In October 2000, Ali Soufan, a 29-year-old Lebanese-American FBI agent, was driving across Brooklyn Bridge when his pager beeped. More than 7,000 miles away, off the coast of Yemen, suicide bombers in a fishing boat had blown a hole in the side of the USS Cole, a missile destroyer, killing 17 American sailors.
Soufan was being summoned to the office, where his mentor John O’Neill, head of the FBI’s National Security Division, would put him in charge of the investigation. O’Neill and Soufan were rare voices in the FBI and beyond in sounding the alarm about the scale of the threat posed to the US by al-Qaida.
