David Talbot: Allen Dulles & 'The Devil's Chessboard'

OCTOBER 29, 2015 | David Talbot talked about his book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, in which he recalls the life and career of Allen Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA.
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[@lovman]

Both of Talbot's books - Brothers and The Devil's Chessboard are important reads in understanding the post WWII history of the 1950s-60s that led to much of what has followed.

[@shenendoahh]

Dulles Disgraces US--that we have Dulles Airport is a sign of OUR evil.

[@liljimlambert7]

Neeeds removed Hoover LbJ and all the war criminals needs their monuments took down they removed civil war southern war peoples for slavery that's a start

[@yuothineyesasian]

Not that it's any better but the airport was named for John Foster not Allan. Still a disgusting thing to do, name an international airport after treasonous criminals.

[@liljimlambert7]

@@yuothineyesasian no both are evil greedy bastards who need removed

[@garrettchristensen8074]

Sadly. . I agree.

[@michaelbeckwith6177]

I agree and also naming the FBI building the J. Edgar Hoover building. Who was more disgusting Hoover or Dulles is a tough one!!!

[@alexmac101]

40:00 Journalist Gary Webb uncovered the CIA dealings of importing tons of cocaine into the ghettos of America and committed suicide *by shooting himself in the head TWICE*. Might want to make that distinction there clear

[@alwagner9722]

I was disappointed in Talbots answer to Gary Webb question. "He committed suicide." And then he goes says he can't elaborate on his death because he hasn't looked into it.

[@davidotness6199]

How bad was the CIA under Dulles? From Robert Fisk-the preeminent Middle East reporter of our time. Taken from his epic tome The Great War For Civilisation -- The Conquest of the Middle East -2005 [All 1045 pages of it] "Christopher Montague Woodhouse was asking himself if he had helped to create the Islamic revolution in Iran. He was an old man now, but you could see the energy that still gripped him, a tall, dignified, brave and ruthless seventy-nine-year-old. It was snowing that morning in Oxford in 1997, but he had come to the gate of his retirement home to greet me, his handshake a vise. He sat ramrod-straight in his library with the mind of a young man, answering my questions with the exactness of the Greek scholar he was, each sentence carefully crafted. He had been Britain’s senior agent in “Operation Boot” in 1953, the overthrow of Iran’s only democratic prime minister, Mohamed Mossadegh. It was “Monty” Woodhouse who helped to bring the Shah of Iran back from exile, [he] along with his colleagues in the CIA, who set in motion a quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, “Light of the Aryans”, would obediently rule Iran-repressively, savagely, corruptly and in imperious isolation-on our behalf. Woodhouse was a reminder that “The Plot”-the international conspiracy, moamara in Arabic*-was not always the product of Middle East imagination. Woodhouse was in the last years of a life in which he had been a guerrilla fighter in Greece [WW II], a Tory MP, and a much honoured Greek linguist and academic. Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was now dead: CIA boss Allen Dulles, Robin Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian brothers, who organised the coup, Mossadegh himself and the last Shah of Iran. Except for Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Tehran [at the time of the coup], “Monty” was the last survivor.[…] * The overall tenor of the book is about various Arabic countries, and the West’s relationship to them, therefore a commensurate word in Farsi is not used. Fisk both speaks and writes Arabic, I know not of his fluency in Farsi.~ djo …There were also lessons for for the Americans and the British, and for the Shah, had they chosen to pay attention. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States and Britain. The fall of Mossadegh, as James A. Brill has written, “began a new era of intervention and growing hostility to the United States among the awakened forces of Iranian nationalism.” Woodhouse was to become deeply depressed by Khomeini’s subsequent revolution. “I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once the Shah had been restored,” he said. Things were were taken for granted too easily,” After Mossadeg had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower administration to back the coup. “That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!” he told the man from MI6. [Truman, the presidential adoptive father/facilitator of the CIA in 1947, had turned Dulles’ Iranian coup plans down.] ~ djo But we don’t go in for “little eggs” any more. More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies-and bigger egos-are involved in “regime change” today. [Stated in 2005] Maybe that’s why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily. The coup against Mossadegh was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War-and the last by the British. At least we never claimed Mossadegh had weapons of mass destruction. But the final word must go to the CIA’s man, Kermit Roosevelt. “If we are ever going to try something like this again,” he wrote with great prescience, “we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want.” The “sort of complacency” which Woodhouse defined was based upon the security services which the Shah established after his return. Savak- Sazman-i Etelaat va Amniyat-i Keshvar, the “National Information and Security Organisation”-was to become the most notorious and the most murderous, its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions. A permanent secret U.S. mission was attached to Savak’s headquarters. Methods of interrogation included-apart from the conventional electric wires attached to genitals, beating on the soles of the feet and nail extraction-rape and “cooking,” the latter a self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a bed of wire that was then electrified to become a red-hot toaster.* Mohamed Heikal, that greatest of Egyptian journalists, once editor of Al-Ahram and former confidant of Nasser, has described how Savak filmed the torture of a young Iranian woman, how she was stripped naked and how cigarettes were then used to burn her nipples. According to Heikal, the film was later distributed by the CIA to other intelligence agencies working for American-supported regimes around the world including Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines.[…] *One of its victims was Massoud Ahnadzedah, an engineer later executed by the regime. In 1972, Nuri Albala, a French lawyer, who attended his trial, described how Ahmadzedah pulled up his pullover to show the marks of torture. “The whole of the middle of his chest and his stomach was a mass of twisted scars from very deep burns. They looked appalling… His back was even worse. There was a perfect oblong etched into it, formed by a continuous line of scar tissue. Inside the oblong, the skin was again covered in shiny scars from burning.” Ashraf Dehqani, who escaped from prison after torture-she was an opposition militant-wrote of how she was raped by her Savak torturers and had snakes placed upon her body. [“A permanent secret U.S. mission was attached to Savak’s headquarters.”]

[@jakesgrobler1634]

Thanks for sharing this

[@AmyBuccilla]

Excellent book!

[@richardwhitfill5253]

Interesting presentation thank you

[@alwagner9722]

The book was a great read. There's one point in this interview, 38:50 talking about Gary Webb and the Dark Alliance story, David mentions that Gary committed suicide. Gary was shot in the head..... twice. James Corbett did a nice report on this. kzbin.info/www/bejne/fISQoIGKmp6erac. He was "suicided".

[@adamfitzgerald911]

he did commit suicide, he shot himself in front of the face thru his cheek, then finished it off with a second shot,.

[@alwagner9722]

@@adamfitzgerald911 from the Corbett Report "Requiem for the Suicided"- Gary Webb.. Emails between Jon Roland and Gary Webb confirm that, according to Gary, "if I'm ever found dead, it would never be from suicide." Roland is a constitutional reporter. According to Corbett, he [ James Corbett] called Jon to clarify details about the emails. During their conversations, Jon reiterated that Gary had a cache of evidence left over from his writings that had never been published, which made him concerned for Gary's life.

[@colinstewart1432]

Unless I'm very much mistaken, John le Carré coined the term "The Deep State " Devil's Chessboard is a very good book, I'm reading it at the moment and it's gripping.

[@wsegen]

great book(s), insight, research. IMO. seems by the time of Devil's Chessboard, he's gotten over his antipathy to Mark Lane. But we all owe Mark a debt and David needs to clarify this. e.g., he can talk about E. Howard Hunt without mentioning Plausible Denial. Paying tribute to the amazing C. Wright Mills doesn't compensate for dissing Lane.

[@starblaster77]

Fantastic book!

[@russellsmiley2304]

the LBJ, the name Clinton..... does he really study this and miss Barry Seal and that entire story?

[@liljimlambert7]

Missed i think not just not related to this book

[@hal7ter]

The web is endless with a jillion players.

[@AW-pw8lx]

What does Fox News have to do with Dulles? No I agree that the corporate media is a huge problem in this country and has been for a long time probably even before the CIA project mockingbird. But I just find it disingenuous that he doesn’t mention New York Times CNN ABC NBC MSNBC only Fox News.

[@andrewgillis8572]

hey Phil Shenon your credibility is a match for Judith Miller's and Jayson Blair's - well done

[@truthfreedom303]

"politics" - that's serious

[@notrueflagshere198]

This Talbot fella sounds like the ultimate insider. I don't think I can watch this.

[@MJ-fj9yv]

A key indicator of where David Talbot is going in his portrait of CIA Director Allen W. Dulles comes from his treatment of C. Wright Mills and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mills was a Columbia University sociologist whose 1956 book, The Power Elite, caused a minor sensation in the seemingly placid ‘50s. Liberal and conservative scholars alike depicted the American political process as a balancing act among competing interests, which included big business, organized labor, farmers, and professional groups. But Mills, as Talbot notes approvingly, did not believe such a perspective was “adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works.” Unfortunately, as in so many episodes related in the book, the true story is at odds with Talbot’s invented version. After the GOP convention nominated Eisenhower, Herbert Brownell, Ike’s campaign manager (who would become attorney general), told Eisenhower the time had come to select a running mate. After ruminating for awhile, the nominee handed his short list to Brownell, who then consulted leading Republican pols, including Dewey, but not the Dulleses. How Nixon got picked is recounted in an exhaustively researched new book about Eisenhower and Nixon, The President and His Apprentice, by Irwin F. Gellman. There is a breathless quality to the writing, which tends to distort reality Nuance is in rare supply. The book describes (accurately) how Senator Joseph McCarthy made the CIA’s William Bundy (younger brother of McGeorge, who would later serve as JFK’s national security adviser) one of his targets and tried to subpoena him for testimony. Bundy had a connection to Alger Hiss, thus making him highly suspect in McCarthy’s eyes. Dulles refused to bow to McCarthy’s demand to put Bundy under oath, and Talbot rightly says this set up a clash of titans. But instead of writing that Dulles simply told Bundy to leave town (“Be out of touch,” were Dulles’s parting words to his young subordinate), Talbot claims “The Agency had Bundy spirited away to an undisclosed location . . . ” A reader could be forgiven for imagining Bundy in some remote locale, owned and operated by the CIA. In fact, Bundy went home to Massachusetts and played golf with his father for a few days. Overall an amazing piece of Socialist liberal propaganda, laced with some accurate facts and many suggestive conclusions.

[@franktatom1837]

I tend to agree, although I have just begun the book. To your point, I note that, in the opening pages, Talbot describes the pre-WWII and wartime activities of the Dulles brothers, and notes Allen Dulles was in communication with many Germans and German Nazis while working with the OSS, and was trying to facilitate negotiations for a separate peace with Germany, as he was an anti-communist and wanted to isolate the USSR from Europe in the post-war period. Talbot's description of these activities, however, fails to mention (either from ignorance or from the desire to avoid the subject) that the Roosevelt administration had active communist agents in it, who had the ear of FDR, who the Dulles brothers and others were working against. Talbot also claims that the unilateral action of FDR announcing the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender was due to the Allen Dulles' attempts to negotiate a separate peace, but Dulles was merely an intelligence agent at that time and I doubt FDR would have made a public announcement directed at a sole intelligence agent. I assume (I haven't read that far yet) that Talbot also omits the unilateral decision of FDR to cede Eastern Europe to the USSR at the end of the war, which horrified Churchill (as he hadn't been told this would occur until after Stalin was told), and which was also the product of communist-leaning persons in the FDR administration. That lead to the cold war and the need for men such as the Dulles to fight communism, sometimes covertly and sometimes not entirely within the law in the post-war period. But we should not forget that the intelligence activities undertaken during the 1950's and 1960's, however wrong they were, likely helped avoid an outright war and may have stymied the spread of communism much better than overt activities such as the Vietnam war, which caused so many deaths of innocent civilians and combatants. There is always give and take among people of power, and the Dulles brothers were in a tug-of-war based on their beliefs and goals, just as others against whom they pulled did likewise, pulling in the other direction. The ambiguity of history sometimes is unacceptable to even historians, or those who present their beliefs in the guise of history, which I fear the remainder of this book will do.

[@MJ-fj9yv]

@@franktatom1837 I agree with your comments regarding FDR’s support to Communist sympathizers. As a matter of fact, very few books even mention FDR’s or the Democrats connection with the domestic Socialist Communist movement. One of the prime reasons leading to the McCarthyism and the “second red scare”, of course the first “red scare” was 1917-1920s. CIA and the US military intelligence knew even before entering WWII that the long threat to the US will be Communism and not Facism.