The story of the man who nearly prevented the 9/11 attack: 9781582951158: Amazon.com: Books

CIA failure to warn of warning signs of 9/11 attack continues to be one of intelligence agencies’ most controversial questions, after 20 years of terrorist attack that has changed the story.

In 1996, five years before the attack, the United States received a declaration of war from a man with a long beard, dressed in a tunic, speaking to them from a cave in Tora Bora.

They never imagined that he would become America’s main public enemy.

However, for what they were primitive, it was actually a message that would flow to some 20,000 people by the year 2000. Most of them with a university education and a penchant for engineering.

This is how Lawrence Wright explains it in the book “The elevated tower”, which won him the Pulitzer Prize: Bin Laden orchestrated his strategy “by invoking images which were deeply meaningful to many Muslims, but practically invisible to those who do not know this faith”.

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The book is considered one of the essential elements for understanding the World Trade Center attacks: it includes 500 interviews conducted in five years to understand how bin Laden became what he was.

For CIA agents, Bin Laden was the essence of the delay. A senior Clinton administration official put it this way: “How can a man in a cave outshine the world’s leaders in the information society?”

However, John O’Neil, head of the FBI’s counterterrorism section, detected something different. Bin Laden was not a primitive man, but sought to resemble Muhammad: he fasted on the same days as the prophet and spoke in verse formulated as poetry.

His message was not for the West, but for Muslims, and that misled American analysts.

John O’Neil died the day of the attack: he was in one of the towers.

The same poses and postures that seemed backward to Western audiences are considered sacred according to Islamic tradition considered sacred. Even the Taliban regularly express themselves in poetry.

“The elevated tower” follows the life of John O’Neil, one of the few American agents to have understood, since the 1990s, the extent of the threat posed by Al-Qaida.

Why read it

“The elevated tower” is a mixture of detailed chronicle and Thriller in French stunning events that caused September 11. It also raises a reflective inspection of the world that produced the perpetrators of the attack.

The book has won multiple awards, won journalist Lawrence Wright the Pulitzer Prize, and is considered the best book ever written on the origins of al Qaeda and the death of Bin Laden.

About the Author

Lawrence Wright is a prestigious Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist, screenwriter and screenwriter and regular contributor to The New Yorker. He has published three essays on the Debate label: The High Tower, The Years of Terror and God Save Texas. World’s End Day, a medical thriller written before the Covid-19 pandemic, is his first novel and the translation rights have been sold in more than ten languages.