Deep states

Dmitri Poshlost is one half of Subliminal Jihad, a podcast that explores conspiracy, parapolitics and esoteric history. Here, Dmitri takes us through a reading list designed to cultivate occult knowledge, spanning mind control, intelligence operations and the global arms trade.

Stewart Steven, Operation Splinter Factor (Hodder & Stoughton, 1974)

This obscure out-of-print exposé features one of the most insane stories of the early Cold War that has been completely forgotten. Steven is told by unnamed insiders about a plot by CIA chief Allen Dulles to personally psyop Joseph Stalin into “discovering” that various high-ranking figures in Eastern Bloc countries were deep-cover Titoist-American spies plotting to betray him. Dulles’s sociopathic plan to frame an old State Department chum, fellow traveller Noel Field, as his man in Europe resulted in a cascading wave of paranoid “show trials” and executions of faithful party luminaries like Rudolf Slánský and László Rajk. These dealt a massive blow to Soviet prestige and communist morale across Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria. It’s somewhat odd that a liberal British journalist somehow manages to humanise and explain Stalin’s actions better than the most hardcore anti-revisionist tankies ever have, but facts are stubborn things…

Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (Granta, 1999) 

If you think I just went completely off the rails by suggesting that Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison were CIA ops, you should take a step back and read the groundbreaking work of Frances Stonor Saunders. This is one of the most essential academic books about CIA soft power and the Agency’s role in shaping the direction of Western “culture” after World War II. Saunders traces the origins of a massive public-private effort (much of it steered by the aforementioned CIA Old Boys and their wealthy friends) to leverage art and culture as weapons in the Cold War struggle against Communism. The CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom subsidized scores of journals and magazines across Europe, often championing voices of the “anti-communist left”. Abstract Expressionism was specifically promoted as a quintessentially “free” American art movement, contra Soviet socialist realism, and so on. Even the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, that great incubator of high-falutin’ navel-gazing autofiction, had its connections to the CIA cultural apparatus. Troubling implications abound for the Foundation-funded cultural world we find ourselves in today.

Dave McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart Of The Hippie Dream (Headpress, 2010)

Many people will dismiss the work of conspiracist Dave McGowan as too “vibes-based”, but sometimes that’s the only way to investigate the deepest levels of covert cultural warfare and social engineering. McGowan settles for nothing less than a full-frontal assault on the massive cultural capital generated by the “Psychedelic Sixties”, and the benighted music from Laurel Canyon that changed everything. No book is more likely to enrage the boomers in your life than this one. If you didn’t know that Jim Morrison’s dad was the Navy Captain responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin false flag that kickstarted the Vietnam War, or that Frank Zappa’s father was a chemical warfare specialist at the Edgewood Arsenal in the MKUltra days, or that David Crosby’s ancestors ruled the colony of New Amsterdam for centuries, it’s time to wake up. Pair this with Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS (2019) about Charles Manson’s CIA connections, and a disturbing mosaic of cultural manipulation starts to emerge.

Dr Wendy Painting, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh (TrineDay, 2016) 

Dr Painting’s dissertation on the high weirdness surrounding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing is a rigorous and terrifying dive into military mind control, the high-tech US massacres of the first Gulf War, and the security state-managed dramaturgy of domestic terrorism in the decade between the fall of the USSR and 9/11. Prepare to add “Domestic Gladio” to your daily lexicon.

Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (Penguin, 2012)

I first came across this book years ago while researching a screenplay about arms dealers. The screenplay is still sitting in my drawer, but Feinstein’s sprawling chronicle of the global arms underworld has been a core source for my DEMON FORCES series. It’s the only book I know of that traces the very direct connections between the hellish civil wars of Liberia and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, right down to the CIA Gladio men and “ex”-Nazi arms dealers who flooded those countries with pilfered Soviet weapons. Maggie Thatcher’s failson Mark makes quite a cameo in the infamous Al-Yamamah arms deal, and there’s enough interlock tea about Western politicians and businessmen to back a thousand criminal indictments at the ICC.

Gabriel Rockhill , Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (NYU Press, 2025)

Building on the strengths of Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper?, professor of philosophy Gabriel Rockhill strolls into the Frankfurt School ivory tower and detonates the vest. The book exposes academic leftist heroes Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse as deeply compromised actors whose careers were subsidised by the US national security state. Don’t bring this one to parties at the Verso loft, you’ll catch a lifetime ban.

Patricia Goldstone, Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi (Counterpoint, 2015) 

Can making conceptual art get you assassinated by the deep state? The story of Mark Lombardi seems to suggest that you can. Lombardi’s minimalistic “interlock” drawings of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal, Iran-Contra money laundering networks, and CIA money flows are equally mysterious and revelatory, and they’re a wonderful reminder that “conceptual art” can be much more than a mystified bourgeois circle jerk. Goldstone traces Lombardi’s career right up to his mysterious suicide in 2000, and then boldly uses his drawings to hypothesise that his untimely death might be related to incoming President George W Bush and the tragedy of 9/11.

Whitney Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein (TrineDay, 2022) 

We know much more about the Epstein class today, but this two-volume opus from 2022 still stands undefeated as the most sweeping and comprehensive examination of the system that produced him. Webb was highlighting some of the weirdest corners of the Epstein-verse back when most people were treating it like a turbo-charged #MeToo/true crime melodrama. It’s all there: the transhumanism, the Israeli intelligence ties, the Maxwell sisters’ forays into the early internet economy, the suspect ex-hippies running the Edge Foundation, Iran-Contra ties. To fully understand the scope of the Epstein story, one needs to learn about the true nature of US, Israeli and British intelligence operations since 1945, and Webb’s books touch on it all with copious footnotes. The end result is a noided researcher’s bible.

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (Penguin, 2013)

This is the only work of fiction I feel like recommending wholeheartedly in 2026. Pynchon’s stock has been rising as our world increasingly comes to resemble his (and two Paul Thomas Anderson adaptations of varying quality), but not enough people are revisiting Pynchon’s 2013 detective yarn about the late 1990s NYC dot-com bubble and its murky connections to 9/11. Allusions abound to the Metaverse, Josh Harris’s bizarre “We Live In Public” Y2K MKUltra experiment in Manhattan, Saudi money flows, Mossad agents and high WASP lawyers lurking in the margins, and the sinister momentum of the DARPA internet itself. This may end up being Pynchon’s final “prophetic” novel, and it was warning us about how weird and dark the new cybernetic frontier was going to become. No wonder the CIA Iowa Writers’ Workshop doesn’t want people writing like him.

Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (St Martin's Press, 1986) 

Desperate to fill some gaps on your shelves after throwing out all your old Chomsky books? Grab this and every other book by the recently departed Dr Parenti. It was published two years before Manufacturing Consent (1988) and curiously makes all the same points, only better and with Marxism (Edward S. Herman wrote all the best parts of Manufacturing Consent anyway). Parenti is such a clear, forceful and charismatic defender of actually existing socialism that it seems inevitable the CIA would relentlessly push Epstein’s favourite MIT professor as the “leading intellectual leftist radical” in the Anglophone world.

Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (1907)

As we like to say on the pod, “There ain’t nothin’ new under the sun.” Socialist muckraker Gustavus Myers began dropping this exposé trilogy in 1910, near the end of America’s first Gilded Age, but its relevance has only ripened as we’ve sunk into the doldrums of the second. Myers lays out in meticulous, flowery fin-de-siècle detail how all of America’s great fortunes from the colonial period onwards were built on fraud, bribery, political corruption, theft, extreme labour exploitation and war profiteering, retroactively legitimised through “philanthropy” and the fawning bromides of sycophantic journalists. Carnegie, Morgan, Sage, Gould – none of our venerable lords of capital are spared, and Myers has a mountain of receipts proving their perfidy. I’m patiently waiting for someone to write its spiritual sequel about Gates, Musk, Thiel, and the psychopathic wealth hoarders of our own age.

Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (Scribner, 1992)

I’m often surprised by how good certain mass-market middlebrow books were before the internet took over, and Hersh’s The Old Boys is a sterling example. Hersh was a bit of an Eastern Establishment insider himself, but he clearly had excellent access to the retired patrician architects of the Cold War in their dotage. Crucially, the elite class character and vibe of the CIA’s founders are emphasised: by and large, these men came from the paternalistic, insular Eastern Establishment of the high WASPs, the quasi-aristocratic merchant class that already held a centuries-long monopoly on political and economic power by 1945. They attended private boarding schools modelled on the British public school system (yikes), joined secret societies like Skull and Bones, and often came from families whose status predated the American Revolution. They were also neurotic, alcoholic egomaniacs who probably had President John F. Kennedy murdered for insufficient loyalty to their secularised Protestant mission to dominate the world for American capital, but you’ll have to read between the lines for that angle…

Khalid bin Ya’Qub is the other half of Subliminal Jihad. Here, Khalid offers an alternate reading list, curated to educate on Islamic theology, history and poetry. The list covers everything from early Sufi literature to post-Islamist politics.

Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj, Kitāb al-Ṭawāsīn (c. 870-90 bce)

This short work epitomises the gnomic weirdness of a certain kind of early Ṣūfī literature; I considered al-Niffarī’s Kitāb al-Mawāqif for this spot, but I chose the Ṭawāsīn for its memorable handling of Iblis. If you read this in English translation, I’d go with Bewley’s over Louis Massignon’s 1913 translation.

Shams al-Dīn Aflākī, Manāqib al-ʿārifīn (c. 1319)

I’m a fan of Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī, but sadly, I hesitate to put it on this list, because many tend to associate the name “Rūmī” with a cringe Deepak Chopra-esque character invented by hacks like Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinsky. Aflākī, a disciple of Rūmī’s grandson, captures in his hagiography the social, political and spiritual meanings that Mawlānā held for his successors and followers in the century after his death; he reminds us, lest we be made to forget, that Rūmī is actually interesting. John O’Kane’s excellent English translation has the title The Feats of the Knowers of God (2002).

Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2012)

The Impossible State earned some fame in certain quarters for its conception of “Islamic politics” beyond the failures of Islamism, but it is limited by its struggle to bridge the divide between theory and praxis, resorting instead to generalities. Yet even at its weakest, Hallaq’s argument demands a hearing, and at its strongest, it is a compelling treatment of an urgent topic. This book is effectively a sequel to Hallaq’s earlier macrohistory, Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, and Transformations (2009) and is arguably incomplete without it, but it feels like cheating to list two books.

Farīd al-Dīn MuḥammadʿAṭṭār, Manṭiq al-ṭayr (c.1177)

The Muslim community is in such a state today that some will try to convince you our religion is about never criticising rulers and making your wife pray in the closet, but Manṭiq al-ṭayr shows what it’s all really about. In its broad “genre”, I’d put it second only to the Mathnavī (see #5). Dick Davis’s 1984 English translation is far lovelier but also freer than Peter Avery’s 1998 translation.

Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī, Rawḍat al-Shuhadāʾ (c.1504–05)

Rawḍat al-Shuhadāʾ (The Mea dow of the Martyrs), is the definitive Shīʿa martyrology, from the pen of a fellow “Twelver Sunni”. Kāshifī stirs the heart, as is his imperative as a vāʿiẓ, but his narratives of the sufferings of the prophets and the family of Muḥammad (ﷺ) also invite reflection on the contingency of historical memory and the ineluctable facticity of feeling.

Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (University of Chicago Press, 2018) 

Somewhat to my surprise, Pandolfo’s ethnography has become my go-to recommendation for those concerned with the ontology of the jinn, or with the supposedly “irrational” aspects of religiosity. A fascinating study of epistemological collision and instability in the colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī, Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (c.1240)

Ibn al-ʿArabī well deserves his epithet al-Shaykh al-Akbar; he is one of human history’s most luminous practitioners of writing as a mode of thought. The relatively accessible Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (Ringstones of Wisdom) might be the more practical recommendation, and I do enthusiastically recommend that book, but it is to the magisterial Futūḥāt as a reflecting pool is to the moon. It’s difficult to state succinctly what the Futūḥāt is “about” (everything?) or to say what kind of book it is, other than the kind that people don’t write anymore.

Muhammad Iqbal, Kulliyāt

I’m ashamed to have come to an interest in Iqbal rather late; obviously, he’s hardly an unknown writer, but I feel he’s still surprisingly underappreciated in the West, even among Muslims. I see no reason why Iqbal should be less well known to politically engaged Anglophones than Lenin (for whom Iqbal has named a must-read poem). I can only actually read his Persian poems in the original, but if I ever learn Urdu, it will probably be to the credit of this writer. .