The Concept of the Deep State

The author having dinner with the Turkish former Foreign Minister and Defense Minister Ümit Halûk Bayülken at a conference in the town of Side in Turkey in 2004.

The historical origin of the Deep State concept

In the 1990s, I wrote a couple of draft papers about shadowy forces in Sweden and Italy that were involved in coup attempts linked to the Americans. I found that it was an obvious parallel between these forces and similar forces in Turkey. In Turkey, they were called the “deep state”, also presidents and prime ministers used this concept. There were similar forces in Italy, Greece, Turkey, France, and Sweden, and what they all had in common were their close ties to corresponding forces in the US and sometimes to the UK. In Italy, one had used the concept “lo stato parallelo” to describe these forces. In Sweden, there was no word for it. I saw a similarity between these forces and what Carl Schmitt, in his Political Theology (1922), had called the “Sovereign”, the one “who decides on the exception”. As any scholar of International Relations knows, this is the entity that decides on when to introduce a state of emergency or not, when to initiate a military coup, as we experienced in Cold War Italy, Turkey, or Greece. This is the entity that decides when the law should be applied or not.

When these forces intervened with “coup attempts” in Italy in 1964, 1970, 1973 and 1974, they always acted in close collaboration with the Americans, primarily with the CIA but sometimes also with the DIA or the US Navy. Before Prince Junio Valerio Borghese’s coup attempt in 1970, his forces prepared for the coup by the use of terrorist attacks (with bombs exploding in public squares) that created a demand for protection, for order and for a strong leader. Borghese had been heading the Special Forces Decima MAS under Benito Mussolini during World War II. He had been recruited by CIA’s later Counter-Intelligence Chief, James Jesus Angleton, already in 1945. In 1970, the “liaison” of the coup plotters, Adriano Monti, turned to CIA’s man in Madrid, Otto Skorzeny, the famous SS officer who had rescued Mussolini in 1943. Now, in 1970, Skorzeny gave Borghese’s coup plotters the U.S. “green light”. Under command of the Fascist leader Stefano delle Chiaie, they took over the Ministry of Interior and were about to take over the Ministry of Defense and the TV, when they had to withdraw from the scene. Italian political leaders had accepted the U.S. demands. Who gave the coup plotters order to back down is not clear. A collaborator to Borghese, Gaetano Lunetta, actually insisted that there had been a coup d’état, and the political Italy had accepted a total loyalty to the U.S. In this example, we find that the veto force of the security state acted outside or above the law to limit the range of the democratic state.

I participated at a couple of International Relations conferences in Turkey after year 2000, and the concept of “deep state” was well-known in Turkey. In 2004, I presented a paper at the Fifth Pan-European International Relations Conference (Panel on Geopolitics), where I brought up the idea of a “Dual State” comprising of a “Security State” or a “Deep State” in conflict with the regular Democratic State. The title of the paper was: “Securitization, Dual State and US-European Geopolitical Divide or The Use of Terrorism to Construct World Order”. This was the first time I used the concept of ”Deep State” as a general concept for these shadowy security entities, what the Italians called ”stato parallelo”. In the following year, I also used the concept of “Deep State” in an article I wrote for the journal Geopolitics (2005): “Swedish Geopolitics: From Rudolf Kjellén to a Swedish ‘Dual State’”.

In the year 2006, I participated at a conference on Parapolitics and criminal sovereingty organized by Eric Wilson in Melbourne, Australia. My paper, “Democratic State vs Deep State: Approaching the Dual State of the West” (which is also published on my Substack), became a chapter in Wilson's book Government of the shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty (Pluto Press, 2009). My chapter had some significance for Wilson’s next edited volume The Dual State: Parapolitics, Carl Schmitt and the National Security Complex (Asgate, 2012), where I contributed with a chapter: “The Dual State: The Case of Sweden”. I discussed the Swedish but also the Turkish and Greek “Deep State”.

My paper from Melbourne (2006) was my third contribution that brought up the concept of the “Deep State”, and a version of this paper was published in a Danish volume on Carl Schmitt already in 2007, edited by Mikkel Thorup (Museum Tusculanum, 2007). My chapter “The Dual State and the Sovereign: A Schmittian Approach to Western Politics”, was using my paper to the Melbourne conference. This paper was more systematic than my two earlier contributions. I referred to a text by Hans Morgenthau (1955), where he spoke about a “dual state”, about the regular democratic state hierarchy that acts according to the rule of law and a more or less hidden security hierarchy that not only acts in parallel to but also monitors and exerts control over it. I also described this state hierarchy as the “Deep State”. The concept of “dual state” may have originated from Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State (Octagon Books, [1941] 1969) that brought up the overt duality of the German state of the 1930s with a regular legal state on the one hand and the SS paramilitary emergency state on the other. Fraenkel actually wrote the book largely in the 1930s. He also referred to his predecessor Emil Lederer and his duality of a “legal state” or “Rechtsstaat” versus a “Machtstaat” or “power state”.

After I had presented my paper in 2006 in Melbourne, another participant at the conference, Peter Dale Scott, brought up this “Deep State” concept the following year in his book, The Road to 9/11 (California University Press, 2007), where he also generously referred to my use of the concept. This is supposedly the first use of “the deep state concept” in the United States, not just as a description of what happened in Turkey (or in Egypt or Pakistan), but as presentation of the shadowy forces in the U.S. and in other Western states that, according to Morgenthau, are able to “exert an effective veto over the decisions” taken by the official state that acts according to the rule of law. Peter Dale Scott later wrote the book, The American Deep State (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). Both Scott’s essay on “Parafascism and the CIA” (1986) and my “Democratic State vs. Deep State” (2009) were discussed on Aaron Good’s podcast “American Exception” (May 14-26, 2023). After Donald Trump became president in 2016, the deep state concept was used everywhere but often with a rather different meaning. The New York Times and other mass media succeeded to find the origin of this very concept in the United States in the writings of Peter Dale Scott, who then referred to my contribution (Gingeras, “How the Deep State Came to America: A History”, War on the Rocks, 2019).

However, I have to clarify a couple of things. In my early writings on the “Deep State”, I almost identified the “Deep State” with the “Security State”. The “Security State” is a recognized security entity or rather a security elite, a number of officials or military and security officers, that are able to “securitize” what used to be public (Wæver 1995; 2001) by claiming that this or that event is an issue of life and death (Morgenthau 1955), when no political alternatives exist – in other words where democracy is no longer relevant, because there is no longer a political choice. A state of emergency might be introduced because of a terrorist event or because of a security threat from another state and that threat has priority before political choice. “The time for dialogue is over”, they say. The “Security State” is then able to veto the decisions of the Democratic State by referring to the “present danger”.

The “Deep State”, on the other hand, is rather the hidden or not recognized entity of the “Security State” that not just decides whether the law should be applied or not but also acts outside or above the law as a formally speaking “criminal entity” which is able to veto or even “fine-tune” the democracy, for example by the use of terrorism, sometimes financed by drug trade as described in for example Turkey and in the United States.

I have studied this case from a very empirical perspective. Some people in Turkey identified the military leadership with the “deep state”. The idea was that the military was able to veto the policies of the “Political Turkey” by launching a military coup, and then, afterwards, “to hand the state over to the civilians”. But the coup leader in Turkey in 1980, General Kenan Evren, also spoke about a “deep state” but as something different from himself. The “deep state” appears here rather to have been a network of people linked to the Turkish Stay Behinds or perhaps even to “the parallel Stay Behinds”, which were directly linked to the Americans, an entity that already in late 1970s had started a terrorist campaign with bomb attacks to destabilize the country to make a military take-over or a coup d’état “necessary”, similar to what had happened in Italy ten years earlier, where similar “parallel Stay Behinds” of Pino Rauti’s Ordine Nuovo was responsible for bomb attacks in public squares. Rauti was linked to the CIA and had his background from the Fascist Italy of World War II.

I once had a dinner with Ümit Halûk Bayülken at a conference in Turkey. He had been Evren’s defense minister, and, according to Bayülken, Evren had called him late at night before the coup. Evren had said: “you have been a foreign minister and your father was a general”, and I want you as defense minister tomorrow, or actually in a few hours. There had been too much bloodshed and violence and the military had to intervene, he argued. Mr. Bayülken’s wife understood that something was going on and tried to stop him, but his father had been a general and he could not walk away from his responsibility.

I also met Evren’s foreign minister, who was a civilian and a diplomat. General Evren certainly tried to give the coup civilian legitimacy, but the brutal violence that had justified the coup was largely initiated by Abdullah Çatlı. He had collaborated with Stefano delle Chiaie in Italy, and Çatlı’s extreme rightwing Grey Wolfs were used by Turkish Stay Behinds or Counter-Guerilla. They were linked to the CIA but also to criminal activity (assassinations and drug trafficking, primarily heroin). As every student of the “deep state” knows, Çatlı was later found dead in 1996 in the Susurluk incident, after the car crash, in a Mercedes, with his girlfriend, the beauty queen Gonca Us, with the MP Sedat Bucak (who had his own private army supposedly with 20 000 men) and with the Istanbul Chief of Police and former head of the Special Operations Department, Huseyin Kocadağ. In the car, there were as well pistols and of sub machine guns, false passports, a cache of narcotics and thousands of U.S. dollars. Çatlı was close to former Prime Minister and now Deputy Prime Minister Tansu Çiller, who spoke at his funeral. Çatlı’s license to carry weapons was signed by the Minister of Interior Mehmet Ağar, who had to leave office because of this incident.

This information seems to support Aaron Goods argument in his doctoral thesis and in his American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (Skyhorse, 2022) about a “tripartite state” comprised of a democratically elected state, a security state, and a deep state. There were seemingly three different entities, but they all seem to overlap. Tansu Çiller, Mehmet Ağar and Abdullah Çatlı were all deeply involved in this criminal underworld either as prime minister, as interior minister or as drug trafficker and contract killer. The coup plotters with Chief of Defense General Evren were heading the “security state” but not the “deep state”, while others in the security state hierarchy with the Counter-Guerilla were supposedly part of the “deep state”. In Turkey, many people described the coup as the military officers taking their responsibility, when democratic politics was unable to do so. They argue that the military had intervened in an attempt to “return the power” to the civilians as soon as possible, but this is not the whole truth. Evren’s coup in 1980 was definitely brutal. Many people were killed, but not Çatlı, the Grey Wolfs and the Counter-Guerilla people. The coup rather attacked left-wingers if I have understood it correctly. Soon afterwards Richard Perle signed an agreement with Bayülken about a Turkish total loyalty to the U.S. Former CIA Station Chief to Ankara, Paul Henze, confirmed CIA’s role in the coup to President Jimmy Carter and Henze said: “Our boys have done it”.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey. To the right former Director of Central Intelligence and U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger (Wikipedia: Public Domain).

The Deep State as the Apex of the Security State

The analysis in the former section seems to indicate that the “Deep State” is largely a US-linked network or perhaps rather a CIA- or CIA/DIA-linked network that has penetrated the regular “Democratic State” (or “Public State”) as well as the “Security State”. The US linked “Deep State” seems to enter every European state by using very secret agreements, and in many cases oral agreements, because these ties may be so secret that no formal agreement is possible, which may be what actually constitutes the “Deep State”. The “Deep State” hierarchies are so secret that nothing of it can be regulated by a legally binding agreement, which turns its activities into an extra-legal entity.

Former U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey (1981-85) told me at a dinner in Oslo that “when it comes to Sweden, there was only one rule: Nothing on paper”. I called him eight years later, and he confirmed this statement. His Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1981-87), said that it might have been a formal agreement before his time in office, but in his years, there were “consultations, which led to an understanding” with the relevant Swedes. There was nothing on paper. Several other high-ranking officers said the same, including U.S. former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. Norwegian Chairman of NATO Military Committee, General Herman Fredrik Zeiner-Gundersen, told me that this is a general rule: if something is written on paper, “it is no longer secret”. It could be leaked to a journalist, he said. One might argue that he is going too far, but according to Zeiner-Gundersen, the “real secret information” or at least what is most secret (and most important) exists only as oral information. This means that a breach of discipline cannot be punished according to the law. There is no law that regulates this activity. This whole activity has to be conducted as extra-legal activity, as something of a “mafia-like” activity or a “deep state” activity that is located outside or above the law. Anything that is above the formal hierarchy of secrecy is also above the law.

This seems to make much of this activity into a “criminal activity”. People that do not adhere to secret oral agreements have to be punished by extra-legal use of force: they may be assassinated or just threatened. To finance this activity, you may have to use secret accounts hidden from the regular budget. You may use criminal activity like drug trafficking that cannot be tracked by any other state authority. Peter Dale Scott quoted in American War Machine, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). a former DEA agent Michael Levine saying: “in my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA”. Of course, very secret covert action could be financed also through other criminal activities or by secret accounts hidden in the budget, but it is striking that only intelligence services or security services are able to cross national borders with huge amounts of drugs without being caught by law enforcement. You don’t carry five thousand tons of heroin hidden in your body or in your underwear, not even one thousand. The major drug smuggling is always done by state agencies, by the “deep state”.

When I was a civilian expert in the Swedish 2001 Submarine Inquiry, which was physically located at the Swedish Defense Ministry, we found that there was a separate archive for documents above the formal levels of secrecy, above top-secret, that the Defense Ministry Archivist did not have access to. Formally speaking, these documents did not exist. They had a green stamp and had no legal existence. They were something in between a top-secret document and even more secret oral information. Some of these documents were burnt after reading, the responsible officer said. The particular document that we were looking for (the Chief of Operations analysis on the submarine events for the Minister of Defense), did no longer exist, he said. Later, I found that other documents (photographs and single pages in documents) were removed from the top-secret intelligence archives probably into “private archives” of one or another high-ranking officer. They no longer existed in a legal sense. They had disappeared.

The security state and its hierarchy of secrecy tends to develop very secret “need to know”-levels above the formalized levels of secrecy. Officials that have access to this information will be able to profit from their ties to the Americans and the British to be able to take decisions, while the democratically elected Government is kept in the dark. These echelons of extreme secrecy of the security state tend to develop into levels of oral agreements, and such oral agreements will be kept by making its participants enforcing discipline by the use of extra-legal threats and violence executed by a power entity we call the “deep state”. It seems to me that these more than top-secret echelons tend to develop private ties to the Americans and perhaps also to the British and the Israelis. If one looks at the Swedish experience, the informal, oral, and very secret ties to the US (and to the British) were handled largely by Swedish officers loyal to the US and the UK. Defense Secretary Weinberger had chosen the Swedish Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Per Rudberg, as his escort officer while he visited Sweden in 1981. Rudberg went on holiday with the then Deputy Director of the CIA Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former Sweden’s Deputy Chief of Defense Staff Intelligence, Björn Eklind told me. And as an Assistant Naval Attaché to Sweden in the mid-1960s, Inman worked two days a week at the Swedish Ministry of Defense. Then Defense Minister Sven Andersson would have known about it, but he did not tell the Prime Minister and he didn’t tell him about the Western submarines. “Did Sven cheat me?” Prime Minister Olof Palme asked afterwards. General Zeiner-Gundersen went skiing in the mountains, while he was Norway’s Chief of Defense (1972-77), with his Swedish counterpart General Stig Synnergren (1970-78), because what was most important was to keep deep personal ties, he said. Senior Swedish officers discussed the necessity of a military coup in Sweden in the early 1980s also with representatives of the US Embassy.

The Italian experience seems to have been very much the same. Before every coup attempt, they always consulted with the CIA representatives. These networks of officers in Sweden and Italy, on various levels, were considered to be the relevant actors when the CIA or the Pentagon wanted to have something done in these very countries, if they wanted to prepare for regime change or just to adjust the policies (or in other words to “fine-tune” the policies) of this or that state to adapt them to the US or the CIA’s priorities.

This seems to indicate that the logic of the “Security State” brings us into the “Deep State”, while the “Public State” or “Democratic State” may be infiltrated by elements of the “Deep State” (as in Turkey in the 1990s), but this is not the inner logic of the “Public State” as such. That logic is supposed to be a relative openness and rather the opposite to the logic of the secrecy of the “Security State”, which accordingly, in the final analysis, opens for an extra-legal “Deep State” – the Deep State as the apex of the Security State.

Admiral Bobby Ray Inman receives the Distinguished Service Medal from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in 1981. He also received his fourth star (Photo: NARA & DVIDS Public Domain Archive). To the right, James Schlesinger as an ornithologist in the Norwegian mountains 1993 (Private archive).

To me, this means that the essence or inner logic of these state entities, makes it more fruitful to speak of them in terms of a “Dual State”. I have in earlier books and articles referred to a lunch I had with former CIA Director and US Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger (1973-75) at a nuclear weapons conference in Rjukan in Norway in 1993. I asked him about his understanding of Sweden while he served in the US Administration. His answer was short and concise: “Which Sweden? The Political Sweden, or the Military Sweden? The Military wanted us to come as soon as possible”. When I called him a few years later, he confirmed this quote, or rather he corrected it and made it even stronger. He said: “The Military was planning for us to come as soon as possible”. He obviously did not speak about all Swedish politicians or all Swedish military officers, but rather about a fundamental divide between a few relevant political leaders with the ambition of keeping Swedish neutrality, and some senior military officers that were directly linked up to the U.S. agencies, officers that identified themselves with the United States and with U.S. military priorities: They planned for the U.S. military forces to come to Sweden “as soon as possible”.

In Sweden, high-ranking naval officers gave cease-fire orders when Western submarines were trying to escape, while almost all Swedish officers, the Swedish Government and the Swedish public believed that these submarines were Soviet submarines. Many naval officers believed that the Prime Minister was responsible for these cease-fire orders and that he collaborated with the Soviets, which made some naval officers plan for a coup d’état (the Naval Officer’s Revolt in late 1985). After three years of submarine intrusions deep into Swedish archipelagoes and naval bases, the number of Swedes that considered the Soviet Union as a direct threat or as hostile to Sweden increased from 25-30 percent to 83 percent. A small group of Swedish officers collaborating with the Americans and the British had been able to radically change Swedish public opinion in just three years. They had made Sweden into another country. This was the most successful deception operation ever.

The “Deep State” in Italy, in collaboration with its U.S. counterpart, was able to deceive the general public and probably also the Italian Government to believe that the terror attacks around 1970 were run by anarchists and other leftwing radicals, and this deception was, according to CIA’s Carlo Digilio, a preparation to be able to launch a coup d’état, while the “Deep State” in Sweden, including some Swedish admirals in collaboration with its US and British counterparts, were able to deceive the general public and the Government to make them able to facilitate a regime change. The “Deep State” in the single European countries appears here as an instrument of their U.S. and of the British counterparts that are using these European or Scandinavian officers to transform and discipline Continental Europe. The “Deep State” in various European countries has become a political instrument of the Anglo-American powers.

These “Deep State” officers in Sweden were not necessarily at the very top of the “Security State”, but they were able to run their own policy and to deceive the “Political Sweden”, thanks to their very secret ties to the U.S. and British agencies. The logic of the “Public State” (or the “Democratic State”, which is never perfectly democratic) is rather the opposite to the secrecy logic of the “Security State”, and the latter opens for the “Deep State” as a “criminal entity”, at the apex of the “Security State”. If these state entities are run from the top of a hierarchy or from the deep underground, or as deep-sea currents deciding about events on the surface as the word “deep state” implies, is just a question of which metaphors one prefers to use.