In the pages ahead, my goal is to fulfill the promise I made in 2001 with “Six Lives”: to create a memorial to all those who were killed and to provide a record for all who survived. Plus one more: to build understanding among those who follow.
—Mitchell Zuckoff, Boston
THIS BOOK COULD BEGIN NEARLY FOUR DECADES BEFORE 9/11, IN 1966, with Egypt’s execution of a fanatically anti-Western author named Sayyid Qutb, whose writings inspired two generations of Islamist terror groups. Or further back in time, to 1918, with the defeat of the last great Muslim empire, the Ottoman sultanate. Or even further, to 1798, the year Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Egypt. Or seven hundred years before that, with the start of the Crusades. Or five hundred years before that, when Muslims believe the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Or more than two thousand years earlier, with the birth of Abraham.
When it comes to historical storytelling, it’s impossible for one volume to capture everything that came before. Yet a story must start somewhere. In this case, consider a relatively recent date: February 23, 1998. On that day, a shadowy forty-year-old Islamic militant named Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa, a furious religious decree. His edict declared war on the United States and all its citizens, wherever they or their interests could be found.
Faxed to an Arabic newspaper in London, the fatwa was signed by bin Laden, a Saudi heir to a construction fortune who was living in Afghanistan, and three other belligerent Islamic leaders, from Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Their declaration invoked a militant interpretation of jihad that they said obligated every Muslim to violently defend holy lands against enemies. Two years earlier, bin Laden had issued a narrower fatwa, aimed at military targets, that called for the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia: “[E]xpel the enemy, humiliated and defeated, out of the sanctities of Islam.” The new fatwa went much further.
In florid language, the February 1998 fatwa asserted that three primary offenses justified a declaration of global war: (1) the presence of American military forces on the holiest lands of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula; (2) the U.S.-led war in Iraq; and (3) the United States’ support of Israel, in particular its control of Jerusalem. “All of these crimes and sins committed by the Americans,” the statement said, “are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims.” In response, bin Laden and his cohort issued a command: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it… . We—with Allah’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”
By the time he released his more strident fatwa, the bearded, lanky bin Laden was no stranger to American intelligence agencies. Between 1996 and 1997, U.S. officials learned that he headed his own terrorist group and was involved in a 1992 attack on a hotel in Yemen that housed U.S. military personnel. They also discovered that bin Laden had played a role in the “Black Hawk Down” shootdown of U.S. Army helicopters in Somalia in 1993 and had possibly orchestrated a 1995 car bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five Americans working with the Saudi National Guard. After the fatwa, bin Laden’s threat profile rose dramatically among U.S. officials, especially when, six months later, sources blamed him for the nearly simultaneous bombings of American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, in neighboring Tanzania, which killed more than two hundred people. In response to those bombings, President Bill Clinton authorized an attack using Tomahawk missiles aimed at six sites in Afghanistan. American officials believed that bin Laden would be at one of the target locations, but he had left hours earlier, apparently tipped off by Pakistani officials.
Bin Laden remained a focus of kill or capture discussions, even as a federal grand jury in New York indicted him in absentia in 1998 for conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations. The U.S. intelligence community formally described his terror group, called al-Qaeda, or “the Base,” in 1999, fully eleven years after its formation. The attention only emboldened him. Bin Laden struck again in October 2000, when a small boat loaded with explosives tore a hole in a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, as it refueled off the coast of Yemen. The blast killed seventeen crew members and injured dozens more.
Yet even as they tried to keep tabs on bin Laden, even as warning signals became sirens, American political and intelligence leaders never fully grasped how determined he was to execute his fatwa with mass murder inside the United States. Despite solid clues—which intensified during the summer of 2001—and sincere investigative efforts by a small number of individuals, overall the U.S. government response to bin Laden was characterized by missed connections, squandered opportunities, and overlooked signs of impending disaster. An intelligence-gathering structure built to monitor Russian men with bad suits and nuclear warheads didn’t know what to make of a fanatical Saudi in flowing robes issuing fatwas by fax machine.
Even discounting for hindsight, overwhelming evidence shows that the U.S. government’s failure to anticipate the attacks of 9/11 was as widespread as it was ultimately devastating. Scores of examples prove that point, but consider one. Several months before 9/11, the head of analysis for the U.S. government’s Counterterrorism Center wrote: “It would be a mistake to redefine counterterrorism as a task of dealing with ‘catastrophic,’ ‘grand,’ or ‘super’ terrorism, when in fact most of these labels do not represent most of the terrorism that the United States is likely to face or most of the costs that terrorism imposes on U.S. interests.” Those very labels—“catastrophic,” “grand,” “super-terrorism”—were in fact the perfect descriptions of what was about to happen.
WHILE GOVERNMENT AND intelligence officials tried to get a handle on bin Laden before and after his February 1998 fatwa, average Americans remained largely ignorant of him and his followers. For one thing, there was bin Laden’s country of residence. Among journalists, Afghanistan had long been shorthand for any subject too far away for many Americans to care about.
When bin Laden’s name did appear in the American media, journalists focused mainly on his wealth. Usually he’d be described something like this: “[A] multimillionaire Saudi dissident whom the State Department has labeled ‘one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today.’” Rarely did news accounts suggest that he might pose a direct threat to the United States as a terrorist leader, although a 1997 article in the New York Times tiptoed in that direction, noting that “recent reports” indicated that bin Laden had paid for a house in Pakistan that sheltered the mastermind of a 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing that killed six people and injured more than a thousand. But in general, at the time of the fatwa it would have been easy for a well-read American to claim little knowledge and less concern about bin Laden. Before he issued his declaration of war, his name had appeared in a grand total of fifteen articles in the New York Times, sometimes only in passing. Most other American news organizations mentioned him less, if at all.
Even bin Laden’s February 1998 fatwa against Americans passed unnoticed by most U.S. news organizations. The first clear reference in the Times came nearly six months later, as an offhand line in a story about a search for suspects in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania: “Earlier this year, Mr. bin Laden and a group of extremist Muslim clerics called on their followers to kill Americans.” The story quickly moved on, mentioning only that bin Laden was the prime suspect in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, an apartment complex in Saudi Arabia, that killed nineteen American airmen.
