The subject of this book is the “deep history” of the United States and its sphere of influence during the last fifty years. By Deep History or Deep Politics, political scientist Peter Dale Scott refers to the underlying, and often shrouded, decisions and activities that determine major historical events, especially armed conflicts. A deep history relies on declassified secret archives and the testimony of insiders and whistleblowers, rather than merely official treaties and public discourse, to explain history’s tumult. It includes, but is not limited to, the history of secret services (the Intelligence Community of the United States includes sixteen government agencies). Considering that the causes of war cited in conventional history are so often rife with false pretense, deep history is necessarily revisionist. Independent investigators conduct it more often than professional historians. It is also pacifist, since exposing the real causes of war will help prevent wars. Finally, it involves in “conspiracy theories” if by that we mean that it openly admits the role of secret pacts and hidden agendas, undercover and paramilitary operations, psychological warfare and disinformation campaigns, in the course of world politics since the beginning of the Cold War, and increasingly since September 11th. In fact, only a deep history can help explain the shift from the world of the Cold War to the world of our amorphous “War on Terror”.

 

An important part of a deep history is devoted to “false flag operations”, in which a State feigns an enemy attack to wage a war while claiming legitimate defense, presenting the country it attacks as the aggressor. Conventional history — written by the victors — readily imputes such operations to the defeated nations: we know that in 1931, when the Japanese army decided to invade Manchuria, they dynamited their own railway lines near the military base in Mukden and then accused the Chinese of the sabotage. We also know that in 1939, when Hitler needed a pretext to invade Poland, he ordered German soldiers and prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms to launch an assault on the Gleiwitz outpost. And we suspect that just prior, in 1933, he had set fire to the palace of the Reichstag to construct a “communist conspiracy” and thereby suspend civil liberties. The victorious nations, however, manage much better at burying their lies and war crimes, and it is the role of a deep history to exhume them.

 

Deep history is the story of the Deep State, meaning the power structures that act behind the scene of political spectacle to set in motion great movements of history. Although it has always existed, the deep state was strengthened in modern democracies (in a dictatorship it merges with the public state), by those who considered their interests above the people’s and took control of the electoral system without regard for its principles. Thus the deep state is hostile to the democratic institutions of the republican state. The transparency that is essential to the latter is lethal to the former. But the deep state seeks less to destroy democratic power than to confine and control it. In the United States, it has for fifty years gained almost total control of foreign policy, so much so that almost all direct or indirect actions of the United States in the international realm needed to be hidden from the general public.

 

The exceptional power of the deep state in the United States can be explained by the dual and contradictory nature of that nation, best defined by the oxymoron “imperial democracy”. Within its borders, the United States is a democracy, but outside, it behaves like an empire or colonial power. The deep state is the invisible heart of the Empire, the command and control center of imperial violence. This violence must remain hidden from the eyes and consciences of the American citizenry, who must be satisfied that the government acts only to defend the global persistence of freedom and democracy. That is why the deep state constantly needs to blow around itself and into public opinion a screen of smokes made of humanistic propaganda.

 

While it may occasionally act as an “invisible government”, the deep state is not a homogeneous and stable structure but a polymorphic and changing organism. Some clans are made and unmade with every changing alliances and betrayals. Some of these clans are united by personal ties of blood or money, to which can be added initiation type fraternities. Some are communitarian and, in more than one case, secretly loyal to a foreign government. Other clans are ideological, consumed with visions of global supremacy incompatible with classical republican patriotism and the universal values claimed essential to the public state. Finally, some major players in the deep state appear driven mainly by the thirst for personal power: psychopaths excel and thrive in the deepest workings of the State. It the task of deep history to identify, behind the propaganda, these projects and loyalties that lay below the shelter of the media’s censorship.

 

Actors within the deep state are not necessarily unknown to the public. Although often engaged in discrete or secret circles, their influence on the world is not completely hidden, and some even boast of it in their later years. The most powerful occupy senior government positions, where they are more often appointed than elected. One of the key positions in the American deep state is the National Security Adviser, because he is protected by the secrets of the institutional State. Recently, it was his/her advisers, acting even more discreetly, who pulled the strings.

 

For the elite operating at the deep level of power, the world is a battleground where all forms of war are permitted. Infomation is a weapon as important as money in the fight against political opponents, but also for the control of public opinion and the manipulation of democracy. Deep actors create history by telling “stories” to the people, interweaving fact with fiction and fantasy to maintain a continuous national narrative. The term “deep state” in the title of this book may therefore be taken in a psychological sense, to describe the hypnotic sleep into which the deep powers seduce the masses in order to govern them and, most importantly, lead them to approve war.

 

This book is divided into two parts: the first is in the context of the Cold War, the second in the context of the War on Terror. The period investigated begins just before November 22nd, 1963 and peaks September 11th, 2001: these are the two deep events we explore because they weigh most heavily on the effects and outcomes of the unfolding of American history. By “deep events" we mean events whose causality is mostly hidden and whose functioning emerges only in traces. Their true nature is often foreign or opposite to their comported meaning under media spotlight. It can take fifty years for such deep events to gain sufficient transparency to render the “official story” unsustainable, depending on the pace of declassification of archives. It is only now that the research on the Kennedy assassination is slowly emerging out of the “conspiracy theory” ghetto where it had been locked by institutional culture. The Dallas crime has now become a textbook case, and affords, to anyone willing to take the time, proof of the existence of the deep state, its vital link with war, and its ability to change history and shape public opinion. The main ambition of this book is to examine September 11th through the illuminating lens of November 22nd, highlight their structural similarities, examine how one made the other possible thirty-eight years later, and follow the underlying thread leading from the one to the other, in the hopes to anticipate and circumvent future atrocities.

 

The links between the two cases are structural but also personal. They involve, among others, George H. W. Bush, who was secretly in the CIA and in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, long before he became CIA director — then Vice-President, then President, and finally a President’s father. Those who still fight tooth and nail to defend the government’s thesis on Kennedy’s death are the same as those who seek to prevent the emergence of the truth about September 11th. Conversely, denouncing the internal plot of September 11th without elucidating the Kennedy assassination is a bit like telling the story of Noah’s Flood without mentioning Adam’s Fall.

 

I gave myself the goal of brevity; I wanted to present the basic facts and get to the point, so as to make a clear case and give the non-specialist reader the best opportunity to understand what was, and is, a very long and complex history. This book is intended, therefore, not to demonstrate a thesis by accumulation of arguments, but rather coherently assemble the most meaningful facts, those who give sufficient keys to this deep history; the intention was to paint the big picture from carefully selected elements. Renouncing that which was too obscure or difficult to substantiate, I focus on the surest and most critical episodes, that is to say the minimum to understand the genesis and nature of the world in which we live. I am also trying to logically connect the dots, so to speak, as any work of history must. In the interests of brevity, some details are shown in illustrated boxes, which will also provide image-based evidence, revealing quotes and insights into some personalities whose faces and names deserve a place in the collective memory — deep history has its own heroes, martyrs, and villains, some of whom are not mentioned in textbooks.

 

The rules I have tried to stick to are accuracy and precision. The bulk of the book consists of established facts, and the few assumptions or interpretations put forward will be clearly stated as such. Any unfounded rumor was excluded. Most of the data included in this book is well known to rigorous researchers. In order to help the reader to check any statement and further information by a search engine, I always provided the dates, proper names and other useful keywords. What applies to events also applies to citations, which are chosen for their informative content; if it be reported speech, the source is indicated. I have tried to give the floor to the protagonists, avoiding the trial of intent. The essential bibliography, from which most of this narrative is reconstructed, is given at the end of work, and information from other sources is referenced throughout the text.