by David Talbot
Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command, enjoys himself at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1946. William Donovan, Dulles’s OSS boss, even tried to cut a deal on Goering’s behalf, outraging the top U.S. prosecutor. (KURT HUTTON/GETTY IMAGES)
Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s spy chief on the eastern front, was among the “rats” rescued after the war by Dulles, who helped install Gehlen as the powerful director of West Germany’s intelligence apparatus. (AP PHOTO)
William Gowen, a young U.S. Army intelligence agent, tried to track down war criminals fleeing justice through the Nazi “ratlines” in Italy. But he was no match for Dulles and his counterintelligence protégé in Rome, James Jesus Angleton. (COURTESY OF WILLIAM GOWEN)
Clover Dulles (left) and Mary Bancroft formed a lifelong bond when they met in Switzerland during the final days of the war. The women took to calling Dulles—the cold, relentless man who dominated their lives—“The Shark.” (COURTESY OF JOAN TALLEY)
Quaker relief worker Noel Field was one of the innocent “little mice” who fell into Dulles’s trap during the Cold War. (© CORBIS)
The young congressman Richard Nixon (far right), with fellow members of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, rode the anti-Communist inquisitions to power with the help of the Dulles brothers. (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Harry Dexter White, the most celebrated New Deal economist, was one of Nixon’s victims. (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Senator Joseph McCarthy, with his aide Roy Cohn in 1954, was such a powerful exploiter of the red scare that he became a threat to President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers. (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (left) and President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over a growing U.S. empire enforced by nuclear “brinksmanship” terror and CIA cloak-and-dagger intrigue. (COURTESY OF JOAN TALLEY)
The maverick sociologist C. Wright Mills, who rode a motorcyle that he built himself, was America’s most incisive analyst of the Cold War “power elite.” His provocative scholarship won a wide following—and got him listed by the CIA as an intellectual threat even after his premature death in 1962. (PHOTO BY YAROSLAVA MILLS. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF C. WRIGHT MILLS)
The shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and Queen Soraya arrive at the Rome airport in August 1953, in flight from their country’s democratic uprising. A CIA-engineered coup would soon put the shah back on the Peacock Throne. (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Wealthy, young, attractive, and dedicated to uplifting their impoverished country, President Jacobo Arbenz and his wife, Maria, were the Kennedys of Guatemala. But Arbenz was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored military rebellion in 1954 after his land reforms antagonized United Fruit Company and the Dulles brothers. (CORNELL CAPA/GETTY IMAGES)
The programming of the assassin in the 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, starring Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey, eerily evoked the massive CIA mind control program—code-named MKULTRA—that was launched by Allen Dulles in 1953. (COURTESY OF MGM MEDIA LICENSING)
Cuba’s new leader Fidel Castro was amused by reports of an assassination plot when he visited New York in April 1959. (© Corbis) But the campaign to kill Castro became a more serious matter when the CIA hired security contractor Robert Maheu (right) to enlist the Mafia in its lethal plot. (RALPH CRANE/GETTY IMAGES)
The Congo’s brief moment of post-colonial euphoria ended in December 1960 when Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first democratically elected leader, was arrested by rebel troops under the guidance of the CIA. (STRINGER/GETTY IMAGES)
President John F. Kennedy, a strong supporter of African independence, was stunned when he received a call from United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson in February 1961 informing him of Lumumba’s brutal execution. The CIA had kept the news of Lumumba’s murder from the newly inaugurated Kennedy for nearly a month. (© THE ESTATE OF JACQUE LOWE)
President-elect Kennedy greets adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. outside the Harvard historian’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January 1961. Schlesinger’s diaries would later provide a remarkable inside view of the Kennedy presidency as it was torn apart from within by national security conflicts. (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Allen Dulles, followed by Clover, trudges through the snow to Kennedy’s inauguration. Though JFK decided to retain Dulles as CIA director, the two men would soon suffer a bitter break over the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961. (ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/GETTY IMAGES)
While President Kennedy was wrestling with CIA and Pentagon advisers over the Bay of Pigs, he suddenly found himself thrust into another CIA-connected tempest, when President Charles de Gaulle of France charged that U.S. intelligence officials were backing a military coup against him. During a visit to Paris in June 1961 with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, JFK tried to repair U.S. relations with France. (RDA/GETTY IMAGES)
Kennedy with his vice presidential running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, at a 1960 campaign stop. “One out of every four presidents has died in office,” LBJ told Clare Boothe Luce when she asked him why he settled for the number-two spot on the ticket. “I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’.” (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
The Rockefeller brothers—led by banker David (far left) and politician Nelson (second from left)—were central members of “the deep state,” the discreet nexus of power whose chief “fixer” was Allen Dulles. (BERNARD GOTFRYD/GETTY IMAGES)
Top CIA administrators like Richard Helms (left) and key operations officers like Howard Hunt remained loyal to Dulles even after President Kennedy forced him out of the agency. (BOTH PHOTOS © BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Lee Harvey Oswald was a born “patsy,” as he called himself after his arrest for assassinating President Kennedy. His wife, Marina—shown with their baby June in 1962, the year he returned to the U.S. from Russia—thought Lee “did not know who he was really serving. . . . He tried to play with the big boys.” Senator Richard Schweiker later saw “the fingerprints of intelligence” all over the doomed young man. (© CORBIS)
International businessman and CIA informant George de Mohrenschildt took Oswald under his wing in Dallas. He later deeply regretted how he helped frame him for the assassination. (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Quakers Ruth and Michael Paine also befriended the Oswalds. Filled with the arrogance of good intentions, the Paines firmly denied they played an intelligence role in Dallas. But the Paine family was well known to Dulles and his mistress, Mary Bancroft. (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren hands his commission’s report on the assassination of President Kennedy to President Johnson in September 1964. Dulles (second from right) lobbied aggressively to be named to the Warren Commission—a panel he so thoroughly dominated that some thought it should have been called the “Dulles Commission.” (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
David Lifton, pictured here around the time he confronted Dulles about the Warren Report’s flaws at a UCLA gathering in 1965, was a graduate student in engineering and physics, and the only person who ever grilled Dulles in public about the assassination. He later recalled feeling that he was in the presence of “evil” that night. (COURTESY OF DAVID LIFTON)
An autopsy photograph of President John F. Kennedy, following his assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Two of the surgeons at Parkland Memorial Hospital who worked in vain to save the mortally wounded Kennedy saw clear evidence that he was struck by bullets from the front as well as the rear, demonstrating that he was the victim of a conspiracy. But afraid to reveal what they observed in the emergency room, they remained silent until years later. (APIC/GETTY IMAGES)
Senator Robert F. Kennedy tours a tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in May 1967. Despite the fears of his family, RFK threw himself into the presidential race the following year, privately confiding to close aides that he planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s death. (FRED W. MCDARRAH/GETTY IMAGES)
James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary counterintelligence wizard, photographed in 1976 after he was finally ousted from the agency. He served Dulles with a devout sense of mission, but by the end of his life he came to believe that the CIA’s archangels were far from godly men.
(PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD AVEDON © THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION)
About the Author
DAVID TALBOT is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and the acclaimed national bestseller Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love. He is the founder and former editor in chief of Salon, and was a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine and the features editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He has written for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, The Guardian, and other major publications. Talbot lives in San Francisco, California.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by David Talbot
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love
Credits
Cover design by Kelly Frakeny and Robert Newman
Copyright
THE DEVIL’S CHESSBOARD. Copyright © 2015 by The Talbot Players, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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 hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-227616-2
EPub Edition October 2015 ISBN 9780062276216
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
