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
... mission might entail, I wanted to be on his team. This was weeks after thousands had been murdered, and any officer in any government service would feel a need to join or support the effort to respond, and maybe to play a bit part in ...
... mission is and deliver, quickly and flexibly, with a minimum of bureaucracy. Dobbins depended heavily on that mission flexibility, and we benefited greatly from agency help during those days. afghanistan had gone through many years of ...
... missions, it turns out, don't always happen in the cocktail party environments you read about. Transportation, too, proved to be a persistent challenge. aside from the mechanics of arranging aircraft, there was the issue of traveling ...
... missions, all slept under one grimy roof. I was an analyst who shared a room that included both agency field personnel and Special Forces officers. nobody asked any questions; I didn't know who they were, and they never approached me ...
... mission demanded it—the war was still on, hot and heavy—and the conditions didn't exactly provide a lot of alternate entertainment, beyond books and shipped-in DVDs. It was around the days of Tora Bora—the mountain hideout for bin laden ...
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 |