Call Me Ishmael Jones - Part 1
Navigating the CIA leviathan
“All of us sensed that the oft-repeated delay “two more weeks” could go on for years.” - Ishmael Jones
“Blaise Pascal wrote that, “All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.” Surely he’d be surprised to learn that, in fact, millions of government employees are quite happy never to leave their rooms.” - Ishmael Jones
This is a post about The Human Factor. No, not the novel by Graham Greene or its screen adaptation but rather the anonymous memoir of a CIA deep cover case officer named Ishmael Jones.
Published in 2008, the book came to my attention only recently when a twitter follower started DMing me humorous passages, most of which covered anecdotes about bureaucratic absurdism.
When I finally read the book a few months ago, I empathized with the author given the obscurity of his book and his pseudonymity, not only because Eric Holder’s DOJ eventually prosecuted Jones for the content of the book but also because of the limitations inherent to writing about bureaucratic lived experience. (As an aside, I know what you’re thinking: this book is a “limited hangout” or disinformation. Maybe it is. Jones himself states that it’s CIA policy to portray CIA failures as intentional to preserve the illusion of its omnipotence.)
I know what it’s like to experience something absurd in an institution and be incapable of adequately capturing that absurdity in words, either because of legal risk or my limitations as a writer (outside of one or two novelists, nothing in fiction or nonfiction can really capture the absurdity of modern institutions).
I imagine many will read some of Jones’s anecdotes, like the earliest Christmas Holiday Excuse anecdote (a story about the time someone received a “Christmas is coming up” excuse for not processing a request several months before Christmas), sensibly chuckle to himself, and then move on without fully comprehending the inappropriateness of the excuse in context or the bewildering and demoralizing feelings it produces.
Jones’s anecdotes extend to other agencies and offices like the FBI or INS (the latter’s functions now being distributed among agencies like ICE and CBP within Homeland Security). For example, Jones writes:
“INS holding pens were always full of arrivals from Asia. An INS officer explained that illegal immigrants would flush their passports down the toilet on the plane, then arrive with no documents and claim that they’d be killed if they were forced to return. Sometimes they’d cut their wrists, though never deeply enough to endanger their lives. Once, a group of men chained themselves together. The INS would have to release them and tell them to come back again in to the office for an interview. Of course none ever did.”
Aside from conveying amusing anecdotes, the primary purpose of the book is to catalyze reform (or even elimination) of the CIA by setting forth a model for how successful human intelligence is collected. Jones accomplishes this by telling his story in a way that identifies whom the agency tends to recruit for cover work, how the agency operates to prevent officers from accomplishing the agency’s mission, and how the rare successful officer circumvents the agency to accomplish the agency’s mission.
The Spirit vs. the Letter
Jones frames the problem of CIA bureaucracy in terms of the conflict between the spirit and letter of the law. A famous example in the philosophy of law is H.L.A. Hart’s ordinance “no vehicle in the parks,” to which Lon Fuller raised the famous hard case of a veteran’s committee pursuing the construction of a memorial featuring a Jeep in the park. Undeniably, such a memorial would violate the letter of the law, yet adhering to the letter doesn’t feel like the right thing to do in this case (at least to common law folk). The reason it doesn’t feel right, according to Fuller, is that we look to the purpose of the law and not just its language to determine how to properly interpret and apply the law.
Late in the book, Jones gives his own example of the distinction. In response to a wild orgy at CIA headquarters in Iraq, the Agency installed cameras and prohibited the consumption of alcohol in the public space where the orgy occurred. Jones nevertheless visits the space to enjoy a beer. When challenged by a colleague, Jones replies that he’s “breaking the letter of the law, but not the spirit,” because, “[t]he rule wasn’t meant to keep a lonely guy from listening to music and having a single beer.”
This mindset explains why, unlike many of his colleagues, Jones can perform as a successful cover officer, and why the Agency is an active impediment to its own mission.
Jones fleshes out the spirit-letter dichotomy by portraying the formal rules and procedures of the CIA as legitimacy-spaces in which increasingly risk-averse individual bureaucrats and politicians hide. The insight here, at least for me, is that if adherence to a formal rule regardless of the outcome of such adherence allows an individual or institution to legitimize itself, then people and institutions have incentives to appear to adhere to formal rules without concern for the consequences of such adherence.
Moldbug popularized the phrase “manipulating procedural outcomes” to describe, as I understand it, how money and the manipulation of public opinion can be used to exploit the neutral laws and procedures of modern government. When procedural outcomes are manipulated, strict adherence to the letter of the law is maintained but the spirit of the law is perverted, such that the law is weaponized for the purposes of “lawfare”.
This is a very old observation in legal philosophy deriving from disputes between formalistic or normative legal philosophies and more wholistic or informal legal philosophies. Critics of formal law stretching from antiquity to the 20th century observed that formalism could be used to legitimize illegitimate acts of sovereignty, implying for such critics that the written law cannot protect you from illegitimate power and can even expand illegitimate power under the guise of restraining it.
The manipulation of procedural outcomes isn’t just a sinister weapon of political competition, however. Individual bureaucrats and politicians often operate from personal and short-sighted incentives that push them to manipulate procedural outcomes. Whether an auditor is breathing down your neck or an appointed official is urgently seeking a “win” to publicize, bureaucrats have an incentive to technically satisfy the letter of the law to pass the audit or produce a “win.” But rather than adhering to the letter of the law to achieve its spirit, the bureaucrat is adhering to the letter to achieve unrelated, self-protective results.
Thus, Jones’s book implies that whether an agency successfully fulfills the spirit of the law – its mission -- depends upon the quality of the people the agency employs to implement its formal laws. Some people want to fulfill the mission while others want to protect themselves and avoid feelings of anxiety. The former often ignore the letter of the law in favor of its spirit because the exigencies of reality are never perfectly captured by formal laws, while the latter tend to seek the appearance of compliance with the letter of the law to hide from the demanding responsibilities of reality.
If the rule of formal law becomes a refuge for the weak, short-sighted, and risk-averse, then the task of the agency reformer is to improve the quality of personnel while diminishing the authority of the formal law. The task is not, in other words, to restore the strength or “original meaning” of the formal law and eliminate its manipulation.
A properly functioning state prioritizes the will, intelligence, and creativity of the individuals operating the state over formal law and procedure. This entails that the best state is, in the words of Jacob Burckhardt, a “work of art” -- the product of ongoing conscious reflection and adaptation by exceptional individuals – and not a machine which blindly follows procedural forms regardless of the individuals operating the machine.
Shifting away from public institutions
As the quality of personnel declines, the nature of the agency begins to shift even as it maintains the appearance of adherence to the letter of the law, largely because of the varying incentives that push personnel to give the appearance of conformity with the law.
Sometimes the mission shift is public and reflective of short-term political “win” harvesting by transient appointed directors. A good example of how excessive formalism pairs with such incentives to violate the spirit of the law is the trend in public health institutions pursuing gun reform or climate change activism to bolster the reform transcript of politicians who otherwise lack the political power or skill to reform institutions that are designed to pursue policy goals like gun reform or climate change.
Other times the mission shift isn’t readily apparent.
The CIA has always had the mission of supplying the President with reliable intelligence, and cover officers like Jones were always supposed to be recruiting foreign human sources in furtherance of that mission. Jones describes how, during his tenure, and especially after 9/11, the agency devolved to function as a risk-averse pork distribution operation, paying unreasonable salaries and contractor fees to individuals who mostly resided in the United States and rarely collected intelligence from human sources.
As the mission shifts, the institution increasingly functions as an obstacle to individuals seeking to implement the spirit of the law. This compels exceptional personnel dedicated to the spirit of the law to operate outside the scope of the letter and therefore the purview of the institution. Such exceptional personnel often weaponize the lazy and nihilistic formalism of the institution itself to provide themselves with additional cover.
In Jones’s context, this eventually means that he must treat the CIA and its mandarins like human sources. He must, in other words, manipulate procedural outcomes to his benefit within the agency, to handle, placate, and evade detection among its mandarins, solely to fulfill the spirit of the law.
In fleshing out Jones’s thesis, I’ll survey his account of how the Agency recruits officers and agents, and how it fulfills its mission in general. Along the way I’ll recount some of his interesting anecdotes concerning, for example, how his efforts to recruit Israeli and British agents were thwarted by Agency mandarins.