I first realized there might be a good biographical book to be written about bin Laden when I was talking to Haji Deen Mohamed, the governor of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, during the summer of 2004. I was interviewing the governor about the hunt for bin Laden for a story I was writing for The Atlantic, and had sought him out because Naranghar province is where Tora Bora is located, the last place bin Laden is known to have been before he disappeared in mid-December 2001. During the course of our chat, Mohamed, a genial white-haired former mujahideen commander, mentioned in passing that he had known bin Laden reasonably well in the 1989 to 1991 time period when the Saudi millionaire was helping the Afghan war effort against the communists. That comment started me thinking about who else might have spent time with bin Laden, who might be willing to speak to me. As it turned out there were around fifty people that I spoke to directly, who had had some encounter with bin Laden, whether that was a brief meeting or a friendship of decades. Those interviews were conducted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the United Kingdom.

  

     

   The model I used for this book may be somewhat surprising; the 1982 book Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein, which was edited with the help of George Plimpton. Edie is an oral history of Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgewick, the beautiful model and actress who lit up Warhol's Factory in New York during the mid-1960s only to die at the age of 28 after epic struggles with drugs and depression.  On the face of it no two subjects could be more different than Edie Sedgewick and Osama bin Laden, though they are both scions of prominent families similarly addicted to the public spotlight. Yet it was the personal recollections that Stein collected for Edie that illuminated better than any other book what it was like to be in New York during the 1960s as the flower power era gave way to the darker times symbolized by the attempted murder of Warhol by a deranged feminist in 1969. In a similar manner, I hoped this oral history of bin Laden would recapture and illuminate worlds of which the reader is likely to have had little experience: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the 1970s where bin Laden grew up; the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s where al Qaeda slowly took shape; Sudan in the early 1990s where bin Laden became more radicalized; Afghanistan under the Taliban in the late 1990s, and the secretive inner world of al Qaeda itself.

     Two other models influenced the way that this book is constructed. The first was the type of television documentary that does not use narration where, instead, a seamless weave of sound bites tells the story. I tried to keep my authorial voice out of the book as much as possible. As I was writing the book I realized that it was necessary to write explanatory introductions to each chapter as bin Laden's story is a complicated one that has played out across several continents and decades, and it was necessary to set up some of the voices we hear from in the book, but my aim was to keep my authorial interventions to a minimum. In this way the reader can make his or her own decisions about what he/she is reading rather than being constantly told what to think by an omniscient narrator.

      As I constructed the book I was also influenced by the novels of John Dos Passos, whose wonderful evocations of the United States in the 1920s were written using a variety of collage techniques, such as the insertion of newsreels to punctuate the narrative. Similarly bin Laden's story is told using a collage of different voices and many different sources including indictments; plea agreements; transcripts of trial proceedings and interrogation reports involving al Qaeda members and associates from the United States, Canada, Italy, France, Bosnia, Belgium, Spain, Germany and Egypt. And I mined books written by al Qaeda's leaders; thousands of pages of transcripts of U.S. military tribunal proceedings of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay; first hand accounts of bin Laden from newspapers from around the Muslim world; documents from the Saudi Bin Ladin Group, and a trove of al Qaeda-related documents and publications going back to the early 1980s that I have collected over the years. And I also used statements made by bin Laden himself such as those he made to CNN's Peter Arnett and myself in March 1997 when we interviewed him for his first television interview, the only time that I met al Qaeda's leader.

     I hope that the result of all this work paints a more comprehensive portrait of a man who changed history, yet has revealed little of himself, and has too often been shrouded either in a fog of our own propaganda, or the delusions of those who hero worship him.