Charles S. Faddis, a former C.I.A. officer who became an outspoken critic of the agency, a leader of the 2020 election-denial movement in Pennsylvania and a conspiracy theorist who appeared often on Steve Bannon’s far-right podcast “War Room,” died on July 25 in Philadelphia. He was 68.
His death, at a hospital, was announced by his family. His Substack newsletter said he had been hospitalized for Covid-related lung disease and pneumonia.
Mr. Faddis, who often went by his middle name, Sam, spread baseless claims to receptive Republicans that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, and that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, were under the sway of the Chinese Communist Party.
He led a coalition of grass-roots groups in Pennsylvania that demanded the end to no-excuse mail-in voting after Mr. Biden carried the state in 2020 and President Trump falsely claimed that mail ballots had helped Democrats “rig” the election.
On the “War Room” podcast, one of the most popular political talk shows with the MAGA base, and in his newsletter, Mr. Faddis claimed that citizens protesting immigration roundups were part of a Marxist plot to create a totalitarian government, and that Mr. Walz, who had led student trips to China as a schoolteacher, was an agent of the Chinese government.
“To what extent this guy is co-opted, controlled, owned by the Chinese, that remains to me a little bit unclear,” he said of Mr. Walz before the 2024 election. “But clearly he’s chosen a side, and it’s not ours.”
Before spreading conspiracy theories to the far right, Mr. Faddis had a 20-year career in the C.I.A., recruiting and handling sources abroad. One of his supervisors, Luis Rueda, said in an interview that Mr. Faddis’s emergence in the MAGA media sphere was at odds with his training as a case officer charged with analyzing intelligence objectively.
“Somewhere he went off the reservation,” Mr. Rueda said. “MAGA, for a case officer, is basically dispensing with logic, reason, evidence and facts. And that is heinous for a case officer.”
Another former C.I.A. colleague, John Maguire, defended Mr. Faddis’s political commentary. “Sam is not a radical MAGA guy,” Mr. Maguire said in an interview. “He is a rational, objective man who drills deep into issues. That’s a valuable trait in a case officer: to speak truth to power.”
Both Mr. Rueda and Mr. Maguire praised Mr. Faddis’s leadership of one of two C.I.A. teams sent secretly to northern Iraq in 2002 to prepare for the U.S. invasion the next year. The assignment was to establish networks of intelligence sources for the American-led war.
In a pair of books that Mr. Faddis wrote after leaving the C.I.A. in 2008, he said that his team had found no evidence that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, contradicting the Bush administration’s justification for the March 2003 invasion.
In “Operation Hotel California: The Clandestine War Inside Iraq” (2009), written with Mike Tucker, Mr. Faddis was sharply critical of senior American officials who ignored what the C.I.A. operatives had reported about the conditions on the ground in Iraq. In “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the C.I.A.” (2009), Mr. Faddis wrote that the intelligence agency was riddled with incompetence and mired in bureaucracy. He called for the C.I.A. to be abolished and replaced.
“The failure of the C.I.A. is structural,” he wrote. “The machine is broken, and it is broken beyond repair.”
Charles Samuel Faddis was born on May 23, 1958, in Bethesda, Md., to Violet (Tucker) Faddis and James M. Faddis, a career Navy officer.
He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from the University of Maryland.
After serving as a military lawyer in the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, he worked as an assistant attorney general in Washington State. He joined the C.I.A. in 1988 and spent his career in its Near East Division, recruiting spies as an operations officer in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
In 1979, he married Gina Cook, who also became a C.I.A. operations officer, starting in 1989 — one of the few women to begin at the agency in that role. She was often posted abroad alongside her husband.
After leaving the agency, Mr. Faddis organized the Pennsylvania Patriot Coalition, which claimed that mass voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election tipped the results to Mr. Biden. He gathered some 40 right-wing groups at the State Capitol in Harrisburg in 2022 to demand an end to mail-in voting, which he called “a gift to those who want to engage in electoral fraud and election theft.”
The ability of any registered voter to request a mail ballot in Pennsylvania was enacted in 2019 by the Republican-led legislature and signed by a Democratic governor. Cases of fraudulent mail ballots are rare, and claims of widespread mail voting fraud have been repeatedly debunked.
Mr. Faddis’s Pennsylvania organizing led to appearances on “War Room,” whose host, Mr. Bannon, was a White House strategist during Mr. Trump’s first term. A study in 2023 found that “War Room” was the No. 1 peddler of misinformation among 79 political talk shows.
Mr. Faddis also spread his brand of politics through his newsletter, AND Magazine. He wrote that Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned in May, was a victim of the “deep state,” and that Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, whom he described as “a radical Marxist,” intended to end private home ownership.
Like other conspiracy theorists, Mr. Faddis often began with a kernel of truth — say, that Mr. Biden’s son Hunter received several million dollars in a failed deal with a Chinese energy company with ties to the Chinese government — and, through leaps and conjectures, arrived at a shocking conclusion: “The Chinese bought Joe.” (The deal was investigated by House Republicans in 2024, who produced no proof that the president had profited from his son’s businesses.)
Besides his wife, Mr. Faddis is survived by their four children, Hannah, James, Samuel and Elizabeth Faddis Weibel; and six grandchildren.
After President Trump went to war with Iran in February, Mr. Faddis appeared on “War Room” to offer insights about a region he knew as a former intelligence officer. When Mr. Trump signed a deal with Iran in June to halt the fighting, and announced that it “achieves everything we set out to accomplish,” Mr. Faddis was deeply skeptical.
As he wrote on his Substack, “You can start the countdown to the next round of hostilities right now.”