The rise and fall of Osama bin Laden

Review by Booklist Review

Bergen, CNN's national security analyst and the author of numerous books about terrorism, including United States of Jihad (2016), deepens readers' understanding of Osama bin Liden, founder of the terrorist group al-Qaeda and the force behind the 9/11 attacks. His extensive research includes information gathered by U.S. Navy SEALs when they killed bin Laden at his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011 and interviews Bergen conducted with President Obama and his national security team about the raid. Bergen reveals that before his death bin Laden was desperately seeking recognition for what he viewed as his role in the Arab Spring and that, after fleeing Afghanistan, he micromanaged operatives via letters hand-carried by couriers. Bergen meticulously describes bin Laden's youth, family, and radicalization. The narrative gains speed and suspense as Bergen recounts bin Laden's ruthless rise to power, al-Qaeda's early successes, and bin Laden's last bitter years, leading to an excellent summary of bin Laden's effect on American and international politics. Bergen reminds readers that, from presidents to frontline workers, including U.S. customs agent Diana Dean, who foiled an LAX bomb plot, many individuals in intelligence agencies and the military worked tirelessly to stop bin Laden. Bergen's detailed, incisive, and clarifying biography is an invaluable work marking 9/11's twentieth anniversary.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

CNN national security analyst Bergen (Trump and His Generals) adds intriguing new details to the story of Osama bin Laden in this solid, well-sourced biography. He visits bin Laden's ancestral home in Yemen; traces the origins of his wealth to his father's construction company in Saudi Arabia; and reveals that his father's death in a plane crash helped push bin Laden to embrace fundamentalist Islam. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, bin Laden raised millions of dollars to support the Afghan war effort, recruited Muslim fighters from around the world, and brought in construction equipment to build better roads for the mujahideen. Bergen dispels the myth that the CIA supported the formation of al-Qaeda (though the agency did funnel $3 billion in aid to Afghan fighters) and sharply critiques the slowness of America's response to the terrorist group's rise. He also delves into the 1998 attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, the planning for 9/11, bin Laden's escape from the mountains of Tora Bora when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and the raid that killed him in 2011. Documents seized in that raid reveal that at the time of his death, bin Laden believed his strategy for bringing down America had failed. Surprising insights (as a young man, bin Laden loved Bruce Lee movies and drove a white Chrysler with red leather seats) and fluid prose enrich this authoritative portrait of the terrorist leader and the movement he inspired. Foreign affairs buffs will be fascinated. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Aug.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Drawing on fresh documents and exclusive interviews with family members and associates, CNN analyst Bergen (The United States of Jihad) limns The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden (60,000-copy first printing). From retired U.S. Army Major General Eder, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line chronicles 15 mostly unacknowledged women, from a Dutch resistance fighter to an American tennis champion, who made a difference during World War II. In The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, former Guardian journalist English shows how a Weimar-era doctor's collection of artwork by psychiatric patients inspired emerging artists, which led to a Nazi backlash against so-called degenerate art and the patient-artists themselves, who were eventually gassed in a run-up to the Final Solution. Evans's Maiden Voyages moves from celebrities in first class to professional women in second class to desperate émigrés in steerage--not to mention crew members--to reveal how the golden age of ocean liner travel changed women's lives (60,000-copy first printing). As seen in Costa biography finalist Kavanagh's The Irish Assassins, republican militants in 1882 Dublin murdered Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke--Britain's chief secretary and undersecretary for Ireland, respectively--which ended their secret negotiations to achieve peace and independence for Ireland. Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, Levine details the battle that raged between Frederick Douglass and President Andrew Johnson as The Failed Promise of Reconstruction became evident. In Once More to the Sky, Raab collects the 10 Esquire pieces he wrote between 2005 and 2015 about the construction of One World Trade Center, adding an epilogue and including Woolhead's four-color photographs throughout. In The Ambassador, British American biographer Ronald (Condé Nast) digs deep into Joseph P. Kennedy's controversial tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (75,000-copy first printing). Former curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory Greenwich and director of the Antiquarian Horological Society, Rooney is the author to tell us About Time--that is, the history of timekeeping worldwide.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Journalist and national security analyst Bergen delivers a compelling, nuanced portrait of America's erstwhile public enemy No. 1. Osama bin Laden, whom the author interviewed long before he became a household name, was an enigmatic and contradictory man: He was rich but insisted on living ascetically--a fact that drove a son of his away in adulthood--and though he had the bearing of a quiet cleric, he engineered the deaths of countless thousands of people, and not just on 9/11. Bergen resists psychobiography while examining some of the facts of his family life that shaped his personality. He barely knew his father, whom his mother had divorced, and he idealized a remote, dusty corner of Yemen, his family seat, even as it gave birth to an offshoot of Islam that worshipped Christian saints alongside Muslim ones. In the last weeks of his life, bin Laden was consumed with the fear that, hidden away in a compound in Pakistan, he was missing out on what he felt should have been a leadership role in the Arab Spring movement--and never mind that it had little to do with his religious fundamentalism. Throughout, Bergen turns up revealing details and sharp arguments against received wisdom: one moment finds bin Laden treating his white beard with Just for Men hair dye; another introduces readers to one of his wives, a "poet and intellectual who…played a key, hidden role in formulating his ideas and helping him prepare his public statements." Though intelligence presumes him to have delegated the work to lieutenants, Bergen shows bin Laden micromanaging the 9/11 attacks and subsequent operations as the Bush administration bungled its efforts to find him. Meaningfully, the author notes that waterboarding and other torture of captured al-Qaida operatives yielded almost no actionable intelligence, and he disputes the claim that the Pakistani intelligence service shielded bin Laden from American discovery, discounting what has become the near-official narrative. Essential for anyone concerned with geopolitics, national security, and the containment of further terrorist actions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1: Sphinx Without a Riddle? ONE SPHINX WITHOUT A RIDDLE? A sphinx without a riddle. --Bismarck on Napoleon II Around the time of the 9/11 attacks, relatively little was known about Osama bin Laden. In the rare television interviews that al-Qaeda's leader had given before then he came across as largely inscrutable, with only an occasional thin, enigmatic smile playing across his lips. He had gone to considerable lengths to keep information about his private life hidden, which wasn't surprising since he had grown up in Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed societies in the world. He also led an organization, al-Qaeda, whose very existence was a well-kept secret for a decade after its founding in the late 1980s. The bin Laden family, one of the richest in the Middle East, had also largely avoided scrutiny. Was the leader of al-Qaeda a sphinx without a riddle? In recent years a great deal of information has surfaced to illuminate bin Laden and the inner workings of al-Qaeda. First there is the small library of documents found in bin Laden's Abbottabad compound that were released in full only in late 2017, amounting to some 470,000 files. Secondly, many bin Laden associates have finally shown a willingness to talk. The result is that a decade after his death, it is now possible to appraise him in all the many dimensions of his life: as a family man; as a religious zealot; as a battlefield commander; as a terrorist leader; as a fugitive. He was born a young man of contradictions, and he kept adding to them: he adored his wives and children, yet brought ruin to many of them. He was a multimillionaire, but he insisted his family live like paupers. He projected a modest and humble persona that appealed to his followers, but he was also narcissistically obsessed about how his own image played out in the media, and he ignored any advice from the leaders of al-Qaeda that conflicted with his own dogmatic views. He was fanatically religious, yet he was also willing to kill thousands of civilians in the name of Islam, despite the fact that some verses of the Koran emphasize the protections afforded to innocents, even in times of war. He inspired deep loyalty, yet in the end, even his longtime bodyguards turned against him. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, bin Laden failed to achieve any of his strategic goals. Al-Qaeda's leader is one of the few people of whom it can truly be said changed the course of history. Who could have predicted that in the two decades following the 9/11 attacks he masterminded, the United States would wage various kinds of military operations in seven Muslim countries--in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen--at the cost of more than $6 trillion and more than seven thousand American lives? In addition, tens of thousands of soldiers from countries allied to the United States died, as did hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Syrians, and Yemenis who were also killed during the "war on terror." But just as it has taken many years to get a better understanding of the man who launched the 9/11 attacks, it has taken two decades to assess the successes and failures of both al-Qaeda and the United States in the long conflict that followed. This is not to suggest any moral equivalence between the two--but rather to explain where each side miscalculated the other's intentions and actions. Al-Qaeda did have some tactical successes. Before the 9/11 attacks it deftly exploited its safe haven in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to train thousands of militants. On 9/11 al-Qaeda carried out the first significant foreign attack against the continental United States since the British burned the White House in 1814. Al-Qaeda used the opportunities presented by the Iraq War to recruit a new generation of militants, planting the seeds for ISIS. And al-Qaeda expanded its affiliated groups from Africa to Asia. There were also serious American policy failures. They include letting bin Laden escape at the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, which allowed him to lead his organization for another decade, and the conflation of al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein, which helped make the case for the Iraq War, a war that ultimately produced the very thing it was supposed to prevent--an alliance between al-Qaeda and Iraqi Baathists. But bin Laden and al-Qaeda also had many failures of tactics and strategy. For one thing, the United States eventually came up with an increasingly effective tactical playbook against al-Qaeda and other jihadist militant groups--a playbook that largely, if imperfectly, worked, relying on armed drones, a much-expanded intelligence community, and Special Operations Forces raids. It's a playbook that presidents as different as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all embraced to varying degrees and that kept the United States largely safe from jihadist terrorism since 9/11. During the two decades after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda and its affiliates failed to successfully carry out a large-scale lethal terrorist attack in the United States. I Al-Qaeda's failure to strike the United States after 9/11 was neither inevitable nor predictable, especially in the first years after the attacks, when bin Laden and the organization he led continued to plot against Western targets. The key question about bin Laden is: Why did he build an organization dedicated to the mass murders of civilians? It's a question I have been probing since I met bin Laden in 1997 as the producer of his first television interview. There was no single event that turned bin Laden from the shy scion of one of the richest families in the Middle East into the architect of the 9/11 attacks. Rather, bin Laden went through a gradual process of radicalization that first began during his teenage years when he became a religious zealot. The invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979, when bin Laden was twenty-two, turned him into a leading financier of Muslim volunteers from around the globe who were drawn to the Afghan holy war. Eight years later bin Laden led his followers into battle against the Russians. From that battle emerged al-Qaeda, a group dedicated to spreading jihad, holy war, around the world. The introduction of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into the holy land of Saudi Arabia in 1990 turned bin Laden's latent anti-Americanism into a passionate hatred of the United States. He started conceiving of the Americans as his main enemy while he was living in exile in Sudan during the first half of the 1990s. His expulsion from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996 angered him further against the United States, and in the late 1990s the planning for the 9/11 attacks began in earnest. There was nothing inevitable about bin Laden's transformation over the course of decades from a quiet, humble, religious young man into the leader of a global terrorist network who was intent on killing thousands of civilians. This book is an attempt to explain how that transformation happened. I . The only lethal terrorist attack in the United States in the two decades after 9/11 that had any direct connection to al-Qaeda was when its branch in Yemen coordinated with a Saudi air force officer who killed three U.S. sailors at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida on December 6, 2019. It wasn't clear whether this attack was directed by al-Qaeda from Yemen, or whether the Saudi officer came up with his own plan and he simply kept al-Qaeda apprised of it as it matured. Excerpted from The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden by Peter L. Bergen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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