The Reluctant Spy Read online

  It’s a fair point, as is their contention that cooperative efforts with the intelligence agencies of other countries would be jeopardized. I also agree with President Obama that his administration needs to look forward, not back. No one is above the law, but it probably would be difficult, if not impossible, to make a case against those claiming they gave the best legal advice they could, however flawed it turned out to be. I suspect the many reviews and Congressional inquiries of post-9/11 treatment of detainees will yield a relatively complete portrait that includes sins of omission as well as commission by the CIA and other government entities. Meanwhile, our country has huge problems at home and abroad that need the full attention of our leaders.

  What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple of counts. I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence. I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time. Now, we know that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied. In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the arts of deception even among its own.

  The national debate on waterboarding and other forms of torture got a second wind early in Obama’s presidency, and I’m proud to have played a small part in it. In a larger sense, this is not an American conversation that has ended. If we have learned anything since 9/11, we have learned anew that a tension exists between protecting our national security and ensuring the human rights guaranteed in that most precious of documents, the U.S. Constitution. Our challenge, in a world of unprecedented threats, is to strike a balance between the polarities—to find that place where the two can live reasonably, if not comfortably, side by side. It won’t be easy. But then, it never was.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FIRST, I WOULD like to thank Mike Ruby for the hundreds of hours he committed to helping me turn my ramblings into a coherent manuscript. Mike never lost his composure or sense of humor despite nine separate drafts I had to send through the CIA’s notorious Publications Review Board. Thanks to Rich Klein, my dear friend, for getting the ball rolling in the first place and for his unflagging friendship and support through some dark days. Thanks to Flip Brophy at Sterling Lord Literistic for guiding me through the process, and to John Flicker, Jessica Waters, Dennis Ambrose, and Michelle Daniel at Random House/Bantam Books for their editorial support. Thanks to Bruce Riedel for his long friendship and wise counsel. Thanks to Plato Cacheris for having my back when I went public that the CIA had waterboarded prisoners. And most of all, thanks to “Katherine.” I don’t know what I did to deserve a wife as wonderful as you. One preemptive apology: Any errors, faulty recollections, or oversights that appear in this book are mine and mine alone. I have related the facts as I recall them, or as the CIA has allowed me to tell them, but there are bound to be some mistakes. For those I take full responsibility.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOHN KIRIAKOU is a senior staff member in the United States Senate. He served in the Central Intelligence Agency from 1990 until March 2004, first as an analyst and later as a counterterrorism operations officer. He was later named the executive assistant to the CIA’s associate deputy director for operations, where he was intimately involved in planning for the Iraq war. His op-eds on the Middle East and Afghanistan have appeared in more than eighty newspapers in dozens of countries.

  Copyright © 2009 by John Kiriakou

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kiriakou, John.

  The reluctant spy: my secret life in the CIA’s war on terror / John Kiriakou with Michael Ruby; foreword by Bruce Riedel.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90733-9

  1. War on Terrorism, 2001—Personal narratives. 2. Kiriakou, John. 3. Spies—United States—Biography. 4. United States. Central Intelligence Agency. I. Ruby, Michael (Michael Handler).

  II. Title.

  HV6430.K57 2010 327.12730092—dc22 2009042956

  [B]

  www.bantamdell.com

  All photographs from the author’s collection

  v3.0