“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.
Watch the clip:
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.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (1 h) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0222MichaelWaller
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Michael Waller, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Michael Waller: It’s great to be back with you.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s been a long time and you have an amazing new book out. Before we dive into Big Intel, what do you make of Tucker Carlson going to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin?
Mr. Waller: 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.
Mr. Jekielek: My thoughts exactly.
Mr. Waller: Putin is going to say what he will say. One can guarantee that he put his best propaganda people in charge of preparing him for a very long time.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of suggestions that Tucker Carlson shouldn’t be allowed back into the country or having been put on a kill list by the Ukrainians. What do you make of these types of things?
Mr. Waller: Mr. Waller:A great way for the Ukrainians to win support from people who are on the fence 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?
Mr. Jekielek: Any journalist should want to interview any world leader. With the appropriate caveats that you mentioned earlier, it would seem like a normal thing.
Mr. Waller: Of course it would. Who wouldn’t want to interview Xi Jinping? Any international journalist would want to interview the guy knowing that it’s all set up.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about your background so we know what you’re coming in with here.
Mr. Waller: 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. The FBI is mainly counterintelligence against Soviet spies and agents of influence. The CIA is the main instrument for the containment of communism or we hoped it would have been. Its mission was waging covert warfare at the sub-military level so that we wouldn’t have to send our own troops in, and informing our presidents with the finest possible intelligence gathered in the best manner with the most solid vetting. That’s what I was expecting.
I saw something very different coming in as a college undergrad. That’s how I got into all of this. I’ve still been looking at it in the context of the system, but I am very alarmed. Any human institution is always going to have its problems and challenges. There was a breaking point in the FBI and the CIA where they stopped serving American interests.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s an astonishing statement. Right now there are many people that are wondering if that statement is true. Obviously, it can’t be entirely true. Right?
Mr. Waller: Right. No, it’s a generalization. But as a yes or no issue, looking at it in a black or white way, it does not serve the American interest if they view themselves as states within states, if they stop believing in the real American founding principles, and they are there as the central government to protect all of us rather than be the servant of all of us. It’s flipped on its head.
Of course, they fight foreign spies. Of course, they’re great at fighting child trafficking within the country. They’re great at fighting organized crime. The FBI has done a lot. They have protected us from international terrorism attacks.
The CIA has been the world’s best at this, there’s no question. But there is that breaking point where they are not really protecting America anymore, if they’re full of people who don’t even believe in America, the way it was founded, the principles on which it’s based, and they view half the country as potential enemies?
Mr. Jekielek: You entered the system out of college. Please tell us about your career.
Mr. Waller: It was never in the government, it was around the government. Starting out as an undergrad, I was approached when I was a student journalist, and 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. I didn’t really know what I was getting into at the time.
I should have been quicker to figure out that 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 that 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. In fact, it was actually Bill Casey giving me my cryptonym at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. It was 30 years later I found out that he did that so that he would never have to testify before Congress what went on in that church.
Mr. Jekielek: Can you flesh out what you actually did?
Mr. Waller: I started out wanting to be in the CIA to wage Reagan’s fight against communism. My professor Jack Dziak, and Angelo Codevilla, who’s really well known and who I knew as a Senate Intelligence committee staffer said, “Don’t go in. You will hate it and it will hate you. It’s not mission-oriented anymore.”
Mr. Jekielek: Wow. What year was that?
Mr. Waller: 1983. That’s when I went in with Casey’s privately funded network. 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 and it was his own business. We were just kids and we didn’t know what we were up against. 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.
Mr. Jekielek: Did you stop doing this at the end of his tenure?
Mr. Waller: It was before then. I met a Salvadoran girl during the war, got married, and had a family. Then I went off and did other things, but I kept going back and forth. I still worked with the Contras in my own private capacity because I believed in their cause. I was working with the Salvadoran army in my own private capacity as well, and then finally I went into journalism.
Mr. Jekielek: There is a narrative on the conservative side that mainstream media is actually just a mouthpiece for U.S. intelligence. What do you make of that?
Mr. Waller: For some elements in U.S. intelligence there is a symbiosis between the intelligence community and mainstream media and some investigative journalists who are chiefly on the Left. It has been that way since the 1950s. They have built up the careers of certain journalists at the Washington Post or the big three networks that they used to have, and now it’s CNN and certain websites. They give them illegal leaks of classified information.
They become dependent on 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 those books. They might get some movies out of it. Now, you’re creating a wealthy class of journalists who are wholly dependent on the intelligence community as the source of livelihood.
Mr. Jekielek: Do you have a sense of how prevalent that is?
Mr. Waller: Anybody can tell. If you read intelligence sources say or so-and-so has received documents from the CIA or unnamed intelligence officials say this, that means unnamed officials are leaking to that journalist or to that news organization. There is a favored relationship there. Now, any good journalist is going to work his sources there, but not every good journalist is going to get a constant stream of leaks over a lifetime of journalism.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that these relationships started in the ‘50s, and you hear about Operation Mockingbird. The thesis of your book is that they went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. Did that start as early as the ’50s? Please explain that to us.
Mr. Waller: When the CIA was founded in the early ‘50s, that’s when the Cold War began. On 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. In the ’50s you had Allen Dulles, who was head of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State. They were very close to President Eisenhower.
There were times like when Nikita Khrushchev gave that secret speech to the Soviet Party Congress to supposedly expose Stalin’s crimes and to hold themselves blameless for the crimes they had 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.
That’s why it was a secret speech, because if the whole communist movement and the different parties of loyal Soviet agents and supporters around the world knew about it they would be terribly demoralized. When the U.S. got their hands on this speech it had to come out. It was a great intelligence coup to get that speech.
How do you publish it? Do you have the CIA leak it? No. In this case, you had the U.S. Secretary of State release it through the State Department, translate it into various languages by the AFL-CIO through a private entity that was allied with the U.S. in waging the Cold War, and distribute it to ethnic communities who didn’t speak English or distribute it abroad.
That’s a good way of using intelligence in a non-manipulative fashion, not playing favorites with journalists and just getting the information out there. 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.
Mr. Jekielek: With a specific agenda.
Mr. Waller: When it becomes a political agenda it gets even worse, because then it’s intervening on how Americans think about their own leaders and how they think about their own policies. Then you have unaccountable intelligence officials manipulating American public opinion, and therefore, manipulating American politics and elections through management of attitudes.
Mr. Jekielek: For the benefit of our viewers, what is Operation Mockingbird? Some people suggest this is still very much ongoing.
Mr. Waller: First of all, we don’t know what is ongoing. We don’t know what kind of operations are continuing or what new ones there might be so that we actually know what has been declassified or leaked. Mockingbird was an operation to work through the press to influence public opinion and capture journalists. 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.
Mr. Jekielek: Was that with the intent to seed specific narratives into society?
Mr. Waller: It was really to wage the Cold War against the Soviets. But the CIA did not support real anti-communist movements and they didn’t build up anti-communist forces. They built up non-communist forces. They built up the Democratic Left, or even the almost Democratic Left or the undemocratic Left that wasn’t totalitarian, in order to keep them away from the Soviet controlled communist parties and organizations and bring them into the wider spectrum of politics in whatever countries they were in. You had the real anti-communists in Europe. Who were they? We don’t know.
It was all moderate Christian Democrats and then anti-communist labor. They were not real Right-wingers, but they viewed the communists as rivals to their goal to control the labor movement. You had this building up of the international Left, while the Soviets were building up the international hard-Left at the same time. That dramatically affected world politics and the way the world is today and also globalism for that matter, because they were both global movements.
Mr. Jekielek: There was a group in the solidarity movement of Poland which was called Fighting Solidarity. They were the only group which had the explicit mandate to be anti-communist and to seek the removal of communist governance. A lot of people today don’t understand 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?
Mr. Waller: You don’t hear about it much. I had forgotten about it.
Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to us why they were not supporting anti-communist forces, but only so-called non-communist forces.
Mr. Waller: During World War II, we didn’t have an intelligence service when the war was about to begin. The war had already begun elsewhere in the world, but it really didn’t affect us. But we had no foreign intelligence service. The British came to the U.S. and said, “You really need a foreign intelligence service. Let us help you set one up.” That seemed like a pretty good deal.
President Roosevelt appointed Wild Bill Donovan to set up what became the Office of Strategic Services [OSS]. That was our wartime intelligence service that collected and analyzed intelligence for the president and then ran covert operations behind enemy lines. This is where young guys like Bill Casey were recruited. He had invented tax shelters to help people get around Roosevelt’s New Deal wealth confiscation. You needed to bring in guys like that who know how to disrupt systems with minimal effort.
A lot of them were good anti-communists, as well as anti-Nazis. During the war, Bill Donovan’s real goal with the OSS was to defeat the Axis enemy. He didn’t see anything beyond that. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, whom Donovan couldn’t stand 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.” Lo and behold, Stalin was flooding the United States with his agents and assets, many of whom went into the OSS.
You need native speakers of these different languages behind Nazi lines and in areas where we need to operate. Who are you going to get? A lot of them were communist party members from those countries who had fled to the United States, some for refuge, and some to implant themselves as agents. This is how the Frankfurt School developed in the United States.
For the purposes of our diplomacy and our covert operations, if you have Left-wingers from Europe and communists from Europe coming into the United States in the ‘30s, joining our intelligence services as subject matter experts and operatives, they are remembering where they came from and how they want to shape things when it’s done.
You have the Stalinists wanting to shape it on Stalinist lines. Then you have the Euro-socialists who want to have a socialist Europe emerge from this. This is not putting American interest first. This is defeating Hitler in order to gain whatever they want. You had these Left-wing, pro-communist and Left-wing, anti-communist sections in our intelligence services. When the OSS was abolished, many went into the State Department and they shaped the policies that we are living with today.
Mr. Jekielek: You use the term from Diana West’s book, The Red Thread. She found some astonishing disclosures around people who identified as communists very early on. You’re saying the seeds of this were planted right at the beginning.
Mr. Waller: Before our beginning. It’s one thing to say, “These people on the Left or these Soviet agents did something in the ‘30s and therefore things are the way they are today.” It’s not cause and effect to say that. In writing Big Intel, I was really looking at what happened under Obama.
How did the center just collapse within the FBI and the CIA, and both get 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?
Where did that impetus come from and where did it come from before that? By going backwards, you can find Diana West’s Red Thread, this intellectual chain of custody going back person to person, without a break, to a 1922 meeting in Moscow at the Marx-Engels Institute with the leaders of the Comintern, the Communist International.
This was a brand new international global entity that was set up by the Bolsheviks to control all the radical socialists and communist parties around the world and make them loyal to the Bolshevik Revolution, and then to replicate Bolshevism worldwide. This was a centrally-structured command and control system for this. They were meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute mainly with their European agents and Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka or what became the KGB, to discuss, “How can we have a Bolshevik-type revolution worldwide?”
The consensus was, “We are not going to have workers rise up in a violent workers struggle like Marx had called for or even a violent revolution as happened in Russia, because the workers are too well-paid. They’re aspiring, or at least they have some kind of hope. We have to find a different way to do it.”
A Hungarian Bolshevik named Gyorgy Lukacs, who had been a minister of culture in the Hungarian Bolshevik regime, which had taken power just before the Soviets took power and didn’t last long, 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, and break up nuclear families. This was a strategy of his.
Mr. Jekielek: It sounds familiar.
Mr. Waller: 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 and he was the first to implement it. Karl Marx came up with it in 1843, five years before he ever wrote The Communist Manifesto. He wasn’t yet this economic madman who didn’t know anything about economics, but then he became famous for the Manifesto and Das Kapital.
But five years earlier, he was a cultural warrior. He was writing about destroying pride in one’s country. He said that obeying legitimate laws, church, family, heritage, history, and parents were all oppressive. He said, “Your country is 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.” That was what he wanted to do to just rip society apart.
That didn’t catch on. 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. 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.
This was at a time when Germany was ripping itself apart after its unconditional surrender after World War I, not knowing what direction to go in. It didn’t have a long history of unity as a unitary state anyway, so you had all these factions battling each other.
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.” However, Hitler moved faster than they did and 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.
The university had a teaching school to teach the teachers who fanned out across America and worked with a certain John Dewey, head of the National Education Association. He went to the Soviet Union and wrote a six part series in the New Republic praising Stalin’s education system. He also designed a new education system to change how American children learn and how they view the world.
Mr. Jekielek: There are a few interviews of Yuri Bezmenov and he says that the majority of the effort that the KGB exerts is for subverting America, as opposed to intelligence gathering.
Mr. Waller: Bezmenov gets a whole chapter in Big Intel. I went through those interviews and transcribed a lot of them so that they would be in print and not have YouTube suddenly banish them all someday. He was such a wise figure in his time. These were interviews that took place 40 years ago.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us who he was.
Mr. Waller: He wasn’t a KGB man. He was a Soviet propagandist under journalistic cover based in India, but he knew the whole English-speaking world very well. He defected to the United States and relocated to Canada. Then he resurfaced with this immense knowledge of how Soviet propagandists are trained.
He shared the whole philosophy and doctrine behind that training with the hows and the whys of that training. The goal is 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. It is to ruin us inside, to collapse us from within, and to basically defeat us. Sun Tzu wrote, “You defeat the enemy without fighting him.” This is what Bezmenov was explaining to us in 1983 and 1984.
Mr. Jekielek: Many people were not ready to grasp this and did not understand it. How was it received at the time?
Mr. Waller: It was received by people who were ideologically anti-communist and allied with President Reagan. But no one else wanted to hear the message.
Mr. Jekielek: Our biggest threat from subversion currently comes from the Chinese Communist Party. It’s not something that appears a lot in Big Intel, and I’m curious about that.
Mr. Waller: That’s a whole separate book or a separate lifetime of work to explore that. I didn’t focus on them in Big Intel because I was trying to answer the question, “How did the FBI and CIA become woke?” I investigated Obama’s political lineage and all 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 agent was Gus Hall running on the Communist Party USA ticket.
Then after he voted, three years later he got hired by the CIA. That’s kind of a problem. Why? It’s not like he had an epiphany at some point to fight communists. He just dismissed it and went along his way. Even in his memoir where he admitted this, he never drew any lessons from it. He just said it was a lark as a young man.
Mr. Jekielek: He didn’t hide his ideological leanings when he was hired into the agency, which is shocking.
Mr. Waller: When you’re interviewing for a job with security clearance, especially in intelligence, it’s like a confession. You admit all your dirt because they’re going to find out anyway. If you’re lying or obfuscating you’re definitely out, so you just admit it. Then they assess, “Does this present a danger to the United States?”
Mr. Jekielek: Right, exactly.
Mr. Waller: He had just voted for the Soviets a few years earlier, 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 more like, “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, there was another radical, General Clapper. I call him that because these guys wear uniforms that have stars and talk about, “My lifetime of brave service.” No, he was a known extremist throughout his career and there are stories about him at the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] back in the ‘90s. I was close to people at the DIA at the time, and heard these stories firsthand and have 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. One of the people he was protecting was Ana Belen 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 Soviet and Russian military intelligence here in Washington, to go around unescorted in the Pentagon. Who on earth would do this? He had the authority to do that.
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. 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 they couldn’t do it with meritocracy. That’s where diversity, equity, and inclusion comes in to pull them up with that criteria. Lo and behold, you now have woke people running the entire nerve center of the CIA.
Mr. Jekielek: This is how DEI actually works. Essentially, there’s a kind of coded language. If you speak the language and put it into your applications, everybody who is involved knows exactly what it means and knows what team you’re on.
Mr. Waller: There’s a lot of that.
Mr. Jekielek: Not to mention people who would identify themselves as being part of a visible minority, when in fact they’re not. They knew the right language would get them in for more opportunities.
Mr. Waller: As long as you can self-identify as what you’re really not, you will be promoted because your ideology is right. Look at what this does to the truth. If you can say that you’re a gender or a sex or a race that you’re actually 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, then that’s just 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. The FBI had a training program in 2021, and I got the 56-page slide presentation for it. There is a whole chapter devoted to gender and the importance of gender, because now DEI is what FBI Director Wray calls, “A core principle.” The CIA has also said this in their own literature which is unclassified. These have become core operating principles. Recently, the FBI even sent out a message on X that DEI ranks on par with the U.S. Constitution as a core principle of the FBI.
But here’s the thing. When you believe that a man is not a man or a woman is not a woman and it’s whatever gender they say they are, and that you must believe it and your professional future depends on it, what does that do to an honest assessment of evidence as a crime fighter or as an investigator? What does it do to intelligence collection and assessment and the evaluations that we do for the national leaders of the country within the community, if facts are no longer facts?
Mr. Jekielek: It’s like everything is subjected to an ideological test.
Mr. Waller: Who did this before? The Soviets did it. The Chinese Communist Party does it. Here we are in a post-fact intelligence community driven by social, political, and cultural agendas that have their direct origins back in cultural Marxism spawned at that 1922 meeting with Feliks Dzerzhinsky 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 are the best people for the job. That’s what you want.
You need to have the FBI trained to 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 they are making our own FBI agents and CIA officers into agents of change to change our culture. This is not legal and this is not what the intelligence community is for, but that is what they are doing.
Mr. Jekielek: What portion of these services think that way?
Mr. Waller: It’s tiny. In the FBI, about 1.6 percent are what the FBI now defines as LGBTQIIA+. They keep changing that label so it might have changed again. It is 1.6 percent according to the FBI’s own figures. The FBI isn’t as diverse as it pretends to be and not all of that 1.6 percent wants to shove this down everybody’s throat, it’s just a fraction that wants to.
You have a tiny militant group within the bureau pushing this. Then they end up being the nerve center and the political enforcers within the bureau. According to this 2021 FBI training course, if you misgender someone a third time, that’s a mark against you professionally and that will affect your promotion.
Mr. Jekielek: Almost every system in Western society seems to have this same structure that you’re describing. A very small group of people says, “Yes, this is the right thing we’re doing.” Ultimately, it’s a very tiny group of people, but they have a lot of energy, and therefore they wield power. Everyone else goes along with it, with just a few defectors.
Mr. Waller: Think of it from the cultural Marxism side. You’ve got the ideology of cultural Marxism and critical theory as the intellectual structure for how we process things. You don’t even need to know the ideology if you’re trained to think a certain way. They say, “You can’t say that, that’s racist. You can’t say that, you’re a misogynist for saying that.” No, I’m not.
Then you want to overcompensate for that, so you won’t be called that again. The whole goal of cultural Marxism is to cause us to lose confidence in all our institutions. It’s not just the FBI, it’s not just the CIA, it’s not just the government, it’s now in medicine.
Think of it, you can’t trust your doctor anymore, and 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?
Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. You’ve just mentioned these policies that Director Christopher Wray of the FBI has instituted and explained why they are highly problematic. At the same time, Director Wray testified in Congress about the Chinese communist party’s infiltration of American systems with cybertools set up to not just gather intelligence, to not just perform military activities, but to actually harm civilians. That testimony is accurate based on our own information.
However, you have a whole bunch of Americans out there doubting this is real because of other things the FBI has done that have proven to be false. What you’re describing is a huge problem, but there’s also an important role that’s being played by the agency. Director Wray publicly testified about these things because this is a reality that we need to be concerned about. How do we square this, because we could fall into the trap that the cultural Marxists want us to fall into?
Mr. Waller: 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. 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. Usually, it’s just the Chinese government.
That means the FBI is really onto something and they’re devoting resources to this problem. 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.
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 wonder if we can trust them even when they’re doing the right thing. This is just damaging.
Mr. Jekielek: Then there’s also the issue of focus. You could be focusing on ideological tests for the local populace as opposed to identifying national security threats and neutralizing them.
Mr. Waller: Think of the people who would make the best counterintelligence officers 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 whose real mission in life is to go hunt down Chinese communist spies force them to go this route?
Look at military recruitment. We can all see that by looking at the types of ads the military has been putting out to get the most useless elements of 20-something society to join the military. These are not the real people and the real warriors we want to join the military. We are alienating them out, and then we have this terrible recruitment crisis. You take the lowest common denominator, which is spelled DEI, 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.
Mr. Jekielek: The people that disproportionately go out and die for this country are the white males which according to the DEI system are at the absolute bottom of the intersectional hierarchy.
Mr. Waller: For anybody who is mission-oriented, it doesn’t matter what kind of demographic they are from. They’re not finding a home in the military or the intelligence community because basically they are not welcome.
Mr. Jekielek: In your book, you list ideas about how to deal with this, because it is so overwhelming.
Mr. Waller: It gets really discouraging if you just look at the problems, and the problems are really severe. But if you have stage 3 cancer, that means you have hope. Maybe even if you have stage 4 cancer, there’s still hope, so what can we do?
The first thing is that the FBI is 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? The FBI’s eyes and ears on the ground at the local level are the state and local police and the county sheriffs. The county sheriffs have a unique legal authority to determine how or whether or not federal agents can operate in that county.
County sheriffs are elected law enforcement officers. This is an election year, so every county sheriff is going to be up for reelection this year, and there are other candidates who seek to be sheriffs. This is a way for every citizen to say, “How can we help you as sheriff to make sure that the feds don’t come in and abuse us? How can we hold you accountable if you’re not going to be doing your job in that way?”
You’re letting the sheriffs who are already aware or the candidates know that they have the people behind them, and you’re letting other candidates know that they had better do their job to defend the people who elected them.
Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to us what sheriffs do.
Mr. Waller: I look at more of the federal part, but I’ve got two colleagues at the Center for Security Policy, Kyle Shideler and Chris Holton, who work this all the time at the state level. They’re working with sheriffs nationwide and with state legislatures nationwide. But the unique thing is every single citizen has a say during the campaigns for this and when they vote for sheriff this fall.
We don’t normally pay attention to who’s running for sheriff, we just check whatever party affiliation we like and move on. But no, you have to talk to them and say, “We’ve got your back,” or, “We don’t like the job you’re doing,” or, “What are you going to do to make this right?”
A lot of sheriffs’ 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. It’s really neat and really fun, but how does that protect the local population from an abusive central government? This is something that has to be an election issue for sheriffs, and it’s one of the solutions for overreaching federal control.
Mr. Jekielek: It might not be obvious to people that a sheriff can take a stand against the FBI.
Mr. Waller: They can say, “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. You’re doing something here that’s abusing the Constitution. You are breaking the law. Even if you’re not, and you can come in legally, I’m not going to help you. I don’t have to.”
Mr. Jekielek: I don’t know if this is a commonly known reality.
Mr. Waller: 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 and they don’t realize it. They’re in awe of Washington or they’re afraid of Washington, or they want that cool surplus military type gear coming from them. Once you’re bought in, you'll do the FBI field offices. They say, “Hey, we need to send agents in. Can you help us? Can you be our eyes and ears?” That’s when the sheriff can say, “No.”
Mr. Jekielek: Many of your solutions are at the local county or state level.
Mr. Waller: That’s what my colleagues are doing at the Center for Security Policy. Go to securefreedom.org and you can find their material. They’ve been behind a lot of state legislative initiatives as well to help states grapple with this problem. The states 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. 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 also come in with a real team that likes and trusts each other and has a real plan. They have executive orders written before inauguration day, and a calendar to roll out those executive orders. Executive orders are decrees from the president to implement a certain policy, stop a certain policy, or instruct 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. He has learned his lesson, but he needs to have his own executive orders to repeal bad ones that are already there. He can do it unilaterally, and then put his agenda forward through executive orders.
By law, the federal agencies have to abide by that as soon as they’re 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.
Biden then came in and simply repealed the executive orders and there was no law behind it. 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. Biden did too with Obama’s team, I would argue, using Biden as a cutout.
Mr. Jekielek: We’ve learned over the last several years that the agencies don’t necessarily follow what the president’s requirements are.
Mr. Waller: They can wait it out for four years. They can drag their feet, they can slow walk, they can do whatever they feel like. They can lie and do whatever they want to a president who doesn’t know how to manage a bureaucracy, and who doesn’t have a team to manage it. It’s simply not enough to put in your own guy as CIA director for a year, then transfer him to the State Department and let the CIA run itself. That’s literally what happened.
When President Trump came in, he put in Mike Pompeo, a great congressman, as CIA director. What did the CIA do? They ran him like an op, flew him around the world to visit all the CIA stations, and kept him out of Langley as much as they possibly could. Then they said, “Just trust Gina Haspel who had so much great experience working with the British, and let her run the agency for you.”
He didn’t have any deputies under him who he trusted, so she worked on him really well. Then he recommended her when he was made Secretary of State, “Let’s put Gina in there, she’s a career CIA person.” If the CIA is part of the problem in interfering in our elections, why on earth would you let the CIA run itself?
There was so much going on in the Trump administration and there was not a coherent team that was really working on this. They didn’t have an action plan because the president viewed running America like you would run a business, and it doesn’t work that way.
Boom, the CIA just continued running itself. All those woke ads that came out from the CIA during the first months of the Biden administration were actually produced under CIA Director Gina Haspel when she was working under Trump.
Speaker 3: When I was, 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 damned 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’m a woman of color. I’m 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 the CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke or slipped 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 feel there’s so much more to do.
I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36, I refuse 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. My parents left everything they knew and loved to expose me to opportunities they never had. Because of them, I stand here today as a proud first generation Latina and officer at CIA. I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically whoever you are. Know your worth, command your space. Mija, you’re worth it.
Mr. Waller: She just kept it going on within the community. The same thing with the FBI. You just don’t fire Comey, then his deputy McCabe, and then Peter Strzok, the counterintelligence chief. He was the 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 repairable 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 because our military has messed up leadership and terrible recruitment, we should just not have a military anymore. That doesn’t make sense at all. We need the functions of the CIA. We need most of the functions of the FBI. 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.
There are lots of different points of view and this is just to kick off a national discussion of how we would do this. 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. Marshal Service, eliminating some of the non-useful functions. Therefore you’re eliminating the positions and therefore you’re eliminating the federal employees.
Get them off the federal payroll and get them out completely because you can’t fire them. Move it over to the U.S. Marshal Service, which is the first and oldest federal law enforcement agency, originally created by George Washington, with a really good reputation and not as woke yet as everything else.
Move the FBI Academy over to the Marshal Service. Move the FBI National Security Division, that’s probably one of the most politicized units, and break that into a separate counterintelligence service simply to hunt spies and agents of influence.
Then the rest of the National Security Division like counter-terrorism, 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 human resources side and the other parts that you don’t need.
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.
Then with the CIA, first, it’s really bloated. 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. 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.
Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to us how that works.
Mr. Waller: I can’t. It’s beyond logic, but they believe that gender is a fundamental role of the 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 that you don’t need.
Of the 30-odd thousand CIA personnel, if you only have 1500 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? A lot of them are doing support activities and intelligence collection and analysis. You need that technology and you need all that, but it’s very wasteful and very bloated. 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. Keep the clandestine covert operations side lean and mean and effective. There are a lot of great people in there doing a fantastic job as a separate standalone service, like a separate clandestine service. With 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.
Mr. Jekielek: How are people reacting to your suggestions?
Mr. Waller: On the sheriff’s side, a lot of people just never thought of that before. I never did until my colleagues told me about it. On the dismantling of the FBI side, I found that the younger, former agents and whistleblowers think it’s a great idea. 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 apart.”
But they’re also attached to the FBI brand. It’s like the FBI has become the Bud Light of law enforcement. Now, if you like that brand, you can stick with it, but most people would not stick with that brand under those circumstances. We don’t need an FBI if it has run its course, but we need everything it does. The question is how do you organize it to do its functions?
Mr. Jekielek: What about on the CIA side? Are there similar reactions?
Mr. Waller: They mostly hate the idea. They won’t argue on the woke issue because it’s so blatant and so public, even with a lot of even liberal CIA guys who are still mission oriented. They say, “Yes, this is insane. This is doing us a lot of damage.” Well fine, then speak up and get rid of it. They wouldn’t speak on record for the book. I couldn’t even make hints about some of the people I talked to.
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 once the mission was 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 pair back the useless functions that are within them.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re describing massive changes. It’s hard to imagine how all of this would work. As we finish up, any final thoughts?
Mr. Waller: 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. There is a need to know the answers. 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?” But the senior FBI official would not answer.
He was literally saying, “Did the FBI plan and commit crimes against Congress?” The FBI would not answer. 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 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.
That’s a real danger. Now is really the time. 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.
Mr. Jekielek: Michael Waller, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Waller: It’s great to be with you. I wish I could be more optimistic, but there is a reason for us to be that way if our citizens are adequately informed and active.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Michael Waller and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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