The “Deep State” Explained

– [Vivek] If you want to
seal the border, vote Trump. If you wanna restore law and order in this country, vote Trump. If you want to defeat the
deep state, vote Trump. (suspenseful music)
(keys rattling) – Hey, Johnny.
– Hey, Paji. – I’m having a really hard time wrapping my head around
this story, I must admit. – Yeah, and this concept
of deep state has been so, I think poisoned by politics
and Trump sort of using it for everything that he doesn’t like. And it kind of makes it hard
to approach it earnestly, but I think we have to keep digging, like I think there’s something here. – Is the deep state real?
– Is the deep state real? (ominous music) (ominous music continues)
(glasses clinking) There’s this moment in the ’60s (ominous music continues)
(rocket exploding) where you really like see
how this actually works, like where power really is to the height of this moment where the US and the Soviet Union are in this like massive staring contest. There’s nuclear weapons involved. Everyone thinks the entire
globe could be wiped out in this conflict. And Cuba is centered right
in the middle of it all, right off the coast of the US, but they’re on the Soviet
side of the conflict. The US at this point
wants nothing more than to snatch Cuba, to make it their own. And they’ve been trying to kill Fidel Castro a
million different ways. They’re looking for an excuse to invade and to push back on all of this, the Soviets actually start
shipping nuclear weapons to the island. (suspenseful music)
The US has no idea until one day a spy plane
is flying over the island and they snap this wild photo. (suspenseful music continues)
(camera snapping) I mean, it doesn’t look like a wild photo, it just looks like a random field in Cuba. But you zoom in and you
see canvas tents, trailers, missile launch equipment. I mean, the US government
immediately knows what they’re looking at here. The world’s most destructive weapons are actually hiding under
these tents, ready to launch, sitting right in the
United States’ backyard, right off their coast,
nuclear war 103 miles away. – Within the past week, unmistakable evidence
has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on
that imprisoned island. – It’s a crisis, a Cuban missile crisis. (suspenseful music) And one man in Washington DC suddenly has a really difficult decision to make. (suspenseful music continues) Everyone around him
wants him to invade Cuba, but he’s not sure. Okay, but here’s the
kicker of the whole thing. Instead of stay at work that night and like figure out this
crisis with his advisors, Kennedy gets in a car and travels across town
to like a cocktail party. He came here to a house in Georgetown, the home of Joe Alsop, one of the nation’s most
influential newspaper columnists. It was the eve of nuclear war and the President of the United States kept his dinner date in Georgetown. And the reason why is
because at that party were the people he trusted, the people who really
had power in Washington during that time. Most of them lived here
in this neighborhood, many of them side by side,
all within a few blocks. William Colby, the far
east chief of the CIA, he would later become the
director of the agency, Chip Bohlen, a former
ambassador to the Soviet Union, Allen Dulles, who (exhales), boy, Allen Dulles,
where do you even start? He’s the CIA’s longest running director and he lived right here in Georgetown. Frank Wisner, one of the
founding officers of the CIA, he lived just six blocks away. Felix Frankfurter, a
Supreme Court Justice, just a couple minutes walk away. And Kennedy himself had a
house in this neighborhood. (suspenseful music) The reason JFK kept his date
in Georgetown that night was because this is where
power in Washington was, on the other side of town
from the Capitol building, the seat of American democracy, the decisions were being
made here by unelected men who had an immense amount of secret power. (suspenseful music continues)
(pictures clicking) These were powerful men who
were not elected or accountable and at this point they’d
become drunk on the worst kind of power, the secret sort
of power that corrupts, the kind of power that our
founders sought to check and balance with all of
their founding documents. But here in Georgetown, it had moved beyond anything the designers of the country could have predicted, into a shadowy separate part
of our government, a deep state that was actively
blackmailing the Congress and working to undermine the
President of the United States and being horrifyingly successful at it. – Unelected deep state
operatives who divide the voters to push their own secret agendas. – You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from
Sunday at getting back at you. So even for a practical,
supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this. – As far as I know, we don’t
engage in assassinations and kidnappings and things of that kind. – I do think there has to
be serious questions raised about some of the foreign policy blunders that this country has had
over the last 20 to 25 years. – There’s some truth in the idea that there is an ongoing group of people who continue the work of government as administrations come and go. And is it possible for
these entities to go rogue? Absolutely.
– Was the agency involved in the kind of domestic surveillance that has been portrayed
in the news reports? – My feeling is that it has not. – (sighs) Okay, I am doing this. The deep state, is the deep state real? And if so, what is it? Before we do that, I wanna take a moment – [Nick] We’re good.
– [Johnny] Okay, sweet. Paji, are you on the board over there? – [Paji] Right here,
we’re here at the same. – [Johnny] Okay, if you can hear us. – I really want this.
– Could you start by introducing yourself,
who you are, and what you do and what your relationship to this topic of the history of the CIA is? – Yeah, so my name’s Jefferson Morley. I’m a journalist in Washington. I’ve been a journalist in
Washington for the last 40 years. – In the old days, spy
agencies were a war thing. When the US was at war, it would set up an
international spy operation to best wage that war. And then when the war was
over, they would pare down or totally get rid of the spy agency. The thinking here was that a spy agency took up a lot of resources and
threatened civil liberties, a lot of power concentrated into a bunch of unelected people. Worth it during war, not
worth it during peace. But then the biggest war of them all came to America’s Pacific doorstep
and it changed everything. – [Announcer 1] And in today,
the bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy units.
(bombs exploding) – And so Roosevelt now has a license, more of a license to do what he wants. And one of the first things he does is consult with a man named Bill Donovan. – [Johnny] Wild Bill, a
corporate Wall Street lawyer who was obsessed with the
power of intelligence. – Donovan had very strong opinions and he said, “You need a
wartime intelligence service. “You’re going to war.” – Wild Bill Donovan would be in charge of the Office of
Strategic Services or OSS, a centralized intelligence agency that would be given immense
power to do whatever it took to keep our people safe and
to keep our team on top. This was the birth of modern intelligence, a euphemism for spying,
and lying, and cheating, and deceiving, and sneaking, and breaking, coercing, dividing and conquering. No idea was too crazy for
the OSS during this time. Like one OSS psychologist had this idea that Hitler could be demoralized if they just showed him
a vast quantity of porn. – [Jefferson] Paramilitary operation. – [Johnny] Strapping
explosives to a bunch of baths and letting them loose over Tokyo. – [Jefferson] A guy skiing
into Nazi occupied Norway. – [Johnny] Making fake companies, recruiting off Wall Street
from all of his old colleagues, bringing in bankers and movie directors, fake radio stations,
anything to demoralize, divide or confuse the enemy. – The OSS is the first intelligence agency that the United States ever has. – Oh, and one of Wild
Bill’s favorite things to do was to have parties at his house. – Hi, are we the first ones here? – [Announcer 2] It’s the big night. – [Johnny] To plan and plot his operations with his friends in Georgetown, a neighborhood in Washington DC that is strikingly beautiful. Here is Bill Donovan’s house. It’s now worth $17
million, it’s beautiful. And this is where he would have a drink and chat with other
Washington power brokers. He would recruit new agents
from American high society, earning the agency the nickname
Oh So Social, pretty clever. Okay, but remember that
spy agencies like this were a war thing only,
and the war ended in 1945 and the OSS got dissolved. – The forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. – What do we do with the
OSS now that we’re at peace? And Truman says, “We don’t want “to risk having an American Gestapo.” – A political police.
– His meaning, especially in the context of having
just defeated the Nazis, was, you know, that’s
what led our enemy astray. They had a secret intelligence
agency, the Gestapo, which wound up enforcing political norms and enforcing tyranny, and
we don’t wanna risk that. – Here’s Harry Truman
doing the right thing and signing a piece of paper that says that the OSS
can no longer exist. I mean, Truman was freaked out. He’s like, this was really
great to help us win the war, but this is way too
much power in the hands of unelected officials
holding secret information. But it was kind of too late. Putting the genie back in the bottle would prove to be an impossible task. (ominous music) Is it significant that all
these guys live four blocks from each other in Georgetown? – [Jefferson] Yeah, it’s very significant because they’re the product
of this wartime culture. – This is one party that
just has to turn out right. – Here is target number one for the Reds. And who’s in the bullseye? You are.
– So there was a brief moment after World War II when
the Cold War didn’t exist. We were at peace. But then almost immediately
tension started to rise between these two great
empires that had been allies to defeat the Nazis, but were
now skeptical of each other. And senators were suddenly
declaring that it was impossible to know where war begins
and where it ends. – The Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe. – And this is when all the intel people that had run the OSS, many of them who lived in Georgetown
by the way, start calling for the resurrection of the OSS, a centralized intelligence
agency that we can use to fight this new global
war with the Soviet Union. But no, say a bunch of other lawmakers, the Constitution wasn’t designed for us to put so much power in the hands of men who are doing secret things. Doing this will result
in, “A police state run “by power grabbing bureaucrats.” (ominous music continues) Too much power to, “Military leaders,” and their, “Insatiable
appetite for more money, “for more men and more power, “whatever the cost to democracy.” – Truman’s mind changed. And what changed Truman’s mind
was the growing confrontation with the Soviet Union. – And soon the papers were signed and a new agency was formed, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. – When Truman signs the
National Security Act, he says, “We have to be careful “that we don’t have an American Gestapo.” So that thought is still on his mind. – The CIA was the big shiny new weapon of the United States in the Cold War and their mission was to, quote, “Gain and distribute intelligence,” and to perform, quote,
“Other functions and duties “related to intelligence
affecting national security.” What does that mean? – Everybody knew what that language meant. Everybody knew that that was, and we just weren’t gonna talk about it because we didn’t wanna
write it down on paper. – Like what do they do
with this vague mandate of national security? – Oh boy, they go to town.
– Who’s that? (crowd chattering) – [Announcer 3] You must
stir the ingredients in your chocolate cake. – [Announcer 4] “The Tonight Show.” (screen screeching)
– So clean but so soft and smooth.
(ominous music continues) – Operation Paperclip, 1945 to 1959, the Americans wanted to get
those Nazi rocket scientists on their side so that they could develop
their own rocket capacity. James Angleton, for example, protects a general under Hitler. – CIA, gets involved in
the Italian elections. – Italian elections, 1948, puts its thumb on the Italian democracy and make sure that US allies win. – [Johnny] Operation
Ajax, coup in Iran, 1953. – [Jefferson] The CIA and
the MI6 organized a coup to overthrow the democratically
elected government. – Now that we encouraged the Shah to take that action I will not deny. – [Johnny] CIA coup,
Guatemala, 1954, bananas, for of course, bananas.
– [Jefferson] Again, democratically elected
government reformists wanted to engage in land reform and the CIA overthrows
it really at the behest of the United Fruit Company. – The CIA is now helping
American corporations? – [Jefferson] The influence
of American corporations on the CIA actions is unmistakable. Allen Dulles was on
the board of directors, Howard Hunt, Birch O’Neal, David Phillips, CIA coup in Congo.
– Congo. – [Jefferson] Early 1960s,
CIA coup in Chile, 1973. (suspenseful music)
– Las Vegas. – The assassination operation
against General Schneider in 1970 is coordinated
with Kissinger’s office. – Thank you, nice to see you all. – [Johnny] Mind control
experiments, MKUltra. – In 1950, the CIA
launches a massive program to develop means of
controlling people’s minds. Some 40 US academic institutions were involved in this kind of research. – [Johnny] Feeding LSD to
people without their permission. – [Jefferson] Can we
develop a truth serum, dosing somebody with
LSD 60 times in a week? NSA’s Operation Shamrock. – [Johnny] Operation Shamrock. – [Jefferson] Electronic
surveillance, 1945 to 1975, the first warrantless wire tap. – Oh God, Bay of Pigs nightmare. – [Jefferson] There were hundreds of CIA assassination plots.
– Operation Phoenix. – [Jefferson] Eventually Bill
Colby, who was later director, admitted that they had
killed 20,000 people. – Operation Mockingbird. – [Jefferson] COINTELPRO.
– [Johnny] COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos,
Watergate, Jim Critchfield, Frank Wisner, James Angleton,
Roosevelt, John Foster, McCoy. – [Jefferson] The CIA coup in
Indonesia, CIA coup in Greece, CIA involvement in the
Guatemalan Civil War. It was a CIA crime spree for 20 years. There’s no other way to describe it. (suspenseful music) – So by the 1970s, the
CIA is this powerful, well-funded machine of intelligence that is doing a lot of secret
things all around the world. They start blackmailing lawmakers to scare them away from investigating them and reigning them in. – These agencies had
harmful personal information on lots of people. When I was doing my Angleton book, a guy told me one day when
he went to meet Angleton, Angleton quoted back to him
what he had said to his wife in bed the night before.
– Jesus. – And so, they had this capacity and people knew that
they had this capacity. You know, the Kennedys knew that J. Edgar Hoover had
information about his affairs with various women. ♪ Happy birthday, Mr. President ♪ – This kind of knowledge that they had, Angleton and Hoover were masters at using those kind of secrets as leverage. Kennedy had this thing
hanging over his head and he knew Hoover, you
know, had that on him. And so, you know, he couldn’t fire Hoover. – And so much of this
power is concentrated among just a few people,
many of them not elected, and many of them living right
here along these streets in this neighborhood of
Georgetown, living in fancy homes, having fancy cocktail parties and kind of running the Western world. It’s exactly the nightmare of
the founders of the country and the nightmare of President Truman. – And one month after the assassination of President Kennedy, Harry
Truman publishes an article in the “Washington Post” and says, “The CIA should be abolished.” – Wow.
– And he says, “It has cast a shadow on
the historical reputation “of the United States.” – The man who signed the piece of paper that created the CIA comes
out and says he regrets it. Eventually Americans start
to get savvy to the fact that their government is
sort of going off the rails. (suspenseful music)
(bell ringing) As this war in Vietnam drags on, more and more Americans
stand up and say enough, demanding accountability for
a national security apparatus that had gotten out of control. And what does the
government do in response? They start spying on the protestors. – Operation Chaos was the CIA spying on the anti-war movement. Johnson calls in Dick Helms
and says, “What’s going on?” They said, “Communists
have to be behind this.” And so they start infiltrating
the anti-war movement and they come back in about a year and they say, “Well, you know, Moscow “and the North Vietnamese, “they really like this anti-war movement, “but it’s not controlled by
them, it’s not funded by them. “It’s pretty much an
American thing, you know, “but that doesn’t change anything.” And Chaos continues to grow
and eventually by 1970, there’s 30 officers working
on it, hundreds of agents. And you know, the
ostensible purpose of Chaos, to detect a foreign hand, I mean, Chaos was in
existence for seven years, every time they were asked to
report on it, they came back and said, it’s not foreign controlled and it’s not foreign
funded, which was obvious to anybody who was involved
in the anti-war movement. There were a lot of people
inside the CIA saying, “You know, we’re spying on
our wives and kids basically, “you know, they’re going
to the demonstrations “and we’re reading the reports at night. “We shouldn’t be doing this.” – Are we trying to
exterminate an entire people? What have we become as a nation? – Americans were waking up to the fact that these unelected men were
wielding way too much power and spying not only on the entire world, but on Americans themselves. (suspenseful music) – We have been victimized
by excessive secrecy, not only with respect to
the failure of the Congress in the past to exercise
proper surveillance over intelligence activities, but also excessive secrecy
has created this kind of mischief within the executive branch. – [Johnny] Senator Frank
Church helps lead the charge of taking all of these
secrets and excesses and thrusting them onto the national stage and shining a light on them. – There has never been
a full public accounting of FBI domestic intelligence operations. – The American people are learning for the first time just how bad this was. 800 witnesses, 10,000 documents. Their secrets were shared. CIA, FBI, NSA, assassination plots. – Does this pistol fire the dart? – [William] Yes, it does, Mr. Chairman. – [Frank] When it fires,
it fires silently? – [William] Almost silently, yes. – Spying on Americans. – A wholly comprehensive listing of everything those people fought or did on any subject you can imagine, they’re having a concern with. – [Johnny] Targeting people
like Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights
or feminist activists. – Bureau agents were told
to attack the new left by disinformation and misinformation. – [Johnny] Anti-war protestors
were spied on, intimidated. – COINTELPRO is the name
for the effort by the bureau to destroy people and to
destroy organizations, or as they used the words,
disrupt and neutralize. The bureau went so far as
to mail anonymous letters to Dr. King and his wife. “King, there is only one
thing left for you to do. “You know what it is. “You have just 34 days in
which to do it, you are done.” – That was taken by Dr.
King to mean a suggestion for suicide, was it not? – [Frederick] That’s our
understanding, Senator. – The CIA’s LSD mind control experiments were also detailed to the public. – [Jefferson] One of the
first things they come across is the MKUltra papers. – And so were the FBI and CIA’s attempts to infiltrate the free
press, planting journalists within our newspapers. We would later learn in
some investigative reporting that this infiltration of the free press was much more widespread
than Church even discovered. – He reported that up to 400
journalists had been paid by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird. And there’s no doubt that
it was a massive effort and effective.
– The Church committee made a few things clear,
number one, that indeed a group of unelected government
employees used immense power and resources of the
United States government to pursue programs that
were illegal, unethical, and generally out of line with
American values and norms. And they did it in secret outside of any set of accountability, partly because the US Congress
wanted to give them money and turn a blind eye. – I can recall members of Congress who recoiled from responsibility of knowing what was happening, members of Congress who said, “Don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know.” I think that is an
indictment of the Congress just as severe as any indictment which is labeled against any
of the intelligence community. – When Dulles wanted to get
approval for the CIA budget, all he had to do was
take a top line number to the chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee and he would say, “This is
what we want for this year.” And the chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee would say, “Okay, that’s what you’ve got “and please don’t tell us anything “about what you’re doing with it.” And so there was no internal challenge to this world of CIA people. – But here’s the other thing
that is so crucial here, which is that when you
listen to these hearings, you see people who thought they
were doing the right thing, who thought that they were
doing what they needed to to protect the country
during a very scary time. – After a 30 year period, all of a sudden, you woke up one morning
and here was this creature that had been created
that no one along the line had ever really contemplated. Each of these steps that I think initially were innocent, honest steps. – Many of these agents
were earnest patriots, but they were operating in a system free of accountability and transparency. – Even within the deep
state, there are people who were doing things for
altruistic and good reasons. And then there are people
who were doing things for their own selfish or bad reasons. And you know, exactly how
many are in each category, is you know, sort of
impossible to delineate. – I got sucked in when I
should have known better and where many other more intelligent, sophisticated people got
sucked in in other areas. – So after the Church committee, all kinds of new oversight
regulations come in. There’s new committees formed,
there’s new regulations, and suddenly the intelligence
community now finally has some kind of oversight. The deep state was reigned in. Now they did fight back. Church was undermined and
intimidated by these agencies. – CIA people, I mean,
they hated Frank Church. Jim Angleton would go around and say, “Frank Church was a KGB agent.” Dick Helms raged against him. Kissinger, they couldn’t believe that US intelligence was being opened up. On the other hand, Americans
were like, “Oh my God, “this is what was being done in our name?” – But overall, this is a
story of American democracy, doing what it’s supposed to do, reign in the worst impulses
of humans with power, and in the process avoiding disaster at least for a few decades. – One of you is about
to be elected the leader of the single most powerful
nation in the world. Have you formed any guiding principles for exercising this enormous power? – When it comes to foreign policy, that’ll be my guiding question. Is it in our nation’s interests? Peace in the Middle East is
in our nation’s interests. Having a hemisphere
that is free for trade. (screen screeching)
(crowd cheering) – Have some very, very sketchy
details reaching us here at SkyCentral, important
enough to bring to you though, at this early stage. We believe that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. (suspenseful music continues)
– Gotta move back! – [Johnny] A new threat. (suspenseful music continues)
(pedestrians yelling) And a new call to give
power to professional spies and bureaucrats to keep us
safe by doing secret things. – And by passing the Patriot
Act, we will make America safer while safeguarding our
civil liberties and privacy. – [Johnny] And then of
course, new agencies, all with variations on the same name. – 9/11 is kind of like a Pearl Harbor. There’s this desire, you
know, we’ve been attacked. Anything goes, we have to strike back. This is an existential struggle. And that same ethos of the Early Cold War, anything goes, that returns
big time after 9/11, and the CIA seeks or asserts
without being checked, all sorts of powers that
they hadn’t asserted before. They implement the torture program, they massively expand the
warrantless wiretapping, the kind of things that we
had seen Angleton do in Chaos. Those exact same techniques are revived and expanded after 9/11, you
know, on a very large scale. – Taxpayers funneling money into millions of new top secret jobs. 22 capital buildings
worth of new office space that spring up all around
this area where I live, to house all these new secrets, and inside them waterfalls
of new programs, so many weirdly named programs that no one leader could ever hear about, let alone regulate all of them. – There’s not a whole lot of effective oversight on something that has grown so big and so bushy. – [Johnny] And none of which
should be known to the public, that is until someone
who’s worried that history is repeating itself,
decides to spill the beans. – Our breaking news this evening
is the identity of the man who sent the Obama Administration into defend and explain mode this week. His name is Edward Snowden. He’s an American former CIA employee and computer technician. Today he came out as the leaker
of classified NSA documents that spell out a secret. – [Johnny] And we all kind of wonder, what if we actually need this now? What if we need all these dark windows and top secret PowerPoint
decks where they design how they’re gonna spy on us? What if our safety relies
on what happens inside of all these buildings? So we keep funding them, but in doing so, we must at least acknowledge
what we’re doing here. We are trading a portion of our freedom in exchange for a sense of security. And in the process we’re creating and feeding kind of a new branch of our government to power,
one that operates outside of this elegant triangle that
the founders constructed, to trip up the corrupting
forces that run the risk of always possessing
men with secret power. – Most everybody agrees that
there’s over classification, there’s way too much
information that’s classified, but information is power, and
the fewer people that have it, the more power the people
that do have it have. – [Johnny] And the result is
that when the most powerful man in the world arrives to
the most powerful House in the world, promising
to reign all of this in, to reign in the excesses, he
actually finds that he can’t. He’s not able to change much of it. Instead, he sits there and
watches much of the things that he critiqued grow under his watch, the thing that he’s supposed to control he finds he doesn’t have
that much control over. – These targeted strikes
against Al-Qaeda terrorists are indeed ethical and just. – Secrets keep us safe, but secrets also degrade
this delicate thing that we have called
democracy and accountability, that is until we save ourselves from their everlasting seductive pull. – The United States must
not adopt the tactics