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Senator Bob Graham: Keys to the Kingdom
Topic Started: Jun 7 2011, 11:47 AM (1,520 Views)
shure
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Keys to the Kingdom
Bob Graham (Author)


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http://www.amazon.com/Keys-Kingdom-Bob-Graham/dp/159315660X/

Description

FORMER SENATOR JOHN BILLINGTON KNEW WRITING THIS NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED PIECE MIGHT GET HIM KILLED . . .


July 6th...

The congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks left several secrets unanswered. The top three are Saudi Arabia’s full role in the preparation for and the execution of the plot; the Kingdom’s willingness and capacity to collaborate in future terrorist actions against the United States; and why this and the prior administration conducted a cover-up that thus far has frustrated finding the answers to the first two questions.

Now, there is an even more ominous unknown. Does Saudi Arabia have the bomb? . . . The United States should take prompt action to prevent this potential conflict from becoming a reality.


Shortly after this appears in print, his suspicion comes true: Senator Billington, a co-chair of the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry Commission, is murdered near his Florida home. Sensing the danger he faced before he was murdered, Billington left ex-Special Forces operative Tony Ramos detailed instructions for an investigation into Saudi complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.


Now Ramos, in conjunction with Billington’s daughter Laura, must uncover a shocking international conspiracy linking Saudi Arabia — the Kingdom — to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, in a race against time that will span Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.


But will Ramos and his team be able to stop al-Qaeda from unleashing nuclear disaster on American shores and beyond?


Destined to be a titan amongst thrillers, Keys to the Kingdom is infused with inside information and insight into the world of terrorism that only Senator Bob Graham — as former Chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence — can offer.



Author Bio -

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Senator Bob Graham, author of Keys to the Kingdom, is a former two-term Governor of Florida and served eighteen years in the United States Senate. He was appointed by President Obama to co-chair the National Commission on the BP oil spill and served on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

He is recognized for his leadership on issues ranging from healthcare and environmental preservation, and for his ten years of service on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — including eighteen months as chairman of the Committee. In 2004, he authoredIntelligence Matters, based upon his experiences during the Joint Inquiry and its analysis of the run-up to the Iraq War.

After retiring from public life, he served for a year as a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. While there, he wrote a book about civic participation entitled . Currently, he chairs the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida.







Reviews

“His novel delivers uncommon insight into the treacherous and sometimes frantic craft of intelligencce gathering. It reads like a true story because Graham knows where the truth lies.”
– Carl Hiaasen, New York Times bestselling author



“Senator Bob Graham had more wisdom than I when he said that going into Iraq would take our focus off Afghanistan. Graham is able to present a narrative about the threats we face in an exciting and fast-paced novel. Read this book and you will become more expert in understanding our dangerous world.”
– Jane Harman, Former Congresswoman and President, CEO, and Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.



“Keys to the Kingdom ignites like a Homeland Security briefing and The Situation Room colliding head-on. Current, fast-paced, and crackles with the authenticity of someone who has obviously been ‘in the room.’”
– Andrew Gross, #1 New York Times bestselling author



“A fast-paced thriller that rings with authenticity, because it’s written by someone who knows how things really work at the highest levels of power.”
– Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author



“A page-turner with believable characters, brimming with suspense, and steeped in wonderfully authentic and brightly-drawn locations.”
– Steve Martini, New York Times bestselling author



“Bob Graham has produced a taut thriller that educates while it entertains. His novel throbs with the heart-pounding urgency of its memorable characters.”
– Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Former Senior CIA Operations Officer and Director of the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence for the U.S. Department of Energy



_________________________________


previous book...


Intelligence Matters: The CIA, The FBI, Saudi Arabia, and The Failure of America's War on Terror
Graham Bob (Author)


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Book Description
In this explosive, controversial, and profoundly alarming insider’s report, Senator Bob Graham reveals faults in America’s national security network severe enough to raise fundamental questions about the competence and honesty of public officials in the CIA, the FBI, and the White House.

For ten years, Senator Graham served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he had access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Graham co-chaired a historic joint House-Senate inquiry into the intelligence community’s failures. From that investigation and his own personal fact-finding, Graham discovered disturbing evidence of terrorist activity and a web of complicity:

• At one point, a terrorist support network conducted some of its operations through Saudi Arabia’s U.S. embassy–and a funding chain for terrorism led to the Saudi royal family.
• In February 2002, only four months after combat began in Afghanistan, the Bush administration ordered General Tommy Franks to move vital military resources out of Afghanistan for an operation against Iraq–despite Franks’s privately stated belief that there was a job to finish in Afghanistan, and that the war on terrorism should focus next on terrorist targets in Somalia and Yemen.
• Throughout 2002, President Bush directed the FBI to limit its investigations of Saudi Arabia, which supported some and possibly all of the September 11 hijackers.
• The White House was so uncooperative with the bipartisan inquiry that its behavior bore all the hallmarks of a cover-up.
• The FBI had an informant who was extremely close to two of the September 11 hijackers, and actually housed one of them, yet the existence of this informant and the scope of his contacts with the hijackers were covered up.
• There were twelve instances when the September 11 plot could have been discovered and potentially foiled.
• Days after 9/11, U.S. authorities allowed some Saudis to fly, despite a complete civil aviation ban, after which the government expedited the departure of more than one hundred Saudis from the United States.
• Foreign leaders throughout the Middle East warned President Bush of exactly what would happen in a postwar Iraq, and those warnings went either ignored or unheeded.

As a result of his Senate work, Graham has become convinced that the attacks of September 11 could have been avoided, and that the Bush administration’s war on terrorism has failed to address the immediate danger posed by al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. His book is a disturbing reminder that at the highest levels of national security, now more than ever, intelligence matters.
From the Back Cover
Advance praise for Intelligence Matters

“Intelligence Matters is a work of great patriotism, a searing insider’s account of the government’s ineptitude, and at times deceit, both on 9/11 and in the war in Iraq. Senator Graham is unflinching in a damning and persuasive indictment of President Bush, the FBI and the CIA. This is no liberal, conspiratorial, antiwar polemic, but rather a convincing argument by a hawk in the war on terror as to why the country is less safe today because of blunders made by President Bush. Intelligence Matters also makes a meticulous–and at times startling–case for official Saudi Arabian complicity in the 9/11 plot. This is an important book and a must read for anyone concerned with the war on terror and the future of America.”
–GERALD POSNER, New York Times bestselling author of Why America Slept

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Matters-Arabia-Failure-AMericas/dp/1400063523/















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Senator Graham Comes to Tallahassee For Book Signing
WCTV 9:32 AM Jun 7, 2011
http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/Senator_Graham_Comes_to_Tallahassee_For_Book_Signing_123300733.html


Hundreds of people lined up at a local book store to get the autograph of a former Florida Governor.

Senator Bob Graham was at Books-a-million today (6-6) signing his new book "Keys to The Kingdom".

The book is about what Graham calls the secrets and unanswered questions of the 9-11 attacks.

Graham says his readers will be surprised about some of the book's details.

"Well I think they'll be surprised at the role the Saudi's played in 9-11. I think they'll be even more surprised at the extent to which our government went to cover up the Saudi role," said Graham.






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO71yPlvcSA



Graham is a member of the CIA advisory board and says she had to submit several drafts of the book to the CIA for their approval. He says that's because of the highly sensitive information.


















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Bob Graham: From Senator to Novelist
June 8, 2011

Bob Graham has accomplished a lot in his career. He served as governor, then senator of Florida, and on the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry Commission. Former Sen. Graham can now add “novelist” to his long list of achievements. His new book is called "Keys to the Kingdom: A Novel of Suspense." And while it’s fiction, some of the events and characters in the book bear a striking resemblance to former Graham’s real life.


Former Sen. Bob Graham joins us today in the studio.

http://www.thetakeaway.org/2011/jun/08/bob-graham-senator-novelist/









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Graham was in Tallahassee today, signing copies of his new book "Keys to the Kingdom." It's a fictional political thriller based on his belief that the U.S. government covered up Saudi Arabia's role in terrorism following the 9/11 attacks.

Graham admits he wrote the novel because he was angry the administration of George Bush withheld information about the Saudis' role in 9/11.

"My anger is directed at anyone who has made the decision that the American people should not understand the full extent of Saudi involvement in 911 and with that information take the steps to protect us from a future such action by the Saudis."
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/rss/article/206771/4/Anger-Prompts-Novel-from-Former-US-Sen-Bob-Graham
________________________________

Former Florida Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham says most people don’t know the whole story behind 9/11.

On Monday, Graham embarked on a book tour to promote his new novel “Keys to the Kingdom.” The book is about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the September 11th attacks. Graham had to get clearance from the CIA to release his book, which he spent five years writing. Graham says the book merges fact and fiction.

“It’s fiction, but I would say that 35 to 40 percent of it is pure fact except I changed the names of living people. Another 20 percent is based on fact that is exaggerated and the rest of it is fiction,” said Graham.

Graham chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee during the 9/11 attacks and opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/state/former-senator-promotes-book-about-9_11








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Senator Bob Graham on Keys to the Kingdom
The Leonard Lopate Show June 7, 2011

audio link -

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2011/jun/07/senator-bob-graham-keys-kingdom/






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Bob Graham pens political thriller
By PATRICK GAVIN | 6/8/11 7:23 AM EDT
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56490.html

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Bob Graham is an old hand when it comes to writing policy tomes such as “Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America’s War on Terror” and “America, The Owner’s Manual: Making Government Work for You.” But the latest effort by the former Florida senator and governor presents a different challenge — it’s fiction.

Out Tuesday, “Keys to the Kingdom” is a political thriller that takes readers on a journey that includes the murder of a former senator, nuclear weapons, a government cover-up and an ominously dangerous Saudi Arabia. POLITICO sat down with Graham, who left the Senate in 2005, to discuss how fictional his book really is.



Tell me about the book’s genesis...

It had several parents. One was anger. I co-chaired the congressional inquiry into Sept. 11, and I came away from that experience feeling there were some important questions for which there were answers, but there had been a cover-up to keep us from getting those answers. And part of this book is to try to provide some — albeit fiction, I think credible — answers to those questions.

Second, I had given a number of commencement addresses, and one of the standard lines was to stay alert and intellectually engaged, you ought to periodically challenge yourself to do something that is different than what you had done before and hard, such as learning a musical instrument or a new foreign language. And when I retired from the Senate in 2005, I thought I ought to eat my own cooking. So I decided that writing a novel would certainly be different, and it turned out to be really hard.

Tell me about the process of writing fiction and what challenges you perhaps hadn’t anticipated. Was it easier than nonfiction?

I’ve written three nonfiction books, and I found them to be easier in the sense that you already have a road map. … In a novel, you’ve got 300 blank pages; you can write whatever you are moved to put on paper. I found it to be a lot of fun writing a novel precisely because … you’ve got to come up with characters that are interesting and are affected by what happens in the book. You want your characters to be a different person at the end of the book, and that’s kind of fun.

Did you just literally sit down and start writing?

I wrote it in spurts, and then there were a couple of long delays. I was chairman of the weapons of mass destruction commission in 2008 and into 2009. I did almost no work on the novel during that period. And then, last year, I was co-chairman of the national oil spill commission, so I took an almost six-month sabbatical from the book. The WMD commission turned out to be very valuable to the novel because the plot is a terrorist group getting access to nuclear bombs, what the group would do with them, how affected they are and what the U.S. does to try to counter that. I did it all on the computer.


There’s a character — Tony Ramos — that you talk about at one point as the Will Smith of the State Department because of how he dresses. Is that based on a real person, and who is that person?

Most of the characters are composites. … Tony is probably the most composite-like. As someone who’s lived most of my life in south Florida, I know a lot of Cuban-Americans, so there are several people I have known who have contributed to this.

Do you feel that this book could only have been written by somebody with the kind of background in government and in your current capacities?


Immodestly, I don’t think there are very many people who could have written this book, because it requires some experiences that are not generally available, some understanding of the way the people in these positions function and some geopolitical understanding of international politics.

Was this enough to inspire you to write a second novel?

The publisher has asked me to write a second book, and if you get to the last chapter, it sort of presages the next book. I told the publisher I want to see how the first book is received before I commit to doing a second. But I hope there will be a second. … It will probably not be on nuclear terrorism, as this is, but on biological terrorism.

You’ve been such a prolific chronicler of your day-to-day activities (Graham has long kept a near-legendary personal diary of his daily life) … and that makes me think that you were an original tweeter, just before tweets existed. What is your take on modern social media and politicians?


I am not a tweeter. I think the difference is I do this for my personal records and it’s also reminders for things I have committed to do or want to do. It is not a public document. I have done about 2,500 of these, most of which, all except the last couple of years, are at a library at the University of Florida, and they will be at some time released to the general public. Now, they’re available on request for academics or for others who are interested. But it was not intended to be a form of communication, which Twitter is. I respect that, and I know a lot of people are interested in following the hour-by-hour activities of Paris Hilton and other prominent people, but that’s not what I’m about.








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Bob Graham on The Dennis Miller Show -

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dennis-miller-show/id251866368






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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7WMygIb9Ko

Sen. Bob Graham talks about government coverup involving a study report which he was involved with that was censored by the U.S.government before it's public release.











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Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe?
Jul 11, 2011 12:56 PM EDT
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/11/saudi-arabia-fried-or-foe-asks-senator-bob-graham.html

Senator Bob Graham asks why hard questions about Saudi Arabia have gone unanswered since 9/11. He explains why he’s finally taken to fiction to explore this controversial topic about what the U.S. is covering up.


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Saudi men carry a national flag during celebrations in support of Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh in March, AP Photo


On September 12, 2001, Americans learned that 15 of the 19 commercial-airplane hijackers of the previous day were Saudis. The thought that went through many minds was, What are the Saudis thinking? Were these 15 individual suicidal decisions, or does 9/11 represent a break in our mutually beneficial relationship stretching back to World War II?


From that date until today those questions have largely gone unanswered. Unanswered because the government of the United States has engaged in a sustained and effective campaign to keep the American public from knowing the truth. And we may ask: Why?




These are some of the questions that have preoccupied me since co-chairing the congressional inquiry into 9/11. They arose from the truth that surfaced, which included: The first two hijackers who entered the United States did so through Los Angeles International Airport in mid-January 2000. Within days they were urged by a shadowy man, already described in an FBI report as an “agent” of the Saudi government, to relocate to San Diego with promises of extensive support—promises on which he promptly delivered.


The agent’s cover was as a ghost employee of a contractor to an agency of the Saudi government—paid a salary and allowances but never expected to show up and work. His real job was to monitor Saudi youth in San Diego getting an education to ensure they were not also plotting the overthrow of the monarchy.


When the two future hijackers reached San Diego, the agent’s allowances were substantially increased. Upon their arrival the agent secured and paid for an apartment. He arranged flight lessons. He introduced them to a tight circle of Muslims, primarily Saudis, who offered additional support.


Yet the support being funneled to the two visitors proved insufficient for their decidedly non-Islamic tastes—alcohol, strip clubs, even a desired, though unfulfilled, marriage to a stripper. The agent then tapped another source of funds: a welfare account maintained for the benefit of Saudis in need by the wife of the kingdom’s ambassador to the United States.


That is some of what we do know, and we got a sufficient glimpse to know what we didn’t know. Still unanswered after nearly 10 years are the questions of the full extent of the Saudi pre-9/11 involvement: Did any or all of the other 17 receive support from Saudi interests? Why would Saudi Arabia do this? Do the Saudis have the will and capability to aid future attacks against the United States? And most important: Why the cover-up by our government?


I have attempted to address these questions in the final report of the congressional commission and the nonfiction book Intelligence Matters, published in 2004. Each was censored by authorities in the intelligence community, particularly on the role of the Saudis in 9/11. I am now attempting to provide these answers in the form of fact wrapped in fiction in my novel Keys to the Kingdom.


Some have claimed my statements and anxieties are over the top, that there are less incendiary explanations for what the Saudi and U.S. governments have done. But a string of recent occurrences has brought to the surface the suspicion of direct, deep Saudi involvement in 9/11.


Why would the Saudis have given substantial assistance to at least two of the hijackers, and possibly all 19? The answer I have come to is survival—survival of the state and survival of the House of Saud. The Saudi regime in the late 1990s faced the prospect of a repeat of the 1979 Iranian revolution, when young revolutionaries toppled the shah. Osama bin Laden was ascending. He had achieved hero status—in his country of birth, Saudi Arabia, and across much of the Muslim world—for his work with the mujahedin in expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan. He had successfully bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. He had trained thousands of potential terrorists in his Afghan camps. And he was planning even greater attacks—this time within the United States itself.


But bin Laden recognized a deficiency: Most of those who would be spirited into the United States had never been there before and did not speak English. How could they survive and maintain anonymity while they completed the final planning, practiced and executed an enormously sophisticated attack? The Saudis, who were known to have a global network of agents to monitor their youth against the prospects of another Iran, could provide the support infrastructure to make this possible. The threat of civil unrest against the monarchy, led by al Qaeda, could be the leverage for access to this network.


The Arab Spring has posed a similar threat to the survival of the state and the House of Saud.


There have been at least three responses from the palace.


Beheadings, the traditional means of traumatizing the population into submission, have surged. According to Amnesty International, at least 27 such executions occurred during the first five months of 2011. This was the same number as the total for 2010. Another 100 or more wait on death row.


Religious organizations, many aligned with the austere Wahhabi sect and the religious police, have been allocated an additional $200 million.


The royal treasury, swollen by $214 billion in oil revenues last year, has been opened to essentially buy off the people. Public employees have received an additional two months’ salary; $70 billion has been lavished on 500,000 units of low-income housing.


One of the few reformists in the royal palace, Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, brother of King Abdullah, has said, “These people want to preserve their power, their money, and their prestige, so they want to keep the status quo. They are afraid of the word ‘change.’ This is a problem because they are shortsighted, but the difficulty is I don’t know how to change their way of thinking.”


An insight into how far the regime might go in defending and perpetuating the status quo occurred in May of this year at the Vienna meeting of the World Health Organization. Advancing its policy of avoiding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or biological, the United States offered a resolution that would have required all 193 members of the WHO to either declare they were smallpox-free or—as would be the case with the United States—to commit to the destruction of any smallpox pathogens held in laboratories or elsewhere within five years. Throughout history, smallpox has been a scourge of mankind, and the virus remains the only communicable human disease successfully erased from nature, a miracle of organization and determination. There is only one way it can reappear, and that is in a weaponized form from a nation or group bent on mass catastrophe and worldwide havoc. The results of any dissemination would automatically be classified as a crime against humanity. This resolution to destroy all samples was successfully filibustered by Iran. It is not surprising that a country which for more than a decade has sought to develop a nuclear capability would also be seeking a biological weapon. What was surprising was Saudi Arabia, one of Iran’s staunchest opponents, declaring that it “strongly disagreed” with the United States' position.


Why would the kingdom abandon its most important ally to support a nation that for the past 30-plus years has been considered its archenemy? Could it be that Saudi Arabia is also developing biological weapons?


The most perplexing unanswered question remains: Why would the United States engage in a cover-up? Many have pointed to the special personal friendship between the royal family and the highest levels of our national government. The fact that the Saudis were allowed to fly a planeload of their elite home from the United States in the days immediately after 9/11, when all other commercial aviation was grounded, is often cited as support for that position. In fact, all that actions such as this do is make America’s post-9/11 reaction to the Saudis even more mysterious.


Secrets deemed this critical by both governments are bound to be buried under many layers of official protection and unofficial obfuscation. The actions since 9/11 are a perverted application of Winston Churchill’s truism on the Allies’ plans to end World War II: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”


If one method of disclosing precious truth doesn’t work, you try another. I’d always wanted to try my hand at a novel—to place characters of my own invention in challenging and intriguing situations that tested and defined their wits, strength, courage, and moral fiber. Now I had both motivation and material. Having been thwarted in my “real life” efforts to bring out the answers to these questions, which should be among the highest priorities to our citizens, I resorted to fiction, to the imaginative world of “What if?” With the publication of Keys to the Kingdom, I feel I have finally conveyed the reality I’ve pursued for so long.














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