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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... seemed like a good option: until threedozen high schools rejected my resume, all in similar letters that I taped to the refrigerator door. after earning a Master's degree in literature, I found myself working at a tiny newsletter ...
... 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. without google, how did a prospective applicant ...
... seemed to notice. another crisis averted. nine months after the CIa clearance process began, after the interviews, psychiatric evaluations, polygraph, investigators questioning old friends and visiting neighbors, I walked through the ...
... seemed more of a TV show set, not a daily commuting route. walking outside you might see some foreign leader you'd only ever heard of in the news getting out ofa limousine to walk through the west wing doors, a nationally recognizable ...
... seemed out-of-the-ordinary special. Picking a new Starbucks over the old Swing's, though, would have seemed like sacrilege, so a few of us regularly met there. we would trade insights about issues in the Middle east and South asia ...
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 |