New York Magazine: 9/11 Anniversary
It’s one of my annual goals to stretch my writerly legs and write for a magazine to which I subscribe—a goal fulfilled in several past years by Wired. This year’s entry in that category was somewhat unexpected but humbling.
As part of New York‘s 9/11 Anniversary issue this week, they did an “Encyclopedia of 9/11,” from A to Z, from Abbottabad to Zazi, looking back over the last decade and the changes big and small in the world, in the United States, and in daily life. I was asked to contribute the “Evidence” entry, focusing on how the FBI pulled together the first hours of the PENTTBOM investigation and the critical jumpstart they got from the 1988 Toyota Corolla, California license plate 3JFZ283, owned by Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. It was a fascinating piece to research—I got to spend some time with one of the last FBI agents still assigned to the PENTTBOM case, who has worked the case since the first hours a decade ago—but all the more so, this piece was humbling to be part of such an ambitious project. New York does a great job with its magazine in general, but this encyclopedia was really impressive. I recommend reading the whole thing.
Next Stop: Berlin
I took some time off the “Threat Matrix” book tour circuit this week to speak at the NEXT tech conference in Berlin, Germany, about personal branding. The NEXT conference is one of Europe’s biggest and hippest tech conferences, held this year in what appeared to be an abandoned factory a few blocks south of Potsdamer Platz. It was really great to be back in Berlin just six months after my last trip; there are few cities in the world that I have such a strong emotional attachment to as Berlin. I just love being here.
Actually, I gave two talks this week at NEXT—one for the entire conference focused on how “metanarratives” kill on the web and in politics. This is a phenomenon we lived on the Dean campaign (the Dean Scream), as well as how the Macaca Moment killed George Allen in the Virginia Senate race, among other examples. Social media makes it so easy for moments to go viral—but the ones that really impact politics are viral moments that connect with a larger story.
Back in 2007, I was talking to a McCain advisor and he said the thing he feared most was McCain tripping or falling at an event, something that would lend credence to the fear that John McCain was too old and frail to be president. That exact same slip or fall could happen to Barack Obama without any fear of it impacting his campaign as anything more than a night’s laughs on the comedy shows.
Anyway, my second talk in Berlin this week was more focused on personal brands online—specifically, “Inventing an Online Persona: How to balance authenticity and your online brand.” I ran through ten rules of personal branding that would be mostly familiar to any of the graduates of my course at Georgetown. The bottom line of why you want to build a personal brand? We all want to spend our days doing things we love. The presentation itself wended its way from Barack Obama to Charlie Sheen to Julia Allison to Sarah Palin to Gary Vaynerchuk, among many others—each of whom has defined himself or herself online in a certain realm.
The Threat Matrix is out!
As many of you know, I’ve spent much of the last three years writing a book about the FBI, tracing the history of its counterterrorism program from the 1972 Munich Olympics to the Times Square bombing in May 2010.
This product—The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror—grew out of a summer 2008 profile I wrote for The Washingtonian about Bob Mueller. I was fascinated that someone who has held such a key role in government for so long—he is today the only top national security official still in place from 9/11 and is now the longest-serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover—has been so under the radar. This was a man who stood eye-to-eye with President Bush in March 2005 and threatened to resign over what he saw as unconstitutional surveillance tactics the President was backing—and won, a man who was a highly decorated officer in Vietnam who entered the Marines from a privileged background of St. Paul’s and Princeton, a man who has led the nation’s primary domestic law enforcement agency through its most tumultuous and dangerous period, and yet he—mostly by his own choice—has been a footnote for journalists. I wanted to know more about him.
As I learned about him and the FBI, I was shocked at how often my background in geopolitics, globalization, and technology proved useful—the FBI I was learning about, with hundreds of agents working overseas, making arrests in foreign countries, tracking terrorists through remote jungle and mountain hideouts half-a-world away, bore little resemblance to the agency I knew from TV shows and movies. The FBI had gone global and no one had noticed.
At the same time, crime had gone global. Cases that once revolved around a few blocks in Queens now stretched back to the mountains of Sicily; terrorist threats went both ways: American jihadists were traveling to Somalia to attack targets there and jihadists from Yemen and Pakistan were coming here to attack us. Threats didn’t end or begin at our shores anymore. Whereas the CIA has spent the years since the Cold War closing its stations around the world, the FBI has been opening new foreign offices at the rate of four or five a year ever since the Berlin Wall fell and now has a presence in almost half the countries of the world.
To figure out where these developments came from and where they were going, I spent years pouring over FBI reports, reading once classified documents, interviewing hundreds of FBI personnel from case agents to nearly every living former FBI director, and getting an inside look at FBI bases from Budapest, Hungary, to the training facilities at Quantico, Virginia, and even the top secret lab facility where the FBI studies IEDs from Iraq and Afghanistan. I traveled with FBI Director Mueller to field offices across the country, logging more miles and more interviews with him than any other journalist in his entire tenure as director.
Altogether, when I added it up, I did over a thousand hours of interviews with over 180 people. While this is obviously an FBI-centric tale, I’ve also interviewed people throughout the intelligence community, including officers, analysts, and executives of the CIA and the NSA, members of the military and the Department of Defense, officers, detectives, agents, and executives from Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, the DEA, the Secret Service, the NYPD, and the Department of Justice (“Main Justice”), including the U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the District of Columbia, Eastern District of Virginia, and both the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, as well cabinet officials and staff at the State Department, the Treasury Department, the National Security Council, the National Counterterrorism Center, Congress, the White House, and a host of other government bodies. All but three of the interviews were conducted in person, generally over the course of many hours.
I also relied upon some 100,000 pages of books, reports, articles, and primary sources, as well as court records and FBI and government files, some of which have never been released to the public before. Those sources were a wealth of information. (It was also my first in-depth experience with the challenges of the government FOIA process, which led me—with the help of national security lawyer Mark Zaid—to file a lawsuit against the Department of Justice to try to force it to change its FOIA practices.)
The synthesis of all that research, which covers more than 30 years of FBI history, much of it once classified, paints a picture of an agency at once more powerful, more global, and more secret than anyone imagines.
The Threat Matrix is in bookstores now. You can buy the book from: Amazon.com
Best Books of 2010
If it’s Christmas, it’s time for my annual list of the best books I read this year. I read a lot of good books this year, so there’s some cheating in this list to allow me to mention more books than the traditional ten.
1. The Passage by Justin Cronin :: This was simply one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s a literary post-apocalypse vampire story—which sounds like any of a score of books out in recent years, but having read many of those as well, this one stands above all others. It’s a sweeping, massive tale—the kind where the first two hundred pages are just an interlude before the real story begins—but every bit a masterpiece. I was lucky enough to be given an advance copy by a friend at the publisher and devoured it; when it actually came out, I probably gave a dozen copies away to friends. It’s the first of a trilogy and the only shame of this book is that the next two installments are years off.
2. Max Perkins by A. Scott Berg :: Berg’s National Book Award-winning portrait of Scribners’ editor Max Perkins, who edited Hemingway, Wolfe, Lardner, and the Fitzgeralds, among many others, is one of the best books on writing I’ve ever come across. My Washingtonian predecessor gave me the book as a present as I took over the magazine and it taught me enormously how to think about my job as editor. The other book on writing that stood out this year is Tom Grimes’s Mentor, about writing his first novel and his relationship with his mentor, the novelist and Iowa Writing Workshop god Frank Conroy.
3. Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius :: I became a serious reader of Ignatius novels this year and found that this one captured espionage especially well, the emotions, the scenes, the challenging motives and practices. It’s one of the best spy books I’ve ever found.
4. Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens :: I’ve always enjoyed Hitchens writing (his God is Not Great was on my 2008 list) and his memoir this year was a real tour-de-force of Hitchens.
5. Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield :: Pressfield has made a career out of writing fictional novels out of major military historical moments. This telling of the Spartan 300 and the battle of Thermopylae stands as one of the best stories of men at war—and specifically what makes men fight. I came across because it’s part of the recommended reading list for Marine officers and after reading it can absolutely see how it’s critical for thinking about leading men into battle. Two other books on men at war that really stood out this year were Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, an epic Vietnam novel which I read while at Peacham this summer, and Rick Atkinson’s Day of Battle, the second volume in his nonfiction World War II “Liberation Trilogy,” which focuses on the Allies’ Italy and Sicily campaigns.
6. The Bridge by David Remnick :: I’ve been reading all of the Obama campaign books as they’ve come out and almost didn’t pick this one up, figuring I’d read about everything on the campaign that I cared to read. I’m glad I did. One of my great frustrations with all of the other works that Campaign 2008 generated is that they’re all compared in importance to Making of the President 1960 by people who evidently have never read the old Teddy White series. Teddy White’s series succeeded because they taught you not just about the campaign but about America at the time. His digressions about the inner city, the plight of blacks, the economy, and foreign affairs were what made those books wonderful. The books weren’t about the candidates per se, they were about the campaigns and the context in the country. Remnick managed to do the same, actually teaching us about America and Barack Obama’s place in it as he tells the story. Not much of the book actually ends up being about Obama himself, which, to my mind, is the sign of a truly exceptional biography. The other biography I read this year that stands out is Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Richard Gid Powers, which I read as I finished my own FBI book after realizing that I hadn’t really spent a lot of time researching Hoover himself, who is a bit character in my book but whose influence very much continues to shape the Bureau today.
7. Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett :: This is one of the first financial collapse novels, focusing on a banker, a government official, and the official’s sister. I found the opening especially interesting and a model that I hope to emulate someday.
8. The Alienist by Caleb Carr :: A gift from a friend, this book tells the fictional story of Teddy Roosevelt’s pursuit of a serial killer in turn-of-the-century New York with the first beginnings of criminal profiling. It’s a great tale, with lots of famous historical characters wrapped up in it, including J.P. Morgan himself.
9. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc :: This was another gift from a friend and turned out to be the most intense, heart-rending, and thoroughly-researched books I’ve come across in a while. The story of a caring and dysfunctional family on the edge of poverty, illness, crime, and employment, it shows just how hard the American Dream can be to achieve.
10. The Watchers by Shane Harris :: My friend and colleague at Washingtonian wrote one of the definitive books of the post-9/11 world, focusing on Admiral John Poindexter’s twenty-year journey to help the nation fight terrorism using new technology. It’s in a certain way the biography of the surveillance state and America’s general tension between security and civil liberties.
Honorable mentions this year go to two novels I really enjoyed reading: Gary Shteyngart’s appallingly-possibly-prescient Super Sad True Love Story, and the literary thriller The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney, which had some really colorful details that made the story come alive.
[Check here for my past lists: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.]
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