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

by David Rohde

the “deep state”: former director of national intelligence James Clapper and former FBI g...

to Richard Blee, a covert CIA operative who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and Tom O’Connor, an FBI agent who spent his career prosecuting extremists, from white supremacists to Al Qaeda members.

In 2019, 70 percent of Americans agreed that low trust in government—and in their fellow citizens—

made it harder to solve the country’s problems.

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

On April 29, 1976, a select investigative committee of the US Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho and John Tower of Texas, released a six-volume report that detailed decades of illegal FBI and CIA spying on American citizens.

York Times journalist Seymour M. Hersh reported allegations of secret government spying on domestic targets,

the committee discovered abuses more widespread than those commit...

From the 1940s to the 1970s, American intelligence and law enforcement agencies had investigated more than half a million Americans who were engaged not in crimes but in constitutionally protected political activities. The misconduct spanned the tenures of six pres...

The heads of the CIA and FBI lied to presidents about their activities; in 1970, for instance, they assured Richard Nixon that they were no longer opening citizens’ mail, when, in fact, the practice continued.

The National Security Agency, an organization few Americans knew existed at

and politicians such as Tennessee senator Howard Baker, a Republican member of the committee, and Church himself, its chair. The IRS was also implicated, launching investigations “on the basis of political rather than tax criteria,” and opening intelligence files on 11,000 Americans.

Hoover fed presidents dirt on their political rivals. Chief executives from both parties received it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked the FBI to compile the names of citizens who sent telegrams to the White House opposing his pre–World War II support for Britain.

The Kennedy administration had the FBI wiretap three officials of the executive branch, a congressional staffer, and a Washington law firm. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy received “information of a political nature” from FBI wiretaps

of Martin Luther King Jr. and a member of congress. Johnson had the FBI conduct background checks of the staff of his 1964 election opponent, Republican senator Barry Goldwater. He had FBI agents compare senators’ anti–Vietnam War statements to the Communist party line. Johnson also obtained purely political intelligence from FBI wiretaps of fellow Democrats during the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

against Nixon’s Democratic political rivals. In one bizarre “dirty tricks” operation, Mitchell approved the payment of $10,000 to a faction of the American Nazi Party to carry out a failed effort to remove Governor George Wallace from the presidential primary ballot in California. Judges later ruled that Mitchell’s actions violated the Constitution.

the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned the American presidency had grown out of control and exceeded its constitutional limits.

In the influential book The Imperial Presidency, he described its symptoms: “The all-purpose invocation of ‘national security,’ the insistence on executive secrecy, the withholding of information from Congress, the refusal to spend funds appropriated by Congress, the attempted intimidation of the press, the use of the White House as a base for espionage and sabotage directed against the political opposition.”

Nixon, Hoover, and their aides illustrated the dangers of paranoia, conspir...

Suspecting that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Communist sympathizer, agents planted negative stories about King in the press, bugged his hotel rooms, and sent him and his wife a tape recording which, they claimed, was evidence that King conducted extramarital affairs. Shortly before he traveled to Oslo to accept the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, agents sent King an anonymous

letter suggesting he commit suicide.

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.”

loyalists. The country’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence agencies—the FBI and the CIA—had secretly and, in some cases, unilaterally

In a remarkable example of bipartisanship, Church, Tower, and several moderate Republican senators convinced, after much resistance, President Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby to give the committee a document known as the “Family Jewels.” The top-secret internal CIA history chronicled wrongdoing dating

CIA operatives opened files on, and sometimes tracked, nearly 10,000 anti–Vietnam War activists and groups, including four members of Congress and John Lennon.

Career CIA and FBI officials acknowledged that, in a handful of cases, J. Edgar Hoover’s use of the bureau for political point-scoring grew so toxic that it distracted agents from their mission.

suspicion. Colby, who removed Angleton from his post and implemented other changes, came to believe that the agency had to confess to its sins in order to gain the trust of Congress, the press, and the public. “The agency’s survival,” he wrote in his memoir, “could only come from understanding, not hostility, built on knowledge, not faith.”

The committee’s success stemmed, in part, from its size, structure, and makeup. It had six Democrats and five Republicans,

Schwarz felt more anger toward the FBI as an organization. He considered its suppression of constitutionally protected political activity a graver threat to the legitimacy of American democracy than the CIA’s misconduct.

“The FBI’s wrongdoing was to undermine our democracy,” Schwarz said. “The CIA’s wrongdoing

was to undermine our reputation overseas. Undermining our democracy was far more dangerous to the country.” On a personal level, Schwarz was ...

They were “amoral rather than immoral,” and shockingly duplicitous, he said. Schwarz watched in dismay as Richard Helms, who served as CIA director from 1966 to 1973, told lie after lie during committee interviews. “He was the best liar I have ever seen,” Schwarz r...

The committee found that the abuses were not the “product of any single party, administration, or man.” The abuses were institutional and the product of a fevered period of American history: the Cold War.

insufficient. “It was my assumption that what we were doing was justified by what we had to do,” an anonymous FBI official testified, for the “greater good, the national security.”

Church warned of a future in which technological advances “could be turned around on the American people” and used to facilitate a system of government surveillance. “No American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide,” Church said. “I

96 recommendations designed to prevent future abuses. It took years to fully enact them, but over time Congress, with the support of Presidents Ford and Carter, created new Senate and House intelligence committees to monitor the work of the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. Ford and Carter issued executive orders barring the CIA from operating inside the United States and from carrying out political assassinations abroad. They ordered intelligence chiefs to inform congressional leaders of all covert CIA action programs.

Other reforms were enacted to curtail FBI and NSA abuses in the name of national security. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 created a new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review all national security–related eavesdropping requests inside the United States. The law made explicit that the agencies could only wiretap an American citizen or resident as part of a national security investigation with the approval of a federal judge.

Congress passed a law setting a ten-year term for future FBI directors.

The committee’s work brought national prominence to Church, who ran for president in 1976 but lost the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter.

Church lost his Idaho Senate seat to a conservative Republican challenger. In 1984, at the age of 59, Church died of pancreatic cancer. Supporters declared the committee’s work his greatest legacy. Opponents said he ...

As the reforms were enacted, resentment of the Church Committee simmered in the intelligence community and White House. Some Ford administration officials saw its reforms and recommendation as a congressional power grab. Supporters of executive branch power felt that, in the wake of Watergate, the Democratic-controlled Congress was unduly impinging on the president’s power to protect national security and conduct foreign affairs. The Church reforms were seen as an extension of the War Powers Act, which Congress passed in 1973, overriding Nixon’s veto. A Vietnam-related effort to prevent presidents from unilaterally entering the country into wars, the law required presidents to inform Congress within 48 hours of deploying American military forces into hostilities.

Scalia, who, a decade later, would be appointed by Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court, championed the view that presidents had sweeping powers and should aggressively combat legislative and judicial branch encroachment.

Scalia’s allies included Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s 42-year-old chief of staff and later defense secretary, and Rumsfeld’s deputy, 34-year-old Dick Cheney. To Scalia, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, invasive congressional and judicial oversight of the CIA and FBI was a perversion of what they saw as the constitutional order.

While liberals hailed the Church reforms, Scalia and his allies viewed them as an infringement of presidential power under their...

Supporters of expansive of presidential power cited the writings of Alexander Hamilton, who warned in the Federalist Papers that a strong chief executive was needed to defend the country in war or a moment of crisis. “A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” Hamilton wrote. “A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution: And...

In yet another assertion of congressional power, the House Judiciary Committee launched an investigation into whether Ford had secretly promised Nixon the pardon in exchange for the presidency.

In response, Ford took a step that supporters of presidential power and prerogative bemoan to this day. On October 17, 1974, Ford voluntarily testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Criminal Justice Subcommittee. He was only the third sitting president, after Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, to testify before Congress. To backers of executive branch power, a president answering questions from members of the legislative branch demeaned the presidency. To members of Congress, it was the embodiment of the founders’ vision of three coequal branches of government acting as checks and balances on one another.

Urged on by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Scalia, Ford fought back. He vetoed a bill that strengthened the Freedom of Information Act, giving

argued that the amendments infringed on the secrecy of the FBI and other intelligence agencies.

In the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, though, most Americans remained distrustful of sweeping presidential powers. Democrats in Congress overrode Ford’s veto with a 65–27 vo...