Glenn Carle

Glenn Carle was a career CIA officer, who worked on four continents and retired in 2007 as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats--terrorism.

His last major operation was to interrogate one of the top members of al-Qa'ida. But Carle found that the detainee was not the senior member of al-Qa'ida that the CIA thought, and Carle rejected the detention and enhanced interrogation policies of the War on Terror; he considered them un-American and immoral, and he found that they do not work. His book, The Interrogator, is an expose of the dark side of the War on Terror, and his struggle with the most difficult question a patriot can face: what do you do when your government tells you to do something that is morally abhorrent?

Carle is from an old Yankee family, whose ancestors were spies in the American Revolution, and fought in almost every war in American history. He grew up playing hockey on ponds in Massachusetts, and found the lessons he learned on the ice surprisingly relevant to his career in the CIA. His wife sometimes thinks that he reads too much; and she is right.