In 1998, he became the first American journalist to interview terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Now Miller, with veteran journalist Michael Stone -- and the cooperation of several intelligence officials -- uncovers the covert forces that triggered the horrific events of September 11th. -

FROM THE PUBLISHER: In New York City, a handful of veteran FBI agents, police officers and investigative journalists had known for years that a terrorist event on the scale of 9/11 was likely. Ironically, one of the men who had been most aware of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden had recently left the FBI, where he had been following the movements of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, to become Chief of Security at the World Trade Center. John O'Neill died on that awful day. The FBI's O'Neill, along with Neil Herman, Kenny Maxwell, reporter John Miller and very few others, had been on bin Laden's trail for years. To them, he had long been considered the most dangerous man on the planet. In The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, And Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, John Milller, an award-winning journalist and co-anchor of ABC's 20/20, along with veteran reporters Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell, takes readers back more than ten years to the birth of the terrorist cell that later metastasized into al Qaeda's New York operation. This remarkable book offers a firsthand account of what it is to be a police officer, an FBI agent or a reporter obsessed with a case few people will take seriously. The Cell also contains a first-person account of Miller's face-to-face meeting with bin Laden and provides the first full-length treatment to piece together what led up to the events of 9/11, Ultimately delivering the disturbing answer to the question: Why, with allthe information the intelligence community had, was no one able to stop the September 11 attacks? John Miller is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and co-host of ABC's 20/20 with Barbara Walters, and one of the few Western reporters ever to have interviewed Osama bin Laden. He lives in New York City. This is his first book. Michael Stone is a veteran journalist who has covered many of New York's most notorious stories, including John Gotti, Robert Chambers and the Central Park jogger assault, and is the author of Gangbusters. He lives in New York City. Chris Mitchell is a senior editor at The Week. His previous collaboration, Jack Maple's The Crime Fighter, inspired the television drama The District. FROM THE CRITICS New York Daily News: Remarkably readable. . . Compelling. New York Post It does an excellent job. Publishers Weekly This eye-opening investigation into anti-American terrorist activities would have been even more shocking if information hadn't already started to dribble out about the inadequacies of the FBI and CIA in tracking and preventing such activities.

But every page of this information-packed report seems to announce ineffectual actions, missed opportunities and frustrated agents on the ground blocked by the FBI hierarchy, turf battles and political lack of will. Even by the mid-1990s, when al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well known to U.S. authorities, strong action wasn't taken because, one State Department official says here, their acts hadn't exceeded an "acceptable level of terrorism."

The 1998 African embassy bombings, for instance, could likely have been prevented, according to the authors. The plot is tangled, but through it Miller, Stone and Mitchell follow two threads from 1990 up to September 11, 2001: first, "the cell," actually a series of terrorist cells, beginning with the one responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing a cell that, in one of their most illuminating revelations, the authors trace directly back to El Sayyid Nosair, convicted of murdering Rabbi Meir Kahane!

 Hyperion Books 0786869003 / 9780786869008
Hardcover As New New York 

Price: 19.11 USD