Bill Kelly's Review of David Talbot's new book "The Devil's Chessboard"

[Martin Blank]

Paul - since the subject of this thread is Bill Kelly's review of Talbot's new book, not Caulfield's, perhaps you could restrict your discussions of your theories please to Caulfield's thread or Walker threads so those of us who want to see the Dulles Brothers clearly could discuss the book without distraction. That goes for any thread on The Devil's Chessboard. If you want to talk about Dulles and tell us all why he was a hero and was just being pragmatic when he made deals with the Nazis feel free to do so.

Fair enough, Paul B. Yes, about Allen Dulles and his deals with the Nazi's AFTER THE WAR, let us be clear that Dulles was making deals with the DEFEATED Nazis.

Actually, the only alternative with making deals with the DEFEATED Nazis would have been -- what?

I mean, they're defeated, so they have no more power. It's just like, at the end of the US Civil War, after Robert E. Lee surrendered to the North, the North then began making deals with the DEFEATED South. That's just common sense.

In the case of the Cold War, the issue after the surrender of Germany to the Allies was an immediate clash of the West with the USSR. The USSR wanted to take more and more of Europe, and Europe didn't want to be taken.

So, the Cold War began. Winston Churchill was a leader in the first moments of the Cold War, but soon the clash with the USSR became so heated that the USA and Western Europe needed INFORMATION about Soviet spies.

Enter Allen Dulles. His first problem was to get QUICK information about Soviet spies -- and where would he get it? The answer is OBVIOUS. Allen Dulles would go to the DEFEATED Nazi Intelligence Department, and make a deal so that the USA could get their computerized database of Soviet spies.

It was really an act of brilliance and courage -- except to the Communists who really wanted the USSR to win.

For anybody to criticize Allen Dulles for that deal with the DEFEATED Nazi's is, even today, a political opinion of the left-wing, IMHO.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

First order of business: if having a sense of morality, a conscience and a desire for justice make someone left wing, then sign me up, comrade. For anyone, especially today, to praise Dulles’ deal with the DEFEATED Nazis is a political opinion of the extreme right wing.

Second, a great man once said “You can’t be around something too long without getting some of it on you.” This is precisely what happened to this country through its post war associations with mass murderers. By bringing these people who used slave labor, made unprovoked war, and engineered mass death into our camp ultimately made us more like them and not vice versa. Dulles’ deals were the beginning of our slide toward fascism. IMHO

It doesn’t matter whether a deal was with DEFEATED or UNDEFEATED Nazis, it spit on the many who gave their lives to defeat this evil, including the 300,000 American servicemen who perished fighting Germany.

This was all the upshot of Dulles’ deal with the DEFEATED Nazis blowing up in his face. By taking on Gehlen and his apparatus in his extreme hunger to get info on the Soviets and turning him loose to operate he opened the United States up to manipulation by those DEFEATED Nazis. It was an act of stupidity of the highest order and helped lead our government astray with false information that would get the DEFEATED Nazis what they wanted and fan the flames of the Cold War.

The alternative you ask? Trials and appropriate punishment for those guilty. Justice for the millions killed in the camps, the millions slaughtered on the battlefields, the thousands who met their end as slave laborers.

Churchill was voted out of office in July 1945

Christopher Simpson writes of Gehlen in his book Blowback:

“The Gehlen Organization was the one group that did have networks inside Eastern Europe, and that is why we hired them,” international affairs expert Arthur Macy Cox says. “[but] hiring Gehlen was the biggest mistake the U.S. ever made. Our allies said, you are putting Nazis at the senior levels of your intelligence,’ and they were right. It discredited the United States.” According to Cox, the Gehlen Organization was the primary source of intelligence that claimed that ‘’the Soviets were about to attack [West] Germany. . . . [That was] the biggest bunch of baloney then, and it still a bunch of baloney today.”

The crucial period of 1945 to 1948, when East-West relations moved from a wary peace to an intense political war, provides one case study of the damage that Gehlen’s intelligence and analysis could produce. Among the most basic elements in the American interpretation of European events during the early cold war years was the evaluation of the Red Army. That subject, it will be recalled, was Gehlen’s specialty.

In mid-1946 U.S. military intelligence correctly reported that the Red Army (then in control of most of Eastern Europe) was under equipped, overextended, and war-weary. Its estimate of the number of Soviet troops in Eastern and Central Europe was quite high -- some 208 divisions -- but the U.S. Army concluded that these forces were almost entirely tied down with administrative, police, and reconstruction tasks in the Russian-occupied zone. Soviet military aggression against Western Europe was highly unlikely for at least a decade, if only for logistical reasons, the army determined.

Particularly intriguing were 1946 U.S. Army reports concerning railroads in eastern Germany. The Red Army, it was well known, lacked the motorized strength of Western forces and relied heavily on the railroads to move troops to the front and for logistic support.* The U.S. Army intelligence reports drawn from military attachés inside the Soviet zone, from the U.S. strategic bombing survey research teams in Eastern Europe and from other on-the-spot reports prior to the Soviet decision to close its occupation zone to the West made it clear that the Russians were tearing up much of the German railroad network and shipping it back to the USSR as war reparations. The Soviets uprooted about a third of the entire German railway system, including such strategic lines as Berlin-Leipzig and Berlin-Frankfurt, seizing train yards, switches, and thousands of miles of track. Whatever else may be said of this form of Russian industrial development, it was clearly not the behavior of a military power contemplating a blitzkrieg attack.

Over the next two years, however, the U.S. appraisal of the capabilities and intentions of the Red Army fundamentally shifted, and this change was pushed along by misleading reports and mistaken warnings from the Gehlen Organization. By the time the reappraisal was over, it had become an article of faith in Washington, D.C., that the war-weary Soviet occupation forces were actually fresh assault troops poised for an attack on the West. The Americans’ new estimate of the number of those troops, furthermore, was also greatly exaggerated because it did not take into account the large-scale demobilization of Soviet forces after 1945. As U.S, intelligence’s primary source of information on the Soviet military during this pivotal period of the cold war, Gehlen’s organization played an important role in the creation of the American evaluation--or rather misevaluation--of Soviet power in Europe that has not been adequately appreciated until recently.

Important changes took place within the U.S. intelligence community in the course of those years that reinforced the overall drift toward open hostilities with the USSR. Colonel John V. Grombach of the Pentagon’s Military Intelligence Service (MIS), who appears later in these pages, played a significant role in one such change: the U.S. purge of the foreign intelligence analysis teams at the Pentagon and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This self-imposed purge, which appears to have been carried out primarily for political reasons, helped lay the foundation for Gehlen’s growing influence within the U.S. intelligence community.

Edited October 16, 2015 by Martin Blank

[Paul Trejo]

It doesn’t matter whether a deal was with DEFEATED or UNDEFEATED Nazis, it spit on the many who gave their lives to defeat this evil, including the 300,000 American servicemen who perished fighting Germany.

My gosh, Martin, you're completely mistaken about this accusation. It surely makes a difference if the Nazis were DEFEATED or UNDEFEATED before somebody made a deal with them. If you can't follow that logic, then there's no reasoning with you.

Allen Dulles was a great American patriot. He advanced the cause of the USA in the 1940's and 1950's as few others in public service.

Further, there's nothing Right-wing about me, Martin. I'm very liberal -- but I'm clearly not Left-wing. Nor is Left-wing defined as the only moral, honest and fair people -- as they like to think. They make as many mistakes as anybody else.

The Radical Right in the USA were probably the ones who killed JFK. I detest the Radical Right. But the Radical Left in the USA were quick to defend LHO on the theory that he was a Fidelista, and they could not imagine a Fidelista killing JFK (e.g. Lyman Paine).

So they joined Jim Garrison to defend LHO for the past 47 years. I agree that LHO was a Patsy, and so one of the victims of the JFK plot. Yet it's a mistake to imagine that LHO was a Leftist; he worked for Guy Banister. (Jim Garrison saw this in the early days of his investigation which led him to 544 Camp Street and the Radical Right. But events frightened Garrison away.)

But let's focus on Allen Dulles and the flaw of the Left-wing in the USA that fails to recognize the necessity of the CIA in World Politics. There simply is no such thing as International "Law" -- and War is the most common condition in International Relations.

The USSR wanted to push into Europe, and Allen Dulles defended Europe by appropriating the DEFEATED Nazi databases about USSR spies. We own Allen Dulles a patriotic debt of gratitude.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited October 17, 2015 by Paul Trejo

[Martin Blank]

wow

[David Andrews]

The USSR wanted to push into Europe, and Allen Dulles defended Europe by appropriating the DEFEATED Nazi databases about USSR spies. We own Allen Dulles a patriotic debt of gratitude.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Notwithstanding that the Dulles brothers, Harriman, and others of their circle helped create Nazi Germany and revive its economy, industry and military along fascist lines. Great heroics there, if decades of accumulated private profit and governmental murder equal heroics. Your arguments for Allen Dulles's heroism are the same as those that have sustained a hard-right versus hard-left system worldwide, with the US continually backing repressive, murderous, rightist governments. Surely the US could have attempted something more moderate and humane after WW II, which was what Kennedy was after. Yet Allen Dulles: "That little Kennedy - he thought he was a god."

Edited October 17, 2015 by David Andrews

[Glenn Nall]

It doesn’t matter whether a deal was with DEFEATED or UNDEFEATED Nazis, it spit on the many who gave their lives to defeat this evil, including the 300,000 American servicemen who perished fighting Germany.

My gosh, Martin, you're completely mistaken about this accusation. It surely makes a difference if the Nazis were DEFEATED or UNDEFEATED before somebody made a deal with them. If you can't follow that logic, then there's no reasoning with you.

Allen Dulles was a great American patriot. He advanced the cause of the USA in the 1940's and 1950's as few others in public service.

Further, there's nothing Right-wing about me, Martin. I'm very liberal -- but I'm clearly not Left-wing. Nor is Left-wing defined as the only moral, honest and fair people -- as they like to think. They make as many mistakes as anybody else.

The Radical Right in the USA were probably the ones who killed JFK. I detest the Radical Right. But the Radical Left in the USA were quick to defend LHO on the theory that he was a Fidelista, and they could not imagine a Fidelista killing JFK (e.g. Lyman Paine).

So they joined Jim Garrison to defend LHO for the past 47 years. I agree that LHO was a Patsy, and so one of the victims of the JFK plot. Yet it's a mistake to imagine that LHO was a Leftist; he worked for Guy Banister. (Jim Garrison saw this in the early days of his investigation which led him to 544 Camp Street and the Radical Right. But events frightened Garrison away.)

But let's focus on Allen Dulles and the flaw of the Left-wing in the USA that fails to recognize the necessity of the CIA in World Politics. There simply is no such thing as International "Law" -- and War is the most common condition in International Relations.

The USSR wanted to push into Europe, and Allen Dulles defended Europe by appropriating the DEFEATED Nazi databases about USSR spies. We own Allen Dulles a patriotic debt of gratitude.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

"If you can't follow that logic, then there's no reasoning with you."

that's very funny, Paul, coming from you... almost like you intended the irony...

[Glenn Nall]

The USSR wanted to push into Europe, and Allen Dulles defended Europe by appropriating the DEFEATED Nazi databases about USSR spies. We own Allen Dulles a patriotic debt of gratitude.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Notwithstanding that the Dulles brothers, Harriman, and others of their circle helped create Nazi Germany and revive its economy, industry and military. Great heroics there, if decades' accumulated money and murder equal heroics. Your arguments are the same as those that have sustained a hard-right vs. hard-left system worldwide, with the US continually backing repressive, murderous right-wing governments.

and let's not forget that little mishap in dallas. with heroes like him, who needs treasonous, back-stabbing, spineless whores in our government?

[Paul Brancato]

Martin, David, Glenn - I thought my offer to Paul T to discuss Dulles here might draw him out of the closet. He calls himself a liberal, and Alan Dulles a hero. Wow!! Hoover is also a hero, as is Curtis LeMay, and even Edwin A. Walker - Trejo's words not mine. I know of no other self described liberal who believes this.

[Glenn Nall]

General George Custer was a hero, to some. William Tecumseh Sherman was, too. (I'm from Atlanta - he's not my favorite person, as persons go). Funny, the things that impress people as heroic, manly...

[Glenn Nall]

I'm failing to understand people's needs to introduce their own current political labels into this thing. "I'm no Right-Winger" - "self described liberal" ... it escapes me how today's partisanship has ANY relevance to yesterday's political scenery and power and destruction. This was 50+ years ago.

I'm a self-described conservative/libertarian - it is NO SKIN OFF MY BACK if the right-wingers were mostly responsible for this - i happen to believe that this is the case. But just because I lean right doesn't mean i'm willing to defend GHWBush and his ilk. Or Nixon. From what i've seen in present day politics, both parties can produce some low slung dung. Especially in Texas.

i'm just sayin'. If your particular political persuasion affects your approach to this kind of research, then good luck to ya.

[Mark Knight]

Mr. Nall, I think that's a valid point. Many of the political positions of the right in 1963 are considered to be on the left in 2015.

So I agree that we should do our best to view the events of 1963 which are political in the frame that was prevalent in '63.

[James DiEugenio]

Its pretty obvious that some people are discussing the Talbot book without reading it.

Talbot is specifically talking about discussions that Dulles had with high level Nazis before Germany surrendered in May of 1945. These were with Wolff and representatives of Himmler.

Secondly, even if one argues that the Reich was militarily defeated, if not actually formally defeated, the point he brings out is this: FDR had made it clear that he wanted nothing less than an unconditional surrender with Germany. Period. In other words, the terms were to be dictated by the USA and England, and the Nazis were to have nothing to do with it.

Dulles was defying this order. This was bad on two grounds.

First, it now allowed the Nazis to know that they had a friend on the other side, someone they could go to to escape justice. And they were right. As Talbot details in several instances, Dulles did all he could to thwart what Jackson was doing at Nuremburg.

Second, it aided in Dulles' true aim. Which was to jumpstart the Cold War against Russia. One could not have done any better than having Gehlen in charge of intelligence to achieve that. But also, as some authors have pointed out of late, this also thwarted what FDR had planned for the post war world. He intended to keep a cordial relationship with the Russians. Dulles was directly challenging that.

Allen Dulles as a hero? How anybody can read this book and say that is astounding.

Edited October 17, 2015 by James DiEugenio

[Cliff Varnell]

Allen Dulles had powerful enemies.

Robert Lovett, David Bruce, Joe Kennedy.

http://cryptome.org/0001/bruce-lovett.htm

What does Talbot say about this?

Lawyer Allen Dulles had powerful clients.

Does Talbot take an inventory of those for whom the Dulles Bros. worked?

Edited October 17, 2015 by Cliff Varnell

[Glenn Nall]

Its pretty obvious that some people are discussing the Talbot book without reading it.

Talbot is specifically talking about discussions that Dulles had with high level Nazis before Germany surrendered in May of 1945. These were with Wolff and representatives of Himmler.

Secondly, even if one argues that the Reich was militarily defeated, if not actually formally defeated, the point he brings out is this: FDR had made it clear that he wanted nothing less than an unconditional surrender with Germany. Period. In other words, the terms were to be dictated by the USA and England, and the Nazis were to have nothing to do with it.

Dulles was defying this order. This was bad on two grounds.

First, it now allowed the Nazis to know that they had a friend on the other side, someone they could go to to escape justice. And they were right. As Talbot details in several instances, Dulles did all he could to thwart what Jackson was doing at Nuremburg.

Second, it aided in Dulles' true aim. Which was to jumpstart the Cold War against Russia. One could not have done any better than having Gehlen in charge of intelligence to achieve that. But also, as some authors have pointed out of late, this also thwarted what FDR had planned for the post war world. He intended to keep a cordial relationship with the Russians. Dulles was directly challenging that.

Allen Dulles as a hero? How anybody can read this book and say that is astounding.

when i read Oglesby's Yankee Cowboy War and first grasped the significance of the Gehlen (and that Russian spy/general cat) enterprise, the irony - the absolute hypocrisy - of the US being in bed with these people at the same time the American citizenry is building bomb-shelters in their backyards and the US Senate is witch-hunting "commies" is mind-boggling. Absolutely despicable.

This realization i think i can say is when the light went on and I became fully open to the depths to which our 'shadow' govt are willing to reach to get what they want. It's at this point that I reached the inability to be surprised by anything in this arena. General Landsdale and/or GHWBush pulling strings in 63? Why the hell not? Reagan and Bush bargaining with American hostages with some guns and then blaming a good old-fashioned Colonel when it hit the fan? Why the hell not?

Dulles helping plan a political assassination? Why the hell not?

[Roger DeLaria]

I haven't read Talbot's new book yet, but it's certainly on my list.

The Dulles brothers through Sullivan and Cromwell certainly represented some some very powerful interests around the world, and had their hands in quite a few cookie jars.

http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/dulles-brothers/

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US_Guat.html

https://theoligarchkings.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/united-fruit-company/

Edited October 17, 2015 by Roger DeLaria

[Paul Trejo]

...The Dulles brothers, Harriman, and others of their circle helped create Nazi Germany and revive its economy, industry and military along fascist lines. Great heroics there, if decades of accumulated private profit and governmental murder equal heroics. Your arguments for Allen Dulles's heroism are the same as those that have sustained a hard-right versus hard-left system worldwide, with the US continually backing repressive, murderous, rightist governments. Surely the US could have attempted something more moderate and humane after WW II, which was what Kennedy was after. Yet Allen Dulles: "That little Kennedy - he thought he was a god."

Politics is a fuzzy business. Allen Dulles and Joe Kennedy might have been compeitors -- but at one time Joe Kennedy predicted that Hitler was going to win WW2.

If the only choices we have are Hard Right and Hard Left, David, then I must lose, because I'm in the middle. But it's so fuzzy -- we must define our terms.

When you say Hard Right, do you mean, as Hitler meant, and as the KKK mean, White Supremacy? If so, then I can't be with them -- I'm not White.

When you say Hard Left, do you mean State Ownership of all Property? If so, then I can't be with them -- I advocate Private Property as sanity itself.

If these are the meanings of the terms, then Allen Dulles wasn't on the Hard Right. The problem with the Cold War was that the USSR was openly advocating the abolition of Private Property. That's a declaration of War all by itself.

Worse than that, the Marxist "Communist Manifesto" openly advocated the Abolition of: (1) Private Property; (2) Religion; (3) the Family; (4) the Nation. It was like a science-fiction nightmare.

This was the Hard-Left in the Cold War. Just because Allen Dulles opposed that nonsense -- did that make him a Neo-Nazi?

I don't think so.

The problem with any criticism of Allen Dulles that suggests he was a Neo-Nazi is that it is inspired by the Hard Left. For the Left-wing, EVERYTHING that isn't Hard Left is too far Right -- and they use the word "Nazi" as a euphemism.

So, as I say, we must define our terms.

In the objective study of US History, I regard Allen Dulles as a Great American. What a genius he was. He brought stability to the world during the Cold War -- which required only the greatest of minds.

By contrast, a mediocre mind like General Edwin Walker, who claimed to be Anticommunist, was really a Segregationist, and so he made Allen Dulles' work that much more difficult. General Walker gave America a bad name, IMHO, while Allen Dulles did great work that will stand the test of time.

But first, it must stand the test of this new book by David Talbot. I still don't have my own copy, but I will get one soon. Allen Dulles didn't kill JFK -- that's my position. I'm a CTer, not a LNer, but I totally absolve Allen Dulles and the CIA high-command from the murder of JFK.

Now -- if somebody has already condemned the CIA and Allen Dulles, then by mere proxy and innuendo they will conclude that Dulles and the CIA killed JFK, right?

Regards,

--Paul Trejo