The Deep State (23 page)

Barely a month after he landed on SIFMA's payroll, the banking group proposed a government-industry cyberwar council that would include financial industry executives and deputy-level representatives from at least eight U.S. agencies, including the Treasury Department, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security, all led by a senior White House official.
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Is better cybersecurity a good idea? Sure. But hiring the man who presided over a top-secret agency when the unauthorized removal of millions of electronic documents from that agency occurred certainly is a head-scratcher. And what does Wall Street really want with this council? Ultimately, they want legislative relief from liability for exposing their customers' data to hackers. One congressman, Alan Grayson of Florida, was skeptical: “This could in effect make the banks part of what would begin to look like a war council. Congress needs to keep an eye on what something like this could mean.”
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Petraeus, Alexander, and most of the liegemen of the Deep State—
the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think-tank experts who besought us to “stay the course” in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are blessings that make us all better off in the long run—are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well-considered advice based on profound expertise. Expertise is what they sell, but that pose is nonsense.

Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues like abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the “Washington consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation, and the commodification of labor. Internationally, they espouse twenty-first-century American exceptionalism: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world, coercive diplomacy, boots on the ground, and the right to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior, such as the prohibition of torture. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said over four hundred years ago about treason, now that this ideology has prospered, none dare call it ideology. That is why describing torture by using the word “torture” on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: like smoking a cigarette on
Face the Nation,
these days it is simply not done.

What Bipartisanship Means

To a greater degree than in domestic agencies, the organs of national security retain high-level appointed personnel who serve under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Putting the best face on the practice, one could say it is an attempt to make politics stop at the water's edge, and to maintain a cadre of senior people with policy experience. But that is not quite right, because policy experience has a very specific meaning in Washington: an operative is supposed to toe the line on subjects like national security. Victoria Nuland, Obama's assistant secretary of state
for European and Eurasian affairs, who made headlines for a bugged phone call in which she made highly undiplomatic remarks about the countries in her diplomatic portfolio, also served as a foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney and as U.S. ambassador to NATO in the administration of George W. Bush.
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Her husband, Robert Kagan, a well-known Washington neoconservative and dogged advocate on op-ed pages of U.S. military intervention, was highly regarded by the Bush administration and remains a fellow at the Brookings Institution. One never lacks for employment opportunities in Washington if one advocates involvement in overseas mayhem.

John Brennan, Obama's current CIA director, was director of the National Counterterrorism Center under George W. Bush. When Obama took office, he intended to appoint Brennan CIA director, but he had to withdraw when awkward charges surfaced about his possible advocacy of torture—the very practice that Obama had so vigorously campaigned against in 2008. Obama then appointed him deputy national security adviser, a post not requiring Senate confirmation. By early 2013, the controversy had subsided, and Obama nominated him for CIA director once more—this time successfully. In a less labyrinthine environment, one might consider a Bush administration holdover alleged to have engaged in practices the current president campaigned against to be a millstone rather than an asset. Is it any wonder that Democratic national security policies differ somewhat in tone but not in fundamental practice from those of the Republicans?

The Strange Case of Bob Gates

This flexibility in personnel is hardly an innovation of Obama's presidency. George Tenet served as CIA director for both Clinton and Bush, and Robert Gates served as secretary of defense under both Bush and Obama. Gates made heavy weather of his nonpartisanship after leaving the job, saying in response to a question about his party affiliation, “Well, I'm actually not a registered Republican.” When asked where he stood on the subject of abortion, he replied, “I don't have a stand on abortion. Somehow that's never come into the national security arena.” A clever and disarming answer. Contrived dog-whistle themes like abortion or gay marriage are designed to mobilize voters to support one party or another, but senior servants of the Deep State are above that kind of petty partisan issue-mongering, because they know that the only ideology worthy of their effort is one that will keep the right people in the real positions of power and the cash flowing into the hands of those who matter.

It is worth lingering over Gates's career. He is a prime example of the longevity of senior operatives of the Deep State and their characteristic habits of mind. Now that he is retired, Gates has seen fit to criticize his former bosses, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, in his memoirs. Fair enough; they are hardly immune from criticism. What generated controversy was his claim that President Obama did not believe in the military's strategy for Afghanistan that Gates pressed him to adopt. Given everything that has unfolded in Afghanistan since this decision to escalate the war, one can only conclude that it is a peculiar species of candor to criticize Obama for accepting, however grudgingly, advice that Gates himself tendered, advice that was based on flawed assessments. It is, perhaps, a variant of Robert Nisbet's “no fault” doctrine: the advice that generals offer is sacrosanct, and those criticizing it show ill grace even if the critics are eventually proved right.

The real mystery is why Obama, who campaigned so effectively in 2008 against the national security policies of George W. Bush, decided to keep Gates on as secretary of defense. One defense industry source told
me in early 2009 that Gates was essentially able to dictate the terms under which he would serve. If true, it speaks volumes that Obama was so eager to placate the Washington consensus that he would allow an old Bush family retainer to write his own job description for a crucial cabinet portfolio. If there was any early sign that the candidate of hope and change was actually going to be the avatar of stay-the-course, his reappointment of Gates was a glaring one.

Obama ought to have known what he was getting into. A cursory examination of Gates's past performance would have revealed that he was a Soviet specialist and deputy director for intelligence at the CIA in 1982, early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when the agency issued greatly overstated estimates of the Soviet threat. Those estimates unleashed a military spending spree that seriously impacted the federal deficit.

Shortly after that, the world learned about the arms-for-hostages scandal known as Iran-Contra. That tragicomic, illegal operation required an assessment by the CIA that moderate factions in Iran were ready to make a deal. This assessment was conveniently forthcoming from the CIA as Gates moved up to deputy director of the agency (his influence was greater than his title indicated as the director, William Casey, was fading into senescence). A man in his position was also situated to know exactly what sort of freedom fighters we were sending arms to in Central America and Afghanistan. Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel who investigated the Iran-Contra affair and indicted several of the principal actors, did not indict Gates, but Walsh later wrote how frustrating Gates's slipperiness was in making sworn statements.
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The sharp and incisive Bob Gates could develop amnesia on cue.

The agency in which Gates, the Soviet expert, played a pivotal role somehow missed one of the epochal events of the twentieth century: the collapse of the Soviet Union. The CIA failed to anticipate events in the one country it was set up to focus on. But the information was available for anyone willing to listen. In 1985, I attended an unclassified symposium on the Soviet Union. One of the experts, Murray Feshbach, was a demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau. Rather than interpreting
Soviet power from satellite photographs of missile fields, he looked at available data about life expectancy, fertility rates, infant mortality, and nutrition. The implication was clear: the USSR was a walking corpse. Gates and his team of experts greatly exaggerated the Soviet threat and left U.S. policy makers unprepared for the crumbling of the Warsaw Pact, yet later he demanded that presidents accept his assessments of Afghanistan at face value.

Gates's cultivated public image as a no-nonsense truth teller is a perfect example of how Deep State operatives are able to fashion artificial personas. Ray McGovern, a Soviet analyst at the CIA for twenty-seven years who presented the president's daily White House briefing and was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal, has a somewhat different recollection of Gates than is available in his official biography. At one time, McGovern was his supervisor in the agency's Soviet division. He recalled Gates being intelligent and a good writer, but said he had to hedge when he wrote his performance evaluation: “He was perpetually cultivating senior officials elsewhere in the agency.” The young analyst had already understood the old Washington chestnut that “know-who” trumps “know-how.” McGovern recalls that Gates was so visibly ambitious that he was a disruptive influence among his colleagues.
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Gates is an example of something that has often puzzled me: the incongruous sentimentality that ruthless American men of affairs frequently show. Like Citizen Kane's longing after Rosebud, it is a psychological quirk that can be depicted but never quite explained. Gates's emotions about combat soldiers, feelings he has so visibly demonstrated in public, are perfectly genuine. His record in shaking up the military's medical command and forcing it to reduce the maximum time allotted to evacuate a wounded soldier to a hospital from two hours to one was surely proper and to his credit. Praiseworthy, but that action does not nullify the crux of the matter: his execution of policy.

Was the surge in Iraq that gave rise to the casualties Gates has so publicly mourned wise or necessary given that it reinforced failure in a war launched on false pretenses in a country that was bound to lapse into
sectarian violence after the United States' inevitable withdrawal? Was Gates accordingly justified or unjustified in excoriating then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid for saying that the war was lost? Was the surge in Afghanistan with its attendant casualties wise or necessary, given that the United States had already remained too long, and that the number of U.S. troops was irrelevant so long as Afghanistan was saddled with the corrupt Karzai regime? It is questions like these that should compel us all to keep a firm grip on our reason and our wallets whenever members of the political class choke up as they invoke Old Glory or the blood of patriots. Samuel Johnson's hoary statement that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel is no less true for being a cliché.

Mark Leibovich's exposé of the permanent Beltway class,
This Town,
reads like Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
as annotated by Tina Brown, but he makes several valuable observations—albeit shorn of their deeper political significance. When a lobbyist in a lucrative partnership with a colleague of the other political party tells Leibovich, “Everyone involved in the world in which we operate is a patriot,” he expresses the tacit, wink-and-nod understanding among the permanent operatives, short-term contract players, and hangers-on of the Deep State that the daily politics of the stereotypical “issues” that agitate the public are basically bread and circuses for the cheap seats. Leibovich focuses on the limos, greenroom chitchat, and after-parties as titillating aspects of the Beltway class. But his tale is like a history of World War II as told by a stateside troupe of USO entertainers: the reader is left to infer the meaning and the mayhem of the epic event. Alan Greenspan's attending a reception for Maria Bartiromo indeed shows us that “everyone, ultimately, is playing for the same team,” but what is that team, and what do the players want beyond an appearance on
Meet the Press
to raise their market value on K Street?

Leibovich harps on the Scrooge McDuck level of greed of the average Washington player, who moans that he is having a terrible year when he makes only ten times the national median household income. There is a good deal of truth to that characterization, but it is not the whole truth, and it may invert cause and effect. Corruption does not always require an
immediate cash nexus. Justices of the Supreme Court, who have lifetime tenure and fixed salaries, receive no bribes from corporate America to rule in its favor. They do so because they believe in a certain ideology with dogmatic faith, and accordingly backfill their rulings with whichever legal arguments more or less hang together. It is not corruption so much as bias confused with principle.

The New Nomenklatura

The personnel of the Deep State in some respects resemble the old Soviet nomenklatura, the officials who held key administrative positions in the important sectors of the USSR's government and economy. They obtained their positions with the approval of the Communist Party apparatus. Lenin laid down the principle that appointments were to take the following criteria into account, in descending order of importance: reliability, political attitude, qualifications, and administrative ability.