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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... early fall days swampy, humid washington can offer, we thought that our office building might be the next target. During a chaotic few hours on September 11, we went quickly from a buzz about what appeared to be a tragic but isolated ...
... early estimates ofloss oflife were astonishing. The next hours were surreal: spending the afternoon and evening at the home of my closest friends in washington, watching the horror unfold on their television. I had initially gone to my ...
... 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, convulsed by brutal militia violence, and unaccustomed to control by a central ...
Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda Philip Mudd. I received word early on that Dobbins's team would have members drawn from U.S. government agencies with overseas missions—State Department, Pentagon civilian brass, military, and CIa. and I told ...
... early doubters were, we now know, hopelessly wrong. Combining the shrewdness ofa tough, longtime diplomat with the experiences of weaving together complicated and competing interests in his earlier assignments, Dobbins proved to be a ...
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 |