hardened Egyptians: Wright, Looming Tower, 162.
met with the king: US News & World Report staff, Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War (Random House, 1992), 82; Wright, Looming Tower, 178.
one hundred thousand Muslims ready: Wright, Looming Tower, 178–79. Wright notes that bin Laden’s offer “was a bizarre and grandiose replication of General Schwarzkopf’s briefing.”
hundreds of pamphlets: Central Intelligence Agency, “Usama Bin Ladin: Islamist Extremist Financier” (declassified 1996 memorandum), available on the George Washington University’s National Security Archives website.
Yemen: Abu Musab al Suri, quoted in Tawil, Brothers in Arms, 27. For a discussion of bin Laden’s early focus on fighting communism, see Wright, Looming Tower, 150.
CHAPTER 5: PREPARATION
killed nineteen White Devils: The crash resulted in 130 casualties, including 24 fatalities. Mary Ellen Condon-Rall, Disaster on Green Ramp: The Army’s Response (Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1996), appendix.
parachute drop since World War II: John R. Ballard, Upholding Democracy: The United States Military Campaign in Haiti, 1994–1997 (Praeger, 1998), xiii.
“the most violent regime”: Bill Clinton, “In the Words of the President: The Reasons Why the U.S. May Invade Haiti,” New York Times, September 16, 1994.
sixty-one war planes: Douglas Jehl, “Haiti’s Military Leaders Agree to Resign,” New York Times, September 19, 1994.
deaths occur on the field: “Historically, approximately 90% of combat-related deaths occur prior to a casualty reaching a medical treatment facility (MTF).” Russ S. Kotwal et al., “Eliminating Preventable Death on the Battlefield,” Archives of Surgery (December 2011), 1350).
emergency medical technicians (EMTs): “100% were trained as first responders, 10% as emergency medical technicians” (Sherry Wren, “Invited Critique,” in Kotwal et al., “Eliminating Preventable Death,” 1358).
more than eight thousand operations: The time frame for these raids was October 1, 2001, to March 31, 2010. Kotwal et al., “Eliminating Preventable Death,” 1351.
complications from surgery: “None of the 32 deaths resulted from the 3 major potentially survivable causes of death . . . defined in the literature. One casualty with potentially survivable extremity wounds died of post-surgical complications following evacuation” (ibid., 1352).
rate proved to be lower: “Although the DOD does not have a process to systematically evaluate potentially survivable deaths, the regiment’s 3% rate (1 in 32) is significantly lower than the 24% rate (232 in 982) previously reported for a subset of US fatalities from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom” (ibid.).
wounded 4,500—mostly Kenyans: “U.S. Grand Jury Indictment Against Usama Bin Laden: Usama Bin-Laden, Muhammad Atef et al.,” (Counts 4 thru 238), United States District Court, Southern District of New York, November 6, 1998, 37.
blinded: Wright, Looming Tower, 308.
immediately suspected Osama bin Laden: Commission members and staff: Thomas H. Kean et al., The 9/11 Commission Report: The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, July 22, 2004, 115–16.
lived in Sudan: Wright, Looming Tower, 187.
fax machine from the Hindu Kush: Notes to Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries” in Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, ed. Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli (Belknap Press, 2008), 274.
primarily a financier: Central Intelligence Agency, “Usama Bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier” (declassified 1996 memorandum), available on the George Washington University’s National Security Archives website.
“these young men love death”: The full text of this fatwa can be found translated as Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” in Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Context from al-Banna to Bin Laden, ed by Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, (Princeton University Press, 2009), 436–59.
volley of cruise missiles: Commission members, 9/11 Commission Report, 117.
including nerve gas: Wright, Looming Tower, 320.
produced pharmaceuticals: Ibid.
deprived thousands of Sudanese of medicine: Thomas Cushman and Simon Cottee, eds., Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left (New York University Press, 2008), 223.
filed suit against the United States: Ibid.
sixty-six Tomahawk cruise missiles: Wright, Looming Tower, 320.
thought bin Laden would be: Ibid., 321.
on the road to Kabul: Ibid., 321–22.
wounding twice that number: The various casualty claims were reported in Ibid., 323.
thirty militants were killed: Commission members, 9/11 Commission Report, 117.
twenty of its trainees: Weaver, “Real Bin Laden,” 37.
snow-tracked Afghan mountains: Ibid., 32.
“killed Pakistani intelligence officers”: Ibid., 38.
less inclined to act that way: Ibid., 37–38.
counts against the accused: Figures related to the trial are from Benjamin Weiser, “4 Guilty in Terror Bombings of 2 U.S. Embassies in Africa; Jury to Weigh 2 Executions,” New York Times, May 30, 2001.
former members of Al Qaeda: Vernon Loeb and Christine Haughney, “Four Guilty in Embassy Bombings,” Seattle Times, May 30, 2001.
send him to the American courts: “Taliban Won’t Hand Over Osama Bin Laden,” PBS: Online, NewsHour, May 29, 2001.
CHAPTER 6: THE FIGHT BEGINS
That same morning: The four hijacked flights that morning departed between 7:59 A.M. and 8:20 A.M.
“Tighten your clothes well”: Muhammad ‘Ata al-Sayyid, “Final Instructions,” in Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Context from al-Banna to Bin Laden, ed. by Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, (Princeton University Press, 2009), 436–59.
“When you board the airplane”: Ibid., 469.
four hundred miles per hour: “Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7,” National Institute of Standards and Technology, November 2008, 15.
“for the sake of God”: Muhammad ‘Ata, “Final Instructions,” 471.
fifty thousand reserve troops: Jane Perlez, “After the Attacks: The Overview: U.S. Demands Arab Countries ‘Choose Sides,’” New York Times, September 15, 2001.
“with the terrorists”: George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” The George W. Bush White House website, September 20, 2001.
his ambassador to Pakistan: This scene is recounted by the former ambassador, Abdul Salam Zaeef, in his memoir, My Life with the Taliban (Columbia University Press, 2010), 149.
“resort to anything beyond threats”: Ibid.
Green Berets into northern Afghanistan: Gary Bernsten, Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda (Crown, 2005), 78.
Mullah Omar’s compound outside Kandahar: Ibid, 82.
blows against the United States: The effectiveness of these attacks—infrequent but more and more spectacular—were inseparable from bin Laden’s drumbeat of messaging that played on the increasingly unblinking media environment of the 1990s, including the growing private Arab TV stations. See Omar Saghi, “Introduction,” in Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, ed. Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli (Belknap Press, 2008), 24–28.
“wherever they find them”: Osama bin Laden, “World Islamic Front Statement Urging Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” in Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, 55.
two army engineer officers: Steve Vogel, The Pentagon: A History (Random House, 2008), xxiii–xxv.
air-conditioned office space: Ibid., 40. Other details about the concept for the Pentagon co
me from the same work, especially 137, 155.
17.5 miles of corridors: Ibid., xi.
thirty-three thousand workers: Ibid., 356.
first occupants in April 1942: Ibid., 213.
eighteen months from concept: Ibid., 295.
after midnight on October 11: “Vote Summary on the Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 114),” U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes, 107th Cong., 2nd sess., October 11, 2002 available from the Library of Congress THOMAS website. President Bush signed it into law five days later, on October 16, as Public Law 107-243.
refused to contribute: Robin Wright and Sonya Yee, “Mobilization of Iraqi Exiles Falls Short,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2003.
only seventy-four Iraqis: Ibid.
ninety million dollars: Ibid.
invited to attend: David Lightman, “Top Secret,” Hartford Courant, April 2, 2003.
ask questions or request information: “The most valuable part,” Senator Levin was quoted as saying in the New York Times, “is you can ask questions, you can press for information” (Carl Hulse and Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Strokes Lawmakers Every Morning, and They Seem to Like It,” New York Times, March 29, 2003).
while Levin had not: “Vote Summary on the Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 114).”
mulling plans to attack: The first briefing delivered to the chiefs of staff in “the Tank” (where they convene) occurred on Memorial Day, May 27, 2002. Micah Zenko writes an account of the briefing in Between Threats and War (Stanford University Press, 2010), 97.
lower limit of the No Fly Zone: Ibid., 98.
in Europe and perhaps beyond: When this facility was attacked and captured, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers suggested on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer that the facility was the source of the ricin and terrorist operatives implicated in the 2002 Wood Green ricin plot to attack the London subway. “U.S. Troops Search for Chemical Biological Weapons,” Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, March 31, 2003.
dispatching American bombers: Zenko, Between Threats and War, 98.
inserting a ground force: Ibid., 100.
attacking the Hussein regime: Ibid., 106
larger force package than envisioned: Ibid., 100.
equipment Ansar al-Islam had used: Ibid., 108–109.
soldiers and their families: Robert F. Worth, “Extension of Stay in Iraq Takes Toll on Morale of G.I.’s,” New York Times, July 19, 2003.
more Americans had died: Sergio Vieira, “U.S. Deaths in Postwar Iraq Equal to Those in Conflict,” CNN, August 25, 2003.
CHAPTER 7: THROUGH THE HOURGLASS
drove through a field: R. Jeffrey Smith, “After 10 Months in Iraq, U.S. Marks 500th Military Death,” Washington Post, January 18, 2004.
another eight times over: At the time of writing, 4,486 Americans had died in the Iraq war, according to icasualties.org.
“responsibility and duty and engagements”: T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Vintage, 2008), 41.
four square miles: William Langewiesche, “Welcome to the Green Zone,” Atlantic, November 2004.
busts from their perches: Joel Brinkley, “A Joyful Palace Event: Four Heads Roll in Baghdad, and All of Them Are Hussein’s,” New York Times, December 3, 2003.
rebuilding the stock market: George Packer’s description of the palace is unfortunately quite accurate: “Amid the grotesque faux-baroque furnishings, the palace was a hive of purposeful activity. . . . Most of them seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad. . . . Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application.” George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 183–84. See also Yochi J. Dreazen, “How a 24-Year-Old Got a Job Rebuilding Iraq’s Stock Market,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2004.
only a fraction of their size: Eight thousand seven hundred soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division replaced the 101st in January 2004. Eric Hamilton, “The Fight for Mosul,” Institute for the Study of War, 7–8.
left my key TF 714 staff behind: My recollection of this October trip and helicopter flight was confirmed in interviews with team members present.
the administration’s official line: That week President Bush said, “The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become.” “Week of Violence,” NewsHour, PBS, October 31, 2003.
Sunni stronghold after the invasion: Eric Hamilton, “The Fight for Mosul,” 4.
sandbags, burlap sacks: These processes were described in interviews with participants.
at 4:30 P.M.: Langewiesche, “Welcome to the Green Zone.”
KAMAZ flatbed truck: Sameer N. Yacoub, “FBI: Deadly U.N. Headquarters Bomb Made from Materials from Saddam’s Old Arsenal,” Associated Press, August 20, 2003.
“they can rape the land”: “The Insurgency,” Frontline, PBS, February 21, 2006. Zarqawi later claimed responsibility for the U.N. attack, among others, saying, “God honored us and so we harvested their heads and tore up their bodies in many places.”
during East Timor’s independence: Abu Omar al-Kurdi, an Al Qaeda in Iraq operative, said Zarqawi targeted Vieira de Mello specifically as “the person behind the separation of East Timor from Indonesia.” Quoted in Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press, 2008), 514.
a cap attributed to Secretary Rumsfeld: Interview with senior military official.
critical step to secure authority: Interview with participant.
CHAPTER 8: THE ENEMY EMERGES
a framed exhibition case: Don Van Natta, “Hussein’s Gun May Go on Display at Bush Library,” New York Times, July 5, 2009.
three concentric circles: This understanding of Al Qaeda’s structure appears in Coll, Ghost Wars, 474. Coll notes that by the late 1990s, such a description of the terrorist group was “common” at the CIA.
core was a bureaucracy: Commission members and staff: Thomas H. Kean, et al., “Overview of the Enemy: Staff Statement No. 15,” National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, June 16, 2004, 2–3 (hereafter, “Overview of the Enemy”).
“centralization of decision”: Khalid al Hammadi, “Bin Ladin’s Former ‘Bodyguard’ Interviewed on Al-Qaida Strategies,” Al-Quds al Arabi, trans. by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, August 3, 2004. The article quotes Abu Jandal (a former “personal guard” to bin Laden) explaining this operational model in 2004. Since then, this statement has been cited by both Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, 359) and Peter L. Bergen (The Osama bin Laden I Know, 253). The organization, as Steve Coll describes it, “was tightly supervised at the top and very loosely spread at the bottom” (Ghost Wars, 474).
top-level Military Affairs Committee: Al Hammadi, “Bin Ladin’s Former ‘Bodyguard.’”
staying to clean their tracks: “Overview of the Enemy,” 8.
in Europe, and elsewhere: Contrary to reports, bin Laden did not personally finance Al Qaeda; estimates of his fortune were chronically inflated, and determining his actual wealth was a persistent difficulty for the intelligence community. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens, 347–48, 488–96.
twenty other groups: Commission Members, 9/11 Commission Report, 470, note 80.
bin Laden attempted to bring: Leah Farrall, “How Al Qaeda Works,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2011).
ten thousand and twenty thousand: 9/11 Commission Report,
67. This figure is also cited by Thomas Hegghammer (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” Middle East Journal [Winter 2006], 14) and Wright (Looming Tower, 341).
as high as seventy thousand: Bruce Hoffman, “Leadership Secrets of Osama bin Laden,” Atlantic, April 2003.
hard, poor lives: Coll, Ghost Wars, 474–75.
science and engineering degrees: Wright notes the “strong bias” toward these specific academic disciplines (Looming Tower, 340–41).
physical training alongside indoctrination: Behavior we witnessed on the battlefield validated Norwegian terrorism scholar Thomas Hegghammer’s assessment: “Here lies the key to understanding the extremism and the internal cohesion of the so-called ‘al-Qa’ida network.’ The training camps generated an ultra-masculine culture of violence which brutalized the volunteers and broke down their barriers to the use of violence. . . . [T]he harsh camp life built strong personal relationships between them. Last but not least, they fell under the ideological influence of Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who generated a feeling among the recruits of being part of a global vanguard of holy warriors, whose mission was to defend the Islamic world against attacks by the Jewish-Crusader alliance” (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 14).
invited attendees to brainstorm: “Overview of the Enemy,” 9.
an Al Qaeda trademark: Wright, Looming Tower, 211.
prestige of such “martyrdom operations”: “Overview of the Enemy,” 10.
graduating to advanced training: Ibid.
endorsed the same strategy: Hegghammer writes of the “ideological unity” among men who had passed through the camps (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 14).
across sixty countries: Coll, Ghost Wars, 474.
control over the disparate network: “The eviction from Afghanistan in 2001 made al Qaeda Central more dependent on franchises to maintain operational reach, while local groups were attracted by the strength of the al Qaeda brand name.” Thomas Hegghammer, “The Ideological Hybridization of Jihadi Groups,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, November 18, 2009.
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