In the 2012 Hollywood hit “Zero Dark Thirty,” a red-haired Central Intelligence Agency analyst played by Jessica Chastain travels to a secret CIA prison and watches a colleague waterboard a screaming Al Qaeda suspect, then lock him in a box a little bigger than a mini-fridge, to make him talk.

In 2002, red-haired CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer, then known by her maiden name Bikowsky, travelled to a secret CIA prison to watch the torture of...