Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 196th episode of the Atlas Society asks, my name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. Most of you know me as Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We're the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn ran. Apologies for the background. I am on a six city donor appreciation tour through Florida. One of those donors, not in Florida, but is sponsoring actually this episode. He's the vice president, associate publisher for Human Events Media Group, Brent Hamachek. He's the author of the new book, dissidently speaking, change the Words, change the Way, which is available for sale on Amazon. We'll promote the link for purchase in the chats. So thank you, Brent, for that sponsorship. Today we're joined by Jay Michael Waller. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, you guys know the drill. Go ahead, line up and type in your questions. Whether you're watching us on Zoom, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, use the comment section to put your questions in there. We'll get to as many of them as we can. So our guest, J. Michael Waller, is the author of Big intel, how the CIA and FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep State villains. The book recounts the inception and the evolution of various arms of the american intelligence bureaucracy and explains why they've become so politicized and prone to partisan activism. President of Georgetown Research, a political risk and private intelligence company. Waller previously worked for the CIA in Central America and published an award winning doctoral dissertation titled Soviet Empire, the KGB in Russia today. So we're going to talk about that as well. Michael, thanks for joining us.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Great to be with you.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: So I really enjoyed chatting with you a bit before we went live. Michael is the father of seven children up in the free State of New Hampshire. So we're all curious to know a little bit about your origins. Were you also a child of a large extended family? And what were some of the early influences that might have shaped your involvement and study of the intelligence community?
[00:02:45] Speaker B: Came from a small, rather small family, four kids at least, was small for the time, and it was normal and sort of non political. So what got me interested in intelligence was that in high school I was an idealist and this was the 1970s and South Vietnam had fallen. So I was, entered high school right after that. But the old Vietnaks, the people who were not just anti war but who were supporting the communists in Hanoi and the Viet Cong, then took up anti nuclear activism. I didn't know the context of that then, but I got involved, partly fired well, completely fired up because they were building a nuclear power plant in our state. And so we got wound up that this was going to destroy the environment. So being an outdoorsy type and somebody who likes to go fishing with my grandpa and my dad offshore, and you've got this boiling water coming out of the reactor cooling system and being piped out to sea, I thought, well, this is going to harm the fishbed. So I got involved in the anti nuclear campaign against this nuclear power plant.
Well, there were some professionals brought in from California who selected us, isolated us one by one, started grilling us. And I later learned this was a struggle session to Maoist type session to make me tear myself apart psychologically and not believe in anything I'd believed in before to reshape me. And they said, what are you getting involved in this movement for? And I told them, I care about nature and the environment. And they laughed, put me down and said, this is about overthrowing american capitalism.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Wow. Okay. Well, and as an early idealist, I don't know when it was that you discovered Ayn Rand. You've read outlaw shrugged a couple of times.
Tell us, is the audience that's curious about that.
When did you discover Ayn Rand? What did it mean to you?
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Well, I was open to it because I realized I had been a dupe. And it was such a helpful experience to have been a dupe of real communists who were really trying to indoctrinate me and recruit me into a movement that was to overthrow everything our country ever stood for.
That was in high school, in college. I came in right when Reagan was elected that fall, 1980. And it was somebody who lived on my floor who asked me about Atlas Shrug, and I hadn't heard of it before, and she tried to get me to read it, but it's this thick, and you're a college freshman and you're doing so much stuff. So I didn't read it, and I kept putting it off and putting it off. But she brought me to a couple of young Americans for freedom meetings where they had some Ayn Rand people talking about the philosophy behind it and the whole proper role and the improper roles of government and how it impedes it's supposed to protect enterprise, not impede it, not to play favorites or anything else according to the founding of our country.
So I learned more about that. It wasn't for a few years later that I actually read the book the first time and then really identified with certain of the circumstances in the book because my trajectory was going toward serving the nation in the intelligence community and battling the communists through what Reagan was trying to do at the time. But I also saw at the same time that the CIA was a pretty liberal institution, and its way of fighting the communists was to support left wing and socialist movements around the world. It wasn't supporting free market, it wasn't supporting small government, it wasn't supporting any of that. It was to support the so called democratic left and even elements of the nondemocratic left to wean them away from what the Soviets were trying to do, to recruit them into their popular fronts.
So I learned early on that, wait, we're really messing up the world this way in our competition with the Soviets. So it all seemed very upside down. And so that's what led me a few years later to read short once again and sort of internalize it a lot more. And it just added so much context.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: To everything, especially Ayn Rand. Nay. AlysSa ROSENBauM, twelve years old when she saw the Bolshevik revolution from the window of her apartment, coming to United States, really on a hero's journey to warn Americans in her fiction about the dangers of collectivism, socialism, and communism. And you traveled the other way, geographically, at least, with the study and research for your dissertation, which took you to Russia to find out just how they were doing in terms of transitioning from soviet intelligence post KGP. So, 30 years plus later, what do you feel you got right and what did you get wrong?
[00:08:06] Speaker B: It's a terribly vain thing to think that I did get everything right and didn't get anything wrong. But looking back on what I wrote 30 years ago, I can't find much wrong with it.
I said in there that there's a KGB gangster state being created, and at the rate things are going, you're going to have a KGB takeover of the russian economy and the russian state.
And that's precisely what happened.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sure we're going to have plenty.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Plenty of questions from the audience about intelligence, both in the Soviet Union and our intelligence community and their activities now in Ukraine. Now, just turning to the really breathtaking sweep of history that you lay out in your book. If I understand correctly from my reading of history, intelligence operations from the time of our founding were run out of the military. George Washington used spy networks and battlefield disinformation techniques. So help us understand how this all got started. Why did FDR believe that he needed his separate centralized intelligence agency in the form of the office of Strategic Services, or OSS, rather than running those operations out of the military?
[00:09:33] Speaker B: So it began. We really owe our independence, in very large part to George Washington's spy networks.
He lost most of his military battles, but as other authors have written, he outspied the British. And sure enough, had it not been for his own spy networks, we might not have been a country.
So it's inherently part of our founding, and there's a great aspect to it in that spying can save a lot of lives. It can limit the enemy's ability to work against you. The danger is that it can take over a government. It can corrupt a society if it's not reined in, if you don't have checks and balances. So a person like George Washington is a very unique character in history, where he could have easily become a dictator with popular support.
He easily could have become a king in a group of colonies that all they ever had known was a monarch.
And he chose not to. And he ultimately chose to walk away.
And after doing his, he tried to walk away a few times. Actually, I have a quote here carved in wood in my kitchen about I had rather stay on my farm than become emperor of the world.
You don't see many leaders who think.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: That way, especially not today. So, speaking of the OSS, many in our audience have an interest in postmodernism, particularly as a movement that paved the way for today's obsession with identity politics. More than a few in our audience are familiar with Herbert Marcusa and his role in ushering in cultural Marxism.
But few will have known that Marcusa worked for many years at the OSS. I certainly hadn't been aware of that. How did that example or tell us a little bit about his involvement with our intelligence services? And maybe how that example illustrates some of the trade offs involved with intelligence agencies recruiting refugees, immigrants with needed skills and networks.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: The United States never had a civilian intelligence network up until just before our involvement in World War II. So that was the Office of Strategic Services. That was created from a 1940 initiative. So it was right. It was before Pearl harbor, and it was an initiative of the British.
They needed us very badly. They said, you need to have a civilian intelligence service. President Roosevelt agreed. So when he brought in William Donovan to head what became the OSS, he had Donovan liaise with the british secret service out of Washington to help advise this, because we had no intelligence veterans, we had know commandos and others who could run covert operations behind enemy lines. We had nobody with any of that experience, so we relied heavily on the British. But we also needed people who had fluency in the languages of the Axis powers and the places where the axis powers were dominating, whether it was in Serbia or Germany or China or elsewhere. We needed linguists. We needed people who had networks in the region, and we had a lot of them here in America. But the best networked ones were the communists.
They came here to escape. They did not come here to become Americans. They remained networked and loyal to Stalin, and they wanted the outcome of the war to be on Stalin's terms, not our terms. So when the call came for mass recruitment into the office of strategic Services, there was a great need for people with a scholarly discipline in this area. How can they analyze where are the different factories behind enemy lines that were crucial to the enemy war effort? What could we do about them? What are the personalities like and all these other things? So they had a very robust research and analysis staff, and they hired at least 100 and probably more communist party members from their old countries were people who were communist party members here in America who were acting as Stalin agents, plus the networks around them. So you hear about the people like Alger Hiss in the State Department and Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department. You seldom hear about the ones that were in the OSS. And this is a fiction that the CIA has sort of maintained that Bill Donovan pushed them out as soon as he realized they were there. That's not true at all. He actually lied to Congress about it. He kept people in because his objective was, let's just fight Hitler and not worry about anything else, not thinking that these people are essentially double agents working for Stalin. So then boom comes around the Yalta conference, when the United States gave Stalin his way on nearly everything.
A large amount of that was the result of the communists within the OSS, one of whom was Herbert Marcuse, who was taking in here as a refugee from the Frankfurt school in Germany. And then digging back, learning about this in the book, you had the then head of the german Communist party, Ruth Fisher. She had been in the 1920s, she came to America, she defected, and she gave her testimony in public. But she told journalist Ralph de Toladano at the time of a meeting she was at in 1922 with the communist international leadership, the common turn, and with Felix Jerzinski, who was the founder of the Czecha, which became the KGB. And their whole idea was, we're not going to defeat the western countries through a Bolshevik type revolution because the workers there have hope.
Let's make an attack on their cultural institutions and their belief in themselves and their whole civilization around them, tear it all apart, collapse everything, and then come in and take them over. And that's why Herbert Marcusa came here. But even today's CIA, you go on its website, you can search Herbert Marcusa. The CIA accepts him as one of its own.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Wow. And thus began the long march through the institutions. Seeing a lot of great questions coming in from our audience. We're going to get to them. But when you touched upon the 1940s and we were talking about Ayn Rand, the accepted modern narrative on investigations into communist party membership back in the 1940s is that of McCarthyite paranoia and excesses. The fact that Ayn Rand gave testimony before the House on american activities Committee has made her a target for criticism as guilty, abetting anti communist witch hunts. But as you described in your book, such investigations weren't merely looking into individuals who identified with or liked the communist ideology, but rather who were members of the party, which required active commitment to serve Moscow and subvert the government of the United States. That seems a relatively straightforward threat.
So why is this deemed so controversial now?
[00:17:09] Speaker B: That's the whole thing. Your whole point to get to it is there was not a hunt against socialists in the state department or the government. There was no hunt against leftists. It was strictly communist party members because they had a sworn loyalty to obey the soviet regime of Joseph Stalin.
They all were controlled or active agents of the soviet regime, working secretly, some overtly, but mostly secretly, across the United States government and in our universities and in our seminaries and churches and newspapers and entertainment. So when you had people like Ayn Rand come out, or you had people like Ruth Fisher came out, she'd been german communist party leader, she'd been austrian before that. People like her coming, Elizabeth Bentley, all of these others coming out, getting terribly attacked. Why? Because they were going after the communist party itself.
But you could see through the nature of the attacks. These were not party members necessarily doing a lot of the attacking. This was their friends, whether it was their trusted assets or whether it was what the Bolsheviks called their useful idiots, rallying around these communist party members and saying, you're just beating up on people because of their views.
Complete destruction of individuals who revealed this and then the intimidation of others who never came out. So we're only still recently discovering a lot of these soviet agents in our government and our institutions and how they were able to create and spread and concretize critical theory in our country that's now permeated all of our institutions.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: All right, some great questions from the audience. Of course. My modern Gault, always first to the gate, asks, did your book talk about the Iran Contra affair? Well, funny you should ask.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Only in passing. And that was barely a sentence, because when I got involved myself, it was in the first person part of the book. The publisher said, you've got to tell some of your story because whatever. So I was involved in Central America under Bill Casey in the first Reagan administration, and I worked with the Contras in Nicaragua. I was physically there with them. So I'd been an illegal alien in Nicaragua, for what it's worth. But the CIA man at the White House who I was working with, his name was Constantine Menguez. When I was first getting started, he said, stay away from that lieutenant colonel on the National Security Council. He's going to get you in trouble.
And that was Oliver north. So I had no.
That's the only mention of, really the only implication of the Iran Contra affair in big intel.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: All right. Alexander Kronos on Facebook asks, do you think the fall of the Soviet Union makes intelligence agencies scramble to find a new enemy that the US needed to face? Or were there legitimate threats that warranted big intel expansion?
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Both.
The KGB was never abolished.
They're still Czechists like Felix Jacinski today, they still call themselves Czechist. So even though the old KGB has been reorganized, it's still the same institution in different packaging, and it still fundamentally has the same checkist ideology. So until that's broken, it's like denazification.
Until that ideology is broken, Russia is going to continue to be a still. We still need a robust intelligence and counterintelligence system for that. But then you have China, which the CIA never predicted. The rise of communist China as a strategic threat to us. It didn't predict the rise of jihadism as a threat to us and a threat to us here at home. So you had a mandate for expanded vigilance, on the one hand, both offensively and defensively. But you also had a search for enemies, for more enemies. So this whole post 911 national security state that say what you will about anything before that, it completely violates all of our founding principles. When you have a super centralized FBI, now you have an 18 member intelligence community that was deliberately kept separate, each one from one another, so it couldn't take political power or abuse the political system. Now it's centralized under a single director of national intelligence. You have this department of Homeland Security that's always looking for new enemies, and it's mainly people like us that's right.
On top of that, that was so draconian that certain parts of it were supposed to sunset after a few years, and instead, Congress just mindlessly keeps renewing it for what?
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Maybe this helps to explain this next question on Instagram from the marker maker. How did the US get to have 18 intelligence agencies? Is it that many?
[00:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah, they consider it 18 formally. I think it's more if you include what's inside the Department of Homeland Security. There are separate units, but there are officially 18.
But when you think of it makes sense. You need a central intelligence agency for foreign intelligence, for spying on other countries and regimes and movements abroad, and then analyzing events in the world and informing our leadership through intelligence collected secretly, what's happening so our presidents can make informed decisions. That makes sense. You have the FBI, which is supposed to be a law enforcement agency, but it's part of the intelligence community, and it's become, to get to the previous question now a domestic intelligence service with police powers.
But then you have army intelligence, Navy intelligence, national Security Agency, which is electronic intelligence, supposed to be only working against people abroad. But now we can see how that's become politicized, too. You have the National Geospatial intelligence Agency, which runs our spy satellites and so forth. So overall, you have 18 different intelligence agencies.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: All right. On Twitter, Jackson Sinclair. We're going to actually get to this question. I'm going to save it for last.
Jackson is asking if big intel was reined in, what steps do you think would have to be taken to limit their authority and mandate? And J. Michael Waller actually spends quite a bit of time at the end of his book. So we also put that link to his book in the chat. I listened to the audio version, which was really excellent. So I highly recommend. But we are going to get to that.
Let me see. Yes, and I'm seeing more questions about what to do. So we're going to get to that. Towards the end, talk a little bit. We passed over 911. How did the centralization of intelligence infrastructure in the wake of 911 under President Bush 43 pave the way for the acceleration and spread of identity politics from critical theory within the agencies under later administrations?
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you had the trend toward identity politics happening well before then. But then how did it get into our services? This was President George W. Bush in September 2001. He only had a few of his own people in the intelligence leadership and the defense leadership of the country. They were still mostly Clinton holdovers. By that time, his people hadn't been confirmed by the Senate. So FBI director William Webster, who he had named, not Webster, pardon me, Mueller. Robert Mueller, who he had named, had only been on the job for a week. 911 hits. And Bush just turned to him and said, you make sure. The FBI makes sure that no terrorist ever harms another American. Again, that's a pretty tall order, and it's a pretty noble one for the intent.
If our state institutions are not even protecting our citizens, then why have them?
But what happened? He understood it. He went out and he hired a consulting firm. It's actually the same consulting firm that's advising the communist chinese governments on how to be more efficient. So they presented a plan to revamp the whole FBI, create 60 OD, new positions at the top. Meaning more careerism, more of the brown nosers, make it to the top, less mission orientation. So you have all that, on the one hand, with broad counterterrorism powers now, and, oh, by the way, you can't say the word jihad or jihadist or islamic extremist or anything like that because that offends people.
So you can't say that. So you have that on the one hand. Then you have the Department of Homeland Security created out of nothing, pulling all of these separate services. And remember, the services are separate so that none of them become too powerful. None of them can threaten the constitutional government. What do they do? They bring them all into one now. Homeland Security Department and with a huge hiring rush. Who are they going to get? People straight out of the colleges. Great. Are they going to get the best of the best? Maybe not. Are they going to get people with critical theory and all these other ideas? Yes, a lot of that, because the screening is much lower now and it's not fashionable to ask such questions anymore. Same thing with the CIA. And then this whole new director of national intelligence position, which is only supposed to be a couple dozen people, and now it's a thousand times that.
A hundred times know exponents matter, but even there, a hundred times, that is still atrocious. So you had all this centralization for the purposes of protecting the country, but what did that do?
It upended the design to make sure that the intelligence community didn't become powerful against the constitutional government. So then somebody like Obama comes in and now he can just reach down from the top and politicize the whole thing.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Well, yeah, we're going to get to that. Another gem unknown previously to me from your book was the description of Gus Hall, a communist agent and a perennial presidential candidate in the United States. Do you describe how the future CIA director under Obama, John Brennan, voted for hall as a college student, then enlisted in the CIA three years later? Now, while Brennan may have grown out of this youthful political infatuation with Marxist, you argue that regardless he would willingly or unwittingly impose cultural Marxism on american intelligence, quote, from top to bottom, end quote. Tell us a little bit about how he did that.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: Well, when you have, you can't hold people responsible for the dumb things they did in college, right? But when you do something really dumb, like vote for a soviet agent to become president, when you know that he's a communist because it's the Communist Party ticket, and then you go into intelligence, well, there's problem number one. What's the CIA doing in the first place, hiring somebody like that?
Second, he had no introspection. He never indicated he learned any lessons from this.
He never indicated this is how the KGB, one of the ways it was interfering in our politics. It's really ironic to see John Brennan saying that the Russians were running Donald Trump as an operative or an asset when he himself had personally voted for a soviet asset at the time. And he never learned any lessons from it. You never once heard him say, well, I know what it's like with this Kremlin interference in our politics because I voted that way once. And here's a counterintelligence lesson we should learn about that. He never did that. So he never drew any lessons and he never turned his back on the ideology. He was always a left winger.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: Right?
Now, Brennan was also among the 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story, quote, had all the classic earmarks of a russian information operation.
Given that the laptop was later confirmed to be real, what does the coordination of so many former intelligence officials lining up to try and bury that story pre election tell you about the state of partisanship within the intelligence community?
[00:30:21] Speaker B: Yeah, it's awful. First, let's look at what he. So Brennan, Brennan and the others said that in 2020, but now we've learned that the intelligence community knew that the laptop was real in 2019.
So it's even worse. It's not just bad intelligence or it's not just politicization. It is now lying knowingly and then politicizing that lie. So it's not even bias. So you've always had the CIA being basically, since the maybe early sixty s, at least even in the 50s, basically a liberal leaning organization.
So when I first got involved in the early 80s, Casey's whole problem was he couldn't trust the intelligence analysis inside the agency because they had this liberal worldview where you couldn't get a good estimate of what the Soviets were doing or you couldn't have an intelligence, really good analysis of soviet support for international terrorism. And subversion in other countries, even on our southern border. So Casey had people outside the intelligence community funded privately to do that for him. But that was simply as bad as that was. That was an ideological bias within the CIA. What happened was with this infiltration of our institutions with critical theory and cultural Marxism and the mainstreaming of that and even the denial that it's cultural Marxism, you have now a CIA that's not just liberal, but doesn't believe in our country anymore, doesn't believe in our founding principles anymore.
So imagine you have your institutions sworn to protect our constitutional system.
Think that the men who framed the constitution were a bunch of white racists who have no redeeming values. They were vile men.
And then the whole philosophy around it, the judeo christian philosophy, even the aristotelian philosophy of natural law, is garbage, all designed to build white supremacy forever. And then everything coming out of that is oppressive and white supremacist, down to even the nuclear family. And so the people charged with then protecting our institutions don't believe in those institutions. And they're trying now, through critical theory and DEI and all this other, to destroy all of our institutions and to destroy our relationship as citizens with one.
It's more subversive than just being left leaning.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: Right. Was it Obama's executive orders mandating diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal workforce that really marked the beginning of a systematic attempt to shape the ideological makeup of the intelligence community's demographics and priorities? Or. It sounds like it began even earlier.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: Right? That was in August 2011. So he came into office with the bipartisan national security team. It was fairly moderate, but then within a year, he started purging. And then by 2011, he had this order, a Valerie Jarrett type order. There's another person with a heavy party history from the Chicago machine with diversity, equity, and inclusion mandating it for the entire federal workforce. This was part of the fundamental transformation of America that Obama talked about. It was to push Dei on every aspect of hiring of an ever expanding central government.
And so when you have Dei, you're not looking for, first of all, you're not talking small government, but you're not talking about even the best of the best in, say, the technocratic, progressive sense. You're talking about injecting ideology in and hiring people based on their ideology and their worldview and promoting that. So when you apply that to intelligence and law enforcement and national security, you're talking about a political police.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: Okay, E. Keller on Instagram, we are going to get to that question again. A lot of people really eager for the solutions, wanting to know whether there's a way to abolish some of these intel agencies. And I promise we are going to get to those answers. And you'll also find them in this wonderful book, big intel. We have the links in the comment threads across social media.
Clarkson for cars on X this is an interesting question. I wouldn't have thought of wants to know, is there evidence of big intel playing a role in the current migrant crisis?
[00:35:10] Speaker B: That's a great question. Yes.
And we know this for a fact because Homeland Security secretary majorcas has personally been twice now to migrant. Migrant. I hate that word. It's part of the changing of our language. But illegal alien processing centers that were built secretly in Panama, we have eyewitness accounts of this now. We have a lot of video from the camps. I was going to go down there last summer with the guys who were documenting this and got caught up in something different, but my orcas was there twice. So you have the Department of Homeland Security running these camps. Now, the DHS is part of the intelligence community, and it's homeland security. It's not foreign.
So it has to have the foreign intelligence services being part of this because it is operating now abroad. Every place from processing facilities in Africa, Mauritania, Mali, flights to Ankara and then flights to Central America. And some of them go to Nicaragua so that certain individuals can get nicaraguan passports and then some to Panama for ultimate processing and then coming up by land from Panama on a bus route to Mexico to here. So, yes, you have this. And the fact that the FBI is not enforcing laws that it should be enforcing. It's part of the intelligence community.
You have all the indicators that are positive indicators and conclusive proof that the intelligence community is a big part of the migrant crisis, just as some foreign intelligence services have weaponized the same type of activity for their purposes to destabilize us.
[00:36:57] Speaker A: On Facebook, Georgie Alexopoulos asks, what would you say to modern leftists who accuse the corruption and instability in Central America? Blame that on the US intelligence state.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: Well, Central Americans are really good at being corrupt without our involvement.
I know that from having spent many years down there and throughout all of Latin America, it's always been a handy thing for, and it was a big soviet propaganda theme that the US is propping up corruption for the sake of corruption, or the US was covertly pushing corruption. Now intelligence services have to manipulate vulnerabilities of people and they therefore get involved in corrupt activities. But it's not like the CIA was propping up corrupt regimes because those regimes were perfectly capable of doing it on their own.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: Okay. Edgar Moreaus on X. Is there any relationship between big intel and the military industrial complex?
[00:38:04] Speaker B: Big connection, because you have the contracting industrial complex in which so much of our government activity is outsourced to private companies.
You think, well, sometimes that's beneficial. I mean, you need private companies to build our military hardware or design our technology. You don't want government doing it because they can't. So you need that kind of contracting, but you need also contracting for expertise. Can we have someone who can interpret Arabic into Yoruba and figure out what's being said between those two languages? So you might need to hire contractors for that. So after 911, we weren't expecting as a nation the type of threat that we were facing then. So you needed to contract up to build in that expertise and those capabilities into government. But that then became an industry of its own. So it's not like, well, the mission is accomplished. We've done our work, let's shut down now. No, let's find other things we can do. Because imagine you're, let's say, a CIA officer and you're making $150,000 a year and you might out at 180 a year, but if you put in your 30 years and you keep your clearance, you can start out at 250 or 350 a year and then on top of whatever pension you're going to get, and then you can even set up your own contracting company where you're entitled to anywhere between a 10% and 50% profit. And that's after you pay yourself a million dollars a year so you can become quickly a millionaire off the american taxpayer just by going along and playing along.
So it becomes then this giant community that's their entire business model, is finding new missions to have the american taxpayer pay for. So if you look at a map of America, the 20 wealthiest counties in America, nine of them are in the Washington DC area.
There's no industry in the Washington DC area that's not related to the central government. So it's all a huge intelligence industrial complex, the homeland security industrial complex, apart from the military and the welfare state and everything else.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: So we spent a lot of time at the Atlas Society discussing government overreach when it came to COVID non pharmaceutical interventions from the lockdowns to mask and vaccine mandates. An angle I hadn't really considered before was the weaponization of vaccine mandates and how they were used not just in the military but also in the intelligence bureaucracy to purge those who resisted the woke agenda to what extent was this intentional?
[00:40:59] Speaker B: We only have indicators. Now we don't know. So a lot of it was just knee jerk. A lot of it was. Now we're finding out it was whimsical. It was people sitting around a table or sitting around on Zoom saying, gee, what should we do for this mandate? Well, let's do this. There was no science behind it. There was no real containing a pandemic. It was pulled out of thin air, and then it was marching orders for everybody else.
So it was random, say nothing of the political ones who wanted this type of compliance and these types of purges. Because if you have people in our military or in our intelligence community who have a conscience that's so strong that they will jeopardize their careers or even kamikaze their careers out of conscience, who wants those people? If you're trying to create a technocracy, perfect, the one that's there.
[00:41:59] Speaker A: You also talked about the problem of over classification, something that is relevant to some of the scandals and court cases that we're seeing regarding our two likely presidential candidates, saying that over classification rewards incompetence and AIDS politicization. How so?
[00:42:26] Speaker B: Because they can always hide behind the excuse that I can't tell you because it's secret and I have a clearance and you don't. So you're not entitled to know.
So they hide behind that. And so it gives them immense authority to go way beyond their mandate, whether it's a political mandate or a legal mandate or even a constitutional mandate, because they can hide behind this and it's really knee jerk and brainless. So one of the way I got first attuned to this problem was a long time ago, after the soviet collapse, when I was in Moscow and I was working with journalists and certain people in the russian government who wanted to take an axe to the KGB. And so I got bags and bags of classified Soviet KGB material, including manuals, really valuable material. Well, my Russian is just pigeon Russian. So I couldn't really master what was written in there. And I came back here and I gave it to a friend or talked to a friend about it who was working in a congressional committee, and he said, well, I can bring these over to the CIA. They can translate it. We didn't have automatic translations back then. And I thought, okay, well, look, if they give me copies of the translations, then I'll share the material. I'm just happy that people know about it. I wasn't working for the government at all at the time. In fact, I never worked for the federal government because my CIA work was funded out of Bill Casey's pocket. So just to make that clear, it was always in a private capacity. And so, you know, they can have the stuff that I found as long as I get the english translations back. And of course they broke their word.
Why can't I have my translations back? And they said they're classified.
Why are they classified?
Because the only reason you have classification. You have to protect the source.
Where did it come from? Is somebody's life going to be in jeopardy if we reveal who? This information that could allow a bad guy to retaliate, or the method. We have to protect the method and then not let it be known to the other side that we actually know what we know. So protecting sources and methods and denial of information to the other side. But I was the source.
Ransacking KGB offices was the method, and you're not going to jeopardize me by making any of that known. So they just overclassified my own material and to deny it to me. So then it's like mindless stuff and the sheer mindlessness of. And this was 30 years ago, so you can imagine how this has been. Most of the people involved at the time have since retired.
[00:44:58] Speaker A: Wow. All right, we're going to take one more question. We're going to leave an ample amount of time to talk about all of the suggestions that you offer.
At the end of the book on X, Chrissy, K 91 asks, beyond what we learned through the Twitter files, anything more that you can add about the relationship between big intel and social media?
[00:45:25] Speaker B: Well, it's still very much there.
And media overall, even entertainment media, where you have former officials creating entertainment for us. But if you're looking at what are they doing? They're mainstreaming the idea of civil war.
They're glorifying the intelligence services in ways that it's just not merely to have an exciting movie or TV series, but in ways to glorify and to mainstream the idea that these are supreme beings that we Cretans can never challenge.
So you have Jill Sanborn, who was the top FBI official responsible for national security, testifying before Congress before the Senate, refusing to answer yes or no question, did the FBI have any assets or agents or personnel involved in the planning or execution of criminal acts of violence at the Capitol on January 6.
Yes or no question? She repeatedly refused to answer, implying that it's all classified. Well, that means yes, they were there anyway. Where does she go? She got a sweetheart deal job at Roku after this. So you have them going into HBO into all the different TV production companies as well as still the social media companies. Not X, as far as I know. So this stuff is still happening because it works. And you see this censorship industrial complex where you have federal grants being given out to different groups to devise different ways to censor us.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: Censorship. And it sounds like propaganda, as you say, kind of this glorification of our supreme intelligence superiors and also normalization of conflict and demonization of half of America. So let's get to the solutions. You do provide many in depth suggestions for reversing the abuse of our intelligence apparatus. What are some of the most strategic priorities for change?
[00:47:38] Speaker B: It's a huge issue because there are so many ifs involved, and you can't be idealistic about it. You have to be principled and strategic, but still think what's really likely to work. And so it's really an approach that's not as satisfactory as I would like. But I'm just trying to figure out how can we manage this. And first of all, it depends on having a president who wants to do this.
Very few politicians want to do it. Even some of the, quote, good guys, when push comes to shove, don't want to do it. But if you had a president come in this fall who says, this is an abomination, it's a complete corruption of our government and what it's for. We have to take an axe to it, but we have to do it in a way that's going to ensure our national interests, our legitimate national interests writ large. You need to have an intelligence service against foreign adversaries, enemies. But you don't need an intelligence service to spy on gender or climate.
You don't need a secret intelligence service to do open source intelligence osint work. You don't need a bloated intelligence bureaucracy.
So oftentimes smaller is better. If you look at the british secret service or the french secret service, they're very small, but arguably they're better than ours in many ways.
So part of it's cutting that down. So you take the CIA and you'd cut it into an intelligence analytical unit to just collect and analyze stuff on a classified level, and then a small unit to do covert operations abroad as they're needed. And a lot of that, when it becomes so large, they start looking for reasons to conduct covert operations for the sake of doing the operation rather than accomplishing a strategic objective or even a tactical objective. So that's on the one side. The important side is, what about us internally? What's our central government doing? To us, that's really abusive, and how can we stop it? And the first order of business, and there can be many first orders of business, but what I'm proposing is you take the real functions of the FBI that we need. Counterintelligence hunting foreign spies, legitimate counterterrorism work, breaking up cartels, legitimate fight against real organized crime, and not citizens doing just normal work. So you take that and you break that up into separate entities along separate functions, and you parcel it out to other agencies that are already doing that work, some of which are pretty scandal free, like, say, the US marshals. George Washington founded the US Marshals, so that's the only law enforcement agency at the federal level that know founding father legitimacy and relatively few scandals, and they haven't become as woke as the FBI. So take all the criminal activity stuff in the FBI academy, move it to the marshal service, have a separate counterintelligence service, and then break up the rest of it. So why do you have a Bureau of alcohol, tobacco and Firearms and an FBI firearms unit? So you've got two different federal agencies going after gun owners.
Do it incrementally, pull the part out of the FBI, transfer it to ATF, and this sounds awful, but I have to say it, and then work on ATF later. So we're just doing it stage by stage. And then similarly for other different government entities. I had one proposal in there that I disagree with now, but it's in the book. It's to transfer the FBI cyber abilities over to CISA, which is the homeland security cyber unit. But CISA has become so politicized that this is not a viable option anymore. So you just need to have the real tech people go someplace to fight real cybercrime, cyber subversion, cyber terrorism, but have it to be not a politicized entity. That means abolishing things because you can't fire federal employees. But if you abolish their positions, there's no obligation to rehire them in different areas. So just abolish the positions, get them off the federal payroll. So that means all your human resources, all your DEI personnel, some of your worst managers elsewhere, and you go throughout the government and you just abolish them. And then they have to leave. They lose their clearances, they can't be in government anymore.
So, looking forward, if I could Jag. There's one more important, because every citizen has a role, too. You have to assume that another president's going to have a team that's putting this together and have a real strategy that's put together that's what some of us hoped for before and we didn't get. Maybe the next time around we might get it, but every citizen can do something on the local level because of the sheriffs. Most of us don't think of sheriffs and what they do or how they matter, but they're the highest ranking local law enforcement officer who's elected directly by the people, so they're generally at the county level. But what the sheriffs do, and they have legal and constitutional authority to do this, they often are the eyes and ears of the FBI and the ATF and the other central government internal security agencies. And they routinely provide their offices and their personnel and their resources to federal authorities to work on local cases. Sometimes that's proper to do, but oftentimes it's not. And especially when the federal agencies do not have constitutional powers to investigate or enforce state laws, the sheriffs have the power to deputize them, to either let them become deputies to enforce state laws, or to say, no, you guys have no legitimate reason to be in my county. You are not welcome. I will not help you. So you've plucked out the eyes and ears of the central government from your county. So all of us, when we go, we should all talk to our candidates for sheriff, look at the records of the incumbent sheriffs, talk to the people running against those sheriffs, and then do what Soros did to the district attorneys and turn the sheriffs really into back to their constitutional role where they're not performing it, and empower those who are. And we're going to have a severe limitation of government reach at the local level if we can get the sheriff's all to do the right thing.
[00:53:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a really innovative suggestion that you made and also a way that each one of us can get involved in this fight as well. So, last question. Looking forward to the upcoming presidential election, essentially a rematch of 2020, do you expect more activism from the intelligence community, or do you think that the revelations of the Durham report will discourage more active interference?
[00:54:18] Speaker B: No, I think that the actions by the House and the Senate, Democrat and Republican, have rewarded the intelligence apparat because they know they can get away with it.
So the House weaponization subcommittee, they've been trying, but they have a staff of, what, five very tiny.
So the FBI director knows he can keep coming in and just obfuscate and filibuster and lie to Congress without any penalty whatsoever. So they're going to continue to do that. And then you had former CIA director Brennan just the other day, the one who voted for the communists to become president of the country.
He just said just the other day that he heard word from inside the intelligence community, meaning it's been leaked to him to be their unofficial spokesman once again, that they're going to deny the customary briefings to the presidential nominee, classified briefings, because they don't trust Trump. So he's already setting the tone for the intelligence community that it is, again, big intel at war against Donald Trump and his supporters.
[00:55:30] Speaker A: All right, well, it's going to shape up to be an interesting year.
Michael, where can we follow your work, keep track of your many publications and what's next for you?
[00:55:45] Speaker B: Well, our organization, the center for Security Policy, is securefreedom.org. I'm on Twitter or x at jmichaelwaller. I got a brand new substac at Big intel. So it's going to just expand on the theme of this book and on american founding principles and then all the new stuff that keeps coming on big intel is available anywhere online. And it's also available to get the best deal at Costco. It's about $8 cheaper than Amazon.
[00:56:12] Speaker A: Wow. Fantastic. Well, thank you, Michael. This has just been a very eye opening interview. Again, I highly recommend the book, get it at Costco and also wonderful audio adaptation. Also want to thank all of you guys who jumped in with so many fantastic questions. And if you enjoyed this interview or any of our other content programming at the Atlas Society, remember, our trustees are matching all new donations. So consider putting a tip in the can. Atlassociety.org slash donate. Be sure to join us next week when Catherine Brodsky will be here with us on the Atlas Society asks to discuss her new book, no Apologies, how to find and free your voice in the age of Outrage, lessons for the silenced majority. We'll see you then. Thanks. Bye.
