My understanding of the events leading up to 9/11 have been shaped by great authors and believe Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI–and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him by Peter Lance makes significant contributions to understanding the full breakdown of the US intelligence community. Many elements of his research and interviews will should shock Americans.
Lance reveals Al Qaeda had a mole in the NYFD who was able to steal blue prints of the World Trade Center before the 1993 bombing and that US authorities had been tracking Al Qaeda for more than 10 years.
The book’s primary focus is the role of Al Qaeda master spy Ali Mohamed and his work as a mole within US Army intelligence, the CIA and the FBI. Lance brings a number of key points that were overlooked or more appropriately ignored by the 9/11 Commission.
Patrick Fitzgerald, National Security Coordinator for the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York met multiple times with Ali Mohamed years before 9/11. During this timeframe Ali Mohamed declared his loyalty to Osama bin Ladin and told Fitzgerald that he did not need a fatwà to attack America. And yet Fitzgerald did nothing.
Ali Mohamed was identified by the US State Department as Osama bin Ladin‘s first security trainer and helped smuggle Al Qaeda’s co-leader Ayman al-Sawahiri into mosques located in California and North Carolina for recruiting and fund raising. Lance reveals that even Bin Ladin recruited at mosques in Chicago in the late 1980s.
Would you be surprised to learn foundations of al-Qaeda began from an Egyptian enrolled in grad school at the University of Northern Colorado in 1949? His name was 
As one who learned about this breakdown from traditional news sources Hersh provides criticism for the Bush Administration and Donald Rumsfeld with a new insider view of the breakdown of command and control.
I decided to read Woodward’s