American Thought Leaders - How the FBI and CIA Operate as ‘States Within a State’: Michael Waller

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“So, you had this left-wing, pro-communist and left-wing, anti-communist sections in our intelligence services. And then when the OSS was abolished, many went into the State Department. And they shaped the policies that we’re living with today.”In this episode, I sit down with Michael Waller, senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and the author of “Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.”“There was a breaking point in the FBI and the CIA where they stopped serving American interests,” says Mr. Waller. “It ceases to serve the American interest if they view themselves as states within a state.”We dive into how the Soviet Union influenced our intelligence and security agencies, and how President Barack Obama fundamentally altered their agendas.“They’re making our own FBI agents and CIA officers what they call ‘agents of change,’ to change our culture. This is not legal. This is not what the intelligence community is for,” says Mr. Waller.He also reflects on Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin.“I think any journalist should go meet any foreign leader and get whatever information or disinformation he can out of him. As long as he knows it’s all an orchestrated setup on the other side,” says Mr. Waller.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

So you had this left-wing pro-communist and left-wing anti-communist sections in our intelligence services. And then when the OSS was abolished, many went into the State Department, and they shaped the policies that we're living with today. In this episode, I sit down with Michael Waller, Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy, and author of Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. There was a breaking point in the FBI and the CIA where they stopped serving American interests. We dive into how the Soviet Union influenced America's intelligence and security agencies, how President Barack Obama fundamentally altered their agendas, and how woke ideology has ultimately shifted their focus. They're making our own FBI agents and CIA officers what they call agents of change,

to change our culture. This is not what the intelligence community is for. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year. And Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation. American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver.

With one short phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside your IRA or 401. American Hartford Gold is one of the highest-rated firms in the country, with an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients. If you call them right now, they'll give you up to $2,500 of free silver and a free safe on qualifying orders. Call 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Michael Waller, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be back with you. It's been a long time. And you have an amazing new book out. Okay, before I dive into big intel, I want to ask you

about, as we're filming today, the Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin interview. Okay, so what do you make of Tucker Carlson going to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin? I think any journalist should go meet any foreign leader and get whatever information or disinformation he can out of him, as long as he knows it's all an orchestrated setup on the other side. My thoughts almost exactly. So that's interesting. Putin's going to say what he will say, will have said. And one can guarantee that he put his best propaganda people in charge of prepping him

for a very long time. So what do you make of, you know, suggestions that Tucker Carlson shouldn't be allowed back into the country? Or I haven't verified this, but having been put on a kill list by the Ukrainians, what do you make of these types of things? That's a great way for the Ukrainians to win support from people who are on the fence, you know, is to threaten to kill Tucker Carlson, really. What kind of lunacy is out there where they want to use either censorship or violence to prevent a journalist or commentator from interviewing a world leader? Any journalist probably should want to interview any world leader, you know, with the appropriate caveats that you mentioned earlier, it would seem a normal thing. Of course it would. I mean, who wouldn't want to interview Xi Jinping? Any international journalist would want to interview the guy, knowing that it's all set up.

So before we dive into Big Intel, tell me a little bit about your background so we know, you know, what you're coming in with here. Well, my background is kind of eclectic. I came in with a very favorable view toward the FBI and the CIA and our whole intelligence community as the fundamental instruments of our protection during the Cold War. FBI mainly is counterintelligence against Soviet spies and agents of influence. CIA is the main instrument of containment of communism, or what we had hoped would have been. Waging covert warfare at the sub-military level so that we wouldn't have to send our own troops in. Informing our presidents, you know, with the finest possible intelligence, gathered in the best manner,

with the most solid vetting and everything. That's what I was expecting. What I saw was something very different, coming in as a college undergrad. And so that's how I got into all of this, and I've sort of been looking in still with a lot of contacts inside the system, but very alarmed that where any human institution is going to have its problems always, its challenges always, there was a breaking point in the FBI and the CIA

where they stopped serving American interests. I mean, that's an astonishing statement, or maybe would have been astonishing some years back. Right now, there are many people, including myself, that are wondering how much that statement is true, because obviously it can't be entirely true, right? Right, right. No, it's a generalization. But if you were to say, is it a yes or no issue, looking at it in a black or white way, it ceases to serve the American interest if they view themselves as states within a state, if they cease believing in the real American founding principles.

And they're there as the central government to protect all of us rather than servants of all of us. So it's flipped on its head. Of course they fight foreign spies. Of course they're great at fighting human child trafficking within the country. They're great at fighting organized crime. The FBI has done a lot. They've protected us from international terrorism attacks.

The CIA has been the world's best at this. There's no question. But there gets to be that breaking point where what are they protecting if they're full of people who don't believe in America anymore, the way it was founded, and the principles on which it's based? And they view half the country as potential enemies. in America anymore the way it was founded and the principles on which it's based. And they view half the country as potential enemies. So, you know, you entered, let's call it the system, you know, out of college. But tell me a little just about your career. It was never in the government.

It was around the government. So starting out as an undergrad, I was approached when I was a student journalist, ended up being a part of CIA Director William Casey's privately funded network to support President Reagan's policies against the Soviet bloc, to roll back Soviet communism. Didn't really know what I was getting into at the time, but, and I should have been quicker to figure out if you're told to go to church and sit in the back and then the CIA director walks up to you and tells you a name, has somebody repeat the name, and he keeps going after one of his friends had given you walking around money to go on a trip with a CIA-backed insurgency against a communist regime. It took me a long time as a 21-year-old to put all that together. But in fact, it was actually Bill Casey giving me my cryptonym at St. Matthew's Cathedral.

And 30 years later, I found he did that so that he would never have to testify before Congress what went on in church. Can you just flesh out a little more about what you actually did? Yeah, well, first I started out wanting to be in the CIA to wage the fight, Reagan's fight against communism, and was told by a few people. My professor, Jack Ziak, and Angelo Cotovilla, who's really well known, who I knew as a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer. And he said, don't go in. You will hate it and it will hate you. It's not for the mission oriented anymore. Wow. And what year was this? 1983. So that's when I went in with Casey's privately funded network, which it turns out he was funding

it out of his pocket. Again, so he wouldn't have to tell Congress anything because it was his own money. It was his own business. We were just kids. We didn't know what we were up to. And we just went. And my job ended up being to collect intelligence in Central America on Soviet bloc support for the communist government in Nicaragua and for communist guerrilla movements elsewhere in the region. And at some point you stopped doing this, I guess, was it at the end of his tenure? It was before then. Yeah, I got married at the time and then went off and did other things. But I met a Salvadoran girl during the war. We had a family, but I kept going back and forth. And I still worked with the Contras in my own private capacity because I believed in their cause and was working with the Salvadoran army in my own private capacity

as well, and then went into journalism. I keep hearing this narrative repeated. This is kind of a narrative, let's say, on the conservative side, that mainstream media is actually just a mouthpiece for US intelligence. You've heard this? What do you make of that? Some journalists are, for some elements in US intelligence. What we have is a symbiosis between the intelligence community and mainstream media and some investigative journalists who are chiefly on the left.

And it's been this way since the 50s. You build up the careers of certain journalists at the Washington Post or the big three networks that they used to have, or then CNN and certain websites now. You leak to them illegal leaks. It's illegal leaks of classified information. They become dependent on you, the intelligence officer or analyst or agent as the source. So they're not going to cross you. They're not going to say anything bad about your entity. They're going to protect you as a source, and then you're going to build them up in their careers. They're going to write books.

The better ones are going to make a lot of money off these books. They might get some movies out of it. And so you're creating now a wealthy cast of journalists who are wholly dependent on the intelligence community as their sources of livelihood. And do you have a sense of how prevalent that approach is? Anybody can tell. If you read intelligence sources say, or so-and-so has received, you know, documents from the CIA, or unnamed intelligence officials say this, that means, okay, unnamed officials are leaking to that journalist or to that news organization. So there's a favored relationship in there. Now, any good journalist

is going to work sources in there, but not any good journalist is going to get a constant stream of leaks over a lifetime of journalism. You mentioned that these relationships started in the 50s. I mean, you hear about Operation Mockingbird, for example, and so forth. But the thesis of your book is, you know, they went from war heroes to deep state villains, right? Or Cold War heroes to deep state villains. And so that started as early as in the 50s? Is that what you're saying? Or explain that to me. Well, that's when the CIA was founded, in the early 50s. Right. And that's when the Cold War began. Now, on the one hand, it's important for journalists

to know certain things. But it's also important for intelligence officers to obey the law and not leak classified information to journalists and not pick favorites among journalists. So this is where in the 50s you had Allen Dulles who was head of the CIA and his brother John Foster Dulles who was Secretary of State and they were very close to President Eisenhower. So there were times like with Khrushchev's secret speech. Nikita Khrushchev gave that speech to the Soviet Party Congress to supposedly expose Stalin's crimes and to hold themselves all blameless for the crimes they also committed. But it was admitting that it wasn't just Stalin who was the bad guy.

It was the whole communist leadership and international communist movement. And so that's why it was a secret speech, because if the whole communist movement knew about it, just the different parties of loyal Soviet agents and supporters around the world, if they knew, they'd be terribly demoralized. So when the U.S. got their hands on this speech, that had to come out. That was a great intelligence coup to get that speech. So how do you publish it? Do you have the CIA leak it? No. In this case, you had the Secretary of State release it as a State Department release, translated into various languages by the AFL-CIO, by a private entity that was allied with the U.S. in waging the Cold War for distribution to ethnic communities who didn't speak English or to distribute abroad. So that's a good way of using intelligence in a non-manipulative fashion,

not playing favorites with journalists and just getting information out there. So they knew how to do it right. But they also knew how to do Operation Mockingbird type activity, which was to run things through news organizations. With a specific agenda. Yeah. And when it becomes a political agenda, it gets even worse because then it's intervening in how Americans think about their

own leaders, how they think about their own policies. And then you have unaccountable intelligence officials manipulating American public opinion and therefore American politics and elections through management of attitudes. You could briefly remind us for the benefit of the viewers, you know, what is Operation Walking Birdbird, if someone may not have heard of it? And, you know, some people suggest this is something that's still very much ongoing. So, well, we don't know what's ongoing, first of all, do we? So we don't know what kind of operations are continuing or what new ones there might be. So we know what's been declassified or leaked.

So Mockingbird was an operation to work through the press to influence public opinion, capture journalists that way. It was very straightforward, but it was not just individual CIA officials leaking to certain journalists. It was an actual controlled operation that was run from the top and coordinated. And was that with the intent to seed specific narratives into society? Yeah, it was really to wage the Cold War against the Soviets. But the way the CIA did it was they didn't support real anti-communist movements.

They didn't build up anti-communist forces. They built up non-communist forces. They built up the Democratic leftist forces. They built up the democratic left or even the almost democratic left or undemocratic left that wasn't totalitarian to keep them away from the Soviet controlled communist parties and organizations and to bring them into the wider spectrum of politics

in whatever countries they were in. So you had the real anti-communists in Europe. Who were they? We don't know. It was all sort of moderate Christian Democrats. And then anti-communist labor, not because they were right-wingers, but because they viewed the communists as rivals in their faction to control the labor movement. So you had this building up of the international left while the Soviets were

building up the international hard left at the same time. And that dramatically affected world politics and the way the world is today and globalism for that matter, because it was, they were both global movements. You know, you actually make a very interesting point because, you know, let's take the solidarity movement in Poland, which is perhaps one of the ones that I'm the most familiar with, right? There was a group of the Solidarity Movement, which was called Fighting Solidarity, Solidarność Walcząca. And they were the only group actually which had the explicit mandate to be anti-communist, to basically seek the removal of communist governance or something like this. Whereas a lot of people today don't understand actually that solidarity was a labor

union fighting for workers' rights. Some people do, but a lot of people don't. How many people know about fighting solidarity? You don't hear about it much. I'd forgotten about it. Right. That's fascinating. So explain to me, and of course, you develop this quite a bit in Big Intel, but explain to me why. Why were they not supporting anti-communist forces but only so-called non-communists? That's a fascinating distinction to me. During World War II, we didn't have an intelligence service when the war was about to begin for us. It had already begun elsewhere in the world. But it didn't affect us really, but we had no foreign intelligence service.

So the British came to the U.S. and said, hey, you guys really need a foreign intelligence service. Let us help you set one up. Seemed like a pretty good deal. President Roosevelt appointed William Donovan, Wild Bill Donovan, to set up what became the Office of Strategic Services. And that was our wartime intelligence service that collected and analyzed intelligence for the president and then ran covert operations behind enemy lines. So this is where young guys like Bill Casey were recruited. He invented the hedge fund, not the hedge fund, the tax shelters to help people get around Roosevelt's New Deal wealth confiscation. So you need guys like that who just know how to disrupt systems with minimal effort to be brought in. A lot of them were good

anti-communists in general as well as anti-Nazi. But when you think about during the war, Bill Donovan's real goal with the OSS was, and the way he saw it, defeat the Axis enemy. He didn't see anything beyond that. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, Donovan couldn't stand him and it was mutual, said, it's not just that. Stalin wants to reshape the world after the Nazis

are defeated. We have to be cognizant of the fact that he's going to be manipulating us. And lo and behold, of course, Stalin was flooding the United States with his agents and assets and so forth, many of whom went into the OSS. So you need native speakers of these different languages behind Nazi lines and in areas we need to operate. Who are you going to get? Well, it was a lot of them were Communist Party members from those countries who had fled to the United States, some for refuge, some to implant themselves as agents.

So this is where the Frankfurt School developed in the United States. We can touch that later on. For the purposes of our diplomacy and our covert operations, if you have left-wingers from Europe and communists from Europe coming in to the United States in the 30s, joining our intelligence services as subject matter experts and operatives, they're thinking of where they came from and they're thinking, we want to shape that when it's done. So you have the Stalinists want to shape it on Stalinist lines But then you have the euro socialists want to have a socialist Europe emerge from this

This is not putting American interests first. This is defeating Hitler for whatever they want. So you had this left-wing pro-communist and left-wing anti-communist sections in our intelligence services and then when the OSS was abolished, many went into the State Department, and they shaped the policies that we're living with today. That's fascinating. Well, so you actually, you know, you, I think you use this term, right, from Diana West,

the unbroken thread, right? The red thread. Sorry, the red thread, that's right. Actually, I interviewed her about that book years ago now. She found some astonishing disclosures around people who identified as communists very early on and so forth. You're basically saying the seeds of this were there right from the beginning, right? Before our beginning. So yeah, it's one thing to say, well, these people on the left or these Soviet agents did something in the 30s and therefore things are the way they are

today. That's not cause and effect to say that. So in writing Big Intel, I was looking really at what happened under Obama. How did the center just collapse within the FBI and the CIA and they both got overtaken by wokeness? Who was responsible? When did it happen? Why did it happen? What are the original documents to prove that it happened this way? And then going to look back, well, where did that impetus come from?

And where did it come from before that? So by going backwards, you find the Diana West's red thread, this intellectual chain of custody, going back without a break from person to person, all the way back to a 1922 meeting in Moscow over 100 years ago at the Marx Engels Institute with the leaders of the Comintern, it was the Communist International. So this was a brand new international, global entity that was set up by the Bolsheviks to control all the radical socialist and communist parties around the world, make them loyal to the Bolshevik revolution, and then to replicate Bolshevism worldwide. But it was all a centrally structured command and control system for this. So they're meeting at the Marx Engels Institute with their European, mainly, agents and the founder of the Cheka, or what became the KGB, Felix Juzinsky, to discuss how can we have a Bolshevik-type revolution worldwide? And the consensus was, well, we're not going to have workers rise up in a violent workers' struggle like Marx had called for,

or even a violent revolution as had happened in Russia, because the workers are being paid too well. They're aspiring, or at least they have some kind of hope. We have to find a different way to do it. So a Hungarian Bolshevik named Georgi Lukács, who had been a minister of culture in the Hungarian Bolshevik regime that had taken power just before the Soviets took power. It didn't last long. But he was the strategist behind the Red Terror of his country, to round people up and murder them based on their political

and cultural views, to break up families, to break up churches, to break up any sense of moral tradition, to sexualize children and separate them from their parents, break up nuclear families. This was a strategy of his. Sounds familiar. It sounds familiar. He lived until 1971, and he was very active as a theorist and a revered figure on the left for all those decades. He was part of that red thread, but it was one of his ideas. He was the first to implement it.

Karl Marx came up with it in 1843, five years before he ever wrote the Communist Manifesto. So he wasn't this economic madman who didn't know anything about economics, became famous for the manifesto and then das capital but five years earlier he was a cultural warrior he was writing about destroying pride in one's country you know obeying legitimate laws church family, parents, all of these things were oppressive. Your country's oppressive, your just rulers are oppressive, your morals are oppressive, your religion is oppressive, your parents are oppressive, your siblings are oppressive, everybody is oppressing you. And that was what he wanted to do to just rip society apart. That didn't catch on, so he got onto the Industrial Revolution troubles

and the terrible treatment of workers back at that time to try to then have economic conflicts become the engine of change. So this was revived after the Bolshevik Revolution at this 1922 meeting to set up a school in Germany where you could have all the intellectuals and trendy beautiful people and trust fund babies looking to be cool and relevant and add a lot of Freudian sex stuff and drugs and any kind of intoxication and just be cool and have a good time being revolutionaries to rip society apart. At a time when Germany itself was ripping itself apart after its unconditional surrender after World War I, not knowing what direction it's going to go, and it didn't have a long history of unity as a unitary state anyway.

So you had all these factions battling each other. So the cultural Marxists, backed by the Soviets, thought, let's just fight the Hitlerites last. We'll fight everyone else first, tear out the center of the country, and then we'll take over. Well, Hitler moved faster than they did. They fled. Many of them came to the United States with the help of a Soviet intelligence agent who negotiated with Columbia University for them to set up their Frankfurt school shop at Columbia University, which had a teaching school to teach the teachers who's fanned out across America. And to work with a certain John Dewey,

who was head of the National Education Association, who went to the Soviet Union and wrote a six-part series in the New Republic praising Stalin's education system and designing a new education system to change how American children learn and how they view the world. I'm thinking about Yuri Bezmenov right now. Because Yuri Bezmenov, you know, there's a few videos of him lecturing that have been preserved, talking about how a core... let's say the majority, I think he, I believe he says the majority of the effort that the Soviet, I guess it's the KGB or, you know, state security exerts is to basically subvert America versus gather intelligence or something like that.

Besmanov gets a whole chapter in big intel. So I went through those interviews and his lectures, transcribed a lot of them so that they'd be now in print and not have YouTube suddenly make them all vanish someday. And he was such a wise figure of his time. These were interviews that took place 40 years ago. And just very briefly, if you can just tell us who he was. He wasn't a KGB man. He was a Soviet propagandist under a journalistic cover based in India. But he knew the whole English-speaking world very well. So he defected to the United States, relocated in Canada,

and then surfaced with this immense knowledge of how Soviet propagandists are trained and the whole philosophy and doctrine behind that training and the hows and the whys of that training to break down our societies piece by piece, to create confusion, to create demoralization, to cause us to lose faith in ourselves and everyone around us and everything that we ever believed was good, and just to ruin us inside, to collapse us from within, and to basically defeat us the way Sun Tzu wrote, right? You defeat the enemy without fighting him. And this is what Besminov was explaining in 1983 and 84.

I don't think a lot of people, you know, understood it or were ready to grasp that this was something that was happening or I don't know how, how was it received at the time? It was received by people who were ideologically anti-communist and allied with President Reagan. No one else wanted to hear the message. I would argue that our biggest threat at subversion, and I think I could argue extensively about this, currently comes from the Chinese Communist Party, which I know this is something you know a lot about because we've talked about it in the past, both online and offline.

But it's not something that appears a lot in big intel, and I'm curious about that. That's a whole separate book or separate lifetime of work to explore that, but I didn't focus on them in big intel because I was looking at, I was trying to answer how did the FBI and CIA become woke mm-hmm then I traced to Obama and then Obama's political lineage and the people all around Obama the CIA director under Obama had voted for a Soviet agent to

become president of the United States and knew that he was a Soviet agent. This is Gus Hall running on the Communist Party USA ticket. And then three years later, he gets hired by the CIA. That's kind of a problem. Why? And it's not like he had an epiphany at some point to fight these guys. He just sort of dismissed it and just went along. And even in his memoir,

where he admitted this, he, he never drew any lessons from it. He just said it was a, a lark as a young man. He didn't hide his ideological predilections as, as at the time that he was being hired into the agency. Right. Right. If I recall correctly. So this was, I mean, I, that's what I, I, I found shocking. Right. Well, I mean, that's what I found shocking. Well, what you do when you're interviewing for a job with security clearance, especially in intelligence, it's like confession. You admit all your dirt

because they're going to find it out on you anyway, and if you're lying or obfuscating, then you're definitely out. So you admit it and then they assess, well, does this present a danger to the United States? Well, right, exactly. Yeah. So, hello, but he had just voted a few years earlier for the Soviets and now he wants to be a CIA officer. It's not like he's a defector from the Communist Party saying, I want to help the U.S. destroy this. It's, okay, I voted for Leonid Brezhnev's man to run America.

He makes his career there. And then Obama makes him his Homeland Security Advisor at the White House and then names him to run the CIA. At the same time, another radical, General Clapper, who, you know, just because these guys wear uniforms and have stars and talk about, my lifetime of brave service, or whatever they say. No, he was a known extremist throughout his career. His stories about him at the Defense Intelligence Agency back in the 90s, and I was close to people at the DIA at the time, and I heard them firsthand then and collected more since. He was protecting the worst elements in the DIA. He even protected the group of female Latin America analysts at the time who were outwardly pro-Che Guevara.

One had a Che Guevara poster in her cubicle, not as a trophy, but as a sort of a shrine. But one of the people he was protecting was Annabelle and Montes, the Cuban spy. Now, I'm not alleging he knew that she was a spy, but I am alleging that he was protecting openly radical extremists who were intelligence analysts there. He gave Pentagon passes to the Russian GRU military intelligence resident, the chief of Russian military, Soviet and Russian military intelligence here in Washington, a Pentagon pass to go around unescorted. Who on earth would do this? He had the authority to do that. So these are the people who make their way up the system and somehow they all coalesce under Barack Obama at the top of the intelligence community.

And then they reach down into the system to bring up those who came in from below and put them in middle management and upper management, but couldn't do it on their merits a lot. So that's where diversity, equity, and inclusion comes in to pull them up for other criteria. And lo and behold, you have now woke people running the entire nerve center of the CIA. Well, so this is very interesting because one thing that, you know, from lots of discussions with people

who have been studying this or, you know, trying to expose it, is how DEI actually works. It essentially, there's a kind of a coded language, if you will, if you speak the language and you put it into your applications, everybody who is involved knows exactly what it means and knows what team you're on. And that's, I guess, whether you're a true believer or someone who's just kind of figured out the code

and how to game the system, because I assume it's... There's a lot of that. Right, right. Not to mention any., but for example, people who would identify themselves as being some sort of visible minority or part visible minority when in fact they're not because they knew that that would get them with the right language, you know, more opportunities. Yeah.

Right. And as long as you're able to self-identify as what you're not, you can be advanced because your ideology is right. But I mean, look what this does to truth. identify as what you're not, you can be advanced because your ideology is right. But I mean, look what this does to truth. If you can say that you're a gender or a sex or a race or whatever that you're not, and people are forced to believe that you are, and they can't just agree that you are, they have to really believe that you are, because that's part of it, is like Winston in 1984. Two plus two equals five.

You can't just say it. That's not good enough. You have to believe it. So, like, the FBI had a training program in 2021. I got the 56-page slide presentation for it that's devoted a whole chapter to it on gender and the importance of gender because now DEI is what FBI Director Wray calls a core principle also in the CIA. And the

CIA has said this on their own literature that's unclassified. So these become the core issues and if core operating principles and even the FBI recently sent out on X a message that DEI ranks on par with the U.S. Constitution as a core principle of the FBI. a man or a woman is not a woman and it's whatever gender they say they are and you must believe it and your professional future depends on it what does that do to honest assessment of evidence as a crime fighter or as an investigator what does it do to intelligence collection and assessment and the and the evaluations that we do for the national leaders of the country within the community if facts are no longer facts. Well, it's like everything is subjected to an ideological test, basically. And who did that before? The Soviets did it.

The Chinese Communist Party does it. So here we are in a post-fact intelligence community driven by social, political, cultural agendas that have their direct origins back in cultural Marxism, spawned at that 1922 meeting with Felix Jerszynski in Moscow. The Republican Congresses have been funding this stuff. So it's not like it's a partisan issue. They go along with it because it must be important if the FBI is doing it or the CIA is doing it. But if you look at what they're doing, it's important to have whoever's the best person for the job. I don't care where they're from or

what they do or what their personal life is like, as long as they're not threats to national security and they're the best people for the job. That's what you want. And you need to have the FBI trained in, okay, how do you work in certain cultural groups and subgroups? Because you have to be trusted as an investigator. You have to make a coherent case before a jury. You need to work in those communities to understand them. That's fine. But what they're doing is they're making our own FBI agents and CIA officers what they call agents of change to change our culture this is not legal this is not what the intelligence community is for but that's what they're doing what

portion of these services do you think is, you know, thinks that way, I guess, is the question. It's tiny. So in the FBI, it's about 1.6% are what the FBI now defines as LBGTQAI+. They keep changing it, so I might have switched again. 1.6%, according to the FBI's own figures. So the FBI isn't as diverse as it pretends to be. And not all that 1.6% wants to shove this down everybody's throat. Just a fraction of that wants to. So you have a militant tiny group that's within the Bureau

pushing this, and then they end up being in the nerve center and then being the political enforcers within the bureau. So according to this 2021 FBI training course, if you misgender somebody a third time, that's a mark against you professionally, and that will affect your promotion. Almost every system in Western society seems to have this same structure that you're describing, right? A very small group of people that sort of says, yes, this is the right thing we're doing. And a very tiny, ultimately a very tiny group of people behind it, but wielding great energy and effectively power and everyone else kind of going along with it with a few defectors and people who don't like it and do so openly. So think of it from a cultural Marxism side.

You've got the ideology of cultural Marxism, and the critical theory is the intellectual structure, theoretical structure for how do we process things. So you don't need to know the ideology if you're trained to think a certain way. We can't say that, that's racist. You can't say that, you're a misogynist for saying, well, I'm not, no. And then you wanna overcompensate for that so you won't be called that again. So the whole object of cultural Marxism is to cause us to lose confidence in all our

institutions. So it's not just the FBI, it's not just the CIA, it's not just government, it's medicine. Think of it, you can't trust your doctor anymore. You can't trust the pharmaceutical industry anymore. Now, there are many reasons why we should be really skeptical and concerned, but when it gets to the point

where there's a total lack of trust, what becomes of us? Well, exactly. So let's use an example, okay? Because I'm thinking of one in particular. You know, you've just mentioned these policies that, you know, Director Christopher Wray, right, of the FBI has instituted and made a, you know, kind of a top priority of the agency. And you've just explained why that is highly problematic. At the same time, you have Director Wray testifying in Congress about the Chinese Communist Party's, well, one infiltration of American systems to basically cyber tools set up to not just gather intelligence,

not perform military activities, but actually harm civilians. And this is the testimony that he's giving. I believe that testimony is accurate based on our own information. However, you probably have, and apparently for good reason from what we're discussing, a whole bunch of Americans out there doubting, maybe doubting that this is real because of other things the FBI has done that have proved to be, well, false, frankly, and contrived. So, you know, what you're describing, it's a huge problem, but there's also this important role that's being played, right, by the agency. And I'm very glad that Director Wray was able to publicly testify to these things

because this is a type of reality that we need to be incredibly concerned about. So I'm trying to figure out how we kind of square this because we kind of fall into the trap that the cultural Marxists want us to fall into and we have reason to. Yeah, now if we know the trap is there, we can avoid the trap. But if we deny the trap is there or don't see the trap at all, then we're getting pretty close to the end. So it was great to hear FBI Director Wray make that public warning about Communist China. And he specifically said, Chinese Communist Party.

I don't remember him saying it that way before. If he did, I missed it, but usually it would be the Chinese government or whatever. So it means the FBI is really on to something something and they're devoting resources to this problem. And we've seen it over the past few years anyway. But just think, if there are nine senior diversity coordinators in the FBI, that's nine senior people who are not working against the Chinese Communist Party. That's nine senior people who are alienating most FBI personnel to comply with this crazy ideology and nine senior officials who are elevating people on DEI grounds who have no business being promoted

in the first place. So on the one hand, the FBI is our first line of internal defense against Chinese Communist Party espionage and subversion. But on the other hand, it is wasting its resources on its own cultural revolution internally. So that we can't trust them even when they're doing the right thing. Or at least we have, we wonder if we can trust them even when they're doing the right thing. This is just damaging. Right. And then there's also the issue of focus, which I've talked about on numerous shows,

right? If you're focusing on ideological tests for the local populace as opposed to identifying national security threats and neutralizing them, which you're also doing. But the focus, if there's so much of an emphasis on the first thing I mentioned and the second, you know, I would argue would be kind of the entirety of the mandate gets diluted.

Yeah. Think of the people who would make the best counterintelligence officers, let's say to work against the CCP. Is the rainbow flag trans agenda really a recruitment point to get that type of person to want to join and have supervisors who force them to go this route when their real mission in life is to go hunt down Chinese communist spies. Look at military recruitment.

We can all see that. And look at the types of ads the military's been putting out to get sort of the most useless elements of 20-something society to join the military, and not the real people who we want as real warriors to join the military, alienating them out. And then we have this terrible recruitment crisis. So then you take the lowest common denominator, which is spelled D-E-I, and you focus your recruitment efforts on them to bring them up into the system for the sole purpose of making the FBI look more like America.

A number of people have pointed out that the people that disproportionately go out and frankly die for this country are these white males, which are now kind of in the DEI system. They're the absolute bottom of the intersectional hierarchy. Yeah. But even, you know, anybody who's mission-oriented, doesn't matter what kind of demographic they're from, they're not finding a home in the military or the intelligence community

because the invitations basically say they're not welcome. One of the things that you catalog in your book is sort of thoughts about how to deal with this, because it almost seems intractable. It gets really discouraging if you just look at the problem. And the problems are really severe. But if you have stage three cancer, that means you have hope. Maybe even if you have stage four cancer, there's still hope. So what can we do? First thing is the FBI's, let's say it's politicized beyond repair. Let's just say that as a point of argument. What is it doing to harass or abuse ordinary Americans for political reasons, let's say?

The FBI's eyes and ears on the ground at the local level are the state and local police and the county sheriffs. And the county sheriffs have a unique legal authority to determine whether or not or how federal agents can operate in that county. Now, county sheriffs are elected law enforcement officers, so this is an election year, so every county sheriff is going to be up elected law enforcement officers so this is an election year so every county sheriff is going to be up for re-election this year and there are other candidates who seek to be sheriff so this is a way for every

citizen when they know this to say how can we help you as sheriff to make sure that the feds don't come in and abuse us or how can we hold accountable if you're not going to be doing your job we hold accountable if you're not going to be doing your job that way so you're letting the sheriffs who are already aware or the candidates that they have the people behind them and then you're letting other candidates know that they had better do their job to defend the people who elected them maybe you should explain a bit like what what is it that sheriffs can do well Well, I look at more of the federal part, but I've got two colleagues at the Center for Security Policy, Kyle Scheidler and Chris Holton, who work this all the time at the state level.

And they're working with sheriffs nationwide and with state legislatures nationwide. But the unique thing is every single citizen has a say when they vote for sheriff this fall and during the campaigns. And we don't normally pay attention to who's running for sheriff. We just click whatever, check whatever party affiliation we like and move on. But no, just talk to them. Say we've got your back or we don't like the job you're doing. What are you going to do to do it right?

Sure. See, a lot of sheriff departments and local and state police are bought off when the federal government gives them all this stuff, like cool electronic gear and cool armored vehicles and cool automatic weapons and cool training. And it's really neat and really fun. But how does that protect the local population right from abusive central government? So this is something that has to be an election issue for sheriffs and it's one of the solutions. That's the federal solution. But I mean it might not be obvious to people that a sheriff can take a stand against the FBI. You're not going to operate in my county if I think what you're doing is illegal. I'm the chief law enforcement officer in this county and you're doing something

here that's abusing the Constitution or arguably breaking the law, and even if you're not and you can come in legally, I'm not going to help you. I don't have to. I don't know if this is a commonly known reality, what you're just describing. It was new to me until my colleagues brought it to my attention.

But a lot of sheriffs know this already, and they're really glad when they know that other people are making others aware of it. A lot of sheriffs don't know. They don't realize it. And they're in awe of Washington, or they're afraid of Washington. They want that cool surplus military-type gear coming from them. Once you're bought in, you'll do, you know, the FBI field office says, hey, we need to send agents in. Can you help us? Can you be our eyes and ears? And that's where the sheriff can say no.

Many of your solutions are sort of at the local county or state level activity. That's what my colleagues are doing at the Center for Security Policy. And they've written, go to securefreedom.org and you can find their material. And they've been behind a lot of state legislative initiatives as well to help states grapple with this problem. So the states still, and the counties and cities and towns still have a lot of ability. It's just they don't realize it and the voters don't realize it. So that's the first part of it. The second part of the equation is you have a president come in who recognizes the

problem but can come in with a real team that like and trust each other but have a real plan. They have executive orders written before Inauguration Day, a calendar to roll out those executive orders. So executive orders are decrees from the president to implement a certain policy or stop a certain policy or instructing different agencies to do certain things. Every president does it. There's not a problem with that. The problem is when President Trump came in last time, he didn't undo Obama's executive orders. I think he's learned his lesson this time. But you need to have his own executive orders to repeal bad ones that are already there, which he can learned his lesson this time. But you need to have his own executive orders to

repeal bad ones that are already there, which he can do unilaterally, and then put his agenda forward through executive orders. And by law, the federal agencies have to abide by that as soon as they are made effective, which would be the very day that they're signed. But where he did use executive orders in other areas of his presidency, he didn't try to implement them as laws even when both houses of Congress were on his side. So Biden then came in and simply repealed the executive orders and there was no law behind it. And then he just came in on day one with his team in place with his executive orders to fundamentally transform the government. Reagan did this very well when he took office in 1981. Bill Clinton did a really good job at it,

like it or not. Obama did a superb job at it. And Biden did too, with Obama's team using Biden, I would argue, as a cutout. You know, what we've learned over the last several years is that the agencies don't necessarily follow what the president's requirements are. They can wait it out four years. They can drag their feet. They can slow walk, whatever they feel like. They can lie. They can do whatever they want to a president who doesn't know how to manage a bureaucracy, who doesn't have a team to manage it. But it's not simply enough to put in your own guy as CIA director for a year, transfer him to the State Department, and then let the CIA run itself.

That's literally what happened. When President Trump came in, he put Mike Pompeo in as CIA director, great congressman. What did the CIA do? They ran him like an op. They flew him around the world to visit all the CIA stations, kept him out of Langley as much as they possibly could. And then they said, just trust Gina Haspel here, who had so much great experience working with the British. Let her run the agency for you. So he didn't have any deputies under him who he trusted, so he did. And she worked on him really well, and then he recommended when he was made Secretary of State,

let's put Gina in there, career CIA person. Well, if the CIA is part of the problem in interfering in our elections, why on earth would you have the CIA run itself? I mean, there was so much going on in the Trump administration, and there was not a coherent team that was really working, and they didn't have this action plan, because the president viewed America as you would run a business, and it doesn't work that way.

So, boom, CIA just continued running itself. So all those woke ads that came out from the CIA during the first months of the Biden administration were actually produced under Gina Haspel, CIA director when she was working under Trump. When I was 17, I quoted Zora Neale Hurston's how it feels to be colored me in my college application essay.

The line that spoke to me stated simply, I am not tragically colored. There is no sorrow dammed up in my soul nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. At 17, I had no idea what life would bring, but Zora's sentiment articulated so beautifully how I felt as a daughter of immigrants then and now. Nothing about me was or is tragic. I am perfectly made.

I can wax eloquent on complex legal issues in English while also belting Guayaquil de mis amores in Spanish. I can change a diaper with one hand and console a crying toddler with the other. I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I am a walking declaration, a woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her

sentences suggesting that a question has been asked. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke or slip through the cracks. I earned my way in and I earned my way up the ranks of this organization. I am educated, qualified, and competent. And sometimes I struggle. I struggle feeling like I could do more, be more to my two sons. And I struggle leaving the office when I could do more, be more to my two sons. And I struggle leaving the office when I feel there's so much more to do. I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36, I refused to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I'm supposed to apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance. I am proud of me, full stop.

My parents left everything they knew and loved to expose me to opportunities they never had. Because of them, I stand here today a proud first-generation Latina and officer at CIA. I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are. Know your worth. Command your space. Mija, you're worth it. So she just kept it going on within the community. Same thing with the FBI. You just don't fire Comey and then his deputy, McCabe, and then Peter Strzok, the counterintelligence chief. I mean, counterintelligence chief, chief spy hunter of the country,

taking Hillary Clinton's campaign propaganda, working with foreign intelligence officers and a Russian who they suspected all along was still working for the old KGB to do the Trump collusion narrative. It's not enough just to cut off those layers of the FBI and then put in somebody else, even if it was the best person on earth. You have to just really go down to the root of the rot. Again, it's like a cancer patient. You have to cut out the parts that are beyond repair. You have to heal the parts that are reparable.

And you might have to have some transplants here and there. Or you'll lose the patient. I appreciate the frustration of people who say, just defund it all and shut it down. But that's like saying just because our military has messed up leadership and terrible recruitment that we should just not have a military anymore. That doesn't make sense at all. So we need the functions that the CIA does. We need most of the functions that the FBI does. So let's preserve

the functions, but change the structures, change the command and control, change the whole bureaucratic ethos and break them up so that they cannot be used against constitutional government. So what I propose, and there are lots of different points of view, so this is just to kick off a national discussion of how we would do this. So it's, there are ideas in progress all the time. But you take the crime fighting part of the FBI, the criminal branch, and you move it over to the U.S. Marshals Service, eliminating some of the non-useful functions and therefore you're

eliminating the positions and therefore you're eliminating the federal employees. Get them off the federal payroll. Get them out completely because you can't fire them. So you move it to the U.S. Marshals, which for its entire history is the oldest, the first federal law enforcement agency created by George Washington with a really good reputation and not as woke yet as everything else. Move it over to the Marshal Service. Move the FBI Academy over to the Marshal Service. Move the FBI National Security Division.

That's probably one of the most politicized units, break that into a separate counterintelligence service simply to hunt spies and agents of influence. And then the rest of the National Security Division, like counterterrorism, parcel that out to other offices in government that already do that role. And so on down the line. It's not a perfect solution, but then you have nothing left of the Bureau them, parcel that out to other offices in government that already do that role. And so on down the line. It's not a perfect solution, but then you have nothing left of the Bureau except the

use of the human resources side and the other parts that you don't need. And then those positions are simply abolished. Those federal employees are off the books. They no longer have security clearances. They can't be a problem anymore. And then with the CIA just divided into, first, it's really bloated. I mean, you don't need secret intelligence to spy on climate change.

But that's what we're doing with our intelligence assets. We're literally spying on the climate. Like, why do you need that? That's a big waste. Why do you need secret intelligence for gender? It's crazy all the waste that goes in there. Explain to me how that works. I can't. It's beyond logic. But they have a gender as a fundamental role of CIA now.

I don't understand it, but they say that that's a big part of their core mission. So let's accept that as a truth coming from the CIA. But there's a lot you don't need. Of the 30-odd thousand CIA personnel, if you only have 1,500 actual agents out there around the world in the clandestine service, we don't really know how big it is, but it's comparatively very small. Then what are the rest doing? I mean, a lot of them are doing support activities and intelligence collection and analysis, and you need that. Technology, you need all that. But it's very wasteful and very bloated. So abolish a lot of the functions that don't need to be done. You don't need the CIA doing open source intelligence because any journalist can do that.

Any grad student can do that. So you keep the clandestine covert operations side lean and mean and effective because there are a lot of great people in there doing a fantastic job. As a separate standalone service, like a clandestine service, separate, and then the analytical or the intelligence collection and analysis side, the information collecting and processing side, make that its own service, but weed it out to get a lot of the woke craziness out of there. How are people reacting to your suggestions?

Well, on the sheriff's side, a lot of people just never thought of that before. And I never did until my colleagues told me about it. On the dismantle the FBI side, I found that the younger former agents and whistleblowers think it's a great idea, and they would even go farther than I would go on it. Some of the older guys, either still in or retired, say, no, you can't do it. It's too complicated. There's a whole technology side that you can't break that part up.

But they're also attached to the FBI brand. Mm-hm. It's like the FBI has become the bud light of law enforcement. Mm-hm. Now, if you like that brand, you can stick with it, but most people would not stick with that brand under those circumstances. Mm-hm. So, we don't need an FBI if it's run its course, but we need everything it does.

So the question is, how do you organize it to do it that way? And what about on the CIA side? I mean, similar reactions or how? They mostly hate the idea. They won't argue on the woke issue because it's so blatant and so public. And a lot of even liberal CIA guys who are still mission oriented, they say, yeah, this is insane. This is doing us a lot of damage.

Well, fine, speak up and get rid of it. They wouldn't speak on the record for the book. I couldn't even make hints about some of the people I talked to. So if they're not going to come forward, then they're dooming their own former agency. It should go the way of the OSS. The OSS just became a liability. That was a mission accomplished. But do it in a more orderly way than the OSS, which was completely abolished and then we

had nothing. Split it in two along those two functional lines and then pare back the useless functions that are within them. You're describing massive changes. It's hard to imagine how all of this would work, but as we finish up, any final thoughts? We need all these functions, but we don't need states within a state.

We don't need an intelligence community that views itself as above the American people, whose leaders believe and act that they can mislead Congress and lie to Congress, including the very oversight committees whose responsibility is to govern how they operate. You can't have an FBI director come in and not answer a yes or no question when either answer would not be violating any necessary secrets. You just need to know the answers. But if it's like when Senator Cruz said, did the FBI have any assets or agents who were involved in the planning or execution of criminal acts of violence on January 6th at the Capitol? And the senior FBI official would not answer.

He was literally saying, did the FBI plan and commit crimes against Congress? And the FBI would not answer. And that was two years ago. And they still have not answered. You've got to ask, why is that? You would think the FBI would come forward and be as forthcoming as possible. But instead you have an FBI director who flies a Gulfstream jet from Reagan Airport in Alexandria, Virginia to Manassas, Virginia, a six-minute flight for his commute home. This is his little principality, his little kingdom. And he acts like a sovereign entity. So that's a real danger. So now is really the time

when we, it's our last great chance to do something about it, because the way the careerists have moved in and elevated, you're going to have the whole FBI full of bad people in the next presidential term, unless something is done this year. Well, Michael Waller, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. It's great to be with you. I wish I could be more optimistic, but there is reason for us to be that way if our citizens are adequately informed and active. Thank you all for joining Michael Waller and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова