Table of Contents
Preface to the Paperback Edition
★ 1 ★ - Daring Greatly, Perhaps
★ 3 ★ - American Apprenticeship
★ 4 ★ - Perseverance and Soothing Language
★ 5 ★ - Sent to Spy Out the Land
★ 6 ★ - Trying to Hustle the East
★ 7 ★ - Morning in Eastern Europe
★ 12 ★ - Darkness and Brief Dawn
★ 15 ★ - The Way of the Weasel
Appendix - Solutions for reform of the clandestine service
Praise for The Human Factor
“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 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
“Jones (the cover name the Agency gave him during his first training course), a Marine who joined the Agency’s clandestine service and became a case officer in the late ’80s, paints a devastating and alarming picture of a vast bureaucracy he calls ‘a corrupt, Soviet-style organization’.”
Michael Ledeen, National Review Online
“Mr. Jones obviously believes that the United States deserves the best intelligence organization in the world. He believes passionately that every American taxpayer is being cheated because we are paying scores of billions of dollars for a bloated, ineffective, risk-averse organization that cannot perform the mission for which it was created.”
John Weisman, The Washington Times
Praise for The Human Factor
“Ishmael Jones represents an altogether uncommon breed of CIA officer, one willing to risk life and career in the pursuit of gathering better intelligence. If the CIA as a whole shared this one officer’s relentless pursuit of WMD sources, terrorists, and the rogue nations that support them, then we might find ourselves in a much safer world today. With his book The Human Factor, Jones relates the details of his extraordinary career with a notable lack of bravado and a tremendous amount of dry wit.”
Lindsay Moran,
Author of Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy
ʺ[The Human Factor] is an extremely engaging and readable memoir of one man’s quest to protect his nation from attack and his frustration at not being allowed to, while money allocated for the purpose is being wasted. In fact, if the book were not so deadly serious, it would be one of the funniest books of the year. . . . The Human Factor is an enormously important book and a surprisingly accessible read. Hopefully, it will propel the reform debate beyond the usual tinkering. . . . Call him Ishmael, or not, but I call him a patriot.”
David Forsmark, Frontpage Magazine
“Scathing - and unauthorized.”
Congressional Quarterly
“One good spy is worth 10,000 soldiers.”
Sun Tzu
“I would trade every satellite