by David Talbot
When the Bay of Pigs operation was under way and “the chips were down,” Dulles wrote, he was confident that JFK would be compelled to do the right thing and send in the awesome power of the U.S. military to rescue the invasion. That’s the way the CIA game was played: there was a certain amount of hoodwinking and massaging of White House anxieties, and then the president fell in line. But this time, the president, despite his youth and the collective browbeating of his gray-haired national security ministers, stood his ground. Kennedy said no to expanding an operation that he had felt all along was sordid. And the long reign of Allen Dulles came crashing down.
At least, that’s the way Dulles’s story is told in biographies and CIA histories. The truth is that Dulles’s reign went on, deeply cloaked, toward an even more catastrophic conclusion.
In the first days and weeks after his ouster, Dulles’s world caved in. Suddenly unmoored from the daily routines of power he had known ever since he was a budding young spy in the service of Woodrow Wilson, Dulles seemed “a very tragic man,” in the words of one CIA colleague. He shuffled around his Georgetown home, with his gout-ridden feet softly coffined in bedroom slippers. But Dulles’s “tragic” period did not last long. He soon began meeting with a surprising range of CIA officers—men from the top rungs of the agency, as well as agents from the field. They paraded in and out of the brick manor on Q Street, huddling with him in his book-lined study and on sunny days quietly chatting on his walled-in terrace. His day calendar was filled with yet more meetings at his favorite Washington retreats, the Alibi Club and the Metropolitan Club, where he dined with the same generals and national security wise men with whom he had done business at the CIA. It was, in fact, as if he had never left the spy agency.
Dulles would turn his Georgetown home into the center of an anti-Kennedy government in exile. As time went by, the Dulles circle became ever more disenchanted with JFK’s foreign policy, which they considered appeasement of the Communist enemy. Dulles grew bolder in his opposition. He met with a controversial Cuban exile leader named Paulino Sierra Martinez, a former henchman for the deposed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Sierra, whose anti-Castro activities were underwritten by the Mafia and U.S. corporations with a stake in Cuba, later fell under Secret Service suspicion in a conspiracy against President Kennedy. The topic of Sierra’s meeting with Dulles in April 1963 remains a mystery.
By October 1963, Dulles felt confident enough to speak out against Kennedy’s foreign policy in public, ignoring the Washington etiquette that deemed it bad form to criticize a president whom you recently had served. Dulles declared that the Kennedy presidency suffered from a “yearning to be loved by the rest of the world.” This “weakness” was not the mark of a global power, insisted Dulles. “I should much prefer to have people respect us than to try to make them love us.”
In the weeks leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the flurry of meetings at Dulles’s home intensified. Among the CIA men coming in and out of Q Street were several who later came under investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations and other probes for their possible connection to the president’s murder. And on the weekend of the assassination, Dulles hunkered down for unexplained reasons at a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia known as “the Farm,” despite the fact that he had been removed from the agency two years earlier. Such was the odd swirl of activity around the “retired” Dulles.
After Kennedy’s assassination, Dulles would again push himself into the Washington spotlight, lobbying President Lyndon Johnson to appoint him to the Warren Commission. Dulles was so actively involved in the official investigation of Kennedy’s murder that one observer remarked it should have been called the Dulles Commission. He worked carefully behind the scenes with his former CIA colleagues to steer the inquiry away from the agency itself and toward “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald.
How did a bitter political enemy of President Kennedy wind up playing a lead role in the official investigation into his death? It was just one more mystery in a lifetime full of enigmatic twists and turns. Just as puzzling is why the American press never troubled itself to explore this intriguing question.
Over half a century later, many questions about JFK’s violent end remain “unspeakable,” in the words of Kennedy biographer James W. Douglass—at least in the carefully controlled arena of media discourse. It is even more unthinkable in these circles to explore the suspicion that Allen Dulles himself—a towering pillar of the U.S. establishment—might have played a role in the epic crime against U.S. democracy that took place in Dallas. But this is just one of many taboo and top secret areas of Dulles’s life explored in this book.
The Allen Dulles story continues to haunt the country. Many of the practices that still provoke bouts of American soul-searching originated during Dulles’s formative rule at the CIA. Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, massive surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies—these were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign.
Dulles was capable of great personal cruelty, to his intimates as well as his enemies. Underneath his twinkly-eyed personality was an icy amorality. “Our faults did not often give us a sense of guilt,” remarked Eleanor Dulles, who followed her two brothers into the Washington arena. Allen was less troubled by guilt or self-doubt than any of his siblings. He liked to tell people—and it was almost a boast—that he was one of the few men in Washington who could send people to their deaths.
But Dulles was not a rash man; he was coldly calculating. As the chairman of cloak-and-dagger America, he would never initiate a high-stakes operation unless he felt he had the support of the principal members of his “board”—the Washington and Wall Street men of influence who quietly dominated the nation’s decision-making.
What follows is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar. This is a history of secret power in America.
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 plots led by generals to impose military rule. 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.
The Devil’s Chessboard seeks to shine a torch down the well of “deep politics,” as Peter Dale Scott—an important scholar of American power—has termed this underworld of unaccountable authority. Until we have a full reckoning of the Dulles era and its high crimes, the country cannot find its way forward.
In the course of researching this book, I came to know Joan Talley, one of the three children of Allen Dulles. When we met in her Santa Fe cottage, in a room cluttered with books and artifacts, Joan was nearing ninety and, after a long career as a Jungian therapist, devoting herself to editing the searingly intimate diaries of her mother. Our conversations at times took on a therapeutic character, as we wrestled with the painful legacy of her father and, more broadly, the American soul. In an effort to understand her family, and her own life, Joan had delved deeply into the historical literature on the Cold War and the CIA. She had read all about the coups and trench coat mayhem. “It seems we just went wild,” she told me. “And the CIA was
leading the way.”
But as she pored through her mother’s diaries, Joan also was seeking a deeper understanding of her father than mere history can provide. One afternoon, she invoked Jung’s Red Book, the master’s night journey into his own tortured soul. “Jung says you must embrace the dark, as well as the light, to understand life,” remarked Joan, sitting in the passenger seat as I drove her dusty Prius through New Mexico’s high-desert chaparral.
The next morning, we spoke again over the phone. Joan was still agitated by our conversations about her father the previous day. She was trying to make sense of how she could have been so oblivious to this violent rush of history as a younger woman, even when it roared right through her own living room.
“Life sweeps you along—you see people floating by. Everyone is so busy and in the moment. It’s only later that you realize what happened and how alarming it all was. You read books and you finally try to put it all together, and you don’t know what to believe.
“But it’s very important to understand it all—the dark and the light.”
Part I
1
The Double Agent
Allen Dulles went to war on November 9, 1942, crossing into neutral Switzerland from Vichy France, just minutes before the Nazis closed the border. He later told the story of his border crossing with pulse-racing, dramatic flair. But, in reality, it went surprisingly smoothly, especially considering the forty-nine-year-old Wall Street lawyer’s high international profile. After presenting his passport to the French gendarme at the border station near Geneva, Dulles paced the train platform while the policeman made a phone call to Vichy authorities. Then, after a hovering Gestapo agent conveniently disappeared, the gendarme obligingly waved Dulles through. It was almost as if Dulles was expected.
There was nothing undercover about Allen Dulles’s wartime exploits in Switzerland. Afterward, he made much of his espionage adventures, with a sympathetic press and then equally credulous biographers dutifully repeating his beguiling tales. But, in truth, there was little daring involved—for a very simple reason. Dulles was more in step with many Nazi leaders than he was with President Roosevelt. Dulles not only enjoyed a professional and social familiarity with many members of the Third Reich’s elite that predated the war; he shared many of these men’s postwar goals. While serving in his Swiss outpost, Dulles might have been encircled by Nazi forces, but he was also surrounded by old friends.
After crossing the border, Dulles wasted no time in settling into Bern, the scenic Swiss capital where he had begun his espionage career a quarter century earlier as a junior member of the U.S. legation during World War I. The medieval city—built on cliffs overlooking the glacial-green Aar River, as it flowed down from the white-capped Alpine peaks on the horizon—held a treasure of memories. During the earlier war, there had been embassy parties and rounds of tennis—with balls arriving in diplomatic pouches from back home, courtesy of his brother Foster. There was an international parade of mistresses—young secretaries from the consulates that filled the city’s diplomatic quarter as well as free-spirited women from the local art colony. He met his conquests for drinks and pleasure at the Bellevue Palace Hotel, the elegant Art Nouveau fortress that dominated the Old City’s skyline. Dulles affected the look of a dashing Continental cavalry officer in those days, with a waxed mustache, slim waist jacket, and high starched collar.
One of his affairs during the First World War had a brutal ending. She was a young Czech patriot who worked alongside Dulles in the U.S. legation offices. British agents concluded that she was using her position to pass information to exiled Czech leader Jan Masaryk as well as to the Germans. When the British confronted Dulles with their suspicions, the ambitious young diplomat knew he was in an awkward spot, and he quickly complied with their plans. One night Dulles took the woman to dinner, and afterward he strolled with her along the cobblestone streets to an agreed-upon location, where he handed her over to two British agents. She disappeared forever.
When Dulles returned to Bern in 1942 for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s World War II spy agency, he set up his base of operations in his residence—the ground-floor apartment of a handsomely renovated fourteenth-century mansion at 23 Herrengasse, near the city’s majestic cathedral. Dulles later insisted that he had carefully chosen the location with security in mind, since the street ended in a cul-de-sac. He prevailed upon municipal authorities to extinguish the lamplight outside his building, giving late-night visitors a measure of anonymity as they slipped in and out. Guests seeking more confidentiality could enter Dulles’s apartment from the rear, climbing an ancient flight of stone steps that rose steeply to his back terrace from the grape arbors and dark river below.
But all this cloak and dagger was a bit of a charade. As soon as Dulles showed up in Bern, his arrival was reported in one of Switzerland’s leading newspapers, which announced him—to the spy’s great delight—as “the personal representative of President Roosevelt.” This afforded Dulles a status that would be very useful as he pursued his various intrigues.
After arriving at 23 Herrengasse with such great fanfare, Dulles found himself under intense scrutiny. Although the newly arrived American spy had enjoyed long friendships with many in the enemy camp, each side trusted the other only up to a point. From across the street, Nazi agents kept close watch on the Dulles residence twenty-four hours a day. The Germans also infiltrated his staff—his cook turned out to be a spy and his janitor stole carbon copies of his documents out of his trash. Meanwhile, Swiss intelligence agents, who worked closely with their Nazi counterparts, eavesdropped on Dulles’s phone conversations. There was little that was secret about the American spy’s life in Bern.
None of this seemed to disturb Dulles, who wandered openly through the streets of Bern in a rumpled raincoat and a fedora cocked carelessly on the back of his head. He did not have a bodyguard and he did not carry a gun. He met openly with informers and double agents in cafés and on the city streets. “Too much secrecy can be self-defeating,” he observed.
This strategy of hiding in plain sight did not make much sense from an espionage point of view. And it confounded and angered Dulles’s counterparts in the local office of MI6, the British spy agency, who dismissed the American as a rank amateur. But Dulles was involved in something far more ambitious than mere spy games. He was running his own foreign policy.
William “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the OSS, originally wanted to station Dulles in London. But Dulles insisted on Bern and he prevailed. Donovan was a legend—a World War I combat hero and self-made Wall Street millionaire lawyer who had charmed FDR and outmaneuvered powerful rivals like J. Edgar Hoover to build the country’s first international intelligence agency. Undaunted by Washington bureaucracy, Donovan had recruited an impressively eclectic array of talent for his new spy agency—from Ivy League adventurers and society girls to safecrackers and professional killers. But Dulles, who moved in the same social circles as Donovan and competed aggressively with him on the tennis court, was not awed by his boss. He thought he could do a better job than Donovan of running the show. Dulles knew that the isolated splendor of Bern would afford him free rein to operate as he chose, with only tenuous supervision from back home.
Dulles also positioned himself in Bern because the Swiss capital was the center of wartime financial and political intrigue. Bern was an espionage bazaar, teeming with spies, double agents, informers, and peddlers of secrets. And, as Dulles knew, Switzerland was a financial haven for the Nazi war machine.
The Swiss demonstrated that they were masters of duplicity during the war. Banks in Zurich and Basel allowed the Nazis to stash the treasure they were looting from Europe in secret accounts, which Germany then used to buy the essential products from neutral countries that fueled the Third Reich—tungsten from Spain, oil from Romania, steel from Sweden, beef from Argentina. Swiss bankers promised the Allies that they would block Germany’s stolen assets, but all the while they reaped h
uge profits from their behind-the-scenes deals with the Nazi Reichsbank.
Dulles knew many of the central players in the secretive Swiss financial milieu because he and his brother had worked with them as clients or business partners before the war. Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers’ Wall Street law firm, was at the center of an intricate international network of banks, investment firms, and industrial conglomerates that rebuilt Germany after World War I. Foster, the law firm’s top executive, grew skilled at structuring the complex merry-go-round of transactions that funneled massive U.S. investments into German industrial giants like the IG Farben chemical conglomerate and Krupp Steel. The profits generated by these investments then flowed to France and Britain in the form of war reparations, and then back to the United States to pay off war loans.
Foster Dulles became so deeply enmeshed in the lucrative revitalization of Germany that he found it difficult to separate his firm’s interests from those of the rising economic and military power—even after Hitler consolidated control over 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. He donated money to America First, the campaign to keep the United States out of the gathering tempest in Europe, and helped sponsor a rally honoring Charles Lindbergh, the fair-haired aviation hero who had become enchanted by Hitler’s miraculous revival of Germany. Foster refused to shut down the Berlin office of Sullivan and Cromwell—whose attorneys were forced to sign their correspondence “Heil Hitler”—until his partners (including Allen), fearful of a public relations disaster, insisted he do so. When Foster finally gave in—at an extremely tense 1935 partners’ meeting in the firm’s lavish offices at 48 Wall Street—he broke down in tears.