EPISODE 284: The CIA and FBI are Beyond Repair

Bill Walton (00:31.568)

I’m back talking today with my friend Mike Waller, who’s been on the show many times. He’s a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and author of Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. We talked about his book and a show we did last February and about how those agencies have become essential players and what’s now a growing surveillance state in the United States.

We talked about the history and the structure and things like that, but we didn’t get as much into the recommendations that Mike had in the book. And he’s got two outstanding chapters that ends the book, one on the FBI and the other on the CIA. And I want to talk about both agencies today. The point I wanted, the reason this came up, of course, is that President Trump is standing up the Department of Government Efficiency.

affectionately known as DOGE, which is going to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a couple of whirlwinds. And their focus, one of their focuses will be on dismantling government bureaucracy. Just to get us going on this, Mike concludes his chapter on FBI by saying, it’s become a rogue organization that resists congressional oversight.

and it is populating itself with new politicized cadres who will make tomorrow’s FBI far worse. The only way to fix the FBI is to take it apart, parcel out the useful functions, and close down the rest. And with regard to the CIA, it concludes this. Mike doesn’t mince his words, by the way. The CIA has run its course and should be dissolved in favor of something new. It should be small and efficient.

and free from cultural Marxism and woke critical theory people who have contaminated the profession of intelligence. Quite strong recommendations, but in the current climate, there’s some chances this could actually happen. I know that Donald Trump wants to replace Christopher Wray and he’s pushing back. So Mike, why don’t you take it from here? Where are we? And we want to start with the FBI or the CIA.

Mike Waller (02:55.65)

We’re at a wonderful crossroads in history with some amazing opportunities that are many, many years overdue. Any bureaucracy by its nature is going to exceed its authority, continue to expand and then get bloated and wasteful and inefficient. then, so it has to be trimmed back. There’s never been any real public sentiment for that. In fact, to the contrary, there’s been.

public sentiment for funding more and more and more of it. But you can’t run a business that way. So why would you run a government that way? So in the case of, yeah.

Bill Walton (03:31.26)

Well, FBI, FBI, people, know, it’s always been there. It’s always been the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover and an institution. But I was fascinated. How the FBI, how was it stood, they started it in what I think in 1912? Talk about its inauspicious beginnings.

Mike Waller (03:55.244)

Yeah, it started actually about four years before that. And it’s interesting, it was started with a memorandum from the attorney general. This is Teddy Roosevelt’s attorney general. So at this time, 1908, you had anarchist violence, radical socialist violence, mostly coming in from unscreened immigrants from Europe. they were, and this lasted for a couple of decades. A lot of terrorist violence in America before.

and during World War II and of course earlier President McKinley was assassinated. So, and there was an assassination attempt on President Teddy Roosevelt. So you had all of this happening plus interstate crime and there was no federal body of special agents who were qualified to do this. So there was a Bureau of Investigation that was set up as an office within the Justice Department in 1908. And the reason it was done

by an attorney general memorandum was, Congress at the time opposed a federal police agency or something that could be used by the president against people across the country. So you had even at the founding of the Bureau of Investigation, a circumvention of Congress to create this entity. So when the FBI became the FBI decades later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there was still no act of Congress that established it. It was all established by

administrative means. So the opportunity now is where we have an FBI that really needs to have the whole mission rethought and redone, it can be dismantled and parceled out by administrative means because there’s no law that created it in the first place.

Bill Walton (05:41.618)

So it’s not only a rogue agency, its basis is not, it’s lawless in a way. Who does Christopher Wray, the FBI director, report to?

Mike Waller (05:54.41)

He’s supposed to report to the Deputy Attorney General and to the President, but in fact, the way he’s running the Bureau or the way the Bureau is running him, he’s really sort of the palace eunuch. He’s being run by the radicals who’ve taken over the nerve center of the Bureau.

Bill Walton (06:10.578)

How are they radical?

Mike Waller (06:12.588)

They were radicalized mostly in college, whether they were activists in college or they studied those who went to law school, studied critical law theory, which is like critical race theory, but pertains to using the law as a weapon to dismantle the Constitution. And they took over the nerve center really under Obama, which meant the very expanded legal department.

the human resources department and the whole administrative staff. So much of that became radicalized and then diversity, equity and inclusion were used as a reason to promote people who are otherwise not hireable or promotable. They’ve taken things over and they basically have Ray in his pocket, in their pocket.

Bill Walton (06:53.254)

We talk about culture.

Bill Walton (07:02.136)

We throw out the term cultural Marxism. How would you define it?

Mike Waller (07:07.992)

Cultural Marxism is the use of culture as a replacement for the economic class struggle between the poor masses of the proletariat and the rich small bourgeoisie. Now it is using, now the enemy is not the rich bourgeoisie under Cultural Marxism, it’s Western culture. So it’s the whole Judeo-Christian ethic, the whole Greco-Roman ethic of Republican form of government.

democracy itself, and it’s used to attack everything from values, the nuclear family, patriotism, morals of what is right and wrong, redefining all of that and destroying everything to create something new. They don’t say what it is new that they’re going to create, but that’s what cultural Marxism is. And really it’s not an innovation because Karl Marx developed it himself in 1843, five years before he became

what people call an economist and wrote the Communist Manifesto. His first writings in 1843 were to destroy Western civilization.

Bill Walton (08:16.72)

And that’s been the aim then, and it’s the aim now. so this is the same cultural Marxism that we think about as infecting the universities and now, you know, K-12, critical race theory and DEI and so on and so forth. And it’s really, it’s not only against Western civilization, but it’s against white people who’ve become the villains simply by virtue of the fact that they’re white.

Sort of hard to run a law enforcement agency with that is the lens through which you’re looking at everything. That’s sort of like FEMA that had the guidelines to avoid, when the hurricane came, to avoid houses with Trump signs in the front yard. So it comes out of that.

Mike Waller (09:01.068)

Yeah. Yeah. And then the person came out and said, this is the norm. she said, I’m not the exception who was doing this. This was the policy. So imagine you have that now government-wide and you have a belief system through DEI and critical theory. So what we see in K through 12, imagine that going through the universities and from the universities to the graduate schools and law schools and from there into the federal bureaucracy, you have people who have learned unemployable

Bill Walton (09:10.258)

Yeah.

Mike Waller (09:31.05)

subject matter and unemployable skills whose only real job are either in the government or creating a false demand for something that nobody wants like critical theory and then demanding DEI slots in private companies. So this is where these armies of people have gone in and they’ve gone in not to uphold the constitution but to transform it.

Bill Walton (09:53.392)

Well, absolutely. if you were without in the show, our show in February, we got into some more detail about what the various pieces of the FBI are about. But I want to I want to go to your your chapter on what to do about it. If you’re advising Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and I hope they do bring you into their their effort, where do you where do you start? How do you how do you tell them to think about the FBI and where to look?

Mike Waller (10:23.832)

Well, first you need the big picture. What do we need as a country? And then that demand for what we need drives what we have and then drives what we transform or rebuild or recreate. So we do need federal law enforcement, like it or not. We do need federal investigative capabilities, like it or not. As long as we have federal laws, we’re going to need an entity or entities that enforce those laws.

We need a strong counterintelligence service. We’re the world’s number one target for hostile foreign spies and the recruitment and subversion of our people. So we need all of these things, counterterrorism capabilities to certain degrees. So then now once we decide what we really need as a country and where our threats are coming from, we have to take into account one of the greatest threats is the ability of these entities to turn against the elected leadership of the country and to even turn against

a large element of the public for political reasons, which again was the concern of Congress back in 1908 when the Bureau of Investigation was first started. And President Harry Truman was in agony over this. even wrote handwritten notes about the FBI. We don’t need a Gestapo. So it’s not extreme to be using these kinds of terms. So for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to look at this, once we see what needs to be done, well, then how do we have these effective systems?

functions that the FBI performs that are very important and some of them it performs very well. Let’s take those good, let’s call them centers of excellence, which is an overused term in government, but take it seriously. Take them and preserve them in general, but transfer them out of the FBI. We can’t have a big centralized apparatus anymore. So transfer the crime fighting element of the FBI over to an agency.

that was created by the founding fathers. It’s our only federal law enforcement agency that’s part of the American founding. That’s the U.S. Marshals. Relatively scandal free over the years, especially compared to everybody else with their own ethos, even though the marshals are starting to become woke also. Take the crime fighting functions and the police training functions and those, move them over to the U.S. Marshals. Take the counterintelligence part of the FBI, which has really not done a good job because it’s more of a

Bill Walton (12:25.146)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Waller (12:44.92)

fly swatting operation. They go after mainly low hanging fruit, the low level student who’s spying at MIT or the low level staffer. They really haven’t gotten a big spy in a long time unless somebody has betrayed that spy to the Bureau. So there’s no penetration at all of foreign spy services to describe.

Bill Walton (13:04.635)

I think you said that most of the people, most of the good material they get is because somebody walks in the office and becomes a whistleblower, not because of anything they’ve done to ferret out evil doers.

Mike Waller (13:16.918)

Right. Yeah, even in the Robert Hansen case of the senior FBI counterintelligence agent who had been a Soviet penetration in the bureau for decades, he was only discovered because of a Russian walk-in who was handling this. So it wasn’t a, it wasn’t any FBI sleuthing that got Robert Hansen. In fact, the FBI was investigating Brian Kelly, a CIA man.

Bill Walton (13:20.582)

Heh.

Bill Walton (13:33.735)

Yeah.

Mike Waller (13:45.09)

falsely accusing him, ruining his life, because they believed that FBI could never be penetrated by the Russians. So take the counterintelligence column of division of the FBI, take that and create an independent counterintelligence service. It’s not a law enforcement service. It’s just a spy hunting service. And you merge that in with other counterintelligence elements of the US government to take a standing service that has no law enforcement function.

and operates abroad against foreign intelligence services and then does the pickup service here to build evidence against spies here and then hand it over to prosecutors for prosecution. And then so on down the line, say that why does the FBI have its own firearms and explosives?

division when we already have an ATF and we already have an ATF that’s a huge problem. So why not simply combine the FBI’s firearms and explosive unit, move it over to ATF and then figure it, you now it’s all consolidated and then you figure out what to do with ATFs.

Bill Walton (14:50.571)

How’s ATF become a big problem?

Mike Waller (14:54.35)

Well, it’s a big problem because it really exists to violate the rights of American citizens to violate their second amendment rights. That’s a big problem. Now you, now you, now it has the explosives mandate also. When, when you’re talking about illegal explosives and, and terrorist attacks and so forth, you need some kind of investigative capability for that. there’s something that’s needed, but this is a time now for the department of government efficiency to see.

Bill Walton (14:59.794)

Okay, that’s a problem. That’s a problem.

Bill Walton (15:18.77)

So.

Mike Waller (15:22.228)

What are we going to, what do need an ATF for?

Bill Walton (15:24.371)

So put them together, we get those two functions and then we can figure out what to do about it once it’s been put together. Okay.

Mike Waller (15:30.048)

Right. And then you pick the most capable people from each and abolish the positions of everybody else so that they, because in government you can’t simply fire people for the most part. There are exceptions. But if you, if you abolish their positions, they have to leave government service.

Bill Walton (15:38.578)

Well, what?

Bill Walton (15:44.371)

One of the things you pointed out in the book, and we talked about a bit last time, is that there’s a real difference between criminal enforcement culture and an intelligence culture. And in the crime world, you’re anticipating going into court and having hard evidence to make your case. And that’s a world of facts and data and evidence.

in the intelligence business, it’s much more speculative, it’s much more hypothetical, it’s all sort of things. And so when you put those two cultures together, you end up with something pretty toxic.

Mike Waller (16:23.788)

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what happened when after 9 11, the FBI was turned into a domestic intelligence agency with police powers. So for rules of evidence, if, if the, if the authorities get something on you by stealing your communications or by doing something that would ordinarily be illegal, that evidence is not admissible in court, but it’s a

job of intelligence services to do those kinds of things against others and it’s perfectly admissible as intelligence because the purpose of intelligence is to aid decision makers. It’s not to prosecute people. when you have this combination of intelligence and law enforcement rules of intelligence versus rules of evidence, it’s extremely dangerous as we’ve seen.

Bill Walton (17:14.29)

So there’s six branches. The national security we talked about, the intelligence branch, and there’s also something criminal cyber and services and the science and technology branch and information and technology branch. Don’t you love government? We create these new things. And then human resources branch, I suppose, to make sure all the incoming recruits are properly woke. What do you do with the rest of the FBI?

Mike Waller (17:43.224)

Well, there are certain parts that you can transfer out and then cull. There are other parts that I think can be privatized. The FBI has a really excellent crime lab, and it does really good work on science and technology. But the private sector does the science and technology so much faster and so much better. And even on certain types of information collection, there are already private companies that already do this. So why not privatize a lot of those functions?

then the FBI won’t be out there just continuously collecting things. can simply subscribe to a service or pay private investigators to do a lot of the work, but it’s all auditable. Right now, it’s not auditable.

Bill Walton (18:26.534)

Now if you’re Ilan and you want to talk to people, people who understand the problem and who are on our side on this, could you put together a panel of six or seven or eight people who understand the issues and have these kind of solutions? Okay, so I don’t really want to name names, but there are people who could, we’ve got people with deep subject matter expertise who know how to do this and where these things ought to go.

Mike Waller (18:44.109)

Yes.

Mike Waller (18:55.724)

Yeah, you need a good combination of younger people with a lot of vision and a lot more optimism than more jaded older guys. But they have the vision, they’re tech-oriented, they know where society is moving. But they also need the expertise of subject matter experts who’ve been in or around the system and who can guide people’s way through the system and who know where the bodies are buried and know where the opportunities are.

Bill Walton (19:05.394)

Yeah.

Mike Waller (19:24.14)

And then you need those who know the law and how to make the law work in favor of these reforms and to do it all legally. And then you need those who have the philosophical approach. So who knows? you know, let’s break this apart. It might be more efficient if it’s centralized. It might be cheaper if it’s centralized, but if it’s centralized, it stomps on the rights of states and it’s more prone to abuse. So what can we push down and use our federalist system for empowering the states more?

facilitating those states that don’t have the means to do the work themselves.

Bill Walton (19:58.684)

The headcount of the FBI is what? Roughly what? 20? How many people work there?

Mike Waller (20:04.608)

They give different numbers. It’s above roughly 20 something thousand.

Bill Walton (20:10.204)

So if you did what we’re talking about here and divided it up, how many people in this, if we’re playing musical chairs, how many people are gonna be left without a seat? I would we need half the people doing this that we have now?

Mike Waller (20:26.2)

I think it can be done with about a third of the people who are doing it now, and that’s really generous.

Bill Walton (20:32.316)

So could, know, when Alana Musk went into Twitter, he cut the headcount by 80 % and as the company’s running a whole lot better without those people. So you’re saying up to two thirds or maybe more of positions could be eliminated and you have a highly effective organization doing what we the people wanted to do.

Mike Waller (20:52.448)

Right. So you have a lot of talented people who are real professionals and yeah, they’re going to go along to get along because that’s their job. They have to follow some chain of command and some chain of discipline. So while you can say, well, these are just following orders type people using the Nuremberg excuse, the fact is that we do need law enforcement people who do respect their chain of command as long as

what you know they’re convinced that what they’re doing is legal. So you need that. So there’s a lot of talent in there that we can use a lot of dedicated people in there who who are excellent public servants. So you need to find them and then and then call them out and transfer them to to to another location. I’d imagine you’ve got more than 60 SES level senior management at the bureau and you have

If you’re a special agent in charge, that means the top agent at one of the 56 field offices in cities across the country. If you need to talk to the director about something, you have to go through 15 separate bureaucratic steps just to communicate with the director.

Now, when J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI, he also had a similar number of field offices, but any special agent in charge could directly call him anytime they needed to talk to him. And back when Hoover ran it, you had something called the originating office. So Hoover didn’t just say, go investigate somebody and run everything from the center. As strong an FBI director as he was, it was decentralized then. The cases were started at the local level by the field offices.

But since 9-11 now, they’ve been politicized and run from the top now.

Bill Walton (22:39.964)

Well, when you meet with Alain, start with that. He’ll lose his mind. That’s exactly the way you know, I’ve run a lot of businesses. That’s exactly the wrong way to have an effective organization. need to, know, somebody at the top needs to be close to what’s actually going on in the field. Now, my impression though is that a lot of the cultural Marxism rot is at the top. It’s not…

It’s not among the field offices. that correct or is it already infected? I don’t like your answer. It’s already affected them.

Mike Waller (23:11.51)

Well…

Mike Waller (23:18.282)

It has. This is why the Bureau simply can’t be fixed by changing it at the top. The first you have, you have, this has been the real extreme stuff has been going on since 2009. So that’s 15 years.

Bill Walton (23:23.942)

Yeah, okay.

Bill Walton (23:34.588)

Yeah. That’s day one from Obama.

Mike Waller (23:38.496)

They went from Obama so the people who went in at entry level are now midway through their careers.

They’re the middle management. They’re running the field offices now. They’re the special agents in charge of the field offices. You’ve seen the picture of the rather portly FBI woman bending the knee in her body armor at the BLM march on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. She was promoted after that and she is now assistant special agent in charge of the Washington DC field office.

So these are marks for promotion. if you do not go along with the, and this is the incentive system that was put in, you have to check all these boxes. Every field office, a special agent in charge has to make sure they’re filled. So it’s, you have to do electronic surveillance of people, certain number of them per year, even if it’s not needed. Oftentimes it’s easier just to go and talk to somebody and they’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But no, you have to check the box that you did electronic surveillance.

You have to check the box that you swatted somebody’s house. You have to check the box that you’re sufficiently promoting DEI. That’s not simply following the instructions of the center to make DEI available or whatever. You have to be what they call an ally. You have to be an activist, go above and beyond any statutory requirements. And it’s really the politicization of the bureau. If you do not do that, you won’t get promoted.

Bill Walton (25:08.338)

Well, that’s more like Mao’s culture revolution. You’re not supposed to just obey. You’re supposed to believe everything that you’re being told. They want your mind and your soul, not just your actions. Am I interpreting that right?

Mike Waller (25:24.938)

Right, right. So if you have a religious values or just a moral code where you say, you know what, sorry, I’ll be a good colleague and I’ll just do my work and I’ll be respectful to others, but I’m not going to be part of this. That counts against you. So these people self-select for leaving the Bureau or at least never getting promoted the way they ought to be. And it self-selects the politicized type, sort of the Red Army Zampolits, as the Soviets called them.

Bill Walton (25:35.739)

Yeah.

Bill Walton (25:41.297)

So.

Bill Walton (25:54.172)

So if you’re guilty of wrong think, you don’t stand a chance there. So let’s take an action step and then I want to turn to the CIA. Donald Trump has the power to fire Christopher Wray, as I understand it. Day one.

Mike Waller (25:54.532)

for promotion.

Mike Waller (26:09.666)

Yes. Yes. Any president. So an FBI director has a 10 year term. By, you know, that’s by law. But any president who loses confidence in his FBI director can remove him at any time.

Bill Walton (26:25.116)

So there ought to be some action steps before that though to think about not a replacement in traditional sense, but a change agent, somebody that wants to dismantle it and put the various parts in the places you suggest. So that’s a different job description than you might normally think of a CIA head, so.

Mike Waller (26:46.574)

Yeah. imagine Washington politics and the Washington business model. If you’re a senior executive service level manager, leader in the FBI, and you’re making, I’d say $200,000 a year or whatever the amount is, you know that as soon as you retire in good graces from the Bureau, you’re going to become a partner in a big DC law firm. Imagine what your income level is going to be now.

or you’ll be brought on as general counsel, part of the general counsel team of a very large, very wealthy tech company. So you don’t rock the boat. So you’re not going to, it’s not in your personal interests to rock the boat, to make these needed changes. So you really need somebody who doesn’t care. And this is where, and this is where somebody like Matt Gates as attorney general, who ordinarily I would have thought, what’s going on? How would he be attorney general? Or

or Cash Patel or a guy like him as a potential FBI director. The time is, we’re at a place in history right now where we need guys like that to do it because they do not crave that respectability in the DC establishment. They don’t want to be part of DC law firms. They don’t want any of that inside the Beltway swamp game. They just want to get the job done and they don’t want to become part of Washington’s beautiful people crowd.

Bill Walton (28:14.148)

I think that’s exactly right. Well, I’m going to we’ll make sure that Mr. Trump, President Trump gets that. think he already gets it if you look at his point appointments right now. But Matt Gates certainly fits that bill as cash. Well, let’s turn our let’s go. OK, we fix the FBI and now let’s fix the CIA.

Mike Waller (28:35.842)

We fix it by breaking it apart and putting it in the history books.

Bill Walton (28:37.839)

Well…

Bill Walton (28:43.038)

And we’ll all enjoy the G-Man movies if we want to reflect on its faded glory, but that’s not a future thing. So where do we start with the CIA?

Mike Waller (28:55.32)

Well, again, the CIA is a, you need, we need a foreign intelligence service. So the purpose of the CIA, it’s mainly two purposes. It’s to collect and analyze information or intelligence, synthesize that into analytical form to inform the president of the United States and his designees about anything that they need to know in any part of the world. And the other main part of it is to conduct covert operations abroad.

at foreign targets in the interests of the United States so that we don’t need to use military force. So those are the two general purposes of the CIA. But the CIA has become so huge. Again, mission creep again. We just throw money at this. Black budgets. So nobody knows publicly what the CIA budget is. And it makes sense because we don’t want our adversaries to know.

Bill Walton (29:50.194)

And CIA also has about 20 something thousand employees, is that right? Yeah.

Mike Waller (29:54.156)

Right, right. But if you look at the products, I mean, think of it. They didn’t predict the collapse of the Soviet Union when those of us in the private sector did because we were in the middle of it. They didn’t predict so many advances and so many developments around the world, even though private citizens did, journalists did, NGOs did, but the intelligence people did not. And of course,

Bill Walton (29:57.564)

Eh.

Mike Waller (30:19.874)

They would say, well, we have access to information you don’t have. we, well, no, they were wrong. They didn’t predict the rise of communist China. The CIA broke with the rest of the intelligence community in a general assessment of where the COVID virus originated from. CIA said, we don’t know. To the FBI’s credit, even Director Ray’s credit, they said, it came out of the Wuhan lab. CIA said, no, and if you go back and look,

CIA Director Brennan gave financial incentives for his analysts to come up with the right conclusion that they could not discern where the virus originated. And they even said, we couldn’t find out because the Chinese wouldn’t cooperate with us.

Bill Walton (31:03.74)

Well, didn’t they also predict, and you pointed this out, that Russia would be in Kiev, or Kiev as we now call it, within four days of going into Ukraine?

Mike Waller (31:15.32)

Yeah, Russia would have a total complete Blitzkrieg kind of victory.

Bill Walton (31:21.294)

The other thing you talk about, I found it really interesting, is so much of what the CIA produces as so-called intelligence is in the public, it’s already out in public, and they’re basically reading the know, the Financial Times and Asia Times and that sort of thing to gather a lot of what they then turn into CIA reports so that a big chunk of their intelligence is not even remotely proprietary.

Mike Waller (31:48.822)

Right. And then a whole lot that we get is from other foreign intelligence services. So we don’t have many human agents around the world doing the actual spying. We just rely on the Brits or the Canadians or the French or the Pakistanis or you name it to provide us with intelligence on what’s going on. But that puts us at the mercy of the agendas of those other foreign governments.

Bill Walton (32:09.764)

I think you said only about 1,500 are intelligence officers stationed, stationed abroad and only only a handful of those are actually out in the field. The we think of, you know, John Le Carre’s spies, you know, out in the cold. mean, not not a lot of that happening now.

Mike Waller (32:23.702)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Waller (32:28.106)

No, not much at all. We have about roughly 1,500 in the clandestine service, meaning they’re operating undercover abroad. And I thought just by looking at the rest of the bureaucracy, you could cut that by two thirds and still have a good efficient clandestine service, 500 clandestine service officers. And I raised this in a discussion with a group of six former CIA station chiefs who get it, who know what the problems are.

And they laughed and they shook their head and one of them said, just take one of the zeros off that. So it’s not 500 who are worth anything, it’s 50. So imagine then, this is sort of a Twitter X transition. If you take those best 50, you eliminate the rest of the clandestine service. You take those best 50 and you create something really elite, really competitive.

Bill Walton (33:01.612)

Ha ha ha ha!

Bill Walton (33:08.348)

So.

Bill Walton (33:13.351)

Yeah.

Mike Waller (33:23.638)

really good out of that, we would have a fantastic clandestine service capability that we could be rebuilt from the bottom up without losing any of what we have right now.

Bill Walton (33:36.646)

Well, pardon that interruption. That was the central intelligence calling to tell us we ought to cut it off. You talk about splitting it in two. One of them is an intelligence service for analysis of intelligence. The other is a separate service for cohort operations. It’s that simple.

Mike Waller (33:44.078)

You

Mike Waller (33:59.498)

No, it’s more complicated than that. But as a start, just separate the intelligence collection. That’s the people who get the information in, whether it’s through agents or informants or liaison with foreign intelligence services or electronic means. And then they analyze that into an intelligence product. So these are assessments and briefings and so forth for the president and his designees. You make that one standing

collection and analytical intelligence service. Then you have a much, then you break off the, what was called the clandestine service or the director of operations. You break that off into a standing active intelligence service of its own, very small. So therefore it’s much more controllable and much more auditable. And then have that run really high end long-term operations against our adversaries abroad.

Bill Walton (34:58.642)

So when we’re thinking about, you also talk persuasively in the book about how the CIA has also been invaded, pervaded with cultural Marxism, and that has its roots even further back in the 30s with the Frankfurt School and the way they infiltrated big chunks of the FDR’s government and then the OSS. And I think they took a lot of care in 1947 when they.

They created the CIA to root that out, but they didn’t succeed. And that’s metastasized ever since.

Mike Waller (35:32.642)

Yeah. Yeah, we had a, we didn’t have an intelligence service until World War II. And so very quickly with the, at the instigation of the British in 1940, President Roosevelt set up the Office of Strategic Services and the British intelligence service helped us build our OSS to fight the Nazis and their allies. So they did a really fast job, brought in people really quickly. They

not just operators, people to operate abroad, because we had no commando or special operations forces of any kind at the time. So we had those, but then we didn’t have any foreign analysts. We didn’t have any, any disciplined body of linguists apart from some folks in the state department. People had with firsthand subject matter expertise in the Nazi occupied areas. So we needed all that. So was a very quick activity to recruit people, especially immigrants who were fresh from those areas, refugees from the Nazi rule.

Bill Walton (36:12.274)

Hmm.

Mike Waller (36:29.804)

They knew everything. They knew the people, they knew the dialects, they knew infrastructure vulnerabilities and so forth. That was all really vital. But what happened was that the OSS was recruiting Communist Party members from foreign countries. These were people who were loyal to the Soviet Union as US intelligence officers. Now, we need those types of people in wartime. Like if our enemy is…

our enemy’s enemy, then that guy becomes our friend also. So it’s necessary. And we were right, rightly or wrongly, allied with Stalin at the time. But there’s a difference between using those individuals for our own intelligence purposes or allowing a foreign intelligence service to use you. And the way it turned out was the British liaison officer at the British embassy in Washington who helped set up the OSS was himself

a Soviet agent. Nobody knew it at the time. So you had a Soviet agent setting up the OSS and then you had General Wild Bill Dardup and Dickie Ellis.

Bill Walton (37:35.782)

What was his name? Dickie Ellison, okay.

Mike Waller (37:41.192)

And his boss was William Stevenson, the man called Intrepid, brilliant man, but he didn’t know that his underling there was a Soviet spy. And then you had James Angleton, who was one of the early OSS and CIA heroes, had developed a friendship with his British counterpart, Kim Philby. So it took a while to figure out these things, and all of that’s understandable, but when you have warnings at the time, so J. Edgar Hoover was warning at the FBI, communists are infiltrating our institutions. We have to be watchful.

Bill Walton (37:44.657)

Yeah.

Mike Waller (38:11.148)

and we have to purge them out. But Hoover and Donovan hated each other from previously when they both worked together in the Justice Department earlier in the 1930s. So you had, or 20s even. So Donovan didn’t want to hear it, but it wasn’t that he was just blind to it. He actually lied to Congress about it.

And to this day, the CIA still on its website includes one of those communists, Herbert Marcuse, as one of its own. And Herbert Marcuse is the academic who developed…

Bill Walton (38:45.04)

Wait, wait, wait, wait, Herbert Marcuse? That the Herbert Marcuse, the hero of the SDS on every college campus in America in the 60s who was advocating the most radical stuff? That Herbert Marcuse?

Mike Waller (38:48.866)

Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Mike Waller (39:03.766)

Same guy, the one, the founder of the Frankfurt School who worked with Stalin and who broke with Stalin, but not with communism because he thought Stalin wasn’t communist enough. And he was the German academic who developed critical theory in Frankfurt, Germany and in New York when he was brought to Columbia University. And then he went right into the OSS and brought his friends with him.

Bill Walton (39:27.058)

My, so how does this color our intelligence gathering? if you’re, it a little bit, we talked about how the FBI would now target parents of children talking to school boards as enemies of the state. I how does this color our intelligence collection if you’ve got woke DEI, cultural Marxism as your core value?

Mike Waller (39:51.778)

Yeah, well, this is a problem when you view your own society as enemy territory, when you subscribe to critical theory that wants to tear down American founding principles, and when it indoctrinates people, K through 12 and into the universities, with the idea that our founding fathers were evil, racist, bigoted,

Bill Walton (40:00.796)

Yeah.

Mike Waller (40:20.614)

misogynistic, slave-owning, greedy people with no redeeming values, and they wrote our Constitution, and they wrote all of our founding principles, then, and you’re sworn to uphold those founding principles now as a federal official, you’re thinking, this is all junk, we’re gonna transform everything. So they’re not looking at the intelligence of what is a threat to our founding principles, they’re viewing our founding principles as the threat.

Bill Walton (40:34.395)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Walton (40:49.564)

Well, and also their promotion in our State Department is what flying an LBGT plus Q, Q plus flag at every embassy around the world and including some places that, you know, I mean, so we’re, the CIA is part of the same culture where they’re really taking.

Mike Waller (41:05.422)

absolutely, they fly the rainbow flag. They actually lit up CIA headquarters in rainbow colors on Pride Month. It’s really cultish over there. They fly the rainbow flag. It’s a solemn ceremony as if it was for a military funeral. They call the people out. There was one case where at the office of the director of national intelligence, this is this giant centralized bureaucracy created after 9-11. So all 18 intelligence.

agencies of the United States are coordinated under this one mechanism. They actually had a rainbow flag raising ceremony, very solemn command performance where everybody had to go show up. And of course it was not publicized at all, but I talked to people who were forced to attend and observe it like it was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Bill Walton (41:58.342)

God.

Bill Walton (42:02.854)

You stopped me in my tracks. Well, there’s yeah, that’s the problem with doing this show. I learned too much about what’s really happening. The other thing you point out is that they, and this is true not only just in the CIA, but the other federal agencies, is they classify too much information as top secret and therefore they can hide behind.

Mike Waller (42:05.479)

I’ve got more good news for you,

Bill Walton (42:30.322)

security classifications to keep people from knowing what they’re doing.

Mike Waller (42:33.836)

Right. And this was done for a lot of reasons for decades, not for political reasons so much as to be overly cautious or to be territorial. There was one case where more than 30 years ago, I was in Moscow and we were working with a bunch of democracy activists ransacking KGB offices and running off with shopping bags full of KGB documents. And I brought back up bags of KGB manuals. And then from the Soviet Politburo vaults.

documents of KGB memoranda from, from chairman Urian drop off to the Soviet leadership. And we didn’t know what we had. We just grabbed it and ran. And, and I gave these to, to a friend in the intelligence community. Cause I said, you guys might want this. All I ask in return is that when you translate them into English, would you give me copies? And he said, sure. But once the bureaucracy got ahold of that, they classified it all as top secret to protect their sources and their methods. Well, you know, I was the source.

I was the method and I don’t need protection. just want my translations and they didn’t keep their word. So about 25 years later, they finally declassified them.

Bill Walton (43:36.784)

Okay.

Bill Walton (43:42.066)

Well, a sidebar, when I was in the Army, I was an enlisted guy and they sent me to the Pentagon and one of my jobs was to be the enlisted clerk on the MeLive files, peers investigation. And they had classified as top, top secret file doors filled with the Cleveland plane dealer because the Cleveland plane dealer broke the photos of the incident. so that much because…

because they believe those photos were real, they classified that as top secret. I don’t know if they’ve ever released it at this point. it’s another time, another day. I’ll tell you story about all that. was very, very interesting how that was effectively covered up. But.

Mike Waller (44:29.208)

But this is typical of how bureaucracies work just for bureaucratic purposes. But imagine now it’s being done for political purposes and things are deliberately kept secret that there’s no need for the secrecy, especially in the electronic age where it’s easy to sort things out, you know, instantaneously on what’s sensitive and what’s not. So you’re building then a secretive entity that no one has oversight of. Nobody can audit.

Nobody can check and it just grows and grows.

Bill Walton (45:02.588)

So that’s another, we need to put that on the president’s to-do list as well. And just like the FBI, you could put together a team of seven to 12 people who’ve got deep experience in this, who know where the changes need to be made and people need to be cut and come out with a lean and mean intelligence service.

Mike Waller (45:24.14)

Right, right. You could do it. You could really slash the CIA analytical bureaucracy and the collections bureaucracy by maybe as much as 90%. Because first of all, a lot of it produces material that is never needed. It’s worthless. We don’t need to spy on the climate. We don’t need to spy on gender. We don’t need an open source intelligence capability in the CIA because it’s just

Bill Walton (45:44.444)

See.

Mike Waller (45:53.442)

public information that they’re analyzing. So just get rid of all of that. If you see, if you talk to anybody who’s been privy to the president’s daily brief and presidents from both parties after leaving office have talked about it, they said, yeah, there’s not much in those briefs that are of value. Well, if they’re producing intelligence that’s not of value to the president, then why don’t we even have this body at all if the no president finds it useful or why do we have it the way that we have it? So

So those things can be cut and a lot of these things, especially on the open source intelligence part, that can all be done privately. So you can privatize it. CIA is already subscribing to these services anyway, which is why they, which is how they use open source intelligence, but just privatize it and then use just the way a news organization would or an academic organization would. So there you’d be cutting thousands of positions there and, you know,

showing once more that so much of our vaunted intelligence community, which is so mysterious and therefore untouchable, is really another emperor has no clothes type of place.

Bill Walton (47:01.868)

And this applies to that other big defense organization, the Defense Department itself. mean, get, having worked in the Pentagon and talking, knowing people like you and other things, you could take the same gimlet eye to the Defense Department and take a look at what all those different agencies are doing inside the Pentagon and so on and so forth. I bet you could come up with similar personnel cuts without too much trouble.

Mike Waller (47:31.842)

Right.

Bill Walton (47:32.811)

But that’s another show. We’ll dig into it. But doesn’t that, I mean, it makes sense that it would just decree it in the same way. But there’s one other thing you say, even if we break this down to lean and mean, we’ve got to repeal all the Obama and Biden executive orders that mandated critical theory and cultural Marxism. And that’s right. That’s in the rule book right now.

Mike Waller (47:40.114)

sure.

Mike Waller (47:56.79)

Right. Abolish those on day one, but then abolish all of the positions that were involved in implementing and enforcing DEI. Just abolish them. That means that the officials holding those positions no longer have government jobs. So you don’t even need to, you don’t want to transfer them. You can’t fire most of them, but if you abolish their positions, then they’re gone.

Bill Walton (48:20.05)

Well, we need to get the Center for Security Policy and one Mike Waller to brief Vivek and Elan on this because I think they’ll be delighted to understand, you know, this, this and I’m going to see if we can, I can’t help make that happen. Mike, this is fabulous and I think timely and if we can apply the same approach to the rest of government, we could actually do a lot of good.

Mike Waller (48:50.328)

Sure can. mean, can you imagine now you take being from Washington, knowing how the machine works, that’s one thing, but imagine informing the guy who invented the Tesla automobiles or is putting, is going to put people on Mars and all of these other things. he did it the way he’s done it. Once you acclimate him to what the issue is, he’s going to come up with ideas that none of us have ever imagined before.

Bill Walton (49:17.328)

Yeah, right, Yeah.

Mike Waller (49:18.24)

and Vivek and others will be coming up with these ideas and then all the people around them. So you get everybody together saying, well, this is how it works. This is how it ought to work. This is where it’s dangerous. This is where it’ll be really helpful. Boom. Can you imagine all of the different opinions and the brainstorming that’s going to take place to create not only efficiency, but so much more opportunity and so much more freedom and much smaller government.

Bill Walton (49:42.61)

Of course, I live in the DC area. I think it’s time to sell my house because what we’re going to do is dramatically drop the value of houses. All these people are put out of work, which is a noble thing. Mike, thank you. we’ll come back and talk about this and other topics in the future. And hope you all enjoyed the Bill Walton show today with Mike Waller, Center for Security Policy and author of Big Intel.

The rest of it is how the CIA and the FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. It’s worth the time to read it because you’ll see all the colors and all the different avenues that Mike pointed out in this. Strong read, you’re gonna be very smart after you’ve read it. So anyway, thanks for joining and if you’re not subscribed, please subscribe. Tell your friends to subscribe. You can catch us in all the major podcast platforms and.

and also on Substack. So we’ll look forward to talking with you soon. Take care.

Bill Walton (50:50.416)

That was great, Mike.

Mike Waller (50:52.136)

I enjoyed this bill. It just got warmed up too.