Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture

Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ishmael Jones, a former member of the Central Intelligence Agency. He joined the agency in the 1980s, where he served as a deep cover officer focusing on human sources with access to intelligence on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. His assignments included more than fifteen years of continuous overseas service in numerous exotic countries and several rogue nations. He resigned from the CIA in good standing. Ishmael Jones is a pseudonym, in accordance with laws that make it a felony to reveal the true names of deep cover officers. He is the author of the new book, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. It is the first book written by a deep cover CIA officer. FP: Ishmael Jones, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Jones: Thanks very much. I’m a long-time fan of Frontpage.

FP: What inspired you to write this book?

Jones: I realized the CIA’s clandestine service was broken. False and nonexistent human source intelligence exposes Americans and our allies to great risk, and has been at the root of most of the foreign policy crises faced by post-war American presidents: Korea, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Iran hostages, 9/11, Iraq, and so on. 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. It’s deadly serious.

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.

FP: What is unique about your book?

Jones: Many CIA books are written by retired Headquarters managers who are accustomed to pontificating in front of their underlings, trapped within a windowless room at Headquarters, and their books can be a bit windy. I hope mine is not.

My book has also been disapproved in its entirety by CIA censors. I actively sought the approval of the censors, and repeatedly asked them during the course of a year what parts of the book they would like removed or rewritten. But they simply replied: all of it. In the end, CIA censors returned the manuscript to me as a stack of blank pages. There is no classified information in my book. It is simply highly critical of the organization.

My book is also the first CIA book for which all author profits will be given away. The recent George Tenet and Valerie Plame books, for example, were written for the profit of the authors.

FP: What was the CIA when you worked for it?

Jones: The CIA bureaucracy is a living creature, and like any life form it wants to feed itself and grow. There are many hard workers within the CIA, but the bureaucracy itself is a couch potato - there actually are televisions in many CIA offices - and it wants to avoid difficult tasks.

Its demeanor masks a powerful will to survive. It will leap up and ferociously defend itself if it feels threatened.

The CIA thrives on ever-expanding funds from Congress and secrecy that prevents accountability. It organizes itself by stacking employees in offices, employees who don’t get out on the streets much. The CIA is meant to serve in foreign countries, and CIA targets such as terrorists and nuclear proliferators are located in foreign countries. But most CIA employees live and work within myriad offices in the United States, because it’s just a lot easier that way.

FP: Paint a picture for us of the CIA's training methods.

Jones: Our instructors were intelligent and well-meaning, but they’d had little actual espionage experience. They’d spent their careers within Headquarters in Langley and in embassies abroad, meeting Soviets at diplomatic cocktail parties and playing a lot of tennis. In hindsight, though teaching us little about espionage, they were doing a good job of teaching us to exist within the bureaucracy.

My training class sat in stuffy rooms with the shades pulled down, listening to instructors drone on. Visiting speakers from Headquarters arrived late and spoke without preparation, usually about themselves and their thoughts and feelings. We role-played as US State Department diplomats working in embassies.

I visited a large CIA training facility in recent years, though, and the training was much improved, with organized lectures and schedules, and excellent instructors.

FP: Tell us about your experience in the CIA and what your main struggle entailed.

Jones: I had some tremendous experiences in the CIA and a great family life. The main struggle was to fight, outwit, and manipulate the bureaucracy in order to get the job done.

The CIA has bureaucrats within each embassy located in friendly or neutral countries. CIA officers doing operations in these countries must obtain approval from these people.

For example, if a CIA officer stationed in Germany wants to meet a rogue state nuclear scientist planning to travel to Belgium, approvals are needed from CIA bureaucrats in Germany, Belgium, the Headquarters desks for Germany, Belgium, and the rogue state, the Headquarters desks for the nuclear issue, and a Headquarters desk responsible for the officer’s administration. Each bureaucrat can block the operation, and there’s little incentive for them to approve. Most of the bureaucrats will have had little actual espionage experience upon which to guide their decisions, and some will stonewall the request, making sure that nothing can go wrong by simply not answering. If the rogue state scientist should at the last minute change his plans and travel to France instead, the need for fast approvals would make the operation impossible. James Bond would be shut down in a matter of hours and forced into a cubicle.

For many years I recruited and ran human sources in five separate weapons systems, in five separate countries, each of which were important threats to the lives of Americans.

This was what I called “management”. But that’s not how the CIA sees it. Management means how many CIA employees one sits upon in the CIA bureaucracy. There’s a lot of pressure on CIA officers in the field to return to Headquarters to be managers.

FP: What is supposed to be the purpose of the CIA? Why has the CIA failed in this purpose? What are its main weaknesses and flaws?

Jones: Gathering human source intelligence is the fundamental purpose of the CIA’s clandestine service. It involves locating people within hostile governments or terrorist organizations, meeting them, developing a relationship, and obtaining secret information, usually in exchange for money.

The CIA fails as a result of system design. More to the point, when the CIA fails to deliver the intelligence the President needs, nothing happens. CIA employees are sometimes punished if they make an effort to collect intelligence and something goes wrong, and low level employees are sometimes punished for losing a briefcase or having porno on their computer, but no top CIA manager has ever been disciplined for failure to do his duty. The CIA continues to perform poorly, and yet is rewarded with ever greater amounts of money.

Recruiting human sources is a low form of work within the Agency, and few top managers have ever recruited a good human source. To have recruited human sources in al Qaeda and in Iraqi WMD, a case officer would have had to be in the field for years, away from Agency stations and HQs. He’d have returned to a dead career, with no management experience and with none of the connections at HQs necessary for personal advancement. A person who wants to advance in the organization does so through lengthy service at HQs, with occasional embassy assignments overseas.

This leads to mission drift: to doing fun things, to doing things which lead to promotion, such as creating layers of managers, handling liaison operations, building boondoggles, Potemkin offices and elaborate cover mechanisms, and elaborate covert action schemes.

For example, if the CIA were to run a hospital, doctors would realize there’s nothing to be gained from treating patients - sick people are not much fun to be around, after all, and bad things can happen: sick people sometimes bring malpractice suits. In such a hospital, doctors seek to climb the ranks of hospital management, avoiding patients, and creating new management layers. Treating patients becomes lower-level work, looked down upon, the work of a few oddballs who just insist on treating patients. Fast-track doctors get into management as soon as possible, and spend decades seeking to increase their federal funding and the size of their bureaucratic turf, without ever seeing a patient. That’s how a hospital would run if it looked like the CIA.

Periodically, CIA management blames the poor quality of the CIA work force for its failures, but this is not true. The CIA has always hired good people. These people want to do the best job they can, and if the system were changed, they’d get out and gather the intelligence we need, and they’d start doing it overnight.

FP: How do you think it is best for the U.S. to fight the terror war? What have we done right and wrong in Iraq?

Jones: We have a strong military and despite years of war the military maintains excellent standards of discipline and morale. Our military forces are creative and innovative, and under dedicated and motivated leadership. When the military has problems, it identifies the problems and fixes them. We should strengthen the ability of the US military to control the war on terror.

The CIA people I met in Iraq were the best I encountered. But to improve productivity in Iraq, the CIA should assign more espionage officers there and send most of the support staff home. There are only a few experienced officers who actually collect intelligence in Iraq. Most experienced officers serve as supervisors, and most of the people they supervise are support staff. Lots of chow hall, security, and computer people. CIA officers should also be rewarded for service in Iraq. Most top CIA bureaucrats have not served in Iraq, and this tells employees that service in Iraq is not the path to the top.

FP: Can you talk about your experience in serving with the CIA in Iraq?

Jones: In Iraq, I met Iraqis and gathered intelligence, and I started doing that the moment I arrived. Through good luck and the hard work of others, I was assigned to a position which actually made me one of the world’s top producers of intelligence on terrorism.

The hyper-violence in Iraq at the time made the CIA people there much less risk-averse. In Europe CIA officers can be frightened of making a phone call. In Iraq CIA employees were doing all sorts of daring and productive things with minimum Headquarters resistance.

FP: What positive and effective things has the CIA been doing to win the war for us in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and also in finding bin Laden?

Jones: I think we have the best of the CIA’s people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite some PR blunders, the terrorist interrogations have been one of the most effective producers of intelligence, and there are some good CIA intelligence networks in Iraq.

FP: What do you know about how dangerous Iran is right now in terms of nuclear weapons? What do you propose we do?

Jones: Unfortunately I know this target, and I know that the CIA has no human sources of any quality there. The President, the United States, and our allies are walking blindly into danger in the Iranian nuclear weapons issue without the intelligence they need. I know who these targets are, I know where they are, and I know we’re not doing anything about them. This will become apparent in the future, as has happened with so many crises in the past, when former CIA managers reveal in their memoirs that we never had a single human intelligence source of value.

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.

FP: How can the CIA best be reformed? Or are there other alternatives?

Jones: John McCain has a plan involving creating a small, nimble clandestine service along the lines of the old OSS of World War II days. I think this would be an effective solution.

I hope Barack Obama, who promises real change, will also create a plan for change at the American institution most in need of it.

The CIA has proven virulently resistant to reform and I believe it should be broken up and the parts assigned to organizations that already have clear missions and defined chains of command. CIA offices and personnel operating within the United States should be transferred to the FBI. The CIA was never intended to be a domestic spy agency. The FBI is measured and held accountable by its ability to catch criminals, and this accountability provides the motivation for the FBI to perform. CIA embassy activities overseas should be assigned to the US Department of State. The State Department is designed to handle diplomacy. Much of what the CIA now does in its embassies involves diplomacy, such as handling relationships with liaison services.

Overseas human intelligence collection programs should be given to the US military. The fundamental motivation of the American military—to win wars and to protect the lives of its soldiers—will give the motivation to ensure that its case officers provide the necessary intelligence and do not become distracted by soft targets or by designing programs meant to look busy and spend money. The US military already has a large corps of trained case officers, graduates of the CIA’s own training course.

FP: Ishmael Jones, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Jones: Thank you very much.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.