The modern concept of "Deep state" is associated with Turkey, a presumed secret network of military officers and their civilian allies trying to preserve the secular order based on the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk from 1923.
[9] In Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is often considered a significant deep state entity due to its substantial economic, political, and military power.
[10][11][12][13] In May 2020, an article in Haaretz describes how people meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "have heard lengthy speeches [...] that even though he has been elected repeatedly, in reality, the country is controlled by a 'deep state.
It was founded in 1877 with the name of Masonic Propaganda,[20] in the period of its management by the entrepreneur Licio Gelli it assumed deviated forms with respect to the statutes of the Freemasonry and became subversive towards the Italian legal order.
[30] According to the Journalist Robert F. Worth, "The expression 'deep state' had originated in Turkey in the 1990s, where the military colluded with drug traffickers and hit men to wage a dirty war against Kurdish insurgents".
[31] The journalist Dexter Filkins wrote of a "presumed clandestine network" of Turkish "military officers and their civilian allies" who, for decades, "suppressed and sometimes murdered dissidents, Communists, reporters, Islamists, Christian missionaries, and members of minority groups—anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order".
[32] Journalist Hugh Roberts has described the "shady nexus" between the police and intelligence services, "certain politicians and organised crime", whose members believe they are authorised "to get up to all sorts of unavowable things" because they are "custodians of the higher interests of the nation".
In 2018, Steve Hilton, then advisor to David Cameron, claimed Tony Blair had said: "You cannot underestimate how much they believe it's their job to actually run the country and to resist the changes put forward by people they dismiss as 'here today, gone tomorrow' politicians.
[37] Writing for The New York Times, the analyst Issandr El Amani warned against the "growing discord between a president and his bureaucratic rank-and-file", while analysts of the column The Interpreter wrote:[37] Though the deep state is sometimes discussed as a shadowy conspiracy, it helps to think of it instead as a political conflict between a nation's leader and its governing institutions.According to the political commentator David Gergen, quoted by Time in early 2017, the term had been appropriated by Steve Bannon, Breitbart News, and other supporters of the Trump administration in order to delegitimize critics of the Trump presidency.
[39] In October 2019 The New York Times gave credence to the general idea by publishing an opinion piece arguing that the deep state in the Civil Service was created to "battle people like Trump".
[42] The Cartel of the Suns, a group of high-ranking officials within the Bolivarian government of Venezuela, has been described as "a series of often competing networks buried deep within the Chavista regime".
President Hugo Chávez made partnerships with the Colombian leftist militia Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and his successor Nicolás Maduro continued the process, promoting officials to high-ranking positions after they were accused of drug trafficking.