CIA Veteran Rips Agency, Tests Limits of Right to Publish Without Permission

[babylonsister]

CIA Veteran Rips Agency, Tests Limits of Right to Publish Without Permission
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor


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.

“There is no classified information in the book,” he maintains. He used a pseudonym, he says, because “I was under deep cover for most of my career, so to use my real name might expose people I’ve met.”

Jones (whose true identity has been independently verified) says he is giving any money he earns from the book to the children of a hometown soldier who was killed in Iraq.

But 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.

more...

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002933505

[annabanana]

1. Why do I think he ought to go ahead and release the galleys?

ASAP. . online.

[bdf]

2. To wikileaks (n/t)