The road to 9/11 and beyond

In a riveting new book that ranges from ancient Mecca to the corridors of the FBI, Lawrence Wright brings to life the fanatics behind 9/11 -- and the turf wars that caused U.S. intelligence to miss it.

Editor's note: This article continues a Salon series exploring the impact of 9/11 five years after the attacks.

By Mark Follman

Read more: Books, Terrorism, FBI, Afghanistan, Pentagon, Iraq, CIA, Osama Bin Laden, Reviews, Saudi Arabia, Book reviews, Al Qaeda, Mark Follman, 5 Years After

Aug. 30, 2006 | Five years later we are still sifting through the rubble. Newly released recordings of frantic phone calls from those trapped inside the Twin Towers remind us the wounds are still raw. The airline terror plot foiled in London reminds us we are still vulnerable. With national security again the central fault line for approaching elections, a familiar rhetoric of fear keeps us mired in the politics of a war with no apparent end. And the long discussion goes on -- not only about the origins and lessons of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but about the U.S. military ventures and global spasms of violence that have followed.

Lawrence Wright's remarkable new book, "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," illuminates that discussion like no volume before it. Wright synthesizes an array of figures and events into a riveting tableau. He traces al-Qaida's strategic conception and ideological evolution, born of smoldering dissident movements from Egypt to Pakistan. He casts aside the cartoonish mug shot of a madman who provoked a global war to reveal Osama bin Laden in his many achievements, failures and contradictions. And he uncovers an intricate and astonishing tale of how myopia and infighting among U.S. intelligence agencies almost certainly blinded them to the plot that would plunge hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The book is a feat of exhaustive reporting and research, yet reads like a novel, thanks to Wright's vivid prose and instinct for dramatic detail.

There is already a library's worth of books available on how the 9/11 attacks were conceived and carried out, and on the scattered attempts by U.S. officials to stop them. But Wright delves deeper, stitching together the key personalities of the epic event. Along with bin Laden, they include Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian medical doctor turned fanatic who would become a deeply influential and indispensable second-in-command to bin Laden; and John O'Neill, a conflicted FBI counterterrorism chief obsessed with the Islamic terrorist threat, who would leave the bureau in August 2001 only to perish in the attacks as the head of private security for the World Trade Center.

Wright, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, builds his tale of these men on hundreds of interviews with their family members, childhood friends and professional associates; extensive travel through the Middle East, Asia and Europe; and a library-sized bibliography of his own, including key primary source materials translated from the Arabic. In scrutinizing these figures, he humanizes them, showing us their quirks, strengths and flaws. We see how distant adversaries mirror each other, their respective organizations at times reeling from vicious infighting, at others galvanized by renegade leadership. The illumination of these men in their complexity clarifies our sense of the people and politics that detonated the seminal event of our time.

At the heart of Wright's wide-ranging narrative is America's arch nemesis. "One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it," he says. "The answer is certainly not." Wright argues that by the close of the millennium, after a string of al-Qaida attacks against U.S. and allied interests abroad, "the tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest." While there were provincial militant Islamist movements blooming across the Middle East, Wright emphasizes that it was bin Laden's vision to create an internationalist jihadi corps.

It would be easy enough to look at the victories and defeats of bin Laden's career, and his evolving worldview, and see the specter of a madman behind 9/11. "But there was also artistry involved," Wright declares with a hint of admiration, "not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required."

By exposing al-Qaida's clash with America, Wright also helps us see the road beyond it. His work reminds us that the consequences of the Iraq war, massive deficit spending on security and the military, and the degradation of America's moral standing fit bin Laden's goals. Indeed, when bin Laden's organization officially trained its mass-murderous sights on the United States in the early 1990s, Wright explains, "al-Qaeda's duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular, modernizing West. In order to do that, bin Laden told his men, al-Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam -- 'a large-scale front which it cannot control.'"

Five years after the attacks, the United States may still be unable to track down bin Laden, but Wright helps us continue to track down who he really is. His portrait of the elusive Kalashnikov-toting terrorist builds on an already well-documented background. As a young man, bin Laden held a post in his family's Saudi Arabian construction empire. He later enjoyed high-level contacts in the CIA and Saudi royal family as a jihadi leader in Afghanistan's war against the Soviets. By the early 1990s, living in exile in Sudan, he ran a sizable farming operation while cultivating followers for his nascent war on the West.

Though bin Laden had a piece of the family fortune, Wright explains that he was a lousy businessman. In his early years as a jihadi, "he was not politically sophisticated," but he was generous and tireless. Even so, "bin Laden did not make much of an impression as a charismatic leader," Wright says. "He was shy and serious, and he struck many as naive."

That would seem to belie the savvy and vision of a man who had long shaped aspects of his life after the prophet Mohammed's -- a man who, in Wright's view, would come to use political and religious mythmaking "brilliantly" in the service of his ominous cause.

Next page: The rise of al-Qaida -- and its high-tech headquarters in a cave