Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistle blower, an
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Hello my friends, and welcome to the Kyle Seraphin show.
Today is Wednesday, it is January the 17th, and we've got
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that out. Before we get into our
interview, which I think you will enjoy immensely.
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and the promo code is Kyle. Kyle, Ladies and gentlemen,
joining me for today's Kyle Seraphin show is J Michael
Waller, who goes by Mike. Unless I'm very mistaken, that's
what I. Always call you, so hopefully
that's OK. And Mike Waller is the recent
author of a book called Big Again, Tell how the CIA and the
FBI went from Cold War heroes to Deep state villains.
It's going to be released this week.
You guys should be able to find it on Amazon.
We'll make sure that the links are in the description for you.
Mike, thanks for joining me. Great to be here.
All right, buddy, and I made you download a Google product, no
less. It was, it's a terrible
experience, but yeah, it's, it's better than visiting the local
field office. All right, so you're a security
analyst, you work for a think tank in DC, but I also remember
your previous Twitter bio said that you were like a one
thousandth generation American. You guys basically put the soil
in place in order for the American continent to to exist.
What's the story there? How long has your family been in
this in this area? Oh well, if you don't include
the American Indian side, we need to.
Include that we can't, we can't discount it this.
We're not trying to get cancelled today.
I want to be diverse here and inclusive but but not equitable.
So but but my first English settler side came over on the
supply ship for the Mayflower, which really wasn't a supply
ship at all. It was just a bunch more
colonists coming in who didn't have supplies.
So we were the next ship in in 1621.
That goes back a long way. Yeah.
And has your family always been, are you all E coasters?
Has that always stayed there? Yeah.
And what part of the New England?
There's some, there's the Southern Wallers were different.
They were in a different group. So we invaded Ireland with
Cromwell. They came over earlier.
You say the Southern Wallers. I love that.
I want to have factions of my family where I can do that.
We're not that we haven't been here that long to do that.
The Southern Wallers. All right, Mike, you, you have
an incredible life story. Your your book kind of I told
people that it reads like a Clancy or a Ludlum novel.
And if people are not spy novel fans, they don't know what I'm
talking about. But will you kind of tell
people, you know, where you came from, where you grew up?
Obviously you've got deep roots in America.
And then let's get into your story and, and how that came
into writing this book. Well, it's kind of almost like a
Forrest Gump experience as opposed to a Clancy or a loved
1. And I sort of just was there at
the time of things and I was just ended up being part of
events and and, and, and even history.
So it was kind of it was a neat experience where where I
thankfully didn't get into Georgetown University.
I had been trained first and we came from a non political
family, rural New England and patriotic Americans but
completely non political and and my grandpa voted one party and
my grandmother voted another party and we never knew till
they passed away which party they were in.
So it was that kind of a kind of a family.
But when I was a teenager I got interested in the anti nuclear
energy movement. And this was in the mid to late
70s because I was concerned about the environment, what
nature, what was going to happen to boiling water coming out of
the cooling part of the reactor being dumped into the ocean and
what was going to happen to the fish beds off the New England
coast. So that was my concern and I was
brought in to struggle sessions after a while.
These were professional agitators from California who
came in to recruit high school kids who had been recruited by
their teachers who were all, you know, anti Vietnam War activists
and stuff. And and going through struggle
sessions where they then berated me and wanted me to berate
myself, which I wouldn't do that.
How stupid it is to be for the environment when the real
struggle is to fight American capitalism.
Right. Yeah, of course.
How old are you at that? Time I was about. 15 That's
really and and what about your peers?
What kind of peers were in these struggle sessions?
Or was it like a, you know, a gang scenario?
It was it was a gang scenario. And then we were peeled off
individually, OK, We were three, you know, older people from
California. And when you're 15 years old,
somebody's in their 30s or 40s, they seem really old.
And these people were really intense.
And I thought, no, just this is not for me.
These people are really bad people.
So I sort of declared a personal war against this kind of
subversive movement, recruiting kids, turning them into anti
American radicals when they were joining for innocent purposes.
What would the lifelong interest?
Yeah, So you're anti nuclear. That seems like a thing that at
least I don't know whether it makes sense now to you or not,
but, you know, loving the environment's not a terrible
sort of virtue. And the Sierra Club and so on
and so forth, they're not awful, at least by nature.
And then they're trying to subvert this and turn it into an
anti American sentiment that American capitalism is the
actual problem. Right.
Is that where people do it? Where the other kids in the area
are like going like, Oh yeah, you're right.
There were, there were, they were not as many as they wanted
to. And this was a neat thing
because the at that time the the pro Soviet far left wasn't
attracting young people very much.
So they were they were really open about who they accepted
into their movement. But for our purposes here, I was
brought into a larger group of different high school kids from
different parts of my state to go through training.
So we didn't even know each other.
I guess that's part of the the advantage.
If you don't know anybody, you don't have any kind of natural
defenses maybe or or clicks or allies.
Why do you think it wasn't successful?
Because it seems like it's pretty successful now.
If they wanted to push that, I think it would be very
successful. There's something that must have
changed in the in the interim. Well, they did succeed in that
they they succeeded in shutting down construction of one nuclear
reactor. It was supposed to be a dual
reactor. This is the Seabrook nuclear
power plant in New Hampshire. So they they succeeded in, you
know, to this day there's only one nuclear reactor.
So New England is importing gas from Putin, trying to make it
look like they're not, but they have been.
They've got an offshore pipeline off Cape Cod where the ships
dock, so they can't even be seen now.
And they used to dock right up in Boston Harbor, but after So
you don't even see these Russian ships coming in to supply gas to
mainly Massachusetts. So so now what's this?
What 40 plus years later, the the the chief sources of energy
in northern New England are oil, nuclear energy and wood.
Right and. You get your sustainable energy
green tax credits. Well, at least through 2023.
If you buy an iron stove that burns trees, you get the same
tax credit you would get for buying solar panels because it's
considered renewable energy. Makes sense to me and everything
old is new again. The, the interesting, I guess
piece to that is that you see these kind of like memes online
and I, I always think that memes kind of say 1000 words.
They, they, they put so much in one place and it's like people
that are arguing against Russia, they're so awful.
That's why we got to do this thing.
And at the end of the like the meme, they're buying Russian oil
and gas and they fully put on the clown wig and the mask and
the makeup and they've a clown themselves over and over again
because all these things end up serving the exact thing that
they claim that they're against. I wonder if that's on purpose or
are people really just that ignorant?
I can't really tell either. Well.
I don't know because you people like Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts who was behind this deal with the Russians, you
know, they shut down the both the Pilgrim reactors in
Massachusetts. The reactors could have been
renewed. They shut down the reactor in
Vermont. They shut down the main Yankee
reactors. So the only one left is Seabrook
in northern New England and that's powering 3 states.
They didn't want to have hydro coming down from Quebec because
that would involve cutting down trees to put in a power line.
So they've they've really screwed themselves.
People like Elizabeth Warren who are pushing for this on the
side, let's buy gas from Putin kind of secretly at the same
time she's out there lobbying Barack Obama.
This was years ago to exonerate Soviet Atom bombs by Ethel
Rosenberg. I'll be thinking what what, what
kind of agenda are these people in?
If you averse of it for a long time, you can kind of figure it
out, but it sounds strange to the average American.
Well, we're looking at them. We know they're not dumb,
although they appear that you know they're, they're happy to
appear dumb or say things that are dumb that motivates a base.
But then in the background, they're doing all these
nefarious actions that look very calculated.
You have more exposure to these people than than most, at least
dealing in Washington to see the way you do.
Would you agree they're not dumb that there is at least some
motivation or they're not just? Operating, they're not, they're
not dumb. They're, they're, they're really
sharp people. They, they, a lot of them know
how to make a lot of money in office.
They know how to pressure crazy agendas on the American public
and how to, you know, they know what they're doing.
You, you, you cannot have somebody like Senator Ed Markey
of Massachusetts, who when he was a congressman, or now
Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts when he was a
congressional staffer helping communist insurgents in Latin
America under President Reagan. And they have.
It's not like it was a youthful stupidity or indiscretion.
It was they have been on this for their entire political
lives. They're pushing something.
They know precisely what they're doing.
All right, so you've got a pretty good insight into this.
Like you said, Forrest Gump was the other analogy, by the way.
It's it's either Clancy, Ludlam or Forrest Gump who just touched
all these interesting key points in history.
When I first started perusing your book, that was what drew me
in. I was like, whoa, what is this
guy all about? He's been all these different
things. He kind of has these crazy
experiences that you'd think you had to plan it.
And then in reality, we know that it's just like you're more
likely to just kind of accidentally Forrest Gump your
way into it. Tracy Beans, my buddy was
reading. She was like, I'm absolutely
engrossed by this. I sent her over that sort of
advanced comedy. So she would and she'll probably
interview you as well. So let's give people this,
you're 15, you're getting this anti nuclear energy situation.
You're you're running into commies from California doing
struggle sessions and that kicks off your personal jihad, which I
like that word. So we'll just use it real
quickly. Tell people where that took you
in the next couple years and how you ended up doing some of the
wild things that you did, which are right in the first pages of
the book. That'll hook people.
In So I ended up going to George Washington University, and this
was in the late summer of 1980. So Jimmy Carter's President
Reagan is on the verge of being brought in.
He's going to start a nuclear war.
He's going to, you know, destroy the world.
There's all this terrible propaganda going on about
Reagan. So I cast my absentee ballot for
Reagan from my dorm, but I had to show my ID and apply in
writing and explain to my town office why I needed to vote
absentee. But those were the old days when
you needed those types of things.
Yeah, well, we had some sort of basic.
Common sense. Yeah.
Yeah, So. So imagine being a freshman kid
three blocks from the White House when Reagan is inaugurated
president and his inaugural parade breaks up on your campus.
I'd gone in as a congressional intern and my congressman was
retiring. And he said, hey, you wouldn't
do any good in my office because I'm retiring.
Why don't you go intern in the Senate?
So he called up my US senator, Gordon Humphrey, and said, hey,
if this kid from the state, would you like to have him in?
And so, so boom, I'm in. And who's there 22 cubicles away
from me? But this guy, very nice guy, but
kind of quiet, always on the phone like this.
In the fall of 1980, Morton Blackwell, who then disappears
the day after Reagan's elected to join Reagan's transition
team. And he becomes one of Reagan's
main policy people. And his whole, he'd come up
through youth politics. So he said, hey, come on and
join us. Come to this thing called CPAC,
CPAC 81. How long Reagan was there, Bill
Casey was there, and all these other people were there?
Yeah. How long had it been going at
that time? Was it relatively new?
It was just a few years old. OK, yeah.
And it wasn't anywhere near like it is.
It's a hotel space and people come in and speak in the big
rooms and there are hospitality suites.
But you get to meet all of these people.
You could just, you know, meet the Reagan's and say hello to
them and get your picture taken with them and all that.
It was a really, really cool time.
And so you're there as a kid and they say, say, what are you
doing? And then who's there?
Roy Cohn, lawyer, who would. He'd been, you know, Joe
McCarthy's investigator in the 1950s.
And you had, you had all these old people from the OSS and,
and, and legends from World War 2 and all these other folks and
you'd get to meet them and just hang out with them.
So it was being in that environment where you have all
these opportunities come up and just stumble right into them.
Do you remember thinking that you were touching pieces of
history that we're going to be written about and spoken about
for 100 years at the time, Or what was your sense of the of
the environment when you were walking through?
No, it was cool because it was Reagan.
It was, I mean, we were looking for girls and so we weren't, you
know, and it was a good venue for that.
But but Megan's a movie. Star too, and like we we forget
that. I think at least my generation
does because he wasn't a movie star to me.
But. He was, you know, California's
governor, but he was also a movie star.
That was like his big thing. And he was head of the Screen
Actors Guild, and that was one of his experiences.
He was a Liberal Democrat who was head of the Screen Actors
Guild union. Then he testified before
Congress about communists in Hollywood.
This was in the in the 40s or 50s.
This was long, long ago. So he was on this back then.
But you, you get to meet these people and some of them you're
just a kid. So they don't know who you are
and and so forth. And you don't know who they are.
Like, I didn't know. I'd never heard of Roy Cohn when
I met him. I just knew about him after the
fact. So you just bump into these
people without knowing who they are.
This is my life right now too, by the way.
I keep meeting people and they go, oh, this is so and so.
And I go, oh, it's really nice to meet you.
And then I find out later I'm like, oh, that person some some
national relevance. I probably should have known
that beforehand. It's kind of fun.
It's kind of fun to Forrest Gump through it.
So as you're meeting these folks and you mentioned youth politics
and obviously you're now involved in youth politics.
You're, you're an intern, yes. But was that a driving force?
Did people look at it as a driving force to be able to move
national politics and and the needle at least in the 1980s?
Was that something that people were driven to?
Yeah, yeah. They were very much so.
And Reagan was really conscious of it because for him, groups
like Young Americans for Freedom, which was his favorite
youth group, and the College Republicans, were vital to his
electoral victories in California.
They were active in supporting him, especially Young Americans
for Freedom. In his 1976 presidential
campaign. John was his favorite youth
group. And this was back when John
Wayne was signing direct mail letters for for Young Americans
for Freedom, right? So you get the, I think was it
Jimmy Doolittle or some of these other great World War 2 figures
were signing direct mail for for this youth group.
This was right before I came on, but Reagan had had helped do
fundraising for Young Americans for Freedom back then.
So it was a great time to be in youth politics and we really
didn't know where we were going to go.
Some come into Washington with a big agenda.
I want to be a senator someday. I want to be this and that.
And those are your more often times cutthroat people with,
let's say, fluid ethics. Yeah, morality.
That's a bit flexible. Yeah, yeah.
And you could see it at the time, but then in hindsight, you
can really, really, really see it.
So other people just sort of went along and said let's just
let's just do stuff. And that's sort of where I fell
in. All right, So what comes up
next? So let's see, you got into
student journalism. I wanted to go to Afghanistan
because at that REF chapter at George Washington, we had a guy
from Soldier Fortune magazine come in, Jim Coyne, straight
from Afghanistan. And so so he said, you want to
do journalism? He said, come on back to
Afghanistan with me. And that's a great idea.
But at the same time, I was working now at the College
Republican National Committee. I was with the Young Americans
for Freedom national office, so I was doing President Reagan's
national security portfolio for both youth groups.
So who's at the White House? Morton Blackwell.
Now he's with Conservative Outreach.
He was the guy I'd worked with when I was a Senate intern.
And then Faith Wittlesie, who was Reagan's ambassador to
Switzerland, who was also very youth politics oriented.
And she said to me, look, you speak Spanish.
You you go down to Central America, do your student
journalism down there. OK, great.
I want you to meet somebody. So.
So she introduced me to Reagan's, one of his Central
America guys on the National Security Council.
It's ACIA, man. Constantine Mengez, they called
him constant menace. Both his friends did for one
reason and his enemies did for another.
Really great guy. And he said yeah, come on down,
I'll get you set up with the Contras in Nicaragua.
So these are the anti communist insurgents who were fighting the
Marxist regime in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega even back then
fighting him and went down there on my first trip.
And then that started off my student journalism career.
But at the same time, Constantine, so this was the
invasion of Grenada in 1983. When Reagan went in, cleaned out
the communist government there, there'd been a coup.
They overthrew and assassinated the Marxist Prime Minister.
There were American Medical students on the island.
So Reagan went in, took out the regime and came back with this
trove of secret communist documents and treaties.
And everything Reagan had been saying about the Soviets taking
over the hemisphere was proven true by these documents.
This is. Is that urgent fury?
Is that what I'm thinking? Operation Urgent Fury yeah, and
they so they so and and the documents were most of them in
English or or they were English versions of them captured
because it's an English speaking government.
So wow, here's something that Reagan CIA wanted to keep it all
secret. Of course, you know, what source
and what method are you protecting in that way?
But anyway, that was the idea. Michael Levine over at the
working with the White House and the State Department and and and
Constantine and others said, no, let's make it all public, which
they did. It was fantastic.
So Constantine said to me, hey, we're not we're not.
I want you to be on the on the watch for, for hard evidence of
Soviet military equipment, any documentation, any Soviet
involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
And they were collecting it obviously from the Ciai didn't
know what I was doing. He didn't tell me what he was
putting me up to do. But I guess I ended up working
to collect this kind of documentation and photographic
evidence and material evidence of Soviet military support for
the communists in the region and ended up being a back channel to
CIA Director Casey. But he, I was getting this
walking around money to do it. I didn't know where it was
coming from. It was this old guy who'd been
in the OSS who said, here, here's some walking around
money. He introduced me to, well,
years, 30 years later, I found out he came out of CIA Director
Casey's pocket and he was apparently funding a bunch of
people like me out of his pocket so that he would never have to
report to Congress that he was spending this money because it
was his own private money. It wasn't appropriated money.
Hold on, you got to say that again.
So the director of the CIA is taking money from his own
pocket, his personal cash, and he's he's laundering it through
former OSS guys that are retired that.
Are his old buddies from the OSS because Casey had been in the
OSS? Sure.
That are just in the world that are kind of operating and and
he's personally running what we would call a hip pocket source,
somebody who's not officially on the books and and they're just
sending you off on these like official cover or non official
cover journalists and things, but you don't even know what
you're reporting. So, no, I had no idea.
And and it was so Constantine at the White House, he'd said to
me, hey, I want you to meet my friend Jim.
I was OK. I didn't ask questions.
It's like a White House guy says, I need you to do
something. I said, OK, cool.
So Jim's this nice old guy and we had coffee or tea and, and
we, he's telling me, you know, some World War Two stories.
He'd been in the OSS. And I think, OK, well, it's
really cool to be talking to somebody who was, you know,
blowing up Nazis and everything and, and, and also thought the
Communists were bad at the same time.
But I really didn't know. And then one day he said to me,
this was late 83, and I was supposed to go out with the
Contras in January 84 for the first time.
He said, you're a Catholic, aren't you?
I see I'm not a very good one. He says, well, look, go to the
Saturday vigil Mass at 5:00 at Saint Matthew's Cathedral and
sit in the back left set of the pews and just stay there until
someone talks to you. I know what this was.
Is this really such a dangerous trip that I've got to, you know,
yes, it would have been a good idea to be in in good standing
with the Lord, you know, before going on a trip like that.
But I really didn't know, but I thought, OK, I'll go.
So I went and and you know, during Mass, I see further up
ahead this stupid guy and I said it looks like little Casey and
sure enough, it was him. So after Mass, he gets out and I
thought, oh, I'm going to talk to him.
I'd met him at CPAC and I just shook hands with him and that
was all. So.
So he had no, you know, there was no connection other than
that. And then this woman comes up to
me and said, are you water? I said, yeah.
She said stand here. OK.
And then who shuffles up the aisle to leave?
But Casey with his whole personal security detail that
just materialized from these plain clothes people in the in
the the the evil. And he shuffles over to me like,
Oh no, it's this. So really in a goofy stupid kid
ways. Oh, nice to meet you, Mr.
Director kind of thing. I didn't know.
And he said Capitanoke. And I said what?
Because he was famous for mumbling and said Capitanoke.
And he shuffled away And then a man with him said to me, Capitan
Luke, remember that name? And that was that.
And so I didn't know. OK, fine.
It was weird. So then the next week I went out
with the Contras and I'm stuck at the airport in Tegucigalpa,
Honduras with my friend and, and my I had hair then, you know,
and I was skinny. So I looked kind of like one of
these communist Marxist kids who got out.
They were called Sandalistas to show solidarity with the with
the Cuban backed movements. And so and we're getting a hard
time getting through customs because we didn't know where we
were staying. We didn't have any local
contacts or anything. We couldn't answer any of the
questions. So I said full rank.
I said in Spanish, said I need to speak with Capitan Luke,
Captain Luke. And they looked around and went,
what's that? So this later on this big fat
officer comes out and I didn't recognize their Insignia.
And I said Capitan Luke. And he said, oh, Capitan Luke,
welcome, come on with me. And then he let us through.
Well, it was 30 years later, Bill Casey's son-in-law told me
that I was Capitan Luke. That was my crypt in him that
Bill Casey had given me in church.
And, and it didn't make any damn sense because he gave you no
context and you're out there. You just Forrest Gumped into it.
He just mumbled it and then another guy said remember that
name and I was OK. So when I said Capitan Luke, so
I, I didn't know for 30 years. So I was talking to Casey's
son-in-law who was president or chairman of the board of the
school, the grad school where I taught at the time, Institute of
World Politics. And he listened to the story and
he laughed. He says that was Bill.
He was giving you your cryptonym.
He said he always did that in church because he could never be
forced to testify in Congress what he had said to anybody in
church. So I didn't exist on any books.
So you're paid out of his pocket.
He's given you, he's given you a pseudonym to go work underneath.
And and this is your secret identity as you go down there
that you didn't even know is your secret identity
accidentally say that. So OK, So what do these guys do?
They they took you in. They said, oh, you're good to go
now you're Captain Luke. They just left and then they,
they, they, we had, you know, a twin cab pickup full of Contras
out there waiting for us and we just took off.
I had no idea. All right, so and, and your your
cover is essentially that you're doing photojournalism.
Is that what they? Student journalism.
So the thing back then was to, to was for, for conservative
students to have their own newspapers, because most college
newspapers then, as now were lefty.
And, and so we set up our own 1. And unlike, say, the Dartmouth
Review, which Dinesh D'souza founded or, or, or, you know,
the more polite, that review wasn't erudite, but it was
sophisticated and it was clever and it was informative.
We were just out there to attack and to expose Marxists and
infiltrate Marxist groups for fun and disrupt them and expose
all their paperwork and their members and this kind of stuff.
I would call a shit disturber. You guys are just poking the
bear. Yeah, yeah.
And really, if if we had had social media, then we would have
been shit posters. I love it.
Yeah. So as opposed to the Dinesh was
the more sophisticated guy and his his people ended up going to
the Wall Street Journal and other places.
And my guys sort of just sort of dispersed.
Some of them actually went places.
But I don't want to expose them and discredit.
Don't. Expose anybody that's great.
So student journalism and and then are you trying to do
original reporting down there? Was that the goal, I mean?
Yeah, original reporting. And do what I was going to do
had I gone to Afghanistan. And this was when, when
Afghanistan was occupied by the Soviet Union, we were going out
with Ahmad Shah Masood's forces to who?
Who was always on the good guy side.
He was not a jihadist ever. He was.
He was assassinated by al Qaeda right before 911.
And then and then we went in. But he and I, I had met Masood
but not in Afghanistan, but never made it to Afghanistan
until much later. All right, so as Captain Luca,
you're doing your reporting, you come back to the United States.
Where are we going with this? Where does it keep going?
Oh, so then I started writing for for, you know, real
publications and then and then got involved with some, some
think tanks where I was pretty much free to do as I wanted.
It was. So it was a lot of fun and it
was stuff, again, mostly in the Western Hemisphere, any place
that was Resistance. Yeah.
All around Central America, Columbia got Chile.
This is what Pinochet was running Chile.
And it was, it was a really remarkable time to be a kid
then. But it was also at the time the
Soviet active measures were at their peak.
And Reagan was battling Soviet active measures and exposing
them in public really for practically the first time in a
systematic way. And so he had a whole apparatus
within the White House and the State Department and interagency
to be exposing Soviet covert influence campaigns against the
United States and against the West in general.
I got I was part of that because, lo and behold, through
College Republicans, the daughter of the House
Intelligence Committee staffer who was doing this, who then
went into the Reagan administration to run it, she
was working with me at College Republicans.
And then we became friends and she said, hey, you should meet
my dad. And then I got connected in with
this whole office to counter Soviet active measures.
And it was a great office because the guy running it heard
Romerstein himself had been a Communist Party member when he
was a kid in the 1950s, and he had defected in place to the
House Committee on Unamerican Activities.
Then he became a staffer there. So he was involved in the
breakup of the Communist Party USA, the breakup of the Ku Klux
Klan, a whole bunch of other, you know, anti subversive stuff.
And so he took me under his wing and then brought me into a whole
new universe of people. Let's talk about active measures
just a little bit for people's kind of background.
I know a lot of people probably heard the terms you kind of
touched on what it is, but can you talk about some of the, the
techniques that were being used and, you know, end goals and,
and, and who was implementing them at least in the United?
States sure well the the Soviet Communist Party so it wasn't the
Soviet government, but it was the ruling party itself that had
this apparatus for active measures.
So active measures is a Soviet term.
So it's an English translation, like the word disinformation is
an English translation of a K GB term disinformancia.
And active measures was was any it was a spectrum of covert
activities ranging from planting false stories as disinformation
to recruiting journalists or politicians or businessmen or
any influencers, all the way up to supporting insurgencies and
assassinations and terrorism. So it's that whole active
measures spectrum. And that was the Soviets most
effective weapon against us, put us on the strategic defensive
even before the nuclear age. But during the nuclear age, it
was really handy because the Soviets could fight us without
ever escalating up to a nuclear threshold of strategic nuclear
war. And how successful?
What's the crowning kind of achievements of these active
measures, if we can pin them down?
On some specific ones, shutting down the American nuclear power
industry was one of them. So this is where it really when
I really learned this. Now I'm in my late teens, early
20s, learning about Soviet active measures and thinking,
wait a minute, I was a dupe in a Soviet active measures campaign
to shut down the American nuclear industry.
Interesting. Which was part of shutting down
the American strategic weapons production because the plutonium
being produced for our warheads was coming from the nuclear
waste of nuclear power plants. Interesting.
So when you realize, whoa, you were right in the middle of it,
you didn't even know. And then to see it now at the
national strategic level was astonishing.
So they they got us to shut down our nuclear power industry
effectively. They stopped, they got President
Carter to stop strategic modernization for the most part.
They got the United States to not deploy the enhanced
radiation warhead in Europe to defeat a Soviet armor attack on
NATO. A lot of a lot of nuclear
weapons production and modernization and arms control
issues were were exploited by Soviet active measures
campaigns, and those campaigns succeeded as the Soviets were
modernizing. Their goal was to keep us from
modernizing, keep the Brits from modernizing.
And there is. Reagan exposed a lot of that,
and he was able to force a lot through.
But they're, they're using basically Americans compassion
and sensibilities towards their fellow man and sort of good
nature and kind of weaponizing it in order to sort of subvert
the ability of the of the national security apparatus to
do the thing that it's supposed to do, which is allow people to
be compassionate but keep them safe 1st and.
Right. And there were people in the
national security apparatus who were wittingly or unwittingly
part of it. We don't have good laws to
defend ourselves from this. We've got the Foreign Agents
Registration Act, which is from the 1930s, and it's a slap on
the wrist and it's it's not that effective.
But we don't have good counterintelligence laws.
We have counter espionage laws against spying, but we don't
have good counterintelligence laws against acting as an
intelligence operative for enemy power.
So they get away with it. Yeah, it's really worth pointing
that out to my to my audience because I think we I've talked
about this a little bit, but it's it's very strange to learn
that people are doing things that are against United States
interest. That would obviously be be
antithetical to the way that we would want them to behave,
whether they be government actors or non government actors.
And yet they're not breaking any laws.
They're doing things that we would sort of all agree are not
good for America and they're not good for even themselves maybe.
And yet we can't stop them. That's sort of why freedom and
liberty is dangerous, I guess, is that we have a lot of open
door policies that you wouldn't have if we had an autocracy or
if we had a a truly tyrannical police state, which we seem to
be trending towards. Yeah.
And some believe that having that type of police state is
really a good thing for America because it protects US against
these types of adversaries. So they want to have, you know,
the equivalent of Britain's Official Secrets Act.
Oh, well, Britain's a democracy. Well, it's not a Republic.
It has, it has a chief of state and commander in chief who is
ordained by God to be in that position.
Really, really, we really believe that, you know, it's
nice and quaint in in an American point of view, but it's
very important in a British point of view to have a
monarchy. But it's not the same thing.
And that same person is Canada's commander in chief and
Australia's commander in And so when we import ideas and
systems from countries that don't have our fundamental
founding principles, that becomes a danger to us.
You know, we keep, we keep coming back to this like
democracy versus Republic thing. And and for whatever reason, the
political left continues to push the idea of democracy.
Do you have a do you have an instinct on what that end goal
looks like? Why that that terminology push
continues to happen? Well, as as our founders knew,
if you have pure democracy, you will have tyranny.
You'll have mob rule and mob rule through elites who are
ensconced, and then they're able to mobilize the mobs.
That's if you have pure democracy.
So if you have a Republic that is democratically elected, then
you have these checks and balances in a federal system.
So now it's a Federal Republic. So you can't have a centralized
elite take over ideally, yeah. You can't have a powerful
centralized government with few checks and balances, ideally.
And you have the individual states having a lot of power
ideally. OK, I'm, I'm putting something
together in my head here. You talked about Russians using
some of our compassion against the nuclear program keeps us
from doing the things that are best for US.
One of the things that I always here argued against the
institutions that exist in the American Republic, the way that
our constitutional Republic is structured, things like the
Electoral College, the argument is that it's elitist.
It's old fashioned and elitist. And the thing what you just said
a second ago was that when you have mob rule, true democracy
50% + 1, the elites can actually run that much more effectively
because they can run the mobs. So they're, they're selling this
agenda of democratic type rule. And yet you're saying that it's
in fact the opposite. The arguments are almost turned
on their head. It's kind of an interesting
little subversion. Yeah, And you, this is entirely
consistent with the ideology of somebody like Barack Obama,
where if you have that 50% + 1, that's considered a mandate for
you to do as you want. So when he was elected, he came
in with all these executive orders to fundamentally
transform our entire government and our society overall.
He had these executive orders prewritten.
So executive orders are legal, they're constitutional.
They're the president's missives to different government agencies
or bureaucracies to do whatever, you know, the president deems
needs to be done. And a lot of these executive
orders remain in force from president to president.
And sometimes they're changed and sometimes they're kept
intact. So Obama came in with the whole
with these executive orders pre written because he had his very
narrow mandate, you know what, a 1 1/2% popular vote majority,
but a very large electoral vote majority.
So the Electoral College was fine with him because it showed
a massive, massive mandate for what he was going to do in terms
of electoral votes. But in a pure democracy, he
would have had almost no mandate at all.
But this is consistent with the critical theorists and the the
the Marxist scholars like like Herbert Marcusa, who Obama was a
big fan of. Marcusa was a.
One of The Pioneers of critical theory, critical sex theory,
critical legal theory, critical race theory and so forth, it's
permeated our society. Yeah, so his, his his doctrine.
He had many doctrines, but one of repressive tolerance was to
tolerate up to a certain point and then shut off your tolerance
and then have that 50% + 1 majority to impose your will as
a democratic mandate. What does that look like in
practice? The the tolerance to a certain
point? Can you give an example?
Free speech up to a certain point, and then it becomes
insensitive, then it becomes dangerous, then it becomes
terroristic, disruptive of society, hurtful.
So that's the move from political correctness, which I
remember when I was a kid being sort of the argument, to now
there's hate speech, and hate speech is not just immoral, it's
potentially illegal if we can make it so kind of thing.
Right, right. So you start, you start now.
Now Google just the other day came out with a a policy on, on
insensitivity. They're going to have some sort
of insensitivity index in case that there's something, somebody
says something during a time of political or cultural or social
attention, they're going to shut things down.
This was their big event release that they just did.
Yeah, it was called significant event or something to that
effect. I.
Remember seeing right, Yeah. So back in the in the say in the
Vietnam War period, in the in the 70s and the Cultural
Revolution that was taking place in America, free speech was
taken to its extreme by the far left because it was to their
benefit at that time. They were there were words
people didn't say. There were, you know, you didn't
talk about sex or you didn't talk about, you know, bodily
functions or other things in public.
You didn't have, you know, George Carlin's famous words,
you know, could not be said on TV, but they really weren't
tolerated anywhere except among friends or certain types of
groups. So in the name of, of complete
freedom of speech, all those, all that social self-control
that we had as a civil society was thrown out the window.
And and then they issued their own types of censorship, like
hate speech, as you've just said, and.
What do you think that what do you think the motivating goal is
by by throwing those social norms out?
Well, it's part of it's part of what the, the, if you go look at
say, the Frankfurt School of Thought, which was created by
the Soviets aimed at Weimar Germany to tear apart Germany
after World War One, tear out the political center of the
country so that the communists would come in and take over the
institutions. It didn't work as Hitler beat
them to the punch. So what did they do?
They came here and they set up, they set up their doctrines here
at Columbia University and elsewhere at a teacher's college
to go populate the different schools, to teach the teachers
and indoctrinate them. And to tear us apart in society.
To take away our beliefs in family, our belief in church,
our belief in God, our belief in society, our belief in American
founding principles, and just, you know, regular human decency,
hard work from the character right, to tear it all apart and
make us relentlessly question everything we say and everything
we do. And then to start censoring
people who try to recover that, or to try to stop this
calculated destruction from taking place.
The first you, you've written several books, correct?
I know this is your first book we're talking about.
You wrote one about the KGB. Did you write some previous
books as well that I'm I'm not aware of?
My doctoral dissertation was on the KGB and its successors under
Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and that was a really cool experience
because I got to go to Moscow during the Soviet collapse.
Another Forrest Gump experience being Imagine being in the
Kremlin the day Boris Yeltsin secedes from the Soviet Union
and declares the Soviet Union is abolished.
It was just a neat thing there. So what do you do?
So as a doctoral student, well, I came right back the next
month, and I started working with these activists and
journalists and others. They had sacked KGB offices and
were going through all these documents.
And by that time I'd studied a little Russian, but it wasn't
any good. And so they were just showing me
what was there. So I was bringing bags of
documents back to the US to be translated, and this was KGB
internal documents and internal party documents.
And one journalist I worked with got into Gorbachev's vault,
where all of the Soviet Communist Party leadership's
archives were, and she was there for days and days and days with
photocopiers and bags hauling out documents.
She wrote a whole book based on this and provided me a lot of
the materials herself. So this was a really neat time
to be there. But I got to meet the exact KGB
generals who were running Soviet active measures campaigns
against the United States. And how open were they with you?
At that time they were remarkably open because, you
know, in a weird sense, the KGB foreign intelligence officers
were among the most liberal in quotes in the Soviet Union
because they knew how messed up the USSR really was in relation
to the rest of the world. But they, they knew the truth
and they thought, if we can save the Soviet system, let's do it
through glasnost and perestroika with Gorbachev and let's have
some sort of, of, of relations with the West.
But by this time, they didn't know what was happening and what
their future would be. So there were a series of
conferences in Moscow that, that were run by former Soviet human
rights activists and journalists and others.
And so, and they would have these KGB officers come in with
victims and they would talk and, and it was sort of like a, like
a big a, a meeting almost. It was a really cool time to be
there. People airing grievances.
People were explaining what had happened and you know, this is
what you were a victim of, kind of deal.
Is that what we're kind of hearing?
Yeah, yeah. And it was inconsistent.
So some were some of the the KGB people were very defensive or
defiant about what they did. But there were others who, who,
who if they knew that you weren't a dupe and that you kind
of knew what you were talking about, they would you could have
a good conversation with them and come to an understanding.
Some of them because they still have the Russia post Soviet
Russia kept the old Soviet secrecy laws.
Got it. And, and some of these guys,
these cage even were angling for partnerships with Western
companies and economic opportunities because they were
still just getting their Soviet salaries and rubles at the time.
So at the time you could you could buy whatever you wanted
to. Interesting also and.
Then figure out what was true in the Yeah.
Sure. It sounds like though, what
you're saying is that the the the people that were most
educated upon what was happening in the West, that were doing the
active measures that were working against the West also
were getting radicalized in their own right based on how
much better the West was and what they were trying to defeat
actually looked like a better outcome from what than what they
were living in. Yeah, yeah.
One of them was a very famous KGB general, Oleg Kalugin, who
lives in Maryland now. He, he did not defect to the
United States, but he was, he was an advisor to Yeltsin.
He stood on the tank with Yeltsin in front of the Russian
parliament building in 1991. And then, and then he thought,
wait, no, this is Yeltsin's day. Everybody else off the tank and
just have Yeltsin stand up there as the hero against the
communist machine. So it was General Kalugin who
knew and who understood it. He knew all about activism.
He ran tons of operations against the United States.
He even paid a very famous journalist who taught other
journalists to. He was the bagman, the KGB
bagman to pay this guy. Very interesting.
So. So he, yeah, it's a very.
And he'd been doing that since the 1950s.
So his knowledge of America was very, very intimate.
Your, your new book is called Big Intel.
It's talking about sort of the woke tip.
You talked about executive orders and the missives and sort
of the, the agenda that Barack Obama came into the country
with. We're also seeing it kind of
tied in right now. I think the Twitter Files and
some of the other interesting sort of reveals of the, the, the
private Intel industry, which seems to have an awful lot of
folks from the government start, you know, either former
government or current government that are on a different salary.
Can we talk about the swing, the way that intelligence has moved?
They were heroes. We talked about it.
And I think we've we sort of knew the American way of life
was superior. Even the Soviets knew it.
And then somehow they're the villain today.
There's got to be some kind of a changeover.
Where where did that happen? Well, they were always a villain
to somebody. So it's a question of, you know,
whose villain are they? So if you look at the, the start
of the FBI and, and this even before he was in the FBI, this,
this Edgar Hoover, this this young lawyer, he was in his 20s
when he was running the Justice Department unit to round up
communists and deport them to Russia.
He, he, he had, he grew up on Capitol Hill.
He worked in the Library of Congress.
That's how he knew how, you know, the early 20th century
version of databases worked. That's how he knew how
Washington worked. But his main job, and then when
he took over the Bureau of Investigation, it wasn't as a
lawman to fight crime. It was to hunt down communists
and anarchists. And the, the law wasn't a really
good tool for him. But he, he did what he could.
He didn't have, he was winging it as he went along.
And when you're in, when you're running the Bureau for almost
half a century, you're going to make a ton of mistakes.
But when you think about the few laws that that that reigned in,
who were and the immense power that he had, he was really
restrained in comparison to today's FBI.
That is, that is a profoundly, probably upsetting statement for
most people who are looking at today's FBI and thinking where
it is. And they go, well, think about
the big abuses. And we can go back to the Palmer
Raids. We can go back to McCarthy and
we can go back to all the different, you know, we had guys
that were in the civil rights movement trying to tell Martin
Luther King Junior that we've got stuff on you and you better
do the right thing and kill yourself.
And we think, man, that's super abusive.
And, and the statement you just made is that they're way worse
today. And that Hoover was pretty
restrained. Let's let's keep fleshing that
out because just let people kind of have that digested moment.
And, and it's intense. That's an intense claim.
And I don't think you're necessarily wrong.
I think the powers just in and of themselves kind of tell us
that too. So some of it's technology.
Yeah, Can you imagine if Hoover had the technology that Chris
Ray has? Well, that's the thing we talk
about often times that people, you know, the Soviets too, if
they had the ability to do what some of these data companies
could do, change things, manipulate people's perceptions
without them ever even knowing that they're being manipulated.
You know, that's the Soviet wet dream is being able to send
information and and curate what it is true and what's false.
People, I think knew they were being lied to in the Soviet
Union, at least the people that were paying attention.
That's sort of the instinct we have.
And that seems to be what you just said about the least the
KGB guys that were trying to do the those operations, They
weren't. Fooled.
Well, everybody in the Soviet Union knew they were being lied
to, and they would lie to each other and then they would know
how to read through the lies. Sure.
And I've talked to, so I talked to Matt Taibbi about this a
little bit. But on Dinesh's podcast and, and
when we were talking about it, he said, yeah, there was sort of
this, this atmosphere of people saying words, but none of them
had any meaning because that's just the thing you did.
If you were silent in public, you looked ridiculous.
So you're just talking about inane.
You're, you're tweeting. And we, we kind of saw this kind
of interesting little amusement of a it's like it's just birds
making noise. If the birds stop making noise,
that's usually when something really scary is about to happen.
And he said that was always the Soviet There was always people
talking, but nobody was saying anything because you didn't want
to. Yeah, that's a great way to put
it. Yeah.
You, you talk about your beet rations or something.
And and that would, that had special meaning.
It was called esoteric communication.
But it's funny you brought up Matt Taibbi, because I've never
met him, but I followed him since I was in Moscow during the
Soviet collapse. He was with this sort of
counterculture or underground paper called the Exile.
And I really liked it. And I followed it because he was
just going after the KGB like crazy.
And there were very, very few American journalists who were
doing that. So I was not in the, I was doing
academic work back then, but I, but I followed him and never got
to meet him. And then he resurfaced online
and I thought, wait, I've heard of this guy.
I've met him. And then boom, he comes out and
exposes with with Mike Shellenberger that the the
Twitter Files and and so he has just stuck with his principles
on going after big government, just from a very different
perspective. Yeah, I mean, he's an
interesting guy because I think he's more like the classical
liberal left. We don't agree on probably
everything. I don't know what we don't
disagree on though. Like we haven't really kind of
compared notes and saying, oh, this is where I think you're
wrong. But he's he's kind of like a
he's an athlete and he comes from an American position of, of
liking what this country is about.
And the disagreement is like, how do you make it better?
I think that used to be the old left versus right, at least when
I was a kid. That's what people were trying
to figure out. Like how, OK, we kind of agree
that America is a great place, but we want to make it better
and it different parties were abusing it.
But that's not what's going on right now.
That's not what we're seeing in this country.
We haven't even agreed on the moral basis.
And it sounds like some of that was actually subverted through
Soviet techniques and Frankfurt School and so on.
And then it made its way into the Intel community, which is
really from hunting commies to basically hunting people that
disagree with commies. We've done a a whole flip.
There had to have been some kind of major infiltration.
Do you have a sense of what it looked like to to make that
happen? Well, there was but, but when
you think of it, American counterintelligence was never
very good. They'll be very sad to hear you
say that, but I'm I'm OK with that.
It's terrible. I mean, there was only one.
So, so I had the sort of the, I was the only, you know, person
to be in KGB headquarters after the Soviet collapse at Lubyanka.
And then going around just with ransacked documents and talking
one-on-one with all these people who were involved both inside
and outside the KGB and in the party and then victims and
everything else. And only one person from the FBI
wanted to know more. And he took me out.
We became friendly. He was kind of a strange guy.
So we weren't pals, but I went to his house a bunch of times.
His wife cooked me dinner. I got to know him pretty well.
And he wanted to know everything he possibly could.
And then one day he was arrested.
It was Robert Hanson. So Robert Hanson was the only
FBI person interested in in the my findings on the KGB.
And then another time I got some material on in Arabic, and I
knew it was some extremist stuff, but I couldn't read
Arabic. I didn't know, but I knew the
source. So I gave it to a friend of mine
whose wife was an FBI agent who was born in Lebanon and she
spoke native Arabic. And I was with him when he gave
it to her and she just kind of dismissed it.
And I thought that's really unprofessional for an FBI agent
to just dismiss, be so dismissive of something and not
even ask where it came from or not we want to know more or
anything. So, so I, I mentioned her to,
to, to the FBI, said, hey, there's a problem.
You got a professional issue here.
Well, turned out she was an alleged spy for Hezbollah and I
reported her to Hanson. So I've, I've, I've seen some of
these little snippets as I was scrolling through your book.
I, I, I didn't get to like sit down and and page through
everything one at a time. I did a lot of kind of like
touching the waypoints on which is that's the only way that you
can see this, that I knew that was the setup.
So I had to cover my face because it's.
No. That the the guy who was
interested in the KGB was the guy who was getting his paycheck
from the KGB. There's just, you can't make
this stuff up. And so the idea that the FBI has
always been kind of bad at it, like I said, it will hurt the
feelings of people that I worked with who thought they were
great. And there are, there are former
agents that worked in CI that would consider themselves, you
know, kind of spook like. And they didn't want to be
criminal investigators. They wanted to be Intel people.
But they're not trained. For it, and they don't have the
background in it. And even though they're getting
a little better about sending people to farm and and sending
people to Langley, it's just not the FBI.
It's not built for that because it's theoretically still has a
law enforcement. It's both a shackle and a
weapon. And I think we've seen it move
towards more of a weapon lately. Only because they're willing to
come after us internally. Yeah.
We're trying to deal with that now.
The comment I said before about the FBI being really poor about
counterintelligence, historically, it's not against
the FBI counterintelligence agents.
It's it's the way the FBI is set up.
Yep. It was never set up to be, to
run deep dive strategic offensive counterintelligence
operations to disrupt the adversaries foreign intelligence
services against us. We don't have a capability for
that. The CIA doesn't do it.
The FBI has. A counterintelligence entity
should do it. In fact, President George W Bush
tried when he set up the foreign counterintelligence executive it
it didn't. It didn't stay.
Why? Because they put FBI agents in
charge of it, right. Or just one more bureaucracy.
So, so it, it was, it was really sad.
So, yeah, you'll have, you'll have some good.
Most of the penetrations or most of the cases that we see that
that are made known to the public are not like really good
counterintelligence work being done.
I'm sure some is, Most of it is walk insurance or most of it is,
is provided by foreign countries that rely on that, that provide
this to us. So some of the best cases
against the Soviets and even against the Russians were walk
insurance. Yeah, you want.
To define what that is for folks who don't know what a walk in
is. So, so it's a, it's a, in this
case, it's a foreign intelligence officer or agent
who turns himself in to the FBI or wants some defects to the
United States and turn against the other side.
So there were some really vital ones, you know, KGB major
Stanislav Levchenko being one of them.
My former professor, Vladislav Bittman, who was with the
Czechoslovak Secret Service, who was the pioneer of, of teaching
the discipline of studying and countering disinformation in the
United States, which none of the so-called disinformation experts
you see have ever probably even heard of the guy, let alone
studied under him. He was a brilliant, wonderful
man. But these were walkins who
volunteered. So it wasn't like they were
being worked as an op by the FBI or the CIA to, to have them come
over. Some of that might have
happened, but basically it that's if.
If it has, it hasn't been public.
It seems that most of what the FBI has been able to do even
recently, we see them, they're basically like spamming and, and
giving people, you know, direct advertising on social media
saying, hey, like, go put something in Russia.
And there's a, there's a certain amount of money associated with
coming over here. But you know, the, the, the
words I remember someone saying is like, if anybody is willing
to step over from, from a Russian intelligence service, if
you're going to get, you know, people from the Gru or whatever,
they're going to come over. It's a 7 figure amount of money
that the United States government is willing to go.
And they're going to, because these people are going to have
to relocate their entire life and going to try to make it
worth their while. But that's not how you recruit
people. And the other big problem that
they have is if you're talking about people that are
essentially law enforcement officers that have this mandate
under their, their actual job code, the 1811 criminal
investigator and, and all the training at, at Quantico is
based on you're going to go find crimes and we're going to go
find out who did them. That's the theory of what the
FBI is, which goes back to that route.
They were going after commies, but probably ineffectively, even
if that's what he was interested in.
And they they basically got their funding and they got their
money and their and their ability to operate going after
Interstate crimes where there was a problem with local law
enforcement unable to proceed. Pursue people across
jurisdiction. I always tell people, if you
want to know why the FBI doesn't make any sense, because it's got
a mission set that has nothing to do with why it was created.
And you have this expectation they're going to go after Bonnie
and Clyde and the Dillinger Gang.
And so do people who join the FBI, it turns out.
And and then they're like, no, no, no, no.
You're going to be like looking for cyber actors from, you know,
North Korea and you're like, how do we do?
What laws do we have to affect? And they're like, oh, none,
none, none at all. You can't do it.
And. It's just this mission creep
where the FBI performs all these valuable functions that our
country needs, but how well is it doing it?
You get state police, local cops, They're doing a great job
busting people. The FBI comes in to help and
then delays everything for a long time and then gets all the
credit and then gets more money from Congress for the great job
it's doing. You're literally describing
Steve Friends talking points here, so I love that.
Let me let me tell you something that I thought when I was there
doing counterintelligence. You tell me how this analogy
works from a lot of time looking at this.
I forgot you were a counterintelligence, but I said
how bad it sucked. Well, it was, it's totally, it's
awful. It was one of the worst things
I've ever done in my professional career.
I spent two years basically hating what I was doing and
thinking, I, I remember having a discussion with my boss.
This is very candid. And I said, she goes, you know,
where do you think you're going to be in five years with this
agency, which they love to know, do you want to be a manager?
Can we groom you into this garbage, whatever else?
And she said, where are you going to be in five years?
Where do you see yourself and how you're going to get there?
And I said, well, it's January and if I'm still working the
squad by June, I'm not going to be working for the FBI anymore.
So that's where I see myself in the next 6 months.
I don't have five years of, of foresight because I can't even
do this for another six months. I've got to get out of here.
I can't do this work. And, and the, and the way that
I'd come up with it because I'm always looking for analogies.
The, the, let's say that the, the law enforcement apparatus is
a hammer, right? Bad guy pops up, smash it.
That's what we're, that's the job.
And counterintelligence is a much more sort of sophisticated
move. And so it's more like a
screwdriver. You know, you've got to
basically turn it, turn it, turn it, turn it, turn it, and
eventually you get home where it needs to be and it keeps two
things together. And the FBI, as it currently
stands, is a hammer with a screwdriver welded on top of it.
So it is the most awkward screwdriver to use because it's
got all the way to the weird, clunky law enforcement thing
behind it. And it's also kind of a crappy
law enforcement agency because as you try to swing it, you've
got this thing that's thrown off the balance and you can't get
too close to the wall because there's this thing sticking out
the end of it. So it's doing two things pretty
ineffectively because of the, you know, because it's trying to
do 2 missions with one tool. What do you think about that as
an analogy? Yeah, yeah.
It was set up as a well, have you seen the founding memo of
the FBI? No, I don't think it's like a
half page memo, which it's like a stream of consciousness from a
turn an attorney general named Bonaparte.
He was related to Napoleon and this was because you there were
of the anarchist violence and other things and it referred to
special agents. We need special agents for this
and that. So that is what the FBI
considers its founding document, meaning a memo, poorly written
memo from an attorney general from 19 O 8.
So the FBI wasn't even created by law.
There's no law establishing the FBI.
Now they've, they've been since moved underneath the DOJ, which
was done by some, some move that Congress I think signed off on.
So there's that. Yeah, well, it was part of the
DOJ from the beginning, but it had a different status within
the DOJ, but. What you're saying is that
basically the foundation of it is that under considered
executive order, Attorney general mandate?
What does that? Play a general memo and this is
this is the FBI on its own website describing its own
history, saying that this is our founding document.
Which is weird by the way, because if you've ever seen and
I've made this argument, I said if you ever find a woman who
lies to you about her birthday, what else was she lied to you
about? And her age?
The FBI lies about it's age to me because it became the FBI in
19341935. I can't remember where it
officially crosses over, but it was called the Bureau of
Investigation. The the Air Force used to be
called the Army Air Corps. They don't claim the birthday is
when the Army created the Army Air Corps.
They became the when they became ADOD entity underneath the
United States Air Force. That's their birthday.
It's 1947. I should I should remember that
better. But I think it's in September of
47. But that's their birthday.
That's the real birthday. The FBI really started in 1935,
but they claim a different birthday because it's I don't
know, is it sexier? They got more time on the on the
earth, but. It's well, this is they're,
they're, they are so they hate J Edgar Hoover, right?
I mean, they're really embarrassed about him.
They want to take his name off headquarters, but.
Well, there's hey guys, I, I literally, this is very just
personal and funny. I, I went to a, a retired agent
and I'm, and he's working in law enforcement now with a bunch of
real cops, you know, doing real cop work stuff.
He's a sheriff and he may even see this, which will be funny.
He's got a picture of Hoover on his wall.
And I, I, I'm interviewing with his guys and I'm chatting with
him. And I said, isn't it funny that
he's got a picture of that famous tranny up on his wall?
And they said, what are you talking about?
And, and they said who who I said Hoover, I said Hoover was
famous for cross dressing and bunch of, you know, sort of
alternative sexuality. And they said, is that real?
And go, Oh yeah, it's real. So they they they were, they
were loving it because they they wanted to make fun of him for
being a Bureau guy, because local law enforcement always
guns to give the Bureau a little bit of a hard time.
That's sort of natural rivalry state and fed.
So they go in and they go, what's up with that tranny you
got on the wall there, man? And he's like, oh, it's, you
know, unconfirmed rumors. The OG guys love the Hoover era
because they were taught by the Hoover guys.
But at some point in the last 20 years, yes, I agree with you.
Now they've kind of, they want to divorce themselves from it,
even though he was kind of like the original, you know, he was
the original alternative guy in government who wanted.
The he was the G man, you know, he was the always gets his man.
He was upright. And really he was the most, one
of the most popular figures in America for years, one of the
most trusted figures in America for years.
So even up until the late 60s, just just before he died in the
early 70s, he still had the support of 2/3 of the
population. Selling your own legend?
Try to. Yeah, exactly.
So So the whole legend of the FBI being born in 19 O 8, it's
just a modern day continuation of Hoover's fiction.
And even Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation but
still wasn't Federal Bureau until you said FDR brought it in
sometime in the 30s. And, and you think that even in
all that gangsterism, which is kind of the way you have to look
at it, the way that he had files on people, the way that he used
the authorities and he was stretching what he was allowed
to do versus what he was legally, you know, supposed to
be doing, even that was constrained.
I think that, like I said, that nugget is going to bother me now
that it was constrained compared to what's going on today.
Yeah, so, so think of, you know, the Banona intercepts.
This was the Army Signal Corps had had broken the Soviet code
during World War 2. And so while we were focused on
fighting the Nazis, the Army Signal Corps was revealing, hey,
the Soviets are doing this nasty stuff to us because they have an
end state after World War 2 or after the war, as they called
it, that goes beyond just defeating the Nazis.
They're coming after us. And so they were able to.
This was a foreign intelligence mission to break the Soviet
code. But Hoover knew about parts of
it. OK, but he could never use what
those intercepts said about Americans working for the
Soviets, had their names, their positions within various parts
of the government and wherever else.
This was sort of like a earlier day version of NSA monitoring
and and FISA 7O2 and all of that.
But there was no law preventing Hoover from exploiting that
intelligence. He just didn't exploit that
intelligence. He never even told the president
about it because he knew the President Roosevelt was
surrounded by Soviet agents, the code to the Soviet agents.
Why do why do we think he didn't use that in a a weaponized way
or or go after some of these folks like what was the the
restraining principle? So Hoover got, Hoover was was
generally lean Republican, but he would work for whatever
president wanted him to. So he did spy work for President
Warren Harding to spy on political opponents.
He did spy work for FDR to spy on political opponents and even
political allies. And he he even monitored Eleanor
Roosevelt's appointment secretary.
And when she found out, she got really angry and she said the
FBI is a Gestapo. Interesting.
And, and Truman, he Truman and Eisenhower didn't make any
political abuse of the FBI. And they didn't like they, they
Hoover was not part of their inner circle, but they kept him
on. The Kennedys used him a lot.
They hated him and he hated them, but they used him a lot
for their spying on mainly Communists in the civil rights
movement. And so it was Bobby Kennedy,
attorney general, who instructed Hoover to wiretap Martin Luther
King. It wasn't Hoover just getting
his jollies by listening to dirty conversations.
It was it was a direct missive from Attorney General Kennedy to
Hoover. And Hoover thought at the time,
I don't want to do this because this will destroy the FBI if
we're caught spying on the civil rights movement.
So he did it. He had to do it anyway.
So at that time. The FBI was doing a lot of this
sort of like anti KKK stuff. They were trying to expand
influence and trying to show that they were the good guys.
I think that's kind of concurrent.
So that would that would make sense that it would look really
bad. Yeah, and there was trouble,
too, because the KKK wasn't violating federal laws at the
time, right? So it wasn't an FBI issue.
So. So to fault the FBI for not
going after the Klan, that was a state issue.
So it was President Johnson who finally said you've got to smash
him. He said I want you to infiltrate
the Klan like you infiltrated the Communist Party and Hoover
actually did and just destroyed it because you had a lot of
state and local law enforcement working with the clan in the
Deep South. What was the the authority set
that they were using? Did they have that?
Was the KKK act that they passed or was there something else that
had to like how did they justify it?
There were there were some laws then, but it was mostly LBJ
telling Hoover plus up the KKK. And then they did.
Yes, Sir. And that and did that start is
that Emmett Till era that I'm thinking of?
I'm trying to remember kind of what was happening concurrently
as far as big cases and. That was 6465 was that it was
early to mid 60s, obviously right after the Kennedy
assassination. But you had, you know, murder is
still not a federal crime, right?
KKK is lynching somebody. It's not a federal crime unless
it's it's over different states. But boy, you know, right, every
FBI agents need the cooperation of the state and local police
and the courts. And if you don't have that in
the Deep South at that time in many areas, then that's a big
problem. But Hoover went in and got the
job done. Now, sending New Yorkers down to
Mississippi, you know, they didn't quite fit in, but it was
still, it was still he, he did a good job at it.
They're still happy to do that. Oh yeah, yeah.
It's such a misfit sort of situation.
So he, my buddies and I always kind of wonders, like when did
the FBI kind of step it outside of its scope of operations and
start doing things that it doesn't really necessarily have
a legal mandate or it doesn't really have legal authorities to
do? And that was always the question
I always had. It's like, hey, go do this
thing. It's like, OK, well, what legal
authority do I have? That should be the whole concept
of a special agent is that you actually have a very, and I'll
say this again, because I think people may not know it.
A special agent is someone who is an agent of the government in
a very special instead of circumstances.
They are not broadly speaking, Joe Biden is an agent of the
government. An ambassador can be an agent of
the government. They have broad powers to make
deals and and enforce certain, you know, requirements.
But a special agent is a very narrow thing.
It's actually people think special agent makes you better.
It's like, no, it makes you more limited.
You only have these things, Title 18 and Title 21 that you
can go out and enforce. So it's very weird to think that
if they said go do this thing, go get the KKK and you don't
have the authority to do it. Like the people were like, got
it. Let's go, boss.
That's that loyalty to the Bureau culture that I guess is
probably one of the most dangerous thing that continues
to exist. Yeah, it's just, it's like a
fraternity, right? Where you, you, the fraternity
can do no wrong even when you know it's doing really wrong.
And so you still defend the fraternity because it's a
fraternity. But this is not.
We can't look at at the FBI as a frat, although maybe we should.
Now it's a frat that's I. Won't allow us to now, I don't
know. We'll ask Sarah at the DC field
office when she thinks about frats.
But anyway, so that's you got, you've got a, if you have
loyalty to a brand, regardless of the quality of the brand,
then you're doing a disservice to everybody that you're
advocating to. You don't have the FBI agents
Association saying, hey, the bureau's hurting.
It's got bad leadership. It has weak leadership.
It has too much leadership. It's too centralized.
It's got mission creep. It's lost public support.
We need to do something to help fix this.
You don't see them doing that. No, you see them giving gift
cards to people that took a knee for BLM, Yeah.
Yeah, so so it's not even like the former agents or explore
special agents or or management or anybody else or even
advocates for making the FBI really serve the public.
When you talk about special agents in Hoover's time, you had
the FBI had its narrow role. It was to fight anarchists and
communists and and certain Interstate crimes.
Then you had the gangsters and the multi State Bank robbers.
But it didn't enforce prohibition laws during
prohibition that there was a prohibition Bureau with special
agents for enforcing prohibition.
It didn't enforce alcohol, tobacco and firearms because you
had and have a separate Bureau for that.
But you don't hear many people saying ATF is a sacred agency.
We have to keep it. We can't change it or fix it in
any way, right? Because it's, it's OK to say
abolish ATF because it's abusing Second Amendment rights serially
and, and you don't. And a lot of the laws are
obsolete from the prohibition era still.
So, so a lot of the mandate for ATF is not there.
But as long as ATF exists, why has the FBI usurped certain ATF
functions that already by statute are being handled by
ATF? So let's just peel that away and
let ATF handle that, take it out of the Bureau and then put ATF
in its box and deal with it as it needs to be dealt with later
on. Yeah, thrown in the ocean and
never recovered. It's, it's so interesting
because so much of this historical context, I think is
what's lacking from this is one of the biggest things about
America's that don't know anything about their history.
They don't know anything about the concepts of where things
came from and why they're there. And then they're easily
steamrolled by stupid arguments. You know, ATF when it was
created and you just mentioned prohibition, so it's worth
talking about. We're talking about a
fundamentally a tax organization that joined DOJ in the 90s.
In my lifetime, it joined the, it's not like it's historically
been there. They didn't have a law
enforcement core mission. Their job was to take money from
things that were illegal or that were already legal but were
regulated under a certain way. And like, you know, and then tax
violators were what they went after.
And they turned that into this, like thing where they are
hunting down guys who have machine guns, which is also
relatively new to the American concern because people were
rolling around with those for many years and, you know, just
started. And the gangster era is why
those things got sort of regulated in kind of a way that
I think probably wouldn't pass today.
It wouldn't pass scrutiny today. I can't imagine the National
Firearms Act in 1934 getting through a Supreme Court review
if it wasn't already part of our history for the last whatever it
is, 80 years, 90 years. Yes.
So it's institution, it's all like New Deal socialist
bureaucracies. And if you go back and study the
New Deal, who was the New Deal? The New Deal had these writers
programs for who? For Communist Party
propagandists who could not get real jobs, so they were working
on the off grants and salaries from the US taxpayer in the name
of economic recovery, writing their stuff and then recruiting
their cadres at our expense. So the Soviets then got their
assets on the ground here to be paid for by the American
taxpayer. It's brilliant with the stamp of
approval as government employees.
And, and the amount of damage that FDR has done, you know,
historically to this country and even, I think even Truman, some
of the stuff that got signed under Truman were, were fourth.
It was the fourth term. It's, it's the closest that we
ever had to like a, a complete takeover of our federal
government is the only guy that ever didn't do the 2 terms and
out right. And it's so interesting to me
that, that he's revered on the political left in so many ways.
And, and then you just look and you're like, you can pretty much
trace a lot of this stuff. That is the rot that has finally
come home to roost. It's finally metastasized to an
end state of, of a pretty obvious danger to the left and
the right, if they're being honest about it.
I can't, I don't think they are. But it, it actually, it's, it's
grown beyond those original boundaries of, of just being
ideologically driven. Now it's just progress.
And the progress is to its own detriment, it seems like.
Yeah. And, and what is progress?
What do they mean by it? If you look at at the term
progressive, there are lots of different histories of it.
But in the Marxist sense, you're always moving to progress.
What is that progress? Well, for his his part, it was
the dictatorship with his words of the proletariat, the
dictatorship of the working class.
So there any Marxist by definition is working toward a
dictatorship. So you have the economic
Marxists where the toiling masses of the proletariat defeat
the rich bourgeoisie. Well, now the rich bourgeoisie
are the Marxist leaders, so they've changed it to a cultural
approach. So instead of being an economic
battle between the haves and have nots, the victims and the
victimizers, it's a cultural battle.
And the cultural battle, now the proletariat is anyone who wants
to destroy American founding principles, anything with
Western. In the Western moral tradition,
it's them, because it's the dead white men who are the
oppressors, and they have to be destroyed.
Except for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were dead
white. That's right.
Yeah. Well, if you can't have
inconsistencies and, and you know, what do you call it,
cognitive dissonance, then you can't be on the political left.
I don't think you have to tolerate a certain amount of
that headache every day. It let's talk about how it kind
of goes after the info. So you talked about communist
writers, you talked about new deals, sort of infiltrations
with that sort of thing where now the federal government is in
fact paying for its for people writing against its own
interests in theory. Or American people and even even
more than that, because if you you consider that that World War
2 is beginning, we're not involved in it yet.
This is 1940, nineteen, early 1941, and we don't have a
foreign intelligence service. We have naval intelligence.
We have army intelligence overall, but they're very
narrowly, narrowly defined. We don't have anything like
ACIA. So President Roosevelt says, you
know, after the British are leaning on us, we need to have a
Central Intelligence organization.
So this is where the Office of Strategic Services was set up as
a wartime foreign intelligence service.
Really neat story about the OSS and we've heard a lot about it
while Bill Donovan setting it up.
He was a really cool guy in history.
I mean, we need guys like him as long as they had a good
counterintelligence instinct, which he did not.
So Donovan set up the OSS with the single minded objective of
defeating the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese by Mussolini.
We never thought about what's the end state going to be after
the war. Nobody almost in the United
States was thinking what do we want the world to look like
after we win the war. Stalin had decided by 1943 I
want to spread communism to Europe and the Americas and have
communism to rule the world. We didn't have that kind of
view. So we just looked at Stalin as a
war time ally to fight Hitler. So when Donovan is recruiting
into the OSS, he is bringing in Americans or foreign nationals
who had been born Americans who'd been born abroad, or
foreign nationals bringing them into the OSS as analysts and
linguists and all the things that we lacked.
But he wasn't screening them to make sure they were not agents
of town. He said he was, but in fact, he
wasn't in the Venona. Transcripts proved this.
Hoover was aware of what much of what was happening.
Congress was aware of much of what was happening, but Donovan
actually lied about it. That allowed the Soviets to have
a wholesale penetration of the new US intelligence community,
and it became so contaminated that by the end of World War 2,
OSS was disbanded and we had no intelligence community at all.
But it got us to the point where among intelligence
professionals, there were no enemies on the left.
This is a gross over generalization, but I mean,
where you get this intelligence community sentiment that there
are no enemies on the left, even with an intelligence service
that was set up to battle the and that's so bizarre.
That's so and it was and it was populated by people.
I mean, it's a it's an over generalization because at first
they were doing a really good job, need operations.
I mean, Italy would have been a Italian Soviet Socialist
Republic had it not been for James Angleton and and the CIA
making sure that the Italy's 1948 elections didn't go to
Stalin because the Soviets were really active in that.
So there were a lot of the early CIA covert operations did a
great job to protect American interests and Western
civilization. Can you imagine if Italy was a
Soviet Warsaw Pact member about how that would have changed?
Well, to be married right now. Even though my wife grew up in
communist New York, she would have been probably a very
different version of that family came from from Italy and not not
to right in that era. Yeah, so, so there was some
really neat stuff going on by a lot of these early intelligence
professionals under under Allen Dulles running the CIA.
I have to imagine, and that's the thing about being in a, that
was a start up environment. So they didn't have rules, they
didn't have bureaucracy, they didn't have lots of oversight
that people even knew what the hell they were doing.
It was just like, hey, you, they're, they're paying people
out of their pocket to go and do stuff, which that kind of cowboy
culture, you kind of almost have to run Intel.
Like it's never going to be looked at.
Like no one's ever going to be able to look at what you're
doing again. If you're right, yeah.
And this was why the OSS was so successful in running commando
operations behind the line. So Bill Casey, Reagan's CIA
director, he was he was a finance lawyer in New York.
He invented the tax shelter to get around FD Rs, New Deal
taxation. And so he was recruited into the
Navy and then into the OSS. And he had this crazy idea of
when, when, when Eisenhower, you know, runs D-Day to invade
Normandy, how are we going to get the Allied troops from the
coast of France to Berlin? So he said, let's parachute in
behind Nazi lines and get native born Germans behind Nazi lines
to run operations to make it easier for our forces to get
through. And it was a crazy idea.
Everybody thought it was nuts. OSS chief Donovan loved it.
The British said it'll never work, but let's try it anyway.
Casey ran that whole operation. So this was just guys who pretty
much didn't know what they were doing or they they didn't know.
They had not been conditioned to think in a defeatist way that it
couldn't be done. Yeah.
Which will Colby with a guy like this, he became CIA director.
The thing is like that, that sort of mentality which still
exists in unconventional warfare, still exists in the the
special operations thing. We used to call it operating in
the Gray. When you talk about people, it's
like it's not right, it's not wrong.
If it works, it's still it's still good.
That's very operational morality type stuff.
It's a terrible way to run a society, it turns out.
And those people cannot be everywhere.
Because if everybody's operationally moral, then
everything decays. But having some Gray operators
in the world that are ready to go out there and just solve
problems, whatever the cost is it, it may end up being the the
only tool that you can use in somebody's very, you know,
especially if nobody's looking to the end state.
As you just mentioned. It just reminds me that we're
not looking at end states when we did a lot of our policy with
China, either the US is really good.
In fact, the CIA historically is pretty good at what's, what are
we trying to accomplish right now.
But they push into something and something else pops out and we
end up with either, you know, some other regime we're going to
fly in 10 years. That's, that's the entire story
of the American, the American intelligence services is we're
going to solve this problem right now.
And we have no idea what it's going to lead to and nobody is
leave it out. But they do a great job for the
duty that they have right in front of like right after 911.
It was a really similar thing where we didn't have, you know,
FBI was in no shape to deal with it.
And, and there was a debate in Washington.
Should the 9/11 attacks be considered a law enforcement
issue and not a military type attack?
So should we just have an investigation that arrests
terrorists around the world rather than go off and and do
what we ended up doing? So that was a great idea.
But then what happened? This supercharged FBI, this and,
and what's his name, the director, Then Mueller, he'd
only been on the job for a week, which people don't realize.
And worse, turns to him and says, why weren't you guys on
top of this? And he said, well, it wasn't I,
I really don't know. I said, I want to make sure this
never happens to another American again.
It's your responsibility. So that was Mueller's marching
order. So he then what did he do?
He did a great job of what the president wanted him to do was
to create this monstrous FBI and, and, and everything that
came out of it. And he was the second longest
serving director after Hoover. But then you had the Department
of Homeland Security come out of this.
You had the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence come out of this. So what Bush did was centralized
everything to prevent the stove piping of intelligence.
But in centralizing everything, he made it so that a few people
at the top could manipulate it. So when Obama takes office, he
likes what he sees with Mueller and his FBI and asks Congress to
extend Mueller's term beyond the 10 year mandatory limit.
He brings in people like General Clapper to run the 17 member
intelligence community. He brings in Brennan ideologues
like Brennan to run the CIA. Who did Brennan vote for?
Three years before he was recruited into the CIA, he voted
for Soviet asset Gus Hall as president of the United States.
Now, you can think, well, he had a stupid attack or whatever
else, but really only three-year maturation from that time until
the CIA brings him in. And then he writes in his memoir
that was just a lark. Rather than say, you know what,
I'm going to use this as a counterintelligence lesson.
This is how these guys work. This is how these guys fool
young voters. Nothing like that at all.
Instead, he went and put he and Clapper at Obama's orders.
But they didn't need to be ordered because they were fine
with it, imposed DEI and all the alphabet soup of rainbow ISM
into the entire intelligence community with a vengeance.
And they could do that because it was a few people at the top
of a very centralized system that had been designed never to
be centralized because that would endanger our Republic.
There's something really critical.
You talked about Mueller coming on and my buddy George Hill
talks about this as well, former NSA and military intelligence,
etcetera, and also FBI. And the thing that he says is
that literally the like September 12th, the mandate
comes down that no American will die again from terrorism on US
soil. And that is fundamentally A
tyrannical mindset because you can't have a 0 failed mission
without imposing tyranny. You can't do it.
There's no opportunity. And and when they did that, they
changed the definition of national security fundamentally
from what it was all the way from inception to date.
And that moment onward, it's like now you can't fail.
Tyranny's on the menu and it's required.
And as you just said, centralization allowed.
Everyone always thinks it's like, oh, if you could just
change the things at the top. No, the guys at the top made it
so the things at the bottom were also then corrupted.
And this problem that I think most people have a hard time
getting their head around, how do you fix it when the top is
corrupted? Everyone's sort of OK with the
idea that senior management and various different agencies are
problematic, but they've changed the culture and they've had 20
years to do it. And so now, now we're not
dealing with a problem at the top.
We're dealing with agencies that are a problem.
I think that's my position. I assume that's the same thing
that we're kind of coming to with what you're saying.
Sure, because imagine how the recruitment standards changed 20
years ago. So now you have people in mid
career and senior career who entered as very junior people
recruited on that basis of what we would now call DEI.
Yeah, 100. Percent and the CIA had had a
very, very lame like the FBI had very poor tech capabilities back
then and so they were hiring techies right Well these techies
are you know San Francisco type techies brought in to the CIA.
Well, it was neat to have a broad spectrum of the public buy
in on fighting terrorism, but then that changes the whole
culture of the whole agency. So you and it wasn't just being
imposed from the top. They couldn't impose things from
the top, say the Clappers and the Brennans of the world if
they didn't have organized cadres at the lower levels.
And these operate like old Communist Party cell groups.
So these are autonomous, but linked horizontally linked
employee research or employee resource groups, ER GS or in the
CIA they're called agency resource groups AR GS.
So this is whatever my identity of the month is or whatever.
However I view myself as I'm going to identify with other
people like me. So like you, you asked me if I
what my family background was and I said, you know, way back
in the 1600s, there was an Indian someplace.
But if all of a sudden I start running around saying I'm an
Algonquin, you know, that that's just stupidity and, and, and
pretty much and untruth, even though there's, there's much
truth there to it. But I start demanding my rights
as a Native American Indian and I start going around wearing
feathers and, and a loincloth or something, which would terrify
anybody. They worked for me.
Yeah. So, So what a stupid thing for
for me to demand Native American rights just because I might
identify with 1. And that's what's what's
happening with these ARGS and ER, GS throughout the government
bureaucracy. And it started out in the
private sector and in the universities and then and then
in the during the Clinton administration started going
into the government. Well, what did Bush do?
He kept Clinton's CIA director on George Tenet.
So Tenet was fine with all of that.
So by the time, you know, through the early 2000s, you had
these wackos with these identity groups now getting into the
lower level management so that when the radicals come in at the
top, they pull these people up into the senior management
levels and start putting their mandates down.
And that's really how the old common term works.
The old Soviet Communist Party networks around the world worked
in a very similar fashion, interestingly.
Enough the, there's a, there's an analog I'm seeing right now.
You talked about the guys that were in the Soviet Union that
were the, the KGB, the senior collectors or the senior
management there. And those officers would know
what was going on in the West and it radicalized them to be
more pro western or at least more sympathetic to the West
'cause it looked like the outcome was better.
I think the environment that you operate in and that you immerse
yourself in does have a, a general effect.
When I talk about the FBI needing to leave Washington, DC
and, and we've talked about this privately, but we'll say at
public here. The one of the major problems
with having a swampy type group of your basic level employees is
that if you are the FBI director, the CIA director and
you go down to the Starbucks that's in the lobby, which there
are, and, and you're sitting around the everyday secretaries
and intelligence analysts on the front lines and the people who
are the SOS and the Mappas and all these different lower level
positions. The banter that you hear is pro
government, pro left. And you are hearing that that is
what America looks like because that's what your day looks like.
You're, you're surrounded by it. And so whether you may have, you
know, libertarian leanings or lowercase C conservative type
feelings, that's not what you're surrounded by.
And it radicalizes you because that's what you think is normal.
And where you are is what you think is normal, which is why my
argument has always been Kansas City, Omaha, I don't care where
you put it. Put it somewhere in the middle
of America. And you know, Huntsville is a is
a cheap choice for us just because there's already a big
base of operations there with billions of dollars already
spent. But move it from something like
DC. We talked about people in DC
think that America looks like DC.
It's the same problem New Yorkers have.
It looks nothing like most of America.
And I don't know why they don't know that, but maybe they just
don't travel or when they do, they just think, oh, they're
just hiding the real America from me.
It looks actually like where I live, which is crappy.
It's it's just so strange. But this is this is the
fundamental problem is that it's it's now, it's now encouraging
that spin of operations, even in a worse and worse way.
They're radicalizing. Yeah, yeah.
And and and this part of the dilemma, what do we do with the
FBI? So moving it out of DC is a
great idea, but then what happens to those communities,
right? Every time you have a big
federal project go someplace, you have, you know, craziness
emerge around it of whether it's all same with university towns
and college towns. So, So maybe not so much
military bases, military towns, maybe not yet, but it's
certainly going to go that way. So So yeah, you've got a great
idea to move it out of town, and Huntsville is a good, cheap
choice. But what about the people of
Alabama? I mean.
Very sympathetic to that because the last thing you want to do is
go drop in. Like the question is this, are
1500 or 2000 FBI employees going and plunking down in the middle
of Huntsville, AL going to change the culture of Alabama?
Probably not. Will it change the culture of
Huntsville? Possibly.
A lot of money comes in with it, right?
And those people are then now dependent on those jobs and so
on. So you, you do move it.
But the other question is, do we bring in enough local people
from Huntsville? Because there's an awful lot of
people that work in DC that are not going to leave DC.
That's the only hope that I would hold on to that your lower
level staff, the janitor staff, the, the secretarial staff, the,
you know, the basic level, what they call management and program
analysts, which are not analysts at all.
They're just, you know, low level kind of grunt employees.
Are those people going to be able to shift the culture so
that when you go down and have that that coffee, it's not at a
Starbucks, it's at a Dunkin' Donuts now, or it's at something
that's a little bit more. Maybe there's a Waffle House
outpost on the base and maybe you go and have that and that
actually moves people back towards the center.
If it tax it back. That's the only hope that I
would have. I'm also down with the disbanded
all completely. You've, you've failed in your
mandate and you tarnished your brand and, and it doesn't seem
like anybody's interested in doing that, even though I, I
think there's a strong argument for it at this point, especially
if we're talking. About Brand is so powerful.
It's kind of like Disney where you know how rotten it is, but
you have to watch it anyway and expose your kids to it.
I suppose. But if you if your argument is,
and I don't think you're wrong that that Hoover, you know, had
nowhere near the amount of corruption and capabilities that
a Chris Ray does, how terrifying is that for most Americans to
probably hear that for the first time?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't like Hoover
blackmailed JFK to stay there. His his.
He was. By law, he was mandated to leave
the FBI at age 62. Can't.
The Kennedys wanted him to stay on because he was doing their
work for him. He didn't need to blackmail
them. Now, you could say that, well,
there was a subtle blackmail, but that's not the point.
Any FBI director can do that to any leader if there's something
legitimate there. Hoover did have files on
everybody. And even when, after he died,
Judge Lawrence Silberman was tasked to go in and to find
Hoover's files. And the FBI, FBI director, I
think Kelly at the time said they're not here.
He didn't realize that they were in the file cabinets lining the
hallway to his office. They were just part of the
landscape. And he never, they were not in
any database. So Hoover had a lot of really
gross dirt on a lot of people, but he didn't use it and he
didn't weaponize it. Well, he he did use it, but he
used it not against the American population.
It was to protect the Bureau a lot of times.
It was to maintain what he wanted to be able to do for the
mission set that he saw as a fundamental good.
Yeah, which is. And he saw himself as a real
protect, rightly or wrongly, found himself as a protector of
the country. Because if you if you go back
and read his, he was a prolific writer and a prolific speaker.
He would talk about preserving the Christian values of America.
He would talk about Marxist infiltration of churches and
communist infiltration of schools and how they're out to
brainwash your kids. He was warning all of these,
everything that you see now, whoever started warning about as
early as the 1920s. Yeah, predating FDR then.
Yeah. And we let them all in and, and,
and now they've they've won it. They're almost like the.
It seems to me that they're like the dog that that has caught the
car and doesn't know what to do with the hubcap.
It's like, I mean, it can smash the hubcap on the ground, but it
can't eat the whole car. But at the same time it doesn't
want the car to keep driving. And and we're just there doesn't
seem to be an end state that would be a victory.
Maybe that's just a fundamentally American inability
to look into the future, but it doesn't seem an end state
victory. Like what's a victory for the
left look like other than I guess just just dictatorship?
Is that what? Is that where it has to go like
you stated? Well, luckily leftists end up
eating their own when they take power, so.
So yeah. How did they not see that?
That seems like the most fundamental truth.
It's like, OK, this agency which used to go after people on the
left and is now going after people on the right, It's still
eating people on the left every day.
It's going after Muslims and blacks in ways that they would
consider weaponized. And I'm not real crazy about it
right now either. They they can't even see that
because what it's it's mostly doing our dirty work.
Yeah, it, well, a lot of things just can't be answered.
We, we, we, you know, you leave, you're left speechless.
Because this was the thing, in researching this book, if if had
had somebody said to me, J Edgar Hoover was far more restrained
with his abuses than Chris Ray is with today's FBII would have
thought this guy's, you know, this guy's crazy.
That's the hypothesis you'd assume that you were going to
disprove by doing your research. No, it never occur.
It didn't even occur to me until I started doing the research and
I thought, well, why didn't Hoover smash these guys when he
good? Well, he didn't have a lot to do
that. Why didn't he go after this when
he could? Didn't have a lot to do that he
was he had his own really great ideas and did some really
valuable services to the country he wanted to.
He he kept, for example, FBI was a foreign intelligence service
during World War Two in the American hemisphere.
He fought for that. He wanted to make the FBI an A
global intelligence service for the US.
So he lost that fight. But he succeeded in keeping at
least the Americas under FBI purview.
And in doing so he probably changed history because the OSS
person in charge of Latin America was a Soviet agent.
Perfect. So, so he did a lot of really
neat things. He just did it in a he got too
long in the tooth. He was there too long and he
didn't have laws to govern this. So the like you said a while
ago, in the 40s and 50s, you didn't question the FBI
director. In the 50s, you didn't have
oversight hearings about the CIA, not until really Watergate.
It was even even as a kid I talked to senators about hearing
something. We really shouldn't be
questioning things about the CIA because they should just be left
to do what they're supposed to do to protect the country.
And this is at the time when the CIA was becoming really super
controversial because of what Reagan was weaponizing it
against what? Against the international
communist movement. So you had.
So if you have lawmakers think we can't question these guys.
Then of course, you're going to get impunity because that's
pretty much been blessed by Congress for these agencies to
act with impunity. President Johnson had a, had a
quote. He was, he thought, you know,
Hoover's been around too long, it's time for him to go.
But he's so handy at spying on opponents.
So he he said, you know, I'm going to team Edgar on the team.
I'd rather have Edgar inside the tent pissing out than outside
pissing in. Yes, I've heard this quote.
I didn't realize, but yeah. The Kennedy said you can't fire
God. Right.
So this is how they looked at the Bureau and it was kind of
OK. It was accepted by Democrat and
Republican presidents Alive you. Know what's interesting, though?
Durham actually almost sort of cosigned on some of these ideas,
stating essentially that the problem is not policy or law or
procedures that the FBI has, is that it fundamentally needs to
have good men and women that are enacting the mission of the FBI
like it historically has. That's sort of the argument.
And that's not happening. So he doesn't, he doesn't point
to any particular failure and say, oh, if you had just done
this training or if you done this when you read the Durham
report, his whole thing is like, like your culture is trash and
people aren't doing what they were designed to do.
He doesn't really recommend to fix other than people need to go
back to doing what they used to do.
And I don't know how you do that either.
No, no, because the FBI has no legal charter.
There was an attempt and I think 19791980 to like by
conservatives to have a charter for the FBI.
This was in the, in the aftermath of the Church
Committee hearings and the, the, you know, the trashing of the
whole intelligence community and the demoralization and so forth.
And let's have a legal charter for the FBI so that it that can
be governed by some set of principles and that was defeated
that never became law There's. No left and right boundary and
it's just doing whatever it wants to do.
No guard rails up. It's never a good.
Do you have any sort of do you have a hypothesis for correction
on this yet? Like you said, you didn't expect
that you'd come up with the the conclusion that you did when you
started doing this research. Have you come up with a path
that makes sense to you? Well, I think it's like with the
old OSS that did great service for our country during World War
2 to defeat the Nazis and the fascists and the Imperial
Japanese. It's time to start over.
You need a new ethos. You need a new culture of just
mainstream culture. Doesn't it be liberal or
conservative? It just has to be American.
But when? Here's the thing with the
wokeness that's permeated it. Imagine wokeness and critical
theory. It starts out with a with a with
a with an end state that they want.
So everything has to be manipulated to achieve that end
state. Imagine rules of evidence being
applied in that fashion by the FBI, where you collect evidence
and then you present evidence and then you have investigative
rules of procedure that are all governed by the end state that
you wish. And of course, everybody wants
to prosecute the guy they're investigating.
I get that. Or at least let the facts speak
for themselves and let the evidence speak.
But there are rules for this. But if if you're basically
inventing facts and distorting facts on purpose to achieve a
political end state, then you've thrown out the whole idea of
justice and law enforcement, and the same with an intelligence
service. If you're tasking intelligence
and then collecting intelligence and then analyzing intelligence
to inform by law the president, but you're doing it to achieve
your own personal end state, you're not serving the country.
You become a danger. And if the whole culture is that
way, look at the CIA recruitment videos that were put together
under Trump. I saw.
They were released under Biden, but they were put together under
Trump. And you have this, this
self-serving, you know, every sentence was was in the first
person. This, this, what do you call it?
Intersectional woman with an admitted mental disorder.
Yes, she's she's not an urgent or whatever the hell she was
talking. Neurodivergent and she can do
whatever and she's this and that and she's so wonderful.
She's the poster child for the CIA.
This is where we're trying to recruit people like that to be
intelligence analysts. It looks like narcissism to me.
But if you had one person with that, OK, that's an issue that
can be handled in human resources, which is a whole
another that you know, can of worms.
But but it's a recruitment video.
This is who we want. Yeah, they don't want people
like you. Bring yourself centered weird
focus. We would have just generally
called non scientifically weirdos when I was growing up.
Bring the weirdos, not bring the Captain America types, not bring
the selfless self-serving patriotic types.
Like just bring me the people that are so focused on their own
weirdness and, and we love you for it.
Like come here and be part of the CIA.
That's what that's what those videos say to me.
It's not surprising that's who's and also what you're going to do
is you're going to turn guys that are like me that decided
when I was 27 that if I die in service to their country, then
that's an appropriate use of my life.
And I think you got to be a certain type of person to do
that. Many of our 17 and 18 year olds
have no concept of what they're signing up for.
They do it anyway. God bless them.
And we need that. There's also some older people
that have looked in, you know, guys that were in my recruitment
class 27, 252627 to have a little bit of taste of life.
And they still said, yeah, this is what I'm about.
Like I'm into this. You had a bunch of guys re up
after 911 because they believe in the concept of what America
is. And you're going to take those
people and you're going to say, wait, you want to have some
black lesbian neurodivergent, you know, ADD weird things that
she wants to celebrate about herself?
That's not my values. I'm not going to go serve that.
Like let all the weirdos go do that.
And we're going to have an entire agency of weirdos with an
awful lot of powers. Yeah, if you have certain traits
that you can't help, but if you're still the best person for
the job, you're the best person for the job.
I think we should have more autists in the intelligence
community. They think so differently from
everybody else and they focus so well and they're very fact
driven. Those are my favorite analysts,
by the way. They're like, give me a total
weirdo that does that's socially out outrageously strange that
nobody wants to talk to, but we'll answer questions in a
blunt and honest way, like I'm 100% behaving.
That person needs to be doing some thinking with me.
We need more of that kind of thing, but we can't hire
somebody because they have that. We can't send them like get
sources or anything like we need you doing the source work.
You're the guy for that. You're, you know, personable and
interesting and, you know, walking into a place and
accidentally, you know, saying the right thing and that's you
need that. But the autism 100%.
Give me those people on the the screen.
Yeah. Yeah, but if you, you know, I
mean, my son went through Army basic training, but he was only
as good as the chubbiest girl in his unit.
That's how basic training was at Fort Sill, you know, 10 years
ago. And you had you had high school
football players grow fat in basic training because they
couldn't work out right. Because we have to all do the
same thing at the same. Time so think of this
intellectually now and and where you have and this is where this
is where the Harvard controversy is so handy right now in terms
of what are the universities producing in terms of
intelligence analysts and intelligence agents when they
either don't know or they deplore American history and
founding principles. If you hate your country and
what it was founded on, how can you take an oath to uphold the
Constitution? And secondly, how can you defend
your country if you don't believe in it?
That's not a liberal or conservative issue.
That's a crazy versus non crazy issue.
But so when you're packing the intelligence community with the
finest of the finest from Harvard, I don't know if Harvard
grads even go into the CIA anymore, but this is this is
throughout academia. You've got the same problem.
They don't understand their history.
They don't find me one non Marxist Latin American studies
department at any American University.
I don't know of one, but if our people working in our own
hemisphere are educated with a Marxist view of the hemisphere
and the politics of the hemisphere, it's no wonder that
we're staging A coup right now in Guatemala because it's a
conservative Christian country. And, and so USAID and the CIA
and the State Department have been working for years to change
their whole judiciary to have a judicial coup d'etat in that
country. And then we we sanctioned
Guatemala lawmakers from coming to the United States because
they vote the wrong way, even if they have sons in the US Marine
Corps as as was in one case. So this is the kind of thing
you're seeing worldwide. You kind of got to think.
And Dinesh wrote a book about this.
Dinesh D'souza wrote a book, The Enemy Within, looking at what
motivates Islamic extremism. And a lot of it is our own
wokeness that we're exporting on everybody.
Yeah, the weirdest thing. I think I had a long
conversation with Tara Reid about what happened and now
she's in Moscow and she's she's in Russia and she's she said,
you know, I was raised like everybody else, even though
she's kind of on the anti war and political left.
She said, you know, I sort of believe that Russia was always
our enemy and I'm over here now. They look like they're a lot
happier than what I saw and I'm a lot less fearful.
The idea that somebody in the United States who was not like
an enemy of the state that the Americans would look at and go
like, yeah, you're a problem. You sold secrets, whatever you
did, you gave missile technology away.
Somebody who just spoke out against the regime, sought
sanctuary in Moscow. I that that's untenable to me as
someone who grew up in in the 80s and 90s.
It's unbelievable. And and it's a complete
reversal. And, you know, maybe it's a
failure to grasp that the Cold War is over.
And as you said, like some of those people there, they
actually embraced when it ended, it was ended for them.
Maybe they were like, OK, let's next stage.
It's a different stage now. Obviously what's going on in
Russia is not the same kind of animal.
And some of the old cronies are there, but it's not the same
enemy, even if we want to treat it that way.
And the idea that. People, it's not communist and
I, I think this is where a lot of American leftists started
hating Putin was because Putin is not a communist.
He's a Russian nationalist and they're two very different
things. He's still not a nice guy, he's
still a tyrant. He's still, he, he assassinated
2 members of my editorial board. So I, I take it a little bit
personally. He he's, he's got 10s of
thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at us and he's got a huge
intelligence presence that continues to compromise our
whole country now. Like an old school Russian, like
the old school Russian. More like a monarch than he was,
than he is. Like the Communist Party is sort
of. Like the KGB men called
themselves Chichisti or checkists after the check up,
which was the first Soviet intelligence agency.
So it's the, it's the the KGB traces its origins to the check
up. He's a checkist and he's a proud
checkist. And we, we want to call him a
fascist. He's not a fascist.
He's not a Nazi. He's not a communist.
He's a checkist. If you understand the mentality,
then you can understand Putin and you can work with him.
But we have to remember, if it wasn't for we depended on Putin
to supply our forces in Afghanistan by land, we were
shipping things in by sea to the port of Riga, Latvia, and then
through the Russian river system, through the Russian
railroad system all the way to Central Asia and then down to
Afghanistan. And so, so you can work with the
guy. He's not going to attack us.
He'll subvert us. But we never pushed back.
Like when the Soviet Union collapsed, we were saying, let's
have a stand down against all offensive Russian intelligence
OPS against the United States. Start over.
There was no need for this kind of thing anymore.
And the United States government under Bush Senior was against
it. Clinton was against it.
So. So they were against opening up
the KGB archives and pushing with the huge leverage we had to
open up the KGB archives to expose all the KGB agents in our
society. Bush 41?
No, Bush. Yeah, 41 and Clinton both
opposed it. The whole political
establishment oppose it, which has to make you wonder, what is
it in the political establishment that makes it so
that only the most left wing and the most conservative people are
advocating for exposing these KGB archives?
And there it is then. That's something we talk about
like a uniparty or a single kind of focus.
It doesn't have to have parties. Probably even the wrong word,
but just Co aligned interests that that seem to work well,
perfectly well together. Which is why again, get people
out of the DC swamp and that sort of power circle.
It'd be really interesting to see if we could decentralize
some of our government. I'd love to see it, but there's
an awful lot of people that seem Co aligned to not make that the
case. Doesn't seem to be serving
Americans very well right now. Yeah, well, I'm on Capitol Hill
right now, so you see it all around me.
So. So I, I don't, I don't want to
expose too many people in, in my own neighborhood right now
because it would show where I am.
But you, you see the if, if they had federal, if they lost their
federal jobs, they would lose their, their million and a half
dollar homes. They would lose their secondary
homes, they would lose their entire lifestyle, they'd lose
their friends and networks. They couldn't do the
entertaining they do. They couldn't take the vacations
they take. So you have both spouses working
on taxpayer funded salaries and then they go into government
contracting with their now taxpayer funded pension and then
making twice or more what they were making in the civil service
as contractors now. So they're, they're racking in
half $1,000,000 a year or more off the US taxpayers.
So you have like 9 of the wealthiest counties in the
United States are surrounding the DC area there.
It's just, there's no industry here.
It's just just central government.
You can't take that away from. They'll fight to the death to
keep that because that's their whole existence.
It's. The self licking ice cream cone,
I said that to someone, they'd never heard it before the other
day and they were like, oh, I'm taking that.
I'm like that's been taken. That's a pretty well established
metaphor for people who ever been around the Beltway.
Mike, I appreciate you spending all the time kind of chatting
with us. I think people are educated and
they're probably going to be more interested to tell them
where they can find the the book and where they can find your hot
takes on social, which are also some of my favorites.
So the book is Big Intel. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes
and Noble, anywhere else. It's on Audible.
So there's audio versions and Kindle versions and everything
else. Big Intel.
And then our website issecurefreedom.org at the
Center for Security Policy, and I'm on Twitter at J Michael
Waller. And we'll have all those links
in the show description so folks, you guys can click
through if you're hearing it and you're thinking I need to see
more of it. Some of your Twitter takes are
some of my favorites, too. They are not polite and they are
not pulling punches. So I appreciate that and I
appreciate the honesty. Thanks for spending the time
with us today, and I hope we do this again.
Maybe not the next book. That may take a little bit too
long. We may have to get you back on
sooner than that. That'll be fun.
All right. Appreciate it buddy.
See you. OK, you all, Big thank you to
our guest, Doctor Waller, for joining us and having this very
long conversation. I hope you guys enjoyed it.
I hope you learned something. I hope something walks away.
Things that I didn't know as well, especially that sort of
hot take on the idea that J Edgar Hooper was more
disciplined than today's director, Chris Ray.
That is a troubling thing to hear, and yet I'm fairly
confident he's correct. If you guys want to support our
show, you can also support our buddy Garretta Boyle over at the
merch store. This is the Dash Suspendables.
Again, the Dash Dispensables. Don't forget the dash The Dash
dispensables.com. Use the promo code Kyle.
Save 10% on any of the merch out there.
You guys got a number of different neat T-shirts today.
I'm wearing the suspendable or die.
You see that down on the bottom left hand side of the screen?
You guys can check out the pins. I'll probably be wearing one of
those as I fly. I tend to like to show them to
see TSA. They don't know what to do with
it. Yeah, they just make you take
off your jacket anyway. But check out the dash.
suspendables.com support the old Boyle family sweatshop.
Keep them moving. I know it's probably pretty
chilly up there in Wisconsin, and there's no reason for us not
to put them to work unless the lights go out, in which case you
can't run the printing press. The.
T-shirt press the dash, dependables.com, the merch store
really appreciate it, folks. Make sure you're supporting all
of our sponsors. If you want to check out the my
pillow, you can also use my pillow.
Our promo code is Kyle very easy.
You guys know how to get there. Mike Lindell got cancelled this
week, so it's probably a rough week.
If you were thinking about making a purchase from them, use
our promo code Kyle. You'll save just like any of the
others, except it'll support the Kyle Sarah can show and we do
appreciate that. All right folks, that's about it
for today. Let me go ahead and throw up a
five star review. Standby for one of those.
And there it is, our five star review of the day coming in from
Tactical Arms Corps. Joe says love it, five stars.
Kyle, I respect you and I appreciate your service and
sacrifice so much. Thank you for doing this amazing
show and keeping us informed and prepared concerning the crazy
closing in around us. Keep up the good work.
God bless you and your family. Well, God bless you, Joe.
I really appreciate that. Thanks for watching the show.
Thanks for listening on Apple, folks.
If you want to leave us a five star view and have yours read,
just do so on Apple. It is the link in the
description on Apple podcast. You can also find us on Spotify
on iHeartRadio, anywhere that you listen to podcasts,
including the spyware devices that you shouldn't have in your
kitchen, but you probably do. Go ahead and just say, hey, play
the Kyle Seraphin show and Alexa or Siri or whatever, these other
sort of crazy AI things that are spying on us.
They'll be able to pull that up and give it to you right away.
We'll see you. Again tomorrow with another
interesting interview, I'll be on the road.
You'll be listening to an interview with John Frankman,
former Green Beret and a patriot who said no thank you to the jab
as well. Another suspendable, no doubt.
So we appreciate you guys today. Have a great one.
And we'll see you again tomorrow.
God bless. You thanks for listening to the
Kyle Seraphin show, streamed live weekdays on rumble.com/kyle
Seraphin. Follow Kyle on Twitter, True
Social and Instagram at Kyle Seraphin.