SpyTalk

Jones denounced claims by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the CIA kept her in the dark about water-boarding terrorist suspects, saying the California Democrat "has been using the interrogation issue as a political tool for years."

But he said the spy agency's congressional briefers are also experts at camouflaging classified programs.

"In Mrs. Pelosi's defense, CIA managers do not give fist-pounding briefings," Jones recently wrote for the conservative National Review in a blog that drew scant media interest.

"They mumble, they dissemble, and there's a lot of 'on the one hand ...'," Jones declared.

The CIA deploys so many briefers to the Hill it's hard for both the agency and intelligence committee members to reconstruct who said what to whom, he added. 

"Its enormous numbers of employees have led to briefings being handled by groups, with vague chains of command, so that it may have been difficult to pin down what was said, when it was said, and who was in charge," Jones said of the CIA interrogation briefings.

Jones also charged that, contrary to beliefs that the agency has a political agenda, "In reality the CIA is loyal only to itself. As long as Mrs. Pelosi supported its bureaucratic lifestyle, it supported her, but when she attacked it, it fought back. The CIA may not be able to conduct efficient intelligence operations, but it knows how to survive."

Reports that CIA managers were outraged or demoralized by the water-boarding controversy are wrong, Jones also maintained. To the contrary, he said, they felt that revelations of their interrogators roughing up, or even torturing, detainees made them look tough.

"The interrogations controversy has served the CIA bureaucracy," Jones asserted. "A top goal of bureaucracy is to look busy, and whether one agrees with the interrogation methods or not, the impression given is that the CIA is both busy and aggressive."

Jones added: "It relishes this 'cowboy' image, and its greatest fear is that the taxpayer might figure out how little it actually is doing.

"Bans or restrictions on interrogations," he added, "would have the constructive effect of removing this smokescreen, this distraction, and redirecting focus to what exactly the CIA is doing to provide the foreign intelligence the president needs."

A CIA spokesman said Jones didn't know what he was talking about.

"His comments prove--as if further proof was necessary--that Ishmael Jones knows nothing about the Central Intelligence Agency," CIA spokesman George Little said in an email Tuesday.

"From counterterrorism and counterproliferation to virtually any other national security challenge you can identify, the CIA lives up to its name--it is central to providing detailed intelligence to our government, including the United States Congress."

"Jones" surfaced last summer with the publication of a rogue memoir, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, ignoring agency rules that required him to clear the book with its censors.

"I'm ready to take whatever they have to do," Jones told SpyTalk in a July 29, 2008 interview.

As it has in the past, the CIA declined to comment Tuesday on a legal response -- if any -- to Jones' unauthorized memoir.

"There is no classified information in the book," Jones maintained in his SpyTalk interview. He said he used a pseudonym because "I was under deep cover for most of my career, so to use my real name might expose people I've met."

"There are no viable whistleblower mechanisms within the CIA, Jones told National Review.

"If a single FBI agent, with full security clearances and a contact number, were assigned to the CIA with the ability to investigate reports of fraud and waste provided by CIA employees," he added, "it would set off a chain reaction of accountability."

According to some accounts, President Obama's appointment of Leon Panetta to lead the agency has improved relations with the intelligence committees.

"Not only has he won over some detractors who had questioned his loyalty to the agency," CQ intelligence reporter Tim Starks wrote over the weekend, "he also appears, for now, to be successfully balancing the CIA's need to keep its work quarantined as much as possible from external political influences and the mandate to improve the agency's congressional relations, which had soured during George W. Bush's presidency."