Tower, his book for the national Book Awards that is up at this time. When did you start writing this book . I started on 9 11, that very morning. I said to my book editor, okay, im going to write what i saw. I have spent five years researching the book and traveling in the middle east in new york and europe. How much was in the new yorker before putting it in their . And then i rode a story of my experience in saudi arabia. They wouldnt let me in as a representative order. So after year and a half i realized that i had to take a job, so i found a job teaching young reporters. It was in the moderns hometown. The best piece of bad luck. You because i was both get much more involved in saudi arabian society. And. Were you able to find . I was able to talk to the members of the family, those that had been in al qaeda, those that knew him in school, his brotherinlaw, people like that and i found there were quite a lot of things that we thought about that were not really true. For instance, how tall is he. I kept running into very close friends of his and those that are close list say that these sixfoot 1 inches, not taller than that, he was not as big as he had been described before and at most he was only worth 7 million and the saudi arabian government cut him off from not that he had fallen ill, chronic back pain, sometimes low blood pressure. And she had trouble with his blood pressure. These were all symptoms of a pituitary disorder. So that is possibly what he suffers from. And so those kinds of things, he was never a playboy. He never partied, he was always very religious. Another one of these things similar, he said sometimes he would take his sons for picnics on the shore with sandwiches and sodas and in the past and the Family Man Part of it, how deep is that and permitted to have four wives at a time, two of them have divorced him and i think one was born after 9 11. And she doesnt like to come from a big family and he was always taking these kids out of the desert and teach them how to shoot and there wasnt much book learning. One of his sons in his early 20s when he left his father in afghanistan came back in and rolled in the first grade. Broadening this a little bit, that is the whole issue of the agency, the Intelligence Agency in the United States and the inability to cooperate how are you able to work on that in our intelligence agencies talked about skill personalities, and the languages of the community and they dont understand and you know, one of the heroes in my book is a young man who at the age of 29 in the year 2000 and then he was made the Case Agent on the cole bombing. And there could be fewer of them now. And it doesnt make any sense. If you go up on the seventh floor of the fbi for headquarters, an organization and who do you see up there. Irish and italian catholic eyes. Its not surprising they would impact in fighting these organizations may come from the name community. And they cant pronounce the names they are trying to capture. , in some cases it is a failure to connect the dots and they dont understand what theyre trying to talk about in the ministry. And this would be true of someone of some. I will tell you that i have spoke to an Army Interrogator about a month ago and they have been the beneficiary of a lot of those who have come forward to suit their needs. And that includes in the most dangerous possible mission. They cant get a job in american intelligence because they are thought to be a security risk. That is outright craziness and its really handicapping us. Cement what about the department of Homeland Security . The director of intelligence, those that really dont have the ability to get intelligence from the defense agency. Not entirely from the ei and so that kind of coordination of intelligence is really happening area in congress is so mad at Homeland Security now, theyre talking about cutting the budget, 30 under wanted. What would make the difference in intelligence in this country, putting skilled people to work, that is what we need to do. Showing our viewers again. This is a quote from Bin Laden, he actually was quoting the koran, it was three times in which he spoke about this passage. Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower. It was such a resonant phrase. Apparently it is a signal to the hijackers. And i couldnt get it out of my mind. Thats how we came the title. Habit changes that you were working on this . That is a very interesting question. When i started this, i was very angry, like a lot of americans. It was hard for me to control my emotions. And i have been the cowriter of the movie with Denzel Washington on this as well and so i was compelled to try to find out what had really happened in the early on i went to cairo, egypt. There were a lot of long angry nights, there was a lot of denial, that arabs had done it, and i could not quite bring myself to be as impartial as i wouldve liked to have been. I did come to understand where this movement came from and what motivated them. That helps me a great deal. Not that i forgive their actions. I do not. And i think that after composing this to have a greater sense of the scale of the tragedy that has been going on for a long time. It involves the arab and muslim worlds as well. Cement is the anger gone . Have you directed elsewhere . My anger . Cement well, i can still be pretty angry about it. Especially when i run into people that are deniers, those that deny what really happened to whether its in america were in the arab world, those that try to cook up a conspiracy theory. It is pretty clear what happened. And its not just me, the 9 11 commission, there are some mysteries but they are not grand mysteries. I grew up in dallas. Since this is something that i have lived with all my life since the Kennedy Assassination but it does anger me 2 at the end of your book you talk about your sources in this. And you talk about how readers will be able to well, they could be skeptical about some of your sources. Can you talk about that and how difficult it was for you as a reporter . Cement my sources tended to be intelligence agents and terrorists. The people that really know those people. And they are trained. So i was constantly having to cross check any documents that i might be able to get, other interviews i would use as well. What he said about this or that. It was a consensus, a way of going about as we try to establish the most probable truth. So i do think that i got as close as i could possibly get. I interviewed more than 600 people and i read tons of documents and i had many books in arabic and articles and other languages translated. Getting some sort of these fine that i could judge the truth again and so most of what you see in her his original research. It is always fascinating to me why people will talk to a Reporter And Everybody wants to have their story told. It does not matter if you are a terrorist or if you are a doctor and cairo. There is a common thread or i wouldnt be in Business Everyone wants to have their story told him they believed in it. You to do an interesting thing, you listed every author listed. Did you decide to do that because why . Well, this is a book that i hope will be used as a standard reference. I was also thinking of it as a signal to the people that i interviewed as well. You know, the world. If you know something about this group and you see all of the people in that organization that i interviewed, then you know where im getting my material and for most leaders are probably would not matter that much because their names may not mean an end to them. But if you are in the Intelligence Agency, if you know anything about that, if you look through my list, you will get an understanding of the world that i was in. Can you talk about the definitive look . That would be my greatest hope that it would be a standard reference and what really led up to 9 11. And i told the story through individual buyers. How do you bring it down to a level that a reader can understand and i found four people that i thought their lives would tell the outline of the story in a way that would be more approachable and to begin with i am the number two man who was looking over the shoulder of osama Bin Laden. He is the real brainchild. It is actually his organization and its largely an egyptian organization. And of course it was osama Bin Laden himself. I have the opportunity to me with them who is the head of saudi arabian intelligence and he is now the ambassador to the United States. He was the head of the Counterterrorist Organization and then John Oneill as well who was actually the first person that i wrote about in this effort. He had been the head of the Counterterrorism Division in new York City and he was pushed out of his own organization, they were angry at him and leaked information and he resigned and became the head of security at the world trade center. And he died on that day as well. See mackie has kind of become a folk hero. And he had a made for Television Movie . Just. One of the things that you talked about, he chose to put three pictures of him, all of these different women discussing his personality and his relationship with women. One is that im thing that he talked about. Well, his life is what im writing about her in order to honor his hand John Oneill coming up to understand that in the midst of this he was married and involved with three women and they didnt know about his wife initially been they had been talking about it for years and that was one of the things that added to the kind of breakdown that he experienced shortly before 9 11. That part of what you mentioned is that he wanted to write about this because it was just too bizarre. Yes, yes. Cemented a hard time, its hard even feel that this is a reality. I understand it now. And i see where they lead. Unlike most americans even though i had some interest in this, although i have lived in a world, i did not understand why this would happen and who these people were, why they were trying to attack us. It was that they really mean we want to go out and learn something. What kind of subjects have you taken on the aura . I wrote a memoir about growing up in dallas during the Kennedy Assassination. I have also written about religious things as well and a book about the amish and other book as well and i wrote a book about recovered memories and that includes only 1980s and 1990s and they remembered crimes that didnt actually occur. And so i wrote one novel about it. And a book as well on identical twin research. When they discover each other, how are they like and how are they different. Things like that. And i have always been fascinated by twins in a relationship which is so intent and i have spent a lot of time talking about it and learning about it, learning about their lives and it was an interesting project. What have you found out and what are they saying to you . There asking if we are more safe, and the answer is anyone who tells you yes or no actually doesnt know. So we dont actually know for safe. People that are trying to attack, we did not know before 9 11. Although we should have and the cd is one of those elusive qualities in which you reach for. And you are never at a point where we can say yes, we are now saved. The unfortunate thing is though Window Grocery Biz shipman and it was in philadelphia on my tour. I went to libertyville. Like an international flight from you have to take off your belt, empty your pockets. We had to take off our shoes to visit the liberty bell. But in the scale of freedom versus safety, i think that we have probably tipped too far into running some freedom with the ordinary things that we think of is the right of every american in the pursuit of something. In austin, texas, several in the group and 9 11 just about ruins it and we just recently got back together. Nothing more fun or therapeutic, i cant tell you how glad i am. The book is called the moving tower. The road to 9 11 and a finalist for the national Book Award this