2: 4. The Birth of the Counterterrorism Center and Early Warnings of Bin Laden Liza Mundy Book: The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA Following the Cold War, the CIA lacked a clear mission. However, a terrifying series of terrorist incidents
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
Following the Cold War, the CIA lacked a clear mission. However, a terrifying series of terrorist incidents in the mid-1980s, including the 1985 Malta hijacking handled by Heidi August, led to the formation of the small, low-prestige Counterterrorism Center (CTC). Heidi, traumatized after calling the mother of a dead civilian victim, chose to devote her career to fighting terrorism. The CTC, located in an undesirable office, attracted an odd assortment of people, including future key figures like analysts Cindy Storer and Barbara Sude. Cindy Storer, initially relegated to the Afghanistan desk, was the first to recognize the threat posed by Arab jihadist fighters dispersing globally and being funded by a mysterious financier: Osama bin Laden. Despite gathering critical intelligence, the CTC's analysts (Directorate of Intelligence—DI) struggled to be heard, facing contempt from the clandestine spies (Directorate of Operations—DO) and difficulty publishing their findings due to required corporate buy-in.
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| 0:30.5 | I'm John Baxter with Liza Mundy. Her new book is The Sisterhood, the Secret History of Women at the CIA. |
| 0:37.9 | It's also a history of the CIA. So you can see the mission after the fall of the Soviet Union was unknown. |
| 0:43.4 | It didn't have a clear way of, this is what we're for, 20,000 people working at Langley with a reputation of James Bond's. |
| 0:46.1 | But Smersh is gone. |
| 0:49.3 | Karl is gone. |
| 0:51.4 | Moscow Center's gone. |
| 0:52.9 | What do we do now? |
| 0:58.1 | Well, Heidi had seen it in Malta, but now we go to something called the CTC, the Counterterrorism Center, which Liza, you introduces having a faded |
| 1:05.8 | carpet. What was it? The Counterterrorism Center was a very small office, just as you say, at headquarters, the CIA that was created in the mid-1980s. |
| 1:18.1 | Just as you say, Heidi August handled a terrorist hijacking on the island of Malta. |
| 1:24.8 | And those of us, you know, who were adults in the 1980s, remember this period of |
| 1:29.5 | hijackings, the Achille-Laro, certainly the explosion of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. |
| 1:35.8 | There was a terrifying series of terrorist incidents in the mid-1980s when the Cold War was still |
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