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

by David Talbot

“Jung says you must embrace the dark, as well as the light, to understand life,” remarked Joan, sitting in the passenger

True

“Horror, fear, mental torture,” she would later write, “are not physical facts but creations of one’s own spirit. They were not forced upon me by outside acts or conditions, but lived within me, born of the weakness of my own heart. . . . I did not have to break if I did not want to.”

Tough mindset!

Was it his mordant way of saying that for him, Big Brother’s suffocating authoritarianism was already an unbearable reality?

Absolutely

Blough’s company occupied a central position in the country’s corporate pantheon, which was reflected in the U.S. Steel board of directors. Blough himself was well connected within the power elite—including to Dulles,

So true, then and now...

He had staked his reputation with organized labor and American consumers on the deal—and now he was faced with “the most painfully embarrassing predicament of his career,”

JFKs second crisis that no one remembers....

“beware the ides of April.”

Was it ever not a “thing?”

November 2, local Secret Service officials foiled a well-organized assassination plot against President Kennedy. After landing at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport that day, Kennedy was scheduled to ride in a motorcade to Soldier Field for the annual Army-Navy football game. But the motorcade was canceled after the Secret Service exposed a plot to ambush the president from a tall warehouse building as his limousine slowed for a hairpin turn. The plot, which involved a sniper team composed of a disgruntled ex-marine who worked in the building and at least two Cuban marksmen, bore a disturbing resemblance to the series of events that would claim Kennedy’s life twenty days later in Dallas.

We even caught the dress rehearsal and still couldn’t connect the dots....

Committee investigators were intrigued by Sierra’s unsavory connections, including to three sketchy characters who showed up with Lee Harvey Oswald at the Dallas home of Silvia Odio, the daughter of a prominent anti-Castro activist, in September 1963. But, in the end, lacking the time and resources to fully pursue its leads, the congressional panel was forced to acknowledge that the “relevance to the assassination” of Sierra’s activities “remained undetermined.”

How is this now lost in history??

Allen Dulles, a prominent member of the Warren Commission, could have revealed what he knew about Sierra. But Dulles never brought up Sierra’s name—nor did he ever inform fellow commission members that he had met with someone whom the Secret

The fox was in the hen house...

In fact, many people have talked during the past half of a century—including some directly connected to the plot against Kennedy. But the media simply refused to listen. One

Yes, but why??

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 and shot a rabbit for him.

Thkis is the man who hit a moving target 3 x in a row over 12 seconds from 400 ft away???

De Mohrenschildt took the young man with whom he had spent hours discussing politics and offering advice about love and marriage—the man who hung on his every word, whom he thought of as a son—and threw him under the wheels of infamy.

And then some....

It was another striking “coincidence” in the endlessly enigmatic Oswald story. The housewife who took the Oswalds under her wing had married into a family whose foibles and weaknesses were well known to Dulles and his mistress.

So the head of the CIA had ties to Oswald, and yet was put in charge of the investigation. Nothing odd about that...

With the Warren Report, Dulles would literally rewrite history.

The understatement of the century...

When President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana—one of the new African leaders who had considered Kennedy a vital ally—was handed a copy of the Warren Report by U.S. ambassador William Mahoney, he opened it up, pointed at the name Allen Dulles in the list of commissioners, and handed it back to Mahoney. “Whitewash,” Nkrumah said simply. It summed up the entire charade.

Striking how everyone Knew how corrupt Dulles was internationally....

But when Helms was sworn in, he simply lied.

And there you have it. At the end of the day, to thwart the suspicion of the CIA in his assassination, the new head of the CIA just blatantly lied under oath....