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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... story begins. Months into graduate school studying english literature at the University of Virginia, things weren't going entirely smoothly. The students were too good—not competitive in a negative way, just too smart, too focused, and ...
... story of Booth's escape; she did not. The first step I had to take to find my way out of this hole was to explain whyI had mentioned that I was from a family of a convicted felon. That took some time—she was not a Civil war buff. The ...
... story ofwhat I saw, one bit of history that might help create a mosaic among hundreds of thousands of other stories, and just one angle on a complex counterterrorism campaign that is now into its second decade and that has defined the ...
... stories, later proven false, broke of an event at the State Department, not far away and near my route home, across one of the bridges connecting washington to suburban Virginia across the Potomac river. Soon, as I tried to circle back ...
... story; we learned a painful lesson about understanding this adversary that day. But no one would have believed the scenario that unfolded with enough conviction to take the kind of action needed to fight this threat—global 4 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 |