[PREV - THEORY_NO_MORE] [TOP]
DULLES_DID_IT
November 18, 2021
Yes, Allen Dulles did it.
A review of "The Devil's
Did what? He did everything. Chessboard" by David Talbot.
Allen Dulles engaged in treasonous conspiracies
with Nazis; he protected war criminals from the
Nuremberg trials; he played to Stalin's paranoia
and created the Stalinist purges; he bankrolled
Richard Nixon, started the communist witchhunts
and rolled back The New Deal; he engineered
anti-Democratic coups in Iran and Guatemala and he
pushed for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and
after he was fired from the CIA he organized the
assasination of JFK; then he bulled his way on to
the Warren Commission and engineered a cover-up. (And I haven't
even finished
Allen Dulles did America. Allen Dulles did the the book yet.)
Twentieth Century.
Or at least that is what you might glean from
reading David Talbot's book, which is such an
extreme portrait that I found it really amusing--
not that I'm objecting, you understand, it's
easy enough to convince me that an OSS/CIA man was
an unsavory character, and myself I expect that
David Talbot's account here is substantially
correct--
What's funny-- provided you have a similarly weird
sense of humor-- is how little Talbot pulls his
punches: there's very little in the way of
traditional nods in the direction of Being
Reasonable for the sake of form. Talbot goes as
far as you can go without actively ranting...
And what's really funny is that Talbot really is
persuasive: that Allen Dulles (younger brother of
John Foster Dulles) has some skeletons rattling
around in the closet is something that I think would
honestly surprise no one (some might affect
disbelief, but only disingenously).
What's funny is what an absolute, unmitigated
piece-of-shit Allen Dulles was, it's so bleeding
obvious it's remarkable it's not common knowledge--
it's a testament to his skill that he always found a
way to weasel out of any problem.
Allen Dulles was really good at finding innocent people to
frame to distract or just create confusion; he would
throw his weight behind political movements that pushed in
the opposite direction from him and his kind, and usually
came up a winner.
Getting his ass fired by Kennedy is one of his few
major setbacks, but he barely let it slow him down.
Now, when I mention this book to people, I get
questions about how good Talbot's sources are, and so
on-- all us intellectuals affect an interest in this
sort of process: you're supposed to pretend you did
the work of checking references, seeking out contrary
voices, weighing the evidence even-handly and so on.
I might go there later, but no, I haven't bothered
with that at this point, and I'm not terribly
worried that I might've been conned. If I do start
checking sources, honestly it'll be to see how easy
it is to make a case that I can use to embarrass
people who believe-- or claim to believe-- that this
is some sort of crazy extreme point-of-view (rather
than, for example, something you would believe about
any third world country with far less evidence).
This book does have a very bad flaw in its
scholarly aparatus: it has many supporting
notes at the rear of the book, and all of
them with page numbers pointing back at the
text, but there are no footnotes in the text
you can use to easily check them in the
forward direction.
And when you do check them, there's nothing
more fine-grained than the page number to
tell which point the note is supposed to be
supporting... the best you can do is read
through all the notes for a page in order,
and try to line them up with what they're
*probably* referring to.
At some point, I may go through
a copy and manually write in the
missing footnotes...
But then the main things I'm going to want
to support is probably relatively small-- my
likely focus is the Bay of Pigs, the JFK
assasination and the Warren Commission.
--------
[NEXT - THE_IMMORTAL_WARREN]