The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Back in Washington, Wisner exulted over each wave of arrests and each new round of show trials, where the accused were made to publicly condemn themselves before they were executed. “The comrades are merrily sticking knives in each others’ backs and doing our dirty work for us,” Wisner gleefully reported.

  The Office of Policy Coordination men knew that many of the Splinter Factor victims were patriots who were beloved by their own people. But, in the eyes of Dulles, this actually made them more dangerous. As one political observer of Splinter Factor remarked, “Dulles wished to leave Eastern Europe devoid of hope so that he could introduce a pro-American, anti-Soviet form of government. . . . Nationalist Communists were making communism acceptable to the people, and so, accordingly, they had to be removed.”

  As a result of the rapidly spreading inquisition, political dialogue in Eastern Europe was frozen, the screws of thought control were tightened, and cultural exchange and trade with the West were shut down. But Dulles saw all this as a positive development. Like the most rigid of Marxists, he believed that by increasing the suffering of Eastern Europe’s enslaved populations, they would be pushed beyond their breaking point and forced to revolt against their Soviet masters. But, as was the case with the Communist true believers who advocated “heightening the contradictions” in order to bring about the glorious revolution, Operation Splinter Factor brought only more misery to the people of the Soviet bloc. Dulles would not live long enough to see their day of liberation.

  Erica Wallach was freed from her arctic gulag in 1954, after Stalin died and the “Field conspiracy” was finally exposed behind the Iron Curtain for what it was—a devilishly clever Allen Dulles brainstorm. She was released into the custody of Soviet secret police officials, who apologized and offered her money, and then took her to East Berlin, where they put her in a taxi to the West. She walked to freedom through the Brandenburg Gate, exactly where she had started her harrowing journey five years and two months earlier.

  The Fields, too, were released that year. Hermann returned to the United States, where he became an urban studies professor and a pioneering environmentalist at Tufts University and wrote novels. Noel and Herta shocked their family by staying in Hungary, where they quietly lived out the rest of their lives. For Noel, the personal betrayal by Dulles and his own country was, in the end, more unforgivable than the years of abuse at the hands of his Communist comrades. “He would never talk to me about his years in prison,” Hermann said about his brother. “He dismissed the episode as a Stalinist aberration. He was a true believer . . . to the end of his life.”

  Wallach was eager to reunite with her husband and their two children, although so much time had gone by, she was unsure how she would begin again with her family. It would take two years before U.S. authorities finally allowed her to enter the United States. “I was continuously interrogated—let’s put it that way,” she later said. “Not interviewed, interrogated. My visa was refused three times, even though I had an American husband and American children living here.”

  The irony was not lost on her. The official mind-set on both sides of the Cold War looking glass was remarkably the same. The American interrogators kept asking the same questions that their Soviet counterparts had.

  After she was finally allowed into the United States, Wallach settled into a comfortable life with her family. Her husband had begun a successful career as a banker in Washington, and they lived in the lush Virginia horse country, not far from the new international airport that would be named for John Foster Dulles. Wallach taught French and Latin at the exclusive Highland School.

  Wallach wrote a book about her years in captivity, but she didn’t believe her ordeal bestowed any special distinction on her. “From a European point of view,” she drily observed, “this is a rather common story.”

  Years later, Wallach came to realize that Dulles had played some significant role in her suffering. Wallach had worked briefly for Dulles immediately after the war, at the OSS base outside Wiesbaden, Germany, where the spy agency had taken over the gilded headquarters of the Henkell sparkling wine company. Wallach was one of the few OSS women on Dulles’s payroll at the time, and she had undoubtedly caught his eye. She had also worked with Frank Wisner at the winery. But neither man ever expressed any regrets for what they had done to the young mother.

  A few months before she died, in 1993, Wallach recalled her story for a journalist who found his way to her grand house in the northern Virginia countryside. In the final stages of the cancer that would claim her, she seemed to float above her own life in a way that gave her a lofty yet clear-eyed perspective on the past. She could even appreciate—in a detached sort of way—the spycraft behind the Dulles operation that had ambushed her life. “Allen Dulles’s motives are easy to imagine,” she remarked. “Anything that destabilized the situation in Eastern Europe was good for U.S. interests. Stalin was paranoid enough. The crackdown was real enough. By fanning the flames, you could turn the people against communism. The strategy is completely understandable.”

  She could even see how Noel Field made such a tempting mouse for someone like Dulles. “And then we have this fool Noel Field, a romantic, he had been everywhere, he was full of these enthusiasms, he went back and forth into these countries freely. I don’t think Allen Dulles hated Noel Field, not at all. But the opportunity was too good to miss.”

  And yet, even in her enlightened state, Erica Wallach was not prepared to entirely forgive Allen Dulles. There was something disturbing about the man, at his core, that she wanted to put on record while she still had time. “Dulles had a certain arrogance in which he believed that he could work with the Devil—anybody’s Devil—and still be Allen Dulles,” she told her visitor. “He could work with Noel Field and betray him. He could work with the Nazis or with the Communists. He thought himself untouchable by these experiences and, of course, you cannot help be touched, be affected, no matter how noble your cause is.”

  8

  Scoundrel Time

  In late August 1947, Richard M. Nixon, a freshman congressman from Southern California, arrived in New York City to board the luxurious Queen Mary for a fact-finding tour of war-ravaged Europe that he would later call “one of the greatest thrills of my life.” Nixon’s parents came to see off their ambitious son, and before the ocean liner embarked, the family took in a performance of the long-running Broadway musical Oklahoma! The young congressman was part of a nineteen-member delegation chaired by Representative Christian Herter, a patrician Republican from Massachusetts tasked with investigating the devastation of the war. President Truman hoped the bipartisan delegation’s well-publicized trip would help him win congressional approval for the Marshall Plan, his ambitious, multibillion-dollar aid package to reconstruct Europe. Truman’s sweeping proposal was generating stiff opposition from GOP conservatives, who saw it as another example of Democratic extravagance.

  Back home in Whittier, California, one of the conservative businessmen who had helped pave Dick Nixon’s successful entry into politics the previous year warned the young congressman not to be taken in by the slick State Department types during the European junket. The country could only rid itself of “the hangover philosophies of the New Deal” if Republican congressmen like Nixon were “wise enough to refuse to be drawn into support of a dangerously unworkable and profoundly inflationary foreign policy.”

  Herter, a Boston Brahmin who was married to a Standard Oil heiress, was part of the bipartisan, internationalist political elite who rejected this type of thinking as narrow-minded and isolationist. Herter’s circle saw the Marshall Plan not only as an essential antidote to the growing appeal of Communism in poverty-stricken Western Europe, but as a financial boon for America’s export industries and international banks, which would profit enormously from the revival of European markets. Herter asked one of his oldest friends to accompany the delegation—Allen Dulles, a man who shared his views and was well known for his powers of persuasion. (Dulles had another moti
ve for backing the Marshall Plan: he and Frank Wisner would later use funds skimmed from the program to finance their anti-Soviet operations in Europe.) As young diplomats in Bern during World War I, Dulles and Herter had shared the joys of bachelor life. Now, the Herter Committee’s round-trip, transatlantic journey and lengthy tour of Europe—a political expedition that would stretch for longer than two months—would give Dulles and Herter ample opportunity to win over conservative skeptics like young Dick Nixon.

  The opulent accommodations on board the Queen Mary were a far cry from the drab veterans’ halls and school auditoriums where Nixon had been spending his days just a few months earlier on the campaign trail. On the eve of his trip, Nixon had earnestly declared, “This will be no junket. It will be no cross-Atlantic cocktail party.” But in between delegation meetings, the luxury liner offered a wealth of diversions, from its grand, three-story-high dining salon, to its elegant, tiled swimming pool, to its Art Deco–style observation bar with dazzling ocean views. The storied cruise ship had hosted the likes of Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, Winston Churchill, and General Eisenhower. It was all heady stuff for the thirty-four-year-old Nixon, whose Quaker family’s grocery store and gas station had always wobbled on the brink of bankruptcy.

  Throughout his career, Nixon’s all-consuming ambition was fueled by resentment and envy, by the sense that he would always be excluded from the top decks where men like Allen Dulles and Christian Herter belonged. When Nixon was finishing law school at Duke University in 1937, he spent a frigid Christmas week in New York searching for a starting position with a prestigious Wall Street firm. He managed to get on the appointments calendar at Sullivan and Cromwell, the firm of his dreams. As he waited in the lobby, he marveled at the “thick, luxurious carpets and the fine oak paneling,” a picture of corporate power and comfort that stayed with him for many years. But he did not meet the Dulles brothers during his job interview, and Sullivan and Cromwell—which, like all the top New York firms of the day, drew their young talent almost exclusively from the Ivy League—showed no interest in this product of Whittier College and Duke Law. Nixon, who could only afford a room in the Sloane House YMCA on West Thirty-Fourth Street during his weeklong job hunt, felt a bitter sense of rejection by the time he returned to school. “He was not charmed by New York,” remembered a Duke classmate of Nixon’s. He felt the city had kicked him in the teeth.

  Yet here he was, ten years later, being wined and dined on the Queen Mary in the same privileged company as Allen Dulles. The spymaster and Herter took the young congressman under their wing during the ocean crossing. They schooled him about the importance of foreign aid as a facilitator of U.S. economic and political interests. By the time the delegation returned to the United States in early October, Nixon was fully on board as a supporter of the Marshall Plan. The congressman’s new enthusiasm for Truman’s ambitious proposal did not go down well with his conservative supporters back home. But Nixon was shrewd enough to figure out that senior members of the GOP’s East Coast elite like Dulles and Herter could be of more benefit to him than the Southern California citrus growers and businessmen who had launched his career.

  The political relationship forged between the rising politician from California and Dulles’s East Coast circle would become one of the most significant partnerships of the postwar era. Nixon grew into a potent political weapon for the Dulles group, a cunning operator who managed to accrue solidly conservative credentials with the Republican Party’s popular base while dependably serving the interests of the GOP’s privileged leadership class. Together, the Dulles circle and Richard Nixon would bring about a sharp, rightward shift in the nation’s politics, driving out the surviving elements of the New Deal regime in Washington and establishing a new ruling order that was much more in tune with the Dulles circle’s financial interests. The Dulles-Nixon alliance proved masterful at exploiting the Cold War panic that gripped the nation, using it to root out Rooseveltian true believers from government, along with a few genuine Communist infiltrators who posed a marginal threat to national security. When Washington’s anti-Communist witch hunt raged out of control and threatened to consume even those who had lit the flame, Nixon again proved of great use to Dulles, working with him to keep the inferno within safe boundaries. In return for his services, Nixon won the patronage of the kingmakers in the Dulles circle, ensuring the politician’s steady rise toward Washington’s top throne.

  Years later, after Nixon’s climb to power was stalled by his loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, Dulles sent Nixon a warm letter, reminiscing about their relationship and noting that “we have worked together since the days of the mission on the Marshall Plan.” The Dulles-Nixon alliance actually preceded their voyage on the Queen Mary, but the spymaster was understandably loath to officially record its true origins. According to John Loftus, the former Justice Department Nazi hunter, the two men first came in contact in late 1945, when young naval officer Richard Nixon was shuttling up and down the East Coast, wrapping up war-related business for the Navy. While sifting through the military paperwork, Nixon came across eye-opening Nazi documents that had been shipped to an old torpedo factory on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Some of these documents revealed how the Dulles brothers had helped launder Nazi funds during the war. Loftus, citing confidential intelligence sources, alleged that Dulles and Nixon proceeded to cut a deal. “Allen Dulles,” reported Loftus, “told him to keep quiet about what he had seen and, in return, [Dulles] arranged to finance the young man’s first congressional campaign against Jerry Voorhis.”

  Dulles and his clients in the banking and oil industries had ample reason to target Voorhis, a five-term Democratic congressman and ardent New Dealer from Nixon’s home district in Southern California. The crusading congressman was a particularly troublesome thorn in the sides of Wall Street and Big Oil. Voorhis shook the banking industry by pushing for the federal government to take over the nation’s privately owned, regional Federal Reserve Banks—a radical proposal that briefly won President Roosevelt’s support, but ultimately failed to overcome the banking lobby. Voorhis was more successful in his efforts to curb the power of the major oil companies. In 1943, after learning that the Navy was about to grant Standard Oil exclusive drilling rights in the sprawling Elk Hills naval reserve in central California, Voorhis exposed the sweetheart deal and succeeded in blocking it. The congressman earned yet more of the oil industry’s wrath by taking aim at one of the industry’s most cherished tax breaks, the oil depletion allowance, and by stopping offshore drilling plans along the California coast.

  Voorhis also posed a direct legal threat to the Dulles brothers through his efforts to shine a light on the wartime collusion between Sullivan and Cromwell clients like Standard Oil and DuPont chemical company and Nazi cartels such as IG Farben. Voorhis further unnerved the Dulles circle by demanding a congressional investigation of the controversial Bank for International Settlements, charging that bank president Thomas McKittrick, a close associate of the Dulles brothers, was a Nazi collaborator.

  Corporate America viewed Washington politicians like Voorhis as the personification of their New Deal nightmare. In his midforties, Voorhis had the granite-jawed good looks of a movie star. He also combined the same upper-class breeding and populist instincts that made Roosevelt such a formidable threat. The son of an automobile executive, Voorhis was educated at the Hotchkiss School and Yale. But as a young man, he rejected his privileged background, marrying a social worker, going to work on a Ford assembly line, and becoming a Socialist. He changed his registration to the Democratic Party in 1934 when he entered California politics, but his congressional voting record demonstrated he was a stalwart of the party’s left wing.

  In 1944, Voorhis published a book titled Beyond Victory, making clear that, as a leader of the progressive caucus in Congress, he was determined to keep pushing for ambitious reforms in postwar America. Voorhis sent alarms through the ranks of his corporate foes by calling
for the nationalization of the transportation, energy, and utility industries as well as sweeping banking reforms. He wanted to create a national credit union to compete with private banks and to expand the Social Security system as a way to establish a nationwide minimum income.

  Voorhis’s business opponents began searching for a strong candidate to unseat their nemesis long before the 1946 congressional race. While still in uniform, Nixon was recruited to run against the popular progressive by Herman Perry, a family friend who managed the Bank of America’s Whittier branch. Nixon later insisted that no powerful interests were behind his political debut, just “typical representatives of the Southern California middle class: an auto dealer, a bank manager, a printing salesman, a furniture dealer.” But Voorhis knew the truth. He later wrote in an unpublished memoir that he had been targeted by powerful East Coast bankers and oilmen, who saw him as “one of the most dangerous men in Washington.” In the fall of 1945, according to Voorhis, one major New York banker flew to Southern California, where he sat down with local bankers and “bawled them out” for allowing such a progressive firebrand to represent their district.

  Nixon knew that it would take a large campaign war chest to defeat the five-term Voorhis—and he also made clear that he was not interested in running for office if it meant taking a pay cut. Republican business circles in New York and Los Angeles quickly rallied to make the campaign against Voorhis worth the effort of their candidate. An executive for Gladding, McBean, a major ceramics manufacturer whose chairman sat on Standard Oil’s board, later recalled how the corporate message on behalf of Nixon was delivered. At a meeting of seventy-five executives held at an exclusive Ojai, California, resort, the president of Gladding, McBean touted the “young man fresh out of the Navy” who had been lined up for the congressional race. “Smart as all get out. Just what we need to get rid of Jerry Voorhis. . . . He says he can’t live on a congressman’s salary. Needs a lot more than that to match what he knows he could make in private law practice. The boys need cash to make up the difference. We’re going to help.”