By CGTN’s Gao Jing

“Conducting intelligence is a challenge; you need to balance other people’s values and responsibilities while affirming your own without corrupting them…That’s a challenge for every intelligence officer. Any officer who is not aware of that conflict is probably a sociopath or dangerous,” Glenn Carle, a former CIA intelligence agent, told The Point with Liu Xin on CGTN. 

Carle served 23 years in the Clandestine Services of the CIA, working in overseas posts on four continents and in Washington DC. He has worked on terrorism issues at various times since the mid-1980s. His last position was as deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats, on the National Intelligence Council, where his office was responsible for strategic analysis of terrorism, international organized crime, and narcotics issues. 

CGTN Photo

"Dilemmas arise when you find your government doesn’t adhere to the values,” he added. 

Asked why he wrote the book, The Interrogator, a seminal memoir of his experience leading the interrogation of one al-Qaeda senior member captured by the CIA during the war on terror, Carle said he was one of the few individuals with firsthand knowledge of the harm done to American institutions and values by the clandestine, un-American, practices used in interrogating terrorist detainees. He was convinced that the American public had to be informed of the harm these policies cause to their safety and freedoms. 

Liu Xin (@thepointwithlx) concluded by saying that in the name of national security, the power of government is often towering over the lives of individual members of society. As people have learnt all too well by now, personal privacy is increasingly at risk of being abused and citizens are expected to live with it. Everybody wants to live in a safe world, but at what costs? Who can check the power and credibility of the intelligence services? The answers elude for now, but the questions need to be asked.