Glenn Carle is an American writer and former intelligence officer. He is the author of The Interrogator: An Education (2011), which describes his involvement in the interrogation of a man at the time believed to be one of the top members of al-Qa'ida.
Biography
Glenn Carle grew up in Brookline, a town part of greater Boston, in a house "where four generations of his family made their home". Carle received a B.A. in Government at Harvard and in 1985 an M.A. in European Studies and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and completed further graduate work in Europe. He spent 20 years in clandestine field operations with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Carle retired as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats from the National Intelligence Council.
The Interrogator
Carle is the author of The Interrogator: An Education (2011), a memoir which describes his involvement in the interrogation of a "high-value detainee" at a "black site" (off-the-books) prison. Carle tells the story of the brutal interrogation of a man who was believed to be a top al-Qaeda operative but later turned out to be innocent. Carle determined that the suspect was not who he was supposed to be, found the rendition "stupid, bad tradecraft" and the operation to be "a house of cards, like so much of the war on terrorism. Carle's superiors overruled him and sent the suspect to Hotel California, the CIA's most secret detention centre, to be tortured. The suspect at the center of Carle's story is supposed to be Haji Pacha Wazir, an Emirati citizen. He was freed in February 2010, eight years after his capture.
In Carle's words, the CIA made him rewrite The Interrogator "literally a dozen times over" and its objections were some legitimate concerns "amply mixed with ludicrous pettifoggery and ass-covering", causing him to leave in the redacted bits, complete with black bars, and add the occasional withering explanatory footnote, like one that reads: "Apparently the CIA fears that the redacted passage would either humiliate the organization for incompetence or expose its officers to ridicule; unless the Agency considers obtuse incompetence a secret intelligence method."
Johns Hopkins Magazine has found The Interrogator to be "unusually candid in its portrayal of the CIA's internal workings—and the toll the agency's moral gray zones take on its operatives". Carle's book was well received internationally and he was interviewed at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2012. Ali Soufan, a renowned FBI Special Agent who was involved in counter-terrorism cases, reviewed The Interrogator for The Wall Street Journal and remarked that it pulled back part of the curtain on the so-called enhanced-interrogation program of the CIA.
Post-CIA career as national/global security expert
Carle is regarded as a leading expert on al-Qaeda and assessed the threat the organization poses 10 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on C-SPAN. Carle is a regular commentator for Al Jazeera and has appeared on Inside Story Americas. He was interviewed on The Listening Post to comment on the 'Zero Dark Thirty' controversy. In a 2011 interview with Democracy Now! Carle revealed how, in 2005, President George W. Bush's administration at least twice sought damaging personal information from the CIA on Juan Cole, an academic and prominent critic of the Iraq war. A CIA spokesman said in response to queries, "We've thoroughly researched our records, and any allegation that the C.I.A. provided private or derogatory information on Professor Cole to anyone is simply wrong." In an interview with New Zealand's Sunday Star-Times, he talked about the curtailment of freedom of speech under the Espionage Act of 1917, designed for foreign spies, which he claimed was being employed to prosecute at least six American former spies.