Traces America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the years since 9/11, and how the U.S. efforts in the Afghan War faltered because of a failure to understand the intentions of Pakistan's intelligence agency.

December, 2000: In a tiny office in the basement of the National Security Agency, a handful of analysts work on a project so secret its existence is known to fewer than a hundred people. They are intercepting Osama bin Laden's every word as he talks on his satellite phone to al Qaeda cells. What he's planning is big-a strike against the U.S.-and they know from the intercepts they'll learn the details any day... any minute. Suddenly, the conversations...

A Moroccan operative for British and French intelligence describes his time undercover inside the fundamentalist group Al Qaeda, from Islamist cells in Belgium to the training camps of Afghanistan and radical mosques in London.