Lecture: Lawrence Wright
Lawrence Wright speaking at NYU.
Photo by Andrew Bast.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed and burned, New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright was grounded in Austin, Texas, unable to get a flight into New York. “I didn’t know how to go about writing about what had happened, but I just knew that I had to,” Wright told a group of students and faculty from NYU’s Department of Journalism on September 12, 2006.
The phones in New York were down that morning following the chaos of the attacks, so Wright sent an email to his editor, David Remnick. It read simply, “Put me to work.”
That afternoon, Remnick convened a conference call with his staff—many of whom were stranded outside the city, like Wright. He told them to send him “richly detailed memos” that he would weave together into a cohesive narrative.
Those dispatches yielded the famous “black issue” of The New Yorker, with Wright’s contribution—the story of reporter Kirk Kjeldsen’s successful escape from the north tower—framing the piece. But Wright wasn’t satisfied. He felt compelled to go further into the story.
Wright, who grew up in Dallas, has the affable, sincere demeanor of a Southern gentleman, offset by a sly sense of humor. In a genial Texas drawl, he talked about the experiences that he felt put him in a unique position to tell the story of the terrorist attacks. Not only had Wright spent most of his thirty-year career grappling with the complexities of religious faith, but he had also lived and worked in Cairo after college—an experience that gave him an intimate knowledge of the cultural forces at play in the Middle East.
Indeed, at a time when counter-terrorism efforts were not of great national concern, Wright was researching the power struggle between the FBI and the CIA. What he found spurred him to write The Siege, a 1998 thriller that depicted New York City in the throes of a series of terrorist attacks. The film, which shows Arab-Americans being rounded up and denied their civil liberties “eerily prefigured the events of 9/11,” said Wright.
Wright’s instincts as a screenwriter instructed him to look for scenes and characters through which he could narrate the events that led up to 9/11. “I decided I was going to have to tell this really complicated story through individual lives,” he said.
Still unable to fly into New York, he began by scouring online obituaries of the men and women who died in the towers. He came across an entry for John O’Neill, head of security at the World Trade Center and disgraced former head of the FBI’s New York counter-terrorism effort. “I was constantly on the lookout for people who I knew would be revelatory and intriguing,” Wright said. “John O’Neill was certainly one of those characters.” O’Neill, once the FBI’s lead man in tracking Osama bin Laden, had pushed for increased cooperation between the FBI and CIA. His brash style of leadership won him many enemies and he was pressured to leave his post only months before the attacks. “I knew that I had found a vehicle that would take me inside the story,” said Wright.
Ultimately O’Neill became one of the four central characters in Wright’s 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred Knopf), along with the two leaders of al-Qaeda—Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri—and Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence.
Beyond characters, Wright stressed the importance of capturing the reader’s interest by couching information in compelling scenes. “The nice thing about a great scene is that once the reader gets invested in it, you can spread it out and load that scene with lots of information that is otherwise kind of cumbersome for them to digest,” he said.
To keep track of his research over the five year process of creating the book, Wright employed a painstaking methodology, honed by years of writing for publications like The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, and Rolling Stone.
He began by assembling a long list of sources he wanted to contact and then set out to interview them all. As he moved forward, Wright culled telling information from interviews, clips, and documents, classifying them according to subject on 4x6 notecards, for example, “O.B.L. [Osama bin Laden]-Wives.” This ongoing process of categorization helps him to flesh out an outline. The notecards represent, “a reservoir of stuff that I know is interesting to me,” he said, “I know this is what I’m going to write about.”
In the end, he’d conducted 640 interviews and amassed 15 boxes of notecards and 4,100 pages of hand-written notes.
But managing data was hardly Wright’s biggest challenge. He also faced the recurring problem of securing interviews with cagey FBI agents and jihadis. And, once he did, getting them to open up proved equally difficult. The best way to “drag anonymous sources into the light is to ask them if you can come back to them later should you decide to use what they told you,” Wright said. Oftentimes, if the quote you need from them is innocuous, he said, once they know what you’re using, they’ll agree to attach their names.
Reporting in a hostile foreign environment, likewise, called for ingenuity and persistence. After being denied entry into Saudi Arabia for over a year, Wright found a back door into the country. Saudis are willing to hire ex-patriot workers, so he took a job training young reporters at the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah, Osama bin Laden’s hometown. Instead of being sequestered in a hotel room or a protected compound, he was able to immerse himself in Saudi life. “It was a very humbling experience,” he confessed. “I know that if I had been there as a reporter, I wouldn’t have gotten as good a story.”
Through his five year odyssey, Wright remained diligent—enduring FBI wiretaps on his phone calls, being strung along by evasive interview subjects, and the moral ambivalence he felt about engaging with terrorists whose crimes he abhorred. Those obstacles were eclipsed by the importance of telling what he called “the story of my lifetime.”
“I knew that history was looking over my shoulder,” he said. “That for centuries people would be studying this event and I’m the man on the ground now.”