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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... questions—and with a naive idea that an interview was just a conversation with another adult, I also fumbled my opportunity for what was then known as the “CT” (career trainee) program. The interviewer posed the classic question: Can ...
... questions about some odd, top-secret government job for an agency that the interviewing agent won't identify by name. I returned from lunch one afternoon, some time later, to notice an older man (older to me, at least) waiting in the ...
... questions about what job I would actually have—what is an analyst, after all, and what do they do every day?—and how long I would stay at it. I assumed in those first days and weeks that it would be for a maximum of two years. I'll try ...
... question quickly became front-and-center: how to piece together a credible central government in a country long riven by ethnic splits, convulsed by brutal militia violence, and unaccustomed to control by a central government. how to ...
... questions for weeks were so much less exotic than what you read in novels. where are all the pallets for this going to come from? we have the military materiel to ship—can we get it onto the ship? whoever said “don't sweat the small ...
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 |