New York Times, October 12

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE
By Eric Lichtblau

Gerald Posner has built his literary career in no small part on debunking popular conspiracy theories. First came "Case Closed," the 1993 book in which Posner dismantled the arguments that John F. Kennedy's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, did not act alone. Five years later, in "Killing the Dream," he turned his investigative and writing skills to the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to disabuse skeptics of the notion that James Earl Ray was not the killer. So it will surprise some of his followers to see Posner now tackling another seminal event in American history the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in an effort not to debunk conspiracy theories but to fuel them. The theory of "Why America Slept," saved for the provocative final chapter of this smart and evocatively written book: the Saudis were in on it.

The basis for this charge, Posner writes, is the CIA's interrogation of one of America's biggest catches in the campaign against Al Qaeda a senior aide to Osama bin Laden named Abu Zubaydah.

Relying on two unnamed government sources to provide new information about the intelligence gleaned from the questioning, Posner writes that CIA interrogators manipulated the injured Zubaydah's pain medication to wear down his defenses. They tricked him into believing he was in Saudi custody and were then shocked to hear what a relieved Zubaydah finally had to tell them. He instructed them to call a senior member of the ruling Saudi family, Posner writes, and gave them a phone number from memory.

"He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah said. He went on to tell his interrogators that bin Laden had struck a deal in the late 1990's to gain the blessing and support of top Saudi leaders in exchange for assurances that his holy war would spare the kingdom. This testimony, an American investigator says, was "the Rosetta stone of 9/11."

Still more intriguing, three of the Saudi leaders whom the prisoner named as allies (including Prince Ahmed bin Salman, probably best known to Americans as the owner of the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem) wound up dead within a week of one another.

The allegations will no doubt provide grist for those eager to link the Saudis to the Sept. 11 attacks. But as with all conspiracy theories as Posner himself has shown in his past work there is reason for skepticism.

Qaeda prisoners like Zubaydah have become notorious for providing misinformation to their captors, American officials have not rushed to broadcast the information prisoners have given them and the Saudis have vigorously denied any links to bin Laden, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from the kingdom. (Last month, in fact, Saudi officials asserted that bin Laden intentionally recruited Saudis for the Sept. 11 mission in order to strain relations between the United States and the kingdom.) Still, Posner's reputation for sober, exhaustive journalism and his access to classified intelligence signal that his theory should not be dismissed out of hand.

The preceding 18 chapters of "Why America Slept" reveal conspiracies of a much subtler but equally disastrous variety. As he traces the growth of Al Qaeda and Washington's never-ending turf battles in confronting terrorism in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Posner suggests that the government was victimized by what amounted to a conspiracy of silence.

The assertion that America missed many warning signs that could have prevented the attacks is, by now, an oft-heard one. What sets this book apart is not only the accumulation of detail and the lively writing Posner uses to make that point but also the remarkable characters he develops to narrate that story.

In one camp are those who warned for years about the rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism: people like Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism guru in the Clinton and Bush administrations; James Woolsey, director of central intelligence under Bill Clinton, who had a hard time even getting the president's attention, and Neil Herman, the FBI agent who led the investigation into the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and had sought three years before to show that the murder of Meir Kahane, the extremist rabbi, was part of a broader terrorist conspiracy.

On the other side, Posner argues, are people like Clinton, George W. Bush and many of their senior advisers, who failed to give terrorism the urgent attention it demanded, and let repeated opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden slip away.

Oddly, Posner mentions only in passing a briefing that Bush received on Aug. 6, 2001; it included speculation about the possibility of Qaeda operatives hijacking airliners. And at times he seems a bit too fixated on the public's fascination with media spectacles like the O.J. Simpson trial and JonBenet Ramsey's murder, as if to suggest that journalists and the public were distracted from more important stories like terrorism.

But fortunately, such diversions are rare in a narrative that takes on the frenetic pace of a spy thriller as it recounts two decades' worth of terrorist activity, clandestine plots, government malaise and fumbled opportunities that led up to Sept. 11. This account, Posner writes, "is a far more infuriating book" than the one he set out to write. But in the ever-growing collection of volumes on the Sept. 11 tragedy and the lessons to be learned from it, "Why America Slept" should go down as one of the best.