...and former head of the CIA's Khartoum office (when UBL was there), former Task Force Chief in the Near East and South Asia Division, promoted by Tenet to head the CIA's Counterterrorism Center when Tenet was expanding it from a bureaucratic backwater to one of the CIA's central foci (moving from there to this new State Dept Counterterrorism position in Dec 2002). Black's entire CIA career was in the Directorate of Operations, and all of his later assignments were important ones (Near East, South Asia, South America). This guy is very much "in the loop".