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

by David Talbot

(Many JFK–related documents are archived at the essential Mary Ferrell Foundation website.) The American people have only gained access to this hidden history as a result of concerted political pressure, and agencies such as the CIA still remain defiantly opposed to fully disclosing the information they are required to under federal law.

Stephenson was even authorized to kill members of the Nazi network in the United States—including German agents and pro-Hitler American businessmen—using British assassination teams. One of the men considered for elimination was none other than Dulles business partner Gerhardt Westrick. (The big-spending Hitler lobbyist was eventually simply deported.) It was this decidedly ungentlemanly Stephenson tactic that inspired Fleming to grant his hero “the license to kill.”

that's pretty fuckin ninja

Every golden youth in the teeming crowd was filled with adoration as Hitler rode by, standing erect in his open car and returning the lusty cheers with his own rather limp salute.

what a total pussy

As the president’s man in London, Pell thought it was important to carry on with his life in the same plucky manner as the Brits. One afternoon, he took a visiting cousin for tea at the exclusive Athenaeum Club. Although every one of the club’s windows had been blasted out, the waiters still made their rounds with the same crisp and aloof manner as they had before the war.

Jung told her this, in so many words. One day, while sitting in his study—a room stuffed with books, busts of Voltaire and Nietzsche, and primitive artifacts—Jung made an observation that stuck with Mary for many years. 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.

Truman was equally suspicious of Allen, who kept pushing the administration to take full advantage of the broad powers granted the newborn CIA under the National Security Act of 1947. The president, however, took a dim view of a powerful spy agency, fearing that it might turn into a rogue outfit, and he insisted that the CIA serve primarily as a coordinator of intelligence reports for the White House.

well you see here harry,,,,,,,

The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. . . . They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.

The florid McCarthy pageant is a fascinating case study in the dynamics of Washington power. The senator was a glaring outsider in the capital’s elite salons—a crude, hard-drinking ex-marine. He seemed to defy the neat power categories of C. Wright Mills, fueled more by the sort of ideological fervor, demagoguery, and murky sponsorship that would characterize the later Tea Party era of American politics.

Ironically, it was McCarthy’s aggressive chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who took the lead in questioning suspected homosexuals. Cohn, whose heavy-lidded eyes and leathery, perpetually tanned skin gave him a serpentine look, was not only gay but had installed his twenty-six-year-old playmate, a rich golden boy with no particular credentials named David Schine, on his staff. The son of a hotel and movie theater tycoon, Schine was known while a Harvard undergraduate for paying secretaries to take class notes for him. “Essentially,” observed one Cold War historian, “Schine was Cohn’s dumb blonde.”

On July 17, syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop—a journalist so deeply entwined with the CIA that he once declared it was his patriotic duty to carry the agency’s water—announced

how is this your god damn job?

The Eisenhower-Dulles era was a Pax Americana enforced by terror. The administration ensured U.S. postwar global dominance by threatening enemies with nuclear annihilation or with coups and assassinations. It was empire on the cheap, a product of Ike’s desire to avoid another large-scale shooting war as well as the imperial burdens that had bankrupted Great Britain. By leveraging the U.S. military’s near monopoly on nuclear firepower, the president hoped to make war an unthinkable proposition for any and all American adversaries.

spot on

But the real body count in Guatemala started after the invasion, when the CIA-backed regime of Castillo Armas began to “clean” the nation of political undesirables, labor organizers, and peasants who had too eagerly embraced Arbenz’s land reforms. It was the beginning of a blood-soaked era that would transform Guatemala into one of the twentieth century’s most infamous killing fields. The “stainless” coup, as some of its CIA engineers liked to call it, would actually result in a tide of gore, including assassinations, rampant torture and executions, death squad mayhem, and the massacres of entire villages. By the time that the bloodletting had run its course, four decades later, over 250,000 people had been killed in a nation whose total population was less than four million when the reign of terror began.

Reinhard Gehlen was a man of ratlike cunning.

A statement that could apply to so many characters here

What Dulles did not tell his audience in Hot Springs was that several days earlier, he had authorized a CIA mind control program code-named MKULTRA that would dwarf any similar efforts behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, at the same time that he was condemning Soviet “brainwashing,” Dulles knew that U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been working for several years on their own brain warfare programs. This secret experimentation would balloon under the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Launched by Dulles with a $300,000 budget, this “Manhattan Project of the Mind” would grow into a multimillion-dollar program, operating for a quarter of a century, and enlisting dozens of leading universities and hospitals as well as hundreds of prominent researchers in studies that often violated ethical standards and treated their human subjects as “expendables.”

During the war, three dozen captured American pilots confessed to dropping biological weapons containing anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague, and other toxins on North Korea and China. The charges were hotly denied by the U.S. government, and when the airmen returned home after the war, they retracted their charges—under the threat of being tried for treason—alleging that they had been subjected to brainwashing by their Communist captors. The Korean War “brainwashing” story worked its way deeply into America’s dream state, through the aggressive promotional efforts of CIA-sponsored experts like Edward Hunter, who claimed to have coined the term. Writing bestselling books on the alleged Communist technique and testifying dramatically before Congress, Hunter “essentially modernized the idea of demonic possession,” in the words of one observer. The self-described “propaganda specialist” described how all-American boys fell victim to an insidious combination of Asian mesmerism and Soviet torture science, which turned each captured pilot into a “living puppet—a human robot . . . with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body.”

The CIA chemist preyed on “people who could not fight back,” as one agency official put it, such as seven patients in a federal drug hospital in Kentucky who were dosed with acid for seventy-seven straight days by a Gottlieb-funded doctor who ran the hospital’s addiction treatment program. Gottlieb also excelled at cooking up rare toxins and clever delivery mechanisms in his laboratory to eliminate people the CIA deemed political enemies. Gottlieb strongly adhered to the Dulles ethic that there were no rules in war. “We were in a World War II mode,” said a CIA psychologist who was close to Gottlieb. “The war never really ended for us.”

But it was not Trujillo thugs who were responsible for Galíndez’s disappearance on that chilly March night after he taught his final class. His kidnapping was a sophisticated operation run by Robert A. Maheu and Associates, a private detective firm staffed by former CIA and FBI employees that the intelligence agency used as a “cut-out” to do dirty jobs on U.S. soil, where the CIA was forbidden by law to operate.

THIS motherfucker.

Maheu would become the top-paid security contractor in the country, taking on confidential missions for Vice President Nixon and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who later hired him to run his Las Vegas empire.

sheeeeeeyit

The CIA, he tells Eliot, secretly funded a “whole field of Scholars of War” and “nourished the careers of too many square intellectuals,” thereby undermining efforts to “create an alternative free vital decentralized culture.” The result, as Ginsberg wrote in his 1956 masterpiece, Howl, was the unchallenged rise of the American Moloch, “vast stone of war . . . whose soul is electricity and banks,” and a culture that devoured the souls of its own children.

“White people are a minority in the world,” he said. They could no longer hold back the dreams of the rest of the world.

The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism—and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism. Thus, the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain.

At an NSC meeting in August 1960, Eisenhower gave Dulles direct approval to “eliminate” Lumumba. Robert Johnson, the minutes taker at the NSC meeting, later recalled the shock felt in the room: “There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.” Johnson said there was nothing ambiguous about Eisenhower’s lethal order. “I was surprised that I would ever hear a president say anything like this in my presence or the presence of a group of people. I was startled.”

To prevent that from happening, the CIA recruited two cutthroats from the European criminal underworld, whom they code-named QJ-WIN and WI-ROGUE. These Tweedledum and Tweedledee assassins were such loathsome mercenaries that even their CIA handlers found them “unsavory.” ROGUE was the kind of morally unhinged man “who would try anything once, at least,” said his agency supervisors, untroubled by the “pangs of conscience.” While ROGUE went about trying to organize an “execution squad” to kill Lumumba, WIN focused on penetrating the protective ring of UN troops that encircled the house where the Congolese leader was in custody. QJ-WIN had been supplied with a tube of poison toothpaste, which had been delivered to the CIA station in Leopoldville by Sidney Gottlieb, the agency’s wizard of toxins. Dr. Ewen Cameron, of the notorious Allan Institute, had analyzed Lumumba at the CIA’s request and determined that he must brush his teeth regularly, since they looked gleaming white in photos. Therefore, Ewen assured Dulles, chemically altered dental products were the key to getting rid of Lumumba.

basis for the french mercs in ellroy's trilogy

“On Lumumba’s dazed face was the look of a man who did not yet believe that fate could be against justice for his people,” remarked Andrée Blouin, the beautiful “Black Pasionaria” of the Congolese independence struggle and chief of protocol in Lumumba’s government. “His white shirt was now spotted with blood, but his head was still erect. He personified the best of the race that would never again be slaves.”

“I’m Dick Drain. I was sent to brief you, sir.”

lol you gotta be shittin me

De Gaulle’s final words were a battle cry. “Françaises, Français! Aidez-moi!” And all over France, millions of people did rush to the aid of their nation. The following day, a general strike was organized to protest the putsch. Led primarily by the left, including labor unions and the Communist Party, the mass protest won broad political support. Over ten million people joined the nationwide demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands marching in the streets of Paris, carrying banners proclaiming “Peace in Algeria” and shouting, “Fascism will not pass!” Even police officers associations expressed “complete solidarity” with the protests, as did the Roman Catholic Confederation, which denounced the “criminal acts” of the coup leaders, warning that they “threaten to plunge the country into civil war.”

why cant the french always be this awesome?

The summer following the Bay of Pigs, Prescott Bush—the CIA’s man in the Senate—and his wife, Dorothy, invited Dulles to dinner at their Washington home.

ugh. christ.

Schlesinger threw himself into the CIA study with scholarly dedication, amassing a thick file that contained detailed critiques of the organization by Washington liberals like George McGovern and agency whistle-blowers, one of whom wrote, “The Central Intelligence Agency is sick.”

As he continued to wrestle with the disgruntled corporate community into the fall, Kennedy longed to make the battle over the economy the centerpiece of his presidency, telling Schlesinger that he “only wished there were no Cold War so he could debate the future of America with the businessmen.” This is a remarkable and all but overlooked statement, indicating—once again—Kennedy’s visionary thinking.

“We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

The blunt-spoken, pistol-packing Harvey was not a good fit with the CIA either, but the agency would find ways to put him to use. Dulles and Helms thought he had a “cop” mentality. Harvey, in turn, dismissed the CIA’s upper echelons as “Fifth Avenue cowboys” and “fucking namby-pambies.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963,” House Assassinations Committee investigator Dan Hardway, who was assigned by the panel to probe possible CIA connections to JFK’s murder, observed years later. “We considered Harvey to be one of our prime suspects from the very start. He had all the key connections—to organized crime, to the CIA station in Miami where the plots against Castro were run, to other prime CIA suspects like David Phillips. We tried to get Harvey’s travel vouchers and security file from the CIA, but they always blocked us. But we did come across a lot of memos that suggested he was traveling a lot in the months leading up to the assassination.” (More recent legal efforts by the author to obtain Harvey’s travel records from the CIA also proved fruitless, despite the 1992 JFK Records Act, which required all federal agencies to release documents related to the Kennedy assassination.)

cocksuckers

“He never would have been President had he not been Irish,” Jackie Kennedy later wrote to Éamon de Valera, the eighty-year-old Irish president and legendary rebel leader who had hosted JFK during his visit. “All the history of your people is a long one of overcoming obstacles. He felt that burden on him as a young Irishman in Boston—and he had so many obstacles in his life—his religion, his health, his youth. He fought against each one from the time he was a boy, and by always striving, he ended as President. He was so conscious of his heritage—and so proud of it.”

As Hunt related his story to his son, he remained fuzzy about his own involvement in the plot. In the end, he said, he played only a peripheral “benchwarmer” role in the killing of Kennedy. It was Bill Harvey who was the quarterback, according to Hunt. Despite Harvey’s reputation for hard drinking, the agency’s assassination chief had the experience and connections to pull off something like “the big event.” While assembling his Castro assassination team, Harvey had reached out to a variety of underworld professionals, including (with Helms’s permission) the infamous European assassin code-named QJ-WIN, whom the CIA had recruited to kill Patrice Lumumba. And Harvey was well positioned as Rome station chief to once again plumb the European underworld for a Dallas killing team.

There was a magical element to Oswald’s journey. Despite the fact that he was a broke ex-serviceman who had only $203 in his bank account when he left America, Oswald enjoyed the best accommodations. In Helsinki, he stayed in two of the city’s finest hotels, the Torni and the Klaus Kurki. After checking out, he still had enough money to buy a ticket on the overnight train to Moscow. If Oswald was being moved by an unseen hand, his performance at the U.S. embassy in Moscow—where he arrived on a Saturday morning in October to theatrically announce his defection—seemed a particularly awkward piece of staging. There was a scripted quality to the way he renounced his citizenship and declared his intention to turn over military secrets to the Soviets. Listening to the slightly built young man, American consul Richard Snyder had the distinct feeling that “this was part of a scene he had rehearsed before coming into the embassy. It was a preplanned speech.” But Oswald never seemed certain of the role he was playing during his two and a half years in the Soviet Union. He clearly was not a genuine defector, since the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies reacted to his provocative performance at the U.S. embassy with a studied nonchalance, even though he threatened to hand over classified information from his tour of duty at the top secret U-2 base. It took a full year before Angleton’s counterintelligence department finally bothered opening up a standard 201 file on the defector...

Early that evening, after returning to his Miami motel room, Fonzi got a call from Bill O’Reilly, who was working in those days as a Dallas TV reporter. O’Reilly had some stunning news. George de Mohrenschildt had been found dead at home, his head blown apart by the blast from a 20-gauge shotgun. Fonzi’s card was found in the dead man’s pocket. (In his 2012 book, Killing Kennedy, O’Reilly exaggerated his personal involvement in the drama, placing himself on de Mohrenschildt’s doorstep as the shotgun blast rang out. As subsequent news reports pointed out, O’Reilly was actually in Dallas at the time.)

Playing both sides of the Cuba fence, Oswald began passing out Fair Play leaflets in the streets while working out of the same building where Guy Banister, a former FBI agent who was involved in anti-Communist operations, maintained his office.

Under Dulles, America’s intelligence system had become a dark and invasive force—at home and abroad—violating citizens’ privacy, kidnapping, torturing, and killing at will. His legacy would be carried far into the future by men and women who shared his philosophy about the boundless authority of the national security system’s “splendid watchmen.” Dulles had personally shaped and inspired some of these watchmen, including Helms and Angleton—as well as the power players of future administrations, like William Casey, President Reagan’s defiantly lawbreaking CIA director, and Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s smugly confident conqueror of desert sands. And though they never met, Dulles also provided a template for Bush regent Dick Cheney’s executive absolutism and extreme security measures in the name of national defense. These men, too, firmly believed that “patriotism set no bounds” on their power. Today, other faceless security bureaucrats continue to carry on Dulles’s work—playing God with drone strikes from above and utilizing Orwellian surveillance technology that Dulles could only have dreamed about—with little understanding of the debt they owe to the founding father of modern American intelligence. Dead for nearly half a century, Dulles’s shadow still darkens the land. Those who enter the lobby of CIA headquarters are greeted by the stone likeness of Allen Welsh Dulles. “His Monument Is Around Us,” reads the inscription underneath the bas-relief sculpture. T...

But as he crept toward death in 1987, Angleton was less bound by the loyalty oaths of the past, and he began to talk about his career with a surprisingly raw clarity. By then, his lungs were cancer-ridden from a lifetime of incessant smoking, and his sunken cheeks and receding eyes gave him the look of a fallen saint. The Catholic Angleton had always needed to believe in the holiness of his mission. And now, as he faced the final judgment, he felt compelled to make confessions, of sorts, to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento. What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest. These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of tea. “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.” He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters,” he said. “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of p...

“Our phone [is] bugged”: De Mohrenschildt letter to George W. Bush, Sept. 5, 1976, www.maryferrell.org.

Senator Joseph McCarthy, with his aide Roy Cohn in 1954, was such a powerful exploiter of the red scare that he became a threat to President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers.

hard to have two worse men in the same picture jesus fuck