Rumors Fly That Trump May Be Initiating Secret Network to Spy on Deep State

Hannah Arendt, a German-born American political theorist who was born in 1906 and died in 1975, is widely considered to be one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.  In numerous explanations in the 1960s of why governments appear to constantly waver between “persuasion through arguments” and “coercion by force,” Arendt oftentimes referred to Athenian historian Thucydides, a military fleet admiral who was exiled from Athens for 20 years after arriving too late with his ships to save the city of Amphipolis from the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War.

Hannah Arendt (1928)

During those 20 years in exile, Thucydides, who owned his own gold mines, financed the rest of his life as a historian, chronicling the entire Peloponnesian War and inserting philosophies on war, politics and the behavior of man.  He was known to ask questions such as, “What makes nations go to war? How can politics elevate or poison a society? What is the measure of a great leader or a great democracy?”

Thucydides (circa 430 BC)

As Arendt and Thucydides recognized, the political struggles at home (especially those within the deepest underpinnings of the gears of the government) directly affect who leads, who follows, who goes to war, and…most important…who wins and who loses.

For the United States, those questions have been on our tongues since before we were a nation.  Men who proved that they were willing to give up everything that made them who they were, risked it at the threat of the hangman’s noose.  During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had similar philosophical concerns and questions.  In fact, his Gettysburg Address borrowed heavily in tone and message from the Greek historian because these questions are timeless and the moral compass of humanity flawed and errant.

Donald Trump is uniquely poised to be the first president since Reagan to force an abrupt change in American politics that will forever alter the future course of this nation.  The mere fact that he was able to tap into the raw energy and vitality of a people so overcome with derision for government based on a severely misguided and arrogant President Obama, was magic in and of itself.  The full Trump effect cannot yet be foreseen, but it is so powerful that even the once vaunted Fourth Estate has been reduced to a foreclosed community center.

A report has surfaced that is intimating that Donald Trump is considering the unofficial structuring of an incredibly cloaked spy network that will put out of business any notion that the Progressive holdovers from Obama, Bush and Clinton will continue to write government policy.  The network is said to have been initiated by two individuals:  Erik Prince and John R. Maguire.

The Trump administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.

The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration’s political agenda.

“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

The proposals would utilize an army of spies with no official cover in several countries deemed “denied areas” for current American intelligence personnel, including North Korea and Iran. The White House has also considered creating a new global rendition unit meant to capture terrorist suspects around the world, as well as a propaganda campaign in the Middle East and Europe to combat Islamic extremism and Iran.

At the heart of the scheme being considered by the White House are Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his longtime associate, CIA veteran John R. Maguire, who currently works for the intelligence contractor Amyntor Group. Maguire also served on Trump’s transition team.

John R. Maguire / Eric Prince

Michael Barry, who was recently named NSC senior director for intelligence programs, worked closely with Prince on a CIA assassination program during the Bush administration.

Prince and Maguire deny they are working together. Those assertions, however, are challenged by current and former U.S. officials and Trump donors who say the two men were collaborating.

Prince and Maguire have a long professional relationship. Maguire recently completed a stint as a consultant with Prince’s company, Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-based security and logistics company partially owned by the Chinese government. FSG has no known connections to the private spy plan.

Prince has strong ties to the Trump administration: His sister Betsy DeVos is secretary of education, he was a major donor to the Trump election campaign, and he advised the transition team on intelligence and defense appointments, as The Intercept has previously reported.

“Erik has no hobbies,” said the longtime Prince associate. “Counterterrorism is his hobby.”

In some ways, these plans mirror operations Prince led during the Bush-Cheney administration. When Prince was running Blackwater, he and a former CIA paramilitary officer, Enrique Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their “deniability” as a “big plus” for potential Blackwater customers, according to internal company communications obtained by The Intercept.

The longtime Prince associate said that the nexus of deniable assets has never gone away. “The NOC network is already there. It already exists for the better part of 15 years now,” he said.

This would not be the first time that a president has worked specifically to kill the spirit of the Deep State, however.  Back in 1972, President Nixon fired CIA Director Richard McGarrah Helms after the Watergate break-in because he believed Helms “was out to get him;” and he gave orders to Helms’s replacement, James Schlesinger, “to turn the place inside out.”

Richard McGarrah Helms (1962)

At that point, Schlesinger then purged more than five hundred analysts and more than one thousand people in all from the clandestine service.  Of interest here is that later CIA Director George Bush (41) called Schlesinger a disgrace for kowtowing to a politician.

James Schlesinger (1958)

The antagonism between CIA operatives and the White House did not begin or end with Nixon. It was so acute right after the Bay of Pigs and the firing of CIA Director Allen Welsh Dulles that Kennedy told one of the highest officials of his Administration that he wanted “to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Allen Welsh Dulles (1967)

Remember that both of these presidents never completed their terms in office.  As well, Lyndon B. Johnson had such a contentious relationship with the Deep State that he chose not to run for reelection.

Donald Trump runs the risk of slamming into the Deep State wall that many other presidents were up against and that is a real concern.  If he is to make inroads into the Deep State, while this may be a partial answer to that conundrum, it still may not be enough to cut out the whole infected tumor.  That being said, tumors tend to grow back…and more aggressively attack the system.

If this is accurate, and Trump is on board with this idea, I would advise a caution and vigilance like no other before him.  No one in the public square ever thought for an instant that JFK would ever be a victim of the Deep State.  Yet, before his body was cold, the plot to kill his brother had already been hatched.

Source:  The Intercept