Show Notes
The cultural Marxism that wrecked so many of our universities claimed another victim: America’s spies.
That is the premise for a powerful new book on the CIA and the FBI that takes on the question: How did our national security institutions go from being Cold War heroes to deep state villains?
Author Michael Waller, himself a longtime veteran of the intelligence world, has just published a book called Big Intel, He joins Peter and Eric on the DrillDown to discuss his time in El Salvador with the CIA in the 1980s, and the state of America’s spooks today.
Big Intel
Waller worked for Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director William J Casey, and reported to him on how the Contras were doing in their fight to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua. But he now sees great danger to America from two generations of intelligence community members who learned about the world through a cultural Marxist lens.
President Abraham Lincoln said, “From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide.”
“We can’t be conquered militarily, only by destroying how we perceive ourselves,” Waller tells the hosts. “If we are taught to believe that the American founding was evil. . . Once we stop believing in those things, we are easy pickings for hostile powers,” says Waller, who has taught military and intelligence community people for decades on psychological warfare. “Now, imagine transmitting that mentality through popular culture, journalism, academia into the universities that educate our lawyers, our prosecutors, federal investigators, intelligence officers, counterintelligence officers … a couple generations came through that system. And they don’t believe in those values. So, what are they protecting?”
The interview is full of stories from the field of how Waller has documented this lack of belief in America within the CIA, the FBI, and other parts of the intelligence community. One of many fascinating details is how Waller had given the FBI a certain laptop containing secret information about foreign spies in the US back in the late 1990s. Only one person from the FBI, named “Bob,” was interested in it and contacted him to learn details of what the computer contained.
“Bob” would later be unmasked as Robert Hanssen, who was caught, tried, and convicted of being the most damaging Soviet agent in the early 2000s. Ironically, Hanssen had previously been in charge of the FBI’s investigation into the existence of a Soviet mole within the bureau. That is, he was responsible for trying to find… himself.
Waller is asked what he thinks should be done with the intelligence community by the next administration. His advice:
- Don’t be in awe of them. When Trump came in, he had no agenda for drastically reforming the intel community, but he will have if he is re-elected.
- Every citizen can hold fed authorities at bay, by resisting federal search overreach through the people they elect as local sheriffs. Many people don’t know this.
- The next administration should have an action plan not just to replace leaders but to “put the FBI in the history books,” by abolishing or at least shrinking the FBI, taking its counterintelligence functions away and putting its crimefighting functions under the US Marshall’s Service.
- He acknowledges there will be a lot of resistance to this because of how many people from within the FBI go on to make money in private contracting after they leave government service. But Waller insists this must be done.
