Al Qaeda: The True History

A new book tells a story of repeated American failures.

On at least a dozen occasions over the past 30 years, the United States had real and material opportunities to terminate or permanently derail Osama bin Laden and put a stake through the heart of what has become the Al Qaeda network. At each point along the way, we failed. And on September 11, 2001, America paid the price. Now it may be simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle that was opened so long ago.

That’s the horrifying conclusion of a new and truly authoritative work, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, $27.95), by Lawrence Wright, a staff writer and Middle East expert for The New Yorker magazine.

The origins of Al Qaeda go further into the past of the United States and the world than most Americans realize. Wright has traced these origins in impressive detail, mining more than 600 subjects he has interviewed, many closely connected at one time or another with Osama bin Laden or the efforts to neutralize him.

The earliest roots of Al Qaeda can be traced back as far as the years immediately following World War II, when Osama’s spiritual antecedent and role model first landed in what he quickly perceived was the land of the infidels. Sayyid Qutb arrived in New York Harbor in November 1948, a “fervent Egyptian nationalist and anti-communist,” Wright reports, as were most of the early Islamic militants. Qutb told friends who remained home in the Middle East that the prosperous America of the postwar era was filled with “a primitiveness that reminds us of the ages of jungles and caves.” By the time he returned to Egypt, in August 1950, he brought with him a white-hot feeling that “the white man in Europe and America is our number-one enemy.”

It was a feeling he communicated broadly and deeply after his return, becoming one of the leading exponents of radical Islam as he shuffled in and out of jails and courtrooms in Nasser’s Egypt. One of his early disciples was the product of a comfortable middle-class upbringing, an Egyptian physician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who grew up in Egypt in the thrall of Qutb’s revolutionary exhortations and became leader of the elderly Islamist’s following.

Osama bin Laden was born seven years after Zawahiri into one of the leading families of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He was the son of Mohammed bin Laden, a construction contractor who rose to fabulous wealth on the strength of mammoth projects beginning with an unbuildable highway that linked the inland Hijaz region with the holy city of Mecca. Instead of the lure of big money and big business, however, Osama came under the sway of another radical Islamic clergyman, a charismatic Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam, who preached at the mosque of King Abdul Azziz University, in Jeddah. Azzam began holding recruiting sessions in Osama’s home, for Arabs headed for Afghanistan to battle the infidel forces of Soviet communism. By the mid-1980s the United States and Saudi Arabia were pouring huge quantities of cash into the effort—and personnel as well. Osama was one of those who heeded the call, heading first for Peshawar, in Pakistan, where he hooked up with Zawahiri in a military hospital, then into Afghanistan itself. It was there, in the late 1980s, that Al Qaeda was officially born.

When the Soviets finally fled Afghanistan, in 1989, Osama returned home, and in 1991 he embarked on a campaign agitating against U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia. “Infidel” American forces had arrived en masse in the kingdom as part of Operation Desert Storm, which sought to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Osama’s voice became so strident that Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif lifted the young militant’s passport and banned him from travel to Pakistan. It was only after a vocal campaign, and a pledge that he would make no trouble for Saudi Arabia or any Arab nation, that the Prince returned the passport. That was the first place Osama could have been headed off.

With the war in Afghanistan over, Osama decided to set up shop in the Sudan, where, with the millions he brought as an heir to a fabulous fortune, he found a willing welcome from the impoverished leadership of the destitute nation. At the same time, Zawahiri was making a separate effort to raise funds for his own jihad in Egypt, embarking on a lecture circuit that took him across the United States a month after the first World Trade Center bombing, in February 1993. His guide was Ali Abdelsoud Mohammed, a shadowy figure who had tried on several occasions to win recruitment as an American double agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Intelligence Agency and had been rebuffed—another gross misjudgment by the United States.

By 1994 the Saudis were fed up with Osama. King Fahd personally decided to revoke his Saudi citizenship and persuaded the bin Laden family to cut off the inheritance and allowance of their prodigal son. At the request of senior American officials, Sudan wound up expelling bin Laden and his entourage, but not before warning the Americans that he might return to Afghanistan. “Let him,” was the reply. Another fatal mistake.

By that time, a flamboyant, volatile, but brilliant FBI agent had been placed in charge of counterterrorism for the bureau. John O’Neill was to clash repeatedly with the Central Intelligence Agency and fellow bureaucrats in efforts, thwarted at every turn, that might also have proved fatal to Osama bin Laden’s efforts to attack the United States on its home turf. Indeed at the time O’Neill was perhaps the only agent in the entire FBI, Wright suggests, who even knew who Osama was and recognized his potential for lethal action.

It didn’t take very long for a bitter and competitive feud to develop between the FBI and the CIA over critical intelligence in the still largely unrecognized battle to neutralize bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. In 1998 the CIA kidnapped a top Zawahiri deputy in Azerbaijan and refused to turn over to the FBI any material in the computer they seized, including an entire organizational chart of Al Qaeda.

A month later Al Qaeda launched its first, lethal strike against the United States—attacking the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam with enormous truck bombs that caused colossal damage and hundreds of deaths. Within days the U.S. chose to retaliate, against a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant where it believed the weapons had been manufactured. It was an ill-conceived, ill-informed move against an innocent facility, and it cost the U.S. two key accomplices to the bombings, whom the Sudanese promptly set free. Another enormous opportunity lost.

The American retaliation on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, consisting of 66 cruise missiles, also missed the mark. Osama had been en route to the town of Khost with his entourage when they came to a crossroads. Kabul to the right. Khost to the left. His bodyguards voted for Kabul, where they could visit friends. The missiles landed in Khost. Osama was spared.

By now Al Qaeda’s success meant that it was lacking neither funds nor recruits. So in 1999 Osama launched what he called his “planes operation.” And here was the last and most colossal series of failures, any one of which might have succeeded in preventing September 11. Wright chronicles each in gripping detail.

Failure No. 1: At the end of 1999, National Security Agency monitors pick up a telephone conversation from Yemen suggesting a top Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. “Something nefarious might be afoot,” the NSA reports—and does nothing further with the information.

Failure No. 2: In late December 1999 the CIA breaks into the Dubai hotel room of Khaled al-Mihdhar, en route to the Malaysia meeting, and photographs his passport with a multiple-reentry American visa. Neither the FBI nor the Immigration and Naturalization Service is told to look out. Weeks later he arrives with a confederate in the United States and enrolls in flight school.

Failure No. 3: On January 5, 2000, Malaysian intelligence is asked to photograph the Malaysian meeting, but no eavesdropping is ordered. The entire September 11 plot is discussed.

Failure No. 4: On October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda hits the USS Cole, docked in Yemen. O’Neill leads an FBI team to Yemen to investigate but is blocked at every turn by the U.S. ambassador, Barbara Bodine, anxious to encourage good relations with Yemen.

Failure No. 5: In mid-August 2001 an FBI Minnesota field-office supervisor sends a message to headquarters expressing concern about a flight student named Zacarias Moussaoui. The FBI agent explains that he is just “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” No one pays any attention.

Failure No. 6: On August 22 John O’Neill is forced out of the FBI and goes to work for Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center. He was simply too strident an advocate for a cause no one in the bureau really embraced.

On September 11, 2001, O’Neill and 2,748 others die in the World Trade Center.

—David A. Andelman is executive editor of Forbes.com. His new book, By Other Means: Versailles, 1919, and a World on the Brink, is to be published by John Wiley & Sons in 2007.