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Book Description
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 directed by Congress to increase the number of officers working under 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 from within proved absurd. Jones resigned from the CIA to make a public case for reform through the writing of this book.
Effective American organizations feature clear missions, streamlined 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 lives of our allies are in jeopardy.
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 directed by Congress to increase the number of officers working under 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 from within proved absurd. Jones resigned from the CIA to make a public case for reform through the writing of this book.
Effective American organizations feature clear missions, streamlined 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 lives of our allies are in jeopardy.
'via Blog this'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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Excellent...a devastating and alarming picture."
— National Review
“Scathing – and unauthorized.”
— Congressional Quarterly
"Controversial, eye-opening account"
— Foreword Magazine
“This book should be required reading for anyone who serves in our government or is served by it. But beware: Reading The Human Factor will make you very, very angry.”
— Max Boot, Senior fellow in national security studies, The Council on Foreign Relations; author ofThe Savage Wars of Peace and War Made New
“Jones (the cover name the Agency gave him during his first training course), a Marine who joined the Agency’s clandestine service and became a case officer in the late ’80s, paints a devastating and alarming picture of a vast bureaucracy he calls ‘a corrupt, Soviet-style organization’.”
— Michael Ledeen, National Review Online
“Mr. Jones obviously believes that the United States deserves the best intelligence organization in the world. He believes passionately that every American taxpayer is being cheated because we are paying scores of billions of dollars for a bloated, ineffective, risk-averse organization that cannot perform the mission for which it was created.”
— John Weisman, The Washington Times
“Ishmael Jones represents an altogether uncommon breed of CIA officer, one willing to risk life and career in the pursuit of gathering better intelligence. If the CIA as a whole shared this one officer’s relentless pursuit of WMD sources, terrorists, and the rogue nations that support them, then we might find ourselves in a much safer world today. With his book The Human Factor, Jones relates the details of his extraordinary career with a notable lack of bravado and a tremendous amount of dry wit.”
— Lindsay Moran, author of Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy
“The Human Factor is an enormously important book and a surprisingly accessible read. Hopefully, it will propel the reform debate beyond the usual tinkering…. Call him Ishmael, or not, but I call him a patriot.”
— David Forsmark, Frontpage Magazine
— National Review
“Scathing – and unauthorized.”
— Congressional Quarterly
"Controversial, eye-opening account"
— Foreword Magazine
“This book should be required reading for anyone who serves in our government or is served by it. But beware: Reading The Human Factor will make you very, very angry.”
— Max Boot, Senior fellow in national security studies, The Council on Foreign Relations; author ofThe Savage Wars of Peace and War Made New
“Jones (the cover name the Agency gave him during his first training course), a Marine who joined the Agency’s clandestine service and became a case officer in the late ’80s, paints a devastating and alarming picture of a vast bureaucracy he calls ‘a corrupt, Soviet-style organization’.”
— Michael Ledeen, National Review Online
“Mr. Jones obviously believes that the United States deserves the best intelligence organization in the world. He believes passionately that every American taxpayer is being cheated because we are paying scores of billions of dollars for a bloated, ineffective, risk-averse organization that cannot perform the mission for which it was created.”
— John Weisman, The Washington Times
“Ishmael Jones represents an altogether uncommon breed of CIA officer, one willing to risk life and career in the pursuit of gathering better intelligence. If the CIA as a whole shared this one officer’s relentless pursuit of WMD sources, terrorists, and the rogue nations that support them, then we might find ourselves in a much safer world today. With his book The Human Factor, Jones relates the details of his extraordinary career with a notable lack of bravado and a tremendous amount of dry wit.”
— Lindsay Moran, author of Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy
“The Human Factor is an enormously important book and a surprisingly accessible read. Hopefully, it will propel the reform debate beyond the usual tinkering…. Call him Ishmael, or not, but I call him a patriot.”
— David Forsmark, Frontpage Magazine
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
104 of 110 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a clean-sheet final review. I considered dropping it to a four because of false notes. However, after adding up all the substantial "bombs" in this book, bombs I will itemize below, I believe the book not only merits five stars, but should--if Congress were honest, which it is not--warrant a full Congressional investigation, and a wholesale purging of the light-weight risk-averse clowns now managing CIA's directorates.
The author was a Non-Official Cover (NOC) Officer, something he is not allowed to say, but he no doubt has infuriated the pretentious at CIA by making it clear that virtually all of CIA's case officers are under Department of State cover.
I will list the false notes first. While I have not been active in clandestine operations since 1988, the following troubled me:
1) Ability to work on own funds with pay and expense gaps of up to $200,000 at a time.
2) Excessive travel to HQS and entry into HQS. In my day NOCs did not come inside at all.
3) Implied knowledge of inside operations and actual sighting of final cables--in my day, NOCs were handled as prize agents, and never saw any official traffic.
4) Agents (the ones committing treason) complaining to HQS to get their NOC fired? This is way over the edge.
5) Uninformed view on JAWBREAKER and First In with respect to public story--however, it is now it is coming out that Bin Laden was believed killed by multiple air bursts over Tora Bora, and the "flight" to Jalabad might have been a CIA deception ordered by the White House, and the only good explanation for why General Franks refused to drop a Ranger battalion, knowing it was merely in support of a CIA fabrication.
6) Inconsistency between one claim that Plame had four years of training followed by a short tour followed by five more years of training, and footnote 46, which is much more credible.
I hope other case officers, and NOCs, will read and review this book and contribute reviews that extend my own notes in the public interest. The time has come to shut CIA down and start over (the same is true of the rest of the secret world, but this book focuses on CIA).
Management crimes itemized in this book:
1) Waste of billions of dollars in post 9-11 money, to include paying rent for domestic assignments and creating hundreds of new CIA offices all over the USA, while failing to create new NOC capabilities overseas. [Note: open sources tell us that rather than fielding hundreds of NOCs, CIA created extremely expensive cover companies, all but one of which has since had to shut down--just as the Joint Fusion Centers across the USA are shutting down: CIA management is disconnected from reality in a big big way).
2) Risk aversion, multiple layers of inept and egotistical management, most of whom have made a career out of being in HQS rather than serving in the field (I myself did three back to back tours overseas and quit CIA when I was told to go down the hall and lie to another case officer--which was coincident with Ted Price deciding I was unfit for duty because I consider the DO a joke).
3) US academic access agents being sent to destroy NOC access and existing cases, management seeking to triple-up coverage on cases best handled by singleton NOCs. Combined with the risk aversion, with HQS officers being clueless on how easy a commercial approach can be, anywhere including in "rogue" or "threat" states, this book for all of its flaws, is a death blow to the Potemkin village called the National Clandestine Service.
4) HQS, and Agency personnel, have blown virtually every clandestine identity in history--very very few have been brought down by hostile counterintelligence. I was one of five case officers NOT blown by Phil Agee's Cuban-sponsored list as published in Mexico, this resonates with me. CIA lives "immunity from accountability," NOT "cover."
5) Many credible examples of CIA waste of new money on NOC "trainees" that are stationed in USA and "counted" in testimony to Congress. Riveting story on how CIA fabricated NOC overseas presence by sending NOCs on non-operational sight-seeing tours, called "Axis of Evil Tourism" by the NOCs.
6) Lends additional support to the long-known unwillingness and inability of CIA to operate in Syria or any other Middle Eastern country, in anything other than a declared liaison capability.
7) Destroys CIA claims on Europe, pointing out that more often than not CIA is "shut down" across Europe and refuses to do operational actions not being done jointly by liaison. Points out that Europe is important as a transit point, not as a target, but this nuance is evidently lost on risk-averse "managers."
8) Recurring theme is the micro-management, the multiple layers of approval and editing (including the morphing of Reports Officers into "Collection Management Officers" who no longer add value)
9) Exposes the ease with which an ally, perhaps Germany, has dangled double-agents and consistently embarrassed CIA case officers. This probably applies to Russia and France, and more subtly, to China and Cuba, but then CIA is not admitting any of this.
10) Page 118: in the Middle East, the author's primary area of operations, 15% of the NOCs working as they should; 70% quiet failures; 15% spectacular failures. The real question is: what number. My guess is 30, of whom only 4 are real, and half are light-weight contractors.
I am coming up on my 1000 word limit, so here are some teasers: NOC laptops used to fire one out of ten NOCs for access to pornography; polygraph given for "disgruntlement"; CIA stationary accidentally sent to all NOCs overseas; contract firms taking the money and destroying clandestine service....
The appendix, specific recommendations for reform, merits serious consideration. On balance, this book is now on my short list of essential references on the deception and death of our spy service.
The author was a Non-Official Cover (NOC) Officer, something he is not allowed to say, but he no doubt has infuriated the pretentious at CIA by making it clear that virtually all of CIA's case officers are under Department of State cover.
I will list the false notes first. While I have not been active in clandestine operations since 1988, the following troubled me:
1) Ability to work on own funds with pay and expense gaps of up to $200,000 at a time.
2) Excessive travel to HQS and entry into HQS. In my day NOCs did not come inside at all.
3) Implied knowledge of inside operations and actual sighting of final cables--in my day, NOCs were handled as prize agents, and never saw any official traffic.
4) Agents (the ones committing treason) complaining to HQS to get their NOC fired? This is way over the edge.
5) Uninformed view on JAWBREAKER and First In with respect to public story--however, it is now it is coming out that Bin Laden was believed killed by multiple air bursts over Tora Bora, and the "flight" to Jalabad might have been a CIA deception ordered by the White House, and the only good explanation for why General Franks refused to drop a Ranger battalion, knowing it was merely in support of a CIA fabrication.
6) Inconsistency between one claim that Plame had four years of training followed by a short tour followed by five more years of training, and footnote 46, which is much more credible.
I hope other case officers, and NOCs, will read and review this book and contribute reviews that extend my own notes in the public interest. The time has come to shut CIA down and start over (the same is true of the rest of the secret world, but this book focuses on CIA).
Management crimes itemized in this book:
1) Waste of billions of dollars in post 9-11 money, to include paying rent for domestic assignments and creating hundreds of new CIA offices all over the USA, while failing to create new NOC capabilities overseas. [Note: open sources tell us that rather than fielding hundreds of NOCs, CIA created extremely expensive cover companies, all but one of which has since had to shut down--just as the Joint Fusion Centers across the USA are shutting down: CIA management is disconnected from reality in a big big way).
2) Risk aversion, multiple layers of inept and egotistical management, most of whom have made a career out of being in HQS rather than serving in the field (I myself did three back to back tours overseas and quit CIA when I was told to go down the hall and lie to another case officer--which was coincident with Ted Price deciding I was unfit for duty because I consider the DO a joke).
3) US academic access agents being sent to destroy NOC access and existing cases, management seeking to triple-up coverage on cases best handled by singleton NOCs. Combined with the risk aversion, with HQS officers being clueless on how easy a commercial approach can be, anywhere including in "rogue" or "threat" states, this book for all of its flaws, is a death blow to the Potemkin village called the National Clandestine Service.
4) HQS, and Agency personnel, have blown virtually every clandestine identity in history--very very few have been brought down by hostile counterintelligence. I was one of five case officers NOT blown by Phil Agee's Cuban-sponsored list as published in Mexico, this resonates with me. CIA lives "immunity from accountability," NOT "cover."
5) Many credible examples of CIA waste of new money on NOC "trainees" that are stationed in USA and "counted" in testimony to Congress. Riveting story on how CIA fabricated NOC overseas presence by sending NOCs on non-operational sight-seeing tours, called "Axis of Evil Tourism" by the NOCs.
6) Lends additional support to the long-known unwillingness and inability of CIA to operate in Syria or any other Middle Eastern country, in anything other than a declared liaison capability.
7) Destroys CIA claims on Europe, pointing out that more often than not CIA is "shut down" across Europe and refuses to do operational actions not being done jointly by liaison. Points out that Europe is important as a transit point, not as a target, but this nuance is evidently lost on risk-averse "managers."
8) Recurring theme is the micro-management, the multiple layers of approval and editing (including the morphing of Reports Officers into "Collection Management Officers" who no longer add value)
9) Exposes the ease with which an ally, perhaps Germany, has dangled double-agents and consistently embarrassed CIA case officers. This probably applies to Russia and France, and more subtly, to China and Cuba, but then CIA is not admitting any of this.
10) Page 118: in the Middle East, the author's primary area of operations, 15% of the NOCs working as they should; 70% quiet failures; 15% spectacular failures. The real question is: what number. My guess is 30, of whom only 4 are real, and half are light-weight contractors.
I am coming up on my 1000 word limit, so here are some teasers: NOC laptops used to fire one out of ten NOCs for access to pornography; polygraph given for "disgruntlement"; CIA stationary accidentally sent to all NOCs overseas; contract firms taking the money and destroying clandestine service....
The appendix, specific recommendations for reform, merits serious consideration. On balance, this book is now on my short list of essential references on the deception and death of our spy service.
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