Morris: The CIA Podcast Reveals Personnel to Be Even More Self-Important, Mediocre Than We Knew

The CIA has launched a podcast called The Langley Files, and it’s even more boring and cringe than we could have imagined — but it also inadvertently reveals a level of mediocrity in the agency commonly suspected but rarely seen.

To spare the American public, Breitbart News has accepted the undertaking of listening to the four episodes released so far and can report that they broadcast an agency in embarrassing decline.

The show is hosted by “Dee” and “Walter” — last names presumably omitted for maximum super secret, super cool spy effect — who don’t disclose their role at the agency, but are probably millennial comms staff.

“At CIA, there are truths we can share and stories we can tell — stories of duty and dedication, stories of ingenuity and mission, stories beyond those of Hollywood scripts and shadowed whispers,” Dee says, as the first, “unclassified” episode opens. “Today, we’re taking a step out from behind those shadows, sharing what we can, and offering a glimpse into the world of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Walter then introduces his first guest, CIA Director Bill Burns, who opens by acknowledging that “trust in institutions is in short supply,” and then proceeds for the following 15 minutes to patronize listeners with thinly-disguised propaganda and cloying personal anecdotes.

Burns — who by all appearances looks like the quintessential D.C. bureaucrat — helpfully informs us that he doesn’t “exactly fit the image” of James Bond and Jason Bourne, saying that he actually drives a “2013 Subaru Outback” and struggles to work his Roku.

Burns then goes on to tout the agency’s work helping Ukraine and the strike against Ayman al Zawahiri last summer — but stops just short of mentioning some of his agency’s other greatest hits, like the intelligence snafu leading to the droning of an innocent man and his children in Kabul just following the spectacular intelligence failure that was the Afghanistan withdrawal in the summer of 2021. The withdrawal debacle does come up later in the episode, but Burns awkwardly glazes over any responsibility his agency might have had, grouping himself with those who sacrificed their lives in the conflict, saying, “we” did “our duty” and “honored our profound obligation.”

“I think ‘ingenuity’ is very much a reflection of how we at CIA see ourselves,” Burns says, “And ‘dedication’ is another powerful word, which describes I think the, you know, really remarkable sense of mission that I see here every day.”

“I guess I would just add one other word to ‘ingenuity’ and ‘dedication,’ and that’s ‘apolitical’ because our job is not to bend intelligence to suit political or policy preferences or agendas,” Burns adds, without irony.

Omitted from the conversation about the agency’s mission to be “apolitical” was any mention of its leaders’ involvement in perpetuating the Russia collusion hoax. Recall, CIA top brass was fully aware that the “collusion” narrative was a smear concocted by the Clinton campaign, but that didn’t stop former CIA chief John Brennan from spending almost five years going on cable news to call former President Donald Trump a Russian asset.

Also left out of the chat was the role of former CIA leadership in the suppression of the “Laptop from Hell” — when 41 out of 51 signatories on a letter lying that the New York Post series was “Russian disinformation” were from CIA. Those signatories included Brennan, as well as former CIA chiefs Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John McLaughlin.

In episode 3 of The Langley Files, Dee and Walter host a CIA recruiter called “Mike.”

Mike wastes no time before bragging about his commitment to “diversifying our workforce, much like you see throughout the country.”

“We look at racial, ethnic, gender, geographical, socioeconomic, we’re trying to cover all of that,” Mike says of his mission of “diversity.”

“Obviously, people from different backgrounds bring different skills. They bring different areas of expertise, different experiences that apply to our mission,” he continues without elaborating on how someone’s race, ethnicity, gender, or whatever, might dictate what “different skills” they bring to the CIA.

“Diversifying our workforce is one of the top priorities our directors made,” Mike boasts.

Mike is the latest, but not the first, to tell us about the CIA’s diversity mission. In 2021, the agency released a series of insane recruitment advertisements profiling various employees, promoting its commitment to woke nonsense. The ads were part of a series showcasing “Humans of CIA” — one “growing up gay in a small Southern town,” another being “a woman of color,” “a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder,” “intersectional” and refusing to “internalize misguided patriarchal ideas,” and another who is blind and wearing a “love is love” hoodie.

One would assume that Mike was probably referring to those types of hires in his “diversity” talk. It would also appear that Mike thinks he’s coming off as very cool and not at all cliché and superficial and dumb, or incompetent, or dangerous.

“I really appreciate you highlighting that diversity is one of our mission priorities here within the agency,” Dee gushes. “I like to quote Director Burns: he’s often heard saying, about himself, ‘we can’t always be effective, and we’re not going to be true to our nation’s ideals, if everyone looks like me, talks like me and thinks like me,’ and so I think you did an excellent job right there kind of highlighting why we continue to review our processes and are committed to bringing in that well-balanced workforce.”

The episode closes with the hosts encouraging the listener to apply for a job at the CIA. Being a listener myself, I wondered if a female, cisgender, child of an American immigrant to Canada, who then immigrated back to America, but has grandparents who immigrated from further away, Eastern Europe actually, and is an editor at a conservative news outlet called Breitbart, a minority living in the liberal enclave of Williamsburg, would be considered as part of the agency’s mission for “diversity.” Probably.

But in listening, it is striking how clueless and unserious the CIA comes off, and one is left wondering if this is just some sort of bizarre publicity/propaganda operation, or if employees at the agency who are meant to gather intelligence to protect our troops and our homeland actually think and speak this way.

What did we learn from this exercise in spook PR?

We heard Burns casually avoiding acknowledging the carnage and national disgrace of the Afghanistan withdrawal on his and others in the intel community’s watch, which virtually erased 20 years of American sacrifice of blood and treasure in one week — all while calling his agency “apolitical,” in what could only be interpreted as mocking the audience’s intelligence, following years of the CIA’s highly publicized, blatantly political operations from the most senior and most visible members of the organization. Maybe a later episode of The Langley Files will get into some of that — but not betting on it. Then we heard Mike bragging about how recruitment is focused on immutable, meaningless attributes, not using the words “merit” or “achievement” or “intellect” a single time.

The Langley Files describes itself as “offering a glimpse into the world of the Central Intelligence Agency,” and it does accomplish that. Dee and Walter take the listener into their world, where they reveal the agency’s total lack of self-awareness, lack of substance, ineptitude, misguided priorities, and moral rot. Dee and Walter do take “a step out from behind those shadows,” providing the listener with some understanding of how the intelligence community has become an object of scandal and embarrassment for the nation in recent years — the most salient “truths we can share and stories we can tell.”

Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News. Email her at ejmorris@breitbart.com or follow her on Twitter.