In December of 2007, ABC News’ Brian Ross came out with big scoop: A “leader of the CIA team that captured the first major Al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah,” appeared on camera to announce that the waterboarding of Zubaydah had worked. The story was quickly picked up by conservative pundits and other reporters, adding what seemed to be hard evidence to the argument that harsh interrogation works. The web version of the story read like this:

In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds. “The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate,” said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News With Charles Gibson” and “Nightline.”

Except, Kiriakou’s story wasn’t true, and as Foreign Policy reports, Kiriakou has now issued a mea culpa, saying he was mislead by the agency. “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own,” Kiriakou now writes.