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For a year and a half, Dan Coleman continued his solitary investigation
of bin Laden. Because he was posted to Alec Station, the bureau
more or less forgot about him. Using wiretaps on bin Laden's businesses,
Coleman was able to draw a map of the al-Qaeda network,
which extended throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Central
Asia. He was alarmed to realize that many of al-Qaeda's associates
had ties to the United States. He concluded this was a worldwide terror
organization dedicated to destroying America, but Coleman
couldn't even get his superiors to return his phone calls on the matter.
Coleman was left to himself to puzzle out the questions that would
later occur to everyone. Where had this movement come from? Why
had it chosen to attack America? And what could we do to stop it? He
was like a laboratory technician looking at a slide of some previously
unseen virus. Under the microscope, al-Qaeda's lethal qualities began
to reveal themselves. The group was small—only ninety-three members
at the time—but it was part of a larger radical movement that was
sweeping through Islam, particularly in the Arab world. The possibilities
for contagion were great. The men who made up this group were
well trained and battle hardened. They apparently had ample resources.
Moreover, they were fanatically committed to their cause and
convinced that they would be victorious. They were brought together
by a philosophy that was so compelling that they would willingly—
eagerly—sacrifice their lives for it. In the process they wanted to kill as
many people as possible.
The most frightening aspect of this new threat, however, was the
fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive
and exotic. Up against the confidence that Americans placed in
modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from
the savage pageant of history, the defiant gestures of bin Laden and his
followers seemed absurd and even pathetic. And yet al-Qaeda was not
a mere artifact of seventh-century Arabia. It had learned to use modern
tools and modern ideas, which wasn't surprising, since the story of
al-Qaeda had really begun in America, not so long ago.