The Devil’s
Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret
Government
Review of David Talbot’s book
By Prof. Edward CurtinOctober
30, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
This is a bold and
profoundly important book, not only for the portrait of the evil
spymaster Allen Dulles, but even more so for its examination of the
legacy he spawned – the creation of a cabal hidden behind the
public face of the United States government that secretly
runs the country today on behalf of wealthy elites.
The psychopathic
Allen Dulles was the enforcer for this group, called “the power
elite” by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. In recent years, especially
since September 11, 2001, as its power has expanded, it has been
given different names – the deep state, the national security state,
deep politics,etc. – but that has not diminished its power one jot.
Like a patient who goes to a doctor seeking a label for vague yet
disturbing symptoms, people may feel relief from the naming, but the
dis-ease continues until the root cause is eliminated. Aye, there’s
the rub!
Dulles is dead, but the structure he created lives
on and flourishes under new operatives.Because of his intrepid
examination of these forces, David Talbot can expect to be ignored
and attacked by disinformation specialists of various stripes, who
will use specious reasoning, lies, and any small weaknesses in
his style or sourcing to dismiss the essential truths of his
well-documented and beautifully written thesis. First ignore,
and if that doesn’t work, then attack, is the modus operandi
of these propagandists who populate the mainstream media, the
people Dulles had in his pocket and whom Talbot excoriates
throughout the book.
When an author has the guts to accuse America’s
longest-reigning CIA Director of “a reign of treason,” hecan expect
blowback from media and academic spokesmen of the deep-state.
Talbot is a gifted writer whose narrative style
quickly engrosses the reader. Two chapters into The Devil’s
Chessboard, one can’t help being nauseated by his account of Allen
Dulles’s blood-chilling betrayal of large numbers of European Jews
targeted by Hitler. “Dulles,” Talbot writes, “was more in step with
many Nazi leaders than he was with President Roosevelt.”
Together with his brother John Foster Dulles, who
would become Secretary of State under Eisenhower, Allen Dulles had
long-standing business ties to German industrial giants such as I G
Farben (manufacturers of Zyklon B used in the gas chambers) and
Krupp steel. Their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, “was at the
center of an intricate network of banks,investment firms, and
industrial conglomerates that rebuilt Germany after World
War I.” Slow to publicly break with Hitler and his allies, the
Dulles brothers, especially Allen, reserved a place in his hear and
a place at the table for his Nazi friends. When he was recruited
into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1941 and slipped into
neutral Switzerland in late 1942, he was there not so much to
support Roosevelt’s war efforts as to protect the interests of his
law firm’s German clients. In doing so, he betrayed personal
friends and anonymous Jews to Hitler’s killers in a heartless manner
hard to fathom.
Whenever Dulles had a chance to publicize the
plight of the Jews, he buried the reports. For example,when a
German cable reported that 120,000 Hungarian Jews, including
children, were to be taken for work in the “labor services” – a
euphemism for a trip to Auschwitz – “Dulles’s communiques to OSS
headquarters used the same banal language as the Nazis,
referring blandly to the ‘conscription’ of Hungary’s Jews.”
While noting that academic researchers decades later remain hesitant
to condemn Dulles for this, Talbot will have none of it. It is for
good reason that he entitles his book The Devil’s Chessboard. He
thinks Dulles was satanic.
In addition to his chilling indifference to the
slaughter of the Jews, Dulles worked overtime to undermine FDR’s
adamant insistence that he would accept nothing less than an
“unconditional surrender” and that Nazi war criminals would face
justice. Dulles worked his wiles at saving many Nazi war criminals
and returning them to power in post-war West-Germany. Among
them was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s notorious chief of
intelligence. In a talk to the Council of Foreign Relations on
December 3, 1945, as the first Nuremburg trial was underway, he told
the meeting, “Most men of the caliber required to [run thenew
Germany] suffer a political taint.
We have already found out that you can’t run the
railroads without taking in some [Nazi] party members.” Couching
this in anti-Soviet rhetoric for an audience of like-minded power
brokers, many of whom were no doubt as ant-Semitic as he was, Dulles
made sure it happened. He worked hard to save the neck of Himmler’s
former chief of staff and commander of the security forces in Italy,
SS general Karl Wolff. Called the “Bureaucrat of Death,” this
killer was one of many Dulles saved under his separate peace
pact, Operation Sunrise, a traitorous circumvention of
Roosevelt’s insistence on justice. SS colonel Eugen Dollman was
another. In this operation, he worked closely with James Jesus
Angleton, the future CIA head of counterintelligence who saw Dulles
as his maestro. Working together they helped many notorious Nazi
war criminals escape to the United States, Latin America, and other
countries via the “Nazi ratlines.”
In Part II of the book, Talbot buttresses these
historical and well-sourced facts with a detour into Dulles’s
personal life and relationships. It is not a reassuring portrait.
We learn that his wife Clover and one of his mistresses, Mary
Bancroft, called him “the Shark.” (Bancroft was the best friend of
Ruth Paine’s mother-in-law; it was at Ruth Paine’s house that Marina
and Lee Harvey Oswald lived at the time of JFK’s assassination. More
on the Paine’s below.)
Bancroft refers to “those cold blue eyes of his”
and his“peculiar mirthless laugh.” Carl Jung, who treated both
women, said Dulles was “quite a tough nut.”Talbot notes that there
was “an impenetrable blankness that made him hard to read.” This
description approximates Jung’s take on Hitler that Talbot
juxtaposes on the same page – that Hitler seemed like “a mask, like
a robot, or a mask of a robot.” Mary Bancroft recalled that the
emotionally dead Dulles’s favorite word was “useful.” People were
only good to him if they were useful. His daughter Joan told Talbot
that her father was “clearly not interested in us.” A grinning
Dulles once told Mary that his feigned bonhomie, his avuncular
demeanor, and trusting attitude toward people were an act. He said,
“I like to watch the little mice sniffing at the cheese just before
they venture into the little trap. I like to see their expressions
when it snaps shut, breaking their little necks.”
After his WW II work assisting Nazis, Dulles
turned his attention to stirring the cauldron in Eastern Europe.
This time he betrayed many thousands to Stalin’s thugs in a
make-believe plot called Operation Splinter Factor that was meant to
panic Stalin. It achieved its goal and once again the victims were
“useful” to him.
His ideological obsession in countering the
Soviet Union in the Cold War knew no bounds. Talbot reports that
private citizen Dulles funded espionage activities with treasure
looted from Jewish families; that he set up, together with Frank
Wisner and others, his own espionage unit deep within the State
Department – the Office of Policy Coordination; that he was
instrumental in the rise of Richard Nixon to political prominence.
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s he was hard at work
constructing the infrastructure of the CIA and a powerful secret
government that would outlast him.
Once he finagled his way into the position of CIA
Director under Eisenhower, “the CIA would become avast kingdom, the
most powerful and least supervised agency in government …. More in
keeping with an expanding empire than with a vibrant democracy.”
Talbot closely chronicles the rise of Senator
Joseph McCarthy, the bullying Red hunter, and Dulles’s dirty battles
with him. Secret dossiers, sexual blackmail,every trick imaginable
– these were the methods Dulles used in his winning battle with
McCarthy. This victory gave him cachet with Washington liberals,
who celebrated Dulles’s CIA as a safe place for the liberal
intelligentsia. This was a fateful turn of events; “it established
a dangerous precedent,” Talbot notes, for Dulles now had a freer
hand to grow the CIA and expand its secret powers with liberal
support against the “real” communist threat, not the hyped up sort
McCarthy stood for.
“In truth,” he writes, “the CIA became an
effective killing machine under Dulles.” Assassination had always
been one of his favorite methods, and now it had found an
institutional home. Today its home is also in the Obama White
House, a development well-documented, and a sign of Dulles’s
expanded and enduring influence.
Talbot has two excellent sections on what Dulles
felt were two of his greatest successes: the CIA led 1953coup in
Iran and the 1954 coup in Guatemala, both of which ousted
democratically elected leaders and installed dictators for the
benefit of multinational corporations’ foreign investments.
Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were eventually killed and
tortured as a result, and we are dealing with the consequences
today.
Throughout his narrative Talbot mentions many of
Dulles’s protégés who will figure prominently in future events,
including assassinations of American and foreign leaders: Howard
Hunt, James Angleton, David Atlee Philips, Richard Helms, William
Harvey, David Morales, to name but a few. As one reads through his
excellent chronicle of the CIA’s coups, its MKULTRA mind control
project, its cultural engineering that captivated artists and
intellectuals, one can’t help feeling that Dulles’s machinations are
leading to adefining culmination.
Enter Senator John F. Kennedy and an explosive
speech he delivered on the Senate floor on July 2, 1957. Talbot
correctly notes this speech’s significance when he writes, “Breaking
from the Cold War orthodoxy that prevailed in the Democratic as well
as Republican parties, JFK suggested that Soviet expansionism was
not the only enemy of world freedom; so, too, were the forces of
western imperialism that crushed the legitimate aspirations of
people throughout the Third World.”
This speech set the stage for the CIA’s future war
with Kennedy that ended in his assassination on November22, 1963.
JFK was challenging the entire worldview of the Eisenhower / Dulles
/ Republican/ Democratic establishment. He had crossed the Rubicon.
Talbot updates it aptly:
“Even today, no nationally prominent leader in
the United States today would dare question the imperialistic
policies that have led our country into one military nightmare
after another.”
If one could imagine a leader doing so, and that
politician was then elected president, what would be his fate?
Talbot’s implication is sobering, and a reader can’t help thinking
of those prominent leaders who dared to question imperialist
agenda –JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy.
Former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern has suggested that American
presidents since Kennedy are acutely aware of the message sent from
the streets of Dallas.
In the last section of the book Talbot covers a
lot of familiar territory regarding the Bay of Pigs, Dulles’s firing
by Kennedy, and Kennedy’s assassination. He accurately claims that
the Bay of Pigs was a setup of Kennedy by Dulles that “was meant to
fail” so as to force Kennedy to launch a full-scale invasion of
Cuba.
“The wily CIA chief set a trap for
Kennedy, allowing the president to believe that his
‘immaculate invasion’ could succeed, even though Dulles knew
that only U.S. soldiers and planes could ensure that.”
What he doesn’t mention, but would buttress
his argument further, is that classified documents uncovered
in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had
learned of the date of the invasion more than a week in advance, had
informed Castro, but never told Kennedy. This treasonous with
holding was not lost on Kennedy who knew that “Dulles had lied to
his face in the Oval Office about the chances for the operation’s
success.” When JFK refused the bait and courageously avoided the
trap Dulles had set for him – “to break his little neck” – Dulles
and his followers were enraged. “That little Kennedy … he thought
he was a god,” Dulles let slip in 1965 on a stroll with the writer
Willie Morris.
Talbot’s section on the attempted coup d’état
against French President Charles de Gaulle is terrific. This CIA
backed event, launched in the same month as the Bay of Pigs, was
also clearly meant to embarrass Kennedy and to send the message that
it was the CIA, not Kennedy, who was in charge. The July
1962assassination attempt on de Gaulle emphasized the
message: those who dare to recognize the independence of Third
World countries, as JFK had proposed in 1957 and de Gaulle was in
the process of doing with Algeria, would be eliminated.
Talbot convincingly shows that although he was out
as CIA Director, Dulles was still very much in power,avidly
conferring and plotting with his CIA acolytes, his moles in the
Kennedy administration, and hismilitary allies led by the Joint
Chief’s chairman Lemnitzer, who hated Kennedy.
“Like the Time-Life building in Manhattan,
Dulles’s brick house on Q Street was a boiling center of
anti-Kennedy opposition.The actively ‘retired’ spymaster
maintained a busy appointments calendar, meeting not only with
CIA old boys like Frank Wisner and Charles Cabell [the brother
of the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was murdered], but
with a steady stream of top-rank, active- duty agency officials
such as Angleton, Helms,Cord Meyer, and Desmond Fitzgerald.
More surprisingly, Dulles also conferred with mid-level
officials and operational officers such as Howard Hunt, James
Hunt (a key deputy of Angleton, and no relation toHoward), and
Thomas Karamessines (Helm’s right-hand man).”
In October 1963 Dulles gave a speech ridiculing
the Kennedy administration’s “yearning to be loved” by the rest of
the world. His best-selling book, The Craft of Intelligence, also
appeared that fall and was sycophantically praised by his media
allies at The New York Times and Washington Post, papers that would
give their seal of approval to the Warren Commission report that
Dulles would control and which has been called the Dulles
Commission. Talbot correctly notes throughout the book that Dulles
always had the backing of the powerful mainstream media such as The
New York Times, The Washington Post,Time-Life, etc. Their owners
and executives were a key part of his network of friends and
insiders who worked in tandem to support their mutual interests at
home and abroad.
He has a revelatory section on Dulles’s retreat on
the weekend of JFK’s assassination to the top-secret“Farm,” a CIA
command facility, officially known as Camp Peary. From Friday,
November 22, the day of the assassination, through Sunday, the 24th,
the day Ruby shot Oswald, Dulles hunkered down at this training
center for assassins, as described by former CIA agents Philip Agee
and Victor Marchetti. It was also a “black site” where extreme
interrogation methods were used on suspected enemies. What he was
doing there is unknown, though highly suspicious.
The weakest part of Talbot’s final section, where
he marshals plenty of circumstantial evidence that strongly suggests
but doesn’t prove Dulles’s part in the assassination, is his
analysis of Ruth and Michael Paine. Talbot interviewed them in
their retirement community and came away a bit starry-eyed. Ruth
Paine was the Dallas housewife who had befriended Marina Oswald and
taken her – and Lee Harvey on weekends – to live with her. She was
the key witness for the Warren Commission. It was at her home where
incriminating evidence against Oswald was found. The Paine’s
connection to the CIA, Dulles’ network, and other CIA operations,
confirmed by excellent researchers in great detail, escapes
him,although he does note their connection to Mary Bancroft,
Dulles’s former mistress. Of the Paines he writes, “In their
immaculate innocence, the Paines played right into the hands
of those who were manipulating Oswald.” I’m afraid Talbot is the
innocent here. The Paines are very important figures in the
assassination and seeing them clearly would add to his powerful
thesis. Perhaps he was tired at this point in his pursuit of the
satanic Dulles.
He does raise three interesting issues in his last
hundred or so pages. (I should note that The Devil’s Chessboard is
a very long – 661 pages – and heavily documented book.) They are:
the aforementioned account of Dulles at “the Farm,” the connections
to the attempted coup and assassination against deGaulle, and the
very real possibility of CIA operative William Harvey being
involved in the killing of Kennedy. Otherwise, there is not much
new about the assassination, though he does do an excellent job of
marshalling the available recent research on the subject
and sprinkling his text with intriguing suggestions.
One of the most interesting new details he offers
is from a book by de Gaulle’s information minister Alain Peyrefitte,
C’etait de Gaulle, which was never translated into English. In it
the French president, just home from JFK’s funeral, confides to
Peyrefitte that he knew that the CIA was behind the assassination.
“What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me. His story
is the same as mine …. The security forces were in cahoots with the
extremists …. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the
law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to
stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these
shameful deeds. In order not to lose face in front of the whole
world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States.
In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civilwar. In
order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know.
They don’t want to find out.They won’t allow themselves to find
out.”
Thus the “unspeakable,” although an open secret,
was born. But JFK’s assassination isn’t a mystery. As Dr. Martin
Schotz said twenty years ago, “Any citizen who is willing to look
can see clearly who killed President Kennedy and why.” The basic
facts are long known that he was killed by a CIA led operation to
eliminate him for his intention to end the Vietnam War, for his
support of Third-World independence, for his opposition to the
military-corporate-industrial complex, and for his efforts to
end the Cold War. Talbot knows all this. He knows that JFK’s
American University address of June 11, 1963 sealed his fate. He
knows and says that Robert Kennedy was also killed as a result of a
conspiracy, and he needed to be stopped before he became president
and reopened the killing of his brother. Talbot’s valiant effort to
put faces on the conspirators is laudatory. But while
being also highly suggestive, it may not be necessary.
The Devil’s Chessboard is a very important book.
David Talbot has exposed the face of evil incarnate in Allen Dulles,
the hit-man for the power elite. He has documented the rise of the
secret state that holds the ignorant in its grip today, is waging
war around the globe, and spying on the American people. He has
warned us that evil often wears the mask of civility and high
society. Satan, he suggests, wears many masks, and he continues to
move the pawns with a smile.
“Dead for nearly half a century,” he concludes,”
Dulles’s shadow still darkens the land.” And although he is
reticent to name today’s names who carry on his legacy, and refers
to them as “faceless security bureaucrats,” they do have faces, and
names, as Allen Dulles did – so it’s time to call them out and name
them. Otherwise we are playing Dulles’s mind-control games, and we
will have to wait another fifty years to read a comparably excellent
study showing future readers who Dulles’s clones are today.
Like Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s craven
assistant, who, when asked to watch the Zapruder film’s
infamous frame 313 kill shot, turned his head and walked away
saying, “I can’t look and won’t look,” we will become accomplices by
neglect in the ongoing hijacking of the country by the secret state.
David Talbot is a true patriot for giving us this
extraordinary book.
Edward Curtin
is Professor of Sociology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal
Arts, North Adams, MA
