About the same time Bob Woodward’s Fear began grabbing public attention, another, similar book hit the newsstands. Like Fear, it too is heavily based on the accounts of a select few government insiders, though in this case their allegations aren’t made anonymously. And like Fear, it also paints a portrait of the hidden hand of a “deep state” of sorts working to influence government policy — only not for the benevolent goal of supposedly reining in an unhinged leader, but for the purpose of covering up its own incompetence and concentrating power in its own hands.

Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy’s The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror was years in the making. Parts of it have intermittently been released over the years, perhaps most notably in the form of the 2011 documentary podcast Who is Rich Blee? Nowosielski and Duffy chased down leads and interviewed former government officials over the span of a decade, not always with adequate financing.

The book’s central, if still speculative, conceit is simple: that in the process of attempting to “flip” members of Al Qaeda (most notably, September 11 hijacker Khalid al Mindhar), the CIA deliberately prevented domestic authorities from learning about the presence of future 9/11 hijackers in the US, resulting in the worst attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor. Because such an alleged operation would have involved hijackers in the country, it would have been illegal, violating the CIA’s ban on domestic operations.