That ‘Deep State’ you keep hearing about? It doesn’t exist.

Michael Hayden really, really doesn’t like it when people talk about the Deep State.

Well, of course! is what you’re probably thinking. Hayden is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a former director of the National Security Agency, and a former deputy director of National Intelligence. If anybody embodies what President Donald Trump, numerous Trump acolytes and all too many progressives refer to as the Deep State, it would be Hayden. But in his just-released book, The Assault on Intelligence, Hayden makes the case for why the Deep State doesn’t exist.

It’s important to distinguish between the notion of a Deep State and what we all recognize as the military-industrial complex. Whereas the former implies a kind of cabal of like-minded conspirators, the latter – which does indeed exist – has enormous influence both within the executive branch and in Congress, and year after year it wields that influence to expand the already bloated military and intelligence budgets, including ever more expensive high-tech weapons systems.

And while the military-industrial complex doesn’t always demand war as the solution to every global problem – the military brass and the CIA were largely opposed to the war against Iraq in 2003, for instance – it generally supports a more belligerent foreign policy than do other elements of the U.S. government, such as the State Department.

The term “Deep State” has come to the forefront since 2016 in a very particular context: in the charge that the CIA, NSA and FBI, in league with President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, conspired to create a fictional event called Russiagate in order to bring down President Trump. This is an unfounded conspiracy theory.

Hayden writes, “I have worked in intelligence for over three decades. I know what anti-democratic forces look like. I have seen them in multiple foreign countries. There is no ‘Deep State’ in the American republic.”

To be sure, part of the reason Hayden and his longtime colleagues in the spy world have seen the Deep State in countries such as Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Brazil since World War II is precisely because the CIA and its fellow alphabet agencies have conspired to support, collaborate with, arm, and train the military-security underworlds in those countries, where coups d’état have been frequent. (Hayden, you won’t be surprised to learn, doesn’t get into that in his book).

The Deep State conspiracy can easily be unraveled by asking a simple question: Is it conceivable that, among the tens of thousands of people who have access to top-secret intelligence, not a single one has emerged in the past two years to blow the whistle on the conspirators?

Many on both the left and the right, have challenged the narrative of Russiagate, usually with some version of “Where’s the beef?” One group hasn’t challenged it at all: those who have seen the underlying intelligence.

BOB DREYFUSS is a contributing editor for The Nation.