I remember cleaning my basement in 2005 only to find a Newsweek from the late nineties with Osama bin Laden’s name on the front cover. It was a fascinating article in retrospect. I am sure I read it but like most, the name Osama bin Laden did not actually resonate with me until 2001. But what that cover showed to me, even though he was not in the public consciousness in the nineties, somebody knew something.
That is the basis of the new mini-series The Looming Tower as the FBI and CIA track Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden as they declare war on the United States through an interview with ABC News while the agencies butt heads with each other. The big point of contention that starts the series is the CIA acquiring a hard drive from an Al-Qaeda operative but refuses to share that information with the FBI. Things only get more heated when at the end of the episode; two American Embassies get blown up. This is 1998.
The show does the best job I have heard explaining the differences between the two federal agencies and why they are at odds. The FBI are a law and order agencies who want to bring in enemy combatants and put them on trial if they did anything wrong, while the CIA look at the bigger pictures not wasting time on small fish if it will harm catching big fish. And of the course the spies have no problem killing enemy combatants.
The FBI on the show comes in the form of Jeff Daniels (Arachnophobia) as Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's National Security Division in New York City. I would not recommend Googling his character because he plays what I assume a huge role later in the series. Peter Sarsgaard (Green Lantern) is the head of a CIA counter-terrorism unit in DC. Feel free to Google him, he does not exist (but the person he may be based on is fairly easy to find and you can tell why the creators of the show did not want to use his real name; I will say he did not seem to like the book that the mini-series was based on). It is probably because of this that in the battle of FBI and CIA on this show, the former come out looking better than the latter.
The one name I did recognize in the first episode was Richard Clarke who was the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection at the time. The head of the CIA George Tenet (played by Alec Baldwin) does show up in episode three to discuss retaliation on bin Laden. The most high profile government official at the time Bill Clinton only shows up archival footage. And a lot of it, the show does not miss a chance to have a newscast featuring bits on the Monica Lewinski scandal on the television in the background, and the occasional foreground whenever anyone is near a television.
But Clinton is not the only one with a little action on the side. In the first episode alone, Daniels takes flowers to a woman in an apartment in New York. While in Washington, he takes flowers to another woman, and by the end of the episode he goes to the suburbs where another woman is waiting with his two daughters. Do really need to know this guy hunting terrorists has not one but (at least) two mistresses? Probably not. Granted I do find the home life of the rare FBI agent that can speak Arabic who is called to go to a foreign country on his first date and surprisingly there is a second.
There is a growing number of nineties true crime shows on television that I fear we are not too far away from the Amy Fisher and / or John Wayne Bobbitt story, but of the ones that have aired so far, The Looming Tower is the most well made of them. And with all the FBI stories in the news these days, the show is a relevant reminder of just how hard the job is and it is a job that never ends. And more importantly, just what is really going on in the world when the media has one singular focus on something that may warrant impeachment but in the end is may be trivial?
The first three episodes of The Looming Tower are available to stream now on Hulu with new episodes every Wednesday.
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