What must be one of the most tightly held secrets of CIA is the identities and operations of what are called Non Official Cover (NOC) officers. These individuals operate far from the safety of U.S. Embassies as private U.S. citizens under deep cover. As this book makes clear these officers are unique and often courageous individuals.
The pseudonymous author of this book, Ishmael (Call me, Ishmael), has provided an excellent account of just how a NOC goes about the business of recruiting and exploiting foreign agents often under extremely difficult circumstances. To his great credit, Ishmael managed to produce an informative and fascinating memoir that still protects sensitive CIA names, locations and operations. Ishmael is a former Marine Infantry Officer who, despite his contempt for CIA as an institution, still is a patriot first who wants the U.S. intelligence system to really work.
This brings us to what for many is the most important revelation of this book: the fact that CIA is and apparently always has been a dysfunctional institution virtually incapable, as an institution, of either effectively collecting human intelligence (HUMINT) or doing its core mission of producing strategic intelligence. Ishmael suggests that CIA has been able to attract a host of dedicated, capable people who should have made CIA the premier intelligence agency of the world. Unfortunately, Ishmael also describes a culture of amateurism and bureaucratic gamesmanship that has more often than not hampered if not prevented the agency from doing it job of producing good intelligence. CIA managers as described in this book come off as risk adverse, ill-informed bureaucrats incapable of supervising even mundane administrative activities. Ishmael also implies that CIA managers are excellent at protecting themselves, their `turf' and, of course, hoodwinking their nominal overseers in congress.
All this is pretty harsh on CIA, but seems to square with what Robert Baer, another competent and patriotic CIA intelligence officer, has noted in his own `intelligence memoir', "See No Evil" about his adventures as a case officer. Reading both books is an interesting exercise. Although there is no evidence in either book that the men knew each other both have arrived at remarkably similar conclusions on the sad state of CIA.
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