The Deep State: A History of Secret Agendas and Shadow Governments

By Ian Fitzgerald

Beneath the outward appearance of legitimate government and accountable officials there lurk hidden agendas, shadowy personalities and special interest groups seeking to seize control of the nation for their own ends. These 'states within a state', unfettered by legal norms and unworried by public opinion, are known as 'deep states'.

In this fascinating account, Ian Fitzgerald examines what a deep state really is and how they have emerged in various places across the world and throughout history. Ranging from the police state of East Germany in the 1950s to the narco states of Latin America in the 1970s to the institutional corruption of 21st century Nigeria, he explores the many ways people have sought to seize the apparatus of power for themselves while remaining out of sight.

Now the subject of modern conspiracy theories the world over as a worrying trend toward unelected power emerges, this book is more timely than ever, and helps separate fact from fiction.

Looks at deep state conspiracies around the world, including:
• the narco-states of Colombia and Mexico - where legitimate institutions have been corrupted by the power and wealth of the illegal drug trade
• the illicit tax haven of Panama and the 2016 "Panama Papers", history's biggest data leak
• the United Fruit Company's involvement in the 1954 coup d'état in Guatemala
• the robber barons of the late 19th- and early 20th- century America
• the role of intelligence services such as the CIA, FBI and NSA in the US deep state, at home and abroad
• the extent to which social media sites such as Facebook influence voters

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Oct 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781398805040

Book preview

Introduction

‘In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade.’

Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939)

What are governments for? It’s a big question, with many answers, depending on your viewpoint. At a very basic level, most people would agree that governments exist to protect their citizens from harm, to guarantee them a framework in which to live their lives safely and fairly. But not everyone sees it that way. For deep states, governments are merely the vehicles by which they advance their interests; citizens, by contrast, are merely pedestrians, bystanders to be knocked down if they get in the way.

For as long as there have been nation states, there have been deep states manipulating or undermining them. In this book we shall begin with Ancient Greece and Rome and end around the time of the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the UK’s Brexit referendum of 2016, exploring how deep states manifest themselves in every age and in all circumstances. So ubiquitous are they that once you start looking, it’s tempting to rethink civilization as one great unbroken chain of vested interests controlling events while kings, queens, emperors, popes, princes, politicians and presidents act as front-men and -women for history’s true power-brokers. That may ultimately be something of an overstatement – but only just.

While deep states undoubtedly exist, they take a variety of forms. Aristocratic vested interests are the oldest examples we have, arising in the classical world as a reaction to then-novel experiments in government we today call democracy and republicanism. Military deep states came next, and, as we’ll see, have never quite gone away, with a lineage running from the Praetorian Guard of the Roman world to the generals controlling Egypt, Pakistan, Thailand, Myanmar and elsewhere.

From there, the bad actors come thick and fast. As the institutions of government developed in the modern world, so did the institutional or bureaucratic deep state, a body concerned more with its own self-preservation than the interests of the state it nominally serves. Similarly, with the rise of trade, business, finance and commerce, so corporate deep states emerged to capitalize – literally and otherwise – on the enormous riches and power available, making and breaking governments and using their limitless resources to buy politicians, influence the judiciary and set a legislative agenda that favours profits over people. Organized crime has long understood that its needs and wants are also best served by cultivating political leaders, and few do it better than the mafia deep states of Italy and the USA and the ultra-violent and impoverishing narco-states of South America that destroy their civil societies as they amass vast fortunes.

Not all governments are acted upon, of course. Some are highly competent deep state operators themselves. China, for example, is building up a roster of client states across Africa, most notably in Zimbabwe, while Russia’s hidden hand today extends as far as Syria’s presidential palace and, it is suggested, to the White House in Washington D.C. and 10 Downing Street in London. More surprisingly, perhaps, the religious republic of Iran is fast becoming a deep state superpower across the Middle East, exporting its divisive version of Islam to an already troubled region with predictably bloody results. Then there are the shadow states that claim to act in their nations’ interests but always prioritize their own agendas first and foremost, notably the government of Vladimir Putin in Russia and the 40-year reign of the Christian Democrats and the Socialists in Italy, practitioners of a form of state-sponsored kleptocracy that hides in plain sight and ruthlessly suppresses any form of dissent or opposition.

In addition, the past 20 years or so has seen a new form of deep state enter the fray. The rise of computing, mobile technology and the rapid growth of the internet as a means of communicating and sharing information has given birth to digital deep states whose size and reach has the potential to eclipse any form of undue influence that has ever gone before. At the same time, the cyberworld presents every existing deep state – corporate, political, bureaucratic, criminal, military – with new opportunities to extend their interests and influence ever further. It’s a challenge they are surely up to. Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, wrote in The Wealth of Nations that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.’ It’s an insight that’s as true today as it was when Smith’s book was published in 1776. Smith saw that a tendency towards deep state activity is an almost natural outcome of any interaction between power and money – and the bigger the interaction the deeper the state.

There are, sadly, hundreds of examples of deep-state activity to look at across the millennia. This book can only cover a fraction of them, so the focus here is on quality rather than quantity, taking in some of the most representative instances of deep-state subterfuge and largely favouring the modern era. It covers almost every continent, journeys back to the past and looks to the future, too – and what emerges clearly is that while the where, the when and the who of deep states may change, the why remains the same.

Chapter 1

Historical deep states

It’s tempting to think of the deep state as a relatively modern phenomenon, but a look back through history reveals examples in every place and in every time. The deep state’s aim has always been consistent, too: to further its own interests against those of the ruling authority.

In this chapter we’ll look at how the various types of deep state have been established over the millennia. There’s the oligarchic deep state of traditional elites, which arose in the very first democratic city-state, Ancient Athens, and then in republican Rome. Then there is the military deep state, embodied in the Praetorian Guard and in the legions of the Roman Empire, and later in the General Staff in Imperial Japan. The Ottoman Empire of the 19th century best exemplifies an early example of the bureaucratic deep state, where concerned (and self-interested) civil servants and government officials work behind the scenes to control regimes whose activities they disagree with. Finally, we shall explore how ideological deep states in France and Germany acted in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and how their host states reacted in return.

The oligarchy of Ancient Athens

In 508 bce, the Athenian lawgiver Cleisthenes introduced a programme of political reform that he called demokratia (‘rule by the people’). In ‘inventing’ democracy, Cleisthenes’ aim had been to ameliorate rising tensions between the traditional oligarchic elites that had dominated Athenian politics since time immemorial and the growing ‘middle class’ of merchants and citizens who wanted a say in how the city-state was run. However, from its inception, democracy was susceptible to interference and manipulation by groups looking to prioritize their interests over the greater good. In Ancient Athens, this meant the formation of an oligarchic deep state to steal back the power that democracy had forced it to share with the lower orders.

The oligarchs fight back

While Cleisthenes and his successors made the new machinery of government as tamper-proof as possible, the oligarchs nevertheless found a way in. The Assembly is probably Athens’ most famous example of the democratic process at work, a ‘parliament’ open to all of the city-state’s 40,000 male citizens. But a more important organ of government from a deep-state point of view was the Boule. This was the office that did most of the day-to-day work of civic life. Crucially, it controlled the political agenda by deciding which legislation was put before the Assembly. Membership of the Boule was decided by the drawing of lots and this should have made it immune to corruption – but historical records show a higher than normal proportion of oligarchic citizens served on it, although how they managed to rig the lottery is not known.

Our rosy view of Athenian democracy certainly needs revisiting. As the classicist Claire Taylor has pointed out, ‘Every level of Athenian politics was riddled with corruption, from the most important orators to the smallest deme election.’ Between 6 and 10 per cent of senior public officials were tried on charges of bribery during Athens’ golden age, with around half of them convicted. Much of this was fairly low-level corruption and favour-trading, but underlying it all was the constant chipping away by Athens’ richest, most prominent and often competing families at the edifice of popular rule. There is even an argument to say that Cleisthenes introduced democracy partly to protect his own influential oligarchic family, the Alcmaeonidae, against a powerful rival clan, the Peisistratids. From 546 to 510 bce, the Peisistratid family had ruled Athens as tyrants and had exiled Cleisthenes’ Alcmaeonidae kin from the city. After helping to oust the Peisistratids in 510 bce, Cleisthenes saw that continuing the cycle of rule by one family after another was unproductive and that a new approach to government was needed. In that sense, it could be said that while democracy grew out of good intentions the motivations behind it were self-interested as much as pragmatic. It’s one of the great ‘what ifs’ of history to ponder whether democracy would even have been invented if the Peisistratids and the Alcmaeonidae had got on better.

This tension between democratic intent and oligarchic motivation mounted following the outbreak in 431 bce of the Peloponnesian War, Athens’ long-running conflict with its main regional rival, Sparta – an authoritarian, militaristic city-state much admired by those of an oligarchic cast of mind. As the war progressed, with periodic victories and defeats on both sides, Athens’ oligarchic deep state began the process of undermining their home state’s democracy once and for all. They were galvanized by works of propaganda, such as a widely circulated pamphlet called The Athenian Constitution. Its anonymous author was credited as the Old Oligarch, and the piece served as a rallying call for the ‘best and most qualified’ to impose their rule over ‘the vulgar people’.

The end of an era

The war came to a head in 411 bce, when Athens suffered a militarily devastating and financially catastrophic defeat by Sparta in Sicily. As a wave of popular unrest broke out in Athens, the oligarchs encouraged and funded attacks on public buildings and even on public officials. A group of aristocrats, led by the statesman Antiphon and the rogue Athenian general Alcibiades (an Alcmaeonidae, no less, who had been exiled from the city and had defected to Sparta), seized power and installed a government of prominent oligarchs known as the Four Hundred.

Within a year the coup had been overturned, but the damage to Athens’ democracy had been done. The war with Sparta limped on for several more years, but when it finally ended in 404 bce with Athens’ total defeat a Spartan-imposed dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants assumed control. Democracy was restored once more in 403 bce, but was ended for good when Philip of Macedon conquered Greece in 338 bce.

Fortunately, democracy did not disappear with the Athenian city-state. It survived and grew and evolved in Europe and then around the world, but so did the deep state virus that attached itself to the body politic and which remains to this day, dormant in many cases but very active in others.

Republican and Imperial RoME

Ancient Roman history divides into two eras: the republic, which traditionally began in 509 bce, and the empire, initiated by the rule of Augustus from 27 bce. In deep-state terms, this translates to an oligarchic secret network interfering in the republican period, exemplified in the fate of the reforming Gracchi brothers, while for the Imperial epoch it is represented by the creeping influence of a military shadow government that ultimately tired of acting behind the scenes and took power for itself.

Defeating the Gracchi

Legend has it that Rome was founded in 753 bce, on 21 April to be exact, by the brothers Romulus and Remus. It became a republic in 509 bce when the last king was expelled from the city, and from that time onwards Romans were fiercely protective of their royalty-free government. But, as in Ancient Athens, the form of government Romans opted for was one dominated by the oligarchy, the old, aristocratic families of the patrician class, as opposed to the plebeian class of commoners. Patricians saw themselves as descendants of the first 100 men chosen by Romulus as Rome’s original senators. As well as holding political power in the Senate, Rome’s parliament, the patricians dominated economic life, too, through their ownership of vast and extremely profitable estates and plantations. If anything was guaranteed to anger Rome’s landowning aristocracy, it was the suggestion they might redistribute some of their holdings among their fellow countrymen.

This is exactly what the tribune Tiberius Gracchus did in 134 bce. Like Cleisthenes in Athens, he was a high-born aristocrat. He was also a leading light of the reformist Populares faction in the Senate. The Populares were concerned about the growing social inequalities in Rome, with the patricians, represented in the Senate by the Optimates, accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of their low-born plebeian countrymen. Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform proposals involved Rome’s aristocratic country squires handing over large swathes of their estates to the peasantry. The effect was to inflame the simmering resentment of an aristocracy that did not want to share anything – land, wealth, political power – with a population they despised as an uncouth mass.

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, brothers and populist politicians who fell foul of Rome’s oligarchic deep state.

The parallels with Athens’ experiment with democracy are striking. In both cases a progressive oligarch had the foresight to see that social and economic changes were making their existing forms of government unsustainable, but where Cleisthenes succeeded, Tiberius Gracchus failed. Cleisthenes persuaded enough of his fellow oligarchs it was in their interests to follow his lead; Tiberius Gracchus, on the other hand, was more confrontational. He courted popular support among the plebeians against his fellow oligarchs, and the fiery rhetoric he deployed in the Forum gave the Optimates the excuse they needed to bring him down. Under the guise of saving Rome from a burgeoning tyrant, in 133 bce Rome’s aristocrats, senators and a hired mob of enforcers confronted Tiberius Gracchus and, in the ensuing fight, beat him to death along with 300 of his followers.

In the aftermath of this massacre the Senate actually passed Tiberius Gracchus’ reforms – public opinion had swung too far behind the issue to ignore it – but implementation of the act was slow and heavily compromised. In the end, Tiberius Gracchus’ radical proposals suffered death by a thousand cuts.

Ten years later this scenario was played out again when Tiberius Gracchus’ brother Gaius, also a tribune, tried to force the state to subsidize grain prices in Rome to make it affordable to ordinary citizens. The republic’s large landowner and agribusiness deep state disdained this policy. In the inevitable violence that followed, Gaius Gracchus took his own life when cornered by a gang sent by the oligarchs to murder him.

The empire strikes back

What happened to the Gracchi was symptomatic of the state of Roman politics in the waning years of the republic. Before long, the oligarch-dominated Senate would become little more than a talking shop as a cadre of military strongmen emerged that favoured a more direct approach to the exercise of power.

All the offices of state continued as before – senators were appointed, consuls, tribunes and quaestors elected – but they increasingly became proxies for rogue generals pushing their personal agendas. These included Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar, whose bitter power struggle helped to hasten the end of the republic and opened the way for the age of emperors that followed. Both men prioritized military success over politics, so as Rome transitioned from a republic into an empire its deep state morphed from an oligarchic cabal into a military junta.

Augustus, the first emperor, had come to power in 27 bce on the back of military success. This, and the imperial expansion and influx of wealth that accumulated during his 40-year reign, made his position unassailable. Those who followed were not so fortunate. Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, a disillusioned and dissolute old man by the end of his 22-year reign in 37 ce, was supposedly helped on his way to the afterlife by the commander of the Praetorian Guard, Naevius Sutorius Macro. The Praetorian Guard had been established by Augustus as the emperor’s personal security detail. Given its proximity to ultimate power, it quickly became a deep-state kingmaker, removing and installing emperors at will. It arranged the assassination of Tiberius’ successor Caligula in 41 ce, for example, and murdered 13 Roman emperors in total over the course of its history. By the end of Nero’s unhappy reign in 68 ce, Rome’s military deep state abandoned all pretence of impartiality and went to war with itself. The year 69 ce saw no fewer than four emperors, all of them military generals. The last of these was Vespasian, commander of Rome’s eastern legions, who re-established peace and security.

Septimius Severus, (r. 193–211

ce

), one of Rome’s more long-lasting military leaders-turned emperor.

For the next 400 years, until the final fall of Rome in 476 ce, the majority of the empire’s rulers were drawn from the military – but not all of them. When the emperor Commodus (r. 177–92 ce) became violently unhinged towards the end of his rule he was strangled in his bath and replaced by the soldier-politician Pertinax. His two-month reign as emperor ended when he tried to introduce legislation limiting the power of the Praetorian Guard. It reacted by having him assassinated and sold the emperorship off to the highest bidder. The winner, Didius Julianus, was emperor for 65 days before he too was murdered in favour of another military leader, Septimius Severus.

During the so-called ‘Imperial Crisis’ of 235–284 ce, a period of intense political instability beginning with the rule of Maximinus Thrax, there were 27 different rulers in 49 years. They were known as the ‘Barracks Emperors’ as most were drawn from the Roman legions. From a supporting role at the inception of the empire, being the tools of ambitious statesmen such as Pompey, Caesar and Augustus, Rome’s army quickly became at first the power behind the throne and then the power on the throne – a deep state no longer but the state itself.

It is ironic, perhaps, that the institutions the military deep state subverted so successfully and for so long outlasted the men that corrupted it. When Rome fell in 476 ce its armies had long since been decimated by successive waves of barbarian invaders. But the Senate remained, and did so until at least 603, when the last recorded mention of it appears.

Imperial Japan

For a country where respect for authority is embedded in the culture, Japan has a surprisingly long history of deep-state dissent – emanating, even more surprisingly, from the armed forces. It goes back to 1853, when an American armed fleet arrived