“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”: David Talbot exposes America’s “deep state”
From World War II though JFK, "The Devil's Chessboard" explores how Allen Dulles used the CIA as a tool of elites
TOPICS: HOT BOOKS, DAVID TALBOT, JFK, ASSASINATION, COLD WAR, ALLEN DULLES, CIA, DEEP STATE, MKULTRA, THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD, WORLD WAR II, HOLOCAUST, CONSPIRACY, BAY OF PIGS, AOL_ON
John F. Kennedy, Allen Dulles(Credit: AP)
This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction – it’s history. David Talbot’s previous book, the bestseller “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” explored Robert F. Kennedy’s search for the truth following his brother’s murder. His new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” zooms out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.
This isn’t merely a whodunit story, though. Talbot’s ultimate goal is exploring how the rise of the “deep state” has impacted the trajectory of America, and given our nation’s vast influence, the rest of the planet. “To thoroughly and honestly analyze [former CIA director] Allen Dulles’s legacy is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy,” Talbot told Salon. “To really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems.”
Just as America’s current national security apparatus has used terrorism as a justification for spying on American citizens, torture, and the annihilation of innocent civilians as collateral damage, Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how spymaster Allen Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. For readers unfamiliar with Dulles’ history, the first few chapters are like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water. Talbot’s assertion that Dulles is a psychopath is hard to dismiss after the intelligence agent is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Allen Dulles and his fellow Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy.
Jumping from geopolitical strategy to the psychological realm, Talbot details how it was not only enemies who had reason to fear Dulles, but his own friends and family, as well. The book veers into a dark, terrifying investigation of the MKUltra Project, a hideous “mind control program” developed by the CIA during Dulles’ reign as director, that dosed unsuspecting people with LSD, pushed the limits of sleep deprivation and engaged in other deeply unethical experiments. The program has been exposed, bit by bit, over decades, thanks to lawsuits and previous investigative reporting, but Talbot sheds light on how Dulles subjected his own son and attempted to “enroll” his wife in these hideous “therapies.”
By the time “The Devil’s Chessboard” eventually climaxes with the events that unfolded in Dallas in 1963, Talbot’s argument that Dulles had both the power and temperament to execute such a plot is more than believable. “Dulles’ favorite word about someone was whether they were useful or not,” Talbot said. “And that’s the way he thought of everyone – to what extent could he use them.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. [Full disclosure: David Talbot is the founder and former CEO of Salon.]
You begin the book by detailing the Dulles brothers’ sympathy, collaboration and eventual rescue of many high-ranking Nazis during and after World War II. Once you see how comfortable and even eager they were to align themselves with people who epitomize the worst evils of the 20th century, it becomes easier to accept some of the most shocking accusations that come later in the book. Why were the brothers so willing to offer support, even to the point of committing treason, for the Nazis?
I think the story of the Dulles brothers is the story of the amorality of American power, and by extension, all power. On some level, Allan Dulles was a psychopath. He didn’t feel the feelings of other people, and certainly wasn’t able to put himself in shoes of the Jewish people, who were on the brink of the Holocaust in Europe, and even during the Holocaust. He was a man who felt history and politics should be controlled by the elite few. He and his brother were raised in this milieu. Their family was full of statesmen and people who had been at the helm of the country for generations.
They felt that the greater goal of America during the war was reestablishing Germany as a bulwark against growing Soviet power. They felt all along that the Soviet Union represented the greater threat. They were, in fact, very socially comfortable with many members of the Nazi elite, including bankers, security and intelligence people. To them, the whole question about war crimes and the horrors the Nazis had committed during the war were secondary to the more important geo-political questions [such as] who will rebuild Germany after the war and how to make sure the Soviet Union does not overrun Europe.
The thing that I found startling when I was researching the book was the extent to which Dulles, as the top U.S. spy in continental Europe throughout most of the war, was again and again given inside reports on the Holocaust… of what happening inside this inferno and the massive roundup of Jews, and what was happening to them once they were rounded up. He was given these reports at great risk of these people who snuck into Switzerland – with documents and eyewitness accounts – and again and again he failed to relay these inside reports to Washington as it was developing. So, imagine the kind of compartmentalization – there is some kind of psychopathology to it – where it doesn’t even enter into your equation all this massive suffering of the Jewish people.
Dulles was an incredibly cold and remote figure, even with his family. For him, it was all about the game of power. That’s why I called the book: “The Devil’s Chessboard.” He and his brother were obsessive chess players, and they treated people as if they were pawns in their game, and not as human beings.
So it’s clear that even during the height of World War II, while the U.S. and Russia were fighting as allies against the Axis Powers, the Dulles brothers saw Russia as the real enemy. One of the most notorious manifestations of this agenda that you discuss in the book is how an attempt to rescue and negotiate with Nazis – against Roosevelt’s wishes – during Operation Sunrise helped trigger the Cold War by proving to Russia that the U.S. couldn’t be trusted. Was the Cold War inevitable?
Look, Joseph Stalin was no choirboy. He was a monster. And he was gripped with his own dark paranoia as well. Certainly what he did to his people was barbaric – as barbaric as what Hitler did to his people. So, I am not defending Stalin at all. But the fact is: FDR had worked out a very interesting partnership with him, and without that partnership, Hitler couldn’t have been defeated.
The Soviet Union and Soviet people took the brunt of Hitler’s violence and turned it back against him. Really, the Soviet Union was primarily responsible – although American history books don’t reflect this – for the defeat of Nazi forces. FDR knew that he had to keep that coalition together. There were a number of people in the Roosevelt administration – including Roosevelt himself – who felt that, for the good of world peace, that partnership with Russia had to be continued after the war.
So, I feel that if FDR had lived, there is a good chance that the Cold War could’ve been avoided because of the unique relationship of trust between Stalin and Roosevelt. Even while Roosevelt was alive and was sick in the final weeks of war, he was still struggling to maintain that delicate partnership. But, at the same time, you have Dulles in Switzerland, doing everything he can to undermine that partnership by going behind FDR’s back, in violation of FDR’s policy of unconditional surrender. He had a policy that no one was supposed to negotiate deals with the Nazi leaders, that the Nazis were to be fully crushed.
In defiance of that, Allen Dulles throughout most of his time in Switzerland, was meeting with various high-level Nazi representatives, and trying to cut a separate deal with them. [Dulles’s deals] would’ve left much of the Nazi regime highly intact. And in fact, he does cut this deal in Sunrise with Karl Wolff, who is head of Nazi security in Italy and a vile figure (who by all measures should’ve been tried in Nuremberg with the original defendants, and probably would’ve been convicted and hung). Wolff was the right-hand man to [SS Chief] Himmler and the liaison between Hitler and Himmler. This is a guy who had lots of blood on his hands.
But, Dulles protected him and made this deal with him that really didn’t result in anything significant from the strategic point of view. It might’ve ended the war in Italy a few days earlier, but it didn’t save many lives – except the lives of war criminals whom Dulles was dealing with. And, as you say, the even worse effect of this was to instill the idea in Stalin’s mind that the United States was stabbing him in the back by cutting this separate deal in Italy. Everything that President Roosevelt had done to try and maintain this partnership with Stalin throughout the war was effectively dismantled by Dulles in a matter of weeks through the Operation Sunrise dealings.
What do you think Dulles ultimately saw the as the benefits of OperationSunrise? Was heightening this confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, and antagonizing Stalin his goal?
Operation Sunrise was prompted by several things or had several motivations. One: he was trying to stop the Red Army, who were advancing across Europe. So he was trying to cut a peace deal as quickly as possible with the Nazi forces that would prevent the Soviet army from entering Italy (there was a strong communist party in Italy too – a strong Left).
For him, it was “the clash of civilizations” [similar to how] many conservatives feel today about Islam. Communism and the Soviet Union represented, to people like the Dulles brothers – who were these iconic mouthpieces or lawyers or diplomats for Western capitalism – the ultimate enemy. So, Russia had to be stopped and crushed at all costs. They saw the Cold War as inevitable. Just as many of the Nazis they were dealing with saw the Cold War as part two of their own epic crusade against Bolshevism. In that respect, the Nazi war criminals and the Dulles brothers really did have a common enemy and a common goal.
In some ways, because of people like the Dulles brothers, and other like-minded people in the U.S. government and military, we didn’t defeat the Third Reich so much as repurpose them for the Cold War. Many of the people in [Chancellor Konrad] Adenauer’s government in West Germany after the war included a number of high-ranking Nazis.
In the CIA’s employment of former Nazis, American agents worked very closely with these people who part of a regime that was characterized by fascism, violence against its own people, domestic surveillance and other similarly undemocratic attributes. How much of an influence did Nazis have on the nascent CIA and, in a greater sense, the American government?
I think the Nazis had a very pernicious influence on Washington’s thinking during the Cold War. [German intelligence chief] Reinhard Gehlen, for instance, was feeding Dulles and the CIA all sorts of false information about military strength of the Soviet Union, and their aggressive intentions. The Soviet Union, of course, had suffered epically during World War II and was in no mood to plunge into World War III.
But in the mind of people like Gehlen, these fascists who had been at war with the Soviet Union for years, they thought the Soviet Union was about to launch World War III. They injected a paranoid spore into Washington’s mind, and they fed people like CIA officials with lots of bogus intelligence. So, in some ways, our paranoia about the Soviet Union… you see that through the figure of the ex-Nazi scientist “Dr. Strangelove” in the Kubrick film, you that sort of mentality. That was all too true…the feeling that in some ways World War III or this nuclear Holocaust that many people thought was coming was the final stage of this Wagnerian, fascist, apocalyptic view of history.
There are other characters in “Dr. Strangelove” inspired by real people too. General Ripper was influenced by [U.S. Air Force general] Curtis LeMay, who you talk about in the book as wanting to use nuclear weapons or atomic bombs as a solution to every foreign policy.
That’s right. In fact, I was talking with Dan Ellsberg about the film, and he said that he and other defense analysts, who were working at the Pentagon at the time, called it a documentary, not a film, because it was so accurate and true to life. So, the “mind meld” between former Nazis like Gehlen and Dulles was incredibly poisonous and had tragic consequences throughout the Cold War.
Although your book is historical nonfiction, it reads like a spy thriller. So even though we’re talking about events that happened decades ago, I don’t want to spoil readers by giving away your whole case for why Allen Dulles was ultimately the mastermind behind JFK’s murder and the subsequent coverup. So I’ll just ask you to explain however much of the case you’re comfortable with.
I tried, in a very thoroughly documented way, to show how not only Dulles, but the men who were in his network of powerful Wall Street bankers and lawyers and powerful figures in Washington in the national security world developed a feeling that they were the true center of power in America, and not whoever happened to be occupying the White House.
–which wasn’t necessarily untrue.
Right, I mean, that was the beginning of what many scholars now call the deep state. [The deep state] is essentially an alternative network of power that runs the country no matter who is in the White House. I think the book is in some ways a narrative that brings that idea to life. It wasn’t just Kennedy; As I said, it was starting with Roosevelt, then Truman, then Eisenhower — theses presidents that Dulles and the people around Dulles were serving, they were also subverting. They were basically following their own line, the line they had worked out privately amongst themselves in groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, and other elite organizations, or just over dinners or at the private clubs they belonged to (The Metropolitan Club or the Navy Club or the Alibi Club).
So, by the time that this young Jack Kennedy comes along in the final third of [my] book, you start to see that Dulles doesn’t have much respect for the president. He particularly didn’t have much respect for a young, untested president like John F. Kennedy. He had first met Kennedy when he was a very young and physically frail senator. He had just been operated on for back surgery and could barely stand up. He met him at the Kennedy family home back in Palm beach. He thought of himself as Kennedy’s mentor and tutor, and he thought JFK would be a very pliable, young president and open to direction and advice from men like Dulles.
But they had this very acrimonious split over CIA-led invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, where Kennedy felt he had been lied to and sandbagged, and forced into supporting this invasion. I think that the plan all along was the CIA had wanted the invasion to fail, but Dulles hoped and was completely convinced that Kennedy would be forced to send in the full might of the U.S. military to save the invasion and to crush Castro. When Kennedy didn’t do that and refused to escalate it into an international crisis, it provoked this split within the Kennedy government that led to Dulles being forced out of power, much to his shock. He had never been treated that way by a president).
But, he doesn’t just go back home to [retire] after that. As my book shows, he goes back to Georgetown and begins to set up an anti-Kennedy government in exile. He operates as if he’s still running the CIA. And when I read that when I was doing my research… that set off all sorts of lights for me because here you have a guy who is not going gently into the good night of retirement. He feels in some ways Kennedy is an aberrant president and doesn’t deserve to be in power, and that he isn’t really protecting the interest of the state as vigilantly as he should. So, he begins to meet with all his former top aides at his home. These are not just top officials within the CIA, but field agents. He is dining with them in the clubs in Washington. And they are basically creating their own policy.
Again, I show how they acted to subvert Kennedy’s policies, which Kennedy… as his administration went on was trying to find a way out of the Cold War, out of this nuclear knot that had been tied. He and his counterpart Nikita Kruschev were trying to find a way to loosen this knot, but the national security hardliners, who were in control of the CIA, even after Dulles was fired, thought that was weak, naïve, and a dangerous policy. They tried to resist it in every way they could.
I think these tensions between the Kennedy White House and these hardliners grew and grew over the next few years, and exploded in Dallas. I do indicate that Dulles was centrally involved in the assassination planning and that the assassination team that he had created to kill foreign leaders like Fidel Castro and others… that several members of these teams were actually spotted in Dallas in the weeks leading up to the assassination. Allan Dulles himself, who had been retired for two years, during the weekend of Kennedy’s assassination, goes to a remote CIA facility, which is an alternative command post in northern Virginian called “The Farm,” where he monitors activity in Dallas.
Of course, he also becomes a prominent figure on the Warren Commission [the official commission to investigate JFK’s assassination]. He lobbied to have himself appointed by President Johnson on the Warren Commission. He was so active in directing that so-called investigation that some close observers thought it should’ve been called the Dulles Commission.
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