The U.S. Doesn’t Have a Deep State. It Never Should.

About the author: Theodore J. Singer retired in 2023 from the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served five times as a chief of station and head of Middle East operations. He currently advises private and public sector clients.

Whether you choose to believe me or not, here’s a secret from a CIA veteran: There is no such thing as the deep state. Not in this country anyway. At least not yet. And hopefully never.

This may come as a surprise given the incessant headlines these days about the perils of the U.S. deep state. Certainly, folks can be forgiven for asking what the murky world of espionage is, if not the deep state. But they should be asking, who benefits from all this nonsense?

Let me be clear. The U.S. government employs people of all shapes and sizes, even at the CIA. All feds swear an oath—loyalty—to the Constitution, not to an individual or a party. In its oversight role, Congress is supposed to represent constituents’ interests and wield the power of the purse to ensure taxpayers get bang for our buck. And our judiciary ensures our three-letter agencies adhere to the law of the land.

Simply put, the intelligence community is just part of the American state, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That isn’t to say everyone is a rock star. Among our civil servants are quiet heroes, some lazy bums, and everything in between. As taxpayers and patriots, most of them eagerly welcome smart reforms, efficiency, and accountability. And that is true of the rest of the government, too, not just the murky parts.

So, who benefits from getting rid of something that doesn’t exist? Personally, my spidey senses are tingling, warning that we may be creating exactly what we’re supposed to be dismantling. I hope I’m wrong.

Let me explain. If I’ve deciphered the newspeak correctly, the plan afoot is this. Dismantle the deep state. Root out radical opponents. Pursue conspirators. Ensure loyalty to a “unitary executive.” And usher in the “Golden Age.”

This all feels an awful lot like stuff I used to write back home about from overseas, from distant countries where juntas, strongmen, and big bosses relied on honest-to-God deep states to execute and enforce very similar-sounding goals.

I’m not allowed to say where I worked abroad for the CIA. But it is no secret that there were plenty of deep states in the far-flung places you, the American taxpayer, sent me.

By definition, a “deep state” is supposed to be orchestrated collusion by the military, judiciary, and security services to implement a big boss’ orders or to preserve some “ism” without question. Without transparency. Without public accountability.

As a CIA officer in a country with a deep state, your counterparts in foreign governments are by default card-carrying members of this secret cabal. Some slavishly serve autocrats. Others furtively conspire with unelected oligarchs. But a good many of them work nobly to protect their citizens—and often ours.

Some of these deep staters are bad Hollywood movie caricatures, many quietly competent civil servants, and others ruthlessly efficient until power shifts, revolution, or other real and contrived circumstances end their careers.

Seeing the world through others’ eyes is an essential part of the CIA’s work. So, let me share a few lessons I learned from seeing the real deep states up close and personal.

Many of the counterparts I worked with were closely connected to their potentates by ideology, religion, tribe, blood, or marriage. They served in governments with little or no separation of powers, often just rubber stamps. Journalists were generally their tools or strawmen—the fourth deep estate, you might say.

The case officer in me was admittedly a little jealous at times of their room to maneuver. Less paperwork. But idealistic me occasionally wondered whether these deep staters envied my U.S. passport or realized they were expendable bullets in their bosses’ arsenals.

Since you never knew who might be listening and understood that any vulnerability could be exploited, our conversations steered clear of politics and policies. Given human nature, they probably just saw me in their reflections. I was just another cog in the machine. The CIA was no different than their apparatus. And the U.S. president was as self-interested as any ruler.

Though I loved every minute of it, meetings with deep staters could be painful. First, the counterparts would cheerily offer some conspiratorial framework shaped around their big boss’s vision. Then, on the national-security calamity of the day, they’d pose the simple question that I raised above: “Who benefits?” Finally, there’d be a pause, as if the answer was patently clear.

As they say in Arabic, repetition teaches the donkey, and this ass eventually learned there were only three possible answers for the CIA man. The beneficiary of the crisis du jour from the other side’s perspective was either the U.S., a fill-in-the-blank rival neighbor or domestic malcontent, or an adversary of the U.S. The multiple-choice quiz got easier over the years, since the correct response to “Who benefits?” was inevitably linked to the big boss’s positive or negative views toward some U.S. policy.

In the foreign espionage business, there really are no friends, just motives. But there is some unspoken bonhomie. After all, every spy has late nights, fields cryptic calls, misses family milestones, and travels mysteriously to see ailing relatives living around the globe. The members of this clandestine club recognize everyone’s always on the clock and everyone’s got a boss.

I’d pay big bitcoin for a reunion with some of my erstwhile interlocutors, assuming they count me as a member of the association of former deep staters. We’d muse about where the Syrian goons went, the ones responsible for propping up Bashar al-Assad until he ditched them for sunny Moscow and a position in Vladimir Putin’s KGB, Inc.

We’d dissect how the secret police in Egypt and Tunisia seemingly collapsed during the Arab Spring and resurrected a few years later under very familiar management. Hibernating deep states?

We’d reminisce about the Turkish “derin devlet,” the grande dame of deep states. There, the same boss thought he had deep-cleaned the military, judiciary, and security services twice! Curiously, once before and once after the 2016 coup d’etat attempt against him. Not curiously, a whole lot of non-coup-plotters apparently suffered fates as bad as the deep staters.

But really, I’d like to see through their eyes how the U.S. looks today. I’d ask them, “Who benefits?”

So here’s the point. If you really want to see what a deep state is, go look elsewhere. We don’t have one here at home. And we need to keep it that way.

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