Excellent, captivating biography of CIA director Allen Dulles, explaining in disturbing detail how the recent concept of the "administrative state" or the "deep state" is not a new idea, not even close. A modern reader will learn many unfortunate, but important, truths about our country's checkered 20th century history.
To be blunt, Allen Dulles inaugurated a new era of lawlessness in the United States, and the CIA, along with many other administrative bureaucracies (the Pentagon, FBI, NSA and many other lettered agencies[*]), now collectively represent tremendous supra-governmental, unelected and unfettered power.
Author David Talbot puts it this way: "Today, other faceless security bureaucrats continue to carry on Dulles's work--playing God with drone strikes from above and utilizing Orwellian surveillance technology that Dulles could have only dreamed about." To anyone who might claim that the idea of the deep state is silly conservative paranoia, read this book. Open your eyes!
While one one level this book tells the fascinating life story of an amoral, Nietzscheian man who undermined every President he served (and a few he didn't), this book also will sound sadly familiar to a modern reader, rhyming closely with what's happening right now: phony dossiers; unconstitutional and unethical surveillance of American citizens; the use of torture, assassination and extra-judicial imprisonment; and the use of other various grey and black-ops techniques both domestically and internationally.
The Devil's Chessboard chronicles the growth of a tremendous institutional arrogance, where secret policymakers do literally whatever they want: squirrel the worst Nazis out of post WWII Germany, foment revolution and install dictators wherever they want, and then bang each other's wives in their DC townhouses. This stuff all began with Dulles.
Written in 2015, and based in part on trove after trove of official documents that were only recently declassified (some fifty years or more after the fact), this book makes you realize that the so-called corporate state--a state not with elected democratic representatives, but rather a proxy government selected by a sort of oligarchic elite--has been running our country for a century. And while this may not be a brand new idea in today's era, it has certainly reached a level of blatancy we haven't seen in American history before. Twenty or thirty or more years ago, they didn't want you to know, so you didn't. Now, it's as if they don't even care that you know, since they think there's nothing you can do about it anyway.
[*] Today we can now add the FDA, OSHA, the CDC and the NIH to this growing list of unelected vectors of power.
Notes:
1) Dulles gets his start in Bern, Switzerland, where his espionage career began during World War I; he returns during World War II. The Swiss were total douchebags during the WW2, lying about Nazi assets, reaping huge profits behind the scenes, while the Nazis used stolen European gold and other treasure to buy whatever they needed from Spain, Romania, Sweden, Argentina, etc.
2) Note that our modern media cartel is starting to look a lot like the German industrial cartels (like IG Farben and Krupp Steel) all of which were deeply integrated into the Nazi government.
3) "Dulles's CIA overthrew nationalist governments in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and even targeted troublesome leaders in allied European countries."
4) Allen Dulles's brother was John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State.
5) "Alan Dulles was one of the wiliest masters of secret power ever produced by America. And his most ambitious clandestine efforts were directed not against hostile governments but against his own."
6) The Dulles brothers started out on Wall Street, running Sullivan and Cromwell, the Wall Street law firm,
7) When Allen Dulles served as the top US spy in Europe during World War II, "he blatantly ignored Roosevelt's policy of unconditional surrender and pursued his own strategy of secret negotiations with Nazi leaders... He was more interested in salvaging the Third Reich's security apparatus and turning it against the Soviet Union--which he had always regarded as America's true enemy." He went so far as to rescue Nazis who were clearly likely to be tried at Nuremberg, and using various Nazi "ratlines" spirit them out of Europe.
8) Dulles contrived to lure young President Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs, confident that once the mission failed, JFK would be compelled to send in the real US military. However, Kennedy surprised Dulles and the CIA by cutting bait and saying no to a full invasion. This is legit Deep State activity right here, quite striking. Kennedy later figures out Dulles is a threat to him and fires him.
9) Amazingly, Dulles got himself put on the Warren commission, aggressively lobbying LBJ; he then steered the investigation away from the CIA towards "the lone gunman" Oswald. Weirdly, no one in the American media at the time ever asked how a bitter political enemy of Kennedy ended up playing leader in investigating his assassination.
10) The BIS: Bank for International Settlements, created in 1940, was fully under Nazi control. Laundered Nazi gold looted from occupied countries.
11) Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who served with Allen in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, pretty much the predecessor organization to the CIA) claimed that both Dulles brothers, Foster and Allen, could have and should have been charged for treason or collaboration with the Nazi regime, except that then when FDR died there wasn't enough political will to challenge the two "imposing pillars of the American establishment."
12) Dulles subverted "the unconditional surrender ideal" and looked for a more of a win-win/no-fault peace to end the war which would establish a buffer between the West and the "real" enemy, Russia.
13) Faced with conclusive evidence of the Holocaust, Dulles did nothing for more than two years. Even his most ardently positive biographers can't understand why he was silent and did not report this back to Washington.
14) On Dulles's interventions on behalf of Nazis: see for a bald example SS general Karl Wolff, who was trying to work out a separate early surrender in Italy (particularly Northern Italy) because many of the Italian partisans were communist and Russia was encroaching on that region.
15) The "ratlines": various winding escape routes that high-ranking Nazis used to escape Europe and get themselves to South America, the United States, North Africa, etc.
16) On how various American and British intelligence agents were working at cross purposes: some as sincere Nazi hunters, others trying to make use of the Nazis for other purposes after the war. See names like Jim Angleton, Leo Pagnotta, Bill Gowen. The question was which was more important: fighting communism (or perhaps better phrased: establishing American predominance after the war) or prosecuting Nazis?
17) Hjalmar Schacht makes an appearance here, one of the only competent people running Germany post the Weimar hyperinflation: he was one of Hitler's most important central bankers, and he supposedly knew where the SS and Nazi money had been hidden in after World War II. (See The Death of Money as well as Lords of Finance.)
18) Clover Dulles, Allen Dulles's wife; Mary Bancroft, Dulles's mistress, the two women became friends and remained so the rest of their lives. He was impenetrable and incomprehensible to both women. Hmmm, I guess better to be feared than loved and understood.
19) Mary Bancroft spend time under treatment with Carl Jung who also "had a hard time figuring out Dulles": "he did not fit neatly into the Jungian system of power archetypes."
20) People were "useful" to Alan Dulles. Including the two neurotic and intelligent women he kept in his life.
21) The CIA overthrew Iran's demonic democratically elected government in 1953, the idea was to install a friendly dictator so that the CIA could have a surveillance platform bordering the Soviet Union.
22) The CIA was created in 1947, athough President Truman took a "dim view" of the agency, "fearing that it might turn into a rogue outfit." Holy cow how right he was...
23) The USA easily tilted the Italian election of 1948, effectively making Italy into a client state.
24) One way to think of the CIA in these days was as a neo-colonialist force trying to maintain a type of colonial control of the European powers, as well as establishing a new colonial control of the rest of the world. See also the CIA's paradigm of seeing everything on the planet in the context of "the democratic world" versus "the communist world," which was obviously oversimplified and in many cases completely wrong paradigm. This led to many, many wrong-headed policies across the second half of the 20th century. These guys were out of step, out of time, and old and in the way, but they still held the reins of power and created a whole suite of problems for everyone.
25) Dulles used Noel Field (an American communist activist living in Europe) as a total pawn, played him like a violin to disrupt Stalin by implying that the US had a large network of pawns just like Field throughout Eastern Europe; Stalin "disappeared" Field as well as much of his family as a result. This was a very subtle counterintelligence gambit, "operation splinter Factor" and it supposedly resulted in a zillion Soviet show trials all across communist Europe: Stalin flipped out about the idea that there's a wide-ranging infiltration of the various Soviet client states and satellites. Per Dulles: "The comrades are merely sticking knives in each others' backs and doing our dirty work for us." See Laura Lewis's book Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field.
26) Even back in those days there was a monoparty/pseudo-democratic system (and I thought the idea of the USA being a bi-factional monoparty was something much more recent): see how Allen Dulles and the East Coast conservative establishment used and converted Nixon into "their guy" away from the conservative Southern California anti-east coast leaders who had given Nixon his start in politics: once Nixon gets into the machine, he gets converted into the system's assumptions/belief systems (thus Nixon came to favor gigantic expansion of the US government, gigantic programs like the Marshall plan etc).
27) It also looks like Nixon saw some evidence that Dulles's organization was laundering Nazi funds during and after the war and they cut a deal to keep it quiet. See also Nixon and the Alger Hiss Congressional inquiry which both Dulles brothers basically "permitted to happen" from behind the scenes.
28) The book explores overly long tangents from time to time, it spends a lot of time describing the dirty congressional race between Nixon and the incumbent Voorhis in 1946, probably much more time and pages than necessary. Likewise the narrative of the German Eugen Dollmann, a Nazi SS and a homosexual caught up in certain spy dramas at the end of World War II; see also the extended discussion of the Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The book also spends quite a number of pages warming up the audience to controversies between the CIA and Kennedy by going quite far back into Kennedy's life and early political career. It's not that the tangents aren't useful, just that the author could have cut a lot of fat out of them, down to just the meat, and the book would be 350 pages long not 600.
29) It's a very interesting irony in how Whittaker Chambers managed to get Alger Hiss in deep trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee as well as Richard Nixon when Whittaker Chambers himself was a communist: he used to write for the Communist Party press and was a clear example of approved opposition in those days, used as editorial punching bag for example by William F Buckley Jr's National Review (Buckley himself was probably another example of approved opposition).
30) Another ugly truism to politics is that you need to seize the investigative momentum, you want to make sure you're holding hearings and running or launching the committees and the investigations: you want to be holding discussions of the wrongdoings of the other guy, not having them do that to you. I think this is why it's so critically important to manufacture "dossiers" of things and allegations, etc., so that you can hold these hearings and distract your political opponents with your skirmishing. In the case of the Dulles brothers they used these tools very skillfully through their political subjects like Nixon.
31) Allen Dulles also "disappeared" catastrophically clear proof that Nixon took a huge bribe: he had a copy of a $100,000 check that a slippery Romanian industrialist paid Nixon directly to his bank account (it was in return for pulling strings with immigration to get him permission to live permanently in the USA). Dulles made the evidence disappear while he was in the CIA because it would have implicated him as well. The next year Eisenhower (with Nixon chosen as his vice president) cruised to a large victory in the presidential election of 1952. Absolutely disgusting.
32) C. Wright Mills' concept of the power elite, versus the (largely ahistoric and delusional) idea from Marxism idea of power being held by "those who owned the means of production." Power in his model was also not an ebb and flow or balancing act of competing interests like big business vs labor/agricultural interests. Instead, America was ruled by those controlling various key strategic command posts in society: key government positions, key leadership roles in the military establishment and at big corporations: "These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in the 'permanent war economy' that had emerged during the Cold War." Sounds familiar today doesn't it??
33) [Sometimes you need a new language to describe and explain the reality around you, and the language of the media that is there to program us as a populace is (probably by design) insufficient to explain this reality, or it explains it in a way that serves the desired narratives of those in power. This is a type of dialectic control, and you have to think outside the system of that dialectic in order to accurately perceive reality. See for example C. Wright Mills's book The Power Elite which searched out just such a new language.]
34) Another stunner: "During the 1952 presidential race, Dulles proved his loyalty to the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign by channeling funds to the Republican ticket through CIA front groups and by leaking embarrassing intelligent reports to the media about the Truman administration's handling of the Korean War--flagrant violations of the CIA charter that forbids agency involvement in domestic politics." Jesus.
35) Walter Bedell "Beetle" Smith stepped down at the CIA and the Dulles brothers persuaded him to put his second in command (who was Allen Dulles) to take over: "Under Alan Dulles, the CIA would become a vast kingdom, the most powerful and least supervised agency in government." Or as David Halberstam put it in his book The Fifties, "The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington--the transition from an isolationist America to imperial colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but in imperial country did... What was evolving was a closed state within an open state."
36) Senator Joe McCarthy presented a difficult problem to Foster Dulles as head of the State Department: initially he wanted to use McCarthy's reign of terror in order to purge the old FDR-era New Dealers from State.
37) J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI kept files on Foster Dulles, likewise Dulles kept files on Hoover. "Penetration begins at home" was a quote from Jim Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief. Also it was rumored that there was a photograph of Jay Edgar Hoover fellating his deputy and long time aide Clyde Tolson. Likewise Allen Dulles had even more scandalous files on Joe McCarthy's sex life. According to the Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, "He [McCarthy] just couldn't keep his hands off young girls. Why the Communist opposition didn't plant a minor on him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don't know." All these guys have been "Epstein-ing" each other all along.
38) The CIA worked out a deal with McCarthy, which was widely seen as a defeat for McCarthy, but most media also held that the CIA was above examination and too secretive for its own good. "The CIA would grow more powerful and less accountable with each passing year of Dulles's reign." After fending off Joe McCarthy, Dulles consolidated his power at the CIA, and no one else during the Eisenhower era ever challenged him.
39) CIA fomenting a revolution in Iran 1953, convincing Eisenhower to go ahead with it by framing it as an action of anti-communism--when really it was an action to protect oil interests as well as British interests in the region. Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Theodore) was one of the architects of the plan. (!) The Shah was a "wimp" in his view.
40) The Iranian coup in 1953, plus the regime change in Guatemala in 1954: Dulles cited these as the two greatest triumphs of his CIA career. Likewise the CIA is an organization totally got off on the Iran coup in particular, internal documents said things like "it was a day that should never have ended" in an orgy of self congratulations and intoxicated power. We really fucked this country and its people, and you can really see why they hate us, why there was a counter-revolution in the late 1970s, and why they are totally justified in hating us.
41) Eisenhower was way sicker than anybody let on during his presidency: a severe heart attack that took him out of commission for months, a stroke, surgery for a bowel obstruction, all of this was kept quiet.
42) Nikita Khrushchev thought that Foster Dulles (at State) held all the power in the US government. (!)
43) [Note also how the bureaucratization of violence became standard behavior during this era, where our regime thought nothing of sending someone to topple someone else's regime, assassinate someone, foment revolution somewhere, whatever. And today we think nothing of Hillary Clinton saying about some senior person in some Middle Eastern country, "Well, can't we just drone him?" It's become part of the backdrop of how we do business. Another sign of Fourth Turning type activity in a decaying society.]
44) [In fact, in this era we have a bureaucratization of most human experiences: one of the most urgent right now is the bureaucratization of medical care, where policies are decided in a centralized way, many levels/layers distant from the actual doctor-patient relationship; likewise we see the bureaucratization of parenting, the bureaucratization of education etc. More signs and metaphors of a decaying society.]
45) [Also some of the stuff is just kept secret for so long that we can't learn from it! See for example one of Eisenhower's diary entries that was not declassified until 2009: "The things we did were 'covert'... If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed... But our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear." Just gross to read things like this.]
46) More disgusting behavior in the orchestrated coup of Guatemala. The CIA didn't actually assassinate Jacobo Árbenz because, in the words of Howard Hunt (one of the principal CIA orchestrators of this coup), "We'd get blamed for it." CIA spread all kinds of false information to demean and humiliate him. [You see stuff like this done back then and you can see why El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele could very easily find himself in danger with his efforts to make his country less subject to United States economic colonialism.]
47) Allen Dulles' predecessor at the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith, was a board member of the United Fruit Company, the primary landowner in Guatemala. The company was well-connected in both USA political parties and throughout the USA's political system. Worse and still more gross: the Dulles brothers were lawyers for United Fruit dating from their earliest days at Sullivan & Cromwell. At the same time, Árbenz had communist connections and was a "little too alarmingly far left" for the United States in those days, which gave a cover reason to take him down.
48) After the Guatemala coup Eisenhower asked Alan Dulles how many men had he lost. "Just one," Dulles said. "'Incredible!' exclaimed the president." The real violence and gore began afterwards, however, as the CIA backed the newly installed regime so they could clean away the opposition. The US media just presented the CIA side of everything, ad the media was as compliant and complicit then as it is now. (!!)
49) Many in Germany understood that ultimately the US-Soviet alliance in WWII would break apart on ideological grounds, and this would provide "an opportunity for at least some elements of the Nazi hierarchy to survive by joining forces with the West against Moscow." See Reinhard Gehlen as a prime example: he served as Hitler's intelligence chief on the Eastern front, he wanted to reconstitute Hitler's military intelligence structure inside the US national security system, and this model ultimately became West Germany's principle intelligence agency. Allen Dulles was one of his key supporters and this support prevailed, so he was not herded to Nuremberg or prosecuted.
50) In a way you can think of these operatives as government-employed Cantillon insider: Former Nazi Germans who worked in partnership with the US and were funded by them, thus they lived off the taxpayer--and often lived quite well off the taxpayer. The ultimate form of Cantillon insider.
51) The CIA backed a Neo-Nazi youth group in Germany in the 1950s (yes, long after WWII) that had its own alarming plans for overthrowing the German democracy in West Germany, and had also compiled a blacklist of people to be "liquidated" as "unreliable" in the case of an open conflict with the Soviet Union. This was to create a so-called stay-behind network of armed resistance to fight the Red Army, an idea developed in the early days of the Cold War by US intelligence: Operation Gladio.
52) Another gross pairing, Alan Dulles and his CIA unites with Reinhard Gehlen (see note #49), who was installed as part of a security and intelligence apparatus in West Germany, much to the displeasure of then prime minister Konrad Adenauer.
53) It gets grosser: when the CIA begins experimenting on brainwashing, drugging and different types of mind control techniques, Dulles pushes it forward under the sinister sounding MKULTRA program. [I suppose the apotheosis of the stuff came with the opening of the notorious School of the Americas to truly master various torture techniques later taught to repressive regimes in Latin America]. With Operation Paperclip, we brought Nazis over here, and then continued their work.
54) On the subject of how easy it is to co-opt an ethical person, or at least a putatively ethical person: physician Henry Knowles Beecher, who was chief of anesthesiology at Mass General and an outspoken proponent of the Nuremberg Code, was easily enticed and co-opted by the CIA (and its unlimited funding) to dispense with his ethical parameters in search of various magical "truth serums" that would compel prisoners to reveal all. Eventually be began drawing on the work done by Nazi doctors at Dachau.
55) Once you learn the story of Frank Olson, killed by his own colleagues at the CIA, staging his death as a suicide in the Hotel Pennsylvania, you'll be less surprised to learn why the CDC and the FDA aren't interested in silly things like vaccine side effects and vaccine injuries. In 1975 President Gerald Ford would summon Olson's widow and children to the White House and apologize to them on behalf of the US government.
56) See also the experiments done in Montreal at McGill University's psychiatric facility by Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, both richly funded by the CIA, conducting brainwashing experiments "that would later be widely condemned as barbaric." The stuff they did was right out of a Philip K. Dick novel.
57) "Dulles was quite willing to steer suffering relatives toward MKULTRA-connected physicians." This quote is a deeply suggestive one and quite honestly misleading. It goes to the author's rigor. While this statement is technically true with regard to his son (Alan Jr. had been brain damaged in Korea by a mortar fragment and his father had him receive treatment at the McGill psychiatric facility), the author goes on to imply--based on no information--that he also did this for his daughter. The quote itself is misleading on a few levels.
58) More on the story of Alan Jr.: injured with a mortar fragment to the brain in Korea, shuttling in and out of institutions, treated by one of his father's CIA-retained neurologists, finally he retires with his sister Joan (who becomes his guardian). They live as elderly siblings in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
59) Jesus de Galindez, caught up as a Basque idealist against Francoist forces in Spain, flees to exile in the Dominican Republic, then gets caught in the web of dictator Rafael Trujillo there, and then is "disappeared" in Manhattan while working as a lecturer at Columbia University in 1956. The CIA hired out his abduction and delivery to Trujillo (!!!!!) where he was boiled alive then fed to sharks (Trujillo's favorite way to dispose of his political enemies. The CIA had a sanitized euphemism for this type of action: "extraordinary rendition"
60) James Angleton running a "CIA within the CIA" to guard against moles, Soviet spies, etc. People were rattled by British Intelligence agent Kim Philby who was exposed as a Russian double agent. See also Angleton getting caught on a hit mic during the post-Watergate Church Committee probe of CIA lawbreaking. Angleton said, "it is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government."
61) Fidel Castro in New York City in 1960, not allowed to stay in Midtownm so a Harlem hotel opened to him after Malcolm X intervened on his behalf. It became a major propaganda event as a result, deeply embarrassing the US.
62) Note also that Castro did not want to end up like Guatemala's Jacobo Árbenz (see notes #46 and #47). It also appears that the CIA (indirectly, by using a front company) attempted to hire the mafia to assassinate Castro.
63) JFK, as presidential candidate, sought out more nuanced positions on various independence and national liberation movements around the world, but at the same time he couldn't afford to be naive about communism and Soviet exploitation of these national liberation movements. The US until then only supported dictatorships and pseudo-colonial control of countries in its sphere. Also, these newly independent countries would often turn to the Soviet Union because they were locked out of US markets after the regime change. Sanction worked so well back then, just like they "work" today!
64) Kennedy also campaigned with a strikingly soft line against Havana/Castro, even campaigning and giving a speech at the hotel Theresa in Harlem where Castro stayed.
65) "Democracy works only if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can't sit back and let democracy run itself."--Alan Dulles. [Of course, democracy run by the "right people" isn't democracy, it's oligarchy.]
66) JFK actually is on record saying "I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere." [He already knew, he was already savvy about various anti-colonialist independence movements, how could he be so fooled later by Vietnam??]
67) Kennedy also giving a speech in 1957 in support of Algeria, articulating kind of two poles of political debate in those days: the Eisenhower-Dulles worldview, which saw all international events through the Cold War lens, and "allowed no space for developing nations to pursue their own path to progress," versus a seeing these countries through a lens of more of an American independence-type freedom movement (from either Western imperialism/colonialism or Soviet imperialism), Ho Chi Minh for example looked to the American revolution for his inspiration, ironically. Kennedy saw this and understood it and articulated a new way of looking at the geopolitical backdrop.
68) See also with the CIA did with Patrice Lumumba, also the deeply disturbing fact that the CIA kept the news from Kennedy for more than a month. (!!!)
69) Shooting down of the U2 aircraft over Russia and the capture of CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers. The CIA was in charge of these flyovers, and Eisenhower was on again off again with authorizing it and deauthorizing these missions. The shoot-down happened literally on the eve of a major Paris summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, and this caused people to suspect that the CIA had intentionally provoked this incident to ruin the peace conference and to maintain conflict with Soviets.
70) A pretty stunning example of United States policy makers' ignorant indifference to many small countries: Secretary of State Foster Dulles confused Tunisia and Indonesia, "and his State department staff had a difficult time distinguishing between Niger and Nigeria."
71) Alan Dulles played both sides of the 1960 presidential campaign and was thus able to remain in power. Here's still more evidence of a "monoparty," a bifactional one party state with a deep state behind it, that outlasts the elected representatives who are supposed to direct and control them. Dulles even briefed JFK on the Bay of Pigs invasion plans before the election (this was totally inappropriate on many levels), and he then likely lied about doing so to Nixon. "Dulles ensured that he would be the victor, no matter who won."
72) The assassination of Patrice Lumumba happened during the transition period between Eisenhower and JFK, it was seen as a brazen act of insubordination by Alan Dulles towards the elected US government. See Also, Ike, who by 1960 (at the end of his second term) "was sick, tired, and cranky--and he had little patience or understanding for third world freedom struggles." Eisenhower gave Dulles direct approval to "eliminate" Lumumba. CIA agent Larry Devlin delayed cabling information about moving Lumumba to Katanga province (where he had violent enemies--this decision thus was seen as essentially sealing Lumumba's fate). He kept it silent until it was too late to do anything about it.
73) Bay of Pigs invasion was staffed with CIA losers backing Cuban exiles, and then failing to back up the operation when the invasion floundered. Alan Dulles, strangely, wasn't participating at all when events went sideways... One theory is that Dulles intended for the Bay of Pigs invasion to fail, so that Kennedy would be forced to send in the real military. JFK later said: "They were sure I'd give in to them, they couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong."
74) What followed was a battle in the media between Dulles and the White House, Dulles framed the story as JFK having a failure of nerve, tried to pin the failure on JFK.
75) April 1961: there was a near-coup in France against Charles de Gaulle, and the French thought the CIA was partly behind this. (!) Note also that Alan Dulles had organized a secret "stay behind army" originally intended to resist potential Soviet invasion but who were now aligned with rebellious generals looking to overthrow de Gaulle.
76) Kennedy even admitted to the French that the CIA was operating beyond even his control.
77) Even in 1961 France had its own armed secret service military unit the "11th Choc" that frequently liquidated alleged enemies of the French empire, even gunning them down openly in the streets.
78) "The struggle fought between JFK and the national security elite, as Kennedy attempted to lead the country out of the Cold War, was largely invisible to the American people." The US government was at war with itself with three letter agencies on one side and Kennedy and his staff on the other side, trying to not appear "soft on communism" while fighting to manage the CIA's extra-governmental activities. The whole thing seemed out of anybody's control: Per Kennedy "the hardliners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another."
79) Kennedy fires Dulles, then explicitly chooses an Eisenhower-era retread to lead the CIA: John McCone, who goes on to do exactly what Dulles used to do, including maneuvering in Laos to get the US embroiled there despite Kennedy's explicit wish to remain neutral.
80) These agencies and US military and the State Department/Pentagon all literally are like a parallel government! It's quite striking. Sadly the movie Doctor Strangelove is more truthful and accurate than I ever would want to admit.
81) See also the Cuban missile crisis: Kennedy had already been trying to get the USA's missiles that were sitting in Turkey removed, but the State Department "stymied" him, "just one more example of the intransigence and insubordination that bedeviled his administration." Bobby Kennedy later wrote in his book Thirteen Days: "The president believed he was President" to try to describe the insubordination of the agencies and the JFK's inability to execute his political power. Note also that all of JFK's national security advisors wanted him to take extremely aggressive actions with Russia during the Cuban missile crisis; he stood nearly alone with his brother and McNamara to work out a face saving deal.
82) Again, this book frames up a very persuasive argument that because of the animosity between the CIA the State Department, the USA has a sort of permanent government (today we would use the phrase "deep state").
83) Also the book frames up yet another persuasive argument that Kennedy was not assassinated by one man, and that his assassination was a "solution" to the existential threat he represented to these agencies, their extragovernmental power and their worldview. Note that this power, just like it is today, was predicated on "endless wars," proxy wars and a general stance of active bellicosity between the US and the its perceived enemies (in those days the Soviet Union; today, China, Russia, various Islamic states, etc).
84) The Secret Service unearthed and foiled a plot in Chicago on Kennedy's life which looked a lot like what would later happen in Dallas.
85) Striking throwaway blurb here on Chile: discussing a sinister character from the anti-Castro network in the United States who "briefly relocated [to Chile] during the CIA orchestrated unrest that led to the violent overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973."
86) The CIA also overtly subverted Kennedy's diplomatic efforts in Italy, trying to break up his "opening to the left" movement there, which would have helped unite the Socialist and center-left parties, and would have moved the Socialist party away from unity with Italy's Communist party. There was a center left coalition government formed in 1963 in Italy,
87) Lyndon Johnson, totally ostracized, mocked, ignored, made irrelevant by Kennedy and his brother Bobby: by 1963 he was a shell of himself, with none of the power he used to wield as Senate majority leader. Also JFK had already decided by late 1963 that he would not have Johnson as his running mate for his re-election campaign. I didn't know this.
88) Interesting meta-discussion about the "official narrative" of the Kennedy assassination: how no one in the established media ever seemed to want to challenge it, yet at the same time no one was actually willing to closely inspect the evidence--or use any critical thinking to think through it. This is extremely reminiscent of various media narratives today about COVID: early treatment protocols for example, or early reports of severe side effects from mRNA vaccines, all of which were "fact-checked" away and memory-holed into oblivion by a compliant media. Striking once again how history repeats.
89) The chapter on the Kennedy Assassination is gripping reading, and the author makes a fairly persuasive case (although some of it is by innuendo) that Alan Dulles was significantly involved. Lee Harvey Oswald seems more like a wind-up toy than an actual participant in the assassination. He was widely known as a horrible shot too. Oswald's life story was one long example of the dog that didn't bark.
90) The story of Ruth Paine, who took in Marina Oswald and their daughters, Allen Dulles knew all about her, and their families were connected in a really weird way. Paine was the one who told Oswald about the job opening at the Texas School Book Depository.
91) Post-World War II United States policy was genuinely mercantile, backed by military and covert force. Just like the mercantile era of the Dutch, French and English: fighting wars over access to foreign markets.
92) It's interesting to think through the author's decision to include (or pejoriatively, rope) the David and Nelson Rockefeller into the JFK assassination story. Honestly, it doesn't help the books credibility with me, but at the same time, perhaps you can't have a genuinely intriguing conspiracy theory without including a Mr. Burns-type character (or two). See this quote for example, which is a textbook example of innuendo and guilt by association: "There was no evidence that reigning corporate figures like David Rockefeller were part of the plot against President Kennedy or had foreknowledge of the crime. But there is ample evidence of the overwhelming hostility to Kennedy in these corporate circles--a surging antagonism that certainly emboldened Dulles and other national security enemies of the president. And if the assassination of President Kennedy was indeed an 'establishment crime,' as the University of Pittsburgh sociology professor Donald Gibson has suggested, there is even more reason to see the official investigation as an establishment cover-up." What??? Why would you say this? Everybody can see the various problems with the official explanation of the JFK assassination: you don't have to take the thing too far, all it does is hinder your credibility.
93) Even de Gaulle thought JFK's assassination was a conspiracy of the CIA/deep state (note also that he had direct experience of this himself, being nearly killed by similar machinations in his own country): "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... They will throw Noah's cloak over these shameful deeds.... They don't want to know. They don't want to find out. They won't allow themselves to find out." Wow.
94) It's also incredible that Alan Dulles somehow managed to maneuver himself into a position of tremendous power on the Warren Commission (!!!), the official committee that produced the whitewashed narrative of the Kennedy assassination.
95) The Secret Service agency comes off as incompetent with their preparatory work before the Dallas motorcade, but somehow also managed to avoid giving up all their internal records about the assassination, despite Bobby Kennedy thinking that they were involved in the plot against JFK. The Secret Service even managed to turn events into an appeal for a bigger, more beefed-up budget. [This is of course standard Bureaucracy 101: if you fuck up, you therefore need more funding in order to do a better job next time.]
96) Note the diverse group of citizens and citizen detectives who worked through the Warren Commission report on Kennedy's assassination, who uncovered plenty of information in contradiction to the official narrative. This is quite reminiscent of the dissident medical/scientific community that's working through the Pfizer/FDA FOIA documents (as well as other epidemiological and demographic evidence), doing strikingly rigorous work and uncovering many challenges to the official COVID and mRNA therapeutics narratives. David Talbot writes of the diverse Warren Commission critics: "Their zeal for the truth would make them the target of unrelenting media mockery, but they were doing the work that the American press had shamefully failed to do--and in many cases, they went about their unsung labor with great skill and discipline." Oh, how history rhymes!
97) The conversation between David Lifton and Alan Dulles as he spoke at UCLA is an excellent example of how to smear opposition, sidetrack questions, use appeals to authority and control a debate. And yet this undergraduate kid really rattled Dulles with his questions.
98) "I can't look and I won't look." Arthur Schlesinger refusing to look at photo evidence of the fraudulence of the Warren Report. A metaphor for the attitude of Kennedy's staff after his assassination. "It was best not to linger on the horrors of Dulles."
99) Bobby Kennedy stays almost totally silent about his brother's assassination, says he has not and will not read the Warren Report, and then in 1968 announces his candidacy for President, which instantly panics LBJ into abandoning his re-election bid.
100) Bobby Kennedy was reckless in terms of his wading into crowds, not using sufficient security. Also he copied down and carried with him a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson "Always do what you are afraid to do."
101) Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby Kennedy's assassin was likely yet another patsy, another wind-up toy, and per the author likely not the only person firing at RFK when he was shot. The author points out that Sirhan Sirhan was in a hypnotic or narcotic state when taken into custody--as if he was right out of an MKULTRA experiment with mind control. (!) Fucking bakes your noodle to think about these things.
102) Ted Kennedy exchanges courteous letters with Alan Dulles after RFK's assassination, indicating that "it was clear that there would be no trouble from the youngest Kennedy brother."
To Read (this book unleashes a tremendous reading list for the curious reader):
Eric Ambler: A Coffin for Dimitrios
**Gustave Mark Gilbert: Nuremberg Diary
C.G. Jung: Speaking: Interviews and Encounters
Mary Bancroft: Autobiography of a Spy
Laura Lewis: Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field (see also Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s review of this book in The New York Review of Books, February 11th, 1965)
Noel and Hermann Field: Trapped in the Cold War
Erica Wallach: Light at Midnight
Roger Morris: Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician
Richard Nixon: Six Crises
John Dean: Blind Ambition (Dean was Nixon's White House counsel, ultimately becoming a key witness in the investigations that ended the Nixon presidency)
**Whittaker Chambers: Witness
***C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite
**Richard Helms: A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency
Evan Thomas: The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA
Ervand Abrahamian: The Coup: 1953, The CIA, And the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations
Novels of John Buchan (The 39 Steps, Greenmantle, etc.)
C. Wright Mills: The Causes of World War III
Nikita Khrushchev: Khrushchev Remembers
Robert F. Kennedy: Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Sheldon M. Stern: The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality
Rich Cohen: The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King
Piero Gleijeses: Shattered Hope: The Guatemala Revolution and the United States, 1944-54
James Critchfield: Partners at the Creation
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Mario Vargas Llosa: La Fiesta del Chivo (the feast of the goat; a novel about the Dominican Republic in the final days of trujillo's dictatorship)
***Joseph Trento: The Secret History of the CIA
Adam Hochschild: King Leopold's Ghost
Ludo de Witte: The Assassination of Lumumba
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: The Age of Jackson
David C. Martin: Wilderness of Mirrors
Graham Greene: The Quiet American