Deep Politics: Some Further Thoughts
by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.
PREFACE
The reactions to Deep Politics since its publication in 1993 have been
predictably mixed. Most heartening to me is the unsolicited response of a
prominent Canadian social scientist, David MacGregor, who intends to write a
deep political analysis of Marx and Hegel. I myself have contemplated a series
of deep political historical studies; I have long wished, for example, to
consider the powerful message of Augustine's Confessions in the light of those
close to him who worried for the survival of Roman society under a declining
state. Some of these (Ponticianus, Evodius) were or had been agentes in rebus --
members of the secret police which had effectively supplanted Rome's surface
institutions, much like the KBG in Russia, and other such institutions in other
contemporary nations.
The key to understanding this book is the distinction I propose between
traditional conspiracy theory, looking at conscious secret collaborations toward
shared ends, and deep political analysis, defined on page 7 as the study of
"all those political practices and arrange- ments, deliberate or not, which
are usually repressed rather than acknowledged." The essence of the first
is a single objective and/or control point; the second in contrast is an open
system with divergent power centers and goals.
The line between the two is not always easy to draw. On pp. 7-8 I distinguished
between the deep politics of New York City in the Tammany era, a working system
for dividing the spoils of corruption in an ethnically divided city, and the the
conscious or parapolitical stratagem by which the U.S. occupying forces, using
Tammany politicians, imported U.S. mafia figures to oppose left-wing Italian and
Sicilian movements. But of course by the 1980s this post-war stratagem had
helped spawn a deep political system of corruption exceeding Tammany's and (as
we know from the Andreotti trial of 1995), beyond anyone's ability to call it
off.
Having reflected on the deep politics of other countries besides America, I
would propose a second and more capacious definition from a different
perspective. A deep political system or process is one which resorts to
decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those
sanctioned by law and society. What makes these supplementary procedures
"deep" is the fact that they are covert or suppressed, outside public
awareness as well as outside sanctioned political processes.
We see deep politics in imperial and post-imperial systems which are accustomed
to use criminal assets to intervene lawlessly in other societies. But it is also
a feature of large scale political systems which include within them ethnic
communities or regions (Sicily, Corsica, the various ghettos of New York or
Miami) where the law of the outside majority is challenged by, and ultimately
reaches an accommodation with, locally based gangs, triads, or mafias.1
"Deep political analysis
focuses on the usually
ignored mechanics of
accommodation."
Deep political analysis focuses on the usually ignored mechanics of
accommodation. From the viewpoint of conventional political science, law
enforcement and the underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling
to gain control of the latter. A deep political analysis notes that in practice
these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this
practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double
agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of
informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic
corruption. The phenomenon of "organized crime" arises: entire
criminal structures that come to be tolerated by the police because of their
usefulness in informing on lesser criminals. In time one may arrive at the kind
of police-crime symbiosis familiar from Chicago, where the controlling hand may
be more with the mob than with the police it has now corrupted.
It is of course no accident that such dirty realities are not usually talked
about in classrooms. But the mechanics of accommodation are important, perhaps
even more so in the area of political security, where security informants are
first recruited, and eventually promoted to be double agents. The experience of
the FBI and the Communist Party teaches us that such double agents tend to
become increasingly important in the hierarchies of both the investigative
agency and the party investigated. In the Vietnam anti-war movement, double
agents were likely to become provocateurs, whether or not this was part of their
official assignment. The greater the successful provocation, the more important
the double agent to the agency to whom he reports. Truly successful double
agents acquire their own agendas, distinguishable from those of their agency and
possibly their party as well.
(This is a far from theoretical matter in this decade of high-tech terrorism.
Time after time, from the fiascos of Oliver North's Middle Eastern ventures to
the bombings of Pan Am 103 and the World Trade Center, we have seen how the
tolerated crimes of double agents have proved disastrous to those who think they
control them. I offer this as a timely argument against the proposed
Anti-Terrorism Bill. By radically increasing the number of political informants
and double agents in resentful and potentially violent groups, passage of this
Bill would almost certainly aggravate the problem of double-agent terrorism.)
Speaking metaphorically, and a little over my head, I would suggest that deep
political analysis enlarges traditional structuralist analysis to include
indeterminacies analagous to those which are studied in chaos theory. A deep
political system is one where the processes openly acknowledged are not always
securely in control, precisely because of their accommodation to unsanctioned
sources of violence, through arrangements not openly acknowledged and reviewed.
One cannot write of deep politics without discussing the resistance to it:
resistance both to the general notion and to the topics where it is relevant,
such as the Kennedy assassination. Just as in an earlier era people derived
psychological comfort from the idea that the forces of our environment were
controlled by benign or appeasible deities, so today we would like to think that
the violence of the world we live in is subject to sovereign powers and laws.
In deep political analysis the nineteenth-century concept of centralized
sovereignty is deconstructed to the point where in places it seems like little
more than a comforting myth. A relevant example would be the city of Chicago.
Years ago the late A.J. Liebling observed in the New Yorker how difficult it was
to separate the power of the mob from the power of City Hall, and asked whether
the powers of both were not a front for those private corporations who preferred
endemic corruption to the enforcement of laws against themselves.2 Today, in an
age of secret public powers dating back to World War II, the critical gaze of
the New Yorker has been deflected from our society and its institutions, to heap
scorn instead on the "fusion paranoia" of society's critics.
Deep Politics in the U.S.A. : the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate
And yet in this country there is now a JFK/ Deep Politics Quarterly , and even a
Deep Politics Bookstore on the Internet. More than a million pages of new
documents have been declassfied and released since Congress passed the JFK
Records Act. We now have both the Lopez Report (see pp. 43-44 of my book) and
even the document President Nixon was once denied, the CIA's IG Report of 1967
(see pp. 114, 116) on CIA-Mafia plots.3 Though I had some of the details wrong,
the two reports confirm, and indeed enlarge, the picture I presented of CIA
duplicities about Oswald in Mexico, and how CIA plots, if successful, would have
guaranteed the mob a role in post-Castro Cuba.4
We now have far more documents than those seen by the authors of these two
reports, together with the fruits of other researchers. So far all of my major
hypotheses have been not only corroborated, but strengthened. For example:
The complexities presented by the new evidence confirm, above all, the need for
deep political analysis, as opposed to conventional "conspiratorial"
analysis. The Lopez report, valuable as it is, can be faulted (e.g. p. 188) for
treating the Mexican security police (DFS) as a mere catspaw of the CIA. It is
now clear that the DFS was both used and suspected by the Mexico City CIA
station. In other words, a hidden alliance for the sake of control, which on the
DFS side came to include elements from the international narcotics traffic (pp.
104-105, 142), became in the process uncontrollable...much as happened in the
end to the U.S.--mob alliance in Italy (pp. 7-8).
"We now have the CIA's first post-
Watergate memo on Howard
Hunt, showing that in 1970, he had
not retired from the CIA,..."
The new releases have corroborated the claims in this book with respect to
Watergate, as well as 1963. For example, we now have the CIA's first
post-Watergate memo on Howard Hunt, showing that in 1970 he had not retired from
the CIA, but instead had been released on covert assignment to the Mullen
Agency, where he began to inflict such damage on the Nixon Administration. This
gives the lie to all those yea-saying Watergate historians, from Stephen Ambrose
to Stanley Kutler, who ridicule the idea of CIA involvement in Watergate, and
accept the CIA's word that Hunt was a "retired" CIA employee.5 It also
begins to corroborate my suggestion (pp. 304-306) that Nixons's loss of power
began after he had begun to challenge the same deep power centers in this
country as John F. Kennedy.
We also learn from the 1963 documents in the CIA file of Watergate burglar
Bernard Barker (released as part of the CIA's JFK collection) that three of the
future Watergate burglars (Barker, Frank Sturgis and Reinaldo Pico) were
apparently all implicated in the CIA's information-gathering on Cuban exile
Paulino Sierra, and thus (to my surprise) in what my book calls "a
high-level disinformation campaign...to embarrass...Bobby Kennedy" (pp.
89-90). I have not yet found documentary corroboration for the rumor that Hunt
and McCord, the masterminds of the Watergate burglary "had
collaborated...in 1963" (p. 306). But we do have a new document indicating
that a CIA counterintelligence and propaganda operation against the Fair Play
for Cuba Committee was in the hands of two men: McCord and Hunt's propaganda
disciple, David Atlee Phillips.6
It seems more and more likely that Oswald's visit to Mexico in 1963 was part of
just such a program.7 If so, this might seem to corroborate Haldeman's
controversial interpretation of his "smoking gun" Watergate
conversation with Helms, the conversation of June 23, 1972, which when released
in 1974 proved Nixon's involvement in a cover-up, and was followed four days
later by Nixon's resignation. Haldeman's speculation, endorsed recently by Mark
Riebling, was that when Nixon told Haldeman to tell Helms to have the FBI cease
investigating Mexico, because "the Bay of Pigs may be blown,"
"Nixon was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination."8
We know from a Helms memo that, despite a contrary claim by historian Stephen
Ambrose, Helms did temporarily order the suspension of the FBI's investigation
in Mexico of funds deposited into the bank account of Bernard Barker.9 The FBI
thus called off a proposed interview in Mexico city with CIA officer George
Munro.10 Why the FBI wished to interview him is far from clear. FBI Director
Gray identified Munro as the CIA Station Chief, but he was a much more minor
officer. All I know about him is that he was recently identified as the CIA
official in charge of the electronic intercept program which allegedly overheard
Lee Harvey Oswald.11
Deep Politics, the "Responsible"Media, and the Academy
In this country one must distinguish between the media, and the
"responsible" media. The latter, including the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and the major TV networks, are generally (although not always)
protective of the CIA which is one of the major sources of information. Thus R.W.
Apple of the Times presented the incorruptible Dick Helms as the hero of
Watergate, for allegedly resisting (rather than complying with) Haldeman's
efforts to have the CIA truncate the Watergate investigation. ("It would
not be easy in Washington," wrote Apple in 1973, "to find anyone who
knew Dick Helms and ever doubted his word." This was not long before Helms
was convicted and fined for misleading Congress on yet another matter.)12
One way to distinguish between media and "responsible" media is in
their reception of my book "Deep Politics." The San Francisco
Chronicle called it "the most challenging book of the year"; and the
Toronto Star suggested it "may well be the most thoughtful and
serious-minded of the 2,500 titles on the subject."13 The New York Times ,
however, dismissed it in a sentence, as "stunningly opaque."14
This should surprise no one: the Times was not likely to praise an expose of its
past rewritings of history (see p. 28-30). The Times has given similar short
shrift to all serious studies of the Kennedy assassination.15 After all, the
Times had already proclaimed Oswald the "president's assassin" in a
banner headline on November 25, 1963, one day after Hoover's urgent phone call
to the White House about "having something issued so we can convince the
public that Oswald is the real assassin" (p. 36).16 The Times similarly
slanted the available evidence in its 1964 publication of the Warren Commission
Hearings.17
"In its prompt commitment to
the lone-assassin theory, the Times
was of course not alone."
In its prompt commitment to the lone-assassin theory, the Times was of course
not alone. A lead role was played by Life magazine, whose purchase and locking
up of the Zapruder film allowed the media to lie about it. After reports of an
entrance wound in the President's throat, Life itself initially wrote, on
December 6, 1963, that the "film shows the President turning his body far
around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed
to the sniper's nest just before he clutches it." (Of course the film shows
no such thing.)18 Shown the film on November 23, Dan Rather told the world that
it shows the President's head snapped "forward with considerable
violence" (rather than the exact reverse).19
One should not be too surprised at the "responsible" media's
misrepresentations of the JFK assassination; by now they are protecting not only
the government's but also their own misreporting. Thus the media's promotion of
Posner's Case Closed should also not surprise us; such anti-conspiracy books
have appeared regularly over the past thirty years, and can count on a friendly
reception in the Times.
Notes