Transcript of #134 John Gentry - Unpacking the Information War Against the U.S.

John Gentry, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

My pleasure. We have a variety of topics we're going to talk about here today. Your new book, neutering the CIA, the polarization of the intelligence organizations and. But what I'd like to kick it off with is, and what I was really excited to talk to you about, other than that, is propaganda. I've been talking about it for a while. I am not the greatest at explaining how it works and things to look out for, but I think you would be. And so I'd like to kind of kick it off with that. But before everybody gets an introduction here, so let me know if I'm missing anything. Quite the intro. Doctor John Gentry, PhD in political science and a BA in history. Retired US army reserve lieutenant colonel. Duties mainly in intelligence and special operations arenas. Former intelligence analyst at Central Intelligence Agency. Your frequent writer on intelligence and national security issues, author of neutering the CIA, why the us intelligence versus Trump has long term consequences, co authored strategic warning, intelligence history, challenges and prospects, and has published about 40 articles on intelligence topics. We were talking about some of those on the way here.

Frequent public speaker on intelligence issues. Formerly, excuse me, former army special forces soldier and current adjunct professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and teaches for the School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University. Am I missing anything?

No, main voice.

But I have a subscription service that we offer to our top supporters called Patreon. And so I allow them to ask each guest one question. And so this question is from David Crosby. Do you feel Russia is acting with China or vice versa, on a majority of our headlines?

Well, it appears that they're working together on some. My interpretation here is that Russia's got its own agenda. China clearly has an agenda, too. I think with respect to Ukraine, for example, and russian information operations, we'll talk about. They're operating pretty much on their own.

Okay. So you don't think they're connected and they're propaganda?

Not that I see. Not that I see. They both are using techniques that the Soviets developed, but they've got their own agendas, and their techniques are different in some respects.

Okay, well, there you have it. We don't think they're together, but, you know, let's just move right into the interview. I really want to kick this off with talking about propaganda. So if you could kind of explain to, you know, maybe just some basics on how it works and what people can watch out for. Let's start with kind of how it works.

Okay. So what you're trying to do with information operations. Propaganda, actually is only one element of that. So propaganda would be something that would be fairly obvious in media brochures, things of that sort. But there's a wide range of other things, forgeries, for example, social media doings. So I prefer to talk about influence operations or information operations, the history of this as it pertains to the United States. So if we're thinking about different countries, this would be somewhat different. But as we were talking earlier, the Soviet Union, over a century ago, in the early 1920s, set up information operations that were designed to and ultimately destroy their capitalist opponents. And so their intelligence services, their foreign ministry, even their national leaders were integrated in these campaigns. One of the foremost of these operators early on was a young german communist by the name of Willy Munsenberg, who organized printing presses, publishing houses that would publish material that was consistent with soviet interests. He also organized groups of various sorts. He divided them into groups that would be roughly homogenous. So there'd be students groups, there'd be professors groups, there'd be women's groups, labor groups, and so on.

And they would recruit people under false circumstances and, in essence, get these people to push lines and push programs that were consistent with soviet interests. And Billy called these things innocence clubs because he was able to fool so many people so much of the time. They were innocents. T's at the end. So this is, you know, using this word as a noun to. Well, the Soviets pushed this very hard through all of their affiliates around the world, through the communist International, the common turn. There was a variant of that here in the United States called the Communist Party of the USA, which still exists, still is a Soviet Union.

Is it the communist party of the USA?

Yes. Yes. So this was formed again a little over 100 years ago and still exists. So if you want to look online, actually, you can find a newspaper that they publish every day.

Wow.

People's world. I have a friend, as an aside, I have a friend who has eclectic interests of various sorts, and he looks at conservative press. He also gets a subscription to the Washington Post and to the Communist Party paper, and he sees very little difference between the Washington Post and the. In the communist party paper.

Very interesting.

So they're still operating. Again, this is a legacy of the Soviet Union. So soviet intelligence took over after the comintern was abolished in 1943 at pressure from the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United States and Great Britain. They knew what the comintern was all about, and they said, wait a minute, we're fighting this war with you. Not against you. Stop trying to subvert us. So Stalin said, oh, yeah, okay, okay, we'll get rid of the common turn. But he gave the subversion mission to intelligence, so it continued. So the KGB formed, and the Committee for State Security formed in 1954, then took over that mission. And in the late 1950s, the Communist Party Politburo gave the KGB an extra mission and emphasized more what they called active measures. So, active measures would be sometimes physical actions, assassinations, kidnappings, and so on. But mostly it was information operations, broadly defined. They established in 1962 what was called Service A, which is part of the first chief directorate, or the foreign intelligence operation, the KGB, roughly the circumental CIA equivalent of the KGB. And these people had a wide ranging set of missions and did a wide ranging set of things.

So they forged documents that would be given to western newspapers. They planted stories in newspapers in places like India, for example, hoping that they would get picked up by west european and United States newspapers.

What kind of stories?

Stories, for example, like the AIDS epidemic, was a product of the United States Defense Department, so it was one of their most effective active measures operations.

So let's just dive into that one specifically. So they leak a. They get a story into India's media, and they hope that we pick it up.

Right.

Why would we pick up what India made?

Because it's a good and interesting story, but it was not a sure thing. So the Soviets had other things that they would do. So they would write stories and feed them to sympathetic journalists who would then publish them verbatim. What they also did was publish, in essence, notes, this is the message we want to get across. Point a, point b, and so on. And I then give it to you. So I'm a KGB agent, you're my asset, I give it to you, and then you write up my message in your style, so it doesn't look like a KGB product anymore, but you're passing, passing on the message. So, again, a wide variety of approaches that were used to provide a consistent, general message, but one that would not be obvious. So what they did was develop techniques that were designed specifically to be long term in goal, long term, and duration that would be subtle, that would be complementary, and would be hard to both identify and combat. It was a very effective program, and they actually came up with a name for it back in the 1950s. They call it reflexive control. So you're trying to get.

So I'm trying to get you to do what I want, but you need to not know that you have been influenced by me. So that has worked very well for the Soviets and the KGB officers who defected, who were involved in active measures campaigns, have said repeatedly, it really was very easy to fool westerners, to fool Americans. These are gullible people, and they particularly were fond of targeting political liberals, not hard conservatives and not hard leftists. And again, go back to Willie Munsonberg's innocence clubs. They wanted to create a lot of allies as part of the effort to subvert the country as a whole. And their argument was that it was relatively easy to subvert, to fool liberals for two reasons. One, liberals were generally sympathetic to the soviet view, but not wholly in the soviet camp. They weren't communists. And secondly, because they were generally sympathetic, they didn't ask a lot of questions about sourcing, about accuracy. So they found that it was easy, easy to fool liberals. And what they also did, importantly for what's going on here now in 2024 on the campuses, is that they worked. They worked the universities, so they were pushing materials on the universities.

The Russians were.

So, yeah, Soviets. And now the Russians are doing it, are doing it too.

How are. How are they manipulating our schools today?

Well, they're, the governments of these countries, I think, at this point are not. So they influenced enough early on so that they were able to get enough friends, if you will, either committed Marxists or fellow travelers to now do this. Now, to do this, to do this on their own, to back up and go a little bit different direction, if I might, but a complimentary way. There was a group of people in the teens and twenties, and then in the 1930s, good Marxists wanted revolution, wanted that good. That good, perfect world that Marx promised, but realized that the economic conflict that Marx had talked about was not going to work. So, as you recall, Marx postulated that there were two competing groups in the world, capitalists and workers, the proletariat. Their interests were incompatible and that at some point the proletariat would overthrow the capitalists and we'd have. We'd have a perfect world forever. Well, the problem was that workers didn't see the world the way Marx did. And they said, gee, you know, capitalism seems to work pretty well for us, too. If we contribute here, we can do better for ourselves and for our families, too.

So by the twenties, good Marxists were saying, this original marxist plan is not working. So what we need to do is find other ways to divide people and generate the kinds of conflicts, the kind of conflict that Marx envisioned. So in other words, get to the marxian state a different way. And the way they came, the way they proposed to do this is through. Is through social means, through societal. Societal means, and fast forward a lot of ways. Basically, there were five areas that were targeted for efforts to subvert the old western capitalist way of doing things and help generate the marxian nirvana, if you will. Five of them. Education. Why you want to go after a young mind? It's a relatively effective way of converting people, either all the way or at least getting sympathetic allies. And it's relatively cheap. The young people of today are the leaders of 20 and 30 years from now. You have a long time horizon. You're trying to do this in a subtle way. So you go after education, you're targeting the press. Basically the same. Basically the same argument. You're going after the law because you want the law to begin to operate in your favor.

You're not looking for scales that are even. You're looking for the law to favor you. Fourth one is religion. So you want to get rid of. You want to destroy organized religion, because organized religion talks about an alternative world incompatible with the marxian world. So religion is a core enemy of Marxism. And the fifth one is a family. So you want to destroy the family unit where people look out for themselves and their spouse and their children. They're looking for the future of the. The family. You want loyalty in a marxian state to be society wide. Your identity is not to the family, it's to your group. All right, so the mechanism then is that you've got information, operations, broadly defined, going after all of these five areas because they are impediments to the marxian revolution.

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So it's. It is the press, the education system, the law, the family unit, and religion. And religion.

Right. And all five of those are under significant stress in the United States at the moment.

That's what I was just gonna say. We're seeing all of. We've been seeing this happen for quite a while now. So how do we do this in other countries? No, we don't.

No, nothing close.

Nothing close.

So, for many. For a number of years, CIA was the agent. Well, back up even before that. So before World War Two, we had nothing close to a coherent foreign policy, I don't think, frankly. But certainly we did not have anything close to an influence. Operation CIA was created, as you know, in 1947. And in the forties, fifties, sixties, there were some operations that were conducted that, by soviet standards, were crude and simple and small. So we've had public release of information that CIA helped publish some books, for example, and made some pamphlets and contributed to non communist youth going to conventions in Europe and so on. But by soviet standards, this activity was trivial. And as best I can tell, almost all of it was ended in the mid 1970s. So Congress got ahold of some of the real abuses of CIA and FBI and the army in the 1960s and said, enough. We're not doing any more of this. So CIA has a good bureaucracy said, we're not going to do things that are going to get us into trouble with Congress. So they've basically quit doing this. So the malign influence operations are basically being conducted around the world by states that want to change the system.

So you have, you have Norway, for example, that says, gee, we'd really like you to know about our salmon industry, or we got great hydropower and we're a green country and so on. So they have some, in essence, propaganda operations to let the world know about what Norway is doing. That's good. But that's a fundamentally different thing than what we've been talking about, man.

I would have. I don't know. I'm not. I have a feeling the agency has its hands in this, but we'll take.

Well, let's come back to that when we talk about the politicization issue, because that's been, that's been asserted. And my view is that there's a relationship, but it's not quite what's been asserted publicly.

You know, so I got another question. I mean, we're not just looking at the Russians here. We're also looking at, I mean, China obviously has a hand, a big hand in this.

Yeah.

And, well, actually, I'm curious, before we dive into that, we know Russia is involved in this against us. We know China is involved in information wars against us. Is there anybody else that we should be looking out for?

Well, two big ones are big ones, but not as big are Iran. The Iranians are doing information operations by many standards, a lot of it through cyber, cyber operations, and the North Koreans are doing some, too. So here you got the big four intelligence targets of the CIA now publicly identified, going back, what, five years ago now, and they're all heavily involved in information operations as well as nuclear weapons and conquering other countries and so on.

You know, and we discussed the five. I'm surprised. Where would social media and cyber operations fall into in those five categories?

Well, they would. They would be. These were the old soviet ones now. Right.

And so this may be, will be a 6th.

So. Well. Well, these would be the ways that you create turmoil in capitalist society to generate the marxian revolution. Well, the Russians are not Marxists, are they? Putin, authoritarian. Yeah. Russian nationalists. Yep. But they're not marxist Leninist the way the Soviets were. So a lot of what the Russians are doing now, borrowing the techniques and in terms of forgeries, in terms of getting information to friendly journalists and so on, but their goals are different. So Putin has pretty clearly got a russian nationalist agenda restore the territorial empire that horribly, from his perspective, horribly, was lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. So how do you do that? You're targeting then groups that are opposing you, for example, in Ukraine. So that would be the European Union, that would be NATO, and that would be member states of those countries. So you want to generate divisions. So pretty clearly, one of the big targets in the United States is to use information operations, basically active measures again. But now you're trying to generate a removal of support for Ukraine in the United States. Social media is a key way to do that. The people they're targeting are republicans.

So you remember I mentioned earlier that the Soviets found it easiest to target liberals. The Russians are going after conservatives in the United States, in Hungary, in Italy, several other european countries, too. Again, basically to divide, to break the consensus of these big alliances that are really unwieldy in the sense that they require unanimity to make major decisions. So if you can break the unanimity, then you can break support for Ukraine, for example.

That's interesting. Do you now I'm interested. Let's stick with the Russians. They've been at this for well over 100 years.

Yeah.

They would have some very deep ties into media outlets and writers in the media world. Correct? I mean, longstanding assets. Why wouldn't they continue, I mean, if they started this on liberals and now they're transitioning to conservative media, wouldn't they have to, they would have to get in here, create all new assets in a completely different sector than liberal media. Why wouldn't they? As they're developing those assets within the conservative media and the conservative space, why wouldn't they continue to try to manipulate the liberal.

Oh, I think they probably are. I think they are. But the most important, thinking about the current, roughly the current situation, as best I can tell, and a number of people who follow Russia more closely than I do indicate that the current push is Ukraine for obvious reasons. It's a major, demanding war on their part. So who is prospectively a thorn in the side of NATO and the European Union as conservatives?

Oh, no, I 100% agree with you.

So what they're doing, remember, this is a long time program, right? So you're dealing with lots of, lots of avenues, some very subtle, some not very subtle at all. You're constantly developing new groups and new approaches based on your needs. So I don't think it's an evolution, not a requirement for a wholesale change.

I feel like trying to manipulate conservatives to be against the Ukraine, against us, funding Ukraine for the Russia Ukraine war. That's low hanging fruit for Russia. Why wouldn't they? Yeah, you know, that's.

I mean, and you've had a dramatic change. I mean, can you imagine Ronald Reagan comes from the grave? Can you imagine him agreeing with what many of the House Republicans have been saying about Ukraine? I mean, he'd be flabbergasted.

Yeah.

Yeah. Who's the rhino here?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, as far as. So we have four. Four countries that were, that are key players in information wars against the US, at least. Do these four, the four biggest. Do these four, do you feel like they, are they all in this together at some point? I mean, we know they all have their own agendas for whatever reasons, but do you think behind the scenes they are also, even though they have specific agendas that they want to push into the US, are they also allies?

Well, I suspect they may cooperate in some respects, but in the information arena, they have a public, I mean, they have, they have an obvious similar goal to damage the United States. But do they need to cooperate to do that? No, they don't. So that's just pretty obvious. So they're doing their own things to damage us, to damage our foreign policies, to damage us capacities, be a world player and so on. And this gets back to, again, the Marxist in the United States, too. Remember I mentioned this, social cultural Marxism. So you've got lots of the five different avenues. Everybody knows what the general plan is, but there's no, there's no coherent guiding force that says you're going to do this, you're going to do that, you're going to do something else. They all know what the overall plan is, and people can then pick their little niche and push in a way that's roughly consistent with the overall agenda.

What are some things that people are seeing on an everyday basis right now that is part of this information war?

That the United States and Israel are colonial powers and that the decolonization movement, which is marxian argument, that you need to have the United States and Israel decolonize the rest of the world. So this basically is right out of part of Marxism Lenin. Vladimir Lenin years ago talked about imperialism and colonialism and so on. It tracks very well. Edward said was a Marxist who pushed the colonial aspect. Another one that's very common is the diversity, equity and policies that have been adopted by the Biden administration, pushed by the Obama administration, basically ignored by President Trump. This comes right out of critical theory, another one of the cultural marxist views that was developed in the 1930s, originally by the so called Frankfurt school so critical race theory, critical legal studies, critical pedagogy, which you're using to indoctrinate teachers who are then indoctrinating schoolchildren. So on, everything that's got a critical associated with it is marxian in origin.

Interesting.

What DEI is right out of critical race theory.

So this is a very much a snowball effect.

Well, yeah. So it's continuing, it's going on, and then arguably it's achieving widespread, large scale successes.

What's coming next?

Well, that's a good question. I mean, a number of people are talking about civil war at this point, aren't they? Clearly. Also, a number of people have said, gee, I'm finally beginning to realize what's going on here, and this is unacceptable. So they're fighting back against it. Now, whether this now counter revolution, if you will, this is what Chris Ruffo calls what's going on, a counter revolution against the marxian revolution that's been underway for decades now. So whether this counter revolution will succeed or not remains to be seen. The revolution is, as we were talking earlier, the marxist revolutionaries have been quite successful. They know what they're doing. They're tough customers. So the people who want to fight them have got quite a battle ahead.

Of them when it comes to manipulating the legal system. How are they doing that?

Well, you infiltrate the law schools and you create people who are marxian. And outlook, you have then people who are appointing judges, for example, who agree with you. So that's the whole point of, of manipulating the flow into the legal system, is that you get ultimate prosecutors. You get, and ultimately, then you want judges and decisions that are consistent with your view. So we have prominently now a number of, depending on your perspective, either really good or soft on crime prosecutors around the country, most if not all of whom have been elected. George Soros has been providing a lot of money to support these people's campaigns and so on. So here you've got through the prosecution side, you've got, in essence, a manipulation of the legal system. And a lot of people who are marxian and orientation say, say we don't care what some of the law says, we will differentially enforce that which we like.

So when it comes to manipulating the legal system, there's more than one avenue. So there's the seed that has been planted from 100 years ago that continues to snowball in different ways, got into our education system. People that were, that were in school being educated to become lawyers.

Right?

Another one, another one are now graduated. Some of those are teaching the next generation some of those are actually in the legal system as prosecutors, district attorneys, judges.

Some of them are in the federal government administration administering the law through regulations. So that, so when is another, another venue?

So is there direct communication from. So we have the entity that started 100 years ago. That's snowball effect. Now we're also talking about Soros funded prosecuting attorneys and we're talking about. So is there a direct line of communication from, do these attorneys realize they're being manipulated or has it just come through campaign Fox?

Oh, I don't think they know they're being manipulated. I think they understand the general plan.

Okay.

And they are doing their part to help us succeed.

So they've been recruited.

Yes.

So are they an asset of Russia?

No.

No.

Well, I mean, they can help, but they're not an asset in the way you and I understand that term from the intelligence world. So an asset in intelligence would be someone who is to some degree controlled by a formal representative of a government, like a KGB officer would have an asset who would be in the Defense department, hypothetically, who would be providing secrets. No. So they're not assets in that respect at all. They're allies. So if you think another way to think about this, and there are lots of different ways to think about this, this is pretty complicated, but the way I think of it anyway, is that you've got people who, who are widely going back to Lenin, actually, in Stalin. You've got party people, members who are either either working for foreign government, working for the KGB, or they are working within their own national context, working for the Communist Party of the USA, for example, that they are party members. They, they accept party discipline and party orders. You will do this, you know. Yes, sir, no questions asked. These are almost military type organizations. First group, relatively small. This is the hardcore, then you have fellow travelers term that's been around a long time.

So these are people who are generally sympathetic to the overall goal, but they're not completely on board. There are a few areas that they may disagree with, and they also don't want to subject themselves to the kind of discipline that a party member is subject to. And then the third group, the people who Lenin reputedly called useful idiots, and a term that I like better, Stalin's term, he called them naive dupes. So what you want to do is recruit a bunch of naive dupes to be, in essence, the foot soldiers of the revolution. So they're guided by, they're recruited by and they're helpful for, they vote for the goals of the party members and their closely related fellow travelers. So the people we're talking about now, the prosecutors and so on, they are not naive dupes. They are either the hardcore or they're very close fellow travelers.

So these. So let's talk about the prosecutors. So are they? I guess what I'm trying to ask is when Russia or Soros or China or Iran, whoever is trying to infiltrate into the, into the prosecutor's space, they're not directly influencing these prosecutors. They're looking for people who align with their agenda. The closest.

Yes, in this case. Yeah. And they're already on board, so they.

Don'T really have to do anything but funnel money into their campaign funds.

Yeah. And the Chinese actually have a different. And I think in many ways, well, they're all sophisticated. It's a different kind of sophistication. Their messaging is not so much us against them. We don't break NATO, we don't break the EU for purposes of supporting russian national interests. The Chinese have a more diffuse, diffuse system. They're trying to not destroy the system, put in their own, but kind of molded in their own kind of way. They use information operations in a very different way. So you've got millions of chinese students, for example, around the world at universities. They're all assets of the Communist Party of China, the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. So by law, they are subject to direction, to gather information, to disseminate information. They've got a massive operation here that is a very different sort of thing than the old soviet system that was run by the KGB, for example. Similarity is what you're using. Sophisticated means, long duration, lots of different venues, and you're trying to convince target countries to do things differently politically in ways that benefit you.

What are some things we're seeing China implement through this?

Well, for example, one of the things that's been done around the world, there was a big effort in the United States. There's been some pushback on that. They create what they call Confucius institutes at universities, and now they've got to actually have a variant of that that's going to secondary schools around the world. The last I looked, which was a little over a year ago, there were about 500 of these still in existence around the world at major universities in western countries. So the goal here is you create a Confucius institute. So Confucius, famous chinese cultural person, at least he's famous in the west, but wasn't a marxist, wasn't a maoist. So Confucius is very much out in China, but because it's a useful name. You create a Confucius institute here. You staff it with people who you find loyal. You provide a lot of money to greedy western universities. These are very mercenary organizations. So if you get. You make a pitch to them, gee, we're going to do a culturally useful thing. We're going to help you teach people Mandarin. This will help improve international relations. And, oh, by the way, we're giving you a lot of money.

Universities have said, grand idea, so we'll do this. So what the people who follow the Confucius Institutes are saying is that these are core influence peddling operations, and they also are espionage centers. So you've got chinese citizens working for the state, whether formally or not, they are working for the state, and they are helping the chinese intelligence services, via businesses, via their think tanks, whatever it might be, to gather information in the United States. So this is a nice combination. So you can both. Both do influence operations and espionage at the same time.

Wow. What would you say the. I mean, what is the end goal? Is it to get us into a civil war? Is it to just divide everything?

Well, the soviet goal was to destroy the United States, as it was known as a, what? As a capitalist, christian, west leaning, 500 years of western civilization type of an organization. So the goal was to have a crisis. Whether it would be. Whether it would be resolved by a civil war, a coup, or an election, that would be the final election. Any one of those is okay. But the ultimate goal was for this new communist state in North America to be subservient to Moscow. That was the soviet goal. Russians different. So Russians go what? They want to have restoration, want to recreate the grand and glorious soviet and russian empires. So they don't need the United States to be destroyed. They just need the United States to be out or abandon or break NATO, because it's NATO that's protecting Ukraine and protecting the West. Europeans, who, by many standards, I think, including Putin's, are relative pushovers, with a few exceptions. Swedes, the Finns, they're tough cookies, but some of the others are not worth worrying about. So you want to get. You want to destroy us support for NATO and for the general north atlantic community, because that community is your enemy.

If you're Vladimir Putin, how about China? Well, the Chinese. The Chinese. The experts say the Chinese are not trying to mess with Ukraine. They're trying to say, we are rising again and we need to take our proper place in the world. We're far and away the biggest country, with India moving a big country and self evidently, our political system and our long term culture and so on are superior to anything else. So what we need to do is reshape world organizations in ways that are chinese, and we will guide, not control, but guide the renewed, the evolved, if you will, international system. So again, their goal is a little different than the Russians did. Russians, very russian goal, as I understand it. Very territorially oriented, very empire building oriented. The Chinese are more interested in influence, although I talked about the importance of sophistication and subtlety and time. Both Xi Jinping and Putin have been very belligerent lately, haven't they? Certainly in Ukraine. So when you are more belligerent, then the influence operations get harder. So you've got a situation where the Chinese now are showing what probably are their true selves. How so? Well, in the sense that they're trying to push around the Filipinos, for example, they're talking about invading Taiwan and so on.

In the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping, leader at the time, was reputed to have come up with a strategy that's been shortened to hide and biden. So you hide your goals, make China the dominant country in the world, and you bide your time until you are sufficiently strong, culturally, militarily, economically, politically, and so on, to force these changes on the rest of the world. So what some of the China specialists are saying is that, is that the hide is not so hidden anymore. And so this hide and bide strategy, which fooled many people in the west for several decades, is now much more in the open. That said, they still have massive information assets. The students are still out there. They still are providing funds to universities, they've still got huge press operations. They're providing funds to political candidates all over the western world. So they still have huge assets in place, and they have some assets that they're really, the Russians and the Soviets for sure, never had business. So you've got this massively potential, potentially anyway, profitable chinese market. And the Chinese can say to say to a big international bank or a tech company or a manufacturer of some sort, you're welcome to come to this nice chinese market.

We'll be happy to have you, if you operate in a way consistent with our political interests. So a number of the agents of influence now are western businesses, the big banks, for example.

Wow.

Intact, which the Soviet and the tech, since it's China, China didn't, excuse me, the Soviet Union never had, never had that kind of asset.

I mean, pretty much all of our businesses.

Well, an awful lot of them operate in China, don't they? Apple, most of its manufacturing for a long time was in China. So they're really, they've got a, you know, noose around their, in terms of being control, being susceptible to pressure from the Chinese. Now. They're beginning now, as I understand, to put manufacturing plants in other countries, but they're still heavily committed to China.

Is it too late to reverse this stuff?

No, I don't think so.

But it takes really far down the.

Line, understanding the situation. It takes, I think, stopping the ongoing pressure. So russian influence operations are continuing day after day after day right now. So you need to stop those, and then you need to address the influence, the effects of the influence on western people, on voters, on university professors, on journalists and so on. But we haven't begun to do really any of that.

Yeah. Yeah. What are, just for people who are concerned about this, and I think there's a lot of them, more and more people are waking up to false information in all these sorts of things. Is there anything people can look out for to know what they're being fed?

Well, if it's really good, that's hard. But I think sort of general things that people can keep in mind or be skeptical, conspiracy theories are, are usually made up things that make something look like there is an international conspiracy or that the bad guys, whoever they may be, are going after your guys, who are all good. You know, if you hear that kind of a message, it's probably wrong. So I think some skepticism is a good thing. You know, we tried here in the United States, the Biden administration tried and 2022 to create this disinformation some or other board the agency. Yes. And it lasted just a few weeks before it was done away with. And it got enormous criticism from Republicans, especially in this case, because Nina Jankowicz, the head of it, was said to be a purveyor of disinformation of the Biden administration. And whether that's true or not, let's leave it, let's leave aside. But the important point here is that we already reached a point here in the United States where we've got political division sufficient so that it's going to be hard to get any federal, federal entity that can be trusted society wide to be a, to be an arbiter of whether something is maligned foreign influence or not.

So we've already reached a pretty bad state here.

Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get into the polarization of the agencies.

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All right, John, we're back from the break. Now we're going to get into the good stuff about the polarization of the intelligence agencies.

Politicization.

Politicization.

Say that three times quickly.

I'll do it off cam. But what kind of, what prompted this, what started this politic. Politi, maybe I should have said it three times, right?

But, well, maybe it may be first, the definition of politicization. So in the us context. So different countries have different ways of thinking about this. Basically, this is the injection of politics into some aspect of the intelligence business. So historically, there have been two ways of seeing this in the United States. One is what they sometimes call politicization from above or top down politicization. And that's when politicians will use intelligence as part of their fights with other politicians, part of the foreign policy decision making process, as part of battles in Congress and so on. I view that more as the politics of intelligence. It's not really politicization. So it's not what I'm concerned about, not what I think we should be concerned about. What we should be concerned about is what's sometimes called bottom up or politicization by intelligence professionals. So in this case, you've got people who are using intelligence for political purposes. They are injecting messages into political. Into intelligence processes for purposeful reasons, be it ideological, political, organizational interests, career interests, and so on. But this historically has been viewed as being highly inappropriate, whether it's coming from the political left or right, because it damages the credibility of intelligence and it probably damages the quality of intelligence.

So until very recently, this has been considered to be wholly inappropriate and wholly out of bounds. And generally, at Ciataine, four episodes that I've identified, three of them have come from the political left, one from the right, but all of them are generally considered to be inappropriate. The most recent one, the one that emerged publicly in 2016, is very different from the other three in that much, much bigger in terms of numbers of people. For the first time, you had an attack on a sitting. First a presidential candidate and then a sitting president, involved large numbers of former intelligence officers or formers, as well as a lot of current employees who did leaking. They didn't just leak accurate information. They leaked inaccurate, incorrect information on purpose. In other words, the lease were disinformation. So were they. This is a big deal. So what we want to know is, you know, what in the world prompted this? Where and why is where, why, how, when did it occur? And what are the implications of it when we leak?

Can you give any example of the misinformation?

So one of the ones that came out in, gosh, when was it, early? It was 2020. So there was a story that came out in the CB's and it was picked up by other news media that then President Trump had been briefed by his daily briefers. As you know, the president's daily brief team normally briefs the president six days a week unless he's traveling or something of that sort. The story was that the PDB team briefed Trump that there was this new virus coming from Asia, and it was going to be very serious and that it was an important issue, it was a warning issue, but he didn't do anything. And so now this is January, February of 2020. People were already dying in the United States. And the press reporting then said, Trump's got blood in his hands. He didn't take this good intelligence warning and act. Therefore, he's completely with deaths of Americans. Well, it turned out that was not true. It turned out within about three days, the head of the military element of the Defense intelligence Agency at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the people who follow intelligence reports that could affect troops deployed.

So the commander there, a medical doctor, colonel, went public and he said that, no, this never happened. We in the intelligence community did not brief the president on this. That was confirmed by the Pentagon. And so now Bob Woodward got involved in this. And it turns out, according to Woodward, that, in fact, what the, what the briefers had done was actually tell President Trump that the story about this new emerging virus from China was really not very significant at all. Don't worry about it. So here you had a dual disinformation operation. On the one hand, Trump allegedly had blood on his hands that he should not have been blamed for. And secondly, the intelligence community claimed much better performance than it actually delivered.

So you have a group of briefers who are intentionally dubbing down the effects of the virus.

That was the allegation in this one case. I don't, my own view is that the, and I think the record is strong, that the PDB briefers generally, and these go back to the Kennedy administration, these people generally have been pretty good. But something has happened. This is 2020 and it's Trump. So what had been a very, really a fine organization, a fine effort, suddenly changed. So again, another question, why in the world, why and how did this, did this change in collective attitudes occur?

On the other hand, you have a group of people who are leaking the complete opposite type of information to the press, basically saying that he knew about it, it was a big deal and he should have taken it more seriously. So you have two different leakers.

Well, it's not clear exactly who the leakers were, different types. So, well, you got multiple. So you can have, you can have, you can have a leak of accurate information that's damaging. You can have a leak of disinformation of this sort. You can have other kinds that provide different kinds of messaging. So, for example, again, a Trump won right after he was elected in 2016. So late November, December, the leak was that Trump was refusing to take his daily briefings, which apparently was just simply not true. So the message there apparently, purpose of the message there apparently was to say, well, this guy really doesn't care about intelligence. He's, you know, what in the world and the people do electing in this guy, he doesn't really care. But apparently it was just incorrect. Another way, another way, another way the leakers work is to talk with former intelligence officers, especially ones who keep their badges and can go into intelligence workspaces where you're free to talk pretty much whatever you want, classified or not, you're not leaking. And then these formers will go out and, and talk. So now you don't have to go to a journalist.

You can go to a former and you can have the former talk for you.

Where is this misinformation orchestrated from? How high up does this go?

Well, I don't think it's, or I don't think there's any evidence. There's nothing that I've seen that this is done by the agencies proper. So this, again, is, I think, a point that I hope you're the, your viewers will get. I don't see any evidence that the director would call a meeting of all of his senior people, say, well, on the agenda today is how to screw the american people. They're not doing that. What has happened, or we're going to, on the agenda today is how to manipulate the New York Times. What has happened is that you've had a, a change in the organizational cultures of the agencies themselves, and then accordingly, also the formers, the people who have been in this to the point where they think that they need to act against evil, that they know truth, and they have a responsibility to society, to the country as a whole, freedom to democracy, whatever may come to mind at the moment. And they have a mission then to act, to do the right thing.

So this is coming from essentially rogue misinformation agents?

This is orchestrated from anywhere? Yes. I don't see a specific organization that is specific entity of any sort, formal or not, that is specifically guiding the actions of these people. Again, it's kind of like the information operations we were talking about earlier. You've got a group of people who, in the Trump years, didn't like Trump. The general view was that Trump was wrong and evil in the, a number of specific ways. And so then it was left to individual actors to try to go after individual bits of Trump's deficiencies as best they could. So they were collaborators, if you will, but not co conspirators. Okay. Now, so I say the agencies themselves are nothing, are not culpable in the sense that they're planning this. But there is a government and an agency responsibility, I think, in altering the organizational cultures, because it's the organizational cultures that led to the changes that we've seen. So back up a little bit here. So you have, as you know from your government experience, different organizations have different ways of doing things. They have different organizational cultures. The FBI is different than the Navy, is different than the Marine Corps, different than the State Department.

And so on. And in the intelligence world, some. Some organizations have been thought of being generally more liberal or than others, with state departments, Bureau of Intelligence and Research being generally speaking, on the political liberal side, as opposed to leftist liberal, not leftist CIA being close to that, and then the military services being more conservative. Okay, so this has been around for. For a long time now. What happened in the Obama years is that Senator Obama, in October of 2008, right before the 2008 election, said that he was on the verge of winning the election and transforming the country. And pretty clearly soon thereafter, he made good on that promise and the way he did it, in the words of John Brennan, who for four years was a close advisor to Obama in the White House and then became CIA director in Obama's last four years. So Brennan says in his book that what Obama wanted to do was changed the country in an evolutionary, not a revolutionary way. That's right out of Brennan's book. Okay, so what you see then, consistent with that kind of view, is that early in the President Obama period, you began to see changes in policies related particularly to the federal workforce.

My interpretation here is you're going to change the country. One of the best ways to do that is to change the federal workforce first, because these are the people who make and enforce regulations and so on. They do the kinds of things we were talking about, talking about earlier. So by July of 2009. So Obama's in office for six months, you see policies promulgated at the ODNi level. So Odni is the office of the director of National Intelligence to implement what we now call diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. So DNi director of national intelligence Dennis Blair signed this. And at the same time, then CIA director Leon Panetta issued a paper document, which I got ahold of at one point, that said, we are. We are in the. We are going to. At CIA. We at CIA are going to increase the number of minorities at CIA from 24% to 30% by 2012. Why? Because we want CIA to look like America. Look like America. So this was a political goal that was demographically oriented. So even more importantly than this, in 2011. In August of 2011, Obama issued an executive order which applied to the entire federal government, and it pushed the hiring, promotion, and better assignments of people who he liked, basically privileged demographic groups.

Per the Obama administration, that would be minorities, women, LGBTQ people, and eventually people with disabilities. So that would not include people who were healthy, male, heterosexual, and of european origin. So Obama now is pushing this in. This 2011 executive order has got teeth. So you're creating now diversity offices within the federal government. And these offices are told to make and implement and enforce the policies consistent with the executive order within. Within the agencies, agencies themselves. And these, in fact, had teeth. So you've got now agency heads paying attention to what the president says. We're giving authority to the diversity offices, and you're beginning to make changes in the way the agencies do business policy wise. You're having cultural changes in the, you know, in little ways, John Brennan would begin to wear a rainbow lanyard. You know, Lanyard. You know, you recall what lanyards are in the intelligence business. So these are little chains or ropes or things of that sort around your neck that hold your identification documents. Right? So the lanyard, now, the thing around the neck was now a yemenite, a rainbow one, basically an appeal to the lgbtq people at CIA.

Small yes, but indicative of a policy. And what Brennan also did was make specific policy changes that rewarded the hiring and promotion and awarding to women. So you began to have a purposeful alteration in the demography of the intelligence workforce. So it's reached the point now where women who had been relatively small share of CIA workforce in the fifties, sixties, seventies, now a slight majority. Majority. So slightly over 50%. Last time I last figures, I saw, slightly more than 50% CIA employees are women, but the higher. But the preferences continue. So director Burns is still preferentially hiring, hiring women. Okay, so. So what's the purpose of all this? The purpose here now is to, you know, again, change the demography, but also change the organizational cultures. And Clapper, Jim Clapper, who was a key part of the Obama team, implementers within the IC, the intelligence community. So Clapper was the director of national intelligence, the DNI, 2010 to 2017. So most of the Obama period. And Brennan, as I say, the last four years, both of them made pretty clear that they wanted to change the organizational culture, one of different ways of looking, thinking about things.

And Brennan says in his book specifically, he was actually a career CIA officer, retired, and then went to work for Obama, who then appointed him back at CIA. Brennan says in his memoir, I didn't like CIA culture, and as I became more senior, I made a determined effort to change this organizational culture. And what he also did was say that he wanted people, employees, current employees, to be active in defending the progress, his term progress, that he had made in DEI policies. So you might think, gee, this is an intelligence service. This has national security implications. It's a part of the security establishment. Why are they worried about diversity policies? Well, because it turned out that this was what the president wanted. So they were, in fact, pushing this very, very, very hard. And Brennan said to a Wall Street Journal reporter who interviewed him a few days before he left office in January of 2017, one of these usual, it's the end of your time in office. What are your great accomplishments? He said, well, it was Dei policies. So I think in addition to specific statements like that, there's lots of, of other evidence that, in fact, what was really driving these people in important ways was altering the workforce.

Altering the workforce. This was particularly relevant in the Obama years at CIA and the Odni. The other agencies were slower in coming around to this so fast. So you've got made a major effort, eight year effort, to change the way the workforce is going. And you have done several things. Two important ones, you've altered the demography of the workforce. You've hired a lot of people who have both political ideal or ideological, depending perspective interests here. They agree with you. And secondly, you've got a number of people who are materially benefiting from DEI policies. So time is passing. It's 2014, 1516. You're into early 2016, mid 2016. All the polls are showing that Hillary Clinton going to be the next president. That's wonderful because we all know she's going to continue the policies of President Obama. All right, well, in the summer, summer of 2016, this upstart fellow from New York, Donald Trump, looks like he might actually be a viable candidate. Not really, but you got to be careful here. He might actually be a threat. A threat to what? A threat to DEI policies on ideological grounds, on material interest grounds. So in August of 2016, in fact, the 5 August of 2016, you had the first of the big politicization episodes.

So this is when Michael Morell, who was then fairly recently retired as the deputy CIA director, wrote an op ed piece in the New York Times in which he said, roughly, my intelligence experience tells me that Hillary Clinton will be a better president than Donald Trump. So what he did was violate the longstanding norm of aversion of former intelligence officers to partisan politics. And he made a claim that was factually incorrect on two grounds. One, he didn't do domestic anything. His intelligence career was entirely foreign oriented, not the United States. And he also did not recommend policy to anybody, including recommendations on voting. So it was this event that triggered my question, whoa, you know, slap in the face. What in the world is. What in the world is going on, going on here? So what happened then was that opened. That opened the floodgates, and you began to have more formers. First again, former intelligence officers known as formers. So Mike Hayden very quickly was involved in this. Hayden, retired Air Force general, who had been the director at CIA for a while and at a national security agency as well. And eventually, there were several dozen of these people.

And the leaks started in the fall of 2016 and continued throughout the Trump presidency.

And we keep talking about CIA, but this eventually bled into all intelligence organizations.

Yeah. So that's a good point. I think the. And I looked at this researching on the book, where did this happen? Again, one of my three big questions in the early days, it was at the ODNI and at CIA.

What was the odni?

ODNi, the office of the director of National Intelligence. So this is, this is the relatively small administrative organization that was directly controlled by Jim Clapper, the DNI.

So for the audience, because not everybody understands the structure here, the DNI is in charge of is an umbrella over all intelligence organizations, correct?

Yeah.

NSA falls under it. Ciataine, dia, does FBI fall under that?

Only the counterintelligence partner intelligence part of it. So to back up in here for background, and good to say this, for a long time, the DCI, the director of central intelligence, supposedly was not just the director of CIA, but was the director of the whole community. Well, basically that didn't happen. No president ever gave the DCI that authority. And the other agencies said, yeah. Who are you, anyway? I work for my secretary or whoever it might be. So the 2004 Reform act, that was a legacy of the 911 episode. So Congress, finally, they do reform activities every once in a while, and they did it in 2004. So they created a new organization called, or a new entity called the DNI, the director of National Intelligence, who would have an administrative office working for him, or the ODNI, the office of the director of National Intelligence. The ODNI and the DNI had largely coordinating responsibilities, a lot of paperwork requirements levied from Congress and so on. And the DNI could issue some directives that had relatively little additional power. There was some additional power in terms of policies like DEi diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

And there also were, in the 2004 Reform act, there were some other elements that would give the DNI a little bit of authority to reprogram money, for example, which is important for bureaucrats. So the key, the two, in this early period, the two organizations that were primarily affected, where the ODNI, the organization that Clapper, the DNI could specifically influence, and CIA, which was directly under John Brennan's purview. I looked at the other agencies and find relatively little effect at DI, at the Defense Intelligence Agency, at some of the other big ones, and nothing really in the military. So that now has changed. That now has changed a lot. So what happened? So you have an active period where the Obama activists, Obama generated activists are going after Trump inexplicably, in my mind, President Trump did essentially nothing about this. He would tweet nasty things about John Brennan every once in a while, and he'd kind of snort and yell at them, talk names every once in a while. But in terms of specific administrative action to reverse the things that Obama had done, he did virtually nothing. So you get then to, to the fast forward here, and we're skipping a lot that I hope we'll come back to.

But you get to 2021, and President Biden now has spent eight years in the Obama White House, and he's back in the arena of diversity, equity, inclusion. But his major executive order on this in June of 21, June of 2021, actually, in my view, expanded the depth, the scope, the intrusiveness of this DEI regime and added an a. So now it's diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. DEIA. And at this point, now we're seeing lots of evidence, FBI, state departments, INR, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, several other agencies, and then the military as well, that the DEI program is now seriously affecting agencies throughout the government, including the whole intelligence community. I mean.

The current DEI agenda has proven to be extremely effective. Do you honestly believe that the current POTUS is cognitively able to put this together, or is somebody else behind that?

Well, he, I mean, I think he's bought into, into it. He's got a whole staff of people who bought into this. They were, you know, large numbers of people in the Biden White House were in the, in the Obama White House. So he doesn't write his executive orders himself anyway, does he? No, he's got staff to do this, but I see no reason not to think that he has bought into this general agenda, even if he's not a marxist himself. He's an old style retail politician. But he also, you know, finger to the wind. He knows which way the wind's blowing within the Democratic Party. And it's, you know, it's heavily in the, it's heavily in the Obama direction. So he's going along with it with that program. Again, I don't see, you know, there's no internationalist conspiracy behind the, behind the, I mean, I don't have any doubt that Barack Obama still is influential in the White House, but, you know, that's not a that's not a, you know, a big international conspiracy.

Yeah, I don't think so either. I just, it's, it's been very effective.

Oh, yeah, so it has.

More effective than anything we've seen.

Well, he's changed. Think back to the goal, you know, since October 2008, I'm going to transform the country. And he's been able, he, and then his, you know, his compatriots and his white, his White House and now what some people are calling the third Obama term, they've been very effective. Thinking about this from their perspective, they've been very effective.

So if this started. So the Obama administration had an eight year run at implementing this throughout all of the intelligence community.

Right.

What did the Trump administration do to combat this?

Nothing.

Nothing.

I can't think of a single thing.

So are they complying in the issue.

Or they just, I think Donald Trump was just, you know, you know, the old term, he was AWOL on this. He was not paying attention. He wasn't getting word. I have been told by at least one person who was, you know, knowledgeable on this sort of thing. He said that, you know, some, some knowledgeable people in the IC warned about not paying attention to this and they were ignored. So, so Mister Trump himself, key advisors in the White House and some senior people who Trump appointed didn't do anything. So thinking about the two big positions that I was talking about earlier, the DNI and the CIA director. So for a fair amount of time, Trump's DNI was Dan Coats, who was a former senator from Indiana, had spent time on the Senate Intelligence Committee, knew a fair amount about intelligence. But he told Bob Woodward in one of these interviews, he said, well, you know, it's a tough job here being the DNI, and I needed to focus on important things. So if I remember the quote, the quote about right, he said, what I decided to do is be mister outside, quote unquote, mister outside, and I will worry about intelligence interactions with the White House, with the Congress and so on.

And I will leave the internal running of the ODNI and then the IC as a whole to misses inside, quote unquote. Who was sue Gordon? Sue Gordon was a career CIA officer who was a compatriot of John Brennan. So the Brennan policies continued internally at, within the ODNI. So Coates was not concerned about this at CIA. You had, you had first an outsider who was there for a year and then what went to the State Department. And then for the last three, almost three years of the Trump administration, you had, Gina Haspel as the CIA director. Haspel was a career CIA operations officer. Well, the last person in the world you would expect to do radical change CIA as a career CIA officer. And she didn't, she didn't do anything to alter, to alter this. The diversity office of stayed. They moved down a level. So they were originally put in. So there's a big one, CIA level. Then there were some subordinate ones for the directorates, the five directorates of CIA. And then I understand they were even moved down one level before that. So that would be the divisions within the directorate of operations and the analytic offices within the analysis directorate, for example.

And Haspel issued a modification and update of what Brennan had done. Remember, I talked about a number of policies. There were specific things done as well as policy documents. Well, there were strategies implemented at both CIA and at the Odni. And Haspel updated the DEI strategy in ways that expanded the number of demographic groups who were favored. So she added people who identify as neurodiversity. So this is a new, this was in the Trump year. So you're adding to the number of people you want to specifically provide benefits to. So people who are neurodiverse would be people who have dyslexia, for example. So, you know, many of them, many of them, most of them are functional in a number of, of ways. But dyslexia, for example, is normally considered to be a bit of a disability. So you'd prefer most people, and they would prefer not to be dyslexic if they had a choice. But this became a group that would be favored for hiring and promotion and so on to add to the other favored groups.

Has this become the number one priority of the intelligence community?

Sure looks like it to me. I mean, you know, you see, well, gee, at least at the work, the traditional work level, I mean, director Burns will say, well, you know, we really need to focus on China and so on. And Haspel said, well, you know, we've been worried about counterterrorism for nearly two decades now. So this was when, 2019, roughly. We need to shift back to doing traditional espionage and other things related to great power competitions. Okay? So, yes, you're focused externally on real work, but you're also really, really, really concerned about this issue of your workforce, getting the right kind of workforce, encouraging, pandering, if you will, to specific favored demographic groups, identifying people as members of groups, not as individuals. I don't care who you are as a human being. I don't want to hear your background. I can look at you and I can tell you are part, you are male from european heritage. That's your identity. So that's what they're doing now. And that's brand spanking new in terms of the traditional way in which the intelligence community worked or the federal government worked. And it's right out of Marxism.

Right. So cultural Marxism, you don't care about people. You care about, about identities that are group in nature, remember? So you're not talking about capitalists and workers anymore. You're talking about different adversary groups within the five social categories I was talking about. So this is what makes Dei policies right out of, right out of cultural Marxism.

What could have the last administration done to combat this? I mean, it sounds like this goes well.

You get rid of. Well, you.

Yeah, if they, because if I. We talked about two different ways they're doing this. And you said from the top down or from the bottom up, basically. Correct. And we are in a scenario where it went from the bottom up.

Well, this was, this was the traditional definitions of politicization. So what they arguably, arguably what's happened in the last few years is another variety.

I mean, they, they completely restructured the.

Entire workforce on purpose.

To where? The, the ground level. Who was they hired? Ground level employees, you know, brand new employees, mass numbers. And now they're starting to advance and advance and advance.

They're into senior positions by now. The immediate post 2000, post 911 group. Now they're well into management.

So we have management, middle management and workforce, all, all with similar lines.

They've been selected from demographically and they have been acculturated through policies. And so you now have large numbers of people who have bought this view. And again, they believe it on two grounds. One, politically or ideologically. I tend to think in this case, the two terms are similar, but they're not identical. But call it political or political or ideological. If you're a marxist, then it's ideological. If you're thinking that Dei policies really are designed to help specific groups of people, then it'd be political. And then another area is interest. So you get large numbers of people who are benefiting materially from this. They're getting differentially favorable promotions, differentially preferential awards, differentially preferential assignments. So ideational ideological interests on the one hand, material interests on the other, and they work together to say Dei Deiade. Now, policies are really good.

What does the a stand for?

The a for accessibility. Accessibility.

I mean, is this, is this a, is this a mission complete scenario?

Um, no.

And if it's infiltrated every level we're.

Talking because it hasn't all away. Cause there's still pretty clearly some people who are, who haven't all the way bought the program.

Who hasn't? What organization?

Well, it's not organization. It's people within them. So I, you know, I talk with a number of people who are working in government now, as well as a lot of farmers. And the people who are still in government tell me pretty clearly they're keeping their heads down. The people who in government who don't like this. And there are some, they keep their heads down. So there's, they're saying, you know, I, it's now in the Biden years, it's reached the point now where DEi policies and Obama were mandates for management. Now in the Biden years, add the a, you've now added DEi requirements to annual performance appraisals, the old par, remember at CIA? So your performance appraisal now at many of these agencies, if not all of them, now says you're an active participant in DEi.

Are you serious?

I am absolutely serious. So you've still got, though I am told by people who are still there, you've still got people who think this is really a bad idea for political reasons and also performance reasons. And maybe we can talk about how this affects, how this affects operational performance. But every one of these people who I talk to is saying, I can't fight it. It's an utter losing situation to, to fight it. So you do one of two things. You shut up and don't say anything. Or in the words of another very senior guy who not happy with this, you choose your close friends carefully. In other words, you make sure you're not talking to people who are part of the, the program. So what is this doing? I mean, this is dividing the workforce, isn't it? So this is one of many ways that the workforce is being divided. There's actually, actually have been purposeful divisions. So you're creating now within the government as a whole, including in the IC, you've got groups that have different names, but I'll use one of them, employee resource groups. So these are groups created within the organizations based on demographic characteristics.

So you get the women's group, you've got the latino group, you get the LGBTQ group, you've got the asian american group. There's a veterans group. There are about a dozen of these things. So the purpose of these ostensibly is to create safe spaces where people whose identity, demographic identity, can be supported and so on. But in fact, what these clearly have become are places in which grievances are identified and exacerbated. And again, if you think of this from a marxian standpoint, absolutely standard stuff. Cultural Marxism. You're generating divisions. The oppressor, the oppressor, white male of european background, is after you, lgbt people or Latinos or whoever. And so you then can be here in a situation where you can defend yourselves against the oppressors. So this kind of thing now is fully, fully embedded in the federal government.

What else do you see this is bled into outside of intelligence organizations?

It's all through the government.

That's, you know, I've talked about this several times, and I'm just curious what your thoughts are. And it's just a. It's not fact. It's just what I think. And, you know, we saw the. We saw law enforcement across the country broken up from the defund the police movement.

Right, right.

We saw they have demoralized police. They've broken them up. It started with the defund the police movement.

A lot of police officers are quitting or going someplace else.

I mean, in some of these places, it's a ghost town now, and.

They.

Can'T recruit it fast enough. Then we saw the military. You know, it was the forced vaccinations that bled off into the law enforcement community as well. We're actually seeing it in the medical field now with. Do you think. Because I. Especially with law enforcement, I think there was obviously. I mean, what you're saying, there's obviously an agenda to bring in a new guard. Correct. And so to kind of speed that train up on some of these other aspects of government, like law enforcement, the military, do you think that possibly the defund the police movement and the forced vaccinations in the military and in medical field, in a lot of fields, do you think that was more than just, we want everybody to get vaccinated. Do you think that was more than just, you know, the defund the police movement that was, you know, was there another. Was there a deeper agenda than what it appeared to be on the surface, to amplify this, to get the old guard, get them to quit and bring in the new guard with that mindset?

Well, my view on this, and again, this, you know, this would be my judgment, your opinion, if you will, the defund police at the local level. So in Seattle and Portland, Oregon, a number of other places. So this is the marxian view. You want to eliminate police. So listen to Angela Davis, the Communist Party USA member, you know, retired professor at the University of California system. She was a vice presidential candidate of the CPUSA in 70 619 80. CPUSA CP, Communist Party of the USA. So she and the particularly black activists, given the amount, number of black people who were in prisons, these people basically are saying we should eliminate prisons. So this is heavily coming from a, the Communist Party marxist perspective. There's a big racial element to it and it's got Soros money and so on. That's one thing in my mind. The vaccine's a different one, and I have a different view than a number of people on that. My father was a medical doctor who was in the public health arena. He liked to vaccinations because they help keep people alive. And I got a number of vaccinations as a kid, and I spent time in India and happily never got, never got seriously ill.

And I think vaccinations were a goodly part of that. So I see that.

I just want to be clear. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to get your stance on vaccinations. I'm not trying to say vaccinations don't work. I'm not trying to say they do work.

Are they part of a conspiracy? Okay, so I don't. My view is that probably the vaccine situation is different than defund police. And the kind of program that we've just been talking about going back to Obama in 2008, long preceded the COVID vaccination. Vaccination issue.

I guess what I'm kind of trying to say is never good, a good. Never let a, you know the old saying, never let a good crisis go to waste.

Oh, yeah.

And so we've seen demoralization of military.

Yeah.

In a long line of trends, too. I mean, let's talk about, you know, there's been a trend. Demoralize the war fighter. We started trying people that were obviously innocent for war crimes. Eddie Gallagher's wonde, they pinned him for killing an ISIS fighter, which he did not kill, which demoralizes the entire SEAL team special operations community. And that's just one example.

Okay, so I take your point. I would make a different argument. So I know the number of people who were let go from the military. There was some concern there. I think a bigger issue in terms of demoralization and something that clearly had an ideological agenda to it was a stand down. In early 2021, Sec def. Secretary of Defense Austin ordered to give training and so on to everyone in the Defense Department, military and civilian, to try and keep them from being radical right wing terrorists of the January 6 group. And I think we know now I mean, the Defense Department hired the, what was it? I guess it was Ida. The Institute for Defense Analyzes said, do a service. So this is one of the federally funded research and development centers in the Washington area. These are not for profit, technically capable organizations that do research for the government, including a lot for the Defense Department. So Ida did a number of surveys and looked at the Defense Department broadly, had access to the Defense Department, said, hey, do you have a right wing terrorist problem in the Defense Department? And they said, no, we don't.

So they said no, there's nothing special here outside of what might exist in the country as a whole. Well, a report was issued, unclassified report was issued to the Defense Department, which sat on it for, don't quote me on this, but it seems about a year before they finally released it. So you've got a pretty clear ideological agenda coming from the Pentagon. Now Biden's, Biden's executive suite at the Pentagon, where you're injecting politics directly into the management of the defense Department, that I think is a serious problem to me. That's a much bigger deal than the vaccines. And I'm told this is wandering away from the intelligence community here, but I'm told by a fellow I've gotten to know reasonably well, serving us army officer at the moment. He said that even, even in the intelligence part of the army, that partisan domestic american politics are spoken openly on a regular basis and in business offices. So it's part of the day to day business and it's very, very strongly pro, pro Biden. So this, and as you recall from both your intelligence and military perspectives, in the old days that was absolutely forbidden. You just didn't do that.

Yeah.

It'S common now and in fact it's common at CIA too and at the ODNI. And I suspect probably I've got reports from both of those places and I suspect it's common elsewhere too. So the old prohibition against partisan talk in the office is gone, just doesn't exist anymore. It's part of the cultural transformation. So my twelve years at CIA, by comparison, in the 19, basically the decade of the 1980s, that was when the old norms held. And we were told in no uncertain terms, gee, we understand you're reasonably bright people, everybody here, you're educated, you've got political views, but you will leave them at home. And so in my twelve years I knew the personal political views of a grand total of one of my colleagues, and this was a fellow who I got to be very good friends with and we talked politics on the weekend, not at work.

Yeah.

And that is just utterly gone now.

John, let's take a quick break. When we come back, maybe we can talk a little bit about how we start to reverse this, if that's even possible. Thank you for listening to the Shawn Ryan show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Shawn Ryan show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, John, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to cover. How do we fix this? What can we do? But before we do, I missed a couple of points, and one of them being, how did the press get involved? So I'd like to, I'd like to talk to how did the press kind of amplify what's going on here?

Okay. That's an important point and an unusual one. So historically, the press has done what the press supposed to do, take a look at intelligence issues, ask questions. And press, generally speaking, has been critical of us intelligence operations. But in the, the Trump years, there was a highly unusual three part, actually alliance between the activist formers in particular, along with the leakers, with the press, and then also to the House Intelligence committee, which also had oversight responsibilities, of course. So the nature of the issue with the press was that the press saw a, this is the mainstream press. So here we're talking New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, plenty of other newspapers, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, that group. So that, that part of the mainstream left of center press. So we're not talking Fox here. We're not talking Wall Street Journal, although the Wall Street Journal used leakers here, too. But the mainstream liberal press saw allies in the formers, and they amplified the messages that the formers were giving to them. And they helped create a situation in which the formers had credibility to talk about all kinds of things, domestic politics, things that were really outside of their normal bailiwick.

Why? Because these people were seen as being credible, were seen as being reasonable and objective critics of Donald Trump. So, in essence, you had an alliance formed between these people. And one of the key, the key things that the press did was, again, amplify the credibility of intelligence officers, former intelligence officers. So you should listen to these people because they were in intelligence, man.

You know, I mean, it's, you would think, how do you, you would think that just that the press wouldn't have to amplify, you know, the credibility of an intelligence officer.

Well, you would, but again, they were in political alliance.

So it was, I understand that. And now, now they've lost all, I can't say all credibility. But, I mean, we're going to get a bunch of comments on this show because we're both former agency. So many people no longer trust any, any government, any government entity, let alone intelligence agencies, you know.

Yes. And the polling results are showing that, you know, how do you, we'll get.

Into how you rebuild that trust. But, I mean, it's, it's broken.

Yeah. But the point here, I think between, again, the mainstream press and the allies, Washington, that this was a temporary alliance of convenience to go after one person, Donald Trump. But again, even more unusual was the hipsy, the House Intelligence committee doings where Representative Schiff, Adam Schiff, the chairman of the committee, was actively involved here, too. So he was involved in supporting and encouraging through a staffer, the whistleblower who led to Trump's first impeachment in 2019. And we've just learned recently that would be in, what, April of 2024, that national public radio had Adam Schiff on about 25 times getting his take on issues including Trump. And so then this was a way then for Schiff to provide to NPR a major critic of Trump, what his view, what the Democratic Party's view was. And so this was then amplified. So it was a huge three part alliance working together, not in any conspiracy of somebody else, but rather these groups were seeing mutual advantage. So the press, I would argue, took advantage of the intelligence officers to get at a politician they didn't like. An intelligence officer as opposed to Trump used the press because the press then gave them more venues to go after Trump.

So they had airtime on the, on the, on the partisan networks. They had ample opportunity to write op eds in the Washington Post and the New York Times. So the three mutually advance, mutually advantageous.

So the three opponents are intelligence agencies, press and formers.

No, I would argue, I would argue the three key points were formers with a little bit of help from the, from the serving people doing, leaking the mainstream press and the House intelligence committee.

Oh, good.

In the form of Adam Schiff.

Okay.

And as you recall, Adam Schiff was Speaker Pelosi's manager on Trump's first trial in the Senate, which I think was a horrible decision. Here you have the chair of the House intelligence committee, supposedly as apolitical as the House can possibly, and yet he was charged with running the prosecution against Donald Trump. I think it was a serious mistake on her part. So huge alliance here. This is, you know, largely the House part is gone. You have a situation in which a lot of the formers who were active during this, you know, the four, four and a half years of the Trump period, a lot of them are either getting old or have been rendered largely uncredible. And I'll talk about Michael Morell in the case of the laptop 51. But Mike Hayden has been accused of advocating the assassination of Senator Turveydeh Turbeville, for example. I mean, a lot of these people have shot their credibility, but there are plenty more where they came from. So an open question is, who's going to replace them?

Do you think that they are appointed or does this.

Oh, no, no. This is volunteer. And this is, you know, this is a minor. This is a, you know, a community of people who have similar interests.

I guess what I'm saying is for the conspiracy types, is this all orchestrated from somebody way up or just, is it just happening to work out this way? All the pieces are in place, but nobody's really controlling. People are just.

Yeah, because you've got, you've got some general political trends. So, I mean, this issue of conspiracy came up actually more than once with the formers because you could talk to them and you knew who used to be in intelligence and is now talking on CNN. So you ask and say, well, are you guys in cahoots? And a couple of them said, well, no, of course not. We just come from the same place in the world. We just have similar kinds of views, but they can actually collaborate in some important respects. So as I mentioned, some of them talk to former intelligence people in government spaces. So people like John Brennan, people like John McLaughlin, former deputy director of central intelligence and so on. These people retain clearances and retain green badges. So this is a, you know, inside the Beltway term, the Green badge is a badge. That means that you got all the security clearances, but you're a contractor, you're an advisory sort as opposed to a federal employee who gets a check every two weeks. But the Green badgers can go into a federal building and intelligence community building anywhere, basically anywhere, anytime they want.

So they can sit down with currently serving intelligence officers and talk intelligence stuff. So a leaker can talk with a John Brennan or a McLaughlin or some other in a government space knowing that the information is going to get out. But since they're talking to a cleared person in a government space, they can rationalize that they're not leaking at all. So this is a neat little arrangement that the ongoing clearances arrangement has.

Interesting. Let's move into the laptop.

Okay, so what I call a laptop 51 case was a situation in which two prominent former intelligence officers, so Michael Morrell, who I mentioned, and Mark Polymeropoulos, who was a senior operations officer, were apparently approached by a Biden campaign officer who said, in this case, Antony Blinken, now the secretary of state. So according to Morrell's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in the spring of 2023, that's what I'm about to tell you, Blinken said, we need help, intelligence help. Remember, the press had built up the credibility of intelligence officers. These people know everything about everything and can be believed in your heart of hearts. So these people now have credibility. Blinken says, we need help. We need help with this problem. The problem was that Hunter Biden, the president's son, the presidential candidate's son, at that point, his laptop computer had been left at a repair shop. The repair owner set it to the FBI. The FBI verified that the files on the computer were actually hunters. And the files gave credible support to a hypothesis, at least, that both Hunter and his father Joe were corrupt in terms of taking money, basically influence peddling with Ukraine, with China, and maybe some other countries.

All right, so the campaign now says this is a potential October surprise, a killer. We cannot have this come out and damage the purported integrity of candidate Joe Biden. So Lincoln says, we need intelligence help. We need to deflect this story in a way that would exonerate the president and not damage his election prospects. Okay, so morale and Paula monopolists write up a short little letter that says, this laptop story has all the hallmarks, all the hallmarks of. Of russian disinformation. So, as we talked earlier on, the Russians have done all sorts of disinformation kinds of things, including forgeries and so on. So you're using the credibility that these people had built up over time, courtesy of the press, to say, it looks like this might be a russian operation having nothing to do with Hunter, nothing to do with Joe. Okay, so they were very careful in writing this. If you examine this letter and it's online, anybody can find it. It does not say explicitly that this was russian disinformation. It says, it sort of looks like it is all the hallmarks. Okay, so they knew very well that that was, you know, not the point of this letter.

They knew the point of the letter was to help Joe Biden.

In your opinion, did it have all the hallmarks of russian disinformation?

Probably. Well, I mean, it's conceivable, but it's not likely. I mean, we know that there are, we know the Russians do cyber operation, but we also know now, not at the time, but we know now that the FBI had already checked the computer and had already determined that this surely did look like real, you know, their cyber forensic people had already determined that this was legitimate hunter Biden material, and that's not been challenged at this point. So you're trying to mislead voters using intelligence credentials as a rationale for it, knowing full well that the Russians were not behind it. Okay, so these two go to a number of former intelligence officers and ask for their signatures on this, this open letter. So among the back up, a step among the many things that the press had done over the previous four years had been to publish a series of open letters. Open letters usually were published in Politico, a politically oriented newspaper based in Washington, and then were spread to the other, to the other mainline press organizations. And that's the way it worked this time here, too. So you get this short letter. It sort of looks like the Russians were in.

You get 51 former intelligence officers to sign it. You look at that list, a lot of senior people. There were like half a dozen, five, I think, former CIA officials, a lot of very senior people. So this is a credible group of people. Right. So you're a voter. Gee whiz, these really sharp people are saying it looks like Russian. So I'm, hey, I'm not going to worry about Joe Biden. Okay, so how do we, you know, how do we know that this was, this was basically a sham? Basically, this was a political operation. It was an information operation by Morel and Paolo Meropoulos. Well, Morrell told the House judiciary committee that, and I can tell you, not commonly published thus far anyway, that one of the people who was approached told me that the pitch received specifically was, we want your signature to help Joe Biden, not. Not for your intelligence expertise. So the pitch was explicitly political. Okay. So now morale has had his credibility shot. I think pretty clearly he's now out of the partisan limelight, at least for the moment. He does have his own podcast, which is credible, and he's staying out of partisan politics.

So I have no grievance against what he's doing on a day to day basis here in 2024. But he was the epitome. This, I think, was an epitome now well documented of what was wrong with political activism by former intelligence officers. Once again, let me answer.

What he's doing today is credible.

Pardon me?

Did you say what he's doing today is credible?

In the sense that he's doing credible podcasts. He's doing things about, about intelligence that are not domestically partisan in nature.

Do you think he's building that to.

Well, he might. He might. My guess is he's still got a number of years to live. He hopes he's trying to do something that's reasonable and is within his area of expertise. Now, I guarantee you that if he begins to be partisan again, then there are people who will go after him. So he probably knows that at this point, and it's not just me, there'll be others who do that. So he is one of, again, Hayden talking about Tuberville's death and so on. I mean, there are a lot of people who just really shot themselves in the proverbial foot. John Brennan wrote tweets that are just outrageous. And I think his credibility is pretty minimal, too. So I expect there will be resurgence, but some of the 2016, 2021 people will not because they're tired, old, and damaged goods.

What about mark tabs on him?

I do. He is on the, he's on Twitter x, and I follow him every once in a while. He wrote one slightly, slightly partisan thing several months ago, but I haven't seen anything. I haven't seen anything recently, man. You know, so the issue from my standpoint, and I think this is a key point, and thinking back to the definition of politicization from the beginning, it's intelligence officers injecting or using intelligence in a partisan way. So a core problem, and this is what Morel started, was using his intelligence background to rationalize a partisan political view that is, again, historically abnormal from a normative standpoint, and it's also dysfunctional. So if you have, you have, you know, have people who have partisan views but keep them to themselves, that's fine. If they talk publicly, but they talk about things that are not related to partisan politics, that's okay, too, man.

But once you spread purposeful disinformation to influence an election, how could you ever be trusted again?

Well, exactly. So that's why I think he's, he's staying within an area in which he's established a little bit of credibility. But I think Morrell is wise to not venture again into what he started. Brennan has stayed very quiet, too. He's just not on Twitter x anymore. He was an active participant for a long time, he says in his memoir. It's kind of funny. He says, wow, you know, I really didn't want to get onto Twitter, but Trump made me do it because Trump made me do it because I couldn't leave the Twitter sphere to Trump. I had to respond to him. So it's all Trump's fault. So you regret it. But then that's why I did it. But at least for the moment, and he also says in his memoir that he had some real issues with personal discipline. But at least for the moment, he's been quiet on this front. Will he stay? We'll see. We'll see. But my guess is that if he comes back, there'll be a number of people who will remind the citizenry about some of the outrageous things that he said during the Trump years.

How is this kind of stuff affecting operations within the intelligence world?

Okay, so this is a, this is an important issue, right? Intelligence, as you well know, is part of the national security establishment. You want your intelligence people to perform well. They help senior people make better decisions if intelligence works. Right. And they help keep the country secure. Okay, so how does this, how does this affect, again, going back to Obama years, my assertion that the real change occurred at that point, in the beginning of the Obama Dei policies, the rationale was that Dei policies changed hiring, promotion, award, assignments basis. So at least in these four areas, and they were done on a policy basis, that these were ethically good, that this was a morally good thing to do to help disadvantaged people and so on. So the initial argument was ethical in nature. It was political. Fair enough. People could agree or disagree on that. In roughly 20, 12, 13 period, people began to say, you know, these preferences are causing operational problems when you're hiring favored demographic groups but not qualified white men, and it's causing demographic problems. So these are mainly accusations. But about that same time, so call it 2013, call it roughly the beginning of Obama's second term.

Jim Clapper of the DNI mainly. But then also Brennan, to some degree, too, began to add another claim. And that claim was that DeI policies improve the operational performance of the intelligence community. So I've been in the, you know, as you introduced me earlier on, been in the academic world and studying intelligence and teaching on it and so on. So I kind of scratched my head and said, gee, if this is the case, then where's the evidence? Let me see some evidence. So I began to look at this and uncharacteristically for the intelligence business, whereas, you know, assertions, assessments are supposed to be backed by evidence, right? Well, there wasn't any. So I wrote eventually a paper that was published in December of 2021 that said, I cannot find any evidence to support that claim. That claim that DEI improves the performance. So my project here was to assess the claim as opposed to looking at the bigger picture of whether DEI affects performance in any other ways. Okay. So I got a lot of reaction from this. So the DEI proponents, of course, didn't like it. It was not politically correct. And I actually had four representatives of the Odni complain about that article to my journal editor, basically threatening him.

So kind of interesting what kind of threat you're threatening in the sense that you're, you're, we're going to consider your journal not to be a reputable intelligence journal anymore. So not tangible threats. Not tangible threats in terms of money or physical violence or anything of that sort. But they were, they were, it was implied. So the, the editor told me this. Okay. So I also got a lot of responses from people who said, yeah, you're right, it's not helping out. And the point you made at the end of this, which was that, gee, we ought to look at the alternative, which is the claim that the DEI policies are damaging the performance of intelligence. So a lot of people got in touch with me, several dozen got in touch with me and said, you should do this next project. And let me tell you some of these problems. So I now have a significant body of evidence on this score, and I will be writing up what I have within the next couple of months. And my expectation at this point is that the argument is going to be that Dei substantially damages operational performance.

So I'm still working on it. So I'll probably perhaps leave off some of the details here. But these run from budgetary issues to hiring issues to performance in the field issues. And I haven't found any anecdotes or anything that says that Dei does a good job. So if I could put a little plug out to the world here. I make a point of never asking serving intelligence officers questions like this, but I will take information they give me if they offer it. And I do ask former intelligence people if they've got anecdotes to give. So if any of your folks have any evidence of relevance to me, please get in touch with me. And I'm not just looking for negative evidence. What I want to do is be methodologically objective here. So I'm looking for evidence related to whether DeI affects operational performance. So if you've got evidence that DEi improves performance, I'd like to have it.

Where would they get in touch with you at?

Well, my email address. The email address, current email address, it's still at Georgetown. I'm in the process of getting canceled out I think there. But jag 411 at georgetown.edu, something tells.

Me you're going to get a lot of mail, but, and I hope you do.

So anyway, that will come out with that. And my guess is that the evidence that I get will probably, probably not changed dramatically. So I suspect that this will be another controversial article.

Yeah, I would.

So I'll pad, I'll send it to you when it comes out.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, moving into 2024, you know, we're about halfway done. We got an election this year. What are we going to see?

Okay. My expectation, write it in the book, but, you know, set it in another four or two. And I think, actually, I feel more strongly now than I did when I finished, when I put that to bed, my guess is that we will see a significant, significant resumption of the political activity in 2024. So why do I say that the motives that I mentioned are as strong or stronger? So you recall, I mentioned two basic motives, political, ideological, and then an interest based one. So a lot of people who benefit from Dei policies, who will not want to see them reversed. Well, if Trump is a viable candidate and at this stage of game, the polling polls are showing that he's going to be competitive. If, in fact, he becomes the republican nominee in July of 2024, my guess is that we'll begin to see leaks and a new generation of activism. So again, as I said, the activism started in 2016 because people worried about what Trump might do. And then, of course, he turned out to be not much of a tangible threat at all. Well, it's pretty clear now that some of the advisers of the Trump campaign are well aware of President Trump's deficiencies.

I use that. That's not a term that I think is not being used. So he was, again, not really paying attention in the management of the personnel of the federal government. People who were close to him, I'm told, are now well aware of that. They're talking about that publicly. So this is not all inside information, although I know a little bit that's not public, but clearly it's public statements are. The campaign recognizes that there were deficiencies here. So the activists, or, excuse me, the former activists, the people who were worried that there might be a reversal, who worried in 2016 there might be a reversal, have more reason to be concerned this year because some of Trump's advisors made it pretty clear they're going to change things if they have a chance. So my guess is new generation of farmers, largely, maybe some of the old timers, but the leakers will come back. So we had a big surge in leaks in 2016 to 21. None of them were caught and publicly punished. None of them were caught. There was, within the main part of the IC, the one person, certainly not at CIA and Odni, the two activist groups in the first Trump years, there was one young woman who was arrested and punished, a contract employee, former air force linguist at the National Security Agency at their Georgia facility by the name of reality winner, who was then 25 years old, who brought some documents out of NSA that she thought were relevant to the Russia.

Russia is using, using Donald Trump as an asset issue, which was a big one in the early part of the, in fact, not just the early, but later all the way through the Trump year. So she brought some documents out, sent them to news site, the news site, got these documents, sent them to, sent them to the, sent them to NSA and said, are these real reality? Winner was arrested shortly thereafter answering the question. So here was an intelligence officer who used not very good tradecraft. So it turned out that she copied, apparently she copied these documents on machines at the office. And the office left some identifying the machine left some identifying marks. It was easy to figure out who she was. So anyway, she was the one who was caught. She got five years and three months for violating the Espionage act. Nobody at CIA, nobody at the Odni were caught. Nobody. So one of the things I think what I would like to see us do in the leak department is encouragement FBI, justice and whoever else may be involved in here to be thinking about disinformation leaks as not only national Security issue Espionage act issues, but also hatch act issues.

So for some of your viewers, the hatch act of 1939 prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities. When you're doing leaks that are really disinformation and you're doing them for partisan political reasons, that, it seems to me, becomes hatch act material.

I don't know how you reverse this. I mean, if what you're saying is true and these organizations from the bottom up have been infiltrated, where do you even begin?

Well, it's a good question. I mean, we've got, you know, how do you reverse a century worth of, you know, soviet marxist propaganda? Well, it's a long, you know, long haul, long, long process. So it's now embedded. This kind of activism is embedded in the culture. So it's not just the perspective, ideology and material interest, but also there's especially in younger people who've come from universities where the marxian tradition is strong. You've got a culture that says, hey, it's okay. It's appropriate to be activists. Think about Ed Snowden, for example. I have a moral authority to release classified information because I think it's in the public interest. So you have a lot of things moving in the direction of continued politicization. I think it can be addressed, but again, slowly. So among the things you would need to do would be, would be to put in some strong leaders who are bound and determined to reverse this to the extent they can. So there is leadership from the top. So you change policies, but even before that, you rescind the executive orders that are causing the big problems. So the huge one at the moment is Biden's June of 2021 executive order that absolutely needs to go.

You need to get rid of all the DEI offices, the diversity offices and the agencies because these have become, in essence, ideological orthodoxy. Creating and ideological orthodoxy enforcement organizations, so they are now enforced enforcing the DEI agenda. Managers who don't toe the line are punished. So among the bits of information that I've received is that some agencies, now, basically what's happening is that people from some of the privileged demographic groups that get counseled by managers, and most of us who've ever been workers know that you get counseled by bosses and one of your jobs is sometimes to counsel other people constructively. So what's happening is that people who think that they should not have been counseled are going to the DEI offices. The DEI offices, the diversity offices are in some cases overruling line managers and are firing managers for doing this. So in essence, what's happening in some cases. So I have anecdotes here and there. Not the big picture. What's happening in some cases is that the diversity offices are acting the way communist party commissars did in the old Soviet Union, the way party party elements do in communist and chinese businesses, for example.

So line managers work normally most of the time. But if something gets out of line from an ideological orthodoxy standpoint, the diversity office will step in and make a correction. So those need to go. Just go.

Yeah. Yeah. What? I just don't know how you establish credibility again without completely restructuring the entire intelligence.

Well, you can't. I mean, major changes is not a bad idea, but one of the sort of standard and simple. Sounds good, it's easy, but it's too simplistic, is defunditive to defund the FBI, defund the CIA, start all over again and so on. Well, maybe, but I mean, that's a major step. Both of these are important organizations and we need, if the countries are going to be coherent and safe, it needs these organizations to perform well. So my thought is at this point anyway, and I'll keep assessing it and maybe reevaluate at some point. But I think trying to reform is the way to go at the moment. There are some things you can do that would be in addition to this. And let me get, just to mention a couple of them. These would be smaller, but I think are viable and actually are, are administratively relatively easy to do. So, first, if a president says to agencies, I don't like what you're doing, you're giving me bunk. I know some of this stuff is not right. I know there's a political motive behind it. We're going to cut your funding. So the ODNI has, the DNI, the director of national intelligence has a little bit of money reprogramming authority.

So you tell your, you tell your DNI you're the president, you tell the DNI I want you to cut that agency's money for not doing a good job, as I define it. So a second thing you could do, this is administrative. Second thing you could do is reissue executive order 1233, which says you, you recall, is the order that initially was issued by President Reagan in 1981, which gives the responsibilities for the agencies of the IC. It is absolutely dreadfully boring reading. If you want to, you got an insomnia problem, go read executive order 1233. It'll help you. But, and this is online, actually, so you can, you can read it. But you. So, but this has been reissued a couple of times, so you can modify, at the executive order level, you modify missions. So if you've got an agency that is a problem, take missions away from them. Give the missions to somebody else that will get money, and missions will get the attention of bureaucrats. And a third one that would particularly affect CIA, because even though the 2000 Reform act that I mentioned moved the production of the president's daily brief from CIA to the ODNI, CIA people are still mainly responsible for doing it.

Public information is that most of the articles now are still written by CIA people. So if you have ongoing PDB problems of the sort that I mentioned, the COVID story, then what you might do is say, okay, I see you're out of the PDB business. We're moving to the production of the president's daily brief to the White House. So you give us raw reports and we'll establish a small organization within the White House to make the briefings for the president. So that's a major slap in the face at the Odni and again at CIA, too. So that would get their intention. So come back. What are the risks there? Well, I suppose there are some risks. President Nixon actually proposed this for a time, and it sort of occurred during his second term. For a while, Henry Kissinger was the fellow who ran it. But there really has not been a danger of politicizing this kind of activity as done in two other countries. So the British, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the new australian OdNi equivalent do this. They get information from the various agencies and then distill it within the executive office of the prime minister.

In their case. And by all of the accounts that I've seen, this is worked well, and there haven't been politicization problems. But in this case, you could help eliminate the not eliminate. Not eliminate, but reduce presidential concern that there is a bias within the intelligence business. And this is not a. Not a made up concern. Clearly, there's a certain sort of atmospheric concern here, but we know that there are at least some cases in which ongoing intelligence products have been tailored. And again, I would encourage interested viewers to look up online a letter that was written by the analytic ombudsman of the ODNI in January of 21, which is a letter in response to a query from the Senate Intelligence Committee. And in this letter, the incumbent at the time, Barry Zuloff, writes about two episodes, in limited detail, of course, but makes the point clear. Two episodes. In one case, China analysts were accused of withholding relevant information from the White House because allegedly, the China analysts did not want to give President Trump information that they thought would facilitate Trump's policies. Classic politicization. And the second one, different part of the IC, and there were allegations, different time, that this was from Russia House, that this was the Russia operation at CIA.

Again, relatively sketchy public information on this. But the story in the letter was that Russia analysts kept pushing Trump is a dupe of Putin, long after Trump had made it clear he wasn't interested in hearing that. So basically, they were pushing a story at a president just to annoy him. So is the mess. That's my version of the longer explanation there. So to the extent that this kind of thing is being reported a little bit, I think we have reason to think that it's probably occurring a little bit more.

Yeah. Yeah. What about citizens?

Okay, what can they do? So what can citizens do? I think the best thing, I mean, for citizens to do, people who are looking at the press, looking at other podcasts and so on, is to try to understand a little bit more about the intelligence business. Intelligence is a hard thing to understand. There is some reading about it. I've contributed a little bit. A number of other people have done some good work here, too. But learn more about the history, learn about the motives, learn about some of the techniques. We've talked about disinformation. We've talked about press, intelligence, people, connections. We haven't talked too much about the fact that the formers lied on occasion about the proper role of intelligence. If you learn more about what the intelligence business is about, you can better understand when you're being fed a bill of goods. Be skeptical of alliances between the press and intelligence officers. That should not be the case. Should not be the case. Is this easy? No, it's not. I mean, as we were talking earlier, the sophisticated methods here are really substantial. So it's very hard to be fully confident that you've got good defenses against disinformation of this sort.

But if you're aware that you're being attacked from an information standpoint and you're a little bit more skeptical, that can help, man.

It's just, I know you're right, but, you know, the problem for citizens is the time. You know, I mean, yeah, it's so.

I'm not getting through the work day.

Trying to keep up on everything that's going on in the world and in the country, trying to figure out, you know what I mean? It's more homework and it's, it's going to be hard.

I mean, it's, well, it is hard. It's also a responsibility of citizenship. And again, I'm not confident that I can defend myself against all of this. So I'm not suggesting that the perfection is the goal here. You can learn a little bit more, you can be a little bit more defensively oriented, and every little bit, every little bit that helps. But one thing you can do, I think, gotta be easier, and that's to keep an eye out for clear coercion. Coercion, collaboration between intelligence officers and the press. And if you see that, then be skeptical of what's coming out of it.

So when you say that, are you basically, are you saying, are you calling out contributors? You know, former analyst on X, Y and Z news channel? That's what we should be skeptical of.

Well, if it depends on the, depends on the issue you're coming. So what people have done over the years, many years, going back a long time, is talk. Talk analytically and talk professionally. And that is fine. The issue, the problem is when the press gets people like, again, John Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, Morrell and so on, and they are, in essence, pushing a partisan perspective. So what I have tried very hard to do in our discussion is be analytical. So I've not made a point of saying that any one presidential candidate is good, bad or indifferent, have I? I don't think, and that's on purpose. So what I'm trying to do is talk about how intelligence works in the political process and try to, try to be analytical and objective in that sense.

So look out for opinion based stuff.

Yeah. And that, and that's not just, not just from the, from the left. I mean, there's some stuff that's coming from all across the spectrum that is really not close to right. So be careful. Be careful.

Well, John, I appreciate everything. Thank you for all the information you just gave us, the propaganda, what's going on, how to fix it, and is there anything else that we should discuss?

Thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you.

The Rolling Stone Music now podcast gets inside the biggest stories with Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hyatt, movie director James Man Gold. I'd want to turn Bob Dylan into a simple character with a simple thing to unlock that, then makes you go, ah, now I get him. First time I sat down with him, he said, what's this movie about, Jim? It's about a guy who's choking to death in Minnesota and reinvents himself in a brand new place, becomes phenomenally successful, starts to joke to death again and runs away.

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