The Hunt for KSM

January 23, 2012
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. Agent: Paul Bresnick Literary Agency.

Starred review from February 1, 2012
Superlative storytelling and crackling reportage define a pulse-pounding narrative tracing the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. To this day, the bleary-eyed visage of the 9/11 mastermind being hauled off by authorities after a successful raid on his hideout in 2003 remains the most recognizable image of the hated international terrorist. McDermott (101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory, 2010, etc.) and Los Angeles Times chief terrorism reporter Meyer explode that superficial frame with a taut, espionage-thriller-like narrative. The authors render characters on both sides of the law--the hunters and the hunted alike--in rich detail, ably evoking their clear motives and desires. While Osama bin Laden became the main symbol of America's war on terror, it was actually KSM who tirelessly traveled the globe recruiting young Muslim men for his ongoing war on the West, directing their actions, outfitting their operations and setting them loose upon an unsuspecting populace. FBI Special Agent Frank Pellegrino was on his heels from the very beginning, when, in 1993, KSM tried to destroy the World Trade Center with a truck bomb left in a tower garage. During that time, write the authors, none of Pellegrino's superiors seemed interested in his investigations, but ultimately, a decade-long game of cat-and-mouse ensued, marked largely by frustration, futility and missed opportunities. A surprising, sobering look at one of the deadliest terror networks in history, and the American spy agencies charged with bringing it down.

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January 1, 2012

Considered the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammad was captured in March 2003 and remains in Guantanamo Bay detention camp. This story of his capture is based on hundreds of interviews conducted by journalist McDermott, author of an eye-opening piece on KSM (as he is known) in The New Yorker, and Pulitzer Prize winner Meyer, whose "Inside al Qaeda" series ran in the Los Angeles Times. Serious politicos will want.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2012
Terrorism reporters McDermott and Meyer write a fast-moving and deeply disturbing account of the CIA's role before and after the 2003 capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, long considered the mastermind of 9/11. These journalists depict the U.S. intelligence apparatus as schizoid: sometimes freakishly good at predicting movements and placing gadgetry but often blind to what is actually going on. The book moves like a spy novel, cutting from KSM's capture to the seven years before 9/11, when the authors convincingly show that the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice ignored evidence regarding the danger posed by KSM, and then moving to an indictment of the torture-interrogation of KSM, which led to his withholding vital information. The journalistic foundation is rock solid. The authors, in their acknowledgments, note that their claims are built upon a decade's worth of research, most of it abroad, including interviews with hundreds of sources and tens of thousands of pages of documents, obtained through Freedom of Information requests. Vitally important to the understanding of 9/11 and terrorism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2012

McDermott (former correspondent, Los Angeles Times; 101 Theory Drive) and Meyer (former chief terrorism reporter, Los Angeles Times) reveal how for almost a decade U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies sought to identify and capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). Along the way, the FBI and CIA refined their perception of KSM, seeing him first as a shadowy figure somehow involved in Islamic terrorism, then identifying him as Mukhtar (the chosen one), a midlevel terrorist operative, and, finally, recognizing him as the top al-Qaeda leader just below Osama bin Laden. McDermott and Meyer describe how bitter conflict, competition, and bungling for years impeded FBI and CIA efforts to find and capture KSM. It's a complicated story--one the authors do a credible job of untangling--involving many individuals with names difficult for some Westerners to pronounce or remember. Lists of "the Hunters" and "the Hunted" in the back are helpful. The story stretches from New York to Bosnia and Herzegovina through the Middle East to the Philippines and back. VERDICT This is an important book for readers interested in an inside view of the U.S. war on terror and how one man, KSM, played such a key role in so many terrorist plots. [See Prepub Alert, 12/12/11.]--Mark K. Jones, Mercantile Lib., Cincinnati

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.