The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Reviews

• 
  Will Byrnes

  We often forget how fragile a creation democracy is—a delicate eggshell in the rough-and-tumble of history. Even in the cradle of democracy, ancient Athens, rule by the people could barely survive for a couple of centuries. And throughout its brief history, Athenian democracy was besieged from within by the forces of oligarchy and tyranny. There were secret clubs of aristocrats who hired squads of assassins to kill popular leaders. Terror reigned during these convulsions and civil society was too intimidated to bring the assassins to justice. Democracy, Thucydides tells us, was “cowed in mind."
  
  Our country’s cheerleaders are wedded to the notion of American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us. There is an implacable brutality to power that is familiar throughout the world and throughout history. And no matter where power rules, there is the same determination by those in high places to keep their activities hidden.

  Who killed JFK?
  
  In The Map That Changed the World, Simon Winchester wrote about William Smith, an 18th century canal digger who discovered that beneath the surface of the earth there were hidden layers of fossils, earth and stone that rose and fell connecting one to another and forming an understructure that told a tale of the earth’s history. He spent more than two decades gathering the information to prove his theory and eventually created the map of the book’s title. David Talbot entered into a considerable effort of subterranean digging himself, and has drawn a map of unseen layers that cross the planet and affect everything, a map that shows some of the hidden structures that lie beneath the world we think we know, the history we think we have experienced. The fossils in this case are pieces of evidence showing a history of secrets. When you look at the mass of dark deeds perpetrated by the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, there is one man, more than any other, who appears, Zelig-like, over and over again, Allan Dulles, the evidence of his deeds buried in the fossil accretions of our public and foreign policy past. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, would become a Secretary of State and wield considerable influence on his own. The pair formed a two-headed monster of foreign intrigue while in office at the same time. But the focus here is primarily on Allen Dulles
  
  
  David Talbot - from Talbot's FB pages
  
  The Devil’s Chessboard reads like a riveting spy novel, peeling back layer after layer as it races to its climax. Dulles was a partner in an international law firm. Foster was chairman. Allen Dulles spent considerable swaths of time in government service, as a diplomat and spy. As such he made contacts all across Europe that would come in handy later.

  Foster Dulles became so deeply enmeshed in the lucrative revitalization of Germany that he found it difficult to separate his firm’s interests from that of the rising economic and military power—even after Hitler consolidated control of the country in the 1930s. Foster continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben as they were integrated into the Nazis’ growing war machine, helping the industrial giants secure access to key war materials.

  Nazi, schmazi. Foster kept the Berlin offices of the company, Sullivan and Cromwell, open until, in 1935, his partners forced him to shut it down, fearful of horrendous PR problems.
  
  Consider some nuggets dug from the accretions of Allen Dulles’s history:
  ---WW II – he tries to arrange a separate peace with Nazi Germany despite specific orders from FDR to do no such thing, thus undermining the alliance between the US and Soviet Union, and contributing to suspicion between the Allies.
  ---Post WW II - he is instrumental in helping known Nazis and Nazi supporters hold on to their ill-gotten treasures and cash, and helps many either evade punishment or get reduced sentences and improved accommodations from the Nuremberg Courts
  ---He manages a ratline, an underground railroad through which Nazis escape punishment and find comfortable resettlement in other parts of the world
  ---Dulles uses some of these upstanding citizens to create an intelligence network
  ---He creates an armed force in France, ostensibly to be used against an imagined Communist takeover, but ready to act in support of an anti-deGaulle coup fomented by generals angry at the government’s decision to step back from the Algerian conflict
  ---Dulles is instrumental in staging the anti-Mossadegh coup in Iran, installing a reluctant Shah, who had to be dragged back into the country to take over
  ---He goes ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion, knowing it will fail, but expecting that the failure would force JFK to commit the USA military to the plot
  
  The list goes on, and on. Talbot proceeds like a prosecutor, laying out the details that set up the final argument. The litany of specifics, of events, of secret, illegal actions, is stunning.
  
  As you might expect, Allan Dulles was a person of questionable human quality, even to his family. His wife, in her diary wrote:

  “My husband doesn’t converse with me, not that he doesn’t talk to me about his business, but that he doesn’t talk about anything…It took me a long time to realize that when he talks it is only for the purpose of obtaining something…He talks easily with men who can give him some information, and puts himself out with women whom he doesn’t know to tell all sorts of interesting things. He either has to be making someone admire him, or to be receiving some information worth his while; otherwise he gives one the impression that he doesn’t talk at all because the person isn’t worth talking to.”

  He subjected his war-damaged son to bizarre medical treatment in a secret mind-control program he had established. He married his daughter off like a political bargaining chip.
  
  
  Allen W. Dulles - from Oathkeepers.org – Funny, he doesn’t look like a psycho-killer
  
  But it is in his foreign intrigues, and in illumination of his ties to the rich and powerful, that the way is paved for the book’s payoff. It is David Talbot’s contention that Allan Dulles, acting in league with members of America’s business and military elite, orchestrated the murder of JFK. Kennedy was seen as particularly soft on foreign nations who dared to nationalize property owned by Dulles’s peeps. There were many in the military who were eager to get the next war on, the nuclear one, and Kennedy would not play. (Doctor Strangelove had nothing on these guys.) JFK had decided, because LBJ had failed to deliver the Southern votes he had promised, that he would find a replacement VP for his second term, so Johnson, beholden to Texas oilmen, and looking at the potential termination of his political life, was on board. JFK had also sacked Dulles for his insubordination. Not only was the Dallas murder a political hit, there had been an earlier attempt, in Chicago, in November 1963, that did not come off. The Warren Commission was set up not to investigate the killing but to cover it up. Bobby Kennedy knew this, but also knew that unless he could be elected to the Oval Office, the truth would remain cloaked. It is likely his determination to find the truth that got him killed too. The details Talbot offers to back his claim are compelling. I expect that the usual suspects will raise a hue and cry of that old favorite pejorative, “conspiracy theory.” But as we all do, or should know, sometimes there really is a conspiracy. I’m with Talbot on this one.
  
  The details of the sundry plots and executive actions, the coups, planned, executed, or foiled, the breadth of Talbot’s gaze make for gripping reading. And I didn’t even go into the CIA’s work in the mind-control biz, an early example of extraordinary rendition, or any of the juicier bits about our old friend Tricky Dick Nixon, or Castro’s stunning political success story in New York City. This is a compelling must-read, filled with colorful characters, intrigue, and a look at the creation and persistence of a mechanism by which an undercover foreign policy is implemented. You will wonder if, today, the White House has any more control over the intelligence apparatus than it did back then. It will change forever how you view history.

  During a 1965 tour of Latin America, Robert Kennedy—by then a senator from New York—found himself in a heated discussion about Rockefeller influence in Latin America, during an evening at the home of a Peruvian artist that had been arranged by [Richard] Goodwin [an RFK aide]. When Bobby brashly suggested to the gathering that Peru should “Assert [its] nationhood” and nationalize its oil industry, the group was stunned. “Why, David Rockefeller has just been down there,” one guest said. “And he told us there wouldn’t be any aid if anyone acted against International Petroleum [a local Standard Oil subsidiary].”
  “Oh, come on. David Rockefeller isn’t the government,” Bobby shot back, still playing the role of Kennedy family tough guy. “We Kennedys eat Rockefellers for breakfast.”
  The Kennedys were indeed more successful at the rough-and-tumble of politics than the Rockefellers. But, as JFK had understood, that was not the full story when it came to evaluating a family’s power. He fully appreciated that the Rockefellers held a unique place in the pantheon of American power, one rooted not so much within the democratic system as within what scholars would later refer to as “the deep state”—that subterranean network of financial, intelligence, and military interests that guided national policy no matter who occupied the White House. The Kennedys had risen from saloon-keepers and ward heelers to the top of American politics. But they were still overshadowed by the imperial power of the Rockefellers.

  There is no law, only power. Bobby Kennedy should have known that. We all need to know that. Rule by sociopaths is definitely not the way to go, whether the morally-challenged sit on corporate boards, manage branches of government or direct elements of our military. With The Devil’s Chessboard, David Talbot has written an eye-opening and devastating look at modern American history. Your move.
  
  
  Review Posted – October 16, 2015
  
  Book Published – October 13, 2015 (hc) - September 6, 2016 (tp)
  
  =============================EXTRA STUFF
  
  Links to the author’s
  Twitter and
  FB pages
  
  An interesting site on keeping up with
  developments re the JFK hit
  
  Talbot interview in
  Mother Jones
  
  Lest anyone think the CIA is not in the business of killing, here is the CIA manual on assassination 101 –
  A Study of Assassination. There will be a quiz.
  
  Amy Goodman interviews Dulles on
  Democracy Now - Thanks to Natylie for the heads up on this one
  
  Talbot interview with
  Tavis Smiley - November 16, 2015
• 
  Margitte

  This book reminds me of an incident, many years ago, in our town's courthouse. A young man stood accused of refusing to pay alimony to an unwed young mother's baby. The young man alleged that he was not the baby's father. That was long before DNA-testing came into play. To prove his point, he secretly asked all his friends to testify that they also slept with the girl. The honorable magistrate proved his worth by ordering them all to pay alimony until the child reached the age of 21, or finished university, which they were ordered to pay for as well!
  
  This book is yet another version of what happened to JFK and who really was behind it. So many authors tried to accuse people of murdering a president of the USA, that it probably would take years to test the evidence in court, because so many culprits are accused by different people! Not that anyone has ever been allowed to open this can of worms. They either got killed, or accused of conspiracy theories, and with that safety net pulled tightly around any sinister events, the killers got away, laughing all the way to the bank, since they were handsomely rewarded for their successes.
  
  The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government is really an explosive book centering around the death of John F. Kennedy. What makes this book outstanding, is the comprehensive, and yes, impressive research the author did into the life of probably the most dangerous as well as powerful man who ever walked the American soil. Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. He turned the organization into the world's most vicious killing machine.

  David Talbot: "But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world."

  From the blurb:

  Dulles's decade as the director of the CIA was a dark period in American politics. The spymaster saw himself as above the nation's laws and elected leaders, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi war criminals and Mafiosi in the process. Talbot charges that Dulles utilized the same ruthless tactics he employed abroad—targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims—to further his goals at home, and offers shocking new evidence regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
  
  An exposé of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil’s Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state—and the battle for America���s soul.

  Written in this time and age, fifty two years after the assassination of JFK on November 22nd, 1963, the author was able to compile this story from thousands of documents, interviews, and diaries of the people populating the politics of the time, both in America and elsewhere.
  
  What should bother the reader about this mountain of evidence, is why nobody in the seat of democracy has the guts to test these allegations in a court of law. Why was power-hungry psychopaths allowed to get away with it, and still do? Is it possible that democracy is just a lip-service to history?
  
  Why has it become necessary for citizens to electronically hack their own governments to expose the real history of the world? And why are they crucified for doing so? Isn't it a sign of a system crumbling under its own deviousness? That is the real tragedy, in my humble opinion.
  
  This book is one of the most powerful attacks on the dangers behind democracy and why the ignorance of a country's citizens allow a system to be raped by ruthlessness. Exposing the people behind the atrocities of history will never be done by the perpetrators. It has become the function of individuals who have the guts to take on the system that was suppose to protect the people but instead turned against them. David Talbot is one of those people who tries to make a difference, and this book is a testimony to democracy at work - the right way.
  
  Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty. ~ Plato
  
  The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy. ~ Woodrow Wilson
  
  Writing and reading is the most powerful weapon in any liberated society. Without it there can never be democracy. Everyone valuing freedom should be responsible and read this book. It concerns us all.
  
  We are all guilty of parenthood for this baby called Democracy. As long as we allow mismanagement to prosper, we must be willing to foot the bill for the results!
  
  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!
  
• 
  Book Clubbed

  Talbot knows Allen Dulles better than I know my own mother, and I’m not sure if that is an indictment of myself or Talbot. In the first few chapters, I wanted Talbot to speed up. I don’t particularly care about the domestic life of Allen Dulles, and don’t find his garden-variety sociopathy all that intriguing or surprising. He’s a powerful man, ever conniving in the background to accumulate more power, with no moral spine. You can picture the type.
  
  However, the depths of his schemes are fascinating. It’s not a great endorsement of America that the men tapped to lead the CIA started out by negotiating with Nazis and subsequently trying to save them from war crime trials. Dulles is a magnet for powerful men and political upheaval, intentionally creating power vacuums so he can help shape what will replace the vacuum.
  
  With an in-depth view of the CIA, it’s worse than you might imagine, even for the most steeled liberals who are aware of our national pastime—invading smaller countries, toppling left-leaning, democratically elected leaders, and installing puppet dictators. Portraits of men like Dulles prove that there is, in fact, a deep state, not just the one Donald Trump claimed to have taken on. That is, powerful, unelected men shape US policy, both foreign and domestic, no matter how horrific and damaging their previous decisions proved to be.
  
  You should read this if you can stomach 720 pages of pure CIA evil, because it is an instructive guide on who really steers the war machine of the United States.
  
  Listen to full episodes at bookclubbed.buzzsprout.com
• 
  Stefania Dzhanamova

  I've been deeply interested in books about Allen Dulles for some time, although I'm definitely not fascinated by Allen Dulles himself because he is about as attractive a personality as Adolf Hitler. When UCLA graduate student in engineering and physics David Lifton came to a student chat session to challenge Dulles' claim that a lone assassin had shot President John F. Kennedy, he immediately felt he was in the presence of “evil”. "It was the way he [Dulles] looked, his eyes," recalled he many years later. "He just emoted guile, and it was very, very scary." While I've never met the notorious CIA director myself, I understand very well what Lifton meant. Even reading about Dulles makes me feel as if I'm tracing the life of the Devil himself. Maybe exactly this draws me to the man's dark biography, maybe it is the satisfaction that comes with the process of unravelling the complex tangle of lies he left after himself to find the truth trampled under them. In any case, I do find the story of his life engrossing, especially when it is as masterfully told as in THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD.
  
  I finished reading David Talbot's outstanding work precisely a month ago, but it has been on my mind for three days already, and yesterday I came to an interesting realization: the book reminds me of my all-time favorite novel, The Master and Margarita. As you have surely noticed if you've read Bulgakov's immortal work, The Master and Margarita lacks any positive characters whatsoever. So does THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD. Instead, we are offered a vast array of Nazi criminals turned CIA-supervised scientists or agents, Venezuelan dictators, American mob bosses and killers, and spymasters with wrong ideals, all connected to Allen Dulles and his entourage. Much too lately repentant CIA agent James Jesus Angleton remembered the high eminences of the CIA of those days, "the grand masters": "If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell."
  Also, in both books the Devil is the central character – called Woland in the novel and Dulles in the historical work. Yes, curiously, Allie did bear a lot of similarities to Messir Woland. First of all, as Talbot demonstrates, Allen Dulles, just like Woland, could be eerily ubiquitous. Whether it was about meeting with the agents of SS leader (monster) Heinrich Himmler or with his other good Nazi friends, or lobbying Justice Jackson in the backrooms of Nuremberg to secure the acquittal (!!!) of none other than Luftwaffe Chief Herman Göring, Hitler's second in command, or crushing the first democratic government Iran had ever had (read
  The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War), Allen Dulles was always there, at the very core of the action.
  On top of that, just like his fictional counterpart, he had the ability to effectively disguise his arrival from everyone but the people who needed to know about it. For instance: "On the afternoon of August 18, 1953, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the thirty-three-year-old shah of Iran, and his glamorous twenty-one-year-old wife, Queen Soraya, swept into the gilded lobby of the Hotel Excelsior on Rome’s fashionable Via Veneto" after having escaped from Iran because Iranians were done with their despotic rule and Mohammad Mossadegh had come to power. While the shah's dazzling arrival was noticed, no one wondered, surprisingly, why at the very same moment, Allen Dulles and his wife, Clover, also checked into Hotel Excelsior. On that day, no one paid attention; later, this arrival began to be considered as a curious coincidence, but was it really? No. By the following morning, the Teheran mobs, led and financed by the CIA, were running riot through the streets of the city – the final act in a covert drama aimed at overthrowing the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mossadegh and restoring the Shah’s autocratic rule, which was needed in order to save the British oil monopoly in Iran and protect the interests of Sullivan & Cromwell, the powerful law firm Allen and his older brother, John Foster, worked for. Therefore, Dulles' arrival was conveniently timed: he could immediately reach the cowardly shah, who was an old business partner, and convince him that it was now safe to return to the Peacock Throne; and that's exactly what he did. Still no one, except the Shah, who indeed returned to Iran and ruled with increasing cruelty for many years, paid attention to him.
  Dulles' victims, on the other hand, rarely were aware who they had had the misfortune to meet – just like Woland, Allie always masterfully managed to efface any trace of himself and any proof that he was behind their undoings. And I don't mean the arch-victim, President John F. Kennedy, only. There were others before him who had suffered because of the CIA chief. On May 1949, for example, Czech authorities arrested Quaker relief worker Noel Field, who was intrigued by the Soviet revolution, although not a Communist himself, and had been lured to Prague with the promise of a university teaching position. Unbeknownst to him, U.S intelligence had taken advantage of him: it purposefully spread the word to Moscow that Field was actually coming to Prague on a secret mission, sent by his old spymaster, the infamous Allen Dulles, and that while in Prague, he would be contacting his extensive network from the war years – the brave Communists, nationalists, and antifascists, whom he had helped to survive when he was a refugee aid worker and who were all part of the top secret Dulles-Field spy network. All of this was a base lie, made up by Dulles to plant the seed of suspicion in Stalin's mind and wreak havoc through the fragile Soviet "empire" (he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations, stimulating an epic wave of terror, arrests, and executions in Eastern Europe), but during the harsh interrogations the dumbfounded Field was subjected to, the interrogators kept asking exactly one question: "How do you know Allen Dulles?" Poor Noel could not at all understand what his knowing Allen had to do with anything, yet, indeed, Field's undoing was exactly the fact that, as a boy, he and his family had met the Devil in Switzerland, unaware of who Dulles really was and of the fact that since the very moment Allen saw his naive idealism about changing the world, Field joined his collection of "assets", "patsies" – yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald would later be in this collection too. Such an Ivanushka "Homeless" Ponyrev situation, isn't it? "Homeless" was another clueless person who met the Devil in what at first seemed like unthreatening circumstances only to end in the mental asylum because of this meeting, still unaware who that mysterious stranger actually was. Ivanushka, though, can be considered relatively fortunate compared to Field – Noel, as well as his family, was dispatched to the GULAG.
  
  Just like Messir Woland, Allen Dulles could not perfectly run his high carnival alone, of course: he needed sidekicks, and he got them. "His stubborn insistence on staying in the middle of the postwar action paid off," tells us Talbot. In April 1947, Allen was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intelligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to his most important aide, the CIA, later that year. Under his guidance, the Central Intelligence Agency would be everything but a simple information-gathering service like the one President Harry Truman had envisioned. Instead, it would become for him what Azazello, the killer-demon, was for Woland; it would do his dirty work – the assassinations of leaders abroad and at home, the international sabotage, the rescuing of myriad Nazi scientists (wartime criminals who conducted a brutal human experimentation program) for his mind-control project during which he and Sidney Gottlieb drugged hundreds of people with LSD without their knowledge and killed many others in the name of finding a magical, memory-erasing substance (read
  Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control).
  When Dwight Eisenhower succeed Truman in the White House, Allen also got his diplomatic Koroviev – Secretary of State John Foster Dulles – who would handle the President and other trifling governmental matters the CIA chief didn't bother himself with. He was, after all, the cloak-and-dagger genius, the action man. Just like Woland, he preferred to let "Koroviev" handle the "house-managers", "buffet attendants", "investigators" etc. that were trying to infiltrate and investigate his sinister agency, his "apartment no.50."
  And no need to mention that just as the appearance of Woland and his entourage anywhere always led to calamities, the involvement of the CIA in matters both domestic and foreign brought about only anguish.
  
  When it came to private life, Allie was about as caring and loving as a log. He ignored his kids, and was rarely home, travelling all over the world on "business trips" and never informing his long-suffering wife, whom it had taken him exactly three days to court before she had agreed to marry him, where he was going and why. If a family problem arose, the spymaster also immediately vanished into thin air, just as Woland vanished from the Variety Theatre, leaving John Foster, who had become the head of the family after their father's death, to handle everything just as Koroviev handled the black magic show. Clover, a mentally unstable woman, who reminds me of Bulgakov's equally weak and unstable Master, called her domineering husband "the Shark", and developed a sexual interest in his long-lasting mistress, spy Mary Bancroft, "a woman whose morals were conveniently flexible," who befriended Clover and eventually began to serve as a peculiar link between her and Allen, just as Margarita connected the Master to Woland.
  
  Some critics of Bulgakov's great novel argue that Satan in The Master and Margarita represents the absolute truth. This, for me, is incomprehensible and ridiculous. How can the Devil be truthful? A good question in its own right. Just as good as "How could Allen Dulles, a man who should have been tried for treason for his helping Nazi, be the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency?" He could, though, he most definitely could. And on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy, the young man who the Dulles brothers had once mentored, hoping to make another fanatical Cold Warrior to add to their ranks out of him, the leader who chose peace and was marked for death by the military-industrial complex, and especially by the CIA that hated him passionately ever since the Bay of Pigs humiliation, was shot in Dallas, Texas, Allen Dulles surely had his Satan's Ball; he surely celebrated what he then thought was a masterfully executed assassination. And afterwards, all giddy, he lobbied for and got himself a position on the Dulles– oh excuse me, on the Warren Commission. And then he lied, and covered up, and destroyed the facts that exposed his Azazello, who had not handled the conspiracy as well as Dulles initially thought, who had made up too many fake Lee Harvey Oswalds and two much conflicting evidence even for the cunning CIA chief to find a plausible explanation for. No wonder, though, that Woland and Dulles were both often regarded as honest. Satan, with his animated geographical globe and his knowledge of all world's affairs, and Allen, with his "all-seeing eye", the CIA, were apt at feigning truthfulness; both were seemingly eager to share the vast knowledge they possessed, Dulles even ordering "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." to be inscribed in the lobby of CIA headquarters. In reality, however, he did not want anyone to know the truth and be free. He more than showed this during the Warren Farce. (Read
  JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.)
  
  What is most disturbing, notes Talbot and I agree with him, is that those who enter the lobby of CIA headquarters are greeted by "the stone likeness of Allen Welsh Dulles," and the inscription "His Monument is Around Us". This words sound like a curse on all who work in the citadel of national security. Because if the Devil is still around them, if his ways are still used as example for the new agents of the intelligence service, then the CIA is still his pawn, in his chess game, on his chessboard. Then the horrible past will repeat itself.
  
  
  THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD is a mind-blowing book. Every word of it is pure gold. Apart from being a meticulously researched and compellingly written biography of Allen Dulles, it also offers fresh insight into the Bay of Pigs invasion, the beginnings of Allen's spymaster career in Switzerland, his relationship with the different presidents he served, the other CIA "grand masters", and many, many other curious details everyone interested in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency would love to know. Ten stars, not just five.
• 
  Louise

  Whenever it is said that the “CIA” or “the mafia and the CIA” killed JFK, no name is ever associated with it. It is as though some leaderless operators managed to carry off this major crime and cover up all on their own. This biography shows how Allen Dulles had the motive and the means, the attitude (a law unto himself) and the experience (he successfully toppled governments and destroyed critics). You see this as a culmination of everything he had engineered to date.
  
  David Talbot begins by showing how Allen Dulles ran the OSS office in Bern, Switzerland as though it was an extension of his Sullivan and Cromwell firm whose clients included the financial and industrial institutions of Nazi Germany. You read how he had no reservations about protecting former Nazis from the Nuremberg trials and hiring some of the highest level Nazis in the CIA. In contravention of US policy he tried to negotiate a separate peace with a representative of Himmler, a peace that would send the Jews in camps to Africa. He could set up friends and children of friends as unwitting decoys knowing that they would wind up in Soviet gulags. It didn’t bother him to have experimental drugs tested on vulnerable populations or have his own son suffer an experimental brain manipulation.
  
  You see how he built power throughout the Washington and financial establishments. You see how be built a loyal staff and how he socialized to make alliances and create a benign image.
  
  Talbot shows the Bay of Pigs as the defining event when the new President Kennedy became aware of the danger of Dulles and the “shadow government” he had developed with little oversight by President Eisenhower. It is unclear how Dulles was let go from his post since there appeared to be a lot of face saving, but it is clear that he never really left. His staff continued to defer to him and he was able to spend the night in CIA quarters as he did just after the JFK assassination.
  
  This volume is not a “conspiracy” book, it is a biography. The JFK assassination was part of Allen Dulles’s life and has the appropriate amount of space. It does not show that Dulles led the operation, but you see where he was and what he did and how the circumstantial evidence points to him. His lobbying to get on the Warren Commission and then his work on that commission, certainly point to active participation in the cover up. The book concludes with the death of Bobby Kennedy (13 shots when Sirhan’s gun had only an 8 bullet capacity), which may also be part of the Dulles life story, and shows how lax the press and opinion makers continue to be to this day.
  
  A good complement to this volume is
  The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War which has more on his childhood and family history. The Dulles grandfather, Robert Lansing, was Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson who similarly had no problem with helping his corporate clients through his public office. Author Stephen Kinzer ties Lansing to the overthrow of Queen Liliokalani of Hawaii. His grandsons followed his path, in using their public office for client services and in the overthrow of the elected governments in Iran the Congo and Guatemala where business interests were at stake.
  
  This book makes me sad all over again for Kennedy family and the US, but more particularly for the Iranians and the Congolese who today still suffer due to what unelected officials did to their elected leaders decades ago.
  
  This book breaks new ground. I don ‘t see it on the "Best Books" or "Prize" lists for 2015 which says to me that to the media establishment, this subject is still taboo.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Ian Divertie

  It was depressing, I need to think about this before I write a full review. Two thoughts that did come through were that: 1. I need to donate more money to Bernie Sanders presidential campaign today! 2. I'm 60 years old, my parents and grandparents generations created this mess, all staunch Republicans, which among them actively participated in making this disaster and which were just dupes?
  Finally, this does sort of finish off a lifetime of reading books and magazine articles about the JFK assassination.
• 
  Jennifer

  The subtitle of The Devil’s Chessboard says it all. This is a biography of Allen Dulles who served as Eisenhower and Kennedy’s Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). It is also a scathing attack on the CIA and the supposed “secret government’, what others have identified as the “invisible government” or “secret state”. Talbot hopes to convince his readers that Allen Dulles, a master spy disguised as a genial grandfather figure complete with pipe and tweed, was the sole force behind the rise of the United States to world domination after World War II. It seems to me that Talbot has three goals. The first is to place the CIA at the heart of a secret government that is even more powerful than the executive citizens elect and the legislative branch combined, because it is not an agency based on the collection and analysis of intelligence but instead on mounting a series of clandestine operations that may or may not be directed by the president. A bit late to the party when it comes to the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of JFK Assassination, Talbot is ready to offer his own theory. The CIA killed Kennedy at the direction of its former director. This, of course, was because the liberal and peace-seeking Kennedy posed a threat to Dulles and the rest of the secret government [apparently, Douglas Dillon the secretary of the treasury was in on this too]. In other words, although the conspicuously negative assessment of Dulles as a public servant and as a human is more strident than that offered in the past, the conspiracy, independent CIA, secret government is not nor is the idealizing of Kennedy and the dream that the world would be a better place had he lived.
  
  Where does this book succeed? The storytelling is compelling. It is page turner. Conveying a story of this breadth with this number of characters is no easy task and, in fact Talbot, does an excellent job in making his narrative move forward with the right amount of suspense and drama. He adds just enough color to let you get to know the idiocentricities of the characters with well placed adverbs and adjectives. Talbot mines the rich material in the journals of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. which have only recently been made available in their entirety to researchers. There are also interviews with the offspring of some of the major figures. But, these must be taken with a grain of salt. They are important, but perhaps not as primary sources for the period he is discussing. Rarely did men involved in intelligence share the details of their jobs with their families.
  
  The questions Talbot is seeking to answer are important. What power do unelected officials have? What are the controls on that power? Should out intelligence agencies be involved in clandestine operations? How does a president deal with the established and career officials of Washington? But, in the end, because of the way Talbot addressed his subjects and did his research I am less than convinced that the answers to these questions he suggests are the right ones. Dulles had power. He had questionable motives. But, was his desire for power so great that he killed the president? I am not convinced that Dulles was the only one with power here. Kennedy was far more powerful than Talbot allows. He was also much more complicated than Talbot wants us to know.
  
  In fact, one of the aspects of this book I found to be most frustrating was the author's tendency to mimic the dualism of the chessboard in his cast of characters. He says people are complex, but does not allow them to be multi-faceted. You are either black or white, good or evil, with Dulles or not. [Hint, if you are in the CIA you are not on the side of the angels]. Moreover, if you did not stand up to Dulles like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and the faulty Warren Commission report you were, in the authors opinion, "weak". The men and women in this story are inordinately complex with varied and contradictory views and behaviors. There is no sense of that here, nor of the breadth and complexity of the CIA.
  
  
  The problem? Talbot is not writing a history of Allen Dulles and his career; this is a journalistic expose. In his attempt to cast Allen W. Dulles as the devil, Talbot jumps to conclusions, leaves out pertinent details that do not fit into his argument, and does not evaluate between sources. . [David M. Barrett does a good job of highlighting the problems here:
  http://www.washingtondecoded.com]
  
  And, full disclosure, here I am writing a biography of John A. McCone, the man who was actually Director of Central Intelligence while Dulles was supposedly overseeing a covert operation to assassinate President Kennedy, the man who had dared “depose” him. Talbot makes some grievous errors in his treatment of McCone and his leadership of the intelligence community. There is no reference to the reorganization that takes place within the Agency,the competition within the agency between those who were analysts and those who were operators, the way McCone pushes Dulles out from his "consultancy" with the Agency, the ongoing jurisdictional fight McCone had with Harriman and the State Department. The most glaring gap is a failure to discuss McCone's close friendship with Robert Kennedy and the attorney general’s continued involvement in CIA affairs throughout McCone’s tenure.
  
  McCone WAS a power at the CIA. He was a power in Washington. He was a powerful member of the Kennedy Administration. Dulles had to deal with him and the power he had. There is no sense of that here. Also, the depth of difference between their connection of service and intelligence are glossed over and thus the CIA is portrayed as an unchanging monolith. McCone served the president and he expected his officers to do the same. Personally, he did not always agree with Kennedy; as Talbot points out, Schlesinger heard him criticize Kennedy's steel policy at a dinner party. But, at the same time, he worked to convince the steel industry leaders to back dow.n In other words, McCone was complex. He was neither all bad nor all good. But, like so many of the figures in this book, Talbot does not let him be human, to be a force to reckon with, to be both a conservative Republican and a member of the New Frontier. To do so might undercut his characterization of Dulles as evil incarnate.
  
  Like Schlesinger, I am a Kennedy Conspiracy agnostic. This book has not convinced me that the establishment, the intelligence community, Dulles or LBJ was ultimately behind the shots fired in Dalles more than fifty years ago.
• 
  Sebastien

  Very much enjoyed this book. Entertaining, albeit incredibly disturbing (that is if everything claimed in this book is proven to be true!).
  
  I have to offer this statement first: when it comes to CIA history, the deep state, and the history of the Kennedy assassination, in many respects I'm a blank slate. I don't know many of the facts, many of the details. I'm inclined to believe the worst though (those who operate in the shadows often have little checks on their power, no accountability to the public, which is very dangerous and can bring out the worst in human nature). But certain extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence, and even if I'm somewhat inclined to lap up what is being served in this book because it fulfills my bias I still am cognizant there may be deep flaws in the evidence here.
  
  This is one of the first books I've read that gets into CIA history in a nuts and bolts manner, while also delving into the Kennedy assassination (final third of the book). The author, David Talbot, seems to have conducted exhaustive research, many of his claims and arguments are backed by facts (uh, I think?). So while I'm marked by his arguments, I need to emphasize that I'm kind of a blank slate here and liable to be very impressed by the first cogent argument I come across on these subjects, of which Talbot's is for me. He offers some pretty astounding assertions and arguments, many of which I have no idea as to how much water they hold. The evidence and argument he crafts, the narrative of the CIA being behind the Kennedy assassination with Dulles playing a prime role? uh, yeah that seems eminently plausible to me. But then again, while I don't know much CIA history I'm certainly inclined to believe the worst about that agency and its shady history and machinations, that's my bias, and it is a strong one. Not to say that there aren't incredibly moral and good people who serve and have served this agency, and it does serve a purpose (although one could question why we should have an agency of this type operating outside of military structure and purview). But given its secretive nature, lack of strong oversight and accountability, I'd say it is an organization that is particularly vulnerable to corrosive unscrupulous undertakings.
  
  The problem is Talbot does rely on some circumstantial flimsy evidence at times, and some weak witnesses: for instance the testimony of Howard Hunt's son, St. John. He is an incredibly weak and flawed witness imo. Talbot does not really acknowledge this, he presents this guy's evidence without any caveats. Here's an article on his son and Hunt I came across, it is interesting.
  http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/f...
  
  There are some good critiques of this book as well. I'd take everything with a grain of salt, especially the Kennedy assassination stuff. Here's a nice review of someone who seems to know a thing or two about this history, provides a counterbalance:
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
  
  It's hard for me to parse how deeply biased Talbot might be. He certainly doesn't like Dulles or the CIA (I don't blame him for that though haha). How much he is cherry-picking his facts and information to craft his narrative, how solid are certain testimonials, what are the various hidden motivations and agendas of various witnesses? I honestly don't know but I would sure as heck want deep background info on each witness to establish their credibility. I do know the CIA had a big hand in various overthrows of democratically elected governments and was intimately connected with large multinationals and did their bidding. This is the least controversial stuff to me in this book, mostly covered in the first half: overthrows and attempted overthrows in Guatemala, Congo, Iran, France, CIA links to Nazis. Yadda yadda. In effect the CIA is fundamentally undemocratic, and serves (at least served, in the period of Dulles' time and beyond) to maintain and expand the powers of an oligarchic elite.
  
  Regardless of how accurate or not this book is, it is damn entertaining and very well-written. I highly recommend it. I'd say this book is a mix of the documented known aspects of our history with various conjecture propped up by circumstantial evidence, some more solid some more speculative. Like I've mentioned, separating what's what is tricky for me. One interesting aspect of the book was the window into the the inner-workings, power struggles, and inner-office politics of the CIA. That was really neat stuff.
  
  Would love for my buddies that know this part of American history and have some knowledge of CIA history to read this book. It'd be great to hear your critique and analysis of David Talbot's narrative and evidence.
• 
  Don

  When I first began to travel to Europe more than thirty years ago, I was initially surprised at how often pejorative comments were directed to me about the United States government and its "empire". Had David Talbot's book been available when I began my travels to some fourteen countries, I would have been better equipped to understand how America is perceived through an international lens. Talbot's comprehensive research and writing about the life of the former, controversial Central Intelligence Agency Director, the late Allen Dulles, presents the very disturbing history of the C.I.A. under the tutelage of Dulles, and his propensity to further build that empire. If you are willing to invest the time to read this comprehensive six-hundred forty page book, be prepared to have your perception of the U.S. government changed forever.
  
  Outwardly, Allen Dulles projected the image of a gentle, bespectacled, pipe-smoking grandfather. In actuality, he was a calculating, cunning sociopath, who thought nothing of ignoring his superiors' orders in Washington, D.C., to further his, and his brother, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' personal agenda, resulting in what the author describes as America's secret government. In large measure, the Dulles brothers were responsible for the proliferation of The Cold War, and the resultant Red Scare that enveloped the United States in fear.
  
  It is eye opening to learn of the depth of Dulles' contacts with Germany's Third Reich during World War II, as well as to read of his behavior, which arguably, could very well be classified as treasonous. What is most disturbing is the role that Dulles played in smuggling members of Hitler's high command out of Germany at war's end, which saved them from certain conviction at the Nuremberg trials for their participation in war atrocities, and a sure date with the gallows pole.
  
  Talbot provides specific details of the Dulles' role in engineering and directing coups d'état in several independent, sovereign nations, including Iran, Guatemala and The Congo. The circumstances surrounding the overthrow of the Administration of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of The Congo are particularly heinous, and the details of Lumumba's brutal murder are nothing short of barbaric.
  
  The author dedicates the last one-third of his book to Dulles' adversarial history with the Administration of President John F. Kennedy. He provides specificity of the events leading up to JFK's firing of Dulles from his position of Director of the C.I.A, and discusses JFK's famous quote that he wished to "splinter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." Talbot opines that Dulles had the means and motive to participate in planning the assassination of J.F.K.
  
  Based on my own research, Talbot's sources are cogent, verifiable and persuasive.
  
  I recommend this historical book without hesitation.
• 
  Pete daPixie

  The book is a colossus. Over six hundred pages of a powerful biography, eminently readable, meticulously researched and thought provoking. David Talbot in his follow up to his N.Y. Times bestseller 'Brothers:The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years' has produced an explosive exposition of the corruptive forces of power within the political deep state.
  In this three part investigative probe into the career of Allen Dulles, Talbot documents the malevolent evil of the CIA, U.S. military chiefs, and the elite corporate forces that operated in concert, post WWII.
  Part I introduces Dulles' Office of Strategic Services spy agency operations in Europe during and at the end of the war culminating with his personal agenda of Operation Sunrise (in parallel with Operation Paperclip) that employed high level Nazi war criminals and Mafia operatives in intelligence black ops that helped the birth of the Cold War.
  Part II traces Dulles' rise to head the 'agency' at it's formation under Truman and it's unbridled rise to power under Eisenhower, with brother Foster running the State Department. The analysis of this period through the 50's is penetrating and disturbing as the author charges these secret elements of working against elected government policy, even betraying or subverting White House statecraft. Disloyalty that is commonly termed treason. The insanity of the secret projects of MKULTRA, the paranoia of the fight against godless communism and Dulles' management of foreign regime changes, often resulting in assassinations, were all the dark machinations on the devil's chessboard, with the pieces moved by Dulles' hand.
  The book culminates in Part III with the JFK presidency and his murder. The sleeve notes state that Talbot offers shocking new evidence regarding the assassination. Having spent many years reading this topic I found much of this section, particularly Chapter 18 'The Big Event' familiar. The revelations of St.John Hunt are well known. However, I think Talbot's overall treatise raises this work into the pantheon of major publications on this subject, among the likes of James Douglass, David Lifton, Professor John Newman and Peter Dale Scott. Readers should not expect the names and numbers of any smoking guns, or documentary proofs of guilty parties to the conspiracy. After more than half a century we are well past this kind of historical evidence. Yet that is no reason to downgrade such a fluent and highly recommended volume.
  Certainly one of my reading highlights of 2015.
  
  
• 
  David

  This is a long book that contains many purported facts about the life of Allen Dulles and the doings of his colleagues and contemporaries. I looked forward to reading it because it's an interesting and important era.
  
  Unfortunately, this is a terrible book. I say this not because the author is an acerbic critic of his subject, and not even because it flows into theories about a conspiracy to kill first John F. Kennedy and then Robert Kennedy. Rather it's because the book is written as a polemic, and many of its allegations are either unsound or unsupported, and because the author makes unfounded assumptions about the historic setting of the events he describes. Let me give three examples.
  
  The author makes much of the fact that Allen Dulles was an intelligence agent in Switzerland during World War II, and suggests he was insufficiently attentive to information about the Nazi murder of the Jews. The world has, of course, made a religion of the Holocaust. You can deny Christ, or Mohammad, or Moses, in Europe, but not Auschwitz. Dulles and the OSS did not murder the Jews, nor was their assignment to prevent that crime. Rather, it was to win the war. One can argue that the Allies did not do enough to mitigate the genocide, but here the author uses the common policy of the Allies--benign neglect of genocide, in favor of military victory--to prejudice the reader into thinking of Dulles as some kind of Nazi.
  
  Second, the author deprecates Dulles for supporting hard-line anti-Communist policies from the end of WWII to the early postwar period. Now Cold War revisionists claim that if FDR had lived or if the West had been less paranoid, a modus vivendi cold have been worked out with Stalin. The majority view in the West is that Stalin sought the maximum advantage he could obtained and set up tyrannical régimes wherever he could, and represented a real threat to West Europe at least. The author does not address or explain this issue. He just assume Dulles was a villain because he favored a vigorous, and sometimes foolhardy resistance to what he perceived as the communist threat. The author may disagree, but to understand his subject he needs to come clean about the historical context.
  
  Third, the author ignores or pooh-poohs the fact that there was a sizable communist espionage presence in the administration of FDR. He doesn't even acknowledge what is by now conventional consensus, that Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, for example, really were Russian agents. I would not object to his denying these accusations, but not to his ignoring the majority view that they are true. Similarly, he dwells on the excesses of Sen. McCarthy and the security crackdowns in the State Department, but treats them simply as irrational or wicked acts of repression, rather than responses to a real problem.
  
  In short, the author lives in a world of left-wing assumptions, which, if one adopts them, make easy a polemical biography of a Cold War, Establishment figure like Dulles. He's entitled to his view, but he could have advocated more effectively for it if he didn't treat his left-liberal picture of the period as axiomatic.
  
  By the time I got through this fog of assumptions, and the tendentious narrative based on them, the many interesting vignettes of the '50s and early '60s became so suspect in my eyes that I found the book annoying and hard to read.
  
  Toward the end, the author segues to an accusation that the CIA was behind the assassinations of both Kennedys. I find these rehashes of those events tedious and unconvincing. I've heard Vincent Bugliosi's meticulous evaluation of the evidence, and after that these conspiracy theories bore me to tears. Perhaps that's because I was never an admirer of either Kennedy, and so regarded the assassinations as historically somewhat routine events. I guess I don't really care that much if the official stories are wrong.
  
  A final note: there is no bibliography, and although there are end notes, they don't reveal much. The book is not well-sourced for a work of history, and given the author's blatant bias, I'm unwilling to take anything he says on faith.
• 
  Dan

  I am no fan of Allen Dulles, but the final third of this book is an unhinged screed. The rank speculation presented as fact only serves to undermine those contentions of the author that are supported by some evidence.
• 
  Sam Hedrick

  I've been studying the Dulles Brothers since reading Steven Kinzer's excellent, The Brothers: John Foster, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War. I've since read Kinzer's similarly well-written books on the Iranian and Guatemalan coups on '53 and '54, All The Shah's Men and Bitter Fruit, respectively, as well as amassing a library of all the available scholarly work on the Dulles Brothers. Lest I appear as a conspiracy theorist, my research was undertaken in the process of writing my honors thesis in American History on JF Dulles. When I became aware of Talbot's book, The Devil's Chessboard, it was an intriguing new take on an old story, and I quickly picked up a copy.
  
  Talbot's research is familiar, drawing from many of the same sources I've previously read, with two major exceptions. Talbot goes much deeper in his research regarding "Operation Sunrise", the coup de grace of Allen Dulles' WWII OSS career, in which he facilitated the surrender of German SS Commander Wolff and his Italian command, and most importantly, his broadening of the scholarship surrounding the JFK assassination, and the subsequent alleged conspiracy , which points to the acrimony between Dulles and JFK and the Bay of Pigs fiasco as the catalyst for the President's murder. Dulles' subsequent firing, and the manner in which he led elements of the CIA in a rogue operation that resulted in Kennedy's assassination are at the heart of his thesis, and his scholarship is well-cited and researched. For someone who has studied the history of both Foster and Allen Dulles, Talbot's theory holds a certain amount of credibility that bears consideration. If in fact there was a conspiracy, and many reasonable, well-respected scholars and political figures have held there was, nobody could be more suspect than Dulles. One of the most salient arguments for me was the manner in which Allen Dulles essentially forced himself onto the Warren Commission, especially in consideration of the animosity held for him by both John and his brother, Robert Kennedy.
  
  If I were to take Talbot to task for anything, it would be for his flights of literary embellishment. In much the same manner modern media uses hyperbole to lead their viewers toward their points, Talbot has a tendency to become a bit sensationalist with an often unrestrained use of colorful and borderline hyperbolic adjectives. Rather than make his points, it often has the effect of making his academic work seem more like one of Howard Hunt's badly written spy thrillers. He'd have been far more likely to receive much more favorable reviews by scholars- and would certainly have gotten another star from this reviewer. The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government is a must read for anyone interested in American foreign policy from the post-WWII period, and especially anyone interested in the growth of the CIA and covert operations in the Eisenhower Administration. It's a worthy addition to the historiography of the period, and an interesting insight into the great American tragedy of the Kennedy assassination.
• 
  Mike

  David Talbot writes about Allen Dulles’ 1963 book ‘The Craft of Intelligence’. He notes:
  
  “Allen drew a dire picture of the espionage battlefield in the Cold War, where Soviet agents employed the darkest tools available to achieve victory, while their Western adversaries - hampered by operating in open, democratic societies - were forced to play by more civilized rules.
  
  There was a strange, looking-glass quality to ‘The Craft of Intelligence’. Many of the extreme measures he accused the Soviet espionage network of employing were, in fact, standard operating procedure at the CIA, including ‘secret assassination’ as a political weapon. According to Dulles, the KGB had built an ‘executive action’ section to murder enemies of the state. But this is precisely what Dulles himself had done within the CIA.
  
  Dulles also denounced another flagrant example of Soviet ‘cold-blooded pragmatism’: the ‘massive recruitment’ of Nazi war criminals ‘for intelligence work’. Coming from the man who salvaged Reinhard Gehlen and untold numbers of other Hitler henchmen - and, in fact, helped build the West German intelligence system out of the poisoned remains of the Third Reich - the utter gall of this statement surely provoked howls of derision inside the Kremlin” (pg. 485).
  
  Any talk about the U.S. being restrained by ‘the rule of law’ is bogus…a tale people are sold about the ‘free world’ (which incidentally locks up more of its citizens than any other country). If you want to learn the specifics of why this is the case, give this important book a read. Talbot did his research for this one, reading old memoirs, death bed confessions, all types of books, conducting family interviews and perusing declassified documents… you name it.
  
  Don’t spend your time reading this long review… read the book instead! This review is my method of remembering important takeaways from the text…kind of a letter to myself to help gather my thoughts… Way too long for my fellow GoodReaders.
  
  
  Okay Mike…So this is where my investigation has led me.
  
  The 1980s was a period of absolute hell for indigenous peoples in Central America. …actually, it’s been hell for indigenous peoples there for hundreds of years, but the 1980s reached a peak in brutality. So many innocent lives lost. Multiple generations of families destroyed. Pain and hatred were sowed that decade that will never go away.
  
  Given that the United States sponsored many of these massacres via direct training, weapons sales and funds to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, one could image why some 'mesoamericans' would say; ‘Fuck America!'
  
  But I spent my teenage years in the States, and none of my homies knew anything about U.S. foreign politics. We never once spoke about anything remotely related to that. This was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. So you obviously can’t just say ‘Fuck a whole country’. That’s crazy talk!
  
  So then you’re like ‘Fuck the U.S. Government!’
  
  But that’s too broad. There’s tons of good people in government jobs working essential services.
  
  So then you’re like ‘Fuck Ronald Regan’.
  
  But wasn’t he a Hollywood actor?! Okay I know he was originally a senator from Cali (clashing with Cesar Chavez’s farmworker’s movement). But I read somewhere he was more of a domestic politics oriented president. And I also remember reading how James Baker, the White House Chief of Staff under Regan would steer him away from matters in Central America because of how bloody it got. So it’s better to go behind the scenes…who were the men on the ground? Who was calling the shots in Central America?
  
  Could it be the CIA? Is that the true beast? I may be getting warmer. But the CIA is a huge organization, spanning decades. So where to begin? David Talbot explains how the CIA’s reign of terror originates with one man. Allen Dulles. The longest serving Director of the CIA. Before that he was a non-combatant spy with the OSS in WW2. He came up as a lawyer in one of the most powerful corporate law firms in the country (Sullivan & Cromwell).
  
  Even in the 50s he was known throughout the CIA as the Old Man. Eisenhower made it official. “For the Dulles brothers, the Eisenhower-Nixon victory was the culmination of years of political strategizing dating back to the Roosevelt era. Now they were headed for the very center of Washington power. As the new heads of the State Department and the CIA, they would direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world. The 1952 presidential election represented the triumph of ‘the power elite’” (pg. 193).
  
  Talbot further notes that Eisenhower was actually their puppet, maneuvered into running for President, with the key appointment being Nixon on the VP ticket, their true acolyte, put on a trajectory towards a future presidency. Talbot doesn’t mean to paint Eisenhower as a puppet, but writes “Ike’s malleability offered its own advantages in their eyes. As secretary of state, Foster Dulles succeeded in undermining or deflecting every tentative step that the president made toward detente with the Soviet Union” (pg. 246). After the 1955 Geneva summit released an air of goodwill between the two powers, Dulles urged every CIA station chief around the world to keep fighting communism. Even Nikita Khrushchev noticed how Eisenhower would not make a single decision without first hearing from Foster Dulles. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, that Eisenhower was like “a dutiful schoolboy taking his lead from his teacher. It was difficult to imagine how a chief of state could allow himself to lose face like that in front of delegates from other countries. It certainly appeared that Eisenhower was letting Dulles do his thinking for him”.
  
  Talbot explains that John Foster Dulles wasn’t even really anti-communist to the core. His anti-communist crusade was not an ideological one…he was working for the interests of ‘the Power Elite’ (more on that later). “Foster, who always acted in the interests of the American establishment, understood this. It was this permanent war fever that empowered the country’s political and military hierarchies and enriched the increasingly militarized corporate sector. It was the very lifeblood of this ruling group’s existence” (pg. 247). As C. Wright Mills wrote, the power elite’s power came from a “continual preparation for war”. The Dulles brothers were not ready for peacetime after WW2 so they immediately began a war against communism…and this war was the furthest thing from a “cold war”.
  
  Regarding Nixon, I always pictured him as an old man. But of course he had his start as a young lawyer fresh out of law school. He tried to get a job with the Dulles brothers at Sullivan & Cromwell. The Dulles brothers were sure that Nixon would follow Eisenhower for two terms, keeping them in power behind the scenes at the State Department and CIA. But then JFK came out of nowhere and beat Nixon, throwing a wrench in the works. But that was taken care of and Nixon of course eventually got the presidency.
  
  David Talbot goes deep into the subject of the Dulles brothers' very close ties with Nazis. And I’m not talking about just Nazi scientists funneled to the U.S. through Operation Paperclip. It was also high ranking Nazi intelligence officers and spies. Allen Dulles even used CIA money (taxpayer’s money) to purchase Reinhard Gehlen (former Nazi head of intelligence on the Eastern front) a big villa in Germany after the war. That’s pretty crazy to think about…how quick the U.S. intelligence apparatus got close to Nazis in order to fight Commies, the sworn enemy-in-common.
  
  An important aspect of this book is highlighting the close ties between the national security apparatus and the mainstream media (primarily Time, Wall Street Journal, NYTimes and the Washington Post). Allen Dulles was personally close friends with Henry Luce, a media mogul who founded many magazines (Time, Life, Fortune, etc). The CIA even directly appointed ex-Nazi’s (Paul Hoffman) to the New York Times staff in Rome! “Hoffman became one of the New York Time’s leading foreign correspondents”.
  
  Talbot includes letters from editors of major newspapers asking Dulles for advice on how to cover major news events, and even to proofread their articles before publishing them! “Dulles used the CIA’s own network of media assets to spin the Warren Commission coverage. The New York Times was a favorite Dulles receptacle” (pg. 583). “Despite the public’s overwhelming rejection of the Warren Report, Dulles could count on the unwavering support of the Washington establishment and the corporate media. An exchange of letters between CBS news director William Small and Dulles in July 1967 summed up the media’s lockstop allegiance to the official story, no matter how many holes were punched in it by new research” (pg. 597).
  
  Due to Dulles close relationships, his books would always get favorable reviews in those publications. “The Washington Post heralded what amounted to little more than a predictable Cold War screed as ‘one of the most fascinating books of our time’” (pg. 487). That got a good chuckle out of me.
  
  But this all just goes to show how the Orange man didn’t invent ‘Fake News’...he just made the term mainstream. The major news outlets have never been about objective journalism (although undoubtedly there have been some good journalists speaking truth to power).
  
  I’m reminded of the story of Raymond Bonner, the NYTimes reporter in Central America who reported a horrific massacre in the small canton El Mozote, during the Salvadoran civil war in 1981. He was subsequently lambasted in the American press, namely the Wall Street Journal. He was charged with being a communist sympathizer and distorting facts, when all he did was report how a town full of indigenous men women and children were systematically killed by the Atlacatl battalion (state forces trained and funded by the American taxpayer and killed by ammunition produced in Pennsylvania).
  
  The executive editor of the NYTimes at the time pulled Bonner off the Central American detail and brought him back to the U.S. “The Times’ decision to remove a correspondent who had been the focus of an aggressive campaign of Administration criticism no doubt had a significant effect on reporting from El Salvador. The New York Times editors appeared to have ‘caved’ to government pressure, and the Administration seemed to have succeeded in its campaign to have a troublesome reporter - the most dogged and influential in El Salvador - pulled off the beat” (pg. 138 in the book Massacre at El Mozote). So ever since then I’ve been on some ‘Fuck the New York Times’ tip.
  
  Talbot further outlines how deep the CIA’s propaganda machine ran. We learn about Eisenhower’s Cold War propaganda adviser C.D. Jackson, “who served as a sort of intelligence link among the White House, the CIA, and Henry Luce’s media empire” (pg. 215) and Allen Dulles’ ‘Voice of America’, the State Department’s Cold War propaganda arm with 1,400 employees, who spend their time writing fake anti communist articles about left-leaning regimes all over the world. Or how about the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ the CIA’s main front organization to spread their anti communist rhetoric into the intelligentsia. “Many leading artists and intellectuals fell into the ranks of the CIA’s generously funded culture war. The individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part of a propaganda war” (pg. 331). I think it’s very important to know just how far back ‘Fake News’ really goes. So y’all can miss me with all that “free press” talk.
  
  Still not convinced? Peep this section: “When the press lord [Henry Luce] launched into a lengthy diatribe on Cuba, demanding that Kennedy invade the island, the president suggested that Luce was a ‘warmonger’ and the afternoon came to an unpleasant conclusion, with the Luces marching out of the White House. Shortly afterward, Luce convened a remarkable war council of his top editors at Time-Life, where he declared that if the Kennedy administration was not bold enough to overthrow Castro, his corporation would take on the task. Luce and his wife were already funding raids on Cuba, with the quiet support of the CIA” (pg. 448). A media mogul was illicitly funding raids on another country!?
  
  The narrative moves on to the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, where democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz was ousted and a military junta more amenable to U.S. corporate interests was put in power. Talbot writes how Allen Dulles viewed this as one of his greatest career achievements! The CIA literally held a party after the successful coup d'etat. Many people know vaguely about this event, but often view it as a small event in the long history of the Cold War, way back in the 50s. I don’t think they realize how ruthless this was. Talbot corrects that. Arbenz had instituted moderate land reforms in 1952, expropriating land from United Fruit Company (still in business today) for poor farmers. But battling the United Fruit Company and Guatemala’s “medieval land barons” (couldn’t have worded it better myself) would be the end of Arbenz’s ambitions of democracy in the country.
  
  “United Fruit was especially well connected to the Eisenhower administration. As the agribusiness giant began lobbying the White House to overthrow Arbenz, Walter Bedell ‘Beetle’ Smith, the president’s trusted friend and undersecretary of state, was seeking an executive position with the company. After the coup, he was named to the United Fruit’s board of directors” (pg. 259). This illustrates how corporate interests hold very close connections to the very highest levels of U.S. power.
  
  We go on to find out that the CIA offered a blatant $2 million dollar bribe directly to Arbenz to abort the land reform measures. When that didn’t work, Arbenz was physically threatened. After that second step didn’t work (Step 1: Bribery Step 2: Physical Violence), Allen Dulles went to work to remove him from power (Step 3: Orchestrate Coup D’Etat). The lengths the CIA went to oust Arbenz is incredible. They would target key army commanders and bribe them (only $60,000 to one commander) to surrender his troops. A 1997 declassified document revealed that the CIA had a 57 name hit list for key Guatemalan leaders around the country (pg. 263). Fifty Seven! After his overthrow, Arbenz held a radio farewell address to his countrymen. The CIA even went so far as to jam the frequency of his radio address. As Arbenz was leaving the country in exile, the CIA hired hundreds of “protestors” to yell and hurl insults at him in the airport, for the media lens.
  
  “The U.S. press coverage of the Guatemalan coup offered a sanitized account, one that smacked of CIA manipulation. The leading newspapers treated the overthrow of Arbenz’s government as a tropical adventure, an ‘opera bouffe,’ in the words of Hanson Baldwin, one of Dulles’s trusted friends at The New York Times” (pg. 262). But for the millions of poor indigenous Guatemalans, the true horror was yet to come. The CIA backed regime of Castillo Armas began a campaign of terror and repression…“the beginning of a blood-soaked era that would transform Guatemala into one of the twentieth century’s most infamous killing fields” (pg. 262). The CIA didn’t just pull off a coup and leave…they trained Guatemala’s new military junta in the art of the ‘political murder’, leading to an era of assassinations, rampant torture…the prototypes of the death squads that would emerge in the 1980s. “The CIA, enamored of making ominous lists, helped the new regime assemble a lista negra of subversives that soon grew to seventy thousand names” (pg. 264). I think you get the point. This wasn’t just a small side story in the Cold War. This is THE story…the mass murder of indigenous peoples all over the world for corporate interests, generating unimaginable amounts of ill will and malice.
  
  Side note. Recently in 2021, an article appeared by journalist Aaron Coy Moulton, about recently declassified documents that outlines Britain’s role in the Guatemalan coup. He notes that the British Foreign Office’s intelligence division (the IRD) “inundated Guatemalans with a flood of anti-communist material by publishing as many as three dozen articles per month, radicalizing the country’s politics”. These are important revelations to remember. I think this is the power of studying and knowing history. To know that this isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a whole bunch of criminal conspiracies. It’s important to know that it happened (and likely still happens).
  
  Talbot then examines the Iranian coup, where Mossadegh is overthrown because he tried to nationalize British Petroleum (then known as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company). They reinstated the Shah’s autocratic regime, and just like in Guatemala, it led to decades of repression followed by a hard-line islamist revolution. He then goes into the tragic story of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s shining hope for a better future…his primary goal being ‘Congo for the Congolese…complete independence’. The CIA recruits European assassins to kill him. Sidney Gottlieb even produced a tube of poisoned toothpaste to kill him. Ultimately they decided to deliver Lumumba to his murderous political rivals in the Congo. And history tells the rest of the tale. Congo descended into hell, first under Mobutu’s regime, then two civil wars with a total of over five million deaths!
  
  What really sticks to my mind is the long lasting consequences and how the fate of millions of people rests on certain decisions. The seeds of a growing democracy are very fragile, and once trampled, rarely make a comeback. This must be why William Blum named his classic book about CIA interventions ‘Killing Hope’.
  
  But those are impoverished countries full of brown and black people. We all know their lives mean less to the Power Elite. Who cares about them, right? But they would never have the gall to do this to European countries, would they?
  
  (Continued in Comments Section)...
• 
  Mack Simpson

  I never pick up a book, begin reading, then stop. I should have made an exception for this one.
  
  What sells itself as a "history" is actually a thinly veiled conspiracy screed, dispensing with the "thinly veiled" long before it reaches its dual-Kennedy assassination climax, whose stories obviously drove its writing.
  
  Talbot's pretense is laid bare, his bias shining brightly. "The Devil's Chessboard" is best found for purchase among the street hucksters and wide-eyed wanderers of Dealey Plaza.
  
  If you're looking for a history of the CIA, this is not the book you're seeking.
• 
  Reza Shaeri Shaeri

  Even for someone who has a very negative opinion of Allen Dulles, and his role in the CIA, this book was too much. Talbot paints Dulles as a NAZI sympathizer and enabler, and somehow, that's hardly the worst of it. Much of second part of the book is dedicated to JFK assassination conspiracy ramblings, based on little more than hearsay and largely unsupported accusation.
• 
  Paul

  This is an extremely well-researched history of Allen Dulles and how he affected the period of history from the end of WWII until his death. Dulles was an evil, psychopathic man who considered himself and the CIA, his agency, the real power in the United States. Even after JFK fired him for his machinations around the Bay of Pigs, during which he dared JFK to provide air cover and possibly Marine support for a mission that failed, and, had it been successful, might well have touched off WWIII, Dulles continued to run a shadow CIA that circumvented and frequently opposed the wishes of the presidents of the United States.
  
  The fact of his being the ultimate prime mover of the JFK assassination fits perfectly with what I've read about the assassination, and I've read more than 50 books on it. In fact, it was the fecklessness of the press (which continues today) that made me decide to go into journalism 40 years ago. Whether it was the number of CIA assets in the press, or whether one of Dulles's black ops fixers terrified the mainstream media into buying the ridiculous conclusions of the Warren Report, the whole "conventional" narrative was immediately laid down by the government powers that tried to create a case that Lee Harvey Oswald was a "lone nut," with communist ties (oooh, that's about as bad a person as you can be in 1963) and Jack Ruby killed him because he felt so bad about Jackie having to come back to Dallas for Oswald's trial (sure he did).
  
  The government's seizure of the Zapruder film and its rearranging of the frames to better support the "lone gunman from behind" narrative (which is documented in the late James Fetzer's book Assassination Science) is only a small part of the elaborate cover-up that the government has done, starting with The Warren Report, to try to bully its narrative into the public consciousness.
  
  If you ask most Americans today who have an opinion on the JFK assassination how it really happened, you will no doubt get a wide variety of answers, but rarely will you get the most definitive answer that was ever articulated, which was the 1977 House Subcommittee's Report on the JFK assassination, which concluded that there was also a gunman in front of JFK at the Grassy Knoll, meaning that there WAS a conspiracy. The nature of a conspiracy is more than one person getting together to do something, which the House Subcommittee established in its 1977 report. Yet, for decades, anyone questioning the lone-nut theory has been denounced as a "conspiracy nut."
  Well, guess what, guys? THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY in that there were at least two shooters.
  
  The government first tried to dismiss this fact by not letting the public ever see the Zapruder film, and at first only allowing highly placed journalists see it and describe it verbally. I watched a clip of the Zapruder film narrated by Dan Rather (or at least his narration from the version he'd seen) and during the head shot, he said blatantly that JFK's head "moved forward with considerable force." This narration described the head shot, which was clearly from the front and the grassy knoll side.
  
  Although a huge number of books have been written trying to get to the "real" story of what happened in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, few of them were reviewed in the mainstream media, and other, fraudulent books like "Case Closed" by Gerald Posner (1993) were thrust upon the unsuspecting and confused public to try to buttress up the official Warren Commission conclusions. The most well-known film about the assassination, JFK, by Oliver Stone, was ripped universally by the mainstream media (cover line from Newsweek: JFK, How Oliver Stone Gets It Wrong)
  
  If you even look at the rearranged Zapruder film, it is possible to see that the head shot was clearly a near-simultaneous hit from two weapons at the right front. Even John Connally, who was sitting in front of JFK and was also hit, to his dying day refused to believe the "magic bullet" theory that had JFK and he were hit with the same bullet--the almost pristine bullet (exhibit 399 in Warren Report) that was found on a stretcher at Dallas hospital.
  
  I could go on forever on this subject, but I will only say that this book is one of the most important books of the last few decades. If you are at all interested in history, this is the one book you should read this year. If you'd like to be enlightened about the multifarious things that American intelligence has done up to today, read this book. If you want to be enlightened about how America really works and has worked in the last half-century, read this book. At any rate, READ THIS BOOK!
• 
  Christopher Saunders

  Ostensibly, The Devil's Chessboard is a damning biography of Allen Dulles, founder of the Central Intelligence Agency, and a history of that organization's early years. In fact, it's a familiar, thoroughly unoriginal rehashing of discredited conspiracy theories - especially those involving the JFK Assassination. Talbot's book starts on interesting ground, detailing for instance the Dulles Brothers' business and personal connections with Nazis before, after and even during World War II, convincingly arguing that their evangelical anticommunism overshadowed even a pretense of morality. And the segments on MKULTRA and the Dulles-sponsored coups in Iran, Guatemala and Cuba are reasonably compelling, even if his determination to present the Dulleses as supervillains from an Ian Fleming novel often seems over-the-top. The further along the book goes, though, the less credible it becomes, embracing the fringiest of fringe theories (the CIA trying to overthrow Charles De Gaulle, for one) before descending whole-hog into nuttiness.
  
  Unsurprisingly, the last third of Chessboard focuses on the John F. Kennedy. Talbot trots out the tired idea that the CIA was a "rogue elephant" executing all manner of skulduggery without the knowledge or approval of higher-ups - least of all Jack Kennedy's, who in true Oliver Stone fashion is a liberal saint who would never dream of assassinating Fidel Castro or doing anything but save humanity from war. (That Kennedy appointed his brother to run the Mongoose plots against Castro doesn't matter here, apparently; it was all done behind the Kennedys' backs.) Much of his evidence barely qualifies as circumstantial, from the discredited "deathbed confession" of Howard Hunt to citing Dulles meeting a Cuban exile leader in spring of 1963 as proof - proof! that the CIA killed the President. Why? Because Dulles was mad at Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs, and because Kennedy, a saber-rattling, militarist Cold War liberal if ever there was one, was somehow a threat to the deranged Man-Devils operating the Military-Industrial Complex. This junk's no more convincing now than it was in The Parallax View or Executive Action four decades ago. Then Talbot actually calls Lee Harvey Oswald "one of those bright, lost, fatherless boys whom society finds inventive ways of abusing." Such misplaced mawkishness inspires nausea, or at least incredulity, rather than reflection.
  
  Overall, any merits the book possesses sink under its parboiled paranoia. There's little new (most of Talbot's sources are familiar secondary works, including Anthony Summers' conspiracy books) and much that's mendacious and false in Talbot's portrait of the CIA, whose very real misdeeds are nasty enough without embellishment. But facing this honestly might require accepting that the CIA, and other components of the so-called "Deep State," are tools of policy rather than evil entities operating on their own accord while our sainted Eisenhowers and Kennedys and Reagans and Obamas act only for the Public Good. Better to believe in boogeymen than accept the truth.
• 
  David Drum

  David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government chillingly documents Allen Dulles’s role in the rise of what is often called the “deep state,” the unelected militaristic bureaucracy within the federal government that kills and tortures people, topples legitimate rulers, orders drone strikes, and basically does anything it wants to fortify the American empire without much oversight by elected officials.
  
  The most startling claim in Talbot’s very readable 620-page book is that former CIA Director Allen Dulles plotted and personally oversaw the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. While he finds no smoking gun, Talbot spins a web of incriminating information to support his claim.
  
  Talbot portrays Allen Welch Dulles as a bright, cunning, ambitious, superficially charming man who was not much interested in money but who coveted and ruthlessly exercised power. A minister’s son, Allen Dulles became a lawyer and secured a place at the top of Sullivan and Cromwell, a law firm headed by his brother John Foster Dulles who later became secretary of state. Through a network of corporations, banks, and financiers, Sullivan and Cromwell helped German industry rebuild after World War I and opposed President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
  
  Recruited in 1941 to the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, America’s wartime spy agency, Allen Dulles functioned as an American spy in Switzerland but remained sympathetic to Germany. Like many in America’s business elite, Dulles believed that America’s real enemy was its wartime ally the Soviet Union. Despite President Franklin Roosevelt’s desire to try high-ranking Nazis, Dulles helped bring former Nazi officials into the American-backed West German intelligence service and greased the way for other Nazis to escape prosecution down “ratlines” through Spain and South America.
  
  Dulles joined the Central Intelligence Agency founded by President Harry Truman as an overseas information-gathering organ of the state, and helped it morph into something similar to the OSS which was disbanded at the end of the war.
  
  When Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, Allen Dulles was appointed to head the CIA and his brother, John Foster Dulles, became Secretary of State. Given a long leash to fight Communism by Eisenhower, the CIA engaged in horrible “mind control” experiments, consorted with mobsters, and arrogantly toppled legitimate governments in countries such as Guatemala, Iran, and the Congo. Legitimate leaders were arrested, tortured, intimidated, and assassinated with the help of the CIA. One of the most stunning of these involved a military coup and attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle which occurred shortly after President John F. Kennedy was elected, for which Kennedy apologized to de Gaulle.
  
  Kennedy wanted the United States to align itself with rising democratic movements in former colonies and South America, in the tradition of the American revolution. In his speeches and actions Kennedy worked to make this worldview a part of his New Frontier.
  
  Kennedy retained Dulles as head of the CIA but came to regret retaining the man CIA insiders called “the Old Man.” The Bay of Pigs, the CIA’s half-assed attempt to invade Cuba with a motley crew of Cubans trained by the CIA, was planned by Dulles under Eisenhower and its failure soured Kennedy on the CIA.
  
  The landing party at the Bay of Pigs was quickly rounded up and captured. Dulles apparently believed the new president would order an invasion of Cuba when the invasion predictably faltered. Instead, Kennedy refused to send troops into Cuba and took responsibility for the failed invasion.
  
  When Russian missiles were found in Cuba not long after that, Kennedy again resisted pressure for a military attack on Cuba and instead got on the phone with Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev to work out a deal.
  
  Kennedy fired Dulles after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but Talbot documents how completely Dulles remained in the swim of things after being fired. Dulles gathered around him a sort of government in exile, receiving briefings, entertaining underlings, and basically acting as if he was still running the CIA where many spooks remained loyal to him.
  
  The entire weekend of Kennedy’s assassination, Dulles stayed at “the Farm,” an alternate CIA command headquarters at Camp Peary, Virginia, Talbor describes as a sort of black site where Dulles had built himself a comfortable home.
  
  While at the Farm, Talbot suggests, Dulles helped orchestrate the events of the tumultuous weekend in Dallas which included Kennedy’s assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest, Oswald’s assassination by the mobster Jack Ruby, and Kennedy’s body snatched from the hospital in Dallas and rushed back to Washington for a questionable autopsy.
  
  According to Talbot, Dulles lobbied hard to be appointed to the Warren Commission, which looked into the circumstances of Kennedy’s death. Since he was the only person on the commission without a day job, and a seasoned political manipulator, Dulles took virtual control of the commission and his heavy hand may be seen in its results, which found no conspiracy and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
  
  Talbot presents information to show that Oswald was indeed a patsy, as Oswald asserted before being shot. He shows some ways in which the well-connected former CIA director worked to manage the news in the United States as troubling information came out.
  
  Talbot asserts that Dulles may have feared the wrath of Bobby Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968 as he ran for president. According to forensic reports, the bullet that killed Robert Kennedy was fired into the back of his head at point blank range and thus could not have been fired by the alleged assassin Sirhan Sirhan, who attacked from the front and was convicted of the crime.
  
  Talbot presents Allen Dulles as a man of the upper classes who was ambitious and capable of anything. Married with mistress, Dulles’s wife called him “the Shark.” Time after time, Talbot’s book asserts, the Shark got away with murder.
  
• 
  David Tingley

  An essential book if you want to understand post -WWII American history.
  
  The National Security Act of 1947 fundamentally changed America from a historian's perspective. Once the Government began to classify much of what it did as top secret, the official, overt public account of things came to be grossly insufficient. An understanding of the covert workings of the Secret Government became essential as well. David Talbot does an excellent job of supplying a narrative that connects Allen Dulles' Nazi sympathies and fascist leanings before and during the war to the present fascist uprising in the USA. A gripping read, and very well researched and sourced.
  
  Put this one at or near the top of your "Must read" list.
• 
  Jennifer Ozawa

  This book is so incredible that I can’t quite find a way to write a review. It chronicles the (mis)deeds of the CIA under Allen Dulles, who is one of the most evil f***ers to ever walk the earth. What is chronicled in this book is verifiably true, but so unbelievable that I wish it weren’t true. At any rate, this book is well-written and researched.
• 
  Charlie Collins

  
  There is a ton of historical info here. Much of it is disturbing, if true, but I have to remind myself when reading books like this that I'm not 100% positive I am reading the facts.
• 
  Mal Warwick

  If you’re familiar with mid-twentieth century American history, you’ll know the name Allen Dulles (1893-1969), who served as the director of the CIA through the tense years of the Eisenhower Administration and remained in office until John F. Kennedy fired him in 1961. Now, investigative journalist David Talbot has written an eye-opening new biography of the man.
  
  The historical record reveals a great deal about Dulles’ career in espionage, highlighting his central role in the overthrow of the Iranian and Guatemalan governments in 1953 and 54, in the notorious MKULTRA program that administered mind-altering drugs to unwitting subjects in at least seven countries, and in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Recently, The Brothers, Stephen Kinzer’s dual biography of Dulles and his older brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, also spotlighted the two men’s unsavory roles in funneling American capital to help build Hitler’s Germany and in the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Fidel Castro in Cuba.
  
  Now, Talbot has delved more deeply into the record and taken a far more critical look at Dulles’ career in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. The picture that emerges is shattering.
  
  The most powerful men in America
  
  During the seven years that Allen Dulles served as CIA director while his big brother was Secretary of State (1953-59), the two held sway virtually unchallenged at the helm of U.S. foreign policy. From the outset, Dwight Eisenhower was a disengaged President, favoring the golf course over the White House, and in the second term of his administration he was sidelined even more frequently by serious illness. These were the years of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s alcohol-fueled rampage through the U.S. government, when rabid anti-Communism infected the military, academia, and the news media as well as government, and the reactionary John Birch Society built a nationwide network of chapters with more than 100,000 members. Foster Dulles’ nuclear brinksmanship was the order of the day. And his younger brother was left free to pursue his own course at the CIA, free from scrutiny or moral scruples. In many ways, the two were the most powerful men in America. Talbot sums up the case in stark terms: “In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality.”
  
  The untold story of Allen Dulles
  
  From the perspective of more than half a century, now that once-classified records are gradually being opened, it’s difficult not to conclude that Allen Dulles’ virtually unchallenged reign at the CIA was an unparalleled disaster. Previously published books and articles have brought a number of extremely unflattering revelations to light. To my knowledge, though, only David Talbot has put all the pieces together in The Devil’s Chessboard:
  
  Dulles and his brother Foster didn’t just help their law clients finance the Third Reich. Though they publicly disavowed the Nazi regime shortly before war broke out, they helped high-ranking German officials to launder looted funds through Switzerland throughout and after World War II. (Dulles headed the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS office in Bern during the war, so he was in a perfect position to continue to help his former clients and their German partners.) Talbot notes: “Dulles was more in step with many Nazi leaders than he was with President Roosevelt.”
  
  In the final stages of the war, Dulles defied Allied strategic policy and direct orders from Roosevelt. He negotiated a separate surrender of Nazi forces in Italy with the high-ranking SS general who ran the Gestapo there. When Italian partisans began closing in on the general’s hideout, Dulles organized a rescue mission. The general he snatched from the clutches of the Resistance was Heinrich “Himmler’s top troubleshooter, [who] frequently intervened to ensure the smooth efficiency of the extermination process,” the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” Nonetheless, Dulles repeatedly took action to prevent him from prosecution at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. As Talbot reports, “Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason.”
  
  The general was far from the only Nazi official whom Dulles saved from justice. Using OSS staff members who reported to him, Dulles helped smuggle an untold number of Nazi criminals to South America, the United States, and elsewhere around the world through the so-called “ratlines” established by ODESSA, the secret organization of former SS officers. He also took part in the OSS’ Operation Paperclip, the notorious clandestine operation under which the U.S. smuggled more than fifteen hundred German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States to work in rocketry, biological and chemical weapons, and other fields. Many of the scientists were committed Nazis, some of them war criminals. And Dulles personally engineered the extraction of Reinhard Gehlen, the SS general who ran military intelligence for the Nazis on the Eastern Front. Gehlen, too, would have been in the dock at Nuremberg were it not for Dulles’ protection. He arranged for the Nazi spy to establish an anti-Soviet espionage network for the U.S., employing a large number of other Nazis; later, with Dulles’ support, Gehlen took over the new West German intelligence agency.
  
  Still under Dulles’ leadership in April 1961, the CIA colluded with right-wing French officers in a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. The plot had been organized by the OAS, the secret paramilitary organization that attempted to prevent Algeria’s independence from France. As Talbot notes, “Allen Dulles was once again making his own [foreign] policy, this time in France.” The plot was thwarted only after President Kennedy personally warned de Gaulle’s ambassador to the U.S. that the CIA might be involved. Kennedy ordered U.S. base commanders in France to disguise the landing strips where the OAS might land its planes from Algeria, and de Gaulle mobilized the French citizenry to oppose the conspirators through strikes and other actions.
  
  But these (and a great many other) crimes pale in comparison with Dulles’ role in the Bay of Pigs disaster and in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that followed his termination by President Kennedy. Much of what Talbot writes about this period brings new evidence into the light of day.
  
  The secret government meets resistance
  
  Under President Eisenhower, the CIA directed by Allen Dulles operated with little oversight. Though the president was uncomfortable after the fact with some of the agency’s more egregious operations, he did nothing to rein in Dulles. Even the director’s brother, the Secretary of State, often found himself in the dark. Few in Congress were aware of the extent to which the CIA was manipulating events around the world. The agency operated in such secrecy that it’s possible some members of Congress didn’t even know of its existence. But the insular existence of the CIA under Dulles’ direction began to unravel following the election of John F. Kennedy.
  
  It’s well known that the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion was planned during the final years of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency and that the newly elected president only reluctantly allowed it to continue. It’s also widely believed that the invasion failed because President Kennedy refused to authorize air cover for the dissident CIA-trained Cubans of the invading force. However, as Talbot reveals, the truth is far different from the popular belief. Even an internal investigation by the CIA brought many of the facts to light. “It is now clear that the CIA’s Bay of Pigs expedition was not simply doomed to fail, it was meant to fail. And its failure was designed to trigger the real action — an all-out, U.S. military invasion of the island.” Dulles fully expected that his hard-line allies who ran the Pentagon and staffed the National Security Council would force the new president to approve the action. Kennedy’s refusal to do so caused the distrust for him within the military and the CIA to harden into hatred. Their opposition to him grew even more bitter when he fired Dulles a few months later.
  
  The secret government strikes back
  
  Talbot explains, “Dulles had been deposed, but his reign continued.” He remained a darling of the establishment press, especially Henry Luce’s magazine empire and The New York Times, and the largely unchanged leadership of the CIA held frequent meetings with Dulles in his Georgetown home. Kennedy blundered by appointing Dulles ally John McCone to succeed him and leaving most of the agency’s leadership in place. Dulles’ acolytes, Richard Helms and James Jesus Angleton, continued to dominate the CIA. Operations continued in secret, outside the oversight of the White House. As Talbot makes clear, “it was a mood of hatred and rage.” In this explosive atmosphere, Kennedy’s decision to lower the tension over Cuba following the near-catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis proved fatal. “This marked the fateful turning point when the rabid, CIA-sponsored activity that had been aimed at Castro shifted its focus to Kennedy.”
  
  In Part Three of The Devil’s Chessboard, about one-third of the book, Talbot concentrates on the evidence about CIA involvement in the assassination of JFK. Much of what he reports is based on his own interviews and on documents that came to light only decades after the event. He writes, “Those resolute voices in American public life that continue to deny the existence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy argue that ‘someone would have talked.’ This line of reasoning is often used by journalists who have made no effort themselves to closely inspect the growing body of evidence and have not undertaken any of their own investigative reporting . . . The official version of the Kennedy assassination — despite its myriad improbabilities, which have only grown more inconceivable with time — remains firmly embedded in the media consciousness, as unquestioned as the law of gravity. In fact, many people have talked during the past half of a century — including some directly connected to the plot against Kennedy.”
  
  There is now abundant evidence that high-ranking CIA officials orchestrated the murder and the cover-up that followed. Dulles himself appears to have been fully informed. Talbot reveals much of what is now known about the plot in The Devil’s Chessboard. Corroborating evidence has been published elsewhere, most notably in another remarkable book, Mary’s Mosaic, published in 2012. Two other books I’ve recently reviewed, Top Secret America and National Security and Double Government, probe the consequences of the secret government that Allen Dulles conjured into being.
  
  About the author
  
  David Talbot is best known as the founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Salon. The Devil’s Chessboard is the fourth of the nonfiction books he has written in recent years after he left work as a reporter for newspapers and magazines.
• 
  KOMET

  Of all the works of non-fiction I've read thus far this year, "THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government" is one of the most profound, sobering, well-researched, and revelatory books I've ever read. At 640 pages, this is a book that demands of the reader a full and earnest commitment. But one should not be deterred by the scope of this book. It has lots of substance to it, is highly readable, and will provide the reader with invaluable insights into how the CIA and by extension the national security state within a state - which is undergirded by Wall Street and a coterie of academics, civilian, political & military officials, and conservative-minded monied elites - have exerted for decades a pervasive, coercive power and influence over the U.S. government.
  
  Allen Dulles (1893-1969) stands out in this book as the exemplar of the master power broker, and untiring promoter of "America's Secret Government." Born the second son of a Protestant minister boasting of ancestors who had had distinguished careers in the law, military, and politics (an uncle served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson), Dulles, a Princeton graduate, went on to become a diplomat during the First World War, serving in the U.S. embassy in Bern, Switzerland. After the war, he served (along with his older brother John Foster Dulles) with the American delegation at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, earned a law degree from George Washington University in 1926, and (with John Foster Dulles) built a lucrative career in New York with Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most powerful law firms in the country. He also ingratiated himself with many social, economic, and political interests in the U.S. and Europe during the interwar years. Both he and John Foster were staunch Republicans who were vigorously anti-New Deal.
  
  With America's entry into the Second World War, Allen Dulles managed to get an appointment with the country's wartime spy agency, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) as head of the OSS office in Bern from 1942 to war's end. He proceeded to establish his own fiefdom, concerned himself with re-establishing contacts in Occupied France and Germany with former business associates, and even defied FDR's official policy of unconditional surrender through helping to quietly arrange - with the help of high ranking SS officers Karl Wolff and Eugen Dollmann (both of them war criminals that Dulles protected postwar from prosecution) - a separate peace in Italy on May 2, 1945 (six days before the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Europe). Dulles certainly should have been relieved of his OSS position or reprimanded. But he had his protectors in different areas of the federal government who shared Dulles' political beliefs and uncompromising anti-Communism. So, he was well-protected through most of his public service career, which reached its height during the Eisenhower years, when he was made CIA Director.
  
  Much of the nefarious and shady activities for which the CIA became known were developed and encouraged by Allen Dulles. Examples: the 1953 coup in Iran (the CIA overthrew a popularly elected nationalist government and put Shah Reza Pahlavi back on the throne), the 1954 coup in Guatemala (another "success" with the ouster of the freely elected Jacobo Arbenz leftist progressive government and replacing it with a military junta supportive of U.S. interests), the MKULTRA program (a top secret mind control research project that often used ordinary citizens as unwitting guinea pigs), and Operation Mockingbird - a program through which the CIA poured millions of dollars to influence the output and distribution of news by media organizations throughout the U.S. and the West. At the same time, John Foster Dulles served as Secretary of State, exerting an uncompromising anti-Soviet, iron-fisted grip over U.S. foreign policy til his death from stomach cancer in 1959.
  
  Eisenhower pretty much gave Allen Dulles a free hand in running the CIA. So long as broad policy goals and objectives as developed in Washington were met, that is what mattered most. The U.S. developed during the 1950s an informal empire on the cheap, which was "a product of Ike's desire to avoid another large-scale shooting war as well as the imperial burdens that had bankrupted Great Britain."
  
  With the election of John F. Kennedy as President in 1960 and the coming of the New Frontier a year later, a sea change took place in Washington. Allen Dulles didn't think much of Kennedy's capacity for leadership, dismissing him as too young and inexperienced to run his Administration. Following the failure of the Bay of Pigs undertaking (which was created during the waning days of the Eisenhower Administration and enlisted support from anti-Castro Cuban exiles and elements of the Mafia, which had lost its gambling monopoly in Cuba once Castro had closed down all the gambling casinos and nationalized mob-owned property; from the book, I learned how badly planned the operation was - that surprised me!; Dulles had anticipated Kennedy using the U.S. military to mount a full-scale invasion of the island and thus ensure the success of the CIA plan) --- for which President Kennedy assumed full responsibility (as a result, his approval ratings shot upward to 83%) --- JFK "took ... steps [by early 1962] to signal that the Dulles era was over and that the CIA would no longer be allowed to run wild; he placed overseas agents under the control of U.S. ambassadors and shifted responsibility for future paramilitary operations like the Bay of Pigs to the Pentagon. It was the Kennedy brothers, not the Dulles brothers, who now ran Washington."
  
  President Kennedy would remove Dulles from his post at the CIA in November 1961. But Allen Dulles did not go quietly into that good night. As always, he "saw himself as above the nation's laws and elected leaders, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients."
  
  President Kennedy would make a lot of enemies among the Wall Street cliques and business interests who came to see him as a national security threat. His handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his "Peace Speech" at American University (June 10th, 1963) proved to be the last straw. Within the secret state, a clear consensus emerged: "For the good of the country, [President Kennedy] must be removed. And Dulles was the only man with the stature, connections, and decisive will to make something of this enormity happen. He had already assembled a killing machine to operate overseas. Now he prepared to bring it home to Dallas. All that his establishment colleagues had to do was to look the other way - as they always did when Dulles took executive action."
  
  Should the reader of this critique opt to read "The Devil's Chessboard", I leave it to him/her to reach their own conclusions about Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Secret Government that is with us still.
  
  
  
  
• 
  George Schmitz

  Phenomenal book.
• 
  Malcolm Pellettier

  I am by no means a Kennedy (conspiracy) buff - though my grade 7 teacher was well nigh obsessed with the matter - but this is pretty chilling stuff. As a novice, therefore, I'm in no real position to comment on the recently unearthed government materials; however, as a lawyer I'm appalled by the CIA's repeated ability to ignore subpoenas, destroy documents, and just generally withhold information from either congressional or executive oversight. It's also nice to realize that some unhinged bellicose lunatics made it to the top of the Intelligence/Military heaps, none of whom had any real compunctions about using nuclear weapons as regular militaristic weaponry during the Cold War.
  
  This is also a lovely overview of just how ethically challenged tricky Dick Nixon and the Republican apparatus were. The red scare that allowed HUAC to ruin political enemies was such a transparently political exercise and such vaudevillian travesty of process, that I can't quite believe it was allowed to take place, (although the unquestioning bellicosity after 9/11, tells me that sweet eff all has changed). It actually puts things like the Tea Party's anti-intellectual, cynical sanctimony into context. It also puts paid in many respects to the Left's latter day wistfulness for, if not hagiolatry of, Eisenhower Republicans. Don't kid yourselves. Anti New Deal fury of the day makes today's Tea Party seem pretty tame by comparison.
  
  All you're left with is the repeated specters of what might've been: if Truman had not inherited FDR's mantle, instead of, say, Henry Wallace; if Kennedy had lived, or if RFK had been able to gain the White House.
  
  And of course, all of the main characters just happen to turn up again for the Watergate affair, Iran Contra and Dick effing Cheney, all of whom, bizarrely, thinking they were somehow exempt from the rule of law, and more frustratingly, proved right by an acquiescent and cowed democratic apparatus.
  
  Add to this the fact that not one Wall STreet Exec went to jail over 2008?! (just imagine if FDR were never elected), and the media asks itself (rhetorically, I presume) why the American electorate is so cynical.
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  Public Scott

  Glad to finally be finished with this absolute doorstop of a book. It was a long read, but also a gratifying one. I'll admit it started a little slow. The World War II section where Dulles played an active role in protecting Nazi war criminals and finding new gigs for them in Cold War intelligence was honestly a bit of a snooze. The same goes for the section on the Eisenhower era. But I really appreciated that long slow walk through the 1940s and '50s for the insight it afforded to the main event: The Kennedy years. I bought this book to learn more about Dulles's role in the assassination and I did not feel disappointed.
  
  This notion that we can never know what really happened with the whys and wherefores of the conspiracy to kill the president is completely misguided and wrong. Names like James Angleton, Howard Hunt, and most especially Allen Dulles have been right in front of us the whole time. Read this book if you'd like to know more.
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  Paul Conroy

  Fascinating look into the creation of the CIA and how it’s directors, especially the iconic Allen Dulles, fought covert wars abroad, assassinated foreign dignitaries, staged coups and how they eventually engaged in these activities at home in the US.
  tl;dr Allen Dulles orchestrated the death of President John F Kennedy.