“You need to leave your home immediately.” It was the chief of security for the CIA on the phone. “We have a credible death threat by ISIS against your life, and we want you to evacuate until we determine how viable it is.” ISIS had tweeted a request that a jihadist cut my head off, and according to the CIA, someone had just volunteered to do the job. The agency’s security officer said it was possible the person was already en route. It was December 2014.

Minutes later the FBI was in my driveway. Later, the local sheriff’s department’s SWAT team commanders were in my living room and wandering around my yard, determining likely avenues of assault and deciding where to position men for the best shot. As it started getting dark, retired SEAL team members and special operators from various shadowy counterterrorist units who had gotten wind of the threat called, offering to bring their long guns to watch our backs while my wife and I slept. My bedroom smelled of gun oil. My house felt like a kill zone for anyone stupid enough to try to breach its security.

A target had been placed on my back and was endangering my family. Sadly, the notion that my family and I might be targets was not new. I had interrogated the worst terrorists in the world for the CIA—the al-Qa’ida operatives who had sucker-punched the United States in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that had killed approximately three thousand innocent Americans—and although the CIA had tried to keep my identity secret, lawyers for the terrorists made sure the killers, and thus anyone those killers could smuggle messages out to, knew who I was.

My thoughts flashed back to July 2009, when officers from the CIA’s counterintelligence unit sat on a rumpled bed in a small, nondescript motel off the interstate. An aging air conditioner rattled and clanked. The noise was like sitting next to a running bus; that was good because it masked the sound of our conversation. The air smelled of dank mold and burned coffee.

“Do you recognize any of these people?” one officer asked me.

“Well, this one is me, obviously, and I know three or four of these other guys,” I said, leafing through the stack of photos he had handed me a few minutes before. Several were obviously surveillance photos surreptitiously taken outside homes and office buildings. The one of me was a driver’s license photo.

All the photos had been found recently in the cell of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, an al-Qa’ida planner and financier now in Guantanamo Bay, during a routine search for contraband. The photos had been obtained surreptitiously by private investigators hired by the lawyers defending the terrorists who attacked the United States. The attorneys smuggled the photos into the cells of terrorists held there, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to reveal the true names of CIA interrogators who had questioned them. I was told by the counterintelligence agents that I needed to “watch my back.” My life and the lives of my family might be in danger because it was possible that my true name, home address, and image also had been passed to terrorists still at large.

Since items going in and out of detainee lockup at Gitmo are supposed to be searched for contraband, you might ask yourself how those photos got past the guards. The lawyers did it by hiding them among documents that could not be searched because of attorney-client privilege.

Later, when the incident was being investigated by a reluctant Department of Justice, the lawyers who were responsible claimed that sneaking around taking surreptitious photos of CIA officers (many of whom were undercover) and contractors was a legitimate enterprise motivated by a deep concern for providing the best defense for the terrorists they were representing.

I was concerned when those lawyers gave my true name and location to the terrorists they were defending, but those terrorists were locked up, and the threat was hypothetical. That concern was nothing compared with the way I felt after the phone call from CIA security in December 2014 alerting me that a terrorist might actually be coming to harm me and my family. I was frightened for my wife, ramped up and angry. Not at ISIS but at those who had put a target on my back. Here is how that happened.

In December 2014 Senator Dianne Feinstein and her Democratic colleagues on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released a report on the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program, claiming it was the program’s definitive history.

But it wasn’t. Feinstein and her colleagues had ransacked through millions of CIA documents, selecting those which supported her claims and ignoring the ones that didn’t. They refused to interview any of the CIA officers or contractors who actually had been involved in the program, including me. After five years and $40 million they released a one-sided report that claimed the CIA’s interrogation program tortured detainees; was run by lying, incompetent, and corrupt senior CIA officers; and produced not one detail of intelligence value: zero, nothing, nada, zilch, diddly-squat—a ridiculous and categorically untrue claim.

The CIA and the minority Republican members of the committee tried to push back, describing Feinstein’s report as deeply flawed and riddled with factual errors. The information used to produce the report was cherry-picked, taken out of context, and framed to produce a misleading narrative of what had happened. The CIA released a previously classified rebuttal, and the Republican SSCI members debunked Feinstein’s ludicrous claim that the CIA’s interrogation program had produced nothing with intelligence value. Most of the media ignored the contrarian views.

When Feinstein released her report, she left my true name out of it. Instead, I was assigned a pseudonym to hide my identity. However, reporters immediately came to me looking for my reaction. Several told me that Feinstein’s staffers had told them on “deep background” which pseudonym referred to me. Feinstein’s report claimed that I lacked the background and experience to do what the CIA had asked of me and that I tortured detainees, and it clearly implied that I bamboozled the taxpayers out of $81 million for my personal gain. The committee never gave me the opportunity to answer a single question. Instead, Feinstein’s inaccurate report stirred up the crazies and jihadists, essentially issuing a fatwa against me and everyone past or present working to protect Americans from jihadist terror attacks.

Some people who have not followed the issue closely might wonder why I would write this book. “That chapter of our history is over,” they might say. “Just let it go. Bringing it up again only reopens old wounds.” But that’s not true. It isn’t over. Hardly a week goes by without lurid new articles falsely attributing horrendous acts to me and those with whom I worked. The larger issue, however, is that the American public has a right to know what was—and wasn’t—done in their names. Within sensible national security bounds, the few of us who were present cannot let others distort history.

Feinstein’s report was not the first media leak about my involvement with the CIA’s interrogation program. For over a decade I had been the target of rumor and innuendo. But my nondisclosure agreement with the U.S. government prevented me from discussing my role. I was not allowed to defend myself or the program. I was told by the government that its promise of indemnification could be taken away if I told Americans my side of the story. The only good thing that has come out of the Feinstein report is that now—finally—the government is allowing me to defend myself.

The truth matters. It matters to the American people. Senator Feinstein and her colleagues tried to rewrite history. It is important for people to know what really happened and why.

Al-Qa’ida tried to decapitate the United States on 9/11 by simultaneously attacking our most important financial center and our senior military leadership. It would have taken out our center of government, the Capitol Building, if it hadn’t been for the brave passengers of United Flight 93 sacrificing themselves to save others. In the turmoil and confusion after the attacks of 9/11 and under the threat of new ones, possibly involving a nuclear device, the CIA followed the president’s orders and took forward-leaning action that kept Americans safe. Those actions were cleared by the Department of Justice, approved by the president, and reported to the congressional leadership.

I believe it is time for Americans to hear the facts from the person who helped develop the high-level terrorist interrogation program. Someone who was there, on the ground, in the interrogation rooms, doing the work. These ground-level facts are not in Feinstein’s report. They are not even in the CIA rebuttal or the Senate minority response. None of those documents put you in the room with the action so that you can get a sense of what was actually going on and why. That’s what I intend to do.