In the days since, several commentators, including in these pages, have dismissed these purported connections as exaggerated, pushed by the White House and its allies to justify the administration’s hostile posture toward Iran. But important new evidence, including interviews with senior al-Qaeda members and Osama bin Laden’s family, gathered by the authors over the past five years, tells a surprising history of the post-9/11 epoch, and it’s one that severely undercuts the conventional view.

Our research reveals that al-Qaeda and covert agents acting for the Iranian deep state first attempted to broker an unlikely agreement more than two decades back, after Saddam Hussein flat-out rejected al-Qaeda’s request for military assistance. The pact then flourished under the George W. Bush administration, when a back-channel from the White House to Tehran, running from 2001 to 2003, discussed it frequently. Former State Department and White House officials in on these talks maintain that the vice president’s office suggested the White House do nothing, worrying that the administration would undermine the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq—which was being underwritten by claims he sponsored al-Qaeda and concealed weapons of mass destruction. Finally, according to these same sources, the vice president’s office also told U.S. envoys to Iran and Afghanistan that once regime change had succeeded in Iraq, Tehran was next.