A 'painstaking' record of the events leading up to 9/11

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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright.
Probably the best-written account of the terrorist group’s origins and the nexus of radical personalities at its center, Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account is mostly a painstaking record of bureaucratic failure: Notably, the CIA was aware for more than a year that two of the group’s operatives were in the US — information it delivered to the FBI on Sept. 12, 2001.
The book is told primarily through the lives of four individuals, Wright told The New Yorker in 2006: Saudi construction scion Osama bin Laden; his Egyptian deputy and personal physician Ayman al-Zawahiri; former Saudi intelligence head Prince Turki al-Faisal; and FBI agent John O’Neill. Buy The Looming Tower from your local bookstore.

document fetched 2026-09-12 02:58 · canonical https://semafor.com/article/09/11/2026/a-painstaking-record-of-the-events-leading-up-to-911