"Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda"is an insider account by a
former high-level official at the CIA and the FBI about how both
agencies substantially upgraded their counterterrorism capabilities
after the U.S. government's failure to prevent al Qaeda's catastrophic
attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
Philip Mudd is ideally positioned to
discuss these issues after a distinguished 24-year career at the CIA,
where he rose to become deputy head of its Counterterrorism Center,
culminating in a four-year detail in 2005 to the FBI as a deputy
director of its National Security Branch.
... Mr. Mudd explains
that a measure of success in counterterrorism is not merely "who was
captured or killed ... but whether operations broke plots and destroyed
the networks that could sustain long-term training and planning
resulting in another strategic strike." In this sense, Mr. Mudd
concludes, "the focus on these operational figures was well founded:
virtually no one, in 2001, would have bet that the United States would
not have witnessed another 9/11-style event by now. In this most
critical sense, the operational focus was successful. Bin Laden took
nine-plus years to take down, and al-Zawahri is still out there, but
their organization poses nowhere the strategic threat it did a decade
ago, and its leadership is decimated beyond recognition."
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