Shawn Ryan Show - #134 John Gentry - Unpacking the Information War Against the U.S.

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

John A. Gentry is a respected figure in the fields of military service, intelligence analysis, and academia. After earning a degree in political science and international affairs, he served in the United States Army, achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel (LTC). His military career provided him with a robust understanding of global security dynamics and strategic leadership. Following his military service, Gentry transitioned to a role as a CIA analyst, where he evaluated intelligence data and contributed critical insights to national security decisions. His expertise in geopolitical issues made him a valuable asset within the intelligence community, helping to shape assessments on various international threats and foreign policy challenges. Currently, Gentry is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, where he educates students on national security, intelligence analysis, and military strategy. His commitment to mentoring young professionals and fostering interest in public service underscores his dedication to shaping the next generation of leaders in international relations and security studies. He is also the author of the new book "Neutering the CIA," which explores the agency's evolution and future challenges. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://shopify.com/shawn https://preparewithshawn.com https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner John Gentry Links: Author Page - https://www.amazon.com/stores/John-A.-Gentry/author/B001KHXL6M Latest Book - https://www.amazon.com/Neutering-CIA-Intelligence-Long-Term-Consequences-ebook/dp/B0C6WDBBKT Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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for info on kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. John Gentry, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. We have a variety of topics we're gonna talk about here today. Your new book, Neutering the CIA, the polarization of 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 I don't know if I'm missing anything, quite the intro. I don't know if I'm missing anything, quite the intro. Dr. John Gentry, PhD in political science and a BA in history, retired U.S. Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel, duties mainly in intelligence and special operations arenas. Former intelligence analyst at Central Intelligence Agency. You're a 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're talking about some of those on the way here. Frequent public speaker on intelligence issues, former Army Special Forces soldier, and current adjunct professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and teaches for the School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University. Am I missing anything? No. All right. 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 in their propaganda wars?

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 wanna kick this off with talking about propaganda.

So if you could kind of explain, 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 subvert 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. 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- Did you say the Communist Party of the USA? Yes, yes. So this was formed, again, a little over 100 years ago, and still exists. And so if you want to look online, actually you can get a, 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 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 common turn 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 term, but he gave the subversion mission to intelligence. So it continued. So the KGB formed in 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 CIA equivalent of the KGB. in the KGB, roughly the 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 that 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 get a story into India's media. And they hope that we pick it up. Why would we pick up what India? 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 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 in 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. All right, so that has worked very well for the Soviets. 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 Billy Munsenberg'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. Interesting. 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 the universities, so they were pushing materials on the universities.

The Russians were. So yeah, Soviets and now the Russians are doing it too. How are they manipulating our schools today? How are they manipulating our schools today? Well, 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 on their own. To back up and go a little bit different direction, if I might put it, a complimentary way. There was a group of people in the teens and 20s and then in the 1930s, good Marxists, wanted revolution, wanted that good, perfect world that Marx promised, but realized that the economic conflict

that Marx had talked about was not gonna 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 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. We can, if we contribute here, we can do better for ourselves and for our families too. So by the 20s, 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 social means, through societal means. And fast forward a lot of ways. Basically, they were five areas that were targeted

for efforts to again subvert the old Western capitalist way of doing things and help generate the Marxian nirvana, if you will. Five of them. Education, why? You wanna 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, right? Fourth one, fourth one is religion.

So you wanna get rid of, you wanna 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 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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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. Right, so before World War II, 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 40s, 50s, 60s, 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 a hold of some of the real abuses of CIA and FBI and the Army 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 is a good bureaucracy, said we're not gonna do things that are gonna get us into trouble with Congress. So they basically quit doing this. So the malign influence operations are basically being conducted around the world by states that wanna change the system. So you have Norway, for example, that says,

gee, we'd really like you to know about our salmon industry, or, you know, where we've got great hydro power, 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's doing that's good. But that's a fundamentally different thing than what we've been talking about. Hmm.

Man, I would, I don't know. I'm not, I have a feeling the agency has its hands in this, but we'll take it. Well, let's come back to that when we talk about the politicization issue, because 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. You know, and we had discussed the five. as well as nuclear weapons and conquering other countries. You know, and we had discussed the five. I'm surprised, where would social media and cyber operations fall into in those five categories? Well, they would be, these were the old Soviet ones now, right? And so this is the-

This may be a sixth. So well, these would be the ways that you create a turmoil in capitalist society to generate the Marxian revolution. Well, the Russians are not Marxists, are they? Putin, you know, authoritarians, 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 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 wanna degenerate 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 removal of support for Ukraine in the United States. The social media is a key way to do that. The people they're targeting are Republicans. So you remember, 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, began 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 a hundred years. Yeah. They would have some very deep ties into media outlets and writers in the media world, correct? With long standing 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, in the conservative space, why wouldn't they continue to try to manipulate the liberal side? Oh, I think they probably are. I think they are. But the most important thing 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.

I mean, it's- So what they're doing, remember, this is a long. Oh, no, I 100% agree with you. I mean, it's... So, what they're doing, remember, this is a long-time program, right? So, you're dealing with 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 countries that are key players

in the information wars against the U.S. At least. Do these four, the four biggest, do these four, do 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, not public, I mean, 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 they just, it's pretty obvious. So they're doing their own things to damage us, to damage our foreign policies, to damage their, damage US capacities to be a world player and so on. And this gets back to, again,

the Marxists in the United States too. I mean, so 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 coherent guiding force that says you're gonna do this, you're gonna do that, you're gonna 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. 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 dec States and Israel are colonial powers,

and that the decolonization movement, which is a 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 inclusion policies that have been adopted by the Biden administration, pushed by the Obama administration, basically ignored by 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 were then indoctrinating school children. So everything that's got a critical associated with it is Marxian in origin. Interesting. And 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? It 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. And whether this now counter revolution, if you will, this is what Chris Ruffo calls what's going on. Counterrevolution against the Marxian revolution has been underway for decades now. So whether this counterrevolution 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 in outlook. You have then people who are appointing judges, for example, who agree with you. So that's the whole point 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 them 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 an essence and a manipulation

of the legal system and that a lot of people who are Marxian in orientation 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, the people 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. Right. Some of them are in the legal system as prosecutors, district attorneys, judges. Right. Some of them are in the federal government administering the law through regulations. So that, so when these- It's another venue. So is there direct communication from,

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

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 it succeed. So they've been recruited. Yes. So are they an asset of Russia? No. No. Well, 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, and 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 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 are widely, going back to Lenin actually, and Stalin, you've got party people, members, who are 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 accept party discipline and party orders. They accept party discipline and party orders. You will do this, you know, yes sir. And no questions asked. These are almost military type organizations. First group, relatively small, this is a 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 wanna subject themselves to the kind of discipline that a party member is subject to. And then the third group is 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 wanna 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 prosecutor's space, they're not directly influencing these prosecutors.

They're looking for people who align with their agenda, the closest. Yeah, in this case. But in the case, yeah, 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, break NATO, break the EU for purposes of supporting Russian national interests. The Chinese have a more diffuse system. They're trying to not destroy the system and put in their own, but kind of mold it 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. But 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 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 the Marxist, wasn't the 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 gonna 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 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 civil wars, or is it to just divide everywhere? 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 resolved by a civil war, a coup or an election that would be the final election. You know, that would be, 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 a Soviet goal. Russians different. So Russians goal, 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. but some of the others are not worth worrying about.

So you wanna get, you wanna destroy U.S. 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 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, you know, 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 the other goal is a little different than the Russians. Russians, very, Russian goal is, I understand it, very territorially oriented, very empire building oriented. The Chinese are more interested in influence. Although, you know, 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 pushing, trying to push around the Filipinos, for example. They're talking about invading Taiwan and so on. In the 1970s, Dong Xiaoping, leader at the time, was reputed to have come up with a strategy that's been shortened to hide and bide. 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 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 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. And tech. 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 news around their necks in terms of being controlled, 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, heavily committed to China. Is it too late to reverse this stuff? No, I don't think so. But it takes- It seems to be really far down the road. It takes understanding the situation.

It takes, I think, stopping the ongoing pressure. So, you know, 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 and all these sorts of things. Is there anything people could 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 are be skeptical. Conspiracy theories 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 in 2022 to create this, what, 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 Jankiewicz, 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 aside. But the important point here is that we already reached

a point here in the United States where we've got political divisions sufficient so that it's going to be hard to get any federal entity that can be trusted society-wide 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. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance that you could have done right here, right now. You could be covered from your couch in less than 10 minutes with no health exam required. Just go to meetfabric.com slash Sean. Once again, that's meetfabric.com slash Sean. As we approach the new school season with memories of summer family fun behind us, it's time for you to finally get the life insurance you need to protect your family.

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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, maybe I should have said it three times, right?

But. Well, maybe first the definition of politicization. So in the US context, 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 sometimes called 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 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, wholly inappropriate, and wholly out of bounds. And generally at CIA, the four episodes that I've identified, three of them have come from a 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 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 leaks were disinformation. So this is a big deal. So what we wanna know is 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 me an example

of the misinformation? Sure. So one of the ones that came out in, gosh when was it, it was early early it was 2020. So there was a story that came out in the CBS and it was picked up by other news media that 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 that it was gonna 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 complicit with deaths of Americans. Well, it turned out that was not true. It turned out within about three days, they had the military element of the Defense Intelligence Agency,

that for Dietrich 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 get involved in this and it turns out according to Woodward that in fact what the briefers had done was actually tell President Trump that the story that this new, 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 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've got multiple kinds. So 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, and again, a Trump one, 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 do people do electing this guy? He's not, he doesn't really care. But apparently it was just incorrect. 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, right, you're not leaking. And then these formers will go out 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 there's any evidence. Where is this misinformation orchestrated from? How high up does this go? Well, I don't think it's, 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 your viewers will get. I don't see any evidence that the director would call a meeting of all of us, you know, senior people, and say, well, on the agenda today is how to screw the American people. And they're not doing that. What has happened, or we're going to, you know, on the agenda today is how to manipulate

the New York Times. What has happened is that you've had a change in the organizational cultures of the agencies themselves and then accordingly also the farmers, all right, 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,

to freedom, to democracy, whatever, 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,

or a 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 Trump was wrong and evil in 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 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 as 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, is different than the State Department and so on. And in the intelligence world, some organizations have been thought of being generally more liberal or than others, like 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 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

is change 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 gonna 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 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, the CIA Director, Leon Panetta issued a paper document, which I got a hold of at one point, that said, 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 And I know it's 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 the agencies themselves. And these, in fact, had teeth. So you've got now agency heads paying attention to what the president says, who are 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 little ways.

So John Brennan would wear, began to wear a rainbow lanyard, you know, lander, you know, you recall what lanyards are in the intelligence business. So these are 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 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 a relatively small share

of CIA workforce in the 50s, 60s, 70s, now a slight majority. So slightly over 50%, last time, last figures I saw, slightly more than 50% CIA employees are women. But the preferences continue. So Director Burns is still preferentially hiring women. Okay, 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, you know, 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, you know, one of these usual, it's the end of your time in office, you know, what are your great accomplishments? He said, well, was the DEI policies So I think you know in addition to specific statements like that

there's lots of of other evidence that in fact what what What was really driving these people in important ways was altering altering the the workforce 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 FAS, so you've got to make 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 or ideological, depending on your 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, 15, 16.

You're into early 2016, mid 2016, all the polls are showing that Hillary Clinton is gonna 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 gotta 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 5th of August of 2016, you had the first of the big politicization episodes. So this is when Michael Morrell,

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 long standing 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, right? 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 going on here? So what happened then was that that opened the flood gates 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, a retired Air Force general, who had been the director at CIA for a while, and at a national security agency as well. And then, and eventually there were several dozen, dozen of these people. And the leaks, the leak 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? And 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 the relatively small administrative organization that was directly controlled by Jim Clapper. 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, yes. NSA falls under it, CIA, DIA.

Does FBI fall under that? Only the counterintelligence part of it. So to back up, and 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 9-11 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 were 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 yeah. 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 it and 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 the fast forward here and we're skipping a lot that I hope we'll come back to. But you know, you get to 2021 and President Biden now is, you know, spent eight years in the Obama White House, and he's back in the arena of diversity, equity, and 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 Department's 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, I mean, I think he's bought into it.

He's got a whole staff of people who bought into this. Large numbers of people in the Biden White House were 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, you know, he knows which way the wind's blowing within the Democratic Party. And it's heavily in the Obama direction. So he's going along with that program.

Again, I don't see, you know, there's no internationalist conspiracy behind the throne. I don't have any doubt that Barack Obama still is influential in the White House, but that's not a big international conspiracy. Yeah, I don't think so either. I just, it's been very effective. Oh yeah, so it has. More effective than anything we've seen. Well, he's trying to say, you know, 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 compatriots in his White House, and now what some people are calling the third Obama term, they've been very effective. From 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 compliant in the issue? Literally. Or?

They just, I think Donald Trump was just, 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 knowledgeable on this sort of thing. He said that some knowledgeable people in the IC warned about not paying attention to this and they were ignored. So Mr. 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 Wardward in one of these interviews, he said, well, you know, it's a tough job here in being the DNI, and I needed to focus on important things. So, again, if I remember the quote about Wright, he said, what I decided to do is be Mr. Outside, quote unquote, Mr. 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 Mrs. 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 within the ODNI.

So Coates was not concerned about this. At CIA, 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 on CIA is a career CIA officer. And she didn't.

She didn't do anything to alter this. The diversity office has 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, an update of what Brennan had done. So 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, 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 neurodiverse.

So this was a new, this was in the Trump years. 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, most of them are functional in a number 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 see, well, gee, and other, at least at the work, the traditional work level, I mean, you know, 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 counter-terrorism

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 with the federal government work. And it's right out of Marxism, right? So cultural Marxism, you don't care about people, you care 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 cultural Marxism. What could have the last administration done to combat this?

I mean, it sounds like this goes very deep. Well, 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 the traditional definitions of politicization.

Okay. So what, arguably, what's happened in the last few years is another variety, a third variety. They completely restructured the entire workforce. On purpose. To where the ground level, who is, they hired ground level employees, brand new employees, mass numbers,

and now they're starting to advance, and advance and advance. They're in the 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 with similar minds. of management, middle management, and workforce. All with similar minds.

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 ideological. If you're a Marxist, then it's ideological. If you're thinking the 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, DEIA now policies are really good. What does the A stand for? The A for accessibility, accessibility. I mean, is this a mission complete scenario?

No. And if it's infiltrated every level, we're talking workforce. Because it hasn't all the way. Because there's still pretty clearly some people who haven't all the way bought the program. Who hasn't? What organization has?

Well, it's not organization, it's people within them. So I talk with a number of people who are working in government now, as well as a lot of farmers. number of people who are working in government now, as well as a lot of 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 they're saying, you know, 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? now says you're an active participant in DEI. You're- 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 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 fight it. So you do one of two things. You shut up and don't say anything 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 were part of 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 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've got the women's group, you've got the Latino group, you've got 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 embedded in the federal government. What else do you see this as blood into outside of intelligence organizations? It's all through the government. 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 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. It's, I mean, in some of these places, it's a ghost town now. And they can't recruit fast enough. Then we saw, you know, 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. 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 rid of 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, right? So in Seattle and Portland, Oregon,

and a number of other places. So this is the Marxian view. You want to eliminate police. So listen to Angela Davis, a Communist Party USA member, retired professor at the University of California system. She was a vice presidential candidate of the CPUSA in 76 in 1980.

CPUSA Communist Party of the USA. So she and the particularly black activists given the number of black people So she and the particularly black activists, given the number of black people who are in prisons, these people basically are saying we should eliminate prisons. So this is heavily coming from the communist party Marxist perspective. There's a big racial element to it,

and it's got Soros money and so on on it. 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 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 good, a goodly part of that. So I see that as a- I just want to be clear. 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 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 issue. I guess what I'm kind of trying to say is never 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 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 one. 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. I mean, 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 the stand down in early 2021, stand down in early 2021, SECDF, 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 6th 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 Analyses, 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, you know, 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. 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 in the intelligence part of the Army, that the partisan domestic American politics are spoken openly on a regular basis and within in business offices. So it's part of the day-to-day business and it's very, very strongly 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 12 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 12 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. 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 Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave The Sean 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 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 is supposed to do, take a look at intelligence issues, ask questions, and the press generally speaking has been critical press supposed to do, you know, take a look at intelligence issues, ask questions, and

press generally speaking has been critical of U.S. intelligence operations. But in 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 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 farmers the extreme liberal press saw allies in the farmers. And they amplified the messages that the farmers were giving to them. And they helped create a situation in which the farmers 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 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. And- 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 to the dinner, to the dinner. I understand that. And now, now they've lost all, I can't say all credibility, but I mean, we're gonna get a bunch of comments on the show because we're both former agency. So many people no longer trust any government entity,

let alone intelligence agencies. You know, and it's- Yes, and the polling results are showing that. How do you, we'll get into how you rebuild that trust, but I mean, it's broken. Yeah, but the point here, I think, between again, the mainstream press and the allies, was that this was a temporary alliance of convenience

to go after one person, Donald Trump. was that this was a temporary alliance of convenience to go after one person, Donald Trump. But again, even more unusual was the HIPC, 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, it 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, you know, not conspired, not a 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.

And intelligence officers opposed to Trump used the press because the press then gave them more venues to go after Trump. So they had air time on the partisan networks. They had ample opportunity to write op-eds in the Washington Post and the New York Times. So it was mutually advantageous. So the three components are intelligence agencies,

press, and formers. No, I would argue the three key points were formers with a little bit of help from the serving people doing leaking, the mainstream press, and the House Intelligence Committee. Okay. In the form of Adam Schiff. Okay.

And as you recall, Adam Schiff was, was Speaker Pelosi's manager on this, Trump's first trial in the Senate. So which, which I think was a horrible decision. So here you have the, the chair of the, of the House Intelligence Committee supposedly, supposedly as apolitical as the House can possibly be. 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 largely, the House part is gone. You have a situation in which a lot of the the farmers who were active during this, you know, the four or four and a half years of the Trump period, and a lot of them are either getting older or have been rendered largely on credible.

And I'll talk about Michael Morrell in the case of the laptop 51, but Mike Hayden, has been accused of advocating the assassination of Senator 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 gonna replace them?

Do you think that they are appointed or does this just work out? Oh no, no, no, this is volunteer and this is a minor, this is 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 is it just happening to work out this way?

All the pieces are in place, but nobody's really controlling, people are just falling into it. Because you've got some general political trends. So, I mean, this issue of conspiracy came up, actually, more than once, with the farmers, right? Because you could talk to them. And you knew who used to be in intelligence

and is now talking on CNN, right? 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. These people retain clearances and retain green badges. So this is a inside the beltway term. The green badge is a badge that means that you've 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, an 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. Right? So this is a neat little arrangement that the ongoing clearances arrangement has

interesting Let's move into the laptop Okay, so the laptop what I call a laptop 51 case was was a situation in which Two prominent Former intelligence officers so Michael Morrell who I mentioned 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 Morell'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 presidential candidate's son at that point, his laptop computer had been left at a repair shop. The repair owner sent it to the FBI.

The FBI verified that the files on the computer were actually Hunter's 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 and 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 Polymeropolis write up a short little letter that says, this laptop story has all the hallmarks,

all the hallmarks 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 the press, to say it looks like this might be a Russian operation. It had 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, it has 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 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 hey, I'm not gonna worry about Joe Biden. Okay, so how do we know that this was basically a sham? Basically, this was a political operation. It was an information operation by Morrell and Paul Moropoulos. 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, the pitch was explicitly political. Okay, so now Morrell 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. Did you say what he's doing today is credible? Pardon me? Did you say 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 intelligence that are not domestically partisan in nature.

Do you think he's building that to protect his nation? Well, 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. And 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. I mean, 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? Do you have tabs on him? I do. He is on Twitter, X, and I follow him every once in a while.

He wrote one slightly partisan thing several months ago, but 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 Morrell 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 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 staying within an area in which he's established a little bit of credibility, but I think Murrell is wise to not venture again into what he started.

Brennan has stayed very quiet too. He's just not on Twitter, not on TwitterX anymore. He was an active participant for a long time. He says in his memoir, it's kind of funny, he says, well, I really didn't want to get onto Twitter, but 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? 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 an important issue, right?

As 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 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, they again changed hiring, promotion, award, assignments basis, so these, at least in these four areas. The, 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. Okay, fair enough. People could agree or disagree on that. In roughly 2012, 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, 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 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. Kind of interesting. What kind of threat? You're threatening in the sense that 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, it was implied. So 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 the DEI substantially damages operational performance. So I'm still working on it, so I'll, you know, 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 wanna 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, current email address, it's still at Georgetown. I'm in the process of getting canceled out, I think, there. But JAG411 at Georgetown.edu. Something tells me you're gonna get a lot of mail. Oh! 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 not change dramatically, so I suspect that this will be another controversial My guess is that the evidence that I get will probably not change dramatically. So I suspect that this will be another controversial article. Yeah. I would. So I'll send it to you when it comes out. Thank you, thank you.

We're moving into 2024. You know, we're about halfway done. We got an election this year. What are we gonna see? Okay, my expectation, write it in the book, but 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 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 there are 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 the game, the polls are showing that he's gonna 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 leaks in a new generation of activism. So, and 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 advisors of the Trump campaign are well aware of President Trump's deficiencies. And I mean, I use that, that's not a term that I think is not being used. So he was, you know, 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 have made it pretty clear they're gonna 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, 21. None of them were caught and publicly punished to my, 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 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 years. So she brought some documents out, sent them to a news site. The news site got these documents,

sent them to the 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. So 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. Were punished, nobody.

So one of the things I think what I would like to see us do in the leak department is encourage 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.

So 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. 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, of Soviet Marxist

propaganda? Well, it's a long, you know, long, long, long process. So it's now embedded, you know, this kind of activism is embedded in the culture. So it's not just the perspective, ideology and material interests, but also there is, and 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 activist.

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 to put in some strong leaders

who are bound and determined to reverse this to the extent they can. So there's 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 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 enforcing the DEI agenda,

managers who don't toe the line or punished. So among the bits of information that I've received is that at 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 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. from a theological orthodoxy standpoint, the diversity office will step in and make a correction. So those need to get, 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. 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 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 the country, if the country is gonna 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 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 then let me get just to mention a couple of them. These would be smaller, but I think are viable and actually 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. I'm gonna 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 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 12333,

which as 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 a, an insomnia problem, go read Executive Order 12333. It'll help you.

But, and this is online actually, so you can read it. 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 the production of the President's daily brief to the White House. So you give us the 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 has worked well and there haven't been politicization problem. 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 made up concern. I mean, 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 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 was 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 that 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 wanna give President Trump information that they thought would facilitate Trump's policies. So that's classic politicization. Yeah. 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 as 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.

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? 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. 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 and we've talked about press,

press, intelligence people connections. We haven't talked too much about the fact that the former's lied on occasion about the proper role of intelligence. So 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, and, you know, as we were talking earlier, you know,

the sophisticated methods here are really substantial. So, you know, it's very hard to be, you know, 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 the problem for citizens is the time. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's... It's 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 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, a little bit more defensively oriented and every little bit helps. But one thing you can do, I think, can be easier and that's to keep an eye out for clear 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 analysts on X, Y, and Z news channel. That's what we should be skeptical of. Well, it depends on the issue you're coming in. X, Y, and Z news channel. That's what we should be skeptical of. Well, it depends on the issue you're coming in. So what people have done over the years, many years, going back a long time, is 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 be analytical and objective in that sense. So look out for opinion-based stuff.

Yeah. And that's not just 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. My pleasure. Thank you. The Rolling Stone Music Now podcast gets inside the biggest stories with Rolling Stone's senior writer Brian Hyatt. Movie director James Mangold. I want to turn Bob Dylan into a simple character with a simple thing to unlock that then makes you go, ah, now I get it.

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