MAIN IDEA:

This book is written by a journalist who spent decades working in close contact with US intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the FBI. Here is how the author defines what it is all about:” All utopian movements and societies require enforcers. Big Intel is about how these former protectors of American founding principles have followed societal trends to become the secret services of critical theory and fonts of the democracy-demolishing wokeness that the theory animates. This is a counterintelligence story—a chronicle 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. It’s about how American foreign intelligence was targeted and attacked as soon as it was founded. These attacks were not about partisan politics—yes, the FBI and CIA did meddle in domestic politics and still do—but something far deeper: they were meant to turn American instruments of power into enforcers of the vanguards spearheading the fundamental transformation of our country. Big Intel seeks to answer how it happened.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

All secret services of all countries are always instruments
of power. It is never the power of some abstraction, such as people, but rather
the power of a specific group controlling society’s resources and its political
and bureaucratic machinery. In a functioning democracy, resources and control
are divided between competing groups. For example, from the beginning of the
USA until the end of the Civil War, it was between Northern plutocrats and
Southern aristocrats. When the author started his career in the 1970s, it was
between business interests combining rich, middle-class business owners and
professionals represented by the Republican party and government-dependent
groups such as federal, state, and local bureaucracies, unions, welfare
recipients, and educational/cultural establishment represented by the
Democratic party. In this environment, the CIA and FBI remained more or less
neutral, directing their efforts mainly against foreign aggression and internal
criminality. While these are government bureaucracies, their role as the proper
and necessary tools of government psychologically separated members of these organizations
from other bureaucracies that mainly do staff improper for the government, such
as wealth redistribution. The huge growth of government bureaucracies in all
areas of life shifted a lot more areas of life under government control. Hence,
many previously independent groups, such as top-level business managers,
educators, medical professionals, and artists, became dependent on the
government’s handouts. Consequently, divisions within society changed from a
kind of vertical wall when approximately equal power groups, each with its own
elite and masses maintaining dynamic stability, into a kind of horizontal
separation between different floors of society, with united politically/bureaucratic/big
business elite comfortably sitting at the top level, when masses at the bottom
are losing the quality of lives as a result of the various pursuits of the
elite from globalization to climate alarmism. In this environment, the
governmental bureaucracies of the CIA and FBI necessarily lost any shade of
neutrality and had to act to protect their class interests. The big problem is
that the elite, even if it includes 25-30% of the population, is still a
minority. Its isolation and self-protection inevitably lead to incompetence
plentifully demonstrated by lost wars, massive technology, and wealth transfer
to communist China at the expense of the American population, failure in
handling COVID-19, massive illegal immigration, and other developments of
contemporary life.  All this makes
society’s condition unstable and will lead to qualitative changes in its
organization and conditions. It reminds me of the last years of the Soviet
Union, including such features as the gerontologic leadership of the country
and its inability to make things work as they used to.