Q: When a former CIA officer goes “public” does the information need to be cleared for its possible sensitivity to national security first?

A: Everything a former CIA officer writes has to be cleared by a panel called the Publications Review Board (PRB).  And I mean everything has to be cleared, from a letter to the editor of House Beautiful magazine to a memoir about a CIA career.  But clearance is not a science and the process can take years, or 18 months, in my case.  An author frequently finds himself in a fight with PRB over language, and there is an appeals process which most authors take advantage of.  In the end, the author and PRB usually can come to an agreement, but with both sides somewhat unhappy.

Q: You have been at times at the center of the debate regarding the effectiveness waterboarding.  Where do you stand on the issue now?

A: I believe now, as I believed in December 2007 when I went public, that waterboarding was morally wrong.  I said then and I maintain now that Abu Zubaydah provided actionable intelligence after being waterboarded.  I was wrong when I said he had been waterboarded once.  That was what I was told.  We know now that he had been waterboarded 83 times.  But there are two separate issues here.  Did waterboarding work (on Abu Zubaydah it did in a limited way, but it did not work on other prisoners, who simply told the interrogators what they wanted to hear), and was it morally right?

Q: It has been suggested your position on waterboarding was part of a deception campaign.  Are you lying to us now?

A: If I said no, would you believe me?  Seriously, I’ve seen a couple of conspiratorial, fringe blogs make that accusation.  It’s ridiculous.  I called it as I saw it.  It made a lot of people angry and started an important national debate.  I stand by my position.

Q: Stephen Colbert has suggested the need to waterboard you to get the “real” truth.  Would this work or have you been trained to resist torture?

A: I feel like I already have been waterboarded!  Repeatedly.  I was never trained to resist torture.  I wish I had had training in press relations, however.

Want to learn more? Read Kiriakou’s book The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror

Not many people will remember the date, but 45 years ago, on August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This measure authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia (read: Vietnam), notably without a formal declaration of war by Congress. If you think about it, this procedure was very similar to the one adopted through the Iraq War Resolution, which in 2002 authorized the administration to invade Iraq. It almost seems to me that, whenever we try to relegate the Vietnam War to the back pages of our history books, the conflict comes back to teach us another lesson.  

Vietnam as well as Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the U.S. military to engage in asymmetrical warfare—regular troops, using the latest military equipment, fighting primitively armed but highly motivated guerrilla forces. In the 1970s as well as today, U.S. commanders have drawn on the intelligence services, especially the CIA, to wage this kind of counter-insurgency. In Vietnam, the CIA developed and led the so-called Phoenix program: small teams of South Vietnamese paramilitary troops and American “advisers” would systematically seek out known or suspected Vietcong cadres and “neutralize”—i.e., arrest, interrogate, or kill—them; by 1972, over 80,000 Vietcong had been neutralized, of which over 25,000 were killed.

At the time, Phoenix incurred much criticism. Small wonder—taking the war to the villages, Phoenix teams often “neutralized” Vietcong cadres and innocent civilians alike. But if you talk to experts on Phoenix today, they will mostly tell you that the program was effective and dealt severe blows to the Vietcong infrastructure in South Vietnam.

As an avid student of intelligence history, I am keen to learn if and how the lessons of Vietnam can or should be applied in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I am asking myself: Is it legitimate to hunt down and selectively “neutralize” our enemies, even at the risk of killing innocent civilians? Or should we refrain from adopting Phoenix-style operations, both for moral considerations as well as concerns over possible backlashes in public opinion abroad?

Nothing is what it seems.