The Reluctant Spy
My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror
Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture—but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou’s life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot.
In February 2002 Kiriakou was the head of counterterrorism in Pakistan. Under his command, in a spectacular raid coordinated with Pakistani agents and the CIA’s best intelligence analyst, Kiriakou’s field officers took down the infamous terrorist Abu Zubaydah. For days, Kiriakou became the wounded terrorist’s personal “bodyguard.” In circumstances stranger than fiction, as al-Qaeda agents scoured…
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March 16, 2010John Kiriakou is a senior staff member in the United States Senate. He served in the Central Intelligence Agency from 1990 to 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, in which capacity he was intimately involved in planning the Iraq War. His op-eds on the Middle East and Afghanistan have appeared in more than eighty newspapers in dozens of countries.
