He soon began producing for The 51st State, a nightly news magazine where he won the first of his two New York Area Emmy awards for The Great American Land Hustle Part One.

In 1985 he joined a new investigative unit on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings where he worked until 1987, reporting dozens of stories from Pentagon cost overruns to a scandal involving how the FAA had manipulated the number of near mid-air collisions.

Lance's investigative work linking Yousef and al Qaeda master spy Ali Mohamed to the 9/11 attacks has been cited repeatedly in "The Complete 9/11 Timeline" compiled by the nonprofit History Commons, the respected compendium of open source 9/11 intelligence.

Lance describes how an elusive al Qaeda mastermind defeated an entire American security system in "the greatest failure of intelligence since the Trojan Horse".

(Lance) traces these lapses back to 1989 and an FBI surveillance of a group of Middle Eastern men at a Calverton, Long Island shooting range.

Yet inexplicably they (the FBI) suddenly stopped watching after just one month.Rather explains that the Calverton men became devoted followers of blind cleric Omar Abdel Rahman.

He was close enough to take a video, shown in the CBS Evening News broadcast, of a celebration that included several members of the original Calverton group and to hear whispers about bomb plot.

Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror concludes that Al-Qaida showed signs of launching the impending 9/11 attacks in 1995, but were able to evade arrest by exploiting the poor relations between the FBI and CIA and problems within their respective infrastructures.

Another follow-on book, Triple Cross:How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI—and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him, published in September 2006, covers the Al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed.

[14] A review of the book by Rory O'Connor in The Guardian states: "In the annals of espionage, few men have moved in and out of the deep black world between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed....

Peter Lance, author of the highly acclaimed 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up, returns to uncover the story of Ali Mohamed, a trusted security advisor of Osama bin Laden who hoodwinked the United States for more than a decade.

As Lance reveals for this first time, this one man served in a series of high-security position within the United States security establishment, as a Special Forces advisor, FBI informant, and CIA operative, while simultaneously helping orchestrate the al Qaeda campaign of terror that led to 9/11.

In October 2000, after tricking three U.S. intelligence agencies for almost two decades, Ali Mohamed appeared in handcuffs and a blue prison jumpsuit in a Federal District courtroom on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he pleaded guilty five times.

His crimes included brokering terror summits, financing an attack on two Black Hawk helicopters, training jihadis in improvised bomb building and the creation of secret cells.

An important final piece to the 9/11 investigation, Triple Cross penetrates Mohamed's secret past and the dark reaches of Al Qaeda to reveal the danger that still threatens America and its internal security.The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission in Staff Statement No.

[17] Instead, the Commission called Yousef "part of a loose network of extremist Sunni Islamists who, like Bin Ladin, began to focus their rage on the United States".

[17] But on April 10, 2011, The New York Times ran a story confirming Lance's theory: In the piece titled "In Federal Court, a Docket Number for Global Terror", reporter Benjamin Weiser detailed how the Justice Department had amended the original 1993 World Trade Center bombing indictment to include KSM.

"[29] Lance further chronicled the Fitzgerald censorship controversy and tied it into his investigation of the FBI's counterterrorism failures in "The Chilling Effect", a June 2009 article published in Playboy.

[30] In 2010, Lance was contacted by Emad Salem, the ex-Egyptian army officer who had infiltrated the cell around blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy.

Lance's investigative reporting into the WTC bombing and Shalabi was published in "The Spy Who Came In for the Heat", an article for the August 2010 issue of Playboy,[31] recapping his findings on the television show Morning Joe.

[34] Lance offered proof that El Sayyid Nosair, the convicted killer of Kahane, also intended to murder former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a revelation that made page-one news in The Jerusalem Post.

With contacts at the highest levels of the mob, he offered the Feds an unprecedented window into the workings of the Brooklyn families—and tips he supplied led to more than 70 successful prosecutions that helped propel a young district attorney named Rudolph Giuliani to national prominence.

As Emmy-winning reporter Peter Lance discovered while researching his 2004 book Cover Up, DeVecchio had developed a very close relationship with Colombo crime family killer Greg Scarpa Sr., known as "The Grim Reaper".

[46] In the 2011 News-Press series Lance also wrote that officer Beutel "may have committed bankruptcy fraud in 2000"; that she "perjured herself during divorce proceedings in 2005"; and that "she'd suborned the perjury of the minister who married her in 1999 by asking him to back-date her marriage license so that she might receive more post-divorce support".

[49] In October 2012 the News-Press published a new five-part series by Lance that reported on "a local defense lawyer (who) suspected that someone in law enforcement had planted heroin on one of his clients — a woman arrested on suspicion of DUI by Officer Beutel"[50] On October 7, 2012, Lance wrote:[51] At first I didn't believe it, despite the evidence I'd assembled by then, proving that Officer Beutel, the former head of the Santa Barbara Police Department's Drinking Driver Team and two-time Top DUI officer in the county had falsified police reports, committed perjury on a DMV form, witnessed at least five forged blood test waivers, withheld evidence from two suspects in violation of Brady rules, and pre-checked DUI forms before going into the field, suggesting a pre-determined mindset to frame innocent drivers.

I'd uncovered additional evidence regarding the accountant-turned-cop possibly committing bankruptcy fraud in 2000 and perjury in the course of divorce proceedings just months before she donned the uniform of the Santa Barbara Police Department in 2005.

Over the months since then, as more and more information surfaced, including a videotape from County Jail where the discovery of the drug took place, I came to believe that it wasn't just possible, but probable that someone in law enforcement – perhaps Officer Beutel – had intentionally planted that bindle of black tar heroin at the feet of the DUI suspect, causing the District Attorney's Office to charge her on additional charges beyond driving under the influence.On December 5, 2012, the Santa Barbara City Council voted to spend $208,000 to install video cameras in 27 Santa Barbara Police Department patrol cars.