Free Intel Wars by Matthew M. Aid

the overarching doctrine was “we must kill them before they kill us.” It was remarkably similar in tenor and tone to a classified directive written almost thirty years earlier in the aftermath of the September 1972 massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and a German policeman at the Munich Olympic Games, wherein the Israeli cabinet ordered the Mossad to wipe out the Palestinian Black September terrorist group because of the danger that it posed to the Israeli state.
    Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has waged a secret battle beyond America’s borders against a host of foreign terrorist organizations, conducted almost entirely out of view of the American public. The fight has been both remorseless and pitiless, with no quarter asked for or given on either side.
    Since entering office in 2009, the Obama administration has continued the policy initiated during the Bush administration of killing al Qaeda leaders and fighters whenever and wherever they are found. The widely held sentiment inside the U.S. intelligence community remains that the only sure way to ensure that there will be no more 9/11s is, as one current senior administration official starkly put it in a 2009 interview, “We have to kill them all, every last one of them.”
    The U.S. intelligence community’s fight against al Qaeda and the hundreds of other foreign terrorist groups around the world is run from the National Counterterrorism Center , which is located in Building LX-1 next to the director of national intelligence’s office at Liberty Crossing in northern Virginia.
    The chief of the NCTC from June 2008 until his retirement in July 2011, Michael E. Leiter, had an unusual pedigree for the nation’s top terrorist hunter. He spent six years flying navy electronic warfare aircraft off the decks of aircraft carriers before graduating from Harvard Law School in 2000 magna cum laude, where he was also the editor of the Harvard Law Review . After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Leiter spent the next three years (2002–5) as a federal prosecutor in Alexandria, Virginia, before getting his first exposure to the intelligence world when he was chosen to be deputy general counsel of the Robb-Silberman Commission, which examined why the U.S. intelligence community failed so miserably in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That led to a one-year stint as deputy chief of staff for the first director of national intelligence, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, before moving over to take command of NCTC in 2007. When the Obama administration came into office in 2009, Leiter was asked to stay on at his post because of the respect that he had garnered within the intelligence community.
    Leiter may have had the respect of his peers in the intelligence community, but the organization he commanded was viewed by many as troubled. The NCTC was yet another example of the poor compromises that often come out of the U.S. intelligence community’s convoluted decision-making process. Its predecessor, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), had been created on May 11, 2003, to be the U.S. intelligence community’s one-stop-shopping source for all intelligence information, both raw and evaluated, about domestic and foreign terrorist groups and their activities. The only way such a clearinghouse was going to work cohesively was if it brought together under one single roof the more than one dozen counterterrorism units that then existed within the U.S. intelligence community. But when it came time to consolidate, all sixteen American agencies refused to give up the counterterrorism units that they had lavished so much time and money on since 9/11.
    When TTIC was renamed the National Counterterrorism Center in 2005 and placed under the command of the newly created director of national intelligence, it had very few assets to call its own and was almost completely dependent on the charity of the