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

by David Talbot

The Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy operated on twin levels of psychic violence and actual violence. While the secretary of state threatened to evaporate entire populations with “tactical” nuclear strikes, the director of central intelligence actually eliminated individuals around the world whenever they were deemed to be a threat to national security. Determined to use the CIA more aggressively than President Truman, who had feared creating an “American Gestapo,” Eisenhower unleashed the agency, giving Allen Dulles a license to kill that the spymaster utilized as he saw fit. Years later, in the 1970s, when post-Watergate congressional committees forced the CIA to account for its lethal reign under Dulles, the agency tried to downplay its ruthlessness. CIA witnesses testifying before the Church and Pike Committees insisted that while the agency had targeted foreign leaders such as the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Fidel Castro, its assassins had proved inept or were beaten to the punch. Assassination, went the CIA line, was simply not the sort of business at which its people excelled. But the agency was being too modest.