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

[Ichingcarpenter]

A NEW BIOGRAPHY TRACES THE PATHOLOGY OF ALLEN DULLES AND HIS APPALLING CABAL


The Safari Club.

Dulles — the Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served as CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency history — died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived. And nothing about it appears in The Devil’s Chessboard. But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu.

Any normal person would likely hear the Safari Club saga as a frightening story of totally unaccountable power. But if there’s one thing to take away from The Devil’s Chessboard, it’s this: Allen Dulles would have seen it differently — as an inspiring tale of hope and redemption.

Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”

In February 2002, Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until September 1, 2001, traveled to Washington, D.C.

While there, Turki, who’d graduated from Georgetown University in the same class as Bill Clinton, delivered a speech at his alma mater that included an unexpected history lesson:

In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.....


https://theintercept.com/2015/11/02/the-deepest-state-the-safari-club-allen-dulles-and-the-devils-chessboard/

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. Sneak Peek on the book: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

New Book On CIA Master-Plotter Dulles, Sneak Peek: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3


Part 1

http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/10/12/new-book-on-cia-master-plotter-dulles-sneak-peek-part-1/

Part 2

http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/10/13/new-book-on-cia-master-plotter-dulles-sneak-peek-part-2/


Part 3


http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/10/14/new-book-on-cia-master-plotter-dulles-sneak-peek-part-3/

[BlueMTexpat]

2. I'm really looking forward to

reading this.

A good trilogy (if a trilogy can be written by different authors):

- Family of Secrets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_of_Secrets

- JFK and the Unspeakable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_and_the_Unspeakable

and this one.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. Follow the white rabbit if you want the truth

?w=490

[BlueMTexpat]

24. Nice graphic.

But I am one who remembers the 1950s very well, especially the "Cold War" mentality and "Commie" hatred. I was even part of something called the "Ground Observer Corps" which shows just how damned skittish people were.

So I have always found it inconceivable that a former US military man who defected to Russia in those years was allowed back into the US with his Russian wife and family to resume a "normal" life without some sort of penalty. If nothing else, this indicates that some very powerful people wanted it that way.

For whatever reason.

[bmyrab]

21. Totally agree that this book, along with "JFK and the Unspeakable," are the best

Appreciate the recommendation on "Family of Secrets." I'll read it.

Talbot's other book "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years" is also excellent.
But his latest is better.

The NY Times and Washington Post refuse to review "The Devil's Chessboard" because it incriminates them.

[Judi Lynn]

22. Fascinating bit of info. on these "news"papers. Thanks. Welcome to D.U. n/t

[BlueMTexpat]

23. Thanks for the recs! eom

[EdwardBernays]

4. If only Americans would bother to learn history

'It includes detailed reexaminations of Dulles’s most notorious failures, such as the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the nightmarish mind control program MK-ULTRA, as well as his most notorious “successes,” the CIA’s overthrow of democratic governments in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954. Talbot notes that an internal CIA account of the Iran coup fairly glowed with joy: “It was a day that never should have ended. For it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it.” According to a participant in an Oval Office briefing for President Eisenhower, Dulles’s brother John Foster, then secretary of state, “seemed to be purring like a giant cat.”'

Imagine what America could be if Americans were taught was America has been and is.

[tech3149]

5. Could you imagine what it would be like

if the History Channel actually programmed something resembling history? They could start off with Stone's Untold History of the United States, throw in some Adam Curtis documentaries, get some actual historians to present a view of history with like "factual" documentation?
Damn! That would be so cool!
Anyone who doesn't recognize the dastardly influence of the Dulles brothers is sadly lacking in their education.

[EdwardBernays]

6. You can probably guess from my username

that I'm a big AC fan...

If I was President Century of the Self would be part of the High School curriculum...

I am just saddened by the ignorance of most Americans... especially when American history is so easy to find online these days... :/

[Nitram]

7. The problem with online "history" is that there are so many...

...different versions, with wildly differing accounts and conclusions. Too many people find one that confirms what they already believe and stop looking.

[EdwardBernays]

8. I don't disagree

and yet what other options are there?

[Nitram]

9. Books, magazines and newspapers where you can thoroughly vet the authors.

And triangulate the truth from multiple reliable sources when there are widely different points of view.

[EdwardBernays]

10. ehhh

There's a LOT of crap in all of those...

I don't find them any more reliable as a rule...

[Nitram]

16. A lot of crap in ALL THOSE?

I guess you've never read good history in your life. Something to look forward to. Meanwhile, the conspiracy world is way more fun and scary.

[EdwardBernays]

17. Maybe you misunderstood

I don't mean a lot of crap in ALL books, but there's LOTS of books with extremely dubious information in them...

There was a guy named Christopher Story, who made ENDLESS crazy claims in his writings.. those claims were - for years - on wikipedia... I checked source and they all led back to a book called, "Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad". I tracked down a copy of said book and guess what: no references. It's just all fiction, "sold" as fact. (There's even a review that mentions this on Amazon - wish that had been the case when I told wikipedia, because they had an editor who kept changing my revisions, who claimed he owned a copy and it was full of footnotes! - don't trust wikipedia without checking sources, people.)

Here's a taste of the garbage Story wrote:

"In addition, we are independently aware from OTHER information (some being FIRST HAND to this Editor) that the intelligence referencing the biofeedback equipment, the Great Dark Lords, the inoperative satellite, the defective artillery piece, and the Japanese spy computer, as well as the elaborate Halliburton scamming operations, is all correct. Therefore, any belated spoiling attempt to muddy the waters by going off on a ‘remote viewing’ tangent, can be interpreted with confidence as a makeshift operation to discredit the information. Sorry, folks, it’s too late."

Now wikipedia trusted that this guy was a special advisor to the British Government, because a book said it. David Icke also has published books about the Queen being controlled by an interdimensional lizard.

So my point wasn't that all books are crap, but that there's ENDLESS crap books.

You have to work - no matter the medium - to figure out what's probably true and what's probably not true.

Hope that clears it up.

[Nitram]

18. Sorry, I did misunderstand.

My point is just that it is often easier to vet the reliability of the author of a book than a poster on a web site.

[EdwardBernays]

19. absolutely!

I just think - what I meant originally - is that considering how easy it is to say, google the history of the CIA, people - especially Americans - would, or maybe should, be more aware of the history of their country... people get sooooo up in arms about poor people and food stamps, but have no problem with their taxes going to setting up secret police and death squads in other countries... :/

[tech3149]

11. There are no "different" versions of facts

You might be able to interpret facts differently based on ideological blindness but facts are facts.

[bemildred]

12. The thing to understand about the Dulles brothers is that they are very much from the same mould

as guys like Woodrow Wilson and G. H. W. Bush.

[Ichingcarpenter]

13. GHW Bush was working for Dulles brothers

through his CIA front group Zapata oil


January 8, 2007

NEW YORK--Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.


Zapata Corporation split in 1959 into independent companies Zapata Petroleum and Zapata Off-Shore, headed by Bush, who moved his offices from Midland to Houston. In 1960, Bush created a new company, Perforaciones Marinas del Golfo (Permargo) with Edwin Pauley of Pan American Petroleum. Pauley is alleged to have had close ties to Allen Dulles. During the Second World War Pauley aided the Dulles brothers former clients in shifting Nazi assets out of Europe.


According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an active wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.

While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.

The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.

Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that “I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.

Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” and the other as “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

When this document was first uncovered in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."

When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride approached the CIA in 1988, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.

It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.

"After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good."

In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a minor yet significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, “Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.”

This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford's alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.

Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush's friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.

Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an “investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE.” These nautical names - 'Saline' and 'Briny' - or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion 'Wave' - are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.

George H.W. Bush's own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.

The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, “Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe.”

The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database - and only just noticed by an independent researcher.

Click the following to view original supporting documents: [1] [2] [3]



http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbushG.htm
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/4540

[bemildred]

14. Indeed. nt

[Octafish]

15. You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

David Talbot talks with Mother Jones about the book we talked about on DU in 2013:



You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

In a new book, David Talbot makes the case that the CIA head under Eisenhower and Kennedy may have been a psychopath.

—By Aaron Wiener
MotherJones | Sat Oct. 10, 2015

"What follows," David Talbot boasts in the prologue to his new book The Devil's Chessboard, "is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar." Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and author of the Kennedy clan study Brothers, doesn't deal in subtlety in his biography of Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.

Mother Jones chatted with Talbot about the reporting that went into his 704-page doorstop, the controversy he invited with his discussion of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories, and the parallels he sees in today's government intelligence overreach.

SNIP...

MJ: Is that why you chose not to include much about Dulles' childhood or his internal strife or the other types of things that tend to dominate biographies?

DT: I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles's biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn't explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.

They've done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him "the Shark." His favorite word was whether you were "useful" to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.

There's a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld—who was sitting at Dulles's knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.

MJ: I'm interested to hear you mention Rumsfeld. Do you think the Bush years compared in ruthlessness or secrecy to what was going on under Dulles?

DT: Definitely. That same kind of dynamic was revived or in some ways expanded after 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration. Those guys very much were in keeping with the sort of Dulles ethic, that of complete ruthlessness. It's this feeling of unaccountability, that democratic sanctions and regulations don't make sense in today's ruthless world.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/book-review-devils-chessboard-david-talbot

A real sweetheart for democracy. Not.

[enough]

20. Reading the book now, and I am tempted to say: If you only read ONE book this year about

20th century American/Global history, read this one.

The only problem is that, as a US citizen, it is almost unbearable to read. The sense of shame and impotent rage is almost too much.

Having been born in 1944, to politically aware parents, I already knew something about a lot of this stuff, but following the entire narrative from WWI forward is truly overwhelming. I wish I could say I find something encouraging about it, but I don't.

[yurbud]

25. even some of my progressive friends don't realize how bad the history is...

[villager]

26. They don't. Or can't. Because it would challenge their comfortable progressivism too much

...to realize the system that contains, that houses, that "progressivism" has been beyond redemption for quite some time...

[yurbud]

29. even Bernie doesn't seem to question WHAT we are doing in the Middle East only HOW we are doing it

and demanding that the Saudis do more is like demanding Jeffrey Dahmer teach people to be vegetarians.

[snagglepuss]

27. bkmd

[IDemo]

28. I have it on hold from the local library n/t

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

30. Here's The Corbett Report from August this year on Dulles...

...
https://m.

[Ichingcarpenter]

31. Interview with author David Talbot on "The Devil's Chessboard"

Last edited Wed Dec 23, 2015, 08:21 AM - Edit history (2)

Its funny we can only get this stuff on the internet and never on corporate TV
LOL ...........

Published on Nov 22, 2015
Combined segments from an interview with JFK researcher and author David Talbot performed by Len Osanic and Jim DiEugenio on Black Op Radio. This version of the interview is somewhat edited and shortened.

This is the complete interview either one is good

What is interesting he got hold of Dulles' Day planner on who, what, when and where Dulles was meeting with. ........

[bobthedrummer]

32. I missed this thread when OP hit Ichingcarpenter-K&R Have you read Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers"?

Fwiw, here is a link to a related topic

Chapter 21-Omaha
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016139460

[Judi Lynn]

33. From the Shadows of the Cold War: the Rise of the CIA

December 28, 2015
From the Shadows of the Cold War: the Rise of the CIA

by Ben Terrall

Veteran journalist David Talbot, founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon, doesn’t skim over the surfaces of things. With the help of his long-time associate and ace researcher Karen Croft, he digs deep and keeps digging. Season of the Witch, his history of San Francisco in the late 1960s-early ’80s, is a must-read for anyone interested in the aftermath of the ’60s Bay Area counter-culture.

Talbot’s new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, is equally essential reading, especially for readers with even a passing interest in post-WW2 U.S. foreign policy.

The longest running director of the CIA (1952-1961), Dulles helped coordinate extremely bloody coups throughout the world. Not surprisingly, he comes off as a nasty piece of work. He and his brother John Foster Dulles both worked with the prestigious Wall Street firm Sullivan and Cromwell, which made a fortune representing cartels that were part of the Nazi war machine (John Foster Dulles went on to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State). The Dulles brothers were quite cozy with Nazi higher ups in the ’30s and remained staunch apologists for Hitler well into the the ’40s.

Readers of Christopher Simpson’s excellent histories Blowback and The Splendid Blond Beast, which Talbot cites extensively, will be familiar with much of the history of U.S. intelligence recruitment of Nazis but Talbot adds plenty of interesting, albeit horrific, information. Talbot writes, “Like many convicted Nazi criminals in the early Cold War years, a number of the Nuremberg defendants sentenced to prison were later the beneficiaries of politically motivated interventions and early releases; few of the many thousand convicted Nazis were still in prison after 1953. A number of those interventions on behalf of fortunate war criminals could be traced to the quiet stratagems of Allen Dulles.”

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/28/from-the-shadows-of-the-cold-war-the-rise-of-the-cia/

[robertpaulsen]

34. Wonderful comprehensive review by Jim DiEugenio

DiEugenio (who I believe has posted on DU) has read this book twice and he calls The Devil's Chessboard "a milestone in the field."

http://www.ctka.net/2015/TalbotDulles.html