By Peter Lance December 15th, 2016.  Huffington Post 
Back in the Eighties I started out as a correspondent for ABC News covering the dark side of the Reagan presidency for 20/20, Nightline and World News Tonight. I cut my teeth on investigations into Pentagon cost overruns, rigged Pershing II missile tests and FAA cover-ups on near misses after Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike.

Along the way, I got a free education and with a couple of Emmys under my belt I was able to pick my own stories worldwide. I tracked casks of “dirty bomb” uranium through the streets of Antwerp, Pol Pot’s children-soldiers along the Thai-Cambodian border and Genovese family wiseguys through the toxic wastelands of New Jersey. It got to the point where after nearly every piece I’d say to myself, “What a movie this would make!”

I spent the next 14 years writing fiction — mostly crime series — for each of the major networks. It was “Black Tuesday,” the day the Towers fell, that sent me back to journalism, tracking the origins of the 9/11 “planes as missiles” plot in four books for HarperCollins.

I wanted to know how, with a $40 billion-a-year intelligence budget, the “Big Five” couldn’t have seen it coming?