The Deep State (24 page)

The nomenklatura evolved over time into a patronage system that the Tammany Hall cronies of Boss Tweed would have recognized: in return for assistance in promoting his career, the subordinate in the Soviet system carried out and defended the policies of his patron. The nomenklatura became a privileged class in a country that had allegedly abolished the class system. Political reliability was valued over technical competence, so it is no wonder that the system drifted inexorably toward stagnation and decline.

The Deep State is less formal in personnel matters than was the Soviet Union, but parallels remain. The same type of cronyism, political litmus-testing, and mutual back-scratching that pervaded Kremlin politics during what Soviet historians call the “Era of Stagnation” of the 1970s prevails in much of our shadow government. In early 2001, just before George W. Bush's inauguration, the Heritage Foundation produced a policy document designed to help the incoming administration choose personnel (ever since the Reagan administration, Heritage has been very influential in formulating Republican policies,
notwithstanding its nonprofit 501c(3) “charitable” tax status). In this document the authors stated the following: “The Office of Presidential Personnel (OPP) must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second, and . . . the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective.”
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The Leninist principle in a nutshell!

Americans have paid a high price for our Leninist personnel policies, and not only in domestic matters. In important national security concerns such as staffing the Coalition Provisional Authority, a sort of viceroyalty to administer Iraq until a real Iraqi government could be formed, the same guiding principle of loyalty before competence applied. The administration scoured the database of the White House Office of Personnel, the Republican National Committee's donor lists, and evangelical college graduating classes for likely candidates with suitable motivation and loyalty to the company line. Jim O'Beirne, the husband of Kate O'Beirne, a
National Review
columnist much esteemed by conservatives, was the Pentagon political appointee in charge of screening prospects. The
Washington Post
reported that “O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were asked their views on
Roe v. Wade
.”

Such vetting techniques resulted in appointments like these: “A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance—but had applied for a White House job—was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.”
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This riotous incompetence extended far beyond the Coalition Provisional Authority itself and pervaded the entire Iraq effort, both in the theater of war and in Washington.

In 2006, I attended a small staff briefing on Iraq by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Tony is a highly knowledgeable defense analyst who is relatively free of political agendas.
He revealed in the course of his depressing
tour d'horizon
that Rumsfeld's DOD actually disqualified candidates if they were Middle East area experts or knew Arabic. Not certain that I had heard him correctly, I asked him if he wasn't perhaps exaggerating for effect. His deadpan reply, with a touch of irritation, was “No, unfortunately, I'm being completely serious.”

Job-qualified or not, whatever mischief these neophytes were doing wasn't their own idea. The incompetent management of postinvasion Iraq came from the people at the very top, the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, and Wolfowitzes, because they held with the dogmatic rigidity of a religious zealot that a crash program of laissez-faire economics and privatization of Iraq's state assets were just what the doctor ordered for a fragile, sect-ridden state reeling from years of draconian sanctions and a violently imposed occupation. In that belief they were hardly discouraged by the corporate donors they consorted with, or the numerous service contractors like Halliburton who stood to benefit.

Then there is the matter of L. Paul Bremer. As chief administrator in Iraq, he was a kind of imperial sovereign who could rule by decree. Among his more unfortunate diktats were the following: the disbanding of Iraq's army, thereby creating roughly 400,000 desperate, unemployed people possessing AK-47s in a collapsed economy; the firing from government jobs of all members of the Ba'ath Party, including schoolteachers, which meant most of the people who knew how to keep the fabric of civil order intact; and implementation of radical privatization, which greatly complicated the job of restoring Iraq's state-run water, sewer, and electricity systems.

To top it off was the little matter of $12 billion in unfrozen Iraqi state assets, which were supposed to be returned to the country for the benefit of the Iraqi people. Of that amount, $8.8 billion was unaccounted for. Even the former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, no mean author of administrative chaos himself, called Bremer “the largest single disaster in American foreign policy in modern times.”
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It is easy to see why President Bush bestowed on Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which has become a twenty-first-century equivalent of the Order of Lenin, for
his services beyond the call of duty. In Bush's world, it was the appropriate gold watch for the loyal hired help.

The same principle of trying to use unqualified personnel to implement ideological policy was on display in the Bush administration's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. White House misuse of the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a dumping ground for Republican campaign operatives is well known. What exacerbated the poor response to the disaster, however, was not just incompetence—it was deliberate, ideology-driven choices made at the top.

After the hurricane hit New Orleans, while thousands were trapped in the fetid and unsanitary conditions of the Superdome, the key railroad lines leading out of New Orleans remained intact. A contact in the inspector general's office at Amtrak told me that the company's president called the White House and offered—free of charge—to send trains into New Orleans to evacuate the stranded residents. His offer was rejected. Why? My contact did some follow-up with the White House and discovered that the Bush administration, which had been trying to eliminate Amtrak from the budget, was not eager to see the passenger railroad get any favorable publicity from the rescue effort. Human need had better not stand in the way of ideology.

Both Parties Do It

This Leninist approach to recruitment of personnel is not confined to the Republican Party, although the Bush administration went to extravagant lengths in its implementation. Obama has nominated ambassadors who appear barely to have heard of the country to which they are being sent. The president's nominee for ambassador to Norway, a former campaign fund-raiser, referred in his confirmation hearing to the “president” of Norway, although the head of state is the king. Colleen Bell, producer of the soap opera
The Bold and the Beautiful,
was chosen as ambassador to Hungary—where the recent emergence of a far-right government and neofascist movements has been a cause of international concern. Her
testimony revealed a depressing lack of knowledge about her assignment. It is telling that neither candidate bothered to study up for the job. The days of Charles Francis Adams or George Kennan, ambassadors who were deeply knowledgeable of the world, are long gone.

The Deep State runs on money, and these ambassadors, unqualified though they may be, help make the wheels go around in their own minor and farcical way. For services courageously rendered in raising cash for politicians, they receive a short-term, honorary membership in the nomenklatura. Ambassadors have relatively little de facto power, but an ambassadorship is a prestigious job that allows a campaign contributor from, say, the axle-grease business, to rub shoulders with a lot of high-level international business contacts who could be very helpful to his postdiplomatic career. Being able to append “ambassador” to one's name allows a person to dine out on the title for the rest of one's life: a useful prop for getting onto the masthead of directorships and charities or to break into the right social circles. As for the sausage making back at the embassy, those operations are generally run by the deputy chief of mission—normally a career foreign service officer—and the CIA station chief in a kind of informal interagency diarchy. If the embassy is in a politically critical country or a hardship post where no self-respecting Hollywood social climber would deign to serve, the ambassadorial position will be filled by a career State Department employee.

Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Kiev and the voice on the other end of the line of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's notorious “hacked” phone call, fits the template for this type. Armed with the mandatory Ivy League credentials, he worked his way up both in crime-ridden hardship posts like Honduras and in critical posts like the U.S. mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, where a former career in movies would be a jobs-skills mismatch.

The United States has had a policy to fish in the troubled waters of Ukraine by overtly and covertly working with political opposition groups there (Nuland boasted in a speech to the U.S-Ukraine Foundation on December 13, 2013, that the United States had spent $5 billion since
Ukraine's independence to influence politics there). Pyatt was a more appropriate choice for Kiev than some glad-handing campaign bundler. On the other hand, postings that are popular tourist destinations, or have a lot of social cachet like London's Court of St. James's or Paris, are sinecures where figurehead ambassadors can reign rather than rule.

Different Spanks for Different Ranks

We have seen what happens to the higher-grade nomenklatura when they bungle or neglect the job they are supposedly uniquely qualified to perform: Wolfowitz, for botching the Iraq invasion and misleading Congress about the likely outcome of the occupation, got the World Bank presidency; and Bremer, for disastrous policy errors and losing track of $8.8 billion, got a Medal of Freedom. Under Barack Obama, the practice has not changed appreciably: Victoria Nuland, for the severe indiscretion of proposing regime change over an unencrypted phone in a country bordering Russia and giving Vladimir Putin the veneer of a pretext to occupy Crimea, continued in her high-level job without even having to explain her actions. CIA director John Brennan has repeatedly embarrassed Obama over torture and misleading Congress, yet he remains at his post. America's de facto three-tiered system of justice and accountability always seems to allow the great and the good to slip off the hook.

What happens to the foot soldiers who do not dwell in these charmed circles? While the case of NSA contractor Edward Snowden has captured worldwide attention, the example of Thomas Drake, the former NSA employee we met in the previous chapter, should be better known to Americans. Even before 9/11, the NSA was developing systems to capture the rapidly expanding data of the Internet. Drake grew concerned about the NSA leadership's choice of the so-called Trailblazer Project over another system, ThinThread. Drake and a number of other NSA employees favored ThinThread because it met requirements while being cheaper and, he believed, better at protecting U.S. citizens' privacy.

Trailblazer was far more intrusive and would potentially violate privacy rights. In addition, Trailblazer's full implementation would cost billions of dollars, greatly exceeding the cost of ThinThread. But instead of selecting the agency-developed ThinThread, the NSA's director, General Michael Hayden, selected Trailblazer, which used outside contractors like IBM, SAIC, and Boeing. (Hayden's deputy director, William Black, was a former NSA employee who had left for SAIC, and then returned to the NSA to manage Trailblazer for Hayden in 2000).

Drake and several other NSA employees complained to their bosses, the NSA inspector general, the Defense Department's inspector general, and finally the House and Senate Intelligence committees (he was not “going over the heads” of the NSA, as the role of the committees was to provide oversight for the NSA). The Pentagon's inspector general found in 2004 that Trailblazer was poorly executed and overly expensive. Defects included improper contract cost increases, nonconformance in the execution of the statement of work, and excessive labor rates for contractor personnel.
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The NSA finally canceled the project in 2006. But that was not the end of the story for Drake.

For having communicated with journalists—although he did not give them classified information—the FBI raided Drake's house and confiscated his computers, documents, and books. The government then engaged in blatant police-state chicanery, such as retroactively classifying unclassified documents he had retained, and he was eventually charged under the Espionage Act and faced thirty-five years in prison. Finally, in May 2011, after media exposure of the case, the government dropped all the major charges against him. But since federal prosecutors always need to salvage something for their expensive efforts and their expansive egos, they continued to press a misdemeanor charge of misusing the NSA's computers. He was sentenced to one year of probation and community service. At the sentencing hearing the judge slammed the prosecution: it was “unconscionable” to charge a defendant with a list of serious crimes that could land him in prison for decades, only to drop them just before the trial. The prosecution pressed for a large fine, but the judge rejected
that on the grounds that Drake had been made practically destitute, having lost his job and pension.