Episode Details

5. ALEC STATION AND THE INNOVATION OF TARGETING Guest Mundy: Guest Mundy explores the 1990s formation of Alec Station, a "virtual station" dedicated to tracking Bin Laden. This unit uniquely combined analysts and operatives, allowing women to pioneer "targeting" by mapping al-Qaeda’s organizational hierarchy,. Led by the abrasive Mike Scheuer, the group faced significant internal resistance; their warnings were often excluded from the President’s Daily Brief because senior leadership doubted the threat,. Cindy Storer’s realization that al-Qaeda was a sophisticated worldwide bureaucracy, rather than a loose confederation, was a revolutionary insight that the institutional hierarchy was slow to accept. (6)

1966 Libya