The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the poisoning of America
v. 5 – Updated July 26, 2021
This interview is with David Talbot, the author of The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the poisoning of America
Author David Talbot | Brooklyn Public Library
BPLvideos | December 28, 2015
4m30:
They discuss the awful policies Dulles promoted, which we are still tolerating today post-911:
Idea that America is surrounded by dangerous outside threats and acting on this belief in a way which made things worse.
Torture
CIA black sites
Extra-legal assassinations / extra-judicial murder
Extraordinary rendition
Mind control experimentation!
Mass surveillance of private citizens
Subversion of even friendly governments
Talbot: “All of these things have their origins in Allen Dulles‘ reign of the CIA . . . ”
Overthrew democratic government of Iran. Put the Shah in power which radicalized Iran.
6m:
Their military coup in Guatemala resulted in killing fields of Guatemala. United Fruit was represented legally by the Dulles brothers (Allen and John), who ran Wall St. firm Sullivan & Cromwell.
Propaganda machine unleashed. Called the government “communist.” Decades of death squads.
(Note that Edward Bernays (author of Propaganda) was involved in the targeting of Guatemala. The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson includes a transcript of his interview with Bernays.)
Allen Dulles made the world more dangerous and increased hate towards America.
Overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo. The story of Lumumba’s attempted escape is very dramatic.
The author believes the CIA were afraid that JFK would have released Lumumba.
20m:
They hounded the land-reform promoting Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz for the rest of his life and he was murdered eventually. They had earlier humiliated him publicly by stripping him to his underwear.
Then the discussion turns to Cuba, Fidel Castro and efforts to assassinate him. I believe hew was connected to the other side of the elite pyramid, and part of the false dialectic Cold War game.
33m:
There is a significant discussion indicating the connections between Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung and Allen Dulles, who also lived in Switzerland. Dulles’ mistress and his wife were both patients of Jung.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
Jung was in contact with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) and provided valuable intelligence on the psychological condition of Hitler. Dulles referred to Jung as “Agent 488” and offered the following description of his service: “Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied Cause during the war, by seeing people who were connected somehow with the other side”. Jung’s service to the Allied cause through the OSS remained classified after the war.
Talbot says that Dulles had told his mistress about how he liked to see the expressions of his victims as he snapped their little necks.
He put his own son into MKULTRA experimentation.
35m
Discussion about Nazis. Dulles brothers started working with German bankers and industrialists after World War I.
John Foster Dulles was enamored of Hitler.
The author associates Dulles with the America First Campaign and people who wanted to keep America out of World War II. But I believe this war was obviously set up by banking firms who gave their support to Hitler, which is the basic truth indicated by the facts about Dulles– but the false left-right dialectic obscures this. There is information about Dulles in this regard in Carroll Quigley’s book Tragedy and Hope. Author Antony Sutton has also documented the Wall Street support of the Nazi regime, Wall Street support of the Soviet Union for many decades, and Wall Street support for FDR’s New Deal.
I’m putting the discussion into my own words. The Dulles side wanted to negotiate with Nazis towards the end of the war (which makes total sense if they were doing the same before the war) and didn’t want to obliterate Germany completely like the Stalin-supporting FDR. On the other hand, it seems to me that Hitler went a long way in getting German society obliterated, maybe that was his goal also.
The goal of the Dulles faction was to keep German power interests intact.
The fact that totalitarian ideologies such as national socialism, along with Nazi-supporting elites, survived the war and escaped war crimes trials doesn’t surprise me at all, but it does surprise me that people are so easily fooled by the false left-right paradigm and believe that national socialism is somehow the opposite and different from Bolshevik communism.
To me, it’s clear that the post-war order created by the disaster of World War II was the desired goal (a stage towards the ultimate goal) and that the major Western powers wanted to make full use of the results of the moral vacuum they created, including the results of totalitarian human experimentation, whether Nazi or Soviet, which they built on. Wars (and cold wars) provide great covers for atrocities.
38m
The author explains that Dulles often defied presidential orders and acted on what he thought was in the “best interests of himself and his clients, the power circles that he represented.” Yes, he represented the real governing power–as many others did also.
He cut a deal with some Nazi officers in Italy through “Operation Sunrise.”
40m
Angleton would open citizens’ mail. How close and cozy the CIA people were to the media. Warren Commission.
41m
Black sites. Dulles did that also. Soviet defectors etc. were tortured at black sites. Drugs.
42m
Subversion of friendly governments, France, etc. Attempted coup against de Gaulle.
45m
I don’t doubt at all that there was an organized, fake “right-wing” attack on Bill Clinton because in my view, it took the wrong direction to distract the public from the real scandals and truth about Clinton.
47m
He is proud of fellow Salon writer Glenn Greenwald’s dissection of the war on terror, etc.
48m
Discussion of how the regime changed in Washington with the death of FDR (his death is something to investigate). The New Deal people were ousted so the Dulles brothers’ support of the Nazis were not dealt with.
At the end of the Clinton presidency, the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act was passed. There are thousands of pages documenting unseemly communications between Nazi and American officials. Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi intelligence officer (who tortured Soviets etc.), negotiated with the Americans and offered to build a spy apparatus for them. He was incorporated into the post war government of Germany. Gehlen was very cozy with Dulles, who invited him to his clubs (Metropolitan and Chevy Chase clubs).
Talbot:
“When you see how many of the elements of the Nazi regime were not just salvaged but came back into power, we didn’t crush, as FDR wanted to, Hitler’s regime, so much as repurpose it.”
The Wikipedia article on Gehlen has the following external links:
1. “Disclosure” newsletter, Information promulgated by the U.S. National Archives & Records Administration
2. Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945–49 CIA declassified documents on the Gehlen Organization.
3. Reinhard Gehlen’s CIA file on the Internet Archive.
(Useful resources for related information)
In their post, Brasscheck.com also includes a 2013 talk on the Dulles brothers by Stephen Kinzer, author of “The Brothers.”
Stephen Kinzer “The Brothers”
Politics & Prose | October 3, 2013
10m
He discusses the background of the Dulles brothers. Their upbringing was permeated by Calvinist instruction and fishing.
Their grandfather had been Secretary of State in the 1890s, John Watson Foster. He was presiding when the government of the United States overthrew the government of Hawaii.
Kinzer makes the point that the family business of overthrowing governments was carried on into the 1950s by his two grandchildren.
Their uncle, John Lansing, was also Secretary of State during World War I.
He talks about their idea of Manifest Destiny and projecting American power.
The guests who came to dinner when they stayed in Washington as boys included: Andrew Carnegie, Grover Cleveland, Bernard Baruch, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft.
They became corporate lawyers who worked for the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell.
The firm’s specialty was pressuring small countries.
John Foster Dulles’ first assignment was to go to Guyana and get them to get rid of their tariff barrier on flour.
Another example was how he advised the U.S. government to send warships and interfere with the intentions of the liberals in Cuba to build up a domestically-based economy at the expense of American corporate investments.
Allen Dulles worked as a spymaster in Switzerland during both world wars. He worked as a spy for Sullivan & Cromwell–there was no U.S. intelligence agency.
He explains how Calvinism plays into their attitudes, that the world is divided between the forces of good and evil, and that Christians must go out in the world and fight evil and bring light. (Many other Christians would consider that good and evil is something that everyone wrestles with in their own lives and it is a matter of the will, so they would think twice about what kind of evil they end up imposing on other countries when trying to do good).
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company controlled the Iranian oil industry which the elected government nationalized in 1951. Their financial agent was the Schroeder Bank (see below). The Schroeder Bank was a client of the Dulles brothers and Allen Dulles sat on its Board of Directors.
Then also the government of Guatemala began a land reform program of requiring landowners who had a very large amount of land they were not using to sell that land to the government, which would distribute parcels of land to peasants. The biggest landowner was the United Fruit Company which was a major client of Sullivan & Cromwell. They also controlled two companies which owned the railroads and the electricity.
They didn’t want to consider that American interests were at fault. They just want to identify “bad people.” The two brothers came into power in 1953 carrying their grudge against these two–the Prime Minister of Iran and the President of Guatemala.
They didn’t wait for Eisenhower to be inaugurated before they were at work on these projects.
Based on current scholarship, the author says that it is now known that Eisenhower was enthusiastic about these covert operations. Apparently he believed strongly in covert action considering the effectiveness of “fake armies” and other ploys used in World War II.
John Foster Dulles couldn’t accept that France and Britain wanted to let Ho Chi Minh’s communists take over Vietnam and he walked out of a Geneva conference because he was completely isolated on this issue.
He also hated the neutralism of Indonesia’s president Sukarno, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt and of Aung San of Burma (Myanmar).
Dulles called this policy “profoundly immoral” but these countries just wanted to be left alone.
Dulles told Sukarno that “our policy is global” according to Kinzer. He says that the Dulles brothers were members of the Council on Foreign Relations which made foreign policy.
The author notes that the logo of the CFR’s magazine Foreign Affairs has the slogan “VBIQVE” (UBIQUE) which means “everywhere.”
The intervention in Indonesia led eventually to a million deaths because of the resulting conflict. Chaos in Congo because of what they did there also (and Guatemala).
JFK fired Allen Dulles because of the Bay of Pigs failure. The author thinks Dulles was starting to suffer from dementia by that point. (Note that Allen Dulles was a member of the Warren Commission which supposedly investigated the Kennedy assassination–even though he had been fired by Kennedy).
The author was told about this amazing painting by Diego Rivera about the overthrow of the Guatemalan government, and eventually learned that it was rolled up in storage at a Moscow museum.
The information in these interviews confirms my view that the Dulles brothers were following an agenda of world domination–of the elite circle they were a part of–and not a set of arbitrary agendas driven by circumstances, personal religious beliefs, emotions and attitudes.
Additional information on BIS and Schroeder
Quoting from Wikipedia:
Bank for International Settlements
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is an international financial institution owned by central banks that “fosters international monetary and financial cooperation and serves as a bank for central banks“. The BIS carries out its work through its meetings, programmes and through the Basel Process – hosting international groups pursuing global financial stability and facilitating their interaction. It also provides banking services, but only to central banks and other international organizations. It is based in Basel, Switzerland, with representative offices in Hong Kong and Mexico City.
Note the countries who founded it:
The BIS was established in 1930 by an intergovernmental agreement between Germany, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, the United States, and Switzerland. It opened its doors in Basel, Switzerland, on 17 May 1930.
As a purportedly apolitical organisation, the BIS was unable to prevent transactions that reflected contemporaneous geopolitical realities, but were also widely regarded as unconscionable. As a result of the policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany by the UK and France, in March 1939, the BIS was obliged to transfer 23 tons of gold it held, on behalf of Czechoslovakia, to the German Reichsbank, following the German annexation of Czechoslovakia.
At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the BIS Board of Directors – on which the main European central banks were represented – decided that the Bank should remain open, but that, for the duration of hostilities, no meetings of the Board of Directors were to take place and that the Bank should maintain a neutral stance in the conduct of its business. However, as the war dragged on evidence mounted that the BIS conducted operations that were helpful to the Germans. Also, throughout the war, the Allies accused the Nazis of looting and pleaded with the BIS not to accept gold from the Reichsbank in payment for prewar obligations linked to the Young Plan. This was to no avail as remelted gold was either confiscated from prisoners or seized in victory and thus acceptable as payment to the BIS. Operations conducted by the BIS were viewed with increasing suspicion from London and Washington. The fact that top level German industrialists and advisors sat on the BIS board seemed to provide ample evidence of how the BIS might be used by Hitler throughout the war, with the help of American, British and French banks. Between 1933 and 1945 the BIS board of directors included Walther Funk, a prominent Nazi official, and Emil Puhl responsible for processing dental gold looted from concentration camp victims, as well as Hermann Schmitz, the director of IG Farben, and Baron von Schroeder, the owner of the J.H. Stein Bank [de], all of whom were later convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity.
The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference recommended the “liquidation of the Bank for International Settlements at the earliest possible moment”. This resulted in the BIS being the subject of a disagreement between the U.S. and British delegations. The liquidation of the bank was supported by other European delegates, as well as Americans (including Harry Dexter White and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr.). Abolition was opposed by John Maynard Keynes, head of the British delegation.
Keynes went to Morgenthau hoping to prevent or postpone the dissolution, but the next day it was approved; the liquidation of the bank was never actually undertaken. In April 1945, the new U.S. president Harry S. Truman ended U.S. involvement in the scheme. The British government suspended the dissolution and the decision to liquidate the BIS was officially reversed in 1948.
Schröder figures prominently in the book by former Hoover Institution scholar Antony C. Sutton titled Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. As Sutton observes,
Schröder had organized the banking firm of J. Henry Schröder in London and J. Henry Schröder Banking Corporation in New York… in order to act as conduit for I.T.T. money funnelled to Heinrich Himmler’s SS organization in 1944, while World War II was in progress and the United States was at war with Germany.
After the war, there were attempts to conceal the financing of Nazi regime, some by the former American bankers and officials of the Allied military government, especially by blocking the investigation of the bank Bankhaus J.H. Stein based in Cologne, Germany. This bank, the so-called “bank of the cartel kings”, had been suspected to have served as a conduit for funding Heinrich Himmler’s SS through deposits by German industrial cartels.
Note on another powerful relative of Dulles
It is very strange how a Calvinist becomes a Catholic Cardinal:
Avery Dulles
Dulles was born in Auburn, New York, on August 24, 1918, the son of John Foster Dulles, the future U.S. Secretary of State (for whom Washington Dulles International Airport is named), and Janet Pomeroy Avery Dulles. His uncle was Director of Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles. Both his great-grandfather John W. Foster and great-uncle Robert Lansing also served as secretary of state. His paternal grandfather, Allen Macy Dulles, was a member of the faculty of Auburn Theological Seminary and published in the field of ecclesiology, to which his grandson would likewise devote scholarly attention as a Catholic.
Another note about Allen Dulles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Dulles
In 1921, while at the US Embassy in Istanbul, he helped expose the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery. Dulles unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the US State Department to publicly denounce the forgery.