Book Review: The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It

 

This is a book written by John Miller (who was an ABC News Correspondent), Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell about the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. Miller has a unique perspective for a couple of reasons. First, he interviewed Osama bin Laden in person when bin Laden declared war on America from a hovel in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. And, he was also good friends with FBI agent John O'Neil who was the head of the FBI's NY counterterrorism unit who was trying to hunt down members of Al Qaeda up until 2001 when he took a job as head of security at the World Trade Center and was on the job for two days when he was killed in the 9/11 attacks. 

The book really details the entire lead-up to 9/11 covering more than just the 9/11 plot and attacks, but went back to the late 1980s/early 1990s when terrorist cells in NY killed the Rabbi who was the head of the Jewish Defense League and carried out the original World Trade Center bombing back in 1993.  The book does quickly detail the events of 9/11 at the beginning of the book and then about halfway through profiles some of the hijackers and their movements before 9/11. The book does include a lot of detail about what the hijackers were doing in the US up to 9/11 including the fact that it did not seem like the plan was fully formed even very late into the operation because the leader Mohammed Atta, appeared to still be trying to get his hands on crop dusting planes as late as August, suggesting that they would crash planes filled with chemicals into targets, which would have caused far less damage than they ended up inflicting.

The big takeaway from the book, for me, was how the infighting and refusal to cooperate between the intelligence agencies (mostly the FBI and the CIA) led to vital pieces of information that could have resulted in the plot being disrupted, being missed, not shared, overlooked, etc. Blatant examples of this were the fact that the CIA knew that two of the hijackers were members of Al Qaeda and were in the US and did not tell the FBI until about two weeks before the attacks, and even though the terrorists were using their real names to make purchases, the FBI could not track them down, and the FBI leadership refusing to let local agents look at Zacharias Mussoui's computer despite ample evidence that he had ties to terrorists. There was no smoking gun that the authors could point to that suggested if it was discovered ahead of time absolutely would have led to the plot being foiled before the attacks, but that evidence trails could have been followed that might have prevented the attacks. 

Overall, the book is a very good read, and very well-sourced. While much of the information in the book is well known, especially to those who have read other books about 9/11 or watched some of the documentaries on the subject, it does have some details that I had not seen before and I have read many of the reputable books and watched almost all of the reputable documentaries on 9/11. It is definitely one of my must-reads.