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 acknow-ledged." 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
reprinted in JFK: the Book of the Film, 484-499; Hennelly and Policoff tell how
a Times book review by John Leonard conceded, "Something stinks about the whole
affair," and how the offending concession was promptly yanked after the early edition.
7Newman, 393-394.
18.Hennelly and Policoff, JFK: The Book of the Film, 489.
19.Hennelly and Policoff, JFK: The Book of the Film, 490. By 1967 Rather had
come up with a new explanation for the President's sudden movement: "Jackie pushed
him." (Monte Evans, The Rather Narrative, 76). On August 10, 1973, in the midst
of Watergate, Rather asked a strikingly different question: "Lee Harvey Oswald, the man
who shot President Kennedy. Did he ever know or have contact with E. Howard Hunt
or Gordon Liddy....?...Perhaps it isn't time to re-open the Kennedy assassination...in
any formal way. It may be, however, that someone, somewhere in authority is asking quietly.
Investigatively, some of the tough questions about Hunt and Liddy and their Cuban
contacts and whether they had at any time any contact with Oswald, Sirhan, Ray or
Bremer" (Evans, p. 115). Rather may have been referring to the Senate Watergate Committee's
apparent pursuit of the Roselli story of a "retaliation plot" against Kennedy. Shortly
afterwards, the Committee staff interviewed Roselli's CIA cut-out. Robert Maheu (8/30/73), Roselli's lawyer, Edward P. Morgan (9/7/73), and eventually Roselli
himself (2/20/74). Do not expect to read about these interviews in the standard
Watergate histories.Used by exclusive permission of the author. All rights reserved.
