Produced for television by Wright with the Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney and the veteran showrunner Dan Futterman, The Looming Tower is a taut, tense restaging of the internecine squabbles between the FBI and the CIA in the lead-up to 9/11. Like Wright’s book, it makes the case that the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to share information thwarted any chance they might have had of stopping the attacks. But where the book focused primarily on the people who conspired to orchestrate the worst terrorist attack on American soil, the series reorients itself around the people who failed to stop them.

On one side is John O’Neill (Jeff Daniels), a larger-than-life FBI counterterrorism chief grappling with the increasing threat of al-Qaeda. On the other is Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard), O’Neill’s CIA counterpart. O’Neill was a real person; Schmidt is reportedly an amalgam, although there are reasons beyond his initials to deduce whom he’s based on. From the very first episode, O’Neill and Schmidt are at each other’s throats for reasons that are hard to ascertain. Schmidt guards CIA intelligence with fanaticism, while O’Neill resorts to spewing profanities and epithets when he can’t get what he wants.

The show makes clear whose side it’s on. O’Neill might be a womanizing boor but his devotion to his job—and to thwarting attacks on the U.S.—is unmistakable. Schmidt, by contrast, is a pompous, sneering creep whose primary motivation seems to be power. (If both characters seem somewhat implausible, it appears that they’ve been tamped down for television, if anything.) In the three episodes made available for review, al-Qaeda emerges as an increasingly critical threat to America, perpetrating the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and gaining increasing financial and ideological support. But while Schmidt wants the president to respond by carpet-bombing Afghanistan, O’Neill argues that this will only draw more followers to the cause. And the hostilities between the two agencies mean information is hoarded rather than shared, hampering the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

The show’s strongest scenes tend to involve good old-fashioned spycraft rather than intra-agency feuding. Bill Camp is exceptional as Robert Chesney, an FBI agent sent to Nairobi to seek out information, and a scene in the second episode where he interrogates a subject is a masterpiece in pacing, amping up the suspense for more than eight minutes. Tahar Rahim, playing the real-life FBI agent Ali Soufan, is similarly engaging, traveling to locales from Albania to London to hunt down al-Qaeda sympathizers. One of only eight agents out of 10,000 in the FBI who speak Arabic, Soufan is devoted to O’Neill and outraged by the radicals he sees as perverting the principles of Islam.