In Amazon.com Jeff Bezos built something the world had never seen. He created the most recognized brand name on the Internet, became for a time one of the richest men in the world, and was crowned "the king of cyber-commerce."Yet for all the media exposure, the inside story of Amazon.com has never really been told. In this revealing, unauthorized account, Robert Spector, journalist and best-selling author, gives us this up-to-date, fast-paced, behind-the-scenes story of the company's creation and rise, its tumultuous present, and its uncertain future.

Who is Jeffrey Bezos?

Operation Pedro Pan ("Peter Pan") was one of the most massive political rescue missions of young people in history. Masterminded and organized by Father Bryan O. Walsh of the Catholic Welfare Bureau in Miami, Florida, this dramatic humanitarian effort began the day after Christmas 1960 and ran until October 1962, when the United States and the USSR were facing off over Soviet supplied ballistic missile installations in Cuba. On October 22, when President John F. Kennedy announced a naval blockade of Cuba to prevent the delivery of more missiles, Cuban president Fidel Castro responded by terminating all flights from Havana to Miami. By the time Operation Pedro Pan was brought to a halt, more than 14,000 boys and girls, ages 6 to 17, had landed on U.S. shores. Once the unaccompanied children arrived, they were placed into foster care through the Cuban Children's Program, another humanitarian project created by Fr. Walsh and financed by influential south Florida businessmen.

One of the oldest of the group was 17 year old Miguel Bezos, whom everyone called Mike. Bezos (pronounced BAY zoes'Spanish for "kisses") quickly mastered English and was able to graduate from high school in Delaware, where he shared quarters in a Catholic mission with 15 other refugees. Diploma in hand, he headed west to New Mexico, where he enrolled at the University of Albuquerque. In 1963 he took a job in a local bank, where he met another employee, 17 year old Jacklyn "Jackie" Gise Jorgensen, a newly married, attractive native of Cotulla, Texas. Although the two young people came from dramatically different backgrounds, both of their fates were influenced in some way by America's cold war battles with the Soviet Union and the worldwide communist threat. For Mike, it was the escape from Cuba; for Jackie, it was part of her father's job. Lawrence Preston Gise (whom everyone called Preston) had just been appointed by the Congress of the United States to be manager of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) western region. Operating out of headquarters in Albuquerque, he supervised the region's 26,000 employees at the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore laboratories.

Before joining the AEC, Gise (rhymes with "dice"), who hailed from Valley Wells, Texas, had worked on space technology and missile defense systems for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development arm of the Department of Defense that was created in 1958 as the first response by the U.S. government to the Soviet launching of the Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Intended to be a creative counterbalance to conventional military thinking in research and development, DARPA was formed, according to its official mission statement, "to assure that the United States maintains a lead in applying state of the art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from her adversaries." In 1970, DARPA's engineers created a model for a powerful communications network for the U.S. military that could still function even if a nuclear attack demolished conventional lines of communication. The system, dubbed ARPAnet, was the foundation of what would eventually become the Internet. (But we're getting ahead of the story. More about ARPAnet later.)

When Mike and Jackie met, she was already pregnant, and on January 12, 1964, she gave birth to a boy, named Jeffrey Preston, who Mike would later legally adopt after he and Jackie married in 1968. Five years after Jeff's birth, his half sister Christina, was born, and the...

Robert Spector has reported on business for USA Today, UPI International, NASDAQ Magazine, and Women's Wear Daily and appears frequently on television and radio. He is the author of the national bestseller The Nordstrom Way.