When WASN'T the Deep State Evil?

A Century of Failure and Abuse Lead Straight to Today

From Gladio to government overthrows, from Martin Luther King to metadata, from the Bay of Pigs to Whitey Bulger,  America’s security and intelligence community has such an atrocious and disturbing record that one must ask – when WASN’T the deep state evil?

What has been occurring at the CIA, the FBI, the NSA in the past few years regarding President Donald Trump is just the tip of the history of a slithering iceberg of greed, incompetence, corruption, and down- right evil.

And it was an evil that was for years roundly and vehemently denounced by the progressive left; only when it started to serve their purposes did they come around to supporting, extolling, and sanctifying the slime complex.

Reporters who once investigated the CIA now marry its PR flacks, news organizations pay ex-officials to lie to the public, and pundits are heaped with praise – and invitations to the best shadowland Sunday brunches – by the very beast it used to be their job to tame.

But this Cthulhu of convenient conspiracies, however those on the right may wish to believe, did not spring sui generis in the past decade or so – it pretty much started out that way.  And per the highly questionable past Congressional testimony of former Director of National Intelligence and former CIA Director John Brennan and this week’s dubious-a-thon of FBI Director Christopher Wray it remains that way.

The FBI was founded by a deeply troubled control freak, the creation of the CIA almost didn’t occur because so many people were – rightly – worried about what it could – and did – turn into, and the NSA was so secret its founding and subsequent existence was not acknowledged for years. 

Obviously, there have been certain successes and the agencies are correct in pointing out that the public tends not to hear that much about them because of their clandestine nature.

But each agency has both bent to – and vice versa – the will of its political overlords, making them practically untouchable, in both good times and bad.

For a better perspective on the naked gangsterism of today, it behooves us to look at the unconscionabilities of the past, starting with the FBI.

J. Edgar Hoover infused the agency with his own tastes, predilections, and theories, much to its detriment.  From rather early on, the agency engaged in – at best – dubious practices, even as its hand-in-glove relationship with the media allowed its public stature to glow and grow.

But while people were watching G-Men get the bad guys on television and in the movies, the FBI was engaged in practices such as creating personal confidential files on people Hoover thought might not agree with him, illegally wiretapping phones, blackmailing politicians, slandering various leaders and activists, letting killers like Bulger simply wander away, squashing inconvenient investigations (see 1996 and Chinese campaign money), and even denying the very existence of the mafia.

One of the most notorious episodes in the sordid history was COINTELPRO, an agency-wide program to infiltrate agents into domestic organizations and movements across the political spectrum, eerily reminiscent of today.

It is therefore astonishing that there should be any surprise – let alone doubt about - the agency’s treacherous handling of the Trump/Russia hoax.  The FBI has power because the people who give it money – or are coerced into giving it money – allow it and expect the favor to be returned.

Even it’s weird little step-brother, the ATF, has been infected by the agency’s awful combination of incompetence and gross self-regard – see the botched and deadly Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents.

The NSA, for years, managed to stay under the radar, as it were.  After it became more widely known due to the Church Committee in 1975, it still managed to keep a relatively benign “oh, we’re just the tech nerds, nothing to see here” image.

That perception was annihilated by the news that the agency was randomly – and not so randomly – improperly hoovering zilla-bytes of foreign and domestic communications metadata, a practice a federal judge called an “indiscriminate…and arbitrary invasion” of the rights of American citizens and most likely a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.

And in Langley it got even weirder.

The creation of the Gehlen Org – ex(maybe)-Nazis - who were entrusted to spy on the Soviets by the CIA not only allowed hundreds of despicable people to escape justice but even gave them decent livings and social cover (at least the Army’s Operation Paperclip got us NASA).  Ironically, the Org – which didn’t cease to exist until it became the cornerstone of the West German intelligence agency in 1956 – did not exactly relay pristine information as it had been both infiltrated by Moscow early on and was notorious for exaggerating claims in order to receive bigger sacks of cash.

Operation Gladio – in theory created to be a bulwark against the expansion of the Iron Curtain – had so many undesirable mutations and spin-offs – mostly of a fascist (real fascists, not the people who are called fascists by the woke today) and terrorist ilk – that it has become internationally notorious as an example of what can wrong with an intelligence operation.

Then of course you have the Bay of Pigs, the pathetically hysterical failed attempts to kill Fidel Castro, the overthrow of various and sundry governments around the globe, Operation Mockingbird (bribing/hiring reporters to disseminate misinformation – sound familiar?), and numerous internal glitches like Aldrich Ames.

The MK-ULTRA program may have been one of the most bizarre and negligent, as it involved dosing random people with hallucinogens and people jumping out of windows and the abuse of mental patients and hookers and booze and mind control and ESP and gassing subways and on and on and on.

Taken all together, the track record of the security deep state makes what is happening currently – Hunter’s laptop branded as Russian disinfo, the denial of the possible origins of COVID, the abuses of the federal courts, lying on warrant applications, manipulating the media, purposefully undermining a president who threatened their financial and social standing, manipulation of the public – not only possible, not only probable, but inevitable.

The funny thing is, they’re not even terribly good at their “day jobs.”  From the non-existent “Missile Gap” to China to Vietnam to organized crime (remember, it was the Treasury Department that got Al Capone, not the FBI) to 9/11, to WMDs in Iraq, to the creation of malignancies like Dick Cheney, the agencies in question have – at best – a checkered record when it comes to fulfilling their core mission – keeping the country safe.

There is a saying in politics (and elsewhere, one assumes) that goes “If you are incompetent you have to be honest and if you’re evil you should at least be competent.”

The deep state fails at both.

Note – the incidents listed above are rather well-known and can be researched with easy internet searches; for a more immediate and direct reference attribution, you can check these sites here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies