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Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda
University of Pennsylvania Press
April 2013
On Sale: April 12, 2013
224 pages ISBN: 0812244966 EAN: 9780812244960 Kindle: B00B4FJO84 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Political
On 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. Here Mudd tells how the Al Qaeda threat looked to CIA and
FBI professionals as the focus shifted from a core Al Qaeda
leadership to the rise of Al Qaeda-affiliated groups and
homegrown violent extremism from Europe, the Middle East,
and Asia. As a participant in and a witness to key strategic
initiatives—including the hunt for Osama bin Laden and
efforts to displace the Taliban—Mudd offers an insider's
perspective on the relationships between the White House,
the State Department, and national security agencies before
and after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Through
telling vignettes, Mudd reveals how intelligence analysts
understood and evaluated potential dangers and communicated
them to political leaders. Takedown is a gripping narrative of tracking terrorism
during what may be the most exhilarating but trying times
the American intelligence community has ever experienced.
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