The Human Factor by Ishmael Jones

[bourbon]

The publisher, Encounter Books, is the publishing arm of a center-right not profit foundation. Founded by Peter Collier and associated with his pal David Horowitz, who is another red-diaper baby turned jacobin, Encounter churns out highbrow neoconservative literature by the likes of Bill Kristol, John Fund, and Victor Davis Hanson among others.

The cover jacket praise also is a redflag with blurbs from uber-neocon wonk and McCain adviser Max Boot, and Lindsay Moran a DO veteran of all of one tour in Macedonia, and author of possibly one of the worst spy memoir ever published. Lindsay Moran was the best person formerly of the agency that they could get to vouch for it? Really? What about even the critics like Gerecht, McGovern or Robert Steele?

I don't know what a "deep cover officer" is. And I am certain hat whatever they are, CIA does not have them. They do however have officers under Non Official Cover. Jones and Encounter bemoan recent intelligence memoirs that “were written for the profit of the authors”, specifically former NOC officer Valerie Plame and tarnished DCI Tenet's books. Such bullying is typical neoconservative behavior, picking on the weak so they can pump their chests, only to avoid taking such a posture towards Gary Bernsten or Bob Baer who undoubtedly profited from their books and are harder and cooler than they.

Jones' reform to “transfer overseas human intelligence collection efforts to the US military” is misguided and would be fulfillment of the Rumsfeld era's naked assault on CIA. The neoconservatives have had it out for CIA going back at least to Richard Pipe's Team B, just like Iraq, wanting it to be destroyed and “be broken into its constituent parts”. This maybe just another neocon hatchet job on the agency.

The Jones interview in David Horowitz's Frontpage cements my skepticism with this little diddy:

FP: Your thoughts on Israel and the dangers it faces? What must Israel do? What must the U.S. do to help Israel ?

Jones: The best thing a supporter of Israel can do is contact his Senator and Representative and encourage them to improve American intelligence capabilities.

Israel faces the risk of apocalyptic attack from nuclear weapons. It takes 1930’s technology to build these weapons, and they are increasingly available. Terrorist groups who obtain these weapons will use them.

Israel’s intelligence services don’t have the worldwide scope and the money of American intelligence services. The CIA’s clandestine service should be employed to protect free people and allies everywhere, and this includes Israel. A functioning American intelligence service can target nuclear proliferators and prevent nuclear attacks. The dysfunctional CIA we currently have cannot do this.

Supporters of Israel are reputed to be politically adept. Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees are remarkably accessible, and if they’re not, they each have a person on their staffs who handles intelligence issues. Just recently I called the offices of the intelligence committee members to get the names of their intelligence staffers, so that I could send them copies of my book. A supporter of Israel who calls or writes one of these people and encourages them to clean up the CIA’s clandestine service may actually be taking action which will prevent the obliteration of Israel.

I want to see the dismantling of the CIA and its replacement by a functioning intelligence system. But even small, incremental improvements in the CIA will increase Israel’s security. Accountability for money, an end to nepotism, an end to favoritism and fraud in the assignment of contracts, stopping the CIA’s massive expansion within the United States and moving its activities to foreign countries - things that the CIA has already been commanded to do, and is not - would be important improvements.

Michael Ross, a former Mossad spy, and author of The Volunteer, has said that the Mossad recognizes the evil of bureaucracy and fights it effectively. Also, he’s mentioned the restrictions the Mossad has on operating in its own country.

Have they no shame?

[Tom Odom]

The publisher, Encounter Books, is the publishing arm of a center-right not profit foundation. Founded by Peter Collier and associated with his pal David Horowitz, who is another red-diaper baby turned jacobin, Encounter churns out highbrow neoconservative literature by the likes of Bill Kristol, John Fund, and Victor Davis Hanson among others.

The cover jacket praise also is a redflag with blurbs from uber-neocon wonk and McCain adviser Max Boot, and Lindsay Moran a DO veteran of all of one tour in Macedonia, and author of possibly one of the worst spy memoir ever published. Lindsay Moran was the best person formerly of the agency that they could get to vouch for it? Really? What about even the critics like Gerecht, McGovern or Robert Steele?

I don't know what a "deep cover officer" is. And I am certain hat whatever they are, CIA does not have them. They do however have officers under Non Official Cover. Jones and Encounter bemoan recent intelligence memoirs that “were written for the profit of the authors”, specifically former NOC officer Valerie Plame and tarnished DCI Tenet's books. Such bullying is typical neoconservative behavior, picking on the weak so they can pump their chests, only to avoid taking such a posture towards Gary Bernsten or Bob Baer who undoubtedly profited from their books and are harder and cooler than they.

Jones' reform to “transfer overseas human intelligence collection efforts to the US military” is misguided and would be fulfillment of the Rumsfeld era's naked assault on CIA. The neoconservatives have had it out for CIA going back at least to Richard Pipe's Team B, just like Iraq, wanting it to be destroyed and “be broken into its constituent parts”. This maybe just another neocon hatchet job on the agency.

The Jones interview in David Horowitz's Frontpage cements my skepticism with this little diddy:

Have they no shame?

Interesting post. Hat tip for connecting some dots I am favor of a rework of the agency, pehaps the entire community as John T siggests. The above smacks of pure sell out.

Best

Tom

[Ken White]

From both sides of the political spectrum, too...

The publisher, Encounter Books, is the publishing arm of a center-right not profit foundation. Founded by Peter Collier and associated with his pal David Horowitz...

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.

The cover jacket praise also is a redflag with blurbs from uber-neocon wonk and McCain adviser Max Boot, and Lindsay Moran a DO veteran of all of one tour in Macedonia, and author of possibly one of the worst spy memoir ever published. Lindsay Moran was the best person formerly of the agency that they could get to vouch for it? Really? What about even the critics like Gerecht, McGovern or Robert Steele?

Critics from within have to walk a tight rope; Langley is mildly accepting of some things, reacts with some fury at others. Consider that Jones is essentially saying the same things Gerecht has said, just doing it more fully and with more force. The majority of former Officers will support the Agency even when they know its ills.

I don't know what a "deep cover officer" is. And I am certain hat whatever they are, CIA does not have them.

Are you really? Interesting. It may or may not but what it does have is a jargon -- and that jargon is (1) Directorate dependent; (2) Time of most service dependent, the old and new differ; (3) Geographical area of service dependent.

They do however have officers under Non Official Cover.

An official term given recent popularity but little used by many...

...only to avoid taking such a posture towards Gary Bernsten or Bob Baer who undoubtedly profited from their books and are harder and cooler than they.

Do you know that for certain or are those your presumptions?

Jones' reform to “transfer overseas human intelligence collection efforts to the US military” is misguided and would be fulfillment of the Rumsfeld era's naked assault on CIA.

Not really. Not really misguided that is. The history goes back a whole lot further than Pipes, Neocons and even Rumsfeld. The fact is that that US Army MI and US Navy ONI worked pretty well on the humint effort worldwide prior to, during and immediately after WW II (while the OSS contribution was spotty, some areas poor, some were fair, none were stellar, regardless of Dulles myths). The issue of who should do that humint surfaced with the creation of the CIA in 1947, literally before Pipes was born. It has waxed and waned as a topic ever since; generally when an Agency failure makes the news, DoD makes a play. That predates neocons and Rumsfeld by many years. Korea in 1950 comes to mind. So does the ascent of Castro in Cuba -- and the debacle with the Shah in 1979...

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.

In short, Jones has some good points. He has some bad points. Accept the good and discard the bad -- and as the disagreement between you and I over the humint mission show, what's good and what's bad can be in the eye of the viewer.

The problem is that the IC is in disarray right now and this is not a good time for that to be the case. Congress means well but reform efforts will become a partisan political football and little will be done. While I strongly disagreed with the establishment of the DNI, his existence is a fact so we can only hope that the incumbent and his successors fix the problem.

As Tom and John said, a fix is needed -- that's one thing we can probably all agree upon.

[jmm99]

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".

[Ken White]

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

on the Redneck Riviera...

About five hours out of the way...

[jmm99]

right on it.

On the Redneck Snowbelt....

Thought great minds might run along the same highway. Now, I'll have to come up with a more "complicated and implausible" explanation.

PS: The url for Ms. Sutherland's article is now giving me problems - Sun website down ? Worked fine this afternoon. Maybe my wife's computer - since she hates "I spy stuff", maybe it too. Have to go before she throws me out of her wigwam.

[Ken White]

On the Redneck Snowbelt....

Snowbelt or ice cube belt? Benton Harbor is as far north as I've been in a Michigan winter and that was quite enough, thank you...

Thought great minds might run along the same highway. Now, I'll have to come up with a more "complicated and implausible" explanation.

They do, check the map. You and I are on a direct N-S Axis as modified by a 3.175 deviation of magnetic north from this end to which the curvature of the earth and the transient effects of this years flood water have added a slight westward cant.

My Mother told my wife before we married that what I said would be "generally believable..." My own mother!... No idea what she meant by that.

[jmm99]

from White
Snowbelt or ice cube belt?

Snowbelt; Lake Superior adds a Med effect, even when it freezes over (which it does). Snow fall (as opposed to snow cover) in inches runs to mid-200's usually. High is just shy of 400" (78-79, when my dad cashed in his chips). See here for totals (Keweenaw runs a little higher than here - maybe a coiuple of feet).

http://www.johndee.com/history.htm

Ideal winter temp is about 20-25F. Anything at 32F or higher is a problem because snow melts, creates a mess and then freezes - leading to an ice cube belt in driveway. Plus, it makes igloo living wet; and bear can more easily breach the walls. See Pierre of the North comic strip.

I expect this site will tell you more about this region than you want to know.

The City's proximity to majestic Lake Superior gives it beautiful mild summers and wonderful snowy winters.

http://www.cityofhancock.com/

from White
You and I are on a direct N-S Axis as modified by a 3.175 deviation of magnetic north from this end to which the curvature of the earth and the transient effects of this years flood water have added a slight westward cant.

...as further modified by a almost 0.00 deviation of magnetic north from this end (making bearings and departures easy); plus the effect of snow load - and the glacier that is coming over the hill (no, no, Mike, that was the 70's Global Cooling Model).

from White
My Mother told my wife before we married ...

My mother in law told me (before my wife and I married) that I shouldn't believe everything my wife would tell me. My wife claims that my father misrepresented to her everything about me - thus, she (my wife) should be able to sue me (why me; sue the old man) for fraud. So, married life goes on.