CIA vet may face repercussions for revealing agency secrets Andrew McLemore

Published: Saturday August 2, 2008





Print This Email This A 25-year CIA veteran has written a unauthorized, 384-page book that sharply criticizes the mismanagement and misdoings of the agency, creating an unprecedented test of the rights of former employees to reveal potentially harmful information. "The Human Factor: Inside the CIAs Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture" was written under the pseudonym "Ishmael Jones" to protect people the author has met who didn't know he was working undercover, CQ Politics reported. Jones denies that the work contains any classified information and said he wrote the book to "improve the system and help it defend ourselves and our allies." "I realized the CIAs clandestine service was broken," the author said in an interview with FrontPage Magazine. "My mission has always been to defend America, and for many years I sought to do this by producing intelligence as an active CIA officer. Today, using this book as a tool, I seek to defend America by working to fix our broken clandestine service." Jones is donating the book's earnings to the family of a soldier killed in Iraq and said he is ready for the consequences of publishing his book. "Im ready to take whatever they have to do," Jones said of his former employer. He may have a lot to take. Former CIA operative Frank Snepp faced heavy repercussions after he skipped agency censors and published an account of his Vietnam tour titled "Decent Interval: An Insiders Account of Saigons Indecent End, Told by the CIAs Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam." The CIA sued him and won in landmark Supreme Court case that ended with the confiscation of Sneep's earnings by the agency. The court justified the decision on the basis that Snepp violated his employment contract by not submitting the book to the agency's censors. Snepp said Jones is "inviting big trouble" because he actually submitted the book to the CIA for review, which approved only about one percent of it, according to Jones. Undeterred, Jones published the whole thing anyway. "God knows what the hell could happen to him," Snepp said. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told CQ Politics that Jones' book was fiction and declined to say what, if any, legal action the agency might take in response. Jones' book describes at length the inefficiency of his former agency and its poor tactics to gather intelligence in Baghdad. "We probably had more case officers in California than we did in Iraq," he writes. But the author also details the less than exemplary behavior of the agency's employees. Jones said secretaries and security guards would have group sex in Green Zone parking lots oblivious to security cameras. "All of the culprits were identified and sent home," he writes, but not before "senior employees got to watch the video the next day." Jones also said the CIA's problems must be addressed by the next president. "Whether we have President Obama or President McCain, history suggests that the major crises they face will feature a lack of good human source intelligence," Jones said in the interview with FrontPage Magazine. "Its deadly serious." An excerpt from the article by CQ Politics follows: # The system valued "industrial" production over quality, he writes. "Some people had enormous output; a few, although they sat at their desks for twelve hours, had none...Sending e-mail to friends throughout the organization was a common time-waster. If anyone giggled while sitting at his desk, it was a safe bet he was 'instant-messaging' with a friend in the agency. If two people giggled alternately, it usually meant they were sending messages to each other." But Jones saves his hottest anger for what he describes as self-dealing CIA managers who, he says, have avoided or mismanaged clandestine operations around the globe. Since 9/11, he writes, many CIA "mandarins" (its most senior officials) have retired from the agency to "get rich" as private contractors with their old employer. And theyre not being replaced by people with on-the-ground counter-terrorism experience, he says, despite the agency's constant ballyhoo about gearing up for "the long war" against terrorist groups. #