Deep State

D.B. Grady, Marc Ambinder

Description

There is a hidden country within the United States. It was formed from the astonishing number of secrets held by the government and the growing ranks of secret-keepers given charge over them. The government secrecy industry speaks in a private language of codes and acronyms, and follows an arcane set of rules and customs designed to perpetuate itself, repel penetration, and deflect oversight. It justifies itself with the assertion that the American values worth preserving are often best sustained by subterfuge and deception. Deep State, written by two of the country's most respected national security journalists, disassembles the secrecy apparatus of the United States and examines real-world trends that ought to trouble everyone from the most aggressive hawk to the fiercest civil libertarian. The book: - Provides the fullest account to date of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance program first spun up in the dark days after 9/11. - Examines President Obama's attempt to reconcile his instincts as a liberal with the realities of executive power, and his use of the state secrets doctrine. - Exposes how the public’s ubiquitous access to information has been the secrecy industry's toughest opponent to date, and provides a full account of how WikiLeaks and other “sunlight” organizations are changing the government's approach to handling sensitive information, for better and worse. - Explains how the increased exposure of secrets affects everything from Congressional budgets to Area 51, from SEAL Team Six and Delta Force to the FBI, CIA, and NSA. - Assesses whether the formal and informal mechanisms put in place to protect citizens from abuses by the American deep state work, and how they might be reformed.

Authors’ Note xi

Introduction: Asleep under Fire 1

1. Need to Know 12

2. The Curious Case of Primoris Era 21

3. From Inception to Eternity 33

4. Fairly Modest 48

5. Vital Information 67

6. The Horrors Book 78

7. Conspiracies 91

8. Inside the Enclave 101

9. The Tip of the Spear 110

10. Necessary Secrets 122

11. The Tools for the Job 136

12. The Known Unknowns 147

13. The Structure of Secrecy 159

14. Partisan Transparency 176

15. Open Source Strikes Back 187

16. Resistance 194

17. The Flicker of a Piercing Eye 213

18. Olympic Games 254

19. The Next Battlespace 261

Conclusion: Shooting at Ahmadinejad 280

Acknowledgments 291

Notes 293

Index 311

Sujets

• Political Science
• D. B. Grady
• Marc Ambinder
• WikiLeaks

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 14 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781118235737
• Langue: English

Extrait

CONTENTS
Authors Note
Introduction: Asleep under Fire
Chapter 1: Need to Know
Chapter 2: The Curious Case of Primoris Era
Chapter 3: From Inception to Eternity
Chapter 4: Fairly Modest
Chapter 5: Vital Information
Chapter 6: The Horrors Book
Chapter 7: Conspiracies
Chapter 8: Inside the Enclave
Chapter 9: The Tip of the Spear
Chapter 10: Necessary Secrets
Chapter 11: The Tools for the Job
Chapter 12: The Known Unknowns
Chapter 13: The Structure of Secrecy
Chapter 14: Partisan Transparency
Chapter 15: Open Source Strikes Back
Chapter 16: Resistance
Chapter 17: The Flicker of a Piercing Eye
Chapter 18: Olympic Games
Chapter 19: The Next Battlespace
Conclusion: Shooting at Ahmadinejad
Acknowledgments
Index

Copyright 2013 by Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady. All rights reserved
Cover Design: Wendy Mount
Cover Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images; Presidential seal Sylvia Schug/iStockphoto
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
ISBN 978-1-118-14668-2 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22580-6 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-23573-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26378-5 (ebk)
Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
- John le Carr , A Perfect Spy
For Michael and Kelly
AUTHORS NOTE
This is a book about secrets, and the authors feel an obligation to be transparent about a few things.
During his time in the military, author D. B. Grady (which is a pseudonym for David Brown) held a security clearance. No sensitive information he came across while serving in Afghanistan or in the United States made it into this book.
In September 2012, author Marc Ambinder began consulting for Palantir Technologies LLC, an analytics company that does work for intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense, among other clients. He was brought in to work on a specific project that did not require access to secrets or to classified information. There was no cross-pollination; the manuscript had already been completed, and nothing in this book comes from any material gathered at Palantir.
Finally, both authors wrote extensively about secrecy while writing this book. We ve written tens of thousands of words on the subject, and have collectively written more than 20,000 posts to Twitter. If one compares our body of work to this book, it is possible that we have reused phrases or metaphors to describe certain subjects. If that is the case, it is entirely unintentional. Our brains don t compartmentalize the way that computers can. However, aside from some material about the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command that also appeared in The Command: Deep inside the President s Secret Army , the book is an original work in its entirety, the reporting is fresh, and the conclusions, we hope, are original.
While researching this book we stumbled across many things that we won t be able to write about. Though we have no legal obligation to submit our work to the government before publication, we have an ethical obligation as citizens to take extreme care when writing about sensitive subjects. We shared certain chapters with a number of former senior national security and intelligence officials, including several former directors of intelligence agencies. Our purpose was to learn if the publication of this book would truly jeopardize national security. After receiving the feedback, we asked ourselves whether there was a compelling reason to print the secrets in question anyway, and worked from there. We hope we ve struck the proper balance.
INTRODUCTION
Asleep under Fire
On January 5, 2011, Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, had dinner with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, in a dining room at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. After dinner, Panetta asked Rogers and his staff director, Michael Allen, to stop by his office. When they reached the seventh-floor office, Panetta shut the door. We ve got a bead on bin Laden, he told the two men. The CIA had tracked down Osama bin Laden s most trusted courier, and it turned out that the terrorist leader was holed up in an unusually constructed, well-crafted bunker-style house in a wealthy town in Pakistan just west of the Indian border. Come back in a few weeks and we ll give you the full brief, he promised.
Panetta had divulged to the Republican chairman the nation s most precious secret at that time-and did so informally, and with a promise to provide more information. He did so without formally consulting the National Security Council. Over the next few months, he would find a way to make sure that the entire Gang of Eight, a group of eight leaders in the House and Senate, knew about the operation, the intelligence behind it, and the range of options the administration was considering. Rogers and Allen returned to Langley in February and took in two hours of discussion with the CIA s lead on the project. They pored over models of the compound and a variety of other intelligence, much of which remains classified. A few weeks later, Panetta called Rogers to let him know that the White House had chosen the most dangerous, most potentially valuable option: a U.S. Joint Special Operations Command SEAL team would storm the compound and kill or capture bin Laden. On the Friday before the raid, Panetta telephoned Rogers on a nonsecure phone line.
You know that thing I ve been talking about? he asked. Well, there s going to be something on it soon. Rogers knew exactly what the director meant.
Because the raid was successful, it is hard to determine what the reaction from Congress would have been had things gone south. On one hand, congressional partisanship had frozen the Senate in place. On the other, Rogers came to trust Panetta. And Panetta had not hidden a thing from him.
Allen would later tell Jeremy Bash, Panetta s chief of staff, that Rogers was prepared to vocally defend the White House if the raid had gone bad. Even though the intelligence was equivocal, Panetta had the gumption and the foresight to share it with the Gang of Eight. A few weeks later, Rogers would get another call from Panetta, this one informing him about a more politically precarious secret: the United States had captured an al-Qaeda terrorist and was holding him on a U.S. ship in the Arabian Sea. Republicans refused to sanction any federal trial of terrorism suspects in the United States, but Panetta told Rogers that once the military and the intelligence community finished interrogating the suspect for knowledge about current al-Qaeda operations, he would be read his Miranda rights and transferred to the custody of the U.S. Department of Justice. Rogers could have squealed, or could have found some way to register his objections. But he did not. His interests and his institution s interests had been satisfied. In extending the umbrella, which risked compromising the administration s legal policy on terrorism, Panetta had instead depolarized the intelligence operation.

As a matter of course, the American government withholds information from the public. It s been this way since the beginning, and there s little likelihood that it will ever change. Accordingly, the public seeks to learn that information, both directly (through such mechanisms as the Freedom of Information Act) and indirectly (by purchasing newspapers with sensationalized details). The resulting tension is healthy and is essential to keeping the government honest in its classification authority. For example, in the 1940s, the United States began research into a secret silent flashless weapon. 1 When this research began, someone recognized the danger of it falling into enemy hands, and classifying the material made it a criminal act to reveal any de