Conspiracy theorists overestimate how bright their foes are

Consider the popular theory that Deep State Svengalis psy-opped the Laurel Canyon rock scene into existence in 1965. Isn't that expecting a little much of middle-aged civil servants?

One of the general rules of history is that few things go exactly according to plan.

A popular example of this wisdom, even though it’s not exactly true, is that Field Marshall Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1891-1906, meticulously created the Shlieffen Plan for how Germany could quickly win a two-front war against France and Russia: invade France first, take Paris, then go east and beat the less nimble Russians. As he reminded his fellow Junker generals on his death bed, the one thing that could go wrong was if they lost their courage when the Russians invaded their East Prussian estates and demanded that to stop the Russians, troops be pulled from the French front before Paris is taken.

But of course, his successors did exactly that and the Germans were stopped by the French outside Paris at the First Battle of the Marne, which then led to over four years of catastrophic trench warfare, bringing down the royal houses of Russia, Austria, and Germany.

Well, actually, this didn’t quite happen the way it’s often recounted in popular histories, especially not Schlieffen’s prophetic deathbed words, which nobody ever claimed in print that he said until many years later. In truth, the reality was vastly more complicated.

But, still, the popular version offers a pretty good, if highly stylized, lesson: the Imperial German General Staff was possibly the most competent planning organization in the history of the world up through 1914, but even their plans didn’t quite work, and within a half decade there was no more German Empire. (Then, as you may have heard, a whole bunch more stuff happened that nobody had foreseen before the Great War.)

In contrast, popular conspiracy theories tend to assume that civil servants are malign but far-seeing savants capable of flawlessly managing triple bankshot plans of vast historical consequence.

One of my favorite local conspiracy theories is that the famous Laurel Canyon rock scene of the mid-1960s (The Doors, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Still, Nash & Young, The Byrds, etc.) was a Deep State psy-op to … well, what the purpose of it was is usually a little speculative.

Sure, it would seem as if the rise in the U.S. of long-haired post-Beatles rock from 1965 turned out badly for young people’s support of Washington’s war in Vietnam in the later 1960s.

Granted, late 1960s rock wasn’t as leftist as rock critics claimed — “Taxman” by George Harrison and “Revolution” by John Lennon are not unrepresentative of the relatively few songs of the time with overtly political lyrics.

Still, the efflorescence of rock music from the mid-1960s onward thrust into the forefront of popular culture a more innately anti-war temperament: musicians tend to be less overtly masculine than, say, jocks. Moreover, rock music allowed a lot of draft age young men who didn’t want to be cannon fodder to become superstars, while not long before movie stars had tended to be older men who had either served impressively in WWII (e.g., Lee Marvin) or had sidestepped service for respectable reasons (e.g., John Wayne).

But that’s not point, say the theorists. The point is that rock music was obviously a brilliant conspiracy to bring about … well … whatever it is that the theorists dislike about the years after the 1960s. Sure, in 1965, the Deep State got the impact of rock music on support for the Vietnam War in 1968 wrong … but, nonetheless, they were geniuses about how it would lead to transgendermania in 2015 or to the “racial reckoning” in 2020. Or something.

The main evidence that 1965 American rock was a Deep State psy-op seems to be that Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison was the son of Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was in the chain of command during the dubious Gulf of Tonkin Incident:

I’m putting the paywall here, with 1400 words afterwards. In it, I offer a new, more plausible conspiracy theory about what the Deep State might really have done to alter American pop music in an anti-Communist direction in 1965 by getting in touch with the one guy who actually mattered.

Also, Frank Zappa’s dad was a defense industry engineer.

But, having grown up near Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the unfashionable flat part of the San Fernando Valley, a half dozen miles north of the intersection of Laurel Canyon and the Sunset Strip, the center of the music industry, it seemed like practically everybody’s dad either worked in defense aerospace (like my dad) or entertainment. Airplanes and movies were two industries attracted by the sunny weather.

Interestingly, there were two main aspects to the U.S. Deep State during the Cold War: the wordcels and the shape rotators. The literary intellectuals turned CIA men like James Jesus Angleton, who had edited a magazine that published T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, were concentrated on the East Coast, where the CIA is headquartered. In contrast, the technical side of intelligence collecting, such as designing the U2 and SR-71 spy planes for the CIA, was better represented on the West Coast.

For example, one of my mom’s best friends when she was a secretary at Lockheed married an engineer named Henry Combs, and I often played with his kids at his High Desert ranch in the 1960s. Decades later I was reading Ben Rich’s wonderful memoir Skunk Works about Rich’s career that led to him being the successor to the legendary Kelly Johnson as head of Lockheed’s advanced design unit, when I was stunned to see Rich credit Mr. Combs as the “genius” structural engineer who was the chief designer of the SR-71 Blackbird Mach three superplane, the most jaw-dropping airplane ever:

You could also point out that the father of the drummer of The Police, Stewart Copeland, was Miles Copeland, one of the most famous CIA agents. I can recall reading a couple of William F. Buckley interviews with Miles years before The Police formed in 1977. But that was in another country, and, besides, Laurel Canyon was dead.And it’s not like the Copelands fils were secretive about Copeland père: all three entrepreneurial sons named their start-ups after scary government institutions: The Police, IRS Records, and the Frontier Booking Institute (FBI).

One group that did cooperate with the American Deep State was horn rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears

And they paid a heavy price for it.

They were huge when I started listening to Top 40 radio in 1970, but you never hear about them anymore. This could be due to their sound being, now that I’m no longer 11 years old, kind of annoying. But it also could be due to them being blackmailed by the Deep State.

Blood, Sweat & Tear’s Wikipedia page says:

The band went on a United States Department of State-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in May/June 1970. Voluntary association with the U.S. government was highly unpopular with "underground" rock fans at the time, some of whom engaged in radical politics. The band was criticized for allowing itself to be co-opted. It is now known that the State Department subtly pressured the group into the tour in exchange for a U.S. residency permit to [Canadian lead singer David] Clayton-Thomas, who had a criminal record in Canada, and had been deported from the U.S. after overstaying his visa. The tour and its aftermath is the focus of a 2023 feature-length documentary titled "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?"

Update: A reader brings nuance to the question of what really happened:

My dad was Blood, Swear and Tears' manager during their heyday. He was the junior partner of their manager at the time of the Eastern Europe tour. We had a framed poster in Polish from the tour in my rec room when i was a kid.

My dad has struggled for years (including giving interviews and materials to the makers of the documentary) to try to debunk the story that the tour was to get David a visa. It's simply untrue and my dad says that David's visa situation had been cleared up well before the tour. It is true that the manager at the time, Larry Goldblatt was an old friend of someone senior in the State Department and that relationship helped make the tour happen. But it was really more a bone head move on Larry's part. He seem to think this was going to be a positive publicity coup for the band, that they would get clout for being "the first big western pop act behind the iron curtain.” The band members agreed. Rolling Stone sent a correspondent along. But for whatever reason, a few of the big lights of the counterculture decided that the salient fact of the tour was US government support/endorsement and they famously crashed the post-tour presser. It did certainly harm the band. David was definitely a very badly behaved person who probably should have been kept in the soon-to-be 51st State. But there was not a connection between that and the tour.

Lots of jazz greats, such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, and Sarah Vaughan, did good will tours of Eastern Europe under the sponsorship of the State Department, and that didn’t ruin their careers. Same for a lot of writers like John Updike.

But rock turned out to be different.

Heckuva job, Deep State!

Other evidence for a Deep State thumb on the cultural scales:

During the Cold War, the CIA subsidized the international highbrow magazine Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, to persuade European highbrows that anti-Communists weren’t all lowbrow Babbitts.

And a CIA agent, future distinguished writer Peter Matthiessen, founded the literary Paris Review while a CIA agent, although it’s not clear whether that was a topdown CIA master plan or whether a bored operative with literary ambitions came up with the idea himself. Eventually, Matthiessen’s friend, the delightful bon vivant and jock George Plimpton became editor and made it prominent for his in-depth interviews of famous writers, asking professional questions like “What hours of the day do you write?”

Was Plimpton on the CIA payroll in order to make America more popular with literary intellectuals? I dunno, but if he were, I can’t say that my contributing a few pennies over the years to helping keep Plimpton’s liquor cabinet stocked was the expenditure of my taxes I regret most.

Likewise, the CIA helped subsidize some art exhibitions in Europe to promote New York Abstract Expressionist painters to make America look cooler in the eyes of sophisticated Europeans. But note that it’s not like the CIA invented Abstract Expressionism and psy-opped it into popularity. CIA men, and their wives, liked paintings by Rothko and Pollock for the same reason their higher paid cousins running the Fortune 500 liked eating at the Rothko and Pollock-decorated Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building: they were in tune with their times.

If you were a genius at manipulating the youth of the 1960s into liking rock bands, why would you spend your career working for the CIA in Langley, Virginia for a civil servant’s salary, rather than moving to Malibu? (In 2024, the maximum federal civil servant’s salary is $191,900, a pleasant sum, but one that pop music impresarios would scoff at.)

Seriously, why assume that CIA employees are brilliant? What’s their track record? Tim Weiner's well-known history of the CIA is entitled Legacy of Ashes for a reason.

If I were going to make up a more plausible conspiracy theory about how the Deep State manipulated pop music around 1965, I’d focus instead on the collapse of folk music. Undermining the Communism-adjacent folk music fad would be a more plausible exercise of Deep State power.

After the red scare of the McCarthy years, folk music was the Communist Party USA’s most appealing tool. Communists like Pete Seeger were making melodic music that everybody liked, such as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “If I Had a Hammer.” Here’s Elvis Costello’s dad:

And the folkies were at least moderately cool. Folk music was attracting new talent like Simon & Garfunkel and The Byrds, who did a lovely cover of Seeger’s Biblical “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

If you were the most insightful Deep State operative in the mid-1960s, even if you could recognize the inchoate peacenik vibe of the Laurel Canyon scene, altering the course of cultural history would be like King Canute having the rising tide whipped. It’s virtually impossible for even the most genius bureaucrat to divert the cultural momentum of a generation.

On the other hand, the threat posed by Communist folkies like Seeger was the kind of old time menace that CIA men could understand.

And, if you were the CIA’s greatest sage, perhaps you figured out that just maybe there was one thing you could conceivably do to cripple the prestige and coolness of Moscow’s American music.

It doesn’t involve creating an entire new world-conquering music scene. It just involves talking this one guy into doing what he already kind of wants to do.

Sure, this guy doesn’t like Jim Crow, he doesn’t like nuclear war, but who does? And if you listen closely to his songs, he seems to goddam love America as the land of the free, a place where somebody like him can come from Nowheresville, USA and have his say in Greenwich Village. He doesn’t particularly want money, or at least not more than the considerable sums he can earn with his talent. What he wants to do is to say whatever he wants, as loudly as feels like.

Why not encourage him to take elite American popular music in the direction he wants rather than continue to conform to Communist folkie rules?

If only we could get to folk music’s greatest talent and help him realize that his destiny lies not in pleasing boring old Pete Seeger and the CPUSA, but in fulfilling his destiny as the artist of America’s newest and freest and loudest generation: he’s the one guy who could stab his Communist folkie allies in the back and leave them dying in the ditch in terms of relevance:

Now, there’s zero evidence from the life of Bob Dylan, one of the best documented personalities in history, that the Deep State got to him and persuaded him to tie his destiny to the electric rather than the acoustic guitar, and thus divert pop music from a tool of the Communists to an American onslaught.

But still … theorizing that there was proof the the CIA turned Bob Dylan in 1965 would be a lot more plausible than most conspiracy theories going around.