‘It was all hands on deck’: how the CIA responded to 9/11

The CIA director, George Tenet, with senior Bush administration staff at the presidential emergency operations center after the attacks of 9/11. Photograph: David Bohrer/US National Archives via Getty Images

A generation of spies had lost an enemy but not yet found a role. Then came 9/11.

A decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, al-Qaida’s devastating attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 announced to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that the long era of battling communism, for which it had been founded, was officially at an end.