The Hunt for KSM
Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The definitive account of the decade-long pursuit and capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the terrorist mastermind of 9/11.
Only minutes after United 175 plowed into the World Trade Center's South Tower, people in positions of power correctly suspected who was behind the assault: Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. But it would be 18 months after September 11 before investigators would capture the actual mastermind of the attacks, the man behind bin Laden himself.
That monster is the man who got his hands dirty while Osama fled; the man who was responsible for setting up Al Qaeda's global networks, who personally identified and trained its terrorists, and who personally flew bomb parts on commercial airlines to test their invisibility. That man withstood waterboarding and years of other intense interrogations, not only denying Osama's whereabouts but making a literal game of the proceedings, after leading his pursuers across the globe and back. That man is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he is still, to this day, the most significant Al Qaeda terrorist in captivity.
In The Hunt for KSM, Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer go deep inside the US government's dogged but flawed pursuit of this elusive and dangerous man. One pair of agents chased him through countless false leads and narrow escapes for five years before 9/11. And now, drawing on a decade of investigative reporting and unprecedented access to hundreds of key sources, many of whom have never spoken publicly -- as well as jihadis and members of KSM's family and support network -- this is a heart-pounding trip inside the dangerous, classified world of counterterrorism and espionage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The cat-and-mouse game between American investigators and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, architect of the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist spectaculars, unfolds with suspenseful immediacy in this engrossing saga. Journalists McDermott (Perfect Soldiers) and Meyer (the L.A. Times's chief terrorism reporter) present a police procedural starring an FBI agent, Frank Pellegrino, Port Authority detective Matt Besheer, and the inter-agency anti-terrorism experts who tracked KSM and his confederates for a decade before his 2003 capture. The pursuit of their elusive quarry required legwork in Manila strip clubs and Karachi slums, electronic eavesdropping, computer forensics, and cagey, empathetic questioning of suspects. Inevitably, turf battles arose with the CIA, whose impulsiveness, tunnel-vision, and brutal interrogation techniques the authors portray as the ineffective antithesis of the FBI's meticulous sleuthing. The authors' vivid profile of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed depicts a resourceful, charismatic man he retained his self-possession under CIA interrogation, they contend, while spewing false information that sparked wild goose chases and paints a detailed portrait of the workaday terrorist life of fund-raising, recruitment, bomb-rigging, and general plotting, all carried out while dodging a global manhunt. The book is disjointed and breathless at times, but it gives us one of the most revealing dispatches yet from the war on terror.