The Interrogator: An Education

by Glenn L. Carle Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner

Overview

Here are the confessions of a senior CIA operative who ran the interrogation of one of the highest profile al-Qaeda captures in the last decade. Carle's journey is a tale of international intrigue, deceit, and betrayal-it is also an extraordinary and intimate portrait of our war on terror.

To his friends and neighbors, Glenn L. Carle was a wholesome, stereotypical New England Yankee, a former athlete struggling against incipient middle age, someone always with his nose in an abstruse book. But for two decades, Carle broke laws, stole, and lied on a daily basis about nearly everything. “I was almost never who I said I was, or did what I claimed to be doing.” He was a CIA spy. He thrived in an environment of duplicity and ambiguity, flourishing in the gray areas of policy.

The Interrogator is the story of Carle's most serious assignment, when he was “surged” into the global war on terror to interrogate a top-level detainee at one of the CIA's notorious black sites overseas. It tells of his encounter with one of the most senior al-Qaeda detainees the United States captured after 9/11, a “ghost detainee” who, the CIA believed, might hold the key to finding Osama bin Laden.

But as Carle's interrogation sessions progressed, he began to seriously doubt the operation. Was this man, kidnapped in the Middle East, really the senior al-Qaeda official the CIA believed he was? Headquarters viewed Carle's misgivings as naïve troublemaking. Carle found himself isolated, progressively at odds with his institution and his orders. He struggled over how far to push the interrogation, wrestling with whether his actions constituted torture and with what defined his real duty to his country. Then, in a dramatic twist, headquarters spirited the detainee and Carle to the CIA's harshest interrogation facility, a place of darkness and fear, which even CIA officers dared mention only in whispers.

A haunting tale of sadness, confusion, and determination, The Interrogator is a shocking and intimate look at the world of espionage. It leads the reader through the underworld of the global war on terror, asking us to consider the professional and personal challenges faced by an intelligence officer during a time of war and the unimaginable ways in which war alters our institutions and American society.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al-Qaeda
“Glenn Carle writes with great verve and lyricism about a decidedly unlyrical moment in the history of the U.S. intelligence community; the decision after 9/11 to take the gloves off when it cane to the detention and interrogation of al Qaeda suspects. As Carle witnesses, the U.S. government’s assumptions about how important those suspects were was sometimes way off base, while their treatment at the hands of American officials often did not measure up to the high ethical standards the United States wishes to uphold as a country. Carle tells the story from inside the CIA’s “war on terror” and he does it with great honesty and realism; he has the eye of the novelist and the analytical skills of the senior CIA officer he was. That makes “The Interrogator” an engrossing read, and also an important book.”

David Ignatius, columnist for The Washington Post and author of Body of Lies
Glenn Carle’s "The Interrogator" is a remarkable memoir—for its searing personal honesty, for its portrait of the amoral secret bureaucracy of the CIA, and most of all for its revelation of how a decent American became part of a process that we can only call torture."

Gilles Kepel, Professor, Institute of Political Studies, Paris, author of Beyond Terror and

Library Journal

In was late summer 2002 when Carle was offered a career-changing assignment—the type a CIA officer spends his or her career yearning for. He was asked to participate in the interrogation of a detainee called CAPTUS who was considered a High Value Target (HVT) connected with al-Qaeda. As Carle builds an odd relationship with CAPTUS, it becomes clearer to him that CAPTUS is not the HVT the U.S. government believed. Despite his misgivings, outlined in cables to superiors, Carle had to intensify his interrogations. Carle spends much of the book soul-searching, weighing his belief in duty to his country against his moral obligations to another human. VERDICT Despite considerable CIA redactions of this text, readers will find a frightening picture of what has been taking place behind the scenes in the so-called war on terror, including incompetence, secrecy, and corruption. A well-written and highly engaging story.—Patti C. McCall, Pratt Inst. Lib., Brooklyn, NY

AUGUST 2011 - AudioFile

Malcolm Hillgartner provides a stern but amiable voice that embodies the tone of Carle’s memoir. The author relates his decades of experience within the CIA, with particular attention to his post-9/11 experiences as an interrogator of terrorist suspects and affiliated criminals. Hillgartner’s sympathetic tone coupled with details of Carle’s personal life works well to humanize Carle and make listeners sympathetic to him. The most problematic issue of the production is the numerous redactions within the book. The CIA had to approve the book before publishing and removed significant numbers of Carle’s words. In the audio, whether it is one single word or an entire page, the listener hears only the one (almost haunting) word “redacted.” This continual interruption distracts from the production, and listeners can become increasingly confused. L.E. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169522631
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	06/28/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

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