WASHINGTON — Evan McMullin, the former CIA officer running for president, told BuzzFeed News Tuesday that he was aware of — but never participated in — the agency’s controversial torture program and would not wholly rule out the future use of tactics like waterboarding.

“I was aware of it by virtue of where I was,” McMullin said. “I was serving in a place that was the kind of place where people entered that program from that place, but I never participated in it, I never went to a black site, never met with a detainee.”

McMullin said he opposes the use of torture, but also declined to clearly qualify what he considered torture, and whether CIA tactics like waterboarding crossed the line.

"I don’t believe in taking it easy on terrorists when they’re incarcerated. But I also don’t support the use of torture. There are gray areas,” he said. “I believe that waterboarding is in a gray area. I don’t think we need to use it.”

“There’s a scale, a range of actions that can be taken, and it’s useful to recognize that it is a range,” he said.

Since McMullin announced his candidacy in August, some current and former intelligence officials have engaged in half-hearted gossip about who, exactly, McMullin is, and where his decade with the agency took him. As the Utah native zeroes in on a banner finish by stealing his home state — he’d be the first third-party candidate to win any electoral votes in 48 years — new details are emerging about the clandestine résumé he’s running on.

McMullin was in the agency during one of its most harrowing periods, in some of the world’s most volatile hotspots. Though he declined to name all the specific countries in which he worked, his bio says his service took him to the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia regions from 2003 to 2010.

That work also put him alongside one of the agency’s extraordinary rendition and torture programs, two of its most controversial operations in recent history, where terror suspects were shipped to secret prisons and tortured, sometimes for months on end. The latter, a 2014 Senate investigation found, was widely abused and mismanaged.

McMullin says he wasn’t “read-in,” or officially briefed on the operation, which saw its heyday in the early 2000s, when he was in a relevant South Asian country. But, he says, he did hear watercooler talk about the top-secret program.

“I wasn’t officially read-in to the program and that’s fine by me,” McMullin said. “Other people [were], they were my friends, and when you’re in environments like the kinds I was in, you know people are being captured or killed and you learn that they’re going to places and some of them were black sites. So I was aware that that was happening.”

McMullin later said that waterboarding “is probably right across the line of torture or approaching it.”

As a case officer in the region — an undercover agency job where he recruited agents inside terror groups — McMullin said he read intelligence reports that came out of the torture program, but said he didn’t know what tactics were used to get them.

“I would see the intel that came from that,” he said. “I knew people who were doing those debriefings but they were very careful [with] the details.”

McMullin called BuzzFeed News after this article was published to further specify what, exactly, he knew of the torture program. Through his work at the agency, he was aware that there were secret prisons and he knew people were being interrogated there, but he did not know what interrogation techniques were being used until public reports began emerging about enhanced interrogation techniques.

