April 22, 2025
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment focuses on the political endeavors of the FBI and intelligence agencies from the end of World War II (1947) through the 9/11/2001 attack on the United States of America by Al-Qaeda terrorists. As I evaluated the excerpts after developing the text and attached PDF, five things struck me as overarching themes of the permanent bureaucracy in this period of time.
Next: Hugh Wilford’s book, The CIA: An Imperial History provides a glimpse of the CIA’s regime change endeavors within other countries, bolstering pro-American governments, and the surveillance of political dissenters at home.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment focuses on the political endeavors of the FBI and intelligence agencies from the end of World War II (1947) through the 9/11/2001 attack on the United States of America by Al-Qaeda terrorists. As I evaluated the excerpts after developing the text and attached PDF, five things struck me as overarching themes of the permanent bureaucracy in this period of time.
- The continuing infiltration and success of cultural Marxism in our society to the point it has evolved into today’s New Left political entity.
- The intensity of reaction by the FBI and intelligence agencies to major events impacting our country (e.g. Cold War and 9/11) to the point of abandoning their core mission.
- How quickly these two agencies have gone rogue without any regard for the law.
- The continuing theme throughout the permanent bureaucracy of being significantly behind in the use of information technology.
- The stupidity in the FBI’s adoption of a consultant’s human resource system that totally upended the agency’s culture, performance and merit development. Then it was repeated with DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) during the Biden administration.
Next: Hugh Wilford’s book, The CIA: An Imperial History provides a glimpse of the CIA’s regime change endeavors within other countries, bolstering pro-American governments, and the surveillance of political dissenters at home.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH – SEGMENT 6
US INTEL: WWII – SEPT. 11, 2001, TERRORIST ATTACK -- EXCERPTS
SAVING AMERICA FROM COMMUNIST IMPERIALISM: Containment in which the United States and its anti-Communist allies in Europe and Asia would build permanent military alliances to “contain” the expansion of Communism worldwide, became the bipartisan compromise and grand strategy that would govern the United States’ role as a superpower for the next four decades. The containment strategy resulted in merging the War Department with the Navy to create the Department of Defense as we know it today. It established the NATO alliance and other alliances. It spawned the CIA and most of the rest of the intelligence community, and various other federal agencies, front organizations, non-government organizations, think tanks, and a military-industrial complex to enforce a permanent defensive war footing.
To counter the Soviets’ lock on information in areas under Communist control, the CIA beamed radio and other messages to populations inside the Soviet Union through surrogate Radio Liberty and to Soviet-occupied Europe via Radio Free Europe, two covert operations that were stunning successes and later made independent as overt U.S.-funded media. The CIA’s primary job was, and is, to collect information around the world, analyze it, and provide it to the president and his designees as intelligence to keep them informed so they can make the best national-security and diplomatic-planning decisions possible.
The FBI under Hoover, whose strongman king of leadership gave the bureau a discernible and upright character of its own in defense against all things Marxist, remained apolitical in the sense of not going rogue, but it was often very political in the service of any president who wanted to abuse its powers. FBI insularity and rigidity retarded the institutional and operational changes that the country demanded. Lack of checks and balances for decades – weak internal oversight, literally no practical congressional oversight, and a cultish cloak of secrecy – permitted cultures of excess and failure that often broke the law. Remediation would come too little, too late. Meanwhile, the soft-on-Soviet – and thus soft-on-Marxist – academic and intellectual establishments allowed products and byproducts of the Frankfurt School and their ilk inside the tent.
SAVING US FROM CULTURAL MARXISM: With Nazism and fascism vanquished and the Cold War raging, the apostles of the Frankfurt School and their disciples could turn their full attention to the main enemy: the Western democracies with Judeo-Christian traditions. Over time, that meant destructively criticizing every aspect of that culture, pushing identity politics into every sphere of life, and attacking, mocking, and delegitimizing all resistance. It meant creation of mechanisms to take over political parties, bureaucracies, universities, philanthropic foundations, and levers of power. It meant canceling other points of view and the people who held them. The fight would be a gradual, relentless war of attrition, refining itself as new generations of writers and operators progressed beyond the old, changing with the times and with technologies but always focusing on withering the roots and leaves of Western civilization and the values on which it was built.
A brilliant intelligence operation, combined with a State Department and CIA publicity effort abroad, ripped the international Communist movement apart three years after the death of Stalin. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was still consolidating power. He delivered a historic speech to the twentieth Soviet Party Congress, a meeting of Communist Party leaders from around the world. The “Secret Speech” was never meant for public consumption. It dramatically denounced Stalin. U.S. intelligence obtained a copy of the speech. The Eisenhower administration, which worked closely with the AFL-CIO, provided a copy of Khrushchev’s speech in English, which the union summarized. Cooperation between the CIA and AFL-CIO became standard fare for most of the Cold War against Soviet interests worldwide. A Senate subcommittee published the text and the AFL-CIO summary for public distribution. Publicity of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech provoked crises in ruling Communist Parties around the world and within the American left. It split the Communist Party USA in two, one part breaking with Moscow and all its deceptions for with the members had slaved so hard, and the other remaining obedient to the Kremlin as always.
FBI, CIA, the OLD LEFT, and the NEW LEFT: Hoover was the primary figure in the United States government who consistently kept the public educated and informed about the nature of Communist subversion. The FBI director remained one of the most popular public figures of his time. He personified the decades-long fight against gangsters, Nazis, and Communists. Despite political differences, Hoover and President Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a close professional and personal relationship. Though disliked by presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, Hoover served as a detached lawman and, for Kennedy, a domestic intelligence overlord, but not a political insider.
By the late 1960s, courts nullified most federal laws against Communists, freeing up the party to work out in the open. A 1951 Supreme Court decision had forced the party underground. Now the party no longer required paid membership cards. It became decentralized. Its internal discipline changed with the times. The party’s popularity had waned, and its numbers shrank, especially among young adults who saw it as a bureaucratic relic of the past. The New Left would emerge.
COINTELPRO and What It Did Right: A good example is the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, known as CONINTELPRO. It was started officially under President Eisenhower in 1956, after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, to wreck the Soviet’s primary covert operation against the United States: The Communist Party USA. COINTELPRO ran as a unitary FBI program – not an investigation but an operation – for three years. The purpose of COINTELPRO in 1956 was to inflate, penetrate, disorganize, and disrupt the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). There were seven COINTELPRO operations. The main one, began under Eisenhower and with no special name, was the largest. It was aimed solely at the Communist Party USA.
President Kennedy and his attorney general brother recognized that the Soviets were exploiting America’s internal tensions and attempting to radicalize the civil rights movement led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom they supported. The Kennedy’s had CPUSA monitored and disrupted the Communist Party’s infiltration of the movement. This was a proper use of counterintelligence if aimed at suspected agents and assets. Part of taking down a hostile covert operation is to exploit divisions within its cadres, as with exposing Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, and to cause the factions to fight one another and even to break away and help the FBI. These are necessary and ordinary measures to break apart foreign active measures in one’s own country. But they are not law enforcement. This was good for the enemy but difficult for the FBI. In the early years of the Cold War, the CPUSA resumed exploiting American racial tensions to channel certain civil rights activists and stoke racial tensions in ways that would not seek reconciliation or solutions but would provoke further polarization and chaos.
The second operation was COINTELPRO – WHITE HATE, began under President Lydon Johnson’s instruction to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Operation WHITE HATE ran for even years until the KKK was broken. A third operation, COINTELPRO – BLACK HATE, ran against militant Black Power networks that opposed the mainstream civil rights movement that King led.
Hoover shut down COINTELPRO in 1971 after militants burglarized an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and revealed the program’s existence. There was a reason for concern about abuses under COINTELPRO. Following the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, a deep and broad Senate investigation of intelligence, led by Senator Frank Church (D-ID), reached this conclusion:
US INTEL: WWII – SEPT. 11, 2001, TERRORIST ATTACK -- EXCERPTS
SAVING AMERICA FROM COMMUNIST IMPERIALISM: Containment in which the United States and its anti-Communist allies in Europe and Asia would build permanent military alliances to “contain” the expansion of Communism worldwide, became the bipartisan compromise and grand strategy that would govern the United States’ role as a superpower for the next four decades. The containment strategy resulted in merging the War Department with the Navy to create the Department of Defense as we know it today. It established the NATO alliance and other alliances. It spawned the CIA and most of the rest of the intelligence community, and various other federal agencies, front organizations, non-government organizations, think tanks, and a military-industrial complex to enforce a permanent defensive war footing.
To counter the Soviets’ lock on information in areas under Communist control, the CIA beamed radio and other messages to populations inside the Soviet Union through surrogate Radio Liberty and to Soviet-occupied Europe via Radio Free Europe, two covert operations that were stunning successes and later made independent as overt U.S.-funded media. The CIA’s primary job was, and is, to collect information around the world, analyze it, and provide it to the president and his designees as intelligence to keep them informed so they can make the best national-security and diplomatic-planning decisions possible.
The FBI under Hoover, whose strongman king of leadership gave the bureau a discernible and upright character of its own in defense against all things Marxist, remained apolitical in the sense of not going rogue, but it was often very political in the service of any president who wanted to abuse its powers. FBI insularity and rigidity retarded the institutional and operational changes that the country demanded. Lack of checks and balances for decades – weak internal oversight, literally no practical congressional oversight, and a cultish cloak of secrecy – permitted cultures of excess and failure that often broke the law. Remediation would come too little, too late. Meanwhile, the soft-on-Soviet – and thus soft-on-Marxist – academic and intellectual establishments allowed products and byproducts of the Frankfurt School and their ilk inside the tent.
SAVING US FROM CULTURAL MARXISM: With Nazism and fascism vanquished and the Cold War raging, the apostles of the Frankfurt School and their disciples could turn their full attention to the main enemy: the Western democracies with Judeo-Christian traditions. Over time, that meant destructively criticizing every aspect of that culture, pushing identity politics into every sphere of life, and attacking, mocking, and delegitimizing all resistance. It meant creation of mechanisms to take over political parties, bureaucracies, universities, philanthropic foundations, and levers of power. It meant canceling other points of view and the people who held them. The fight would be a gradual, relentless war of attrition, refining itself as new generations of writers and operators progressed beyond the old, changing with the times and with technologies but always focusing on withering the roots and leaves of Western civilization and the values on which it was built.
A brilliant intelligence operation, combined with a State Department and CIA publicity effort abroad, ripped the international Communist movement apart three years after the death of Stalin. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was still consolidating power. He delivered a historic speech to the twentieth Soviet Party Congress, a meeting of Communist Party leaders from around the world. The “Secret Speech” was never meant for public consumption. It dramatically denounced Stalin. U.S. intelligence obtained a copy of the speech. The Eisenhower administration, which worked closely with the AFL-CIO, provided a copy of Khrushchev’s speech in English, which the union summarized. Cooperation between the CIA and AFL-CIO became standard fare for most of the Cold War against Soviet interests worldwide. A Senate subcommittee published the text and the AFL-CIO summary for public distribution. Publicity of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech provoked crises in ruling Communist Parties around the world and within the American left. It split the Communist Party USA in two, one part breaking with Moscow and all its deceptions for with the members had slaved so hard, and the other remaining obedient to the Kremlin as always.
FBI, CIA, the OLD LEFT, and the NEW LEFT: Hoover was the primary figure in the United States government who consistently kept the public educated and informed about the nature of Communist subversion. The FBI director remained one of the most popular public figures of his time. He personified the decades-long fight against gangsters, Nazis, and Communists. Despite political differences, Hoover and President Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a close professional and personal relationship. Though disliked by presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, Hoover served as a detached lawman and, for Kennedy, a domestic intelligence overlord, but not a political insider.
By the late 1960s, courts nullified most federal laws against Communists, freeing up the party to work out in the open. A 1951 Supreme Court decision had forced the party underground. Now the party no longer required paid membership cards. It became decentralized. Its internal discipline changed with the times. The party’s popularity had waned, and its numbers shrank, especially among young adults who saw it as a bureaucratic relic of the past. The New Left would emerge.
COINTELPRO and What It Did Right: A good example is the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, known as CONINTELPRO. It was started officially under President Eisenhower in 1956, after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, to wreck the Soviet’s primary covert operation against the United States: The Communist Party USA. COINTELPRO ran as a unitary FBI program – not an investigation but an operation – for three years. The purpose of COINTELPRO in 1956 was to inflate, penetrate, disorganize, and disrupt the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). There were seven COINTELPRO operations. The main one, began under Eisenhower and with no special name, was the largest. It was aimed solely at the Communist Party USA.
President Kennedy and his attorney general brother recognized that the Soviets were exploiting America’s internal tensions and attempting to radicalize the civil rights movement led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom they supported. The Kennedy’s had CPUSA monitored and disrupted the Communist Party’s infiltration of the movement. This was a proper use of counterintelligence if aimed at suspected agents and assets. Part of taking down a hostile covert operation is to exploit divisions within its cadres, as with exposing Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, and to cause the factions to fight one another and even to break away and help the FBI. These are necessary and ordinary measures to break apart foreign active measures in one’s own country. But they are not law enforcement. This was good for the enemy but difficult for the FBI. In the early years of the Cold War, the CPUSA resumed exploiting American racial tensions to channel certain civil rights activists and stoke racial tensions in ways that would not seek reconciliation or solutions but would provoke further polarization and chaos.
The second operation was COINTELPRO – WHITE HATE, began under President Lydon Johnson’s instruction to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Operation WHITE HATE ran for even years until the KKK was broken. A third operation, COINTELPRO – BLACK HATE, ran against militant Black Power networks that opposed the mainstream civil rights movement that King led.
Hoover shut down COINTELPRO in 1971 after militants burglarized an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and revealed the program’s existence. There was a reason for concern about abuses under COINTELPRO. Following the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, a deep and broad Senate investigation of intelligence, led by Senator Frank Church (D-ID), reached this conclusion:
The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens.
The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the “national security” the law did not apply. While intelligence offices on occasion failed to disclose to their superior’s programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law. Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that.
THE POLITICAL FBI: In the political mainstream, for over half of its history, the bureau has illegally intervened, one way or another, in domestic politics. Hoover and the FBI flagrantly acted outside the law and the Constitution by systematically spying on and keeping dossiers about law abiding Americans. He weaponized the FBI against ordinary citizens and their elected representatives. Once a security or police service is able to keep files on citizens and the people they voted into office, operating with no effective legislative oversight, able to spy on elected officials and Supreme Court justices, it becomes an entity unto itself, a state within a state. Hoover led the FBI until May 2, 1972, the day he died. On Sept. 4, 2001, President H. W. Bush designated Robert S. Mueller III as the next FBI director. Mueller served for a full ten years plus a two-year extension at the request of the Obama administration – years in which Mueller showed visible cognitive decline – everything changed.
THE CIA: Most of the revelations and exposures of FBI and CIA abuses in the 1970s came from the left, with conservatives generally defending both agencies. But the concerns crossed the political spectrum. A bipartisan Senate report spoke for all in 1976 when it said, “The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.” The 1970s purges of the CIA changed the professional complexion of the agency and gutted its human intelligence and operational capabilities. None of the changes had anything to do with politicization, however.
INFLUENCE OPERATIONS ARE THE REAL NAME OF THE GAME: Most foreign intelligence work of the Soviet KGB has little to do with spying, which is to steal secrets. KGB foreign intelligence devoted a large amount of its resources to supporting agents who influence foreign elites and top-level decision-making, influencing public opinion more broadly and waging long-term, strategic subversion to undermine Western societies from within.
In the 1970s, the FBI and CIA lost their experienced leadership and analysts who readily understood this and focused instead on the espionage part of intelligence and counterintelligence. A congressional panel revived interest in active measures in 1980, and the new Reagan administration did to a more sustained degree starting in 1982. However, even the Reagan team focused on active measures as relating to diplomacy, proxy wars, and arms control, not subversion of American society from within.
Communist parties and front organizations, infiltrated non-Communist organizations and movements, running agents and assets to influence how people think and how decision-makers decide, and coordinating or at least shaping demonstrations, protests, riots, and mass movements. A narrow subset of active measures in disinformation, the fabrication and insertion of false or distorted information into Western news organizations, textbooks, entertainment, or any other medium to influence decision-makers or public opinion. The saying that it’s easier to deceive a person than it is to convince him that he’s been deceived held true with the KGB. Westerners, and Americans in particular, are vulnerable because they don’t think in the short term, in a matter of months or years, or an election cycle.
The first goal was to demoralize entire societies. Once a society is demoralized, it is subject to the second goal, destabilization. Once destabilized, a society becomes more vulnerable to the third goal, a naturally occurring or manufactured crisis. The fourth goal emerging from the crisis is collapse or overturning of the existing order.
The Subversive Feedback Loop: These goals came from The Frankfurt School. Working toward these goals takes extraordinary focus and persistence. The initial perpetrators might not live long enough to see the finished results, and many knew it.
Stage 1: Demoralization: It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. That is the time it takes to educate students, without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism. Indoctrinating and recruiting from the next generation made universities and teaching of the teachers such a core priority.
Stage 2 Destabilization: The next stage is destabilization. Absent some resiliency, decline can come suddenly and precipitously. This time it takes only two to five years to destabilize a nation, what matters are essentials: economy, foreign relations, defense systems.
Stage 3 Crisis: The next stage is crisis. The crisis would be permanent and usually naturally occurring, sometimes manufactured, always channeled in a desired direction. This stage seeks to plunge a society into a state of permanent crisis, to infuse the public with constant uncertainty and nagging anxiety, punctuated by attacks of panic and breaks in the public’s trust in institutions and in each other. Reason breaks down.
Stage 4 Normalization: After crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have the so-called period of normalization. This is the new normal. You are not living in a time of peace. You are in a state of war, and you have precious time to save yourself.
The power structure, the natural bodies of administration, which are traditionally either elected by people at large or appointed by elected leaders of society, are being substituted by artificial bodies. The bodies of people, groups of people who nobody elected, never – as a matter of fact, most of the people don’t like them at all – and yet they exist. These unelected or unaccountable groups would organize horizontally as networks across and among bureaucracies, all promoting common themes, grievances, and demands.
After years of organizing, they would build enough critical mass and outside support to pressure weak leadership to provide privileged status within the bureaucracy or promote them prematurely and often without objective merit, to the highest levels of the civil service or the equivalent and the entry levels of senior executive service. It would then be a matter of time for politically sympathetic leadership to emerge at the top with its own political appointees to finish the job. This is a simple formula, agonizingly protracted for years. It goes like this: The good professionals inside the bureaucracy become demoralized. Some of the best younger ones will quit early, others will keep their heads down and try to ride it out, more will go along to get along but without much enthusiasm, and those further along in their careers, eyeing retirement, will dejectedly do their job until they can end their careers with full benefits.
This demoralization, from school boards to universities, private business to defense contractors, consumers of news and entertainment to victims of unjust judicial processes or bureaucratic harassment, sports fans to religious believers and more, will ultimately consume a society. The moment you bring a country to the point of almost total demoralization, when nothing works any more, when you are not sure what is right or wrong, good and bad, where there is no division between evil and good, when even the leaders of the church sometimes say, “Well, violence for the sake of justice, especially justice is here.”.
THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11: Two cultural revolutions swept the FBI and the CIA after the al- Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001. President George W. Bush fumed that the intelligence community had failed to detect the terrorist conspiracy. He and his team, with nearly unanimous congressional support, vowed to stop at nothing to prevent such an attack from happening again.
Vice President Dick Cheney handled the levers of power decisively. He led the administration’s national security team. He would revamp the all-seeing security apparat that he, the president, and just about everyone else in Washington thought the country needed. They issued top-secret instructions to turn the FBI back into a domestic intelligence service with police powers, which inadvertently or otherwise meant returning to Hoover roots. The terrorist attacks were not criminal acts to be solved. They were acts of war. Preventing acts of war required aggressive intelligence collection and operation.
Bush, already enthralled by the CIA, kept George Tenet on board a director. At Cheney’s tough direction, Tenet turned his near directionless, lower-tech, status quo agency to a focused, more skilled, para-militarized super high-tech terrorist-hunting machine. The quick ramp-up for a real technological capability meant hiring a log of tech-savvy younger people who didn’t fit with traditional CIA culture. They just needed to be the best at their jobs.
Along with that new influx of younger people came an intellectual sea change within the CIA. By 2000, intellectual devolution had become so advanced that the CIA had anointed the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse to the pantheon of OSS Research & Analysis scholars. The CIA sanitized Marcuse as an American hero, and a philosopher-architect of the New Left and its nihilistic terrorist bombings and assassinations, or a founding father of American critical theory and cultural Marxism. The CIA mainstreamed Marcuse as one of its own.
USA PATRIOT ACT: Within six weeks of the terrorist strike on 9/11, Congress rushed passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. The complex Act established and funded the expansion of a huge domestic security apparat. It beefed up enhanced surveillance procedures, expanding warrantless wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to enable the FBI and National Security Agency to spy, hopefully with limitations, on private citizens. It expanded the use of warrants and roving wiretaps. It mandated that private companies preserve all electronic records of their customers. It also increased border security, placing travel burdens on American citizens while doing little to stop illegal immigration by land. It monitored ordinary citizens’ banking and credit card activity for terrorist finance. Congressional extensions and various legal maneuvers have kept the main provisions of the law alive ever since.
Then came the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which consolidated various domestic security entities. For decades, congresses and presidents had deliberately dispersed those duties across the government to avoid concentration of power. Now, in the name of fighting terrorism, Bush and Congress merged twenty-two of them into one central concentration of power, emerging in early 2003 as the Department of Homeland Security. Then in 2004 came the third major legislative change, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created another new government agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). ODNI’s intended job was to integrate civilian and military intelligence, foreign and internal, to make sure nothing went unshared or slipped between the cracks, in order to keep the American public and U.S. foreign interests safe from terrorist attack. ODNI mushroomed to a force of two thousand.
By design, the U.S. intelligence community had been decentralized among thirteen autonomous or near-autonomous agencies, civilian and military. This “stove-piping” meant that intelligence might get to the top of one organization but not be laterally shared with other agencies. That was one of the problems of 9/11. Certain agencies, including the CIA and FBI, had data that, if shared, might have revealed planning of the terrorist attack. Indeed, through stove-piping – and a large measure of sheer incompetence – the FBI sat on information that probably could have been used to prevent 9/11.
Bush 43—era centralization to fight terrorism inadvertently permitted the Obama metamorphosis of the cultures of the FBI and CIA, and the entire intelligence community under the ODNI oligarchy. Instead of improved performance, this second transformation shocked the system by imposing a governing philosophy of critical theory – a direct descendant of Frankfurt School philosophy – that had nothing to do with enhancing America’s intelligence needs. That critical theory would invent a new and permanent terrorist threat which placed half the country under suspicion.
PARADOX WITHIN THE BUREAU: As a law enforcement agency, the FBI generally dealt truthfully with the public. It had to collect fact-faced evidence in a legal fashion that would stand before the scrutiny of a trial, judge and jury. One is legally innocent until proven guilty. Intelligence, by contrast, is subject to almost none of those rules. Its facts might not be evidence in a legal or constitutional sense, or, for that matter, for legitimate reasons of national security. Sources might be unreliable. Much of the intelligence process and product, by nature, is pure guesswork. Intelligence is not always obtained legally. Even the existence of intelligence is often secret and is sometimes denied. Unless declassified or illegally leaked, intelligence is not subject to independent scrutiny. No right exists to face one’s accuser, or even to know that one has been accused at all. Except in rare circumstances, intelligence may not be used as evidence to prosecute an accused citizen.
As a domestic intelligence agency with police powers, the FBI under Mueller in his final years began to look at large elements of the population as potential enemies, as a menace to the government, with intelligence-based evidence that might or might not be true, but which could be weaponized against the public based on information that might not stand up in court. This is where the citizen has no recourse to the law. The citizen can be blacklisted without seeing the evidence against him, and even without his knowledge. The post-9/11 FBI can punish its targets through investigative and administrative processes without bothering to prepare cases to put suspects on trial. (NOTE: This appears to be the case in many of the January 6th imprisonments)
MANUFACTURED DOMESTIC THREATS – AND THE BOUNTY SYSTEM: To defend the public against terrorist attack after September 11, 2001, Congress passed draconian new laws that made extraordinary powers legal. Mueller used those laws and policy mandates in ways that turned the bureau into what former special agent Thomas J. Baker called “a threat to democracy.” Mueller crippled the bureau’s internal checks by centralizing the director’s power. He created two layers of bureaucracy at headquarters, swelling upper management to more than sixty senior executive service positions, with the highest salaries in the entire federal government. That top-heavy bureaucracy isolated the entire FBI leadership from the field offices. Mueller cut communication between the director’s office and the now fifty-six field offices, forcing special agents in charge to speak to the new high-level bureaucrats instead of to him personally. The open line was gone.
That’s because outside consulting firms convinced Mueller to introduce a bounty system for the upper management to profit personally. The bounty system-imposed quotas that forced field agents to check as many boxes as possible as a means of statistically measuring productivity. The criteria were a synthetic construct, invented by green-eyeshade types to assess the quantity of work, not quality, in all the field offices. If every special agent checked as many boxes as possible, the special agent in charge would be rewarded, as would his supervisor back at headquarters. Promotions would depend on this system. The FBI top leadership would even collect annual cash bonuses for all the boxes their underlings checked, independent of connection to the ongoing logic of actual investigations. As the bureau bloated, it became less efficient.
Moreover, because achieving predetermined benchmarks is tied to FBI executives’ compensation, the FBI’s corrupted incentive structure favors case quantity over quality and encourages employees to deploy their creative faculties to game the system for artificial statistical accomplishments instead of focusing on true case work.
MILITARIZED AGENTS OF CHANGE: The FBI under Bush, Cheney, and Mueller not only centralized but militarized. It introduced the heavy use of tactical paramilitary units, tactical weapons, and military gear in the name of public safety and counterterrorism. As Hoover had been vilified for doing, the FBI ratcheted up intelligence collection against citizens not even suspected of a crime. That shift changed the FBI’s ethos, especially among younger agents who, in their mid-to-late twenties, had an idealistic motive to defend the nation against terrorists, too often with a postmodern worldview that would motivate them as (Illegal) agents of social change and social justice. The bureau’s management tolerated politicization of the workplace. These changes demoralized FBI professionals, young and older, who wanted to bust criminals and foreign spies and fight real terrorists.
FAILURE ON EVERY FRONT: Even with its expanded powers, Mueller’s FBI was unable to find a single al Qaeda member in five years. So, it reverted to Hoover’s proven efforts against CPUSA and KKK, but without the strategic results: Sting operations. Setups. Entrapment. Quick busts for public accolades. Lots of publicity. But more than half of the known FBI cases from 2007 to 2009 against domestic Islamic terrorists were sting operations that prevented no attacks at all. During this time, the FBI developed a list of 700,000,000 terrorism-related records with 1.1 million names. The bureau was almost as backward technologically as it had been when its accounting software designer Robert Hanssen was arrested in 2001. Only a third of FBI agents and analysts had online access by 2008.
Source: Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heros to Deep State Villains by J. Michael Waller (2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE POLITICAL FBI: In the political mainstream, for over half of its history, the bureau has illegally intervened, one way or another, in domestic politics. Hoover and the FBI flagrantly acted outside the law and the Constitution by systematically spying on and keeping dossiers about law abiding Americans. He weaponized the FBI against ordinary citizens and their elected representatives. Once a security or police service is able to keep files on citizens and the people they voted into office, operating with no effective legislative oversight, able to spy on elected officials and Supreme Court justices, it becomes an entity unto itself, a state within a state. Hoover led the FBI until May 2, 1972, the day he died. On Sept. 4, 2001, President H. W. Bush designated Robert S. Mueller III as the next FBI director. Mueller served for a full ten years plus a two-year extension at the request of the Obama administration – years in which Mueller showed visible cognitive decline – everything changed.
THE CIA: Most of the revelations and exposures of FBI and CIA abuses in the 1970s came from the left, with conservatives generally defending both agencies. But the concerns crossed the political spectrum. A bipartisan Senate report spoke for all in 1976 when it said, “The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.” The 1970s purges of the CIA changed the professional complexion of the agency and gutted its human intelligence and operational capabilities. None of the changes had anything to do with politicization, however.
INFLUENCE OPERATIONS ARE THE REAL NAME OF THE GAME: Most foreign intelligence work of the Soviet KGB has little to do with spying, which is to steal secrets. KGB foreign intelligence devoted a large amount of its resources to supporting agents who influence foreign elites and top-level decision-making, influencing public opinion more broadly and waging long-term, strategic subversion to undermine Western societies from within.
In the 1970s, the FBI and CIA lost their experienced leadership and analysts who readily understood this and focused instead on the espionage part of intelligence and counterintelligence. A congressional panel revived interest in active measures in 1980, and the new Reagan administration did to a more sustained degree starting in 1982. However, even the Reagan team focused on active measures as relating to diplomacy, proxy wars, and arms control, not subversion of American society from within.
Communist parties and front organizations, infiltrated non-Communist organizations and movements, running agents and assets to influence how people think and how decision-makers decide, and coordinating or at least shaping demonstrations, protests, riots, and mass movements. A narrow subset of active measures in disinformation, the fabrication and insertion of false or distorted information into Western news organizations, textbooks, entertainment, or any other medium to influence decision-makers or public opinion. The saying that it’s easier to deceive a person than it is to convince him that he’s been deceived held true with the KGB. Westerners, and Americans in particular, are vulnerable because they don’t think in the short term, in a matter of months or years, or an election cycle.
The first goal was to demoralize entire societies. Once a society is demoralized, it is subject to the second goal, destabilization. Once destabilized, a society becomes more vulnerable to the third goal, a naturally occurring or manufactured crisis. The fourth goal emerging from the crisis is collapse or overturning of the existing order.
The Subversive Feedback Loop: These goals came from The Frankfurt School. Working toward these goals takes extraordinary focus and persistence. The initial perpetrators might not live long enough to see the finished results, and many knew it.
Stage 1: Demoralization: It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. That is the time it takes to educate students, without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism. Indoctrinating and recruiting from the next generation made universities and teaching of the teachers such a core priority.
Stage 2 Destabilization: The next stage is destabilization. Absent some resiliency, decline can come suddenly and precipitously. This time it takes only two to five years to destabilize a nation, what matters are essentials: economy, foreign relations, defense systems.
Stage 3 Crisis: The next stage is crisis. The crisis would be permanent and usually naturally occurring, sometimes manufactured, always channeled in a desired direction. This stage seeks to plunge a society into a state of permanent crisis, to infuse the public with constant uncertainty and nagging anxiety, punctuated by attacks of panic and breaks in the public’s trust in institutions and in each other. Reason breaks down.
Stage 4 Normalization: After crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have the so-called period of normalization. This is the new normal. You are not living in a time of peace. You are in a state of war, and you have precious time to save yourself.
The power structure, the natural bodies of administration, which are traditionally either elected by people at large or appointed by elected leaders of society, are being substituted by artificial bodies. The bodies of people, groups of people who nobody elected, never – as a matter of fact, most of the people don’t like them at all – and yet they exist. These unelected or unaccountable groups would organize horizontally as networks across and among bureaucracies, all promoting common themes, grievances, and demands.
After years of organizing, they would build enough critical mass and outside support to pressure weak leadership to provide privileged status within the bureaucracy or promote them prematurely and often without objective merit, to the highest levels of the civil service or the equivalent and the entry levels of senior executive service. It would then be a matter of time for politically sympathetic leadership to emerge at the top with its own political appointees to finish the job. This is a simple formula, agonizingly protracted for years. It goes like this: The good professionals inside the bureaucracy become demoralized. Some of the best younger ones will quit early, others will keep their heads down and try to ride it out, more will go along to get along but without much enthusiasm, and those further along in their careers, eyeing retirement, will dejectedly do their job until they can end their careers with full benefits.
This demoralization, from school boards to universities, private business to defense contractors, consumers of news and entertainment to victims of unjust judicial processes or bureaucratic harassment, sports fans to religious believers and more, will ultimately consume a society. The moment you bring a country to the point of almost total demoralization, when nothing works any more, when you are not sure what is right or wrong, good and bad, where there is no division between evil and good, when even the leaders of the church sometimes say, “Well, violence for the sake of justice, especially justice is here.”.
THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11: Two cultural revolutions swept the FBI and the CIA after the al- Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001. President George W. Bush fumed that the intelligence community had failed to detect the terrorist conspiracy. He and his team, with nearly unanimous congressional support, vowed to stop at nothing to prevent such an attack from happening again.
Vice President Dick Cheney handled the levers of power decisively. He led the administration’s national security team. He would revamp the all-seeing security apparat that he, the president, and just about everyone else in Washington thought the country needed. They issued top-secret instructions to turn the FBI back into a domestic intelligence service with police powers, which inadvertently or otherwise meant returning to Hoover roots. The terrorist attacks were not criminal acts to be solved. They were acts of war. Preventing acts of war required aggressive intelligence collection and operation.
Bush, already enthralled by the CIA, kept George Tenet on board a director. At Cheney’s tough direction, Tenet turned his near directionless, lower-tech, status quo agency to a focused, more skilled, para-militarized super high-tech terrorist-hunting machine. The quick ramp-up for a real technological capability meant hiring a log of tech-savvy younger people who didn’t fit with traditional CIA culture. They just needed to be the best at their jobs.
Along with that new influx of younger people came an intellectual sea change within the CIA. By 2000, intellectual devolution had become so advanced that the CIA had anointed the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse to the pantheon of OSS Research & Analysis scholars. The CIA sanitized Marcuse as an American hero, and a philosopher-architect of the New Left and its nihilistic terrorist bombings and assassinations, or a founding father of American critical theory and cultural Marxism. The CIA mainstreamed Marcuse as one of its own.
USA PATRIOT ACT: Within six weeks of the terrorist strike on 9/11, Congress rushed passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. The complex Act established and funded the expansion of a huge domestic security apparat. It beefed up enhanced surveillance procedures, expanding warrantless wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to enable the FBI and National Security Agency to spy, hopefully with limitations, on private citizens. It expanded the use of warrants and roving wiretaps. It mandated that private companies preserve all electronic records of their customers. It also increased border security, placing travel burdens on American citizens while doing little to stop illegal immigration by land. It monitored ordinary citizens’ banking and credit card activity for terrorist finance. Congressional extensions and various legal maneuvers have kept the main provisions of the law alive ever since.
Then came the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which consolidated various domestic security entities. For decades, congresses and presidents had deliberately dispersed those duties across the government to avoid concentration of power. Now, in the name of fighting terrorism, Bush and Congress merged twenty-two of them into one central concentration of power, emerging in early 2003 as the Department of Homeland Security. Then in 2004 came the third major legislative change, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created another new government agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). ODNI’s intended job was to integrate civilian and military intelligence, foreign and internal, to make sure nothing went unshared or slipped between the cracks, in order to keep the American public and U.S. foreign interests safe from terrorist attack. ODNI mushroomed to a force of two thousand.
By design, the U.S. intelligence community had been decentralized among thirteen autonomous or near-autonomous agencies, civilian and military. This “stove-piping” meant that intelligence might get to the top of one organization but not be laterally shared with other agencies. That was one of the problems of 9/11. Certain agencies, including the CIA and FBI, had data that, if shared, might have revealed planning of the terrorist attack. Indeed, through stove-piping – and a large measure of sheer incompetence – the FBI sat on information that probably could have been used to prevent 9/11.
Bush 43—era centralization to fight terrorism inadvertently permitted the Obama metamorphosis of the cultures of the FBI and CIA, and the entire intelligence community under the ODNI oligarchy. Instead of improved performance, this second transformation shocked the system by imposing a governing philosophy of critical theory – a direct descendant of Frankfurt School philosophy – that had nothing to do with enhancing America’s intelligence needs. That critical theory would invent a new and permanent terrorist threat which placed half the country under suspicion.
PARADOX WITHIN THE BUREAU: As a law enforcement agency, the FBI generally dealt truthfully with the public. It had to collect fact-faced evidence in a legal fashion that would stand before the scrutiny of a trial, judge and jury. One is legally innocent until proven guilty. Intelligence, by contrast, is subject to almost none of those rules. Its facts might not be evidence in a legal or constitutional sense, or, for that matter, for legitimate reasons of national security. Sources might be unreliable. Much of the intelligence process and product, by nature, is pure guesswork. Intelligence is not always obtained legally. Even the existence of intelligence is often secret and is sometimes denied. Unless declassified or illegally leaked, intelligence is not subject to independent scrutiny. No right exists to face one’s accuser, or even to know that one has been accused at all. Except in rare circumstances, intelligence may not be used as evidence to prosecute an accused citizen.
As a domestic intelligence agency with police powers, the FBI under Mueller in his final years began to look at large elements of the population as potential enemies, as a menace to the government, with intelligence-based evidence that might or might not be true, but which could be weaponized against the public based on information that might not stand up in court. This is where the citizen has no recourse to the law. The citizen can be blacklisted without seeing the evidence against him, and even without his knowledge. The post-9/11 FBI can punish its targets through investigative and administrative processes without bothering to prepare cases to put suspects on trial. (NOTE: This appears to be the case in many of the January 6th imprisonments)
MANUFACTURED DOMESTIC THREATS – AND THE BOUNTY SYSTEM: To defend the public against terrorist attack after September 11, 2001, Congress passed draconian new laws that made extraordinary powers legal. Mueller used those laws and policy mandates in ways that turned the bureau into what former special agent Thomas J. Baker called “a threat to democracy.” Mueller crippled the bureau’s internal checks by centralizing the director’s power. He created two layers of bureaucracy at headquarters, swelling upper management to more than sixty senior executive service positions, with the highest salaries in the entire federal government. That top-heavy bureaucracy isolated the entire FBI leadership from the field offices. Mueller cut communication between the director’s office and the now fifty-six field offices, forcing special agents in charge to speak to the new high-level bureaucrats instead of to him personally. The open line was gone.
That’s because outside consulting firms convinced Mueller to introduce a bounty system for the upper management to profit personally. The bounty system-imposed quotas that forced field agents to check as many boxes as possible as a means of statistically measuring productivity. The criteria were a synthetic construct, invented by green-eyeshade types to assess the quantity of work, not quality, in all the field offices. If every special agent checked as many boxes as possible, the special agent in charge would be rewarded, as would his supervisor back at headquarters. Promotions would depend on this system. The FBI top leadership would even collect annual cash bonuses for all the boxes their underlings checked, independent of connection to the ongoing logic of actual investigations. As the bureau bloated, it became less efficient.
Moreover, because achieving predetermined benchmarks is tied to FBI executives’ compensation, the FBI’s corrupted incentive structure favors case quantity over quality and encourages employees to deploy their creative faculties to game the system for artificial statistical accomplishments instead of focusing on true case work.
MILITARIZED AGENTS OF CHANGE: The FBI under Bush, Cheney, and Mueller not only centralized but militarized. It introduced the heavy use of tactical paramilitary units, tactical weapons, and military gear in the name of public safety and counterterrorism. As Hoover had been vilified for doing, the FBI ratcheted up intelligence collection against citizens not even suspected of a crime. That shift changed the FBI’s ethos, especially among younger agents who, in their mid-to-late twenties, had an idealistic motive to defend the nation against terrorists, too often with a postmodern worldview that would motivate them as (Illegal) agents of social change and social justice. The bureau’s management tolerated politicization of the workplace. These changes demoralized FBI professionals, young and older, who wanted to bust criminals and foreign spies and fight real terrorists.
FAILURE ON EVERY FRONT: Even with its expanded powers, Mueller’s FBI was unable to find a single al Qaeda member in five years. So, it reverted to Hoover’s proven efforts against CPUSA and KKK, but without the strategic results: Sting operations. Setups. Entrapment. Quick busts for public accolades. Lots of publicity. But more than half of the known FBI cases from 2007 to 2009 against domestic Islamic terrorists were sting operations that prevented no attacks at all. During this time, the FBI developed a list of 700,000,000 terrorism-related records with 1.1 million names. The bureau was almost as backward technologically as it had been when its accounting software designer Robert Hanssen was arrested in 2001. Only a third of FBI agents and analysts had online access by 2008.
Source: Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heros to Deep State Villains by J. Michael Waller (2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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