The lawsuit accuses the officer of breaking his secrecy agreement with the US. Ishmael Jones, the pen name for the 20-year CIA veteran and Arabic speaker, told reporters that he published the book to expose corruption in the agency. He now faces a civil lawsuit over his 2008 book, “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture.”
The book is a detailed account of his career inside the CIA’s clandestine service and his work as a “nonofficial cover” operative in the Middle East and Europe.
The CIA says his book was submitted to the agency’s publications review board under a secrecy agreement that covers books written by former CIA officials, but Jones went ahead and published the book without the CIA’s official approval.
The suit seeks an injunction against further violations of Jones’ secrecy obligations and recovery of proceeds from unauthorized publication.
One of Jones’ main disclosures in the book is that, despite being limited solely to collecting secrets outside the country, 90 percent of CIA employees live and work entirely inside the United States. The US-based work force, he says, is “largely ineffective” and the failure to have more people outside the United States violates the agency’s founding charter.
“We need to make Americans safer by increasing the tiny numbers of CIA heroes serving undercover in foreign lands,” he told reporters. “We need financial accountability and whistleblower systems to stop tremendous waste and theft.”
“The book contains no classified information and I do not profit from it,” Jones told The Washington Times. “CIA censors attacked this book because it exposes the CIA as a place to get rich, with billions of taxpayer dollars wasted or stolen in espionage programs that produce nothing.”
Jones told reporters that he was never notified by the agency and discovered it only after he was served with court papers in late September.
The book, available online, has received positive reviews in the intelligence community.
Max Boot, senior fellow in National Security Studies at The Council on Foreign Relations wrote: “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” because “For ‘Ishmael Jones,’ better than any previous spook, peels back layer upon layer of deception to show how dysfunctional the CIA is….
“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… but has provided no greater service than to risk his former employer’s wrath to alert us to the CIA’s continuing, crippling woes.
The lawsuit is one of a few cases brought by the agency against former officers since the James Snepp was forced to pay the agency over his 1977 book about Vietnam, “Decent Interval.”
Steven Aftergood, who monitors government secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, told reporters that CIA is probably on solid legal ground in the case “although it may be unfortunate for the author and the reading public.”
Since Snepp’s book was released, he said: “Courts have held that the manuscripts of former CIA employees are subject to pre-publication review even if they do not actually contain any classified information. To a regular person, this might look like an infringement on an author’s freedom of expression, but when you sign a nondisclosure agreement with the CIA, you surrender some of that freedom.”
The lawsuit is being revealed as the Obama administration prepares to respond to a new round of public disclosures of classified military documents from Iraq to be posted on the website WikiLeaks.
On Monday night Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan asked all media outlets not to publish any information expected to be released by Wikileaks within the next few days.
The US government has already condemned the Wikileaks site when it released around 70,000 documents on the Afghanistan war last July. This time, Julian Aassange, creator of the controversial site, is expected to release 500,000 classified documents relating to the Iraq war.
The Pentagon has already gathered a team of 120 experts to assess and manage the massive leak. The team has reviewed the information that they believe will be released and are primarily worried for the safety of the Iraqi citizens named in the files who aided US forces.
