Al Qaeda

Jane Corbin
September 2003     ISBN: 1560255234

Traveling across four continents, Jane Corbin traces the complex Al Qaeda network through the Middle East, Africa, Europe and America. She demonstrates how its members used their training in Afghan terror camps to elude the world's most sophisticated intelligence agencies, and describes how parallel plots to kill hundreds in Europe were only uncovered in their final stages. Based on Corbin's own recent trips to Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda challenges the Pentagon and State Department's highly varnished version of the assault on Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda.

As President Bush's "war on terror" continues to pose more questions than it answers, Al-Qaeda provides a penetrating assessment of the West's response to September 11.

"In Al-Qaeda: The Terror Network that Threatens the World, Jane Corbin traces the rise of Mr bin Laden's group, focusing on the September plot and its aftermath. Ms Corbin, a BBC journalist who has made several documentaries about al-Qaeda, credits the group for its skills and cunning. But the cascade of missed chances to detect the conspiracies form an equally important counterpoint to her gripping narrative."

--The Economist

"Jane Corbin, a long-standing reporter for the BBC's Panorama news programme, has been chasing Al Qaeda longer than most in the international press. She has written her own story in a book that reads like a thriller. Along the way she tries to explain the bigger picture, but it is her fascination with the terrorists and their lives that is most gripping.... What emerges in Corbin's racy and highly descriptive book is the extraordinary complexity of emotions, ideology, family and tribal ties, and inspiration that terrorism requires."

--Ahmed Rashid

Jane Corbin was twice nominated for an Emmy and is the four-time winner of the Royal Television Society Award for journalism. She is a senior correspondent at Panorama, the BBC's flagship current affairs program. In recent years she has specialized in studying the growth of terror movements in the Middle East and produced the first profile of bin Laden to be shown on British television in the wake of September 11.