Democratic State vs. Deep State: Part II

Approaching the Dual State of the West

Admiral Gino Birindelli, General Giovanni de Lorenzo and the leader of the fascist party MSI Giorgio Almirante in 1972. Former commander of fascist Naval Special Forces Decima MAS, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese at the coup attempt in 1970 (Photo: Wikipedia).

THE SOVEREIGN DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE

Drawing on these two examples of Italy and Belgium, we see that Western European states have seemingly been characterised by the existence of a regular ‘democratic state’, on the one hand, and a ‘security state’—what Vinciguerra simply calls the ‘state’, a US-linked security structure—on the other. This is what the Italian Parliamentary Commission on terrorism and massacres from 1995 meant by ‘il Doppio Stato’ or ‘the dual state’.

As mentioned, de Felice argues that this dual state is born from the incapacity of the regular democratic state to reconcile domestic politics with foreign policies, primarily its responsibility to the USA and NATO. As Vinciguerra argues, the extra-legal violence did not originate from the ‘terrorist groups’, ‘but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance... The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency.’ Within such a context, NATO is not just something in between an alliance of sovereign nation-states and a super-state in its own right, but also something of both—with the US ‘supranational political-military authority’ unifying the policies of the individual states. For example, in Italy in the 1960s and the 1970s, two chiefs of military intelligence (SIFAR and later SID)—General Giovanni de Lorenzo and General Vito Miceli—led military ‘coup attempts’ while they were liaison officers to the USA. Both of these men had been appointed on the recommendation of the US ambassador and both later became members of parliament for the Italian fascist party, MSI. When Licio Gelli—a former fascist intelligence officer, US liaison officer and head of the Italian quasi-masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2) —was interviewed about the Strategy of Tension, he suggested that ‘dictatorship and democracy always march side by side, because democracy is being undermined by dictatorship and dictatorship is being undermined by democracy,’ adding that we have not yet ‘reached an equilibrium.’ For Gelli, the activity of the Italian ‘security state’ during the Cold War was close to what the Turkish military elite would describe as the ‘deep state’ correcting the course of democracy—or the political ‘fine tuning’ of democracy.

In Italy, a number of ‘coup attempts’ took place (in 1964, 1970, 1973 and 1974), though all were called off at critical moments once the government had been reminded of the existence of the ‘state’—or rather the ‘security state’: the real ‘sovereign’. In these cases, various liaison officers, generals and fascist leaders exerted an effective veto on government policy by informing the prime minister that a coup had been set in progress, warning that he would have to suffer the consequences if he did not back down on his policy. In 1964, for example, a governmental shift to the left was interrupted by General de Lorenzo’s ‘coup’ in collaboration with Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the ‘Black Prince’ who had headed the Italian naval special forces Decima MAS during the Second World War. To achieve his aims, De Lorenzo set in motion the plan ‘Piano Solo’, which had originally been devised for counter-insurgency purposes (just as Colonel George Papadopulous, the Greek liaison officer to the USA, would similarly activate Greece’s ‘Prometheus’ plan three years later, launching a military coup in Greece to prevent NATO critic Georgios Papandreou from returning as Prime Minister.) In December 1970, another ‘coup’ was launched in Italy. Prince Borghese set in motion the counterinsurgency plan ‘Triangolo’. [His “foreign minister”, Adriano Monti, turned to CIA’s man in Madrid, former SS officer Otto Skorzeny]. This time, Borghese’s people—led by Stefano delle Chiaie —had already taken over the Ministry of Interior when the coup was aborted. Borghese’s collaborator, Gaetano Lunetta, later insisted that ‘the truth is that it was a coup and that it succeeded.’ He said that the

political result that those who organized the attack sought to attain was achieved: the deep-freezing of the [centre-left] policies of Aldo Moro, the removal of the PCI from the government arena, [and] the assurance of [Italy’s] total pro-Atlantic and pro-American loyalty.

After this followed the Rosa dei Venti ‘coup’ led by General Magi Braschi in 1973 and the so-called ‘White coup’ led by Count Edgardo Sogno in 1974. General Maletti described in court his conversation with Sogno. After Sogno had presented his case to the CIA Station Chief in Rome in July 1974, Maletti had asked Sogno if the Americans would support the coup. Sogno responded, ‘the United States would have supported any initiative tending to keep the communists out of government’. In the court case following the Rosa dei Venti ‘coup’, the coup plotters were accused of ‘having promoted, set up and organized a secret association made up of civilians and military personnel, with the purpose of provoking an armed insurrection and, as a consequence, an illegal alteration of the Constitution and of the form of government through the intervention of the armed forces.’ In October 1974, Chief of Italian Military Intelligence, General Vito Miceli was arrested accused of political conspiracy. However, in court, he argued that the secret organisation accused of overthrowing the government had been formed under a secret agreement with the US and within the framework of NATO. In the later court case in 2001, General Maletti said that Count Sogno had close ties with the CIA.

All the ‘coups’ were carried out in close collaboration with the Americans, and notably, two of the major actors in this game—Federico Umberto D’Amato, chief of the secret service UAR (the Interior Ministry Office of Special Affairs), and Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, leader of the National Front and former president of the fascist party MSI— had been close collaborators with the US postwar liaison to Italy, CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, Angleton maintained his contacts with Borghese and D’Amato up to the 1970s; and, as CIA Station Chief in Rome in the mid-1960s, William Harvey was Angleton’s close collaborator.

THE SOVEREIGN AND THE GROSSRAUM

The organisation that General Miceli had spoken about in 1974 was Gladio—the Italian ‘Stay-Behind’ army—that would not only ‘stay behind’ in case of a Soviet occupation, but that would also conduct clandestine domestic operations to counter domestic communist forces. The Stay-Behinds were coordinated in Brussels by the very secret Allied Clandestine Committee (also known as the Allied Coordination Committee, ACC) and by the equally secret Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC). In addition, there was a parallel structure. Former chief of the Italian Stay-Behinds, General Gerardo Serravalle (1971–1974), said that when he heard how Vinciguerra, in court, had presented the Stay-Behinds ‘with such a precision and in such detailed terms’ he concluded that Vinciguerra was an insider and that it must have been a parallel structure (later confirmed as the NDS) that he himself was not informed about. Serravalle stated that there was a part of the Stay-Behinds that he did not control and that he was forced by the Americans to carry out this domestic campaign to blame the Left in order to receive material support from the CIA.

Mr Stone [the CIA] stated, quite clearly, that the financial support of the CIA was wholly dependent on our willingness to put into action, to program and plan, these other—shall we call them internal measures [terrorist operations blaming the Communists: author]. I said this was not in the orders for the Stay-Behinds. Nor had it been foreseen by Gladio when the original discussion took place.

But this was CIA policy Serravalle said.

In addition to these US-led formal structures, there existed an informal ‘US network’. The US created and maintained special intelligence ties and clandestine ties with individuals not only in Italy and Belgium but all over Europe. These local ‘US elites’ were more tuned to US interests and were often able to influence local state policies, and even to veto or manipulate policies and individuals in conflict with US interests. Such elites formed part of what we have called the ‘security state’—the ‘sovereign’—which included informal groups and their network of extra-legal executives.

One such ‘entirely informal group’ was the Cercle Pinay, which brought together Atlanticist ultra-right-wing political leaders, industrialists, and intelligence chiefs. It was named after former French Prime Minister Antonio Pinay but was, in practical terms, run by its secretary, the French fascist intelligence operative Jean Violet. Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti has named other participants: US State Secretary Henry Kissinger, US Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller (host), David Rockefeller from Chase Manhattan Bank, German CSU leader Franz Josef Strauss, Andreotti himself and Pinay’s ‘good friend’, the Italian industrialist Carlo Pesenti. According to David Rockefeller, it was Carlo Pesenti who took him aside and invited him to join the ‘Cercle’. Rockefeller referred to the Cercle as the ‘Pesenti Group’. Pesenti was, according to Christi, the main financial backer of the Aginter Press ‘correspondent’ Stefano delle Chiaie and his Avanguardia Nazionale. Jean Violet had also direct links to Aginter Press. This suggests that the Cercle Pinay acted as some kind of parapolitical ‘board’ to the extra-legal executives of Aginter Press.

Thus, the Schmittian ‘sovereign’ cannot be identified with NATO as a formal organisation but is rather the parallel hierarchy of informal Western structures with their military/intelligence centre in the US and in some European capitals. And it was this informal security structure, or ‘security state’, that intervened if necessary to guarantee US or ‘Western’ interests. Indeed, the central actors of this Western security network appear as the real ‘sovereign’, in the Schmittian sense, that decides on the exception in the Euro-Atlantic area, or what Schmitt would call Grossraum.

This idea of a Grossraum led by a central power, or Reich, was first introduced by Schmitt in the late 1930s, and further developed in his 1950 work Nomos of the Earth. Distinct from Karl Haushofer’s Lebensraum, Schmitt’s vision of a German Grossraum covered a bloc of independent states under German leadership and protection. Its realisation would have created an economic sphere of interest for Germany, just as the British colonies had come to represent a similar sphere for England. Schmitt based his idea on the US Monroe Doctrine, which denied European and other powers the right to interfere in North and South American affairs. Schmitt sought to apply this approach to Central Europe, a bloc of independent states under German leadership and protection, orchestrated around German political ideas. However, after Germany’s defeat in the Second World War and the Red Army’s advances in the East, it was the US that emerged as Europe’s protecting power.

Western leaders established a Euro-Atlantic ‘bloc of states’, a Grossraum that we call ‘NATO’, orchestrated around Western political ideas and protected by its Reich, the USA. Cold War NATO was a ‘bloc of states’ intended to exclude Soviet intervention. It was led by its central power and unified by its hegemonic political ideas: democracy, market liberalism, national pluralism, the rule of law and collective defence. However, the glue that held Cold War NATO together was not just ideas. Equally important were the informal super-national structures—or rather a hierarchy of such structures under the sovereign’s hegemony. Under this view, NATO—or the Western security community— may have been a more unified entity than even Schmitt’s concept of Grossraum.

An Italian COSMOS-class submarine used for intrusions into foreign naval bases (from an article written by Admiral Birindelli 1970). Swedish Dagens Nyheter’s report on the use of depth charges against the submarine trying to escape in October 1982. The USA most likely used some small Italian submarines for this purpose.

THE DUAL STATE AND THE DUAL SECURITY STRUCTURE

To guarantee the stability and defence of the NATO area, or Grossraum, the US developed a ‘dual security structure’ that included both defensive forces and offensive units that would regularly challenge the defensive force structures. In 2000, US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1981–87) confirmed that during the Cold War the US had specifically tasked units to play the role of enemy forces. These would secretly attack Western defences worldwide in order to ‘regularly’ and ‘frequently’ test their capabilities and increase their state of readiness, so that counter-forces to potential Soviet capabilities could be developed prior to their emergence. Referring to covert US/UK submarine operations in Swedish waters in the 1980s, Weinberger stated that

it was necessary to test frequently the capabilities of all countries, not only in the Baltic [Sea]—which is very strategic of course—but in the Mediterranean and Asiatic waters and all the rest…. And it was not just done in the sea. It was done on air defences and land defences as well [see Belgium above: author] ... and all this was done on a regular basis and on an agreed upon basis.

In collaboration with local security elites, the US ‘security state’ used special forces that tested and reinforced the defensive capabilities of US allies and friends worldwide. In the case of the submarine intrusions into Swedish waters in the 1980s, a couple of admirals trusted by the US were informed about the operations in advance, but the mass media, local military forces and even the host country government were led to believe that the operations were carried out by the ‘enemy’, the Soviet Union. In the 1970s (up to 1980), only 5 to 10 per cent of the Swedish population believed in a direct Soviet threat. In 1983, however, after a series of submarines turned up within densely populated Swedish archipelagos, 42 per cent of the population viewed the Soviet Union as a direct threat; and the percentage of people viewing the Soviet Union as unfriendly went from 27 per cent to 83 per cent over the same period. Thus, in collaboration with trusted individuals within Sweden, US forces seem to have been able to change the mindset of the population and the government almost overnight. Members of the Swedish ‘security state’, or ‘deep state’, acted in collaboration with their US counterparts to deceive the Swedish government and public. These PSYOPs—psychological or ‘perception management’ operations—were run outside the law.

In that sense, there is a correspondence between the dual state and the ‘dual security structure’ (offensive/defensive forces) of the Western powers. In Italy, for example, the same US officers (David Carrett and others) who ran US operations to ‘test the readiness’ of Italian coastal defences (Delfino Attivo and Delfino Sveglio) simultaneously organised the terrorist campaign aimed at raising the awareness of and ‘changing the mindset’ of the Italian population as a whole.

In a similar development, US Rear-Admiral James Lyons, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations, in 1984 set up a ‘terrorist unit’—known as the Red Cell—recruited from his own naval special forces (SEAL Team Six), to attack naval bases worldwide. This unit set off bombs, wounded US personnel and took hundreds of hostages as part of its operations. According to Lyons, it was necessary for US forces to get ‘physical’ experience of the terrorist threat in order to ‘change the mindset’ and ‘raise the awareness’ of the troops to prevent a possibly even more devastating attack.

Once again, the US was developing a security system that included both sides of the coin. With the end of the Cold War and the decline of the Soviet threat, however, many Europeans believe this ‘dual structure’—with its specifically tasked terrorist units—may have evolved into an instrument for establishing not only internal Western stability but also US global hegemony. In such a world, war is no longer waged between the large armies of major powers, but by ‘special units’ to create ‘a special mental atmosphere… to keep the structure of the society intact,’ to quote George Orwell’s 1984.

 CONCLUSIONS

The above examples show that the ‘sovereign’—the ‘security state’ or what some would call the ‘deep state’—is able not to just limit the range of the democratic discourse but also to manipulate or ‘fine tune’ such discourse.

• First, the secret armies of the ‘sovereign’ (the Stay-Behinds and the ‘parallel Stay-Behinds’ or NDS) were recruited from the defeated fascist forces of Southern Europe in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. In Northern Europe, hundreds of Nazi SS officers were recruited for a similar purpose. Fascist leader Prince Junio Valerio Borghese was rescued and recruited by the later CIA liaison to Italy, James Jesus Angleton, at the very end of the war, and Angleton’s man, Federico Umberto D’Amato, was given the task of recruiting forces from the fascist Republic of Saló to the Ministry of Interior, the army and the secret armies in order to combat the Italian communists. The brutal ‘black’ terrorist, Stefano delle Chiaie, collaborated with both Borghese and D’Amato. These secret fascist and Nazi armies were recruited and developed as part of a ‘historical compromise’ between the winning Anglo-Saxon democrats and the losing autocrats of the Axis powers. But, more importantly, the ‘sovereign’, as it developed after the Second World War, turned these secret armies into a sophisticated military arm for PSYOPs to limit the range of democratic discourse and to ‘fine tune’, calibrate and manipulate that discourse.

• Second, by letting fascist forces carry out the preliminary stages of military coups, the ‘sovereign’ was able to force governments to resign or accept a change of policy on a number of occasions. Once a change of policy had been accepted, as during all the Italian ‘coup attempts’ in the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘sovereign’ then aborted the military coup and the use of extra-legal measures was no longer considered necessary. The Borghese– delle Chiaie ‘coup’ of December 1970, for example, was allegedly aborted after interventions by General Vito Miceli—or, according to Remo Orlandini, a close collaborator with Borghese, by US President Richard Nixon himself. In each case, the Italian government was presented with a fait accompli, giving the ‘sovereign’ a de facto veto over policy. The elected government, the ‘democratic state’, was forced either to yield to the ‘sovereign’, the ‘security state’, or to confront it by mobilising popular support and legitimacy—something the ‘security state’ is only able to do through the introduction of its ‘game’ of fear and protection. In the final analysis, with the exception of Aldo Moro, Italian prime ministers always chose to back down.

• Third, the ‘sovereign’ may decide to carry through a military coup in order to take over government responsibility, as in Greece in 1967. To a certain extent, the same CIA network (including the CIA station chief and the leader of the Italian Ordine Nuovo) was involved both in Italy and in the 1967 coup in Greece. In the Greek case, the ‘sovereign’ was able to veto the anti-NATO policy of Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou. However, it later proved to be more difficult to return to democratic politics, and over time US officials grew less happy with the Greek generals. For the ‘sovereign’, fascist or military rule was never a goal in itself. The ‘coup’ was rather an instrument to reestablish order in accordance with the Machiavellian formula of fear and protection: first, let a ‘cruel and efficient governor’ eliminate all opposition; then, publicly eliminate the same governor to regain legitimacy. In comparison with Greece, the return to regular politics was always smoother in Turkey, where the army had widespread legitimacy and military coups have been more or less institutionalised. However, in most of Europe, the overt coup d’état appears to have been too clumsy an instrument for controlling domestic politics.

• Fourth, the ‘sovereign’ may raise the ‘security temperature’ through the use of ‘indiscriminate terrorism’—dramatising politics, as happened during the bombing campaign in Italy. Fear of bomb attacks has enormous psychological impact, compelling people to turn to the state for protection and to blame the perceived enemy. In the event of such attacks, mass media will often respond hysterically, blaming whomever the authorities say is responsible. Such an instrument is thus ideal for calibrating government policy, in other words as a means to ‘fine tune’ democratic politics and to ‘securitise’ what used to be open to public debate, bringing the democratic political sphere more into line with the political vision of the ‘security state’. Through the use of a brutal bombing campaign, it is possible to create events that the mass media will interpret as an ‘enemy attack’, that will enable the ‘sovereign’ to externalise conflicts to provide internal stability. The Strategy of Tension, as it was developed in Italy, was used to discredit critics and to ‘correct’ the political line of the democratic state. Most important was the exercise of control over domestic Italian politics in a way that could not be achieved through the use of legal means.

• Fifth, if necessary, the ‘sovereign’ may turn to ‘selective terrorism’ to take out a political leader, either as a way of vetoing the policies of that leader or to blame anti-US forces for such ‘terrorist’ actions. In the case of Aldo Moro’s murder in 1978, both of these goals were achieved. Moro’s wife accused the Americans of responsibility for her husband’s death, claiming that they had previously threatened to kill him, and Moro himself was given a private funeral. Moro’s murder enabled the ‘sovereign’ to veto his ‘historical compromise’, and at the same time to blame left-wingers—the so-called Red Brigades—for the operation. Both General Maletti and secret service chief D’Amato confirmed that the Red Brigades had been penetrated at the top. Indeed, Maletti has even confirmed that the top echelon of the Red Brigades was run by Western intelligence. Until 1974, the ‘sovereign’ could rely on the assassination squads of Aginter Press, but when it began using the Red Brigades it needed special forces support. The killing of Aldo Moro was a special forces operation, involving the use of ammunition from special forces supplies.

• Sixth, the ‘sovereign’ may use specifically tasked units (army or navy special forces) to attack its own forces or allied or friendly forces throughout the Western world in order to increase readiness and raise public awareness of a common threat. Such dramatic operations are conducted as realistic exercises (‘train as you fight’), but in the mass media they are presented as enemy attacks or intrusions, which thus shape and influence the mindset of the general public and local military forces and even the policies of the host country government. Such attacks create fear and demands for protection; they externalise conflicts to provide internal stability; and they may force governments to back away from particular policies. The ‘enemy attacks’, as they are reported in the mass media, are turned into PSYOPs that alter world opinion and influence decisions in international forums such as the UN. Such a strategy gives the ‘sovereign’ an ideal instrument for calibrating the ruling mass media discourse as well as government policy in various countries.

• Seventh, the ‘sovereign’ spans the entire Western world. By this is meant that the dual state divide between the ‘democratic state’ and the ‘security state’ seemingly corresponds to a divide between democratic nation-states and a protective central power—or, to use Carl Schmitt’s terminology, between the states of the Western Grossraum and the US Reich. In every state, US intelligence has recruited loyal officers and civil servants that have acted as direct liaisons to US authorities—such as General de Lorenzo and General Miceli in Italy. Licio Gelli set up P2 as a parallel ‘security state’ or shadow government, and in practice it was a high-level US–Italian network ‘authorised’ by Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. A similar picture is emerging in other European states. These local ‘US elites’ played the game of fear and protection to set the agenda, to influence local governments and even to veto policies or individuals in conflict with US interests. This presence of the Reich in various host countries gives the hegemonic power, in this case the US, an even more dominating role than Schmitt had anticipated. The central actors of the Western informal security network appear as the real ‘sovereign’, in a Schmittian sense, that decides on the exception in the NATO area or Grossraum.

• Eighth, in the world of democracies, the ‘sovereign’—the ‘deep state’—has always to implement its game of fear and protection covertly and its very existence is always denied in public. Thus, the problem with liberalism in political science and legal theory is not its ambition to defend the public sphere, political freedoms, and human rights, but rather its claim that these freedoms and rights define the Western political system. Liberal political science has been turned into an ideology of the ‘sovereign’ because undisputable evidence for the ‘sovereign’—what Vinciguerra simply calls the ‘state’—is brushed away as pure fantasy or ‘conspiracy’. Schmitt has been described as an apologist for the autocratic emergency state in Germany, but when we look closer at his arguments, he rather emerges as a scholar unveiling the dual state—the hidden autocratic security force parallel to the democratic state. Some might argue that this dual state is defensible, others not, but we should be aware that the liberal denial of its very existence is based on an illusion.