Lance - 1000 Years For Revenge

M uch of the information in this book was gathered from sources inside the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities. The database of research included dozens of first-person interviews, hundreds of pages of declassified documents from the FBI and foreign intelligence services, and more than forty thousand pages of court records and open source material from the print and electronic media. My primary focus was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, specifically the FBIs handling of the original World Trade Center bombing investigation and the hunt for its mastermind, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. A genius at crafting improvised explosive devices, Yousef fled New York the night of the bombing in 1993 and went on to create the blueprint for the subsequent 9/11 attacks.

The evidence I uncovered established a direct connection between those two eventsa dotted line of intelligence that ran like a hot circuit cable from Afghanistan to New York to the Philippines and back to New York again. Each dot on that line represented a lost opportunity for the U.S. intelligence community to stop Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda juggernaut. While many were culpable, the evidence now suggests that the agency most responsible was the FBI.

As early as 1983, President Reagan designated the Bureau as the lead agency for combating terrorism in the United States. the FBI was specifically charged with the responsibility for preventing acts of terror on American soil. Yet in less than a decade, the nation was scarred by the 1993 Twin Towers bombing, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 attacks. The question is, Why?

In my effort to find an answer, much of the material I unearthed was in the blackeither classified or known to key players unable to speak on the record. Still, I interviewed a number of retired FBI agents and supervisors who were close to the Yousef hunt, including Carson Dunbar, the assistant special agent in charge (ASAC), and Jim Roth, the principal legal officer (PLO), of the FBIs New York office. Both men spoke publicly for the first time about their roles in the investigation leading up to the first World Trade Center bombing and its aftermath.

I conducted multiple interviews with Detective Louis Napoli, who spent twenty years with the NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force in New York. On condition of anonymity, I also spoke with a number of special agents and investigators who are still on active duty. One of the key agents in the investigation that led up to the Trade Center bombing was Special Agent Nancy Floyd. I had been personally acquainted with her for some time, but we had never discussed the case. Then, in October 2002, I made a formal application with the Bureau to interview her on the record. The FBI never responded to my request, and Bureau policy restricted Agent Floyd from discussing the specifics of her work. However, because of our past association, she was able to talk about her moving personal life in the years before and after the WTC bombing on February 26, 1993. The remaining details surrounding her story came from confidential Bureau sources and retired agents close to the investigation who agreed to speak to me on the record.

The remarkable story of FDNY Fire Marshal Ronnie Bucca was drawn from dozens of interviews with his brother firefighters in Rescue One, the marshals of the Bureau of Fire Investigation, and personnel with whom he worked as a U.S. Army Reserve Warrant Officer in the 3413th Military Intelligence Detachment.

I owe a special debt of thanks to the chief fire marshal of the FDNY, Louis F. Garcia, and another to Jacob L. Boesen, a former intelligence analyst who worked with Ronnie at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center in Washington, D.C. But without the generous cooperation of the Bucca family, specifically his wife, Eve, and their children, Ronnie and Jessica, Fire Marshal Buccas extraordinary role in this story could not have been told.

The most enigmatic figure in this mystery was Yousef himself, the brilliant bomb maker who defied the Feds for years as he escaped from New York and plotted one horrific act of terror after another until he was brought to ground in Pakistan in 1995. Yousefs terrifying story was pieced together from dozens of interviews with members of the U.S. intelligence community, sources in the Bureau of Prisons, and officers of the Philippine National Police, as well as Yousefs former lawyer Roy Kulcsar and his current attorneys, Bernard Kleinman and Steven Legon. A particular thanks goes to Frank Gonzalez, a retired federal agent who played a key role as an investigator assigned to the Yousef defense team.

My longtime friend and attorney Jeff Feldman and his associate Ruth Botstein were most helpful in analyzing a number of legal issues relating to the World Trade Center bombing investigation. Private investigator Joe Murphy, with whom Id worked many years before on an arson investigation for ABC News, gave me hours of assistance. I owe a personal thanks to Richard Arlook of the Gersh Agency, whom Ive known since my days as a correspondent for 20/20. But the book would not have been possible without the tireless support of Judith Regan, who believed in my ability to report this epic and sometimes volatile story. Cal Morgan, the brilliant editorial director at Regan Books, helped me tell it in a way that was both human and journalistically precise. My thanks to his tremendously supportive assistant, Lina Perl, and to Judiths remarkable executive assistant, Angelica Canales.

This is a work of nonfiction, but there are elements in the story as gripping as a spy thriller. I started looking into the origins of the 9/11 attacks in the late fall of 2001, but back then I had only a small piece of the puzzle. Already dozens of books on the aftermath of September 11 were in the works, and though only a few would examine the cause, I wasnt sure what I could contribute to the body of knowledge.

I had done a number of investigative stories on the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department while working as a correspondent for ABC News in the late 1980s. I had a law degree, and Id worked as a trial preparation assistant in the office of the Manhattan DA while in law school, but Id spent most of the last fifteen years writing fiction, and my most recent book had involved an investigation into whether the CBS television network had violated 1950s FCC game show rules in the alleged rigging of its reality series Survivor. the subject had lost its meaning in the aftermath of 9/11, and after years away from covering intelligence issues, I wasnt sure I was ready to take on the job.

Then, one night in 2002, Chief Fire Marshal Louis Garcia took me to Memorial Park. It was a three-story, white temporary structure tucked down between Bellevue Hospital and the FDR Drive. The structure was surrounded by a high fence topped with the flags of a dozen municipal and law enforcement agencies. Inside, the floor was covered with green Astroturf. An enormous American flag hung from a rafter overhead. Backed into the east and west sides of the structure were eight enormous white refrigerated trailers. Each had a small set of wooden stairs leading up to its back doors. The stairs were surrounded by dozens of funeral wreathes and standing bouquets of flowers. The trucks were covered with purple and black mourning crepe. Along the sides of the trailers, visitors had written their good-byes.