Democrats are apoplectic this week at the announcements of nominations for the Trump Cabinet. Many are talking about the “chaos” that Trump brings. While folks on the right are divided about particular nominees thus far, there ought to be a consensus around this point: chaos is good. As strategist Clint Brown wrote earlier this week, the right needs to be very comfortable with hearing about it. “Anytime the uni party uses the word ‘chaos,’ it means something they can’t control. They want control. You want chaos in their world to disrupt their control. Anyone they call ‘chaos’ is good for you.”
Given that definition, the question should never be whether Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence), Matt Gaetz (Attorney General), John Ratcliffe (CIA), and others are chaotic, but whether they are chaotic enough. This is particularly true when it comes to these positions in federal law enforcement and intelligence, which have been turned into leftist power centers. They have control. It is this Deep State that Donald Trump has vowed to wage war against.
For those on the frontlines of this battle and those on the home front—members of the Trump Administration and GOP pondering how to fight and ordinary Americans wondering how on earth these once-trusted agencies became what they are—J. Michael Waller’s new book is, by turns, exciting, depressing, angry-making, and hopeful. Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains tells the story of “a battle the FBI and CIA fought for decades before they succumbed to a generations-old hostile foreign intelligence operation to destroy the United States and Western civilization from within.”
A senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and president of Georgetown Research, a private intelligence company, Waller begins his book with an account of his own introduction into the world of intelligence and counterintelligence when he was a junior at Georgetown. Having a grasp of Spanish and a desire to help expose American networks supporting Communists in Central America, Waller planned a trip on his own with the knowledge of a National Security Agency official named Constantine Menges. Menges connected Waller with an old intelligence hand named “Jim” (he never learned his real name), who gave Waller the wealth of his knowledge of intelligence and cash for his trip. Jim also told Waller to attend a particular Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington and wait for someone to meet him. That mysterious person was CIA Director William J. Casey, who walked back through the center aisle, saw Waller, and uttered a few then-mysterious words Waller later realized were connected to his trip.
Waller’s trip was successful. He never saw “Jim” again. And he was hooked on the world of intelligence, beginning a career of practice and study of how to defend American principles and western civilization. It was only later that he realized that Casey had been the source of the cash from “Jim.” Casey understood that he needed channels of information outside the agency he ran. Waller never joined the CIA because of the advice of Angelo Codevilla, who told him the CIA “isn’t doing its job” and “is about perpetuating itself as a bureaucracy.” It wasn’t “for mission-oriented people like you. Not anymore.”
How had it gotten that way? Waller’s account starts before the creation of either agency. The FBI’s legal basis was a July 26, 1908, memo written by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte concerning a “force of special agents” under the direction of the “Chief Examiner” in the Department of Justice. It wasn’t much. Finally, after World War I, the fledgling FBI began to take its present form under the direction of a patriotic young Washingtonian named J. Edgar Hoover, who had started out in the Alien Enemy Bureau of the Justice Department, fighting against Marxist, particularly Bolshevik, influences. At about the same time, a young lawyer and soldier under General John “Blackjack” Pershing, William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan was also discovering the world of Communist subversion. In 1920, he traveled to Europe again on behalf of J. P. Morgan to research the Comintern, the popular name for the Communist International, an organization founded the year before to promote communism on a world scale.
What they were both discovering was that, despite all the talk about economics in the later Marx, most Marxists were interested in Marx’s 1843 writings, which advocated a “ruthless criticism of the existing order.” As Waller describes it, in Marx’s vision: “The battlespace would be not economic, but cultural. It would be an all-of-society attack.” In short, the original Marxism was already “cultural Marxism,” an attack on private property, but also religion, the family, and national borders.
Waller recounts the Comintern’s 1922 meeting in Moscow at the Marx-Engels Institute, where Politburo member Karl Radek, Hungarian radical Georg Lukács, German Communist Willi Münzenberg, and Cheka (Soviet secret police) commissioner Feliks Dzerzhinsky gathered to plan an attack on the West and achieve what Lukács called “the abolition of culture” in order to counter the deep roots of “Western civilization and its deep Old and New Testament culture passed from one generation to another by family and church or synagogue.” Their strategy involved espionage, front groups, cultural penetration via art and writers, political penetration, and control of education. They decided that the best way to achieve this destruction was not “the more challenging, doctrinaire Communism” but a “nihilism” they pursued through numerous means, including “a Neo-Freudian theory of sexual assault on traditional values.” And their most effective work in this regard came through the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany.
It was through this educational institute that many Americans were indoctrinated in the critical theory that would supply what we now know as wokeness. It was through fellow traveling theologians such as Protestant Paul Tillich that many Americans were to get a sanitized version of Marxism and a poisoned version of Christianity. And it was in education schools, particularly Columbia University Teachers College, that the cultural Marxists were most successful. Columbia’s legendary John Dewey called himself a socialist but was “a willing Comintern fellow traveler.” His vision was of a National Education Association that “would use its unsuspecting dues-paying members as agents of change to push critical theory and cultural Marxism to generations of American schoolchildren….” He got his wish.
Waller judges both J. Edgar Hoover and Wild Bill Donovan as clear-eyed about the challenge. But Hoover had a better grip on how to face it. He would also make sure those under his command had not drunk the cultural Marxist Kool Aid. Donovan, whose time for real leadership came when Franklin Roosevelt tasked him with creating “a new intelligence service,” was much less careful. The Coordinator of Information (COI), an agency begun by Roosevelt under Donavan’s direction, yielded to a second body known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donavan’s approach with both was “seat of the pants,” smart about “the need for a real espionage service with human agents, clandestine communications, and all that went with it,” but also not cautious enough about screening out personnel who were Marxist fellow travelers or even Communists. Frankfurt School immigrants such as Herbert Marcuse worked for the agency. Waller describes the OSS as having a “poisoned start.”
The U. S. itself was poisoned, if one realizes how many Communists had penetrated the U. S. government from the 1930s to the 1950s. Joseph McCarthy’s imprudent behavior often kneecapped his accurate assessments of the real subversion that was happening at very high levels. Hoover proposed putting all intelligence and counterintelligence operations under the control of the FBI. But neither he nor Donovan were to run the show in the long run. A new agency known as the Central Intelligence Agency would take the place of the haphazard OSS.
The CIA in its beginnings was a sane and professional organization. While those in charge were generally liberal, they were also anti-Marxist. Waller describes early figures Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and James Angleton as “honorable men operating in a gray world but with honorable intentions.” If there were flaws initially, they related more to the way in which the organization became bureaucratized. Leaders in the 1970s became enamored of technology and turned away from the importance of human intelligence. At the same time, the subversion of education had meant more and more people influenced by the New Left were entering into the agencies. Eventually, something would have to give.
The FBI got out of hand with its internal spying on American citizens, but it was generally done in the name of American principles. Its hands were slapped in the 1970s by Congress for its misbehavior. But it was the CIA that would become subverted first, under Clinton’s second director, George Tenet. “By 2000,” writes Waller, “intellectual devolution had become so advanced that the CIA had anointed the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse to the pantheon of OSS Research & scholars…. The CIA sanitized Marcuse as an American hero.” This is the same Marcuse whose notion of “repressive tolerance” became the theoretical basis for political correctness and eventually cancel culture.
The overreaction to 9/11 caused further harm. The Patriot Act helped create the conditions for the victory of unpatriotic and culturally Marxist ideas by merging twenty-two “domestic security entities” into the Department of Homeland Security and creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which immediately grew to a force of two thousand employees. As Waller notes, “The post-9/11 measure then merged America’s intelligence and military machine with progressive San Francisco capital.” Like the situation of emergency that caused Wild Bill Donovan to staff his OSS with unvetted agents and analysts, the needs of the Global War on Terror allowed the development of “the predatory American Security state,” in which foreigners crossed the border at will but Americans were forced to submit to searches at the airport and let the government monitor their “banking and credit activity for ‘terrorist finance.’” The FBI was again turning its eyes on ordinary Americans and capable of punishing Americans by “investigative and administrative processes without bothering to prepare cases to put suspects on trial.”
The cultural revolution was complete with the subversion of the FBI under Robert Mueller during the Obama years. Obama and his administration, especially Valerie Jarrett, promised “fundamental transformation of America” and delivered. 2011 was the year in which the FBI quietly began to adopt critical theory and its attendants DEI and extreme gender theory. By 2016, these ideologies had bloomed there as well as at the CIA. Waller inspects the very obvious bad fruits of Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the 51 intelligence officials who falsely declared that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, and the dishonest approach to January 6, 2021—we know there were professional agitators and feds among the rioters but still don’t know how many.
While there are still many honorable men and women who serve in the FBI and CIA, both agencies are now explicit in their tweets, training materials, and official documents about their woke allegiances.
What can be done? In the book’s final section, Waller lays out a plan for getting rid of both the FBI and the CIA without abandoning their important functions. Waller admits that his plans will require both strength of will and organizational savvy. In other words, they will require the right kind of “chaos” from both Donald Trump and his appointees.
Waller’s book, at 386 pages of text and another 41 pages of notes, is a goldmine of information about the last hundred years and fodder for both historical and practical debates about his conclusions. Though a reader might be a bit confused when his narrative sometimes goes backward or forward in time to capture the relationship between events, these jumps are usually made clear. He makes fair appraisals of the figures of our history, refusing to make complicated individuals purely good or purely bad; some will think him too kind to one and too harsh about another. And he gives hope to the reader baffled by our current situation. Yes, we’ve been under threat by Marxism before. We are not doomed to defeat. However, it will take prayer, courage, and persistence to fight against the nihilism that surrounds us. And, perhaps, the right kind of chaos.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.