How Predicting 911 Came About - It Started with a Lay Off and a Fiction Book That Became Fact

Recently while moving papers I discovered an old dusty thick file. Inside I found a printed original manuscript for a "fiction" book I was writing about a terror attack against the U.S. - in 1990!  The original title was Fire Over Arabia.  It was fiction that become fact in more ways than one.

I wrote it because I had lost my high flying global negotiating job after being sent to over 30 countries in a five year span--from Egypt to China and India and South America. I figured it might be a way to take my unique knowledge of people and strange places far and wide that I had come to know -- and make a buck trying to be like Tom Clancy or Dan Brown etc. since I was broke!  Little did I know I was writing a non-fiction scenario that would soon occur.

Fire Over Arabia was my fictional story of "a flash war in the Middle East" and a "terror attack on the U.S."  I was about half way through the manuscript, writing about my main character becoming caught in an unexpected flash war in Iraq, when the news broke that Saddam had invaded Kuwait.  Part of my fiction book had just become real. America was heading for the first Gulf War.

Being broke means you have a highly refined radar for sensing opportunity. I didn't let not having a car at the time stop me (it had broken down and been repossessed).  I sent my book info around to Houston TV stations.  I got exactly one favorable response: Houston's Fox 26 station sent for me.  I got a friend to drive me there and one of the broadcasters dropped me back at my apartment afterward.

This is IMPORTANT: Fox 26 then and now is nothing like the national Fox network.  Houston's Fox 26 has always had the nicest group of people in studio with no political agenda. It presents straight news in a non-biased, non-political manner. I like everyone there - from Fran Fawcett (1990) to Jose Grinan, Melissa Wilson, etc. and I still appear there from time to time.  It is totally different from the national Fox network which is become like Russian TV, which is one-party controlled propaganda media for Mr. Putin instead of straight unbiased news.)

Within three years the second part of Fire Over Arabia would also come true.

In 1993, we had a warning. It was was the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Few Americans remember it but I paid attention. Six people were killed when terrorists set off a bomb in the parking garage below the twin towers.  The second plot part of "Fire" was a terrorist attack on the United States. People remember 9/11, but we had a series of warnings long before then, from the attack on the USS Cole to the African U.S. embassy bombings and including the famous August 2001 memo President Bush received warning about an imminent Al Qaida attack, but Americans didn't notice until we had our generations Pearl Harbor size event.

My Fire Over Arabia terrorist plot was about a nuclear device, not planes flying into buildings. The result is the same although the delivery systems will vary.  My "Fire" did have a (nuclear) missile flying towards Washington DC, launched offshore by terrorists operating from the Middle East.


Why did the local Fox station pick me?

Because few people in Houston, then and now, had the unique experience I had in the Middle East doing actual business deals (not strolling around as a casual tourist).  I had been a young Fortune 500 legal negotiator for a major oil services company (Dresser Industries).  Before that a company called Brown and Root (now KBR) had hired this kid out of school and sent him to Nicaragua, so I was there at the beginnings of the Contra war in the Reagan administration and witnessed a lot of other very weird stuff -- like the company getting indicted and the then B&R President coming suicide.   I even had to try to get $ 2 million out of Saddam in the 1970's for Brown & Root on an oil drilling deal.  I was "kicked" out of a room at the Nile Hilton in Cairo, Egypt to make room for President Carter's entourage for the first ever peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country (all described in "Better Times Ahead".)

"Fire" never got published. Why? Because back then it took a year to get a book processed and printed.  The publishers said "Saddam will be gone within a year" and then the book would be out of date.

Well, they were wrong. Saddam was around for over another decade because the first Bush administration knew what would happen if they toppled him (I just heard James Baker talk about it on "Meet the Press" today).

In 1994, I produced a TV video talking about the potential of a 9/11 coming and my guest was a weapons expert from the Reagan administration. It is posted on YouTube. I sent a copy to VP-Elect Dick Cheney and Congress Majority Whip Tom DeLay nine months before 9/11. No Response. This link is the video they would have seen if they looked.

I am attaching the Prologue that I wrote for "Fire Over Arabia" in 1990 --so YOU can judge if I had vision of national significance or not.   And if you want to know what America should be concerned about next - and how to FIX it then read a new book I have published called "Better Times Ahead April Fool."  Sorry, its a jpeg converted from a PDF but it is authentic, except the address and phone number which I haven't used in twenty years.

If I was right about 911, then read my latest book and ask yourself if I am also right about how to make America No. 1 again in the final chapter "Agenda for American Greatness."

Fire Over Arabia was written in 1990 - 11 years before 9/11.  That was almost a quarter century ago from today and still America isn't listening. Agenda for American Greatness is all about looking ahead.  Because we can win, but only if we are smart.


Here is my 1990 Prologue for Fire Over Arabia...let me know with a comment if you think I should publish it, or even update it.