Blee said. “I knew it was a quagmire, but at some point you have to do something about your enemies.” Post–Cold War cuts in CIA staffing also limited the agency’s ability to counter Al Qaeda, he said, which, by 2001, had an estimated three thousand members. “It was twenty or thirty people against three thousand,” Blee recalled. “That was a period when the agency was firing people; the [Berlin] wall was coming down, there was no longer a need for the CIA.”
