Early on in “The Looming Tower,” FBI agent Ali Soufan (Tahir Rahim) testifies in front of the 9/11 Joint Inquiry in 2004, a year before he quit the bureau at age 34.
Very calmly, he tells the panel that the CIA withheld intelligence from the bureau that would have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks — adding that he first became aware of the CIA’s withholding of evidence as early as 1998. “There were a lot of mistakes on everybody’s part,” the real-life Soufan tells The Post. “The CIA knew that these people were in the US. They never passed the information.”
Based on the Pulitzer-winning book by Lawrence Wright, “The Looming Tower” is a 10-episode series that tells the maddening story of how in-fighting between the CIA and FBI paved the way for the hijackers to gain entry into the US and eventually wreak their horrific destruction.
In 1998, the Lebanese-born Soufan, who applied for a job at the FBI on a dare, became the bureau’s best defense against terrorism following the twin bombings of US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya) which killed 224 people, 12 of them Americans. He joined the bureau a year before and possessed the rare distinction of being one of eight agents who could speak Arabic and could translate the content of faxes, phone calls and live conversations. He was also 25 years old.
“I was the youngest [agent] and I was assigned to New York,” says Soufan, now 46. “[Assistant Deputy Director of Investigation] John O’Neill took me under his wing.”
Once the FBI determined that the CIA had in its possession the hard drive of an al Qaeda cell in Eastern Europe that held a list of operatives and 50 potential targets, O’Neill sent Soufan to Albania to break up a terrorist cell. He also took him along to Britain when the bureau and Scotland Yard investigated the activities of al-Qaeda operative Anas al-Libi (Ayman Samman) — one of the men tied to the Nairobi bombing — in Manchester.
“The show has it right about me working with John, following up the leads in Pakistan and London. A lot of the coordination took place in the UK,” Soufan says. “We [eventually] did get Anas al-Libi from Libya after Khadafy fell [in 2011]. We brought him here and he was about to stand trial. He died in jail. Most of that cell has been taken out.”
While some of the characters in “The Looming Tower” are composites — among them Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard), the coordinator of the CIA’s Al-Qaeda-gathering “Alec Station” — several villains are the real deal. Khalled (Samer Bisharat) is a one-legged operative who assists with the Nairobi bombing. Mohammed al Owhali (Youssef Berouain) escapes the Nairobi devastation but is later captured and gives up vital information.
Soufan’s stature at the FBI grew after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and he was in charge of the interrogation (“It was a great honor to bring justice to those 17 [Americans] who were killed,” he says). He was back working at 26 Federal Plaza when O’Neill retired from the bureau on Aug. 22, 2001, to take a job as the head of security at the World Trade Center — dying there three weeks later during the attacks.
Soufan, who now runs the Soufan Group, a security concern that employs former FBI agents as well as members of the NYPD and CIA, is listed as a producer on “The Looming Tower” and commends the filmmakers [Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney and Wright] for staying true to the story “because that’s what matters.
“It gives you an idea of the importance of human behavior and how it can lead to disasters,” he says.
“Maybe we need to have accountability as a nation. If there’s no accountability, it will happen again.”
“The Looming Tower” Series premiere Wednesday on Hulu