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

by David Talbot

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked. With

The staggering sacrifice made by the Russian people in the war against Hitler meant little to Dulles. He was more interested in salvaging the Third Reich’s security apparatus and turning it against the Soviet Union—which he had always regarded as America’s true enemy.

Dulles helped a number of notorious war criminals escape via the “Nazi ratlines” that ran from Germany, down through Italy, to sanctuary in Latin America, the Middle East, and even the United States.

Dulles would turn his Georgetown home into the center of an anti-Kennedy government in exile.

He worked carefully behind the scenes with his former CIA colleagues to steer the inquiry away from the agency itself and toward “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald.

“It seems we just went wild,” she told me. “And the CIA was leading the way.”

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

While serving in his Swiss outpost, Dulles might have been encircled by Nazi forces, but he was also surrounded by old friends.

Meanwhile, Swiss intelligence agents, who worked closely with their Nazi counterparts, eavesdropped on Dulles’s phone conversations. There was little that was secret about the American spy’s life in Bern.

Switzerland was a financial haven for the Nazi war machine.

He donated money to America First, the campaign to keep the United States out of the gathering tempest in Europe, and helped sponsor a rally honoring Charles Lindbergh, the fair-haired aviation hero who had become enchanted by Hitler’s miraculous revival of Germany.

William Stephenson, who would become famous as the “Man Called Intrepid.”

Foster carried himself like a “high churchman,” observed Douglas. But in reality, he was the kind of “predatory” Wall Street shill “who for a fee would stand for almost anything.” If the John Foster Dulleses of America were destined for heaven—as men of his ilk were always utterly certain—then Douglas would rather end up in hell.

President Roosevelt drove the plutocracy mad. J. P. Morgan Jr. was so incensed by the “class traitor” FDR that his servants had to cut out the president’s picture from the Wall Street titan’s morning newspaper for fear that it would spike his

blood pressure.

Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to postwar power, to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union.

And during the Cold War, he would be more intent on using Nazi loot

to finance covert anti-Soviet operations than on returning it to the famili...

If their powerful enemy in the White House had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason.

Dulles sat down one wintry evening with an agent of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, an oily Mittel-European aristocrat who had flitted in and out of Dulles’s social circle for many years.

(There is no getting around this unwelcome fact: Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.)

Bigoted enemies of the New Deal enjoyed a ditty about Franklin and First Lady Eleanor—who was known as a champion of African American civil rights—that went, “You kiss the niggers / and I’ll kiss the Jews / and we’ll stay in the White House / as long as we choose.”

Anti-Jewish attitudes in this insular club were so deeply ingrained that they were reflexive. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, when young Allen Dulles was serving in the U.S. embassy in Turkey, his first overseas posting after World War I, he fell for the most notorious anti-Jewish fabrication in history. One day the young American diplomat was given a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by a British reporter who had fished the scurrilous document out of a secondhand bookstore in Istanbul’s old European quarter.

It is not widely recognized that the Nazi reign of terror was, in a fundamental way, a lucrative racket—an extensive criminal enterprise set up to loot the wealth of Jewish victims and exploit their labor. The chemical giant Farben was at the forefront of integrating concentration camp labor into its industrial production process, with other major German corporations like Volkswagen, Siemens, and Krupp following closely behind.

But there was nothing in Dulles’s communiqué about the imminent fate of Hungary’s Jews. And there was nothing about the possibility of bombing rail lines to the death camps—and even the camps themselves—as informants like Schulte were urging the Allies to do.

Dulles’s pantomime of concern clearly convinced the British reporter. But in fact Dulles had begun receiving reports about the mass extermination of Jews over two years earlier, before he even left the United States for Switzerland.

the mounds of human ash to be sold as farm fertilizer, the pyramids of human hair and boxes of gold dental fillings to be sold for wigs and jewelry—the final value extracted from the victims of the Reich.

Franklin Roosevelt was trying to save their bacon from a revolution that was rumbling right outside their gates. “I am almost the last capitalist who is willing to be saved by you,” Pell wrote Roosevelt in 1936 in a letter beseeching the president to draft him for the New Deal cause.

We cannot forget [for example] that one of the big war factories in Germany was the Opel Company which was owned and financed by the General Motors Corporation, a company in which Secretary Stettinius had a great interest. The biggest electric company in Germany was owned and financed by the General Electric Company of New York. We have here very potent reasons why a large and important group in this country is trying to pipe down on the serious investigations of [corporate Germany’s collaboration with the Nazis].”

For Dulles, the wartime alliance that had defeated Hitler was already dead. In fact, he had been planning throughout the war for this moment when the Western powers—including elements of the Third Reich—would unite against their true enemy in Moscow.

The hangman never expressed any doubt about his historic role at Nuremberg. “I hanged those ten Nazis . . . and I am proud of it,” he said after the executions. A few years later, Woods accidentally electrocuted himself while repairing faulty machinery at a military base in the Marshall Islands.

It was one of the most bizarre missions in wartime Europe: a joint U.S.-German rescue effort organized for the benefit of a high-ranking Nazi general.

After the separate peace was declared at Caserta, some German divisions in Italy were told not to lay down their arms but to get ready to begin battling the Red Army alongside the Americans and British.

Dulles went so far as to bury incriminating evidence, including one particularly damning OSS report that blamed the Nazi general not only for the “wholesale slaughter of populations” and “the collective reprisals” against Italian civilians, but also for the torture and murder of OSS agents in his Bolzano SS headquarters.

Wolff walked out of the men’s prison at Hamburg-Bergedorf a free man. Gaevernitz and other Sunrise intermediaries were there to celebrate the war criminal’s release. “It seemed like old times and we missed you greatly,” he wrote Dulles.

In Rome, the two men conferred about the growing “Red challenge” and “the drastic, sub-rosa measures required to meet it,” as a colleague put it. These extreme measures included recruiting agents “without overscrupulous concern for [their] past fascist affiliations.”

Colonel Walter Rauff,

In 1941, Rauff had overseen the development and operation of a fleet of “Black Raven” vans, in which victims were sealed inside and asphyxiated with exhaust fumes. As many as 250,000 people on the war’s eastern front were murdered in Rauff’s vehicles, which were eventually replaced by the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau.

American military hierarchy shared the Dulles-Angleton view that fighting Communism was a bigger priority than prosecuting fascist war criminals.

The opposite of love is not hate, he said. It’s power. Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.

The drive for absolute control was the only passion that truly gripped Allen Dulles.

National Committee for a Free Europe

the committee was actually a CIA front that channeled funds to anti-Communist European émigrés and financed major propaganda efforts like Radio Free Europe.

In the early years of the Cold War, the Nazi treasure looted from Jewish families and German-occupied nations would become a key source of funding for Dulles’s secret operations.

The OPC was run with little government oversight and few moral restrictions. Many of the agency’s recruits were ex-Nazis.

“Dulles wished to leave Eastern Europe devoid of hope so that he could introduce a pro-American, anti-Soviet form of government. . . . Nationalist Communists were making communism acceptable to the people, and so, accordingly, they had to be removed.”

Nixon was shrewd enough to figure out that senior members of the GOP’s East Coast elite like Dulles and Herter could be of more benefit to him than the Southern California citrus growers and businessmen who had launched his career.

Nixon proceeded to cut a deal. “Allen Dulles,” reported Loftus, “told him to keep quiet about what he had seen and, in return, [Dulles] arranged to finance the young man’s first congressional campaign against Jerry Voorhis.”

Voorhis also posed a direct legal threat to the Dulles brothers through his efforts to shine a light on the wartime collusion between Sullivan and Cromwell clients like Standard Oil and DuPont chemical company and Nazi cartels such as IG Farben. Voorhis further unnerved the Dulles circle by demanding a congressional investigation of the controversial Bank for International Settlements, charging that bank president Thomas McKittrick, a close associate of the Dulles brothers, was a Nazi collaborator.

As promised, Nixon was well compensated for his efforts. When he and his family embarked for Washington, they took with them $10,000 (about $130,000 in today’s dollars), a new Ford, and a generous life insurance policy.