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

by David Rohde

2013 David O. Russell film American Hustle, with a portly, toupéed Christian Bale playing Weinberg, and Amy Adams playing his mistress and co-conspirator.

He and his fellow agents designed a scheme to ensnare public officials on the take.

FBI agents dressed as sheikhs offered senators and representatives bags of cash in exchange for investment advice, green cards, and government contracts.

All told, five House members, one senator, an immigration official, a state legislator, and a mayor were convicted of taking bribes. After news of the probe leaked in 1980, videotapes of congressmen accepting the bribes aired on national television.

“Mel was a fabulous con man,” he told the Newark Star-Ledger. “Without him, it’s unlikely we ever would have had a case.”

Abscam was the first test of the system that the Church reforms had created to prevent the FBI from committing Hoover-like abuses.

repeat of the Watergate and Church investigations, the Senate created a select committee to investigate the operation. James Neal, a former Watergate prosecutor, served as its special counsel, and Daniel Inouye, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was one of the committee members.

Critics questioned the bureau’s methods and called for the passage of new laws requiring a judge to pre-approve FBI undercover operations. The American Civil Liberties Union accused agents of luring the officials into carrying out crimes that they were not predisposed to commit. Two federal prosecutors claimed that Weinberg coached officials into saying t...

Justice Department officials defended Good and Weinberg. The number-three official in the department at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, argued that informants often aided investigations. Giuliani, who would go on to become New York’s mayor and President’s Trump’s pers...

“There is no constitutional right not to be investigated,” Giuliani told the New York Times in 1982. “You need someone who can get the confidence of the crook, and that will generally be a crooked person. ...

and assured lawmakers that the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover had not returned. He

After months of hearings, the select committee recommended changes in FBI undercover operations but found no systematic misconduct by agents. James Neal,

Skeptics contended that Webster, and other FBI and CIA directors, learned, over time, how to manage congressional oversight, co-opted

Webster himself later described the Hanssen case as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.”

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 an innovation, Meese and other aides quickly filled nearly 3,000 positions across the government with experienced conservative appointees. After those officials were in place, the administration was able to implement its policies.

One such appointee was William Barr, the former CIA legislative affairs aide who had advised George H. W. Bush when he testified before Bella Abzug and other House members.

Barr’s time working as a clerk for Wilkey, according to friends, bolstered his belief in a more powerful presidency.

In 1982, the Reagan White House hired Barr as a deputy assistant director for legal policy.

In 1982, Olson founded “The Federalist Society” with other conservative lawyers. In a bid to reverse Roe v. Wade and other court rulings of the 1960s and 1970s that conservatives

Barr joined the society as well. Over time, it grew to be one of the most influential legal organizations in the country. In 2019, thirty-seven years after its founding, five of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court would be current or former Federalist Society members.

In another assertion of presidential power, the Reagan administration backed a lawsuit Ted Olson filed that challenged the constitutionality of independent counsels after one was named to investigate him.

Conservatives also viewed independent counsels as both unaccountable and costly, and accused Democrats of using them as political weapons to smear Republican administrations.

One targeted alleged drug use by Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan—and ultimately pressed no charges. Six others investigated various Reagan administration officials but found no criminal wrongdoing.

The 1988 Supreme Court ruling in the case Morrison v. Olson devastated Olson, Meese, Cheney, Barr, and other supporters of executive power. In a 7–1 vote, the justices upheld the constitutionality of independent counsels. The majority found that independent counsels do not interfere “unduly” or “impermissibly” with the powers of the executive branch. The one dissenting justice was Antonin Scalia. In a blistering thirty-page opinion, Scalia argued that the Constitution granted executive powers of investigation and prosecution solely to the president. In his opinion, Scalia warned that a politically biased independent prosecutor could endlessly carry out “debilitating criminal investigations” for minor crimes. “Nothing is so politically effective,” Scalia wrote, “as the ability to charge that one’s opponent and his associates are not merely wrongheaded, naive, ineffective, but, in all probability, ‘crooks.’” Ultimately, prosecutors declined to charge Olson.

She applied to a program the Carter administration had created, the Presidential Management Fellows Program, to attract top graduate students to work as civil servants. To her surprise, Dempsey was accepted.

Casey, who had served in the OSS during World War II, was a multimillionaire Wall Street lawyer known for being a ruthless political

At the urging of Vice President–elect Bush, Reagan received the President’s Daily Brief each day, usually in the morning. Frequently dressed in a bathrobe, he greeted CIA aides warmly and then proved to be a “thorough and very intent reader”

“The problem with Ronald Reagan was that his ideas were all fixed. He knew what he thought about everything—he was an old dog,” said Davis. In

Once Reagan moved into the White House, his one-on-one contact with CIA officers declined dramatically. A written version of the President’s Daily Brief was given to Reagan’s national security advisor, who then passed the briefing book to Reagan himself. Unlike Carter, Reagan did not scribble notes or questions in the PDB. And unlike other presidents, he read the PDB alone, with no CIA staffers present. Instead, he asked questions to Casey, his CIA director.

Inside the CIA, Casey set about revamping an agency that he believed had been hollowed out by the Church reforms and the Carter administration.

From the outset, Casey politicized the intelligence flowing to Reagan to fit his own views. He drove out analysts who didn’t share his politics. Richard Lehman, who had created the first-ever President’s Daily Brief in 1961 for John F. Kennedy and served as an agency analyst for 33 years, said that Casey marginalized him because he was “insufficiently hard” on the Soviet Union.

In his first two months in office, Casey expanded the covert operations that Carter had initiated in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, and created sweeping new covert operations in Nicaragua, Cuba, northern Africa, and South Africa as well. Citing the Soviet threat, Congress gave Casey hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that he used to hire nearly 2,000 new members of the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service’s first expansion since Nixon.

Robert Gates, who served as Casey’s first chief of staff and later as CIA director, found the organization to be hidebound. “Burdened by years of bureaucratic encrustation and the lessons of the investigations of the 1970s, the D.O. set was hard-pressed for resources, unimaginative, and a blindered fraternity living on the legends and achievements of their forebears of the 1950s and 1960s,”

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...

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...

Congress fought back. In the spring of 1982, Edward Boland, the Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, demanded a CIA briefing on how the agency’s new covert action program was being conducted in Central America.

The limited briefings failed to mollify Boland and other Democrats.

Congress passed the Boland Amendment, which barred the CIA and Defense Department from spending funds on military activity inside Nicaragua.

in the spring of 1984, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who had served on the Church Committee and now was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, angrily accused the CIA of failing to inform the committee of the covert operation as required by law. Casey insisted he had informed the committee in veiled terms.

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.

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

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.

In the spring of 1986, Reagan’s new national security advisor, John Poindexter, approved the diversion of $12 million from the Iran arms sales to the Contras. In testimony before eleven members of the House Intelligence Committee that summer, North ...

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. In the process, they repeatedly lied to Congress, the courts, and the American public. A decade after Nixon’s aides broke the law to try to wi...

On November 25, 1986, the Lebanese magazine Al Shiraa broke news of the secret American arms shipments to Iran. In their White House offices, North and his secretary began frantically shredding documents. Outraged members of Congress demanded immediate answers and Casey ...

Casey suffered a massive seizure in his CIA office. Rushed to a nearby hospital, he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. For the next five months, Casey drifted in and out of consciousness. In May 6, 1987, Casey died in a New York hospital. Exactly what Reagan and Bush knew of Casey’s illegal...

Four weeks after news of what became known as the “Iran-Contra” affair broke, Attorney General Meese, under intense political pressure, appointed an independent counsel to investigate potential criminal misconduct. Meese chose Lawrence Walsh, a lifelong Republican and former judge and deputy attorney general, was appointed independent counsel to investigate potential criminal misconduct. FBI agents arrived at CIA headquarters with subpoenas and began collecting documents to prevent them from being destroyed, as had occurred in the White House. Morale at the agency plummeted again. Casey had empowered the agency and then driven it off a political cliff.