The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture

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Overview

American Presidents make decisions on war unaware that the human source intelligence provided by the CIA is often false or nonexistent. From Harry Truman during the Korean War to George Bush during the War on Terror, modern Presidents have faced their darkest moments as a result of poor intelligence. The CIA has assured Congress and the President that intelligence programs in hostile areas of the world are thriving when they simply do not exist.

The CIA is a broken, Soviet-style bureaucracy with its own agenda: to consume federal funds, to expand within the United States, to feign activity, and to enrich current and former employees. After 9/11, billions...

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More About This Book

Overview

American Presidents make decisions on war unaware that the human source intelligence provided by the CIA is often false or nonexistent. From Harry Truman during the Korean War to George Bush during the War on Terror, modern Presidents have faced their darkest moments as a result of poor intelligence. The CIA has assured Congress and the President that intelligence programs in hostile areas of the world are thriving when they simply do not exist.

The CIA is a broken, Soviet-style bureaucracy with its own agenda: to consume federal funds, to expand within the United States, to feign activity, and to enrich current and former employees. After 9/11, billions of dollars by Congress to increase the number of officers working deep cover on foreign streets have disappeared without the CIA fielding a single additional productive officer overseas.

The Human Factor makes the case for intelligence reform, showing the career of an accomplished deep cover CIA case officer who struggled not with finding human sources of secret information in rogue nations, but with the CIA's bloated, dysfunctional, even cancerous bureaucracy. After initial training in the US, Ishmael Jones spent his career in multiple, consecutive overseas assignments, as a deep cover officer without benefit of diplomatic immunity. In dingy hotel rooms, Jones met alone with weapons scientists, money launderers, and terrorists. He pushed intelligence missions forward while escaping purges within the Agency, active thwarting of operations by bureaucrats, and the ever-present threat of arrest by hostile foreign intelligence services. Jones became convinced that the CIA's failure to fulfill its purpose endangers Americans. Attempting reform form within proved absurd. Jones resigned from the CIA to make a public case for reform through the writhing of this book.

Effective American Organizations feature clear mission, transparency management, transparency, and accountability. The CIA has none of these. While it has always hired good people, it wastes and even perverts employees. The CIA is not doing its job and must be fixed. Until it is, our lives and the liver of our allies are in jeopardy.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
What's wrong with the CIA? A number of authors have tackled this question lately, and the pseudonymous Jones brings what could be a unique vantage point: a career operative, Jones claims he was "America's number one producer of intelligence reports on terrorism." Unfortunately, the book is more memoir than expose, privileging personal complaints (Jones is frequently underutilized and underappreciated) over actual accounts of the intelligence community's accomplishments and setbacks. Even as he hops the globe, Jones revels in woefully familiar aggravations: the Agency fails to reimburse his expenses in a timely fashion, wastes his time in team-building exercises, etc. He convincingly labels headquarters a haven for burnt-out, risk-averse pension-seekers, but he spends just as much time getting in digs at difficult landlords, surly cab drivers and airplane travel. Though Jones levels many serious charges against those running the CIA, he doesn't follow through and offers just a few pages of suggestions; his self-concern and attention to mundane details make this more suitable for those considering a career at the Agency than those wishing to understand it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
ForeWord Magazine
Ishmael Jones, the false name for a deep cover agent, offers a chilling insider's account that shows repeatedly that the agency is driven by incompetence and greed. Its false intelligence not only led President Bush to declare war in Iraq, but the Agency's blunders were responsible for the Iranian hostage crisis that bedeviled the Carter administration, and the Cuban Missile Crises, which nearly precipitated a world-ending nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Kennedy administration.

Jones was not thrown out of the CIA but was a highly regarded agent who resigned to write this book because he could no longer serve in this organization that had lost its sense of purpose and the capability to protect the United States from terrorist attacks. This controversial, eye-opening account will be popular in public libraries and debated by its readers. Copyright © ForeWord Magazine. All rights reserved.
—Karl Helicher
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
FrontPage Magazine
When Tenet -- on whom Bush had bestowed the Medal of Freedom instead of firing for his abject intel failures before the 9/11 terror attacks -- retired from the Agency, he signed a big book deal for a don't-blame-me, blame-Bush memoir, complete with some juicy tidbits that should never have made it past the censor.

On "celebrity spy" Valerie Plame's would-be bestseller, which came nowhere near making back its huge advance, Jones comments, "CIA censors seem to have approved those portions of her book that were critical of the President; but to have blocked those portions that would have revealed she was not an active intelligence officer."

But when Jones brought his book to the CIA censors, as required when a current or former CIA employees write anything, he delivered a book with no operational details and no classified information - but entirely too much truth... Copyright © National Review. All rights reserved.
—David Forsmark
National Review Online
I don't know any other author who has told this devastating story so calmly and so convincingly. He thinks the Agency should be broken up into its component parts and integrated into other Agencies, from State to Defense.

Jones shows that the CIA is not doing its basic job, penetrating our enemies' organizations and getting their people to work with us. One of/ The Human Factor/'s most surprising revelations is that, despite all the hue and cry about the need for more and better human intelligence, despite the billions of dollars that have been poured into this project, we don't have any more case officers today than we did back when. So where did all the money go? It went to create a domestic empire right here in the United States... Copyright © National Review. All rights reserved.

—Michael Ledeen

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781594033827
  • Publisher: Encounter Books
  • Publication date: 4/6/2010
  • Pages: 400
  • Sales rank: 239,755
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 8.90 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

ISHMAEL JONES was born in the United States and raised in the Middle East, East Asia, and East Africa. He attended universities in the United States and served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. In the late 1980s he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served as a deep-cover officer for eighteen years, focusing on human sources with access to intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition xi

Introduction xxiii

Prologue 3

Part 1

1 Daring Greatly, Perhaps 13

2 Training Days 21

3 American Apprenticeship 47

4 Perseverance and Soothing Language 62

5 Sent to Spy Out the Land 77

6 Trying to Hustle the East 93

7 Morning in Eastern Europe 119

8 Physicists Who Knew Sin 144

9 Always Be Closing 164

10 Restless 186

11 Hazardous Microbes 221

Part 2

12 Darkness and Brief Dawn 237

13 Trying 250

14 Grifters 270

15 The Way of the Weasel 280

16 Headquarters 299

17 Starting Over 307

18 Remington Raider 318

Epilogue 351

Appendix: Solutions for Reform of the Clandestine Service 355

Acknowledgments 363

Notes 365

Bibliography 371

Index 376

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