Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It

"The definitive book on the 19 men who brought such devastation and terror to this country … a well-told, meticulously researched cautionary tale." — Washington Post Book World

Using research undertaken in twenty countries on four continents, Los Angeles Times correspondent Terry McDermott provides gripping, authoritative portraits of the main players in the 9/11 plot. With brilliant reporting and thoughtful analysis, McDermott brings us a clearer, more nuanced, and in some ways more frightening, understanding of the landmark event of our time.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were a calamity on a scale few had imagined possible. In their aftermath, we exaggerated the men who perpetrated the attacks, shaping hasty and often mistaken reporting into caricatures we could comprehend—monsters and master criminals equal to the enormity of their crime. In reality, the 9/11 hijackers were unexceptional men, not much different from countless others. It is this ordinary enemy, not the caricature, that we must understand if we are to have a legitimate hope of defeating terrorism.

From an award–winning L.A. Times reporter, a brilliantly researched investigation of the lives of the men responsible for September 11 attacks – how they lived, what they thought, and how they changed into the sort of men who could do what they did.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the acknowledged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, had been to the United States before; as a bright young man, he had come here from his native Kuwait to study science. He had returned home appalled, telling people Americans hated Muslims, and spent the next 20 years plotting to get even, developing for this purpose an unusual weapon: a group of young men from Hamburg, the agents of a seismic shift in modern history but in many respects utterly normal.

The Sept. 11 attackers have largely been depicted with a series of caricatures that run from evil genius on one end to deluded fanatics on the other, but most of Mohammed's protegees came from apolitical and only mildly religious backgrounds. Under his watch, though, they evolved into devout, pious Muslims who debated endlessly on how best to serve, to fulfil what they came to regard as their religious obligations. In fundamentalist Islam, religion and politics are inseparable; the Hamburg men saw themselves as soldiers of God.

"The definitive book on the 19 men who brought such devastation and terror to this country … a well-told, meticulously researched cautionary tale." - Washington Post Book World

"The very best [book] available … on the subject." - Los Angeles Times

"McDermott puts a human face on the hijackers and offers riveting accounts of the final weeks and days as the plotters prepared to carry out their horrific mission." - Booklist

"Engrossing. . . . McDermott’s doggedness and eye for detail enable him to get as close as one ever will to answering why a group of fairly ordinary men from intact families and unexceptional backgrounds become the extremists who executed such a monstrous act. . . . Paints a vivid portrait of the pilots who led the devastating attacks." - Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Thoroughly researched [and] ... a disturbing investigation.... As interesting and important as the story of the hijackers in Perfect Soldiers is the author’s ability to explain in simple terms the complicated blend of politics, religion and customs of that area of the world that spawned these radical young men." - Denver Post

"Perfect Soldiers is bound to become one of the most insightful books ever published about September 11." - Houston Chronicle

“A chilling read.” - Kirkus Reviews

"Absorbing.... [A] richly textured narrative full of the sort of small, telling details that turn these men from faceless figures of evil into individuals." - New York Times

"Fascinating. . . . A simultaneously passionate, compassionate, and dispassionate book that neither indicts Islam nor excuses the terrorists’ crimes but draws a chilling, clear, and cautionary map of the small, fateful steps with which ordinary men cross the dangerous line between faith and fanaticism." - Francine Prose, O magazine

“We’ll never know it all, but Terry McDermott comes as close as anyone has—and perhaps ever will—to explaining how nineteen zealots came to the place they did. It’s all in the details, and they are all here. This is journalism at its best.” - Seymour M. Hersh