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The John Batchelor Show

S8 Ep736: 5. ALEC STATION AND THE INNOVATION OF TARGETING Guest Mundy: Guest Mundy explores the 1990s formation of Alec Station, a "virtual station" dedicated to tracking Bin Laden. This unit uniquely combined analysts and operatives, allowing women to pioneer "tar

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

News, Books, Arts, Society & Culture

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2026

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

5. ALEC STATION AND THE INNOVATION OF TARGETING Guest Mundy: Guest Mundy explores the 1990s formation of Alec Station, a "virtual station" dedicated to tracking Bin Laden. This unit uniquely combined analysts and operatives, allowing women to pioneer "targeting" by mapping al-Qaeda’s organizational hierarchy,. Led by the abrasive Mike Scheuer, the group faced significant internal resistance; their warnings were often excluded from the President’s Daily Brief because senior leadership doubted the threat,. Cindy Storer’s realization that al-Qaeda was a sophisticated worldwide bureaucracy, rather than a loose confederation, was a revolutionary insight that the institutional hierarchy was slow to accept. (6)

1966 Libya

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:35.3

This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.

0:39.9

Here's John Batchelor.

0:42.5

Visiting with the sisterhood, the secret history of women at the CIA by Liza Mundy, continuing.

0:48.7

It is June 25, 1993.

0:52.3

Heidi August, our heroine, for having fought the Soviets, having fought the Abu

0:59.0

Nidal, is drawn her way for another stationing.

1:02.0

She's moving around within the agency.

1:05.0

She's on her way to work that morning on the road, the access road that comes into the CIA.

1:10.0

She sees up ahead. A man get out of a brown Dotson, is my note here, and open fire.

1:16.6

Two agency officers are killed, many are wounded, he gets back in the car and flees.

1:21.6

Now this is June of 93.

1:24.6

Months later, there's an attempt to bring down one of the World Trade Center

1:29.3

towers with an enormous explosion that's eventually treated as a law enforcement

1:33.3

matter what we're seeing here is how hard it is to put together events and say

1:39.3

this is al-Qaeda this is an attack on the United States.

1:44.3

They're going to attack us.

1:46.8

Liza's book tells the story of how the women of the Counterterrorism Center put all these pieces together

1:53.4

and warned and warned and worn through the balance of the 90s.

...

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