Watching the World Change, page 24
The footage—showing a seated bin Laden in what appears to be a private house, engaged in an animated, circuitous conversation with a Saudi sheikh—amounted to a self-incriminating deposition. As the sheikh speaks about jubilant Arab reaction to the attacks, bin Laden admits: “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated…three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. Due to my experience in [the construction] field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.”
The clandestine nature of the tape—taken from across the room, at a low angle, with bargain-basement sound quality—left viewers and intelligence experts uncertain as to whether bin Laden knew or cared that he was being recorded, and whether the tape’s release was somehow sanctioned by al-Qaeda. Some even wondered whether the video was a sophisticated bit of disinformation created or ginned up by American agents so as to prove, verbally and visually, that bin Laden was indeed behind the attacks. (On the tape, the normally reed-thin bin Laden seems fuller of face and at one point begins to write, uncharacteristically, with his right hand.)
The videos, of course, burnished bin Laden as man and as myth. Unlike still photographs, which could be doctored more convincingly—and with cheaper software—videos provided flesh-and-blood proof of his having survived, and their accompanying audio tracks made it possible to date them, since bin Laden would invariably refer to an event in the recent past. The tapes became the centerpiece of a concerted media campaign by al-Qaeda to convince the world that its leader—thought by some to have been killed, wounded, or cornered in the allied assaults on Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in November and December—was still among the living and in command, even if he appeared weary, possibly recovering from recent war wounds. “After a month passed without another videotape,” Jane Mayer pointed out in a 2003 piece in The New Yorker, “some experts began thinking that bin Laden was dead. Then came a stream of audio recordings, faxes, Internet postings, and other communications, all asserting, or implying, that bin Laden was alive.”13
But videotape was always bin Laden’s trump card. (Radio personality and humorist Don Imus would joke, comparing him to the recording artist: “Bin Laden’s made more videos than Usher.”) The tapes conveyed a measure of technical sophistication. They projected distinctive personality traits, and physical resilience, that still pictures could not. And they reinforced the extent of bin Laden’s political reach. In the past, according to the old saw, all politics was local. Now, in the age of electronic connectivity, all political acts had the potential for worldwide impact, through the ripple effects afforded by global media. All that was required, bin Laden understood, was a leader with charisma, a cause, and access to a camera.
Bin Laden and his acolytes continued to disseminate dollops of video and audio during the five years after 9/11. On the attacks’ second anniversary, al-Jazeera showed a clip depicting bin Laden making his way down a mountainside, prophetlike, walking stick in hand (Figure G). “Intelligence analysts will no doubt scan the tape for every geographical clue they can find,” wrote Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. “But mountains are also mythic space…Mountains aren’t just a place one retreats to, but a place of refuge, a place closer to God…Perhaps that’s the intention. He is not on the run, he’s out for a walk. He’s not in a cave, but on top of the world.
Videotape from 2003 showed Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, descending a mountainside. AP Photo/Al Jazeera via APTN
“It’s as if someone on his video production team,” Kennicott reasoned, “has channeled the spirit of the old Nazi propaganda filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl…straight from the annals of German romanticism: Show the old warrior looking like a young poet communing with nature…The tape shows not just that he’s alive, but that he’s alive and in a better place. If you were carefully controlling your own mythology, this is precisely the kind of tape that would be inspiring right now. Osama in the clouds.”
Then came the propaganda coup de grâce. In 2004, five days before Americans went to the polls to elect their next president, bin Laden appeared on camera, demon ex machina, addressing the U.S. voter in the language and manner he knew best: face-to-face and over the airwaves. In a new videotape he downplayed the significance of the two candidates and the political process. “Your safety,” he declared, “is not in the hands of Bush, Kerry, or al-Qaeda. Your safety is in your own hands.”
Whatever bin Laden’s intentions, the video was cited as a linchpin in Bush’s eventual triumph over Kerry: many on-the-fence voters, unnerved by the very propaganda they decried, decided to throw in their lot with the law-and-order candidate. Even John Kerry himself, interviewed in January 2005, contended that the video played a key role in his loss, even though he had been upended by many other factors. “I believe that 9/11 was the central deciding issue in this race,” he said in his first postelection TV interview, with NBC’s Tim Russert. “We were rising in the polls up until the last day when the [bin Laden] tape appeared. We flatlined [that] day…and went down on Monday.” Kerry would tell Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker that Americans felt “a visceral unwillingness to change Commander-in-Chief five days after the bin Laden tape.”
If he weren’t so diabolic a presence, the leader of al-Qaeda might well have been seen as irony incarnate. His appearance, in many ways, aped the famous antiwar ad created in 2002 by the progressive political activists at TomPaine.com (just as America was laying the groundwork for taking out Saddam). The ad, widely downloaded from the Web, shows bin Laden as Uncle Sam. He points toward the viewer, daring Americans to throw their support behind a war that could, as the ad copy reads, “distract [the U.S.] from fighting Al Qaeda…divide the international community…[and] destabilize the region.” The picture’s headline: “I WANT YOU TO INVADE IRAQ.”
On September 14 Pakistani officials confirmed that the leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had died five days earlier as a result of wounds inflicted when al-Qaeda operatives, posing as newsmen, assassinated him with booby-trapped camera equipment.
Massoud, the most visible and viable opponent of the Taliban regime, was known by his pakul hat, Lincolnesque beard, and appealing smile. He combined Che’s mystique with Yasir Arafat’s staying power. Even as his counterparts perished or slipped into obscurity, the charismatic Northern Alliance chieftain had persevered, fending off in turn the Soviet Army and the Taliban over a twenty-year span. In and around the peaks of the Hindu Kush, he had achieved the status of a warrior of the noblest mold.
Massoud’s September 9 murder was particularly grisly. The bombers, disguised as journalists nominally employed by an Arabic news service, had commenced a prearranged interview with the guerrilla leader. As Massoud made himself comfortable in a chair, one of the men readied his camera. The supposed interviewer explained that he would be posing a series of questions, then asked: “What will you do with Osama [bin Laden] if you get him?” Massoud responded with a hearty laugh.
At that, the videographer triggered his bomb. He was blown to bits; only his legs were left intact. Massoud, too, was mortally wounded, dying within minutes of the explosion. The second assassin was shot dead by a Massoud bodyguard.
The killers had been enlisted by al-Qaeda as part of a plan to remove Massoud from the political and military stage on the eve of 9/11. Bin Laden had probably reasoned that were America to seek retribution for the pending attacks, Massoud would have been the only credible leader around whom the West and other Afghans could rally in their fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Bin Laden, tellingly, had always been wary of booby-trapped cameras. Christopher Isham, now chief of the investigative projects unit of ABC News, remembers that as long ago as 1998 bin Laden’s minders had insisted that Western crews not videotape him unless they shot with gear provided by al-Qaeda. “His men insisted, repeatedly, on providing their own equipment and cameramen,” says Isham. In a battle of wits, however, Isham managed to persuade bin Laden’s minions that for authenticity’s sake an ABC camera was far superior. “I said, ‘With all due respect, I’ve seen your cameraman’s work. You want your guy to look good, right?’ Eventually, we were able to get a one-man crew in. Bin Laden’s vanity had trumped his concerns for safety.” Indeed, bin Laden and his team had possibly hatched their plot against Massoud as a ghoulish manifestation of this photo-paranoia.
“He lived and died by the media,” explains journalist Sebastian Junger, who spent time in late 2000 covering Massoud for National Geographic Adventure magazine. Even so, Junger notes, the same could be said of “any other leader, including bin Laden, especially bin Laden.” (The pair shared another attribute as well: Massoud’s nom de guerre was “Lion of Panjshir”; “Osama,” it so happens, means “lion.”)
Massoud, Junger points out, had recruited his own internal press cadre. “He knew the power of the media,” he says. “He trained six cameramen to document the war against the Soviets, realizing how difficult it was for journalists to get into Afghanistan and [then] get their film out into the world. Only one of those original six survived. They were very, very brave guys.” When one young Afghan offered to fight with his troops, Massoud refused, says Junger. “You’re too young,” Massoud told the boy, “but here’s a camera.”
Junger says that he and Reza, the photographer who accompanied him on several trips to the region, learned about Massoud’s last moments by talking with his closest bodyguard. “Massoud basically died in this guy’s arms,” recalls Junger. “He said Massoud had such respect for journalists—or understood their usefulness, depending on how you want to interpret it—that he [had a policy of asking] his bodyguards to step out of the room [in the presence of journalists]. He didn’t want to show disrespect [or risk] being intimidating to them. He also ordered his bodyguards not to search reporters.”
On the morning of his murder, Massoud expressed trepidations about the two journalists who had waited a week or two to meet him. Massoud’s attackers, Junger believes, could not have “got as close to him with any other type of equipment.” But the killing, he insists, was not the result of inattention. “It wasn’t a sloppy naïveté at all,” he says. “It seemed to be a sacrifice he was willing to make. He was trading security for the opportunity to reach out to the press. He realized he needed the press in a kind of way that bin Laden did too.”
If Massoud’s murder was inevitable, so might have been the weapon of choice: death by camera.
On Friday, I called my old friend Jean-Jacques Naudet, an editor at Hachette Filipacchi Magazines who specializes in photography. I had heard that on Tuesday the attacks had almost claimed his sons, Gedeon and Jules, both filmmakers, and both of whom I’d known since they were teenagers growing up in New York City, their adopted home. I wondered how the family was faring. Little did I realize how horrifying, and incomparable, their experience had been.
Jean-Jacques told me that on Tuesday he had been dining at the Voltaire, in Paris, with photographer Bettina Rheims. During the meal, the restaurant had begun to buzz. “New York has been attacked,” he heard. “The World Trade Center…” Naudet excused himself and left for his apartment nearby. He was certain that his sons were in the twin towers.
The night before, at midnight Paris time, he had spoken by phone with “the boys,” as we have always called them (even though Gedeon and Jules were then thirty-one and twenty-eight, respectively). For several months the pair had been making a documentary film about Engine 7, Ladder 1—the Duane Street firehouse in downtown New York, just seven blocks from the World Trade Center. That evening, Jules had cooked gigot—leg of lamb—for the thirteen men on duty, and had called his father to talk about the meal and the progress of the film; many nights Jules and his brother had checked in with their parents after finishing their station house dinner. “We knew they were up all night,” said Naudet. “They were living there. They had been accepted [by the fire-fighters]. In their minds, they had become firemen.”
That afternoon and evening (Paris time) Naudet and his wife, Shiva, watched it all play out on television, terrified for their sons. “I’m sitting five meters from her, in a corner across the living room,” Naudet recalled. “We don’t exchange one word for four hours. The telephone rings all the time. It’s never the kids. I am extremely disagreeable to these callers. Finally, around seven p.m., we hear from a friend that both of them are at the firehouse alive. We both broke down, but still are separated by this huge living room.”
Six months later, his sons’ documentary, 9/11—about the men of the Duane Street firehouse—would air for two hours, in prime time, on CBS. Directed by the Naudet brothers and their firefighter partner, James Hanlon, their film would be the only visual chronicle of the September 11 attacks from start to finish. Their footage (the brothers shot nine hours of tape that day) is the true Zapruder film of the New York terror attacks. With much of its narrative playing out in real time, the movie, including additional scenes distilled from more than 140 hours of reportage and interviews, is relentless, unflinching, and excruciatingly intimate. And yet at the same time it is inspirational in its portrayal of the valor of a tight knot of firefighters. “A monumental piece of history,” in the words of the Boston Herald, “it could be the greatest, most intense TV movie ever made.” Remarked The New York Times: “[It is] an important, firsthand piece of history…You may…find it impossible to take your eyes away [even] for a second.” (I would have the opportunity to serve as an executive producer of the documentary, along with Graydon Carter, Susan Zirinsky, Hanlon, and the Naudets.)
The filmmakers’ personal story is possibly the most chilling yet ultimately uplifting episode related to the visual representation of 9/11, a story that seems no less elemental in its way than the images they shot on the day that would forever alter their lives.
Gedeon and Jules Naudet were unusually devoted to one another, even as brothers go. Like many in their proudly bohemian circle, they were smitten with cinema and with New York City. They even possessed the smoky allure of film stars. Gedeon, compact, with the piercing eyes of a falcon, was Jean-Paul Belmondo; lanky Jules, three years younger, was a soft-featured Antonio Banderas. At boisterous parties and free-form dinners, they held forth on film and journalism and the meaning of existence with an intensity that often accompanies raw youth and perpetual sleep deprivation.
As boys growing up in Paris, and then on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (where their father had resettled the family in 1989), Gedeon and Jules had a dark dynamic. Jules, looking up to his older brother, remembers him as “the cool kid. I wanted him to be my best friend. With his friends, he would avoid me at school. The lack of closeness with my brother was a very big factor in my [early] life.” To make matters worse, Jules, on his sixteenth birthday, was diagnosed with severe curvature of the spine. He was consigned to a body cast, then a corset, for four years. “I would not date at all,” he says. “I felt like a freak, everyone gawking. I turned inward and matured faster.” Jules, over time, became more sensitive, self-effacing—and tough. At twenty-four, he sailed up the Amazon from Brazil to Peru. He took up fishing for marlin, competitively. He went scuba diving with sharks in the Indian Ocean.
Gedeon, on the surface, was the dark and brooding one. In fact, he possessed the wiles of a conjurer and a cheerleader’s vim. He was quixotic, generous, fiercely principled—and amazingly resourceful. While directing his first film, at age twelve—with Jules serving as producer (filling in after one of Gedeon’s classmates swiped their seed money to buy candy)—Gedeon duped his principal into giving him the run of their school for a week by insisting, falsely, that actor Gerard Depardieu had agreed to stop by for a cameo.
Gedeon was also endearingly impulsive. I remember an afternoon, several years before, when he and I were both attending the Arles photo festival in the south of France. After a long outdoor picnic on a ranch in the Camargue, Gedeon decided, on a whim, to try the local custom of dashing through the nearby bullring. He ended up bloodying his face in a scrape with a bull, requiring several stitches. In 2000, impetuous as ever, Gedeon proposed marriage to a childhood friend as they walked past New York’s City Hall. She accepted, though five months later they divorced.
While growing up, the brothers had been spoon-fed movies by their father, formerly a film critic for French Vogue. As children, Jules remembers, “we watched a movie every night during dinner. Many evenings, if there was a classic on TV, we would watch that too, and my father would write a note to the teacher to explain, ‘Sorry, the kids are tired, but they had to watch Hitchcock,’ or Renoir.”
In their twenties the brothers finally forged a lasting bond, through cinema. Gedeon took a full course load at New York University film school while Jules, pretending to be Gedeon but not actually enrolled, also attended classes. Soon they decided to make documentaries together: Jules became the fastidious producer, Gedeon the impassioned director. They believed that creating films—beginning with their first feature, Hope, Gloves and Redemption, about young boxers in Spanish Harlem—would allow them to indulge their affinity toward groups and social classes normally off-limits to outsiders. “We like to look on the other side of the mirror,” Jules confesses, “and identify with people who live on the fringe of society. It’s a French thing. We’re definitely voyeurs.” Adds Gedeon, “When we did our boxing movie”—which took grand-jury honors in 2000 at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival—“we both almost joined the Golden Gloves tournament.”
For years, firefighters had intrigued the Naudets. At a party in the mid-1990s, Gedeon, smoking a Gauloise, had met James Hanlon, a brash, cocksure fireman-in-training, smoking Luckys. They clicked at once, and the Naudets were soon palling around town with Hanlon, an occasional actor. (He has since left the FDNY to pursue his acting career.) They were taken with his French wife (a ballerina turned actress), his Bronx-Irish brogue (he narrated their boxing movie and, eventually, 9/11), and his firehouse tales of camaraderie and peril. The more time they spent with him, the more determined they were to make a film with Hanlon that would explore the heroism and brotherhood among men such as those at his fire station.
