This article appears in the October 13, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Documenting America’s Turn to the Dark Side
[Print version of this article]
Oct. 7—While ostensibly focused on U.S. history from the post-World War II period through the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, these two books, taken together, effectively write the prologue for the entirety of what the world is seeing of the U.S. today. That is because the United States went from a country which fought fascism during World War II, to one which (quietly, of course) adopted its principles in the years following. If there were one criticism of each of them, it would be that these books underemphasize the cui bono and the “British hand”—led by financial forces of The City in London, and Wall Street in the U.S.—in these events.
This policy shift had been desired by London from even before World War II had begun, but which had been continually opposed by American President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, although willing to aid in the defeat of the Nazis in Germany, Italy, and Japan, saw the post-war world from a very different perspective than did the financial powers. To fully appreciate the significance of this tension between presumed allies, it is necessary to read the book, As He Saw It, written by FDR’s son and confidant, Elliott Roosevelt, and published in 1946, which reports that FDR made clear to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that America was not fighting the war to re-establish the “18th-Century methods” of British imperialism throughout the world.
The American President favored the liberation of this subjugated majority of mankind through American-led economic development. To British imperialists (and their Wall Street co-thinkers), these words were every bit as repulsive as Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” Readers may need to remember that “fascism” is also known by the euphemism “corporatism,” acknowledging the source of its ideological and financing base in the international banking community. Possibly the best proof of this charge is the case of the U.S.-based banking house of Brown Brothers Harriman, which was carrying on financial relations with fascist Germany well after the U.S. entry into the war in 1941. Its relations finally had to be shut down under the U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942.
Allen Dulles and the Nazis
With that in mind, David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard goes through—with so much detail that even a “see no evil, hear no evil” American liberal cannot dispute it—what might be called the “unauthorized biography” of Allen W. Dulles, a man who single-mindedly represented the interests of the developing multi-national corporate community as a priority for his entire life.
Dulles—along with his brother John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State for a critical seven years (1953–1959)—came out of Sullivan & Cromwell, a “white shoe” law firm, which represented (some would say “protected”) the greater financial community from legal or other threats. As such, Allen Dulles got himself posted to neutral Switzerland during the war, from which post he oversaw (protected) the financial interests of major Hitler supporters (and Sullivan & Cromwell clients) such as ThyssenKrupp Steel Co. After the war ended, Dulles continued this treason by protecting unrepentant leadership of Hitler’s inner circle from prosecution by the Nuremburg Tribunal. He later facilitated the “relocation” of both men and money outside of Europe—to North and South America.
Much of this story was semi-public knowledge; Talbot’s genius was to assemble it into a coherent, dramatic, “chronicle of treason.”
Officially, Allen Dulles worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, formed by FDR in 1940 as the nation’s first intelligence service, the war-time predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Under the direction of Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the OSS quickly developed an “actions” division in addition to its primary intelligence-gathering function, which became known for daring missions during the war. In its covert actions, the OSS worked closely with the British MI6, a force which drew on centuries of history of clandestine service for “empire.”
While Roosevelt was President, the rogue (imperial-leaning) elements of the OSS were held in check, but became unmoored upon FDR’s untimely death and the dissolution of the OSS in 1945.
The CIA was established in 1947. In 1953, after 10 years of protecting Nazis and their assets, Allen Dulles became the third director of the CIA and held that post until 1961.
Talbot’s masterful production is that he pulled together all of this history—not told until then in any books, and “preferably” not told at all—showing how Dulles’ work in support of what could be called “international financial fascism” during the war was transposed seamlessly into his work at the CIA following the war. He paints Dulles, the person, as a vindictive iconoclast with almost psychopathic and certainly misogynistic tendencies, who kept up a public relationship with his extra-marital lover to the very end of his life.
Under Dulles’ guidance, the CIA—originally designed as an intelligence gathering organization to aid Executive Branch policy decision making—quickly developed a clandestine operations division, which acted extra-judicially in defense of the financial establishment, using the guise of Cold War “patriotism” as cover.
Under Dulles, the CIA helped (along with the British MI6) to depose the Prime Minister of Iran, then engineered the overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz. Each man had become a threat to the rule of corporate finance: Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and Árbenz had threatened to nationalize United Fruit Company. Both were leading multi-national corporations and proponents of corporate exploitation of developing countries, and each company had direct ties to Dulles and the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm.
JFK—From Cold Warrior to Peace President
And on it went, until 1961, when an electoral “upset” victory brought a young John Fitzgerald Kennedy into the White House as President. Counting on his youthful inexperience, Dulles had engineered[fn_1] the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, whose socialist revolutionaries had quickly offended both the mob and Wall Street by ending legal gambling and otherwise seizing control of other major offshore investments of Wall Street.
The otherwise implausible Bay of Pigs “invasion” was designed to box in the new President, forcing him to commit U.S. air power to an operation otherwise designed to fail. With this game of high-stakes international poker, the untested JFK was to be firmly forced into the CIA’s corner and into the CIA narrative that Wall Street’s enemies were America’s enemies—the corporatist (fascist) ideology of the expanding Cold War.
But JFK didn’t flinch. Although he had campaigned as a Cold Warrior against the even more conservative Richard Nixon, World War II veteran Kennedy had within him an inherent distaste for war, along with the courage to act on his convictions. He also had a like-thinking brother, Robert, as his Attorney General, and together they resisted and eventually reversed the Wall Street/CIA Cold War path the Establishment had envisioned for post-war America. After courageously taking responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy did the unthinkable—he publicly “outed” Allen Dulles’ leading role, under the lights of TV cameras. The gauntlet had been thrown down.
After publicly taking the blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK actually fired Dulles—the first and only President to fire a director of the CIA or the intelligence community. But the experience taught Kennedy, a quick learner, where his enemies lay, and what was behind their “forever war” agenda.
The genius of James Douglass’ book is that he went on to evaluate the succeeding, brief Kennedy Administration from that standpoint: The Bay of Pigs incident triggered the latent anti-Cold War impulses in Kennedy, and the following two short years were defined by a turn away from the war party’s agenda.
JFK went so far as to establish a back-channel discussion with Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev, and then another with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, both of whom he eventually came to trust, and who in turn came to trust him. The famous “peace speech” in June of 1963 came to be the President’s public raising of the Peace Flag, the foundations of which had been laid in these private discussions.[fn_2]
Having added his own research, Douglass additionally takes his readers step by step through the entirety of the “unspeakable” evidence-base, including a huge (if not yet complete) trove of recently declassified CIA files surrounding JFK’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963. After reading Douglass’ description of the event, including a parallel assassination plan in Chicago only days before Dallas—complete with another patsy, Thomas Arthur Vallee—even the most cynical of readers can do nothing but conclude that the “conspiracy” was real, and that treason has indeed prospered on and since that fateful day in Dallas.
Douglass portrays JFK’s path of conversion through the eyes and words of Father Thomas Merton, a Catholic priest and theologian in that Cold War era. It is from Merton’s writings that the term “unspeakable”—for JFK’s and America’s enemies—comes. During JFK’s foreshortened presidency, the Bay of Pigs invasion; his show-down with Wall Street and the steel industrialists; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the fight for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; and, most importantly, his fight against expanding the War in Vietnam, all brought Kennedy closer to the heart of this “unspeakable” (a better term for the “deep state”), which was finally forced to assassinate him, his brother Robert, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in order to emerge triumphant in the 1960s and beyond.
In the end, Douglass offers no false palliatives to comfort today’s “liberals,” ending his book with a quote attributed to Jackie Kennedy in the weeks after losing her husband. To an aide to Russian President Nikita Khrushchev, she is reported to have said: “My husband is dead. Now, peace is up to you.”
Her words should be taken to heart by all Americans. We now know the enemy. The question is: Who will join the fight for truth?
[fn_1]. As Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles was careful not to get directly tied to any of these operations. The man he set up to directly oversee the Bay of Pigs “invasion” and the U-2 spy plane reconnaissance, for example, was CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell. [back to text for fn_1]
[fn_2]. JFK biographer Sorenson noted that, not only was the Peace Speech published in Russia, but—despite the preceding 15 years of continuous jamming of Voice of America—Russians heard the speech live, with only one section censored. From then on, the Soviets ceased jamming Voice of America’s broadcasts entirely. Douglass, p. 45, citing Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (1965), p. 731. [back to text for fn_2]
