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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... 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 reflection ...
... military campaign that would put tens of thousands of troops on the ground for years. Surprisingly, I don't remember having that clear sense in the days after the attacks; history has a way of making what was in late 2001 a hazy future ...
... military, and CIa. and I told langley, the location of CIa headquarters, that if there was to be a CIa officer detailed to the team, I wanted to be that person. The timing was right for the assignment: I had already been contemplating ...
... military materiel to ship—can we get it onto the ship? whoever said “don't sweat the small stuff” didn't have to find a military aircraft for diplomatic transport at a time when the military was itself engaged in a huge, rapid ...
... military transport aircraft eventually did appear. we spent the following weeks shuttling across europe and into Central and South asia, a wandering crew looking for consensus from potential foreign partners and afghanistan's neighbor ...
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 |