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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... talking along the way as he settled down. he initially told me he would charge me with three violations: for misdemeanor speeding, driving without a valid registration, and evading a police officer. (he said he had been following our ...
... 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; washington does power, policy, and ...
... talk among that rome group, unreal in the most unreal of times, about him returning not just as a figurehead or a steadying force but as a serious player helping run a government—an idea, even then, that seemed as far-fetched as it was ...
... talking to Pakistani leaders there even as the fighting raged across the border. we had a security detail with us. I mentioned to one of them that I had recently bought farmland due west of washington, D.C., in the rolling hills of ...
... talks among afghan factions). hank and his team arranged the trip, via Uzbekistan, across the massive hindu Kush mountain range. Flying over these mountains, many 20,000 feet or more, stuns the senses: it is as if the face of the earth ...
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 |