentially had the picture, but fighting between the two prevented them from slotting the jigsaw together to get a clear sense of what was really going on.

For example, the FBI's leaders were adamant, based on their own investigations, that New York was a target for bin Laden's cronies.

But what they didn't know was that the CIA had clocked two of these militants, who would eventually carry out the attacks, sneaking into America - although they were never told this by the CIA, and would almost certainly have acted against the terrorists if they were.

In the Amazon show, this conflict plays out between Jon O'Neill, the bull-in-a-china-shop head of the FBI (Jeff Daniels), and Martin Schmidt, the intelligent but petty chief of the CIA's al-Qaeda unit (Peter Sarsgaard).

O'Neill is a real person who was actually involved in the FBI's pre-9/11 investigations, while Schmidt is a fusion of the personalities of a number of people who really headed up the CIA at the time.

But The Looming Tower makes clear that it wasn't just infighting which blinded America to the threat from al-Qaeda: part of it was down to old-fashioned complacency.

Occupied by the unravelling Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton's administration just didn't prioritise dealing with Islamist terror over other, seemingly more pressing issues.

And with the stained dress dominating news cycles, few Americans paid much attention to a fantasist on the other side of the world who wanted them dead.

All this meant that in the late 1990s, the FBI was so ill-equipped to investigate threats from the Middle East that they had just eight Arabic speakers in the whole of the bureau, out of tens of thousands of operatives.

This is another issue explored in The Looming Tower, which shines a spotlight on Ali Soufan (Tahar Rahim), one of these eight real-life Arabic specialists who actually understood the seriousness of bin Laden's threats.


The show may dramatise aspects of the story, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning book it's based on was meticulously researched, informed by 600 interviews with real people involved in the build-up to 9/11.

Peter Sarsgaard says his involvement with the series has taught him that we still have a lot to learn about the collective failure which opened the doors to an attack at the centre of the free world.

“We weren't paying attention," he said.

"It’s what’s happening now. As a society we’re getting derailed."

The Looming Tower premiered on Amazon Prime on 1 March, with instalments released every week for the following seven weeks.