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

by David Rohde

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. The Church Committee consensus that improper activities by the FBI and CIA were not acceptable and that both organizations required congressional ove...

the central focus of his tenure. Levi issued the first-ever “Attorney General’s Guidelines”

for how the FBI should conduct domestic national security investigations. The new rules required the bureau to produce evidence of a crime before conducting wiretaps or searching homes, reduced the number of investigations from 21,414 in 1973 to 4,868 in 1976. Levi worked with Clarence M. Kelley, a career law enforcement officer whom Nixon had appointed FBI director after Hoover’s death in 1972, to reduce the embezzlement that had become common among agents. Levi and Kelley also improved coordination between the FBI and CIA—a practice Hoover had discouraged.

Levi so thoroughly embraced nonpartisanship that confusion surrounded his political leanings. News accounts questioned whether he was a ...

But the attorney general should not, for example, target for prosecution individuals whom the president considered political enemies, as Nixon and Mitchell had.

Ford came under pressure from Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger,

state, as well as Ronald Reagan, the then conservative governor of California, to lead the Republican Party more aggressively.

Conservatives called for Ford to confront the Soviets more aggressively and revive morale at the embattled CIA.

late 1975, Ford fired Colby,

had cooperated with the Churc...

He nominated George H. W. Bush as his replacement. Ford hoped that Bush, who had served as a congressman from Texas, Republican National Committee chair, and UN ambassador, would be more successful...

his “prolonged involvement in partisan activities at the highest party level.”

Eight days after Bush’s hearing, a killing in Greece altered the political dynamic.

White House and CIA officials, as well as supporters of the CIA in Congress, blamed the Church Committee’s disclosure of CIA assassinations abroad.

No clear evidence existed that the Church Committee’s work had caused the assassination, but support for Bush’s nomination surged among Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Strom Thurmond

States Rights platform supporting racial segregation.

was more worried about the Church Committee’s disclosure of national secrets than about Bush’s past political work. “That is where the public concern lies, on disclosures which are tearing down the CIA,” he said, “not upon the selection

man to repair the damage of this over-exposure.” With the support of conservative Democrats, Bush was confirmed in a 64–27 vote. Political support in Con...

CBS News’s Daniel Schorr, who gave a copy to the Village Voice, which published it. In its report, the House panel accused the White House of “foot-dragging, stone-walling, and careful deception.” Ford and Bush, backed by Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Senate, defended the CIA and condemned congressional leaks.

aggressive oversight from Congress and the courts, was necessary in order to defend the country. Post-Watergate, their maximalist view of executive power remained largely on the fringes of American politics. It would gain greater currency during the Reagan administration, after the 9/11 attacks, and, unexpectedly, when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016—forty years after the Church Committee completed its work.

recruits. One of them was William Barr, who would briefly work at the CIA and later serve as attorney general for both George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump. Barr, who declined to be interviewed, grew up in Manhattan, among the bookish elite of the Upper West Side.

At a young age, Barr displayed his conservatism. In the first grade, he delivered a speech in favor of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign. Later, he declared his support for Richard Nixon, and a nun promised to pray

high school, at Horace Mann, an elite private school,

Billy—defended th...

intellectual combat: “He was virulently a...

recalled. He really liked to push peop...

then, he said, Barr was convinced that only a strong president could protect the country.

“He always viewed it as more of a constitutional republic than a direct democracy.”

He told a high school counselor that he hoped one day to lead the CIA, and, during breaks from school, he spent two summers as an intern there. In 1973, he received a master’s degree in government and Chinese studies from Columbia and then joined the CIA as an intelligence analyst. At the time, the Church Committee was uncovering decades of abuses by the CIA, and laws were being passed to curtail its activities. But Barr embraced its mission and questioned the aggressiveness of the congressional oversight, later saying that the Church Committee delivered “body blows” to the agency.

George H. W. Bush became the CIA director, and Barr helped prepare him for testimony on Capitol Hill.

Barr’s work in the agency’s legislative affairs office helped him develop a personal relationship with Bush.

intelligence. While Barr would serve as attorney general in the Bush and Trump administrations, Clapper would serve as President Obama’s director of national intelligence. In the Trump era, they would criticize each other’s work.

Over the next decade, Clapper’s father worked for the NSA conducting surveillance around the world.

One afternoon, President Kennedy arrived for a family vacation in nearby Hyannis Port. Kennedy shook hands with the cadets, and asked Clapper which type of plane he wanted to fly. When Clapper responded that he wanted to be an intelligence officer, Kennedy paused and, according to Clapper, looked a bit skeptical. The president then told him, “Good. We need more like you.”

later, he was sent to Vietnam, where he served as an intelligence officer on an air base outside of Saigon. Clapper watched in dismay as more senior officers ignored clear evidence that the American war effort was failing.

Clapper defended the NSA’s surveillance of Vietnam War protesters and black nationalist groups in the early 1970s. “There was genuine concern about an insurrection in this country,” he contended. “I was genuinely frightened with what was happening in the country.”

Clapper would play a role in the creation of the faulty intelligence assessment that was used for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Democrats in Congress would accuse Clapper of lying to the American people about government surveillance in 2013, a charge Clapper denies. But the strangest turn would come in the Trump era. Barr, who in some ways had much in common with Clapper, would launch a criminal investigation in 2019 into whether Clapper was part of a “deep state” plot to discredit Trump’s presidency.

The meeting was not part of a “deep state” conspiracy. Carter, a foreign policy novice, had asked for a series of CIA briefings on world affairs that would help him better prepare for the upcoming presidential campaign, particularly the debates. Most major party nominees receive CIA briefings, but Carter had requested his early—before he formally secured the Democratic nomination. President Ford, displaying magnanimity toward the man he would likely face in the general election, approved a series of limited briefings by Bush and CIA experts.

That both Carter and Bush would later be elected president seemed inconceivable at that point. Carter, a little-known governor from Georgia, was leading Ford in opinion polls but was by no means a shoo-in for election. Bush, for his part, appeared to have derailed his political career by agreeing to become director of the CIA,

and a supporter of Ford’s attempt to curtail Congress’s post-Watergate powers. Carter, a born-again, evangelical Christian and peanut farmer, was skeptical of the CIA, and was running for president on an idealistic post-Watergate slogan: he promised to never lie to the American people.

In a rebuke of the agency, Carter cited the work of the Church Committee during his acceptance speech. “The embarrassment of the CIA revelations could have been avoided if our government had simply reflected the sound judgement and good common sense and the high moral character of the American people.”

Carter again displayed an intense interest in intelligence and asked sharp questions. The Democratic nominee, though, kept his personal views of the CIA secret.

Privately, Carter opposed its long history of funding pro-American dictators who engaged in gross human rights abuses. If elected, he intended to stop it.

Carter came across as credible on foreign affairs, while Ford, in fact, committed a major gaffe, claiming that Poland was not dominated by the Soviet Union. Most importantly, Ford’s standing among voters never fully recovered from his deeply unpopular surprise pardon of Nixon. On November 2, 1976, Carter narrowly won the presidency, garnering 50 percent of the vote to Ford’s 48 ...

More importantly, he enacted sweeping new laws and reforms, including several recommended by the Church Committee, that altered the balance of power in Washington.

He empowered Congress’s new intelligence oversight committees, created a new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to curtail improper government surveillance, and prosecuted FBI officials for breaking into the homes of Americans without warrants.

but they all appeared to make the same political calculation: namely, that if they engaged in Nixon-like abuses of executive power or suggested the president was above the law, they would rapidly lose public support and potentially be driven from office. That would begin to change after the 9/11 attacks and change entirely with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. •

In a subsequent interview, Carter said he considered Bush’s past work in partisan politics as disqualifying. “The job of DCI must be depoliticized,” he said, using the acronym for Director of Central Intelligence. “Bush was too political.”

After the awkward exchange regarding Bush’s future, the CIA director revealed to President-elect Carter a dozen top-secret, covert action programs the CIA was conducting around the world. Carter listened quietly as Bush described the CIA’s funding of various dictators long seen as bulwarks against Communism. Bush later recalled that Carter “seemed to be a little turned off. He tended to moralize.”