Mr. White.

I be a-wishin I been a-writin that - rather than thinking it.

from White
The real problems with national level Humint did not arise until Nixon had Schlesinger start the dismantling of the DO in 1973, the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee did their thing and James Earl Carter and Stansfield Turner completed the massacre. The Agency has never fully recovered. Efforts to ramp up DIA to cover the shortfall were probably necessary.
And,

Bull is always with us... From both sides of the political spectrum, too...
......
While affiliation with Horowitz is always suspect, the content rather than the association should be the determinant. This is an issue that should never be approached in a partisan manner. Unfortunately, too many cannot rise to the level required to do that.
.....
I'd also point out that partisanship cuts both ways; legitimate criticism can be negated by claiming partisanship and illegitimate criticism can be elevated by the same thing. What's required is to simply filter the information provided and apply logic instead of bias to the issue.
------------------------------------
Now, trying to apply Mr. White's mode of analysis in my fumbling McCarthy manner.

Since Lindsay Moran has been mentioned, here is her review of Jones' book

Ishmael Jones is the real deal, a CIA case officer who worked under deep cover – without the traditional safety net of diplomatic immunity – targeting this country’s most hostile threats and winning over critical informants. He represents an altogether uncommon breed of CIA officer, one willing to risk life and career in the pursuit of gathering better intelligence. Undeterred by the Agency’s baffling bureaucratic barriers, Jones bucked the system when he had to, and served in a series of successful overseas assignments. If the CIA as a whole shared this one officer’s relentless pursuit of WMD sources, terrorists and the rogue nations that support them, we might find ourselves in a much safer world today. With his book The Human Factor – as entertaining as it is informative – Jones relates the details of his extraordinary career. Better yet, he tells his story with a notable lack of bravado and a tremendous amount of dry wit. I laughed out loud at descriptions of CIA characters and culture that were all too familiar. Jones represents the kind of CIA officer that I – and many other neophyte spies – had always hoped to encounter as a supervisor. But he wisely sidestepped managerial positions within the Agency in order to remain exactly where he should have been: active in the field.

Lindsay Moran
Author of Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy
http://www.ishmaeljones.com/reviews/

Here is a review of Ms. Moran by a longer-serving agency gal:

She Gives Spies a Bad Name
By MARTHA SUTHERLAND, Special to the Sun December 16, 2004
....
For nearly 20 years, I was a case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. I ran foreign agents in China. I had many alias passports and held clandestine meetings in strange hotel rooms all over the world. I was there when Tiananmen Square erupted in 1989; I still possess spent bullets that vengeful Chinese soldiers shot through my apartment walls that day. I was also in Cairo and in a lot of other places I don't talk about, even though I've been officially ex-Agency for five years.

Lindsay Moran, valedictorian of her Harvard class, joined the CIA in 1998,and after three years of training at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., she spent only two years of service in Macedonia before leaving to get married. Thus her new book, "Blowing my Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy," (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 304 pages, $22.95) is a wonderfully bold and naive misnomer. It's akin to a first-year medical intern writing a book called, "My Life as a Surgeon."
http://www.nysun.com/arts/she-gives-...bad-name/6360/

Which does not necessarily mean that everything Ms. Moran says is bull. The part of Ms. Sutherland's article that bears more attention is the apparent liberality of the Publications Review Board to allow disclosure of training methods.

Another of the three reviewers in Jones' webpage (cited above) is Michael Ross (the other is Max Boot), who says:

Ishmael Jones takes on many sacred cows in this blistering, yet often humorous divulgence of how the CIA has summarily opted-out of the spy game replacing the real work of human source intelligence collection with a humorless and anemic bureaucracy scared of its own shadow. This page-turner chronicles the journey of a gifted and patriotic CIA officer of the elite Clandestine Service and his Herculean attempts to get the job done while fending off the risk-averse mandarins back at Langley determined to thwart his every effort. Sometimes he succeeds and to the CIA’s great shame, sometimes he doesn’t.

-Michael Ross

Author of The Volunteer: My Secret Life in the Mossad
A review of Mr. Ross' book by Hayden Peake is in the Spring 2008 Intelligencer, which is not online; see

http://www.afio.com/22_intelligencer.htm

The bottom line of Peake's review (p.127) is

from Peake
Both editions [US and Canadian] lack documentation. We are left with a well written story book that asks the reader to "trust me", but provides little reason to do so.
Which does not necessarily mean that everything Mr. Ross says is bull.

The next piece of "evidence".

LINKS

Encounterbooks.com
Encounter is the publisher of THE HUMAN FACTOR

BLOWING MY COVER
Lindsay Moran, auther of BLOWING MY COVER, is the most talented writer to have written about the CIA.

WAR MADE NEW
by Max Boot, Senior Fellow, The Council on Foreign Relations

THE VOLUNTEER
by Michael Ross. This is the best book written about the Israeli Mossad.

Amazon
Buy the book at Amazon.com
http://www.ishmaeljones.com/links/

From which, I infer that a publisher and four folks got together to sell their books.

Conspiracy ? - anything is possible and can be conceived - see quote below signature.

So, back to Mr. White: "What's required is to simply filter the information provided and apply logic instead of bias to the issue."

PS1 (Ken) Do you happen to live near US 41 ?

PS2 Now some other folks can launch into a discussion of "deep cover, mesne cover, and thin cover officers" - to say nothing of "agents" and "spies".