The Deep State (22 page)

As information technologies matured, their user base expanded, and the ability to exploit information grew by an order of magnitude, millions of Americans learned from experience that corporations were keeping tabs on them. As we have seen in the cases of Target or the hacking of Blue Cross–Blue Shield, tens of millions of us have had to deal with financial loss and frustrating inconvenience as our credit card or Social Security numbers have been compromised and other personal identifiers have been stolen. Beyond the overtly criminal activity of hackers and thieves, merely going online and using social media generates an array of personal data that companies assiduously collect and sell to others. One of the ironies of the digital age is that even as American citizens have become worth less and less to businesses as paid employees, their value as living repositories of commercial data is becoming greater by the day.

In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission issued a report about the increasing pervasiveness of this practice and the activities of commercial data brokers who facilitate it.
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Companies like Acxiom, RapLeaf, and the appropriately named PeekYou have compiled volumes of data on customers and sell or barter that data to other firms. Just as the NSA, FBI, and other federal agencies compile massive amounts of data and winnow it according to algorithms that result in numerous “false hits” of the kind that can land an innocent person on a terrorist watch list, the nine data brokers the FTC reviewed were not only assembling billions of pieces of information, they were also categorizing consumers in ways that could be inaccurate. The brokers have characterized persons according to income, ethnicities, hobbies, and other traits in ways that may be incorrect or misleading. These categories become red flags for financial institutions or insurers, and can cause a person unfairly to receive a poor credit score or be turned down for insurance. One of the firms the FTC reviewed has information on 1.4 billion consumer transactions and 700 billion aggregated data elements.

Most of us have only the most shadowy concept of what goes on in the intelligence agencies. Nor do we know the full extent of the intelligence community's collaboration with the commercial information technology companies to whom we entrust so much personal information. Almost all of what we know comes from inference, the occasional leak, and the government's own sanitized and self-aggrandizing accounts. We can judge the significance of the Snowden material by how it has roiled the public and forced politicians, much against their will—they would rather do nothing and go back to sleep—to take baby steps in the direction of making intelligence agencies accountable to their nominal masters, the American people. I shall leave the last word to Thomas Drake, who knows more about this secret world than I ever will, and who learned at great personal cost, as we shall see in the next chapter, how difficult it was to try to hold it to account: “Obama—like any president—is literally a captive of the people who brief him on secret intelligence.”

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against the holders of power.

—John Dalberg-Acton, First Baron Acton, in a letter to Mandell Creighton, author of
History of the Papacy During the Period of Reformation
, April 5, 1887

Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders
.

—Elizabeth Warren, describing a meeting with Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council, Spring 2009

Holding Officials Strictly Unaccountable

If the Deep State is an institution that hides in plain sight, the same holds true for the people who run it. While there are countless operatives in and out of government with beyond-top-secret clearances who toil away in anonymity on projects we will never hear about, they are usually the order-takers. The individuals who drive the policy are mostly people we know about, or whose names are at least publicly assessable. What distinguishes these leaders from those of similar rank who do not drive the Deep State agenda is their gravitational attraction to power, their agenda-
setting ability regardless of which party is in power, and their remarkable longevity.

The historic—and disastrous—national security policies of the George W. Bush administration were established by men who were already senior officials in the Ford administration thirty years before. The change agent Barack Obama picked as the most important member of his national security team was an individual who was a key operative in secretive, questionable activities as far back as the first term of the Reagan administration. Many of Obama's other national security picks had been high-level Bush administration officials, carrying out policies he had sharply criticized in his campaign.

Perhaps the most characteristic quality of these senior personnel is their imperviousness to accountability. However responsible they might be for misbegotten policies, they are usually able to walk away from the train wreck unscathed, with their future job prospects intact. Lesser mortals do not enjoy these privileges.

The Deep State Is Not Quite
House of Cards

One of the surprises of recent years has been the immense popularity of a television drama set in Washington called
House of Cards
. The series is an American knockoff of a British drama of the same name from two decades ago. Both series vividly depict the swinish behavior and Machiavellian scheming that film directors now consider mandatory for depicting politicians, albeit in an oddly decontextualized political and social environment. The principal characters, Francis Urquhart in the British version and Frank Underwood in the American, are central casting's up-to-date representations of the conniving politician on the make: coldly cynical, sociopathically amoral, not even blanching at the cold-blooded murder of an inconvenient witness. President Obama himself is a fan of the show. He has even told the producers, “I wish things were that ruthlessly efficient . . . this guy's getting a lot of things done.”
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So a TV show about politics has channeled Walter Mitty fantasies even in the president of these United States.

Such depictions understate the social ecology in which these characters function.
House of Cards
presents the arcane rigmarole of Washington politics through a prism that people who have been conditioned by decades of TV crime dramas can readily understand: the lone psychopath, the Hillside Strangler of a hundred cop shows, from
Dragnet
to
CSI
. The establishing shot has now gone upscale, to Capitol Hill, and the references are to cloture motions in the Senate rather than drug busts in the tenderloin district, but the machinery of the plot is familiar and comprehensible. It is digestible in a way that the less telegenic reality of Washington is not.

Would similar numbers of viewers sit still for a straightforward documentary on the skullduggery that went into the introduction and passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, or Wall Street's efforts to buy off politicians so as to blunt the force and effect of financial reform? Would they generate the same buzz of social media chitchat? Let's unpack the contrasts. During the decades of my tenure on the Hill, I was aware of no elected official skulking in the corridors of Capitol Hill or the adjacent Metro system looking for ambitious reporters to murder. But these same politicians rubber-stamped legislation that led to the needless deaths of 4,500 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The narrative arc of financial deregulation over the last thirty years would be far too tedious to explain in a TV miniseries to a public used to dramatized bank heists and ordinary embezzlements.

Art is not always truth. Elected officials are not the kind of people who would commit a murder with their bare hands. As dim a view as I hold of a lot of them, I do not believe most of them are cynical in the way Frank Underwood is cynical. Through conditioning and assimilation, they come to believe what they say, at least most of the time, and vote accordingly. With appropriate adjustments, the unelected officials of the shadow government, be they cabinet secretaries, generals, or corporate senior executives, respond to the same stimuli in roughly the same way. The man becomes the mask. That metamorphosis, combined with peer
pressure, groupthink, and confirmation bias, makes them what they are. The mixture of such traits in otherwise “good” persons discharging what they hold to be their public or corporate duties can sometimes result in a far more subtle but consequential evil than the obvious amorality of a lone criminal.

Meet the Characters Who Run the Deep State

Only a few of those who come and go (and always seem to come back again) in our permanent government rate as genuinely toxic. On his departure in 2006, Donald H. Rumsfeld was one of the most reviled figures in government. It is difficult to plumb the depth of the distaste with which the members of the congressional defense committees viewed him. As the Iraq casualties began to mount, this walking vacuum of human empathy could not even be bothered to sign condolence letters to the next of kin to the fallen. He assigned his office staff to sign them by autopen. Yet this was likely just a lack of imagination and self-reflection, rather than a conscious capacity for the violent malevolence of Frank Underwood.

Most people have forgotten that Rumsfeld was a player during another American disaster. He was President Ford's chief of staff during the final military collapse of South Vietnam. When asked in 2013 about which lesson he drew from America's misadventure in Vietnam, he answered with lapidary succinctness: “Some things work out, some things don't, that didn't.”
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Even looking from four decades' distance, his answer was like his off-the-cuff remarks during the Iraq war: Why did the U.S. military that he was in charge of have no plan to prevent the looting at Baghdad's museums? “Stuff happens.” Why, irate combat infantrymen asked him on a later occasion, were the troops not provided proper body armor? “You go to war with the army you have.”

Rumsfeld is an egregious example of a character type that seems to be magnetically drawn to the upper levels of the government and corporate world. Actual competence is often less important than boundless self-confidence and a startling lack of reflectiveness about what one is
actually doing. That, and being sheep-dipped and credentialed in the proper elite colleges and politically connected think tanks. One of the major counts of the conservative bill of indictment against public education is the claim that American public schooling fills children with a sense of unearned self-esteem while failing to instill core competence. You can fault a child for not knowing algebra, but that dereliction is not in the same league as invading the wrong country. And what about the perennial cry against grade inflation in schools? If one were to apply that criterion for judging competence, how did Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense who blithely predicted before the committee I was serving that there would be no insurgency in Iraq and that the war would pay for itself, ever earn a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a sinecure at the World Bank?
*

An overweening sense of self-importance and a capacity for self-satisfied assertion seem to be all that are required. Such persons, whether appearing as cabinet heads or corporate CEOs, make splendid witnesses for their organizations in front of congressional investigating committees. Their bluff bonhomie combined with bottomless obtuseness allows them to sail through a hearing without visibly betraying any personal consciousness of responsibility for whichever foul-up is under investigation. They can also mouth the party line without any feeling of cognitive dissonance. No doubt they sincerely believe it, at least in the moment they say it. Rumsfeld's statement that he never read the so-called torture memos generated by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel is believable in view of his imperturbable incuriosity. He is a shining example of what David Owen, a former British foreign secretary and a medical
doctor by training, has called “hubristic incompetence,” the narcissistic habit of seeing the world as an arena for achieving power and glory rather than as a place for pragmatic problem solving.

The Deep State as an evolved social organism is optimized to achieve certain things: power, money, and career security for its major players; and a preservation of the status quo for the system within which they operate. What it is not well adapted to achieving is useful solutions for society as a whole. Iraq and Libya were never “problems” crying out for American answers, certainly not by means of a full-dress ground invasion or an armed intervention leading to regime change. As a consequence, potential difficulties needed to be concealed and purported facts constructed in order for the leadership class to get its preferred outcomes.

Likewise, the existence of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banking was hardly a problem in the real world: it was a firewall against recurrence of the financial calamity of 1929, and it had worked well for more than six decades. But by the 1990s, the lords of finance, in their own hubristic quest to make their corporate empires bigger and bigger, and to stuff more money into their pockets, convinced themselves—along with a compliant Congress and a collusive Treasury Department—that the law was anachronistic and a hindrance to the complex, competitive, and globe-girdling financial industry. A moment's thought should have suggested that the huge market leverages, global reach, and instantaneous transactions of modern finance did not make the risks inherent in gambling with depositors' money go away—they increased them exponentially.

This pattern has played out over and over again: once one or a handful of the leadership class get a notion about something that appeals to their acquisitive or grandiose instincts, most of the rest of the elites, their staff underlings, and their troubadours in the think tanks and op-ed pages troop behind them like a flock of parrots, all squawking the same tune.

The Career Path

Once a senior operative has completed his job in one sector of the Deep State, it is usually time for promotion to another—at a considerably higher salary. The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well-trodden highway for the personalities we got to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and many others. Perhaps the most notorious was Rubin. President Clinton tapped the Goldman Sachs cochairman to be his treasury secretary, and in that role Rubin lobbied assiduously for the repeal of Glass-Steagall. When he left his government job, Clinton called him “the greatest secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.”
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Rubin promptly landed a job as director of Citigroup, the conglomerate that had just been formed as a result of the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Insurance; it was only because of Glass-Steagall's repeal that the merger of a commercial bank and an insurance company was legal. Thereafter, he pocketed $126 million in salary and bonuses, including during the period that Citigroup was being bailed out by taxpayer money. Like the other senior executives of bailed-out institutions, Rubin did not have to disgorge any of his earnings, thanks to his friend and former Treasury subordinate Timothy Geithner's insistence that the sanctity of contract prohibited government-imposed compensation limits on the officers of rescued financial entities (for some reason, sanctity of contract never seems to apply to lesser fry like hourly workers or municipal pensioners).

Not all the traffic to and from Wall Street involves persons connected with the financial operations of the government: in 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), a private equity firm with $40 billion in assets. The firm specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus's expertise in these areas is unclear; his ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. He has also
obtained a sinecure as a nonresident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is the preferred bleaching tub, charm school, and postretirement sinecure of the American oligarchy.
*

Petraeus's fellow army general, NSA director Keith Alexander, who several members of Congress claimed misled them about the scope and legality of his agency's collection of Americans' private information, and who has recommended legislation to restrict the media's First Amendment rights, has also reached for the big payday on Wall Street. After retiring in 2014, Alexander set himself up as the head of a consulting boutique called IronNet Cybersecurity. His principal client is one of Wall Street's largest lobbying groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), from which he receives $600,000 per month.
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