Scan barcode
jhook's review against another edition
4.0
Great read, very dense, but the last 100 pages or so about Oswald are specious at best. Still very good, and it made me eager to watch some Oliver Stone.
kaycerface's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
5.0
lilly71490's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
medium-paced
5.0
terriblysublime's review against another edition
challenging
informative
tense
slow-paced
3.75
Excellent narrative history that shows how the Dulles family sculpted the American government and policies—and eventually even foreign countries’ governments and policies to suit their interests and those of their class. Rather slow and dry at times, but that’s because it’s so detailed and the bureaucracy is so complex. Definitely would recommend to any American; we should all know this history.
tittypete's review against another edition
4.0
This was a long one. Here are my summaritic notes.
Allen Dulles worked in Switzerland and was down with nazi businessmen. His brother was a lawyer that loved nazi businessmen. He repped IG Farben, the company that used slave labor during wartime. They used Swiss banks to help the nazis buy stuff they weren’t supposed to because of embargoes and whatnot. Beef, steel, stuff to feed the war machine. Foster Dulles seemed like a shitty person.
Allen Dulles grew up the son of a preacher in NY state. He was known to be unfazed by the suffering of others. Later, in wartimes he was similarly unfazed by the plight of the jews.
Turns out Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to shoot the Nazi leaders after WWII and oddly it was Stalin who said there should be a trial and due process. Allen Dulles really liked the Nazis and wanted to make sure they could stay in business after the war. This seemed to be a big focus for him. Lots of American businesses (GM, GE, banks) had interests in nazi Germany and they didn’t want to see their business stuff fricked with. Yay history.
There was one Nazi that Dulles really wanted to help, SS General Karl Wolff. People called this guy the “bureaucrat of death”. He and Dulles were doing to figure out Operation Sunrise and get the Germans to stand down in Italy. This made the Russians nervous because they thought the US was going to broker it’s own peace with Germany and leave them out. This would be considered one of the first dickpunches of the cold war. Dulles told Wolff he’d give him immunity but then everybody else found out he was, like, bankrolling science experiments on concentration campers. Vile shit. So he had to stay in fancy boy jail. But then he’s set free and goes to work in an ad agency.
Another nazi that Dulles like was this guy named Eugen (Oigen) Dollman. This guy was into pushin’ turds and hinted that maybe Hitler was a stinkerboy too. Dollman was the nazi ambassador to the pope. The Vatican was helpful to escaping nazis because they really hated commies and also because money.
Allen Dulles had a wife named Clover and a mistress named Mary. Both of them went to Carl Jung for analysis. Fun stuff.
Noel Field is some American guy working for the commies and Allen Dulles let’s it slip that he’s a secret double agent so then he has to go to Russian prison and it makes Stalin super paranoid that he starts a bunch of show trials to purge out potential spies. Cold war intensifies. Wewp wewp. Also something about a guy named Wisner and the super secret ungoverned clique called the OPC.
Somehow Richard Nixon is digging through some old shit at a torpedo factory in Virginia and finds some old nazi papers that say the Dulles brothers were laundering nazi money during wartimes so in order to keep that under wraps the Dulleses help kick start Tricky Dick’s political career. They pull some strings with some of their buds and get him elected to congress at the expense of this Voorhis guy who seemed like a good guy but Nixon called him a commuinist and that ended his career.
Nixon goes on to go HUAC on people like Alger Hiss. The Dulleses didn’t like Roosevelt and his New Deal legacy so they got Nixon to go after anybody who was a New Dealer and call them communists.
Then they got on the Joe McCarthy train and Jesus did that guy ever suck. Seriously, fuck Joseph McCarthy in his stupid drunken ass. He and his turd-pushin’ lawyer pointed poopy fingers at everyone and smeared everybody who was even remotely uninterested in total corporate control of America.
There’s some musings about how the country isn’t really and hasn’t really been a democracy for a bit now. It’s basically an oligarchy with some show elections. Now that John Roberts let corporations become people and influence elections, that seems to be the case. This is so far a very detailed example of how the USA as it stands is a fucking bummer. Anyway, eventually the Dulles brothers got sick of McCarthy’s shit. They took him down a peg. Turns out he was a groper and a possible peter puffer. So he drank himself to death, the worthless fuck.
The CIA is a thing now (thanks Harry Truman) and cannot be touched.
Iran has a democratically elected prime minister named Mosadeq and he wants to nationalize the oil industry and that’d fuck over the British and America companies that are making money there. The Dulles people call that communist and say “the entire world’s oil supply is about to be controlled by Russia!” So they help start a coup and they put the Shah back in power. The Shah sounds like kind of a puss but his wife supposedly has a big swarthy set on her so that’s nice. They like to go shopping a lot. So he gets back in power and is encouraged by the CIA to hunt down anybody that’s tangentially left-leaning. But they don’t hunt down the crazy islams who are against him so the Shah basically fucks himself down the road.
Meanwhile in Guatemala, the president is passing land reforms to give some of the country back to the people because essentially the whole thing is owned by the banana company. United Fruit doesn’t like this so they get their Dulles buddies to depose the guy in a coup and there are death squads and like 250,000 people out of a nation of 4 million die. The deposed president kills cooks himself to death in a too hot bathtub while in exile. His daughter kills herself too. Hard to stay jazzed about the good ol USA at this point.
To further the awesomeness, the CIA decides the head of Hitler’s intelligence division, Reinhard Gehlen, is an OK guy and that his organization should be a USA buddy. Dulles likes him because he doesn’t like Russians. But he seems like a pretty shitty person.
Under Dulles’s reign the CIA starts up the MKULTRA project. This is where they dose unsuspecting people with LSD and stuff to see if they can be manipulated or interrogated better. It’s a shit show. One of the guys working on it falls out the window of a hotel and dies. This is mysterious. Dulles has a son who took some shrapnel to the head in Ko-rea. This made him cranky, daring to call his old man a nazi-lover. So the old man has him worked on by MKULTRA doctors.
There’s bit in here where the author talks about Rafael Truijillo, el jefe of the Dominican Republic. He was a bad guy who liked having his opponents and Haitian immigrants murdered.
Evidently, there was was a Spanish writer in the states who was criticizing Franco and Trujillo and this was ruffling Dulles feathers. Anyway, the Spanish guy gets kidnapped in New York and flown down to DR. He and the pilot get killed and it a whole thing.
Now we meet James Jesus Angleton. He’s the guy in charge of counterintelligence and rooting out moles in the CIA. And he knows all about Dulles’s not-so-secret nazi helping.
Boom JFK is elected president. And he is not part of the establishment. This stresses the Dulles deep state out. JFK isn’t hard enough on Castro. He doesn’t seem jazzed enough about the cold war. And worst of all, he wants to shake up the CIA and probably get rid of Dulles. Dulles is flat out doing his own thing. He’s even carrying out his dead (cancer of the asspipe) brother’s wishes.
Patrice Lumumba was a guy democratically elected by the people of the Congo. The CIA doesn’t like him because he poses a threat to businesses. So the CIA back militias to shut him down. Dulles has him falsely painted as a Soviet buttboy. The CIA gets Mobutu to force Lumumba out of office and then CIA contractors beat him to death. Western newspapers mock his wife’s bare-titted mourning.
Castro continues to rankle the powers that be. Except for JFK. The Dulles gang sets up the Bay of Pigs. They tell JFK it can be done just with the cuban exiles they trained. JFK goes along but is NOT down with escalating and bringing in the US military to take over Cuba. When the shit fails. Dulles wants JFK to send in air support but JFK doesn’t. It looks shitty for everybody. In the subsequent hearing Dulles tries to make it seem like it was JFK’s fault but RFK shuts that shit down and the old man is stuck looking like an asshole. JFK vows to smash the CIA. Bad move.
Now Algeria has rebelled and Charles DeGaulle let ‘em go. Generals want to rebel against DeGaulle for being soft. There’s some angry paratroopers who are ready to drop into Paris and start fucking things up. Turns out they’re Dulles-backed guys. Dulles is afraid Algeria will become a soviet oil base. Right wing Frenchers straight up coup. And OAS tries to assassinate him, Day of the Jackal-style.
Dulles gets kicked out of the CIA and a lot of corporate and intelligence people are mad. JFK kicks out all his buddies.
LBJ was put on JFK’s ticket to help him with the south but after they win the election he gets iced out and basically castrated power-wise. This pisses him off. Corporations and other oligarchs are pissed off too. He closed the oil depletion allowance tax loophole.
JFK is getting through to the third world by being inspirational and Allen Dulles is like, “fuck I was trying to do it with undermining governments, coups and assassinations.”
A guy named Bobby Baker has DC sex party with big titty hookers that LBJ loves.
LBJ actually puts in a request at the beginning of JFK’s presidency to be granted powers over the country’s entire national security apparatus, including the defense department, CIA, State Department and Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. JFK blows this off.
Then we get another retread of the same assassination conspiracy. Spooks like E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and David “El Indio” Morales are involved. Oilmen like H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson are involved. Maybe Corsican gangster hit men. Oswald and de Mohrenschildt were CIA operatives/patsies/plants. Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, and everyone who was pisses about the Bay of Pigs, maybe the mafia, and the guy who owned the book depository was a right-wing nut who kept the window frame after the assassination, etc. But now the Rockefellers were involved because of growing resentment that JFK would be shutting down their international banking expansion. Also they used Chase Manhattan to finance CIA off-the-books shit. And who could pull together such a shadowy cabal of treachery? Allen Dulles. Boopity doop. In order to make a conspiracy seem extra obvious, LBJ puts Dulles in charge of the Warren Commission. Dulles then makes sure the commission doesn’t pursue any other story than the lone gunman. LBJ later said it was RFK’s idea to put Dulles in charge but this was after RFK was already dead. Pretty convenient. But that was later. RFK is still alive and has his doubts but doesn’t wanna say anything. But then he decides to run for president and people think he’s going to be a shoo-in. And that means he’ll have the power to open up the investigation full bore. So, the author posits, Dulles MKULTRAs Sirhan Sirhan to make him pull a Manchurian Candidate on RFK. Case closed. Whenever the findings of the Warren Commission are questioned by anybody, the CIA smears them and calls ‘em communist agents. Par for the course.
Net-net: Democracy in America is an illusion and we are all fucked unless we are super rich.
This book was pretty good as far as deep state conspiracy theory shit goes.
Allen Dulles worked in Switzerland and was down with nazi businessmen. His brother was a lawyer that loved nazi businessmen. He repped IG Farben, the company that used slave labor during wartime. They used Swiss banks to help the nazis buy stuff they weren’t supposed to because of embargoes and whatnot. Beef, steel, stuff to feed the war machine. Foster Dulles seemed like a shitty person.
Allen Dulles grew up the son of a preacher in NY state. He was known to be unfazed by the suffering of others. Later, in wartimes he was similarly unfazed by the plight of the jews.
Turns out Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to shoot the Nazi leaders after WWII and oddly it was Stalin who said there should be a trial and due process. Allen Dulles really liked the Nazis and wanted to make sure they could stay in business after the war. This seemed to be a big focus for him. Lots of American businesses (GM, GE, banks) had interests in nazi Germany and they didn’t want to see their business stuff fricked with. Yay history.
There was one Nazi that Dulles really wanted to help, SS General Karl Wolff. People called this guy the “bureaucrat of death”. He and Dulles were doing to figure out Operation Sunrise and get the Germans to stand down in Italy. This made the Russians nervous because they thought the US was going to broker it’s own peace with Germany and leave them out. This would be considered one of the first dickpunches of the cold war. Dulles told Wolff he’d give him immunity but then everybody else found out he was, like, bankrolling science experiments on concentration campers. Vile shit. So he had to stay in fancy boy jail. But then he’s set free and goes to work in an ad agency.
Another nazi that Dulles like was this guy named Eugen (Oigen) Dollman. This guy was into pushin’ turds and hinted that maybe Hitler was a stinkerboy too. Dollman was the nazi ambassador to the pope. The Vatican was helpful to escaping nazis because they really hated commies and also because money.
Allen Dulles had a wife named Clover and a mistress named Mary. Both of them went to Carl Jung for analysis. Fun stuff.
Noel Field is some American guy working for the commies and Allen Dulles let’s it slip that he’s a secret double agent so then he has to go to Russian prison and it makes Stalin super paranoid that he starts a bunch of show trials to purge out potential spies. Cold war intensifies. Wewp wewp. Also something about a guy named Wisner and the super secret ungoverned clique called the OPC.
Somehow Richard Nixon is digging through some old shit at a torpedo factory in Virginia and finds some old nazi papers that say the Dulles brothers were laundering nazi money during wartimes so in order to keep that under wraps the Dulleses help kick start Tricky Dick’s political career. They pull some strings with some of their buds and get him elected to congress at the expense of this Voorhis guy who seemed like a good guy but Nixon called him a commuinist and that ended his career.
Nixon goes on to go HUAC on people like Alger Hiss. The Dulleses didn’t like Roosevelt and his New Deal legacy so they got Nixon to go after anybody who was a New Dealer and call them communists.
Then they got on the Joe McCarthy train and Jesus did that guy ever suck. Seriously, fuck Joseph McCarthy in his stupid drunken ass. He and his turd-pushin’ lawyer pointed poopy fingers at everyone and smeared everybody who was even remotely uninterested in total corporate control of America.
There’s some musings about how the country isn’t really and hasn’t really been a democracy for a bit now. It’s basically an oligarchy with some show elections. Now that John Roberts let corporations become people and influence elections, that seems to be the case. This is so far a very detailed example of how the USA as it stands is a fucking bummer. Anyway, eventually the Dulles brothers got sick of McCarthy’s shit. They took him down a peg. Turns out he was a groper and a possible peter puffer. So he drank himself to death, the worthless fuck.
The CIA is a thing now (thanks Harry Truman) and cannot be touched.
Iran has a democratically elected prime minister named Mosadeq and he wants to nationalize the oil industry and that’d fuck over the British and America companies that are making money there. The Dulles people call that communist and say “the entire world’s oil supply is about to be controlled by Russia!” So they help start a coup and they put the Shah back in power. The Shah sounds like kind of a puss but his wife supposedly has a big swarthy set on her so that’s nice. They like to go shopping a lot. So he gets back in power and is encouraged by the CIA to hunt down anybody that’s tangentially left-leaning. But they don’t hunt down the crazy islams who are against him so the Shah basically fucks himself down the road.
Meanwhile in Guatemala, the president is passing land reforms to give some of the country back to the people because essentially the whole thing is owned by the banana company. United Fruit doesn’t like this so they get their Dulles buddies to depose the guy in a coup and there are death squads and like 250,000 people out of a nation of 4 million die. The deposed president kills cooks himself to death in a too hot bathtub while in exile. His daughter kills herself too. Hard to stay jazzed about the good ol USA at this point.
To further the awesomeness, the CIA decides the head of Hitler’s intelligence division, Reinhard Gehlen, is an OK guy and that his organization should be a USA buddy. Dulles likes him because he doesn’t like Russians. But he seems like a pretty shitty person.
Under Dulles’s reign the CIA starts up the MKULTRA project. This is where they dose unsuspecting people with LSD and stuff to see if they can be manipulated or interrogated better. It’s a shit show. One of the guys working on it falls out the window of a hotel and dies. This is mysterious. Dulles has a son who took some shrapnel to the head in Ko-rea. This made him cranky, daring to call his old man a nazi-lover. So the old man has him worked on by MKULTRA doctors.
There’s bit in here where the author talks about Rafael Truijillo, el jefe of the Dominican Republic. He was a bad guy who liked having his opponents and Haitian immigrants murdered.
Evidently, there was was a Spanish writer in the states who was criticizing Franco and Trujillo and this was ruffling Dulles feathers. Anyway, the Spanish guy gets kidnapped in New York and flown down to DR. He and the pilot get killed and it a whole thing.
Now we meet James Jesus Angleton. He’s the guy in charge of counterintelligence and rooting out moles in the CIA. And he knows all about Dulles’s not-so-secret nazi helping.
Boom JFK is elected president. And he is not part of the establishment. This stresses the Dulles deep state out. JFK isn’t hard enough on Castro. He doesn’t seem jazzed enough about the cold war. And worst of all, he wants to shake up the CIA and probably get rid of Dulles. Dulles is flat out doing his own thing. He’s even carrying out his dead (cancer of the asspipe) brother’s wishes.
Patrice Lumumba was a guy democratically elected by the people of the Congo. The CIA doesn’t like him because he poses a threat to businesses. So the CIA back militias to shut him down. Dulles has him falsely painted as a Soviet buttboy. The CIA gets Mobutu to force Lumumba out of office and then CIA contractors beat him to death. Western newspapers mock his wife’s bare-titted mourning.
Castro continues to rankle the powers that be. Except for JFK. The Dulles gang sets up the Bay of Pigs. They tell JFK it can be done just with the cuban exiles they trained. JFK goes along but is NOT down with escalating and bringing in the US military to take over Cuba. When the shit fails. Dulles wants JFK to send in air support but JFK doesn’t. It looks shitty for everybody. In the subsequent hearing Dulles tries to make it seem like it was JFK’s fault but RFK shuts that shit down and the old man is stuck looking like an asshole. JFK vows to smash the CIA. Bad move.
Now Algeria has rebelled and Charles DeGaulle let ‘em go. Generals want to rebel against DeGaulle for being soft. There’s some angry paratroopers who are ready to drop into Paris and start fucking things up. Turns out they’re Dulles-backed guys. Dulles is afraid Algeria will become a soviet oil base. Right wing Frenchers straight up coup. And OAS tries to assassinate him, Day of the Jackal-style.
Dulles gets kicked out of the CIA and a lot of corporate and intelligence people are mad. JFK kicks out all his buddies.
LBJ was put on JFK’s ticket to help him with the south but after they win the election he gets iced out and basically castrated power-wise. This pisses him off. Corporations and other oligarchs are pissed off too. He closed the oil depletion allowance tax loophole.
JFK is getting through to the third world by being inspirational and Allen Dulles is like, “fuck I was trying to do it with undermining governments, coups and assassinations.”
A guy named Bobby Baker has DC sex party with big titty hookers that LBJ loves.
LBJ actually puts in a request at the beginning of JFK’s presidency to be granted powers over the country’s entire national security apparatus, including the defense department, CIA, State Department and Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. JFK blows this off.
Then we get another retread of the same assassination conspiracy. Spooks like E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and David “El Indio” Morales are involved. Oilmen like H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson are involved. Maybe Corsican gangster hit men. Oswald and de Mohrenschildt were CIA operatives/patsies/plants. Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, and everyone who was pisses about the Bay of Pigs, maybe the mafia, and the guy who owned the book depository was a right-wing nut who kept the window frame after the assassination, etc. But now the Rockefellers were involved because of growing resentment that JFK would be shutting down their international banking expansion. Also they used Chase Manhattan to finance CIA off-the-books shit. And who could pull together such a shadowy cabal of treachery? Allen Dulles. Boopity doop. In order to make a conspiracy seem extra obvious, LBJ puts Dulles in charge of the Warren Commission. Dulles then makes sure the commission doesn’t pursue any other story than the lone gunman. LBJ later said it was RFK’s idea to put Dulles in charge but this was after RFK was already dead. Pretty convenient. But that was later. RFK is still alive and has his doubts but doesn’t wanna say anything. But then he decides to run for president and people think he’s going to be a shoo-in. And that means he’ll have the power to open up the investigation full bore. So, the author posits, Dulles MKULTRAs Sirhan Sirhan to make him pull a Manchurian Candidate on RFK. Case closed. Whenever the findings of the Warren Commission are questioned by anybody, the CIA smears them and calls ‘em communist agents. Par for the course.
Net-net: Democracy in America is an illusion and we are all fucked unless we are super rich.
This book was pretty good as far as deep state conspiracy theory shit goes.
joshuamt's review against another edition
3.0
The strength of this book is its readability. In 500 fast-paced pages, the sordid side of the CIA's history is laid out, with episodes on Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Iraq, Greece, France. I learned alot from these sections, and more importantly, I finished the book with a thirst to learn more. The author definitely views the CIA as a dangerous and misguided organization, and I tried to remember that when enjoying these chapters.
The final third of the book segues from Cuba into President Kennedy, and here the pace slows. The sub-title of the book would more accurately be "Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Assassination of the Kennedy Brothers". Talbot presents his theory about JFK and RFK's assassinations, namely, that Dulles was the mastermind behind the assassination. This section of the book, while intriguing, bogged me down in the details of the many characters and their motivations.
The book left me with insight into the CIA's foreign activities in the 20th century, the justifiability of which depends how dangerous and competent you believe "the bear" to have been during that time. I am also left with disturbing thoughts about the extent of the CIA's involvement in domestic activities, including assassination. What I did not get was a feel for Dulles the man; in portraying him as a sinister villain, a more interesting opportunity was missed to examine his humanity.
The final third of the book segues from Cuba into President Kennedy, and here the pace slows. The sub-title of the book would more accurately be "Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Assassination of the Kennedy Brothers". Talbot presents his theory about JFK and RFK's assassinations, namely, that Dulles was the mastermind behind the assassination. This section of the book, while intriguing, bogged me down in the details of the many characters and their motivations.
The book left me with insight into the CIA's foreign activities in the 20th century, the justifiability of which depends how dangerous and competent you believe "the bear" to have been during that time. I am also left with disturbing thoughts about the extent of the CIA's involvement in domestic activities, including assassination. What I did not get was a feel for Dulles the man; in portraying him as a sinister villain, a more interesting opportunity was missed to examine his humanity.