The former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the FBI’s National Security Branch, Philip Mudd is no stranger to covert ops, enhanced interrogation techniques, and extraordinary renditions. Yet in his honesty and forthrightness about our intelligence shortcomings in the War on Terror, he has sometimes invited the criticism of some high ranking figures. That candor comes to the fore in BLACK SITE: The CIA in the Post 9/11 World (Liveright: July 30, 2019), Mudd’s sober, balanced assessment of “The Program,” the post-9/11 strategy developed by the CIA to hold captured prisoners, extract information and prevent another catastrophic attack.
After framing what the CIA was like before Al-Qaida, Mudd delves into the planning, operating, and disassembling of the notorious “black sites”—which were the secret CIA-run prisons used to interrogate captives from battlefields around the world. Questions about these “black sites,” which were based in foreign countries for legal reasons, have been circulating for years: how were prisoners transported there? What did these secret prisons look like? How were the detainees “broken”—and what happened after?
While providing us with answers, Mudd shows how deeply thought out every single step of the process was.
What happened internally in the decade after the attacks has so rarely been discussed or written about publicly. So Mudd laces this history with interviews with former colleagues, allowing them to voice how they felt in those exact moments. Surprisingly, the 2014 Senate report didn’t even include interviews of CIA officers, many of whom have not spoken in public and would have never spoken without this book. Nearly two decades later, most tend to look back on those critical days with their hands up, a mixture of guilt and we had to.

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