Spy elite revelations

Oh, the suffering of the CIA: In Showtime’s “The Spymasters,” America’s chief spooks bare their souls on the pain of the terror war

José Rodriguez is a Harley-riding hardass who spent many years as a clandestine counter-terrorism operative in the Central Intelligence Agency, and he’s sick to death of hearing people whine about waterboarding. Some people may have understood Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” as a pro-CIA movie, but Rodriguez assures us its depiction of waterboarding as brutal and nightmarish was “total bullshit.” Yeah, that venerable technique of “enhanced interrogation” has been used as torture at other times in history, Rodriguez admits, including by the Nazis, the Soviets and the witch-hunters of the Spanish Inquisition. But not by the CIA. Our guys always had doctors on hand to make sure nobody died, he says.