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
Results 6-10 of 65
... never make it through the review process. I quit the newsletter job thinking this background check was a formality, a box-checking exercise, which turned out to be a completely unfounded assumption, I later learned. no applicant knows ...
... never stick. It did stick, though, after many years of meetings with heads of state and briefing the president in the Oval Office, answering questions in the well ofthe Congress of the United States, traveling around the world, and ...
... never 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 ...
... never be repeated: the launch of an effort that would be part of american history. Much to my surprise, I got the call to join up. It seemed like a blessing to me; I was to become the CIa liaison to Dobbins's team. I did not know that ...
... never get near fifty-fifty. The military transport aircraft eventually did appear. we spent the following weeks shuttling across europe and into Central and South asia, a wandering crew looking for consensus from potential foreign ...
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 |