In Deep: The FBI, The CIA, And The Truth About America’s “Deep State

 

David Rohde, “In Deep: The FBI, The CIA, And The Truth About America’s “Deep State”,” W.W.Norton and Co., 2020, 274 pp.

Three-quarters of Americans believe that a group of unelected government and military officials secretly manipulate or direct national policy in the United States. President Trump blames the "deep state" for his impeachment. But what is the American "deep state" and does it really exist?

To conservatives, the “deep state” is an ever-growing government bureaucracy, an "administrative state" that relentlessly encroaches on the individual rights of Americans. Liberals, on the other hand, fear the "military-industrial complex"—a cabal of generals and defense contractors who they believe routinely push the country into endless wars. Every modern American president—from Carter to Trump—has engaged in power struggles with Congress, the CIA, and the FBI. Every CIA and FBI director has suspected White House aides of members of Congress of leaking secrets for political gain. Frustrated Americans increasingly distrust the politicians, unelected officials, and journalists who they believe unilaterally set the country’s political agenda. American democracy faces its biggest crisis of legitimacy in a half century.

Rohde’s book examines the CIA and FBI scandals of the past fifty years—from the Church Committee’s exposure of Cold War abuses, to Abscam, to false intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, to NSA mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden. Rohde then investigates the claims and counterclaims of the Trump era, and the relentless spread of conspiracy theories online and on-air. While Trump says he is the victim of the "deep state," Democrats accuse the president and his allies of running a de facto "deep state" of their own that operates outside official government channels and smears rivals, both real and perceived.

Based on dozens of interviews with career CIA operatives and FBI agents, In Deep answers whether the FBI, CIA, or politicians are protecting or abusing the public’s trust.

My Notes:

Pg. xvii: Since the 1939 Hatch Act has barred federal workers from engaging in political activity while performing government duties.  Like the president and members of the military, civil servants take an oath of office: “I do solemnly swear that I will support an defend the Constitution of the US against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

Pg. xviii:  Instead of a Deep State, we have what the author calls ‘institutional government.’  In general, the loyalties of most civil servants tend to lie with their respective institutions, which they defend, try to grow, and strengthen.  They fight other government agencies for turf, budget, and influence.  (On January 6,, 2021 this description was validated as institutional government finally curbed Trump’s irrational, dangerous, behavior.)

Pg. 3f:  In a society that declared itself exceptional, democratic, and free, the violations of privacy and liberty were stunning.  The CIA secretly opened and photographed nearly a half-million letters mailed between private citizens in the US, including the personal correspondence of John Steinbeck, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon.  Agency operatives had secretly funded or infiltrated student groups, university centers, and foundations across the US.  The FBI broke into the offices of hundreds of political groups, tapped their phones, and opened their mail to obtain information agents could use to disrupt and discredit movements the bureau had unilaterally deemed threats to domestic security.  Without obtaining court orders, agents investigated 500,000 people whom they declared ‘subversives’ and infiltrated grassroots political groups that spanned the ideological spectrum—from the far right John Birch Society to the far-left Students for a Democratic Society.  The FBI kept files on more than one million Americans.

Pg. 8:  The CIA released, what are called “The Family Jewels, hundreds of pages of internal reports on assassination plots, secret drug testing and spying on Americans that triggered a scandal in the mid-1970s.  The documents detail assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, the testing of mind- and behavior-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting citizens, the wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China and break-ins at the homes of former CIA employees and others. 

The 693 pages, mostly drawn from the memories of active CIA officers in 1973, were turned over at that time to three investigative panels - President Gerald Ford's Rockefeller Commission, the Senate's Church committee and the House's Pike committee. 

Pg. 11:  The Church Committee issued 96 recommendations designed to prevent future abuses described in “The Family Jewels.”  Presidents Ford and Carter, created new Senate and House intelligence committees to monitor the work of the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies.  The CIA was barred from operating inside the US and from carrying out political assassinations abroad.  Intelligence chiefs were to inform congressional leaders of all covert CIA action programs.  Also, FBI directors could no longer serve longer than ten years.

Pg. 48:  Under Reagan, the CIA experienced the most radical change of any government agency.  While William Webster had embraced congressional oversight of the FBI, Reagans new CIA director William Casey, did the opposite.  Over the course of his six-year tenure, Casey repeatedly instructed his subordinates to lie to Congress.  Reagan, meanwhile, delegated near-absolute authority to Casey and paid little attention to day-to-day CIA operations.  That decision nearly cost Reagan his presidency. 

Pg. 78:  In the 1994 elections, Republicans took control of the House for the first time since 1952, Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, vowed more aggressive congressional oversight of Clinton and an aggressive conservative agenda.  As Scalia had predicted, accusing one’s opponent of being not simply wrong on policy but also a criminal produced political dividends. 

Pg. 79:  On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was the two-year anniversary of the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.  The bomb killed 168 people, including nineteen children in a day care center.

Pg. 84:  A new cable news network, Fox News, began broadcasting on October 7, 1996, bringing conservative talk radio hosts to a far larger audience.  Founders Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch viewed it as a long overdue antidote to the liberal bias at CNN and in other parts of the mainstream media. 

Pg. 97:  Forty-five days after 9/11/01, Congress overwhelmingly passed the USA Patriot Act.  This was a dramatic change in American privacy laws.  Section 215 of the law allowed the FBI and NSA, with the approval of the FISA Court judge, to seize or monitor the personal records of Americans held by phone companies, political groups, universities, churches, public libraries, bookstores, medical offices, and other institutions without informing those targeted.  Section 505 vastly expend the power of the FBI to issue national security letters’ that force internet service providers, financial firms, and credit companies to secretly hand over personal customer records without prior court approval and without informing the customer.  Section 213 authorized ‘sneak and peek’ searches, which allowed the FBI, with the approval of a judge, to search an individual’s home or business without notifying them.  Only one senator, Russ Feingold, vote against the bill.

Pg. 111:  After backing PATRIOT Act legislation that reversed key elements of the Church reforms, Bush, Cheney, and their White House aides confirmed the worst conspiracy theories of the American left and right.  An overzealous President Bush covertly conducted mass surveillance on the American people, operated secret torture facilities abroad, and launched a costly war based on faulty WMD intelligence. 

Pg. 135:  Four years before Trump formally announced his candidacy for president, he debuted the political technique that would carry him to the White House.  Trump’s ability to weave together hyperbole, fear, and falsehoods into a narrative of aggrievement attracted attention, outrage, and millions of voters.  He first questioned whether Obama was born in the US.  Later he accused Obama and then Hillary of blocking military forces from rescuing Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and on and on.

Pg. 149:  In July 2016 Comey and other senior FBI officials received a report from Britain.  The Australian ambassador to the UK, Alexander Downer, told FBI agents that a young Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, had told him that Russian officials had ‘dirt’ on Clinton including ‘thousands of emails,’ and were willing to work together with Trump to defeat her.  Three other Trump aides had also been in contact with Russians-Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort.  Comey began an investigation of the Russians.

Pg. 153:  On October 28^th, 2016, eleven days before the election, Comey sent confidential letters to the chairs and ranking members of the eight committees that had investigated Clinton’s email use.  The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee immediately leaked the confidential information that Hillary’s aide’s husband, Weiner’s, laptop was found to contain thousands of Hillary’s emails.  Hillary’s poll numbers immediately slumped: her lead in national polls dropped from 5.9 percent to 2.9 percent.  In swing states, her lead declined from 4.5 to 1.7 percent.

Pg. 163:  On December 29, 2016, Obama expelled 35 Russian spies, closed two Russian diplomatic properties, and placed new sanctions on Moscow in retaliation for Russia’s election interference.  Amazingly, the Russians did not retaliate--lending credence to the charge that Flynn talked to the Russians before Trump took office.  This was confirmed as the Russian Ambassador’s phone calls were being monitored, which Flynn should have known.

Pg. 186:  Officials in the Justice Department and FBI, from Comey to Yates to Rosenstein, had all declined to carry out actions that they believed violated post-Church reform norms, or, in some cases, the Constitution, In the first five months of Trump’s presidency, the Justice Department and the FBI and senior intelligence officials proved to be the most formidable resistance that the president encountered in the federal government.  A struggle for power that would define Trump’s presidency had begun.

Pg. 218:  During 2018 Trump forced out his secretary of state, defense secretary, national security advisor, and attorney general.  He assailed Mueller and his team of investigators as ‘thugs’ and as ‘angry Democrats’ who were ‘totally discredited.’  He disputed the CIA assessment that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince was involved in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.  He met with Russian president Putin in Helsinki and said he believed Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election more than the assessment of US intelligence officials.  He publicly offered his former campaign manager Paul Manafort a pardon when it appeared that Manafort, then facing tax evasion charges, might become a cooperating witness.  Republicans lost forty-one House seats in the 2018 elections. 

Pg. 226ff:  Sessions, appointed as AG by Trump, attempted to defend Trump’s contorted legal positions.  The department defended the travel ban against Muslims, a prohibition on transgender people joining the military, a policy of separating immigrant children from their parents, and a dismissal of claims that the president had violated the emoluments clause.  Notably, several career officials declined to put their names on legal memos.  Then came Barr who placed the Justice Department at the center of the partisan battles beginning with the 2018 citizenship question on the national census, a question Barr lost to the Supreme Court 5-4 when Roberts ruled ‘the sole stated reason’ for the change ‘seems to have been contrived.’  Of course, most importantly, Barr protected Trump from the fallout of the Mueller investigation and kept Trump’s tax returns secret.

Pg. 239:  On July 25, 2019 Trump used the powers of his office to pressure Ukraine’s president into launching a criminal investigation of Joe Biden, his rival in the upcoming election.  This all came to light through an unnamed CIA official who filed a whistleblower complaint and filed it with the appropriate authorities.  At the time of Trump’s call, Russia had already sent military forces to annex Crimea and was carrying out military operations in eastern Ukraine.  While Trump was asking for a ‘favor’, he was withholding nearly $400 million in military aid.  Barr blocked the whistleblower complaint from Congress.  With the release of the complaint to Congress blocked, word of the whistleblower complaint was leaked to the Washington Post and the WSJ.  Trump refused to hand the complaint over to Congress so Pelosi filed a formal impeachment inquiry. 

.Pg. 271f:  Trump has expanded executive power and weakened legislative oversight more than any other post-Watergate chief executive.  After Democrats won control of the House in 2018, he rejected virtually all forms of congressional oversight.  It seems that Barr and Trump have combined a Reagan-era drive to dismantle government, with a Trump-era drive to politicize it.