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librechik

(30,663 posts)
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 02:27 PM Oct 2015

“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”

“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”: David Talbot exposes America’s “deep state”

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/15/every_president_has_been_manipulated_national_security_officials_david_talbot_investigates_americas_deep_state/

This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction – it’s history. David Talbot’s previous book, the bestseller “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” explored Robert F. Kennedy’s search for the truth following his brother’s murder. His new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” zooms out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.

This isn’t merely a whodunit story, though. Talbot’s ultimate goal is exploring how the rise of the “deep state” has impacted the trajectory of America, and given our nation’s vast influence, the rest of the planet. “To thoroughly and honestly analyze [former CIA director] Allen Dulles’s legacy is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy,” Talbot told Salon. “To really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems.”

Just as America’s current national security apparatus has used terrorism as a justification for spying on American citizens, torture, and the annihilation of innocent civilians as collateral damage, Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how spymaster Allen Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. For readers unfamiliar with Dulles’ history, the first few chapters are like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water. Talbot’s assertion that Dulles is a psychopath is hard to dismiss after the intelligence agent is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Allen Dulles and his fellow Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy.

Jumping from geopolitical strategy to the psychological realm, Talbot details how it was not only enemies who had reason to fear Dulles, but his own friends and family, as well. The book veers into a dark, terrifying investigation of the MKUltra Project, a hideous “mind control program” developed by the CIA during Dulles’ reign as director, that dosed unsuspecting people with LSD, pushed the limits of sleep deprivation and engaged in other deeply unethical experiments. The program has been exposed, bit by bit, over decades, thanks to lawsuits and previous investigative reporting, but Talbot sheds light on how Dulles subjected his own son and attempted to “enroll” his wife in these hideous “therapies.”

Looks like a must-read--

22 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials” (Original Post) librechik Oct 2015 OP
Deserves greater attention. blm Oct 2015 #1
We can see how easily this President caved; no reason to think the next one won't either villager Oct 2015 #2
our resident authoritarians... grasswire Oct 2015 #4
David Talbot has written a classic history of our times. Octafish Oct 2015 #3
thx for the link; great read! librechik Oct 2015 #8
I met Lisa Pease at Duquesne conference: 'Passing the Torch' Octafish Oct 2015 #17
sweet--eyewitness to revisionist history librechik Oct 2015 #18
If I were to devise a place within CIA for the blackest operations it would be in counter-terrorism leveymg Oct 2015 #5
BushInc's BCCI nurtured terrorism…and drugrunning, armsdealing, moneylaundering, etc…. blm Oct 2015 #15
Manipulated, and if thought necessary, murdered. Scuba Oct 2015 #6
I understand that Talbot doesn't actually say hifiguy Oct 2015 #12
When you think about it... Xolodno Oct 2015 #7
Harry Truman regarded the mutation of the CIA, hifiguy Oct 2015 #10
This will be a must-read. hifiguy Oct 2015 #9
I love that book (National Security and Double Government by Glennon) librechik Oct 2015 #11
I do too, hifiguy Oct 2015 #13
truedat-- librechik Oct 2015 #16
K&R. Adding this to my list! Great OP! nt riderinthestorm Oct 2015 #14
Author David Talbot with Amy Goodman and DemocracyNow! Octafish Oct 2015 #19
excerpt: Talbot explains how much the media hate this book=no coverage librechik Oct 2015 #20
Whose thumb? Octafish Oct 2015 #21
Here is part two, the Web Extended version mrdmk Oct 2015 #22
 

villager

(26,001 posts)
2. We can see how easily this President caved; no reason to think the next one won't either
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 02:34 PM
Oct 2015

Though I wonder if Bernie would be more resilient in that regard than Hillary?

Of course, they'd probably arrange it so that Bernie never actually got elected, if push came to shove for them.

On an added note -- given all that we know about Dulles, grimly hilarious that so many here at the "Underground" gladly take him at his word about how certain historical events went down....

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
3. David Talbot has written a classic history of our times.
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 02:38 PM
Oct 2015

From one scholarly review:

Whenever Dulles had a chance to publicize the plight of the Jews, he buried the reports. For example,when a German cable reported that 120,000 Hungarian Jews, including children, were to be taken for work in the “labor services” – a euphemism for a trip to Auschwitz – “Dulles’s communiques to OSS headquarters used the same banal language as the Nazis, referring blandly to the ‘conscription’ of Hungary’s Jews.” While noting that academic researchers decades later remain hesitant to condemn Dulles for this, Talbot will have none of it. It is for good reason that he entitles his book The Devil’s Chessboard. He thinks Dulles was satanic.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-devils-chessboard-allen-dulles-the-cia-and-the-rise-of-americas-secret-government/5484565


Dulles (and Prescott Bush and Richard Nixon) helped create this modern world where secret government and secret agents help capital accrue in the pockets of the very, very few at the expense of the nation, Constitution and planet.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
17. I met Lisa Pease at Duquesne conference: 'Passing the Torch'
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 05:53 PM
Oct 2015

Hosted by the Wecht Institute, it was about the first generation JFK assassination researchers passing the baton to a new generation, of which wise Ms. Pease is a major participant.

I'm a nobody, but I am so proud to have been there.

leveymg

(36,418 posts)
5. If I were to devise a place within CIA for the blackest operations it would be in counter-terrorism
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 02:46 PM
Oct 2015

That provides a layer of built-in plausible deniability and ready patsies when "our" terrorism operations go awry, like they did on 9/11. I was surprised to read a while ago that CIA has had a CounterTerrorism Center going back decades, long before anyone heard of bin Laden.

blm

(112,919 posts)
15. BushInc's BCCI nurtured terrorism…and drugrunning, armsdealing, moneylaundering, etc….
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 05:09 PM
Oct 2015

.

 

hifiguy

(33,688 posts)
12. I understand that Talbot doesn't actually say
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 04:44 PM
Oct 2015

that Dulles was ultimately responsible for JFK's death, for which it is nearly impossible to avoid concluding he gave the final approval, though he apparently draws the line straight to his door.

Xolodno

(6,330 posts)
7. When you think about it...
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 03:00 PM
Oct 2015

...how can they not be?

By the time an elected President gets in office with a goal, (i.e. end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), the public appetite for such things have already waned, thus, those advisers already know they have to change policies and strategies.

And as for everything else, the advisers probably tell the president certain operations are already in full swing. To cut them would cost money, lose spies of the target country (and maybe their families), lack credibility in future endeavors, even if failure were to occur (America abandons you and then you and your family are dead is a lot more "dangerous" than America stays with you to the end).

So quite often, their hands are tied. The CIA is an agency that really isn't beholden to anyone.

 

hifiguy

(33,688 posts)
10. Harry Truman regarded the mutation of the CIA,
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 04:34 PM
Oct 2015

which he envisioned to be an otherwise powerless agency analyzing data to present to the president, into n unchecked and uncheckable monster with its own priorities, as his greatest failure.

Harry shouldn't have been so hard on himself. Allen Dulles, not any Truman appointee, was the man responsible for turning the CIA into a rogue state-within-a-state, and Dulles painted his "masterpiece" on 11.22.1963, two years after he had theoretically been relieved of control of the CIA (in reality, he was still very much in control of large parts of it, as Talbot proves) by John F. Kennedy, who paid the ultimate price for defying Dulles and the CIA.

 

hifiguy

(33,688 posts)
9. This will be a must-read.
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 04:29 PM
Oct 2015

And may I also recommend Michael Glennon's slender yet absolutely terrifying "National Security and Double Government." That is a book that can scare the hair off of a gorilla and it explains SO much.

Allen Dulles, the Nazi-sympathizing managing partners of their era's most powerful corporate law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, and later CIA Director and SoS in the Eisenhower years, were the Founding Fathers of the Deep State, originated in the immediate postwar era with the help and assistance of numerous "ex" Nazis Allen Dulles made sure got out of Germany. The Deep State of the US is the proof that the Nazis did NOT lose the war; quite to the contrary, they won rather decisively in this country, and the last 65 years proves it.

librechik

(30,663 posts)
11. I love that book (National Security and Double Government by Glennon)
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 04:41 PM
Oct 2015

and mention it as often as I can here

 

hifiguy

(33,688 posts)
13. I do too,
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 04:45 PM
Oct 2015

though it is one of the most deeply frightening and troubling pieces of history I have read in a lifetime of reading post-WW II US history.

librechik

(30,663 posts)
16. truedat--
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 05:12 PM
Oct 2015

only thing that has saved me from suicide over it is the realization that there really really is nothing we can do about it. So sit back and enjoy the dystopic future.

librechik

(30,663 posts)
20. excerpt: Talbot explains how much the media hate this book=no coverage
Wed Oct 28, 2015, 10:28 AM
Oct 2015

DAVID TALBOT: Well, thank God, I was saying earlier, for alternative media, like this, Amy, because there is resistance to this book. First of all, I call out the mainstream media. I say that New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, they were all under his thumb. They did his bidding.

AMY GOODMAN: Whose thumb?

DAVID TALBOT: Allen Dulles’s thumb. So, when the Warren Report came out, I was saying that one of the editors, top editors, at Newsweek wrote to him and said, "Thank you so much, Mr. Dulles, for helping shape our coverage of the Warren Report." Well, of course, Allen Dulles was on the Warren Commission. In fact, some people thought it should have been called the Dulles Commission, because he dominated it so much. So, you know, it’s way too cozy, the relationship between Washington power and the media. And—

AMY GOODMAN: What was the relationship between Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, they were social friends, not just him, but other members of the Sulzberger family. I found, you know, cozy correspondence between them, congratulating him when he was inaugurated, Dulles, as CIA director. They called him "Ally," one of the Sulzberger families, in one letter. They would get together, you know, every year. Dulles would hold these media sort of drink fests for New Year’s. And these were, you know, top reporters, top editors, would get together with the CIA guys and rub elbows and get a little drunk. And, you know, when Allen Dulles didn’t want a reporter, because he felt he was being overly aggressive, covering, say, Guatemala—Sydney Gruson, the reporter—in the run-up to the coup there in 1954, he had—he made a call to The New York Times and had him removed. That was because of his relationship with Sulzberger, the publisher. So, that was the kind of pull that Allen Dulles had.


what is most frightening is how the same group of "shadowy people" i.e., dedicated Right Wing Imperialists, Dulles used for his operation have carried out many similar exploits through the years, even after Dulles died. He was able to put his psychotic and paranoid stamp on that institutional culture to the detriment of the entire CIA, if not the US.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
21. Whose thumb?
Wed Oct 28, 2015, 11:25 AM
Oct 2015

Allen Dulles and his murderous henchmen have done so much damage to the nation, one needs a computer to keep track.

Historian and political science guru Larry J. Sabato, author of "The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy," reported what Prescott Bush wrote to Clover Dulles in April 1969:

I recall in the summer of 1961, after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs affair, you were away and we called Allen to come for supper, and he accepted. That afternoon he called and asked if he could bring a friend, and we said "surely." So he brought John McCone, whom we had known well, but had not thought of as a particular friend of Allen's. But Allen broke the ice promptly, and said, in good spirit, that he wanted us to meet his successor. The announcement came (the) next day. We tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them. (Misspellings corrected here.)

SOURCE p. 368 online:



Clearly shows how the players, like the aspens, look like a forest of individual trees above ground, but really are connected by their roots underground, sight unseen.

mrdmk

(2,943 posts)
22. Here is part two, the Web Extended version
Wed Oct 28, 2015, 04:18 PM
Oct 2015

Link: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/10/14/the_rise_of_america_s_secret

<snip>

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guest is David Talbot. His book is The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. He’s the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon. Let’s start with the title, The Devil’s Chessboard. Why did you call it that, David?

DAVID TALBOT: The Devil’s Chessboard refers to the fact that the Dulles brothers—John Foster Dulles, who’s secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his brother, Allen Dulles, who I focus on, head of the CIA—they loved to play chess with each other. They would go at it for hours, even when Allen Dulles was about to be married. He kept his wife-to-be waiting around while the two brothers went at it. And they tended to look at the world as their chessboard. People were pawns to be manipulated. So I felt that was a—you know, an apt metaphor.

But, Amy, I wanted to go back to what you were talking about—alternative media—before this. I think—I just want to underline what you were saying about how essential it is to have countervoices. They are the lifeblood of democracy. And shows like yours and public radio are just essential. You know, my book is having a hard time getting through the media gatekeepers. They don’t want to hear about this, and in part because the CIA, particularly under Allen Dulles, but even today, are masters at manipulating the media. I’ve been on shows and been bumped. I was scheduled to be on shows at the last minute, strangely. I was supposed to write something for Politico magazine. Someone there called the book a "masterpiece." They wanted the book to be, you know, showcased there. Instead, I was bumped from Politico. And an article based on recently leaked CIA documents—conveniently leaked—was written by a former New York Times reporter, Phil Shenon, and what he did was to basically accuse Fidel Castro of assassinating President Kennedy. This has been a CIA disinformation line for years. So the CIA is still manipulating the media, and it’s essential that independent media exists, like this.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the relationship between The New York Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Allen Dulles?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, the Sulzberger family had a long relationship with Dulles. When he was inaugurated as CIA director, one of the Sulzbergers wrote to him, saying, "This is the best news I’ve heard in years." In another letter, he calls him affectionately "Ally." They were on a first name basis. They belonged to the same clubs. They were masters at—the Dulles brothers, particularly Allen—at manipulating the media. After the Warren Report comes out, the official investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy, one of the top editors at Newsweek writes to Allen Dulles. And I’m getting all this from Allen Dulles’s own files; he was very proud of the fact that he could—he had the media in the palm of his hand. But this Newsweek editor writes to him, "Thank you so much for basically directing our coverage of the Warren Report. We couldn’t have done it without you." So, you know, this was the kind of cozy relationship that existed between the CIA and the media in those years. CBS, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they were all in the palm of the CIA’s hands. They all lived together in Georgetown. They had cocktail parties together. It was a very cozy set.
<end of snip>

Author David Talbot makes the connections of the past years to today's international problems. Very Interesting. Would like see the citations Talbot uses. May need to buy the book for that.

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