By Richard Leiby,
a staff writer in The Post's Style section
Wednesday, September 10, 2003; Page C01
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1000 YEARS FOR
REVENGE |
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THE MAN WHO WARNED AMERICA The Life and Death of John O'Neill, the FBI's Embattled Counterterror Warrior By Murray Weiss ReganBooks. 464 pp. $25.95 |
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WHY AMERICA SLEPT The Failure to Prevent 9/11 By Gerald Posner Random House. 241 pp. $24.95 |
Several new books spread blame for the intelligence fiascoes leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Choose your favorite culprit -- the CIA, the FBI, the INS, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush. There's plenty of political hubris and bureaucratic bungling to lay bare. But all such critiques benefit from expert hindsight and face a high hurdle: Tell us something we didn't already know, or suspect, two years after the skyjackers slammed airplanes into buildings.
Peter Lance, a former correspondent for ABC News, clears the bar with "1000 Years for Revenge." So does Gerald Posner in "Why America Slept," but it's a far less engaging read -- unless you proceed directly to the startling material in the final chapter.
In his book, Lance sharply focuses the hindsight lens on the first attempt by Islamic militants to topple the World Trade Center in 1993. The group behind that bombing, he says, was established by Osama bin Laden and served as a prototypical al Qaeda cell. In his telling, bin Laden's Sept. 11 scheme was in the works long before any government agency seems willing to admit.
A recent congressional investigation marshaled more than half a million documents and took testimony in 22 sessions, but Lance says it failed to make obvious connections between two attacks on the same building in New York. The joint intelligence committee focused on al Qaeda's planning from 1998, and by then, he writes, the plot "was already four years old."
Quite convincingly, Lance connects dots on an Islamic terror timeline that extends even further back, to 1989, when the FBI had under surveillance a crew of mainly Egyptian radicals at a shooting range on Long Island. Thence follow warning signs and law enforcement slip-ups at every juncture, all documented on a handy, well-illustrated insert in the middle of the book.
Lance's conclusion: Much of the blame for Sept. 11 lies with the FBI, which he faults for its institutional arrogance and propensity to punish agents who dare to speak up. One leading Bureau critic who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), calls Lance's book a "must-read," adding, "If the FBI is to successfully transform itself from a crime-solving agency to a terrorism prevention force, it must learn from the mistakes described in '1000 Years for Revenge.' "
A nice blurb, but most readers want more than a blueprint for oversight and reform when they tuck into a tome like this. Lance obliges by planting strong characters in his labyrinthine exposé and using them to steer the central narrative. Two are cast as unsung heroes: FBI agent Nancy Floyd, who recruited a vital mole in the '93 World Trade Center bombing investigation and later terror plots but was sidelined by her supervisors; and New York Fire Marshal Ronnie Bucca, who obsessively pursued his own inquiry into the global jihad after he was shut out of the official one. (Though Bucca held a secret clearance as an Army reservist, the Joint Terrorism Task Force seemed to have no interest in a fireman's contribution.)
These heroes come off as somewhat one-dimensional, but their stories are compelling and briskly told. Lance sometimes lapses into tabloid-style prose, however, as he animates Bucca, Floyd and a huge cast of holy warriors, laying out their connections and loyalties. The main evildoers (other than bin Laden) include the blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman; master bomb-maker Ramzi Yousef and his accomplice, Hakim Abdul Murad; and Yousef's uncle Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a chief al Qaeda operative.
Many of the details about efforts to blow up the United Nations and New York landmarks, and a Philippines-based scheme to kill the pope and destroy 11 airliners in flight, emerged in criminal trials in the mid-1990s. Lance, who holds a law degree, revisits the evidence, interviews a key Philippine police investigator and breaks ground by putting facts in a new context.
He comes away convinced that Yousef and Mohammed hatched the plot to turn hijacked airliners into bombs: "As far back as 1994 they had sent young jihadis to train in U.S. flight schools. Plans had been made to target a series of buildings in New York, Washington, Chicago and San Francisco" -- namely, the twin towers, the Pentagon, the Sears Tower and the Transamerica Tower.
Yousef, Murad and Mohammed all grew up in the same neighborhood in Kuwait but trace their roots to Baluchistan, a frontier zone in Pakistan that Lance describes as a "radical Islamic no-man's land." He cites a Baluchistani proverb as the inspiration for the book's title: "If it takes me ten centuries to kill my enemy, I will wait a thousand years for revenge." The title takes on more resonance when one considers that bin Laden's ultimate goal seems to be to avenge the victories the Crusaders scored over Muslims centuries ago.
In the course of his investigation, Lance revisits the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and he finds "a growing body of evidence" to suggest that Ramzi Yousef may have designed that truck bomb. He devotes a chapter to this possibility, citing potential connections between Yousef and Nichols (who was married to a Filipina). It also emerges that Murad -- Yousef's co-conspirator -- claimed responsibility for the 1995 Murrah Building bombing on the morning it happened. An FBI document confirms it. (Full disclosure: I've spoken to Peter Lance several times, after first hearing about his work-in-progress from a whistle-blower group that champions FBI reform.)
"The Man Who Warned America," by the New York Post's Murray Weiss, is a more straight-ahead, inside-the-FBI account that covers much of the same ground as "1000 Years for Revenge." It serves as an able critique of intelligence missteps as well as a biography of FBI counterterror expert John O'Neill, who arguably knew more about bin Laden than anyone else in the government. As Weiss's larger-than-life hero, O'Neill is a prescient and complicated figure who juggled multiple mistresses while raising the alarm about Islamic terror.
O'Neill, who believed that Yousef's 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was, as Weiss writes, "the first, rather than the last, attack," ended up taking a job as security chief at the trade center. He died there on Sept. 11.
Gerald Posner, a lawyer-turned-author, also touches on the 1993 attack as a prelude to horrors ahead. Posner made his reputation as a debunker of conspiracy theories, most notably in his 1995 study of the JFK assassination, "Case Closed," and has little use for the Oklahoma City connection.
"Why America Slept" is a solidly researched catalogue of what Posner calls "fumbled investigations and misplaced priorities," but it lacks page-turning prose until the end, when he lays out a remarkable tale suggesting there could have been more Saudi Arabian complicity in the 9/11 plot than previously known.
Citing two "government sources," Posner details the U.S. interrogation of Abu Zubaida, a Saudi-born al Qaeda operations chief who was wounded by gunfire during his March 2002 capture in Pakistan. By withholding pain medication, administering sodium pentothal and setting up a "false-flag" operation to make Zubaida think he was in a Saudi prison and certain to be executed, the CIA may have gotten more than it bargained for from the ruse.
In Posner's telling, Zubaida was actually relieved to see his "Saudi" inquisitors (played by two Arab American Special Forces soldiers) and gave them, from memory, the home and cell phone numbers of a senior member of the Saudi ruling family. "He will tell you what to do," the terrorist told them.
The numbers, according to Posner, belonged to Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz -- better known to Americans as the owner of War Emblem, the horse that won last year's Kentucky Derby.
Zubaida also spilled secrets about alleged cooperation among bin Laden, the Saudi royals and Pakistani officials, and he claimed both countries knew the attack on America was imminent. To confirm his tale, Zubaida gave the interrogators private phone numbers for two more Saudi princes.
Within four months, all three princes met untimely ends in Saudi Arabia, in rapid succession. The horse owner died of a heart attack at 43; his cousin died in a car wreck en route to the funeral; the third, age 25, "died of thirst" during a trip in the summer heat.
Posner, always the measured skeptic, draws no conclusions but says he believes his sources. In any event, he is certainly saying something new.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company