The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
Vintage, 2007

If you're only going to read one book about 9/11, this should be the one.

There are dozens—maybe hundreds—of books about the events of 9/11, the so-called War on Terror, and the development of radical Islam, but this one is among the most important. It's also one of the most accessible for non-experts, and it's almost certainly the most readable.

With this book, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a nominee for a National Book Award, Wright, a reporter and writer and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has done something unique in two ways. First, it doesn't demonize Islam, the Clinton administration, either Bush administration, Israel, Iraq, or any government agency. Rather, it traces the events of 9/11 from the origins of radical Islam in the 1940s through the attacks by relating the life stories of four people who, in various ways, connect all of the dots. Those four are Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the creators of al-Qaeda; John O'Neill, the former chief of FBI counter-terrorism; and Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence. The activities of these four men encompass all of the important events, relate all of the players to one another, and, most importantly, demonstrate how the events slowly took on a sort of historical inevitability.

Second, this book does the seemingly impossible: It is a carefully researched, heavily annotated (almost 200 pages of notes, bibliography, lists of interviews, and index), academic study. At the same time, it is a fast-moving narrative that reads like a thriller or suspense novel. You'll find that you almost literally can't put down.

There are a number of lessons we can learn from this book. Among the most important:

We should not demonize Islam. The vast majority of Muslims have been struggling against the extremists for decades. Demonizing the entire faith simply reinforces the radicals' notion that their struggle is between the faithful and what they call the crusaders.

Inter- and intra-agency turf wars and bureaucratic bungling cost us dearly on 9/11, and they continue to be problematical. For example, the CIA knew that several of the hijackers were in the US, but they refused to share that information with the FBI until after 9/11. In addition, the FBI's administrators mistakenly interpreted the rules about avoiding cross-contamination between intelligence and criminal investigations, thus handicapping any attempts to disrupt the 9/11 plot.

Bin Laden is a complex, critically important player in the terrorist world, but he's not the center of that world; indeed, if he died tonight, there would be no appreciable change in the terrorists' campaigns, in large part because the 20,000 or so people who went through his training camps between 1994 and 2001 would simply carry on as they now are. Bin Laden's role was actually confined mostly to providing inspiration and raising money. (Interestingly, he isn't the billionaire that he's generally thought to be; indeed, as he was being forced out of Sudan in 1995, he was fleeced out of almost all of his money and he had to beg the Taliban for shelter and supplies.)

Maybe most importantly, we need to appreciate and encourage the work of out-of-the-box thinkers like John O'Neill and several others featured in the book. Their insights were ignored or suppressed, delaying an effective response to al-Qaeda until it was too late.

If you're looking for the one great book about 9/11 and the events surrounding it, this is it. It's a richly rewarding and even entertaining reading experience.