FROM 2015: Diplomat, spy, Wall Street lawyer, philanderer, government overthrow specialist, Nazi collaborator, MKULTRA overlord, presidential assassin.
This week on the Corbett Report podcast: meet Allen Dulles, fascist spymaster.
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Full transcript below.
REPORTER: Mr. Dulles, I know you’ve heard this many times, that there are people who say that we—with regard to the CIA—are waging a secret war with an invisible government.
ALLEN DULLES: We are obviously engaged in many facets of what is generally called “the Cold War,” [in] which the Communist policy is forced upon us. No use denying that. That’s a fact of life.
But may I say this, and I do it with all solemnity: at no time has the CIA engaged in any political activity or any intelligence activity that was not approved at the highest level.
SOURCE: CIA Covert Action in Iran, Vietnam, Laos, the Congo, Cuba, and Guatemala: Documentary Film (1965) (VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE)
JAMES CORBETT: But what is the “highest” level of power? That might be the operative question.
Well, welcome to the program, folks, this is James Corbett of corbettreport.com, coming to you on August 30th, 2015, with Episode 307 of The Corbett Report podcast, “Meet Allen Dulles: Fascist Spymaster.” And the real question might be: who was Allen Dulles? A diplomat, a lawyer, a spymaster, a serial philanderer? Well, all of those things, I think, quite famously, but many shadier things besides as we will start to explore in this edition of the podcast.
And yes, if we want to answer that question of who Allen Dulles was, I think we have to go beyond just the titles and the roles that he played in the overt political sphere and look more at that “higher level of power” that he refers to and that he was under as Director of Central Intelligence. And I think we can see at least a glimpse into what that higher level of power is—the real head of the secret government, as it were—by looking at Dulles himself in his own biography, where he perfectly represents the combination of Wall Street lawyer and American intelligence that formed the nucleus of the CIA, at least there in its early years. People these days talk about a group like Kroll being the kind of “CIA of Wall Street.” Well, the CIA was the CIA for Wall Street long before then, and Dulles represents that perfectly in his biography, as we shall see.
Image: Allen Dulles (From the Public Domain)
But I think one good way of framing this whole idea and understanding who Dulles really was is to look even at the most mainstream of mainstream commentators on Dulles and his legacy in our current day and age. For example, Stephen Kinzer, who recently wrote a book about the Dulles brothers and their effect on shaping American foreign policy and really the overt and covert foreign policy of the United States in the 1950s when they reigned simultaneously as Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, and John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, having a remarkable degree of power that they wielded very much for their own personal benefit and the benefit of their cronies—again, as we shall see. But Stephen Kinzer—again, a very mainstream commentator, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and writer of mainstream biographies—he, I think, encapsulates this quite well when he says that “Allen Dulles was the ambassador of the secret government to the overt government.” Which I think is a good way of putting it. I think that is one of the main roles that he played there in the 1950s as Director of Central Intelligence.
But then again, we don’t want to rely too much on the mainstream commentators for the Allen Dulles biography or the real meaning of the Dulles legacy because . . . well, they tend to say things like this:
PETER GROSE: The notion of the CIA as a secret government or as a rogue elephant really is not borne out by the histories that we can now see as documents are released. The political leadership—first, Harry Truman and the Truman administration, where it all got started, remember, then Eisenhower and his administration, Kennedy, etc., etc.—the political leadership has always called the tune for what the agency [CIA] would do. If sometimes enthusiasts within the agency tried to get away with something, as they did, they were dealt with with relative promptness.
I think Allen Dulles has to be given the credit for establishing that tradition of responsible, relatively competent actions and mechanisms to carry out government policy.
SOURCE: Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Interview with Peter Grose)
CORBETT: Yes, mainstream commentary indeed. Well, I will put a link in the show notes to that video so you can watch the rest of that interview yourself if you so desire. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but I will say that I will put it as a little homework assignment for you guys out there to find out who that was and more specifically what he did between 1984 and 1993. The man in the clip, what did he do between 1984 and 1993 and how might that have affected or influenced what he says or doesn’t say in that clip and in his writing generally? The first Corbett Report member to report back with who that man is and what he did between 1984 and 1993, the first Corbett Report member to leave that answer in the comments for this podcast at corbettreport.com will win a free Corbett Report DVD of their choosing.
Alright, let’s move on. Obviously, we can’t rely on the mainstream commentators to give us any sort of real insight into the Dulles brothers or Allen Dulles specifically. So, in order to find out more about Allen Dulles and what he was really up to, we will have to roll up our sleeves—metaphorically, as the case may be—and get to work ourselves. We’re going to start by looking at Allen Dulles’ own book, The Craft of Intelligence by Allen Dulles, which, yes, I have read for you so you don’t have to do it yourselves. It’s not particularly interesting or ground-breaking. It’s more a sort of overview of the craft of spying and the history of spying and what those damn Russkies are doing and things like that. So, it’s not all that insightful from that perspective, but there are some little nuggets in here.
Well, why not get the story of the ass from the ass’ mouth, as it were? We’re going to read from the introduction here of this book—or the preface, actually—where Allen Dulles is writing about his early life:
My interest in world affairs started early; in fact, it goes back to my childhood days. I was brought up on the stories of my paternal grandfather’s voyage of 131 days in a sailing vessel from Boston to Madras, India, where he was a missionary. He was almost shipwrecked on the way. In my youth, I was often in Washington with my maternal grandparents. My grandfather, John W. Foster, had been Secretary of State in 1892 under President Harrison. After serving in the Civil War he had become a general and had later been American minister to Mexico, to Russia and then to Spain. My mother had spent much of her youth in the capitals of these countries, my father had studied abroad. I grew up in the atmosphere of family debates on what was going on in the world.
My earliest recollections are of the Spanish and Boer Wars. In 1901, at the age of eight, I was an avid listener as my grandfather and his son-in-law, Robert Lansing, who was to become Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson, hotly discussed the merits of the British and Boer causes. I wrote out my own views—vigorous and misspelled—which were discovered by my elders and published as a little booklet; it became a “best seller” in the Washington area. I was for the “underdog.”
After graduating from college a few months before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, sharing the general ignorance about the dramatic events that lay ahead, I worked my way around the world, teaching school in India and then China, and traveling widely in the Far East. I returned to the United States in 1915; and a year before our entry into the war, I became a member of the diplomatic service.
During the next ten years I served in a series of fascinating posts: first in Austria-Hungary, where in 1916—17 I saw the beginnings of the breakup of the Hapsburg monarchy; then in Switzerland during the war days, I gathered intelligence on what was going on behind the fighting front in Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Balkans. I was, in fact, an intelligence officer rather than a diplomat. Assigned to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 for the Versailles Treaty negotiations, I helped draw the frontiers of the new Czechoslovakia, worked on the problems created for the west by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and helped on the peace settlement in Central Europe. When the Conference closed, I was one of those who opened our first postwar mission in Berlin in 1920, and after a tour of duty at Constantinople I served four years as Chief of the Near East Division of the State Department.
By that time, 1926, although I had still not exhausted my curiosity about the world, I had exhausted my exchequer and turned to the practice of the law with the New York law firm of which my brother was the senior partner. This practice was interrupted for periods of government service in the late twenties and early thirties as legal adviser to our delegations at the League of Nations conferences on arms limitations. In connection with this work I met Hitler, Mussolini, Litvinov and the leaders of Britain and France.
SOURCE: The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World by Allen Dulles
CORBETT: Well, that at least gives us some of the early background of Allen Dulles, and let’s see what it is that we can glean from this. First of all, he mentions that he was attending the 1919 Paris Peace Treaty/Versailles Treaty negotiations for the American delegation, and specifically in his role, as he puts it, as an intelligence officer, not a diplomat. The “diplomat” being really the cover for the works that he was doing first in Austria/Hungary during the war and then in Paris as part of the “peace delegation.”
But attentive listeners—and I’m sure Corbett Reporteers will already know that, of course—the 1919 Versailles Treaty negotiations saw a cadre of people giving birth to what was The Royal Institute of International Affairs and what was to become its sister organization in the United States, the Council on Foreign Relations. And the question is: was Allen Dulles tied in with that group? And did he have relations with the Council on Foreign Relations? Well, you bet your life he did!
We can glean that from a completely different book. This is of course The Shadows of Power by our good friend James Perloff, who we’ve interviewed a number of times here on the podcast, including specifically about this book. And on page 104 he talks a little bit about Allen Dulles’ brother John Foster Dulles’ connections to the Council on Foreign Relations and also Allen Dulles’ own connections.
Winding up as Secretary of State was John Foster Dulles. Dulles had been one of Woodrow Wilson’s young proteges at the Paris Peace Conference. A founding member of the CFR, he had contributed articles to Foreign Affairs since its first issue. He was an in-law of the Rockefellers, and chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. He was also board chairman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his choice for president of that body had been Alger Hiss. An inveterate internationalist, he had been a delegate to the founding UN conference. Also a member of Truman’s State Department, he had none of the earmarks one would expect of a Republican. Nevertheless, before the election, he began to parrot conservative slogans, just as Eisenhower did. So great was the disparity between Dulles’ words and his personal reality that one of his biographies was entitled The Actor.
[. . .]
For CIA Director, Ike selected Allen Dulles, John Foster’s brother. He, too, had been at the Paris Peace Conference. He joined the CFR in 1926 and later became its President.
SOURCE: The Shadows of Power by James Perloff
CORBETT: Alright, interesting little nuggets there. Thank you, James Perloff. So, let’s step back a moment. What do we have so far?
Elite political pedigree including an uncle and a grandfather, both of whom were Secretaries of State, and hobnobbing in his youth via his family connections with people like Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Carnegie? Check.
Rockefeller in-law by way of his brother? Check.
Globalist CFR jet-setting stooge? Check.
Part of the invisible government’s secret intelligence apparatus? Check.
Wall Street lawyer? Check.
This is an interesting start, but what does this add up to, you’re saying to yourself. So there was another insider, crony-connected, political elite person within part of the intelligence apparatus half a century ago (or more at this point). So what? Who cares? What does this have to do with us here today?
STEPHEN KINZER: All of the oil in Iran, thanks to a corrupt deal that had been reached with a former monarch, was 100% owned by one company and that company was British and owned mainly by the British government. What it meant was that Britain, through the ownership of this one company, controlled all the discovery, all the refining, all the production and all the sales of all the oil in Iran.
In the period after World War II, there was a great popular sentiment in Iran: “Let’s nationalize our oil industry! Let’s take it back from this British company!” And the parliament passed a law to that effect, unanimously, and the elected leader who was charged to carry out this law was Mohammad Mosaddegh. So, Mosaddegh became the Prime Minister of Iran who was leading the nationalistic campaign to take back control of the Iranian oil industry.
That got the British hugely upset. Through a long series of machinations, they brought the Americans into the project, and in the summer of 1953 the CIA sent an agent into Iran who, in the space of just a few weeks, threw the country in chaos and secured the overthrow of the democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh.
SOURCE: Overthrowing Governments 101, CIA Coups
MICHAEL CARROLL: Guatemala, genuine banana republic, is dominated by a giant American company. United Fruit not only controls the fruit industry but also the railroads, the telephone system and even the delivery of mail. Newly elected President Jacobo Árbenz promises agrarian reform and to break United Fruits’ monopoly. United Fruit appeals to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, at one time the company’s legal counsel. He agrees to help and rid Guatemala of a President he considers communist. His brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles—a United Fruits stockholder and once a member of its Board of Directors—is given the go-ahead.
The CIA gives its plan the code name Operation Success. The coup attempt will depend on a handful of soldiers, a small air force and the massive use of psychological warfare.
SOURCE: Spies “Diplomacy – CIA Style”: Guatemala
NARRATOR: September 1946. It’s been little more than a year since former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen began working secretly for the United States. By now, former Nazi scientists and engineers have also been brought to the US and put on the government payroll. It’s a top-secret operation run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the code name “Paperclip.”
SOURCE: CIA and the nazis documentary
NARRATOR: In the wake of World War II, the US government is engaged in a large number of secret medical experiments designed to help win the Cold War. Developing techniques for mind control to create a so-called “Manchurian Candidate.”
SOURCE: CIA Mind Control
ALAN W. SCHEFLIN: The Director of Central Intelligence in April of 1953, Allen Dulles, gave a talk in which he said that we were in a battle for control of men’s minds—that’s his term—and that we were losing the battle.
NARRATOR: Dulles wastes no time in signing a secret executive order creating Project MKULTRA. The goal: to leave no stone unturned in the area of mind and behaviour control.
SOURCE: America’s Secret War – MKULTRA Mind Control
MICHAEL CARROLL: Allen Dulles pinpoints Cuba for his most ambitious attempt to eliminate a foreign leader: Fidel Castro. Castro nationalizes American property in Cuba and offers to pay for it with nearly worthless Cuban bonds. The US rejects his offer. Castro refuses to negotiate.
In Guatemala, the CIA trains a Cuban exile force of 1,500 men. This tiny army, the 2506 Brigade, is expected to invade Cuba, hold the beach head for 72 hours and wait for a popular uprising against Castro. Success will depend on American air support.
April 17th [1961] the invasion force reaches its destination: the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban people do not rise up against Castro as expected. The Cuban army does not defect. Outnumbered and outgunned, Brigade 2506 is doomed.
SOURCE: Spies “Diplomacy – CIA Style”: Cuba
CORBETT: Yes, I think we can see how this “ancient history” has very real real-world relevance even to this very day, as the effects of those operations continue to spill forth across the headlines. And just as the 1919 Paris “peace” conference literally drew and redrew the lines on the map over which wars are currently raging, so, too, did the Machiavellian machinations of Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence in the 1950s leave scars on the earth which are still being felt—and picked at—even to this very day.
So, in order to even begin encompassing a career as expansive and infamous as Allen Dulles’—and we will only be able to scratch the surface of it today—let’s turn to an article from 2005 by Cory Panshin entitled “Allen Dulles, the Nazis, and the CIA,” where he notes:
Dulles entered the diplomatic service after college and served as a State Department delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which brought a formal end to World War I. The Versailles Treaty which came out of this conference included a provision making it illegal to sell arms to Germany. This displeased the powerful DuPont family, and they put pressure on the delegates to allow them to opt out. It was Allen Dulles who finally gave them the assurances they wanted that their transactions with Germany would be “winked at.”
Dulles remained a diplomat through the early 1920’s [sic], spending part of that time in Berlin. However, he left government service in 1926 for the greener pastures of private business, becoming a Wall Street lawyer with the same firm as his older brother, John Foster Dulles.
[. . .]
He would become the lawyer for the Thyssens’ Rotterdam bank and would also represent other German firms, including I.G. Farben.
However, there was a serpent in this businessmen’s Eden, and its name was Adolph Hitler. August Thyssen’s son and successor, Fritz Thyssen, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and had been funding the Nazi Party since 1923. Other German industrialists would do the same. It is hard to say to what extent the American investors shared Thyssen’s enthusiasm, though it seems likely that most of them were swayed less by ideology than by the prospect that Hitler would be good for business. Either way, the outcome was that many wealthy and powerful Americans wound up supporting a regime that would ultimately become their own nation’s enemy, and investing in the very firms that would provide the core of that regime’s military machine.
Early in 1933, both Dulles brother attended a meeting in Germany where German industrialists agreed to back Hitler’s bid for power in exchange for his pledge to break the German unions. A few months later, John Foster Dulles negotiated a deal with Hitler’s economics minister whereby all German trade with the United States would be coordinated through a syndicate headed by Averell Harriman’s cousin. With the Nazis enforcing a favorable climate for business, the profits for Thyssen and other companies soared, and the Union Banking Corporation increasingly became a Nazi money-laundering machine. In 1934, George Herbert Walker placed Prescott Bush on Union Bank’s board of directors, and Bush and Harriman also began to use the bank as the basis for a complex and deceptive system of holding companies.
The Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, which Harriman and Walker had controlled since 1920, had a particularly high degree of Nazi involvement in its operations. In 1934, a congressional investigation revealed it to have become a front for I.G. Farben’s spying, propaganda, and bribery on behalf of the German government. Rather than advising Walker and Harriman to divest themselves of these tainted assets, Prescott Bush hired Allen Dulles to help conceal them. From 1937 on, the Dulles brothers would serve Bush and Harriman in all their covert dealings with Nazi firms. They also performed similar cloaking services for others, like the Rockefellers.
SOURCE: Allen Dulles, the Nazis, and the CIA
CORBETT: It’s an extensive article. I suggest that you do read the entire article for more detail on those various overlapping business interests and how they come together in that nexus of the Dulles brothers helping to perform the cloaking operations for the American support for the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s. A very, very important and interesting story and a detailed one.
But I hope that at the very least you’re starting to get the point that the Dulles brothers—and Allen Dulles, of course, specifically—represented in a very real sense “fascism” in the Mussolini definition: the nexus of corporate and state power. That’s exactly what is represented by these Wall Street lawyers wielding all of their influence over the banking and finance operations that were then later rolled into the overt and covert foreign policy of the United States when these brothers reached the highest ranks of foreign policy power in the United States, more on which in a moment.
But first, let’s turn back to the story, as we continue to develop this, of Dulles before the CIA in 1953.
So, in the 1940s Dulles found himself working for Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS, which was the forerunner organization to the CIA. He was stationed in Bern, Switzerland, under the cover of Assistant to the US Ambassador, where, according to Robert Crowley, who later became the Assistant Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA, he became an initiate of the Night of Malta. After the war ended, Dulles became instrumental in launching Operation Paperclip with the help of Nazi spymaster Reinhard Galen. And this history should be familiar to Corbett Report listeners who can remember all the way back to Episode 49 of The Corbett Report, Paperclipped Nazis and Stay-behind Gladios.
But here’s more of that story from theforbiddenknowledge.net:
Convinced that German scientists could help America’s postwar efforts, President Harry Truman agreed in September 1946 to authorize “Project Paperclip,” a program to bring selected German scientists to work on America’s behalf during the “Cold War.” However, Truman expressly excluded anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Naziism or militarism.”
The War Department’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) conducted background investigations of the scientists. In February 1947, JIOA Director Bosquet Wev submitted the first set of scientists’ dossiers to the State and Justice Departments for review. The Dossiers were damning. Samauel Klaus, the State Department’s representative on the JIOA board, claimed that all the scientists in this first batch were “ardent Nazis.” Their visa requests were denied.
Wev was furious. He wrote a memo warning that “the best interests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in ‘beating a dead Nazi horse.'” He also declared that the return of these scientists to Germany, where they could be exploited by America’s enemies, presented a “far greater security threat to this country than any former Nazi affiliations which they may have had or even any Nazi sympathies that they may still have.” When the JIOA formed to investigate the backgrounds and form dossiers on the Nazis, the Nazi Intelligence leader Reinhard Gehlen met with the CIA director Allen Dulles.
Dulles and Gehlen hit it off immediately. Gehlen was a master spy for the Nazis and had infiltrated Russia with his vast Nazi Intelligence network. Dulles promised Gehlen that his Intelligence unit was safe in the CIA. Apparently, Wev decided to sidestep the problem. Dulles had the scientists [sic] dossier’s [sic] re-written to eliminate incriminating evidence. As promised, Allen Dulles delivered the Nazi Intelligence unit to the CIA, which later opened many umbrella projects stemming from Nazi mad research. (MK-ULTRA / ARTICHOKE, OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX)
Military Intelligence “cleansed” the files of Nazi references. By 1955, more than 760 German scientists had been granted citizenship in the U.S. and given prominent positions in the American scientific community. Many had been longtime members of the Nazi party and the Gestapo, had conducted experiments on humans at concentration camps, had used slave labor, and had committed other war crimes. In a 1985 expose in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Linda Hunt wrote that she had examined more than 130 reports on Project Paperclip subjects—and every one “had been changed to eliminate the security threat classification.”
President Truman, who had explicitly ordered no committed Nazis to be admitted under Project Paperclip, was evidently never aware that his directive had been violated. State Department archives and the memoirs of officials from that era confirm this. In fact, according to Clare Lasby’s book Operation Paperclip, project officials “covered their designs with such secrecy that it bedeviled their own President; at Potsdam he denied their activities and undoubtedly enhanced Russian suspicion and distrust,” quite possibly fueling the Cold War even further.
SOURCE: “Operation Paperclip“
CORBETT: Again, a lot more to this story than we’re going to cover here, so I would suggest that you continue reading that article, but I think some parts of this story are by now well known. For example, Werner von Braun and Reinhard Gehlen himself and Klaus Barbie and some of these other people who were paperclipped into the American scientific and even intelligence apparatus.
But some of these names that come up in connection with Paperclip and Dulles are very fascinating and much less talked about. For example, Licio Gelli:
Head of a 2400-member secret Masonic Lodge, P2, a neo-fascist organization, in Italy that catered to only the elite, Gelli had high connections in the Vatican, even though he was not a Catholic. P2’s membership is totally secret and not even available to its Mother Lodge in England. Gelli was responsible for providing Argentina with the Exocet missile. He was a double agent for the CIA and the KGB. He assisted many former Nazi high officials in their escape from Europe to Central America. He had close ties with the Italian Mafia. Gelli was a close associate of Benito Mussolini. He was also closely affiliated with Roberto Calvi, head of the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank. Calvi was murdered. Gelli’s secret lodge consisted of extremely important people, including armed forces commanders, secret service chiefs, head of Italy’s financial police, 30 generals, eight admirals, newspaper editors, television and top business executives and key bankers – including Calvi.
Licio Gelli and others in P2 were behind the assassination of Pope John Paul 1. The central figure in Europe and South America that linked the CIA, Masonic Lodge, Vatican, ex-Nazis and several South American governments, the Italian government and several international banks was Licio Gelli. He, with Klaus Barbie and Heinrich Rupp, met with Ronald R. Rewald in Uruguay to arrange for the Argentine purchase of the French-made Exocet missile, used in the Falkland Island attack to kill British soldiers.
SOURCE: “Operation Paperclip“
CORBETT: Again, another piece of this much larger puzzle that is fascinating, and so many different directions that that can go in.
And in fact, yes, the Project Paperclip wormhole just keeps getting deeper and deeper the more you look into it. And for another fascinating article that gets into so much deeper levels of this, you can look at an article entitled “Project Paperclip and the Space Race,” which was extracted from Secret Societies that Threaten to Take Over America by Jim Marrs. And in that very extensive article—which, again, you will have to read for yourself, it notes:
To coordinate covert operations, the NSC created the 5412 Committee, also called the Special Group, which has changed names several times to avoid public exposure. In 1964, it was known as the 303 Committee and in 1970 it was renamed the 40 Committee.
Within this organization – which included such familiar names as Nelson Rockefeller, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Gordon Gray, and Allen Dulles – was a subcommittee dealing with science and technology. It is here that the connection between the corporate and financial world and government-held technological secrets may be found.
SOURCE: Project Paperclip and the Space Race
CORBETT: And it goes on to talk about some of those secrets that are held in the secret space program, which emerged at least partially from that core nucleus of Nazi scientists from Project Paperclip, overseen and shepherded into existence by Allen Dulles in his coordination with Reinhard Gehlen.
Again, a fascinating story. And there’s so much more detail to that, but it at least gives you some of the insight into some of the operations that Dulles was involved in even before he became head of the CIA in 1953 under Eisenhower.
Continuing that story a little bit, with a couple of other details:
In 1948, he helped co-found the Office of Policy Coordination, which was a US psychological operations and military covert action organization that was eventually rolled into the CIA in 1951, I believe.
In 1949, he co-wrote a report critiquing the CIA which ultimately led President Truman to appoint a new CIA director and shake things up at the CIA. And it was supposedly on the basis of that report—the work that he did on that—that in 1953 he was appointed by President Eisenhower to be Director of Central Intelligence at the same time as his brother John Foster was appointed to become Secretary of State.
And just like that, the Dulles brothers, Wall Street lawyers at the fascistic connection of government and corporate power and military power and covert power, came together to completely dominate American foreign policy for the rest of the 1950s into the 1960s. And this was a very bad thing for America, of course, but perhaps more importantly, for the entire world.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, again, the Dulles’ shady business connections play a central role in the story of the operations that the CIA conducted under Dulles in the 1950s.
STEPHEN KINZER: The Dulles brothers’ war started with two interventions in the early 1950s, soon after they came to office. That was in Guatemala and Iran.
I think these two are tied together by one particular factor. The Dulles brothers, of course, spent decades as corporate lawyers for this remarkable law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. This firm had a specialty of pushing around small countries to force them to accept American corporations and allow those corporations to operate freely.
One client of the Dulles brothers was something called the Schroeder Bank, which was a big international bank. And Allen Dulles was actually on the board of the Schroeder Bank. Now, the Schroeder Bank was the financial agent for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which owned the oil industry in Iran. In 1951, the democratically elected government of Iran nationalized its oil industry. So, Allen Dulles had to go back to his friends at the Schroeder Bank and say something like: “You hired us to protect your interests in Iran, and we failed. You don’t have your oil company there anymore. We lost it.”
And then shortly thereafter, we had a similar operation in Guatemala. So, the Guatemalan government—again, with the vote of its Congress—adopted a land reform program. That land reform program affected the interests of United Fruit, which was another big Sullivan & Cromwell client who both Dulles brothers represented. And both brothers held large blocks of United Fruit stock. There was nothing they could do about the land reform program in Guatemala, and they had to go back to United Fruit and say: “We failed you. We couldn’t protect your interests in Guatemala.”
Now, the Dulles brothers were not used to failing, and they didn’t like having to do this. They never forgot that Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran and President Arbenz in Guatemala had deeply wounded clients of their firm and themselves. So, they couldn’t do anything about it while they were private lawyers, but they carried this grudge with them. And in 1953, when John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State and Allen Dulles became Director of the CIA, they immediately set out against these two. And within a year and a half after they took office, both were gone. Mossadegh was gone in Iran. Arbenz was gone in Guatemala.
And it wasn’t just two leaders who were gone. Those two countries were plunged into periods of terror and violence from which they still have not recovered. So those were the first two monsters that the Dulles brothers went abroad to slay.
SOURCE: Stephen Kinzer on the Dulles Brothers
CORBETT: Now, that was Stephen Kinzer, one of those mainstream biographers that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, who recently wrote a book, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, that, as I say, he’s made the rounds on, talking about John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles and their role in shaping American foreign policy in the world in the 1950s during their time in power. And for descriptions of some of the nefarious activities that the Dulleses were involved in and some of the business connections that drove those actions, someone like Kinzer can be a valuable resource. There are a lot of facts there and a lot of meat there to chew into.
But having said that, again, like any mainstream commentator, there are certain limits to Kinzer’s narrative. And one of them is that the Dulles brothers themselves weren’t necessarily bad people. They were more reflections of what America is and the way America sees itself. They’re reflections of the American dream and corporate power and all of these things that are part of us. So really, when we look at the Dulleses and the awful things they were involved in, we should be turning the gaze inward. He has that kind of a narrative, which, I think, deflects conveniently a lot of the blame and stops too deep an analysis of what was really going on there.
But it really takes the cake when you start getting into the 1960s. Because, of course, people might know that one of the first things that JFK did as President—in fact, in his very first press conference, in his very first breath, one of the first things he did—was to reappoint Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence. But all of that changed quite dramatically by November of 1961, when he appointed a new director of Central Intelligence.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: I have asked Mr. John McCone to accept the responsibility of being the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Board and have asked him to assume this responsibility later in the fall.
When Mr. Allen Dulles and I had our conversation last November, and when I asked him to continue on in his responsibility as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he agreed to do so for a year. He and I have been concerned this summer that this agency should continue to serve as an effective instrument of our country’s policy, and we have been most anxious that we would secure the services of an experienced public servant and that the transition which would be made this fall should be as smooth and effective as possible.
SOURCE: September 27, 1961 – President Kennedy Announcing the Appointment of John McCone as Director of CIA
CORBETT: So, what happened between the beginning of JFK’s presidency in early 1961, when he reappointed Dulles, and less than a year later, when he fired Dulles and appointed John McCone to replace him as Director of Central Intelligence?
Oh, that’s right: the Bay of Pigs. Yes, of course, the fumbled, botched, ridiculous invasion of Cuba by the anti-Castro Cubans, coordinated by the joint chiefs of staff and backed up by the CIA. And of course, famously, in the wake of that, JFK was quite furious at the way that the CIA had completely led him up the garden path with regards to that operation. And he said quite famously to one of his advisors, “I am going to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter those pieces to the winds.” And he goes on to fire Allen Dulles and appoint John McCone, which is a pretty major turn of events.
Image: Kennedy presents the National Security Medal to Dulles, November 28, 1961. (From the Public Domain)
Of course, on the surface, it’s all very cordial, and he never said anything in the press conference or anything of that sort about Allen Dulles. He even went on to award him with a National Security Medal, one of the highest awards he could appoint as President. But under the surface there were some significant tensions going on.
And of course, I think that shouldn’t need to be elaborated too much, but in case you do need any elaboration, we can just read an excerpt from JFK: the CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy by L. Fletcher Prouty, where he writes:
President Kennedy was seriously upset by the failure of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide him with adequate information and support prior to his approval of the brigade landing at the Bay of Pigs. He was also upset by the results of the total breakdown of CIA leadership during the operation that followed that landing.
Kennedy’s good friend Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, in recalling a discussion he had with Kennedy shortly after the disaster, said:
“This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon, on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect . . . it shook him up!”
Can any President “ever be strong enough to really rule” the CIA and the Defense Department? Eisenhower had learned that he was not strong enough when a U-2 went down in the heart of Russia despite his specific “no-overflight” orders in 1960.
Kennedy set out to prove that he was “strong enough,” and he might have done so had he had a second term in office. Instead, he was first overwhelmed and then murdered.
SOURCE: JFK: the CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy by L. Fletcher Prouty
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(from l. to r.) C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles with C.I.A. Counter-insurgency expert Colonel Edward Lansdale, United States Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan F. Twining, and C.I.A. Deputy Director Lieutenant General Charles P. Cabell at the Pentagon in 1955. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
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CORBETT: Well, I think any reasonable human being would at the very least place Allen Dulles and the CIA on the list of suspects for involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963. It is certainly means, motive and opportunity all coalescing into the nexus of someone like an Allen Dulles . . . unless you’re Stephen Kinzer! You know, former foreign bureau chief for The New York Times, who says, “No, no, no. You see, Dulles was starting to suffer from dementia, which, towards the very end of his life, in the late 1960s, he was more or less a vegetable. Well, that had already started to set in in the early 1960s, before he had even been fired. And this is why he wasn’t very deeply involved in the Bay of Pigs operation. This is why he couldn’t really be blamed for that failure. This is why, when, two years later, the JFK assassination happened, you couldn’t possibly put the blame on Allen Dulles.” He was already starting to go out of his mind, according to Stephen Kinzer.
And yes, amazingly enough, just three days after JFK’s assassination, before the body was even cold, you have the phone call of President LBJ calling Allen Dulles to offer him a position on the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of JFK.
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: We’re going to name very shortly a Presidential Commission made up of seven people: two from the House, two from the Senate, two from the public and one from the court as a study group to go into this FBI Report, this Court of Inquiry and all the incidents in connection with the assassination of our beloved friend and you’ve got to go on that for me.
ALLEN DULLES: You think I can really serve you?
LBJ: I know you can. I know you can. There’s not a doubt about it. Just get ready now to go in there and do a good job. We’ve got to have . . . America has got to be united in this hour.
DULLES: I would like to be of any help . . . and you’ve considered the work of my previous work [sic] and my previous job?
LBJ: I sure have.
SOURCE: Conversation with ALLEN DULLES, November 29, 1963
CORBETT: You can’t make it up. No, LBJ appoints Allen Dulles to be one of the commissioners on the Warren Commission. And no, nothing to see here, nothing suspicious about that. Absolutely unbelievable.
Well, the role of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination is obviously beyond the scope of this episode, and we’re already reaching the point at which there’s so much information in this episode that a detailed review of the ways that Allen Dulles manipulated the information that the Warren Commission was privy to and the ultimate outcome of that commission in finding Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole lone gunman is, again, too big a story to possibly really encapsulate here. It deserves probably an episode unto itself. But I’ll just point a few of the cookie crumb trails along that path.
For example, a couple of stories from JFKFacts.org: “Allen Dulles and the origins of the lone gunman theory,” that notes that in the very first meeting of the Warren Commission, you can look at the transcript of that meeting, and on page 51 Allen Dulles passes out a copy of a book to the various commissioners that he says will predict the outcome of the investigation. Namely, that it was done by a lone gunman. And John McCloy retorts that the Lincoln assassination was a conspiracy, to which Dulles replies that one man was so dominant in the JFK plot [sic] that “it almost wasn’t a plot.” So, there you go, before the very, very first meeting, Allen Dulles apparently had solved the case.
And another ridiculous piece of history from that Warren Commission cover-up, again from JFKfacts.org, “Allen Dulles: ‘I think this record ought to be destroyed.’” which notes: “Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles, during a January 22nd, 1964, executive session at which the allegation that Lee Harvey Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI was discussed,” said: “”I think this record ought to be destroyed.’ The transcript was indeed destroyed, but an original court reporter’s tape was later recovered and the transcript remade from it after a long legal battle brought by Harold Weisberg, a former Capitol Hill staffer and JFK researcher.”
So, there you go. We actually have, in black and white, in his own voice, Allen Dulles talking about, well, “Let’s destroy that pesky little evidence connecting Lee Harvey Oswald to the FBI!” Exceptionally interesting.
And again, those are just a couple of cookie crumbs along the trail of Dulles and his fingerprints on the JFK assassination and subsequent cover-up. Again, so much more to go into, and I hope you will join me in the open source investigation by adding all of the various other crumbs on that cookie crumb trail in the comments section of this podcast.
But it brings us to the point of how you actually encompass and encapsulate what we’ve learned today—even, again, just scratching the surface of a character like Allen Dulles. And again, I think that the fascistic nexus of Wall Street / legal / intelligence power, that is the higher level of power that we heard Allen Dulles mention at the beginning of today’s episode is perfectly encapsulated in the biography of someone like Allen Dulles.
And let us not be so naive to think that that nexus of power does not exist today—in fact, has not been amplified over the decades that this cancerous tumor has been allowed to grow on the planet.
But perhaps, as a fitting tribute to the legacy of Allen Dulles, we’ll summarize with a couple of quotes, one again from Robert Crowley—again, Assistant Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Operations—who in a candid set of remarks that I’ll include the link to so you can go and read them for yourself, said, among other things:
Allen was not a kind or thoughtful man. But his wife really did a number on him at the end. Allen was dying in ‘69 and they had a Christmas party at his place. Wife was downstairs with the guests, having a wonderful time. Not a word about Allen except that he was not feeling well. Finally, one of the boys decided to go up and wish Allen a Merry Christmas. Guess what he found? [. . .] Allen lying in a urine and feces soaked bed, completely out of it and mumbling to himself. She had left him up there for quite a while. Ugly. She really must have hated him. The boys picked him up, wrapped him in a clean blanket and took him to the hospital, where he died about a month later. She didn’t care at all and was very upset that they used one of her good blankets.
CORBETT: It really says something when your wife, at the end of your life, cares more about the blanket that is used to transport you to the hospital than you yourself. So, that is one, I think, fitting testament to the legacy of Allen Dulles, who, although we didn’t get into it in this podcast, was absolutely an on-the-record and admitted serial philanderer. And so, there are probably reasons that his wife was not quite so fond of him and treated him like that towards the end of his life.
But let’s leave the final word on Dulles and the Dulles brothers’ legacy to Stephen Kinzer, who actually had an interesting little story about a piece of artwork that might serve as a fitting testament to the real legacy of the Dulles brothers.
That’s going to do it for today. Once again, I invite you to join me in the open source investigation to continue laying out the cookie trail—pointing so many of these dark deeds back at the doorstep of Allen Dulles—in the comments section of this podcast at corbettreport.com.
Once again, this is James Corbett of corbettreport.com, looking forward to talking to you again very soon.
KINZER: Now, also during my research, I came across a magnificent artistic masterpiece. I consider this one of the greatest works of political art of the 20th century. It’s a mural painted by Diego Rivera.
Now, right after Arbenz was overthrown in 1954, there were huge protests in Latin America. I just had lunch yesterday with Ricardo Lagos, the recent President of Chile. He told me that as a teenager, he rioted. He demonstrated in front of the US Embassy on the day after the coup in Chile as a college student. Well, so did Diego Rivera. Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo participated in a protest rally. Frida Kahlo was deathly ill and was under doctor’s orders not to move out of her bed. But she was so outraged by the overthrow of Arbenz that she insisted. And Diego Rivera pushed her in a wheelchair in the front of the protest rally in Mexico with all these signs denouncing America for overthrowing democracy in Guatemala. Frida Kahlo died eleven days later.
Diego Rivera went on to paint this spectacular sixteen-foot-long mural depicting the Guatemala coup. There you see Foster Dulles shaking hands with his Guatemalan lackey, while Allen Dulles is right behind him with a big satchel of cash. And there you see the bought-off archbishop and the American ambassador who carried it all. Meanwhile, you’ve got these Guatemalan laborers breaking their backs with huge loads of bananas that they’re carrying onto a ship with an American flag, with all dead Guatemalan children in front of them. It’s a spectacular piece. I have seen many reproductions of this painting, and I’ve stared at it literally for hours.
So, I decided that, while writing this book, I’ve got to go see that picture.
Now, that painting has a very tortured history. It was shown in Guatemala for about six months. That would have been about five or six years ago. I missed that. Som I want to track it down. It’s not in Guatemala anymore. So, of course, I figured it’s got to be in Mexico with all of the Diego Rivera paintings. It was very difficult to locate where in Mexico it was. I finally had to hire someone in Mexico to go to all the Diego Rivera foundations and figure it out. Finally, I came back to the answer that this picture is not in Mexico. This picture is in a museum in Moscow, because Diego Rivera was a communist. He sent it to the Soviets, but the Soviets didn’t want to display it, because Diego Rivera actually only considered himself a communist. He was not pro-Soviet. He was quite a free thinker, and the Soviets didn’t like him.
So, I finally located the museum where this painting is, and through a Russian lady who helped me with a lot of emails, I was able to contact the assistant director of that museum. And I got back an email and it said: “I’m sorry to tell you that that painting is not on display. It’s on a roll rolled up in our storage room. If you would like to come to Moscow, as you said you’d like to, we can take you into the basement and show you the roll, but we cannot unroll it because we don’t have the space.”
So, this brilliant masterpiece is never seen. And actually, the audience that needs to see it is really not in Russia, and it’s really not in Guatemala. It’s here. We’rethe ones that need to see that picture.
So, this is my modest proposal: Dulles Airport. Let us place the bust back where it was! Let us bring the Diego Rivera mural and let Americans confront the Dulles brothers and what they mean for us. Thank you.
SOURCE: Forgotten History of the Dulles Brothers
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