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Life-changing events are a frequent occurrence in politics and economics. Recent examples include the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) in 1963, the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11), COVID-19 (which began in the eponymous year), and the Global Financial Crisis (2007-08). Some events are accidents. Others arise from systemic factors. But, on occasion, hidden manipulators known as the “Deep State” are to blame.

After looking at cases of political interference, such as the soft coup against Australia’s Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the 1970s, this article considers two examples of Deep State events: the clandestine “Gladio” networks set up across Europe after World War II (1939-45) and the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York, which triggered a “global war on terror” in which most of the nations of the world participated. These are known to researchers as “Deep State” events. They are contrived and covered up by agents of the security apparatus and dismissed by mainstream media as baseless conspiracy theory.

Before exploring the differences between the “Deep State” and the “Open State,” consider some definitions. 

WHAT IS “THE DEEP STATE”?

The term Deep State is widely attributed to the academic Peter Dale Scott, who notes that at least four major political events in modern US history were designed by Deep State actors: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Watergate (1972-74), the Iran-Contra Affair (1985-87), and 9/11. In each case, Deep State actors reportedly had access to a doctrine called Continuity of Government (COG): a contingency plan that allows for surface-level government shutdowns in the event of major crises. Scott argues that COG was unofficially invoked to hide the sale of weapons to Iran by the US to finance the latter’s dirty war against socialists in Nicaragua (Iran-Contra). But COG was officially implemented for the first time on 9/11.

Within each state’s “deep” network lie competing factions; for example, there is often a rift between intelligence analysts and operations units. The latter tend to work against the former for political reasons, which further complicates the nexus of surface-level vs. deep politics. For instance, Michael Scheuer, former head of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) unit responsible for finding the alleged leader of “al-Qaeda,” Osama bin Laden, told the BBC that the Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001) had ten “easy opportunities” to kill or capture bin Laden between 1998 and 1999. But, on each occasion, Clinton declined to act. The implication is that certain Deep State actors working against Scheuer’s brief wanted bin Laden alive. 

But conspiracy researchers often fail to look at broader, structural reasons for unusual events. Many refuse, for instance, to critique the workings of capitalism as explanations for certain occurrences. For example, on 8 March 2020, Dr Anthony Fauci who served on US President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, told Americans not to wear facemasks because they allegedly don’t work. Fauci later said that masks are indeed effective against COVID. Fauci acknowledged that he had lied because, at the time, masks were in short supply and he wanted to ensure that frontline workers were prioritised over members of the public who might otherwise panic-buy. Fauci’s immoral act was not part of a mandatory mask conspiracy: it was a reflection of capitalism. Masks were not profitable until the pandemic struck, so corporations didn’t stock them and the few that were available went to healthcare workers. 

By contrast, “ad hoc” theorists – i.e., those who think that all political decisions are surface-level and made off-the-cuff in response to unexpected circumstances – refuse to explore the hidden workings of states and corporations. They fail to accept a striking facet of human nature: the tendencies of many individuals to form secret, mutual associations and to consciously plot against and deceive others. It is, therefore, important to distinguish between events caused by systemic design and events orchestrated by invisible forces. 

Sometimes, major events occur because laws, lobbying, and licentiousness allow them space to happen. In the US, for instance, decades of financial deregulation enabled investors and traders to create bubbles of worthless, fancy-sounding products that were tied to bad mortgages: “collateralised debt obligations,” “credit default swaps,” and “derivatives,” against which the multibillionaire Warren Buffett had previously warned, describing them as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Because the aforementioned toxic financial products were bloating the portfolios of asset managers, banks, hedge funds, liquidity firms, and more, the collapse of certain banks triggered an entire global financial crash. Unlike Deep State events, this was not a conspiracy. It was the inevitable consequence of deregulated, neoliberal capitalism. 

WHITLAM AND WILSON: DEEP VS. OPEN STATES 

On other occasions, however, things happen as a result of forces that are hidden from public and media scrutiny under the veils of national security and plausible deniability. These events are said by conspiracy researchers and the few scholars open-minded enough to look at them to be the calculated works of Deep State actors. 

In November 1975, for example, Australia’s Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the leader of the Labour government, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The official reason was that Whitlam’s minority government was a lame duck: it could not get a budget through the Senate and Whitlam refused to resign or call an election. But researchers like the journalist John Pilger note that there was more to the situation than meets the eye. 

Australia is home to Pine Gap, a ground-based listening station belonging to the US military and serving the US National Security Agency’s permanent global surveillance operation. The original members of the top-secret alliance were known as the Five Eyes. They included Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the leader of the pack, the USA. Today via secret projects like PRISM, dozens of US allies, from Germany to Israel, provide the US Deep State with surveillance-based intelligence by sweeping the electronic signals of the world – from civilian telephone calls and private internet searches to conversations in living rooms via hacked smart TVs and sounds picked up through baby monitors. 

Since the 1950s, Governor-General Kerr had allegedly been courted by the CIA. He was, for instance, a member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, an entity later exposed in the US Congress as a CIA front. Christopher Boyce, an employee of the CIA contractor TRW, described him as “our man Kerr.” Victor Marchetti, a CIA officer previously involved with Pine Gap, told journalist Pilger that Whitlam’s hints against the US spy base “caused apoplexy in the White House.” The US and British Deep States collaborated to depose Whitlam.

Each state, including democratic ones, has its own parallel government, which is kept secret from the public. 

As Whitlam was being sacked in Australia, the UK’s internal Security Service, Military Intelligence Section Five (MI5), was spying on the left-wing Labour PM, Harold Wilson, as well as dozens of left-leaning MPs and intellectuals. Fifty years earlier, the nascent Labour Party’s chances at the general election 1924 were torpedoed by the UK’s external Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the equivalent of the CIA. To sabotage Labour, MI6 forged a letter purportedly written by the Soviet communist, Grigory Zinoviev. The preposterous letter claimed that the Bolsheviks, who had recently come to power in a coup in Russia, would back the Labour Party and foment civil war in the UK.  As Whitlam was being sacked in Australia, the UK’s internal Security Service, Military Intelligence Section Five (MI5), was spying on the left-wing Labour PM, Harold Wilson, as well as dozens of left-leaning MPs and intellectuals. Fifty years earlier, the nascent Labour Party’s chances at the general election 1924 were torpedoed by the UK’s external Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the equivalent of the CIA. To sabotage Labour, MI6 forged a letter purportedly written by the Soviet communist, Grigory Zinoviev. The preposterous letter claimed that the Bolsheviks, who had recently come to power in a coup in Russia, would back the Labour Party and foment civil war in the UK.  Gladio was designed to defeat both leftism and Sovietism. By 1991, the US had won the Cold War and the Soviet Union was no more. But the threat of leftism persisted. Enter the “global war on terror” (GWOT) and the creation of new layers of the “national security state.” The GWOT was launched after 9/11 by the George W. Bush administration (2001-09). Bush’s father, George H.W., had been Director of the CIA for a year, beginning 1976, during which time he oversaw Gladio operations. Bush the elder was also President of the USA from 1989 to 1993. Several times he spoke publicly of wanting to build a “New World Order” in the post-Soviet era. A businessman, Bush also invested in the acquisitions firm, the Carlyle Group, whose investors included the Bin Laden family: Osama bin Laden being the alleged “al-Qaeda” mastermind whose networks were trained by US and British forces between 1979 and 1989.

The Presidencies of Bush senior and junior are rare examples of the Deep State operating as an open state. 

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a right-wing, imperialist think tank whose associates included former Presidents Bush senior and junior. Other members and associates who ended up in the Bush junior administration included future Vice President Dick Cheney, future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, future Deputy Defense Sec. Paul Wolfowitz, and Defense Sec. Advisor Richard Perle. 

In September 2000, before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under the pretext of fighting the GWOT, PNAC stated that its goal was “to shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests.” American business interests are assured by the US “fighting and winning multiple large-scale wars,” backing out of anti-missile treaties in order to weaponise space, and exploiting the “revolution in military affairs.” The document says that drones will “project military power around the globe” and that “advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” 

The plan to attack US targets and blame enemies was hinted at in the document: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” The demolition of the World Trade Center in New York a year later was blamed on Arab airline hijackers. To confuse the military and intelligence units that were not involved in the false-flag attack, the Deep State perpetrators created their own “fog of war” by timing the events to coincide with multiple training exercises. 

For example, the National Reconnaissance Office was running an exercise simulating a small corporate jet crashing into a building. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was running its annual Operation Northern Vigilance, which began on 9 September and ran for several days. NORAD was also running Vigilant Guardian, which involved several scenarios. On the ground, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was positioned in New York on the night of 10 September in preparation for Operation Tripod, a huge counter-bioterrorism drill scheduled in New York for 12 September. 

After 9/11, the strategically important nation of Afghanistan was occupied, as were the oilfields of Iraq. A new hi-tech economy was created, with drones and big data. Shortly after the attacks, lawyer, future Obama diplomat, and ex-Democratic Senator, Gary Hart, chaired the US government’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, during which he said: “There is a chance for the President of the United States [George W. Bush, a Republican] to use this disaster to carry out a phrase his father used… and that is a ‘new world order’.” Several years later, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University: “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq” (that’s actually three things). Within a decade, the US security and surveillance industry was worth $1 trillion. In Wired for War, P.W. Singer notes that five years after 9/11, border, construction, and airport security was a $30bn market, leading one private industry report to state: “Thank you, Osama bin Laden!” 

9/11 was orchestrated by a Deep State cabal, whose surface-level members, like the Bush family, had come to power in the US. In the absence of new enemies, like the Soviets, their aim was to attack civilian targets and blame Islamic terrorists. This could justify the next phase of US military global domination and stimulate hi-tech investment. 

In his farewell address, US President Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61) warned Americans about the potential of “misplaced power” by “a scientific-technological elite.” He admonished the people to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The revelations of NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, decades later proved beyond doubt that Eisenhower’s warnings about an emerging Deep State were based in fact. 

CONCLUSION

To deny the existence of a Deep State operating within one’s country is to fail to understand, holistically, how the nation-state works: in whose interests it operates and the laws and regulations, or lack of, that allow for violent, clandestine activities. Structural factors underlie many major events, like the Financial Crisis. Accidents also occur, like nuclear power plant disasters. But, in addition, conspiratorial agents are responsible for certain events. Part of the process of deciphering propaganda, be it from the mainstream or from the alternative media, is to figure out what is structural, what is accidental, and what is conspiracy.

This article has focused on the US and British Deep States and their effect upon both geo- and domestic politics. Each country has its own Deep State, sometimes working alone, sometimes working in collaboration with others. Sometimes the Deep State will work in total secrecy against democratic elements abroad, other times it will work with the Deep State of the host country. The presence of US spy installations on Australian soil is a classic case of sympathetic parallel structures colluding with foreign elements to interfere in democratic processes. 

It is all-too-easy for academia, media, and political punditry to ignore, dismiss, and ridicule the Deep State as a conspiracy theory. But the Deep State thrives on conspiracy. Conspiracy is its business. To ensure its own survival and thus the privileges of the small number of elites it serves, maintaining conspiracy is essential. Once in a while, innocent people around the world pay the price for the actions of these dark agents.  

Dr T.J. Coles - https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/mysteries-of-the-deep-state-examining-the-hidden-hands-that-guide-world-events

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