The “Deep State” Explained

if you want to seal the Border vote Trump if you want to restore Law and Order in this country vote Trump if you want to defeat the Deep State vote [Applause] Trump hey Johnny hey py I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around this story I must I must admit and this concept of deep state has been so I think poisoned by politics and and 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 I think we we have

to keep digging like think there's something here is the Deep State real is the Deep State real there's this moment in the' 60s 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 the US has no idea until one day a spy plane is flying over the island and they snap this wild photo I mean it doesn't look like a wild photo it just looks like a 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 Mi away within the past week unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sights is now in preparation on that imprisoned Island it's a crisis a Cuban Missile Crisis and one man in Washington DC suddenly has a really difficult decision to make 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 advisers 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 alsa one of the nation's most influential newspaper columnist 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 Bolan a former ambassador to the Soviet Union Alan does who boy Alan doues where do to even start he's the cia's longest running director and he lived right here in Georgetown Frank Weisner 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 [Music] neighborhood the reason JFK kept his date in Georgetown that night was was because this is where power in Washington was on the other side of town from the capital building the seat of American democracy the decisions were being made here by unelected men who had an immense amount of secret power these were powerful men who were not elected or accountable and at this point they' 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 defi 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 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 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 okay I'm doing this the Deep state is the Deep State real and if so what is it before we do that I want to take a moment to say thank you to our sponsor nordvpn is a longtime sponsor of our Channel we couldn't make this work if we didn't have sponsors like Nord nordvpn is a tool that we use to surf the Internet more securely a VPN allows you to connect to the internet

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you are and uh what you do and and what your relationship to this topic of the history of the CIA is yeah so um my name is 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 pair 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 and bombing out har by enemy 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 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 psychologists had this idea that Hitler could be demoralized if they just showed him a vast quantity of horn paramilitary operations strapping explosives to a bunch of bats and letting them loose over Tokyo guys skiing into Nazi occupied Norway 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 is

house are we the first ones here the big night 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 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 Gusto a political police his meaning especially in the context of having just defeated the Nazis was you know that's what led our enemies stay they had a secret intelligence agency the gapa which wound up enforcing political norms and enforcing tyranny and we don't want to we don't want to 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 is it significant that all these guys live four blocks from each other in Georgetown 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 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 intell 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

too much power to military leaders and their insatiable appetite for more money for more men and more power whatever the to democracy Truman's mind changed and what changed Truman's mind was the growing confrontation with the 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 Gusto so that thought is still on his mind 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 going to talk about it because we didn't want to write it down on paper like what do they do with this vague Mandate of National Security oh boy they they go to town you must stir the ingredients your chocolate cake feel so clean but so soft and smooth operation paper 1945 to

1959 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 1948 thumb on the Italian democracy and make sure that us Allies win operation Asia acts coup in Iran 1953 the CIA and the MI6 organize a coup to overthrow the democratically elected government now that we encourage the Sha to take that action I will not deny ciaq Guatemala 195 Banas of course bananas 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 CIA is now helping American corporations the the influence of American corporations on the CIA actions is unist istable Alan Dallas was on the board of directors Howard hunt Burch O'Neal David Phillips CI coup and Congo early 1960s caku in Chile 1973 Las Vegas the assassination operation against General Schneider in 1970 is coordinated with Kissinger's office thank you nice to see you all mind control experiments MK Ultra 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 LSD to people without their permission can we develop a truth serum dosing somebody with LSD 60 times in a week nsa's operation Shamrock electronic surveillance 1945 to 1975 the first warrantless wir God b pigs nightmare there were hundreds of CIA assassination plots operation Phoenix eventually Bill Colby who was and later director admitted that they had killed 20,000 people Mocking Bird Co operation chaos Watergate Jim critchfield Frank weasner James Angleton Roosevelt John fostery CIA coup in Indonesia C 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 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 angelon 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 kennedies knew that Jay Edgar Hoover had information about his affairs with various women happy birthday Mr presid this kind of knowledge that they had Angleton and Hoover were Masters at using that kind of those kind of Secrets as leverate 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 this 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 as this war in Vietnam dragged 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 protesters operation chaos was the CIA spying on the anti-war movement Johnson calls in dick Helms and says what's going on there's Communists

have to be behind this and so they start infiltrating the antiwar movement and they come back in about a year and they say well you know MOS 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 they 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 control 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 extrema an entire people what are 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 [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 senator Frank Church helped 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 yes it does chairman when it fires it fires silently almost silently yes spying on Americans a wholly comprehensive listing of everything those people thought or did on any subject you can imagine they're having a concern with 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 anti-war protesters were spied on and intimidated coel Pro is the name for the effort by The Bureau to destroy people and to destroy organizations or as they use 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 our understanding

Senator the cia's LSD mind control experiments were also detailed to the public one of the first things they come across is the MK Ultra 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 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 mockingbir and there's there's no doubt that it was a massive effort and and and 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 uh members of Congress who uh uh recoiled from responsibility of knowing what was happening members of Congress who said don't tell me I don't

want to 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 Topline 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 hearing 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 and I think initially were

innocent honest 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 are doing things for altruistic and good reasons and then there are people who are 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 to delineate I got sucked in when I should have known better and where many other more intelligent sophisticated people have 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 uh free for trade some very very sketchy details reaching us here at Sky Center a new [Applause] threat 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 and then of course new agencies all with variations on the same name 911 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 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 Sur 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 going to 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 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 that's classified but information is power and the fewer people that have it the more power the people that do have it have

and the result is that when the most powerful man in the world arrives to the most powerful house in the world promising to Rin all of this in to reig 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 in 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 poll the United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy means are as important as ends crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men [Music] [Laughter] [Music] pre