Quotes from Mitchell Zuckoff

When New Yorkers went to the polls a few weeks later, election officials came across the names of two unexpected write-in candidates for state treasurer: John D. Rockefeller and Charles Ponzi.

When Norway fell to the Germans the following year, he established the Norwegian Air Force training base known as Little Norway in Canada, to train pilots who'd escaped the Nazis. After handing that task to others, Balchen ferried bombers for the British.

Desperate, Ponzi sent a cable to Italy appealing to the dictator Benito Mussolini. No help there either, making Ponzi one of the rare topics on which Coolidge and Mussolini agreed. Ponzi was returned to Texas to await extradition, a process

The operators divided the world into two categories: shooters and non-shooters.

Oz had been reading No Easy Day, a memoir by a former SEAL Team Six member about the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

His debts approached three thousand dollars and, as Ponzi liked to say, his only assets were his hopes.

Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the highest honor bestowed by the CIA. The award goes to clandestine service members for "a voluntary act or acts of extraordinary heroism involving the acceptance of existing dangers with conspicuous fortitude and exemplary courage.

Albert Einstein once said, "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind." Later,

The GRS operators enjoyed repeated showings of the blood-soaked story of fearless King Leonidas and his tiny force of Spartan soldiers, outnumbered ten thousand to one by the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BC.

The roots of the tangled relationship between Filipinos and Americans dated back nearly fifty years, to 1898 and the Treaty of Paris, which marked the end of the Spanish-American War. The treaty gave the United States control over the Philippines, much to the chagrin of the Filipino people, who ached for independence after three centuries under Spanish rule.

It would take a few years, but just as the legend had prophesied, the spirits' return indeed marked the beginning of the end of the lives they'd always known.

The hitch, Ponzi understood, would be getting cash for the stamps he bought with the coupons. One possibility would be to sell the stamps at a slight discount to businesses that used large amounts of postage, giving them a bargain on a necessary item while still maintaining huge profits for Ponzi. Another hurdle would be figuring out how to buy and transport the enormous numbers of coupons necessary to turn a significant profit. But those crucial details would wait for another day.

she was a bookkeeper for the Port Authority, one week shy of her sixtieth birthday. She had limped down about one thousand steps from the 73rd floor, hobbled by fallen arches, a bad leg from having been hit by a car several months earlier, and assorted maladies. An office manager and others had helped Josephine to get this far, but she could go no farther and had sent her helpers ahead to safety. Now she was alone.

Flecks of dust twinkled in the beam, like a sudden spotlight on a darkened stage. Jay stared at it until comprehension dawned. "Guys," Jay said. "There used to be one hundred and six floors above us, and now I'm seeing sunshine.

CIA case officers, or COs,

Jay saw no sign of the more than twenty-seven hundred people22 who'd arrived at the Twin Towers that morning as workers, visitors, or emergency responders, or as airplane passengers and crew, but who'd soon be counted among the departed.

They wanted revenge for the Bataan Death March of 1942, during which Japanese troops killed or brutalized thousands of captured Filipino and American soldiers along a forced hundred-mile march to a prison camp.

Within weeks of the attacks, the United States went to war in Afghanistan, a conflict that continues at this writing. The war in Iraq followed, starting in 2003 and officially ending in 2011.

Roughly three thousand children6 under age eighteen lost a parent on 9/11, including 108 babies born in the months after their father's death.

In their Connecticut home, Lee and Eunice Hanson watched the televised explosion of the plane carrying their son, Peter, daughter-in-law, Sue Kim, and granddaughter, Christine. The strike into the South Tower ended the Airfone call between Peter and Lee. Later, Eunice realized: "We heard his first cries and his last cries." They endured the unspeakable, and yet they endured.

By eight o'clock Margaret was due at her post, a metal desk with a clackety typewriter where daily she proved that war wasn't just hell, it was hell with paperwork.

Thirty-eight U.S. military women who died were members of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the WAFS, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASPs, who flew military aircraft on noncombat missions to keep male pilots fresh and available for battle.

reaction whenever Jack arrived in