The dump of an apartment in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, offered a bevy of clues that foreign terrorism had come to America. Inside were a thousand AK-47 cartridges and a stack of bombmaking manuals. In a notebook was a scribbled message in broken English. It called for “destroying exploding … their high world buildings which they are proud of … ”

The police raiding the home in 1990 failed to realize that this violent language had been copied by the apartment dweller from his mentor, Omar Ahmad Abdel Rahman — “the blind sheik.” From a mosque in Jersey City, he preached to a devout circle mesmerized by his calls to jihad. In 1993, he would guide the plot to bomb some “high buildings” — the World Trade Center.