'The Terror Years': How things got to be this way

From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State

nolead begins By Lawrence Wright

Knopf. 400 pp. $28.85

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Reviewed by Bob Hoover

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The terror years are right now - as recent months have clearly affirmed. This collection of Lawrence Wright's journalism dating to the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, arrives at the right time.

Wright, 69, wrote these 11 articles for the New Yorker. Some of this material appeared in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, his meticulous 2006 account of the people behind the attack on America. It includes the first story in this collection, "The Man Behind bin Laden."

An old-school reporter who relies on face-to-face interviews instead of e-mail and Facebook, he grinds out his research through frequent visits to the Middle East, often in dangerous places meeting anonymous (and mysterious) sources. He's also no stranger to the federal government, which sent agents to his home, tapped his phone calls, and even linked one of his children to his investigation.

"That troubles me," he told Michael McConnell, then director of national intelligence.

"It may be troublesome, it may not be," was McConnell's reply.

Wright's profile of the nation's first intelligence czar in "The Spymaster" is also troublesome. A career military man, McConnell appears to have little conflict about warrantless wiretapping or torture. Wright bores in, finding contradictions and even factual errors in his claims. In Wright's portrait, McConnell is a shifty character out of a John le Carré spy novel.

There are 16 federal agencies in the U.S. "intelligence community," operating at a cost of $50 billion a year, Wright claims, leading to the creation of a director of national intelligence during the George W. Bush administration. In such articles as "The Counterterrorist," "Five Hostages," and the McConnell piece, he constructs a disturbing overview of missed opportunities, failures of communication, political maneuvering, and straightforward incompetence in the government's war on terror.

He's also a sharp critic of Israel and its policies in the Gaza Strip in "Captives," a grim account of life and death in that strip of disputed territory home to a million Palestinians.

Not all Wright's words are negative. He finds plenty of admirable people on all sides, working to find solutions or at least ways to ease the suffering that terrorism has caused. His profiles of FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan in "The Agent" and publisher David Bradley in "Five Hostages" are inspiring.

If international affairs continue to falter, we should hear more from Lawrence Wright. For now, we have The Terror Years to help us understand today's situation.

Bob Hoover is a former book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.