Call Me Ishmael Jones - Part 2

Crisis and Expand

Part 1 is available here.

In this part I’ll summarize how, from Jones’s perspective, CIA mandarins perceive and operate their Agency, such that intelligence collection is often hampered. In so doing I’ll restructure Jones’s content along the model set forth in the introduction, discussing risk-averse behaviors, the crises they precipitate, and the resulting dysfunctional crisis response behaviors, highlighting along the way the personnel problems that are created by, and catalyze, these behaviors.

The CIA and Journalism

Jones begins his book by functionally defining the CIA’s mission as looking busy while spending money and being risk-averse, with the Agency’s mission of protecting and informing the President being transformed into a mission to protect the Agency.

Because of the CIA’s position within the Executive branch, housing various politicized appointed leadership positions, and its connection to Congressional intelligence committees, enabling persistent relationships and information flows to and from elected Representatives, the Agency’s operations are heavily informed by politics (journalism).

Political dependence upon the public sphere, which is sustained by the mass media, provides Agency mandarins with a de facto inspector general biased in their favor. Jones highlights a closed-loop relationship with cable news as well when he describes how one colleague was given a $40,000 budget and ordered to spend it on televisions for his office (to be perpetually tuned into CNN), even though he didn’t want them.

Jones explains that prestige media incentives like the Pulitzer keep journalists dependent upon the strategic leaking of (sometimes false or misleading) classified information by Agency mandarins and encourage reporters to participate in political assassination campaigns that benefit the CIA bureaucracy. In one instance, Jones suspects a politically active mandarin of leaking and asks a high-level bureaucrat why nobody has put a stop to it, to which the bureaucrat responds that nobody knows who is leaking. In another, Jones asserts that the Agency falsely leaked that the Agency had warned President Bush about 9/11 to deflect blame upon the President and FBI.

That the Agency would try to blame the FBI is salient for many reasons, not the least of which is that rival intelligence Agencies under the same Executive compete with each other through public relations, including, we may assume, guerilla marketing campaigns online. For the purposes of this article, the CIA blaming the FBI is relevant to how the Agency bureaucracy understands itself and the CIA.