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By Susan Freis Falknor

The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture            by Ishmael Jones
Encounter Books (2008; new material added 2010)

“The Marine Corps issued orders for the benefit of the United States. CIA orders
were issued for the convenience of the bureaucracy.”

“Call me Ishmael,” begins the fictional narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The invitation forms a memorable opening to this famous American novel of Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest to kill the formidable white whale.

And so, with some resonance, the narrator of The Human Factor presents himself with the nom de plume (indeed, the nom de guerre) of Ishmael Jones. 

Son of American parents in an unspecified branch of foreign service, Ishmael grew up on posts in the Middle East, East Asia, and East Africa, giving him an ease with languages and the startlingly clear perspective that an American growing up overseas can sometimes bring to assessments of domestic ways.

He attended a U.S. college and graduate school, served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, and went to work in a Wall Street investment firm.

Then he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the late 1980s “with one purpose in mind:  to serve my country.”

 “My service, except for initial training, was in continuous field assignments overseas, in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe while working on WMD targets, and in Iraq while working on terrorist targets during the war.”

The Human Factor is a vivid, witty, engaging, and sometimes surreal personal memoir of the author’s training in tradecraft with his CIA entering class; getting stationed overseas; and recruiting rogue-state weapons scientists while posing as a commercial software manufacturer.  

Ishmael recounts holding interviews with “men with bad breath” in seedy European hotel rooms. He recalls how he had to maneuver around CIA paycheck delays that could sometimes last for “a year or two.”

A constant theme is the need to outwit and outmaneuver his own “risk-averse” supervisors to carry out his professional duties.  At one point he comments:

“The people of India under the License Raj and the people of Eastern Europe under Communism reminded me of my colleagues in the CIA. Subject to a maze of restrictive bureaucratic rules and procedures, human creativity and productivity are blocked.”

(The License Raj was the elaborate system of licensing and regulations that India imposed on business activities from just after the end of World War II until 1990.)

Through it all, Ishmael interweaves reassuring asides about how he made a secure life and happy home for his wife and children, even during several tough postings overseas.

Ishmael’s CIA career stretched through the 1990s and most of the first decade of this century. This period saw the arrests of traitorous CIA agents Aldrich Ames (1994) and Harold Nicholson (1996). Ames in 1985 had betrayed agents working for the U.S. against the Soviet Union.  

It included the 1995 “Paris Flap,” in which French security, “possibly for its own internal purposes during an election season,” put the Paris CIA station under surveillance,  and then released much of the information to the media, causing several France-stationed CIA officers to be recalled home.  Ishmael explains its larger significance:

“The Paris Flap had immense repercussions not only for operations in France but also for the Agency has a whole.  It was a seminal event in risk aversion. The Paris Flap taught Agency managers that a complaint from a foreign government to an American ambassador about the espionage activities of the station could result in closure of all intelligence operations in that country and could end the careers of all case officers involved.”

During his career as an overseas agent, Ishmael witnessed the ranks of his talented entering class dwindle, seeing them ordered home to desk jobs, or leaving the CIA altogether.

In a sense, his lonely position in those last few years echoes the ending of Moby Dick, after narrator Ishmael has become the only survivor from Ahab’s wrecked ship:

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

Ishmael’s CIA tenure included September 11, 2001, and its disappointing aftermath.

He recalls:

“I knew I was watching an intelligence failure unfurl, and within seconds of watching that airplane hit the World Trade Center, I thought: This will bring reform and accountability to the CIA . . . .  I thought: America will see that it needs a functioning intelligence agency, not a failed bureaucracy.”

After a few months of unprecedented freedom to act in the field, during which time Agency officers were, for example, “successful” working with the military in Afghanistan, even coming close to capturing Osama Bin Laden at Tora Bora–the CIA “bureaucracy roared back stronger than ever.”

“By March of 2002, the bureaucracy was certain that no heads would roll. It figured that its methods–avoidance of risk, creation of management layers–had been vindicated.”

In the wake of 9/11, Congress gave the CIA “virtually unlimited billions of dollars.”  The most visible result was that a rash of “Potemkin offices” opened up around the United States to house a flood of new recruits, while the CIA overseas presence continued to languish. 

Ishmael’s tenure covered most of the Bush presidency, the Valerie Plame-Joseph Wilson scandal, and Porter Goss’ 2004-2006 stint as CIA director. “I was excited about Goss’ arrival,” Ishmael writes, but hoped-for agency reforms did not materialize.   His final assignment included some months supporting combat operations in Iraq, wearing a Kevlar vest and working with the Army to destroy terrorists.

At the end of his Iraq assignment, Ishmael resigned from the Agency:

“I resigned when I decided further service was pointless and that my best contribution to our nation’s defense would be to enter the debate on the on the reform of the CIA.”

From the Belly of the Beast

Ishmael gives us his own take on the machinery of the CIA.  Here are some of his insights which we found, frankly, jaw-dropping.  Our first reaction? Where are the Congressional overseers?

Retired Employees:  “The really big money went not to the ordinary retired case officers, though, but to the retired Agency mandarins who formed contracting companies.  The requirement that everyone involved in Agency contracting have a security clearance kept anyone out of the game except former Agency employees.”

. . . . .

“Some of the contracting companies were ‘body shops’ that supplied retirees to the Agency. The company would get a contract from the Agency to supply a number of retirees, at $250,000 per retiree, for example, and the contracting company would take $50,000 and [disburse] $200,000 to the retiree. Conventional wisdom within the CIA was that the payoff to the former mandarins running these companies would come not from gross revenue but from the sale of the company to a larger beltway contractor.”

Iraq:  “Iraq was a unique environment, and both Agency and military intelligence officers were doing a fine job. In the rest of the world, I thought the military officers were much more capable and less risk-averse. The military can place 30 trained case officers in non-State Department positions nearly anywhere in the world within a matter of days. The Agency, with billions of dollars at its disposal, couldn’t do this in a decade.”

Syria: “The U.S.has no formal restrictions on espionage activity in Syria, but the Agency’s turf bureaucrats do, so Syria is a de facto safe haven from the Agency’s scrutiny. Agency operations from Iraq into Syria were blocked not by strategic or diplomatic considerations, but for the entirely inexcusable reason that Agency turf bureaucrats in Syria chose not to approve those operations.”

In a brief appendix to The Human Factor, Ishmael Jones lays out clear, straightforward solutions for “reform of the clandestine service.”

He characterizes the CIA as a “failed organization that has proved resistant to reform.” Therefore, the CIA “should be broken up into its constituent parts, and those parts assigned to organizations that already have clear missions and defined chains of command . . . .”

Most of all, the author warns, “We should recognize the scope of the problem,” which, as he points out, stretches back a half-century.  

The “scope” includes major intelligence failures with military consequences that gravely damaged at least 10 American presidencies, according to Jones.

Ishmael Jone’s book is a fascinating if disheartening look at the living anatomy of the best known organization in our intelligence community. Don’t miss it.

REVIEWER’S ADD-ON:  The book reviewed here is the paperback edition of The Human Factor, with new material added in 2010. Faithful readers will recall that we have previously visited Ishmael Jones here, here, and here.

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