The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From al Qa'ida to ISIS

The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From al Qa'ida to ISIS

Bill Harlow

Language: English

Pages: 384

ISBN: 145558567X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Called the "Bob Gates of his generation" by Politico, Michael Morell was a top CIA officer who played a critical role in the most important counterterrorism events of the past two decades. Morell was by President Bush's side on 9/11/01 when terrorists struck America and in the White House Situation Room advising President Obama on 5/1/11 when America struck back-killing Usama bin Ladin. From the subway bombings in London to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Morell always seemed to find himself on the cusp of history.
A superb intelligence analyst and briefer, Morell now presents THE GREAT WAR OF OUR TIME, where he uses his talents to offer an unblinking and insightful assessment of CIA's counterterrorism successes and failures of the past twenty years and, perhaps most important, shows readers that the threat of terrorism did not die with Bin Ladin in Abbottabad. Morell illuminates new, growing threats from terrorist groups that, if unaddressed, could leave the country vulnerable to attacks that would dwarf 9/11 in magnitude.

He writes of secret, back-channel negotiations he conducted with foreign spymasters and regime leaders in a desperate attempt to secure a peaceful outcome to unrest launched during the "Arab Spring." Morell describes how efforts to throw off the shackles of oppression have too often resulted in broken nation states unable or unwilling to join the fight against terrorism.

Along the way Morell provides intimate portraits of the leadership styles of figures ranging from Presidents Bush and Obama, CIA directors Tenet, Goss, Hayden, Petraeus, Panetta, and Brennan, and a host of others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

particular to prevent another attack. Most important, it was impossible to forget for an instant that three thousand people had been killed in a little over an hour by only nineteen terrorists. And now we had reporting that another such tragedy, or even worse, might be right around the corner. This deluge of threat reporting coincided with the capture of senior al Qa‘ida operative Abu Zubaydah in March 2002. Zubaydah had extensive knowledge of al Qa‘ida personnel and operations. While briefly

see the pilot’s facial features. In the distance below we could see the Pentagon, smoke still rising from the crash earlier in the day, and lights flashing from emergency vehicles on the scene. It was the darkest of hours. Tears welled up in my eyes for the first but not the last time that day. Immediately on arrival at Andrews AFB, the president flew off in Marine One back to the White House, while most of the staff piled into vans to follow him. I waited at the Andrews visitors lounge for a

president’s staff. The degree of analysis being done by political appointees was unprecedented in my career. Officials in the vice president’s office were trying to be both the analysts and the policy-makers. A similar dynamic was occurring in Doug Feith’s office at the Pentagon, where Feith, the most senior policy advisor to the secretary of defense, had created his own unit to conduct intelligence analysis. My office was just ten or fifteen feet from Miscik’s conference room, and at one point

would go over it word by word, sentence by sentence. My sense was that he wanted to understand the information fully, to be able to articulate it in a way that the public would understand, and to make sure that Tenet and McLaughlin would stand behind the speech as delivered. In total, the secretary spent dozens of hours, over a weekend, in the conference room, asking question after question. During this process, mostly with McLaughlin, Walpole, and the analysts answering questions, I began to

95 percent certain that Bin Ladin was there. The senior analytic manager—the one who did the briefings for the president—said he was at 80 percent. The CTC analysts were certainly aware of CIA’s failure regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—where the Agency had made an enormous mistake by accepting another circumstantial case. But they kept going back over the intelligence again and again, asking themselves, “What other explanation could there be?” Taking lessons from Iraq, they outlined

Download sample

Download