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Shop nowThe Reluctant Spy
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Learn moreLong 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 the streets for their captured leader, the best trauma surgeon in America was flown to Pakistan to make sure that Zubaydah did not die.
In The Reluctant Spy, Kiriakou takes us into the fight against an enemy fueled by fanaticism. He chillingly describes what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11, the agency leaders who stepped up and those who protected their careers. And in what may be the book's most shocking revelation, he describes how the White House made plans to invade Iraq a full year before the CIA knew about it—or could attempt to stop it.
Chronicling both mind-boggling mistakes and heroic acts of individual courage, The Reluctant Spy is essential listening for anyone who wishes to understand the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the truth behind the torture debate, and the incredible dedication of ordinary men and women doing one of the most extraordinary jobs on earth.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News. He was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be the third-ranking official in al Qaeda. In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program, telling ABC News that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been approved by then-President George W. Bush. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act-a law designed to punish spies. He served twenty-three months in prison as a result of the revelation. In 2012, Kiriakou was honored with the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who "advance truth and justice despite the personal risk it creates," and by the inclusion of his portrait in artist Robert Shetterly's series Americans Who Tell the Truth, which features notable truth-tellers throughout American history. He won the PEN Center USA's prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015, the first Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize for Bravery and Integrity in the Public Interest in 2016, and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, also in 2016. Kiriakou is the author of The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror and The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars.
Michael Ruby is an award-winning journalist who has worked for BusinessWeek, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. His book collaborations include Don Hewitt's Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television.
Arthur Morey has recorded over two hundred audiobooks in history, fiction, science, business, and religion, earning a number of AudioFile Earphones Awards and two Audie Award nominations. He was an editor at two publishers and taught writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed. Arthur attended Harvard and the University of Chicago.