Covert Netherworld

One of the most important historians of his generation is the award-winning scholar Alfred W. McCoy, Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. McCoy has authored what is perhaps the culminating volume of a long and distinguished career, In The Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.

In a completely original analysis, prize-winning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power—from the 1890s through the Cold War—and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony—covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.

Peeling back layers of secrecy, McCoy exposes a military and economic battle for global domination fought in the shadows, largely unknown to those outside the highest rungs of power. Can the United States extend the “American Century” or will China guide the globe for the next hundred years? McCoy devotes his final chapter to these questions, boldly laying out a series of scenarios that could lead to the end of Washington’s world domination by 2030.

In one particularly fascinating section of his book, McCoy brilliantly outlines and fleshes out what he describes as the “covert netherworld.” This is his own unique terminology for what other noted scholars (principally his contemporary and sometimes rival analyst Peter Dale Scott) have deemed the “deep state.” I first encountered McCoy’s discussion of this seminal concept in an earlier 2009 essay, “Covert Netherworld: Clandestine Services and Criminal Syndicates in Shaping the Philippine State,” published in Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, edited by Eric Wilson. Here is a brief excerpt:  

COVERT NETHERWORLD

As these stunning statistics on illegal gaming indicate, the study of crime, police and political crisis can take us beyond the conventional approach to Philippine politics. To learn something of the causality underlying this or any country’s recurring crises, we need to look beneath the surface formalities of elections and administration into a netherworld where secret services and criminal syndicates play a defining, yet unexamined, role in contemporary political life – in effect, probing that murky interstice between the formal and informal, or licit and illicit, that we call, for want of better words, the ‘covert netherworld’. Other terms, recently coined, fail to capture the analytical import and robust multi-disciplinary reach implicit in this phrase. The term ‘parapolitics’, for example, denotes a narrow, synchronic sub-field that masks its actual agenda – a wide-ranging inquiry with well-developed diachronic dimensions. Similarly, the term ‘deep politics’, though more evocative, is freighted with undertones of conspiracy theory from Peter Dale Scott’s book, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, and its association with Oliver Stone’s controversial film JFK that distract from a significant scholarly inquiry encompassing covert operations, criminal syndicates, and global commodities.

By contrast, the term covert netherworld conjoins the contemporary term ‘covert’, signifying state security, and the classical ‘netherworld’, connoting the parallel subterranean kingdom of the dead, to signify a similarly spectral clandestine realm intersecting with and influencing the visible surface of society in ways that elude existing models of politics or political economy. Indeed, this term and the analytical approach it entails can open us to a changing modern world in all its complexity, allowing new perceptions of politics, entire polities, and the global system that encompasses both. Just as exploration of the covert netherworld offers a powerful prism for understanding Philippine politics, so a close-grained case study of a single country shows the potential of this paradigm to open new perspectives on entire national polities, in first world and third.

At its core, this covert netherworld is an invisible interstice, within both individual nations and the international system, inhabited by criminal and clandestine actors with both the means and need to operate outside conventional channels. Among all the institutions of modern society, only intelligence agencies and crime syndicates can carry out complex financial or political operations without leaving any visible trace. Just as legal imperatives force syndicates into elaborate concealment of membership, criminal activities and illicit profits, so political necessity dictates that secret services practise a parallel tradecraft of anonymous membership, off-the-shelf financial transactions and covert operations. In sum, both are practitioners of what one CIA operative, Lucien Conein, has called ‘the clandestine arts’ – that is, the essential skill of operating outside the normal channels of civil society.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, there have been recurring signs of a surprising affinity between these two clandestine actors. Since the 1920s when global drug prohibition amplified the scale and scope of the illicit economy, state security services around the globe have found drug traffickers useful covert-action assets – from Nationalist China’s reliance on Shanghai’s Green Gang to fight the communists in the 1930s through the Gaullist regime’s use of Marseilles’ milieu against military terrorists in the 1960s. As our knowledge of the Cold War grows, the list of drug traffickers who served the CIA lengthens to include Corsican syndicates, Nationalist Chinese irregulars, Lao generals, Afghan warlords, Haitian colonels, Panamanian generals, Honduran smugglers and Nicaraguan Contra commanders. The sum of these sub rosa alliances is a political symbiosis that amplifies the reach of state security services and provides informal protection for criminal syndicates.

After the Cold War’s blocs of rival states collapsed, the international community was suddenly forced to confront an extraordinary array of non-state actors who threatened the stability of global governance. As an organisation that engages the world as it is rather than one imagined by political theorists, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime in 1998 allowing states ‘legal force to deprive drug traffickers of ill-gotten financial gains and freedom of movement’. To give force to this convention, the UN established the Office of Drugs and Crime to tame ‘highly centralised’ transnational crime groups with some 3.3 million members worldwide who traffic in drugs, arms, artifacts, humans and endangered species.

3:59 pm on September 4, 2017