The Devil's Chessboard

AUDIO: Robert Scheer and David Talbot Explore the Origins of America’s Secret Government 

Posted on Nov 13, 2015

Harper

In the second episode of “Scheer Intelligence”—Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer’s new KCRW podcast—Salon.com founding Editor David Talbot tells how former CIA chief Allen Dulles defied Franklin Roosevelt to conscript former Nazi leaders in preparation for war with the Soviet Union—one of many deviations from official history that are recounted in Talbot’s new book, “The Devil’s Chessboard.”

Talbot describes how Dulles assisted efforts to overthrow foreign governments in defiance of American authority, and alludes to new information he says supports the idea that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in a conspiracy that may have involved Dulles. 
Talbot says several mainstream media publications have refused to review his book.
Like Talbot’s book, the conversation dwells on the particulars of obscure and obscured U.S. history. But its relevance to our understanding of how the U.S. government operates in the present is clear. Below is one of the interview’s choice moments.

Scheer: You describe Allen Dulles’, basically his plot to keep the Soviets out [of] Italy and to find good Germans and good Italians, even if they were with Mussolini, to then help us. And he expects, right or wrong, that there’s going to be a war with the Soviet Union.
Talbot: Absolutely. Well, that was his secret plan, called “Operation Sunrise,” in direct defiance, by the way, of Roosevelt policy, again this policy of unconditional surrender. He’s busy trying to cut a separate deal in violation of this policy with the Nazis, primarily in Italy at the end of the war. And he succeeds. And they do surrender, just in a matter of a few days before the general surrender in Italy. As I say, [it] had no real strategic value. It didn’t really save any lives, except the lives of the Nazis whose necks were saved by dealing with Dulles. But this begins this policy of Dulles’ incorporating elements of the Third Reich into post-war Germany. And as I say in the book, in some ways the Third Reich was not defeated or crushed, the [way] FDR wanted, so much as repurposed for the Cold War. There were key people in Nazi leadership who were rehabilitated by Dulles and others.

Listen to Talbot speak at the Peace Center in Los Angeles at 7 p.m. on Tuesday.
Listen to the conversation on iTunes here.

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/audio_robert_scheer_and_david_talbot_and_uncover_the_secret_20151113