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The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture
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 & 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 USA & to feign activity,
Ishmael Jones (b. 12/15/61) is a pseudonym used by a former CIA officer. He resigned from the CIA, becoming a proponent of American intelligence reform, with special emphasis on the improvement of human source intelligence collection. He's a former deep cover case officer & author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture & many articles on intelligence reform.
Introduction
Prologue
Daring greatly, perhaps
Training days
American apprenticeship
Perseverance & soothing language
Sent to spy out the land
Trying to hustle the east
Morning in Eastern Europe
Physicists who knew sin
Always be closing
Restless
Hazardous microbes
Darkness & brief dawn
Trying
Grifters
The way of the weasel
Headquarters
Starting over
Remington raider
Epilogue
Appendix: Solutions for Reform of the Clandestine Service
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Ishmael Jones (b. 12/15/61) is a pseudonym used by a former CIA officer. He resigned from the CIA, becoming a proponent of American intelligence reform, with special emphasis on the improvement of human source intelligence collection. He's a former deep cover case officer & author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture & many articles on intelligence reform.
Introduction
Prologue
Daring greatly, perhaps
Training days
American apprenticeship
Perseverance & soothing language
Sent to spy out the land
Trying to hustle the east
Morning in Eastern Europe
Physicists who knew sin
Always be closing
Restless
Hazardous microbes
Darkness & brief dawn
Trying
Grifters
The way of the weasel
Headquarters
Starting over
Remington raider
Epilogue
Appendix: Solutions for Reform of the Clandestine Service
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
395 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
March 23, 2010
This was an excellent book. I can never read books very fast due to work and family schedule and finished this in three days. Mr. Jones details his frustrating experience navigating the beuracracy of the CIA as a case officer living overseas under non-official cover. It was an extremely interesting look into a side of one of the most secretive government agencies. At the end, he also details his suggestions on how to fix the problems he identified. You truly get a sense that his superiors were not pleased to have seen this published.
My only complaint is the formatting in the Kindle version. I am aware that the book was heavily redacted, but there were numerous errors in navigating these redactions. They weren't serious, just annoying. Otherwise, anyone interested in US national security, the CIA or American government in general should read this book.
My only complaint is the formatting in the Kindle version. I am aware that the book was heavily redacted, but there were numerous errors in navigating these redactions. They weren't serious, just annoying. Otherwise, anyone interested in US national security, the CIA or American government in general should read this book.
May 15, 2010
Not an honest portrayal. Most of the events are probably true, but his version of events is too self-serving. He has some good points - the IC, presumably including the clandestine service, is encumbered by excessive bureaucracy. Some leaders are on ego trips, or put turf ahead of mission. I seriously doubt, however that they make up the majority. Overall I got the impression of someone with a martyr complex who doesn't take direction well, pouts when he doesn't get his way, and isn't as smart as he thinks he is. He never tells us his grade (I am guessing he was a GS-14) but complains that junior officers were put in charge of him. That's probably because he didn't show the potential or desire to be a leader or manager. There's nothing to be gained by grousing about those who are willing to take on that thankless responsibility. I think he left something out of the story - a professional setback that turned him against the system he apparently thrived in up to a point. His disdain for Tandem couples is surprising. Everyone hates it when a spouse wears his or her partner's rank, but this was a recurring theme throughout the book. Were they really all that bad? Or was he jealous? Characterizing his instructors as "rednecks" is another clue to his arrogant personality. I could go on and on. Read this book carefully, and read between the lines.
February 14, 2023
Jones (a nom de guerre) was a Marine, then a Wall Street broker, then a CIA case officer for nearly 20 years (it’s not clear exactly how long). Case officers are stationed overseas and recruit and handle human sources. The CIA has far too few case officers despite having pledged to Congress and presidents for decades that they will field more of them. To juice their numbers, they establish stations overseas replete with chiefs, secretaries, analysts, and other support staff without increasing case officers. You see, the allure of a well-paid job in Langley pushing paper is far more attractive to the mandarins running the Agency than being posted out in the field.
A peculiarity of the book is that Jones always uses “HQs” rather than “HQ” to refer to Langley. I started by using [sic] after every instance below but there are too many.
Below are some of the passages I found most interesting.
P. 34. Our Cuban sources were mostly double agents. Our real Cuban spies were betrayed, but the CIA kept sending more. Spies in dangerous assignments have failsafe code words in their communications; if those are missing, the agency knows that the comms have been sent by the captors. In the case of America’s real Cuban spies, “the Agency figured the Cuban agents had just forgotten them [their codes] … The Cuban programs were among the most important that the Agency ran during the Cold War. Many case officers earned promotions and awards based on their handling of Cuban agents. As time went on, many of these officers became Agency mandarins. No promotion or award was ever rescinded, no accountability ever enforced.” The spurious data was never purged from the Agency’s systems. “All of the Cuban double agents had passed polygraph examinations.” Much the same thing happened with Middle East spies (see p. 67).
P. 35. The KGB told Kim Philby “that he was an official KGB officer. When he fled to Moscow, however, his uniform and full access to KGB headquarters were denied.”
P. 47. Pre-9/11, the CIA had 24 sites in the US, accounting for 85% of the CIA’s employees. Post 9/11 the number of sites has undoubtedly increased.
P. 53. Every request to approach a potential human source had to be approved at Langley. “The cable, having passed through many layers of management, rarely read as it had going in. It was like a game of Telephone. Many ‘editors’ seemed to make changes to suit their personal agendas. My cables often mutated into something shapeless, flaccid, and always risk-free.”
P. 55. Jones wanted to approach a foreigner in the US. “I’d cleared all my routine Agency and FBI approvals to contact the scientist, but the local FBI office in his small university town wanted to be notified personally prior to any meetings on his turf. It was a one-man office. The other OJT trainees had dealt with this agent before and they instructed me in how to deal with him: ‘He never picks up his phone, so you have to go there in person to talk to him. He’s usually asleep at his desk, with the window shutters closed, so you have to knock. Knock softly so as not to startle him, but knock persistently. If he thinks you might go away, he won’t answer the door.’”
P. 59. The CIA has many married couples on the payroll, often working together or even managing the husband or wife. Jones’ friend dubbed them OFTPOTs, one for the price of two. “One of the OFTPOT couples in the office sold products in some Amway-style pyramid scheme,” including to prospective human sources. “I learned that the OFTPOTS had pitched their products to agents and prospective agents, as well as to US government contacts at the FBI and INS.”
P. 62. A bureaucrat told a case officer in June that “he might not be able to get my overseas assignment approved, what with the holiday season coming up.” That would be Christmas and New Years.
P. 65. A linguist who had learned to speak Japanese in Japan visited the CIA’s Japanese language program. “They’re not learning the language,” he said. “When they do speak, they sound like women. Japanese men and women speak in different tones. Since the teacher is a woman, the students naturally sound like her.”
P. 66. CIA claims that its field-officers-to-be, cooling their heels in the US, are productive by sending them to language school. Two such employees were living in a safe house, one a speaker of Japanese, the other a speaker of Korean. Their manager met privately with the Japanese speaker, said there was no need for his language skills so he was being sent to Korean school. The manager then met with the Korean speaker and told him there was no opening for a Korean speaker so he was being sent to Japanese school.
P. 67. Remember Lower Slobbovia? Andy Capp coined it in his Li’l Abner strip in 1946. The CIA uses “Slobovia”[sic] in its training programs, a fictional country for which the Agency has compiled a thick binder of information, which eager trainees devour and regurgitate for the instructors. Curiously, Wikipedia has entries for Lower Slobbovia (detailing Andy Capp’s creation) and Slobbovia (which goes into minute detail on the sci-fi games involving the “country”). Yet neither article mentions the CIA. Guess the spooks have carefully scrubbed Wikipedia. Mustn’t let the PRC or the Iranians know our “sources and methods” in training case officers!
P. 78. Case officers buy a car overseas with Agency funds and often get a fancy one. That can lead to envy by State Department employees or other US government people, who denounce the officer to HQs. “During the course of my career I counted at least a dozen situations in which an officer’s extravagant car led to a one-way ticket home. Then again, the car may have been merely a symptom of the officer’s lack of judgment.” Mentioned again p. 122.
P. 83. Jones did not work with the protection of diplomatic status. CIA officers who do spend a lot of time schmoozing foreign government employees. “Liaison work was a risk-free, friendly exchange of information over tea or coffee, and it produced a great deal of the Agency’s intelligence reporting. Some of this reporting was useful, but it’s important to bear in mind that most of it was selected by the host country. The Agency assigned encrypted names and file numbers to official liaison contacts, as if these people were real clandestine human sources. Without knowing more about a case, it could be difficult to tell whether an intelligence report had come from a unilateral agent, or from a digest of a friendly government’s misinformation.” The US “intelligence” community is lapping up foreign disinformation? Say it ain’t so!
P. 84. “A popular way for our overseas stations to generate activity was to recruit American citizens as intelligence sources … As with liaison contacts, American citizens were assigned encrypted names and file numbers as if they were real spies. Like those contacts, however, they rarely brought in any valuable information.”
P. 134 Harold Nicholson had been a good case officer, was promoted on time and was politically well connected in the Agency. Both Nicholson and Aldrich Ames passed their polygraphs. “One reason it had been hard to pinpoint Ames as the mole within the Agency’s Soviet programs was the existence of such a large number of bureaucrats at HQs who had access to all of the information available on Soviet agents.”
P. 144. Jones planned a trip to Belarus. The Agency gave him a phony passport, which he took to the Belarus embassy for a visa. They mailed it to the supplied address. It bounced. “The Belarus embassy telephoned the phone number I’d given, and the Agency man who answered acknowledged it was the correct number but would not give them the address. The embassy tried the phone number again the next day, and this time another guy answered the phone and gave them a new mailing address. This address bounced the passport back to the embassy, too. I called the embassy and told them to hold on to the passport, and then I went there to pick it up in person. This wasn’t, needless to say, a good way to start alias spy trips to Belarus.”
P. 153. A Pole who had set up a business in Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union and had it stolen from him by a former partner told Jones, “The new Russians are nothing but white Nigerians. Power and guns rule—no laws.”
P. 156. “In 1952, two other case officers, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, were arrested and imprisoned in China after their airplane was shot down. In 1953, an Agency panel concluded that they’d died when their airplane crashed. Even if they hadn’t died in the crash, the panel decided, the men would have been eaten by wolves. (Apparently, there were wolves in the area, though the supposition retains a certain fairytale quality.) Fortunately, Downey and Fecteau had survived. They were held in a Chinese prison until their release nineteen years later. I never expected the Agency to come to my aid in the event of emergency.”
P. 170. Jones’ pay and reimbursements often came in one to two years late! He self-financed from his savings. Most officers could not do that and ended up coming home.
P. 176. Max, a case officer in Europe, met with his chief, who told him that Max was being surveilled. “An agent had told the chief that the local service was following an American. The agent didn’t know the identity of the American, but the chief had a ‘gut feeling’ that it was Max.” Max thought he should take precautions, so he hired some local thugs to surveill him, telling him someone wanted to kidnap him (a common problem in post-Soviet Eastern Europe). Max’s chief, without telling Max, decided to see if he could detect Max’s surveillance himself (without telling Max). The thugs caught the chief, slammed him to the pavement, where he hit his head, then kicked him till they were tired, leaving him with severe injuries. “The thugs never saw anyone else following Max. The chief never mentioned it again.”
P. 185. There was a spike in crime in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. “Gypsies took the blame for the increase in crime, but the burglars arrested never seemed to be Gypsies. The burglar my wife had seen wasn’t a Gypsy.” The Indian embassy sponsored Indian dances. “The performers danced listlessly. Indians, normally so warm and friendly, seemed standoffish and unhappy. After conversing with an Indian diplomat for a while, I learned why. ‘The Eastern Europeans think we are Gypsies,’ he said. ‘They treat us like dirt.’”
P. 187. Pamela Harriman, Clinton’s ambassador to France, sent several case officers home. “The ambassador’s other major achievement in Paris was to end embassy sponsorship of the local Boy Scouts troop and forbid its use of embassy facilities.”
P. 217. “None of the mandarins had ever made any important recruitments [of human sources], and many of them had never made a recruitment at all. This was a peculiarity of the CIA. In most organizations, the top people have had a record of important work.”
P. 237. After 9/11, “for a period of nearly three months, all HQs resistance to my operations evaporated. Operational proposals moved swiftly through the many layers of management, with individual bureaucrats afraid to get in the way … No bureaucrat wanted to be seen to be fearful or risk-averse.” The CIA officers sent to Afghanistan “were successful because they had a clear mission and a clear chain of command. They were unburdened by bureaucracy. There was no CIA station in Afghanistan. The officers had paramilitary and language skills, not HQs staff experience, and few HQs political connections.” On 15 December they located Bin Laden. “Just as the team closed in on Bin Laden, new managers arrived from HQs to replace the cowboys … The new managers did what they knew how to do: They set to work creating a station, with its office spaces, turfs, and layers of management, eager to claim credit for the capture of Bin Laden. Most of the cowboys were withdrawn from the mountains. By late December, with most of the cowboys gone and replaced by HQs’ hand-picked managers, Bin Laden escaped US forces.”
P. 239. “After 9/11, Agency employees expected the axe of accountability to fall at any moment … Talk at HQs was that the ‘seventh floor,’ where the CIA’s top mandarins dwelt, would be swept clean. Nothing happened … Within a few months, the bureaucracy began to sense that it might survive. Its confidence returned, and rather than cowering and waiting for its punishment, it was emboldened. It worked to evade responsibility for the intelligence failure, and blamed the FBI. CIA Director Tenet stated that there had in fact been no intelligence failure.”
P. 243. Jones met with a senior manager who “was clearly determining whether I would be permitted to remain as a deep cover officer in a foreign assignment. She seemed like an ordinary HQs manager, as competent as any other … and she spoke airily about the positive plans she was considering. She seemed to enjoy being surrounded by an entourage of underlings … It turned out that [she] was married to a man who had come under suspicion of spying for the government of Taiwan. Her husband was a senior diplomat in the State Department. A September 2004 search of their home by the FBI found more than 3,600 classified State Department documents.
“The manager had known that her husband was taking classified documents out of a secure area at the US Department of State and bringing them home. The FBI also found classified CIA documents that she had removed from CIA HQs.
“She was quietly removed from her position and sent to the staff of the new Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte. Her husband was charged, however, and he pled guilty to three lesser felonies involving his relationship with Isabelle Cheng, a Taiwanese intelligence officer. He was eventually sentenced and sent to prison, in January 2007.”
For some reason, Jones does not name the two. They were Donald Keyser and his wife, Margaret Lyons. A Steamy Spy Scandal at the State Department - TIME.
P. 253. The Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson scandal. “The Wilson mission provided the Agency with a risk-free and harmless way to look like it was doing something about the lack of intelligtence on Iraqi WMD activities in Niger.”
P. 254. “The now-infamous Plame affair affords an excellent insight into a typical Agency career: four years in training, followed by a short tour in a European embassy working on a safe and unimportant target (the Greek government), then more than five years of training, including graduate schools at Agency expense, then two months overseas—all aborted by a purge that probably wasn’t necessary. The Agency favored the risk-free, lengthy training tours that kept officers looking busy …
“Newspaper reports suggesting Plame had been involved in intelligence operations overseas as a non-State Department officer are false. Plame spent nearly all of her career in training and HQs desk assignments, and trainees and HQs desk officers are not assigned to overseas intelligence missions. 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. Following the purge, Plame spent the rest of her twenty-year career in an HQs cubicle. Such a career path was not unusual.”
P. 283. Jones’ boss added new layers of management, including a new OFTPOT (one for the price of two) husband and wife team, who rejected all his proposed approaches to foreigners with simply “do it again … “’Do it again’ occurred as many as six times per operational proposal.” He wanted to approach an Iranian nuclear proliferator. His proposal came back with “You need to fix the grammar.” Nothing else was marked. He scratched his head, could see no grammatical mistakes, made some changes to make it appear different, and resubmitted. It came back with “You need to answer the question. You didn’t answer the question. Do it again … I didn’t know the question to which the OFTPOT was referring.” He made some changes and resubmitted, getting the same comment. “I was certain that the OFTPOTs were simply delaying my proposal until the Iranian had left the country.” He met with the Iranian anyway.
P. 284. Jones had been producing intel from a foreign scientist. After several meetings, the scientist cut a meeting short, saying he had another appointment. Jones asked, and it was with another Agency officer. “Once I’d started sending in intelligence reports from Dr. B—, I’d made the case look easy. Once it looked easy, it attracted the attention of hordes of HQs people vying for a chance to take it. The first priority was to make as many people as possible look as busy as possible, and their second, predictably enough, was to claim ownership of the intelligence production I’d created.” With so many officers vying for control, the Agency got the man a long-term visa to the US, a university scholarship, and brought his family over. “Once these arrangements were in place, and Dr. B— was in the US, the Agency sent an officer identifying himself as a US government representative to talk to Dr. B—. Dr. B— refused. With that, the operation ended.
“I didn’t learn this until much later—HQs hid it from me, and repeatedly told me the operation was moving along well.
“As of this writing, Dr. B— continues to travel back and forth from his country to the US … I believe that Dr. B— has used his university connections and scholarship to gather additional scientific information for his country’s nuclear program.”
P. 334. A new station chief came to Baghdad. Another officer told Jones, “’I needed an armored car to go meet an agent, and I asked if I could use his car. He said I couldn’t because he had an urgent meeting. Then a while later I saw his car pull up, and the doors opened and out jumped a couple of his girlfriends, carrying some stuff they’d just bought at the PX.’ The chief later became embroiled in charges of sexual harassment, and he was realigned and sent back to HQs.”
P. 339. “There was a sinister aspect to the sluggishness of intelligence reporting. Even if reports get old, stale, even useless, the Agency takes credit for producing them. It looks busy. Also, if information is out of date when it’s received, no one can be held accountable for inaccuracies. This creates an incentive for foot-dragging.”
P. 341. “My work in Iraq was in tactical reporting on topics such as IEDs and the location of terrorists—information American soldiers can use in the here and now. The Agency preferred strategic intelligence reporting on the opinions and intentions of political leaders. It could give the ‘big picture’ and was useful in creating briefings for ambassadors and congressmen.
A peculiarity of the book is that Jones always uses “HQs” rather than “HQ” to refer to Langley. I started by using [sic] after every instance below but there are too many.
Below are some of the passages I found most interesting.
P. 34. Our Cuban sources were mostly double agents. Our real Cuban spies were betrayed, but the CIA kept sending more. Spies in dangerous assignments have failsafe code words in their communications; if those are missing, the agency knows that the comms have been sent by the captors. In the case of America’s real Cuban spies, “the Agency figured the Cuban agents had just forgotten them [their codes] … The Cuban programs were among the most important that the Agency ran during the Cold War. Many case officers earned promotions and awards based on their handling of Cuban agents. As time went on, many of these officers became Agency mandarins. No promotion or award was ever rescinded, no accountability ever enforced.” The spurious data was never purged from the Agency’s systems. “All of the Cuban double agents had passed polygraph examinations.” Much the same thing happened with Middle East spies (see p. 67).
P. 35. The KGB told Kim Philby “that he was an official KGB officer. When he fled to Moscow, however, his uniform and full access to KGB headquarters were denied.”
P. 47. Pre-9/11, the CIA had 24 sites in the US, accounting for 85% of the CIA’s employees. Post 9/11 the number of sites has undoubtedly increased.
P. 53. Every request to approach a potential human source had to be approved at Langley. “The cable, having passed through many layers of management, rarely read as it had going in. It was like a game of Telephone. Many ‘editors’ seemed to make changes to suit their personal agendas. My cables often mutated into something shapeless, flaccid, and always risk-free.”
P. 55. Jones wanted to approach a foreigner in the US. “I’d cleared all my routine Agency and FBI approvals to contact the scientist, but the local FBI office in his small university town wanted to be notified personally prior to any meetings on his turf. It was a one-man office. The other OJT trainees had dealt with this agent before and they instructed me in how to deal with him: ‘He never picks up his phone, so you have to go there in person to talk to him. He’s usually asleep at his desk, with the window shutters closed, so you have to knock. Knock softly so as not to startle him, but knock persistently. If he thinks you might go away, he won’t answer the door.’”
P. 59. The CIA has many married couples on the payroll, often working together or even managing the husband or wife. Jones’ friend dubbed them OFTPOTs, one for the price of two. “One of the OFTPOT couples in the office sold products in some Amway-style pyramid scheme,” including to prospective human sources. “I learned that the OFTPOTS had pitched their products to agents and prospective agents, as well as to US government contacts at the FBI and INS.”
P. 62. A bureaucrat told a case officer in June that “he might not be able to get my overseas assignment approved, what with the holiday season coming up.” That would be Christmas and New Years.
P. 65. A linguist who had learned to speak Japanese in Japan visited the CIA’s Japanese language program. “They’re not learning the language,” he said. “When they do speak, they sound like women. Japanese men and women speak in different tones. Since the teacher is a woman, the students naturally sound like her.”
P. 66. CIA claims that its field-officers-to-be, cooling their heels in the US, are productive by sending them to language school. Two such employees were living in a safe house, one a speaker of Japanese, the other a speaker of Korean. Their manager met privately with the Japanese speaker, said there was no need for his language skills so he was being sent to Korean school. The manager then met with the Korean speaker and told him there was no opening for a Korean speaker so he was being sent to Japanese school.
P. 67. Remember Lower Slobbovia? Andy Capp coined it in his Li’l Abner strip in 1946. The CIA uses “Slobovia”[sic] in its training programs, a fictional country for which the Agency has compiled a thick binder of information, which eager trainees devour and regurgitate for the instructors. Curiously, Wikipedia has entries for Lower Slobbovia (detailing Andy Capp’s creation) and Slobbovia (which goes into minute detail on the sci-fi games involving the “country”). Yet neither article mentions the CIA. Guess the spooks have carefully scrubbed Wikipedia. Mustn’t let the PRC or the Iranians know our “sources and methods” in training case officers!
P. 78. Case officers buy a car overseas with Agency funds and often get a fancy one. That can lead to envy by State Department employees or other US government people, who denounce the officer to HQs. “During the course of my career I counted at least a dozen situations in which an officer’s extravagant car led to a one-way ticket home. Then again, the car may have been merely a symptom of the officer’s lack of judgment.” Mentioned again p. 122.
P. 83. Jones did not work with the protection of diplomatic status. CIA officers who do spend a lot of time schmoozing foreign government employees. “Liaison work was a risk-free, friendly exchange of information over tea or coffee, and it produced a great deal of the Agency’s intelligence reporting. Some of this reporting was useful, but it’s important to bear in mind that most of it was selected by the host country. The Agency assigned encrypted names and file numbers to official liaison contacts, as if these people were real clandestine human sources. Without knowing more about a case, it could be difficult to tell whether an intelligence report had come from a unilateral agent, or from a digest of a friendly government’s misinformation.” The US “intelligence” community is lapping up foreign disinformation? Say it ain’t so!
P. 84. “A popular way for our overseas stations to generate activity was to recruit American citizens as intelligence sources … As with liaison contacts, American citizens were assigned encrypted names and file numbers as if they were real spies. Like those contacts, however, they rarely brought in any valuable information.”
P. 134 Harold Nicholson had been a good case officer, was promoted on time and was politically well connected in the Agency. Both Nicholson and Aldrich Ames passed their polygraphs. “One reason it had been hard to pinpoint Ames as the mole within the Agency’s Soviet programs was the existence of such a large number of bureaucrats at HQs who had access to all of the information available on Soviet agents.”
P. 144. Jones planned a trip to Belarus. The Agency gave him a phony passport, which he took to the Belarus embassy for a visa. They mailed it to the supplied address. It bounced. “The Belarus embassy telephoned the phone number I’d given, and the Agency man who answered acknowledged it was the correct number but would not give them the address. The embassy tried the phone number again the next day, and this time another guy answered the phone and gave them a new mailing address. This address bounced the passport back to the embassy, too. I called the embassy and told them to hold on to the passport, and then I went there to pick it up in person. This wasn’t, needless to say, a good way to start alias spy trips to Belarus.”
P. 153. A Pole who had set up a business in Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union and had it stolen from him by a former partner told Jones, “The new Russians are nothing but white Nigerians. Power and guns rule—no laws.”
P. 156. “In 1952, two other case officers, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, were arrested and imprisoned in China after their airplane was shot down. In 1953, an Agency panel concluded that they’d died when their airplane crashed. Even if they hadn’t died in the crash, the panel decided, the men would have been eaten by wolves. (Apparently, there were wolves in the area, though the supposition retains a certain fairytale quality.) Fortunately, Downey and Fecteau had survived. They were held in a Chinese prison until their release nineteen years later. I never expected the Agency to come to my aid in the event of emergency.”
P. 170. Jones’ pay and reimbursements often came in one to two years late! He self-financed from his savings. Most officers could not do that and ended up coming home.
P. 176. Max, a case officer in Europe, met with his chief, who told him that Max was being surveilled. “An agent had told the chief that the local service was following an American. The agent didn’t know the identity of the American, but the chief had a ‘gut feeling’ that it was Max.” Max thought he should take precautions, so he hired some local thugs to surveill him, telling him someone wanted to kidnap him (a common problem in post-Soviet Eastern Europe). Max’s chief, without telling Max, decided to see if he could detect Max’s surveillance himself (without telling Max). The thugs caught the chief, slammed him to the pavement, where he hit his head, then kicked him till they were tired, leaving him with severe injuries. “The thugs never saw anyone else following Max. The chief never mentioned it again.”
P. 185. There was a spike in crime in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. “Gypsies took the blame for the increase in crime, but the burglars arrested never seemed to be Gypsies. The burglar my wife had seen wasn’t a Gypsy.” The Indian embassy sponsored Indian dances. “The performers danced listlessly. Indians, normally so warm and friendly, seemed standoffish and unhappy. After conversing with an Indian diplomat for a while, I learned why. ‘The Eastern Europeans think we are Gypsies,’ he said. ‘They treat us like dirt.’”
P. 187. Pamela Harriman, Clinton’s ambassador to France, sent several case officers home. “The ambassador’s other major achievement in Paris was to end embassy sponsorship of the local Boy Scouts troop and forbid its use of embassy facilities.”
P. 217. “None of the mandarins had ever made any important recruitments [of human sources], and many of them had never made a recruitment at all. This was a peculiarity of the CIA. In most organizations, the top people have had a record of important work.”
P. 237. After 9/11, “for a period of nearly three months, all HQs resistance to my operations evaporated. Operational proposals moved swiftly through the many layers of management, with individual bureaucrats afraid to get in the way … No bureaucrat wanted to be seen to be fearful or risk-averse.” The CIA officers sent to Afghanistan “were successful because they had a clear mission and a clear chain of command. They were unburdened by bureaucracy. There was no CIA station in Afghanistan. The officers had paramilitary and language skills, not HQs staff experience, and few HQs political connections.” On 15 December they located Bin Laden. “Just as the team closed in on Bin Laden, new managers arrived from HQs to replace the cowboys … The new managers did what they knew how to do: They set to work creating a station, with its office spaces, turfs, and layers of management, eager to claim credit for the capture of Bin Laden. Most of the cowboys were withdrawn from the mountains. By late December, with most of the cowboys gone and replaced by HQs’ hand-picked managers, Bin Laden escaped US forces.”
P. 239. “After 9/11, Agency employees expected the axe of accountability to fall at any moment … Talk at HQs was that the ‘seventh floor,’ where the CIA’s top mandarins dwelt, would be swept clean. Nothing happened … Within a few months, the bureaucracy began to sense that it might survive. Its confidence returned, and rather than cowering and waiting for its punishment, it was emboldened. It worked to evade responsibility for the intelligence failure, and blamed the FBI. CIA Director Tenet stated that there had in fact been no intelligence failure.”
P. 243. Jones met with a senior manager who “was clearly determining whether I would be permitted to remain as a deep cover officer in a foreign assignment. She seemed like an ordinary HQs manager, as competent as any other … and she spoke airily about the positive plans she was considering. She seemed to enjoy being surrounded by an entourage of underlings … It turned out that [she] was married to a man who had come under suspicion of spying for the government of Taiwan. Her husband was a senior diplomat in the State Department. A September 2004 search of their home by the FBI found more than 3,600 classified State Department documents.
“The manager had known that her husband was taking classified documents out of a secure area at the US Department of State and bringing them home. The FBI also found classified CIA documents that she had removed from CIA HQs.
“She was quietly removed from her position and sent to the staff of the new Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte. Her husband was charged, however, and he pled guilty to three lesser felonies involving his relationship with Isabelle Cheng, a Taiwanese intelligence officer. He was eventually sentenced and sent to prison, in January 2007.”
For some reason, Jones does not name the two. They were Donald Keyser and his wife, Margaret Lyons. A Steamy Spy Scandal at the State Department - TIME.
P. 253. The Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson scandal. “The Wilson mission provided the Agency with a risk-free and harmless way to look like it was doing something about the lack of intelligtence on Iraqi WMD activities in Niger.”
P. 254. “The now-infamous Plame affair affords an excellent insight into a typical Agency career: four years in training, followed by a short tour in a European embassy working on a safe and unimportant target (the Greek government), then more than five years of training, including graduate schools at Agency expense, then two months overseas—all aborted by a purge that probably wasn’t necessary. The Agency favored the risk-free, lengthy training tours that kept officers looking busy …
“Newspaper reports suggesting Plame had been involved in intelligence operations overseas as a non-State Department officer are false. Plame spent nearly all of her career in training and HQs desk assignments, and trainees and HQs desk officers are not assigned to overseas intelligence missions. 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. Following the purge, Plame spent the rest of her twenty-year career in an HQs cubicle. Such a career path was not unusual.”
P. 283. Jones’ boss added new layers of management, including a new OFTPOT (one for the price of two) husband and wife team, who rejected all his proposed approaches to foreigners with simply “do it again … “’Do it again’ occurred as many as six times per operational proposal.” He wanted to approach an Iranian nuclear proliferator. His proposal came back with “You need to fix the grammar.” Nothing else was marked. He scratched his head, could see no grammatical mistakes, made some changes to make it appear different, and resubmitted. It came back with “You need to answer the question. You didn’t answer the question. Do it again … I didn’t know the question to which the OFTPOT was referring.” He made some changes and resubmitted, getting the same comment. “I was certain that the OFTPOTs were simply delaying my proposal until the Iranian had left the country.” He met with the Iranian anyway.
P. 284. Jones had been producing intel from a foreign scientist. After several meetings, the scientist cut a meeting short, saying he had another appointment. Jones asked, and it was with another Agency officer. “Once I’d started sending in intelligence reports from Dr. B—, I’d made the case look easy. Once it looked easy, it attracted the attention of hordes of HQs people vying for a chance to take it. The first priority was to make as many people as possible look as busy as possible, and their second, predictably enough, was to claim ownership of the intelligence production I’d created.” With so many officers vying for control, the Agency got the man a long-term visa to the US, a university scholarship, and brought his family over. “Once these arrangements were in place, and Dr. B— was in the US, the Agency sent an officer identifying himself as a US government representative to talk to Dr. B—. Dr. B— refused. With that, the operation ended.
“I didn’t learn this until much later—HQs hid it from me, and repeatedly told me the operation was moving along well.
“As of this writing, Dr. B— continues to travel back and forth from his country to the US … I believe that Dr. B— has used his university connections and scholarship to gather additional scientific information for his country’s nuclear program.”
P. 334. A new station chief came to Baghdad. Another officer told Jones, “’I needed an armored car to go meet an agent, and I asked if I could use his car. He said I couldn’t because he had an urgent meeting. Then a while later I saw his car pull up, and the doors opened and out jumped a couple of his girlfriends, carrying some stuff they’d just bought at the PX.’ The chief later became embroiled in charges of sexual harassment, and he was realigned and sent back to HQs.”
P. 339. “There was a sinister aspect to the sluggishness of intelligence reporting. Even if reports get old, stale, even useless, the Agency takes credit for producing them. It looks busy. Also, if information is out of date when it’s received, no one can be held accountable for inaccuracies. This creates an incentive for foot-dragging.”
P. 341. “My work in Iraq was in tactical reporting on topics such as IEDs and the location of terrorists—information American soldiers can use in the here and now. The Agency preferred strategic intelligence reporting on the opinions and intentions of political leaders. It could give the ‘big picture’ and was useful in creating briefings for ambassadors and congressmen.
June 9, 2013
I do this a lot. I read a book and while I usually understand and appreciate the message intended by the author, my brain often goes off on strange tangents and I wind up contemplating the content of the book from some odd, arguably disconnected angle.
So here we go again. Yes, yes- the CIA is ridiculous and wasteful and frustrating for its employees and United States citizens alike. The crumbling organization throws billions of dollars at problems that don’t exist, contributes approximately zero actual, usable intelligence, and adds layers of management that make all of our other over-complicated government entities look like speedy little efficiency machines.
What I think is infinitely more fascinating, however, was this book’s value as comparative literature. I read The Human Factor right on the heels of Baghdad Burning (see previous review) and the drastic differences in perspective and general worldview was astounding.
I mean, it’s obvious to almost everyone (*cough* Fox News *cough*) that we all have our own perceptions and understandings of lived events, but even that knowledge doesn’t negate the uneasy feeling one gets when the enormous variances in interpretation of “fact” and “truth” are laid out in such distinction.
Despite his disheartening and frustrating experience working within the crumbling bureaucracies of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Ishmael Jones still seems to be a stereotypically “patriotic” American with a mission to protect the Homeland from terrorists and WMDs and the Axis of Evil (i.e. everywhere that’s not America).
While I appreciate his dedication to defending American freedom (truly, I do), his tone seemed incredibly plastic and party-line after reading a first-hand account of everyday life in a war-torn country.
At one point in this whistle-blowing memoir, Jones talks with a colleague (albeit briefly) about how wonderful it is that they live in a country so prone to aggression; how blessed they are to have an almost constant opportunity to wage war. As if it would be so unbearably mundane and purposeless to live in, say, Switzerland, where the only blood-and-gore action to be found is in an occasional PG13-rated movie.
Long story short, my take home messages were twofold:
1) The CIA is basically worthless in our devastatingly ironic fight for world peace, and 2) way too many Americans still don’t understand that Iraqis (and other inhabitants of this diverse, culturally rich place we call Earth) are actually people, not thoroughly evil bomb-making Al-Qaeda robots sent by Satan himself to test the missile-wielding, democracy-spreading, Axis-of-Evil-defeating saviors of Amurica.
Don’t ask me how I got there. This is my brain on books. I swear sometimes it’s more frightening than that anti-drug, scrambled egg commercial.
So here we go again. Yes, yes- the CIA is ridiculous and wasteful and frustrating for its employees and United States citizens alike. The crumbling organization throws billions of dollars at problems that don’t exist, contributes approximately zero actual, usable intelligence, and adds layers of management that make all of our other over-complicated government entities look like speedy little efficiency machines.
What I think is infinitely more fascinating, however, was this book’s value as comparative literature. I read The Human Factor right on the heels of Baghdad Burning (see previous review) and the drastic differences in perspective and general worldview was astounding.
I mean, it’s obvious to almost everyone (*cough* Fox News *cough*) that we all have our own perceptions and understandings of lived events, but even that knowledge doesn’t negate the uneasy feeling one gets when the enormous variances in interpretation of “fact” and “truth” are laid out in such distinction.
Despite his disheartening and frustrating experience working within the crumbling bureaucracies of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Ishmael Jones still seems to be a stereotypically “patriotic” American with a mission to protect the Homeland from terrorists and WMDs and the Axis of Evil (i.e. everywhere that’s not America).
While I appreciate his dedication to defending American freedom (truly, I do), his tone seemed incredibly plastic and party-line after reading a first-hand account of everyday life in a war-torn country.
At one point in this whistle-blowing memoir, Jones talks with a colleague (albeit briefly) about how wonderful it is that they live in a country so prone to aggression; how blessed they are to have an almost constant opportunity to wage war. As if it would be so unbearably mundane and purposeless to live in, say, Switzerland, where the only blood-and-gore action to be found is in an occasional PG13-rated movie.
Long story short, my take home messages were twofold:
1) The CIA is basically worthless in our devastatingly ironic fight for world peace, and 2) way too many Americans still don’t understand that Iraqis (and other inhabitants of this diverse, culturally rich place we call Earth) are actually people, not thoroughly evil bomb-making Al-Qaeda robots sent by Satan himself to test the missile-wielding, democracy-spreading, Axis-of-Evil-defeating saviors of Amurica.
Don’t ask me how I got there. This is my brain on books. I swear sometimes it’s more frightening than that anti-drug, scrambled egg commercial.
January 13, 2022
Oui il peut long mais au bout du compte quand nous sommes dans l'histoire il passe à une vitesse folle, évidement comme presque la totalité des livre il y a des passages triste notamment la fin de deux personnages .
Ce livre a été un vrai plaisir à lire.
Ce livre a été un vrai plaisir à lire.
October 28, 2012
Jones offers a rather in depth perspective on an organization that prides itself on anonymity. Attempting to expose many of the bureaucratic layers that create risk aversion and overall lethargy, he describes numerous experiences in which his zeal for the mission was held at bay by the very organization that had created the mission. This sobering discussion dispels much of the myth that the Agency has needed every post 9/11 dollar in order to combat terrorism abroad.
Jones traces the course of his 15 year career in the CIA in exciting detail. Along the way, he pauses at various points to point out to the reader the ways in which his parent organization kept him from being a productive agent.
Nevertheless, at numerous places, his attempts at constructive criticism break down into petty squabbling. For a treatment aimed at reform, his style does little to engender inspiration and persuasion. Rather, his focus on many minor problems, his inability to distinguish between organizational disfunctionality that is uniquely CIA as opposed to any large organization, and his biographical narrative together leave the reader with the impression that Jones has more of an axe to grind than a reformational heart. Furthermore, his self-proclaimed gruff, uncompromising, and uncooperative nature only leaves the reader with the larger impression that much (not all) of his "bureaucratic nightmare" could have been avoided if he had spent more time developing relationships and working at conciliatory measures with his colleagues.
Even still, this book leaves one with the distinct impression that reform is needed, and his brief appendix does transcend his own squabbling and demonstrates superbly a simple rubric for reform that senior leadership both of the Agency and of any big business ought to carry closely.
Jones traces the course of his 15 year career in the CIA in exciting detail. Along the way, he pauses at various points to point out to the reader the ways in which his parent organization kept him from being a productive agent.
Nevertheless, at numerous places, his attempts at constructive criticism break down into petty squabbling. For a treatment aimed at reform, his style does little to engender inspiration and persuasion. Rather, his focus on many minor problems, his inability to distinguish between organizational disfunctionality that is uniquely CIA as opposed to any large organization, and his biographical narrative together leave the reader with the impression that Jones has more of an axe to grind than a reformational heart. Furthermore, his self-proclaimed gruff, uncompromising, and uncooperative nature only leaves the reader with the larger impression that much (not all) of his "bureaucratic nightmare" could have been avoided if he had spent more time developing relationships and working at conciliatory measures with his colleagues.
Even still, this book leaves one with the distinct impression that reform is needed, and his brief appendix does transcend his own squabbling and demonstrates superbly a simple rubric for reform that senior leadership both of the Agency and of any big business ought to carry closely.
May 10, 2013
Pretty damning book. Does not paint the Agency in a positive light at all. Probably why it's an unauthorized publication written under a pseudonym. It's just mind blowing the level of wasteful bureaucracy, mismanagement, and incompetent boobs who have inferiority complexes. Thousands of lives have been lost needlessly directly and indirectly because of this agency, alleges the author. Worst of all, is his accusation that the Intel the CIA presented President Bush on Iraq was completely made up. Not an ounce of it had merit and did not come from any agent or any of the INTs. Nor did they even try. This isn't to say there weren't bright spots. The author claims many great operatives worked for the agency and some good intelligence production came from their work. The bureaucracy however had ways of undermining continued success in the field from risk-adverse mindsets. Of course accuracy is up for debate as it's one case officers interpretation of how things worked. I'm more inclined to side with him however given that this is a government agency and anything ran by the government is pretty much a cluster f*%$.
May 10, 2012
Ishmael Jones is a pseudonym. The author was a CIA agent for 15 years who spent his career in Europe and the Middle East, and was able to avoid the dead and dreaded HQ assignments. The book is his autobiography as well as his criticism of the CIA.
Jones is sharply and rightfully critical of the layers of CIA bureaucracy required to make decisions, layers which impede decision making and action required for the agents in the field. He's also critical of most of the DCI's under whom he served, such as Tenet and Hayden, critical of the lack of a clear and simple mission statement for the CIA, and critical of the command structure of the CIA.
Jones finished his career with an assignment in Iraq and resigned, but it seems clear that he would have stayed if he hadn't been worn down by the lack of support from upper management and HQ, and worn down with fighting the CIA bureaucracy. I hope this book is not the end of his criticism of the CIA, which desperately needs complete reformation or disbanding with its mission assigned to the military and other organizations.
Jones is sharply and rightfully critical of the layers of CIA bureaucracy required to make decisions, layers which impede decision making and action required for the agents in the field. He's also critical of most of the DCI's under whom he served, such as Tenet and Hayden, critical of the lack of a clear and simple mission statement for the CIA, and critical of the command structure of the CIA.
Jones finished his career with an assignment in Iraq and resigned, but it seems clear that he would have stayed if he hadn't been worn down by the lack of support from upper management and HQ, and worn down with fighting the CIA bureaucracy. I hope this book is not the end of his criticism of the CIA, which desperately needs complete reformation or disbanding with its mission assigned to the military and other organizations.
May 6, 2011
one of the better "I was a CIA agent and this is what's wrong with American intelligence" books out there. Jones tells a familiar tale of bureaucratic waste and inefficiency at the CIA, one of many American institutions that have simply stopped functioning. Jones writes, not just of wasted money or intelligence opportunities, but also wasted lives. It is not uncommon for CIA employees to spend years preparing for a foreign posting, and then spend a few months abroad before being brought back to work in a cubicle at HQ. Lots of dry wit at work, but ultimately the story is too infuriating to be funny. As Jones points out, the CIA's most successful "mission" in the decade after 9/11 was its relentless effort to undermine the Bush Administration through strategic leaking.
September 11, 2011
Enjoyable read, though there were more than a few places where the truth of Ishmael's circumstances were exaggerated or dramatized for the sake of the book. I share his views with regard to the self-serving corporate entity that the US intelligence has morphed into over the years. PowerPoint and briefing skills have replaced fieldcraft and experience as the tools of the trade. If taken for it's finer points, this is a compelling read for anyone who is concerned about the subject.
June 3, 2013
Ishmael Jones, a pseudonym for a retired CIA operative, has written a professional autobiography which excoriates the Agency and calls for its radical reform, if not abolishment. Unlike many other such memoirists, "Jones" appears quite comfortable with the dark dealings of covert operatives, he just thinks such work could be much more aggressive and efficacious. Interestingly, the FBI comes off well, compared to the CIA, in his book.
December 9, 2011
An interesting read and some good points are made but most of the book comes across as Mr. Jones saying he was the greatest spy ever and was the only one trying to serve his country while everyone else was incompetent and just collecting a paycheck. It got old hearing him toot his own horn so often.
January 4, 2011
An important book. Eye-opening for those who still think CIA accomplishes much of anything other than rack up expenses. Book emphasizes the high quality of people serving, how they are failed by "leadership" that is risk averse and clueless about life in the field.
February 21, 2011
This is a great explanation for how the CIA could have what amounts to an unlimited budget and unchecked power and still fail at its most important tasks again and again. Sadly, the book makes perfect sense.
April 13, 2010
I can't say this book was 'informative' exactly. It's a bit depressing actually. It provides a perspective on an organization that many of us don't know how to think about.
November 25, 2011
An eye openning tale. I now have a better feel about the CIA culture
December 17, 2012
While the story was a great one that needed to be told there were times that the delivery was slow and my interest waned. All in all a good message about dysfunction in the CIA.
May 21, 2013
An excellent book on organisational dysfunction and perverse incentives in the intelligence world. Answers the question of why the CIA is bad at HUMINT.
June 10, 2014
Unsure what to think of its accuracy since it was unauthorized. But it was a very interesting read even if only parts are true. I wonder how much has changed since Mr. Jones has left.
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