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
... afghan artifacts; neighboring Kabul was moving farther from Pakistan's controlling orbit as the world demanded a new ... afghanistan so easily. would they continue to view their neighbor as a place where they pulled the strings, at the ...
... afghan, one whose interests often do not coincide with ours. There was no perfect solution then, and there is none now. he was the best we could see. I met Karzai with Dobbins a few times in Kabul, along with other members of the ...
... afghans had been fighting, first against the Soviets, then among themselves, and now alongside a Coalition, losing lives ... afghan elements that ousted the Taliban. I had spent a career as a deskbound analyst in washington; it was the ...
... afghanistan and a longtime 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 ...
... afghanistan by a tenacious afghan opposition. But we were now here, with the southern capital of Qandahar still in Taliban hands, talking about steps forward for a new government. after years ofthe Karzai government, it is easy to ...
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 |