Free The Deep State by Mike Lofgren

through pluck, grit, and improvisation, built a military-industrial machine such as the world had never conceived possible. It constructed pipelines in Burma, airfields in the Arctic, swarms of aircraft, and a vast naval fleet a single temporary task force of which was larger than the entire British navy. German survivors of D-Day remarked in awe that the whole English Channel was so full of Allied ships that one could almost have walked dry-shod from one vessel to the other.
    The crowning achievement of this new military colossus was the development, at breakneck speed, of the ultimate war-winning weapon and inverted guardian angel of the cold war: the atomic bomb. The attainment of workable nuclear weapons was almost certainly the Deep State’s moment of conception. No other governmental project had been so large, and no other large project had ever been shrouded in so much secrecy. * Whole secret cities, like Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Hanford in Washington State, and Los Alamos in New Mexico, sprung up from nowhere in a matter of months. If the Deep State is an evolved structure, nuclear weapons were the genetic mutation that gave it the key characteristics it possesses today: a penchant for secrecy, extravagant cost, and a lack of democratic accountability.
    By 1945, what
Time
magazine publisher Henry Luce called the American Century was at hand. The American people and their leaders had reason to be proud of their collective accomplishments. But that pride transmuted into a hubris that gave us the mistaken belief that we could remake the world in our own image. The history of the next two generations is replete with examples of where this hubris would lead: Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and our more recent series of misadventures in the Middle East. In a more subtle fashion, the tremendous victory in theSecond World War and the responsibilities of world leadership that came with it intellectually corrupted the American political class.
    The first indication came in 1947, when President Harry S. Truman struggled with how to sell Congress on the idea of committing large sums of financial assistance to Greece and Turkey, then perceived to be under threat of takeover by Soviet-backed insurgencies. Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Truman that if he wanted Congress to support his policy, the president would have to “scare the hell out of the American people.” 1 Thus did the seed of one of the Deep State’s prime tactics germinate: fear became the tool of choice for America’s postwar political class, as exemplified by the president’s salesmanship of what became known as the Truman Doctrine. In line with Senator Vandenberg’s advice, Truman darkly described the “totalitarian regimes” that threatened to extinguish freedom all over the globe. He got the money he asked for: $400 million, equal to at least $4 billion in today’s prices.
    The concept of a permanent, peacetime national security apparatus became gradually institutionalized with the National Security Act of 1947, which established the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the president’s National Security Council. NSC-68, a 1950 White House policy document, sketched out a grand strategy for containing communism by means of a permanent peacetime military buildup. The year 1952 saw the statutory creation of the National Security Agency. These policy measures represented the congealing of an idea unprecedented in American history: that the United States should, and would, maintain a large, capable military and a comprehensive intelligence establishment regardless of whether it was in a formal state of war.
    Relations with the Soviet Union over the next four decades varied between tolerable and awful, but there were at least no major direct armed conflicts between the two powers, regardless of the involvement of one or both countries in proxy wars in the third world,