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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... 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 on the enormity ofwhat had ...
... operations officers on the other side of CIa headquarters, and in the freezing expanse of afghanistan, who were ... operational group working in the building, and with U.S. military and northern alliance partners to manage the campaign ...
... operations into afghanistan but now a shell, with the windows of the air traffic control tower blown out and rusting materiel and hulks of steel everywhere in the desert dirt off the runways. It was a moonscape of military hardware ...
... operations. You couldn't have told them apart, at least not quickly. They were a team. They also ate together in that facility commandeered in the days after the surprisingly rapid assault into Kabul. The food was hot, decent, and ...
... a part of that mission. afterward, when counterterrorism operations shifted to the al Qaeda players who had migrated to Pakistan, the mission was equally clear. ensure that we do not have another catastrophic event on U.S. 22 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 |