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

by David Rohde

Counterterrorism officials called for the hiring of 1,900 new agents, linguists, and analysts to focus on terrorism. In the end, they received enough funding to hire only 76 people.

But like Reagan and Bush, Clinton feared the political cost of firing a director of the FBI. In a Washington Post article assessing the vexed relationship

Clinton aides expressed fears of J. Edgar Hoover’s excesses and warned that the FBI had grown unaccountable. They said rectitude, not corruption, had caused the FBI’s failure to coordinate with the White House on important policies.

White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta told the Post that he had not been informed that the FBI was developing a new surveillance system for monitoring e...

The new program raised civil liberties issues that Podesta and other White House officials felt t...

Evidence emerged that Clinton had pressured a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, to lie to investigators

justice. Democrats argued that his actions did not merit removal from office. They accused Gingrich of using Congress’s ultimate power for partisan political gain. Gradually, popular opinion shifted against Gingrich, who had led the impeachment charge. After Republicans unexpectedly lost five House seats in the November 1998 midterm elections, Gingrich resigned as speaker. The House impeached Clinton a month later.

While disapproving of Clinton’s actions, they felt these did not merit removing a president from office. Twenty years later, many Republicans would use the same argument during the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Congressional hearings on Abscam, Ruby Ridge, and Waco were effective in creating a sense that FBI officials were being held accountable. But a dozen other independent counsel investigations of members of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations—as well as congressional

Too many congressional hearings and too many independent counsels diluted the impact of investigations. A public sense of investigative overkill could undermine Congress’s credibility and bolster a president, regardless of his or her conduct. The post-Watergate and post-Church reform consensus regarding the need to hold presidents, as well as the FBI and CIA, accountable was gradually unraveling.

invoking Watergate and past FBI and CIA abuses was losing its political potency.

brazen president could flout them and face few politi...

the growing threat posed by Al Qaeda.

The new strategy focused on tracking and capturing bin Laden, and cutting off Al Qaeda from its sources of financing.

Blee believed that the leadership of Al Qaeda was determined to carry out a domestic or international attack against an American target.

five-year strategy, which involved armin...

and flying drones over Afghanistan, was staggering. Fully funded, the Qaeda initiative cost more than the agency’s tot...

making Tenet one of a handful of CIA chiefs to work for both Democratic and Republican presidents.

After the August 7, 1998 Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton initially declined to retaliate. On August 20—three days after Clinton publicly admitted that he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky—Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike on Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Blee suspected that Clinton had turned his attention to Al Qaeda to distract from domestic embarrassments. “Let’s go distract,” Blee told me. “It was the politicization and manipulation of intelligence.” Clinton flatly denied that politics played any role in the decision.

CIA analysts were instructed not to put in writing any

determination of who was responsible for the attack on the Cole.

“It was very clear to everyone who was working the problem that it was bin Laden,” recalled Blee. After Gore narrowly lost to Bush, the Clinton administration decided to let Bush decide what actions to take. This failure to immediately r...

When Blee spoke, he told Rice that Al Qaeda could be planning to carry out attacks inside the United States. Rice asked the officials to develop a range of options for attacking Al Qaeda but failed to follow up after their meeting. “She never pushed the bureaucracy to move forward,” Blee said.

Four months after his meeting with Rice, Blee walked out of a morning staff meeting in CIA headquarters on September 11, 2001, and a secretary pointed at a nearby television. “Look,” she said, “a plane hit the World

Immediately, Blee knew that he had failed. “That’s bin Laden,” he said. “This is the attack. This is what they have talked about.”

FAA. The agency initially refused, saying it would be illegal for it to provide information the CIA c...

Blee had no idea but said, “Of course there are.” Minutes later, after passengers stormed the cockpit, United 93 crashed into a field in southwestern Pennsylvania, twenty minutes away from reaching its intended target, the US Capitol.

Later that day, Blee received the passenger list from the FAA. Two Saudi men that Alec Station had been trying to track—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—were on the plane flown into the Pentagon. A sense of failure, grief, and guilt settled over Blee that he would carry for years.

Like Blee, O’Connor and his FBI colleagues knew Al Qaeda was responsible as soon as a plane struck the World Trade Center. “Everybody thought, ‘that fucker,’” O’Connor recalled, referring to bin Laden. Minutes later, an agent teaching a training course at a local Fire Department called and said smoke was rising from the Pentagon. O’Connor and another agent, Scott Stanley, sped the four miles to the iconic building in Arlington that houses the US Department of Defense. The streets were largely deserted. As they got close to the Pentagon, they saw people streaming out of the sprawling building. They drove to the site of the attack and donned blue windbreakers emblazoned with “FBI” on the back. Dozens of members of the military were trying to evacuate the injured.

American Flight 77 had struck the Pentagon at 530 miles an hour. Sixty-four people inside the plane perished. So did one hundred twenty-five in the building. O’Connor and his colleagues collected over 2,000 separate bags of human remains.

Exhaustive reviews by Congress and the 9/11 Commission found that the CIA and FBI had failed to share information that might have prevented the attacks; the Clinton and Bush administrations had failed to take the threat posed by Al Qaeda seriously enough; and American officials had failed to imagine that commercial airliners could be used to carry out mass suicide attacks.

The reviews also found that a central goal of the Church reforms—limiting the CIA’s ability to collect intelligence inside the United States—had inadvertently reduced intelligence sharing between the CIA and FBI. A little-known set of 1995 Justice Department guidelines designed to separate the collection of intelligence from the collection of evidence in criminal cases compounded the problem. The procedures “were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied,” the 9/11 Commission

“As a result, there was far less information sharing and coordination.” The commission found that civil servants tended to be cautious rule-followers who jealously guarded their institutional turf. At a time when thousands of American lives depended on the ability of t...

On August 6, 2001, President Bush himself had been warned of a possible domestic attack by Al Qaeda in an article included in the President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” Bush later told the 9/11 panel that he remembered the article but was never informed that a Qaeda cell was active inside the United States. Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that “the system was blinking red” during the summer of 2001, but no one in the American national security community saw what was coming. “The foreign intelligence agencies were watching overseas, alert to foreign threats to US interests there,” the commission found. “The domestic agencies were waiting for evidence of a domestic threat from sleeper cells within the United States. N...

The 9/11 Commission, like the Church and Iran-C...

before them, showed the continued importance and value of bipartisan investigations. Some Americans continued to believe conspiracy theories about the attacks, but the commission created a fact-based, commonly accepted narrative of events and a detailed accounting of what went wrong. Like the C...

Blee argued that the best way to disrupt Al Qaeda and thwart an attack was to launch aggressive cove...

Blee said. “I knew it was a quagmire, but at some point you have to do something about your enemies.” Post–Cold War cuts in CIA staffing also limited the agency’s ability to counter Al Qaeda, he said, which, by 2001, had an estimated three thousand members. “It was twenty or thirty people against three thousand,” Blee recalled. “That was a period when the agency was firing people; the [Berlin] wall was coming down, there was no longer a need for the CIA.”

In hindsight, American policymakers had become overconfident, almost serene, about the country’s strength and security. A decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, triumphalism had taken hold in

Forty-five days after 9/11, Congress overwhelmingly passed the USA PATRIOT Act—an acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” The sweeping, 343-page measure was the most dramatic change in American privacy law since the Church reforms. Section 215 of the law allowed the FBI and NSA, with the approval of a FISA Court judge, to seize or monitor the personal records of Americans held by phone companies, political groups, universities, churches, public libraries, bookstores, medical offices, and other institutions without informing those targeted. Section 505 vastly expanded the power of the FBI to issue “national security letters” that force internet service providers, financial firms, and credit companies to secretly hand over personal customer records without prior court approval and without informing the customer. Section 213 authorized “sneak and peek” searches, which allowed the FBI, with the approval of a judge, to search an individual’s home or business without notifying them.

and strengthened US border security. Only one senator, Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, voted against the bill, citing civil liberties concerns.

After six weeks of American bombardment, Afghan forces backed by the CIA broke through Taliban lines north of Kabul, and advanced on the capital. To the amazement of Afghans and Americans, the Taliban withdrew from the city without a fight.

Jihadist propaganda, advertisements for flight schools in the United States, and bomb-making manuals were found in houses abandoned by Al Qaeda members.

new powers the executive branch received from the PATRIOT Act. Others

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.

Mass surveillance was conducted on Americans without their knowledge. Muslim Americans said the FBI engaged in systematic racial profiling and entrapment. A prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, held hundreds of accused terrorists for years without trial.

The motivation of Bush and other officials was to prevent another major terrorist attack, not consolidate political power, according to former aides. But when many of the practices eventually leaked, they stoked public fears about the actions of America’s spy agencies and alienated allies around the world. Bush and Cheney’s massive expansion of executive power restored the imperial presidency in the name of na...

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.

The conversation baffled and alarmed Baker. For decades, FBI officials, including the one who had spoken with him that night, followed procedure and routed all requests through Baker’s office. Formally known as the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, the office was created in the wake of the Church reforms to ensure that FBI agents followed the law

Baker then approached Daniel Levin, who, at the time, was serving as both counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft and chief of staff to FBI Director Robert Mueller. When Baker asked Levin about the eavesdropping, Levin said he could not discuss it with him without White House approval. The conversations were unlike any Baker had experienced in a decade at the Justice Department. The Bush administration appeared to be conducting mass surveillance of Americans in flagrant violation of American law.