I hope this week's show will help you if you have the uneasy feeling that you never really got to the bottom of what is going on in the Middle East. Although over 3 years old, our first talk is as relevant as ever to understanding what the commercially-controlled media is leaving out of its narrative of events such as the US-sponsored toppling of the Ukraine government. Strange that after a decade of war on Afghanistan, the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline still seems not to figure in corporate news reports of the region...

Our first talk is by a new speaker on the show, Charlotte Dennett, daughter of a CIA agent reported killed in a plane crash in Africa. Dennett tells how an investigation into her father's mysterious death lead her to unravel some unexpected truths. Her FOIA requests, study of maps of the oil fields, geological data, projected pipeline routes and other documents have allowed her to better understand the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. She concludes that access to the oil of the Middle East was the essential prize of both WW1 and WW2. Since they discovered oil there, foreign powers have incessantly played upon local religious, ethnic and other rivalries to achieve the larger geopolitical goal of securing access to fossil fuel reserves.

We follow up with a reading of Peter Dale Scott's - "The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld", from The Asia-Pacific Journal. Scott's compendious and characteristically scholarly paper (with over 100 references). He begins with a definition of the 'deep state' and an examination of its relationship to the 'Shadow Government' and the 'Wall Street Overworld', introducing the CIA (headed by Wall Street lawyer, Allen Dulles) as an action arm of the same group. Funding he notes is not only from the illegal drugs trade, but also from a range of off the books sources including "a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan]".

Scott continues to elaborate upon the interlocking mesh of relationships between individual power brokers such as CIA agents Miles Copeland, Edward K. Moss and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi with private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin. One key event in the development of the deep state, he says, was the "CIA's retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms":

"In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Iran." — Prince Turki bin Faisal (Former Saudi intelligence chief)

The essay continues up to the collapse of the BCCI, looking at the roles of George H.W. Bush and Theodore Shackley. Scott concludes that "the complex milieu of Khashoggi, the BCCI, and the Safari Club can be characterized as a supranational deep state, whose organic links to the CIA may have helped consolidate it. It is clear however that decisions taken at this level by the Safari Club and BCCI were in no way guided by the political determinations of those elected to power in Washington. On the contrary, Prince Turki's candid remarks revealed that the Safari Club (with the alleged participation of two former CIA Directors, Bush and Helms) was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions in Washington.
A former Turkish president and prime minister once commented that the Turkish deep state was the real state, and the public state was only a “spare state,” not the real one. A better understanding of the American deep state is necessary, if we are to prevent it from assuming permanently the same role."

Thanks to Active Ingredients for the Charlotte Dennett talk