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
Results 1-5 of 35
... global events on my doorstep every morning. It seemed interesting. and it had to pay a lot better than my newsletter job. There was no online Wall Street Journal in 1984, obviously, and no way I could think of to contact the CIa ...
... story; 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.
... 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, though: only ...
... global diplomacy, a national security emergency, and a human tragedy now hard to fathom, we had many conversations about the basics. how the heck are we going to get out to the region, and quickly? where do we get transportation? and ...
... army. • aS TIMe went on during those weeks, Karzai's name continued to emerge as the most prominent potential leader to serve as the president of a new afghanistan, and a hodgepodge of afghan factions and global powers, 14 chapter 1.
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 |