For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had former CIA operative and leader of CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center’s WMD unit, author of the must-read and highly relevant 2009 book Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and outspoken critic of the politicized leadership in America’s intelligence and national security apparatus, Charles Sam Faddis on to discuss among other things:

• Why Faddis supports revoking John Brennan’s security clearance — and the bureaucratization and politicization of the leadership of the intelligence community versus the rank-and-file analysts and operatives in the field
• Whether politics dominates over merit in the ranks of intelligence and the national security apparatus more broadly
• What members of the national security establishment really mean when they talk about “protecting the institutions“
• Why President Trump has been deemed a threat to the power of the political leaders within the national security establishment in a qualitatively different way than any of his predecessors — and that’s a positive thing
• What Faddis would do to reform intelligence
• The poor state of America’s counterintelligence capabilities
• The lessons of Iraq regarding U.S. intervention and the national interest
• Whether America has the capability to use intelligence to engage in ideological warfare and bring down Iran’s Khomeinist regime
• How China’s liquidation of our spy network reflects the problems plaguing America’s intelligence apparatus
• The long-term dire ramifications of China’s OPM hack
• The implications of China’s attempt to infiltrate Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office
• The threat to the U.S. homeland of a collapsing Venezuela and Mexico, combined with drug cartels, organized crime groups and Hezbollah in our hemisphere
• Faddis’ optimistic assessment of the Trump administration’s North Korea policy
• Why China poses the greatest long-term threat to America of all, and our willful blindness towards it

You can find the episode on iTunes, everywhere else podcasts are found, and download the episode directly here.