I wrote this book review in 2016 but now seems like a good time to repeat it.
I've just finished reading the book The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. I would say without any hesitation that this was one of the top 3-4 most important books that I have ever read. I highly, highly recommend that everyone read it.
There is so much I learned from the book and I've been studying the whole US-Nazi connection after WW II for many years - but author David Talbot really wrote a spell-binding book - it's like reading a real life mystery story. You come away from the book with a very clear understanding how the US became the corporate fascist state that we have today.
The biggest story for me in the book is the one about Reinhard Gehlen. Talbot writes, "During the war [Maj. Gen.] Gehlen had served as Hitler's intelligence chief on the eastern front. His Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost) apparatus relentlessly probed for weaknesses in the Soviet defenses as the Nazi juggernaut made its eastward thrust. Gehlen's FHO also pinpointed the location of Jews, Communists, and other enemies of the Reich in the 'bloodlands' overrun by Hitler's forces, so they could be rounded up and executed by the Einsatzgruppen death squads. Most of the intelligence gathered by Gehlen's men was extracted from the enormous population of Soviet prisoners of war - which eventually totaled four million - that fell under Nazi control. Gehlen's exalted reputation as an intelligence wizard, which won him the Fuhrer's admiration and his major general's rank, derived from his organization's widespread use of torture."
To make it quick and simple, Maj. Gen. Gehlen made a deal with Allen Dulles (then running the precursor of the CIA called the OSS) that if he and his team were spared trial at Nuremberg he'd turn over his 'rat line' of fascist operatives throughout Europe and would work for the US. Gehlen was brought to the US and put through loyalty tests and eventually sent back to the newly created West Germany where he was put in charge of intelligence in the post war 'free' Germany.
Gehlen's post-war operatives across Europe where used to disrupt and destroy left-wing attempts to win electoral victories in European countries (Operation Gladio). His death squads were used to target the Algerian independence movement. Gehlen and Dulles worked overtime to destabilize the Soviet eastern bloc taking great pleasure in making Stalin hyper-paranoid thus getting him to overreact and launch brutal internal crackdowns on innocent Soviet citizens.
Talbot quotes JFK White House staffer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. saying he was offended by "the notion of American spooks" like Dulles and other leading post-war CIA operatives "cheerfully consorting with people like General Reinhard Gehlen....There was something aesthetically displeasing about Americans plotting with Nazis, who had recently been killing us, against Russians, whose sacrifices [27 million killed during the war] had made the allied victory possible."
Talbot painstakingly reveals how Dulles used his CIA rat line to set up the JFK assassination in 1963. One of the key players in the killing of President Kennedy was the CIA agent William Harvey who worked closely with Gehlen's notorious fascist organization, and Gehlen came to consider Harvey a "very esteemed [and] really reliable friend."
In the spring of 1968, soon after the killing of Sen. Bobby Kennedy, Allen Dulles took the time to write to the last Kennedy brother Ted sending his "sympathy and regards". Talbot reports that Dulles hated Bobby and had used his seat on the President Lyndon Johnson appointed Warren Commission to smash any hopes for a true investigation into the killing of JFK that Dulles had been a key mastermind in executing. Bobby had been privately hoping to expose Dulles and the CIA as the killer of his older brother if he were to be elected president.
Talbot shares that in the fall of 1968 the main social event of the season for Dulles was "the Washington fete in honor of Reinhard Gehlen, the West German spy chief Dulles had resurrected from the poison ashes of the Third Reich. On September 12, Gehlen's US sponsors threw a luncheon for him, and that night there was a dinner for Hitler's old spy chief at the Maryland home of Heinz Herre - Gehlen's former staff officer on the eastern front, who had become West Germany's top intelligence liaison in Washington."
One could easily say that the US and German fascists had all the bases covered.
Why then have the American people, and the people of the world, been largely ignorant about this ugly history of the resurrection of the Nazi war machine during the post WW II years? After viewing the video below about the CIA's clandestine infiltration of US and international media it is no surprise that the public has been spoon fed only what the propagandists, disguised as democratic patriots, wanted people to know. History has been rewritten to suit the needs of the deep state.
Who controls the media?
In 1977, Rolling Stone Magazine alleged that one of the most important journalists under the thumb of the CIA's media control program called Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by Rolling Stone to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by the CIA's Frank Wisner (director of the Office of Special Projects). The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O’Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor).
The American democracy story is illusion created by what author Bertram Gross called "three piece suit fascism" years ago in his book entitled Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. But to emerging democracy movements around the world, brutally suppressed by the CIA and its death squad agents, there was nothing friendly or democratic about these tactics. Because of the relative affluence of America during this period the public was docile and easily keep under control by the manipulations of the media and the political circles controlled by the deep state.
Now that the American imperial project is crashing and burning the story has begun to emerge and the blinders of deception are steadily falling from the public's eyes. What comes next is unknown but until the American people learn the real story behind this 'Hollywood democracy' little can change for the good.
Bruce
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