Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower

Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006; paperback, 2007, Vintage Books)

Until now, I hadn't bothered reading any books specifically on Al-Qaeda. Wright argues (p. 375) that while the conflict between the US and Arab Islamists was long brewing, only Osama bin Laden had the peculiar skills and vision to make the 9/11 attacks happen. That may be so, but I was more interested in the bigger, more general movements, and al-Qaeda always struck me as a bit player in Islamist politics, its obsession with self-aggrandizement a mistake to indulge. The key book on Islamism is Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.

But Wright's book is very readable, and covers the basic story in a very useful way. The Islamism he reports on is just one of several threads, concentrating on Ayman al-Zawahiri's experience in Egypt and Osama bin Laden's development from Saudi Arabia to Sudan to Afghanistan to 9/11. He also covers the counterterrorism efforts of the FBI and, to a lesser extent, the CIA, with a bit role to czar Richard Clarke. He cites Kepel in the acknowledgments, and his narrative is consistent with Kepel, although given a tighter focus.

First chapter, "The Martyr," is on Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist ideologue who reacted radically to his 1948-50 experiences in the US (pp. 11-12):

America, however, stood apart from the colonialist adventures that had characterized Europe's relations with the Arab world. At the end of the Second World War, America straddled the political chasm between the colonizers and the colonized. Indeed, it was tempting to imagine America as the anticolonial paragon: a subjugated nation that had broken free and triumphantly outstripped its former masters. The country's power seemed to lie in its values, not in European notiosn of cultural superiority or privileged races and classes. And because America advertised itself as an immigrant nation, it had a permeable relationship with the rest of the world. Arabs, like most other peoples, had established their own colonies inside America, and the ropes of kinship drew them closer to the ideals that the country claimed to stand for.

Qutb had a prudish reaction to sex in America, and the usual complaints about materialism, but what galled him more than anything was America's racial attitudes and policies -- which as a dark-skinned Egyptian he sometimes ran afoul of (pp. 27-28):

[Qutb] also brought home a new and abiding anger about race. "The white man in Europe or America is our number-one enemy," he declared. "The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble objectives. . . . We are endowing our children with amazement an drespect for the master who tramples our honor and enslaves us. Let us instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity."

Second chapter is on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the well-to-do Egyptian physician who led the Muslim Brotherhood splinter Al-Jihad and eventually became second-in-command of Al-Qaeda (pp. 61-62):

One line of thinking proposes that America's tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. The main target of the prisoners' wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society. Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists' rage. Egypt's prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution -- they called it justice -- was all-consuming.

Montassir al-Zayyat, an Islamist attorney who was imprisoned with Zawahiri and later became his lawyer and biographer, maintains that the traumatic experiences suffered by Zawahiri in prison transformed him from being a relatively moderate force in al-Jihad into a violent and implacable extremist. Zayyat and other witnesses point to what happened to his relationship with Essam al-Qamari, who had been his close friend and a man he keenly admired. Immediately after Zawahiri's arrest, officers in the Interior Ministry began grilling him about Major Qamari, who continued to slip their nets. [ . . . ]

Zawahiri himself doesn't admit to this in his memoir, except obliquely, where he writes about the "humiliation" of imprisonment. "The toughest thing about captivity is forcing the mujahid, under the force of torture, to confess about his colleagues, to destroy his movement with his own hands, and offer his and his colleagues' secrets to the enemy."

Next two chapters are on Osama bin Laden. The story then moves to geopolitics, with Saudi Arabia's intelligence head Prince Turki al-Faisal (pp. 114-115):

Turki's colleagues in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) briefed him on the Afghan resistance, then took him to the refugee camps outside Peshawar. Turki was appalled by the scale of the suffering. He went back to the Kingdom vowing to dedicate more money to the mujahideen, although he believed that these ragged soldiers could never defeat the Red Army. "Afghanistan was gone," he decided. He only hoped to delay the inevitable Soviet invasion of Pakistan.

Similar thinking was going on in Washington, especially by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the U.S. national security advisor for the Carter administration. Brzezinski, however, saw the invasion as an opportunity. He wrote to Carter immediately, saying "Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam war." Looking for an ally in this endeavor, the Americans naturally turned to the Saudis -- that is, to Turki, the American-educated prince who held the Afghan account.

Turki became the key man in the covert alliance of the United States and the Saudis to funnel money and arms to the resistance through the Pakistani ISI. It was vital to keep this program secret in order to prevent the Soviets from having the excuse they sought to invade Pakistan. Until the end of the war, the Saudis would match the Americans dollar for dollar, starting with only seventy-five thousand dollars but growing into billions.

That made Afghanistan a joint Saudi-Pakistani-American operation, which allowed the use of tactics that the Americans might have had second thoughts over, such as the recruitment of Arab jihadists (p. 123):

The lure of an illustrious and meaningful death was especially powerful in cases where the pleasures and rewards of life were crushed by government oppression and economic deprivation. From Iraq to Morocco, Arab governments had stifled freedom and signally failed to create wealth at the very time when democracy and personal income were sharply climbing in virtually all other parts of the globe. Saudi Arabia, the richest of the lot, was such a notoriously unproductive country that the extraordinary abundance of petroleum had failed to generate any other significant source of income; indeed, if one subtracted the oil revenue of the Gulf countries, 260 million Arabs exported less than the 5 million Finns. Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is improverished; where entertainment -- movies, theater, music -- is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women. Adult illiteracy remained the norm in many Arab countries. Unemployment was among the highest in the developing world. Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies.

As the Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan, a Palestinian Islamist named Sheikh Abdullah Azzam enters the picture (pp. 149-150):

First, however, was Palestine. Azzam helped create Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group, which he saw as the natural extension of the jihad in Afghanistan. Based on the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas was meant to provide an Islamic counterweight to Yasser Arafat's secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Azzam sought to train brigades of Hamas fighters in Afghanistan, who would then return to carry on the battle against Israel.

Azzam's plans for Palestine, however, ran counter to Zawahiri's intention of stirring revolution within Islamic countries, especially in Egypt. Azzam fiercely opposed a war of Muslim against Muslim. As the war against the Soviets wound down, this dispute over the future of jihad was defined by these two strong-willed men. The prize they fought over was a rich and impressionable young Saudi who had his own dreams.

(pp. 153-154):

The formation of al-Qaeda gave the Arab Afghans something else to fightover. Every enterprise tha tarose in the sparsely populated cultural landscape was contested, and any head that rose above the crowd was a target. The ongoing jihad in Afghanistan became an afterthought in the war of words an dideas that was being fought in the mosques. Even the venerable Services Bureau, which bin Laden and Azzam had established to assist the Arabs in their desire to join the jihad, was slandered as a CIA front and Azzam as an American stooge.

At the root of these quarrels was the usual culprit -- money. Peshawar was the funnel through which cash poured into the jihad and the vast relief effort to help the refugees. The main pool of funds -- the hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States and Saudi Arabia doled out by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) each year to the Afghan warlords -- was drying up as the Soviets prepared to leave. Scarcity only fed the frenzy over what remained: the international aid agencies, private charities, and bin Laden's pockets.

(p. 157):

The end of the occupation coincided with a sudden and surprising influx of Arab mujahideen, including hundreds of Saudis who were eager to chase the retreating Soviet bear. According to Pakistan government statistics, more than six thousand Arabs came to take part in the jihad from 1987 to 1993, twice the number who came for the war against the Soviet occupation. These young men were different from the small cadre of believers who had been lured to Afghanistan by Abdullah Azzam. They were "men with large amounts of money and boiling emotions," an al-Qaeda diarist noted. Pampered kids from the Persian Gulf came on excursions, staying in air-conditioned cargo containers; they were supplied with RPGs and Kalashnikovs, which they could fire into the air, and then they could return home, boasting of their adventure. Many of them were newly religious high school or university students with no history and no one to vouch for them. Chaos and barbarism, which always threatened to overwhelm the movement, sharply increased as bin Laden took the helm. Bank robberies and murders became even more commonplace, justified by absurd religious claims. A group of takfiris even held up a truck from an Islamic aid agency, absolving their action by saying that the Saudis were infidels.

A reference back to the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which is described at some length pp. 101-108; the bin Laden family did the construction work to refurbish the mosque, and helped to suppress the revolt (p. 167):

The attack on the Grand Mosque ten years before, however, had awakened the royal family to the lively prospect of revolution. The lesson the family drew from that gory standoff was that it could protect itself against religious extremists only by empowering them. Consequently, the muttawa, government-subsidized religious vigilantes, became an overpowering presence in the Kingdom, roaming through the shopping malls and restaurants, chasing men into the mosques at prayer time and ensuring that women were properly cloaked -- even a strand of hair poking out from under a hijab could rate a flogging with the swagger sticks these men carried. In their quest to stamp our sinfulness and heresy, they even broke into private homes and businesses; and they waged war on the proliferating satellite dishes, often shooting at them with government-issued weapons from government-issued Chevrolet Suburbans. Officially known as representatives of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the muttawa would become the models for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In 1992 al-Qaeda exploded a bomb in Aden, Yemen, targeting American troops on their way to Somalia; it missed the Americans, but killed two -- a Yemeni hotel worker and an Australian tourist -- raising the question of killing innocent civilians (pp. 198-199):

One Thursday evening, Abu Hajer addressed the ethics of killing innocent people. He spoke to the men about Ibn Tamiyyah, a thirteenth-century scholar who is one of the primary references for Wahhabi philosophy. In his day, Ibm Tamiyyah confronted the problem of the Mongols, who savaged Baghdad but then converted to Islam. Was it proper to take revenge against fellow Muslims? Ibm Tamiyyah argued that just because the Mongols had made the profession of faith, they were still not true believers, and therefore they could be killed. Moreover, as Abu Hajer explained to the thirty or forty al-Qaeda members who were sitting on the carpet in bin Laden's salon, propping their elbows on the bolsters and sipping mango juice, Ibn Tamiyyah had issued a historic fatwa: Anyone who aided the Mongols, who bought goods from them or sold to them or was merely standing near them, might be killed as well. If he is a good Muslim, he will go to Paradise; if he is bad, he will go to hell, and good riddance. Thus the dead tourist and the hotel worker would find their proper reward.

A new vision of al-Qaeda was born. Abu Hajer's two fatwas, the first authorizing the attacks on American troops and the second, the murder of innocents, turned al-Qaeda into a global terrorist organization. Al-Qaeda would concentrate not on fighting armies but on killing civilians. The former conception of al-Qaeda as a mobile army of mujahideen that would defend Muslim lands wherever they were threatened was now cast aside in favor of a policy of permanent subversion of the West. The Soviet Union was dead and communism no longer menaced the margins of the Islamic world. America was the only power capable of blocking the restoration of the ancient Islamic caliphate, and it would have to be confronted and defeated.

This is, of course, not an analysis, just a propaganda line, not unlike what the Bush administration told us the Iraqis would do once they witnessed our "shock and awe" attack; since bin Laden came up with this line, it has most successfully been repeated by Americans warning against any hint of retreat, no matter how stupidly or fruitlessly the US had engaged further conflicts (pp. 213-214):

Given the diversity of the trainees and their causes, bin Laden's main task was to direct them toward a common enemy. He had developed a fixed idea about America, which he explained to each new class of al-Qaeda recruits. America appeared to mighty, he told them, but it was actually weak and cowardly. Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. For all its wealth and resources, America lacks conviction. It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death. The warships in the Gulf will retreat to the oceans, the bombers will disappear from the Arabian bases, the troops in the Horn of Africa will race back to their homeland.

(pp. 214-215):

Bin Laden claimed that he sent 250 men to Somalia to fight against U.S. troops. According to Sudanese intelligence, the actual number of al-Qaeda fighters was only a handful. The al-Qaeda guerrillas provided training and tried to fit intot he anarchic clan war that was raging within the tableau of starvation that the hostilities had caused. Little the al-Qaeda men did impressed their hosts; for instance, the Arabs built a car bomb to attack the UN, but the bomb failed. "The Somalis treated us in a bad way," one of the Arabs complained. "We trried to convince them that we were messengers for people behind us, but they were not convinced. Due to the bad leadership situation there, we decided to withdraw."

One night in Mogadishu a couple of al-Qaeda fighters saw two U.S. helicopters get shot down. The return fire struck the house next to where the men were hunkered down. Terrified that the Americans would capture them, they left Somalia the next day. The downing of those two American helicopters in October 1993, however, became the turning point in the war. Enraged Somali tribesmen triumphantly dragged the bodies of the dead crewmen throughthe streets of Mogadishu, a sight that prompted President Clinton to quickly withdraw all American soldiers from the country. Bin Laden's analysis of the American character had been proven correct.

Even though his own men had run away, bin Laden attributed to al-Qaeda the downing of the helicopters in Somalia and the desecration of the bodies of U.S. servicemen. His influence was magnified because of insurgent successes -- as in Afghanistan and Somalia -- that he really had little to do with. He simply appropriated such victories as his own.

At the time, the US didn't even know that al-Qaeda existed, but later the War on Terror hawks later echoed bin Laden's claims to try to characterize the US withdrawal from Somalia as the sort of retreat that only encourages further attacks, agreeing with bin Laden's critique of the American character, at least as far as Bill Clinton was concerned. What the helicopter downing actually proved was that US forces were lost and clueless in Somalia, that their presence was not only failing to achieve its peacekeeping mission, that it was in fact making matters worse.

I didn't mark any quotes from the section on the years when bin Laden was in Sudan, but it's worth noting that bin Laden invested a lot of money in Sudan and lost virtually all of it when Hassan al-Turabi sent him packing to Afghanistan. Bin Laden may still have been able to raise money in Afghanistan, but he no longer had much in the way of his own resources.

Also note that the Taliban were not yet in power when bin Laden arrived, although they were gaining significant ground. The Taliban at the time were largely beholden to Saudi Arabia, which insisted that bin Laden be kept under control. It was only later that Mullah Omar became bin Laden's protector, at considerable expense first in Saudi support.

In Afghanistan, with the Taliban (pp. 261-262):

"Women you should not step outside your residence," the new [Taliban] government ordered. Women wee a particular target, as might be expected from men who had so little experience of their company. "If women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves," the decree continued, "they will be cursed by the Islamic Sharia and should never expect to go to heaven." Work and schooling for women were halted at once, which destroyed the health-care system, the civil service, and effectively eliminated elementary education. Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, and seven out of ten teachers were women. Under the Taliban, many of them would become beggars.

The Taliban also turned their attention to ordinary pleasure. They forbade kite flying and dog racing. Trained pigeons were slaughtered. According to the Taliban penal code, "unclean things" were banned, an all-purpose category that included: "pork, pig, pig oil, anything made from human hair, satellite dishes, cinematography, any equipment that produces the joy of music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computers, VCRs, televisions, anything that propagates sex and is full of music, wine, lobster, nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogs, pictures, Christmas cards.

The fashion dictators demanded that a man's beard be longer than the grip of his hand. Violators went to jail until they were sufficiently bushy. A man with "Beatle-ly" hair would have his head shaved. Should a woman leave her home without her veil, "her home will be marked and her husband punished," the Taliban penal code decreed. The animals in the zoo -- those that had not been stolen in previous administrations -- were slain or left to starve. One zealous, perhaps mad, Taliban jumped into a bear's cage and cut off his nose, reputedly because the animal's "beard" was not long enough. Another fighter, intoxicated by events and his own power, leaped into the lion's den and cried out, "I am the lion now!" The lion killed him. Another Taliban soldier threw a grenade intot he den, blinding the animal. These two, the noseless bear and the blind lion, together with two wolves, were the only animals that survived the Taliban rule.

In 1997, at the time Peter Arnett interviewed bin Laden for CNN (p. 279):

It is possible that, until now, bin Laden had not killed an American or anyone else except on the field of battle. The actions in Aden, Somalia, Riyadh, and Dharan may have been inspired by his words, but it has never been demonstrated that he commanded the terrorists who carried them out. Although Ramzi Yousef had trained in an al-Qaeda camp, bin Laden was not connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Bin Laden told the London-based Palestinian editor Abdel Bari Awan that al-Qaeda was responsible for the ambush of American forces in Mogadishu in 1993, the National Guard Training Center bombing in Riyadh in 1995, and the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, but there is no evidence to substantiate these claims. He was certainly surrounded by men, like Zawahiri, who had plenty of blood on their hands, and he supported their actions in Egypt. He was, as the CIA characterized him at the time, a terrorist financier, albeit a financier without much money. Declaring war on America, however, proved to be a dazzling advertisement for himself and his cause -- and irresistible for a man whose fortunes had been badly trampled upon. Of course, his Taliban hosts forbade such publicity, but once bin Laden had gotten hold of the world's attention, he would allow nothing to pull it out of his grasp.

In November 1997, 58 tourists and 4 Egyptians were killed at Luxor, with the attackers committing suicide after the operation (p. 293):

The following day, the Islamic Group claimed credit for the attack. Rifai Taha said that the attackers were supposed to take hostages in order to free the imprisoned Islamist leaders, but the systematic slaughter put the lie to that claim. The death of the killers showed the influence of Zawahiri; until this point, the Islamic Group had never engaged in suicide operations. The Swiss federal police later determined that bin Laden had financed the operation.

Egypt was in shock. Revolted and ashamed, the population decisively turned against the Islamists, who suddenly began issuing retractions and pointing fingers in the usual directions. From prison, the blind sheikh blamed the Israelis, saying that Mossad had carried out the massacre. Zawahiri blamed the Egyptian police, who he said had done the actual killing, but he also held the victims responsible for coming to the country. "The people of Egypt consider the presence of these foreign tourists to be aggression against Muslims and Egypt," he said. "The young men are saying that this is our country and not a place for frolicking and enjoyment, especially for you."

Luxor proved to be the turning point in the counterterrorist campaign in Egypt. Whatever the strategists in Afghanistan had thought would come of their one great blow, the consequences had landed on them, not on their adversaries. Their support evaporated, and without the consent of the population, there was nowhere for them to hide. In the five years before Luxor, Islamist terror groups in Egypt had killed more than 1,200 people, many of them foreigners. AfterLuxor, the attacks by the Islamists simply stopped.

In 1998, Saudi Prince Turki thought he had a deal to get Mullah Omar to turn over bin Laden (p. 304):

After the meeting, Saudi Arabia reportedly sent four hundred four-wheel-drive pickup trucks and other financial aid to the Taliban as a down payment for bin Laden. Six weeks later, the money and the truck allowed the Taliban to retake Mazar-e-Sharif, a bastion of a Persian-speaking, Shiite minority, the Hazaras. Among the Taliban fighters were several hundred Arabs sent by bin Laden. Well-placed bribes left a force of only 1,500 Hazara soldiers guarding the city, and they were quickly killed. Once inside the defenseless city, the Taliban continued raping and killing for two days, indiscriminately shooting anything that moved, then slitting throats and shooting dead men in the testicles. The bodies of the dead were left to wild dogs for six days before survivors were allowed by bury them. Those citizens who fled the city on foot were bombed by the Taliban air force. Hundreds of others were loaded into shipping containers and baked alive in teh desert sun. The UN estimated the total number of victims in the slaughter to be between five and six thousand people. They included ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist, whom the Taliban rounded up and shot in the basement of the Iranian consulate. Four hundred women were taken to be concubines.

At almost the same time, Al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; Bill Clinton struck back (or more accurately, struck out) by launching cruise missile attacks against Sudan and Afghanistan (pp. 319-320):

The CIA suspected that bin Laden was developing chemical weapons in Sudan. The information had come from jamal al-Fadl, bin Laden's former assistant who was now a U.S. government witness. But Fadl hd left Sudan two years before, about the same time that bin Laden had been expelled from the country. Unconvinced by the sincerity of the Sudanese government's repeated overtures to the United States to get itself removed from the State Department blacklist, the agency hired a spy from an Arab country to secure a soil sample from an area close to al-Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant suspected of being a secret chemical-weapons facility and thought to be owned in part by bin Laden. The sample, taken in 1998, purportedly showed traces of EMPTA, a chemical that was essential in making the extremely potent nerve gas VX; indeed, it had few other uses. On August 20, on the basis of this information, President Clinton authorized the firing of thirteen Tomahawk cruise missiles into Khartoum as the first part of the American retaliation for the embassy bombings. The plant was completely destroyed.

It developed that the plant actually made only pharmaceuticals and veterinary medicines, not chemical weapons. No other traces of EMPTA were ever found in or around the site. The chemical might have been a product of the breakdown of a commercially available pesticide widely used in Africa, which it closely resembles. Moreover, bin Laden had nothing to do with the plant. The result of this hasty strike was that the impoverished country of Sudan lost one of its most important manufacturers, which employed three hundred people and produced more than half of the country's medicines, and a night watchman was killed.

Sudan let the two accomplices in the East Africa bombings escape, and they've never been seen again. O'Neill and his team lost an invaluable opportunity to capture al-Qaeda insiders.

(p. 323-324):

In the big-chested parlance of U.S. military planners, the failed strikes were dubbed Operation Infinite Reach. Designed to be a surgical and proportional response to the terrorist acts -- two bombings, two decisive replies -- the missile attacks exposed the inadequacy of American intelligence and the futility of military power, which rained down nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars' worth of armament on two of the poorest countries in the world.

According to General Hamid Gul, the former head of the ISI, more than half of the missiles fell in Pakistani territory, killing two Pakistani citizens. Although Abdul Rahman Khadr buried only five men in the al-Qaeda camp, not counting th eone who died in his arms, there were many false claims. Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security advisor, said that "twenty or thirty al-Qaeda operatives were killed." The Taliban later complained that twenty-two Afghans had also been killed and more than fifty gravely wounded. Bin Laden's bodyguard observed the damage, however, and agreed with Abdul Rahman's assessment. "Each house was hit by a missile but they did not destroy the camp completely," he reported. "They hit the kitchen of the camp, the mosque, and some bathrooms. Six men were killed: a Saudi, an Egyptian, an Uzbek, and three Yemenis."

The attacks did have other profound consequences, however. Several of the Tomahawk missiles failed to detonate. According to Russian intelligence sources, bin Laden sold the unexploded missiles to China for more than $10 million. Pakistan may have used some of the ones found on its territory to design its own version of a cruise missile.

The main legacy of Operation Infinite Reach, however, was that it established bin Laden as a symbolic figure of resistance, not just in the Muslim world but wherever America, with the clamor of its narcissistic culture and the majestic presence of its military forces, had made itself unwelcome. When bin Laden's exhilarated voice came crackling across a radio transmission -- "By the grace of God, I am alive!" -- the forces of anti-Americanism had found their champion. Those Muslims who had objected to the slaughter of innocents in the embassies in East Africa were cowed by the popular support for this man whose defiance of America now seemed blessed by divine favor. Even in Kenya and Tanzania, the two countries that had suffered the most from al-Qaeda's attacks, children would be spotted wearing bin Laden T-shirts.

A little historical prelude to Mohammed Atta in Hamburg (p. 346):

During World War II, Hamburg was a great shipbuilding center; the Bismarck had been built here, as well as the German U-boat fleet. Naturally it became a prime target of Allied bombing. In July 1943, Operation Gomorrah -- the destruction of Hamburg -- was the heaviest aerial bombardment in history until that time. But the attack went far beyond the destruction of the factories and the port. The firestorm created by the day and night attacks killed forty-five thousand people in a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population. Most of the workers in the shipyards occupied row houses in Harburg, across the Elbe River, and the Allied bombing was particularly heavy there. Atta lived in an apartment at 54 Marienstrasse, a reconstructed building on a street that had been almost entirely destroyed by terror bombings.

On the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor (pp. 374-375):

The strike on the Cole had been a great victory for bin Laden. Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan filled with new recruits and contributors from the Gulf states arrived carrying Samsonite suitcases filled with petrodollars, as in the glory days of the Afghan jihad. At last there was money to spread around. . . .

But there was no American response. The country was in the middle of a presidential election, and Clinton was trying to burnish his legacy by securing a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. The Cole bombing had occurred just as the talks were falling apart. Clinton maintains that, despite the awkward political timing, his administration came close to launching another missile attack against bin Laden that October, but at the last minute the CIA recommended calling it off because his presence at the site was not completely certain.

Bin Laden was angry and disappointed. He hoped to lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds. It had happened to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union. He was certain it would happen to America. The declaration of war, the strike on the American embassies, and now the bombing of the Cole had been inadequate, however, to provoke a massive retaliation. He would have to create an irresistible outrage.

A lot of the book deals with FBI counterterrorism agent John O'Neill (p. 383):

O'Neill understood that the crime model was just one way to deal with terrorism, and that it had limits, especially when the adversary was a sophisticated foreign network composed of skilled and motivated ideologues who were willing to die. But when Dick Clarke had said to him during the millennium arrests, "We're going to kill bin Laden," O'Neill didn't want to hear about it. Although al-Qaeda posed a far greater challenge to law enforcement than the Mafia, or any criminal enterprise, had, the alternatives -- military strikes, CIA assassination attempts -- had accomplished nothing except to aggrandize bin Laden in the eyes of his admirers. The twenty-five convictions, on the other hand, were genuine and legitimate achievements that demonstrated the credibility and integrity of the American system of justice. But the jealous rivalry among government agencies, and the lack of urgency at FBI headquarters, hobbled the I-49 squad in New York, who had been rendered blind to the danger that, as it turned out, was already in the country.

The convictions referred to cover the first World Trade Center bombing and other attacks, including the capture of Mohammed al-'Owhali following the Kenya bombing. The story of how the FBI interrogated him is one of the more interesting ones in the book. At the time, al-'Owhali told the FBI: "We need to hit you outside the country in a couple of places so you won't see what is going on inside. The big attack is coming. There's nothing you can do to stop it."

FBI agent Ali Soufan's interrogation of Abu Jandal following 9/11 is another interesting case. Soufan was in Yemen at the time working on the Cole case, and Abu Jandal was coincidentally in jail there "for suspicion" (pp. 410-413):

Soufan realized that the prisoner was well trained in counterinterrogation techniques, sine he easily agreed to things that Soufan already knew -- that he had fought in Bosnia, Somalia, and Afghanistan, for instance -- and denied everything else. The responses were designed to make the interrogators question their assumptions. Abu Jandal portrayed himself as a good Muslim who had flirted with jihad but had become disillusioned. He didn't think of himself as a killer but as a revolutionary who was trying to rid the world of evil, which he believed mainly came from the United States of America, a country he knew practically nothing about.

As the nights passed, Abu Jandal warmed to the sport of the interrogation. He was in his early thirties, older than most jihadis. He had grown up in Jeddah, bin Laden's hometown, and he was well read in religion. He enjoyed drinking tea and lecturing the Americans on the radical Islamist view of history; his sociability was his weak spot. Soufan flattered him and engaged him in theological debate. Within Abu Jandal's diatribes, Soufan picked up several useful details -- that he had grown tired of fighting, that he was troubled by the fact that bin Laden had sworn bayat to Mullah Omar, that he worried about his two children, one of whom had a bone disease. . . . Soufan also brought him a history of America in Arabic.

Abu Jandal was confounded by Soufan and what he represented: a Muslim who could argue religion with him, who was in the FBI, who loved America. He quickly consumed the history that Soufan gave him and was shocked to learn of the American Revolution and the passionate struggle against tyranny that was woven into the American heritage. His worldview depended on the assumption that the United States was the wellspring of evil in the world. . . .

On the fifth night, Soufan slammed a news magazine on the table betwen them. There were photographs of the airplanes crashing into the towers and the Pentagon, graphic shots of people trapped in the towers and jumpers fallign a hundred stories. "Bin Laden did this," Soufan told him.

Abu Jandal had heard about the attacks, but he didn't know many details. He studied the pictures in amazement. he said it looked like a "Hollywood production," but the scale of the atrocity visibly shook him. At that time the casualties were thought to be in the tens of thousands. . . .

Coincidentally, there was a local Yemini paper sitting on a shelf under the coffee table. Soufan showed it to Abu Jandal. The headline read, "Two Hundred Yemeni Souls Perish in New York Attack."

Abu Jandal read the headline and drew a breath. "God help us," he muttered.

Soufan asked what kind of Muslim would do such a thing. Abu Jandal insisted that the Israelis must have committed the attacks on New York and Washington, not bin Laden. "The Sheikh is not that crazy," he said.

Soufan took out a book of mug shots containing photos of known al-Qaeda members an dvarious pictures of the hijackers. He asked Abu Jandal to identify them. The Yemeni flipped through them quickly and closed the book.

Soufan opened the book again and told him to take his time. "Some of them I have in custody," hej said, hoping that Abu Jandal wouldn't realize that the hijackers were all dead.

Abu Jandal paused a fraction of a second on the picture of Marwan al-Shehhi before he started to turn the page. "You're not done with this one," Soufan observed. "Ramadan, 1999. He's sick. You're his emir and you take care of him."

Abu Jandal looked at Soufan in surprise.

"When I ask you a question, I already know the answer," said Soufan. "If you're smart, you'll tell me the truth."

Abu Jandal conceded that he knew Shehhi and gave his Qaeda name, Abdullah al-Sharqi. He did the same with Mohammed Atta, Khaled al-Mihdhar, and four others. But he still insisted that bin Laden would never commit such an action. It was the Israelis, he maintained.

"I know for sure that the people who did this were Qaeda guys," said Soufan. He took seven photos out of the book and laid them on the table.

"How do you know?" asked Abu Jandal. "Who told you?"

"You did," said Soufan. "These are the hijackers. You just identified them."

Abu Jandal blanched. He covered his face with his hands. "Give me a moment," he pleaded.

Soufan walked out of the room. When he came back he asked Abu Jandal what he thought now.

"I think the Sheikh went crazy," he said. And then he told Soufan everything he knew.

Note that there was no waterboarding here, no CIA horseshit. The interrogation is calm, methodical; Soufan recognizes that Abu Jandal views himself as a moral person, and works that to his advantage. The CIA comes off very badly in this book, and indeed if you look at Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, and most likely a dozen other books I haven't gotten to, the judgment could be even worse.

On the other hand, the methodical record that the FBI and DOJ had built up during the 1990s went to hell after 9/11, with Ashcroft going ape shit and managing to convict virtually no one of any importance.

An epilog (p. 415):

In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing sixty-two countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sou chef, a Barbie Doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant. . . . The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe. Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.

Also see the John Burgess letter and discussion filed under Gilles Kepel: Jihad.

posted 2008-02-09