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It is amusing to read on the Wikipedia page for Allen Dulles that, of all things, he was appalled by the Nazi treatment of German Jews and helped a number of German Jews ... escape to the United States from Nazi Germany. No word about the number of prominent Nazis that he helped to dodge justice, or about work with the Gehlen Org. Only the unauthorized "Operation Sunrise" is casually noticed. Yeah, Dulles established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi intelligence officers and received valuable information from Fritz Kolbe - but what he did with that information is an ineffable matter.
Ken Klippenstein: Would you call Dulles a psychopath? David Talbot: My colleague who helped me research the book, Karen Croft, who actually studied psychology at Stanford, she immediately began to see him in those terms and I think I came around to that point of view. He certainly would send people to their deaths without a second thought. His own power and his own ambition were the most important things to him. He tells his mistress Mary Bancroft once, much to her horror, while they're in her bedroom, how he loved to see the little mice's necks get snapped when he set these traps for them. By little mice he meant the people who he was at odds with in his spy games. So yeah, I do think there's definitely a psychopathic element to Allen Dulles. When I was researching this book and seeing how cold and calculating and ruthless he could be, the image that kept coming to mind was the Lannister family in "Game of Thrones." Ken Klippenstein: The patriarch in particular - the similarities are striking!
David Talbot: My colleague who helped me research the book, Karen Croft, who actually studied psychology at Stanford, she immediately began to see him in those terms and I think I came around to that point of view. He certainly would send people to their deaths without a second thought. His own power and his own ambition were the most important things to him. He tells his mistress Mary Bancroft once, much to her horror, while they're in her bedroom, how he loved to see the little mice's necks get snapped when he set these traps for them. By little mice he meant the people who he was at odds with in his spy games.
So yeah, I do think there's definitely a psychopathic element to Allen Dulles. When I was researching this book and seeing how cold and calculating and ruthless he could be, the image that kept coming to mind was the Lannister family in "Game of Thrones."
Ken Klippenstein: The patriarch in particular - the similarities are striking!
An interview with him: "Every president has been manipulated by national security officials"
An excerpt from the book (on JFK assassination)
Also a few casual mentions in other articles, like
Read Stephen Kinzer's book "The Brothers," or my former boss David Talbot's forthcoming "The Devil's Chessboard," and you learn how CIA head Allen Dulles seduced many of the so-called great men of postwar American journalism, including Arthur Ochs Sulzberger of the New York Times, Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post and almost every major political columnist, into becoming shills for hysterical anti-Communism and belligerent Cold War foreign policy. Judith Miller, the Times reporter and Bush administration stooge who did so much to drag us into the Iraq quagmire, is not nearly as much of an outlier as she seems. Miller was just an extreme example of the snuggly relationship with power, and the subtle but pervasive channeling of public discourse through well-worn grooves of accepted dogma, that has characterized mainstream journalism for decades.
A few other titles (about a year ago) from Salon.com
This is not a democracy: Behind the Deep State that Obama, Hillary or Trump couldn't control
"Intelligent people know that the empire is on the downhill": A veteran CIA agent spills the goods on the Deep State and our foreign policy nightmares
The Cold War is back -- and it never went away: Bobby Fischer's tragedy and the conflict that ate America's soul
Literary Agents -- Rethinking the legacy of writers who worked with the CIA.
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