Dismantling the Deep State

By Wayne Allensworth

I worked for 32 years in the Intelligence Community (IC). A lot of that was as a contractor, but I spent 10 years in Washington. It was an eye-opening experience. It changed my views about a lot of things, starting with the hegemonic role the United States had taken on as the world’s policeman. The Black Hawk Down debacle in Somalia was the last straw. It was time for a more modest foreign policy. 

The Cold War had effectively ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet American foreign policy carried on as if nothing had changed. After Washington decided that Russia was not going to join the march to the “end of history” of “liberal democracy,” the globalist establishment treated Moscow as an enemy and a target for regime change. The United States had become an ideological power bent on a global crusade to transform the whole world, whether the world wanted it or not. Like all quasi-religious political ideologies, globalism was an absolute system — even “totalitarian” in that sense — demanding that all be under its sway. I’ve written elsewhere how the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War had prompted hopes, at least for me and a few other colleagues, that America would cash in on the “peace dividend” that seemed so readily available to us. I had grown to understand that the real enemy was within, even during the Cold War. It was time to care for our own pressing problems — social, economic, demographic, and, most importantly, spiritual. Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were harbingers of the populist revolt that followed years later.

At the time, I noted some strange anomalies — or at least they seemed like anomalies to someone who thought that the Cold War was over. For one thing, the intelligence effort directed at Russia was not curtailed. At first, that seemed understandable. In the 1990s, Russia was in disarray. The country was chaotic, and the West rightly worried about the security of Russia’s nuclear weapons. But the sense that Russia was a target of sorts never really left us — and there was the whiff of globalist triumphalism in the air. I wrote my book The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia in the mid-late 1990s while still working in Washington, D.C., and I learned to sympathize with those Russians who did not wish to be swallowed whole by the globalist Blob. Meanwhile, the CIA compound in McLean, Virginia, kept expanding. A new headquarters building was added. It was apparent that the Deep State had no intention of shrinking. After I became a contractor and left Washington, periodic visits there became increasingly awkward and alienating. The city and its surroundings seemed less and less American, as a mass of Third Worlders swamped the place. When I visited buildings in Washington, D.C., that were part of the Deep State-Foreign Policy complex, I noticed all the sloganeering about globalist goals. There was nothing about what I would define as discrete American interests.

The Russiagate-“Crossfire Hurricane” machinations following Trump’s election in 2016 were a regime-change operation directed at a sitting president. The mobs of 2020’s George Floyd Summer were a stab at a “color revolution” on American soil. That they were intimately connected with the Democratic Party and its globalist fellow travelers in the GOP was evident for anyone with eyes to see, but the methodology and instruments used by the plotters were those of the Deep State — the state-within-a state that had its own priorities. Peace was not among them. The FBI and CIA played key roles. We now know that Deep State institutions like the USAID, the State Department, and so-called “non-governmental organizations” were tentacles in a vast complex that was also tied directly to the interests in the Military-Industrial Complex that profited from conflict.

Which brings us to the present day and the Trump Administration’s efforts to tame the unelected bureaucracy in Washington. That will inevitably include restructuring intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies that have played a key role in the Blob’s machinations. President Donald Trump tasked FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard with cleaning house at the FBI and in the IC. Judging from what the recently released, unredacted, JFK files tell us about CIA skullduggery, plotting, and efforts to cover up its activities, they will serve as another nail in the coffin of the Deep State. At least, I hope so.

One of the revelations of the JFK files is an unredacted memo written by Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger on the need to reign in the CIA, which, after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Schlesinger deemed out of control. Kennedy — who authorized that operation against his advisers’ counsel and stood behind CIA efforts to assassinate communist leader Fidel Castro — was disillusioned and had fired CIA Director Allen Dulles. In a memo, Schlesinger advised transferring some of the CIA’s functions to the State Department, which he also advocated overhauling. A considerable body of evidence suggests that JFK intended to reorganize the IC. The memo will likely only fuel more theories about who was behind JFK’s assassination. Point is, if America, and not the interests of the globalist Blob, is truly to be First, we must dismantle the Deep State.

Indeed, more than 60 years have passed since JFK’s murder, 60 years during which the Deep State, born in World War II, and flourishing during the Cold War, expanded and tightened its grip on power. It’s well past time to reform the entire intelligence and law enforcement apparatus at the federal level. Cleaning house at the CIA and FBI and ending Cultural Marxist indoctrination — “diversity, equity, inclusion” — and globalist ideology, should only begin the process. If America First means anything, it must include a more modest foreign policy and a deeper respect for the freedoms of Americans.

To that end, the CIA must be reorganized from the ground up and shrink to a reasonable size. The United States must exit the global “regime change” business and focus intelligence gathering and analysis on a few critical areas, beginning with Latin America. America has plenty of special operations forces in the military (and reigning in the Pentagon is a related task of its own). It doesn’t need a para-military capability within the IC. The goal for all the intelligence and law enforcement agencies would be hiving off redundant functions and reducing bureaucracy.

The size and scope of the Deep State and its globalist foreign policy make it ripe for abuse and overreach. The FBI was born as an investigative agency that pursued federal criminal cases. It chased bank robbers such as John Dillinger and Barker-Karpis Gang, or caught Soviet spies such as Rudolf Abel. It was not meant to be a domestic intelligence agency, let alone a political police force. The National Security Agency is in special need of oversight, as Edward Snowden’s revelations showed us.

Ending the Deep State is a top priority for America First. A more modest foreign policy would brake the growth of a state-within-a-sate that can defy presidents and plot the overthrow of governments, including our own. 

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.

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