bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2024-08-06 07:40 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2024-08-06 07:40 pm
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What the "deep state" was back when that term referred to something
I can’t remember what sale I picked it up at but for some-odd years now I’ve been in possession of a copy of something called The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. I had hesitated to actually read it for two reasons: one is that it is like 700 pages long, and I only have so many of those in me per year. The other is that I was not sure if it would turn out to be a total crank book, and I wasn’t confident I was familiar enough with the subject to tell. The author is David Talbot, the guy who founded Salon, who at least seems to be a real person in journalism, although certainly more than enough otherwise respectable writers turn out to be cranks about something. This book tells you right on the back cover where it’s going: It’s going to give you a biography of Allen Dulles, it’s going to give you a bunch of dirt on the CIA, and then it’s going to try to convince you that the CIA was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
I was not originally going to suggest this for book club. But when we had to skip July and take an extra-long time between book clubs, I somewhat jokingly put this forth for consideration, mainly because it was the longest book on my history-and-politics shelf. But apparently the rest of the book club thought it sounded fun and spicy, so here we are!
First of all, let it be known that David Talbot really, really hates his subject here. There is no pretense of academic neutrality; the book is just like “This is Allen Dulles, he sucks and I hate him and he ought to have been tried for treason before WWII was even over, and the world is a worse place because he was in it, and he was a shitty husband and a shitty dad and a shitty person and have I mentioned, fuck this guy.” I found this extremely funny, which was for sure a badly needed bit of levity because David Talbot is not wrong; Allen Dulles sucked enormously and so did all the ex- (for varying degrees of “ex”) Nazis and robber barons and Cold Warriors he surrounded himself with.
The book does not dwell for long on Dulles’ early life, just enough to set the scene and check in with his siblings a little about what growing up with him was life. The story really kicks off during World War II, when Dulles, a corporate lawyer at a firm that did lots of business with Reich-affiliated German clients until it got too embarrassing, is hired into the OSS, basically the precursor to the CIA. In the OSS, operating out of an office in the theoretically neutral but very strategically placed Swiss city of Bern, Dulles promptly begins giving the runaround to FDR’s very clearly stated policy of extracting total surrender from the Nazis. Dulles, his rotten heartstrings pulled on by the sad thought of rich guys being treated like criminals just because they did horrific crimes, starts cutting deals with various Nazis to try to broker a surrender of just Hitler that leaves something of the Reich intact for these ghouls to continue ruling. When that doesn’t quite work, he pivots to operating “ratlines,” running Nazi war criminals to safety to keep them out of the dock at Nuremberg and set them up as respectable citizens in other countries, or in some cases, back in Germany.
The most egregious of these schemes was his protection of Reinhardt Gehlen, Hitler’s spy chief on the Eastern front, who Dulles wanted to keep around to keep spying on the Russians. It seems clear that Dulles–like a truly unconscionable number of rich people–always thought the Bolshies were the real enemy, with the West’s alliance with them against fascism merely an unfortunate minor detour to clean up a moment of embarrassing excess on the part of the otherwise perfectly fine Nazi Party. Dulles, and the other right-wing Cold Warriors, kept that attitude throughout his entire life, eagerly collaborating with literally anybody, no matter how awful–Nazis, the Mafia, various mercenaries, autocrats and theocrats and other kinds of -crats and -garchs and -ocracies–in his total war against “world Communism,” here defined as anyone who thought regular working people maybe ought to have some kind of support or dignity in life, or that capitalism could stand to maybe have a single regulation put on it ever, or that brown people in the Third World actually maybe did have a reason to think being crushed under the violent bootheels of oil companies or United Fruit kind of sucked. A lot of the language Dulles and company used about “Communism” sounds suspiciously like the things we all actually learned about fascism the hard way, and it seems clear to me that guys like Dulles not just thought that Communism was worse than fascism, they psychologically needed Communism to be worse than fascism in every single particular and were not about to let piddly stuff like “the New Deal was an entirely different thing than the Soviet Union actually” stop them.
Anyway, the book walks us through the creation of the CIA under Truman (who initially envisioned it as just an intel-gathering agency and later regretted having created it at all), the consolidation of the Dulles’ brothers’ power under Eisenhower, and the tumultuous relationship between the national security services and the Kennedy administration. The stuff here that I did already know some things about, such as the coups in Iran and Guatemala, track with my prior knowledge and seem very well documented and credible. The things I didn’t already know about, like the MKULTRA program, also seem well documented, and I know there’s lots more information about these things available now than there was when I was a very young person being told they were just conspiracy theories. The setup here doesn’t try to hide itself, really: look at all these other things the CIA tried to have dismissed as conspiracy theories for decades, which turned out to be real; isn’t it likely the JFK assassination is the same?
And I will say, I am not sure I am entirely convinced that the CIA definitely killed JFK, but I for sure would put it in the “not nearly as far-fetched as it ought to be” bucket. I have not made much of a study of the JFK assassination, but from the cheap seats it kind of looks like every version of the story is kind of far-fetched and shady, which is maybe to be expected for something that unlikely.
The thing that really bothered me, though, about reading about the Kennedy administration’s, ah, difficulties in wrangling its various three-letter-agencies into doing what Kennedy wanted instead of doing whatever they wanted (mostly murdering anybody they deemed to be left of Eisenhower anywhere in the world), is what it might mean for the rest of us who would like to someday get the US off the path of being a vicious imperialist bully on the world stage. We’ve since elected presidents who got us out of individual wars–I think Nixon was the last Republican to maneuver us out of one, after deliberately tanking Johnson’s ability to do so, even though I think Gerald Ford was president by the time the war was declared officially over–but it looks like Kennedy was the last guy to be like “We should change our entire approach to foreign policy and stop being imperialist douchebags” and he simply could. not. get. the American imperial apparatus to follow his damn orders. Whether they actually killed him, or just kind of sat back and slow-walked doing presidential security because hey, this guy doesn’t respect the national security apparatus, or had nothing to do with the murder and were actually just planning to keep doing regular insubordination and sandbagging until the clock ran out, there are real serious questions the left needs to wrestle with about how to engage with a position like the imperial presidency, where the president has basically unlimited power to do whatever he wants as long as whatever he wants is violent imperial bullshit, but risks having the violence machine turn on him if he tries to rein it in. This was not fixed by electing Kennedy president and it wouldn’t have been fixed by electing Bernie Sanders president and it won’t be fixed if we elect the reincarnation of Eugene Debs president either.
Anyway, I think the book was good–depressing, but good. It’s always good to know more about the full depth and breadth of evil that America has committed in the world, if only for the sake of not being a gormless idiot. Figuring out what can actually be done about it, though, is a much more difficult task.
I was not originally going to suggest this for book club. But when we had to skip July and take an extra-long time between book clubs, I somewhat jokingly put this forth for consideration, mainly because it was the longest book on my history-and-politics shelf. But apparently the rest of the book club thought it sounded fun and spicy, so here we are!
First of all, let it be known that David Talbot really, really hates his subject here. There is no pretense of academic neutrality; the book is just like “This is Allen Dulles, he sucks and I hate him and he ought to have been tried for treason before WWII was even over, and the world is a worse place because he was in it, and he was a shitty husband and a shitty dad and a shitty person and have I mentioned, fuck this guy.” I found this extremely funny, which was for sure a badly needed bit of levity because David Talbot is not wrong; Allen Dulles sucked enormously and so did all the ex- (for varying degrees of “ex”) Nazis and robber barons and Cold Warriors he surrounded himself with.
The book does not dwell for long on Dulles’ early life, just enough to set the scene and check in with his siblings a little about what growing up with him was life. The story really kicks off during World War II, when Dulles, a corporate lawyer at a firm that did lots of business with Reich-affiliated German clients until it got too embarrassing, is hired into the OSS, basically the precursor to the CIA. In the OSS, operating out of an office in the theoretically neutral but very strategically placed Swiss city of Bern, Dulles promptly begins giving the runaround to FDR’s very clearly stated policy of extracting total surrender from the Nazis. Dulles, his rotten heartstrings pulled on by the sad thought of rich guys being treated like criminals just because they did horrific crimes, starts cutting deals with various Nazis to try to broker a surrender of just Hitler that leaves something of the Reich intact for these ghouls to continue ruling. When that doesn’t quite work, he pivots to operating “ratlines,” running Nazi war criminals to safety to keep them out of the dock at Nuremberg and set them up as respectable citizens in other countries, or in some cases, back in Germany.
The most egregious of these schemes was his protection of Reinhardt Gehlen, Hitler’s spy chief on the Eastern front, who Dulles wanted to keep around to keep spying on the Russians. It seems clear that Dulles–like a truly unconscionable number of rich people–always thought the Bolshies were the real enemy, with the West’s alliance with them against fascism merely an unfortunate minor detour to clean up a moment of embarrassing excess on the part of the otherwise perfectly fine Nazi Party. Dulles, and the other right-wing Cold Warriors, kept that attitude throughout his entire life, eagerly collaborating with literally anybody, no matter how awful–Nazis, the Mafia, various mercenaries, autocrats and theocrats and other kinds of -crats and -garchs and -ocracies–in his total war against “world Communism,” here defined as anyone who thought regular working people maybe ought to have some kind of support or dignity in life, or that capitalism could stand to maybe have a single regulation put on it ever, or that brown people in the Third World actually maybe did have a reason to think being crushed under the violent bootheels of oil companies or United Fruit kind of sucked. A lot of the language Dulles and company used about “Communism” sounds suspiciously like the things we all actually learned about fascism the hard way, and it seems clear to me that guys like Dulles not just thought that Communism was worse than fascism, they psychologically needed Communism to be worse than fascism in every single particular and were not about to let piddly stuff like “the New Deal was an entirely different thing than the Soviet Union actually” stop them.
Anyway, the book walks us through the creation of the CIA under Truman (who initially envisioned it as just an intel-gathering agency and later regretted having created it at all), the consolidation of the Dulles’ brothers’ power under Eisenhower, and the tumultuous relationship between the national security services and the Kennedy administration. The stuff here that I did already know some things about, such as the coups in Iran and Guatemala, track with my prior knowledge and seem very well documented and credible. The things I didn’t already know about, like the MKULTRA program, also seem well documented, and I know there’s lots more information about these things available now than there was when I was a very young person being told they were just conspiracy theories. The setup here doesn’t try to hide itself, really: look at all these other things the CIA tried to have dismissed as conspiracy theories for decades, which turned out to be real; isn’t it likely the JFK assassination is the same?
And I will say, I am not sure I am entirely convinced that the CIA definitely killed JFK, but I for sure would put it in the “not nearly as far-fetched as it ought to be” bucket. I have not made much of a study of the JFK assassination, but from the cheap seats it kind of looks like every version of the story is kind of far-fetched and shady, which is maybe to be expected for something that unlikely.
The thing that really bothered me, though, about reading about the Kennedy administration’s, ah, difficulties in wrangling its various three-letter-agencies into doing what Kennedy wanted instead of doing whatever they wanted (mostly murdering anybody they deemed to be left of Eisenhower anywhere in the world), is what it might mean for the rest of us who would like to someday get the US off the path of being a vicious imperialist bully on the world stage. We’ve since elected presidents who got us out of individual wars–I think Nixon was the last Republican to maneuver us out of one, after deliberately tanking Johnson’s ability to do so, even though I think Gerald Ford was president by the time the war was declared officially over–but it looks like Kennedy was the last guy to be like “We should change our entire approach to foreign policy and stop being imperialist douchebags” and he simply could. not. get. the American imperial apparatus to follow his damn orders. Whether they actually killed him, or just kind of sat back and slow-walked doing presidential security because hey, this guy doesn’t respect the national security apparatus, or had nothing to do with the murder and were actually just planning to keep doing regular insubordination and sandbagging until the clock ran out, there are real serious questions the left needs to wrestle with about how to engage with a position like the imperial presidency, where the president has basically unlimited power to do whatever he wants as long as whatever he wants is violent imperial bullshit, but risks having the violence machine turn on him if he tries to rein it in. This was not fixed by electing Kennedy president and it wouldn’t have been fixed by electing Bernie Sanders president and it won’t be fixed if we elect the reincarnation of Eugene Debs president either.
Anyway, I think the book was good–depressing, but good. It’s always good to know more about the full depth and breadth of evil that America has committed in the world, if only for the sake of not being a gormless idiot. Figuring out what can actually be done about it, though, is a much more difficult task.