My Q&A with Philip Mudd, the former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and former deputy director of the FBI's National Security Branch, appears in the latest issue of Counterterrorism magazine.
Traditionally, intelligence serves the policy-maker who has to make a decision. In the age of terrorism, it's the CIA who is both collecting the information and typically acting on it. Usually, it is the diplomats or the military who are acting on the intelligence. So that made the intelligence process immediate, it made it personal, it made it tactical. And the second thing was the sense of responsibility, not for a sort of looming strategic threat like the Soviet missile force, but for a threat that could leave a child in Chicago or Los Angeles or Miami motherless if we failed. That changes your dyamic pretty quickly.
You can read the rest of the Q&A below:
Note: I interviewed Mr. Mudd prior to the NSA surveillance controversy.
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