Book Review | Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
Studies in Intelligence, 2007

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

Lawrence Wright. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 470 pp., endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

The term looming tower in the title of Lawrence Wright’s book has a double meaning. Usama bin Laden used these words from the Koran in a video-taped speech to the 9/11 hijackers: “Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.” The other meaning is self-explanatory. Wright tells a compelling story of the key men behind the attack; not those who flew the planes into the twin towers, but those who declared war on the non-believers and who formed al-Qa’ida. To a great extent Wright explains what caused these men to become Islamists. For each, he summarizes the events that radicalized them and the difficulties they experienced as they worked to achieve their goals.

The first is Sayyid Qutb, whom Wright calls the martyr. An Egyptian who became incensed with the decadent, promiscuous West while attending college in Colorado, Qutb returned to Egypt, joined the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and spent harsh time in jail. There he wrote a manifesto that espoused the doctrine of takfir which held that Islam was the only true religion and that true believers had the religious obligation to kill everyone—including women and children—who disagreed with the true faith. (29) Another Egyptian and eventually an al-Qa’ida leader was medical doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, who also spent time in an Egyptian jail for involvement in the assassination of Anwar Sadat. When released, he formed a radical Islamist group called al-Jihad dedicated to imposing Islamic law. By comparison, Usama bin Laden, the third principal of the book, lived a life of privilege. Wright tells of his gradual conversion to radicalism while fighting in Afghanistan. He also details bin Laden’s health problems, denying that he has kidney problems and speculating on Addison’s disease. He also tells of the serendipitous arrival in Afghanistan of the Western-educated Saudi volunteers who became his 9/11 instruments. This event made possible, notes Wright, the implementation of plans gradually formulated by al-Zawahiri and bin Laden since their first meeting in Pakistan in 1980, when they adopted the doctrine of takfir as al-Qa’ida’s operating principle.

The American side of the story is told in terms of FBI terrorist experts Dan Coleman, John O’Neill, and to a lesser extent Michael Scheuer and Richard Clarke. Although they had been tracking bin Laden for some time, they first learned of al-Qa’ida from a Sudanese defector, Jamal al-Fadl, shortly after bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996. While al-Qa’ida evolved and planned its terrorist operations—the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks in Lebanon, Africa, and on the USS Cole—leading up to 9/11, the FBI and CIA came to realize that al-Qa’ida planned terrorist attacks against America itself. Despite a bin Laden double agent in their midst, the FBI comes off better than it did in The Sacred Age of Terror by former NSC analysts, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, though Wright acknowledges that on 11 September 2001, the Bureau had only one analyst working full time on the al-Qa’ida account. But Wright shows convincingly that the failure of the FBI and the CIA to cooperate at key junctures and the failure of policymakers to take their assessments seriously gave bin Laden his success.

The Looming Tower offers by far the best explanation of the barely comprehensible radical Islamic reasoning behind 9/11. It is wonderfully written and thoroughly documented. Wright conducted more than 600 interviews in his research. The book ends with John O’Neill’s death in the World Trade Center and the disappearance of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri into the mountains.