The Devil's Chessboard Read online

  Dedication

  To Karen Croft, who dared to know

  Epigraph

  And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

  —THE INSCRIPTION CHOSEN BY ALLEN DULLES FOR THE LOBBY OF CIA HEADQUARTERS, FROM

  JOHN 8:31–32

  The Colonel laughed unpleasantly. “My dear friend, Dimitrios would have nothing to do with the actual shooting. No! His kind never risk their skins like that. They stay on the fringe of the plot. They are the professionals, the entrepreneurs, the links between the businessmen, the politicians who desire the end but are afraid of the means, and the fanatics, the idealists who are prepared to die for their convictions. The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.”

  —A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS, ERIC AMBLER

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part I

  1 The Double Agent

  2 Human Smoke

  3 Ghosts of Nuremberg

  4 Sunrise

  5 Ratlines

  Part II

  6 Useful People

  7 Little Mice

  8 Scoundrel Time

  9 The Power Elite

  10 The Dulles Imperium

  11 Strange Love

  12 Brain Warfare

  13 Dangerous Ideas

  14 The Torch Is Passed

  Part III

  15 Contempt

  16 Rome on the Potomac

  17 The Parting Glass

  18 The Big Event

  19 The Fingerprints of Intelligence

  20 For the Good of the Country

  21 “I Can’t Look and Won’t Look”

  22 End Game

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Sections

  About the Author

  Also by David Talbot

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  If books were movies, Karen Croft’s name would be prominently featured, high in the credits, as executive producer. This book could not have been accomplished without her essential contributions. It was born out of our mutual desire to get to the bottom of this darkly fascinating pool of history and to seek some type of justice for those who escaped it or were denied it in their time. Along the way, Karen and I engaged in endless discussions and debates. She was my fellow investigator as we pursued sources and documents around the globe. She was the first to read the pages I wrote as they came out of my laptop. Through her obsessive dedication and unfailing support, I was allowed to keep those pages coming. This book is the fruit of our partnership.

  Karen and I owe much to the generous assistance and intellectual camaraderie of many individuals, who are equally committed to enlightening the public about the crimes and sorrows of our past. We must thank, in particular, our mentor, Peter Dale Scott. It was during one of our many stimulating conversations with Peter that the idea for this book was born. We also feel a special sense of gratitude for the aid and fellowship of Jefferson Morley, James Lesar, Gary Aguilar, Vincent Salandria, Gerry Percy, Lawrence Meli, Adam Walinsky, Paul Schrade, Lisa Pease, Rex Bradford, James DiEugenio, Dick Russell, Marie Fonzi, Daniel Alcorn, Bill Simpich, Jerry Policoff, William Kelly, and Cyril and Ben Wecht. In addition, we benefited from insights, suggestions, and documents provided by William Gowen, Dan Hardway, Eve Pell, John Loftus, Fabrizo Calvi, David Lifton, John Kelin, Leo Sisti, Carlo Mastelloni, Malcolm Blunt, Joan Mellen, John Simkin, and Brenda Brody. And we express our thanks to the generous contributors to the Open America campaign on Indiegogo.

  We also relied on the skillful research assistance of Francoise Sorgen-Goldschmidt, Rhoda Newman, Margot Williams, Cliff Callahan, Antony Shugaar, Norma Tennis, and Ron Basich. We are equally indebted to the staffs of Princeton’s Seeley Mudd Library, where Allen Dulles’s papers are kept; Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, which houses the papers of Martha Clover Dulles and Mary Bancroft; as well as the staff members of the John F. Kennedy Library, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, the New York Public Library’s archives department, the Hoover Institution, the University of California–Santa Barbara special collections department, and the George C. Marshall Foundation.

  We are among the historians plumbing the depths of U.S. intelligence and national security, from World War II on, who have made vital discoveries by combing through the wealth of official documents released under “sunshine laws” such as the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act and the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. (Many JFK–related documents are archived at the essential Mary Ferrell Foundation website.) The American people have only gained access to this hidden history as a result of concerted political pressure, and agencies such as the CIA still remain defiantly opposed to fully disclosing the information they are required to under federal law. As the tyrannical regime in Orwell’s 1984 understood, “Who controls the past controls the future.” It is essential that we continue to fight for the right to own our history.

  In addition to archival and documentary research, we also learned much from interviewing the sons and daughters, as well as former colleagues, of the secretive men who are the subject of this book. We are especially thankful to Joan Talley, the daughter of Allen Dulles, though she bears no responsibility for our views.

  Authors who put the products of their hard labors in the hands of editors often do so with the trepidation of parents who place their offspring in the hands of surgeons. It was, therefore, an enormous joy and relief—after entrusting this book to Jennifer Barth at HarperCollins—to witness the delicate precision of her editorial hand. She earned my trust and respect, page by page.

  I am also indebted to my longtime agent, Sloan Harris of ICM, for his sound judgment, levelheaded demeanor, and keen literary and business sense.

  Thanks once again to the indomitable Kelly Frankeny for her cover-design wizardry, as well as to Robert Newman.

  And last—but far, far from least—I celebrate my wife, Camille Peri. Only someone blessed with her indestructible strength of character—and afflicted with her literary talent and destiny—could have empathetically stood by me these past few years, as I clawed my way to the finish line.

  Prologue

  That little Kennedy . . . he thought he was a god.”

  The words were sharp and wrong, like a curse shattering the civility of the soft evening air. They seemed particularly strange coming from the genial older gentleman strolling by Willie Morris’s side. In fact, they were the only strident remarks that Morris had heard him utter in the past few days, as the graying spymaster regaled his young visitor with a lifetime of covert adventures.

  And then the storm passed. The man was himself again—the chatty and amiable Allen Welsh Dulles, a man whose conviviality masked a world of dark secrets. The two men continued their walk on that Indian summer evening in 1965, ambling along the rust-colored brick sidewalks as the lampposts began casting their yellow light on picturesque Georgetown—home of Washington hostesses, martini-loving spies, influential newspapermen, and the assorted insiders who fed off the fizz and sizzle of the nation’s capital. Turning the corner from the unassuming, two-story brick mansion on Q Street that Dulles rented, they now found themselves on R Street, straddling the vast greenery of the Dumbarton Oaks estate.

  Dulles, the creator of America’s sprawling intelligence empire, had summoned Morris—a rising young editor at Harper’s magazine—to help him set the record straight on the most cutting humiliation of his career. He wanted to write his side of the story about the Bay of Pigs. The words a
lone still brought a spasm of pain and rage to Dulles’s face. It was just a spit of sand and scrubby palms along Cuba’s southern coast. But it was the scene, in April 1961, of the biggest disaster in the CIA’s history—a motley invasion that fell ignominiously short of toppling Cuba’s dangerously charismatic leader, Fidel Castro. The failed invasion, Dulles said, was “the blackest day of my life.”

  In public, the newly minted president, John F. Kennedy, took responsibility for the fiasco and made gracious remarks about Dulles as he prepared to usher the aging spy out the door, after a half century of public service encompassing eight different presidencies. But in private, a vicious war had begun between the Kennedy and Dulles camps, with the two men and their advocates working the press and arguing not just the botched mechanics of the invasion, but the past and future of U.S. foreign policy.

  The Bay of Pigs came after a long string of Dulles victories. Given free rein by President Eisenhower to police the world against any insurgent threat to U.S. dominion, Dulles’s CIA overthrew nationalist governments in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and even targeted troublesome leaders in allied European countries. Dulles called himself “the secretary of state for unfriendly countries”—which had an ominous ring when one took note of what happened to unfriendly countries in the American Century. Meanwhile, his brother John Foster Dulles—Eisenhower’s official secretary of state—brought the gloom of a doomsday-obsessed vicar to his job, with his frequent sermons on Communist perfidy and his constant threats of nuclear annihilation. John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked. With his long, dour face topped by his ever-present banker’s homburg, the elder Dulles always seemed to be on the brink of foreclosing on all human hope and happiness.

  By 1959, John Foster Dulles was rapidly succumbing to stomach cancer. It was as if the bile building up inside him all those years over the fallen state of the world had finally devoured him. And by then Eisenhower himself was heart-troubled and weary of his job. Only Allen Dulles still stood firmly at the top, past retirement age at sixty-six, but still determined that the ancient regime must continue.

  When President Kennedy began his vigorous new reign in 1961, he decided to keep Allen Dulles as CIA chief, despite the obvious differences in their world outlooks. With his brush mustache, wire-rim glasses, tweed suits, and beloved pipe, Dulles could have been one of the elderly dons that young Jack Kennedy had studied under at Harvard. As a young senator, JFK had broken from the Eisenhower-Dulles regime over the older men’s nuclear brinksmanship—a game that Kennedy felt courted the abyss. Kennedy had also signaled an eagerness to dramatically change America’s hostile relationship to the developing world, expressing a sympathy for the national liberation movements in Algeria, the Congo, Vietnam, and elsewhere that he saw as historically inevitable. While President Eisenhower viewed the onrush of anticolonial independence in the Third World as a “destructive hurricane,” Kennedy recognized it as the future.

  Though their visions for how the United States should navigate the globe were profoundly far apart, Kennedy was loath to completely overturn the old ruling order that had been presided over by a popular World War II hero. Keeping Eisenhower men like Dulles and other Republican pillars of power like Wall Street banker and statesman C. Douglas Dillon, whom JFK named his Treasury secretary, was the new president’s way of assuring the nation that he would be leading an orderly transition to the New Frontier. But Kennedy soon realized that when it came to men like Dulles, his political calculation was a grave mistake.

  Allen Dulles was one of the wiliest masters of secret power ever produced by America. And his most ambitious clandestine efforts were directed not against hostile governments but against his own. While serving in multiple presidential administrations, he learned to manipulate them and sometimes subvert them.

  In the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust. From their earliest days on Wall Street—where they ran Sullivan and Cromwell, the most powerful corporate law firm in the nation—their overriding commitment was always to the circle of accomplished, privileged men whom they saw as the true seat of power in America. Although Foster and Allen did not come from the same wealthy families who dominated this elite club, the brothers’ shrewd talents, missionary drive, and powerful connections firmly established them as top executives in this rarefied world.

  As younger men, the Dulles brothers were obsessive chess players. When they faced each other over a chessboard, everything else faded away. Even during his whirlwind courtship of Martha Clover Todd, a free-spirited beauty from a prominent family to whom he proposed after a three-day siege, Allen could not be distracted from a lengthy joust with his brother. The Dulleses would bring the same strategic fixation to the game of global politics.

  John Foster Dulles would rise to become the chief counsel for American power, a man destined to quietly confer with kings, prime ministers, and despots. He liked to think of himself as chess master of the free world. His younger brother would become something more powerful still—the knight-errant who enforced America’s imperial will. As director of the CIA, Allen Dulles liked to think he was the hand of the king, but if so, he was the left hand—the sinister hand. He was master of the dark deeds that empires require.

  The Dulles brothers were not intimidated by mere presidents. When President Franklin Roosevelt pushed through New Deal legislation to restrain the rampant greed and speculation that had brought the country to economic ruin, John Foster Dulles simply gathered his corporate clients in his Wall Street law office and urged them to defy the president. “Do not comply,” he told them. “Resist the law with all your might, and soon everything will be all right.”

  Later, when Allen Dulles served as the United States’ top spy in continental Europe during World War II, he blatantly ignored Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender and pursued his own strategy of secret negotiations with Nazi leaders. The staggering sacrifice made by the Russian people in the war against Hitler meant little to Dulles. He was more interested in salvaging the Third Reich’s security apparatus and turning it against the Soviet Union—which he had always regarded as America’s true enemy. After the war, Dulles helped a number of notorious war criminals escape via the “Nazi ratlines” that ran from Germany, down through Italy, to sanctuary in Latin America, the Middle East, and even the United States.

  Allen Dulles outmaneuvered and outlived Franklin Roosevelt. He stunned Harry Truman, who signed the CIA into existence in 1947, by turning the agency into a Cold War colossus far more powerful and lethal than anything Truman had imagined. Eisenhower gave Dulles immense license to fight the administration’s shadow war against Communism, but at the end of his presidency, Ike concluded that Dulles had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left him nothing but “a legacy of ashes.” Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office.

  Dulles would serve John F. Kennedy for less than a year, but their briefly entwined stories would have monumental consequences. Clearly outmatched in the beginning by the savvy spymaster, who beguiled Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs disaster, JFK proved a quick learner in the Washington power games. He became the first and only president who dared to strip Dulles of his formidable authority. But Dulles’s forced retirement did not last long after Kennedy jettisoned him from the CIA in November 1961. Instead of easing into his twilight years, Dulles continued to operate as if he were still America’s intelligence chief, targeting the president who had ended his illustrious career. The underground struggle between these two icons of power is nothing less than the story of the battle for American democracy.

  Walking through Georgetown on that warm September evening, Willie Morris was perplexed to hear Dulles erupt with such scorn at the mere mention of Kennedy’s name. But there was a reason that—nearly two years after JFK’s
bloody end—Kennedy’s hold on the public’s imagination still disturbed Dulles. He knew who the real “god” was—and it was not Jack Kennedy.

  After their stroll, the two men returned to Dulles’s home for drinks and dinner, and then more work on his article, which was to be titled “My Answer to the Bay of Pigs.” There was a sad stillness to the Dulles residence: Clover was away, at the family’s summer retreat on Lake Ontario; their son, Allen Jr., a brilliant young man who had suffered a grievous head wound in the Korean War, was in and out of sanitariums; their grown daughters Joan and Toddie had their own worries and misfortunes. There was nothing to distract Morris and Dulles besides the fleeting presence of one or two servants. Morris proved a good companion, a son of Mississippi who knew how to keep up his end when the bourbon and conversation began flowing. And he was the most touted magazine editor of his generation, on his way to becoming the youngest editor of the venerable Harper’s at age thirty-two. Under his leadership in the late ’60s, Harper’s would glow with the vibrant writing of Norman Mailer, William Styron, and David Halberstam.

  But, in the end, even with Morris’s expert hand, Dulles could not wrestle his manuscript into shape, and the old spook withdrew it from publication. By the time Dulles finally gave up, after months of toil, the article had gone through multiple drafts, adding up to several hundred coffee-stained pages. The drafts, now stuffed into boxes at a Princeton library where the Dulles papers are housed, are a window into Allen Dulles’s tortured relationship with the young president. In finally abandoning the massive project, which one historian later called “The ‘Confessions’ of Allen Dulles,” the old spymaster seemed to conclude that he was saying both too much and too little about what he had been through with Kennedy.

  By writing the article, Dulles had set out to rebut charges made by JFK loyalists Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that Kennedy had been tricked by his intelligence advisers into the disastrous Cuban adventure. But instead, the spymaster’s scribblings—in between angry eruptions at Kennedy and his White House circle of “doubting Thomases” and “Castro admirers”—revealed the myriad ways that Dulles’s CIA had indeed contrived to lure the young president into the Cuban sand trap.