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Hello and welcome to the LawFair podcast, I'm Benjamin Witties. In this episode, my

Brookings colleague Bruce Rydell holds a public discussion with Philip Mudd, former deputy

director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, an author of the new book Take Down, The

Hunt for Al Qaeda. Mudd has also served as the deputy director of the FBI's National

Security Branch and as the FBI's senior intelligence advisor. This discussion at the Brookings

Institution covered how the intelligence community collects, analyzes, and employs data

to combat terrorism, a particularly timely topic in the wake of the intelligence questions

surrounding the Boston bombings, which Mudd and Rydell also discussed.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Brookings Institution. I'm Bruce Rydell.

I am director of the intelligence project at the Brookings Institution in the 21st

century for security intelligence project. I'm also a senior fellow in the Saban Center

for Middle Eastern Studies. It is my great pleasure today to have with us Philip Mudd.

Philip Mudd had one of the most distinguished careers in the US intelligence community

before he left government four years ago. I first got to meet Phil when he was a junior

analyst working on Iranian support for international terrorism. We had a number of interesting

adventures together back in the 1990s. I then asked him to come and serve with me at the

National Intelligence Council and then later at the National Security Council. After 9-11,

he went on to a series of very important positions. He worked at the bond conference that

...