I recently interviewed Austin author Lawrence Wright about the excellent and thought-provoking film version of his one-man play “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which airs at 8 p.m. tomorrow on HBO. Part of my interview with Wright will appear in tomorrow’s Life & Arts section.
Thanks to years of reporting and research for his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” Wright has earned recognition as an expert on Middle Eastern Islamic radicalism in general and al Qaeda in particular. He and I talked for a little over an hour about “The Looming Tower” and “My Trip to Al-Qaeda.” Most of what we talked about had to be trimmed from today’s Life & Arts article but, I think, is too interesting to leave unpublished. Here is an edited transcript of the part of my interview with Wright (shown below interviewing Abdullah al-Shehri, a professor in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) that didn’t make it into print.
Austin American-Statesman: How does “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” relate to “The Looming Tower”? It’s not an adaptation.
Lawrence Wright: No. It’s my reaction to the experiences that I had in researching the book. The book took nearly five years to write. For at least two of those years, and maybe more, I was away from home.
Do you see “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” as theater, as lecture or seminar
It’s hard to categorize. People are always saying, “You’re one-man play, or whatever you call it.” I don’t know exactly what to call it. I call it “nonfiction theater.” It’s just a term to try to understand it.
It is a play. It has structure. It is a performance. But it also has the nature of a conversation. What I like about doing these plays is the intimacy of the connection with people. It is journalism. I’m carrying information to them. But somehow actually standing in front of them and telling them about it and showing them and filtering it through my own experiences, it creates a kind of power that is hard to access in other forms of journalism.
Obviously some new footage was shot for the HBO film of “My Trip to Al-Qaeda.” What was the production process for the film? Why three years between the theatrical run and the broadcast of the film?
The short answer is raising money. It took a while to put it together. Then we still had to transform it from a theatrical to a cinematic experience.
Alex Gibney (the film’s director) and I met after one of my performances and he said he’d really like to make it into a film. It proved difficult to assemble the cash. We finally did get it. Then, with our really limited budget, we had to plan trips to England and to Egypt because we figured there were some key interviews in both places that could be used to enhance the movie experience.
Osama bin Laden’s brother in law, Jamal Khalifa, was an important source for you. I guess he put you one degree from bin Laden.
He was one of the people who was closest to bin Laden. They were best friends, and they were related and they spent a lot of very important moments together — on the battlefield and also as young men.
Jamal was a very complicated figure for me because I liked him so much. He had a great smile. He was full of humor. He seemed to me to genuinely want to separate himself from bin Laden and his ideas — not just in his conversations with me. He had published letters in the Saudi press denouncing bin Laden. So there was evidence of the genuineness of those feelings.
But he was being hampered in his business by the fact that he really couldn’t travel. He was afraid of being renditioned. He consulted me about it. He said he wanted to talk to the FBI, wanted to clear his name. I tried to make that possible. In the course of reporting the book, I had interviewed dozens and dozens of FBI agents. So I knew a lot of them. I made a number of calls over a period of a couple of years. What I was finally told by one of my sources in the FBI was the FBI was told they couldn’t talk to Jamal. The CIA had forbidden it.
He made an exploratory trip to Beirut to see what would happen and nothing happened. So then he traveled to Madagascar and he was murdered. I don’t know what happened. But nobody was ever brought to justice. Whether it was just a gang in Madagascar — what they stole was his laptop computers. They didn’t take his money. His family thinks it was a U.S. Special Ops assassination. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. I’ve been trying to find out. I’ve filed several FOIA (freedom of information) applications.