The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Governments David Talbot, Harper Perenniel (2016)

Oliver Stone tells the story of the 1944 Democratic Convention. The crowd is wildly cheering VP Henry Wallace, and Sen Claude Pepper is pushing his way to the podium, eager to seize the moment and move that Wallace be nominated by acclamation to be FDR's running mate for another term, just as FDR has wished. With three seconds to spare, Mayor Kelly of the Chicago Democratic machine fabricates a "fire hazard" in order to adjourn the meeting without a vote. He and other party bosses then work the delegates all night with bribes and threats, and in the morning the unknown Sen Harry Truman, who had placed eighth the night before, is voted to be Roosevelt's VP.

The point is that FDR had only months to live, and that Wallace would have been an enormously popular president with a strong leaning toward pacifism and democratic socialism. There would have been no Hiroshima, no Cold War, and the New Deal programs would have been continued and expanded. The US economy would have followed a path more like Norway. We came within three seconds of a historic path in which the Military-Industrial Complex and the Deep State would never have gotten a toehold.

How did we get to this place, this crazy paranoid world where our country spills the worst aspects of its violent culture over the planet, murdering and subjugating and stealing resources in the name of "spreading democracy", lying and deceiving for the sake of a handful of robber barons who are mostly oblivious to the carnage that is perpetrated in their name, while the rest of us are inestimably poorer for the waste, the devastation, the lost lives, the shattered bodies and fractured families?

How much of our history is contingent, hypersensitive to obscure events at crucial inflection points? How much difference can any one man have made in the history of America and the world?

I've been reading a biographyof Allen Dulles. Most Americans have never heard of him, and yet I've become convinced that all that is wrong with America, all the imperialism, the xenophobia, the subversion of democracy at home and abroad, all connect to actions of this small-minded sociopath (and his brother) in the 1940s through the 1960s.

Dulles's career began as a lawyer for the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, with clients like the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later re-named British Petroleum) and United Fruit Company, which had sensitive interests overseas in need of political protection. Through his life, his power base was these corporations, and he continued to represent their interests even when his "client" was nominally the citizenry of the USA.

Allen w dulles
(Image by (From Wikimedia) US Governement, Author: US Governement)   Details   Source   DMCA

Allen was the younger brother of John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State under Eisenhower. He always resented the greater stature of his brother, as he was "only" head of the CIA from its incipient days as the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II. Foster was no liberal, but Allen pulled him further to the right as the two had a lock on foreign policy, as Eisenhower was a figurehead and novice in diplomacy and international politcy.

Heading OSS during the War, Dulles spent time in Europe, making his separate peace with the Nazis (after FDR had explicitly made "unconditional surrender" our firm demand), forging ties to war criminals, serving as a liason for business deals and loans financing the Third Reich. After the War, Dulles was instrumental in gaining pardons for top Nazis, and finding roles for them in the US science and policy organizations. He considered Nazis useful in the all-important fight against the socialist ideology of Soviet Russia.

The USSR was our ally during WW II, and did far more to defeat Hitler than the US ever did. During the New Deal years, even Ronald Reagan was a socialist. How did Communism become a dirty word, and the Soviet Union the Evil Empire? More than anyone with the possible exception of James Byrnes , the Dulles brothers were authors of the Cold War. They supported Nixon and Joe McCarthy in their red-baiting vituperation, while knowing it was all based on lies. They steered Eisenhower away from his instinctive attitude of cooperation and accomodation, towad a hard-line stance against Nikitia Khruschev, who came to office after Stalin with a mandate for de'tente. It was the Dulles brothers who originated the American policy based on a threat to use nuclear weapons in response to even minor international skirmishes like Quemoy and Matsu . The first use policy led to the insanity of Mutually Assured Destruction, and the spiraling nuclear arms race of the 1950s and 60s. These policies were lent a macabre legitimacy by the Council on Foreign Relations , where Allen Dulles also played a leading role, and his brother Foster had been director as early as 1927.

Do you know about MKUltra ? It was one of the most sordid chapters in the sordid history of our country. Nazi doctors who performed horrific human experimentation during the war were imported into the US, initiating a series of experiments in mind control using drugs, electric shock, isolation, brainwashing, and devilishly scientific means to destroy brains with torture and turn human individuals into docile puppets. This went on in university laboratories, in hospitals and prisons across the country. Few of the psychiatrists who were tapped to perform torture could resist the lucrative contracts, and those who were shocked sufficiently to threaten publicizing the scandal were murdered, using the same poisons and deceits that the CIA was already using to assassinate foreign enemies.

One bizarre detail illustrates Dulles's psychopathic mind. His son, Allen Jr, was injured in the Korean War with shrapnel in his brain. He came back to the US with an unpredictable temperament, and was prone to tantrums in which he railed against his father in terms that came uncomfortably close to the truth. The elder Dulles shipped his own son off to an MKUltra site for "treatment", and three months later, Allen Jr came back a vegetable.

MKUltra was brought to us by Allen Dulles. Though the program was closed down by hearings of the Church Committee in the 1970s, its legacy continues to this day in the torture camp at Guantanamo and in CIA black sites around the world.

The first instance of extraordinary rendition was also Dulles's handiwork. As a young PhD student, Jesus de Galindez wrote a Columbia University dissertation on the thuggish reign of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. But Dulles had been a supporter of Trujillo, finding him a reliable ally of American business interests and a bulwark against agrarian reformers in the region. Dulles arranged to have Galindez kidnapped from his Manhattan apartment, drugged and delivered to Trujillo personally. Galindez was tortured and murdered, his body disposed in the sea.

We now know that the CIA has a cozy relationship with all the mainstream US press, with paid CIA agents on the editorial staffs of every newspaper from USA Today to The Nation, but most especially the New York Times and Time Magazine. These relationships, too, were originated and negotiated originally by Allen Dulles in the early Cold War years.

Allen Dulles was instrumental in the removal of Iran's first democratically-elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. He did this as a favor for his former client, British Iranian Oil aka BP. The Shah who was installed as his replacement never had a firm hold on the support of his people, and he was eventually toppled by Ayatollah Khoumeini and the fundamentalist Islamic movement in the Middle East was born. Dulles was also a key player in the 1954 coup in Guatemala, overthrowing he popular, elected president Jacobo Arbenz, who affronted the United Fruit Company with public education, health care and, worst of all, land reform. The story was replayed a year later in Honduras, where President Ramon_Villeda_Morales was overthrown by the CIA.

It was Allen Dulles who branded Fidel Castro a communist at a time when he eagerly sought a partnership with his giant Northern neighbor, and his only only sin was land reform. Dulles engineered the economic policies that drove Castro to seek the Soviet Union as a trading partner, and he launched a decades-long campaign to assassinate Castro with infiltrators and Mafia hitmen. (Time and again, Castro escaped by his wits, and the loyalty of mena around him.)

When John F Kennedy became US president in 1961, he embraced a bipartisan administration, and initially retained Dulles as head of the CIA. But behind his back, Dulles was engineering an insurrection against Castro from the Bay of Pigs, just 2 months into the JFK presidency. The idea was to surprise Kennedy with an unfolding revolution that would force his hand, because it would turn disastrous without the direct support of US troops. JFK resisted the call for a US invasion of Cuba from Dulles and other members of his cabinet. When the smoke cleared, he took full responsibility for the fiasco publicly, but privately, he fired Dulles and vowed to "splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds".

But not before one final act of insubordination and treachery by Dulles's CIA. General Charles de Gaulle had been a hero of the French Resistance, and later as President he was so thoroughly identified with French pride and independence that he was perhaps uniquely qualified to lead the historic trend and let go of the French empire in Africa. When de Gaulle granted independence to the French colony of Algeria, President Kennedy approved. JFK had long been a champion of struggles for independence in the Third World. But Dulles was furious. Relinquishing Algeria was not in the interest of his corporate clients, and in Dulles's twisted perception, it represented a capitulation to Moscow. Behind Kennedy's back, Dulles fomented a military coup in France, a revolt to overthrow President de Gaulle in April, 1961. Kennedy got wind of the plot and intervened at the last moment, but it was de Gaulle's perennial popularity that assured the outcome. The "French Putsch" was doomed after ten million French citizens rose to de Gaulle's call and flooded the streets of the major cities. This was Dulles's final embarrassment.

After his firing from the CIA at the hands of Kennedy, Dulles still retained the loyalty of a great number of influential people at the agency. He got his revenge two years later when he orchestrated an American coup d'etat, assassinating President Kennedy and pinning the murder on an alleged Soviet agent .

• Bringing Nazi influence into American politics after WW II
• Anti-communist hysteria
• Legitimizing torture, extraordinary rendition, and human experimentation
• Nuclear madness and the arms race
• Birthing and giving legitimacy to Islamic extremism
• US-sponsored coups in Latin America and the Middle East
• Assassination of President Kennedy and other leaders who presented a platform of peaceful coexistence

These are the roots of much that is wrong in the world today. We may like to feel that it was fated all along, that it could not have been otherwise, that it was baked into America's genes. But it may be that history is highly contingent, and had it not been for the backdoor influence of a pair of sociopathic brothers, our country and the world might be very different today.

(Another recommended book on The Brothers , by Stephen Kinzer)