Cold Outside

0:07The Record Minneapolis. Friday, August seventeenth, two thousand one. The man from the flight school is in custody on an immigration violation. A deportation order has been signed. And he owned a laptop computer.

0:22The Record The agents wanted to search it. They were worried, the Commission says, that the United States Attorney's Office in Minneapolis would find insufficient probable cause of a crime for a criminal warrant. Agents at FBI headquarters agreed that there was insufficient cause.

0:39The Record So Minneapolis tried another road: a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. To get one, the FBI had to show probable cause that Moussaoui was an agent of a "foreign power." The case agent didn't have that information. So, on August eighteenth, he asked for help: from the FBI's office in Paris, because Moussaoui was French, and from London, where he had lived.

1:06The Record The French answered first. On August twenty-second, and again on the twenty-seventh, they provided information connecting Moussaoui to a rebel leader in Chechnya, Ibn al Khattab.

1:19The Record Was that enough? Was a Chechen rebel group a "foreign power" under the law? The Commission calls what followed a "spirited debate" between Minneapolis, FBI headquarters, and the CIA. Headquarters did not believe it was good enough, and its National Security Law Unit declined to submit a FISA application.

1:39The Record In one conversation, a headquarters agent complained that Minneapolis had written its request to get people "spun up." The Minneapolis supervisor said that was precisely his intent. He said he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center." The headquarters agent replied, the Commission says, that this was not going to happen, and that they did not know if Moussaoui was a terrorist.

2:06The Record On August twenty-third, the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, was briefed on the case. The briefing's title was "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." He was told that Moussaoui wanted to learn to fly a 747, paid for his training in cash, was interested to learn the doors do not open in flight, and wanted to fly a simulated flight from London to New York.

2:31The Record Tenet told the Commission that no connection to al Qaeda was apparent to him at the time. He saw it as an FBI case. The Commission's sentence is flat. "No connection was made between Moussaoui's presence in the United States and the threat reporting during the summer of 2001."

2:48The Record In London, the FBI had hand-delivered its request to the British on August twenty-first. On the twenty-fourth, a CIA cable to London and Paris described Moussaoui as a possible "suicide hijacker." The Commission says the British did not handle the case as a priority, amid a large number of other terrorism inquiries.

3:08The Record On September fourth, the FBI sent a summary of the case to the CIA, the FAA, Customs, the State Department, Immigration, and the Secret Service. It did not report the case agent's own assessment that Moussaoui planned to hijack an airplane. It did contain the FAA's comment that it was not unusual for Middle Easterners to attend flight training schools in the United States.

3:33The Record The agents in Minneapolis were asking a question the government's systems weren't built to answer quickly: who is this man connected to? To answer it properly, you would have to go back a long way. Further back than anyone in that office could have imagined.

3:51The Record September fourth. Seven days.

3:56The Record From Will Sigmon Media. This is The Long Fuse. Episode three. Cold Outside.

4:07Student Reverend, they've got the colored lights up already!

4:10Pastor Then you'd better dance. Who's the gentleman by the coat rack? The good grey suit.

4:17Student He's from the college. The teachers' college. He's from Egypt, from the Ministry of Education. His government sent him over to see how Americans teach.

4:27Pastor A long way to come to Greeley. Did anybody warn him we're dry?

4:32Student He asked me why everybody in this town is out watering their lawns every evening.

4:36Pastor It's a desert, dear. We are very proud of our lawns.

4:40Student He isn't dancing.

4:44Pastor Some men don't.

4:44The Record He didn't. But he was watching. And a year or so later, he wrote it down.

4:54The Record Almost everything we know about that night comes from one man, the visitor in the grey suit, writing for a magazine back home in Cairo, called al-Risala. He was not a neutral witness. He was already a sharp critic of the West, and he wrote as one.

5:11The Record He described the dance. "The dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests." "The atmosphere was full of desire."

5:29The Record He wrote that the minister dimmed the white lamps one by one, then went to the gramophone to choose a song. He chose "Baby, It's Cold Outside." And then, Qutb wrote, the minister went home, satisfied.

5:48The Record It's worth being clear about what this is. It is a church dance in a small Colorado town in nineteen forty-nine, as seen by one man who disapproved of it. What matters is not what he saw. It's what he decided it meant.

6:00The Record He was born in October nineteen-oh-six in a village in Upper Egypt called Musha, in the province of Asyut. By his biographers' accounts, he had memorized the Qur'an by the age of ten.

6:12The Record He went to Cairo, to a teachers' college called Dar al-Ulum, graduated in nineteen thirty-three, and joined the Ministry of Education, first as a teacher and later as an inspector of schools. He wrote novels that made little impression, and literary criticism that did. He was one of the first champions of a young novelist named Naguib Mahfouz, who would win the Nobel Prize.

6:36The Record The Egypt of those years was a monarchy living in the long shadow of British power. Over the nineteen-forties his writing turned toward religion and politics, and it grew sharper in its criticism of the government.

6:51The Record In nineteen forty-eight, the Ministry sent him to the United States to study American teaching methods. Why him, and why then, is debated. One reference work says it was perhaps to soften his criticism. Naguib Mahfouz later said friends at the Ministry were worried enough about him that they arranged to send him abroad. The record can't settle it.

7:14The Record He was forty-two years old.

7:19The Record He spent his first months in Washington, D.C., at Wilson Teachers' College. Then, in nineteen forty-nine, he moved west, to Greeley, Colorado, and the Colorado State College of Education.

7:32The Record Greeley had been founded in the eighteen-seventies as a utopian colony, sober and churchgoing, by an editor of the New York Tribune. It still had no bars. It had wide streets, churches, and cattle feedlots at the edge of town. He earned a master's degree in education there. He later studied at Stanford, in California.

8:01The Record His essays home tell a different story from the one a visitor would expect from Greeley. He wrote about American materialism, American racism, and American sexual permissiveness. He mocked the food, the jazz, even the haircuts. He did not stop at criticism. He concluded that the whole civilization was spiritually empty.

8:16The Record The town he judged had been built on purpose. In December eighteen sixty-nine, the Tribune's agricultural editor, Nathan Meeker, asked readers of good character to join him in founding a sober, cooperative colony near the foot of the Rockies. More than three thousand applied. He chose about seven hundred. They named it after his boss, Horace Greeley. One early visitor was warned she would die of dullness within five hours. "There is nothing there but irrigation."

8:48The Record Qutb's essay doesn't read like the work of a bored man. It reads like a prosecutor's brief. He describes an evening at George Washington Hospital in the capital, when an employee was badly hurt in an elevator accident, and a patient came back to the hallway, mimicking the dying man, and the others laughed. From that, and a handful of moments like it, he drew a verdict on a whole people: "the drought of sentimental sympathy in their lives."

9:16The Record And some of the brief is petty. He wrote that Americans salt their watermelon. He wrote that he never once came home from an American barber without fixing the haircut himself. He meant it as evidence.

9:29The Record The Commission summarizes the result in one line. "Qutb returned with an enormous loathing of Western society and history." "He dismissed Western achievements as entirely material, arguing that Western society possesses 'nothing that will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.'"

9:49The Record He left America in nineteen fifty.

9:54The Record In nineteen fifty-two, a group of army officers overthrew Egypt's king. One of them, Gamal Abdel Nasser, soon held power. At first, by many accounts, Qutb was close to the new regime. Around then he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the mass Islamist movement founded in nineteen twenty-eight, and he became the head of its propaganda section.

10:18The Record The alliance didn't last. In October nineteen fifty-four, after a Brotherhood member tried to assassinate Nasser, Qutb was arrested again, and badly tortured. In July nineteen fifty-five he was sentenced to fifteen years.

10:34The Record In prison he wrote. A long commentary on the Qur'an, and then a short, hard book usually called, in English, *Milestones*. It was published in nineteen sixty-four.

10:46The Record The Commission describes the core of what he argued, in three steps. Humanity, he claimed, could choose only between Islam and jahiliyya, a word for the age of ignorance before the Prophet. More people, Muslims included, were drawn to that ignorance and its comforts than to his idea of Islam. And third, in the Commission's words, "no middle ground exists in what Qutb conceived as a struggle between God and Satan."

11:14The Record The Commission adds its own judgment of him: that he "mixed Islamic scholarship with a very superficial acquaintance with Western history and thought."

11:24The Record He was released in nineteen sixty-four, and arrested again in August nineteen sixty-five. He was sentenced to death for sedition. On August twenty-ninth, nineteen sixty-six, the Egyptian government hanged him.

11:38The Record He was fifty-nine years old. He was a writer, not a soldier. What he left behind were books.

11:48The Record The books traveled. His brother, Muhammad Qutb, left Egypt and taught in Saudi Arabia. Egyptian Islamist teachers carried his ideas into Saudi classrooms. The Commission puts the result plainly.

12:03The Record "Through writers like Qutb, and the presence of Egyptian Islamist teachers in the Saudi educational system, Islamists already had a strong intellectual influence on Bin Ladin and his al Qaeda colleagues."

12:15The Record And in its chapter on the foundations of the new terrorism, the Commission names him directly. "Bin Ladin also relies heavily on the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb." "Bin Ladin shares Qutb's stark view, permitting him and his followers to rationalize even unprovoked mass murder as righteous defense of an embattled faith."

12:36The Record So that was the man by the coat rack in Greeley. Sayyid Qutb.

12:42The Record The Commission is careful about what this means, and so are we. "Yet as political, social, and economic problems created flammable societies, Bin Ladin used Islam's most extreme, fundamentalist traditions as his match." A match isn't a fire, and it isn't the forest. Hundreds of millions of people have read about the same faith and found in it the opposite of what he found. The Commission's recommendations say it in four words. "Islam is not the enemy."

13:15The Record Thirteen years after Qutb was hanged, in nineteen seventy-nine, three things happened in one year that turned his books into a movement with an army. That's next.

13:25The Record But first, back to August two thousand one. The twenty-first. Twenty-one days.