For people who aren't familiar with your story, you were a

were a CIA spy for a number of years, and you eventually blew the whistle on one of the CIA's interrogation programs and essentially got prosecuted and spent two years in federal prison.

Is that right?

That's right.

Maybe you could expand on it a little bit better or give your own background on how you got into the CIA and how this all happened.

Sure.

I spent 15 years in the CIA.

The first half of my career was in intelligence, in analysis,

exclusively on Iraq. And then I got bored after a while, and I made a very unusual transfer from analysis to operations.

I went to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center,

became a Counterterrorism Operations Officer, a spy, essentially,

and then Chief of CIA Counterterrorism Operations in Pakistan after 9-11,

led a series of raids that resulted in our very first high-value target captures, and then went back to CIA headquarters, got promoted on the strength of those captures.

And then just as I got promoted, well, I was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director.

That's when we started this torture

program and I objected to it like pretty strenuously and waited for somebody to say something

it took years and in the end nobody said anything and then finally I said this this has to be out there. And so I told ABC News and the

CIA fell on my head with, you know, it's full weight. And they prosecuted me. And I went to prison

for 23 months. Zero regrets. None. And, yeah, I mean, I came out stronger on the

other end. I'm not a, it's funny, when you're in your 20s and your 30s, you think you have your

life all mapped out, like the way it's supposed to be. I figured, okay, I'm in the CIA.

I'm smart. I have advanced degrees. I'm kind of political. So I'm playing the game. Everybody's

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