Ishmael Jones: America's leading proponent of intelligence reform.

INTELLIGENCE REFORM: TO PROTECT AMERICANS AND OUR ALLIES

This book should be required reading for anyone who serves in our government or is served by it. But beware: Reading “The Human Factor” will make you very, very angry. For “Ishmael Jones,” better than any previous spook, peels back layer upon layer of deception to show how dysfunctional the CIA is. Even in the wake of 9/11, when the CIA was inundated with fresh funding, it has failed to cure its cultural ills or to dispatch large numbers of clandestine operatives abroad without State Department cover. “Ishmael Jones” has served his nation honorably and bravely as a member of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, but he has provided no greater service than to risk his former employer’s wrath to alert us to the CIA’s continuing, crippling woes.

- Max Boot, senior fellow in national security studies, The Council on
Foreign Relations; author of “The Savage Wars of Peace” and “War Made New”

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

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

ARTICLES:

National Review - on Pelosi

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmM4NjlkNDNlMjJlZjliZjI4OWY5MmQxODZjYjI1MmI=

Nationl Review - on interrogations

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTc3ZDNjZmRlYmVkNmM0MGIyZDI3MDBmMDY4MWM0MWM=

Citizens Against Government Waste

http://www.cagw.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=11898&security=1&news_iv_ctrl=1165

The Atlantic - Reforming the CIA

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/02/reforming_the_cia.php

American Thinker - CIA Censors