Al-Qaeda has become a virtual phenomenon. We know something exists, though what is continually debated. The evidence of its existence is limited to Internet sites, intermittent statements and bomb attacks which are linked, with varying degrees of justification, to “al-Qaeda” by the perpetrators, by the victims or by a variety of other actors. Where once you could interview members of al-Qaeda or associated militant groups, you now risk far more than gastroenteritis when you travel through the badlands of southern Afghanistan. The sole sources of information are selected leaks from ‘intelligence sources’ of dubious reliability. The result is a wash of information, most of it barely worth the few pulses of electronic energy that its dissemination requires.
This means that every writer working on the subject has to undertake a triage of information. Some do this conscientiously, checking sources insofar as is possible, attempting to get out on the ground where they can. Many don't, unquestioningly repeating the handouts of security services or governments, or selecting facts to match prefabricated analyses.
Lawrence Wright, as the long list of interviewees for The Looming Tower makes obvious, falls into the former category. Though much of what he recounts is well known, the authority with which he describes “al-Qaeda's road to 9/11” is uncommon. There is sufficient new material or, at least, sufficient additional detail on episodes that were not previously properly understood to make the book well worth reading.
Wright dispels a number of myths. The relatively tiny number of Arab fighters in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviet Union received no aid from the US. Thus, Osama bin Laden is not the creation of the CIA. He was not responsible for the attacks of the early 1990s in Somalia and New York. The recruits in the al-Qaeda camps in the late 1990s were well-educated, intelligent men with no evidence of mental instability. The 9/11 hijackers were not “recruited” in Germany, but traveled to Afghanistan under their own steam to seek jihad.
His otherwise impressively thorough system of notes breaks down on the vexed question of al-Qaeda's relation with Iraq. Bizarrely, Wright repeats still-unproven allegations of visits by key al-Qaeda figures to Baghdad. Sketchy references tell us that at least one of the sources is badly-flawed American magazine articles. And when Wright says that Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's closest collaborator, and Abu al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant recently killed in Iraq, set up Ansar ul-Islam, he is in error. Interviews with Ansar members in Iraq in 2002 told me that the group was, in various forms, extant from the mid- to late-1990s. And when Wright says al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi may have set up the group with the aid of Iraqi intelligence, he is repeating something that is dangerous, very probably false and certainly unsubstantiated.
Wright is so unhappy with this apparent “fact” that he adds a rare asterisked footnote on the page, saying this “supposition” is based on information from Ayad Allawi, a leader of the Iraqi opposition before the 2003 war who was a conduit for many of the least accurate elements of the prewar claims about WMD. If the statement is so flaky, why publish it?
He is very strong on the role of al-Zawahiri. An increasing number of al-Qaeda communications now put the square, bearded face of the 54-year-old, Egyptian-born, former pediatrician in the foreground. If bin Laden is the poster boy of al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri is the thinker. Without al-Zawahiri's strategic decision to shift from attacking apostate Middle Eastern governments to targeting the West, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 would not have happened. Without his experience as a militant in the tough environment of Egypt, the “agitation and propaganda” tactics that typify al-Qaeda would never have been developed.
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