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The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government , David Talbot, (New York: HarperCollins, 2015)
The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government , David Talbot, (New York: HarperCollins, 2015) | The Huffington Post
Some passages of The Devil’s Chessboard have a plaintive tone, a kind of lament about the irreparable harm the fanaticism of fighting the Cold War against Soviet Russia (and its alleged proxies all over the world) had on shaping a set of unaccountable secret institutions that have both distorted our politics and undermined the “democratic” principles for which the U.S. supposedly stands.
Exceedingly rare among baby boomer journalists and public intellectuals, Talbot does not shy away from pointing to the uncomfortable facts surrounding Allen Dulles’s life’s work. He chronicles Dulles’s secret activities just after World War Two as a young intelligence agent in Europe helping to establish “ratlines” so Nazis considered useful to the United States in the new Cold War against the Soviet Union could escape prosecution. Talbot also unpacks Dulles’s foundational role, first as a deputy director and then climbing to become director, in setting the course for the newly-formed CIA after President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947.
What followed under Dulles’s leadership were many unaccountable CIA projects that had to remain secret or spun with propaganda to suit the widely-held Cold War fantasies of the period lest they be shown to be so contrary to America’s self image they might generate opposition.
Secret CIA activities in the 1950s under Dulles’s watch included horrifying experiments in “de-patterning” and “mind control” involving LSD and hypnosis (often on unwitting subjects) to try to develop the means to “turn” Soviet agents (MKULTRA). Subsequently, Dulles led the CIA in its first experiments in “regime change” with the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. It was Dulles’s CIA that played a key role in killing the nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960, and setting up the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.
At times The Devil’s Chessboard reads like an engaging spy novel proving yet again that fact is stranger than fiction. The book is full of intrigue and revelations that should make any fair-minded reader cringe at what the CIA has done in our name over the years.
Talbot’s social analysis of the period includes an excellent summation of the work of the great American sociologist C. Wright Mills (who died in 1962) whose book, The Power Elite (1956), cuts through the rabid Cold War ideology of the time to grapple with the darker side of the “American Century.”
The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government , David Talbot, (New York: HarperCollins, 2015) | The Huffington Post
Some passages of The Devil’s Chessboard have a plaintive tone, a kind of lament about the irreparable harm the fanaticism of fighting the Cold War against Soviet Russia (and its alleged proxies all over the world) had on shaping a set of unaccountable secret institutions that have both distorted our politics and undermined the “democratic” principles for which the U.S. supposedly stands.
Exceedingly rare among baby boomer journalists and public intellectuals, Talbot does not shy away from pointing to the uncomfortable facts surrounding Allen Dulles’s life’s work. He chronicles Dulles’s secret activities just after World War Two as a young intelligence agent in Europe helping to establish “ratlines” so Nazis considered useful to the United States in the new Cold War against the Soviet Union could escape prosecution. Talbot also unpacks Dulles’s foundational role, first as a deputy director and then climbing to become director, in setting the course for the newly-formed CIA after President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947.
What followed under Dulles’s leadership were many unaccountable CIA projects that had to remain secret or spun with propaganda to suit the widely-held Cold War fantasies of the period lest they be shown to be so contrary to America’s self image they might generate opposition.
Secret CIA activities in the 1950s under Dulles’s watch included horrifying experiments in “de-patterning” and “mind control” involving LSD and hypnosis (often on unwitting subjects) to try to develop the means to “turn” Soviet agents (MKULTRA). Subsequently, Dulles led the CIA in its first experiments in “regime change” with the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. It was Dulles’s CIA that played a key role in killing the nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960, and setting up the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.
At times The Devil’s Chessboard reads like an engaging spy novel proving yet again that fact is stranger than fiction. The book is full of intrigue and revelations that should make any fair-minded reader cringe at what the CIA has done in our name over the years.
Talbot’s social analysis of the period includes an excellent summation of the work of the great American sociologist C. Wright Mills (who died in 1962) whose book, The Power Elite (1956), cuts through the rabid Cold War ideology of the time to grapple with the darker side of the “American Century.”
