A CIA officer disagrees with American policy

The Interrogator: An Education. By Glenn Carle. Nation; 321 pages; $26.99 and £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

AN OFFICIAL in the CIA is sent abroad to interrogate a man he is told is a senior al-Qaeda terrorist. He begins to doubt this description, but his bosses are convinced that the detainee is withholding vital information. The two men are sent to a second country where the prisoner is subjected to more coercive treatment. The official opposes this and argues that the man should be released. His superiors disagree. He returns to Washington, DC, and eventually retires from the agency. The prisoner is subsequently freed.

If the bare bones of Glenn Carle’s story are less than satisfactory, this is scarcely his fault. The CIA would not allow him to name the detainee or the two countries where the interrogations took place, let alone specify the coercive measures used. The agency initially blacked out 100 of his original 250-or-so pages. It took a two-year fight with his former employers for Mr Carle to get the book published in its present form. Even so, page after page is scarred with redactions. Some pages are more black than white. (Occasionally the author adds a terse footnote to a redaction he feels especially sore about.) To an unusual degree, the reader is left to make sense of a disjointed plot in which key bits of information are either missing or vague.

Mr Carle is not the gung-ho spook of popular fiction. He is a Harvard-educated New England Yankee who threw up a safe career as a banker to become a spy. His early experiences were in Costa Rica and Burundi, and he got a taste of the toxicity of the Middle East as a bit-player in the Iran-Contra scandal. The attacks on the twin towers in 2001 transported him from a desk job in Washington to an operational role in the “global war on terror”. He was sent to interrogate a man he calls Captus, in a country we can surmise is Morocco, with clear instructions to do “whatever was necessary” to get him to talk. Mr Carle became convinced that Captus did not belong to al-Qaeda at all, and was no more guilty than “a train conductor who sells a criminal a ticket”. He suspected, however, that his Arab hosts might be torturing Captus when he was not there.

Against his wishes, he and Captus were sent to a much grimmer establishment, which the author jocularly calls Hotel California, in a desolate part of what is clearly Afghanistan. Here Captus was subjected to noise, cold, sleep deprivation and worse (the redactions keep the reader guessing). Mr Carle wrote two “incendiary” cables to his bosses questioning the whole misguided approach, only to discover that his immediate superior did not send them.

Not all the weaknesses of the book are the fault of the CIA censors. Mr Carle repeats himself unduly as he agonises over the predicament in which he and Captus find themselves. He overburdens his account with quotations from his favourite authors. And for someone whose work requires him to understand Muslims, he has a startlingly low opinion of Islam.

But it is important that Mr Carle’s story has been told, or half-told. This is not the first indictment of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror, its rendition of detainees to “black” sites and its sanction of “enhanced interrogation techniques”. But Mr Carle takes us further into the “dark side” than we have gone before, by depicting in raw human terms the intolerable pressures placed on those torn between the need to prevent another September 11th and the dictates of conscience and constitution. America, he argues persuasively, misread the character of its enemy, creating a culture of fear which in turn led it to subvert its own laws and values. The whole experience has been, as Mr Carle’s subtitle suggests, “an education”. And not just for him.