Unveiling ‘Big Intel’: How the CIA and FBI became deep state villains
J. Michael Waller and I became acquainted exactly one week after the events of January 6, 2021. We both published our first observations of that day on January 13. Waller’s account, “Covert Cadre: What I saw leading up to the US Capitol attack,” was published on the Center for Security Policy website. My story, “What I Saw on January 6th in Washington, DC,” was posted to my blog.
Readers began to cross-pollinate the two articles, sending Waller and myself messages suggesting we should “check out” each other’s work. We did, and a friendship was born. As such, I’ll dispense with the stylebook requirements and henceforth refer to him as “Mike.”
Reform will require the American voter to become better informed of how destructive culturally and constitutionally our intelligence services really are.
My first observations about January 6 were based on pure instinct while Mike’s came from four decades of experience in the intelligence community. Still, the similarities in what we individually saw were substantial. From his primary list, he saw:
Plainclothes militants;Agents provocateurs;Fake Trump protesters; andDisciplined, uniformed columns of attackers.
My “list” was less informed but essentially the same. My first conversation with Mike was one of mutual admiration for our correspondent observations and deductions. I was relieved to have someone of his background and experience offer me validation. While many specific January 6 instances and characters have required reconsideration and changed conclusions — based on the preponderance of now-available video and trial discovery — the bulk of what we published on January 13, 2021, still holds up.
For over three years, Mike has become an ongoing and invaluable resource when my investigations intersect with his expertise.
Mike began his career with the CIA under the legendary William J. Casey working in Central America with the Nicaraguan Contras to overthrow the Sandinista regime and collecting intelligence on Soviet support for regional Communist insurgencies. From there, it gets interesting, with far too many academic works and achievements to list following the attainment of his Ph.D. in international security affairs from Boston University.
From those decades of boots-on-the-ground experience and research from inside and outside the intelligence services comes his latest book, “Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.”
Published in January, I am apologetically late in reviewing “Big Intel.” Mike sent me an advance copy last fall, but that was when I was getting my sea legs with Blaze Media and also when the FBI’s January 6 noose was tightening around my neck because of my coverage of the protests and subsequent riots that day. (Sorry, Mike.)
Knowing the subject matter would be right up my alley, I kept putting off reading “Big Intel” until I could give it the rightly deserved attention. Adding insult to procrastination, I failed to realize I could have at the very least fired up the Audible version during one of my many half-cross-country drives between Raleigh, D.C., and Dallas.
On one of those long drives, I listened to “The White Pill” by Michael Malice instead of “Big Intel.” After completing “The White Pill,” what would appear on my Audible accounts list of suggested follow-ups? “Big Intel” by my neglected friend, Dr. Waller.
I was pleasantly surprised at how magnificently “The White Pill” and “Big Intel” complement one another. I recommend both works as companion pieces. Malice’s book offers a comprehensive look at the rise and fall of the Soviet Empire and how far too many people in the West — including here in the United States — admired and justified the brutal prison planet the Soviets endeavored to establish. By contrast, “Big Intel” focuses on the beginnings of the FBI and CIA and how some leadership positions of our newly formed, 20th-century intelligence agencies sympathetically recruited and borrowed talent and ideals from the totalitarians in Eastern Europe.
Therein lies the revelatory and frightening message of “Big Intel.” While both the FBI and CIA were ostensibly established to protect this country from dangers, foreign and domestic, they were varyingly infected by the Frankfurt Schools Marxist academics here in our country.
According to “Big Intel,” the CIA was poisoned from the outset. It took longer for the FBI to catch up because of the unwavering anti-communism of its longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover. But get there the FBI did, as Mike details in this thoroughly researched, copiously footnoted, and intriguing page-turner.
Mike quotes the late Bishop Fulton Sheen in the book’s epigraph: “It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy.”
That is what “Big Intel” unveils in its pages: how the FBI’s and CIA’s Marxist infiltrators have nurtured freedom-killing cancers into late-stage sickness via slow and deliberate infections of leftist ideology, ultimately leading those agencies and their agents to prioritize “diversity and inclusion,” “racial equity,” “critical theory,” “political correctness,” and other noxious ideas over national security and the Constitution.
Steeped in extensive histories, “Big Intel” reveals how we got here, including the backgrounds of many of the heroes and villains in the histories of our intelligence services. Mike says Karl Marx’s “goal was not to improve but destroy: family, human relationships, economics, patriotism, loyalty, morals, religion, Western civilization. Destruction of the entire human existence.”
The CIA’s precursor agency, the Office of Strategic Services, was commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and founded by “Wild Bill” Donovan. A secret presidential budget funded it, but Hoover considered Donavan a “communist sympathizer.”
Before the creation of the OSS, America had no actual counterintelligence capabilities and leaned heavily on the already well-established British MI6. However, the British operative guiding Donavan in establishing OSS was a double agent loyal to Stalin. Mike writes, “Donovan seemed blind to the fact that Communists and foreign assets recruited into the OSS would not have American interests first in mind.” Donavan’s blindness meant the OSS, and later the CIA, was poisoned practically from the beginning.
Mike offers a far more favorable review of J. Edgar Hoover than most contemporary pundits and historians. His staunch anti-communism prevented the FBI from early infection with cultural Marxism. I’ll leave no spoilers for the readers of “Big Intel” to discover how Mike handles the accusations of homosexuality and cross-dressing leveled at Hoover in more recent histories.
One particularly fascinating story told in “Big Intel” is about Mike’s long-time close relationship with a “senior FBI man, a counterintelligence supervisory agent named Bob,” who was particularly interested in Mike’s work. The last time Mike spoke with Bob was in January 2001, only a couple of weeks before his arrest.
“Bob” was none other than Robert Philip Hanssen, whose spying for the Russians the Justice Department called “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.”
Hanssen had for more than two decades provided classified national security information to the Soviets and the Russians in exchange for about $1.5 million in cash, bank notes, and diamonds. Hanssen pled guilty to 15 counts of espionage and died in prison last year.
Mike leaves no stone unturned in his romp through the historical devolution of the FBI and CIA’s transition from protectors of our republic to active participants in establishing and enforcing Cultural Marxism within America’s vital public institutions. From FDR and Donavan to Obama and Clapper to BLM and Antifa to the Steele dossier and Crossfire Hurricane to COVID and January 6, he spares no one and nothing in his exhaustive analysis.
Unlike so many screeds that might accurately lay out our institutional descent to doomsday, Mike concludes with expert recommendations for restoring and rebuilding American intelligence into the high-minded, heroic agencies we once thought we had. But reforms won’t come easy. It will require the American voter to become better informed and aware of how destructive culturally and constitutionally our intelligence services really are.
If every American voter had an attention span beyond a TikTok reel and would read “Big Intel,” my friend Mike might be credited with helping save America from today’s weaponized FBI and CIA.
