In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America's "Deep State"

by David Rohde

All countries have permanent governments—but not all countries supervise them in the same ways, or to the same extent. After taking office, an American president installs more than three thousand political appointees. A British prime minister appoints only a few hundred. In the American federal government, presidential appointees often work at the top and, in some cases, throughout government agencies. In Britain, the prime minister appoints a member of Parliament to head each government ministry; virtually all of a ministry’s other positions are filled by permanent government employees. Two popular 1980s BBC comedy series, Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, were centered on the power struggles between a newly appointed minister and the “permanent secretary,” or career civil servant, who runs the agency day to day.

When asked by a committee investigator if he found any of the bureau’s actions illegal or immoral, William Sullivan, the FBI’s number-three official, replied, “Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question, ‘Is this course of action, which we have agreed upon, lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning because we were just naturally pragmatic.”

For the remainder of his presidency, Ford fought what he viewed as the erosion of presidential power. In his two and a half years in office, he issued sixty-six vetoes. With their sweeping majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats overrode his vetoes a dozen times. A new generation of lawmakers, elected in the post-Watergate era, saw unchecked presidential power as a threat to the nation, not its salvation.

Barr’s work in the agency’s legislative affairs office helped him develop a personal relationship with Bush. It also cemented his views of congressional oversight, which he saw as excessive, inappropriate, and, at times, comical. He told friends that he was appalled by the mediocrity of some members of Congress and the stupidity of their questions.

Carter approved a new covert action campaign backed by his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that distributed cassette tapes, fax machines, and magazines across Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union itself, the CIA disseminated the work of dissident writers. The goal of the operation was to foment dissent and undermine the Soviet control of information. The covert program was part of Carter’s broader strategy to promote human rights as a way to delegitimize the Soviets. Strengthening the Church reforms, Carter signed an executive order that broadened Ford’s ban on assassinations and required intelligence chiefs to regularly update congressional intelligence committees on their work. It also banned the CIA from conducting electronic surveillance inside the United States, and authorized only the FBI to conduct physical searches inside the country. Carter’s approach, though, was inconsistent and did not always prioritize human rights. He continued to support certain dictators, such as the shah of Iran, a policy that would prove disastrous.

Reagan administration officials did not use the term “deep state,” but they contended that federal government was filled with left-leaning civil servants who resisted Reagan’s cuts in the size of federal departments.

In 1986, Meese, then serving as attorney general, received a report from aides that recommended steps to enhance the power of the presidency. It called for Reagan to veto more legislation, for the White House to decline to enforce laws that “unconstitutionally encroach upon the executive branch,” and it outlined the legal theory that the president had complete control of all executive branch functions. In a subsequent speech, Meese argued that Supreme Court rulings did not establish the “‘supreme law of the land’ that is binding on all persons and parts of government, henceforth and forevermore.” He urged local officials to make their own interpretations of the Constitution.

Olson challenged the constitutionality of independent counsels, which he, Meese, and other conservatives argued were infringements on the power of the presidency.

Under Reagan, the CIA experienced the most radical change of any government agency. While William Webster had embraced congressional oversight of the FBI, Reagan’s 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.

Casey’s obsession—and ultimate downfall—was Central America. He was convinced that the administration had to confront Soviet expansionism in Nicaragua and El Salvador before it reached the United States. Cuban operatives were arming and funding the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and sending weaponry to leftist rebels in El Salvador. In December 1981, Reagan signed a covert finding that authorized the CIA to provide $19 million in arms to anti-Sandinista guerrillas, known as the Contras, who were trying to topple the country’s leftist government. CIA analysts predicted that the strategy would fail because Nicaraguans, who had been brutalized by the dictatorial regime of Anastasio Somoza for more than a decade, supported the Sandinistas more than they did the Contras. Casey blocked their reports from reaching the White House.

That summer, Casey committed the most brazen act of a CIA director since the Church reforms. Violating multiple laws and executive orders, Casey and National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane began a secret program to arm the Contras without telling members of Congress. Using money from private donors and Saudi Arabia, they had National Security Council aide Oliver North secretly buy weapons and supply them to the Contras. In November 1984, as the covert arms shipments continued, Reagan, buoyed by a strong economy, won reelection in a landslide, defeating Walter Mondale in 49 of 50 states. In the summer of 1985, Casey and McFarlane’s scheme began to unravel. News reports of unexplained arms shipments to the Contras appeared in the American press. Called before Congress, McFarlane misled lawmakers, denying that arms shipments were occurring. Then in August, in a separate illegal weapons program, McFarlane and North began selling weapons to Iranian officials in the hopes they would help free American hostages in Lebanon. Reagan signed a retroactive presidential covert action finding that authorized the arms sales, but ordered his aides to withhold it from Congress, yet another violation of law.

The significance of the actions of Casey, Poindexter, McFarlane, and North was staggering. Unable to win congressional support for funding and arming the Contras, they had carried it out anyway, violating the Constitution and the law.

Cheney argued that the Reagan administration had done nothing improper because foreign policy and national security were solely controlled by the executive branch. Cheney attacked the War Powers Act and Church reforms as brazen attempts to create “all but unlimited Congressional power.” He argued that the legislative branch did not have the power to bar the President from funding the Contras. “The power of the purse,” Cheney wrote, “is not and was never intended to be a license for Congress to usurp Presidential powers and functions.” The minority report even attacked the Reagan administration, saying it should have argued that it had a constitutional right to flout Congress’s ban on funding the Contras.

Remembered today as a popular president who was the face of optimism after the Carter era, Reagan’s average approval rating in office, 53 percent, was higher than that of Nixon, Ford, Carter, George W. Bush, and Obama, but lower than that of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton.

The presumption that any president who defied Congress would be punished by voters had been proven hollow.

Bush also abided by post-Watergate norms and avoided taking any steps that could be seen as politicizing the Justice Department. “Watergate made Republican administrations very wary of the Justice Department,” Barr said in the 2001 interview. “And I think Republican administrations—including the Reagan administration, and certainly the Bush administration—took the view that the Attorney General–Justice Department was special and different, and you didn’t mess around with it, didn’t intervene, you didn’t interfere.”

Barr had played a small but secret legal role in the invasion. As the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, he issued a legal opinion that an American president has “inherent constitutional authority” to order the FBI to take people into custody in foreign countries. The opinion reversed an earlier Justice Department policy that the president lacked such authority and expanded executive branch power.

During his fourteen-month tenure as attorney general, Barr redoubled his efforts to expand the authority of the presidency. He also carried out tough-on-crime policies, increased drug-related prison sentences, and cracked down on illegal immigration. His approach reflected the views he held before, during, and after his time as the country’s chief law enforcement officer. In a 1995 symposium on violent crime, he argued that the root cause was not poverty but immorality.

After the triumph of the first Gulf War, his approval rating plummeted from over 80 percent in the spring of 1991 to 31 percent in the summer of 1992. The primary reasons were a punishing economic recession and Bush’s violation of his “no new taxes” pledge as part of a bipartisan deficit reduction deal.

In a statement accompanying the pardons, Bush embraced the position argued by Cheney in the Iran-Contra committee’s minority report. In four years, Cheney’s view had gone from the fringe of the Republican party to the center of

The pardons infuriated Walsh, who said for the first time that he believed that Reagan and Bush had engaged in a cover-up. “What set Iran-Contra apart from previous political scandals,” Walsh later wrote in his memoir, “was the fact that a cover-up engineered in the White House of one president and completed by his successor prevented the rule of law from being applied to the perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimension.”

Barr was espousing a view that was the polar opposite of the apolitical approach established by Gerald Ford’s attorney general Edward Levi. Barr argued that having political leaders review whether individuals should be criminally prosecuted would lead to more equitable outcomes.

Twenty years after the Church reforms, the oversight mechanisms designed to create public trust and transparency in government—congressional hearings, criminal trials by juries, and news media reporting—were increasingly dismissed by large parts of the American public. In part, the suspicion was fueled by the way ATF and FBI officials covered up mistakes made during the Waco and Ruby Ridge standoffs. The primary force driving the distrust, however, was rising partisanship between Democrats and Republicans. Trafficking in conspiracy theories and portraying one’s political opponents as extremists produce political benefits.

The Reagan administration had ordered the FCC to revoke the “Fairness Doctrine,” which required radio license holders to present controversial issues of public importance in balanced ways.

In the short term, those changes were enthusiastically embraced by Americans who feared another attack. In the long term, the shift away from the traditional American division of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches further undermined public trust in government on the far right and far left.

Without the approval of Congress or the courts, CIA operatives began abducting terrorism suspects from the streets of foreign countries, flying them in secret to remote locations, and then brutally torturing them.

There is something spooky going on,” the FBI official told Baker. The National Security Agency was eavesdropping on Americans without a warrant from a FISA Court judge, the FBI official said. If true, the wiretapping was a flagrant violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other Church reforms designed to protect Americans’ privacy and civil liberties. Some officials in the bureau “were getting nervous” about the new surveillance, the FBI official said. He asked Baker if he knew anything about it. Baker replied that he did not.

Three months later, in December of 2001, Baker was finally briefed on the clandestine eavesdropping program that the FBI official had warned him about on the street. Bush had personally authorized a secret program, code-named “Stellar Wind,” that authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on calls between Al Qaeda members and individuals in the United States without the approval of the FISA Court. The program went beyond any of the legal measures authorized by Congress in the PATRIOT Act. The FISA Court and Congress were not notified of the program’s existence. It was illegal, unconstitutional, and, in hindsight, unnecessary.

Yoo, a longtime supporter of presidential power and an ally of Cheney, wrote that during wartime, the president had the power to surveil Americans without the approval of a judge. In other words, the memo asserted, the president could break the law whenever he deemed it necessary to protect the country.

Yoo’s successor in the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, agreed with Baker that Yoo’s legal analysis was shoddy. Goldsmith declared the collection of email by “Stellar Wind” illegal, sparking a power struggle between Justice Department and White House lawyers. When Bush attempted to reauthorize the program without the approval of the Justice Department, nearly every major law enforcement official in the administration threatened to resign.

In the private sector, Barr built a reputation as a pugnacious opponent of federal regulation.

“They didn’t want to expose US troops by exposing them to chemicals or radiation.” Sincere fears of another attack impacted the analysts. “They were largely a group of people who were trying to do their jobs,” she said. “It wasn’t a conspiracy to doctor intelligence.” She added, “we were leaning far forward and we fell.”

Paul Pillar, a retired CIA analyst who was involved in the creation of the CIA’s WMD assessment in Iraq, argued that pressure from the White House influenced agency analysts in subtle ways. He believed that the desire to please the CIA’s most important consumer of intelligence—the president—led to unconscious bias. “It’s much more a matter of a strong awareness of what the policymakers want to see and want to do,” Pillar said.

a series of emails were handed over to Congress showing a wide-ranging effort by White House officials and Gonzales to fire US attorneys who were seen as not sufficiently loyal to Bush.

In the following months, Gonzales was accused of lying to Congress. Miers was as well. Bush stood by each of them publicly, but both were politically wounded by the scandal. Some defenders of executive power said the firings of the US attorneys were justified under their interpretation of presidential power. But Bush was hesitant to be seen openly defying post-Watergate norms. Democrats, who had taken control of the Senate, threatened intensive investigations of Miers and Gonzales.

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 had covertly conducted mass surveillance on the American people, operated secret torture facilities abroad, and launched a costly war based on faulty intelligence.

In 2011, Obama authorized a strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American preacher and US citizen who had joined Al Qaeda in Yemen and had inspired the Fort Hood attack. The killing of al-Awlaki set a new standard for presidential power—an American citizen had been executed by the president with no public court proceeding and no public presentation of evidence.

The sound defeat ended the ability of the Obama White House and congressional Democrats to enact legislation independently. It also marked a shift in the tone of American politics. Among conservatives, a narrative of an ever-growing and ever-invasive federal government helped fuel the rise of the Tea Party.

Among liberals, Republicans were increasingly seen as obstructionist, bigoted, and backward. Fox News and MSNBC gained larger and larger audiences by becoming increasingly partisan.

In Obama’s third year in office, the CIA achieved the single greatest intelligence triumph in its history, locating the compound where Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, and guiding a Special Forces raid that killed the Qaeda leader on May 2, 2011. The raid was a triumph for the agency, the SEALs, Panetta, the Obama administration, and congressional oversight. After the discovery of bin Laden’s possible safe house, Panetta had briefed the Gang of Eight: the top party leaders of the Senate and the House and the top Republican and Democrat on the intelligence committees. All of them kept the secret. Oversight had worked as designed, and for once, intelligence had not been leaked for political advantage.

The documents revealed that the NSA had been collecting the telephone metadata of hundreds of millions of Americans for years. The data did not identify Americans by name but listed what numbers they dialed, where they were when they placed their calls, and when each call began and ended. The disclosure led to calls for Clapper to be prosecuted for lying to Congress, and created a diplomatic and political firestorm for the Obama administration.

In disclosures that US intelligence officials insisted endangered US national security, the documents revealed that the NSA was hacking into computers, tapping fiber optic cables, and circumventing web encryption programs worldwide. In some cases, the federal government forced American tech companies to secretly create “backdoors” in encryption programs that allowed the NSA to read messages without the public knowing

Four months later, the CIA inspector general found that in this instance Brennan had either flat-out lied or been grossly ill informed. CIA officers had, in fact, secretly penetrated a computer network used by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers as they worked on the torture report. Agency officers secretly read the emails of Senate investigators and—in an astounding step—asked the Justice Department to prosecute the Senate investigators for stealing CIA documents.

Obama had come to office promising to respect the rule of law; he vowed he would be transparent with the American people and curb the power of the presidency. With time, though, Obama, like so many presidents before him, came to embrace covert action as a means to protect the country from terrorists and to counter rival nations.

The findings by the Republican-controlled committees failed to convince conservative commentators that the truth had been found. Conservative cable news and radio shows continued to argue that Clinton and Obama were responsible for the deaths of the four Americans. Benghazi was part of a broader narrative—one that echoed the Clinton years—in which Obama was accused of being an authoritarian ruler who engaged in a massive cover-up in Benghazi, targeted conservative groups with IRS investigations, and concealed his country of birth. The narrative was amplified by a group of multimillionaire conservative commentators, from Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on Fox News, to Rush Limbaugh on radio, to Alex Jones on his online program InfoWars.

All told, the five different Republican-controlled Benghazi investigations dragged on longer than the inquiries into the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As an example of congressional oversight, it was an abject failure, undermining the concept of objective nonpartisan oversight.

Trump’s vitriol set a destructive precedent. No major-party presidential candidate since Watergate had lied so consistently and boldly in the service of his own political goals. No major-party presidential candidate in modern times had ever before politically weaponized the deaths of four Americans who died serving their country. And no major-party presidential candidate had been rewarded so lavishly for such behavior. The damage, though, went beyond the erosion of political norms. Trump had flatly contradicted the findings of five exhaustive congressional inquiries conducted by his own political party, separate inquiries within the intelligence community, and the investigations by the vast majority of news organizations.

When the Post examined the accuracy of a sampling of 92 of Trump’s statements, it found that 64 percent were false. By contrast, it found that most politicians, including Clinton, tended to make false or misleading statements 10 to 20 percent of the time—hardly inspiring, but a significant difference in degree.

For decades, an arm of the KGB known as “Service A” promoted “active measures” campaigns that spread dezinformatsiya, or disinformation, designed to exacerbate American political and racial divisions and discredit the United States around the world. In the 1960s, the Soviets funded the publication of books by Western authors that blamed the CIA and FBI for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. They sent letters to the editors of American newspapers alleging that J. Edgar Hoover was a gay transvestite trying to secretly create a “network of like-minded homosexuals.” After Martin Luther King Jr. declined to embrace communism, Soviet operatives distributed forged documents depicting King and his aides as “Uncle Toms” who were secretly working with President Johnson to disenfranchise African-Americans. After King was assassinated, the KGB promoted a conspiracy theory that the CIA had killed him.

Clapper told me that undermining Clinton’s reputation inside and outside the United States in 2016 aided Putin at home and abroad. “By definition,” Clapper said, “if it hurt Hillary Clinton, it helped him.” Over the course of the summer, the Russian activities would intensify. • • •