The CIA, the FBI and the myth of America’s Deep State
The conviction that pointy-headed intellectuals in the US national security establishment are covertly imposing their worldview on American foreign policy hardly originated with the Trump White House. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s was largely premised on the same paranoia about some establishment “deep state”. Similar views were voiced — with lesser degrees of conspiratorial conviction — by the Reagan and Nixon administrations.
And as national security correspondent David Rohde notes in his new book on presidential battles with the US security services, such fears are not the exclusive province of the political right. The idea of a military-industrial complex secretly running US foreign policy outside the prying eyes of right-thinking Americans was a standard trope of the left for much of the Vietnam war era, one that hasn’t altogether disappeared from parts of the Democratic party.
But the accusation that a “deep state” within the permanent government is plotting to oust Donald Trump, as the president and some of his supporters in the partisan media occasionally claim, takes such internecine clashes to a level that has shocked even veterans of Washington’s occasionally brutal bureaucratic warfare.
Although he does not make the connection, Rohde’s portrayal of Trump in In Deep is far more McCarthy than Reagan or Nixon, complete with a protagonist convinced that subversives lurk under every rock in Langley and Foggy Bottom, homes to the CIA and the state department. Rohde views the president’s hostility to the FBI and CIA as a dangerous escalation even from the conflicts between the national security bureaucracy and America’s political leadership that produced Washington’s most notorious scandals of the past half century, from Iran-Contra to Edward Snowden. “The long history of abuse by the FBI and CIA should not be ignored,” he writes. “But there is no evidence of a widespread, politically motivated ‘coup’. President Trump, as he often does, is exaggerating.”
The reason Rohde skips the Red Scare comparisons is that he chooses to start his account with a far less examined event: the 1976 Senate investigation into historic CIA abuses led by Idaho Democrat Frank Church. As Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s chief foreign policy adviser, once noted, even the paranoid can have real enemies. McCarthy’s fears led to horrible excesses, but state department official Alger Hiss was in all likelihood a Soviet spy. The left’s paranoia may have been overwrought, but there had been decades of excesses by an unchecked CIA — abuses which were first exposed by Church’s inquiry.
To Rohde, the importance of the Church committee is not so much what it uncovered — unauthorised wiretapping of high-ranking US politicians, infiltration of peaceful domestic political groups, “black bag jobs” that broke into private homes to plant incriminating evidence — as the reforms it spawned. Many of the norms Trump now flouts, Rohde argues, flowed from Church: justice department independence, congressional oversight, independent counsels, inspectors-general.
It is an interesting and salient point. It is not, as Rohde promises in his subtitle, the “truth about America’s ‘deep state’.” Although he insists at the start that “the institutional government is real”, the author sheepishly admits in his concluding chapter that the truth about America’s “deep state” is that it does not exist, or at least not in the sense that the phrase was first coined, describing the Turkish military’s long-running hold on the state. The federal bureaucracy guards turf, connives for funding, and fights for political relevance, Rodhe argues. It does not plot coups — at least not at home — or systematically work to undermine presidential policies.
In Deep is more a tour of the decades-long effort to square that most unsquareable of democratic challenges: how to run clandestine intelligence and security agencies in a system that is ostensibly accountable to the people. But even here, the author provides little clarity.
Rohde extols the Church reforms, but then notes they were quickly flouted, with almost no legal consequence, by William Casey, Reagan’s director of central intelligence who orchestrated the illegal covert arming of rightwing Nicaraguan guerrillas in what eventually became the Iran-Contra affair.
He wags his finger at the abuse of the system by Reagan appointees in Iran-Contra, but then writes how it was career law enforcement officials who botched the assault on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, during the Clinton administration. Then there’s 9/11, where the security services failed to stop the attacks because they didn’t share intelligence — but failed again by overly centralising unchecked power after the attacks.
In the end, there seems to be no system that can check the failings of the CIA and FBI. Those supposed to play that role, including Congress, independent counsels and the press, have all seen their power diminished, and then debased by President Trump.
The only heroes of In Deep are the apolitical men (and they are all men) who balanced the democratic imperative to be accountable to political leaders with the national security necessity to operate free of political constraints: William Webster, Jimmy Carter’s FBI director who took the helm of the CIA for Ronald Reagan after Iran-Contra, and Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney-general.
It is, in the end, an unsatisfactory conclusion, one that nostalgically pines for some Ivy League knight to rescue a system now mired in dysfunction.
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At a time when Trump and his acolytes are at war with yet another group of government professionals — the federal health agencies — a deeply researched look at how the permanent bureaucracy operates in the age of an increasingly imperial presidency would be of great value. But this is not that book.
Its biggest contribution to the debate over abuse of government authority are a handful of thumbnail biographies, most importantly that of William Barr, who first appears as a CIA recruit in the mid-1970s and reappears, Zelig-like, as a briefer for George HW Bush when he was nominated CIA director; as Bush’s attorney-general in the 1990s; and again as attorney-general under Trump.
Rather than the corporate lawyer and establishment Republican many once considered him, Barr emerges as a cultural warrior of the religious right and an early and vigorous advocate of unchecked presidential power.
“What the two men have in common is a willingness to traffic in fear and aggrievement,” Rohde says of the Barr-Trump axis. It is undoubtedly a potent combination. It is also one that could prove explosive for a nation headed to the polls in the midst of an economic and health catastrophe.
In Deep: The FBI, the CIA and the Truth About America’s ‘Deep State’, by David Rohde, WW Norton RRP$30, 352 pages
Peter Spiegel is the FT’s US managing editor
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