Amazon.com description:
CIA officers are, needless to say, skilled and accomplished professionals.
Unfortunately, the organization they inhabit is stifling, misguided, and
careless. In the darkness of secrecy, with unlimited tax dollars and little
or no accountability, the CIA bureaucracy has mutated into a leviathan that
serves its own aims. From 1989 to 2002, Ishmael Jones carried out
continuous field assignments for the CIA, pursuing WMD targets in the
Middle East and Europe and terrorist targets in the Iraq War. Appalled by
the stifling layers of bureaucracy and unable to reform the agency from
within, Jones resigned with an unblemished record and this astonishing
story to tell.
Unlike many other spy memoirs, The Human Factor does not attempt to be
exciting or make overblown claims or make the narrator the hero of his or
her own story. Ishmael Jones avoids aggrandizing himself, using his
professional experiences to help explain the problems that the Intelligence
Community's bureaucracy faces and to shine a light on the increasingly
neglected art of Human Intelligence (HUMINT). Readers looking for an expose
on the horrible conditions of CIA's bureaucracy will find themselves
unsatisfied. Rather, Jones' complaints will help readers identify patterns
of problem behavior for the Agency and how bureaucracy too often prevents
HUMINT from being properly exploited. Written in 2010 before Snowden became
a household name and the NSA and GCHQ were thrust into the spotlight, Jones
was describing the problems with HUMINT that would force the Intelligence
Community to rely heavily, and at times too much, on Signal Intelligence
and cyber operations. Readers interested in fulling understanding these
problems, and not merely the general shape of the issue, are advised to
read the book. Since the problems described are often bureaucratic, the
excerpts selected are merely highlights - bureaucratic failings are nearly
impossible to describe in a way that's both meaningful and succinct.
