A bad day for the spooks
So, the CIA has decided to bring a civil action against “Ishmael Jones,” former deep-cover agent and pseudonymous author of The Human Factor:Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, a book I was proud to publish a couple of years at Encounter Books. Bill Gertz ably outlined the case a few days ago for The Washington Times. Today, “Ishmael Jones” himself weighs in on PowerLine with an important reflection. He writes, in part:
The CIA filed a lawsuit against me recently for writing a book without CIA approval. I’d been a CIA officer in a career which included more than 15 years of continuous undercover assignments in foreign countries, which is very rare given that CIA officers spend most of their careers in the United States. I showed the book to the CIA’s censors and sought their approval, repeatedly asking what they wanted taken out of the book, but over the course of a year they just waffled.
In the end, it was my duty as an American to defy censors, and I went ahead and had the book published, as a tool for use in influencing the improvement of our clandestine service.
The book contains no classified information and I do not profit from it. CIA censors stonewalled this book because it exposes the CIA as a place to get rich, with billions of taxpayer dollars wasted or stolen in espionage programs that produce nothing. Despite the talented work force, more than 90 percent of employees now live and work entirely within the United States where they are largely ineffective, in violation of the CIA’s founding charter. We need to make Americans safer by increasing the tiny numbers of CIA heroes serving under cover in foreign lands. We need financial accountability and whistleblower systems to stop tremendous waste and theft. The good news is that we can achieve these things simply by enforcing regulations that already exist. It’s already illegal to steal government funds, and we should enforce the CIA’s founding charter requiring that the CIA focus on espionage in foreign countries.
When a former CIA employee publishes a book, the conventional wisdom is that the CIA is wise to ignore it because to do otherwise merely gives the book attention.
But ordering the lawsuit was a way for CIA chief Leon Panetta to curry favor with the CIA’s senior bureaucrats, who dwell on the seventh floor of its headquarters, and who oppose critics of the Agency’s current lifestyle. Panetta is beleaguered at the CIA and is in over his head. He has been Stockholmed by CIA bureaucracy and has become another failed Obama appointee.
It’s great to be an American. In many countries it would be a death sentence to accuse the head of the spy service of incompetence.
Our nation’s Founders recognized that censors will approve books that serve the censors’ agenda and will block books that don’t. Of course an intelligence agency must protect its secrets, but there have always been laws designed for this purpose. The CIA’s ability to censor speech that does not contain classified information is a separate right that the CIA was granted in the 1970′s, in the Snepp case. It is more than an infringement upon the First Amendment. It shields the CIA from accountability and allows them to stifle whistleblowers.
CIA censors do little to stop the leaking of actual classified information. They will permit the publication of startling amounts of classified information if a book is written by an influential bureaucrat, such as the book by former CIA chief George Tenet. The leaking of classified, secret, damaging information to the New York Times and the Washington Post by senior bureaucrats, for the benefit of political agendas, has reached criminal levels at the CIA. The New York Times and the Washington Post have developed franchises around this. As an unfortunate consequence, you’ll rarely see any mention of intelligence reform from these newspapers, because to do so would upset their sources on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters.
C.I.A.: Jones shows that the “I” too often stands for “Incompetence.” His book is an important one that anyone who cares about the integrity of U.S. Intelligence will want to read. As a publisher, I suppose I should be pleased by Leon Panetta’s bringing so much attention to the book. As an American, I find his blustering effort to silence a critic shameful and discreditable.
Well done.
A lifetime ago I worked at NSA in Maryland. It has relentlessly continued to grow over the last 35 years.
If I have been asked in 1972 what NSA needed most I would have said, “fire every second employee – to many bodies” The place was bursting with 10′s of thousands of people, wandering the halls, getting haircuts in the NSA barber shop, shopping in the NSA store and eating in the largest cafeteria ever built by man.
Now and then, individual spooks break the surface and the voters get to look at what they are paying for. Recall E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame. Valerie Plame. Michael Scheuer. Intelligence or the lack thereof?
How could the CIA have missed for years that the Soviet Union was terminal and slowly expiring? Where was the CIA when Ayatollah Khomeini was stewing unguarded in Paris? Why were the old devil’s incendiary taped sermons undermining the Shah not squelched with a bullet? How did the CIA allow a former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin to gain ascendancy in the “new” Russia?
Our foreign affairs problems begin with stuffed shirts, striped pants and heads screwed on backwards at the State Department and continue on to feckless and opinionated stupids at the CIA. Thus we drift from crisis to crisis and are forever closing the stable doors after the horses are gone.
I just ordered the book from Amazon.com
I think you need to order another print run.
In my country in a previous life we called them:
“Caught In the Act”
I am seriously thinking about reading this book…however, I suspect it will just make me scream and pull my hair out.
Roger
Your understanding of the Snepp case is in error. The Supreme Court opinion in Snepp was not based on First Amendment issues. The Court upheld the right of the CIA as an employer to require its employee, Snepp, to maintain the confidentiality of proprietary information of the employer. The Supremes found that Snepp violated his fiduciary duty to not disclose the data that Snepp, in fact, signed a contract to respect. The Brits reached the same conclusion in the Blake case but on the basis of willful breach of contract.
Why is it that many commentators’ reactions to such kiss and tell books depends on whose ox is getting gored and generally on whether one supports the administration being gored? In the process of all this gossiping, the world increases its impression that Americans can’t keep secrets?
In the meantime, the CIA will win its case and the author will have to disgorge the revenues that he receives from the book, without any compensation, and then his career as professional author and commentator will be made. Snepp lost his royalties on his first book but he wrote at least a dozen more and is the darling of NPR and the university crowd.
Deep cover? Deep cover?! Do not make me laugh.
Deep cover is the like of the British spy Alexander Scotland, who infiltrated the German army successfully enough to be made a General, if that story be true. Deep cover is Polkovnik Gosudarstvennoi Bezopaznostii Rudold Ivanovich Abel. Deep cover is Gaczyna, the meticulously-reconstructed American town on a Soviet military reservation, whose purpose was to train agents to a letter-perfect imposture of an ordinary American. I sincerely doubt this country can deploy anything similar.
Grow up people. CIA is not military and can’t operate like the Marines Corps. Give them credit for nailing bin Laden. spies always operate in the dark-the minute you know of them…the day they are dead or at least their spying is dead. And the 90% of employees…call them support staff. what’s the U.S. to do, publicly export spies abroad. oh that’s great PR.
Al