David
Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard – Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of
America’s Secret Government” (Harper-Collins, NY, 2015)
A Preview of the New Political Landscape
By Bill
Kelly
David
Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard” turns the table on the traditional
journalists and historians who have uniformly portrayed Allen Dulles as the
pipe smoking gentleman spy who fought for America’s righteous causes through
two world wars and the Cold War and helped calm America’s anxiety in the wake
of the Kennedy assassination by honorably serving on the Warren Commission.
Not so
fast. By focusing on the one man at the epicenter of both World War II and the Cold
War as well as the assassination – Allen Welsh Dulles, Talbot puts his finger on the pulse of power, and
without promoting any conspiracy theory in regards to the assassination, he
sets the stage for rational discussion and historic acceptance of such
theories, for certainly one of them must be true.
Rather
than the crusading knight, in retrospect we can now see Dulles for what he
actually was – a shrewd lawyer who looked after the interests of his family,
friends and corporate clients, a man who harnessed the secrets of the black
arts of espionage and helped establish the secret intelligence state that has pretty much
run things since the end of World War II.
The game of chess and the chessboard is a fitting matrix model that can help make complex issues simple
or easier to understand and some of the main characters – E. Howard Hunt and
David Atlee Phillips considered themselves Knights and Bishops, major players
in the Great Game that Dulles played, though Dulles himself was not so much a
player on the board but one of the master gamers who moved the pieces around.
From
representing German industrial giants before the war and promoting a separate
peace with the Nazis against the president’s stated policy to instigating coups
against democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran, Talbot
portrays Allen Dulles as a man who not only made his own foreign policy, but
was often at odds with the presidents he served – Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.
With his
brother John Foster Dulles as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and serving as head of the
then relatively unknown Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles was a king
maker in a strategic position to design and call the plays and make the moves
that made American and world history for over a decade.
Dulles’
downfall – the Bay of Pigs, was a major blunder, conceived during the
Eisenhower administration and carried out shortly after Kennedy took office.
While JFK approved the relocation of the invasion beach, refused to permit a
second and necessary air strike, and took responsibility for the failure of the
operation, he privately blamed Dulles for conceiving, approving and convincing
him such a harebrained scheme would work.
Talbot
correctly assumes the contemporary consensus that the Bay of Pigs
operation was designed to fail and force the president to order a large scale
American military intervention, as LBJ would do in the Dominican Republic
shortly after assuming office, but JFK balked and refused to do what the CIA
and military leaders assumed he would.
A
genuine story teller with a narrative flair, Talbot begins with Allen Dulles
walking around his Georgetown neighborhood past Dumbarton Oaks with the editor of Harpers Magazine, trying to explain his side
of the Bay of Pigs debacle. Dulles would write an article on the subject for
Harpers that was never published but Talbot found it among Dulles’ papers.
In
reading this book I found that Talbot presents many of the basic facts but leaves a lot
of supporting details out, details that will eventually come out and fill some of the
missing pieces of the puzzle, such as the fact that the Harvard Research Center
at Dumbarton Oaks was run for many years by a Harvard Russian associate who
just happened to be present in the American Embassy office in Moscow when
former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald presented his passport and announced his
“defection.”
On the
Devil’s Chessboard Oswald is a mere pawn whose movements were closely monitored
by the CIA as well as the Soviets, but Talbot doesn’t give him credit for the
dastardly deed most mainstream historians attribute to him - killing JFK all by himself.
Rather, Talbot portrays Oswald as a political pawn in Dulles’ orbit and caught
up in the intelligence network web that was responsible for the Dealey Plaza
operation and implies that he was framed for the crime.
In a
real game of chess, it is highly unlikely if not impossible for a pawn to take
out a King, but that’s exactly what Oswald is supposed to have done, and he was
certainly maneuvered into position to do so.
“In the
months leading up to the Kennedy assassination, Oswald was moved here and there
with the calculation of a master chess player,” writes Talbot, noting that
“He staged public scenes in New Orleans and Mexico City that called attention
to himself as a hotheaded militant, as he had done at the embassy in Moscow. There
were invisible wires attached to Oswald – and some of the more intriguing ones
led to Allen Dulles.”
In all
of the two thousand and some books that have been written about the
assassination few call attention to certain key facts that Talbot draws out, such as JFK’s bitter enemy Air
Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay was a close personal friend of D. H.
Byrd. Byrd was the owner of the Texas School Book Depository, from where Oswald is supposed
to have fired the shots that killed Kennedy.
Talbot also calls attention to the fact that Dulles’ mistress and agent Mary
Bancroft was a close friend and overseas traveling companion of Michael Paine’s
mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young.
While
Talbot doesn’t mention Ruth Forbes Paine Young by name, he refers to her as “Ruth Paine’s
mother-in-law,” reporting that: “It was another striking ‘coincidence’ in the
endlessly enigmatic Oswald story. The housewife who took the Oswald’s under her
wing had married into a family whose foibles and weaknesses were well known to
Dulles and his mistress. Ruth Paine was aware of her mother-in-law’s connection
to Bancroft and Dulles. Her mother-in-law, in fact, had told her that she
invited the couple to enjoy a get-away on the family island. But with typical
obstinacy, Ruth refused to see any particular significance to this Dulles link
to her family.”
“Dulles
himself,” writes Talbot, “acknowledged that the flat-out weirdness of these
curious facts and, in his own characteristic fashion, simply laughed it off.
The conspiracy-minded would have a field day, he chuckled, if they knew that he
had visited Dallas three weeks before the assassination and that he had a
personal connection to the women whom he identified as Marina Oswald’s
‘landlady.’”
As
Talbot points out, Ruth and Michael Paine were more than Marina Oswald’s “landlady,”
who charged no rent, they were Oswald’s benefactors and sponsors, giving him
rides, providing food and clothing for his family and obtaining him the job at
the Byrd’s Texas School Book Depository, from where shots were said to have been fired
at the president.
“In
their immaculate innocence, the Paines played right into the hands of those who
were manipulating Oswald,” Talbot concludes.
That the
mother of the accused assassin’s chief sponsor was a close personal friend and traveling companion of Allen Dulles’ mistress and agent is not six
degrees of separation but two, and not a coincidence any more than the fact
that the mistress – Mary Bancroft, was Dulles’ intermediary with Hans Bernd
Gisevius, the Nazi officer and principle agent in the July 1944 Valkyrie plot
to kill Hitler. Talbot mentions this, but doesn’t include the fact that in late
September 1963 CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff
on the CIA’s attempt to adapt aspects of the Valkyrie plot to use against Castro
in Cuba.
There
was a lot of movement on the chessboard that September day as the CIA briefed the Joint
Chiefs, temporarily chaired by Gen. LeMay, JFK signed a National Security
Action Memo authorizing “Project Four Leaves,” a military communication order that is still classified,
and left on a Conservation Tour of the mid-west, when the details of the
November visit to Texas were officially announced. It was the same September day that Lee Harvey Oswald slipped
out of New Orleans for Mexico City.
The day
before, the Oswald’s main benefactor Ruth Paine, had picked up the pregnant
Marina, her daughter and their belongings, including the rifle said to have been
used to kill JFK, and drove them to Texas after staying at the Naushon island off Massachusetts that Mary Bancroft had invited them to visit and then stayed with her husband’s mother – Mary
Bancrofts’s good friend in Philadelphia.
As
Talbot notes, “Bancroft reminded Dulles that she had known Michael’s mother
‘extremely well’ for over forty years and had spent summers with her on Naushon
Island,” so Bancroft recognized the significance of their relationship and
conveyed it to Dulles, who laughed it off.
Unlke
John Wilkes Booth’s landlady, who was executed, and those who assist assassins
and terrorists today, who are violently interrogated and vigorously prosecuted,
Ruth and Michael Paine were treated with kid’s gloves by the Warren Commissioners, who were never informed that Michael’s mom was a friend and agent of the former head
of the CIA and Warren Commissioner Dulles.
This
book will spark and put to rest many debates, such as the fable that RFK asked
LBJ to appoint Dulles and John J. McCloy to the Warren Commission, whether the
CIA engaged in a cover-up of the truth behind the assassination and the
veracity of some of the sources of information. To his credit, Talbot
resurrects Col. Fletcher Prouty, who worked in the Pentagon at the time of the
assassination, and weathered attempts to discredit him for his beliefs, and
David Lifton, a conspiracy theorist who had an interesting man to man conversation with Dulles about
the assassination at a public event.
At the
time of the Bay of Pigs Allen Dulles was on a trip to South America.
At the time of the assassination, D. H. Byrd, the owner of the Texas School
Book Depository, was on a safari in Africa with a German Barron whose father
was an assassination expert and supporter of the Valkyrie plot.
In the
two months before the assassination Dulles met with top CIA officials including
Desmond Fitzgerald, the CIA officer who briefed the Joint Chiefs on the
adaption of the Valkyrie Plot, David Atlee Philips, the "Mr. Bishop" who met with Oswald before
he went to Mexico City, Cord Meyer, James J. Angleton and Thomas
Karamessines, all bishops, knights and rooks who made key moves and played
major roles in the assassination drama.
Other
previous biographies of Dulles say that at the time of the assassination he was
in New York at the venerable Council on Foreign Relations, but Talbot places
him back in D.C. at his Georgetown home and then moving to the CIA’s special facility near Quantico, Virginia known as “The Farm,” where he monitored the unfolding assassination drama.
After
the failure of the Valkyrie plot Dulles and Bancroft assisted Hans B. Gisevious
in getting out of the country by providing fake credentials, and after the war,
Bancroft translated Gisevious’ manuscript to English while Dulles brought him
to Washington as a CIA consultant. In Washington Gisevious lived at the home of one of
Dulles’ chief assistants Tom Braden, who interviewed Dulles for the JFK
Library.
As
Talbot writes, “While serving on the Warren Commission, Dulles told Braden, he
had the opportunity to examine the assassination in exquisite detail. He talked
about the events of that day as if he were inspecting the intricate meshing of
synchronicities that had to occur in order for Kennedy to die that day. His description
made it sound like the operation of a lifetime.”
“If the
employees of the Book Depository had eaten their lunch in a little different
place,” said Dulles, “if somebody had been at one place where he might easily
have been instead of another at one particular time – the ‘ifs’ just stand out
all over it. And if any one of these ‘ifs’ been changed, it might have been
prevented…It was so tantalizing to go over the record [of events], as we did,
trying to find out every fact connected with the assassination, and then to say
if any one of the chess pieces that were entered into the game had been moved
differently, at any one time, the whole thing might have been different.”
Indeed,
instead of an accident of history, in which a deranged lone gunman kills the
President seemingly on a whim, it has become increasingly apparent that
regardless of the role Oswald played - patsy or pawn, what occurred at Dealey Plaza was a well
planned and executed covert intelligence operation that was timed to the
second. And without endorsing any particular conspiracy theory, The
Devil’s Chessboard sets the stage for what really happened to be understood and generally
believed.
While
this book is important on many levels, it is the first to call attention to the
significance of the Valkyrie Plot to kill Hitler and its numerous connections
to Dealey Plaza so now we can look forward to the development of more information on this subject as
Washington D.C. attorney Jim Lesar has already filed an FOIA request for the
records related to the CIA’s adaption of the Valkyrie plot to get rid of Castro.
The
associations between the CIA plots to kill Castro and the assassination of JFK,
known to Dulles but kept from the other Warren Commissioners, have previously
focused almost exclusively on the CIA-Mafia plots, and it has been surmised
that one of those plots to kill Castro was redirected to kill JFK. The Valkyrie
plot is now in the forefront of assassination plans that were on the CIA’s
drawing board, and as we learn more about it, and how it was adapted to be used
against Castro, we can also see how it was possibly redirected against JFK at
Dallas.
One of
the key elements of the German military’s Valkyrie Plot to kill Hitler was to
blame the assassination on the SS, just as there was and still is today a functioning
psych war campaign to blame the Dealey Plaza operation on Oswald and
Castro.
As we
await the CIA’s response to Lesar’s FOIA request for the Valkyrie Plot
documents, Lesar has suggested that Talbot’s book might “change the political
landscape” of Washington if not America, and in exposing new facts, presenting a more honest portrait of Dulles and a new perspective of
the Cold War, David Talbot flips the game board table and opens the door to a
more honest and accurate assessment of what happened at Dealey Plaza so we can accept the probability that the President was killed not by a deranged loner but by
his powerful political enemies.
Without
endorsing any particular conspiracy theory the “new political landscape” allows
for the assassination of the President to be viewed more honestly and elevates the discussions and
debates to a new level, one that requires the national security state to give
up its assassination secrets so that what happened at Dealey Plaza can be more fully understood.
Bill Kelly
billkelly@gmail.com
The Devil's Chessboard - David Talbot - Hardcover
The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government: David Talbot: 9780062276162: Amazon.com: Books
JFKfactsAllen Dulles plays 'The Devil's Chessboard' in David Talbot's new book - JFKfacts
The Devil's Chessboard - David Talbot - Hardcover
The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government: David Talbot: 9780062276162: Amazon.com: Books
JFKfactsAllen Dulles plays 'The Devil's Chessboard' in David Talbot's new book - JFKfacts
2 comments:
Nice review, Bill. Thank you very much.
Amazing Book I am reading it now.
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