In New Book, Ex-CIA Agent Comes Clean, Falls Flat

• By Daniel Newhauser
• Roll Call Staff
• March 16, 2010, Midnight

In 2007, ex-CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriakou transformed the national debate on torture by telling ABC News that while in U.S. custody, al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded only once for about 30 seconds before promptly coming clean about his terrorist activities. Kiriakou repeated the story to just about every major news outlet that would listen: Though the enhanced interrogation technique is morally wrong, he stated, it worked, plain and simple. But the New York Times uncovered some two years later that Zubaydah had actually been waterboarded upward of 80 times and the information that he divulged may not have been as actionable as Kiriakou made it seem, breeding speculation that Kiriakou was a CIA media plant. Now, in his new book, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror,” the now-Senate Foreign Relations Committee adviser finally comes clean.