Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al QaedaOn September 11, 2001, as Central Intelligence Agency analyst Philip Mudd rushed out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, he could not anticipate how far the terror unleashed that day would change the world of intelligence and his life as a CIA officer. For the previous fifteen years, his role had been to interpret raw intelligence and report his findings to national security decision makers. But within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, he would be on a military aircraft, flying over the Hindu Kush mountains, en route to Afghanistan as part of the U.S. government's effort to support the fledging government there after U.S. forces had toppled the Taliban. Later, Mudd would be appointed deputy director of the CIA's rapidly expanding Counterterrorist Center and then senior intelligence adviser at the FBI. A first-person account of Mudd's role in two organizations that changed dramatically after 9/11, Takedown sheds light on the inner workings of the intelligence community during the global counterterror campaign. |
From inside the book
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... afghan safehaven to create the expanding network that had led to the 9/11 attacks, there seemed little option other ... afghanistan, and a decade of disinterest in the country following the Soviet withdrawal, it was hard to imagine how ...
... afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse ofthe Soviet-backed afghan government in the early 1990s. That question quickly became front-and-center: how to piece together a credible central government in a country long riven by ethnic splits ...
... afghanistan and the broader South asian scene for decades underestimated Dobbins: “he doesn't know this turf in afghanistan.” “This is complicated, and he doesn't know the players.” “This is too complex to learn so quickly—they should ...
... afghan rebels, years before. Then, in the largest CIa covert action program ever, in a bloody campaign against the arch-nemesis Soviets, trying to ship weapons from a remote location, the questions for weeks were so much less exotic ...
... afghan political authority, which might take many months, with prospects of success that would never get near fifty ... afghanistan's neighbor states on who might emerge from the chaos to become a focal point for new political hope in ...
Contents
1 | |
2 A Return to Langley | 27 |
Moving Beyond the Core of Al Qaeda | 70 |
The Intelligence Problem of Iraq | 90 |
Deputy Director of the Counterterrorist Center | 104 |
6 The Years of Threat | 135 |
The FBI Calls | 145 |
Intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security | 191 |
Index | 199 |