The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror is the memoir of former CIA officer John Kiriakou, covering his CIA career from January 1990 to mid-2004 — split between Middle Eastern analysis, focused mostly on Iraq, and his later counterterrorism operations work.[1] It is generally dated to 2009, though Kiriakou has also cited 2010 as its publication year.[2] It reached number five on the New York Times bestseller list[3][4] and won two literary awards, including the PEN First Amendment Award — which Kiriakou describes as one of literature’s “big four” awards alongside the PEN/Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award.[5] Kiriakou recommends it as the best starting point for readers wanting to learn about the CIA, and has said he is exploring reclaiming the rights to the book in order to publish a new edition.[6]
Origins
Kiriakou says he began writing the book in August 2007 — months before he went public on ABC News with allegations that the CIA had waterboarded detainees, the act that triggered his firing from Deloitte and his eventual prosecution. Because he started drafting before blowing the whistle, he had to keep revising the manuscript as the surrounding events, and his own life, changed underneath it.[7] His wife, Catherine, read an early draft and told him it “reads like a dry government report.” Her advice — “you need to write it the way you tell it” — permanently changed his storytelling style, on this book and afterward.[8]
Kiriakou’s public profile from the ABC interview also brought him op-ed commissions: the Los Angeles Times had run a 2007 piece of his on Afghanistan that became one of the paper’s most-viewed op-eds of the year, and in March 2008, while he was still writing the book, they asked him for a follow-up on Iranian foreign policy in Latin America.[9]
CIA prepublication review
As a former officer, Kiriakou was required to submit the manuscript to the CIA’s Publications Review Board before publication. He says the book took nine months to write but 22 months to clear the Board, which cut 90 pages from the manuscript; everything that remained in the published book, however, was cleared for release.[10]
Kiriakou has given a more detailed account of that clearance fight elsewhere. He says his first draft came back three months after submission with every single word blacked out, rejected in its entirety as classified. He appealed by pointing out individually non-classified biographical facts — that he was raised in western Pennsylvania, that he spoke Greek, that he attended George Washington University — winning back a chapter at a time; the process stretched to nine separate drafts over two years.[11][12] Before the ninth draft, a Publications Review Board member requested a face-to-face meeting that Kiriakou understood — based on what colleagues had told him — was meant to pressure him into abandoning the book; while walking him to his car afterward, the board member privately warned him that the board would reject the book regardless of any changes, because Kiriakou had made “a lot of enemies” after speaking out against waterboarding in a December 2007 interview on ABC News.[13] A former CIA colleague who was serving on the Obama presidential transition team’s intelligence group told Kiriakou, the week before the 2008 election, to make the board’s requested changes but not resubmit the manuscript until instructed. Six weeks after Obama’s election, the colleague called back citing a change in CIA leadership and told him to resubmit; the book was cleared in its entirety a week later.[14][15] Kiriakou credits the timing of George Tenet’s own CIA memoir, published shortly before his, as key to loosening the agency’s review standards — he successfully argued that if Tenet’s book could describe certain material, his own account should be permitted to describe comparable things.[16]
Aftermath
Kiriakou has separately described the sweat lodge at the federal prison where he was later incarcerated after his 2012 guilty plea.[17] Reflecting on the book years later, Kiriakou has said its hardest passages concerned CIA colleagues who went on to participate in torture — men who had been personal friends, whose wives were friends with his wife and whose children played with his own, and who he says “turned out to be monsters, murderers.”[18]