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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright
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A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright’s remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.
The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, John O’Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.
As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organization capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole . . . O’Neill’s heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki’s transformation from bin Laden’s ally to his enemy . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
The Looming Tower broadens and deepens our knowledge of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. Here is Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despairing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family life in the al-Qaeda compounds of Sudan and Afghanistan; O’Neill’s high-wire act in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life—he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others’ existence—and the nitty-gritty of turf battles among U.S. intelligence agencies.
Brilliantly conceived and written, The Looming Tower draws all elements of the story into a galvanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to our understanding of how we arrived at September 11, 2001. The richness of its new information, and the depth of its perceptions, can help us deal more wisely and effectively with the continuing terrorist threat.
- Sales Rank: #36823 in Books
- Brand: Knopf
- Published on: 2006-08-08
- Released on: 2006-08-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.55" h x 1.66" w x 6.63" l, 1.94 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 480 pages
Features
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wright, a New Yorker writer, brings exhaustive research and delightful prose to one of the best books yet on the history of terrorism. He begins with the observation that, despite an impressive record of terror and assassination, post–WWarII, Islamic militants failed to establish theocracies in any Arab country. Many helped Afghanistan resist the Russian invasion of 1979 before their unemployed warriors stepped up efforts at home. Al-Qaeda, formed in Afghanistan in 1988 and led by Osama bin Laden, pursued a different agenda, blaming America for Islam's problems. Less wealthy than believed, bin Laden's talents lay in organization and PR, Wright asserts. Ten years later, bin Laden blew up U.S. embassies in Africa and the destroyer Cole, opening the floodgates of money and recruits. Wright's step-by-step description of these attacks reveals that planning terror is a sloppy business, leaving a trail of clues that, in the case of 9/11, raised many suspicions among individuals in the FBI, CIA and NSA. Wright shows that 9/11 could have been prevented if those agencies had worked together. As a fugitive, bin Ladin's days as a terror mastermind may be past, but his success has spawned swarms of imitators. This is an important, gripping and profoundly disheartening book. (Aug.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
The Looming Tower may be the most riveting, informative, and "heart-stopping account" yet of the men who shaped 9/11 (New York Times Book Review). The focus on individuals gives the book its emotional punch, but it is also a narrative bold in conception and historical sweep. Lawrence Wright conducted more than 500 interviews, from bin Laden's best friend in college to Richard A. Clarke, Saudi royalty, Afghan mujahideen, and reporters for Al Jazeera. The result, while evenhanded in its analysis of the complex motives, ideals, and power plays that led to 9/11, leaves few nefarious details uncovered. An abrupt ending did little to sway critics that Looming Tower is nothing less than "indispensable" reading (Cleveland Plain Dealer).
Copyright � 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Wright, a talented New Yorker staff writer with a diverse portfolio and a long-standing personal interest in the Middle East, was on the al-Qaeda beat within hours of the 9/11 attacks. The product of his efforts is more deeply researched and engagingly narrated than nearly all of the looming stack of books on Osama bin Laden and his cohorts published in the past five years. The events are familiar: this account begins with theorist Sayid Qutb, covers the trajectories of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and culminates with Mohammed Atta and the collapsing Trade Center. But Wright's interview--fueled, character-driven approach captures both the complexity of individual actors--Qutb's alienation, for example, and bin Laden's struggle for legitimacy--as well as the fluid internal dynamics of the often covert terrorist organization. The tragic centerpiece of the book, familiar to New Yorker readers, is Wright's sensitive portrayal of John O'Neill, the deeply flawed working-class FBI gumshoe from New Jersey who may have been the only American to fully understand the al-Qaeda threat before 9/11. Wright seems to have found his calling: a perceptive and intense page-turner, this selection and Peter Bergen's The Osama bin Laden I Know (2006) should be considered the definitive works on the topic. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
89 of 99 people found the following review helpful.
Really 3 1/2 Stars
By Aging Hipstorian
"The Looming Tower" is about the building and concept of Al-Qaeda as a terror organization and the United States' efforts to stop it. The lives of Bin-Laden, Zawahiri, Prince Turki Faisal and FBI agent John O'Neill intersect in the book, which concludes with the September 11 attacks on the USA.
As the book flows, the reader travels through the life of Osama Bin-Laden (the central figure of the book) from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets, the building of his criminal organization, and through an increasingly deadly series of terror acts. Meanwhile, US officials such as Richard Clarke and O'Neill are largely ignored by the Clinton and Bush administrations. Communication between CIA and FBI is hampered by bureaucracy. The attacks are carried out and the world is plunged into an age of terror.
"The Looming Tower" is well written and fast paced. The portrait of Bin-Laden is of a barbaric criminal who justifies his own depravity in hypocritical religious terms. The narrative about the bombing of the USS Cole places the matter in stark and understandable terms. This was a serious matter that was not addressed in the last three months of President Clinton's term nor in the first nine of Bush's. The flaw that I found with the book was the citing of flimsy sources late in the book that weren't backed up by more evidence, particularly the actions of Bin-Laden on 9-11 and in the days afterwards. There is a tabloid feel to the last few pages, which unfortunately, erodes the book's credibility. It's a good read. Take it with a grain of salt.
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but rarely demonstrated so clearly as in Lawrence Wright's peerless work
By The Guardian
Before reading Lawrence Wright's excellent `The Looming Tower' I held the mistaken idea that its primary focus might be the 19 hijackers in the September 2001 `planes operation'. But the book is not about that; it has a more ambitious reach with a narrative deeper, broader and more enlightening.
At the heart of the book is the story of Islamist-jihadism since the 1940s: the revolutionary `Moslem Brotherhood' whose primary goal was the violent overthrow of Arab secular-nationalist governments starting with Egypt; the 18th-century Wahhabi tradition predominant in Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban movement jointly financed and supported by the Pakistani ISI & Saudi Intelligence. These detailed stories replete with revealing personal testimony (the author interviewed more than 1,000 people all over the Middle East & Af-Pak region whilst researching his material) are progressively interwoven with those of the key players in the US Government, in particular the clever but mildly eccentric Richard Clarke; the CIA and the FBI's John O'Neill, a larger-than-life cigar-smoking polygamist highly respected and popular with his staff who prophetically foresaw the Salafi-Islamist attack on the USA in 2001 and worked tirelessly to forestall it before tragically meeting his death in the World Trade Centre on 11th September.
The book starts with a chapter devoted to the austere Egyptian anti-Semitic academic Sayyid Qutb, the pious and sexually-repressed father of modern theocratic Islamism whose time spent in the USA in the late 1940s convinced him the West was irredeemably decadent and deserved to be destroyed. Qutb eventually welcomed execution by the Egyptian government in 1966 as a `martyr for Allah.' The personal stories of al Zawahiri and the bin Laden family are brought to life with a level of detail I've never read before: Osama was the only son of Mohammed bin Laden's fourth wife and something of an odd-ball; MbL built his huge construction empire in Saudi Arabia whilst illiterate but could remember dozens of engineering measurements/calculations in his head; Osama had a lifelong love of horses, and one of his wives left him to return to her family in Syria with her daughters because she could no longer endure the privations imposed by their fugitive life in Afghanistan.
With coherent interlocking narratives, Wright brings these characters to life as real 3-dimensional people and shows exactly how the obsessively theocratic-reactionary strain of Islam became so dangerous. Emboldened in the war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s (though of negligible military value compared to the native Afghan `mujahideen'), its ranks filled with now-underemployed angry young radicals whose birth-countries didn't want them back yet supported by substantial funds both official & unofficial from those very countries, the Afghanistan-based jihadists became the principle perpetrator of extreme terrorist violence throughout the Middle East.
Thrown out of Khartoum in 1996 with his passport seized by the Saudis, ObL had no choice but to return to Afghanistan. "'Let him', the Americans responded, `just don't let him go to Somalia'" (p221). A depressing saga of non-co-operation between on the one hand the intelligence sources of the NSA and more particularly the CIA, with on the other hand the FBI charged with investigating, prosecuting & forestalling terrorism through the late 1990s is revealed step by logical step and with alarming details. The 1993 WTC truck-bomb, the appalling 1998 East African Embassy bombings, the successful attack on the USS Cole in Aden Harbour saw a relentless escalation of operations against US targets. As is now well known, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who had almost nothing in common with ObL) travelled to Afghanistan to propose the `planes operation' to ObL; a high-risk plan to strike the USA at its core. All this time, the impenetrable `wall' between the CIA - who had actionable intelligence that several men with known Al Qaida connections had entered the USA - and the FBI whose task it was to stop them but were frustratingly denied the information, was ironically satirised at the FBI's I-49 HQ thus:
"The agents at I-49 were so used to being denied access to intelligence that they bought a CD of a Pink Floyd song `Another Brick in the Wall'. Whenever they received the same formulation [from the CIA] about `sensitive sources and methods,' they would hold up the phone to the CD player and push `play'" (p344).
Wright illustrates exactly how the 9/11 attacks could have been intercepted and prevented at an early stage were it not for these internecine turf wars between different agencies, particularly between the CIA and FBI. The CIA refused to reveal the presence of jihadists with Al Qaida connections in the USA to the FBI, because to do so might `compromise intelligence sources' and the individuals concerned were not at the time technically indicted for crimes: a defensible legalistic position, but one eventually to prove fatal. Systemic non-co-operation was made worse by sclerotic bureaucratic procedures, rigid outdated rules and a failure at the executive level to pay attention to the siren voices like Daniel Coleman seconded to the CIA's Alec Station who saw the mortal danger of a major cataclysmic attack against US cities from Al Qaida, probably involving suicide bombers and possibly hijacked airliners. The CIA leadership in particular does not emerge from Wright's book covered in glory, but the author does reveal the efforts of a few individuals like the heroically persistent Arabic-speaking FBI agent Ali Soufan whose skilled interrogation of Al Qaida prisoners detained by the Yemeni authorities further confirmed that ObL was behind the 9/11 operation, and others like O'Neill who patiently battled to get the lethal threat from bin Laden & Al Qaida given higher priority by a White House administration by turns vacillating and indifferent.
Lawrence Wright's flowing novelistic style sets TLT apart from the shelf-load of other works on Islamist terrorism these past 30 years, like Steve Coll's scholarly but tough-to-read `Ghost Wars' for instance. The origins of the jihadist hatred and contempt for Western values (not to mention Jews, Hindus, Shi-ite Moslems & just about everybody else on the planet with a world-view different from theirs) and how they have been able to cause mayhem throughout the Middle East & occasionally in the West has rarely been explained with such clarity. In parallel Wright's book is the story of precisely how and why the lavishly financed security agencies of the US government failed to stop them attacking America in September 2001; how in the real world small mistakes and seemingly trivial oversights can accumulate to catastrophic consequence. As a bonus TLT is a cracking read, well worth the time and effort.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
This book is an incredible read. When you read ...
By A.J.
This book is an incredible read. When you read The Looming Towers and Black Flags by Joby Warrick you will understand why Islamic Fundamentalism is such a problem in the Mid-East today. The author presents a very compelling history lesson that is absolutely necessary if one wants to understand what is going on in that part of the world.
I simply could not put the book down.
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