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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... national security, or washington itself, that this was the CIa. Declaring only his first name—Bob? John? Jim? I don't remember, except that it was not memorable—a voice on the other end ofthe line left a short, vague message, and a ...
... national Security Council, or talk about what was going on in washington, one often thousand similar conversations that make up the information exchanges that are the heartbeat of policymaking in the city. new York does money ...
... national security would lurch forward, from earlier decades spent warning of political unrest ten thousand miles away or developments in ballistic missile systems to the new reality. and whether a group named al Qaeda, whose leaders ...
... national Security Council now that the new counterterror campaign would require so many people to take new positions. Despite not having cleared my departure with my colleagues at the white house, not having met Dobbins, and not knowing ...
... 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 how can we be mobile ...
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 |