The Devil's Chessboard

On April 10, 1953, Dulles warned a Princeton alumni conference of Soviet “brain warfare.” Three days later he signed the order creating MKULTRA, and its predecessor ARTICHOKE was already running. Denounce the enemy’s program while building your own: loudly, and first.

Maheu and Associates: “a private detective firm staffed by former CIA and FBI employees that the intelligence agency used as a ‘cut-out’ to do dirty jobs on U.S. soil, where the CIA was forbidden by law to operate.” How to break your own charter: hire your old employees through a front and call them contractors.

After reading the Vrba-Wetzler report on Auschwitz, Dulles performed shock: “One has to do something immediately.” Then he sent a routine cable to Cordell Hull, “a man Dulles knew would not lift a finger.” To kill an urgent report without refusing it, route it to someone guaranteed to sit on it.

Dulles ran his Bern station in the open: no bodyguard, no gun, informers met in cafés. His own maxim: “Too much secrecy can be self-defeating.” When everyone can see you, nobody believes you are hiding anything.

In Hal Vaughan’s account, Dulles assured Himmler’s envoy that the Allies’ declaration was “merely a piece of paper to be scrapped without further ado if Germany would sue for peace.” To kill a policy you cannot overturn, reassure the other side it will not be enforced.

Breckinridge Long’s 1940 memo ordered consuls to “put every obstacle in the way” and use “various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” Bureaucracy kills without ever saying no.

By Dulles’s own account, he let Gaevernitz carry out the Wolff rescue without ordering it: “I noticed a twinkle in his eye, and as he told me later, he noticed one in mine. I realized, of course, what he was going to do, and that he intended to do it on his own responsibility.” Command while commanding nothing: deniability built from a glance.

Arrested by American Nazi-hunters, Dollmann handed over a slip of paper: “Please call this number. Ask for Major Angleton. He knows who I am.” Carry a name that outranks the arresting officer.

Dulles “buried it in the State Department bureaucracy under a purposefully dull name—the Office of Policy Coordination.” The OPC grew to nearly three thousand employees plus another three thousand independent contractors in the field. Hide an army behind a boring name.

Facing exposure over Nazi ties, the Dulles circle seized the investigative momentum and aimed it at New Deal officials instead. Nixon, “Allen Dulles’s mouthpiece in Congress” in Loftus’s phrase, made sure the circle “would never have to answer for their wartime actions.” To escape scrutiny, seize the investigation and aim it at your accusers.

After Galíndez was kidnapped in Manhattan, “the CIA had already moved swiftly to shut down the case,” steering it into NYPD intelligence hands. Asked about it, Dulles “blandly replied that the CIA had no jurisdiction on American soil.” Kill the investigation from behind the jurisdiction line you just crossed.

Dulles cultivated Kennedy for years before the presidency, a relationship Talbot describes as tutorial: “the education of a promising young man,” with “Kennedy as prince and acolyte and the Dulles brothers as court regents.” Capture the next president by becoming his teacher.

Harriman’s advice, via Marshall: “when you change a policy, you must change the men too.” Policy without personnel change is a press release.

Asked on camera whether the CIA operated on a higher moral level than the KGB, Dulles replied: “As far as I know, we don’t engage in assassinations or kidnappings or things of that kind. As far as I know, we never have.” The “as far as I know” is the whole technique: the deniable absolute, stated twice.

Angleton’s doctrine: “It was the paper record—the ‘legend’—that mattered most.” Under him “a person’s file sometimes took on a life of its own, full of actions and dialogue that bore no relation to the subject’s real life.” The file becomes the person; reality is whatever the paperwork says.

McCloy described the Warren Commission’s job as “lay the dust” stirred up in Dallas, “dust not only in the United States, but all over the world.” When the mandate is to settle rather than solve, staffing, deadlines, and conclusions all follow.

The CIA’s 1967 guidance for handling Warren Report critics: give friendly journalists “material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists,” including portraying them as Soviet dupes. The agency’s own document adds: “Communists and other extremists always attempt to prove a political conspiracy behind violence.” The smear template, in the agency’s own words.

The Korean “brainwashing” panic, “the seedbed of so much creeping, Cold War fantasy,” turned out to be largely fictitious, debunked by Dulles’s own commissioned Cornell study. Yet “in response to the brainwashing bugaboo that the CIA itself had conjured, the agency constructed its own intricate mind control machinery.” The point: the invented threat funds the real weapon.

Allen Dulles to the press, on the eve of his campaign: “Democracy works only if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can’t sit back and let democracy run itself.” The creed, on the record.

Talbot’s rule for the CIA’s hierarchy: Hunt, Harvey, Morales were indispensable, until they became expendable. You are protected exactly as long as you are useful, and not one day longer. Hunt’s epitaph for the code: “I thought—mistakenly—that I was dealing with honorable men.”

Bobby Kennedy wrote: “The President believed he was President, and that, his wishes having been made clear, they would be followed.” The context, per Talbot: JFK “was furious when he learned that his original order to remove the Jupiter rockets from Turkey had been ignored.” Authority is what gets obeyed, not what gets ordered.

Dulles on briefing Congress: members stopped him, saying “We don’t want to hear about that, we might talk in our sleep. Don’t tell us this!” Oversight as willful ignorance: the overseers ask not to be told, and the operator obliges.

Shown Frame 313 of the Zapruder film, Schlesinger “visibly paled. “I can’t look and won’t look,” Schlesinger said, turning his head and walking briskly away.” A circle protects itself by refusing to look at the evidence.