The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture

The Human Factor is the controversial, unauthorized memoir of a deep cover CIA agent, Ishmael Jones, who served on the ground during the invasion of Iraq and other rogue states across the globe, pursuing weapons of mass destruction. According to Jones, the CIA is a broken, Soviet-style bureaucracy with its own agenda: to consume federal funds, to expand within the United States, to feign activity, and to enrich current and former employees. After 9/11, billions of dollars directed by Congress to increase the number of officers working under deep cover on foreign streets have disappeared without the CIA fielding a single additional, productive officer overseas.

The Human Factor follows Jones’s struggles, not with finding human sources of secret information in rogue nations, but with the CIA’s bloated, dysfunctional, even cancerous bureaucracy. After initial training in the US, Ishmael Jones spent his career in multiple, consecutive overseas assignments, as a deep cover officer without benefit of diplomatic immunity. In dingy hotel rooms, Jones met alone with weapons scientists, money launderers, and terrorists. He pushed intelligence missions forward while escaping purges within the Agency, active thwarting of operations by bureaucrats, and the ever-present threat of arrest by hostile foreign intelligence services. Jones became convinced that the CIA’s failure to fulfill its purpose endangered Americans. When attempting reform from within proved absurd, Jones resigned from the CIA to make this public case for reform. Indeed, this explosive memoir reveals that the CIA is not doing its job and must be fixed. Until it is, our lives and the lives of our allies are in jeopardy.