On 9/11 the CIA changed. Once a organisation focused on information gathering, it became a militarised force. As Philip Mudd explains, at that time, came a different breed of prisoner, one who wanted to die but held information that could save thousands of lives. Out of this emerged what was referred to internally as "The Program": a world web of secret detention centres that used "enhanced interrogation tactics". A 2014 US Senate report exposed horrifying details from this "Program" but there were no details as to how officials came to their decisions, what happened daily at these "Black Sites" and how the officers felt about what they were doing. Mudd weaves stunning research, new interviews and his own account to illuminate the CIA at this most difficult time.

Adapting the geopolitical and historical lessons gleaned from over two decades in government intelligence, Philip Mudd, an ex National Security Council staff member and one-time senior executive at the FBI and the CIA, has created what promises to be a necessary guidebook in how we approach complex and high-stakes decisions. Filled with logical yet counterintuitive answers to both ordinary and extraordinary problems whether it be buying a new home, deciding which college to attend, or how to pivot a failing business model Mudd s HEAD (High Efficiency Analytic Decision Making) methodology exposes the inherent dangers of searching for a quick solution and why it is so vital, but not necessarily obvious or easy, to ask the right questions first. It is a revolutionary and business-friendly new technique, one that, in the best-selling tradition of Charles Duhigg s Power of Habit and Oren Klaff s Pitch Anything, has the potential to change the way we both live and work."

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.