The original version published 2002 with the author listed as Anonymous. ( )

One of the few books personally approved of by Bin Laden himself who has praised the work as one of the few Western writers who understand him. Scheuer is one of the foremost experts on Bin Laden who tracked him for the CIA.

In the early 1980s, a Palestinian ideologue named Abdullah Azzam was coordinating the jihad from Peshawar, near the Afghanistan border. Azzam, who also taught at Islamabad’s International Islamic University, visited America numerous times during the 1980s, urging support for the war in Afghanistan .

Described as a charismatic orator, he told fanciful tales of Islamic warriors not being harmed by Soviet tanks and bullets, and slain martyrs whose corpses did not decay.

Azzam’s Peshawar center was known as the Afghan Bureau. His deputy and financier was a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam is regarded by many scholars as having laid the ideological groundwork for modern-day jihad. After his assassination in a 1989 bomb blast, bin Laden took over the bureau and developed what would become al-Qaeda.

Was the idealistic 19- or 20-year-old Barack Obama inquiring about the Afghanistan jihad?

Outstanding book by the formerly "Anonymous" head of the CIA's Bin Laden office.