9781422277119

E ven before he became the 43rd president of the United States, George W. Bush knew that foreign terrorists were targeting the country. Early in January 2001, he met with George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA carries out a wide range of activities around the globe to try to prevent enemies from harming the United States. Its duties include spying, helping groups that support US interests, and track- ing down terrorists overseas. In this meeting, Tenet told the incoming presi- dent that a terrorist network called al-Qaeda, controlled by Osama bin Laden, posed “a tremendous threat” to the safety of the United States. The Path to a Terrorist Attack During the 1980s, the CIA had worked with rebels in Afghanistan who op- posed a government set up there by the Soviet Union . This was during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States were rivals in inter- M ission B riefing

Words To Understand hijack take over control of a vehicle, such as a plane or ship, by force intelligence secretly gathered information about an enemy Soviet Union former nation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that broke into 15 separate countries in 1991; the largest of these is Russia

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