Amid a high-profile showdown with the “intelligence community” early in his term, President Donald Trump was repeatedly and viciously threatened — even with prison and death. What kind of people can threaten the democratically elected President of the United States and get away with it? Meet the “intelligence” and “security” tentacles of the “Deep State.”
Since the presidential election, elements of what is often called the “intelligence community” have dropped the mask. For everyday Americans misinformed by the establishment media and unaware of the out-of-control behavior of so many secretive government bureaucracies, it was shocking to hear lawmakers and bureaucrats talking about how the “intelligence” apparatus would take on President Trump. But the truth has been obvious to discerning Americans for many years: A key component of what has become known as the “Deep State” in recent times is the sprawling network of secrecy-obsessed bureaucracies of the “intelligence community.” And while they are not alone, rogue behavior by these agencies threatens constitutional governance in America.
This bloated “intelligence” bureaucracy, which is made up of some 16 (known) individual bureaucracies, includes the well-known Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It also includes many lesser-known bureaucracies burrowed into various cabinet-level departments such as Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury, Energy, State, and Justice. Each branch of the U.S. Armed Services has an intelligence agency, too. According to an investigation by the left-wing Washington Post (published before the paper was purchased by Jeff Bezos, who has massive contracts with the CIA that the paper refuses to disclose), there are more than 1,250 government organizations and almost 2,000 companies in 10,000 locations across America involved in this, including almost a million “contractors,” bureaucrats, and military personnel with top-secret clearances.
Some functions of these bureaucracies are critical to national security. And many employees of the agencies are decent, patriotic Americans working hard to keep America safe. But there is a dark underbelly to the “intelligence community” that was briefly observed by the public in the early months of the Trump administration. And if left unchecked, it literally threatens liberty and self-government. It has shown some of its power. Amid a non-stop deluge of leaks orchestrated by “Deep State” bureaucrats, a frustrated Trump lashed out, suggesting — with good reason — that operatives of the “intelligence community” were trying to sabotage him. Then came some shocking responses. “Now we go nuclear,” wrote former NSA analyst John Schindler on social media. “[Intelligence community] war going to new levels. Just got an [email from] senior [intelligence community] friend, it began: ‘He will die in jail.’”
It seemed to be something of an open secret that “intelligence community” figures would use illegal or immoral schemes to target anyone who challenged them, including the president. Even top lawmakers openly talked about it, as if it were common knowledge on Capitol Hill. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate Minority Leader, for instance, offered chilling remarks that lifted the veil, at least partially, on how the “swamp” in Washington really works. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told far-left activist Rachel Maddow of MSNBC in early January. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.” Schumer did not elaborate on how unelected bureaucracies supposedly subject to the American people’s elected leaders would be “getting back” at Trump. But the threat was unmistakable.
What Is the Deep State?
These rogue agencies and bureaucrats that “have six ways from Sunday” to get back at the elected president of the United States are a key component of the so-called “Deep State.” Among the earliest individuals to use the term “Deep State” and apply it to the United States was Mike Lofgren, a congressional staffer with a top-secret security clearance for almost three decades specializing in national security. The Deep State, wrote Lofgren, is “the state within a state.” “The Deep State does not consist of the entire government,” Lofgren, a liberal who hates the Tea Party, wrote in 2014. “It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department.”
The NSA, which was exposed by multiple whistleblowers spying on virtually everyone without a warrant, is a “core component of the Deep State,” said Lofgren, author of the 2016 book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. The National Security Council, currently controlled by establishment globalist H.R. McMaster, coordinates the Deep State agencies, he said. Even parts of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, Lofgren added, pointing to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court. And Big Business giants in Silicon Valley have been “conscripted” by the Deep State into helping spy on everyone, said Lofgren. Its power is enormous. For instance, the former congressional staffer argued in 2014 that it launches wars around the world at will, never learning lessons — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are among the recent examples.
Terror, Communism, Crime
Whenever there is any resistance to its agenda by the public, the “Deep State” simply cries “terrorism” to elicit a Pavlovian response from citizens and their elected officials, the former congressional staffer said. Although Lofgren did not go into it in his 2014 essay, the Deep State appears to have no scruples about getting into bed with terrorists or simply inventing terrorism by duping mentally ill people into plots to advance its agenda. As just one recent example, an explosive 2012 document from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that was seen by top Obama officials exposed several stunning facts. For one, it shows the Deep State knew that the insurgency in Syria was being led by al-Qaeda — and that the administration was supporting that insurgency anyway. Secondly, it offered proof that creating a “salafist principality” in Eastern Syria was a policy goal of the Deep State and its allies. With the Islamic State (ISIS), they succeeded, as Trump pointed out on the campaign.
Before “terror” was the key threat justifying the massive budget of the Deep State “intelligence community,” it was the threat of communism, which was, of course, extremely serious — and still is today, with the world’s most populous nation still under overt Communist Party slavery. For some perspective on the type of people who run this Deep State Leviathan, though, a brief look at history is revealing. The recently departed CIA boss John Brennan admitted publicly last year that he voted for the Soviet Union-backed Communist Party USA candidate in 1976 — and that he admitted to voting for a Soviet puppet in a 1980 interview, and was hired by the agency anyway, going on to become the agency chief in 2013 under Obama.
Indeed, even when the CIA was still the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), communists and Soviet agents such as Eugene Dennis (exposed in the Venona documents) were deeply involved in the “intelligence” apparatus. Famous defector Elizabeth Bentley, who spied for the Soviet regime in America before defecting to the United States and blowing the whistle, testified that she would collect dues for the Communist Party USA from high-ranking OSS officials in Washington. Among those senior communists in the OSS “intelligence” bureaucracy, which eventually became the CIA, was Duncan Lee, the “confidential assistant” to OSS founder and chief William Donovan and the head of the China section at the OSS’ Secret Intelligence Branch. Lee was exposed in the Venona documents, too, along with many others in the OSS.
Beyond terrorism and communism, and before the torture of “suspected militants” became well-known, the “intelligence” and “national security” component of the Deep State also had a long and troubling history with criminals and criminality — so much so that in many cases it is hard to tell where the criminal networks begin and the government ends. One recent example of “Deep State” machinations getting exposed was the now-infamous “Operation Fast and Furious.” As part of the scheme, the Justice Department, the ATF, and other components of the Deep State were caught transferring large quantities of American weapons to brutal Mexican drug cartels. Then, they blamed the violence on the Second Amendment. When caught, top officials perjured themselves and tried to pretend it was part of some “investigation.” But then, news emerged that the supposed “target” of the “investigation” was already on the FBI’s payroll. The media did its best to sweep it all under the rug.
Drug trafficking by “Deep State” intelligence agencies has long been something of an open secret. More than a few officials, drug lords, and analysts have said the CIA and other secretive agencies actually run the global trade in narcotics. Former DEA chief Robert Bonner, during an explosive interview with CBS, revealed that his agency had learned that the CIA unlawfully imported a ton of cocaine into the United States in cooperation with the Venezuelan government. More recently, a Mexican official accused the CIA of “managing” the global drug trade. “It is impossible to pass tons of drugs or cocaine to U.S. without some grade of complicity of some American authorities,” observed Mexican President Felipe Calderon in a 2009 interview with the BBC. And an explosive 2014 investigation by the Mexican newspaper El Universal revealed that for over a decade, under multiple administrations, the U.S. government even had a secret agreement with the ruthless Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed it to operate with impunity and ship drugs into America at will.
Sometimes, the proceeds of the drug running are reportedly used to finance secret wars and regime-change operations. The most infamous example, perhaps, was the “Iran-Contra” scandal, in which the CIA and its Contras in Nicaragua were credibly accused of trafficking cocaine into the United States to help fund their war. An explosive investigation by reporter Gary Webb dubbed the “Dark Alliance” uncovered a vast CIA machine that reportedly shipped illegal drugs into the United States to fund clandestine and unconstitutional activities abroad, including the financing of armed groups. Webb eventually died under highly suspicious circumstances — two gunshots to the head, officially ruled a “suicide.” Responding to Webb’s discoveries, top officials and even lawmakers eventually acknowledged that the CIA almost certainly had a role. “There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking,” explained then-U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.).
Regime Change, War
Leaving drugs aside, the CIA also has a long history of overthrowing foreign governments without any semblance of a constitutional declaration of war from Congress. From Iran and Guatemala to Congo and the Dominican Republic, the CIA has played a key role in overthrowing more than a half-dozen governments where its involvement is publicly known — and probably plenty more where the CIA’s role is still hidden. Foreign Policy estimates the number of governments overthrown by the CIA at seven. That does not include numerous other operations where the U.S. government — or the “Deep State” — used military intervention, assassination, or backing for homegrown insurgencies. And that does not even include interventions where there was not regime change but where other goals were pursued. Critics say the real numbers are much higher. As if that was not enough, the CIA also played a crucial role in imposing the European Union on the once self-governing peoples of Europe, as official documents show.
In some cases, elements of the “Deep State” have even shown that they are not above using “false flags” to carry out their agenda. Documents from the U.S. Defense Department on Operation Northwoods, for example, outlined a proposed plot in in the early 1960s to have the CIA or other “Deep State” agency perpetrate terrorist attacks against American or Cuban civilians or military targets to blame it on the Castro regime. One scenario involved shooting down an airliner. Another involved bombings in Miami. Yet another would have sunk a boat filled with refugees fleeing Castro’s tyranny. “The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere,” the document states. The plan was ultimately rejected by then-President John F. Kennedy, but the fact that it was developed at all is very revealing.
Ironically, the regime in Cuba was put into power with key help from the U.S. government and the “Deep State behind the Deep State,” which will be examined in an upcoming article. The U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, wrote a book about it, The Fourth Floor, and testified to Congress that Castro would never have come to power without U.S. government support. Indeed, Deep State machinations have been responsible for putting into power and empowering, even militarily, all sorts of monstrous and murderous regimes around the world that have later become “enemies.” CIA documents prove that the Deep State even helped arm Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction prior to the Persian Gulf War, even though the CIA knew he was perpetrating brutal crimes against his own people and others.
Mind Control, Spying
Under the guise of fighting communist brainwashing, the CIA also engaged in horrific experiments aimed at studying and understanding mind control. Among other tactics, federal officials used LSD and mind-altering chemicals, surviving files from the CIA’s Project MKUltra show. According to declassified CIA documents, congressional investigations, and testimony from victims, other efforts to control and engineer human behavior explored by Washington, D.C., involved hypnosis, sexual abuse, and torture. Then-CIA boss Richard Helms reportedly sought to obstruct congressional investigations by ordering all MKUltra documents destroyed. Still, at least two congressional committees investigating the CIA’s mind-control programs uncovered horrifying experiments often performed on unwitting victims — in some cases, on individuals confined in mental institutions, and even children.
The “intelligence” component of the Deep State has also used propaganda and manipulation of the media — even against Americans. One stunning but proven example revealed in declassified documents was the CIA’s Project Mockingbird (also known as Operation Mockingbird). According to official documents, the scheme, launched in the early 1950s, aimed to hijack the U.S. media to parrot CIA propaganda. While many of the documents are heavily redacted, it is clear that the CIA program was wildly successful in recruiting globalist pseudo-journalists to do the Deep State’s bidding. Among the names mentioned in the documents are Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor; Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines; Walter Lippman of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate; CBS’ William S. Paley; Time magazine’s John Scott; Harry Schwartz of the New York Times; Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post; Newsweek‘s Malcolm Muir; and more. William F. Buckley, founder of neocon journal National Review, was also a CIA lackey. Each of those was also a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations, part of the Deep State behind the Deep State. Over 400 American “journalists” carried out assignments for the CIA, according to documents cited by Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.
Then, of course, there is the lawless spying on Americans, revealed by whistleblowers. Among the most important insiders to expose the illegal spying was William Binney, a senior NSA official who spent 30 years at the NSA before resigning to expose the criminal surveillance of the American people. “I knew I could not stay because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country,” he explained, citing the “Stellar Wind” program. “[The NSA] can build up knowledge about everyone in the country, and having that knowledge then allows them the ability to concoct all kinds of charges if they want to target you.” Basically, the NSA knows virtually everything about everyone, he suggested, adding that they have collected and stored most of the e-mails sent and received by Americans and at least 80 percent of phone calls. Later, Edward Snowden also revealed that the NSA was spying on essentially everyone, all the time, with help from Big Business. All of that data is being stored in places such as an NSA facility in Utah that can save a “yottabyte” of information, equivalent to about 500 quintillion pages of text.
Warnings about these capabilities have been offered for generations. In 1975, Senator Frank Church, for example, who led the congressional investigation in the FBI’s COINTEL “counter-intelligence” program, offered a particularly stark warning about the potential abilities of the NSA being used against Americans. “The NSA’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter,” warned Senator Church. “There would be no place to hide. [If a dictatorship ever took over, the NSA] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.” Since then, those capabilities have only expanded beyond Orwell’s wildest dreams — and just as Sen. Church warned, the espionage apparatus has been turned on innocent Americans.
Even Congress is not safe from the Deep State “intelligence” machine’s illegal snooping. In 2014, Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accused the CIA of spying on her committee’s staffers charged with oversight over the CIA. She also said the agency had deleted files from the Senate Committee’s computers. Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Feinstein, who is normally an apologist for the Deep State and illegal spying, said the CIA machinations against Congress may have violated the separation of powers principles of the U.S. Constitution. “It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function,” she continued, adding that several CIA officials had admitted the scheming. In that case, the target was a Committee report exposing CIA harsh “interrogation” techniques and CIA lies about it. But with the ability to spy on lawmakers (or Supreme Court justices) comes the ability to blackmail them, too.
Perhaps even more alarming than spying on Americans and their elected officials are the Deep State’s murders — and murder is the correct term, because the victims have usually never even been charged with a crime, much less convicted by a jury in a court of law. So extreme have the developments become that a former senior intelligence official told the Washington Post that the CIA had been turned into “one hell of a killing machine.” A former leader of the CIA and NSA was caught on video in 2014 bragging in public about how the “intelligence” apparatus murders people based just on their metadata. Today, the CIA has murdered thousands of people around the world using missiles fired from drones. It seems Obama was fond of using the CIA as his own personal assassination squad, as recounted in the book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Mazzetti. But it is almost certainly not a recent development. In 1975, it emerged in Senate testimony that the CIA had developed a gun that shoots an “ice dart.” The frozen projectile would enter the body and cause a heart attack upon melting, leaving virtually no evidence of the crime. Top officials have suggested that today, the CIA can murder people by hacking into their cars, too, again leaving no observable evidence.
Deep State Exposed
Since Trump burst on to the national political stage in the latest election, most of the criticism about the Deep State’s “intelligence” network has come from conservatives and Republicans. Even some honest Democrats, though, have expressed concerns about the “Deep State” intelligence community and its apparent war on the president — and by extension those who elected him. “You have politicization of agencies that is resulting in leaks from anonymous, unknown people and the intention is to take down a president,” former Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “Now, this is very dangerous to America. It’s a threat to our republic, it constitutes a clear and present danger to our way of life. So we have to be asking, what is the motive of these people? Who’s putting these leaks out? Why doesn’t somebody come forward and make a charge and put their name and reputation behind it, instead of attacking through the media and not substantiating their position?”
After confirming that he believed President Trump was “under attack” by the “deep state intelligence community,” Kucinich went even further, saying that it targets anyone who stands in its way. He also suggested that the “deep state” was at work setting policy under Obama, too. “Not only that, Sean, it has to be pointed out in October of 2016, that same deep state overrode the decision of President Obama and Secretary Kerry, to come to an agreement with Russia to a ceasefire in Syria,” said Kucinich, a leading anti-war Democrat targeted by the establishment for his honesty. “They overrode it and launched an attack against a Syrian military base. So, this is a problem in our country. We’ve got to protect our nation here. People have to be aware of what’s going on. We’ve got to stand up for America, this isn’t about Democrat, Republican. This is about getting what’s going on in the moment and understanding that our country itself is under attack from within.”
As the next article in this series will show, many of the ostensible kingpins of the “Deep State” intelligence apparatus, as well as their key enablers, are deeply intertwined with the Deep State behind the Deep State. For example, CIA and NSA bosses routinely attend Bilderberg meetings, and often have deep links to the Council on Foreign Relations and/or the Trilateral Commission, two visible organs of the Deep State’s Deep State. Disgraced General David Petraeus, who was put in charge of the CIA, is a regular Bilderberg attendee and a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations, which has openly expressed its goal of undermining national sovereignty in favor of “global governance.” When he was done with his government “service,” as with many other supposed “public servants,” he was scooped up by Wall Street investment behemoth KKR. Now, he spends some of his time shilling for the end of America and the emergence of a European Union-style “North America.” His agenda and trajectory are typical among Deep State swamp creatures.
Another typical Deep State “intelligence” operative deeply intertwined with the Deep State behind the Deep State is Michael Hayden, who has led both the CIA and the NSA. Like Petraeus, Hayden is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has attended the secretive annual Bilderberg gatherings. He has also publicly expressed sentiments that, in a sane nation governed by the rule of law, would instantly result in his indictment for mass murder. “We kill people based on metadata,” he bragged at the 2014 Johns Hopkins University’s Foreign Affairs Symposium when explaining how important the illegal spying and collection of metadata was to the “intelligence” bureaucracies’ machinations. More than a few critics have also suggested that Hayden should be prosecuted for his role in approving torture, which is a federal felony that could even result in the death penalty being imposed if a victim died. Many of Hayden’s victims died, as have their children and families.
The “Deep State” and its “intelligence” component are coming into public view amid the election of Donald Trump, the spying on his campaign and his transition, the “unmasking” scandal, the carefully orchestrated take-down of National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, and other developments. Meanwhile, Deep State operatives and “Swamp creatures” are burrowed firmly into the Trump administration. Among them is National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, another CFR member and Bilderberg attendee who has been protecting Obamaites and purging Trump loyalists from the National Security Council. But the fact that polls show a strong plurality of Americans now recognize that the “Deep State” exists is very encouraging news. Almost half of Americans see the Deep State, while just a third believe it’s only a “conspiracy theory.” At this point, it is up to Americans to educate themselves on the threat, expose it, and stop it. The alternative is an end to self-government and everything that entails.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.
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Book Review: Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
Deep State’s Relentless Attacks on Trump
Globalist McMaster Purges Trump Loyalists, Protects Obamaites
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Was CIA Director Brennan’s 1976 Vote for a Communist Just a Youthful Indiscretion?
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