The Watchdogs Didn't Bark

“The authors lay bare… an intelligence failure of historic proportions.”
—JOHN KIRIAKOU, Former CIA officer and author of The Convenient Terrorist

In 2009, documentarians Duffy and Nowosielski arrived at the offices of Richard Clarke, the former counter-terror adviser to Presidents Clinton and Bush. There, for the first time, Clarke boldly accused his friend and one-time Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet of “malfeasance and misfeasance” in the pre-war on terrorism. Thus began an incredible—never-before-told—investigative journey of intrigue into how the fall-out from a covert decision within America’s intelligence community about two future September 11th hijackers may have come to secretly define the terror wars and launched a “war on whistleblowers.”

The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark details that story, unearthed over a ten-year investigation. Following the careers of a dozen counterterror employees of the US government from the late 1980s to the present, the book puts the government’s systems of accountability under a microscope. How did current CIA director Gina Haspel manage to climb her agency’s ladder with such speed? The authors examine the merits of decades of serious accusations made against some of her key allies. What can explain how two key Al Qaeda plotters—operating inside the United States for nearly two years before the 9/11 tragedy—could fall onto the radars of so many US agencies without any of them succeeding in stopping the attacks? The authors find unexpected answers and a system all-too-easily manipulated against the best interests of the American people. Taking readers on a character-driven account of how the true lessons of the September 11th attacks were cynically inverted to empower the state, an alarm is raised which is more pertinent today than ever before.