We're back with another edition of The Federalist or Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr
LST, make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course
to the premium version of our website as well. I'm so honored to be
joined today by one of the most fascinating people I think in this space.
Michael Waller is out with a new book called Big Intel, How the CIA
and FBI went from Cold War heroes to Deep State villains now. Michael Waller
is the Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy. He also
has talked political warfare, and he has a huge amount of experience again in
this space, which is a pet topic of this show. So I could
not possibly be more excited to be joined by doctor Michael Waller. Mike,
thanks so much for coming on the show. Emily. It's a great thing
to be with you. Now, Mike, could you just walk us a
little bit through your career, because there's so much that brought you kind of
to this moment, and there's so much that brought the American right to this
moment, and I feel like, actually, there's an interesting arc there.
Could you just talk to us a little bit about how you got to where
you are right now. It started out in high school actually, where I
was interested in the environmental movement and they were building a nuclear power plant in
our state. And of course, as a fifteen year old, I allowed
Jane Fonda and all the other comedies to get me all riled up that to
the end of the world. So I got juped into joining something where,
you know, for perfectly idealistic reasons, because I thought this was going to
just wreck, you know, wreck the seawater with the boiling water from the
reactor cooler, you know, going out to sea. And that was my
big worry. And then they took certain of the kids aside as individuals.
This was in New Hampshire, Okay, in the nineteen seventies. These are
professional agitators from California came in and they took us aside to evaluate us and
to break us down in what I later learned was a struggle session to make
me realize how stupid I am and to break down all to try to break
down all my beliefs, and then they asked me why are you involved in
this? Why do you want to get involved? And I said, well,
because I care about the environment. They said, no, this is
all about overthrowing American capitalism. Had they not said that in trying to indoctrinate
me, who knows what would have happened. But then I realized, but
dupe, what is this? So I got out of that and I thought,
I'm going to fight these guys for the rest of my life. And
that's basically what happened. That's fascinating. And where did your career so you're
talking then in high school? Where did your career go from there? Well?
I went to George Washington University and this was the last few months of
Jimmy Carter's term, and so I got to vote for Ronald Reagan from my
dormitory. Was working for my US senator as an intern, and that was
where I started meeting people, because once you're an intern, you can just
network like crazy. And I got to meet people who are then going on
to the Reagan transition team. They understood the value of youth activists, and
then I got involved in College Republicans, Young Americans for Freedom and I was
a national leader in the national offices of both organizations, and by virtue of
that sort of fell into being the youth coordinator for the Reagan White House on
Foreign Affairs and National Security to take down the Soviet Union. And that was
a heady time in the intel space. Is that also what maybe got you
interested? And maybe this is wrong and correct me and tell us more about
and if it is wrong, But is that also what attracted you to starting
to study things like political warfare and paying really close attention to what was happening
and what a lot of people have called the deep state? Yes? Yeah,
so I got interested in political activism and realized the value of it.
And then I met up with people House Intelligence Committee senior staffer whose daughter was
in college Republicans. His name was herb Romerstein. He was a peal of
Stan Evans of the National Journalism Center, And so you got all these networks
then, and of course Stan had been working on this, you know,
when herber Rohmerstein had been a Communist in the fifties as a kid and was
duped. Then he worked for the House Committee on Un American Activities and then
the House Internal Security Committee and the House Intelligence Committee. So you network in
with these folks and with Stan Evans on the journalism side, and then you're
into this whole new world. So from me as a youth activist at the
White House, I was going to go as a student journalist to Afghanistan,
which was then under Soviet occupation. I was going to go in with am
A s i'm a Shamasut's forces in the Northern Alliance, with soldier Fortune magazine.
And someone from the White House said, now we can do better.
Well, you speak Spanish. Why don't you att out to Central America?
Oh boy? And that's how it began with the contrasts. Who okay,
so this was the American fact anti communist insurgency that was fighting the communists in
Nicaragua. And then so the White House folks put me in touch with someone
else. This is all in the book. Let's say, selibits in the
book with who was a national intelligence officer for Latin America. Who was Bill
Casey? Bill Casey's guy in the White House on this. So Bill Casey
had been Reagan's campaign manager, but more importantly, during World War Two,
he was in the Office of Strategic Services the OSS, and it was his
idea to parachute Allied agents and even German anti Nazis behind Nazi lines right after
D Day to clear the way from Normandy up to to Berlin so the D
Day forces from Normandy could come in and march all the way to Berlin and
take it over. That was Bill Casey, So so it was through him
that I was doing this, ended up doing this work in Central America,
and I was I got walking around money over the years, and I didn't
know for thirty years later that it actually came from Bill Casey's pocket. That's
incredible. That is incredible. Yeah. And he did that so that he
wouldn't have to testify before Congress about what he was doing with CIA director because
it was his private money. And then I met him. I was told
to go to Saint Matthew's Cathedral before my first trip with the Contras, and
I thought, well, this is this old OSS guy. He's a nice
guy in DC. Yeah, in d C, right downtown DuPont Circle.
Yeah exactly. And he, you know, I said, because he knew
I was Catholic, he said, you ka, yeah, but I'm not
a very good We should go to the vigil mass five o'clock PM Saturday.
Sit in the back left hand side of the church and just wait until somebody
talks to you. And I thought, what is this some kind of test
or just to get me to church, because I'm about to do something really
dumb by going with this gorilla force in Nicaragua. And well, sure enough,
I'm told to stand there. And then who comes up to me after
mass but CIA director Casey. Oh my gosh, I'm just a twenty year
old kid. I didn't know anything, and so he said, he mumbled
something up. I mean, I didn't understand it. So somebody else with
him said repeated the name, and he said remember that name. So yeah,
you know, I remember that name, and then Casey shuffled out.
I didn't know for thirty years later that that was my kryptonym and that Casey
used to meet people in church to give them cryptonyms or exchange information because he
couldn't be forced to testify in Congress. What went on in church? That
is incredible. I mean it's just it's Graham Green, but actually even more
wild. And you know, Mike, that's interesting because it's in some of
the dullest books now and I'm going to ask you about this for sure,
but the retrospectives on the legacy of the Dalles brothers that said Alan Dalles used
to frequent and it would be sort of a CIA hotspot. The bar at
the Mayflower, which is right around the corner from Saint Matthew's, of course,
very very interesting. And actually that probably isn't too far from Alan Dallas's
Q Street house, so I guess they were all cavorting around DuPont Circle.
Well. In this case, so Casey was a devout Catholic and he went
to Mass almost every day, so he would repeat, and he wouldn't go
to the same place, you know, repeatedly. He wouldn't have a pattern,
so people would not know his schedule. So he would go. And
his son in law is the one who told me. He didn't know my
case, of course, but when I was explaining it to him thirty years
later, he laughed and he said, ah, that was Bill, that
was his money. He was that all about Bill's money because Bill was funding
these things out of his pocket, so Congress would never find out. And
then that was your cryptonym that he gave you. Oh my gosh, I'm
local officer in Honduras. So I was being hassled down in Honduras about getting
into the country because I'm just a short of long haired, skinny, dumb
college kid, and I thought, Okay, I want to talk to Kapitan
Luke. And then so somebody there got authorization. Okay, somebody invokes that
name led him through and then I met up with the Contras and that was
that. So it was a lot of fun. And the job was to
because Casey didn't have confidence in the career CIA people who somehow couldn't find Soviet
links to international terrorism, even though journalists and scholars could. And so my
job, not at that time, but later on became to go to Central
America work with the Contras and the Sandinista or the Salvadoran army that was fighting
at communist guerrillas. So I was on the anti communist guerrilla side in Nicaragua
and the anti communist army side against communist guerrillas in El Salvador. And it
was to collect intelligence on Oviet support for those insurgencies because people in Congress,
many of them didn't want to hear it, and so a lot of people
and I'm probably guilty of this at different points too, will blend you know,
the Dulles years with the Afghanistan years. They'll blend together what happened in
Guatemala with eventually what was happening in Al Salvador and other places. And I'm
curious, Mike, if you think that there's you know, obviously Alan Dulls
leaves, you know, after the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs
and all of that, But what is it was? Was something similar happening?
Did you feel that there was something similar happening that you were sort of
part of this coup orchestration? Was it for the better? This is a
huge question, obviously, but just as someone again who's there and has been
reflecting on this for a really long time in Central America and then ultimately in
Afghanistan, do you see these these two chapters in CIA history as essentially part
of the same chapter, these two eras as part of the same chapter,
or were there differences? As you can tell, you know, I had
not heard that question before. This is great because when you know, I'm
just kind of thinking this through. I hadn't written it that way and had
thought of it. But if you look at the founding of the CIA with
Alan Dulles, who was in Big Intel. These were all OSS veterans from
World War Two, and then thirty years later with Reagan in the eighties,
it's again being led by one of the last OSS veterans of World War Two,
and he was using his friends as talent scouts to assemble teams of amateurs.
So we had no intelligence training, we were not intelligence officers, we
were not employees of the CIA, and to go do things out of pocket
in a in a non orchestrated way to find and do what we could do
that the CIA couldn't or wouldn't do. I'm a big fan by the way
of of Alan Dulls, the CIA director, because even though he has a
lot of detractors, even among conservatives, if you look at the time when
our greatest threat was the Soviet Union, and not just their nuclear threat,
but the spread of communist subversion to overthrow governments, and that where it was
in our national interest that the Soviets not control. So it wasn't us to
conquer places, it was to deny access to the Soviets that were expanding.
That was the whole strategy of containment. So I have no problem with the
operation to overthrow the pro Soviet most of a government in Iran, or overthrow
the pro Soviet regime that was being set up in Guatemala. That was in
our interest to keep the Soviets out of those areas well. If you're a
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edu slash Federalist to register Hillsdale dot edu slash Federalist. See this is so
interesting, and I was hoping we could get into this mine because I figured
you would have interesting perspective here that especially as we look back. You mentioned
Stan Evans. I mean, his book on the Venona Files is just like
an incredible example of how high the stakes were and how easy it is for
us right now in twenty twenty four to sort of armchair quarterback what people at
the CIA were doing when we had just deployed nuclear weapons for the first time
in human history. And this is obviously really terrifying. The dollars. Detractors
will look at you know, Sicarno or you know Guatemala, our bonds and
Guatemala and say there were better ways to handle this. This was you know,
Alan dolls just sort of moving chess pieces around the board and you know,
laughing about in smoke filled back rooms. But you know, is there
a middle ground? Is there something that's like, you know, some of
these case studies maybe show us that we were using untested methods to you know,
not the best ends, or is it really you know, when we
look back, we're damn lucky that Alan Dallas did some of this stuff,
even if all of the cups weren't, you know, totally executed as they
could have been. I don't know, Mike, I'm just curious what you
think about that. Well, imagine what if what if we had allowed the
communists to get a foothold in Guatemala in nineteen fifty four and stay that way.
They don't just these regimes don't just go away. You have to make
them go away. What if we, you know, had allowed the Soviets
to control Iran from in the nineteen fifties, and then they did. They
trained a lot of the eye tollas. We tend to think, well,
the Iotolers are sheeite fundamentalists, they're not communists, But in fact, the
Soviets had trained so many of them, and it was the communist Tu Depart
Party of Iran that was part of the whole revolution there in nineteen seventy nine
with the Iatolas, and the Iotolas used the communists to take power and then
wipe them all out. So it's we can't if we're going to be the
world's superpower, whether we like it or not, in our own national interest
and our own America first interest depends on us having no peer rival anywhere in
the world. So you can see what's happened when you had our intelligence services
and State Department full of sympathizers of Maotse Tongue taking over China, which really,
I mean that was actually the case, and it's something that is so
left out of history. It was largely under emphasized in Oppenheimer Mike, I'm
curious for if you saw the movie, what you thought about how they treated
that too. Well. Oppenheimer was a secret Party member and he had to
give up his as Stan Evans has documented, and he had to give up
his party membership card because he was involved in such clandem and service in developing
the atomic bomb for the United States that he wasn't to ake quote card carrying
member. At a place I used to work, where I was a librarian,
we had a bag full of Communist Party They're not cards like business cards
or ID cards. They're like booklets, so they have your picture, your
signature, and your stamps. And then where they mark off when you pay
your dues to the party. I had his brother's Communist party booklet at one
time, you know, long ago. Yeah, and these guys were building
the bomb to fight the Nazis, but to help Stalin. So you had
that whole Soviet spy ring. So Oppenheimer is still viewed as a hero.
And if you look at it, yeah, he developed the bomb to help
us defeat the Axis. That's really important. But what was the motive and
if the motive was to help Stalin as was the case with the Rosenbergs and
so many others involved, you know, Klaus Fuchs and the others in the
ring, you had two Soviet spirings, one British and one American in our
Adam bomb project. And so we have to think, why is that a
bad thing? Well, because they were trying to save Stalin. Because remember
Stalin didn't go to war with Japan until the very last few weeks of World
War Two. He wanted Japan to stay neutral. And as Dan Evans documented
with herb Romerstein and their Venona Secrets book, the Soviets wanted the Japanese to
attack European colonies or American interests in the Pacific to keep Japan from joining Hitler
and making war against the USSR after Operation Barbarossa. So it was in the
Soviet interest therefore American Communist Party interests for Japan to make war in the Pacific.
They ended up attacking not European colony targets, but they ended up attacking
Pearl Harbor, and that's how we got into the war. Stalin was delighted
by that because it kept Japan off his back during the entire duration of the
war. So we've been talking here about the CIA, the OSS then the
CIA, and Mike, you also write about the FBI. You write about
the reign of JEdgar Hoover. Can you talk to us a little bit about,
you know, before we fast forward to twenty twenty four and all of
the various problems with these agencies right now, can you tell us a little
bit about how that the kind of FBI evolved alongside the CIA in the twentieth
century with the nuclear threat looming so heavily over the United States. Sure well,
you can't describe it without going into jag or Hoover the man, because
he personified what became the FBI. So he didn't start out as a lawman
in the sense of a law enforcement officer. He started out as a subversive
hunter, as a communist hunter. And so when in World War One he
enlisted for military or in unless he signed up for the draft in military for
the military, but he was working at the Justice Department, and as a
twenty five year old right after the war, he headed up an office in
the Justice Department called the Radical Division. So his job was to identify,
round up and deport foreign born communist, Marxist, radical socialists, and anarchists
and deport them to Russia. So that was his first really big job in
the Justice Department, and that's what he brought in with him to the FBI.
Now, it was such a huge operation, and there were few laws
concerning this and few practices, and he was a twenty five year old Justice
Department official working this, so there were a lot of mistakes, and of
course the far left made use of the mistakes he made so that these roundups
could not continue. But imagine, imagine if Hoover had been able to round
up all the foreign born extremists in our country one hundred years ago, how
different our country would be today. Right, there was a strategic fight there
when he's later named to head up the Bureau of Investigation. So it was
like the Bureau of Prohibition. There was a Bureau of Prohibition to fight liquor
trafficking, and so the Bureau of Investigation was to fight other types of crimes.
We didn't have a counterintelligence service then against foreigns buys. So Hoover heads
up this Bureau of Investigation, which then with the New Deal becomes the Federal
Bureau of Investigation with now new bigger powers as central government gets stronger and more
far reaching and more powerful, and then there are more federal laws to enforce.
And so he built the FBI and into really what became a premier world's
you know, crime fighting agency, and it had no peer in terms of
its technological capabilities at the time. And he built it into a professional force
and fighting the gangsters and so forth in the rise of the organized crime in
the nineteen twenties. But he always had had this commitment to saving America from
cultural destruction and subversion, even where the law didn't There was no federal law
concerning it, because back then we didn't have many federal laws. Before the
Church Committee and all of that well before the New Deal. Yeah, and
then the seventies just made it where the Church Committee came up. Yeah,
the seventies and the whole attack on intelligence, it wasn't so much an attack
on intelligence. It was an attack on anti communist intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities.
So Hoover, I read, I've read his speeches, his congressional testimony,
his books. He was prolific in speaking out since nineteen twenty about communist
subversion. Farn sponsored communist subversion and how it worked here to destroy us from
within and the infiltration of our of our educational system and universe cities and churches
and labor unions and art communities and entertainment and news media everything else in politics,
to cause us all to fight one another, and to polarize the country
so that we no longer believe in American founding principles and what he called Christian
values. Imagine an FBI directors talking that way, now, right, yeah,
yeah, right, So he took this. He himself was a Presbyterian
and a Freemason, and he had flirted with the idea of becoming a street
preacher early on in his career like his brother was. Instead, he decided
he was going to stay home and take care of his father, who could
no longer work because he had some mental illness which then nobody talked about,
and to take care of his mother. So his father died. He stayed
at home taking care of his mother while he was FBI director until he was
forty three years old. And he believed that if he had a relationship and
got married, that he can he cannot be a good husband and a good
FBI director at the same time, and being married to the wrong woman would
destroy him, and it would destroy the FBI that he was trying to build.
And people speculate that he was actually homosexual for all of these reasons,
right, I mean, if he was, If Jay Edgar Hoover was really
a gay FBI leader, you would you know that his banner would be hanging
in a rainbow for the Hoover building right now. Yeah, they would love
that. That would be wonderful. And if he's really a cross dresser,
with Chris Ray being so into promoting trans stuff, if Uber was a cross
dresser, you know they would be you know, there'd be a big statue
of him right now, you know, right right on the Washington mall and
you don't. Of course, you don't see any of that. What happened
was, though, you know, if you live with your mother till you're
forty three, some people thought that was wrong, right, And then well,
you're forty three, so you have not had and you're a workaholic and
you're you're devoted to the bureau, and then your mother passes away. So
what do you do. You live economically, and you work with the guy
you trust most, which is where you live with the guy you trust most,
who's also a workaholic. So you're working together all day. So you
live in the same house together to economize, and you're always plotting and conspiring
and just working twenty four hours a day. So it was assumed then that
bed Hoover had a more than a normal friendship with his deputy, But the
two scholars were. A scholar Beverly Gage just came out with a recent book.
It's a bestseller right now on Hoover. It's an eight hundred page solid
academic study on Jay Edgar Hoover, and she found that there's no evidence to
support those claims that Hoover was either a gay, closet gay or a cross
Dresser and then Tim Weiner, who is a New York Times bestseller liberal guy,
but he would only use primary sources, and he's got a fantastic book
about the FBI called Enemies. He came to the same conclusion separately. So
these were rumors by his detractors to to you know, make fun of him
and reduce them and destroy him. But there's really nothing in fact to prove
that it was true. So this is actually a really interesting transition, no
pun intended to the premise of the book about you know, as you write
Big Intel, and you mentioned Christopher Ray and their focus on diversity, equity
and inclusion and trans riots and all of that. Mike, as we get
into the contemporary era, this current chapter in the history of Big Intel,
what is there sort of governing philosophy and how have they folded this radical cultural
Marxism kind of into what so many people see as this, you know,
even on the left, we'll see as this fundamentally right wing institution that is
Big Intel. In fact, though as you write, it's really been infiltrated
by something so different. Yeah, Well, it's really complicated because the CIA
was always a liberal institution. So if you think about it as sort of
a secret state department. That's kind of the CIA culture and the CIA bureaucracy.
As long as they're still America first, and they're they're intellectually honest,
and they're against the ideologies of our enemies, you know, we can live
with that. We've lived with that since World War Two. It's when they
become woke where they embrace critical theory, which is cultural Marxism, which is
that America was founded by wicked men, wicked white men, who were all
racists, and they all went along with racism, and they had no redeeming
values, and they were Christians, and they had a Judeo Christian ethic backing
them up, and they were building a democratic republican on the Greco Roman traditions.
This is all evil, it's oppressive, and so we have to fight
that oppression. And this is of course Marxism, where everything is oppressing us
there, you know, help help on being repressed kind of thing, and
they have to fight everything that's repressive, so that the church is repressive,
the republic itself is repressive, the constitution is repressive, the nuclear family is
repressive, our morals are repressive, and therefore they all have to be fought,
and they all have to be destroyed. So that's the that's the cultural
dialectic in cultural Marxism. Karl Marx wrote about this in eighteen forty three,
five years before he wrote the Communist Manifesto. But if you don't think of
it as cultural Marxism, because this has been been baking for, you know,
for generations now in our educational systems and our and popular culture and society
and entertainment. You don't look at it as Marxism. You just look at
it as the way it is. And yeah, so it all makes sense.
So and then if you have an FBI and a CIA whose analysts and
intelligence officers and special agents and managers and lawyers believe that America is founded on
an evil premise, and believe that the Constitution is a is a you know,
a living document that can be twisted to mean whatever the latest trends want
it to mean, then how can you hold up your oath to defend America
against all enemies, foreign and domestic and uphold the Constitution unless you believe the
Constitution is a living document and that the enemies are whoever you want them to
be, which is people who are like you and me and listening to this
program, and what are some of the outward and in some respects, I'm
curious for your take on this. Maybe it's more transparent that it has been
in the past. They're almost doing some of the stuff just right out in
the open. But what are some of the signs we know? You know
again, you know a lot of my friends on the left would just say,
what do you mean the FBI is full of cultural Marxists, and to
you and I it seems very clear. But sort of what are some of
the points that tell us exactly what's going on inside of there right now?
Well, when you see cultural Marxists as the biggest defenders of the FBI,
you know that's probably been taken over. That's a good point. Dan Goldman,
big fan. Oh yeah, Dan Goldman, the guy who who is
crying, crying, you know who. He's the trust fund baby who became
a congressman. He was a lawyer on the impeachment committee, and all all
of a sudden, he's he just realizes that all his you know, progressive
friends want to kill people like him since October seventh. Amazing. Yeah,
So so one of the things that Okay. You know, for decades the
FBI was attacking and just ripping the FBI and Jay Edgar Hoover and anything to
do with law and order, ripping it to shreds. And they were the
ones writing these big narratives about how evil the CIA is, and for generations,
so many people bought into that because that was all they were hearing.
And so they're not attacking it anymore. They're idealizing it now, and they're
saying that if you attack them, or I mean, if you criticize them,
or if you say there should be hearings about it, like let's have
Frank Church style hearings about the weaponization of government, Suddenly that's a bad thing
because the wrong people are saying it should be investigated. And so then you
become antipatriotic in the view of big intel. You become maybe a threat to
society in the public, maybe you're a violent extremist. Let's see. So
when you have it where the security apparatus of our country that was designed to
protect us all becomes a state within a state of its own and now views
half the country as potential enemies, you're coming into a complete threat to and
subversion of our constitutional order. And it's not just it's not just people like
us who might think that. Just listen to Chuck Schumer. Not that we
should in ordinary cases, but I mean, he's the most powerful US senator.
And when Trump came in in twenty seventeen and said he wants to go
after this apparatus because it's abusing people, and he said, if you do
that, they're going to be They're going to come after you six ways from
Sunday and destroy you. So even Chuck Schumer is admitting that our security and
intelligence community now have become so overwhelmingly powerful that neither Democrat nor Republican leaders in
the Senate or the White House can go against it or that apparatus will destroy
them. One of the least appreciated or the most underappreciated quotes in American politics
in the last ten years when Truck Schumer said that, Yeah, and he
said it with a passion. He also said it with a smile, which
is really weird. But it's. Yeah, that's a hard thing about writing
books when you go back to double check quotes and you have to watch videos
over and over again just to make sure it's like it's like Peter Strock and
getting his mannerisms down and watching that same videos, it becomes very creepy.
But when you think you know Schumer, you know, as boorish and as
pushy and as obnoxious and as vicious and vindictive as he is, he has
never tried to pull the FBI accountable. Can you talk to us also about
some cases people are very familiar with, where January sixth comes into this,
where the Gretchen Widmer kidnapping plot comes into this, where the infiltration of Orthodox
Catholic parishes comes into all of this, and that broader context of the the
left suddenly the culture Marxist suddenly defending the FBI and the CIA. What's going
on with some of these case studies? This is all and it's all still
a mystery, you know, because we don't have answers. But where we
don't have answers, then that leads us on the one hand to think worst
case scenario, but maybe even to the point of going overboard on it.
But we don't have answers period. So when you have the FBI Director Chris
Ray and his top deputies on national security are repeatedly brought before House and Senate
oversight committees and asks the same questions over and over. So where Ted Cruz
says to the National Security Chief of the FBI, were there yes or no?
Were there FBI assets or agents that were involved in the planning or execution
of criminal acts of violence at the US Capital on January sixth? Yes or
no? And she won't answer the question repeatedly. When the FBI director himself
won't answer the question repeatedly House or Senate, various different committees, then there's
a problem there. Do you think they could say, you know what,
we would never engage in any criminal activity. They didn't even say that.
So if the FBI won't deny that they're engaged in criminal activities, then what
are we left to conclude? Right? And I'm speaking of somebody who I
had idealized the FBI. You know, I grew up with the watching f
the FBI, with that from Zimblas Junior, which was sort of a you
know, a hokey weekly show about the FBI, which happened every every script
was approved by the FBI. But I grew up with this idealistic vision of
the bureau. I was, I was, you know, I knew a
lot of people in the FBI have been to headquarters and met various directors and
so forth, so it's not like I don't know and don't appreciate it.
Similar with CIA, having worked for CIA Director Casey and known a lot of
these folks, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the many of the
people in both institutions, but as to see, what's happened to those institutions
is a national tragedy, and the fact that they can operate free of any
concern of congressional oversight or even presidential oversight and direction shows that they've become dangerous
institutions of their own, and they don't have the public interest in mind any
they might think they do. I'm looking right now the second on the FBI
Twitter pages. They've got fifty six field offices, and they've got headquarters,
and here's FBI L Paso Twitter today. They're going to have a University of
Texas at El Paso Campus spring career fair Thursday and Friday this week, it
says, and here's the pitch. This is what they're trying to recruit.
The FBI is committed to strengthening its workforce and connectivity with our community by continuing
to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion within our efforts. And it's just
it's so strange. Why do they think if you can put yourself, you
know, put their little thinking caps on mike for a second, what does
that say about their end? You know what means? Is this an end?
Or to what end are these means aimed at? Well, they're promoting.
I mean they only want to attract a certain type of people, with
a certain type of mentality that would subscribe to the overarching philosophy of critical theory,
which is cultural Marxism, which came from Stalin's period of time and scholars
and intellectuals who developed under Stalin and then they broke with Stalin, but they
still remained ideological communists how to destroy free societies. And then they moved to
the United States and they set up shop in the United States and became some
of the largest intellectual drivers. So we all know what critical race theory is.
But before there was critical race theory, the same intellectuals who developed this
developed what was called critical law theory, which was to manipulate the law for
ideological purposes and to then dispense with rules of evidence. Rules of procedure,
you know, constitutional limitations and all of that. And by the nineteen eighties,
critical law theory was the dominant legal theory being taught at many, if
not most, American law schools. So where do these lawyers go. Who's
hiring them? Well, the Justice Department was hiring them in spades, as
well as the FBI and other government agencies. So when you think that the
critical law theory lawyers are working at the taxpayer's expense within the Justice Department in
the FBI, well, then of course they're going to be extremist. And
of course they're wanting to recruit younger people still in college who believe in those
views so that they can fully take over the organizations. And I was just
going to ask about that, you know, how widespread with you know,
all of your experience in the space and studying the departments right now, how
widespread is that ideology is? Is it concentrated at the top, does it
trickle all the way down because so many of these staffers are now, you
know, all the way from the bottom to the top, filtered through our
system of higher education, which is, you know, a four year degree
in cultural Marxism. You know, and even if you're going to school for
engineering, how widespread is this mindset? Is the buy in to this mindset
at the FBI and the CIA right now, it started at the bottom,
and especially it took place. It began a little bit earlier, but it
especially took place after nine to eleven when there was this had hiring spree to
expand the CIA and FBI and the entire intelligence community. So they were recruiting
people all over the country. They were recruiting, you know, not based
on DEI or critical theory. They were just recruiting a lot of people.
But when you're recruiting people from the humanities studies, especially from American colleges now
by the early two thousands, and then you're recruiting a lot of tech people
from Silicon Valley, so you've got that San Francisco worldview. Then you're creating
a new base of lower and mid level people coming into the system. Now
this is after two thousand and one. Now they're more than halfway through their
careers, so they're in the mid and upper management of their organizations now,
and of course they're going to pull in and recruit people who think the way
they do because they have an ideological mindset and not a professional mindset. Well,
what Bush had done after nine to eleven to centralize our intelligence community,
which had been split up in multiple agencies that didn't talk to each other for
the most part, because there was a bipartisan consensus that this would be a
danger to our country if they became too powerful at the top, Bush consolidated
the FBI at the top, and then he consolidated the whole seventeen agency intelligence
community from the top with the Director of National Intelligence, and then further consolidated
domestic security with his Department of Homeland Security. He had decent motives for doing
that was to prevent another terrorist attack in America. Well, then with the
Patriot Act, which Bush and Congress they deemed it so dangerous. The Patriot
Act was only supposed to last for a few years and then the Patriot Act
would expire, but instead Congress and Bush and Obama they continued to renew the
Patriot Act, which still exists to this day. And while parts of it
might be necessary, the whole thing is dangerous to us and Congress knew this
from the start. So Bush had set up this top heavy centralized intelligence system
with the laws behind it, so that when you have a critical theory person
like Obama come in as president, he puts his fellow believers in charge,
James Clapper in charge of the entire seventeen agency intelligence community, James Comey as
head of the FBI, and the people he put at the top of the
Justice Department and elsewhere, so that they were able to then take the people
who had the critical theory types, who had were at the junior in mid
levels and bring them upward to promote them rapidly beyond everybody else. And then
they were using DEI as an excuse for rapid promotion of people who were not
competent enough to hold those positions. H I mean, it just explains so
much. Obviously a racist and if you're a racist, you have no business
being in the FBI, right, So that also gives them pretense them to
purge good people I suppose, yeah, and to drive them out. So
you know, there are a lot of really great people in the FBI and
CIA, And I know a lot of folks hate it when I say that,
but I know them it's true, and there's a lot of them there,
and we've seen some of them come out already like the suspendables. You
know, Kyle Sarafin, Steve Friend, Garrett O'Boyle, a bunch of other
ones. They're really great people, and there are a lots still inside.
But if you if you know, well, why don't they come forward and
expose this? Well, the few whistleblowers who did came out, you know,
the system made an example of them, just as Schumer warned it would.
But these were just special agents. These were nobody seenor destroyed them,
file criminal charges against one of them, illegally leaked the personnel files of at
least one of them, did as much as possible to it wouldn't would not.
It would not fire them, because to fire them, we would let
them be free to do anything else. So it merely suspended them without pay
for an unspecified specified amount of time. They could not get other jobs without
FBI approval. Then they ended up having their insurance cut off. And these
people have families, And then you had other people at risk of having their
pensions cut off. Even though that's legally not supposed to happen, it does
happen. And you had FBI insiders leaking more private information. That's a criminal
act. That was happening from within the FBI leaking it to the media to
try to destroy these people. So if you're sitting there and you have your
career, you have your family, and you're thinking, I can't be exposed
this way. I'll never get hired at anyplace else. So you just keep
your head down and keep doing your work. And then you have others saying
I can't stand it here, I'm fed up. But if I give up
this position, you know, I'm manning my post on this sensitive job,
I'm going to have some you know, rainbow wacko, who is going to
take my place? And how does that benefit America. So you do have
these people in there, and then you have older people meaning I put in
my years. I just have a few more years left. I'm just going
to keep my head down, get my pension, and get out. And
then you have your real cynics who are saying, if I say anything,
I won't be able to do really lucrative government contracting once I retire. So
I'm just going to stick in so that I can make it and go along
just so I can make a ton of money once I retire. So you
have all of these problems where this ideological destruction of our intelligence community is taking
place with the passive cooperation of people who many of whom have really good intentions
for the country. They're just stuck and that's a really scary place to be
for a lot of reasons. And one that I want to ask you about
is you mentioned earlier constitutional checks and balances, and this has been an inevitable
and serious hurdle for intelligence agencies, especially as technology has evolved and as we've
had you know, new groups like the NSA and just again so much new
technology the Internet, and with January sixth, they were, you know,
basically demanding Google hand over all the GEOFENS data and all of that. Every
last stroke on your Google when you Google, you know, they can monitor
every single key stroke you have, and now they're every single web page you've
ever visited. And it's terrifying in the hands of the people that you just
described, Mike. So what is the House should say, hypothetically we had
a totally responsible FBI and CIA and NSA and DJ, is it possible to
carry out covert ops to in the age of lone wolf decentralized terrorist plots monitor
genuinely troublesome people is all of this possible within constitutional bounds or is there always
going to have to be some sort of special life and its carved out for
people operating in this space. It's possible to do. It will never be
perfect, even with the terrible overreach we have now, it's still not It's
still never going to be perfect in terms of preventing Americans from being harmed.
But that's like saying, you know, we we have to have so much
safety that we can't drive cars anymore, or we can't you know, do
whatever because we might get in an accident. It's really the same attitude the
anti gun people have. Let's take away everybody's guns because somebody might get hurt.
So we have to think of it in a different way, and that
is how do you rain these how do we keep the capabilities we need?
Because if you don't define if you go from terrorism to domestic violent extremists as
a defining factor of what the FBI's mission is to hunt down and at the
same time, the FBI includes DEI as what it calls a mission critical function
of the bureau and a core principle of the FBI. In fact, FBI
recently made some statements saying that adherence to the Constitution and DEI are core principles
of the FBI's mission. So they're equating DEI with the Constitution. So amazing.
Yeah, so you can see that the damage is now there are ways
to address it which are really This year is really a make or break year
for it, because the next presidency will be the time when the critical theorists
will have taken over these organizations in terms of numbers of personnel, and they
don't need the huge numbers to physically dominate the whole organization. State just need
to dominate the human resources departments, the legal council units, and the managerial
nervous system of the entity, and that way it controls everybody inside and determines
who gets promoted and who doesn't get promoted. So we need these functions of
the FBI, most of them anyway, to one degree or another, but
it doesn't have to be in the FBI. And it was a great man,
Angelo Codevilo who taught me long ago. He was associated with the Claremont
Institute and he was a big fan of the federalist also very prescient thinker,
absolutely so he taught me long ago when I wanted to go into the CIA
as a career, and he warned me, don't do it. You will
hate it and it will hate you. Because I was a mission oriented person.
And he said, these are just bureaucracies, and bureaucracies come and go.
And just because a bureaucracy has a cool brand and has an old brand
that it did great things long ago, doesn't mean it's still a good brand.
So, really, thinking about what Angelo said, the FBI is to
law enforcement and counterintelligence what bud light is to be. It's really good.
So it's just a bad brand, and so get rid of the brand.
Boycott the brand, find another brand. But you still want to have your
beer. You just don't want that brand. So I would say in Big
Intel, I suggest taking the counter intelligence functions out of the FBI and moving
them laterally over to a small agency that was created after nine to eleven for
strategic counter intelligence, which would be just a counter intelligence agency aimed at foreign
spies and agents of influence. The reason that other counter intelligence service never became
successful, and it was created twenty years ago, was because Bush put FBI
agents in charge of it. So move it over there, and with a
management that can can you know, pick out the mission critical people, the
mission oriented people, and really go after spies in a different way. There's
much more. This is very simplistic approach, but this is one part of
it. Take the Criminal Division of the FBI that investigates crimes and move it
over to the US Marshals. The US Marshals have had far fewer scandals.
It's the nation's oldest law enforcement agency. Arguably it's the only constitutional federal law
enforcement agency because George Washington created it, so it's been around forever and it
has a good reputation and it's pretty effective. So you move that and the
FBI Academy, which means the training of all the new personnel, move that
over to the US Marshals Service. You know, why do we have a
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms That was also created at about the
time the FBI was created, So that's already a different bureau. Take the
FBI. We don't need two of those, but we have two of those
because the FBI does the same stuff that ATF does, it just doesn't collect
the tax revenues. Move the FBI's weapons work over to ATF, and then
we can deal with atf later on and so on down the line until you
have really nothing useful left within the FBI and then you can close it down.
This is maybe a strange question. I'm curious what your thoughts are on
to what extent the American right is compromised. And maybe it's you know,
minimal, maybe it's non existent. But I asked that question just in the
context of people have This is not about you know, Rachel Maddow's various theories
on Donald Trump and the American Left, various theories on Donald Trump. But
you know, Pompeo SCIA director under Donald Trump and sort of tried to go
after Julian Aissange. Trump himself kind of went back and forth on Julian Assange,
as we talked to Keith Kellogg about on this podcast about a year ago.
Is there Bill Barr, for example, somebody who various people, you
know, stonewalled some of the committees we were talking about that were reacting to
Intel in the seventies when he was a back of the DJ early in his
career as a lawyer, a young lawyer. What the this is again,
it's a weird question, Mike, but is the is the Republican Party and
maybe even the conservative movement more broadly, Do you worry that some of these
agencies exercise too much control over groups on the right that, you know,
at a time when you kind of need the right to be the bulwark here.
Oh, I worry about a lot. I wouldn't say the agencies control
them, but I would say that our foreign adversaries will use anybody or anything
to divide us as a country, to discredit our own leaders one way or
another, and to to tear us apart however it can so. So our
foreign enemies don't just go after the commis and the MSNBC set and the and
the you know, antiphote types or whatever else. They're going after anybody who
makes a good target, and they're going to go after conservatives. They have
gone after conservatives through you know, through history. Robert Hanson, the Russian
spy and the FBI, was a hardcore conservative. So for us to think,
oh, they're only going to get the people we don't like is just
hubris and it's really dangerous. And I've seen a lot of people who are
friends, who are influencers on social media and elsewhere, who are you know,
they're at risk of doing the bad guys work for them simply because they're
they're seeking more clicks, or they're putting themselves in positions where a foreign adversary
can exploit them. I don't have any information that foreign adversaries are exploiting them,
but I do know. Let me correct that the Chinese Communist Party did
take advantage of this and was using conservatives to against one another. And this
was a Chinese so called billionaire in New York who was with the Chinese Communist
Party and who has actually built his career with the Chinese secret police, who
has been now he's in jail awaiting trial, but he was working for several
years to fund, actually fund conservative activities and conservative social media to compromise them
for the Chinese regime. So we have to be real careful of this because
it's happening to us too. The problem is the issues become so politicized that
we don't know and we can't trust the institutions we used to trust to root
this out. So when you have the FBI pushing a phony Trump Russia collusion
narrative, and the FBI and the CIA and the fifty one intelligence officers former
intelligence officers putting out things that Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation or it has
all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And then even now the Department this week,
the Department of Homeland Security just named majorcis just named former CIA director Brennan
and former Director of National Intelligence Clapper on this special panel for election year.
Right, And these are the guys who are surfacing and pushing these false narratives
in the previous two election cycles. So who do you trust when they say
so and so is being recruited by a foreign intelligence service. There's nobody to
trust anymore. Do to return to Peter Struck just briefly as we're wrapping up
here, Mike, does Peter Struck know what he's a part of? And
not just Peter Struck, but the Peter Struck archetype, the Leasta Page archetype.
Do they know what they're a part of? The conscious of I think
there's a great Sultan needs and clip that's him talking about the infiltration of academia
like in the nineteen eighties. He's talking about this. Do they know who's
ends they're serving? When they cry hysterically about Russian influence and Russian infiltration?
Are they useful idiots to borrow a phrase, or are they, you know,
true believers who are taking their marching orders and doing their best to tear
down all of these institutions, knowing that you know, it'll create a it'll
destabilize the country. Their own children will will have to deal with the chaos
and pick up the pieces. What do they think they're doing? Well,
They won't say. And Peter Strock blocks me on Twitter, so I have
no direct way he think of it, though. He was head of counter
espionage for the CIA, which is to fight foreign spies, and then head
of all of counter into nothing for the for the FBI, and then head
of counter intelligence, which is not just fighting foreign spies but fighting foreign agents
of influence. On his watch, the FBI shut down a successful ten year
program, Operation Ghost Stories, which was against the Russian illegal agent network here
that had begun to infiltrate Hillary Clinton's inner circle. That was the that was
the Anna Chapman group that sponsored the TV series The Americans. Okay, the
FBI shut that down on Peter Strock's watch. And then the only counterintelligence of
operation that we know of that Peter Strock actually ran was Operation Crossfire. Hurricane,
which wasn't a counterintelligence program at all. It was the abuse of his
office for the political purpose of falsely portraying Donald Trump as a Russian asset.
And he was using what a former foreign intelligence officer from Britain who had been
part of a Soviet active measures campaign in the nineteen eighties against American nukes.
Right at the time, I was unwittingly involved as a fifteen year old kid,
but I broke with it within weeks, and Christopher Steele stayed with it
all his life. And then the other source was a Russian individual who the
FBI believed at the time was still working for Putin. So Operation Crossfire Hurricane
was the only major counterintelligence operation that the Peter Strokes of the world ran and
the Andrew mccabes ran while they were in the top positions of the FBI.
So were they acting as foreign assets we don't know. Or were they just
so incredibly politicized that they viewed counterintelligence as a weapon against their political opponents here
in the United States. Okay, I could keep doing this for three hours.
But Michael Waller is the author of Big Intel. How the CIA and
FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. That book is out
right now. You can buy it right now. You should buy it right
now. It's just incredible perspective that goes against the narratives popular narratives not just
of today, but written into our history. So, Mike Waller, thank
you again so much for stopping by Federalist Radio Hour. This was a lot
of fun. It was great talking to you. Absolute blast. We'll have
to do it again soon. Mike. Let's do you've been listening to another
edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm em a Lekashinski, culture editor here
at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be
lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray. I heard the fame voice,
the reason, and then it faded away. Mm hmm