David Talbot - The Devil’s Chessboard - Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.williamcollinsbooks.com

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

First published in the USA by Harper in 2015

Copyright © 2015 by The Talbot Players, LLC.

Cover photograph © AP/PA Images. Design © Kate Gaughran

David Talbot asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008159665

Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008159672

Version: 2016-09-27

To Karen Croft, who dared to know

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, theentrepreneurs , 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 Cover Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

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

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by David Talbot

About the Publisher

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 alone 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.