Democratic State vs. Deep State: Part I

Approaching the Dual State of the West

The terrorist bombing of the Bologna Railway station in Italy on 2 November 1980 killed 85 people and more than 200 were wounded.

[A similar version of this article was published as Chapter 2 in Eric Wilson’s book Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty (London: Pluto Press, 2009). That chapter has 82 endnotes with references that are difficult to include in this article because these references are from before the age of internet. This article has also been discussed on the American Exception podcast with Aaron Good].

In a 1955 study of the United States State Department, Hans Morgenthau discussed the existence of a US ‘dual state’. According to Morgenthau, the US state includes both a ‘regular state hierarchy’ that acts according to the rule of law and a more or less hidden ‘security hierarchy’— which I will refer to here as the ‘security state’ (also known in some countries as the ‘deep state’) — that not only acts in parallel to the former but also monitors and exerts control over it. In Morgenthau’s view, this security aspect of the state — the ‘security state’— is able to ‘exert an effective veto over the decisions’ of the regular state governed by the rule of law. Indeed, the ‘democratic state’ and the more autocratic ‘security state’ always ‘march side by side’. While the ‘democratic state’ offers legitimacy to security politics, the ‘security state’ intervenes where necessary, by limiting the range of democratic politics. While the ‘democratic state’ deals with political alternatives, the ‘security state’ enters the scene when ‘no alternative exists’, when particular activities are ‘securitised’ — in the event of an ‘emergency’. In fact, the security state is the very apparatus that defines when and whether a ‘state of emergency’ will emerge. This aspect of the state is what Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, referred to as the ‘sovereign’.

Logically speaking, one might argue that Morgenthau’s ‘dual state’ is derived from the same duality as that described in Ernst Fraenkel’s conception of the ‘dual state’, which Fraenkel described as typifying the Nazi regime of Hitler’s Germany. In the Nazi case, though, this duality was overt, combining the ‘regular’ legal state with a parallel ‘prerogative state’, an autocratic paramilitary emergency state or Machtstaat that operated outside or ‘above’ the legal system, with its philosophical foundation in the Schmittian ‘sovereign’. Fraenkel refers to Emil Lederer, who argues that this Machtstaat (‘power state’, as distinct from the Rechtstaat) has its historical origins in the European aristocratic elite, which still played an important role within European society after the triumph of democracy. This elite acted behind the scene in the 1920s, but considered it necessary to intervene in support of the Nazi Party in the 1930s to prevent a possible socialist takeover. However, this autocratic Machtstaat — the Nazi SS-state—was arbitrary, because of its individualised command.

In his analysis, Morgenthau draws a parallel between Nazi Germany and the US dual state. Indeed, in his view, the autocratic ‘security state’ may be less visible and less arbitrary in democratic societies such as the US, but it is no less important. Morgenthau argues that

the power of making decisions remains with the authorities charged by law with making them, while, as a matter of fact, by virtue of their power over life and death, the agents of the secret police… [and what I would call the security state: author] at the very least exert an effective veto over [these] decisions.

 Below, I will demonstrate that the activity of the ‘security state’—or the ‘deep state’— concerns not just the vetoing of democratic decisions, but also the ‘fine tuning of democracy,’ for example through the ‘fostering’ of war or terrorism to create fear and increase public demands for protection. The ‘security state’ is able to calibrate or manipulate the policies of the ‘democratic state’ through the use of a totally different logic of politics—a kind of politics that in this book is referred to as ‘parapolitics’ and which operates outside the law to define the limits of the legal discourse. The argument presented here is not meant as a normative statement, but rather as an attempt to describe and analyse the Western state as it actually operates, both inside and outside the law.

This argumentation has already appeared in Italy both in the parliamentary report on terrorism and among scholars. Franco de Felice re-introduced the concept of dual state in Italy in his ‘Doppia lealta e doppio stato’ (1989). He argues that that the dual state is born from an incapacity of the regular state to reconcile domestic policies with foreign policies. But if the Italian dual state, logically speaking, originates from the attempt to bridge between domestic and foreign policy, it originates, historically speaking, from Italy’s post-war ‘historical compromise’ between the emerging democratic forces of the allies and the remaining forces of fascist Italy. At the very end of the Second World War, US intelligence (with later CIA Chief for Counter-Intelligence James Jesus Angleton and his Italian contact, Federico Umberto D’Amato, head of Italian secret service up to the 1980s) recruited large numbers of officials and soldiers from the fascist Republic of Salò and from its Special Forces, Decima MAS, for the new Italian state. This recruitment program included figures like Prince Junio Valerio Borhese, Pino Rauti and Licio Gelli, who are believed to have played a major role in the terrorism and ‘coup attempts’ in Cold War Italy (see below). In the 1960s to the 1980s, these more or less aristocratic fascists came to operate within an extra-legal shadow government or invisible government in liaison with US intelligence and in parallel to the regular democratic state. Paolo Cucchiarelli and Aldo Giannulli have written in their Lo Stato Parallelo (1997) about the dual state or ‘parallel state’ as a state that operates both inside and outside the law; and Rosella Dossi has written about the dual state in Italy’s Invisible Government (2001). Similar to de Felice these Italian scholars refer back to Ernst Fraenkel, not to Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau’s analysis is very useful, however, because it is able to combine the concept of democracy with an autocratic Machtstaat or ‘shadow government’, thus putting a finger on an aspect of the state that is often neglected in political science.

Morgenthau was a traditional ‘realist’, who inherited important ideas from Carl Schmitt and was able to flesh out Schmitt’s rather abstract analysis of the sovereign. My ambition in this chapter is to continue along that path, to give yet more substance to this line of thinking and, at the same time, make it accessible to a wider audience.

Carl Schmitt, Ernst Fraenkel and Hans Morgenthau (the father of the “Realist School in International Relations Theory) Photo: Wikipedia.

THE SOVEREIGN AS THE ‘DEEP STATE’

Let us approach the idea of the ‘sovereign’ as the security side of the state—what some would call the ‘deep state’—by looking at a few examples.

Recent trials and parliamentary inquires in Italy have established that bombing campaigns in the late 1960s and 1970s in that country—and probably elsewhere in Europe—were run not by various anarchist or other left-wing groups, as had been generally believed at the time, but were instead carried out by action squads known as Nuclei di Difesa della Stato (Nuclei for Defence of the State, or NDS) in accordance with a political strategy known as the ‘Strategy of Tension’. Already in 1964, Angleton’s close colleague, William Harvey, then CIA station chief in Rome, had recommended Colonel Renzo Rocca, Chief of Italian Military Intelligence Division R (Gladio: The Italian Stay- Behinds), to use his ‘action squads’ to ‘carry out bombings against Christian Democratic Party offices’ in order to implicate the Italian Communist Party (PCI). These ‘gladiators’ had been ‘recruited from Republic of Salò and from the Italian former naval Special Forces Decima MAS and other militant Fascist organizations.’ From 1966, US and Italian intelligence started to recruit action squads for a ‘parallel Gladio’, or NDS, from Pino Rauti’s fascist organisation Ordine Nuovo. Subsequently, while masquerading as leftwingers, anarchists and Maoists, Italian NDS squads from Ordine Nuovo, in collaboration with the fascist Avanguardia Nazionale and their successor organisations, carried out a bombing campaign that resulted in the deaths of more than hundred people, in direct collaboration with the CIA and ‘US factions’ of the Italian intelligence and security services.

Later, Carlo Digilio, who had worked with the CIA in Italy, would recount in court hearings how he had collaborated with activists from Ordine Nuovo and how the bombing campaign had been linked to a US plan to introduce a state of emergency in Italy in order to exclude the political left from government. The same view was presented by Italian Chief of Counter-Intelligence, General Gianadelio Maletti, who confirmed in court that US intelligence had provided Ordine Nuovo with explosives for the first major Italian bomb attack (Milan in 1969). Digilio also described how he passed on details of planned bomb attacks to his CIA contact, Captain David Carrett, who had also told him that the bombing campaign was part of a US plan to establish a state of emergency in order to control Italian domestic politics.

In 1974, however, after several years of bombings in Italy, a number of activists from Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale were forced to flee the country. This led to a pause in their bombing campaign, with no major operations being carried out until 1980, when a bomb at Bologna’s railway station left 85 dead and more than 200 wounded. However, also in early 1970s, as General Maletti and others have confirmed, Italian and US intelligence and secret service agents were able to assume vital positions at the highest levels of Italy’s Red Brigades. In 1974, the left-wing leadership of the Red Brigades had been arrested, facilitating the ‘takeover’ of the organisation by the US and Italian services. This resulted in the launch of a range of professional military operations, a period of ‘blind terror’ and a radical increase in the number of attacks being carried out within Italy.

It thus seems that the Italian ‘deep state’ switched to using the Red Brigades as its major extra-legal instrument following the flight of right-wing activists in 1974.

After the murder of Aldo Moro in 1978, his wife recounted how a senior US official had threatened to use ‘groups on the fringes’ of the official services to kill her husband ‘if he did not abandon his policy’ of a ‘historical compromise’ with the left. Notably, the ‘Red Brigade’ kidnapping of Moro in March 1978 took place on the very day on which his ‘compromise’ was to go to the vote in the Italian parliament. Later, it was discovered that an apartment and printing press used by the ‘Red Brigades’ at this time belonged to SISMI, Italy’s military intelligence.

It is now indisputable that the use of terrorism was an element of US policy with respect to Italy. US policy was not just to infiltrate and monitor extremist groups, but also ‘to instigate acts of violence’, to quote Italian Chief of Counter-Intelligence General Gianadelio Maletti. A similar strategy, Maletti believed, was also carried out in other European countries. Thus, although a bomb attack in 1972 was first blamed on the Red Brigades, it later transpired that the attack had been carried out by Ordine Nuovo’s Vinunzo Vinciguerra. While Vinciguerra described himself in court as genuinely fascist, he argued that Ordine Nuovo no longer was: it had been turned into a covert military arm of the ‘state’. Here, in using the term ‘state’, Vinciguerra is speaking of the ‘security state’—the ‘deep state’ or parallel state that is prepared to use extra-legal violence to force the general population to trade democratic freedoms for security and protection, establishing a political order that limits the range of democratic discourse and the rule of law.

Similarly, in Turkey, terrorists detonating bombs were exposed as agents of gendarmerie intelligence. Former Turkish Prime Minister and President Suleyman Demirel argued in 2005, ‘In our country there are two [states]: There is one deep state and one other state [the legal state].’ This ‘deep state’ allegedly detonates bombs under cover of being terrorists to justify emergency measures. ‘The state that should be the real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one’, Demirel added. In January 2007, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan confirmed that there is a ‘deep state’, and ‘it should be minimized’. He added that this structure exists in all countries. ‘We can describe it as gangs inside a state organization, and this kind of structure does exist,’ he said. David Philips wrote for the Council of Foreign Relations: ‘The deep state – a shadowy network involving the military and intelligence apparatus as well as the state bureaucracy -- is the ultimate arbiter of power.’ As stated by Cucchiarelli and Giannulli, in Italy this ‘deep state’ or clandestine ‘parallel state’ makes an illegitimate use of power not to subvert, but rather to preserve, the current system of power. The terrorist acts were explicitly carried out in defence of the state by the so-called Nuclei di Difesa della Stato.

In the final analysis, it is the deep state that is the state structure that decides when and when not to use illegal measures to keep order. In Schmitt’s words, it is this ‘state’ that is the actual ‘sovereign’, the entity that is able to establish order and the rule of law through operations outside the law: ‘The sovereign is he who decides on the exception… For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.’

Otto Skorzeny as SS officer, Guido Giannettini, and Yves Guerin Serac (Photo: Wikipedia).

THE HISTORICAL ORIGIN OF EUROPEAN TERRORISM

In his Theory of the Partisan (1963), Schmitt describes the irregular fighter or anti-state insurgent as a ‘partisan’, and in the battle between the state and insurgents, he argues, the state will ‘fight like a partisan wherever there are partisans.’ Schmitt continues, ‘In the vicious circle of terror and counter-terror, the combat of the partisan is often simply a mirror-image of the partisan battle itself … you have to fight like a partisan wherever there are partisans.’ Schmitt refers to the example of French General Raoul Salan, head of the Organisation d’Armée Secrète (OAS) that from 1961 carried out a campaign of mass terror against the insurgency in Algeria. Salan introduced the ideas of ‘revolutionary war’ to fight the insurgency using its own methods. Already from late 1950s, French settlers and the French Secret Service set up an organisation, the Red Hand, for the assassination of nationalist Algerians trying to buy small arms abroad. The Red Hand poisoned their targets or let Algerians carry out the killings to indicate an internal Algerian feud, but from early 1960s the OAS also attacked French citizens, in order to lay the blame for such attacks on the Arab insurgency. In Italy from the mid-1960s, the ‘sovereign’ employed similar terror tactics against the Italian population, laying the blame on the left and the increasingly democratic PCI.

The general ideas for the bombing campaign in Italy, the Strategy of Tension and the concept of ‘revolutionary war’ were presented at a seminar in May 1965—financed by Colonel Rocca’s Gladio division of Italian military intelligence—at the Alberto Polio Institute for Military Studies in Rome. Among the participants at that seminar were top-ranking Italian military officers and politicians linked to NATO and the USA. A central figure was General Adriano Guilio Cesare Magi Braschi, Chief of Division for Unconventional Warfare of the Italian Military Intelligence. He had been close to the OAS and had, according to the court case in Milano 2001, played an important role for the initiation of the Nuclei di Difesa della Stato. Among the speakers presenting the concepts of the Strategy of Tension and ‘revolutionary war’ were two ‘journalists’: Pino Rauti, leader of Ordine Nuovo, and Guido Giannettini, a fascist intelligence operative and liaison to the OAS. Both Rauti and Giannettini were writing a strategy booklet for the Chief of Staff General Giuseppe Aloja and both were central figures in Ordine Nuovo that subsequently carried out the bombing campaign of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1965—66, the international fascist intelligence network Aginter Press was established to implement the Strategy of Tension, with support from the Portuguese security service PIDE and the CIA. This network included a unit specialising in the infiltration of anarchist and pro-Chinese groups, and its ‘correspondents’ would use such organisations as a cover for carrying out bombings and other violent attacks. Aginter Press also included a strategic centre for subversion and intoxication operations, along with an executive action organisation OACI that carried out assassinations (perhaps the same ‘pool of assassins’ that William Harvey, CIA Station Chief in Italy, had recruited in Europe for the CIA’s ‘Executive Action Capability’). All of these divisions of Aginter Press were under the leadership of French OAS officer and former US liaison officer Captain Yves Guillou (alias Yves Guerin Serac), in collaboration with the American intelligence operative Jay Sablonsky (alias Jay Salby) and the French former SS officer Robert Leroy, who had served as an instructor during the war for the Nazi Special Forces commanded by Otto Skorzeny.

Their network brought together Nazi and fascist activists from intelligence services and security services all over Europe (West Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece) and Latin America, South Africa and the US. Italian ‘correspondents’ for Aginter Press included the co-founder Stefano delle Chiaie (leader of Avanguardia Nazionale), Pino Rauti and Guido Giannettini, who collaborated with French OAS leader Pierre Lagaillarde (also involved in the assassination attempt on the French President, Charles de Gaulle). Some of these, such as delle Chiaie and Rauti, were also linked to the US-dominated World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Magi Braschi was later Italian representative of WACL. An Aginter Press document from 1969 (found in Lisbon in 1974) paints a picture identical to that presented by Giannettini earlier in 1965, with proposals for ‘selective terrorism […] eliminating certain carefully selected persons’ (including assassination of political leaders) and ‘indiscriminate terrorism’, including ‘randomly shooting down people with firearms’ and the use of bombs in public squares or buildings, in accordance with the Strategy of Tension bombing campaign. Judge Guido Salvini told the senators investigating the bombing campaign that instructors from Aginter Press ‘came to Rome between 1967 and 1968 and instructed the militant members of Avanguardia Nazionale in the use of explosives’. The intention with the bombings was to create a climate of chaos to dramatise political life in order to ‘securitize’ issues previously open to public debate, thus limiting the range of the democratic discourse. Another Aginter Press document (from 1968) states: “In our opinion the first action that we should undertake is the destruction of institutions of the state under the cover of Communist and Maoist actions … This will create a feeling of hostility towards those that threaten the peace […] Maoist circles characterized by their own impatience and zeal, are [especially] suitable for infiltration. “The document also states that ‘we already have elements infiltrated into all these [Communist and Maoist] groups’.

From late 1960s, fascist activists in Italy started to dress as left-wingers. They masqueraded as Maoists and anarchists while conducting ‘false flag’ terrorist operations, particularly a bombing campaign, in collaboration with US intelligence in order to manipulate public opinion and limit the range of the democratic discourse. In the early and mid-1980s, attacks similar to those that had taken place in Italy were also conducted in Belgium, including the random shooting of 28 people in supermarkets outside Brussels in 1983–85. A ‘left-wing’ terrorist group known as the Cellules Communistes Combattantes (CCC) was accused of having carried out these operations. Later, however, it transpired that the attacks had been conducted by fascist and Nazi groups, with US support. Like Aginter Press before it, the neo-Nazi organisation Westland New Post operating in Belgium contained both an intelligence division and a special operations division. It was run by Belgian agent Paul Latinus in collaboration with US intelligence and the WACL. Around the same time, US Army special forces began a programme of targeting Western/NATO installations in Belgium, while disguising themselves as terrorists. Indeed, the CCC may have simply been a cover for this form of ‘deep state’ extra-legal activity. Notably, the CCC was supported by prominent Belgian neo-fascist Jean-Francois Thiriart, who had founded a ‘Belgium OAS’, had close ties to the French OAS and had initiated the European-wide fascist organisation Jeune Europe, a forerunner of Aginter Press.