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

by David Talbot

Angleton’s activities ranged from purloining documents at foreign embassies to opening the mail of American citizens (he once jocularly referred to himself as “the postmaster”) to wiretapping the bedrooms of CIA officials. It was his job to be suspicious of everybody, and he was, keeping a treasure trove of sensitive files and photos in the locked vault in his office. Each morning at CIA headquarters, Angleton would report to Dulles on the results of his “fishing expeditions,” as they called his electronic eavesdropping missions, which picked up everything from gossip on the Georgetown party circuit to Washington pillow talk. As Dulles was well aware, Angleton had even tucked away explosive secrets about the CIA director himself. That is why Dulles had rewarded him with the most sensitive job in the agency, Angleton confided to journalist Joseph Trento near the end of his life. “You know how I got to be in charge of

counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends. They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out.”

Angleton told a friend in British intelligence, “I would kill Philby.” The betrayal was painfully intimate, and it bred a paranoia that bloomed darkly within Angleton. When he was named counterintelligence chief, he saw traitors and signs of Soviet treachery everywhere. His compulsive mole hunting ruined the careers of dozens of CIA agents, doing more to damage agency security than to fortify it. “I couldn’t find that we ever caught a spy under Jim,” said William Colby, the CIA director who finally terminated Angleton’s long tenure in 1975. But under Dulles, Angleton enjoyed free rein to pursue his demons. He dreamed up Cold War phantasms and bogeymen, and then invented all-too-real methods of destroying these horrible apparitions. He operated a kind of virtual CIA within the CIA, reporting only to Dulles himself—and even the top spymaster was not fully aware of his murky activities. “My father once said, ‘I’m not a genius, but in intelligence I am a genius,’” recalled Siri Hari Angleton, who changed her name from Lucy as a young woman, after following her mother and older sister into the Sikh religion.

Dulles and Angleton shared a disdain for

Washington bureaucracy and for the governmental oversight that comes with a functioning democratic system. Later, in the post-Watergate ’70s, when the Church Committee opened its probe of CIA lawbreaking, Angleton was called to account for himself. As he completed his testimony, the Gray Ghost rose from his chair, and, thinking he was now off the record, muttered, “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.” It was a concise articulation of the Angleton philosophy; in his mind, CIA overseers were a priestly caste that, because the fate of the nation had been placed in its hands, must be allowed to operate unfettered and above the law.

Dulles entrusted Angleton with the agency’s most vital and sensitive missions. He was the principal CIA liaison with the key foreign intelligence services, including those in frontline Cold War nations like France, West Germany, Turkey, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia, as well as with Mossad, the Israeli spy

agency. Angleton developed a special bond with the Israelis, forging a realpolitik relationship, with both parties conveniently overlooking Angleton’s role in the Nazi ratlines after the war. The Israelis maintained close ties to the American espionage oracle until the end of his life. Several members of Mossad came to Angleton’s home as he lay dying in the spring of 1987, to pay their last respects—and perhaps to make certain the vapory Gray Ghost was indeed finally leaving this mortal coil. Dulles also put Angleton in charge of the CIA’s relationship with the FBI—a delicate task considering the rivalry between the two agencies. At the same time he was working with the federal bureau in charge of fighting organized crime, Angleton was also pursuing a CIA partnership with the Mafia. Angleton possessed one of those rare intellects—and characters—that allowed him to lead a life filled with contradiction. He easily passed back and forth between Washington’s overworld and the criminal underworld. He was the sort of man who could crossbreed a new orchid, cook a delicious pasta with slivered truffles imported from Ristorante Passetto in Rome, and then sit down with a criminal mastermind to discuss the fine points of murder. Though he dined and drank with Georgetown high society, Angleton’s work also brought him into close contact with the agency’s rougher characters, including Shef Edwards’s

security cops, who helped install Angleton’s bugs, and Bill Harvey, the hard-drinking gun nut who figured prominently in a number of the agency’s assassination jobs. It was all of a piece, in the intricately wired mind of Jim Angleton: countering dangerous ideas by publishing CIA-vetted literature, or by eliminating the intellectuals and leaders who expounded these ideas. One day, shortly after Fidel Castro took power in Havana, Angleton had a brainstorm. He summoned two Jewish CIA officers, including Sam Halpern, who had recently been assigned to the agency’s covert Cuba team. Angleton asked them to fly to Miami and meet with Meyer Lanksy, organized crime’s chief financial officer, who had been forced to flee Havana ahead of Castro’s revolutionaries, leaving behind the Mafia’s highly lucrative casino empire. Lansky was part of the Jewish mob but had close business ties to the Italian Mafia. Angleton told Halpern and the other Jewish CIA agent to see if they could convince Lansky to arrange for the assassination of Castro. Angleton’s emissaries met with Lansky, but the crime mogul drove too hard a bargain for his services and the deal fell through. This was only the beginning of...

The brothers were imbued with a sense of public service, but in their minds, democracy was something to be saved from the demos. “Democracy works only if the so-called intelligent people make it work,”

Perhaps you didn’t have to be a backslapping “happy warrior” like Hubert Humphrey, a leading rival for the 1960 Democratic nomination.

Every great life in politics has a theme: with John Kennedy, it was his horror of war and the endless suffering it brings.

Allen Dulles had also felt the personal impact of war, when his son and namesake returned from Korea irreparably damaged. But his own family tragedy provoked no deep agonizing within Dulles about war or his central role in Washington’s machinery of violence. The spymaster liked to talk, in a way that sounded almost boastful, about his ability to dispatch men—including his own loyal agents—to their deaths.

Hunt’s speculations about the Kennedy conspiracy were in line with the suspicions of the House Assassinations Committee. When the congressional inquiry got under way in 1976, the panel’s most energetic investigators zeroed in on the CIA’s anti-Castro operation as the nest from which the JFK plot had sprung—and Bill Harvey soon emerged as a prime suspect.

“But we did come across documents that suggested Harvey was traveling a lot in the weeks leading up to the assassination, while he was supposed to be running the Rome station. . . . Near the end of our investigation, I typed up a memo, making my case against Harvey as a leading figure in the crime. I typed it up in the committee’s secure room, on the yellow security paper with a purple border marked ‘Top Secret.’ That memo has since disappeared.”

David Atlee Phillips and Cord Meyer figured prominently in Hunt’s “speculations.”

Phillips was the CIA counterintelligence specialist who had worked closely with Hunt on the Guatemala coup and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Like Harvey and Morales, Phillips did not belong to the Ivy League elite. The Texas-born, roughly handsome, chain-smoking Phillips had been a nose gunner during World War II, not an OSS gentleman spy. After the war, he rambled around Latin America, trying his hand at acting and publishing before being recruited into the CIA. His covert work won the admiration of Helms, who made him chief of the agency’s Cuba operations after Harvey was whisked off to Rome to escape Bobby Kennedy’s wrath. In that position, Phillips was free to roam within the “yeasty” world of anti-Castro and anti-Kennedy ferment, as Senator Gary Hart later described it. Meyer belonged to the agency’s Georgetown set. At Yale, he had dreamed of a writing career and—after returning from the war in the South Pacific, partly blinded by a Japanese grenade—he devoted himself for a time to the cause of world peace. But after he was initiated into the spy fraternity—where he fell under the spell of Jim Angleton—he became chief of the CIA’s culture war, secretly dispersing cash to the literary types whose ranks he once imagined joining. After his beautiful, artistic wife, Mary, left him, Meyer became an increasingly embittered Cold Warrior—and his disposition grew only gloomier when she became a mistress of JFK. Hunt carefully refrained from naming Dulles in his confessions, but ne...

The Liberty Lobby’s attorney, famed JFK researcher Mark Lane, succeeded in convincing the jury that Hunt might indeed have been in Dallas, as his own son came to believe.

To the Georgetown set, there would always be something low-rent about men like Hunt—as well as Harvey and Morales. The CIA was a cold hierarchy. Men like this would never be invited for lunch with Dulles at the Alibi Club or to play tennis with Dick Helms at the Chevy Chase Club. These men were indispensable—until they became expendable. Hunt, Harvey, and Morales were among the expendable men sent to Dallas in November 1963. But the most expendable of all was a young ex-marine with a perplexing past named Lee Harvey Oswald.

the fifteen-year-old Oswald hooked up with the Civil Air Patrol, a group of young men interested in learning how to fly. The military auxiliary group, which was founded during World War II to help defend America’s coastlines against German and Japanese attack, not only trained future pilots, it inculcated the patriotic Cold War values of the time.

Among its founders was David Harold Byrd, a right-wing Texas oilman and defense contractor. Byrd also owned the Texas School Book Depository, the Dallas warehouse where Oswald would be hired in the fall of 1963 and allegedly establish a sniper’s lair on the sixth floor of the building.

theatrical slashes of greasepaint. Catholic-educated and homosexual, he led a secretive and tortured life. He liked to practice hypnosis techniques on the young cadets under his command and tried to lure them into a drug research program at Tulane University with which he was connected. A passionate anti-Communist, Ferrie threw himself into New Orleans’s steamy anti-Castro politics. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, he denounced Kennedy with such vicious abandon during a speech to a veterans group that he was asked to step down from the podium. The president “ought to be shot,” Ferrie began telling people.

In short, he was the sort of boy-man—unfinished, angry, defiant, and hungry to experience life—who stands out from the ranks and gets attention.

And despite his military service, the Russians learned that he was a bad shot. When Oswald went on expeditions with his factory hunting club in Minsk, he never could hit anything. A co-worker took pity on him once

A KGB official described Oswald in one document as “an empty person.”

He was the type who could be used as a “dangle” by a sophisticated puppet master like Angleton, someone to fl...

In the Kabuki theater of Angleton’s mind, people played parts whose significance only he understood. It was the paper record—the “legend”—that mattered most to Angleton. Under the covert wizard’s direction, a person’s file sometimes took on a life of its own, full of actions and dialogue that bore no relation to the subject’s real life. To Jim Angleton, the young, pliable American playing the role o...

living in Minsk, Oswald displayed a sharp awareness of Soviet surveillance that seemed to indicate some prior training.

Oswald’s reentry into the United States was absurdly easy, considering his treasonous track record.

regarded as a chain-smoking, foulmouthed woman with none of Oswald’s intellectual complexity. But Oswald immediately fell under the spell of the sad-eyed beauty with sensuous lips. “The girl emanated raw sexuality about her, repellent to me, but perhaps precisely the feature that attracted Lee,” observed Titovets. Lee and Marina were introduced at a dance at the Trade Union House, one of Minsk’s popular entertainment centers. “The low cut of her dress stressed the size of her breasts,” Titovets recalled. He immediately suspected she was KGB bait for Oswald. When he later asked around about Marina, Titovets was told that she had been run out of Leningrad by local authorities. “Taking into account her past history and her legal problems,” he concluded, “she certainly had given the KGB a sure hold over her.” A month after he met Marina, Oswald proposed to her.

The day after arriving in the United States, the Oswalds flew to Fort Worth, where they moved in temporarily with Lee’s brother, Robert. It would take nearly two weeks before the FBI got around to interviewing Lee.

While in Texas, Oswald and his family came under the watchful care of people who in turn were being closely watched.

“[Lee] did not know who he was really serving,” Marina said years later. “He was manipulated and he got caught. He tried to play with the big boys.”

De Mohrenschildt was minding the Oswalds for the CIA.

Dimitri moved in those circles where millionaires, academics, and spies commingled. He and his wife counted the Bouviers—the parents of future First Lady Jackie Kennedy—as well as the dynastic Bush family among their friends.

His true skill was cultivating the wealthy and well connected. One of his first jobs in the oil business was working for Pantepec Oil—the petroleum company founded by the father of William F. Buckley Jr., the CIA-connected conservative publisher and pundit.

Later, de Mohrenschildt proved adept at working his connections at the Dallas Petroleum Club, a hotbed of anti-Kennedy ferment, whose leading members—including oilmen Clint Murchison Sr., H. L. Hunt, and Sid Richardson—were tied to Dulles, Lyndon Johnson, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Petroleum Club also counted D. H. Byrd, the Texas School Book Depository owner, and Mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Dulles’s former CIA deputy, among its regulars.

The international oil business and the U.S. intelligence establishment were overlapping worlds, and de Mohrenschildt soon found himself with a foot in each one.

While it was probably true that de Mohrenschildt was not an official agent, he was most certainly an agency asset, gathering confidential information on his foreign business trips under what the CIA called “commercial cover.”

De Mohrenschildt was apparently tasked with keeping an eye on the young couple—a job he assiduously performed until the following spring, when he and his wife left on business for Haiti.

Marina Oswald later agreed that de Mohrenschildt and her husband had been “fairly good friends” and that the baron was “a good humanitarian who was interested in other people.” But in an interview with FBI agents after the assassination, Marina added a provocative remark about the two men’s relationship. Oswald “was somewhat afraid of de Mohrenschildt, who was big in stature and talked loudly,” she reported. Her husband clearly knew who, between the two of them, had the power.

In the end, no Warren Commission witness betrayed Oswald more deeply than George de Mohrenschildt.

But he was sharp enough to quickly begin connecting the dots.

America was not Soviet Russia, but the baron had learned from his worldwide wanderings that power was capable of anything, no matter where it operated.

Mohrenschildt was quite anxious when he entered the hearing room that morning. His eyes fixed immediately on Allen Dulles. The spymaster “did not interfere in the proceedings” that day, observed de Mohrenschildt, letting Jenner handle the interrogation. But the baron found Dulles’s silent presence to be unnerving. “[He] was there as a distant threat,” de Mohrenschildt

Jenner raked over the most embarrassing details of de Mohrenschildt’s private life, but he stayed resolutely clear of his espionage connections.

his calendar for October 2, 1963, Dulles penciled in an interesting appointment. “Dillon,” he wrote—by which he meant C. Douglas Dillon, the Treasury secretary and former Wall Street financier.

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.

Though his actions often revealed the knife-cold psyche of a murderer, in many ways he remained a sober-minded corporate lawyer.

not the will of the people, but of his people.

Dulles controlled the country’s secret machinery of violence throughout much of the Cold War, but the spy chief’s power came from the fact that—even after his departure from the CIA—his wealthy sponsors continued to invest him with it.