Meet Allen Dulles: The "Psychopath" Who Created America's Modern Shadow Government

This information 
appeared at Zero Hedge

Submitted by Tyler Durden
October 14, 2015

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog:

Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, was the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles – who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats – falls firmly in the latter camp.

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the '60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It's almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world…

Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I'm sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

– From the Mother Jones article: You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles

Many of you will be intimately familiar with the name Allen Dulles. Younger readers, of my generation or below, will be far less so. It is precisely because the youth of this nation remain so ignorant of the nefarious characters in America's past, that David Talbot's recently published book, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, is so incredibly important.

Mr. Talbot has been recently conducting invaluable interviews about the book with various media organizations. One of the best I've seen is with Mother Jones. Here's some of what he had to say about America's longest serving CIA director:

I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles's biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn't explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.

They've done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him "the Shark." His favorite word was whether you were "useful" to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.

There's a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld – who was sitting at Dulles's knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.

How about Dulles' role in the assassination of JFK? Talbot pulls no punches here either…

To me it's one of the greatest examples of media incompetence and negligence in American history. I even confronted Ben Bradlee about this, who was probably JFK's closest friend in the Washington press corps and wrote a book all about JFK and their close friendship. "Why didn't you, with your investigative resources, try to get [to] the bottom of it?" You should read what he says in Brothers, but basically it came down to, "Well, I thought it would ruin my career."

I think I have studied this about as much as anyone in my generation at this point, and my final conclusion after 50 years was we have to go there, we have to look at the fact that there's a wealth of circumstantial evidence that says not only was there, at the highest level, CIA involvement. Probably in the assassination cover-up. But beyond the CIA, because the CIA wouldn't have acted on its own.

But the CIA are good guys now. Or so the propagandized American public believes…

Now check out David's interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:

 

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Allen Dulles, CIA and John F. Kennedy

 

JFK Assassination Warren Commission Allen Dulles and John Sherman Cooper in Dealey Plaza 

 

Allen Welsh Dulles had a cousin, Foster Rhea Dulles, a history professor at Princeton, who wrote a book titled The Road to Teheran. In his book, Foster Rhea Dulles discussed the historical fact that Russia and America were natural allies and should work together to solve their differences. This is probably one of the biggest reasons today why Foster Rhea Dulles is never mentioned in discussions concerning Russia, especially in light of Russia now in Syria destroying Anglo-American created ISIS assets. In fact, there are no images available online of Foster Rhea Dulles even though he wrote many books and lectured at Princeton. Foster Rhea Dulles advocated for the continued understanding between Russia and America because there had always been a "long cordial understanding between America and Russia."

It wasn't until the Anglo-American relationship developed that this mutually beneficial relationship between America and Russia stopped receiving the attention that it once had in America. Foster Rhea Dulles wrote that there had been a "mutual understanding between Russia and America which has enabled the two countries to settle their differences by negotiation rather than war." Today, Russia extended its wish that Dmitry Medvedev visit Washington to visit President Barack Obama over the conflict in Syria, but this request by Russia was flatly refused by Washington. It isn't necessarily the Russian or the American people that have these differences, it is rather the people who have penetrated American institutions that prefer not to negotiate with Russia today, who are now advocating war with Russia over Syria. Throughout history, Russia and America have come to each other's aid, and it was Russia that mediated with Britain on America's behalf in 1813. This is no longer the case today with America and Russia regarding circumstances in Ukraine and now in Syria.

The Road to Teheran: The Story of Russia and America, 1781-1943 by Foster Rhea Dulles

Further update (October 17, 2015):

Medvedev: US Administration is weak, indecisive and incompetent