I couldn't corroborate the stuff about whether or not it was his agent. The closest I could find was that Frey had shopped it around as fiction first and got a bunch of rejection slips. So then he (presumably) cleaned up the parts that were fictionalized and resubmitted as memoir and then it got picked up. But I couldn't find anything that nailed down whose idea it was to do that.

So while there are always nutty leaders in just about any group, how is it that the nuttiest Islamic leaders are able to coax so many of their followers into such violence so often? Is it a byproduct of being raised in a fundamentalist environment where you just learn to take the leader's words as fact? So if he says violence is necessary, you just believe him?