Osama The Making of a Terrorist

How is it possible for one middle-aged Saudi millionaire to threaten the world's only superpower? This is the question at the center of Jonathan Randal's riveting, timely account of Osama bin Laden's life and role in the rise of terrorism in the Middle East. Randal traces the current sources of Osama's money and tells us why the Iraq war has played into the hands of the terrorists, while also providing essential insight and background on the history of American involvement in the Middle East. With his long-maintained sources in the Middle East and his intimate understanding of the region, Randal gives us a clearer explanation than any we have had of the whys and wherefores of the world's most prominent and feared terrorist.

Jonathan Randal was born in 1933 in Buffalo, New York, and educated at Exeter and Harvard. He spent his junior year in France, and after serving as a private in the U.S. Army in Europe, he started out as a foreign correspondent in the mid-1950s in Paris and over the decades has worked for United Press, the old Paris Herald, Time, The New York Times and, for nearly thirty years, The Washington Post. As a war correspondent he reported the Algerian War of Independence from France, followed by wars and crises in the Congo, Vietnam, Iran, Lebanon, Kurdistan, Bosnia, Liberia, and a dozen other combat zones. He considers himself privileged to have witnessed these events and lucky to have survived when so many of his colleagues did not. Randal is the author of Going All the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers and the War in Lebanon and After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan.