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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... fight after 9/11. It is not only the story of what one lone junior officer did, as a washington-based analyst multiple levels below se- nior decisionmakers in washington. It is the story ofwhat I saw, one bit of history that might help ...
... ; we learned a painful lesson about understanding this adversary that day. But no one would have believed the scenario that unfolded with enough conviction to take the kind of action needed to fight this threat—global 4 chapter 1.
... fight this threat—global military and intelligence operations, along with diplomacy—that came to convulse the planet. living the reality was harder to fathom than any fiction I had read. There was no thought of these implications then ...
... fight. There was no way to anticipate what followed. Those of us on the team knew about South asia, but we were novices at the nation-building game. Many of us who had watched afghanistan and the broader South asian scene for decades ...
... fighting raged across the border. we had a security detail with us. I mentioned to one of them that I had recently bought farmland due west of washington, D.C., in the rolling hills of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. really, he answered ...
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 |