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

by David Talbot

Many of the practices that still provoke bouts of American soul-searching originated during Dulles’s formative rule at the CIA. Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, massive surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies—these were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign.

But Dulles was not a rash man; he was coldly calculating. As the chairman of cloak-and-dagger America, he would never initiate a high-stakes operation unless he felt he had the support of the principal members of his “board”—the Washington and Wall Street men of influence who quietly dominated the nation’s decision-making.

Thousands of Jews in Bucharest were rounded up and beaten and tortured, including one group of more than a hundred—among them children as young as five—who were marched into a municipal slaughterhouse and butchered. The Iron Guardsmen hung their victims, some still alive, on meat hooks and “mutilated them in a vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices,” according to one later account.

Instead, Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite, America was ruled by those who control the “strategic command posts” of society—the big corporations, the machinery of the state, and the military establishment. These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in the “permanent war economy” that had emerged during the Cold War.

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. The Dulles brothers would prove masters at exploiting the anxious state of permanent vigilance that accompanied the Cold War. “For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without foreseeable end,” Mills wrote. “Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”

In 1952, West German police discovered that the CIA was supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy.

alarmed zoo guards by sticking his hand through the bars of a cage to pat the cheek of a Bengal tiger. “This is like prison—I have been in prison, too,” said Fidel, who had survived Batista’s cages.