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The Fates of American Presidents Who Challenged the Deep State (1963-1980)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called
two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre—and its entirety … visible only to God.
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 2014
References
Notes
1 Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.
2 E.g. Marc Ambinder and D.G. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (New York: Wiley, 2013); cf. John Tirman, “The Quiet Coup: No, Not Egypt. Here,” HuffingtonPost, July 9, 2013: “Now we know: the United States of America is partially governed by a deep state, undemocratic, secret, aligned with intelligence agencies, spying on friend and foe, lawless in almost every respect.”
3 Mike Lofgren, “ A Shadow Government Controls America,” Reader Supported News, February 22, 2014.
4 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 93, emphasis added. Adapting Arendt's distinction, Jonathan Schell made a Gandhian case in support of nonviolent persuasive or community power as a means of challenging top-down violent power and thus reforming the world. I developed this case myself in The Road to 9/11 (Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People [New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2003], 227-31; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 249-66, 269).
5 It is one of the special features of America's richly diverse history that it has seen extreme examples of both persuasive power (the town meetings of New England's Puritan communities) and violent power (the oppression of slaves and of native Americans).
6 Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 3.
7 Scott, American War Machine, 31-34, 175-76, 209-11.
8 Scott, American War Machine, 195. In fact all of the major wars were preceded by deceptions, except for the 1980 proxy war in Afghanistan. There, as Brzezinski boasted later in print, a series of U.S. provocations helped draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan where it suffered defeat.
9 Project for the New American Century, “Rebuilding Americas Defenses,” 2000; discussion in Scott, Road to 9/11, 23-24, etc.
10 Rachel Bronson, Thicker than oil: America's uneasy partnership with Saudi Arabia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 168: “After a decade of détente, a policy Saudi Arabia never supported, King Fahd welcomed Reagan's determination to confront Soviet pressure more directly.”
11 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 570-71; citing Michael Beschloss, Crisis Years, 544.
12 Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 554-55.
13 Talbot, Brothers, 172-73; quoted in Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK,” Global Research, November 23, 2010.
14 Kutler, Wars of Watergate, 117, cf. 457–58. Lukas (Nightmare, 105) called the JCS espionage “a natural response to the increasing concentration of national security-making in Kissinger's NSC.” But the objection to Kissinger had to do with policy as well as with procedures.
15 See Phyllis Schlafly and Chester Ward, Kissinger on the Couch (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1975). Ward was a retired U.S. admiral.
16 See e.g. Seymour Hersh, “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” London Review of Books, April 17, 2014.
17 William Arkin, American Coup: How a Terrified Government Is Destroying the Constitution (New York: Little Brown, 2013), 34-35.
18 See the discussions of the personnel changes in the so-called Halloween Massacre of October 1975 under Ford, and the contest between Brzezinski and Vance under Carter (Scott, Road to 9/11, 50-92).
19 In 2007 I wrote that they “had a precedent: Nixon's secret deals with Vietnamese president Nguyen van Thieu in 1968” (Road to 9/11, 100).
20 Robert Parry, “The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter,” Consortiumnews, June 24, 2010: “Inside the CIA, Carter and his CIA Director Stansfield Turner were blamed for firing many of the free-wheeling covert operatives from the Vietnam era, for ousting legendary spymaster Ted Shackley, and for failing to protect longtime U.S. allies (and friends of the CIA), such as Iran's Shah and Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza.”
21 Tom Wicker et al., “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?” New York Times, April 25, 1966; quoted in James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 15.
22 Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: the history of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 374.
23 Weiner, Legacy of ashes, 376.
24 Hugh Wilford, America's great game: the CIA's secret Arabists and the shaping of the modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 295.
25 Scott, Road to 9/11, 62-63.
26 Ibrahim Warde, The price of fear: the truth behind the financial war on terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 133.
27 Robert Sherrill, The oil follies of 1970-1980: how the petroleum industry stole the show (and much more besides) (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983).
28 American charge d'affaires Bruce Laingen had warned from Tehran that the Shah should not be admitted until the Embassy had been provided with a protective force, as “the danger of hostages being taken in Iran will persist” (Barry M. Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: the American experience and Iran [New York: Oxford University Press, 1980], 296-97).
29 Details in Scott, Road to 9/11, 80-92.
30 New York Times, 11/18/79; Pierre Salinger, America Held Hostage: The Secret Negotiations (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 25. Hamilton Jordan, who was one of those present and advising for the Shah's admission, later gave a more hypothetical version: “What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostages” (Jordan, Crisis, 32). Earlier, on July 27, 1979, Carter had commented that “he did not wish the Shah to be here playing tennis while Americans in Tehran were being kidnapped or even killed” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977-1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 474).
31 See Robert Sherrill, The oil follies of 1970-1980: how the petroleum industry stole the show (and much more besides) (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 470-80.
32 Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogue CIA and the legacy of America's private intelligence network (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 61.
33 Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror, 104-05.
34 Trento, Prelude to terror, 113-14.
35 “In 1980, Shackley was set on putting his former boss, George Bush, in the White House and possibly securing the CIA directorship for himself. Shackley volunteered his prodigious skills to Bush in early 1980. Though that fact has come out before, Shackley's involvement in the Iran hostage issue, the so-called October Surprise controversy, has been a closely held secret, until now” (Robert Parry, “Bush & a CIA Power Play – The Consortium,” Consortiumnews. Cf. “The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter,” Consortiumnews, June 24, 2010: “Inside the CIA, Carter and his CIA Director Stansfield Turner were blamed for firing many of the free-wheeling covert operatives from the Vietnam era, for ousting legendary spymaster Ted Shackley, and for failing to protect longtime U.S. allies (and friends of the CIA), such as Iran's Shah and Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza.”
36 Robert Parry, Trick or treason: the October surprise mystery (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1993), 154-55.
37 David Teacher, “The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe,” Lobster, 18, October 1989.
38 David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2002), 412-13.
39 W. Carl Biven, Jimmy Carter's Economy: Policy in an Age of Limits (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1: “There were more practical consequences of the Iranian crisis that tested the temper of the public; perhaps the most visible were a gasoline shortage and long lines of cars at gas stations caused by the cutoff of Iranian oil.” Cf. Daniel Yergin, The quest: energy, security and the remaking of the modern world (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 531: “The Iranian Revolution led to chaos in the oil market, rapid increases in prices, new gas lines, and a second oil shock, and the Carter administration started to come unwound.” In 2007 I myself wrote that “By effectively restricting the access of Iran to the global oil market, the Iranian assets freeze became a factor in the huge oil price increases of 1979-81 (and thus an indirect cause of Carter's electoral defeat in 1980)” (Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 88). It was indeed a factor. But in the context I was arguing that the Iranian assets freeze attributed to Carter in 1979 was in fact part of a complex strategy arranged by advisers to the Chase Manhattan Bank. Prominent among these was Archibald Roosevelt, a former CIA officer and colleague of Copeland, whom Parry also accuses of involvement in the Republican October Surprise (Scott, The Road to 9/11, 91; Parry, Trick or treason, 49, 51, 257).
40 Robert Sherrill, The oil follies of 1970-1980: how the petroleum industry stole the show (and much more besides) (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 435-37. In like manner, William Engdahl has attributed the European oil crisis in 1979 to the market behavior of BP (F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order London: Pluto Press, 2004], 173).
41 David B. Ottaway, The king's messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America's tangled relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 41.
42 Robert Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia & the House of Sa'ud (New York: Avon, 1981), 452-55: “Crown Prince Fahad decided he must distance himself from Washington. In February 1979 he cancelled a trip he had scheduled to meet President Carter in the following month” (452). In ensuing months of negotiations, Saudis first increased production in late 1979 and then increased their oil price in 1980. At issue also was the Saudi desire to acquire AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft, which were not supplied to them until under Reagan (Ottaway, The king's messenger, 42-47).
43 Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 110.
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