The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Of all the ills that might befall us, it's vanishingly unlikely we'd ever find ourselves the victim of a terror attack. And yet, ever since September 11th, that fear has loomed large in the American cultural imagination. It happened once, and it could happen again. But how exactly did it come to happen? That is the question Lawrence Wright seeks to answer in The Looming Tower, in which he traces the development of radical Islam and the life of Osama bin Laden, through the rise of al-Queda and the intelligence community turf wars that handicapped the country's ability to understand and prepare for the threat. It's a story that begins with seeds planted by a few in Egypt that grows to expand to Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the United States. It's a story about people, about men whose understandings of the world are on a collision course. It's a story about near-misses and mistakes that ends in tragedy.

I was a little hesitant when I picked this up...I'd read Ghost Wars about six months before and was worried that this would largely be a rehash of things I'd recently read. But that concern turned out to be unfounded. While there's certainly overlap, that book was focused heavily on Afghanistan, and the CIA's involvement in that country's recent history. This book is really about al-Queda and how it's leaders, Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, came to join together and carry out attacks against the West from their position in Afghanistan. If you're interested in this general subject area and think you might want to read one of these two books, I'd suggest The Looming Tower (or at least reading it first).

While there is no denying the incredible research and level of detail in Ghost Wars, the end result is a book that tends toward the dense. Having read it once, I'm sure it would take me at least another few passes through it to really feel like everything was sinking it. The Looming Tower doesn't bring that level of specificity, but it's not really trying to either. That's not to insinuate that it's not deeply rooted in fact and without a breadth of source material. The references section is extensive. But what The Looming Tower does well is actually stringing that all together into a cohesive narrative. Depending on the author's skill level (and, to be honest, intended audience), non-fiction can struggle with storytelling and a tendency toward dryness. But this is where Wright shines. Despite working with names, places, and concepts that are largely only vaguely familiar to a Western readership, he never lets the pace get bogged down in information dumps. Like the events it recounts, it keeps on moving forward to what we know is coming.

That's not to say it's perfect. There's an emphasis on counter-terrorism expert John O'Neill (who died helping evacuate others on 9/11), especially his personal life, that doesn't quite fit in with the overall flow of the book that I think should have gotten trimmed. And, having read Ghost Wars, I thought the situation in Afghanistan and the relationship of al-Queda and the Taliban was simplified too far. I think the book could have added about 50 pages and given everything a bit more depth and shading and been stronger for it. But for a primer on the situation in the Middle East and inside the federal bureaucracy that culminated in September 11th, written for a wide audience, I think this a very good book indeed. I highly recommend it!

I took away from this book a new picture of terrorists, finding out terrorists are generally well educated and are not always deeply religious. This is surprising. They all seem, however, to be expatriots, living away from the countries of their ancestors. What else? Bin Laden's father was blinded by a teacher at school; after the incident, his father never returned to school and was illiterate for his entire life. O'Neill, one of the senior figures at the FBI who was in search for Bin Laden, left the agency on August 22 and reported to his new job, head of security for the Twin Towers. He was on the job on September 11 and was killed. I never quite figured out what motivated the terrorists. But most used the text of a book written many hundreds of years after the Koran as their basis for action. The Koran itself states explicitly that suicide will result in a trip to Hell. Murder in the Koran is prohibited. The terrorists, thus, are not following the Koran, but those who have interpreted and elaborated on it.

I recently read “Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11” by Mitchell Zuckoff, which I gave a 5-star rating. Zuckoff recommended this book to anyone who wanted to learn more about Muslim fundamentalism and the road to 9/11. Although written by two different authors with different styles, the two books together act like a diptych. Therefore, I highly recommend reading both books.

I learned a lot from this book, starting as early as 1948, which was surprising to me. It describes how Qutb laid the foundation for fundamentalist Islamic ideology in the late 1940s. It connects major developments in the 20th century familiar to us and explains their influence on the Arabic world and Islam as a whole, which went unnoticed by the West. The anti-Semitic thoughts from the early 20th century passed on to the Arabic world, especially when the Jews were granted their own state in the middle of the Arabic world after World War II. Anti-colonialism, the Cold War, and the discovery of oil on the Arabic peninsula had a dramatic influence on Arabs and the countries they lived in. Add to that corruption, nepotism, and the opportunism from the West during the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, and a poisonous cocktail is being brewed before our eyes.

The last part of the book is about the founding of Al Qaeda and the bombing of the two embassies in East Africa and the attack on the USS Cole. It becomes painfully clear that rivalry and distrust between the FBI and CIA stopped the agencies from sharing vital information. It's hard to say whether 9/11 could have been prevented if all agencies had worked together, and the book never draws this conclusion. However, it is obvious that somehow, somewhere, all the information was available within several government agencies. So there was a fair chance of unraveling the 9/11 conspiracy.

The book stops at the events of 9/11. As it was written in 2006, it does not cover the death of Osama bin Laden.

Finally, this book made me think. We all know what the US (or the West as a whole) did after 9/11. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of privacy, and the far-reaching powers given to organizations like the NSA to gather information by any means. It is understandable when reading this story, but on the other hand, it becomes obvious that the issue was not so much a lack of intelligence but more the way it was used.

5 stars for this Pulitzer Prize winning book