The Looming Tower

Prologue

• In August 1996, Bin Laden declared war on America from a cave in Afghanistan.  The stated cause was the continued presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia five years after the first Gulf War.  "Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation."
• Al-Qaeda were fanatically committed to their cause and convinced that they would be victorious.  They were brought together by a philosophy that was so compelling that they would willingly--eagerly--sacrifice their lives for it.  In the process they wanted to kill as many people as possible.

The Martyr--Sayyid Qutb

• November 1948
• Sayyid Qutb
• Age 42
• His literary and social criticism had made him one of the country's most popular writers.  It had also earned the fury of King Farouk, Egypt's dissolute monarch, who had signed an order for his arrest.  Powerful and sympathetic friends hastily arranged his departure.
• He saw the West as a single cultural entity.  The distinctions between capitalism and Marxism, Christianity and Judaism, fascism and democracy were insignificant by comparison with the single great divide in Qutb's mind: Islam and the East on the one side, and the Christian West on the other.
• Even as Qutb was sailing out of Alexandria's harbor, Egypt, along with five other Arab armies, was in the final stages of losing the war that established Israel as a Jewish state within the Arab world.
• The shame of that experience would shape the Arab intellectual universe more profoundly than any other event in modern history.
• Fully a fourth of the 8 million New Yorkers were Jewish, many of whom had fled the latest European catastrophe.  Hebrew letters covered the signs for the shops and factories on the Lower East Side, and Yiddish was commonly heard on the streets.  That would have been a challenge for the middle-aged Egyptian who hated the Jews but, until he left his country, had never met one.
• "What I need most here is someone to talk to," he wrote a friend, "to talk about topics other than dollars, movie stars, brands of cars--a real conversation on the issues of man, philosophy, and soul."
• In Qutb's passionate analysis, there was little difference between the communist and capitalist systems; both, he believed, attended only the material needs of humanity, leaving the spirit unsatisfied. 
• Christianity would be powerless to block this trend because it exists only in the realm of the spirit--"like a vision in a pure ideal world."  Islam, on the other hand, is "a complete system" with laws, social codes, economic rules, and its own method of government.  Only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society.  Thus the real struggle would eventually show itself: It was not a battle between capitalism and communism; it was between Islam and materialism.  And inevitably Islam would prevail.
• Hasan al-Banna was murdered
• He found the Muslim Brothers in 1928, with the goal of turning Egypt into an Islamic state.  Within a few years, the Brotehrs had spread across the country, and then throughout the Arab world, planting seeds of the coming Islamic insurgence.
• Qutb had held himself pointedly apart from the organization that Banna created, even though he inclined to similar views about the political uses of Islam; the death of his contemporary and intellectual rival, however, cleared the way for his conversion to the Muslim Brothers.
• It was easy to be misled by the proliferation of churches, religious books, and religious festivals, Qutb maintained; the fact remained that materialism was the real America god.  "The soul has no value to Americans."
• Certainly the trip had not accomplished what Qutb's friends in Egypt had hoped.  Instead of becoming liberalized by his experience in America, he returned even more radicalized. 
  He also brought home a new and abiding anger about race.  "The white man in Europe or America is our number-one enemy."
• Modern values--secularism, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the sexes, tolerance, materialism--had infected Islam through the agency of Western colonialism.  America now stood for all that.  Qutb's polemic was directed at Egyptians who wanted to bend Islam around the modern world.  He intended to show that Islam and modernity were completely incompatible.  His extraordinary project, which was still emerging, was to take apart the entire political and philosophical structure of modernity and return Islam to its unpolluted origins.
• Separation of the sacred and the secular, state and religion, science and theology, mind and spirit--these were the hallmarks of modernity, which had captured the West.
• Only by restoring Islam to the center of their lives, their laws, and their government could Muslims hope to recapture their rightful place as the dominant culture in the world.
• Banna completely rejected the Western model of secular, democratic government, which contradicted his notion of universal Islamic rule.  "It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet," he wrote.
• Something new was about to born.  In July of 1952, a military junta, dominated by a charismatic young army colonel, Gamal Abdul Nasser, packed King Farouk onto his yacht and seized control of the government, which fell without resistance.  For the real time in twenty-five hundred years, Egypt was ruled by Egyptians.
• The contest quickly narrowed to a choice between a military society and a religious one.  Nasser had the army and the Brothers had the mosques.  Nasser's political dream was of pan-Arab socialism, modern, eqalitarian, secular, and industrialized, in which individual lives were dominated by the overwhelming presence of the welfare state.
• The Islamists wanted to completely reshape society, from the top down, imposing Islamic values on all respects of life, so that every Muslim could achieve his purest spiritual expression.  That could be accomplished only through a strict imposition of the Sharia, the legal code drawn form the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, which governs all parts of life.  Anything less than that, the Islamists argued, was not Islam; it was jahiliyya--the pagan world before the Prophet received his message.
• Qutb was charged with being a member of Muslim Brothers' secret apparatus that was responsible for the assassination attempt.  Nasser thought he ahd crushed the Brotehrs once and for all.
• Some of the imprisoned Brotehrs staged a strike and refused to leave their cells.  They were gunned down.  Twenty-three members were killed and forty-six injured.  Qutb was in the prison hospital when the wounded men were brought in.  Shaken and terrified, Qutb wondered how fellow Muslims could treat each other in such a way.
• Qutb came to a characteristically radical conclusion:  His jailers had denied God by serving Nasser and his secular state.  Therefore, they were not Muslims.  In Qutb's mind, he had excommunicated them from the Islamic community.  The name for this in Arabic is takfir.
• Qutb divides the world into two camps, Islam and jahiliyya, the period of ignorance and barbarity that existed before the divine message of the Prophet Mohammed.  Qutb uses the term to encompass all of modern life: manners, morals, art, literature, law, even much of what passed as Islamic culture.  He was opposed not to modern technology but to the worship of science, which he believed had alienated humanity from natural harmony with creation.  Only a complete rejection of rationalism and Western values offered the slim hope of the redemption of Islam.  This was the choice: pure, primitive Islam or the doom of mankind.
• His revolutionary argument placed nominally Islamic governments in the crosshairs of jihad.
• "Humanity cannot be saved unless Muslims recapture the glory of their earliest and purest expression."
• He received his death sentence gratefully.  "Thank God," he declared.  "I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom."

The Sporting Club--Ayman al-Zawahiri

• Al-Zawahiri's parents, Rabie and Umayma, belonged to two fo the most prominent families in Egypt.  The Zawahiri clan was already on its way to becoming a medical dynasty. 
• The Zawahiri name, however, was associated above all with religion.
• Umayma Azzam was from a clan that was equally distinguished, but wealthier adn more political.
• Because teh Zawahiris never joined the Maadi Sporting Club, Ayman would always be curtained off from the center of power and status.  Teh family developed the reputation of being conservative and a little backward--like "hicks."
• Ayman was a bookworm who excelled in his studies and hatent sports.  From an early age he was known for being devout, and he would often attend prayers at teh Hussein Sidki Mosque. 
• He was an excellent student, and invariably earned the respect of his teachers. 
• His uncle, Mahfouz Azzam, was an attorney in Maadi.
• Sayyid Qutb had been Mahfouz Azzam's Arabic teacher in the third grade, in 1936, and Qutb adn his young protege formed a lifelong bond.  He then became Qutb's personal lawyer and was one of the last people to see him before his execution.
• Young Ayman heard again and again from his beloved uncle Mahfouz about the purity of Qutb's character and the torment he had endured in prison. 
• Ayman's rebellious traits, which might have been chaotic in a less disciplined man, were organized and given direction by an abiding mission in his life: to put Qutb's vision into action.
• Clandestine groups such as the one Zawahiri joined were springing up all over the country.  Made up mainly of restless and alienated students, these groups were small, disorganized, and largely unaware of one another.  Then came the 1967 war with Israel. 
• The speed and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed until then that God favored their cause.  They had lost not only their armies and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves.  The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and elsewhere was born in this shocking debacle.  A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel.  God had turned against the Muslims.  The only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion.  The voice answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.
• The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.
• The voice in the mosque said that the Arabs had let go of the one weapon that gave them real power: faith.  Restore the fervor and purity of the religion that had made the Arabs great, and God would once again take their side.
• The primary target of the Egyptian Islamists was terminology of jihad, the priority was defeating the “near enemy”—that is, impure Muslim society.  The “distant enemy”—the West—could wait until Islam had reformed itself.  To Zawahiri and his colleagues that meant, at a minimum, imposing Islamic law in Egypt.
• Zawahiri also sought to restore the caliphate, the rule of Islamic clerics, which had formally ended in 1924 following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but which had not exercised real power since the thirteenth century.  Once the caliphate was established, Zawahiri believed, Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading it in a jihad against the West.
• Young Islamic activists were appearing on campuses, first in the southern part of the country, then in Cairo.  They called themselves al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya--the Islamic Group. 
• The Islamic Group radicalized most of Egypt's universities.
• Four of the undergroung cells in Cairo, including Zawahiri's, which was one of the largest, merged to form Jamaat al-Jihad--the Jihad Group, or simply al-Jihad.  Although their goals were similar to those of the mainstream Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood, they had no intention of trying to work through politics to achieve them.
• Perhaps Pakistan or Afghanistan would prove a more suitable location for raising an army of radical Islamists who could eventually return to take over Egypt.
• Zawahiri would write that he saw the Afghan jihad as "a training course of the utmost importance to prepare the Muslim mujahideen to wage their awaited battle against the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe, namely, the United States."
• For Muslims everywhere, Khomeini reframed the debate with the West.  Instead of conceding the future of Islam to a secular, democratic model, he imposed a stunning reversal.
• Zawahiri's organization, al-Jihad, supported the Iranian revolution with leaflets and cassette tapes urging all Islamic groups in Egypt to follow the Iranian example.  The overnight transformation of a relatively wealthy, powerful, modern country such as Iran into a rigid theocracy showed that the Islamists' dream was eminently achievable, and it quickened their desire to act. 
• Islamism was by now a broad and variegated movement, including those who were willing to work within a political system, such as the Muslim Brothers, and those, like Zawahiri, who wanted to wreck the state and impose a religious dictatorship.  The main object of the Islamists' struggle was to impose Islamic law--Sharia.
• Under Sadat, the government had repeatedly pledged to conform to Sharia, but his actions showed how little that promise could be trusted.
• On October 6, 1981, the eighth anniversary of the 1973 war, Sadat was assassinated during a military parade. 
• Some say that 9/11 was born in the prisons of Cairo after the Sadat assassination. 
• 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.
• Zawahiri said "The toughtest 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."
• During his time in prison, Zawahiri cmae face-to-face with Egypt's best known Islamist, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who had also been charged as a conspirator in the Sadat assassination.
• The Sheikh became the leader of the Islamic group, though he was not merely the spiritual adviro of the group, he was the emir.
• The theology of jihad requies a fatwa--a religious ruling--in order to consecrate actions that would otherwise be considered criminal.  Sheikh Omar obligingly issued fatwas that countenanced teh slaughter of Christians adnd the plunder of Coptic jewelry stores, on the premise that a state of war existed between Christians and Muslims. 
• Although members of the two leading militant organizations, the Islamic Group and al-Jihad, shared teh common goal of bringing down the government, they differed sharply in their ideology adn tactics.  The blind sheikh preached that all humanity could embrace Islam, and he was content to spread this message.  Zawahiri profoundly disagreed.  Distrustful of the masses and contemptuous of any faith other than his own stark version of Islam, he preferred to act secretly and unilaterally until the moment his group could seize power and impose its totalitarian religious vision.

The Founder

• The founder of the Wahhabi movement, Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, was an eighteenth-century revivalist who believed that Muslims had drifted away from the true religion as it had been expressed during the Golden Age of the Prophet and his immediate successors.
•  Other Muslims in Arabia at the time considered Abdul Wahhab a dangerous heretic.  In 1744, driven out of the Najd, the central part of the peninsula, he sought protection from Mohammed bin Saud, the founder of the first Saudi state.  Although the Ottomans soon crushed the Saudis, the partnership that was formed with Abdul Wahhab and bin Saud's descendants persevered.  The essence of their understanding was that there was no difference between religion and government.  Abdul Wahhab's extreme views would always be a part of the fabric of Saudi rule.
• In the blinkered view of the Wahhabis, there was only one interpretation of Islam—Salafism—and that all other schools of Muslim thought were heretical.
• In 1931, the Wahhabi clerics reaffirmed their position as the arbiters of power in a highly religious society by awarding the king the sole power to declare jihad.
• Mohammed bin Laden, the father of Osama bin Laden, was born in a remote valley in central Yemen, known as the Hadramout.  The Hadramout is known for its ethereal mud-brick towers, like sandcastles, that rise as high as twelve stories.  These fantastic constructions have given the Hadramis their reputation as builders and architects.      
• A catastrophic drought in the early 1930s cast thousands of Hadramis out of their country to seek not merely opportunities but existence itself.  At the age of 23, Mohammed was among them.  He left for Saudi Arabia, which in 1931 was one of the poorest, most desolate places in the world.
• The first great oil boom in the early 1950s ignited the transformation of this barren peninsula.  Foreign contracting giants, especially the American firm Bechtel, brought their behemoth machinery to the Kingdom and set about building the roads and schools and hospitals and ports and power plants that would give the Kingdom the façade of modernity.  Aramco commissioned most of these early projects.  No country had ever experienced such rapid, overwhelming transformation.
• Mohammed was quickly recognized as an exacting and honest builder.  Aramco began a program that granted employees a leave for a year in order to try their luck in business.  If they failed, they could return to the company with no loss in status.  The Mohammed bin Laden Company was one of many enterprises that got its start with Aramco sponsorship.
• Eventually, the king made Mohammed an honorary minister of public works. 
• The original mosque, made of mud brick and tree trunks, had been constructed in 622 C.E. and expanded on several occasions, but it had not been designed to accommodate pilgrims by the millions.  Bin Laden tripled the size of the Prophet’s Mosque during the first renovation, which got under way in 1950.
• Through clever alliances with powerful foreign corporations, bin Laden began diversifying.  Binladen Kaiser became one of the largest engineering and construction companies in the world. 
• While the crown prince shopped for another institution willing to bail out the government, Mohammed bin Laden quietly fronted the money, a gesture that sealed the ties between the bin Ladens and the royal family, and particularly between Faisal and his chief builder. 
• In 630 C.E., the Prophet Mohammed laid siege to the walled city of Taif, which until then had resitsted his authority.  The Muslim forces gained permission from their leader to use a catapult to breach the city’s defenses despite the fact that women and children would be harmed.  (Later, al-Qaeda would use this precedent to justify the killing of noncombatants on September 11, likening the use of airplanes to that of the catapult so long ago.
• Until Faisal became king, a road to Taif remained an unattainable dream.  Bin Laden’s brilliant solution for getting the equipment to the site was to disassemble the giant machines and mount the pieces on the backs of donkeys and camels.  Once in place, the bulldozers and tractors were put back together and set to work.
•  The road from Taif to Mecca is only 55 miles; when it was completed, Saudi Arabia was finally united, and Mohammed bin Laden became a national hero.
• In Osama’s fourteenth year he experienced a religious and political awakening.  He was more concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general.  He thought Muslims are not close enough to Allah, and Muslim youth are too busy playing and having fun. 
• It was during his time in high school that bin Laden joined the Muslim Brotehrs.  The members were highly religious teenagers like bin Laden, and although they were not actively conspiring against the government, their meetings were secret and took place in private homes.  They were hoping to establish and Islamic state anywhere. 
• During this time, it was a time of spiritual questioning for both bin Laden and his cousin Jamal Khalifa.  Khalifa said “Islam is different from any other religion; it’s a way of life.  We were trying to understand what Islam has to say about how we eat, who we marry, how we talk.  WE read Sayyid Qutb.  He was the one who most affected our generation.”
• Bin Laden never studied with Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Mohammed, but he did hear his public lectures.  At that moment Mohammed Qutb was jealously defending his brotehr’s reputation, which was under attack from moderate Islamists.  They contended that Milestones had empowered a new, more violent group of radicals, especially in Egypt, who used Sayyid Qutb’s writings to justify attacks on anyone they considered an infidel, including other Muslims. 
• One such critic was Hasan Hudaybi, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Borthers.  In Hudaybi’s far more orthodox theology, no Muslim could deny the belief of another so long as he made the simple profession of faith: “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His messenger.”
• Osama would soon have a fundamental shift from Hudaybi’s tolerant and accepting view of Islam to Qutb’s narrow and judgmental one—that would open the door to terror.

Change

• Al Saud personified all the venal changes in the Saudi identity, and it was natural that their subjects would consider revolution.  Nonetheless, in a society with so few institutions, the royal family was a conspicuously progressive force.
• Crown Prince Faisal was freer to act than his predecessor because his own piety was unquestioned, but he was wary of extremist who were constantly policing the thoughts and actions of mainstream Saudi society.  From the point of view of some fervent believers, the most insidious accomplishment of Faisal's reign was to co-opt the ulema--the clergy--by making them employees of the state. 
• November 20, 1979
• The man claiming to be the Mahdi was MOhammed Abullah al-Qahtani, but the real leader of the revolt was Juhayman al-Oteibi, a fundamentalist preacher and former corporal in the National Guard.  The two men had been imprisoned together for sedition, and it was during that time, Otebi claimed, that God had revealed to him in a dream that Qahtani was the Mahdi.
• Oteibi insisted on the adoption of Islamic, no-Western values and the rupture of diplomatic relations with Western countries, thus rolling back the changes that had opened the society to modernity.  The Saudi Arabia these men wanted to create would be radically isolated.  The royal family would be thrown out of power, and there would be a full accounting of the money that they had taken from the Saudi people.  Not only the king but also the ulema who countenanced his rule would be denounced as sinful and unjust.  Oil exports to the United States would be cut off, an foreign civilian and military experts would be expelled from the Arabian Peninsula.  These demands foreshadowed those that Osama bin Laden would make fifteen years later.
• In the month between the surrender of the rebels and their mass execution, there was a new shock to the Islamic world: on Christmas Eve 1979 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan.
• For aroused young Muslims such as OBL, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam embodied in a modern fashion the warrior pries--a figure that was as well established in Islamic tradition as the samurai in Japan.  Azzam combined piety and learning with a serene and bloody intransigence.  His slogan was "Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues."
• He mesmerized audiences with his vision of an Islam that would dominate the word through the force of arms.
• The struggle of Islam, as Qutb had framed it, and as Azzam deeply believed, was against jahiliyya--the world of unbelief that had existed before Islam, which was still corrupting and undermining the faithful with the lures of materialism, secularism, and sexual equality. 
• In the skillful hands f Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the legend of the Afghan holy warriors would be packaged and sold all over the world.

The Miracles

• The U.S. national security advisor for the Carter administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the invasion of Afghanistan 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.
• The immediate problem Turki faced was that the mujahideen were little more than disorganized mobs. 
• In order to manage this chaos, the ISI anointed six major émigré parties as the designated recipients for aid.
• The two largest parties were headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani. 
• Turki unofficially started a seventh party, Ittihad-e-Islami (Islamic Union) for Saudi interests.  It was headed by Abdul Raul Sayyaf.
• On June 26, 1984, OBL's camp was attacked by the Soviets.  The Arabs and Afghans shot down four Soviet planes and the men were spared.  OBL quickly returned to Saudi Arabia and raised approximately $10 million for the cause.
• Until now OBL had been seen mainly as a promising acolyte of Sheikh Abdullah's, but suddenly he eclipsed his mentor as the chief private financier of the jihad.  Azzam reacted by officially joining forces with his protégé.
• Azzam also issued a fatwa that electrified Islamists everywhere. In a book eventually published under the title Defense of Muslim Lands, Azzam argued that jihad in Afghanistan was obligatory for every able-bodied Muslim.
• Despite Azzam's famous fatwa and OBL's subsidies, there were never more than three thousand Arab Afghans in the war against the Soviets, and most of them never got out of Peshawar.
• It would be difficult for many of them ever to return home.  These abandoned idealists were naturally looking for a leader.  They had little to cling to except their cause and each other.  As stateless persons they naturally revolted against the very idea of the state.  They saw themselves as a borderless posse empowered by God to defend the entire Muslim people.  That was exactly OBL's dream.
• It was death, not victory in Afghanistan, that summoned many young Arabs to Peshawar.  Martyrdom was the product that Azzam sold in the books, tracts, videos, and cassette tapes that circulated in mosques and Arabic-language bookstores. 
• 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 impoverished; 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.
• Martyrdom promised such young men an ideal alternative to a life xthat was so sparing in its rewards.
• The pageant of martyrdom that Azzam limned before his world-wide audience created the death cult that would one day form the core of al-Qaeda.  The Afghans were fighting for their country, not for Paradise or an idealized Islamic community.  For them, martyrdom was not such a high priority.
• Azzam longed to erase the national divisions that kept the Muslim people from uniting.  For that reason, he always sought to disperse the Arab volunteers among the various Afghan commands, even though few Arabs spoke the local languages or had received any practical training.  They were cannon fodder.  On the other hand, a fixed target such as the camp OBL envisioned was an extravagant waste of money and lives in the hit-and-run guerrilla warfare that the Afghans were waging. 
• OBL was already thinking of the future of jihad, and the Jaji camp was his first step toward the creation of an Arab legion that could wage war anywhere.  The camp was high and cold and exposed to merciless wind.  Osama--The Lion--called teh place Maasada, the Lion's Den.

The Base

• The Quran explicitly states that Muslims shall not kill anyone, except as punishment for murder.  The murderer of one innocent, the Quran warns, is judged "as if he had murdered all of mankind." 
• How then, could groups such as al-Jihad and the Islamic Group justify using violence against fellow Muslims in order to come to power?  Sayyid Qutb had pointed the way by declaring that a leader who does not impose Sharia on the country must be an apostate.
• Bin Laden sometimes came to lecture at the hospital where Zawahiri worked.  Although the two men had different goals at the time, they had in common much that drew them together.  They were both very modern men, members of the educated and technological class, despite their fundamentalist religious views.  From a young age, bin Laden had managed large teams of workers on sophisticated construction projects, and he was at ease in the world of high finance.  Zawahiri, seven years older, was a surgeon, immersed in contemporary science and medical technology.  They were both from families that were well known throughout the Arab world.  They were quiet-spoken, devout, and politically stifled by the regimes in their own countries.
• Each man filled a need in the other.  Zawahiri wanted money and contacts, which bin Laden had in abundance.  Bin Laden, an idealist given to causes, sought direction; Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it.  They were not friends but allies.  Each believed he could use the other, and each was pulled in a direction he never intended to go.  The Egyptian had little interest in Afghanistan except as a staging area for the revolution in his own country.  He planned to use the Afghan jihad as an opportunity to rebuild his shattered organization.  In bin Laden, he found a wealthy, charismatic, and pliable sponsor.  The young Saudi was a devout Salafist but not much of a political thinker.  Until he met Zawahiri, he had never voice opposition to his own government or other repressive Arab regimes.  His main interest was in expelling the infidel invader form a Muslim land, but he also nursed an ill-punish America and the West for what he believed were crimes against Islam.  The dynamic of the two men’s relationship made Zawahiri and bin Laden into people they would never have made individually; moreover, the organization they would create, al-Qaeda, would be a vector of these two forces, one Egyptian and one Saudi.  Each would have to compromise in order to accommodate the goals of the other; as a result, al-Qaeda would take a unique path, that of global jihad.
• In May 1988 the Soviets began a staged withdrawal from Afghanistan, signaling the end of the war.  Slowly, Peshawar shrank back into its shabby fomer self, and the Afghan mujahideen leaders started stockpiling weapons, preparing to confront their inevitable new enemies—each other.
• Azzam recognized that the real danger was takfir.  The heresy that had infected the Arab Afghan community was spreading and threatened to fatally corrupt the spiritual purity of jihad. 
• Afghanistan was just the beginning, Azzam believed.  “We shall continue the jihad no matter how long the way, until the last breath and the last beat of the pulse—or until we see the Islamic state established.”  The property he surveyed for the future of jihad included the southern Soviet republics, Bosnia, the Philippines, Kashmir, central Asia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Spain—the entire span of the once-great Islamic empire.
• 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, theis 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.
• Meeting Page 131-134
• 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.
• The unstated cause of these slanderous salvos was the question of who was going to control bin Laden, the golden Saudi goose.  Bin Laden made his preference known by awarding $100,000 to al-Jihad to begin its operations. 
• Meantime, a new battle was taking shape in Jalalabad, the strategic entry point on the Afghan side of the Khyber Pass, where all the roads and valleys and footpaths converged.  The adversary was no longer the Soviet superpower.  Now it was the communist Afghan government, which refused to collapse as so many had predicted.  (One of the ugly ironies of the Arab Afghan crusade is that it was made up, by a large majority, of Muslims who came to fight Muslims, not Soviet invaders.)  The siege of Jalalabd was supposed to close the curtain on communist rule in Afghanistan.  Emboldened by the Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen had contemptuously decided to mount a frontal assault on the Afghan position.
• The leaders of al-Qaeda developed a constitution and by-laws, which described the utopian goals of the organization in clear terms: “To establish the truth, get rid of evil, and establish an Islamic nation.”  This would be accomplished through education and military training, as well as coordinating and supporting jihad movements around the world.
• After the failure of Jalalabd, the Afghan mujahideen succumbed to a cataclysmic civil war.  The strongest parties in this fratricide were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmed Shah Massoud.  Both were ruthless, charismatic leaders from the north, bent on establishing an Islamic government in Afghanistan.  Hekmatyar, the more skilled politician, was a Pashtun, the dominant tribe in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.  He had the backing of the Pakistan ISI, and therefore of the United States and Saudi Arabia.  Massoud, one of the most talented guerrilla leaders of the twentieth century, was Tajik, from the Persian-speaking tribe that is the second-largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.  Based in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, Massoud rarely traveled to Peshawar, the hotbed of intelligence agencies and international media.
• Most of the Arabs sided with Hekmatyar, excepting Abdullah Anas, the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam.
• Confused and despondent because of the civil war among the mujahideen, and still suffering from the embarrassment of Jalalabad, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia for consultations with Saudi intelligence.  He wanted to know which side to fight on.  Prince Turki’s chief of staff, Ahmed Badeeb, told him, “It’s better to leave.”
• Before he quit Peshawar entirely, bin Laden returned to say farewell to Azzam.  Bin Laden’s rise had left Azzam vulnerable, but somehow their friendship had survived.  They embraced for a long time, and both men shed many tears, as if they knew that they would never see each other again.

Return of the Hero

• Only thirty-one years old, he commanded an international volunteer army of unknown dimensions.  Because he actually believed the fable, promoted by the Saudi press, that his Arab legion had brought down the mighty superpower, he arrived with certain unprecedented expectations of his future.  He was better known than all but a few princes and the upper tier of Wahhabi clergy—the Kingdom’s first real celebrity.
• Only a few years earlier, Saudi Arabia had been on its way to becoming the wealthiest country, per capita, in the world, thanks to the bounty of its oil wealth.  Now the declining price of oil crushed such expectations.  The government, which had promised jobs to university graduates, withdrew its guarantees, creating the previously unknown phenomenon of unemployment.  Despair and idleness are dangerous companions in any culture, and it was inevitable that the young would search for a hero who could voice their longing for change and provide a focus for their rage.
• The West, particularly the United States, was responsible for the humiliating failure of the Arabs to succeed.
• The United States had never been a colonial power, nor for that matter had Saudi Arabia ever been colonized.  Of course, he was speaking for Muslims in general, for whom American support of Israel was a cause of anguish, but the United States had been a decisive ally in the Afghan jihad.  The sense of humiliation he expressed had more to do with the stance of Muslims in the modern world.
• Bin Laden gave them a history lesson.  “America went to Vietnam thousands of miles away, and began bombing them in planes.  The Americans did not get out of Vietnam until after they suffered great losses.  Over sixty thousand American soldiers were killed until there were demonstrations by the American people.  The Americans won’t stop their support of Jews in Palestine until we give them a lot of blows.  They won’t stop until we do jihad against them..”
• Bin Laden would later say that the United States had always been his enemy.  He dated his hatred for America to 1982, “when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them.”
• “As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted."
• In 1989 bin Laden approached Prince Turki with a bold plan.  He would use his Arab irregulars to overthrow the Marxist government of South Yemen.  Bin Laden was enraged by the communist rule in his ancestral home. 
• South Yemen was the only Marxist entity in the Arab world.  North Yemen was a pro-Western military regime, but it was constantly engaged in boundary disputes with the Kingdom.
• Turki listened to bin Laden’s offer and declined.  The grandeur of bin Laden’s manner put Turki off.
• In bin Laden’s mind, the entire peninsula was sacred and had to be cleansed of foreign elements.  The fact that his father was born in the Hadramout, in the southern part of the country, fortified his fervent desire to liberate his kinsmen from any vestige of communist rule.
• The new president of the Republic of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, traveled to Saudi Arabia to plead with King Fahd to keep bin Laden under control.  The king firmly instructed bin Laden to stay out of Yemen’s affairs.
• This time was different.  Naif spoke to him harshly and demanded his passport.  The prince didn’t want to hear any more about bin Laden’s personal foreign policy. 
• By the end of the decade, the Kingdom should have been well equipped to defend itself against the immediate threats in its neighborhood.  It had the weapons; all it lacked was training and troops—an actual army, in other words.
• Two days later, the formidable Iraqi army rolled over the tiny nation, and suddenly all that stood between Saddam Hussein and the Saudi oil fields was a few miles of sand and the superbly equipped but cowed and undermanned Saudi military.  One battalion of the Saudi National Guard—fewer than a thousand men—guarded the oil fields.
• With the Iraqi army poised on the Saudi border, bin Laden wrote a letter to the king beseeching him not to call upon the Americans for protection; he followed this with a frenzied round of lobbying the senior princes.
• In the name of the president of the United States, Cheney pledged that the troops would leave as soon as the threat was over, or whenever the king said they should go.  That promise decided the matter.
• Bin Laden promised Prince Sultan, “You don’t need Americans.  You don’t need any other non-Muslim troops.  We will be enough.”
• The prince laughed in disbelief.  For the first time, he was alarmed by the “radical changes” he saw in bin Laden’s personality.  He had gone from being “a clam, peaceful and gentle man” whose only goal was to help Muslims, to being “a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait.  It revealed his arrogance and his haughtiness.”
• The Prophet said upon his deathbed, “Let there be no two religions in Arabia.”
• Recognizing the danger that the foreign troops posed to their legitimacy, the Saudi government pressured the clergy to issue a fatwa endorsing the invitation of non-Muslim armies into the Kingdom on the excuse that they were defending Islam.  This would give the government the religious cover it needed.
• Within weeks, half a million American GIs streamed into the Kingdom, creating what many Saudis feared would be a permanent occupation.  That many of these foreign soldiers were women only added to their embarrassment.  The weakness of the Saudi state and its abject dependence on the West for protection were paraded before the world, thanks to the 1,500 foreign journalists who descended on the Kingdom to report on the buildup to the war.
• A few months later, the religious establishment fired back with its own vehement “Letter of Demands.”  It was an open bid for Islamic control of the kingdom, containing a barely disguised attack on the predominance of the royal family.  Many of the demands of the religious dissidents echoed those of the leaders of the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque.  They became the basis of bin Laden’s political agenda for the Kingdom.
• To many Saudis, the presence of the foreign “crusaders,” as bin Laden characterized the coalition troops, in the sanctuary of Islam posed a greater calamity than the one that Saddam was already inflicting on Kuwait.  Bin Laden also wanted to create a new world order, one that was ruled by Muslims, not dictated by America and enforce by the UN.  The scale of his ambition was beginning to reveal itself.  In his fantasy he would enter history as the savior of Islam.
• Eventually, Prince Naif backed down and returned bin Laden’s travel documents, but only after making the nettlesome warrior sign a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab country.
• Eventually, Prince Naif backed down and returned bin Laden’s travel documents, but only after making the nettlesome warrior sign a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab country.

Paradise

• They were largely unwelcome in their home countries, which had perceived them as misfits and extremists even before they went to Afghanistan.  These same governments had advertised for young men to go to jihad, and subsidized their travel, hoping that the troublemakers would bleed away in a doomed case. 
• Some countries simply refused to let the fighters return.  They became a stateless, vagrant mob of religious mercenaries.
• Turabi envisioned the creation of an international Muslim community—the ummah—headquartered in Sudan, which would then spill into other countries, carrying the Islamist revolution in an ever-widening circle.
• In order to carry out this plan, he opened the doors of his country to any Muslim, regardless of nationality, no questions asked.  Naturally, the people who responded to his invitation tended to be those who were welcome nowhere else.
• Jamal al-Fadl, a Sudanese member of al-Qaeda, rented a number of houses and bought several large parcels of land that would be used for training. 
• The Islam that Turabi was straining to create in such a radical nondemocratic fashion was, in fact, surprisingly progressive.  Turabi advocated healing the ancient breach between the Sunni and the Shia branches of Islam, which was heresy in bin Laden’s eyes.  Turabi spoke about integrating “art, music, singing” into religion, offending bin Laden’s Wahhabi sensibilities. 
• The ongoing civil war between the largely Arab, Islamic north and the black Christian south was draining the treasury and scaring away investors, who were already appalled by the confluence of terrorists and the experimental nature of Islamist rule.  That bin Laden was willing to put his money into such an economy made him all the more prized.
• There was one galling fact that prevent bin Laden from relaxing into the life of business and of spiritual contemplation that so strongly beckoned: the continued presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia.  Bin Laden agonized over what he believed was a permanent occupation of the holy land.
• Why did these men turn against America, a highly religious country that so recently had been their ally in Afghanistan?  In large part, it was because they saw America as the locus of Christian power.
• Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy.  To them, the Crusaders were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam.
• Al-Qaeda economists pointed to “our oil” that fueled America’s rampant expansion, feeling as if something had been stolen from them—not the oil, exactly, although bin Laden felt it was underpriced—but the cultural regeneration that should have come with its sale.
• Consumerism, vice, and individuality, which the radical Islamists saw as the hallmarks of modern American culture, threatened to destroy Islam—even the idea of Islam—by blending it into a globalized, corporate, interdependent, secular commercial world that was part of what these men meant when they said “America.”
• But they were ambivalent about the way in which technology weakened the spirit.
• Even the values that America advertised as being universally desirable—democracy, transparency, the rule of law, human rights, the separation of religion from governance—were discredited in the eyes of the jihadis because they were Western and therefore modern.  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.”
• Imad Mugniyah, the head of Hezbollah’s security service, came to meet bin Laden and agreed to train members of al-Qaeda in exchange for weapons.  Mugniyah had planned the 1983 suicide car bombings of the US Embassy and the US Marine Corps and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, which killed more than three hundred Americans and fifty-eight French soldiers and had led to the prompt withdrawal of American peacekeeping forces from Lebanon.  That precedent had made a profound impression on bin Laden, who saw that suicide bombers could be devastatingly effective and that, for all its might, America had no appetite for conflict.
• In the 13^th century, Ibn Tamiyyah 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. 
• 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 mujahedeen 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.

The Silicon Valley

• The "tube" constructionthat held up these stupendous stilts required columns spaced only twenty-two inches apart.
• By placing the bomb in the southern corner of the garage, Yousef intended to topple one tower onto the other, bringing the entire complex down and killing what he hoped would be 250,000 people--atoll he thought equaled the pain the Palestinians had experienced because of America's support for Israel.
• Yousef flew back to Packistan, and soon after that, he moved to Manila.  There he began concocting extraordinary schemes to blow up a dozen American airliners simultaneously, to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton, and to crash a private plane into CIA headquarters.
• Zawahiri returned to Sadan facing a dispiriting choice: whether to maintain the independence of his bootstrap organization that was always struggling financially or to formally join forces with bin Laden.
• When they had met nearly a decade before, Zawahiri was by far the more powerful figure; he had an organization behind him and a clear objective: to overthrow the government of Egypt.  But now bin Laden, who had always had the advantage of money, also had his own organization, one that was much more ambitiuos than al-Jihad.
• Zawahiri introduced the use of suicide bombers, which became the signature of al-Jihad assassinations and later of al-Qaeda "martyrdom operations."  The strategy broke a powerful religious taboo against suicide. 

Paradise Lost

• Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam--pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics--would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal.
• Given the diversity of the trainees adn their causes, bin Laden's main task was to direct them toward a common enemy. 
• 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.
• Enraged Somali tribesmen triumphantly dragged the bodies of the dead crewmen through the 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.
• The Egyptians were fed up with the violence spilling out of Sudan and protested again and again that bin Laden was behind it.  Finally, on March 5, 1994, Fahd personally decided to revoke bin Laden's Saudi citizenship.
• Immediately after the king canceled bin Laden's citizenship, Bakr bin-Laden, the eldest brother, publicly condemned Osama, turning the family's back to him. 
• Osama sent Ali Mohammed to Nairobi, the Kenyan captial, to conduct surveillance on American, British, French, and Israeli targets.
• But when the international community withdrew from Somalia, al-Qaeda lost its pallid excuse for attacking the embassy in Nairobi.  The plan was not forgotten, however; it was only filed away.

The Prince of Darkness

• John O'Neill  had been appointed chief of the FBI's counterterrorism section.
• At 9:30 a.m. Pakistani time on February 7, 1995, the agents entered teh Su-Casa Guest House in Islamabad and knocked on teh door of room 16.  A sleepy Yousef was immediately thrown to the floor and handcuffed.  Moments later, the news reached the jubilant agents at FBI headquarters. 
• During the three days he was in SIOC, John O'Neill turned forty-three years old.  He finally took his luggage to his new apartment.  It was Tuesday, his first official day on the job.
• The Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), were drawn mainly from the CIA, the National Security Coucil, and teh upper tiers of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the State Department. 
• The FBI had always been a problematic member of the CSG.  Its representatives tended to be close-mouthed and unhelpful, treating all intelligence as potential evidence that couldn't be compromised, whether there was an actual criminal case or not.  O'Neill was different.  He cultivated his counterparts in other agencies rather than pulling down the bureaucratic shutters.
• In 1995 the efforts of Clarke and O'Neill resulted in a presidential directive giving the FBI the lead authority in both investigating and preventing acts of terrorism wherever in the world Americans or American interests were threatened.
• Few people in American law enforcement or intelligence, including O'Neill, had any experience with Islam or much understanding of the grievances that had already given rise to the attack on teh WTC adn other plots against the United States.
• What distinguished O'Neill early in his new posting was his recognition of the fact that the nature of terrorism had changed; it had gone global and turned murderous.
• In August 1995 bin Laden made a decisive break with his homeland.  In what he labeled a "frank manifesto," bin Laden attacked King Fahd directly in one of his faxed commentaries.
• "It is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers--their filthy feet roaming everywhere--for no reason other than protecting your throne and protecting oil sources for their own use.  These filthy, infidel Crusaders must not be allowed to remain in the Holy Land."
• Many Saudis shared his hostility to the continuing American presence in the Kingdom, especially after Dick Cheney's well-known pledge that they would leave.  Ostensibly, the troops remained in order to enforce teh UN-mandated no-fly zone over Iraq.  By 1992, however, and certainly by 1993, there were enough new basing agreements in the region that the Americans could have withdrawn without jeopardizing their mission.  But the Saudi bases were convenient and well appointed, and there didn't seem to be a sufficiently pressing need to leave.

The Boy Spies

• Zawahiri's justification after al-Jihad bombed the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan: He explained that there were no innocents inside the embassy.  Everyone who worked there, from the diplomats to the guards, was a supporter of the Egyptian regime, which had detained thousands of fundamentalists and blocked the rule of Islam.  Those who carried out the duties of the government must shoulder responsibility for its crimes.  No true Muslim could work for such a regime.  In this, Zawahiri was repeating the takfir view that had been carried to its logical extreme in Algeria.  Yes, he admitted, there might have been innocent victims--children, true believers--who also died, but Muslims are weak and their enemy is so powerful; in such an embergency, the rules against the slaughter of innocents must be relaxed.
• Zawahiri's justification for suicide bombings: In his defense of the bombing, Zawahiri had to overcome this profound taboo.  The bombers who carried out the Islamabad operation, Zawahiri said, represent "a generation of mujahideen that has decided to sacrifice itself and its property in the cause of God.  That is because the way of death and martyrdom is a weapon that tyrants and their helpers, who worship their salaries instead of God, do not have."
• It was Zawahiri argued, a suicidal choice.  Other Muslims did no condemn them at the time because they were acting for the glory of God and the greater good of Islam.  Therefore, anyone who gives his life in pursuit of the true faith--such as the bombers in Islamabad--is to be regarded not as a suicide who will suffer the punishment of hell but as a heroic martyr whose selfless sacrifice will gain him an extraordinary reward in Paradise.
• With such sophistry, Zawahiri reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder.
• Without the Egyptians, bin Laden was isolated and uncertain.  There was no one he could trust.  He knew that something might happen to him.  He was already looking for another sanctuary, just in case.
• The catastrophe that the radical Islamist leaders of Sudan had created for themselves finally made itself starkly apparent.  The government's complicity in the terror plots against New York and the attempted assassination of Mubarak guarantted international sanctions, which took effect in April 1996.
• The Clinton administration still perceived bin Laden as a wealthy nuisance, not a mortal threat.  His name had arisen as a financier of terror mainly because of his support of the blind sheikh.  There was a consensus that he needed to be pushed out of his sanctuary in Sudan, because the country was overrun with Islamic terrorists, and they were far more dangerous with money than without.  There was no real debate about the consequences of expelling him, however.  Nor was there any point in forcing Sudan to hand him over to U.S. authorities, because there was no evidence so far that he had harmed American citizens.
• Having shorn bin Laden of most of his net worth, the Sudanese government thoughtfully chartered him an antique Soviet Tupolev jet.  Bin Laden left on May 18, 1996.  His family was scattered and broken.  The organization that he had built was torn apart.  He held America responsible for the crushing reversal that had led him to this state.

Hijira

• The Taliban arose in 1994 as a small group of students, most of them orphans who had been raised in the refugee camps and who were outraged by the chaos and depravity of the rule of the mujahideen.  The liberators in the war against the Soviets had turned out to be more barbaric rulers than their enemy. 
• Thanks to the support of Pakistani intelligence, they were transformed from a populist militia into a formidable, highly mobile guerrilla army, on the verge of consolidating their rapid rise to power as they stood on the outskirts of Kabul, raining rockets into the ruins.
• Mullah Omar was devoted to the lectures of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.  “Corruption and moral disintegration had gripped the land.  Killing, looting, and violence had become the norm.  Nobody had ever imagined that the situation could get this bad.  Nobody thought it could be improved, either.”
• In this desperate moment, Omar received a vision.  The Prophet appeared to him and instructed this simple village mullah to bring peace to his country.
• There were three streams that fed the Taliban, which flooded across Afghanistan with such extraordinary rapidity.  One was the material support—money and arms—from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
• The second stream drew from the madrassas across the Pakistan border which were crammed full with the sons of Afghan refugees.  Typically, the madrassas were funded by charities from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which channeled the money through local religious parties.  As a result, many of the indigenous Sufi shrines were closed down and turned into schools that taught the Wahhabi doctrine. 
• These boys had grown up in an exclusively male world, separated from their families for long periods of time.  The traditions and customs and lore of their country were distant to them.  Entrenched in their studies, which were rigidly concentrated on the Quran and Sharia and the glorification of jihad, the talibs imagined a perfect Islamic society, while lawlessness and barbarity ran rampant all around them.
• The third stream was opium.  Under the Taliban, Afghanistan became the largest poppy grower in the world. 
• On April 4, 1996, Omar took the Prophet’s cloak to a mosque in the center of the city.  This allowed Omar to gain the political authority he needed to pursue the war; but more than that, the action symbolically promised that the Taliban, as a moral force, would roll through Afghanistan and then magnify itself throughout the Islamic world.
• The absence of any court of justice set the stage for the carnival of religious tyranny that characterized the Taliban era.  The Saudis and the Pakistanis, the Taliban’s chief backers, quickly recognized the new government.  During the entire Taliban reign, only one other country—the United Arab Emirates—recognized their rule as legitimate.
• “You are not unaware of the injustice, repression, and aggression that have befallen Muslims through the alliance of Jews, Christians, and their agents, so much so that Muslims’ blood has become the cheapest blood and their money and wealth are plundered by the enemies,” bin Laden said, on August 23, 1996, in his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.”  The latest indignity—“one of the worst catastrophes to befall the Muslims since the death of the Prophet”—was the presence of American and coalition troops in Saudi Arabia.
• Inspired by Ramzi Yousef’s attack on the WTC, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed joined his nephew for a month in the Philippines in 1994.  They came up with an extraordinary plan to bomb twelve American jumbo jets over the Pacific.  They called it Operation Bojinka. 

Bread and Water

• 1998 CNN Interview—Osama bin Laden declared takfir against the Saudi royal family, saying that they were no longer to be considered Muslims and therefore could be killed. 
• The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it, as the Taliban would conclusively demonstrate.  Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.
• The Islamic Group’s strategy was to attack tourism, the life force of the Egyptian economy and the main source of foreign exchange, in order to provoke the government into repressive, unpopular responses. 
• On November 17, 1997, six young men dressed in black uniforms entered the Queen Hatshepsut’s temple on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor.  Fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians had died, not counting the attackers.  It was the worst act of terror in modern Egyptian history. 
• The death of the killers showed the influence of Zawahiri; until the point, the Islamic Group had never engaged in suicide operations. 
• Immediately after Luxor, there was a period of introspection among the Islamic leaders, who analyzed their predicament and prescribed a strategy for the triumph of Islam and the final showdown with the unbelievers. 
• The main point of their diagnosis was that the Islamic nation was in misery because of illegitimate leadership.  The jihadis then asked themselves who was responsible for this situation.  They pointed to what they called the Christian-Jewish alliance that had emerged following the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which Britain and France divided Arab lands between them, and the Balfour Declaration the following year, which called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  Soon thereafter the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and with it the Islamic caliphate.  This was all seen as an ongoing campaign by the Christian-Jewish alliance to suffocate Islam, using such tools as the United Nations, complaint Arab rulers, multinational corporations, satellite channels, and international relief agencies. 
• In January 1998, Zawahiri began writing a draft of a formal declaration that would unite all of the different mujahideen groups that had gathered in Afghanistan under a single banner.  It would turn the movement away from regional conflicts and toward a global Islamic jihad against America. 
• The language was measured and concise, in comparison with bin Laden’s declaration of war two years before.  Zawahiri cited three grievances against the Americans.  First, the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia seven years after the end of the Gulf War.  Second, America’s intention to destroy Iraq, as evidenced by the death of what he said was more than a million civilians.  Third, the American goal of propping up Israel by incapacitating the Arab states, whose weakness and disunion are Israel’s only guarantee of survival.
• All this amounted to a “war on God, his messenger, and the Muslims.”  Therefore, the members of the coalition were issuing a fatwa: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
• Zawahiri’s assistant, Ahmed al-Najjar, later said, “I myself heard bin Laden say that our main objective is now limited to one state only, the United States, and involves waging a guerrilla war against all U.S. interests, not only in the Arab region but also throughout the world.”

Now It Begins

• Al-Qaeda’s fortunes began to improve after the coalition’s fatwa to kill Americans wherever they might be found.  Until then, bin Laden’s name and his cause had been obscure outside of Saudi Arabia and Sudan, but news of the fatwa excited a new generation of fighters. 
• Overvaluing information for its own sake, the agency was a black hole, emitting nothing that was not blasted out of it by a force greater than gravity—and it recognized that O’Neill was such a force.  He would use the information—for an indictment, a public trial—and it would no longer be secret, no longer be intelligence; it would be evidence, it would be news, and it would become useless as far as the agency was concerned.  The agency treated the exposure of any bit of intelligence as a defeat. 
• Bin Laden said that the bombings gave the Americans a taste of the atrocities that Muslims had experienced.  But to most of the world, and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response.
• O’Neill snatched a young Lebanese American agent named Ali Soufan from another squad.  Soufan was the only FBI agent in New York who actually spoke Arabic, and one of eight in the entire country.  On his own, he had studied bin Laden’s fatwas and interviews, so when a claim of responsibility was sent to several press organization the same day of the bombing from a group no one had ever heard of before, Soufan immediately recognized bin Laden as the author. 
• Prior to the Embassy bombings investigation, the FBI had never solved an overseas bombing. 
• The level of coordination and technical sophistication required to carry out nearly simultaneous explosions was surprising, but more troubling was the willingness of al-Qaeda to escalate the level of violence. 
• The main legacy of Operation Infinite Reach 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. 

The New Millennium

• Bin Laden made a pledge of personal fealty, much like the one that members of al-Qaeda swore to him.  He acknowledged Omar as the leader of the faithful.  “We consider you to be our noble emir,” bin Laden wrote.  “We invite all Muslims to render assistance and co-operation to you, in every possible way they can.”
• With this promise in his pocket, Mullah Omar’s attitude changed.  He no longer viewed bin Laden as a threat.  A friendship developed between them.  From now on, when other members of the Taliban complained about the Saudi, Mullah Omar proved to be bin-Laden’s strongest defender.
• O’Neill had come to feel that there was a pace to the al-Qaeda attacks, and he told friends, “We’re due.”
• On December 14, 1999, a border guard in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam.  Ressam was not really an al-Qaeda operative, although he had learned to build bombs in one of bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan.  He was a freelance terrorist sailing under al-Qaeda colors, the sort that would proliferate after 9/11.
• January 3 is the Night of Power, the date near the end of Ramadan, commemorating the date that the Prophet Mohammed began to receive the word of God in a cave on Mount Hira.
• American investigators learned that on January 3, 2000, a fiberglass skiff was to have been used in a suicide attack on an American destroyer, USS The Sullivans, that was refueling in Aden harbor. 

Boom

• In the jihad against the Soviets, some Shia Muslims had participated, but the new jihadis were entirely Sunni.
• Some of the goals of Al-Qaeda were: (1) establishing the rule of God on Earth, (2) attaining martyrdom in the case of God, and (3) purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity.  These three precisely stated goals would frame al-Qaeda’s appeal and its limitations.  They beckoned to idealists who did not stop to ask what God’s rule would look like in the hands of men whose only political aim was to purify the religion.  Death, the personal goal, was still the main attraction for many of the recruits.
• The manual for the jihadis, entitled Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, stated “The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates…Platonic ideals…nor Aristotelian diplomacy.  But it does know the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun.”
• There were three states in the training.  The raw recruits spent a period of fifteen days in boot camp, where they were pushed to total exhaustion, with only a couple of hours of sleep some nights.  During the second phase, lasting forty-five days, the recruits received basic military training in map reading, trenching, celestial navigation, and the use of an extraordinary variety of weapons, including light machine guns, Claymore mines, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets, and anti-aircraft missiles.  The targets were always Americans, either U.S. soldiers or vehicles, but there were other “enemies of Islam,” according to the handwritten notes of a student in an al-Qaeda ideology class: (1) Heretics (the Mubaraks of the world), (2) Shiites, (3) America, and (4) Israel.
• Graduates of the second phase could choose to attend the guerrilla warfare school, which also lasted forty-five days. 
• What the recruits tended to have in common—besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills—was displacement.  Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared. 
• Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned to the mosque, where he found companionship and the consolation of religion.  Islam provided the element of commonality.  It was more than a faith—it was an identity.
• Spurred by the rhetoric and by the legend of the victory against the Soviets, young men made the decision, usually in small groups, to go to Afghanistan. 
• On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque.  It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath.  According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response.
• The goal of Al-Qaeda was not only to inflict symbolic damage.  Bin Laden imagined that America--as a political entity--could actually be destroyed.  "America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and a wide-ranging economy," he later conceded, "but all this is built upon an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its obvious weak spots.  If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership."  Inevitably, he believed, the confederation of states that made up America would dissolve.
• Khaled al-Mihdhar married Hoda al-Hada, the sister of one of his Yemeni comrades in arms, and fathered two daughters by her.  In fact, it was her family's phone that the FBI had turned up in the embassy bombings investigation and that would prove so important in understanding the scope of al-Qaeda. The movements of Nawaf al-Hazmi and Mihdhar offered the most realistic hope for American intelligence to uncover the 9/11 conspiracy.
• There were now two separate teams on teh rapidly changing planes operation, each of which would lead to a major attack.  The Hamburg cell reported their passports lost or stolen in order to cover up their trip to Afghanistan.  meantime, the four men who had originally been selected for the planes operation went to Kuala Lumpur.  Besides Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, there were the two Yemenis: Abu Bara and Tewfiq bin Attash, who adopted the name Khallad. 
• The meeting in Kuala Lumpur was not wiretapped, so the opportunity to discover the plots that culminated in the bombing of the USS Cole and the 9/11 attack was lost.
• The CIA also failed to alert anyone that the men should be followed.  Nor did the agency notify the State Department to put Mihdhar's name on a terror watch list so that he would be stopped or placed under surveillance if he entered the United States. 
• The agency also neglected to inform either the FBI or the State Department that at least one known al-Qaeda operative was in the country, al-Hazmi.
• Al-Mihdhar arrived in Los Angeles soon after, and he and al-Hazmi became acquainted with Omar Bayoumi, a forty-two-year-old student who rarely attended classes and was supported by a stipend from a Saudi government contractor. 
• One FBI agent followed the men but was called off the investigation by his supervisor, who worried that the Bayoumi inquiry would intrude on a major counter terrorism operation then under way. 
• Bayoumi would later tell FBI agents that on February 1, 2000, he went to the Saudi consulate and overheard two men talking in Gulf Arabic.  He said he spoke briefly with Mihdhar and Hazmi. 
• He let them stay in his apartment, then found them another place across the street and lent them money for the first two months' rent. 
• The FBI had all the authority it needed to investigate these men and learn what they were up to, but because the CIA failed to divulge the presence of two active members of al-Qaeda, the hijackers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them.  

The Silicon Valley

• The "tube" construction that held up these stupendous stilts required columns spaced only twenty-two inches apart. 
• After the WTC bombing, Ramzi Yousef moved to Manila and began concocting extraordinary schemes to blow up a dozen American airliners simultaneously, to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton, and to crash a private plane into CIA headquarters.  
• Zawahiri returned to Sudan facing a dispiriting choice: whether to maintain the independence of his bootstrap organization that was always struggling financially or to formally join forces with OBL.  When they had met nearly a decade before, Zawahiri was by far the more powerful figure; he had an organization behind him and a clear objective: to overthrow the government of Egypt.  But now OBL, who had always had the advantage of money, also had his own organization, one that was much more ambitious than al-Jihad.
• In an August 1993 bombing, the bomber killed Egypt’s interior minister, Hasan al-Alfi, and killed him.  With this action, Zawahiri introduced the use of suicide bombers, which became the signature of al-Jihad assassinations and later of al-Qaeda “martyrdom operations.”  The strategy broke a powerful religious taboo against suicide.

Paradise Lost 

• Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam—pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics—would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal.
• Given the diversity of the trainees and their causes, OBLs main task was to direct them toward a common enemy.  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. 
• Enraged Somali tribesmen triumphantly dragged the bodies of the dead crewmen through the streets of Mogadishu, a sight that prompted President Clinton to quickly withdraw all American soldiers from the country.  OBL’s analysis of the American character had proved correct.
• The Egyptians were fed up with the violence spilling out of Sudan and protested again and again that OBL was behind it.  Finally, on March 5, 1994, Fahd personally decided to revoke OBL’s Saudi citizenship.
• Immediately after the king canceled OBL’s citizenship, Bakr bin Laden, the eldest brother, publicly condemned Osama, turning the families back to him.
• OBL sent Ali Mohammed to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, to conduct surveillance on American, British, French, and Israeli targets.
• But when the international community withdrew from Somalia, al-Qaeda lost its pallid excuse for attacking the embassy in Nairobi.  The plan was not forgotten, however; it was only filed away.

The Prince of Darkness

• John O’Neill had just been appointed chief of the FBI’s counter terrorism section.
• At 9:30 a.m. Pakistani time on February 7, the agents entered the Su-Casa Guest House in Islamabad and knocked on the door of room 16.  A sleepy Yousef was immediately thrown to the floor and handcuffed.  During the three days he was in SIOC, O’Neill turned forty-three years old.  He finally took his luggage to his new apartment.  It was Tuesday, his first official day on the job.
• Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) was mainly drawn from the CIA, the National Security Council, and the upper tiers of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the State Department. 
• The FBI had always been a problematic member of the CSG.  Its representatives tended to be close-mouthed and unhelpful, treating all intelligence as potential evidence that couldn’t be compromised, whether there was an actual criminal case or not.  O’Neill was different.  He cultivated his counterparts in other agencies rather than pulling down the bureaucratic shutters. 
• In 1995 their efforts resulted in a presidential directive giving the FBI the lead authority in both investigating and preventing acts of terrorism wherever in the world Americans or American interests were threatened. 
• Few people in American law enforcement or intelligence, including O’Neill had any experience with Islam or much understanding of the grievances that had already given rise to the attack on the WTC and other plots against the US.
• What distinguished O’Neill early in his new posting was his recognition of the fact that the nature of terrorism had changed; it had gone global and turned murderous. 
• They were quite different men, but O’Neill and OBL were well-matched opponents: ambitious, imaginative, relentless, and each eager to destroy the other and all he represented.
• In August 1885 OBL made a decisive break with his homeland.  In what he labeled a “frank manifesto,” OBL attacked King Fahd directly in one of his faxed commentaries.
• “It is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers—their filthy feet roaming everywhere—for no reason other than protecting your throne and protecting oil sources for their own use.  These filthy, infidel be allowed to remain in the Holy Land.”
• Many Saudis shared his hostility to the continuing American presence in the Kingdom, especially after Dick Cheney’s well-known pledge that they would leave.  Ostensibly, the troops remained in order to enforce the UN-mandated no-fly zone over Iraq.  By 1992, however, and certainly by 1993, there were enough new basing agreements in the region that the Americans could have withdrawn without jeopardizing their mission.  But the Saudi bases were convenient and well appointed, and there didn’t seem to be a sufficiently pressing need to leave.

The Boy Spies

• After al-Jihad bombed the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan, Zawahiri explained that there were no innocents inside the embassy.  Everyone who worked there, from the diplomats to the guards, was a supporter of the Egyptian regime, which had detained thousands of fundamentalists and blocked the rule of Islam.  Those who carried out the duties of the government must shoulder responsibility for its crimes.  No true Muslim could work for such a regime.  In this, Zawahiri was repeating the takfir view that had been carried to its logical extreme in Algeria.  Yes, he admitted, there might have been innocent victims—children, true believers—who also died, but Muslims are weak and their enemy is so powerful; in such an emergency, the rules against the slaughter of innocents must be relaxed.
• In his defense of the bombing, Zawahiri had to overcome this found taboo.  The bombers who carried out the Islamabad operation, Zawahiri said represent “a generation of mujahedeen that has decided to sacrifice itself and its property in the cause of God.  That is because the way of death and martyrdom is a weapon that tyrants and their helpers, who worship their salaries instead of God, do not have.”
• It was, Zawahiri argued, a suicidal choice.  Other Muslims did not condemn them at the time because they were acting for the glory of God and the greater good of Islam.  Therefore, anyone who gives his life in pursuit of the true faith—such as the bombers in Islamabad—is to be regarded not as a suicide who will suffer the punishment of hell but as a heroic whose selfless sacrifice will gain him an extraordinary reward in Paradise. 
• With such sophistry, Zawahiri reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder.
• Without the Egyptians, OBL was isolated and uncertain.  There was no one he could trust.  He knew that something might happen to him.  He was already looking for another sanctuary, just in case. 
• The catastrophe that the radical Islamist leaders of Sudan had created for themselves finally made itself starkly apparent.  The government’s complicity in the terror plots against New York and the attempted assassination of Mubarak guaranteed international sanctions, which took effect in April 1996.
• The Clinton administration still perceived OBL as a wealthy nuisance, not a mortal threat.  His name had arisen as a financier of terror mainly because of his support of the blind sheikh.  There was a consensus that he needed to be pushed out of his sanctuary in Sudan, because the country was overrun with Islamic terrorists, and they were far more dangerous with money than without.  There was no real debate about the consequences of expelling him, however.  Nor was there any point in forcing Sudan to hand him over to U.S. authorities, because there was no evidence so far that he had harmed American citizens.
• Having shorn OBL of most of his net worth, the Sudanese government thoughtfully chartered him an antique Soviet Tupolev jet.  OBL left on May 18, 1996.  His family scattered and broken.  The organization that he had built was torn apart.  He held America responsible for the crushing reversal that had led him to this state.

Hijira

• The Taliban arose in 1994 as a small group of students, most of them orphans who had been raised in the refugee camps and who were outraged by the chaos and depravity of the rule of the mujaheddin.  The liberators in the war against the Soviets had turned out to be more barbaric rulers than their enemy.  Thanks to the support of Pakistani intelligence, they were transformed from a populist militia into a formidable, highly mobile guerrilla army, on the verge of consolidating their rapid rise to power as they stood on the outskirts of Kabul, raining rockets into the ruins.
• Mullah Omar became devoted to the lectures of Sheikh Agdullah Azzam.  "Corruption and moral disintegration had gripped the land.  Killing, looting, and violence had become the norm.  Nobody had ever imagined that the situation could get this bad.  Nobody thought it could be improved, either."  In this desperate moment, Omar received a vision.  The Prophet appeared to him and instructed this simple village mullah to bring peace to his country.  
• There were three streams that fed the Taliban, which flooded across Afghanistan with such extraordinary rapidity.  One was the material support--money and arms--from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.  The second stream drew from the madrassas across the Pakistan border, which were crammed full with the sons of Afghan refugees.
• These boys had grown up in an exclusively male world, separated from their families for long periods of time.  The traditions and customs and lore of their country were distant to them.  Entrenched in their studies, which were rightly concentrated on the Quran and Sharia and the glorification of jihad, the talibs imagined a perfect Islamic society, while lawlessness and barbarity ran rampant all around them.  
• The third stream was opium.  Under the Taliban, Afghanistan became the largest poppy grower in the world.  
• On April 4, 1996, Omar took the Prophet's cloak to a mosque in the center of the city.  Omar gained the political authority he needed to pursue the war; but more than that, the action symbolically promised that the Taliban, as a moral force, would roll through Afghanistan and then magnify itself throughout the Islamic world.  
• The absence of any court of justice set the stage for the carnival of religious tyranny that characterized the Taliban era.  The Saudis and Pakistanis, the Taliban's chief backers, quickly recognized the new government.  During the entire Taliban reign, only one other country--the United Arab Emirates--recognized their rule as legitimate.  
• "You are not unaware of the injustice, repression, and aggression that have befallen Muslims through the alliance of Jews, Christians, and their agents, so much so that Muslims' blood has become the cheapest blood and their money and wealth are plundered by the enemies," bin Laden said, on August 23, 1996, in his "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places."  
• The latest indignity--"one of the worst catastrophes to befall the Muslims since the death of the Prophet"--was the presence of American and coalition troops in Saudi Arabia.
• Inspired by Ramzi Yousef's attack on the World Trade Center, Mohammed joined his nephew for a month in the Philippines in 1994.  They came up with an extraordinary plan to bomb twelve American jumbo jets over the Pacific.  They called in Operation "Bojinka".

Bread and Water

• In March 1997, a television crew from CNN, let by Peter Arnett, interviewed OBL.  OBL declared takfir against the royal family, saying that they were no longer to be considered Muslims and therefore could be killed.
• The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it, as the Taliban would conclusively demonstrate.  Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.
• The Islamic Group's strategy was to attack tourism, the life force of the Egyptian economy adn the main source of foreign exchange, in order to provoke the government into repressive, unpopular responses.
• November 17, 1997--Luxor Massacre
• Fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians had died, not counting the attackers.  It was the worst act of terror in modern Egyptian history. The death of the killers showed the influence of Zawahiri; until this point, the Islamic Group had never engaged in suicide operations.
• Immediately after Luxor, there was a period of introspection among the leaders, who analyzed their predicament and prescribed a strategy for the triumph of Islam and the final showdown with the unbelievers.
• The main point of their diagnosis was that the Islamic nation was in misery because of illegitimate leadership.  The jihadis then asked themselves who was responsible for this situation.  They pointed to what they called the Christian-Jewish alliance that had emerged following the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which Britain and France divided Arab lands between them, and the Balfour Declaration the following year, which called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  Soon thereafter the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and with it the Islamic caliphate.  This was all seen as an ongoing campaign by the Christian-Jewish alliance to suffocate Islam, using such tools as the United Nations, compliant Arab rulers, multinational corporations, satellite channels, and international relief agencies.
• In January 1998, Zawahiri began writing a draft of a formal declaration that would unite all of the different mujaheddin groups that had gathered in Afghanistan under a single banner.  it would turn the movement away from regional conflicts and toward a global Islamic jihad against America.  
• The language was measured and concise, in comparison with OBL's declaration of war two years before.  Zawahiri cited three grievances against the Americans.  First, the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia seven years after the end of the Gulf War.  Second, America's intention to destroy Iraq, as evidenced by the death of what he said was more than a million civilians.  Third, the American goal of propping up Israel by incapacitating the Arab states, whose weakness and disunion are Israel's only guarantee of survival.  
• All this amounted to a "war on God, his messenger, and the Muslims."  Therefore, the members of the coalition were issuing a fatwa: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilian and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."  
• "I myself heard OBL say that our main objective is now limited to one state only, the United States, and involves waging a guerrilla war against all U.S. interests, not only in the Arab region but also throughout the world.

Now It Begins

• Al-Qaeda's fortunes began to improve after the coalition's fatwa to kill Americans wherever they might be found.  until then, OBL's name and his cause had been obscure outside of Saudi Arabia and Sudan, but news of the fatwa excited a new generation of fighters.
• Overvaluing information for its own sake, the agency was a black hole, emitting nothing that was not blasted out of it by a force greater than gravity--and it recognized that O'Neill was such a force.  he would use the information--for an indictment, a public trial--and it would no longer be secret, no longer be intelligence; it would be evidence, it would be news, and it would become useless as far as the agency was concerned.  The agency treated the exposure of any bit of intelligence as a defeat.
• OBL said that the Embassy bombings gave the Americans a taste of the atrocities that Muslims had experience.  But to most of the world and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response.
• O'Neill snatched a young Lebanese American agent named Ali Soufan from another squad.  Soufan was the only FBI agent in New York who actually spoke Arabic, and one of eight in the entire country.  On his own, he had studied OBL's fatwas and interviews, so when a claim of responsibility was sent to several press organizations the same day of the bombing from a group no one had ever heard of before, Soufan immediately recognized OBL as the author.  
• The FBI had never solved an overseas bombing prior to the Embassy bombings.
• The level of coordination and technical sophistication required to carry out nearly simultaneous explosions was surprising, but more troubling was the willingness of al-Qaeda to escalate the level of violence.
• The main legacy of Operation Infinite Reach was that it established OBL 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.

The New Millennium

• OBL made a pleadge of personal fealty, much like the one that members of al-Qaeda swore to him.  He acknowledged Omar as the leader of the faithful.  "We consider you to be our noble emir," OBL wrote.  "We invite all Muslims to render assistance and cooperation to you, in every possible way they can." 
• With this promise in his pocket, Mullah Omar's attitude changed.  he no longer viewed OBL as a threat.  A friendshipdeveloped between them. From now on, when other members of the Taliban complained about the Saudi, Mullah Omar proved to be OBL's strongest defender.
• Prior to the new year, O'Neill had come to feel that there was a pace to the al-Qaeda attacks, adn he told friends, "We're due."
• On December 14, 1999, a border guard in Port Angeles, WA, stopped an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam.  Ressam was not really an al-Qaeda operative, although he had learned to build bombs in one of OBL's camps in Afghanistan.  He was a freelance terrorist sailing under al-Qaeda colors, the sort that would proliferate after 9/11.
• The Night of Power--January 3, 2000, five men broke their fast in Aden, Yemen, then walked down to the shore.  Later, American investigators would learn that the fiberglass skiff was to have been used in a suicide attack on an American destroyer, USS The Sullivans, that was refueling in Aden harbor.

Boom

• The new group of jihadis are predominantly Sunni.
• Goals of al-Qaeda: (i) establishing the rule of God on Earth; (ii) attaining martyrdom in the cause of God; (iii) purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity.
• These three precisely stated goals would frame al-Qaeda's appeal and its limitations.  They beckoned to idealists who did not stop to ask what God's rule would look like in the hands of men whose only political aim was to purify the religiion.  Death, the personal goal, was still the main attraction for many of the recruits.
• "The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates...Platonic ideals...nor Aristotelian diplomacy," the al-Qaeda training manual begins. "But it does know the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of hte cannon and machine gun."  
• There were three main stages in teh training of new recruits.  The raw recruits spent a period of fifteeen days in boot camp, where they were pushed to total exhaustion, with only a couple of hours of sleep some nights.  Durign the second phase, lasting forty-five days, the recruits received basic military training in map reqding, treatching, celestial navigation, and the use of an extraordinary variety of weapons, incluing light machine guns, Claymore mines, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets, adn anti-aircraft missiles.  The targets were always Americans, either U.S. soldiers or vehicles, but there were other "enemies of Islam," according to the handwritten notes of a studen in an al-Qaeda ideology class: (i) Heretics (the Mubaraks of the world), (ii) Shiites, (iii) America, and (iv) Israel.
•  Graduates of the second phase could choose to attend the guerrilla warfare school, which also lasted forty-five days.
• What the recruits tended to have in common--besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills--was displacement.  Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared.
• Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned to the mosque where he found companisionship and the consolation of religion.  Islam provided the element of commonality.  It was more than a faith--it was identity.
• Spurred by the rhetoric and by the legend of the victory agaisnst the Soviets, young men made the decision, usually in small groups, to go to Afghanistan.
• On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque.  It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath.  According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response.
• Their goal was not only to inflict symbolic damage.  OBL imagined that America--as a political entity--could actually be destroyed.  "America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and wide-rainging economy," he later conceded, "but all this is built upon an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to tis obvious weak spots.  If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership."  Inevidtably, he blieved, the conferderation of states that made up America would dissolve.
• Mihdhar married Hoda al-Hada, the sister of one of his Yemeni comrades in arms, and fathered two daughters by her.  In fact, it was her family's phone that the FBI had turned up in the embassy bombgins investigation adn that would prove so important in understanding the scope of al-Qaeda. 
• There were two separate teams on the rapidly changing planes operation.  The Hamburg cell reported their passports lost or stolen in order to cover up their trip to Afghanistan.  Then there were the four men who had originally been selected for planes operation went to Kuala Lumpur.  Besides Khaled al-Mihdhar adn Nawaf al-Hazmi, there were the two Yemenis: Abu Bara and Tewfiq bin Attash, who adopted the name Khallad. 
• The CIA asked the Malaysians to tape the Kuala Lumpur meeting.  The meeting was not wiretapped, so the opportunity to discover the plots that culminated in the bombing of the USS Cole adn the 9/11 attack was lost.
• The CIA failed to alert anyone that the men should be followed.  Nor did the agency notfiy the State Department to put Mihdhar's name on a terror watch list so that he would be stopped or placed under surveillance if he entered the United States.  
• When Hazmi flew to LA in January 2000, the CIA failed to notice that Mihdhar was traveling with him.  The agency neglected to inform either the FBI or the State Department that at least one known al-Qaeda operative was in the country.
• Soon after their arrival in LA, the two men became acquainted with Omar Bayoumi, a forty-two-year-old student who rarely attended classes and was supported by a stipend from a Saudi government contractor.  The FBI thought Bayoumi may be a Saudi agent but failed that any inquiries would intrude on a major counterterrorism operation then under way.
• Bayoumi would later calim that he went to went to a restaurant and heard Gulf Arabic being spoken.  He then spoke with Mihdhar adn Hazmi.  He let them stay in his apartment, then found them another place across teh street and lent them money for the first two months' rent.  
• The FBI had all the authority it needed to investigate these men adn learn waht they were up to, but because the CIA failed to divulge the presence of two active members of al-Qaeda, the hijackers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them.
• When Ramzi Yousef was arrested he was taken by helicopter alongside the WTC.  The SWAT guy gives him a nudge and says, 'You see, it's still standing.'  And Yousef says, 'It wouldn't be if we had had more money.'  Because it was still standing, however, the Trade Center had become a symbol of the success of New York's Joint Terrorism Task Force, a coalition of the FBI, teh CIA, the New York City Police Department, the Port Authority, and various other regional and federal agencies.
• While in Florida at a conference, O'Neill got a page, and left the room to return the call.  When he returned his briefcase was missing.  O'Neill first called the local police, then his supervisor.  He admitted that the briefcase contained some classified e-mails and one highly sensitive document, the Annual Field Office Report, which contained an itemized breakdown of every national security operation in New York.  The enemies that O'Neill had accumulated in his polarizing bureaucratic struggle were eager to destroy him, and now he had given them an opening. 
• Al-Qaeda had developed a management philosophy that it called "centralization of decision and decentralization of execution."  OBL decided on the targets, selected the leaders, and provided at least some of the funding.  After that, the planning of the operation and the method of attack were left to the men who would have the responsibility of carrying it out.  
• Originally, the intention had been to attack an oil tanker off the coast of Yemen.  OBL, characteristically, urged the planners to be more ambitious.  He wanted them to sink an American warship.
• Docked at a fueling buoy was the USS Cole, a billion-dollar guided-missile destroyer.
• On October 12, 2000, at 11:15 a.m., as the Cole was preparing to get under way, a figerglass fishing boat approached its massive prey.
• "The destroyer represented the capital of the West," OBL said, "and the small boat represented Mohammed."
• In a taxi in the city, the concussion shook Fahd al-Quso, a member of the al-Qaeda support team who was running late; he was supposed to have videotaped the attack, but he slept through the page on his phone that would have notified him to set up the camera.
• O'Neill spent much of his time coaxing the Yemeni authorities in the Political Security Organization--the equivalent of the FBI--to cooperate with the investigation.  He was conscious of the need to build cases that would survive American standards of justice, so his agents would have to be present during interrogations by local authorities to assure U.S. courts that none of the suspects had been tortured.
• Ambassadors have the final say over which Americans are allowed to remain in a foreign country, and O'Neill was not one of them.
• Quso admitted that he and one of the suicide bombers had delivered five thousand dollars to "Khallad"--the one-legged mastermind of the Cole attack--in Bangkok.
• Soufan and O'Neill faxed Khallad's passport photo to the Afghan source, who made a positive identification.  That was the first real link between the Cole bombing and al-Qaeda.
• The fact that the CIA withheld information about the mastermind of the Cole bombing and the meeting in Malaysia, when directly asked by the FBI, hampered the pursuit of justice in the death of seventeen American sailors.  Much more tragic consequences were on the horizon.
• Before the interview began with Soufan and Quso, a colonel in the PSO entered the room and kissed Quso on both cheeks--a signal to everyone that Quso was protected.  And indeed, whenever it seemed obvious that Quso was on the verge of making an important disclosure, the Yemeni colonel would insist that the session stop for meals and prayers.
• If the CIA had responded to SOufan by supplying him with the intelligence he requested, the FBI would have learned of the Malaysia meeting and of the connection to Mihdhar and Hazmi.  The Bureau would have learned--as the agency alreayd knew--that the al-Qaeda operatives were in America and had been for more than a year.
• The strike on the Cole had been a great victory for OBL.  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 to teh Cole bombing.
• OBL was angry and disappointed.  He hoped to lure America into the same trap the Soviets had falled 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.

The Big Wedding

• OBL turned to Zawahiri and the Egyptian with a particular task.  He wanted them to kill Ahmed Shah Massoud.  The Northern Alliance commander represetned the only credible force keeping the Taliban from completely consolidating their hold on Afghanistan.
• If the agents in Minneapolis had been allowed to thoroughly investigate Moussaoui, they would have made the connection to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was sending him oney.  Moussaoui carried a letter of employment from Infocus Tech, which was signed by Yazid Sufaat.  That name meant nothing to the FBI, since the CIA kept secret the information about the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place in Sufaat's condo.
• The next day Bongardt sent Corsi an angry email, "Whatever has happened to this--someday somebody will die--and wall or not--the public will not understand why we are not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.'"
• Zawahiri's forged letter had gotten the two phony journalists into Massoud's office.  The cameraman's battery pack was filled with explosives.  The bomb tore the assassins apart, killed a translator, and drove two pieces of metal into Massoud's heart.
• When Ali Soufan heard the news in Yemen, he told another agent, "Bin Laden is appeasing the Taliban.  Now the big one is coming."
• Now the Northern Alliance was leadaerless, the last obstacle to the Taliban's total control of the country removed by this signifacnt favor.\

Revelations

• Soufan was told to identify the hijackers "by any means necessary."  The chief drew Soufan aside adn handed him a manila envelope.  Inside were three surveillance photos and a complete report about the Malaysia meeting--the very material Soufan had been asking for, which the CIA had denied him until now.  The wall had come down.  When Soufan realized that the agency adn some people in the bureau had known for more than a year and a half that two fo the hijackers were in the country, he ran into the bathroom and retched.
• The next day the CIA finally gave Soufan the fourth photo of the Malysia meeting, which it had buried until now.  Quso grudginly identified the figure in the picture as Khallad, although Soufan already knew who he was.  He was the mastermind of the Cole.  The photo was the first link between al-Qaeda and 9/11.
• Quso identified Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the second tower.