The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 Audiobook (Free)

A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking go through the people and suggestions, the terrorist plans and the American intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright’s extraordinary book is dependant on five years of study and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and america.

The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and about The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 insight by telling the storyplot through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, John O’Neill; and the former mind of Saudi cleverness, Prince Turki al-Faisal.

As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of contemporary Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into a business capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack within the USS Cole . . . O’Neill’s heroic initiatives to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki’s change from bin Laden’s ally to his foe . . . the failures from the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that may have prevented the 9/11 episodes.

The Looming Tower broadens and deepens our understanding of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. Here’s Sayyid Qutb, creator of the modern Islamist movement, depressed and despairing as he matches Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family lifestyle in the al-Qaeda substances of Sudan and Afghanistan; O’Neill’s high-wire take action in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life-he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others’ existence-and the nitty-gritty of turf fights among U.S. cleverness agencies.

Brilliantly conceived and written, The Looming Tower draws most elements of the storyplot into a galvanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to your understanding of how we attained September 11, 2001. The richness of its new information, as well as the depth of its perceptions, can help us offer more sensibly and effectively with the continuing terrorist threat.