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

by David Rohde

A month before taking office, Carter committed the kind of unforced political error that would hamper his presidency. Without consulting a wide circle of advisors, Carter chose a nominee for CIA director that baffled members of his own party—former Kennedy administration aide Ted Sorensen. A gifted speechwriter who had been called JFK’s “chief of staff for ideas,” Sorensen was a member of JFK’s brain trust, but he had no experience in intelligence and had never run a large organization. Joe Biden, at the time an ambitious young member of the newly created Senate Intelligence Committee, made a discovery that deeply embarrassed Carter. In 1965, Sorensen had removed 67 boxes of letters, documents, and other

material from the White House, including seven boxes that had contained classified information. First, Sorensen used the material to write a book about Kennedy. Then, when he donated the papers to the National Archives, he claimed a $231,923 tax deduction. After Biden and other Democrats accused Sorensen of mishandling classified information, he withdrew his nomination.

American, Inouye was initially barred from enlisting in the US military by the Roosevelt administration. He later received the Medal of Honor after he was shot five times and lost his right arm while attacking three German machine gun positions. Inouye’s popularity—he had an 84 percent favorable rating among Americans after he played a central role in the Senate Watergate hearings—burnished the new intelligence panel’s credibility.

The committee also had a single unified staff, not a majority and a minority one, in another effort to foster unity.

In an effort to show intelligence officials that information would not leak, secure facilities were built in the US Capitol to hold closed hearings and store classified documents. Finally, as a “select” committee, its members were selected by party

Inouye promised that the committee could “restore responsibility and accountability to U.S. intelligence activities,” without comprom...

they held nine committee seats while Republicans held four, creating little incentive for bipartisanship. The House committee had a staff of twenty, less than half as many staffers as the Senate panel.

Boland declared that “this will not be an inquisition like the Church and Pike committees.”

Agency officials remained skeptical, particularly of the House panel. For decades, it would struggle to win the trust of intelligence officials, who complained that the House committee leaked intelligence for political gain far more often than the Senate panel.

The creation of the new committees further lowered morale within the CIA. No other Western democracy had given their legislatures such sweeping—and potentially intrusive—oversight powers, particularly the power to subpoena documents and testimony. Veteran inte...

As Congress asserted its new powers over the CIA, a college student named Richard Blee agonized over whether to follow in the footsteps of his father and join the agency. The Church Committee had investigated the work of his father, David Blee, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence. The elder Blee emerged from the inquiry unscathed, but officers from his generation felt that the committee had unfairly maligned the CIA as a whole.

On March 6, 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, appeared without warning at the American Embassy in New Delhi and requested political asylum.

Soon after, Blee was promoted. He returned to Washington and became head of all espionage conducted in the Middle East. In 1971,

had paralyzed CIA operations under James Angleton, who believed that virtually every Soviet defector was a double agent.

Veteran intelligence operatives complained to him that elected officials approved covert operations—and then blamed the agency when things went wrong.

They said Carter administration staffing cuts and other changes had gutted covert operations.

they warned that politicians would attack the agency for political gain.

Carter chose a second nominee for CIA director: Stansfield Turner,

but Carter passionately believed in the fellow naval officer’s integrity and insisted that he take it.

The layoffs infuriated members of the Directorate of Operations. All told, Turner dismissed

825 CIA officers,

Over time, his relationship with the clandestine service became so poisonous that Turner accused CIA operatives of mounting disinformation campaigns to discredit him.

having good intelligence.” Carter approved a new covert action campaign backed by his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski,

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.

He continued to support certain dictators, such as the shah of Iran, a policy tha...

Griffin Bell, a personal friend from Georgia and former federal appellate judge.

serve the full ten-year term Congress had mandated as part of the Church reforms.

bureau. Carter, for his part, believed that Webster, a practicing Christian Scientist like Turner, had integrity.

Attorney General Bell,

The reaction among rank-and-file agents was mixed. Some Hoover loyalists—known internally as “Hoover hard hats”—initially resisted Webster’s efforts to rein in the bureau’s tactics and diversify its 8,000 agents, who were overwhelmingly white males.

Two months after Webster took office, Bell indicted three former FBI executives for illegally spying on Americans—acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray; the bureau’s number-two official, Mark Felt; and former head of intelligence Edward Miller.

ordered 58 FBI agents to break into the homes

fugitive members of the Weather ...

(Unknown to the public and everyone involved in the case was the fact that Felt was “Deep Throat”—the anonymous source who had helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break the Watergate scandal. Even though this revelation might have helped him avoid prosecution, Felt asked the reporters to continue to keep his role as a key Watergate source secret.)

In November 1980, four years after the Church Committee revealed systematic FBI abuses, Felt and Miller were convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. Neither man was sentenced to prison, and the charges against Gray were dropped due to a lack of evidence. But the convictions of two former senior FBI officials was, to many at the bureau and in the public, a powerful

Over his nine years as FBI director, Webster restored credibility to the bureau

the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established the new FISA Court where federal judges approved applications to surveil Americans for national security reasons.

general, Bell criminally investigated Carter’s relatives and aides. Bell filed suit against Carter’s brother Billy, accusing him of working for the Qaddafi regime in Libya without registering as an agent of a foreign government. (Billy Carter settled the lawsuit.) And he indicted Bert Lance, a longtime Carter friend and the head of the Office of Management and Budget, on fraud charges in Georgia. (Lance was acquitted of all charges.)

Carter also signed into law three statutes designed to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse in the executive branch. The Civil Service Reform Act was the first major reform of the federal government workforce since 1883. It created a cadre of experienced, apolitical managers—known as the Senior Executive Service—tasked with improving efficiency

Ethics in Government Act, which required federal officials to disclose their financial histories and created the Office of Independent Counsel, tasked with investigating potentially illegal acts by the president and other senior officials. Lastly, Carter signed the Inspector General Act, which established a dozen independent inspectors general in federal departments who could investigate reports from whistleblowers of fraud and abuse. In an effort to create a more open and transparent presidency, Carter made White House records subject to release under freedom of information laws and invoked “executive privilege” only once, declining to release to Congress documents regarding a proposed oil import tax.

White House aides blamed the CIA for failing to warn Carter of the dangers of supporting the shah of Iran.

CIA officials said Carter marginalized them. In November 1980, Reagan defeated Carter in one of the most lopsided presidential elections in US history.

While Carter failed in other areas of his presidency, he played a leading role in establishing mechanisms to police American presidents, monitor intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and prevent the emergence of a “deep state.”

Scalia, Cheney, and other advocates of expansive presidential power assailed Carter’s reforms. But there was broad public support for “good government” laws designed to prevent crimes. The raft of reforms enacted by Carter set a post-Watergate standard for disclosure, behavior, and investigation in Washington. In the short term, they would be questioned, tested, and altered by Reagan, as well as other presidents, but over time the need for them would be embraced by Republicans and Democrats.

He filled Americans with a sense of national optimism not experienced since before Vietnam. And he struck historic nuclear arms agreements with the Soviet Union.

Early in his first term, an undercover FBI sting operation known as Abscam, which had ensnared members of Congress, ignited fears of a return to the outrages of the Hoover era. And, in his second term, the CIA and White House were caught breaking multiple laws and flagrantly lying to Congress about covert CIA operations, US arms sales, and secret hostage negotiations, in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. The

administration’s actions would test popular support for increased presidential power, but in the end, the post-Watergate reforms and the constitutional checks and balances that have divided power and restrained all three branches of government since the country’s founding would stand.

Weinberg turned his scam

arrested him and recruited him as an informant.