The Devil's Chessboard

Subtitled ‘Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the rise of America’s secret government’, this is a gripping and important exposé of the clandestine activities of Allen Dulles during and after the Second World War – a man described by the author as ‘one of the wiliest masters of secret power ever produced by America.’ Both Dulles and his brother John Foster, who was Secretary of State during the Eisenhower years while Dulles ran the CIA, came from a Wall Street corporate law background with influential networks and interests. The title of the book is evocative as both brothers were obsessive chess players in their youth, and political realists such as Brzezinski have used the game as a metaphor for geopolitics. During World War II, Dulles operated his own covert intelligence and foreign policy independently of the President’s directives, socialising with, supporting and even rescuing a number of high-ranked Nazis on the ostensible grounds that the real post-war enemy would be the Soviet Union and that Germany would need well-placed and savvy individuals in government. At the time, he was effectively proposing a no-fault surrender in defiance of Roosevelt while claiming that he had the President’s full support. He was aware of, but chose not to report on, what he knew about the Holocaust. Contrary to orders, he made sure that Himmler’s former Chief of Staff, General Karl Wolff escaped justice ‘and went so far as to bury incriminating evidence.’ (p. 88) Interestingly, Carl Jung sized him up accurately – Dulles’s wife and mistress were both Jung’s patients.

During the Eisenhower years, the brothers wielded enormous overt and covert power as the motive of national security loomed larger and trumped moral conscience. The CIA increased its influence and outreach with minimal supervision. Commercial interests of large US corporations like United Fruit exerted considerable influence on political interventions, both in the Middle East and South America. The 1953 intervention in Iran to oust democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh is characterised as the struggle between imperialism and nationalism, and in a number of cases nationalism was mistaken for communism. Officials remaining loyal to Mossadegh were kidnapped, tortured and murdered, and Dulles managed domestic news reporting of the coup to divert attention away from the agency. The systematic deposing, hounding and eventual death of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz is covered in some detail, as is CIA support for Dominican Republic despot Rafael Trujillo, even to the extent of arranging for the kidnapping and handing over of Jesus de Galindez to gruesome torture and death because he had written an accurate and systematic account of the dictator’s many abuses.

Dulles presided over the development of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control programme as an attempt to reengineer brain and behaviour with the goal of ‘bending a subject’s mind to the agency’s will’, also experimenting with LSD to see if it could be used to programme zombielike saboteurs or assassins. At the same time, they were developing interrogation techniques that came to be known as extreme rendition, with the help of more than 1,600 ex-Nazi scientists (!). Extreme measures were invariably justified in the name of national security on pragmatic grounds, as were relationships with organised crime, as documented in recent books by Whitney Webb. One of the operatives involved was Frank Olson. He began to have qualms about this work, and he met an untimely end plunging to his death from the 10^th floor hotel room where he was being held by the CIA. Needless to say, this was classified as suicide – Olson knew too much and had become a security risk.

The campaign against Castro is central to the narrative, as it also involves JFK and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which was part of an overall intelligence plan to kill the Cuban leader. Already in JFK’s 1960 campaign, warning bells were sounding for Dulles when Kennedy said that he felt it important that ‘the President of United States personify the ideals of our society, speak out on this, associate ourselves with the great fight for equality.’ (p. 351) In saying this, he was aligning himself against Western imperialism in the name of freedom and independence – literally a red flag for the old guard, who were in the meantime involved in the demonising and eventual assassination of the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, which, disgracefully and deceptively, they kept hidden from the incoming president, who was eventually shocked to the core when the news reached him indirectly.

As far as the Bay of Pigs was concerned, Dulles tried to force the president into military intervention by way of escalation, accusing him of a failure of nerve, even though the agency knew in advance that the operation was doomed to failure without reinforcements. Kennedy resisted such aggressive pressure, as he also did to his enormous credit during the Cuban missile crisis. The resentful military, however, considered Kennedy himself a growing national security risk and kept seeking nuclear confrontation. JFK’s commitment to peace was regarded as naïve and weak, and the plot to assassinate him began to take shape.Talbot’s detailed analysis of all the anomalies and inconsistencies is highly informative. Dulles continued to operate behind-the-scenes even after being removed as director of the CIA, and after JFK’s assassination played a leading part in the Warren Commission, which many commentators felt should have been called the Dulles Commission: ‘the man who should have been in the witness chair wound up instead in control of the inquiry.’(p. 572) It also turns out that David Rockefeller, who played a leading role in the Council for Foreign Relations, would sometimes personally bankroll CIA operations with off-the-books cash.

The overall picture of Dulles is devious in the extreme, and it is interesting that De Gaulle was one of the people who really understood what was going on. After Kennedy’s assassination, he observed that ‘they don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.’ The relevance of all this to geopolitics in 2022 is the role of the CIA in Ukraine since at least 2013, including the ousting of its pro-Russian leader in 2014. Both my friend Jim Garrison and Jeffrey Sachs have given informative briefings on this background in the context of the expansion of NATO eastwards, in spite of assurances given to Gorbachev who was seeking co-operative accommodation with the West rather than a perpetuation of the Cold War. Veteran Secretary of State George Kennan issued this prophetic warning in an article in the New York Times in 1997: ‘[B]luntly stated…expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.’ Gorbachev’s last book, reviewed in these pages two years ago, called for demilitarisation when there seemed to be no end in sight of militarism and violence. They continue to be preferred options, and continue to benefit the same power elites frequented by Allen Dulles. All this makes sobering but necessary reading.