One thing the Bush administration did in its second term was really crank up the CIA classification to ridiculous levels so that former officers could not publish anything of value. Their object seemed to be to blackout so much text on any submitted manuscript as to render it useless to the publishers. It’s worked really well, as I haven’t seen any good books come out of retired ranks of the CIA in several years. One officer has had enough and is going to publish his manuscript uncensored.
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.”
“I’m ready to take whatever they have to do,” Jones said of his former employer in a telephone interview July 29.
Here’s a little background:
…former CIA operative Frank Snepp says Jones is “inviting big trouble” — and he should know.
Snepp bypassed agency censors in 1978 and published a searing, unauthorized memoir of his tour in Vietnam, “Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End, Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam.”
The CIA sued, eventually winning a landmark Supreme Court victory that allowed the agency to confiscate Snepp’s earnings, on the basis that he had violated his employment contract by not submitting his book to CIA censors for clearance.
Jones did something far more dangerous, Snepp thinks, by submitting his manuscript for clearance then “thumbing his nose” at CIA censors because he didn’t like their censorship decisions. “God knows what the hell could happen to him,” Snepp said.
“I did the best I could,” Jones told me. “I sent it to them more than a year ago, and I said, ‘Please tell me what you want taken out of this, or re-written,’ repeatedly. But they disapproved all of it, with the exception of a few sentences. They approved maybe one percent of the book.”
It will hopefully be up to an Obama Justice Department to decide what to do with this case. Hopefully, they will recognize that the CIA went nuts with the censorship and decline to prosecute. One thing I’d really like to see restored is openness in government.
