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Can’t anyone go into the spy business and retire quietly, anymore?
Apparently not. It’s not just the 576 pages of George Tenet’s new book, but apparently so many others, which are straining the CIA.
In order for a former CIA employee to publish a book, he/she needs to get approval from the agency’s Publications Review Board (the FBI has a similar board).
USA Today reports that the CIA gets 100 such requests–complete with manuscripts–per month, now. But in 2000, it received only 300 requests in the entire year. In 1980, there were fewer than 100 and a total of 10,000 pages.

(Tenet-afat Artwork by David Lunde/Lundesigns)
And guess who pays for that? We do. Disturbingly, USA Today reports that the agency even has its own “in-house writer’s support group,” called “Invisible Ink.”
Are we running a spy agency here? Or a club for extracurricular hobbies? Time to tell CIA employees that if they want to become authors, they should consider working elsewhere.
That goes for Valerie Plame a/k/a Joe Wilson’s “my beautiful wife.” If she wanted to be a star, she should have moved to Hollywood. Not Langley. Ditto for the egomaniacal so-called Bin Laden expert, Michael Scheuer (whom the CIA notably removed from the Bin Laden desk), whose endless anti-Israel books respecting Bin Laden all go through the CIA vetting process your taxes are funding.