William M. Arkin has written many nonfiction books, some of which were bestsellers with the New York Times and Washington Post.
His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be published by Featherproof in 2021 & is available for pre-ordering now. Here is an interview with Arkin…
What drove you to write History in One Act?
I started with the idea of writing the perfect conspiracy novel. I was at this conference at Dartmouth College a few years after the Iraq War went sideways, and at this conference I was really taken aback by the number of people in the audience—and not just your normal nut jobs—who really believed that the Bush administration had something to do with what happened on 9/11.
Not only did I think that their conspiracies were stupid—how explosives would have been snuck into a half dozen buildings in New York City, or that an airplane didn't really hit the Pentagon, that it was a missile instead, and all the other technical explanations that were so concocted—but I wondered how conspiracy buffs could think that tens or hundreds or even thousands of government people could conspire to do any of that, how they could justify killing 3,000 Americans, for what reason they could do it, justify it to themselves. In other words, to me, the reason for the conspiracy had to match, the outcome. There had to be a gravity behind what conspirators were trying achieve that matched that treason involved in the doing of what they were doing.
It took me awhile to decide on what that conspiracy would be. I wanted to conceive of something that was important enough that I could articulate a strategic justification, an American interest, no matter how big. It had to match the event in bigness, but it also had to be plausible. And I actually had to believe it. I think I read or watched every conspiracy book and movie in my process—you know, the ones where some secret religious sect conspires to control the world, or some cabal of billionaires conspire to control the supply of oil. To me, none of them seem to really fit or be realistic.
And then there were the specifics of the 2001 timeframe. So I cycled through intentionally starting a war with Iraq or stopping a war with Iraq, and again, it just to me that conspiring to create a war—even against al Qaeda—didn’t pass my test, that “The Act” had to match the outcome, the desired outcome. Eventually, the conspiracy I landed on was creating a war against Islam—the religion—and specifically Saudi Arabia as the epicenter of, the custodians of a part of, that religion. The tale I weave shows a self-interested entity that is more threatening to the United States and the wellbeing of the world than a weak and contained Saddam Hussein.
And then I struggled with this war against Islam and with articulating a kind of modern day religious clash, whether it was publishable and what kind of backlash there might be—that is, from zealots who cannot tolerate even a fictional account that insults them. My very concern about the sensitivity associated with such an objective gave me greater confidence that, indeed, this was the right fulcrum for the book. So, yes, it’s a conspiracy book about a group that seeks to start a war against Islam—how they justified it to themselves.
But it’s not just a conspiracy book, is it?
Conspiracy is where I started with History in One Act. I centrally wanted to explain 9/11, and then, as a decade of writing went by, I especially wanted to retell the story for a generation—for the generation of my kids, who knew that something happened on that day, but did not have either the history or the context to get to that day.
It was in that story that I became fascinated with the little-known fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the central figure who conceived of and planned the airplanes attack, had been a college student in the United States during the 1980s. That then became my link that I drew between the U.S. government and the 9/11 hijackers. I started to put together what turned out to be a 1,000-page timeline that followed the life of KSM and the emergence of al Qaeda, from before the first Iraq War through events in the world and in their world. In the course of that, in the course of researching, I came upon the transcripts of KSM’s debriefings: almost 8,000 pages that cover a period from when he was captured in 2003 until about 2008. His interrogations, his musings, his monologues. Reading those transcripts and the associated reports it became clear to me that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had a worldview, a worldview that was coherent, and one that had not really been considered in so much of what had been written.
Yes, there had been people who had written about the emergence and life of Osama bin Laden. And even a couple of books about KSM. But none of them were informed by his own words. And then there was the literature of ideologues before 9/11—about terrorism or even about the specifics of the attacks and the American government response. And then after 9/11, there were the autobiographies of those in the Bush and Clinton administration who did battle as to whether the CIA or the FBI did or did not have enough intelligence to see it coming, did or did not do enough, that blamed each other. But outside of that Washington fight, I just didn't really think that there was a truly objective story that incorporated what was driving KSM and the terrorists. I knew that I could fill a gap.
My second information coup was obtaining the FBI's day-by-day reconstruction of what the three main hijacker pilots did in the United States from June 2000 until September 2001. It was such a detailed re-creation, meticulously compiled for every day, where they shopped, where they visited, that I was able to divine from its picture, from the metadata of their lives if you will, what these three characters—Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah—thought, how they were driven. Of course it's a novel, but I felt for the first time that I could tell the story of 9/11 incorporating their point of view. That ultimately became the spine of this book.
You came up with quite a revelation in that work?
Well, first, I need to say that there is the fictional falsehood that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a CIA asset, that he had been recruited while he was a college student in North Carolina. It is plausible—this was a time of the CIA’s massive covert action against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and KSM was obsessed with the fight going on there (and with the ideologues who emerged from the support for the jihad)—but there’s no evidence that he was an American agent. So I feel like I should say that is not true.
The second revelation, though, I believe to be true. But it’s tricky. Another element that caught my attention—which was brought up in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's debriefs, and also verified to me by people in the FBI who had worked on the 9/11 reconstruction, the worker bees who followed the three hijacker’s lives after the fact—was the suspicion that Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi were lovers. I spent a lot of time reading about homosexuality within Islam, and certainly reading everything I could get my hands on about these two men, to try to understand that human story. And the book includes a lot of discussion between Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, where Atta struggles with his feelings in discussing what was forbidden. I love this part of the book—Ziad, the Lebanese hijacker pilot who went down in Pennsylvania—was the only one of them who was married. And Ziad was the worldliest of these otherworldly men, so his presence is also a good device that allows Mohammed Atta to have this discussion.
Then there is the fact of whether they were gay or not—which I don’t know—or whether whatever their love was could even be understood as being “gay.” Regardless, from the time the two arrived in Afghanistan from Hamburg until the day of 9/11 itself, we have two men who were absolutely inseparable—and, from all of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed says, that Mohammed Atta was also inconsolable when he was not around Marwan. So there is the love story as well.
Aren’t there two love stories?
When friends of mine first read an early History in One Act manuscript, they said: we have no question that you have a mastery of the subject matter, but the characters need a lot of work. I knew they were right. There are American conspirators, and there is an organization of the American government, but it was later in my writing that I turned those two main characters into lovers: the woman who becomes KSM’s case officer, and the man [Steve Draper] who conceives of the conspiracy of the war against Islam, of helping KSM attack the United States but manipulating the outcome so that it leads to a war against Saudi Arabia and Islam.
It is a love story but there is also a lot of friction between the two. The woman, who is called Charlie, is the most uncomfortable with the conspiracy. There's a scene where Charlie and Steve are arguing, where Charlie is annoyed by the ease with which Steve can conspire to precipitate a war—with how unfeeling he is—and she questions whether Steve cares, cares about anything. So right away I had to look in the mirror in more ways than one, but I certainly had to answer the question of how I could make the American character a sociopath who didn’t care about the deaths being caused, how I could draw him so starkly, while leaving the terrorists with a moral footing that perhaps suggested that they were the good guys. I think in the end I made Steve the sociopath because I understand the American mindset and thus was comfortable with that narrative. I hope the reader will see the sociopathy that underpins the others, that I will be granted that indulgence, that of course they are evil, but for some it will be jarring.
But back to the beginning, to why I first started on this book. It was to not just to construct the perfect conspiracy novel, but also to show how the conspiracy theories about 9/11 were all so implausible, thin and concocted. I struggled with the question as to whether or not making Steve into a bit of a sociopath didn't again signal my own view that conspiracies are silly and unworkable. And then thought, of course, that only a sociopath could perpetrate a conspiracy of this magnitude. Just to drive that home, Steve also has an affair with this young woman in Washington and in that affair he almost compromises the entire operation, the entire conspiracy. And so he kills her, kills her without the slightest regret. Well, that’s not quite right—he had regret, but he does it anyhow. It’s a mini-murder within the bigger murder. Besides the fact that the young woman is modeled after the life of Chandra Levy, who disappeared mysteriously just before 9/11, I hope that the meditation on Steve Draper’s nature, on his sociopathy, helps to further answer the question of what drives them—us and everyone. I hope that there’s space enough to consider these clashing human stories.
What do you say to potential critics who say that you are too sympathetic to the hijackers, to the 9/11 terrorists?
The book tries to make the hijackers—and do I need to say “terrorists” as some pledge of allegiance—into human beings. Are we so afraid of history? Are the events of 9/11 so frightening that we can't try to understand those who perpetrated them in human terms? I struggle in this book to explain who the three hijackers were, what drove them, and who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, that he could be both a diabolical scoundrel—monster, criminal—and also a man. And I struggle as well to understand who Osama bin Laden was, what he believed, what his grievances were, what drove him, why he was so charismatic, how he could justify attacking the United States. I do all of that to help explain the events of that day better. I don't apologize for doing this. I imagine some will be angry that I have turned these phantoms into real people. But I also believe that it is necessary, necessary in order for us to gain an understanding of, and a mastery of, our own history.
So just a question on the book itself. What’s up with the endnotes?
I started working on History in One Act in 2008, and when I began, I footnoted what I was writing because I wanted to keep straight the new information that I was learning, and the contradictions I was writing, with what was already out there. I wanted the reader to understand real history. Over time, the footnotes [now endnotes] became an integral part of the novel, and they explain some of the back story of history. But they also explain how there can be so many different viewpoints for an event that occurred, how there can be so many from different angles. Some of them are accurate—that is, that the FBI saw it the way they did, the CIA saw it the way they did, the Bush administration saw it the way they did. But there isn’t one unimpeachable history, and the 9/11 Commission’s report is deeply flawed. So I decided not just to keep the footnotes, to show various versions of events, but also to make up footnotes, footnotes of the American organization. Almost everyone said: don’t do it, that that would be too confusing. But all I can say is, it’s a novel, that there’s a device I use which makes it clear which footnotes are real and which are made up. In the end, I call it an work of “friction,” sort of a mashup between fiction and nonfiction.
Finally, and the title?
History in One Act. It’s meant to convey that history was made in this one act and that this one act made history. It is the defining single act of our era, and as we remember that act in the 20th anniversary year, it is striking to me that we do not have a serious nonfiction book that really struggles to understand the mind of the terrorists. It is one of the greatest tragedies of the two decades since, that we don't understand why this happened and who we are fighting against, which I believe is part of the reason why we continue to fight.
So if you want to understand 9/11 and understand the Middle East and understand how the U.S. intelligence community and the American government works—and understand the role that individuals play in making history—well, then, that's what's in this book. I could have written a dense nonfiction book and picked apart all of the flaws of the 9/11 Commission and the government’s self-justification and the autobiographies of the many actors who all to this day adhere to the storyline that if they had just been listened to this wouldn't have happened. But I decided to write a novel, and it's quite a novel—dense and complex. So, yes, it’s not the first novel to have endnotes, and I hope that the reader sees in that there are precisely 911 footnotes that I have a point—but even without them, it’s a coherent read. Well, that my promise: that, yes, it’s some serious eat your vegetables, but it's also a pretty good read.