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al Qaeda had been responsible for the attacks. Fifteen percent thought the U.S. government was itself responsible for the attacks, as a ploy to justify an invasion of Iraq. A large number of Americans, meanwhile, have thought Iraq was behind the attacks—a notion encouraged by the Bush administration but unsupported by the evidence. As late as 2010, though, an Angus Reid poll indicated that one in four Americans still thought 9/11 was “a fabrication designed to facilitate the campaign against terrorism.” This all reflects an epidemic of doubt and disbelief. It has been spread in part, to be sure, by conspiracy theorists—the “9/11 truth” movement, as it has become known—preaching to the gullible through the phenomenal influence and reach of the Internet. Less well known is the prevalence of doubt in people one would expect less likely to challenge official orthodoxy.

Those who have expressed grave doubt or called for a new investigation have included five past or present U.S. senators, four members of the U.S. House of Representatives, a former governor, three state deputy or assistant attorneys general, members of state legislatures, numerous public officials and civil servants, diplomats, engineers, and twenty-six former Army, Navy, or Air Force officers. In 2010, two gubernatorial candidates in Texas, a Republican and a Democrat, both said they had questions as to whether the U.S. government had been involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Former CIA officers, FBI agents, and intelligence officials from other agencies have also spoken out. Twenty-five of them expressed their views in a letter to the Congress. Louis Freeh, who was FBI director until the summer of 2001, raised specific issues on television and in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article.

Three sometime presidential contenders have expressed concerns. Former Vice President Walter Mondale said he favored a new investigation. “We’ve never completed the investigation of 9/11,” said General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, “and whether the administration actually misused the intelligence information it had.” Former U.S. senator Bob Graham, who had been cochair of Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11, pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia. The investigation, he said, found grounds for “suspicion that the Saudi government and various representatives of Saudi interests supported some of the hijackers and might have supported all of them.” President Bush, he said, “engaged in a cover-up.”

TEN YEARS ON, there is a lingering sense that the nation and the world have been let down, deprived of the right to know—deceived, even—on a matter of greater universal concern than any event in living memory. It need not have been that way.

The release in the past two years of some 300,000 pages of 9/11 Commission documents, a plethora of other material, and new interviews make it possible to lay some of the perceived mysteries to rest.

With access to the new information, we strive in this book to blow away unnecessary controversy, to make up for omissions in the record, and to throw light into the shadows of deception. In a time of anxiety, to tell the story as honestly as it can be told.

PART I

ATTACK

ONE

DID THE STORY BEGIN TWENTY YEARS AGO DURING THE GULF WAR, when a great American army was installed in Saudi Arabia, a land sacred to Muslims? Did it begin in 1948, when the United States recognized the declaration of a Jewish state to be known as Israel? Or on the day in 1938 when Americans discovered in Saudi Arabia one of the largest reserves of oil on the planet? From then on, certainly, the West began an addictive dance with danger, one that it dances to this day.

This is a story, moreover, rooted in a world and a culture that few Westerners really know or can begin to understand, yet played out in the heart of the United States. Mystery and terror, a frightening mix. Yet there is a simple point of entry, a routine event on an ordinary American morning.

IN THE DAWN of September 11, 2001, in Massachusetts, ninety-two people were getting up, breakfasting,