A few years after the attacks of 9/11, a manager of the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert interrogation program posted a warning placard in his office: “There are no secrets,” it said.

Sure enough, details on the agency’s global necklace of covert holding cells and interrogations leaked, culminating in a controversial report by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee that judged the program to be grounded in torture and largely ineffective. Not only that, it accused agency officials of lying about its results. Supporters of the program griped that the committee hadn’t interviewed its managers.

Now comes Mudd, a highly regarded senior former C.I.A. and F.B.I. counterterrorism official, with his own and other insiders’ accounts of the program, from its helter-skelter inception to its ignominious end. This is a book about Washington process and bureaucracy, for sure, but with the added heft of dozens of firsthand accounts of what it was like to ride the tiger into the gates of hell.