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

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 a professor at Missouri State 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  John Gentry, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. We have a variety of topics we're going to talk about here today. Your new book, Neutering the CIA, the polarization of the intelligence organizations. And, but what I'd like to kick it off with is, and what I was really excited to talk to you about, other than that, is propaganda. I've been talking about it for a while. I am not the greatest at explaining how it works, and things to look out for, but I think you would be. And so I'd like to kind of kick it off with that.

• 1:47Shawn Ryan?

  But, but before, everybody gets an introduction here. So.

• 1:56Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if I'm missing anything. Quite the intro.

• 2:00Shawn Ryan?

  Dr. John Gentry, PhD in political science and a BA in history. Retired US Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel. Duties mainly in intelligence and special operations arenas. Former intelligence analyst at Central Intelligence Agency. You're a frequent writer on intelligence and national security issues. Author of "Neutering the CIA: Why the US Intelligence vs. Trump: His 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.

• 2:44Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 3:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:08Shawn Ryan?

  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 the majority of our headlines?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:00Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so you don't think they're... They're connected and they're propaganda wars.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:18Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, well, there you have it. We don't think they're together. But, you know, let's just move right into the interview. I really want to kick this off with talking about propaganda. So if you could kind of explain, 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.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  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. Forgerys, 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. 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,

• 5:28Speaker 03

  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 Munzenberg, who organized printing presses, publishing houses, that would publish material that was consistent with Soviet interests. He also organized groups of various sorts.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  He divided them into groups that would be roughly homogeneous. 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 Vily called these things innocence clubs because he was able to fool so many people so much of the time. They were innocents. TS at the N. So this is, you know, using this word as a noun.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Well, the Soviets pushed this very hard through all of their affiliates around the world, through the Communist International, the Comintern. 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-oriented.

• 7:11Shawn Ryan?

  Did you say the Communist Party of the USA?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  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 find a newspaper that they publish every day.

• 7:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:48Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  So they're still operating. Again, this is a legacy of the Soviet Union. So Soviet intelligence took over after the Comintern was abolished in 1943 at pressure from the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United States and Great Britain. They knew what the Comintern was all about. And they said, wait a minute. We're fighting this war with you, not against you. Stop, stop trying to subvert us. So Stalin said, oh, yeah, okay, okay. We'll get rid of the Comintern. But he gave this subversion mission to intelligence. So it continued. So the KGB formed, and the Committee for State Security,

• 8:34Speaker 03

  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, broadly defined. They established in 1962 what was called Service A, which is part of the first chief directorate or the foreign, the foreign intelligence operation, the KGB, roughly, roughly the CIA equivalent of the, of the KGB.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  And these, these people had a wide-ranging um, set of missions and, 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, and the United States newspapers.

• 9:46Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of stories?

• 9:47Speaker 03

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

• 10:03Shawn Ryan?

  So one, let's just dive into that one specifically. So they leak a, they get a story into India's media.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:13Shawn Ryan?

  And they hope that we pick it up?

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:16Shawn Ryan?

  Why would we pick up what India?

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Because it's a good, good and interesting story. But it was not a sure thing. So, so the Soviets had other things that they would do. So they would, they would write stories and feed them to sympathetic journalists, who would then publish them verbatim. What they also did was, was publish, in essence, notes. This is the, 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.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  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 complimentary, 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.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  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. 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,

• 12:26Speaker 03

  not hard conservatives and not hard leftists. And again, to go back to Willy Munsonberg's Innocence Clubs, they wanted to create a lot of allies as part of the effort to subvert the country as a whole. And their argument was that it was relatively easy to subvert, to fool liberals for two reasons. One, liberals were generally sympathetic to the Soviet view, but not wholly in the Soviet camp. They weren't communists. And secondly, because they were generally sympathetic, they didn't ask a lot of questions about sourcing, about accuracy. Interesting. So they found that it was easy, easy to fool liberals.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  And what they also did importantly for what's going on here now in 2024 on the campuses is that they worked, they worked the universities. So they were pushing, pushing materials on the, I think, on the universities.

• 13:29Shawn Ryan?

  The Russians were.

• 13:30Speaker 03

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

• 13:34Shawn Ryan?

  How are, how are they manipulating our schools today?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Well, they're, the governments of these countries, I think, are, at this point, are not. So they influenced enough early on so that, so that they were able to get enough friends, if you will, either, either committed Marxists or fellow travelers to, to now do this, to now to do this, to do this on their own, to back up, back up and go, go a little bit different direction, if I might put a complimentary way.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  There was a group of people in the, in the teens and twenties and then in the 1930s, good Marxists, wanted revolution, wanted that good, that good, you know, perfect world that Marx promised, but realized that the, the economic conflict that Marx had talked about was not going to work. So as you recall, Marx postulated that there were, there were two competing groups in the world, capitalists and workers, the proletariat, their interests were incompatible, and that, and that at some point the proletariat would overthrow the capitalists and we'd have, we'd have a perfect, perfect world forever.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Well, the problem, 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, we contribute here, we can, we can, we can do, do better for ourselves and for our families too. So by the twenties, good Marxists were saying, this, 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.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  And the way they came, the way they proposed to do this is through, is through social means, through societal, societal means. And fast forward, a lot of ways. Basically, basically, there were five areas that were targeted for, for, for, for efforts to, again, subvert the, the old Western capitalist way of doing things and help generate the, the Marxian nirvana, if you will. Five of them. Education. Why? You want to go after young minds. It's a relatively effective way of, of, of converting people, either all the way,

• 16:21Speaker 03

  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, 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, you're looking for the law to favor you. Fourth one, fourth one is religion. So you want to get, you want to get rid of, you want to destroy organized religion.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Because organized religion talks about a, a, a, an alternative world incompatible with the Marxian world. So religion is, is a, is a core enemy of Marxism. And the fifth one is the family. So you want to destroy the family unit, where people look out for them, themselves and their, their spouse and their children. They're looking for the future of the, the, the, the family. You want loyalty in a, in a Marxian state to be, to be society-wide. Your, your identity is not to the family, it's to your group. All right? So, so the, so the mechanism then is that, is that you've got information operations,

• 17:50Speaker 03

  broadly defined, going after all of these five areas, because they are impediments to the Marxian revolution.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 19:01Shawn Ryan?

  So it's, it is the press, the education system, the law, the family unit.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and religion.

• 19:11Shawn Ryan?

  And religion.

• 19:12Speaker 03

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

• 19:18Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 19:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 19:29Shawn Ryan?

  We don't?

• 19:29Speaker 03

  No, nothing close.

• 19:31Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing close.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  So for many, for a number of years, CIA was the agent, well, backup even before that. Right, so, so before, before World War II, we had nothing close to a coherent, you know, 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...

• 19:58Speaker 03

  60s, there were, there were some, some operations that were conducted that by Soviet standards were, were, were crude and simple and small. So you, 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, by Soviet standards, this activity was, was trivial.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  And as best I can tell, almost all of it was, was, was ended in, in the mid 1970s. So Congress got a hold 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, we're gonna do things that are gonna get in trouble, get us into trouble with, with Congress. So they have basically quit, quit doing this. So the, the, the malign influence operations are, are basically being conducted around the world by states that want to change the system.

• 21:18Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  So you have, you have, you know, you have Norway, for example, that, that says, gee, we'd really like you to know about our, our salmon industry, or, you know, we, we 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're, what we've been talking about.

• 21:43Shawn Ryan?

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

• 21:55Speaker 03

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

• 22:08Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:18Shawn Ryan?

  And, 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?

• 22:32Speaker 03

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

• 23:06Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know, and we, we had discussed the five. I'm surprised, where would social media and cyber operations fall into in those five categories?

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Well, they would, they would be, uh, those, these were the old Soviet ones now, right?

• 23:23Shawn Ryan?

  And so this may be a, will be a sixth.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  So, well, well, these would be, these would be the ways that you create a turmoil in capitalist society to generate the, the Marxian revolution. Well, the Russians are not Marxists, are they? Putin, you know, authoritarians, yeah. Russian nationalists, yep. Uh, but they're not, they're not Marxist-Leninists the way, the way the Soviets were. So a lot of what the Russians are doing now, borrowing the techniques and, and, you know, in terms of warjuries, in terms of getting information to friendly journalists and so on. But their goals are different. So there's, Putin has pretty clearly got a, a Russian nationalist agenda.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Restore the territorial empire that, that horribly, from his perspective, horribly was lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. So there's, the, how do you do that? You're targeting then, uh, groups that are, that are opposing you, for example, in Ukraine. So that would be the European Union, that would be, that would be NATO. Uh, and that would be member states of those, those countries. So you wanted to generate divisions. So pretty clearly, one of the big targets in the United States is to use... Information operations, basically active measures again.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  But now you're trying to generate a, generate removal of support for Ukraine in the United States. Social media is a key way to do that. The people they're targeting are Republicans. So you remember, remember I mentioned earlier that the Soviets found it easiest to target liberals. The Russians are going after conservatives in the United States, in Hungary, in Italy, several other European countries too. Again, basically to divide, to break the consensus of these big alliances that are, that are really unwieldy

• 25:36Speaker 03

  in the sense that they require unanimity to make major decisions. So if you can, you can break the unanimity, then you can break support for, for Ukraine, for example.

• 25:48Shawn Ryan?

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

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:57Shawn Ryan?

  They would have some very deep ties into media outlets and writers in all, in, in, in the media world, correct? With longstanding assets.

• 26:15Shawn Ryan?

  Why wouldn't they continue? I mean, if they, 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, in a, in a completely different sector than liberal media? Why wouldn't they, why wouldn't they, as they're developing those assets within the conservative media and the conservative space, why wouldn't they continue to try to manipulate the liberal side?

• 26:48Speaker 03

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

• 27:23Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, no, I 100% agree with you. I mean,

• 27:26Speaker 03

  So they're, so they're, what they're doing, remember, this is, this is a long time, long time program, right? So you're dealing with lots of, lots of avenues, some very subtle, some not very subtle at all. You're constantly developing new, new, new, new groups and new, and new approaches based on, on your, on your, on your needs.

• 27:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  So I don't think it's, it's, it's an evolution, not a, not a requirement for a wholesale change.

• 27:57Shawn Ryan?

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

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:11Shawn Ryan?

  You know, that's, I mean,

• 28:13Speaker 03

  And you've had a dramatic change. I mean, can you, 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, he'd be flabbergasted.

• 28:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Who's the, who's the, who's the rhino here?

• 28:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, as far as, so we have four, four countries that were, that are key players in the information wars against the US.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  At, at least.

• 28:43Shawn Ryan?

  Do these four, the four biggest, do these four, do you feel like they, are they all in this together at some point? I mean, we know they all have their own agendas for, for whatever reasons. But do you think behind the scenes, they're, they are also, even though they have specific agendas that they want to push into the US?

• 29:10Shawn Ryan?

  Are they also allies?

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Well, I suspect they may cooperate in some respects. But in the information arena, they're, you know, they have a public, I mean, they, not public, I mean, they have, they have an obvious, similar goal to damage the United States. But do they need to cooperate to do that? No, they don't. So they're just, it's just pretty obvious. So they're doing their own things to, to damage us, to damage our foreign policies, to damage their, damage US capacities to be, be a world player and, and so on. And this gets back to, again, the Marx, the Marxist in, in, in the United States, too.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  And so remember I mentioned the, so, this, this, this, you know, social, you know, cultural Marxism? So you've got lots of the five different avenues. Everybody knows what the general plan is, but there's no, there's no coherent guiding force that says, you're 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, in a way that's roughly consistent with the, the overall agenda.

• 30:29Shawn Ryan?

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

• 30:39Speaker 03

  That, that the, that the, that the United States and Israel are colonial, colonial powers, and that, and that the decolonization movement, which is a Marxian argument, that you need, that you need to have the United States and Israel decolonize the rest, the rest of the world? So this, this basically is, is, is right out of, 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, who pushed the colonial, colonial

• 31:23Speaker 03

  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, critical race theory, critical legal studies, critical pedagogy, which you're using to indoctrinate teachers who were then indoctrinating schoolchildren,

• 32:08Speaker 03

  so on. Everything that's got a critical associated with it is Marxian in origin.

• 32:14Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. What?

• 32:17Speaker 03

  DEI is right out of critical race theory.

• 32:20Shawn Ryan?

  So this is a, very much a, a snowball effect?

• 32:27Speaker 03

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

• 32:38Shawn Ryan?

  What's coming next?

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Well, that's a good question. I mean, a number of people are talking about civil war at this point, aren't they? Clearly also, a number of, 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, they're fighting back against it. And whether, whether this now counter-revolution, if you will, is what Chris Ruffo calls what's going on, a counter-revolution against the Marxian revolution. It's been underway for decades now. So whether this counter-revolution will succeed or not, remains to be seen.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:36Shawn Ryan?

  When it comes to manipulating the legal system, how are they doing that?

• 33:42Speaker 03

  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 are agree with you. So that's the whole point of manipulating the flow into the legal system, is that you get ultimate prosecutors, and ultimately then you want judges and decisions that are consistent with your view. So we have prominently now a number of,

• 34:28Speaker 03

  depending on your perspective, either really good or soft on crime prosecutors around the country.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Most, if not all of whom, have been elected. George Soros has been providing a lot of money to support these people's campaigns and so on. So here you've got, through the prosecution side, you've got, in essence, a manipulation of the legal system and 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."

• 35:10Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, in different ways.

• 35:24Shawn Ryan?

  It got into our education system. The people that were in school, being educated to become lawyers.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Another one, another one.

• 35:35Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Some of them are in the federal government administering the law through regulations.

• 35:56Shawn Ryan?

  So that, so when these...

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Another venue.

• 36:00Shawn Ryan?

  So is, 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.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:17Shawn Ryan?

  And we're talking about... So is there a direct line of communication from... Do these attorneys realize they're being manipulated? Or has it just come through campaign funding?

• 36:32Speaker 03

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

• 36:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  And they are doing their part to help it succeed.

• 36:42Shawn Ryan?

  So they've been recruited?

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 36:44Shawn Ryan?

  So are they an asset of Russia?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  No.

• 36:47Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, they can help, but they're not an asset in the way you and I understand, you know, 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.

• 37:08Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Like a KGB officer would have an asset who would be, in the Defense Department hypothetically, who would be providing secrets.

• 37:17Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  No, so they're not assets in that respect at all. They're allies. So if you think, another way to think about this, and there are lots of different ways to think about this. This is pretty complicated. But the way I think of it anyway is that you've got people who 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.

• 37:51Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Or they are working within their own... Their own national contacts, working for Communist Party of the USA, for example. But they are party members. They accept party discipline and party orders. You will do this? You know, yes, sir. And no questions asked. So these are almost military-type organizations. First group, relatively small. This is the hardcore. Then you have fellow travelers, a 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.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  There are a few areas that they may disagree with, and they also don't want to subject themselves to the kind of discipline that a party member is subject to. And then the third group is the people who Lenin reputedly called useful idiots. And a term that I like better, Stalin's term. He called them naïve dupes. So what you want to do is recruit a bunch of naïve 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.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  They vote for the goals of the party members, and they're closely related fellow travelers. So the people we're talking about now, the prosecutors and so on, they are not naïve dupes. They are either the hardcore, or they're very close fellow travelers.

• 39:38Shawn Ryan?

  So let's talk about the prosecutors. So are they... I guess what I'm trying to ask is...

• 39:50Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  In this case, but in the case, yeah, and they're already on board.

• 40:25Shawn Ryan?

  So they don't really have to do anything but funnel money into their campaign funds?

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the Chinese actually have a different, and I think in many ways, well, they're all sophisticated. It's a different kind of sophistication. Their messaging is not so much us against them. We don't break NATO, we don't break the EU for purposes of supporting Russian national interests. The Chinese have a more diffuse 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.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  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?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:16Shawn Ryan?

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

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Well, for example, one of the things that's been done around the world, there was a big effort in the United States, there's been some pushback on that. They create what they call Confucius Institutes at universities, and now they 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 are 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,

• 43:02Speaker 03

  at least he's famous in the West, but wasn't a Marxist, wasn't a Maoist. So Confucius is very much out in China. But because it's a useful name, you create a Confucius Institute here, you staff it with people who you find loyal, you provide a lot of money to greedy Western universities. These are very mercenary organizations. So if you make a pitch to them, gee, we're going to do a culturally useful thing, we're going to help you teach people Mandarin,

• 43:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  So this is a nice combination. So you can both do influence operations and espionage at the same time.

• 44:42Shawn Ryan?

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

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Well, the Soviet goal was to destroy the United States. As it was known, as a what? As a capitalist, Christian, West-leaning, you know, 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 the Soviet goal.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Russians different. So Russians' goal, what? They want to have, you know, 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. The Swedes, the Finns, they're tough cookies.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  But some of the others are not worth worrying about. So you want to get... You want to destroy US support for NATO and for the general North Atlantic community. Because that community is your enemy, if you're Vladimir Putin.

• 46:46Shawn Ryan?

  How about China?

• 46:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  And we will guide, not control, but guide the renewed, the evolved, if you will, international system. So again, their goal is a little different than the Russians' is. Russians' very, Russian goals, 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?

• 48:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  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, their true selves.

• 48:28Shawn Ryan?

  How so?

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Well, in the sense that they're being, they're pushing, they're trying to push around the Filipinos, for example. They're talking about invading Taiwan and so on. In the 1970s...

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Deng 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. Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  So you've got this massively, potentially anyway, profitable Chinese market. And the Chinese can say to a big international bank or a tech company or 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."

• 50:40Speaker 03

  So a number of the agents of influence now are western businesses. The big banks, for example.

• 50:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. And tech.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 50:56Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, pretty much all of our businesses.

• 50:59Speaker 03

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

• 51:28Shawn Ryan?

  Is it too late to reverse this stuff?

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Uh, no, I don't think so. But it takes.

• 51:35Shawn Ryan?

  It seems to be really far down the road.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  It takes understanding the situation. It takes, it takes, I think, stopping the ongoing pressure. So, so, you know, Russian, Russian, Russian influence operations are continuing day after day after day right now. So you need to stop those, and then you need to, 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.

• 52:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. What are, just for, 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, and all these sorts of things. What, is there anything people could look out for to know?

• 52:37Shawn Ryan?

  What they're being fed.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Well, if it's really good, that's hard. But I think, you know, sort of general things that people can keep in mind or be skeptical.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  So I think some skepticism is a good thing.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  You know, we tried, here in the United States, the Biden administration tried in 2022, to create this, what, disinformation?

• 53:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Some or other board.

• 53:30Shawn Ryan?

  The agency.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Yes, and it lasted just a few weeks before it was done away with. And it got enormous criticism from Republicans, especially in this case, because Nina Jankowicz, the head of it, was said to be a purveyor of disinformation of the Biden administration. And whether that's true or not, you know, let's leave it, let's leave aside. But the important point here is that we've already reached a point here in the United States where we've got political divisions sufficient

• 54:09Speaker 03

  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 malign foreign influence or not. So we've already reached a pretty bad state here.

• 54:28Shawn Ryan?

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

• 54:38Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 55:46Shawn Ryan?

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

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Politicization?

• 55:55Shawn Ryan?

  Politicization.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  Say that three times quickly.

• 56:00Shawn Ryan?

  I'll do it off cam. But what prompted this? What started this? Politicization? Maybe I should've said it three times, right?

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Well, maybe it may be first the definition of politicization. So in the US context, so different countries have different ways of thinking about this. Basically, this is the injection of politics into some aspect of the intelligence business. So historically, there have been two.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  Two ways of seeing this in the United States. One is what they sometimes call politicization from above or top-down politicization. And that's when politicians will use intelligence as part of their fights with other politicians, part of the foreign policy decision-making process, as part of battles in Congress and so on. I view that more as the politics of intelligence. It's not really politicization. So it's not what I'm concerned about, not what I think we should be concerned about. What we should be concerned about is what's sometimes called bottom-up or politicization by intelligence professionals.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  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 the political left, one from the right, but all of them are generally considered to be inappropriate. The most recent one, the one that emerged publicly in 2016 is very different from the other three in that much, much bigger in terms of numbers of people.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  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. And 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 want to know is, you know, what in the world prompted this? You know, where and why is where, why, how, when did it occur? And what are the implications of it?

• 59:22Shawn Ryan?

  When we leak, can you give any example of this information?

• 59:28Speaker 03

  Sure. So one of the ones that came out in, gosh, when was it? It was early, it was 2020. So there was a, there was a, there was a story that came out in the CBS and it was picked up by other, other news media that President, then President Trump had been briefed by his daily briefers. As you know, the President's daily brief team normally briefs the President six days a week, unless he's traveling or something of that sort. The story was that the PDB team briefed Trump

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  that there was this new virus coming from Asia and that it was going to be very serious. And that it was, you know, 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 on his hands. He didn't take this good intelligence warning and act. Therefore, he's, he's complicit with deaths of Americans. Well, it turned out that was not true.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  It turned out, within about three days, the head of the military element of the Defense Intelligence Agency at Fort 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, "No, this never happened. We in the intelligence community did not brief the President on this." That was confirmed by the Pentagon. And so now Bob Woodward got involved in this, and it turns out, according to Woodward,

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  that in fact what the briefers had done was actually tell President Trump that the story about this new emerging virus from China was really not very significant at all. Don't worry about it. So here you had a dual disinformation operation. On the one hand, Trump allegedly had blood on his hands that he should not have been blamed for. And secondly, the intelligence community claimed much better performance than it actually delivered.

• 1:02:11Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  That was the allegation in this one case. 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 really a fine organization, a fine effort, has suddenly changed. So again, another question, why in the world, and why and how, did this change in collective attitudes occur?

• 1:03:04Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:17Shawn Ryan?

  And he should have taken it more seriously. So you have two different leakers.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  Well, it's not clear exactly who the leakers were.

• 1:03:26Shawn Ryan?

  Two different types.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  So, well, you've got multiple kinds. So you can have, you can have, you can have a leak of accurate information that's damaging. You can have a leak of disinformation of this sort. You can have other kinds that provide different kinds of messaging. So for example, 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.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  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 doesn't really care. But apparently it was just incorrect. Another way, another way, another way the leakers work is to talk with former intelligence officers. Especially ones who keep their badges and can go into intelligence workspaces where, you know, you're free to talk, pretty much whatever you want, classified or not, right? You're not leaking. And then these, and then these formers will go out and talk. So now, you don't have to go to a journalist.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

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

• 1:05:01Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think it's, I don't think, 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.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  I don't see any evidence that the director would call a meeting of all of his, 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 formers, all right, the people who have been in this, to the point where they think that they need to act against evil, that they

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  know truth and they have a responsibility to society, to the country as a whole, to freedom, to democracy, whatever may come to mind at the moment. And they have a mission then to act, to do the right thing.

• 1:06:26Shawn Ryan?

  So this is coming from essentially rogue misinformation agents? This isn't orchestrated from anywhere?

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  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 that 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

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  deficiencies as best they could. So they were collaborators, if you will, but not co-conspirators.

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  Okay, now, so I say the agencies themselves are not are not culpable in the sense that they're planning this. But there is a government and an agency responsibility, I think, in altering the organizational cultures. Because it's the organizational cultures that led to the changes that we've seen. So, back up a little bit here. So you have, as you know from your government experience, different organizations have different ways of doing things. They have different organizational cultures. The FBI is different than the Navy's, different than the Marine Corps', is different than

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  the State Department', and so on. And in the intelligence world, some organizations have been thought of being generally more liberal than others, you know, with State Department's 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.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  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...

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  For four years was a close adviser to Obama in the White House, and then became CIA Director in Obama's last four years. So Brennan says in his book that what Obama wanted to do was 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 going to change the country.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  And at the same time, the then 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.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Right? So Obama now is pushing this, and 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

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  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 began to wear a rainbow lanyard. You know, you recall what lanyards are in the intelligence business. So these are little chains, or ropes, or things of that sort around your neck that hold your identification documents, right? So the lanyard now, the thing around the neck, was now a rainbow one.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  Basically, an appeal to the LGBTQ people at CIA. Small, yes, but indicative of a policy.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  And what Brennan also did was make specific policy changes that rewarded the hiring of hiring and promotion and awarding of two 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, majority.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  So slightly over 50%. Last time I, last figures I saw, slightly more than 50% CIA employees are women. But the preferences continue. So Director Burns is still preferentially hiring, 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.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  But Brennan says in his, in his memoir, "I didn't like CIA culture. And as I became more senior, I made a determined effort to change, to change this organizational culture."

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  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's your, what are your great accomplishments? He said, well, it was DEI policies. So I think, you know, in addition to specific statements like that, there's lots of other evidence that, in fact, what was really driving these people in important ways

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  was altering the workforce, altering the workforce. This is particularly relevant in the Obama years at CIA and the ODNI. The other agencies were slower in coming around to this. So fast, so you've got to made a major effort, eight-year effort to change the way the workforce is going. And you have done several things, two important ones. You've altered the demography of the workforce. You've hired, you've hired a lot of people who have both political or ideological, depending on the perspective.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  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 in the early 2016, mid 2016. All the polls are showing that Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president. That's wonderful, because we all know she's going to continue the policies of President Obama. All right, well, in the summer, summer of 2016, this upstart fellow from New York, Donald Trump,

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  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 Morell, who was then fairly recently retired as the deputy CIA director, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times

• 1:19:54Speaker 03

  in which he said roughly, "My intelligence experience tells me that Hillary Clinton will be a better president than Donald Trump." So, what he did was violate the longstanding norm of aversion of former intelligence officers to partisan politics. And he made a claim that was factually incorrect on two grounds. One, he didn't do domestic anything. His intelligence career was entirely foreign-oriented, not the United States. And he also did not recommend policy to anybody, including recommendations on voting.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  So it was this event that triggered my question. Whoa, you know, slap in the face. What in the world is, what in the world is going on, going on here? So what happened then was that that opened the, that opened the floodgates. And you began to have more formers first, again, former intelligence officers known as formers. So Mike Hayden very quickly was involved in this. Hayden, retired Air Force general, who had been the director at CIA for a while and at a national security agency as well. And then, and eventually there were several dozen, dozen of these people.

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

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

• 1:21:29Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

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

• 1:21:56Shawn Ryan?

  What was the ODNI?

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So this is, this is the, the relatively small administrative organization that was directly controlled by Jim Clapper.

• 1:22:09Shawn Ryan?

  So for the audience, because not everybody

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:12Shawn Ryan?

  understands the structure here. The DNI is in charge of, is an umbrella over all intelligence organizations, correct?

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:22:21Shawn Ryan?

  And then it falls under it, CIA, DIA.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:25Shawn Ryan?

  Does FBI fall under that?

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Only on, only the counterintelligence part, counterintelligence part of it. So to back up in here for background, and yeah, good, good, good to say this. For 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, you know, my secretary," or my, you know, whoever it might be. So the 2004 Reform Act, that was a legacy of the 9/11 episode.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  So Congress finally, you know, 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, the DNI, had largely coordinating responsibilities. A lot of paperwork requirements levied from Congress and so on. And the DNI could issue some directives

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  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, 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,

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  So that now has changed.

• 1:25:05Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  That now has changed.

• 1:25:07Shawn Ryan?

  A lot.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  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, you know, tweet nasty things about John Brennan every once in a while, and he'd, you know, he'd kind of snort and yell it, and then talk names every once in a while. But in terms of specific administrative action to reverse these, the things that Obama had done, he did virtually nothing.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  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, he's back in the arena of diversity, equity, inclusion. But his major executive order on this in June of 21, June of 2021, actually, in my view, expanded the depth, the scope, the intrusiveness

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:27:04Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, the...

• 1:27:09Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  Well, I think he's bought into it. He's got a whole staff of people who are 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? 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.

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Again, I don't see, you know, there's no internationalist conspiracy behind the throne. I mean, I don't have any doubt that Barack Obama still is influential in the White House. But, you know, that's not a big international conspiracy.

• 1:28:44Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So it has.

• 1:28:55Shawn Ryan?

  More effective than anything we've seen.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  Well, he's trying, 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, you know, his compatriots in his White House. And now, what some people are calling the third Obama term, they've been very effective.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  From thinking about this from their perspective, they've been very effective.

• 1:29:28Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:29:37Shawn Ryan?

  What did the Trump administration do to combat this?

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  Nothing.

• 1:29:42Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing?

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  I can't think of a single thing.

• 1:29:44Shawn Ryan?

  So are they compliant in the issue?

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  Or... They just, I think Donald Trump was just, you know, you know the old term, he was AWOL on this. He was not paying attention, he wasn't getting word. I have been told by at least one person who was 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 advisers in the White House, and some senior people who Trump appointed, didn't do anything.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  So thinking about the two big positions that I was talking about earlier, the DNI and the CIA director. So for a fair amount of time, Trump's DNI was Dan Coats, who was a former senator from Indiana, had spent time on the Senate Intelligence Committee, knew a fair amount about intelligence. But he told Bob Woodward in one of these interviews, he said, "Well, you know, it's a tough job here being the DNI, and I needed to focus on important things."

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  So, again, if I remember the quote about "right," 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."

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  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 Coats was not concerned about this. At CIA, you had first an outsider, who was there for a year, and then 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.

• 1:32:22Speaker 03

  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 offices 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 Director of Operations and the analytic offices within the Analysis Directorate, for example.

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  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 strategy in ways that expanded the number of demographic groups who were favored. So she added people who were people who identify as neurodiverse.

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  So this is 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. Right? So you know, you prefer, most people, and they would prefer not to be dyslexic if they had a choice.

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  But this became a group that would be favored for hiring and promotion and so on, to add to the other favored groups.

• 1:34:38Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:34:42Speaker 03

  Sure looks like it to me. I mean, you know, you see, well, gee, you know, at the least at the work, the traditional work level. I mean, you know, Director Burns will say, well, you know, we really, we really need to focus on China and so on. And Haspel said, well, you know, we've been worried about counterterrorism for nearly two decades now. So this was when, 2019 roughly. We need to shift back to doing traditional espionage and other things related to great power competitions. Okay, so you're, yes, you're focused externally on real work,

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  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 were part, you were, you were male from European heritage. That's your identity. So that's what they're doing now.

• 1:36:07Speaker 03

  And that's brand spanking new in terms of the traditional way in which the intelligence community worked or the federal government worked. And it's right out of Marxism, right? So, cultural Marxism, you don't care about people, you care about 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.

• 1:36:51Shawn Ryan?

  What could have

• 1:36:55Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  Well, you get rid of... Well, yeah.

• 1:37:03Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

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

• 1:37:29Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they completely restructured the entire workforce.

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  On purpose.

• 1:37:37Shawn Ryan?

  To where the ground level, who is... They hired ground level employees, you know, brand-new employees, mass numbers, and now they're starting to advance, and advance and advance.

• 1:37:51Speaker 03

  They're into senior positions by now. The immediate post-2000, post-9/11 group now, they're well into management.

• 1:38:00Shawn Ryan?

  So we have management, middle management, and workforce. All with similar minds.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  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. You know, 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.

• 1:38:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:39:31Shawn Ryan?

  What does the A stand for?

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  The A for accessibility. Accessibility.

• 1:39:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, is this a mission complete scenario?

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  Um, no.

• 1:39:43Shawn Ryan?

  And if it's infiltrated every level, we're talking more force.

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  Because it hasn't all the way. Because there's still pretty clearly some people who haven't all the way bought the program.

• 1:39:54Shawn Ryan?

  Who hasn't? What organization?

• 1:39:57Speaker 03

  Well, it's not organizations, it's people within them. So I, you know, I talk with a number of people who are working in government now, as well as a lot of former's. And the people who are still in government tell me pretty clearly, they're keeping their heads down. The people 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?

• 1:40:51Speaker 03

  The old par, remember, at CIA? So, your performance appraisal now, at many of these agencies, if not all of them, now says you're an active participant in DEI. Are you serious? I am absolutely serious. So, you've still got, though, I am told by people who are still there, you've still got people who think this is really a bad idea, for political reasons and also performance reasons. And maybe we can talk about how this affects operational performance.

• 1:41:31Speaker 03

  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. Or, in the words of another very senior guy, who not happy with this, you choose your close friends carefully. In other words, you make sure you're not talking to people who are part of the program. So, what is this doing? I mean, this is dividing the workforce, isn't it?

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  So, this is one of many ways that the workforce is being divided. There's 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.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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.

• 1:43:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:43:59Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  It's all through the government.

• 1:44:05Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:44:32Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

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

• 1:44:44Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:44:48Shawn Ryan?

  And.

• 1:44:50Shawn Ryan?

  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. With, do you think? Because I, especially with law enforcement, I think. There was obviously, I mean, what you're saying, there's obviously an agenda to, 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.

• 1:45:33Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

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

• 1:46:55Shawn Ryan?

  CPUSA Communist Party.

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  Communist Party of the USA. So, so, you know, her, she and the, and the, and the particularly, particularly black activists, given the amount, you know, number of black people who were in prisons. These people basically are saying, we should eliminate.

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  Prisons. So this is heavily coming from the Communist Party Marxist perspective. There's a big racial element to it. And it's got, you know, Soros money and so on on it. That's one thing in my mind. The vaccine is 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 spent time in India and happily never got seriously ill. And I think vaccinations were a goodly part of that.

• 1:48:02Speaker 03

  So I see that as a...

• 1:48:04Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  Or are they part of a conspiracy? Okay. So I don't, my view is 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.

• 1:48:41Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:48:47Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:48Shawn Ryan?

  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 warfighter. 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. You know, which demoralizes the entire...

• 1:49:14Shawn Ryan?

  SEAL Team Special Operations Community.

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:49:16Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and that's just one example.

• 1:49:18Speaker 03

  So I, okay, so I take your point. My, I would make a better, I would make a different, a different argument. So, you know, I know, I know the number of people who were, you know, let go from the military. I mean, there was some concern there. I think a bigger, a bigger issue in terms of demoralization and something that, that clearly had an ideological agenda to it, was the stand down in, in early 2021. Sec Def, Secretary of Defense Austin ordered to, 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

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  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 Analysis, said, do a, do a survey. 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, for the, for the Defense Department. So IDA did a number of surveys and, you know, and looked at, looked at the Defense Department broadly, had access to the Defense Department, said,

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  hey, do you have a, a right wing terrorist problem in the Defense Department? And they said, no, we don't. So they said, no, there's not, nothing, nothing special here outside of what might exist in the country as a whole. Well, the, 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, so you've got, you've got a pretty clear ideological agenda coming from the Pentagon now. All Biden's, you know, Biden's executive suite

• 1:51:30Speaker 03

  at the, at the Pentagon, where you're injecting politics into the, into the, directly into the management of the Defense Department.

• 1:51:40Speaker 03

  That, I think, is a serious problem. To me, that's a much bigger deal than the vaccines. And I'm told, and this is wandering away from the intelligence community here, but I'm told by a fellow I've gotten to know reasonably well, serving U.S. Army officer at the moment. He said that even in the intelligence part of the Army, that partisan domestic American

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  politics are spoken openly on a regular basis 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.

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  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. It just doesn't exist anymore. It's part of the cultural transformation. So my 12 years at CIA, by comparison, in the 19, basically in 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.

• 1:53:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:54:04Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:54:14Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:54:35Shawn Ryan?

  All right, John, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to cover, "How Do We Fix This? What Can We Do?" But before we do, I missed a couple of points, and one of them being, "How Did The Press Get Involved?" So I'd like to, I'd like to talk to, "How Did The Press Kind Of Amplify What's Going On Here?"

• 1:54:53Speaker 03

  Okay, that's an important point, and an unusual one. So, you know, historically, the press has done what the press is supposed to do, you know, take a look at intelligence issues, ask questions, and the press, generally speaking, has been critical of US, US intelligence operations. But in the, in the Trump years, there was a, a highly unusual three-part, actually, alliance between the activist formers, in particular, along with the leakers with the press, and then also, also to the, the House Intelligence Committee, which also

• 1:55:35Speaker 03

  had oversight responsibilities, of course. So the nature, the nature of the issue with the press was that, that the press saw a, this is the mainstream press, so here we're talking, New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, plenty of other newspapers, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, that group. So that, that part of the mainstream, left-of-center press. So we're not talking Fox here, we're not talking Wall Street Journal. Although the Wall Street Journal used leakers here too.

• 1:56:18Speaker 03

  But the mainstream 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.

• 1:56:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:57:21Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

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

• 1:57:41Shawn Ryan?

  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 this show because we're both former agency. So many people no longer trust any government entity, let alone intelligence agencies.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  Yes. And the polling results are showing that.

• 1:58:09Shawn Ryan?

  We'll get into how you rebuild that trust, but, I mean, it's broken.

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  But again, even more unusual was the HIPS, the House Intelligence Committee, doings where Representative Schiff, Adam Schiff, the chairman of the committee, was actively involved here, too. So he was involved in supporting and encouraging through a staffer, the whistleblower, who led to Trump's first impeachment in 2019. And we've just learned recently, that would be in, what, April of 2024,

• 1:59:09Speaker 03

  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 a conspiracy of somebody else,

• 1:59:54Speaker 03

  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 airtime 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.

• 2:00:34Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:00:42Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:59Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  In the form of Adam Schiff.

• 2:01:02Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  And as you recall, Adam Schiff was, was Speaker Pelosi's manager on Trump's first trial in the Senate. So which, which I think was a horrible decision. Here you have the Chair 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, you know, largely, the House part is gone.

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  You have a situation in which a lot of the formers who were active during this, you know, the four, four and a half years of the Trump period, a lot of them are either getting old or have been rendered largely uncredible. And I'll talk, I'll talk about Michael Morell in the case, in the case of the Laptop 51, but Mike Hayden, you know, has been accused of trying, of advocating the assassination of Senator Turberville, for example. I mean, a lot of these people have, have shot their credibility. But, there are plenty more where they came, where they came from.

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  So, an open question is, who's going to replace them?

• 2:02:31Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that they are appointed, or does this just...

• 2:02:34Speaker 03

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

• 2:02:44Shawn Ryan?

  I guess what I'm saying is, is for the... Conspiracy types. Is this all orchestrated from somebody way up?

• 2:02:54Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 2:02:55Shawn Ryan?

  Or is it just, is it just happening to work out this way?

• 2:02:59Speaker 03

  I think-

• 2:02:59Shawn Ryan?

  All the pieces are in place, but nobody's really controlling. People are just falling into it.

• 2:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you've got, you've got some general political trends. So, I mean, this issue of conspiracy came up, actually, more than once with the farmers, right, because you could talk to them. And, you know, you knew who used to be in intelligence and is now talking on CNN. So you ask and say, "Well, you know, are you guys in cahoots?" And, you know, a couple of them said, "Well, no, of course not. We just, we just come from the same, the same place in the world. We just have similar kinds of views." And, but they can, actually, collaborate in some important respects. So, as I mentioned, some of them, some of them talk to former intelligence people in government spaces.

• 2:03:47Speaker 03

  So people like John Brennan, people like John McLaughlin, former, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, this woman. These people retain clearances and retain green badges. So, so this is, this is a, you know, inside the Beltway term. The green badge is a, is a, is a badge that means that you've got, you've got all the security clearances, but you're a contractor, you're an advisory sort, as opposed to, 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,

• 2:04:30Speaker 03

  anywhere, basically anywhere, anytime they want. So they can sit down with, with, with currently serving intelligence officers and talk intelligence stuff. So, 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, that the ongoing clearances arrangement has.

• 2:05:08Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:05:10Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into the laptop.

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  Okay, so the laptop, what I call the Laptop 51 case was a situation in which two prominent former intelligence officers, so Michael Morell, who I mentioned, and Mark Polymeropoulos, who was a senior operations officer, were apparently approached by a Biden campaign officer who said, in this case, Antony Blinken, now the Secretary of State. So according to Morell's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in the spring of

• 2:05:52Speaker 03

  2023, that's what I'm about to tell you, Blinken said, "We need help, intelligence help." Remember, the press had built up the credibility of intelligence officers. These people know everything about everything and can be believed in your heart of hearts. So these people now have credibility. Blinken says, "We need help. We need help with this problem." The problem was that Hunter Biden, the president's son, the presidential candidate's

• 2:06:31Speaker 03

  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, basically influence peddling with Ukraine, with China, and maybe some other countries.

• 2:07:10Speaker 03

  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."

• 2:07:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so Morrell and Paul Moropolis 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 of the press, to say, "It looks like this might be a Russian operation." Have nothing to do with Hunter, nothing to do with Joe. Okay, so they're very careful in writing this.

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  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, has all the hallmarks. Okay, so they knew very well that that was not the point of this letter. They knew the point of the letter was to help Joe Biden.

• 2:08:54Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:09:00Speaker 03

  Probably, well, I mean, it's conceivable, but it's not likely. We know that there are...

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:09:53Speaker 03

  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. They 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.

• 2:10:37Speaker 03

  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 Russians. So, hey, I'm not going to worry about Joe Biden.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  Okay, so how do we, you know, how do we know that this was, this was, you know, basically a sham? Basically, this was a political operation. It was an information operation by Morell and Paul Moropoulos. Well, Morell told the House Judiciary Committee that. And I can tell you, not commonly published thus far, anyway, that one of the, 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.

• 2:11:50Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  So, so the pitch, the pitch was explicitly political. Okay, so now Morell has had his credibility shot, I think, pretty clearly. He's now out of the partisan limelight, at least for the moment. He does, he does have his own podcast, which, which is credible, and he's staying out of partisan politics. So, so, so I have no, no grievance against what he's doing on a day-to-day basis here in 2024. But, but he was, he was the epitome.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  This, this, I think, was an epitome, now well-documented, of what was wrong with, with, with, with political activism by, by former intelligence officers. Once again, let me, I mean, I'm.

• 2:12:43Shawn Ryan?

  You say what he's doing today is credible?

• 2:12:45Speaker 03

  Pardon me?

• 2:12:46Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

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

• 2:13:00Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think he's building that to?

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  Well, he might, he might. My guess is, he's still got a number of years to live, he hopes. He's trying to, trying to, to do something that's, that's, that's, you know, that's reasonable and is within his, his area of expertise. And I guarantee you, that if, 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, there'll be others who do that. So, he is one of, again, you know, Hayden talking about, you know, Tuberville's death and so on. I mean, there are a lot of people who've just really shot themselves in the proverbial foot. John Brennan wrote tweets that are just outrageous.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  And I think his credibility is pretty, pretty minimal, too. So, so I, I expect there will be resurgence, but some of the, some of the 2016, 2021 people will not, because they're tired, old, and damaged goods. What about Mark? You have tabs on him? Uh, I do. He, he is on, he's on Twitter, X, and I, I follow him every once in a while. He wrote one, one slightly, slightly partisan thing several months ago. But I haven't seen anything, I haven't seen anything recently. Man, you know... The issue from my standpoint, and I think this is a key, a key point,

• 2:14:30Speaker 03

  again, thinking back to the definition of politicization from the, from the beginning. It's, 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.

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  That is, again, historically abnormal from a normative standpoint, and it's also dysfunctional. So if you have, you know, have people who have partisan views, but keep them to themselves, that's fine. If they talk publicly, but they talk about things that are not related to partisan politics, that's okay, too.

• 2:15:16Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:15:25Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. So that's, that's why I think he's, he's staying within an area in which he's established a little bit of credibility. But I think, I think Morell is wise to not venture again into, you know, what he started.

• 2:15:44Speaker 03

  Brennan has stayed very quiet, too. You know, he's, you know, just not, not on Twitter, not on Twitter X anymore. He was an active participant for a long time. He says in his memoir, it's kind of funny. He says, "Wow, you know, I really didn't want to get on to Twitter, but, but Trump made me do it." Because I, Trump made me do it because I couldn't, I couldn't leave, leave the Twitter sphere to Trump. I had to respond to him. So it's all Trump's fault. So, so, so you regret it, but then, that's why, that's why, that's why I did it. But at least for the moment. And he, he also says in his memoir that he had some real issues with personal discipline. But, but at least for the moment,

• 2:16:27Speaker 03

  he's been, been quiet on this front. Will he stay? We'll see, we'll see. But my guess is that if he, 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.

• 2:16:44Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is a, this is a, an important issue, right? Because intelligence, as you well know, is part of the national security establishment. You want your intelligence people to perform well. They help, 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 began

• 2:17:33Speaker 03

  changed hiring, promotion, award, assignments bases, at least in these four areas. And they were done on a policy basis. That these were ethically good, that this was a morally good thing to do to help disadvantage people and so on. So the initial argument was ethical in nature. It was political. Fair enough. People could agree or disagree on that. In roughly 2012-13 period, people began to say, you know, these preferences are causing operational problems.

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  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, as you introduced me earlier on, been in the academic world and

• 2:19:01Speaker 03

  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."

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  That claim that DEI improves the performance. So my project here was to assess the claim as opposed to looking at the bigger picture of whether DEI affects performance in any other ways. Okay, so I got a lot of reaction from this. So the DEI proponents, of course, didn't like it. It was not politically correct. And I actually had four representatives of the ODNI complain about that article to my journal editor, basically threatening him. Kind of interesting.

• 2:20:20Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of threat?

• 2:20:21Speaker 03

  You're threatening in the sense that you're, "We are 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.

• 2:21:03Speaker 03

  So a lot of people got in touch with me, several dozen got in touch with me and said, "You should do this next project and let me tell you some of these problems." So I now have a significant body of evidence on this score and I will be writing up what I have within the next couple of months. And my expectation at this point is that the argument is going to be that DEI substantially damages. Operational performance. So I'm still working on it. So I'll, you know, perhaps leave off, you know, some of the details here.

• 2:21:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:22:26Speaker 03

  So if any of your folks have any evidence of relevance to me, please get in touch with me. And I'm not just looking for negative evidence. What I want to do is be methodologically objective here. So I'm looking for evidence related to whether DEI affects operational performance. So if you've got evidence that DEI improves performance, I'd like to have it.

• 2:22:51Shawn Ryan?

  Where would they get in touch with you at?

• 2:22:53Speaker 03

  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 J A G four one one at Georgetown.edu.

• 2:23:12Shawn Ryan?

  Something tells me you're gonna get a lot of mail. But, and I hope you do.

• 2:23:18Speaker 03

  So anyway, we'll 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 article.

• 2:23:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:32Speaker 03

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

• 2:23:36Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:23:46Speaker 03

  Okay, my expectation, write it in the book, but, you know, set it in another four or two. And I think, actually, I feel more strongly now than I did when I finished, when I put that to bed. My guess is that we will see a significant 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.

• 2:24:28Speaker 03

  So a lot of people who benefit from DEI policies who will not want to see them reversed. Well, if Trump is a viable candidate, and at this stage of the game, the polls are showing that he's going to be competitive, if, in fact, he becomes the Republican nominee in July of 2024, my guess is that we'll begin to see leaks and a new generation of activism. So, and as I said, the activism started in 2016 because people worried about what Trump

• 2:25:09Speaker 03

  might do, and then, of course, he turned out to be not much of a tangible threat at all. Well, it's pretty clear now that some of the advisers of the Trump campaign are well aware of President Trump's deficiencies, and I mean, I use that, that's not a term that I think is not being used. So he was, again, not really paying attention in the management of the personnel of the federal government. People who were close to him, I'm told, are now well aware of that.

• 2:25:54Speaker 03

  They're talking about that publicly, so I'm not, 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.

• 2:26:23Speaker 03

  Because some of Trump's advisers have made it pretty clear they're going to change things if they have a chance.

• 2:26:33Speaker 03

  So, my guess is new generation of formers, 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. 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

• 2:27:18Speaker 03

  and punished, a contract employee, former Air Force linguist at the National Security Agency, at their Georgia facility, by the name of Reality Winner,

• 2:27:32Speaker 03

  who was then 25 years old, who brought some documents out of NSA that she thought were relevant to 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 NSA and said, "Are these real?" Reality Winner was arrested shortly thereafter,

• 2:28:17Speaker 03

  answering the question. So here was a, here was a, an intelligence officer who used not very good tradecraft. So it turned out that, that she copied, apparently she copied, copied these documents on machines at the office and the office left, left some identifying, the machine left some identifying marks, so it was easy to figure out who, who, who she was. So anyway, she was the one who, who was, was caught. She got five years and three months for violating the Espionage Act. Nobody at the CIA, nobody at the ODNI were, were caught. Wow. With punishment, nobody. So my, one of, one of the things I think, what I would like to see us do in the leak

• 2:29:01Speaker 03

  department is, is, 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, when you're doing leaks that are really disinformation and you're doing them for partisan political reasons, that's, that, that it seems to me becomes Hatch Act material.

• 2:29:50Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:30:08Speaker 03

  Well, it's, well, it's a good question. I mean, you know, 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, a 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, not just the perspective.

• 2:30:30Speaker 03

  Ideology and, you know, material interests. But also, there is, 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. You know, I have a moral authority to release classified information because I think it's in the, you know, it's in the public interest. So you have, 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,

• 2:31:14Speaker 03

  would be to, would be to put in some strong leaders who are bound and determined to reverse this to the extent they can. So, you know, there is leadership from, from the top. So you change policies. But even, even before that, you, you, you rescind the executive orders that are causing the big problems. So the huge one at the moment is Biden's June of 2021 executive order. That absolutely needs to go. You need to get rid of all the DEI offices, the diversity offices and the agencies, because these have become, in essence,

• 2:31:54Speaker 03

  ideological orthodoxy creating and ideological orthodoxy enforcement organizations. So they are now enforcing the DEI agenda. Managers who don't toe the line are punished. So among the, among the bits of information that I, you know, have received is that at some, some agencies now, basically what's happening is that people from some of the privileged demographic groups that get counseled by managers and, you know,

• 2:32:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:33:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:33:49Speaker 03

  So those need to get, go, just go.

• 2:33:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:56Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 2:33:59Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:34:06Speaker 03

  Well, you can. I mean, a major change is not a bad idea, but one of the sort of standard and, you know, simple, you know, sounds good, it's easy, but it's too simplistic is, you know, defund the FBI, defund the CIA, you know, 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 going to be coherent and safe, it needs these organizations to perform well. So my thought is, at this point anyway, you know, keep...

• 2:34:47Speaker 03

  Assessing it and maybe reevaluate it 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 just 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.

• 2:35:32Speaker 03

  I'm going to cut your funding." So 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

• 2:36:11Speaker 03

  in 1981, which gives the responsibilities for the agencies of the IC. It is absolutely dreadfully boring reading. If you've got 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.

• 2:36:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:37:05Speaker 03

  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 on the COVID story, then what you might do is say, "Okay, I see. You're out of the PDB business.

• 2:37:48Speaker 03

  We're moving the production of the President's Daily Brief to the White House. So you give us raw reports and we'll establish a small organization within the White House to make the briefings for the President." So that's a major slap in the face at the ODNI and again at CIA, too. So that would get their intention. So, "Come back. What are the risks there?" Well, I suppose there are some risks. President Nixon actually proposed this for a time, and it sort of occurred during his second term for a while.

• 2:38:32Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 2:39:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:39:53Speaker 03

  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

• 2:40:38Speaker 03

  relevant information from the White House because allegedly the China analysts did not want to give President Trump information that they thought would facilitate Trump's policies. So that's classic politicization.

• 2:40:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:41:37Speaker 03

  So is the mess, is the, that's my version of, of the longer explanation there. So to the extent that, 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.

• 2:41:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:00Shawn Ryan?

  What about, what about citizens?

• 2:42:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:42:05Shawn Ryan?

  What can they do?

• 2:42:06Speaker 03

  What can citizens do? I think the best thing, I mean, for citizens to do, people who are looking at the press, looking at, looking at, at other podcasts and so on, is to, is to try to understand a little bit more about the intelligence business. Intelligence is a, is a hard thing to understand. There is, there is some reading about it. I've contributed a little bit. A number of other people have done some, some good work here too. But learn more about the history, learn about the motives, learn about some of the techniques. We've talked about disinformation. We've talked about press, press, intelligence people connections.

• 2:42:47Speaker 03

  We haven't talked too much about the fact that the, the, the, the formers lied on occasion about the proper role of, of intelligence. So if you learn more about, about what the intelligence business is about, you can, you can better understand when you're being fed a bill of goods. Be skeptical of, of alliances between, 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.

• 2:43:29Speaker 03

  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're, 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.

• 2:43:56Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's just, I know you're right, but, you know, the problem for citizens is the time. You know what I mean?

• 2:44:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:05Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's...

• 2:44:06Speaker 03

  So, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not...

• 2:44:08Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:44:24Speaker 03

  Well, it is, it is hard. It's also a responsibility of citizenship. And again, I, I'm not confident that I can, 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, every little bit helps. But one thing you can do, I think, that'd be easier, and that's to, to keep an eye out for, for, for, for clear coercion, coercion, collaboration between intelligence officers and the press.

• 2:45:04Speaker 03

  And if you see that, then, then be skeptical of, of, of what's coming out of it.

• 2:45:10Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 2:45:25Speaker 03

  Uh, well, if, it depends on the, depends on the issue you're coming, so, so what people have done over the years, many years, going back a long time, is talk, um, talk analytically and talk professionally.

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  And that is fine. The issue, the problem is when the press gets people like, again, John Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, Morell, and so on, and they are, in essence, pushing a partisan perspective. So what I have tried very hard to do is, 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.

• 2:46:28Shawn Ryan?

  So look out for opinion-based stuff.

• 2:46:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:46:47Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 2:47:03Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:47:04Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. Thank you.