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Terry McDermott has been a reporter at eight newspapers for twenty-five years, the last seven at the Los Angeles Times, where he is a national correspondent. He has won prizes for his journalism in a number of fields, including foreign affairs, economics, and science.

De la contraportada

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.

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.

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Perfect Soldiers

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

A House of Learning

The Delta

Nearly all of egypt's 65 million people are squeezed by the great surrounding deserts onto thin ribbons of arable land strung along the length of the Nile River. This savannah, made fertile by the regular flooding of the river, has been populated for tens of thousands of years -- far beyond the range of human memory. North of present-day Cairo, the river splits into two main branches -- the Rosetta and Damietta -- and innumerable smaller ones, a spiderweb of streams crisscrossing between the two larger channels. From there north, 100 miles to the sea, the river feeds a broad, improbably lush delta. These northern reaches of the Nile endowed one of the great civilizations of the earth long before the powerful realms of the western world were even the faintest of far-off dreams, when, as one Islamic scholar put it, "northern Europeans were still sitting in trees." The Delta's abundance has forever remained the source of the enormous wealth and talent Egyptian civilizations have produced. Presidents, poets, and revolutionaries have all been shaped in its villages.

Today, the Delta remains Egypt's breadbasket. Its markets overflow;the roads are jammed with pickup trucks and donkey carts. Tractors arerare -- most of the work of the fields is still performed the way it hasalways been, by hand and hoof. The Delta is thick with people, too.Women wear veils or scarves; many men wear the long cotton tunics called galabiyas, muddied at the hem from hard work on wet ground. Thelast village is seldom out of sight before the next slides into view. Betweentowns, the fields, small and irregularly shaped, jigsaw across the tableland.Billboards for the latest Nokia cell phones straddle irrigation ditches teemingwith trash. Women bathe and wash dishes along the dirty shores.

Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta was born here in1968 in the northernmost delta province of Kafr el-Sheik. His father,Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, came from a tiny hinterland village,and his mother, Bouthayna Mohamed Mustapha Sheraqi, from theoutskirts of the provincial capital, also called Kafr el-Sheik. As was, and isstill, customary in rural Egypt, the elder Mohamed and Bouthayna metand married by arrangement of their families. At the time of the wedding,Mohamed el-Amir, as he was known, was already an established locallawyer, having taken degrees in both civil and sharia, or Islamic, law.Bouthayna was only 14, but as the daughter of a wealthy farming andtrading family, she came from several rungs up the social ladder and wasa good catch for the ambitious Mohamed. They soon had two daughters,Azza and Mona, then a son named for the father.

They hadn't many relatives on the father's side and maintained acool distance from Bouthayna's family. This was according to Amir'swishes, Bouthayna's family said. The father was regarded by his in-lawsas an odd man -- austere, strict, and private. He was and remains a bluff,forceful fellow who permitted little disagreement.

Village life in the Arab world offers much the same degree of privacyas village life elsewhere, which is to say, very little at all. Egypt's crowdedgeography further insists that life be communal and shared. People are piledon top of one another. To resist the weight of the centuries in which life hasbeen spent and shaped this way takes real effort. Amir, a stubborn man, waswilling to expend it.

"The father is alone. There are no brothers, one sister maybe. Wenever met her," said Hamida Fateh, Bouthayna's sister. "Here, the familiesare all very close. But even here, the father was separate."

Fateh's family is prominent in Kafr el-Sheik; they own farmland, anauto-parts store, and a six-story commercial building. The family livesunostentatiously above a cobbled, dusty street in a cramped walk-up with whitewashed walls, plain rugs, overstuffed furniture, a Panasonic boombox, and a 19-inch Toshiba television. It is unair-conditioned and theapartment's balcony doors hang open to let the inevitable afternoon heatescape.

Fateh wears a head scarf, more out of habit than belief, she said; neitherher family nor the Amirs were particularly religious. They were partof the secular generation that grew up in Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt,when the country's future did not seem as bound to the past as it doestoday. They were the generation that would remake Egypt and reclaim itsglories. We are educated people, Fateh said, people from the country butnot country people. Fateh studied agricultural engineering at university;her husband studied electrical engineering.

The senior Amir was ambitious, too, and exceptionally focused. Hislaw practice thrived in Kafr el-Sheik, but he was not satisfied. "He movedto Cairo," Fateh said. "He wanted to be famous."

Excerpted from Perfect Soldiersby Terry McDermott Copyright © 2006 by Terry McDermott. Excerpted by permission.
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