The surprise of September 11 2001 was, in part, a failure of imagination and CIA Director George Tenet did not want that to happen again. On September 13 he created the Red Cell and staffed it with “people who were willing to take their analysis to a whole new zip code.” CIA analyst Mark Henshaw’s first novel, Red Cell, is about the adventures of two analysts assigned to that team during a military crisis with China. The story is fiction, but it draws on Henshaw’s three years in the Red Cell....

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was behind many of the most heinous terrorist plots of the past twenty years, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Millenium Plots, and 9/11 itself.He even claims to have personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.Investigative journalist Richard Miniter brings to life the remarkable story of "KSM," including his time living in the United States.Based on interviews with government officials, generals, diplomats and spies from around the...

The war with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did not begin on September 11th. CIA analyst Cynthia Storer was there from the beginning in the early 1990s, a member of a small band of mostly female analysts who worked on Al Qaeda long before September 11.They faced a frustrating uphill battle convincing others about this new threat and were subjected to ridicule for their supposedly excessive passion right up until September 11th.Hear Cynthia discuss with SPY Historian Mark Stout what it was like...

The International Spy Museum created these lesson plans and activities to support student understanding of the role that intelligence played leading up to, during, and following the events of September 11, 2001.

In 2009, the CIA’s partners in the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate had a source named Humam Khalil al-Balawi working inside Al Qaeda and he knew where Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man in al Qaeda was…or so they thought. In fact, Al Qaeda was running a deception. In December 2009 al-Balawi came to a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan and detonated bomb strapped to his chest, killing seven CIA officers and one Jordanian intelligence officer. It was the CIA’s greatest loss of life...

The 13-year search for Osama Bin Laden may have seemed unprecedented, but actually such events have not been uncommon in American history. Since the days of Geronimo, the United States has embarked on at least eleven such "strategic manhunts." Benjamin Runkle, the author of the new book Wanted Dead or Alive: Manhunts from Geronimo to Bin Laden, sits down with SPY Historian Mark Stout to discuss what we can learn from the history of these manhunts. Find out what kind of intelligence it takes...