What Went Wrong?

Although there have been many biographies of bin Laden -- two of the best of them written by Peter L. Bergen and Michael Scheuer -- surprisingly little attention has been devoted to Zawahiri, an Egyptian jihadist. Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for the New Yorker who wrote a memorable profile of Zawahiri four years ago, magisterially redresses this imbalance in The Looming Tower .

Wright tells the compelling story here of a symbiotic relationship between bin Laden and Zawahiri: Their respective strengths complemented each other and created a sum far greater than its parts. The two men's shared strategic vision of a global jihad transformed al-Qaeda into an organization that can punch far above its weight.

Wright deftly evokes the jihadist milieu, but he is on less solid ground later in the book when he attempts to recast his narrative into a sort of police procedural: a race against time by the forces of good -- embodied by John O'Neill, the mercurial head of the FBI's New York counterterrorism office -- to thwart the evil machinations that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. By all accounts, O'Neill was a larger-than-life figure: a Damon Runyon-esque type who J. Edgar Hoover reportedly complained dressed more like a mobster than a G-man. In an especially cruel twist of fate, O'Neill was among the victims murdered on 9/11, having only recently left the FBI for a high-profile private security job at a company located in the twin towers. But captivating as O'Neill's story is, it comes across as a somewhat distracting addendum to what at heart is a rich, finely detailed account of how bin Laden and Zawahiri, two men of vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, together launched an epic struggle more than a decade ago that continues to dominate international politics today.

Another problem is Wright's inclination to view through the prism of O'Neill's beloved FBI America's inchoate, uncoordinated and ultimately failed efforts to blunt the spectacular al-Qaeda attack that U.S. counterterrorism officials feared during the tense months before 9/11. Wright may not have had the same access to intelligence officers that he enjoyed with O'Neill's former colleagues in the FBI. This would explain the short shrift he gives to the similarly tireless and prescient efforts of the CIA's bin Laden unit and especially to its own, equally mercurial chief, Michael Scheuer.

The awful day that concludes The Looming Tower is the starting point for Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton's Without Precedent . The shock of 9/11 led an initially hesitant Congress and a reluctant Bush administration to appoint an independent commission with a mandate, as the co-authors put it, "to understand an event that was unprecedented in the destruction it had wrought on the American homeland, and appalling even within the catalogue of human brutality." Few persons in America today are as respected and admired as the commission's co-chairs: Kean, a Republican former governor of New Jersey, and Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who served more than 30 years in Congress. Although their deep, abiding sense of service and unassailable rectitude obviously would have precluded them from writing a thoroughly unexpurgated inside account, their reluctance to "dish out the dirt" doesn't mean that they pull their punches.

While readers may be disappointed to learn no more than has previously been reported of the 10 commissioners' historic April 29, 2004, meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the authors are nonetheless unsparing in their descriptions of key administration figures who either testified before them (National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice), attempted to frustrate their investigation (Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales) or willfully provided "inaccurate -- if not untruthful" testimony (Administrator Jane Garvey of the Federal Aviation Administration and Maj. Gen. Craig R. McKinley, commander of NORAD). Disappointingly, though, the reasoning behind many of the Commission's more controversial conclusions and recommendations -- including the decision to try to reform the sclerotic FBI rather than endorse the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency along the lines of Britain's MI5 -- is not fully explained; at the same time, the commission's litany of frustrations with the White House, the Republican-led Congress and various federal agencies such as the FAA or military commands such as NORAD is candidly described and bluntly detailed.

The 9/11 Commission and its work are, of course, already well-known because of the open, public hearings; the exhaustively reported disputes over access to top-secret documents, senior officials and other sources essential to its investigation; and its brilliantly written, meticulously researched, bestselling final report. Yet Kean and Hamilton write so well and so fluidly -- and with such evident brio and straightforwardness -- that the reader cannot help but be transfixed. Despite its familiarity, their story still comes across as fresh and as gripping as when it was the stuff of daily headline news reports and galvanizing hearing-room drama. We are reminded, for example, how a tip from the CIA pointed the commission to Jose Melendez-Perez. In some of the most riveting testimony the panel heard, Melendez-Perez, an immigration inspector at Orlando International Airport, recounted how he had stopped the likely 20th hijacker, a Saudi national named Mohamed al-Qahtani, from entering the country a month before the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, the commission's staff concluded that while Melendez-Perez was interviewing Qahtani on Aug. 4, 2001, the attack's ringleader, Mohamed Atta, was outside waiting for him. "If everyone up and down the chain had been as professional as you," one commissioner, former Navy secretary John F. Lehman, told Melendez-Perez at the hearing, "the attacks would not have happened."

Without Precedent also reminds us why the 9/11 Commission set the gold standard for both transparency and impact: It overcame formidable odds and at times tremendous (though now mostly forgotten) invective and opprobrium from congressional leaders, media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and the New York Post's front page, New York City officials, members of less-prominent past national commissions on terrorism and even some of the same 9/11 family members who had lobbied so hard for the commission's creation in the first place. In this respect, Kean and Hamilton have written an essential guide for others who may someday find themselves appointed to serve on blue-ribbon panels and high-profile commissions.

Each book is a welcome and important addition to the growing literature on 9/11: The Looming Tower by providing a seminal account of the two central figures in al-Qaeda and of the heady ideological currents and explosive dynamics that drove the 9/11 plot forward, and Without Precedent for reminding us of the failures that led to that tragic day, the herculean effort devoted to explaining why and how it happened, and how far we still have to go to prevent its recurrence. ·

Bruce Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center in West Point, N.Y. He is the author of "Inside Terrorism."