CIA Veteran Rips Agency, Tests Limits of Right to Publish Without Permission (Jeff Stein)

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CIA Lobby Seal

A 25-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service has written a scathing — and unauthorized — account of the spy agency’s management, setting up an unprecedented legal test of former employees’ rights to pen tell-all books.

Writing under the pseudonym “Ishmael Jones,” the author says he wrote “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture” in order to “improve the system and help it defend ourselves and our allies.”

{xtypo_quote_left} What’s happened is the CIA has spent more than $3 billion specifically on fielding officers outside of embassies,” he added, “but has been unable to field a single additional effective officers overseas. {/xtypo_quote_left}

“I’m ready to take whatever they have to do,” Jones said of his former employer in a telephone interview July 29.

“There is no classified information in the book,” he maintains. He used a pseudonym, he says, because “I was under deep cover for most of my career, so to use my real name might expose people I’ve met.”

Jones (whose true identity has been independently verified) says he is giving any money he earns from the book to the children of a hometown soldier who was killed in Iraq.

But former CIA operative Frank Snepp says Jones is “inviting big trouble” — and he should know.