Book description
It was only a week before 9/11 that Peter Bergen delivered the
manuscript of Holy War, Inc., the story of Osama bin Laden -
whom Bergen had once interviewed in a mud hut in Afghanistan - and his
declaration of war on America. The book became a New York Times
bestseller and the essential portrait of the most formidable
terrorist enterprise of our time. Now, in Manhunt, Bergen picks
up the thread with this taut yet panoramic account of the pursuit and
killing of bin Laden.
Here are riveting new details of bin Laden's flight to Tora Bora
after the crushing defeat of the Taliban, where American forces came
startlingly close to capturing him; his grim, Spartan life in hiding;
and his struggle to maintain control of al-Qaeda even as American
drones systematically picked off his most prominent lieutenants.
On the other side of the world, CIA analysts haunted by the
intelligence failures that led to 9/11 and the WMD fiasco pored over
the tiniest of clues before homing in on the man they called 'the
Kuwaiti', who took them to a peculiar building with twelve-foot-high
walls and security cameras less than a mile from a Pakistani military
academy. This was the courier who would unwittingly lead them to bin
Laden, now a prisoner of his own making but still plotting to
devastate the United States.
Bergen takes us inside the Situation Room, where President Obama
considers the various courses of action presented by his war council
and receives conflicting advice from his top advisors before deciding
to go ahead with the raid that would change history, and then inside
the Joint Special Operations Command, whose 'secret warriors', the
SEALS, would execute Operation Neptune Spear. From the moment that two
Black Hawks take off from Afghanistan, up until bin Laden utters his
last words, Manhunt reads like a thriller.
Based on exhaustive research and unprecedented access to White House
officials, CIA analysts, Pakistani intelligence, and the military,
this is the definitive account of ten years spent in pursuit of bin
Laden and of the twilight of al-Qaeda.
PETER BERGEN is a National Security Analyst for CNN and the author of
three previous books about al Qaeda and the U. S.-led war on terrorism,
including
Holy War, Inc.
, a
New York Times
bestseller that has been translated into eighteen languages. Bergen is
also the director of the national security studies program at the New
America Foundation and a research fellow at NYU's Center on Law and
Security
.
He has reported on al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, counterterrorism,
and the Middle East for a wide range of newspapers and magazines.
