Philip Mudd is an American counterterrorism and national security expert. Mudd is well known for his current role as a CNN counter-terrorism analyst. He was previously the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Counterterrorist Center and the first ever Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s National Security Branch.

Philip Mudd is of Catholic Italian and Irish descent.

In 1983, Philip Mudd graduated cum laude from Villanova University with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. In 1984, Mudd graduated from the University of Virginia with a Master of Arts in English Literature from the University of Virginia. He is bilingual, speaking both English and French.

Philip Mudd joined the CIA in 1985 as an analyst specializing in South Asia and then the Middle East. He began work in the CIA’s Middle East in 1992 and then served on the National Intelligence Council as the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia (1995-98). After a tour as an executive assistant in the front office of the Agency’s analytic arm, Mudd went on to manage Iraq analysis at the CIA (1999-2001).

Philip Mudd then began a policy assignment at the White House in early 2001, detailed from the CIA to serve as the Director for Gulf Affairs on the White House National Security Council. He left after the September 11 attacks for a short assignment as the CIA member of the small diplomatic team that helped piece together a new government for Afghanistan, and he returned to CIA in early 2002 to become second-in-charge of counterterrorism analysis in the Counterterrorist Center. He was promoted to the position of Deputy Director of the Center in 2003 and served there until 2005.

At the establishment of the FBI National Security Branch in 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller appointed Philip Mudd to serve as the Branch’s first-ever deputy director. He later became the FBI’s Senior Intelligence Adviser. Mudd resigned from government service in March 2010.

During his assignments at CIA and the FBI, Philip Mudd has commented about terrorism in open and closed Congressional testimony, and he has been featured by ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Mudd has written in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and Sentinel, the journal of the United States Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center.

Philip Mudd is currently a CNN counter-terrorism analyst and the President of Mudd Management, a company specializing in security consulting; analytic training; and public speaking about security issues.

Philip Mudd is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute. He also serves as Senior Global Adviser to Oxford Analytica, a British-based firm specializing in advising multinational companies. Mudd sits on the advisory board for the National Counterterrorism Center and for the Director of National Intelligence, and he serves on the Aspen Institute’s Homeland Security Group.

Philip Mudd has earned multiple CIA awards and commendations, including the Director’s Award; the George H.W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism; the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal; the first-ever William Langer Award for excellence in analysis; and numerous Exceptional Performance awards.

Philip Mudd's first book Takedown: Inside the Hunt for al-Qa’ida was published on March 12, 2013 with the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book covers the American intelligence community's response to the September 11 attacks and draws on Mudd's experience working in counterterrorism for the CIA and FBI in the aftermath of the attacks.

Philip Mudd's second book The HEAD Game: High-Efficiency Analytic Decision Making and the Art of Solving Complex Problems Quickly was published by Liveright Publishing Corporation on April 6, 2015. The book details Mudd's method for approaching complex decisions which was developed through his decades of leadership experience in the CIA and FBI.

Philip Mudd's third book Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World was published by Liveright on July 30, 2019.The book tells the full story of the post-9/11 counterterrorism world at the CIA.^[23]