Deep state
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The deep state is a term John Kiriakou defends against the people most likely to share his politics. He notes that "a lot of people, especially on the left, think that the deep state is just a right-wing trope to complain about government", and rejects that flatly, with an explicit statement of where he is speaking from: "I can tell you, coming from the left, that the deep state is absolutely real."

"I was a part of it"

His claim to standing is participation rather than observation: "It's real, and it's ugly, and I know because I was a part of it when I spent 15 years at the CIA, and frankly, another couple of years on Capitol Hill on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff."

The label doesn't matter

Kiriakou treats the terminology as a distraction from the thing being named, and offers to drop it: "you don't have to call it the deep state. You can call it whatever you want. You can call it the state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy."

What he will not concede is its existence or its durability: "the truth of the matter is that it is there. It's there to stay. It's not going anywhere."

The moment he was convinced

Kiriakou dates his own conviction that a deep state exists to one meeting. The National Intelligence Council, housed at the CIA, holds the topmost analysts of the whole intelligence community, nearly all in the senior intelligence service, nearly all with doctorates, moving back and forth between the agency and universities such as Harvard and Stanford. Among them was the national intelligence officer for warning, whose job was to look five, ten and twenty years ahead and say which countries would become problems.

Kiriakou, then in his twenties, went into a meeting with him and found people congratulating him. The reason was an age waiver from the director allowing him to work until seventy. He was sixty-five; he had been in the same job for forty-two years; he intended to stay another five.

Kiriakou's question was why anyone would want the same job for forty-seven years, and the answer he arrived at is the article's point. "That's the power that you've built. That's the authority that you've built. Presidents come and go." A president who calls and asks for a hard look at Brazil can be told, not in so many words, to go and take a jump, the response simply slow-rolled until the president is long gone. "And I realized for the very first time there actually is a deep state."

Kiriakou allows that the name is negotiable: "We can call it the federal bureaucracy, but by God it's there. It exists."

The definition he uses

Asked directly whether the CIA is part of the deep state, Kiriakou agreed, "and the CIA''s an important, probably the most important, part of the deep state", and then insisted on defining the term before using it. "In my view, a deep state is a group of unelected, very powerful bureaucrats that can do what the president wants, or they can ignore what the president wants."

The mechanism he identifies is arithmetic rather than conspiratorial. "Presidents come and go every four years or every eight years, and these deep state leaders are in their positions for 20, 30, even 35 years. Presidents come and go and these deep-staters remain. And so if there''s a policy that a president supports or wants, and it''s a policy that the deep state leadership does not like, they just wait until the president''s not president anymore." Asked whether that had happened during the first Trump administration, he answered: "that''s exactly what they did."

Rights without a remedy

Kiriakou treats the absence of recourse, rather than the abuse itself, as what makes the term worth using. Describing the copying of visitors' devices at the Ecuadorian embassy and the CIA''s move to shut the resulting lawsuit down with the state secrets privilege, he said: "this is clearly, obviously a legal, constitutional violation, and there''s nothing that anybody can do about it. You know, there is a deep state, and you can call it whatever you want. You can call it the deep state, you can call it the state, you can call it the federal bureaucracy. Whatever it is, it tramples the constitutional rights of average American citizens, and there is no recourse. This is yet another example."

Refusing the guardian frame

The 2019 impeachment gave Kiriakou an occasion to state the limit of his own anti-Trump position, and he stated it as a refusal. "I will not jump onto the CIA bandwagon and declare that it's the CIA that's the guardian of our democracy."

The grounds are institutional rather than political: "they lied about torture, they lied about rendition, they lied about secret prisons, they lied about hacking into the Senate intelligence committee's computer system, they lie about everything. So why should we take their word for this?" He extends it to the workforce, himself included: "everybody in the building is trained to lie. You get promoted based on how well you lie."

Asked directly whether the deep state exists, he answered by citation. "I don't care what the CIA says, that there's no such thing as a deep state, that they have no beef with Donald Trump, I don't believe any of that." His evidence is Chuck Schumer's 2017 warning to the incoming president that one does not cross the intelligence services because they have, in Kiriakou's rendering, "nine ways from Sunday to ruin you." "I think that's what we're seeing here."

Published, not hidden

Kiriakou's 2021 formulation is that the danger is visible rather than covert. Discussing the counterinsurgency op-ed and John Brennan's public endorsement of it, he says: "a lot of people in the CIA believe this kind of thing. They believe that they're smarter than everybody else. They're smarter than you are, they're smarter than I am. And they are going to put this out there in the newspaper of record for all the world to see, and they're going to show how the deep state is going to make this whole thing right."

Asked whether the crackdown might be deliberately provocative, intended to radicalise the right and so justify further measures, he agrees without qualification: "Yes, that's exactly what we're seeing here." His prediction is that the instrument will change hands: "the Democrats think that they're ascendant right now, and so they're overreacting... this is always cyclical and it's going to come back and bite them. And then they're going to be delisted and then they're going to be thrown off of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And they're going to jump up and down and say how unfair it is and how un-American it is. And then we're back where we started again."

Not the alternative to Trump

Kiriakou's objection to the term's political use is that it invites a swap rather than a judgement. Speaking in 2018 he warned that in a bid to damage Donald Trump, "many liberals will endorse anybody who is challenging him", including John Brennan, who "might not necessarily be going after Trump for the same reasons that the rest of us have, because we actually opposed his policies." His conclusion is that one may decline both: not to like Trump, and still "not throw your lot in with the deep state and the CIA and the FBI." The full argument is set out at no good guy.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- CIA
- Congressional intelligence oversight
