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
... players.” “This is too complex to learn so quickly—they should have chosen someone with experience in this part of the world who could be on the ground running immediately.” Some members of the team were, like me, career watchers of ...
... player helping run a government—an idea, even then, that seemed as far-fetched as it was charming. The former king did return to afghanistan some time later, but he was frail, and his role was not significant. he was never destined to ...
... player in the country's complicated politics (and who would become the victim of a suicide assassin in 2011 when he was attempting to broker talks among afghan factions). hank and his team arranged the trip, via Uzbekistan, across the ...
... players and gain their trust. he had also been my boss at the white house, a senior national Security Council staffer running the Middle east and South asia office at the time I left for the Dobbins trip. we knew each other well, so the ...
... players who were transitioning from fighting to jockeying for position in the new government. From the smell of rapid battlefield success in rolling back a half-decade of Taliban gains to the sudden realization that, with the new ...
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 |