Chris Wood | |
---|---|
Central Intelligence Agency Counterterrorism Center | |
Director | |
In office 2015–2017 | |
President | Donald Trump Barack Obama |
Preceded by | Michael D'Andrea |
Succeeded by | Classified |
Personal details | |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | George Mason University,B.A. |
Profession | Espionage |
Military service | |
Allegiance | United States |
Branch/service | Central Intelligence Agency |
Unit | Northern Alliance Liaison Team |
Battles/wars | US Invasion of Afghanistan |
John Christopher Wood is a retired operations officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. After the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001,he was part of the initial team of seven CIA officers that entered Afghanistan in pursuit of al-Qa'ida and the Taliban just 15 days after the attacks. Later he held prominent positions,including Kabul station chief and director of the Counterterrorism Mission Center (CTMC).
Wood earned a Bachelor of Arts in government and international politics from George Mason University's School of Policy and Government before joining the CIA. [1]
Wood joined the CIA in 1985,serving in various roles throughout the agency's Directorate of Operations.
In 1997 Wood was assigned as a case officer in Pakistan,working under Chief of Station Gary Schroen on operations to find and capture Osama bin Laden,a role he would hold throughout the leadup to the September 11th terrorist attacks. Wood was a mentor of David Tyson, [2] the CIA case officer who was with Johnny Micheal Spann when he was killed at the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi on November 25,2001. Just fifteen days after the hijackings,Wood was one of the seven- or eight-man advance Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team (NALT) led by Schroen and deputy Phil Reilly [3] inserted by Mi-17 helicopter into Afghanistan on September 26,2001. [4] [5] [6] They brought a range of skills to bear including proficiency in Russian,Dari,and Persian. Building on the agency's existing relationship with the Northern Alliance,the team collected intelligence on the Taliban,reporting the latest developments back to Headquarters every two hours. Agency officers slept in cramped rooms,often on top of the three cardboard boxes filled with $3 million in $100 bills used to buy support from locals. [7] Small and highly agile paramilitary mobile teams,including CTC Special Operations,or CTC/SO,headed by Hank Crumpton,Greg Vogle, [8] and others followed the NALT,spreading out over the countryside during the day to meet with locals and gather information about the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. In the evenings,they slept outside of town. [4] [5]
As the war in Afghanistan began in earnest throughout 2002,Wood became head of operations at the CIA's Kabul Station,before being transferred back to Virginia a year later to serve in various leadership roles at ALEC Station,the group that led the hunt for al-Qaeda suspects and was central to the interrogation program throughout 2003 and 2004. He ultimately became chief of ALEC Station,while at the same time the 9/11 Commission was scrutinizing the stations actions and inactions in the days and months leading up to the attacks. [4]
In 2010 Wood served a stint as Afghan specialist at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,before returning to Kabul Station a year later,this time as chief of station,overseeing a far larger unit than he had been a part of eight years earlier. He took the reins of station in Afghanistan at the same time as agency officers who spent years hunting Osama Bin Laden finally found their man. [4] After 2011,Wood served time in Washington,D.C.,where he served as the chief to a number of critical agency offices,and his rotational assignments included stints with the Joint Chiefs of Staff,Federal Bureau of Investigation,and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. [4] [1] Some time later Wood became a member of the Senior Intelligence Service when he returned to overseas duty in charge of all operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan,holding the position of an assistant director,and leading several field commands in sensitive overseas assignments. [4]
In 2015,Wood was tapped by Director John Brennan to replace Michael D’Andrea as head of the drone strike program amid a bureaucratic reshuffling. During his appointment,the controversial wide-ranging targeted killing program was the subject of multiple investigations,with President Obama announcing new scrutiny just days before he entered the position,saying "I don't want our intelligence agencies being a paramilitary organization. That's not their function." [9] Wood's appointment to the role was seen by many as an opportunity to compromise with the military's Joint Special Operations Command and decrease the role of title 50 organizations like the CIA in lethal strikes traditionally the purview of title 10 military operations,citing Wood's more "collegial" approach to policy than the widely reported obstructionist approach of his longstanding surly predecessor. [9] Wood continued in the role until retiring in July 2017 after 32 years of service. [8]
Wood is a board member of the Third Option Foundation,an organization dedicated to providing support and resiliency to the families of members of the CIA's paramilitary operations units,and which bears the motto of the CIA's Special Activities Center:Tertia Optio. [1]
George John Tenet is an American intelligence official and academic who served as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) for the United States Central Intelligence Agency,as well as a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
The Special Activities Center (SAC) is a division of the United States Central Intelligence Agency responsible for covert and paramilitary operations. The unit was named Special Activities Division (SAD) prior to 2015. Within SAC there are two separate groups:SAC/SOG for tactical paramilitary operations and SAC/PAG for covert political action.
Joseph Cofer Black is an American former CIA officer who served as director of the Counterterrorism Center in the years surrounding the September 11th attacks,and was later appointed Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department by President George W. Bush,serving until his resignation in 2004. Prior to his roles combatting terrorism,Black served across the globe in a variety of roles with the Directorate of Operations at the CIA.
The Inter-Services Intelligence is the premier intelligence agency of Pakistan. It is responsible for gathering,processing,and analyzing any information from around the world that is deemed relevant to Pakistan's national security. As one of the principal members of the Pakistani intelligence community,the ISI reports to its Director-General and is primarily focused on providing intelligence to the Pakistani government.
Gary Charles Schroen was an American Central Intelligence Agency field officer who was in charge of the initial CIA incursion into Afghanistan in September 2001 to topple the Taliban regime and to destroy Al-Qaeda.
In late 2001,the United States and its close allies invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban government. The invasion's aims were to dismantle al-Qaeda,which had executed the September 11 attacks,and to deny it a safe base of operations in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban government from power. The United Kingdom was a key ally of the United States,offering support for military action from the start of invasion preparations. The invasion came after the Afghan Civil War's 1996–2001 phase between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance groups,resulting in the Taliban controlling 80% of the country by 2001. The invasion became the first phase of the 20-year-long War in Afghanistan and marked the beginning of the American War on Terror.
The Bin Laden Issue Station,also known as Alec Station,was a standalone unit of the Central Intelligence Agency in operation from 1996 to 2005 dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden and his associates,both before and after the 9/11 attacks. It was headed initially by CIA analyst Michael Scheuer and later by Richard Blee and others.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Mission Center forCounterterrorism was established in 1986,and is a division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. It was renamed during an agency restructuring in 2015,and is distinct from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC),which is a separate entity. The most recent publicly known Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Mission Center was Chris Wood who led the organization from 2015 to 2017.
After the Central Intelligence Agency lost its role as the coordinator of the entire Intelligence Community (IC),special coordinating structures were created by each president to fit his administrative style and the perceived level of threat from terrorists during his term.
The Afghanistan conflict began in 1978 and has coincided with several notable operations by the United States (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first operation,code-named Operation Cyclone,began in mid-1979,during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. It financed and eventually supplied weapons to the anti-communist mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan following an April 1978 coup by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and throughout the nearly ten-year military occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.). Carter's successor,Ronald Reagan,supported an expansion of the Reagan Doctrine,which aided the mujahideen along with several other anti-Soviet resistance movements around the world.
The Haqqani network is an Afghan Islamist guerrilla insurgent group,built around the family of the same name,that has used asymmetric warfare in Afghanistan to fight against Soviet forces in the 1980s,and US-led NATO forces and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan government in the 21st century. It is considered to be a "semi-autonomous" offshoot of the Taliban. It has been most active in eastern Afghanistan and across the border in north-west Pakistan.
Between 2004 and 2018,the United States government attacked thousands of targets in Northwest Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) operated by the United States Air Force under the operational control of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division. Most of these attacks were on targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan border in Northwest Pakistan. These strikes began during the administration of United States President George W. Bush,and increased substantially under his successor Barack Obama. Some in the media referred to the attacks as a "drone war". The George W. Bush administration officially denied the extent of its policy;in May 2013,the Obama administration acknowledged for the first time that four US citizens had been killed in the strikes. In December 2013,the National Assembly of Pakistan unanimously approved a resolution against US drone strikes in Pakistan,calling them a violation of "the charter of the United Nations,international laws and humanitarian norms."
The Camp Chapman attack was a suicide attack by Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi against the Central Intelligence Agency facility inside Forward Operating Base Chapman on December 30,2009. One of the main tasks of the CIA personnel stationed at the base was to provide intelligence supporting drone attacks in Pakistan. Seven American CIA officers and contractors,an officer of Jordan's intelligence service,and an Afghan working for the CIA were killed when al-Balawi detonated a bomb sewn into a vest he was wearing. Six other American CIA officers were wounded. The bombing was the most lethal attack against the CIA in more than 25 years.
Mohammed Atef was the military chief of al-Qaeda,and was considered one of Osama bin Laden's two deputies,the other being Ayman Al Zawahiri,although Atef's role in the organization was not well known by intelligence agencies for years. He was killed in a US airstrike in November 2001.
The following lists events that happened during 2015 in Afghanistan.
Events in the year 2017 in Afghanistan.
Michael D'Andrea is a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer who played an instrumental role in American counterterrorism efforts during the War on Terror. He served nine years as director of Counterterrorism Center (CTC),and held a major role in the manhunt for Osama bin Laden. His 42-year career has been described as among the most consequential in the recent history of the CIA,and he has been called the most lethal leader in the U.S. government for his tenure. He is widely credited with revolutionizing the CIA's terrorist-hunting efforts,and vastly expanding the program of targeted killings by drone strike used heavily against Al-Qaeda. "If he was a combatant commander,he would have been sitting in the gallery for the State of the Union,he would have had all the accolades,and then some,that David Petraeus ever had," said one former senior CIA official. "He ran that war."
Gregory W. Vogle is an American intelligence officer who served as the Director of the National Clandestine Service from January 29,2015 until August 2017. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Intelligence Cross,the nation's highest intelligence award for valor,often described as a Medal of Honor equivalent,for his actions to defend Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his troops against an attack on their position by the Taliban in Tarinkot,Afghanistan.
Henry "Hank" A. Crumpton is a retired Central Intelligence Agency operations officer,in his 24 year career he was appointed deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center and head the CIA's National Resources Division,which focuses on operations in the United States. He played an instrumental role in the early days of the invasion of Afghanistan,leading CTC Special Operations paramilitary forces as some of the first people with boots on the ground in pursuit of the Taliban and al-Qaeda just weeks after 9/11. Gary Schroen's seven man Northern Alliance Liaison Team (NALT) forged alliances and established camp in the mountains,while Crumpton crafted a plan for a larger incursion alongside others like Greg Vogle and Chris Wood. He went on to be appointed by President George W. Bush as Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the Department of State with the rank of Ambassador-at-large on August 2,2005. He is an author and co-founder,co-Chairman,and co-CEO of the business intelligence firm Martin+Crumpton Group LLC.
Ayman al-Zawahiri,the leader of the Salafi jihadist group al-Qaeda,was killed by a United States drone strike on 31 July 2022 in Kabul,Afghanistan. He was the successor of Osama bin Laden,who was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. Al-Zawahiri,who had helped to plan the September 11 attacks against the U.S.,had gone into hiding following the attacks,and was located by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) months before his death. After receiving authorization from U.S. President Joe Biden to initiate the strike,the CIA fired two Hellfire missiles at the balcony of al-Zawahiri's house,killing him.
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Central Intelligence Agency .