The Rise And Fall Of Osama Bin Laden, Bergen - B

        "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 is an attempt to tell how this happened.

        He was born in 1957, the 18th son of a wealthy father, the owner of the leading construction company in Saudi America. Unlike his secular, fun-loving, pro-American siblings, he tended toward religious Islamism in his teens. By the time he was 21, he was "a fully fledged religious zealot." The transformative event of his life came when the infidel Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. While continuing to work in the family business, he began to give substantial amounts, $250,000-$300,000 per year, to support jihad in Afghanistan. In 1986, he moved to Peshwar to oversee the Arab force he was building up. When his troops held off a Soviet attack, he became a war hero throughout the Arab world.  By the time the Soviets left, he was widely revered.  He decided that the flame of jihad should spread elsewhere. In 1991, he moved to Sudan, became a member of the Saudi opposition, supported terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, and started to build his anti-American terror network, al-Qaeda. He also ran multiple businesses for the Saudi Binladin Group. His criticism of the royal family led to the loss of his Saudi citizenship and, as his family business relied on the monarchy, they expelled him too and froze his assets.

        With American troops in Saudi Arabia and then in Somalia, he decided he had to strike at America and drive it out of the Middle East. His radicalism led the Sudanese to force him to leave, and in 1996 he was back to Afghanistan. He declared war on the US (only a few Americans knew), and worked out arrangements with the Taliban to stay outside of Kandahar, where he continued to build his organization. He teamed up with Mohammed al-Zawahiri, a noted Egyptian cleric, declared his desire to kill American soldiers and citizens, and told western interviewers that a black day was soon coming for America. On August 7, 1998, the US embassy in Nairobi was obliterated by a massive truck bomb. A few minutes later, a less powerful bomb went off in front of the embassy in Tanzania. The US now knew who bin Laden was, and the CIA began to pursue him. However, at no point were the full resources of the US applied to bin Laden. The attack on the USS Cole came in October, 2000. There was no US response to the Cole attack from the fading Clinton administration. Throughout 2001, there were those in the intelligence community very concerned about bin Laden, but those concerns never cracked the agenda of the new administration.  September 11th changed America and much of the world.

      Pres. Bush signed a Memorandum of Notification turning the CIA into a para-military organization authorized to hunt and kill bin Laden. The closest the US came was that December when we bombed his environs at Tora Bora. Bin Laden and two of his sons escaped. He was on the run in Pakistan until he alighted in Abbottabad in 2005.  The US spent years diligently looking for him and was able to eventually find him because the CIA had extracted the name of one of his two bodyguards during innumerable interrogations. The CIA found the compound in 2010. On May 1, 2011, Navy Seals descended on bin Laden's compound and killed bin Laden, two bodyguards, bin Laden's son Khalid,  and a bodyguard's wife.

    The depth of the US response to 9/11 assured that a repeat of what had happened would not take place. One example is the US 'no fly' list which grew from 16 to forty-thousand by the time of bin Laden's death.  Bin Laden also failed as he expected the US to leave the Middle East, just as it had left Lebanon, Yemen, and Somalia after tactical setbacks. Instead the opposite took place.  This is a concise, well-written book, but one that adds little to the existing narrative. If you've read The Looming Tower, or Stephen Coll's books on Afghanistan, you're way ahead.