For most Americans the true origin of the 9/11 attacks remains a mystery. But as the two jetliners hit the Twin Towers, three strangers knew exactly what had happened. FBI agent Nancy Floyd, FDNY fire marshal Ronnie Bucca, and Ramzi Yousef, the bomb-making terrorist an American judge once called "an apostle of evil," had been on a collision course for years-- soldiers on opposing sides of a terror war raging since the late 1980s. Now, in "1000 Years for Revenge -- a groundbreaking investigative work that reads like an international thriller -- award-winning journalist Peter Lance reveals how the FBI missed dozens of opportunities to stop the attacks of September 11, dating back to 1989. Drawing on interviews with scores of central figures in the story, as well as hundreds of pages of declassified documents, Lance uncovers startling evidence of FBI negligence that even a joint congressional committee missed. Among his revelations: From the early 1990s, Osama bin Laden was running an active al Qaeda terror cell in New York City -- with blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman as its leader and Ramzi Yousef as its master bomb maker. The FBI had sufficient intelligence to capture Yousef before he built the first World Trade Center bomb in 1993. In 1995, they learned that he had already set the 9/11 suicide-hijacking plot in motion from Manila -- that he was planning "to return to the U.S. to attack the World Trade Center a second time." Yet each time the FBI missed the opportunity to stop him. FBI agent Nancy Floyd used a key informant to penetrate the cell of Sheikh Rahman -- only to have the operation sandbagged by her FBI supervisor. Most alarming, in 1992, a confidant ofSheikh Rahman removed the plans for the World Trade Center from FDNY headquarters. Ronnie Bucca brought the information to the FBI in 1999 but he was ignored. This is a story of heroes: Nancy Floyd, who tried to bring down the New York terror cell but paid for her efforts with damage to her career, and Ronnie Bucca, who tried to alert the FBI to the security threat to New York City from al Qaeda but paid for the agency's negligence with his life on 9/11. It is also a story of the power of evil: Lance offers a chilling chronicle of how one man -- the elusive mastermind Yousef -- managed to defeat the entire American security system in what Lance calls "the greatest failure of intelligence since the Trojan Horse." 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 terrorism in the twenty-first century.