On June 21, the FBI declassified a 1999 video of Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi casing the Capitol and other Washington D.C. sites for the 9/11 attack. How, then, did the CIA-FBI 9/11 report conclude in 2005 that Saudi Arabia was not involved in the attack? And why did the FBI maintain — for 20 years, before its recent retraction — that al-Bayoumi wasn’t a Saudi agent?
Such willful deception, practiced increasingly by American intelligence, is the subject of former CIA agent J. Michael Waller’s new book Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. The dramatic writing and detailing, backed by the author’s experience in espionage — in Central America and the U.S.S.R., and against jihadist conspiracies — make it a page-turner. In 37 chapters, plus additional sections and a reading list, it presents an alarming history of how a century-old Marxist campaign has succeeded in ideologically subverting America and its intel agencies.
The results of that success are seen in today’s leftist street protests, the DEI obsession, and prevalent anti-Israel sentiment; also, in the saturation of academia and bureaucracy by Marxists. Not so evident, because intel agencies operate covertly, is their transmogrification from valiant fighters for American freedom to an emerging state police harrying those who oppose the acceptable narratives du jour.
Big Intel traces the long process of this toxic alchemy. Waller, now an analyst at the Center for Security Policy, borrows his colleague Diana West’s metaphor of a “red thread” leading back to a Bolshevik strategy to destroy the West by capturing the minds of its elites, artists, academicians, and students. It was to unfold over several generations. The planning happened at a 1922 meeting in Moscow, headed by Feliks Dzerzhinsky, then commissar of KGB-precursor Cheka. So, attempts to infiltrate our intel apparatus should have been foreseen but were tragically missed. (Waller praises the one man — J. Edgar Hoover — who did not miss the signs, though he was “imperfect” and “his errors compounded over the decades.”)
Present at the meeting, held at the Marx-Engels Institute, were Cominternpresidium member Karl Radek, the Prussian Willi Münzenberg, and the Hungarian philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs. They decided to use Comintern fronts and intellectual networks in Europe and across the world to reach the elite; at the same time, they would create “foreign subsidiary institutions, under prestigious academic cover, as a sophisticated social base to attract leaders of the arts, culture, and academia.” Lukacs believed in the “abolition of culture,” which Waller interprets as the “wholesale destruction of history, belief, and values, right down to the tearing apart of family life and the sexualization of small children to dehumanize the next generation.”
Thus, the seeds were sown for the Frankfurt School (founded 1923), the nursery of Critical Theory and cultural Marxism, which echoes Lukacs’s destructive theme. Eros and Civilization, a book by Herbert Marcuse, one of the school’s philosophers, sparked the erosion of sexual boundaries that ultimately brought us the absurdities of gender-identity fluidity.
With the rise of Naziism, members of the Frankfurt School took refuge in America, where Leon Trotsky, during his brief stay (1916–17), had prepared the seedbed by running an influence operation to spread civilization-destroying Marxist ideas. From 1933 to 1949, the school was based at Columbia University. It was from here that the teardown of Western ideals was launched, and it was here that the Marxist takeover of academia began.
The simultaneous infiltration of our intel agencies was aided by the exigent recruitment of communists by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a World War II agency for coordinating espionage, which later grew into the CIA. America was then hard-pressed to gather intelligence from Europe and behind enemy lines. Besides field operatives from communist networks, scholars like Marcuse were enlisted for their language prowess and grasp of European politics. By the war’s end, they had penetrated the OSS, academia, journalism, entertainment, politics, federal and state bureaucracies, courts, and even Congress. Besides wielding immense influence, they could steal secrets.
Only Hoover — who headed the FBI from 1924 to his death in 1972 — stood as a bulwark against them, establishing a Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in 1956 to watch, infiltrate, and disrupt their operations. However, the program, found to have violated constitutional rights, was shut down in 1971. From then on, the FBI deteriorated and was weaponized against ordinary citizens and elected representatives. It now stoops to domestic political spying and abridgment of First Amendment rights.
According to Waller, two “cultural revolutions” took place in the intel agencies after 9/11. The first, born of necessity under President George W. Bush, started by watching and listening to the public. The 9/11 attack was seen as the result of intelligence failure, justifying more aggressive intelligence gathering. The Patriot Act, the expanded Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) made this possible. Financial transactions came under greater scrutiny to detect terrorist funding. Intel coordination was centralized under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Big Tech was drawn in to help, and the FBI was doubled and armed to paramilitary proportions.
Strangely, while Americans were subject to increasing scrutiny and inconvenience, Bush took pains to choose an anodyne name — Global War on Terror — for the fight against the jihadists and to insist that Islam was “good and peaceful” and that Arabs and Muslims should not be harassed.
All this paved the way for the second revolution under President Barack Obama. But he hailed from the ‘New Left,’ which believed in the power of change through community organizing, indoctrination of the next generation, and working within the system, not in the guerrilla tactics favored by earlier radicals. A Critical Theory-based philosophy and “anti-imperialist” salience were adopted, new directives focused on “domestic violent extremism” (anything anti-left), and the pursuit of jihadists was halted.
The long march through the institutions began with the appointment of “soft-on-Russia” James Clapper as ODNI chief, the communist-voting John Brennan as CIA director, and communist and social justice warrior James Comey as FBI director. Clapper and Comey consolidated DEI by setting diversity goals for the FBI, purging study material on radical Islam, and requiring two diversity trainings annually for employees. Critical Theory became “mission critical” as the ODNI pressured all agencies, the military, and contractors to toe the line. The entire federal workforce became an instrument of social change. Dissent and political opposition were targeted.
For example, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane, a dirty-tricks campaign to thwart President Trump’s election and later cripple his administration, tried to discredit him using fake documents (the Steele dossier) suggesting he was in collusion with Russia. Similarly, the FBI, CIA, and ODNI worked with social media companies to lie that the Hunter Biden laptop, which would have prevented Biden’s victory, was Russian disinformation. All the while, the real threats of Islamic extremism, the Muslim Brotherhood network, Antifa, and BLM were ignored. At one BLM protest, FBI agents knelt and clapped for the activists.
Under Biden, what Obama started continues with redoubled vigor. A false narrative about a “January 6 insurrection” discredits Trump and targets his supporters as domestic terrorists. Parents speaking up against pornographic material and drag queen hour in schools are sued or harassed by the FBI. In short, our intel agencies have been psychologically manipulated into becoming catalysts of a cultural change that rots America from within.
Big Intel is a dire warning. Waller says this Marxist subversion of intel might be worse than the damage wrought by the most destructive spy discovered in the FBI — Robert Hanssen, who died in prison last year. He ends the last chapter calling for a national discussion on the FBI. The remedy he suggests for the FBI might well apply to the CIA: “Take it apart, parcel out the useful functions, and close down the rest.”