Philip Mudd is a CNN counterterrorism analyst. Mudd joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1985 as an analyst specializing in South Asia and then the Middle East. He began work in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center in 1992 and then served on the National Intelligence Council as the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia (1995-1998). After a tour as an executive assistant in the front office of the CIA’s analytic arm, Mudd went on to manage Iraq analysis at the CIA (1999 to 2001).
Mudd began a policy assignment at the White House in early 2001, detailed from CIA to serve as the Director for Gulf Affairs on the White House National Security Council. He left after the September 11 attacks for a short assignment as the CIA member of the small diplomatic team that helped piece together a new government for Afghanistan, and he returned to CIA in early 2002 to become second-in-charge of counterterrorism analysis in the National Counterterrorism Center. He was promoted to the position of Deputy Director of the NCTC in 2003 and served there until 2005.
At the establishment of the FBI’s National Security Branch in 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller appointed Mudd to serve as the Branch’s first-ever deputy director. He later became the FBI’s Senior Intelligence Adviser. Mudd resigned from government service in March 2010.
Mudd is the recipient of numerous CIA awards and commendations, including the Director’s Award; the George H.W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism; the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal; the first-ever William Langer Award for excellence in analysis; and numerous Exceptional Performance Awards.
During his assignments at CIA and the FBI, Mudd has commented about terrorism in open and closed Congressional testimony, and he has been featured by ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, MSNBC, al-Jazeera, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Mr. Mudd has written in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and Sentinel, the journal of the US Military Academy’s Combatting Terrorism Center.
Mudd is the author of Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qa’ida (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and the The HEAD Game: High Efficiency Analytic Decision-Making and the Art of Solving Complex Problems Quickly (The Liveright Press, April 2015).
Mudd graduated cum laude from Villanova University with a B.A. in English Literature (1983), and he earned an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Virginia (1984). He speaks French.
