The Devil's Chessboard Quotes

“Our country’s cheerleaders are wedded to the notion of American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us. There is an implacable brutality to power that is familiar throughout the world and throughout history.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“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 people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.”
Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. “I guess I will see them there soon.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“If Dulles could use a person, that person was somehow real for him. If not, that person didn’t exist.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“It took me a long time to realize that when he talks it is only for the purpose of obtaining something.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“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.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“few of the some five thousand convicted Nazis were still in prison after 1953. A number of the interventions on behalf of fortunate war criminals could be traced to the quiet stratagems of Allen Dulles.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.)”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“That little Kennedy... he thought he was a god.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

“Everything leads me to believe it,” he replied. “They got their hands on this communist who wasn’t one, while still being one. He had a sub par intellect and was an exalted fanatic—just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. . . . The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the way they had probably planned it would. . . . But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin—supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory! “Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder. “America”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena. In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“The country’s fledgling democracy was dismantled, and members of oppositional parties and the press were rounded up or driven underground.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“I believe in freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of criticism, and freedom of movement. I believe in the goal of equal opportunity, and the right of each individual to follow the calling of his or her own choice, and the right of every individual to an opportunity to develop his or her capacity to the fullest. I believe in the right and duty of every citizen to work for, to expect, and to obtain an increasing measure of political, economic, and emotional security for all. I am opposed to discrimination in any form, whether on the grounds of race, color, religion, political belief or economic status. I believe in the freedom of choice of one’s representatives in government, untrammeled by machine guns, secret police, or a police state. I am opposed to arbitrary and unwarranted use of power or authority from whatever source or against any individual or group. I believe in the government of law, not of men. . . .”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“the Dulles policy of massive nuclear retaliation bore a disturbing resemblance to the Nazis’ exterminationist philosophy—a link that would be darkly satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, with its Führer-saluting doomsday scientist.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“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.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Gehlen had promised Army officials that he would not hire former SS or Gestapo officials. But as his organization grew, it absorbed some of the most notorious figures of the Nazi regime, such as Dr. Franz Six. A former professor at Berlin University, Six left the classroom to become an intellectual architect of the Final Solution as well as one of its most enthusiastic enforcers, personally leading an SS death squad on the eastern front.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“It haunted my grandparents every day,” said Erick Arbenz. “That was another reason there was so much depression in our family. They lived and felt the Guatemala holocaust every day. They had tried to bring about a Guatemala Spring—and then to suffer not only their own defeat, but to see everything that was done to their people . . . it was an overwhelming tragedy.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“The Allen Dulles story continues to haunt the country. 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.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“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.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“The assassination memo was among several hundred documents relating to the 1954 coup released by the CIA in 1997 during one of the agency’s occasional exercises in carefully managed “openness,” which one critic labeled “a brilliant public relations snow job.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“sector. It was the very lifeblood of this ruling group’s existence—even if, in the atomic age, it threatened the existence of humanity.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“War is the health of the state.” Foster, who always acted in the interests of the American establishment, understood this. It was this permanent war fever that empowered the country’s political and military hierarchies and enriched the increasingly militarized corporate sector.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Hope was Foster’s enemy, fear his righteous sword.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“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.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“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.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“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.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in the “permanent war economy” that had emerged during the Cold War.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“As a result of Breckinridge Long’s delaying tactics, 90 percent of the quota places reserved for refugees from Hitler’s and Mussolini’s dark realms were never filled. This meant that another 190,000 souls who could have escaped were trapped inside Europe’s burning building.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Under Dulles, American'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".”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“The Kennedys were indeed more successful at the rough-and-tumble of politics than the Rockefellers. But, as JFK had understood, that was not the full story when it came to evaluating a family's power. He fully appreciated that the Rockefellers held a unique place in the pantheon of American power, one rooted not so much within the democratic system as within what scholars would later refer to as "the deep state" that subterranean network of financial, intelligence, and military interests that guided national policy no matter who occupied the White House. The Kennedys had risen from saloonkeepers and ward heelers to the top of American politics. But they were still overshadowed by the imperial power of the Rockefellers.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“As the global reach of American industry and finance grew during the postwar era, so did the U.S. national security complex. America's vast system of military and covert power was aimed not just at checking the Soviet threat but at protecting US. corporate interests abroad. Behind the rapid international growth of multinational giants like Chase Manhattan, Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, and GM lay a global network of U.S. military bass, spy stations, and alliances with despotic regimes. The twin exigencies of the Cold War and U.S. empire gave the national security establishment unprecedented free rein to operate. The CIA was empowered not only to engage in the deadly "spy versus spy" antics against the KGB that became the stuff of Cold War legend but to subvert democratic governments that were deemed insufficiently pro-American and to terminate these government's elected leaders.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government