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

by David Talbot

Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office.

Over half a century later, many questions about JFK’s violent end remain “unspeakable,” in the words of Kennedy biographer James W. Douglass—at least in the carefully controlled arena of media discourse. It is even more unthinkable in these circles to explore the suspicion that Allen Dulles himself—a towering pillar of the U.S. establishment—might have played a role in the epic crime against U.S. democracy that took place in Dallas.

In the course of researching this book, I came to know Joan Talley, one of the three children of Allen Dulles.

Monitoring Dulles proved an easy task since he shared office space with a massive British spy operation run by legendary Canadian secret agent William Stephenson, who would become famous as the “Man Called Intrepid.” At one point, Stephenson’s Rockefeller Center operation—which was tucked away under the colorless name British Security Coordination—grew to as many as three thousand employees.

Roosevelt was a strong supporter of the British cause, but with as much as 80 percent of the American public against entering the European war and Congress equally opposed, both FDR and Churchill realized it would take a major propaganda offensive to sway the nation.

Years later, when James Jesus Angleton and William K. Harvey—two

British colleague named Peter Wright.

William O. Douglas,

Thomas McKittrick,

Royall Tyler,

In frustration with the information bottleneck, Rabbi Wise finally held a press conference two days before Thanksgiving, announcing that Hitler had already killed about two million European Jews and had plans to exterminate the rest. The New York Times buried the story on page 10, The Washington Post on page 6. The press was reluctant to highlight such an explosive story since it lacked official government sources.

In one of history’s deeper ironies, it was Joseph Stalin who insisted that the Nazi leaders be put on trial, lecturing his Western allies on the merits of due process.

The Soviet premier told Churchill that “there must be no executions without trial; otherwise the world would say we were afraid to try them.”

sociologist C. Wright Mills,

Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite, America was ruled by those who control the “strategic command posts” of society—the

It was men like John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles whom Mills had in mind when he wrote of the power elite’s inner core.

impassioned passages like the concluding paragraph of The Power Elite:

Men like the Dulles brothers rejoiced in such “organized irresponsibility.” Democracy, in their minds, was an impediment to the smooth functioning of the corporate state.

“The real truth,” FDR wrote to Colonel Edward M. House, President Wilson’s close adviser, “as you and I know, is that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

C. Wright Mills was among the first to take note of how “national security” could be invoked by the power elite to more deeply disguise its operations.

Reinhard Gehlen,

Heinz Herre, who was the rabid baseball fan. Herre, who had served as Gehlen’s indispensable deputy ever since their days together on the eastern front,

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, with its Führer-saluting doomsday scientist.

Sidney Gottlieb,

By the end, Allen Dulles would put his own family members in the hands of the CIA’s mad scientists.

The main front organization used by the CIA to spread its largesse and influence was the Congress for Cultural Freedom,

Those who took agency funds became “cheerful robots” of the Cold War, in C. Wright Mills’s memorable phrase. Mills, one of the few prominent American scholars to actively resist the siren calls of the Cold War intelligentsia, was predictably attacked in these circles.

The result, as Ginsberg wrote in his 1956 masterpiece, Howl, was the unchallenged rise of the American Moloch, “vast stone of war .

By April 1954, when Kennedy stood up on the Senate floor to challenge the Eisenhower administration’s support for the doomed French war in Vietnam, he had become an informed critic of Western imperialism.

For a different perspective on this, see Seymour Hersh's article "DOES IT TAKE A WAR" (https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/does-it-take-a-war) where he claims that Kennedy ramped up the Vietnamese war on purpose in order to be a "Great President".

In July 1957, Kennedy once more took a strong stand against French colonialism, this time France’s bloody war against Algeria’s independence movement,

Kennedy’s thinking about the historical imperative of Third World liberation was remarkably advanced. Even today, no nationally prominent leader in the United States would dare question the imperialistic policies that have led our country into one military nightmare after another.

Joseph Conrad modeled the colonial nightmare in his novel Heart of Darkness on it, calling Leopold’s rape of the Congo “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.”

an ambush made famous in the Frederick Forsyth novel and movie The Day of the Jackal.

“Under dictatorship, people are enslaved but they know it,” he told de Mohrenschildt, recalling his days in the Soviet Union. “Here, the politicians constantly lie to people and they become immune to these lies because they have the privilege of voting. But voting is rigged and democracy here is a gigantic profusion of lies and clever brainwashing.” Oswald worried about the FBI’s police-state surveillance tactics.

But Ruth Paine was more than that. She was also the woman who—the month before JFK’s arrival in Dallas—informed Lee about the job opening in the Texas School Book Depository, the warehouse building that loomed over the final stretch of President Kennedy’s motorcade route. Ruth had been told about the warehouse job by a neighbor. The building was owned by yet another intriguing character in the Oswald drama, right-wing Texas millionaire, David Harold Byrd.

In early September, Oswald popped up again in Dallas, where he and his family would move back later that month. This Oswald sighting is an extremely suggestive one, since he was spotted in the company of none other than David Atlee Phillips—one of the more glaring indications that the ex-marine was the focus of an intelligence operation.

After sifting through declassified government documents from this period, John Newman—a University of Maryland history professor and former U.S. military intelligence officer—concluded that the agency had demonstrated “a keen operational interest in Oswald.” Newman’s skilled decryption of the intelligent design behind Oswald’s activities—which he first outlined in his 1995 book, Oswald and the CIA—was a historical breakthrough in understanding the alleged assassin’s mysterious life.

When it came to undertaking secret missions, Allen Dulles was a bold and decisive actor. But he acted only after he felt that a consensus had been reached within his influential network. One of the principal arenas where this consensus took shape was the Council on Foreign Relations.

In his 1971 memoir, Johnson wrote that he appointed Dulles and John McCloy to the Warren Commission because they were “the two men Bobby Kennedy asked me to put on it.” With Bobby safely dead by 1971, LBJ clearly felt that he could get away with this one. But the idea that LBJ would huddle with the man he considered his rival and tormentor, in order to discuss the politically sensitive composition of the commission, is ludicrous.