The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot

Dulles was more in step with many Nazi leaders than he was with President Roosevelt.

Dulles wasted no time in settling into Bern, the scenic Swiss capital where he had begun his espionage career a quarter century earlier as a junior member of the U.S. legation during World War I.

As soon as Dulles showed up in Bern, his arrival was reported in one of Switzerland’s leading newspapers, which announced him—to the spy’s great delight—as “the personal representative of President Roosevelt.”

This strategy of hiding in plain sight did not make much sense from an espionage point of view. And it confounded and angered Dulles’s counterparts in the local office of MI6, the British spy agency, who dismissed the American as a rank amateur.

He was running his own foreign policy.

Dulles also positioned himself in Bern because the Swiss capital was the center of wartime financial and political intrigue. Bern was an espionage bazaar, teeming with spies, double agents, informers, and peddlers of secrets. And, as Dulles knew, Switzerland was a financial haven for the Nazi war machine.

Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers’ Wall Street law firm, was at the center of an intricate international network of banks, investment firms, and industrial conglomerates that rebuilt Germany after World War I.

Foster Dulles became so deeply enmeshed in the lucrative revitalization of Germany that he found it difficult to separate his firm’s interests from those of the rising economic and military power—even

Foster still could not bring himself to cut off his former Berlin law partner, Gerhardt Westrick, when he showed up in New York in August 1940 to lobby on behalf of the Third Reich.

He was clearly enamored of Hiss and