I am suffering from cognitive dissonance. On Monday night—the very same night it was collecting three Oscars–I watched on TV The Bourne Ultimatum. It is, as many reviewers last year noted, a first-rate thriller. It is also a deeply crackpot view of the CIA.
It harks back to 1970s paranoid thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View which depict “the Agency” as deeply malevolent but also darn-near omnipotent. The conceit of the Bourne movies is that Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) has been trained to be a professional assassin by the CIA; in The Bourne Ultimatum the training techniques seem to involve water-torture and, as a final initiation rite, making him shoot a handcuffed, hooded prisoner.

Once Bourne goes renegade, the CIA dispatches other teams of killers to try to take him down. Sitting in a control room in New York, agency muckety-mucks hit a few buttons on their computers to access any information in the world.

Uh, right.

My cognitive dissonance stems from the fact that I just read the galleys of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, a first-rate book coming out in July from Encounter Books. The author is “Ishmael Jones,” a recently retired veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service who spent years abroad working under non-official cover.

The agency he depicts couldn’t be more different from the one shown in the Bourne movies. It is well-meaning but fundamentally plodding and risk-averse. Far from giving its employees the right to kill on sight, the agency he served requires approval from multiple layers of bureaucracy before a field agent can even telephone a nuclear-weapons scientist from a rogue state. Jones recounts how he had to ignore the bureaucracy just to contact such a scientist because if he had waited for approval it would have been too late. “A CIA officer visiting a nasty rogue state to conduct an intelligence operation was out of the question,” he adds.

Which is the real CIA? The one so beloved of popular fiction or the one depicted by so many of its former employees who like Jones have written memoirs of their service? I wish it were the former but I fear it’s the latter.

Which is why serious attention should be focused on a proposal that Jones puts forward at the end of his tome: to disband the CIA altogether and to assign its functions to existing agencies—the State Department, FBI, and military intelligence—that he thinks work better.