There’s a lot of talk these days about the “Deep State,” especially among supporters of President Trump, some of whom believe that this Deep State is working hard to destroy anyone loyal to Trump, both inside and outside of the government, and ultimately, Trump himself. General Flynn was forced to resign after a media scandal surrounding his contacts with Russian ambassadors – a scandal which, by most accounts, was highly exaggerated. After Flynn’s resignation, prominent neoconservative and NeverTrumper Bill Kristol tweeted:

Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state. — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 14, 2017

More recently, Trump supporter Mike Cernovich was on InfoWars with Alex Jones claiming that the recent Milo Yiannopolis scandal was also a “Deep State operation.”

The “Deep State” is aptly summed up by journalist Jefferson Morley in a recent article at Alternet:

“The Deep State is shorthand for the nexus of secretive intelligence agencies whose leaders and policies are not much affected by changes in the White House or the Congress. While definitions vary, the Deep State includes the CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and components of the State Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the armed forces.”

Morley is well-qualified to write about the Deep State, as he is a veteran researcher on the JFK assassination, whose work on CIA agent George Joannides is one of the most important developments in that case in the last twenty years, as I previously wrote. The very term “deep state” was coined by Peter Dale Scott, a veteran researcher of the underbelly of American and world politics, and someone who, like Morley, has done important work on the JFK case.

Although liberals and leftists hate to admit it, there are incredible parallels between Trump and Kennedy. First, both men were independently wealthy when they ran for office, which meant that they were not as reliant upon special interest donations to fund their campaigns. Second, both men are known to have been quite fond of the ladies, their marriages to beautiful women notwithstanding. Trump was surreptitiously recorded by the media making lewd statements. JFK was recorded by J. Edgar Hoover in flagrante delicto on multiple occasions, and was reported to have once remarked to a visiting dignitary: “If I don’t have a woman every three days or so I get a terrible headache.”

When JFK assumed office, he appointed his younger brother Robert as Attorney General, a move that was widely criticized as nepotism. Trump works closely with his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and is criticized in the same way. But more important than any of this trivia, which is on the level of the Kennedy-Lincoln coincidences, is both men’s opposition to the will of the Deep State, specifically in regards to Russia.

Although Kennedy was elected in 1960 as a Cold Warrior, he moved away from a hardline stance almost immediately after being elected. In 1961, he refused to provide U.S. military support to the CIA’s bungling Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, something that many in the CIA never forgave him for.

In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy negotiated peace with Russian leader Nikita Kruschev. This was against much of the advice coming from the Deep State, who estimated that, although the United States would lose 80% of its population in a thermonuclear war, the Russians would lose 100% of theirs. So, we would “win.” Kennedy rightfully recognized this as sheer insanity.

At the same time that JFK was talking to Kruschev, CIA agent Bill Harvey was ordering raids on Cuba, in direct violation of Presidential directive, with the goal of provoking a missile launch by the Russians so as to start a war. When the crisis ended, Robert Kennedy had Harvey transferred out of the Western hemisphere so that he couldn’t cause any more such trouble. Harvey never forgave the Kennedy brothers, and retained a bitter hatred of them for the rest of his life.

In 1963, just months before his death, President Kennedy gave an historic speech at American University, outlining a vision for peaceful coexistence between the United States and Russia. It featured prominently in Oliver Stone’s film JFK, and is worth watching in its entirety.

Kennedy negotiated a peace with the Russians during the missile crisis, and at the time of his death, he was making overtures to Fidel Castro and also beginning to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam. Historians disagree about whether Kennedy was serious about peace with Cuba, as there were also plans for an all-out invasion of the island happening at the same time. But regarding Vietnam, more and more support for the notion that JFK would not have escalated the conflict has emerged since this thesis was first developed by Peter Dale Scott in the 1970s and then more extensively by John Newman in his 1992 book JFK and Vietnam.

Kennedy was a user of “back channels” for sensitive communications. In negotiating with the Soviets, messages were passed back and forth between “Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin or other Soviet officials to other members of President Kennedy’s official family.” The overtures to Cuba were made through journalist Lisa Howard, and also through Ambassador William Attwood. Historian Michael Beschloss, in an article on the back channel talks in the New York Times, writes that “Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy worried that such talks would leak and embarrass his brother on the eve of his 1964 re-election campaign, but the president quietly encouraged Attwood to pursue the matter.” The leaks of General Flynn’s communications with the Russians, and their consequences, show that RFK’s worries were well-founded.

Meanwhile, while JFK was using back channels to negotiate peace with the Russians and possibly with the Cubans as well, Lyndon Johnson had his own back channel – to the Deep State. This is documented by John Newman in his aforementioned book, which has just been re-released in a second edition. Generals from the Joint Chiefs of Staff bypassed the President and communicated with the Vice-President instead, who was much more of a hawk on Vietnam than Kennedy was. It took Lyndon Johnson all of two days to reverse Kennedy’s plans to withdraw from Vietnam. He is alleged to have said to the Joint Chiefs, “Just get me elected, and I’ll give you your damn war.”

Perhaps Hillary Clinton should have made a similar deal with the powers that be. Or perhaps she tried. As Glenn Greenwald, who can hardly be accused of being a right-wing Trump shill, recently said:

“The CIA and the intelligence community were vehemently in support of Clinton and vehemently opposed to Trump, from the beginning. And the reason was, was because they liked Hillary Clinton’s policies better than they liked Donald Trump’s. One of the main priorities of the CIA for the last five years has been a proxy war in Syria, designed to achieve regime change with the Assad regime. Hillary Clinton was not only for that, she was critical of Obama for not allowing it to go further, and wanted to impose a no-fly zone in Syria and confront the Russians. Donald Trump took exactly the opposite view. He said we shouldn’t care who rules Syria; we should allow the Russians, and even help the Russians, kill ISIS and al-Qaeda and other people in Syria. So, Trump’s agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted. Clinton’s was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they’ve been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him. There’s claims that they’re withholding information from him, on the grounds that they don’t think he should have it and can be trusted with it. They are empowering themselves to enact policy.”

As for Lyndon Johnson, he later came to have deep regrets about his decision to “give them their damn war.” The unpopularity of the war, which split American society in two much in the way that Trump’s election has, cost Johnson his reputation. He is reported to have said, in the White House, as anti-war protesters outside shouted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today,” “Don’t they know that I’m with them?” But they didn’t know because, however much he may have been with them in spirit, in deed he had allied himself with the Deep State and the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned against. In 1968, Johnson declined to run for re-election, certain that he would have lost. He lived the rest of his life as a recluse on his Texas ranch, growing his hair long like the hippies who protested against him. He died only five years later, in 1973, a broken and forlorn man.

There has been a lot scholarship and investigative reporting about the Deep State over the past decades, and most of it has come from the left. In the 1980s, Bill Moyers hosted a documentary called The Secret Government, which was based on revelations about the Deep State that had emerged during the Iran-Contra scandal. At that time, John Kerry was a Senator and was in charge of the investigation into Contragate and its associated crimes.

One of the things that they uncovered was massive CIA involvement with drug trafficking, something which was later investigated further by journalist Gary Webb, the subject of the 2014 movie Kill the Messenger. The only people who took Webb’s allegations seriously at the time were people on the left, some of whom had known for years that certain people in the intelligence agencies were involved in the drug trade, because of works like Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and Peter Dale Scott’s Cocaine Politics. Scott once remarked that “When the U.S. was involved in covert operations in southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, we had a heroin epidemic on this continent. In the 1980s, when some of the same people were involved in a covert operation in Central America, we had a cocaine epidemic. That’s not a coincidence.”

But today, liberals and leftists who have historically been been opposed to the nefarious machinations of the Deep State find themselves in a strange situation, which seems to present itself as a choice between rooting for Trump, whom they loathe, and rooting for the cocaine-dealing, Kennedy-sniping CIA. Between a crack rock and a hard place, as it were. The left hates Trump because they think he’s a racist and a tyrant. But those in the Deep State who oppose Trump do so not because they are champions of peace and equality, but because they want war with Russia and Iran, which will become World War 3 and will cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

So, is the enemy of your enemy your friend, no matter how fiendish?

Peter Dale Scott, in a recent article adapted from his book The American Deep State, takes a nuanced approach in which he distinguishes between two factions within the Deep State, which have co-existed for a long time. He writes of

“an old division within Big Money — roughly speaking, between those Trilateral Commission progressives, many flourishing from the new technologies of the global Internet, who wish the state to do more than at present about problems like wealth disparity, racial injustice and global warming, and those Heritage Foundation conservatives, many from finance and oil, who want it to do even less.” It is “an enduring struggle between “America Firsters” and “New World Order” globalists, pitting, through nearly all of this [20th] century, the industry-oriented (e.g. the National Association of Manufacturers) against the financial-oriented (e.g. the Council on Foreign Relations), two different sources of wealth.”

This division within the wealthy elite also existed during the Kennedy years. At that time, right-wingers from the oil industry such as H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison were some of the main proponents of the America First philosophy, against globalist organizations like the United Nations and the Council on Foreign Relations, which they thought were too communistic. Since communism is, by definition, an internationalist ideology, the right has long opposed all forms of globalism.

Since American industry and manufacturing were more powerful in the early 1960s than they are now, it follows that this America First wing of Big Money was more powerful and influential then. It is perhaps an irony that, while capitalism ultimately prevailed against communism in the great ideological battle of the 20th century, nonetheless it was New World Order globalism and not America First nationalism which prevailed in American governance.

In Scott’s view, Trump is not an outsider or opponent of the Deep State, but rather a representative of this other wing of Big Money, which comes from manufacturing and, especially, from oil. Thus, the attacks on “the Party of Davos” – the globalist wing of the ruling elite – are not really populist in nature, but rather merely coming from the other wing of the same ruling elite.

Since JFK was a liberal whose views were more in line with the progressive wing of Big Money, he was most vigorously opposed by the America Firsters. Indeed, on the day of his assassination in Dallas, the son of H.L. Hunt had paid for a full page ad in the newspaper accusing Kennedy of treason. After the assassination, these same right-wing oilmen became prime suspects in the minds of many conspiracy theorists, because of their staunch opposition to Kennedy all throughout his presidency, and because of their close ties with the intelligence and defense industries.

The first book to accuse the entire Deep State of the crime (although that term did not yet exist) was a curious book called Farewell America. It was written pseudonymously under the name James Hepburn, and published in Europe in 1968 by a fake publishing company calling itself “Frontiers.” It alleged that the assassination had been orchestrated by a “committee” made up of interests from big oil, the intelligence agencies, and the defense department. (It even insinuated that Roy Cohn, who worked for right-wing senator Joseph McCarthy and who later became a mentor to Donald Trump, might have had a hand in it somehow.)

Supporters of Farewell America claim that the book has its origins in a private investigation conducted on behalf of Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy by RFK confidantes and by sources in French intelligence. As author Gus Russo tells the story:

“At that time, [Robert] Kennedy said, ‘I just can’t believe that guy [Oswald] acted alone. I’m going to contact someone independent of this government to get to the bottom of this.’ Bobby then contacted a lifelong friend of the Kennedy family, then working in Britain’s intelligence agency, known as MI6. The friendship dated back to the days when Papa Joe Kennedy was the US Ambassador to England. Undertaking this highly secretive mission, the MI6 agent contacted two French intelligence operatives who proceeded to conduct, over a three year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. One agent was the head of the French Secret Service, Andre Ducret. The second was known only as “Philippe” — believed to be Philippe Vosjoly, who was a former French Intelligence Chief in the United States. Over the years, Ducret and Philippe hired men to infiltrate the Texas oil industry, the CIA, and Cuban mercenary groups in Florida. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968.”

But detractors of Farewell America say, au contraire, that the whole thing was a hoax by the KGB, designed to stoke fear and diminish trust in American institutions and the country’s elite.

In his memoir If You Have A Lemon, Make Lemonade, New Left publisher Warren Hinckle recounts how Farewell America may have had its origin in District Attorney Jim Garrison (the subject of Oliver Stone’s JFK) and his decision to approach the KGB for any information they might have on the CIA and its involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Garrison sent an envoy to the Soviets at their Mexico City embassy – the same one that Lee Oswald allegedly visited only months before the assassination – to see if the Russian spies would be interested in ratting out their American opponents. The Russians said that this might be possible, but if it were to happen, it would be in a way that was untraceable to them. A few months later, the manuscript of Farewell America showed up at Garrison’s office. When inquiries were made as to its sources, the trail led back to the French SDECE, which, in Hinckle’s words, “was so notoriously, and almost hilariously, riddled with KGB double agents that as a matter of course Frenchmen were offered vodka before wine at international spy gatherings.”

That the KGB did take an interest in promoting JFK conspiracy theories for this purpose was later confirmed by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin in his book The Sword and the Shield.

It seemed that part of the purpose of Farewell America was to influence the 1968 election in favor of Robert Kennedy, who was praised alongside his late brother, while Lyndon Johnson and virtually the entire rest of the American establishment was vilified. The book likened the Kennedy brothers to the Roman Grachii and their fight against corruption in the Roman Republic. But when Bobby Kennedy was himself gunned down that year, the promotion of Farewell America was abandoned, and the English language version of the book was left to rot in a Canadian warehouse for decades. It is now a collector’s item, known for it’s notoriously poor binding, which splits apart as soon as one opens the book.

Of course, history doesn’t repeat so much as it rhymes, as Mark Twain supposedly observed. This time, it’s not the right-wing America First Deep State fighting the liberal President, but rather the globalist “progressive” Deep State fighting the right-wing America First President. But in both cases, the President’s desire to have peace with Russia is at the heart of the conflict.

To his supporters, Trump is a champion of the people, a Caesar fighting against a corrupt elite, and against the enemies of the Republic both at home and abroad. To his detractors, Trump is a fraud, a billionaire who only feigns allegiance to the working class, and who like Caesar has dictatorial ambitions. That such disparate views of the same man can co-exist within the populace is partly testament to the deep division within American society, and partly to the effect of a multiplicity of media, such that different ideologies can stay locked inside their echo chambers, never having any real contact outside of them.

Then again, even JFK, that relic of a simpler, greater time that Trump harks back to, has his different versions. To some, like Oliver Stone and Jim Douglass, he is a hero and a martyr for peace, murdered by the Deep State because he dared to stand up to them. To others, like Noam Chomsky, he was a warmonger and a mediocre President, as subservient to power and money as any other, who was lucky to be struck down by an assassin’s bullets before he could be struck down by scandal.

Trump’s recent clash with the CIA certainly brings to mind JFK’s confrontation with them after the Bay of Pigs. After privately accusing the CIA of lying to him and giving him false information, he fired Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Directors Charles Cabell and Richard Bissell. He said that he would like to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds.”

Trump almost certainly understands how his predecessor felt. In addition to the leaks of the Flynn communications, recent reports indicate that the agency is deliberately withholding information from him. In a visit to CIA headquarters in January, Trump said to the employees gathered there that maybe he would build them a new room, built “by someone who knows how to build. And we won’t have columns – do you understand that?” Though this was unsurprisingly ignored by the media, his meaning was clear to anyone who knows what a “fifth column” is.

https://youtu.be/8Af9FNFxhKw

It’s tough talk, but it remains to be seen what will come of it.

• • •

Addendum: One thing that hopefully will come of it is that President Trump will oversee the release of the last remaining secret government documents that pertain to the Kennedy assassination, which are scheduled to be released in October of this year – except in the event of a petition from the CIA to keep them secret, which is what everyone is expecting to happen. The classified documents consist of “1,100 files concerning the likes of CIA officials Bill Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Phillips, David Morales, Ann Goodpasture, and George Joannides, as well as the surveillance operations that picked up on Lee Harvey Oswald as he made his way from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas.”

Explaining who these individuals are and why these files are important to history would require, at minimum, a separate and very long article. But what virtually everyone agrees on at this point, even those who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin, is that the CIA and the federal government engaged in a massive cover-up after the event, and the murder was never properly investigated. Explanations as to why this happened vary, with some believing that the feds were merely trying to cover their asses and avoid exposure of some of their more unseemly activities, like wiretapping Kennedy’s mistresses, or partnering with the mafia and trying to kill Fidel Castro. Others, however, believe that the CIA in particular has long been hiding something more sinister. Their collective behavior in stonewalling and deceiving the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s certainly invites such a conclusion.

But regardless of what’s in those files, and regardless of who really killed JFK, Trump should make the CIA release those records. At this point, isn’t the mere fact that the agency doesn’t want to do it a good enough reason for the President to somehow force their hand?

However, it should go without saying that there will be no smoking gun, no master key that unlocks the great unknown. One of the problems inherent in the study of the JFK assassination is that looking into it opens a Pandora’s box of historical mysteries and uncertainties, all interconnected in shadowy, intriguing ways, which nonetheless never offer of themselves a definitive understanding. This lure of an ever-elusive truth, like a mirage receding into the distance, has been the death of more than one journalistic career, such that writers now are cautioned away from the case as if it were hard drugs, or the abyss that Nietzsche warned of – when you peer into it, the Deep State looks back at you.