1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI--the Untold Story

by Peter Lance

1000 Years for Revenge is a groundbreaking investigative work that uncovers startling evidence of how the FBI missed dozens of opportunities to stop the attacks of September 11, dating back to 1989. Award-winning journalist Peter Lance explains how an elusive al Qaeda mastermind defeated the entire American security system in what the author calls "the greatest failure of intelligence since the Trojan Horse." Threading the stories of FBI agent Nancy Floyd, FDNY fire marshal Ronnie Bucca, and bomb-maker Ramzi Yousef, Lance uncovers the years of behind-the-scenes intrigue that put these three strangers on a collision course. An unparalleled work of investigative reporting and masterful storytelling, 1000 Years for Revenge will change forever the way we look at the FBI and the war on terror in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Terrorism, History, Nonfiction, The United States Of America, Politics, Cia, War

560 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2003

About the author

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter now working as a screenwriter and novelist. With a Masters Degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, Lance spent the first 15 years of his career as a print reporter and network correspondent.

He began his career as a reporter for his hometown paper, The Newport, R.I. Daily News. There, while a student at Northeastern University in Boston, he won the coveted Sevellon Brown Award from the A.P. Managing Editors Association. Lance next moved to WNET, the PBS flagship in New York, where he won his first New York area Emmy and the Ohio State Award as a producer- reporter for Channel 13′s news magazine THE 51ST STATE.

Later, while working as a writer and producer for WABC-TV Lance won his second Emmy along with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism prize for WILLOWBROOK: THE PEOPLE VS. THE STATE OF NEW YORK, an exposé on a notorious institution for the mentally retarded. He also was awarded The National Community Service Emmy for that same documentary.

While getting his law degree, Lance worked as a Trial Preparation Assistant in the office of the District Attorney for New York County. Moving to ABC News as a field producer, Lance won his fourth Emmy for his investigation of an arson-for-profit ring in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago: “Arson and Profit.”

In 1981 Lance became Investigative Correspondent for ABC News. For his very first investigative piece on 20/20 Lance won his fifth Emmy for “Unnecessary Surgery,” an exposé of unnecessary surgery in an Arkansas hospital. He won two more Emmy nominations in 1982 for 20/20 investigative pieces on Formaldehyde “The Danger Within” and toxic waste: “Deadly Chemicals, Deadly Oil;” a piece that also won the National Headliner Award.

Over the next five years he covered hundreds of stories worldwide for ABC NEWS 20/20, NIGHTLINE, and WORLD NEWS TONIGHT.

He was a member of the first American crew into Indochina after the end of the Vietnam War. He chased rebel insurgents through the Plaine Des Jarres in Laos and members of the Gambino Family through the toxic wastelands of New Jersey. He tracked knife-happy surgeons in the Deep South and nuclear terrorists through the twisted streets of Antwerp. Then, in 1987, he took a break from non-fiction.

Lance came to L.A. and began working as a writer and story editor for Michael Mann on two of his acclaimed NBC series: CRIME STORY and MIAMI VICE.
In 1989 Lance became the co-executive producer and “show runner” on the fourth season of WISEGUY for CBS and in 1993 he co-created MISSING PERSONS, for ABC. In recent years, he has served as a writer and consulting producer on such series as JAG (NBC) and THE SENTINEL (UPN).

In 1997 Lance’s first novel FIRST DEGREE BURN became a national best seller, ranking No. 24 on The Ingram A-List The Top 50 Requested Titles in Mystery- Detective Fiction. The film-noir mystery features FDNY Fire Marshal Eddie Burke.

Following the 9/11 attacks Lance began investigating the origins of the FBI’s original probe of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. He authored 4 books on counter terrorism and org. crime for HarperCollins between 2003-2013.

In 2020 his investigation of the murder of Eduardo Tirella killed in 1966 by Doris Duke was the lead piece in Vanity Fair's July/Aug. issue. During sequestration Lance expanded into a 438 page book HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT published in 3 editions on 2.23.21 with the Audible edition which he narrated published on 3.10.21

Email: pl@peterlance.com

Reviews

[Harry Annan]

An absolutely scathing analysis of the failure of the major intelligence and crime fighting agencies within the US to head off the 9-11 WTC bombings. Sad to say, I don't think much has changed. Every American should read this book to also understand more readily why the reasons for the war in Iraq were based on false assumptions as the majority of the perpetrators were Egyptian or Saudis with absolutely no connection to Sadaam. Peter Lance has down an outstanding journalistic job in my view.

[Kalli]

An exhaustive look at the road to the 9/11 attacks, beginning in the 1980s. Well researched, but often repetitive. Heartbreaking in its enumeration of all the times the US intelligence community, and particularly the FBI, failed to follow leads that potentially could have stopped the attack.

[DAISY READS HORROR]

I just couldn't get into this. I think for me it would be better to stick to watching documentaries on the History Channel when it comes to this subject.

[Steve]

Peter Lance's account of the backstory on the World Trade Center plots is, at times, a bit tedious. It can't be said to be weak or ill-investigated. For readers that really like footnotes, this is the book to read.

In the post-9/11 landscape it is easy to forget that the US has been at war against militant Islam for many years. 1000 Years for Revenge picks up the story in the early 1990's with the failed attempt to destroy the World Trade Center by truck bomb. In the 8+ years between the attacks on the WTC, we see the evil Ramzi Yousef and other assorted terrorists succeed and fail on several fronts. Sadly, as we all know, al-Qaida finally achieved the end they sought on 9/11.

The myth of the invincibility of the FBI is laid bare, as is the absurd idea that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by the US Government. The story that comes through is one of incompetence, arrogance, missed opportunities, and a few very lucky breaks. I feel no safer knowing that tips and leads are often received and discarded based on the whim of one special agent or supervisor.

The book is a bit dated, however, having been written several years ago. One wonders if, hopefully, many of the weaknesses have been eliminated. We can only hope...

[Zack]

Frustrating is the main word that comes to mind when thinking about this book. Not for how it is written, but for my feelings towards those that failed the American people in the years leading to 9/11. This book isn't just the story of one or two screw-ups along the way. There seem to be endless examples of FBI negligence and arrogance that helped contribute to the failures of stopping the fateful attacks that day.

However, as Ronnie Bucca says, those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. The best hope is that something good came out of all this, and the hubris that was so evident in the Bureau before has at least diminished somewhat.

[Cindy]

Eye opening info on all the ways the FBI let us down by ignoring evidence showing our risk of great harm. Unfortunately, the attacks on 9/11 showed us just how accurate Ronnie Bucca and Nancy Floyd were in trying to alert authorities to our serious danger of attack.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Peter Lance’s 1,000 Years for Revenge dramatically changed the way I think about the intelligence failures leading up to September 11, 2001.

Before reading the book, I tended to accept the common explanation that the warning signs of 9/11 only appeared obvious in hindsight. After finishing Lance’s account, I’m no longer convinced that explanation is sufficient. No single agency possessed a complete blueprint of the attacks, but there were far more pieces of the puzzle in circulation than I had realized.

The intelligence uncovered in the Philippines after the Bojinka plot was especially striking. Investigators had already encountered plans involving commercial aircraft, international terrorist networks, and individuals such as Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. KSM’s failure to become a much higher investigative priority after Yousef’s capture is astonishing in retrospect.

Then the warning signs continued.

There was the Phoenix Memo warning about possible bin Laden-connected extremists attending American flight schools. There was Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota, whose behavior at a flight school was so alarming that an FBI supervisor reportedly warned that he was trying to prevent someone from flying an aircraft into the World Trade Center. There were the difficulties surrounding the investigation of the USS Cole, including John O’Neill’s inability to return to Yemen. Informants, terrorist networks, intelligence reports, and investigations repeatedly brushed against one another without ever being assembled into a coherent picture.

What emerges is less a story of one catastrophic mistake than of institutional dysfunction.

The FBI, CIA, State Department, and other agencies often appeared trapped by bureaucracy, jurisdictional rivalries, poor information sharing, legal uncertainty, personality conflicts, and incentives that rewarded individual prosecutions more than understanding the larger terrorist network.

That is probably the book’s greatest contribution. Lance makes the failures feel less abstract. They were not simply “intelligence failures.” They were decisions made by specific institutions and people, often while others inside those same institutions were warning that something was wrong.

At the same time, I did not find every argument equally convincing.

Lance occasionally stretches circumstantial connections farther than I think the evidence allows. His attempts to connect the Oklahoma City bombing more closely to Middle Eastern terrorism struck me as intriguing but tenuous. Likewise, while TWA Flight 800 absolutely deserved to be investigated as a possible terrorist attack, the accumulated evidence still seems to favor an accidental fuel-tank explosion rather than a bomb.

I was also sometimes distracted by Lance’s tendency toward dramatic storytelling, particularly in his portrayal of FDNY fire marshal Ronnie Bucca. Bucca was unquestionably a remarkable figure who took the terrorist threat seriously, but passages involving prophetic dreams, ominous family moments, and disaster drills occasionally felt more like literary foreshadowing than investigative history. The underlying facts may be genuine, but Lance sometimes presents them with more dramatic certainty than the evidence seems to justify.

That distinction became important to me while reading the book. Lance is strongest when he can show a document, a date, an interview, an intelligence report, or a specific bureaucratic decision. He is less persuasive when broader connections or reconstructed scenes depend heavily on his interpretation.

Still, the documented failures are disturbing enough on their own.

I do not believe the U.S. government knowingly allowed September 11 to happen. What the book reveals instead is a system that repeatedly failed to connect information, challenge assumptions, share intelligence, and recognize the scale of the threat developing in front of it.

That is what makes the book so compelling and, at times, infuriating. Lance filled in enormous gaps in my understanding of the years between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and September 11. Even when I disagreed with some of his conclusions, he forced me to reconsider how much of the threat was actually visible before the attacks.

1,000 Years for Revenge is provocative, occasionally overdramatic, sometimes speculative, but ultimately an extremely valuable and disturbing examination of the road to September 11. I finished it believing there were genuine opportunities to disrupt the plot that were lost through bureaucracy, misaligned incentives, investigative tunnel vision, and failures of imagination.

I am very interested in reading the other books in Lance’s 9/11 trilogy to see whether they strengthen, complicate, or challenge the conclusions I reached here.

[Tony Bridges]

Great reading into terrorism

Great reading as it shows how 9/11 could have been prevented and the incompetence of the USA FBI and all other services failed the world and more important the people of America

[Emmanuel32463]

I thought it was ok because it tells us about history the FBI and people that escaped the FBI.

[Darrin]

One of the best books I have ever read.

[Billy Hammer]

I read this book ten years ago from this blog post. I still remember it clearly.

[S2 Mc]

Ignorance of pride - personal, and organizational - petty fiefdom battles by supposedly mature executives - can only hope this has been widely read and the lessons repeatedly reviewed.

[Frank]

Tight and concise even though it's quite a long read. Plays out like a tense mini-series. HBO's 'The Wire' was NOT a fiction...

[Woarn Eikmen]

This book was incredible, it was exactly what you'd expect, the highly detailed and contextualized story of the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks from both blue team and red team. If you want to learn exactly what was going on with Islamic terrorism the decade leading up to 9/11 this is the book for you.

[Steve]

A frighteneing catalogue of errors and ovesights.A bit difficult to read and could have been half the length(my opinion).Unfortunately like many of these books it is strong on hindsight and light on how to improve for the future.

[Reader]

Peter Lance's "1000 Years For Revenge" is a gemstone of insight and special knowledge surrounding the backstory of what would transform into America's darkest day.

Peter Lance conducted an incredible amount of investigations.

[Kelly]

Interesting, a bit infuriating, but very very very long and pretty complex. It takes a lot of concentration to read which made it difficult for me.

[Kim]

Very interesting - really connects the past to the current state of the world. It's very frustrating in its hindsight!

[Steven]

A very good "conspiracy theory" book. Lot of thought provoking material.

[Kathryn]

very interesting

[A.J. Jr.]

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