This is a fine companion work to Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. While Wright's work does a much more extensive job of showing the events leading to the creation and evolution of Al Qaeda than this book does, both books deal very well with the inside work of American intelligence and defense agencies in dealing with Islamic terrorist groups in general and Al Qaeda in particular. It can be argued that this book picks up where The Looming Tower ends, after a fairly brief "Previously on the Osama bin Laden TV show" type introduction. In fact, that introduction initially came across so sparse, at the time of reading it, it felt like the author was talking extemporaneously from his notes. It later occurred to me that he might have been asked to tack it on for the final edit before publication. After all, the author had previously written his own Looming Tower type books, and may not have felt the need to rehash what he had already written. While this book enthusiastically picks up after 9/11 and takes us to the bin Laden capture and death, it shifts away from much discussion of Ayman al-Zawahiri and other key Al Qaeda figures, and stops short of any discussion of the almost inevitable Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Ultimately, the power of this book is not in the more-exciting-than "Zero Dark Thirty" climax, but in the very deep explanation of how U.S. agencies overcame many of their pre-9/11 misdeeds and demonstrated extraordinary care in "getting it right." All of which seems to have been thrown out the window in a recent Yemen raid by the new U.S. administration. Oh, well. What's that famous phrase? "Those who would never be caught dead reading a history book, will be condemned to make fools of themselves and their country"? ( )

Another book on the long hunt for OBL along the lines of the other book that I read called "No Easy Day". Pretty much the same stuff, a very un-dramatic end for world's most wanted person.

Another book on the long hunt for OBL along the lines of the other book that I read called "No Easy Day". Pretty much the same stuff, a very un-dramatic end for world's most wanted person.

Fascinating reading - especially the insight into into the process of making a complex and very risky decision. ( )

Interesting account of Bin Laden's life on the run and the search for him. Peter Bergen has good contacts in the region and puts together a fair amount of information. Particularly interesting was the news that the U.S. government concluded from monitoring the reactions and communications at the top echelons of the Pakistani government and military in the days immediately following the raid in Abbottabad, that they probably didn't know anything about where Bin Laden had been holed up. At the time I certainly was leaning towards the idea that the Pakistani military high-ups knew where he was, but considering the matter further, sheer incompetence strikes me as an entirely plausible explanation for missing the fact that he was hiding right under their noses. That he would be found in a city and not in some remote cave was something long understood by pretty much everyone who gave the matter some thought, but Abbottabad was a particularly suspicious location given the presence of Pakistan's premier military academy there. ( )