The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. David Talbot

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СКАЧАТЬ Berlin office in March 1933. He was ostensibly on a fact-finding mission to Europe for President Roosevelt, but Dulles was particularly interested in determining what Hitler’s rise meant for his law firm’s corporate clients in Germany and the United States. As Dulles subsequently informed Foster, he did not find Hitler particularly alarming. And he was “rather impressed” with Joseph Goebbels, remarking on the Nazi propaganda chief’s “sincerity and frankness.” After Dulles and fellow U.S. statesman Norman Davis returned to the Adlon, their luxury hotel across from the Brandenburg Gate, Davis was unnerved to find the word “Juden” scrawled crudely on the door of his room, even though he was not Jewish. “The conditions are not quite as bad” as anxious reports about Hitler would indicate, Dulles nonetheless wrote Foster from Germany.

      By the late 1930s, Dulles’s views finally shifted and he came to dismiss Nazi leaders as “those mad people in control in Germany.” He grew increasingly certain that the United States must prepare for an inevitable showdown with Hitler. But, out of deference to Foster, Allen was reluctant to make his opinions public. He also continued to do business with the Nazi financial and industrial network, joining the board of J. Henry Schroder Bank, the U.S. subsidiary of a London bank that Time magazine in 1939 called “an economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.” And Allen and his wife, Clover, continued to socialize with the Lindberghs, who were their neighbors on Long Island’s Gold Coast shore. (Lindbergh, enamored of Hitler, noted in his diary that he and Dulles “have somewhat similar views in a number of instances.”)

      Even after Dulles was recruited into the OSS by Donovan in October 1941, his loyalties were still questioned by some administration officials, including Roosevelt himself. Dulles’s various financial connections to the Nazi regime prompted FDR to place the Wall Street lawyer under close surveillance when he began working in the OSS’s thirty-sixth-floor suite in Rockefeller Center. Monitoring Dulles proved an easy task since he shared office space with a massive British spy operation run by legendary Canadian secret agent William Stephenson, who would become famous as the “Man Called Intrepid.” At one point, Stephenson’s Rockefeller Center operation—which was tucked away under the colorless name British Security Coordination—grew to as many as three thousand employees. It was a remarkably ambitious covert enterprise, particularly considering that England was operating on friendly soil.

      Stephenson had been sent to the United States in 1940 by his enthusiastic patron, Winston Churchill—Britain’s newly elected prime minister—after the evacuation of British forces from the beaches of Dunkirk. With Hitler’s forces overrunning Europe and turning their gaze toward an increasingly isolated England, Churchill knew that his nation’s only hope was to maneuver the United States into the war. Roosevelt was a strong supporter of the British cause, but with as much as 80 percent of the American public against entering the European war and Congress equally opposed, both FDR and Churchill realized it would take a major propaganda offensive to sway the nation.

      The British government and the Roosevelt White House faced not only a deeply wary American public with understandable concerns about the costs of war, but a well-financed appeasement lobby with strong links to Nazi Germany. With the fate of nations at stake, the shadow war in America grew increasingly ruthless. Churchill made it clear that he was quite willing to engage in what he euphemistically called “ungentlemanly warfare” to save his nation—and he enjoyed Roosevelt’s firm support.

      Stephenson—Britain’s point man in the underground war against Nazi Germany on American soil—was a suave operator, with a flair for hosting lively cocktail parties at his penthouse suite in midtown Manhattan’s Dorset Hotel. But, like James Bond—the fictional spy partly modeled on Stephenson by his colleague Ian Fleming—Stephenson was also willing to do the dirty work of espionage. The slim, slight Stephenson, who arrived in New York at the age of forty-four, had the springy step of the boxer he once was—and the smooth self-assurance of the self-made millionaire he had become. He proved an adept practitioner of the black arts of espionage, working his far-flung press contacts in America to expose Nazi front companies—including some of the Dulles brothers’ corporate clients—and pressuring Washington to deport Nazi lobbyists. Stephenson’s operatives also undertook a variety of black-bag operations, such as breaking into the Spanish embassy in Washington, where they stole the secret codes for diplomatic messages flowing between General Francisco Franco’s fascist government and Berlin.

      Stephenson was even authorized to kill members of the Nazi network in the United States—including German agents and pro-Hitler American businessmen—using British assassination teams. One of the men considered for elimination was none other than Dulles business partner Gerhardt Westrick. (The big-spending Hitler lobbyist was eventually simply deported.) It was this decidedly ungentlemanly Stephenson tactic that inspired Fleming to grant his hero “the license to kill.”

      Fleming was a great admirer of Stephenson, whom he called “a magnetic personality” and “one of the great secret agents” of World War II. The novelist, who worked with Stephenson’s operation as a British naval intelligence agent in Washington, also praised the spymaster’s martinis—which he served in quart glasses—as “the most powerful in America.” But as Fleming himself observed, even his fictional hero James Bond was “not in fact a hero—but an efficient and not very attractive blunt instrument in the hands of government.”

      Years later, when James Jesus Angleton and William K. Harvey—two legends of U.S. counterintelligence—were searching for assassins to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, they sought advice from a British colleague named Peter Wright. “Have you thought of approaching Stephenson?” Wright suggested. “A lot of the old-timers say he ran this kind of thing in New York during the war.”

      President Roosevelt was well aware that the Dulleses were at the center of Wall Street and Republican Party opposition to his presidency. The brothers, as top legal advisers to America’s business royalty, were the very symbols of the “plutocracy” that the president railed against when giving vent to his populist passions. The fact that they were also linked to Nazi financial interests only deepened Roosevelt’s suspicions.

      While FDR himself was adept at hiding his true political feelings behind a mask of charm, there were some New Deal loyalists who openly expressed the deep enmity between the Roosevelt and Dulles camps. One such firebrand was William O. Douglas, the progressive young lawyer President Roosevelt put in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the newly formed Wall Street watchdog agency, and later appointed a justice of the Supreme Court. As FDR’s top Wall Street regulator, Douglas had more than one occasion to cross swords with Foster. Years later, Douglas’s hatred for the “unctuous and self-righteous” senior Dulles brother still reverberated in the New Dealer’s memoir. Foster carried himself like a “high churchman,” observed Douglas. But in reality, he was the kind of “predatory” Wall Street shill “who for a fee would stand for almost anything.” If the John Foster Dulleses of America were destined for heaven—as men of his ilk were always utterly certain—then Douglas would rather end up in hell. “I could perhaps endure [men like Foster] for an evening. But to sit on a cloud with [them] through eternity would be to exact too great a price.”

      Though FDR shared the Dulles crowd’s privileged background, the president felt much more in tune with men like Douglas, the product of a hardscrabble childhood in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where he had grown up picking fruit to help support his family. Brilliant and hard-driven, Douglas worked his way through Columbia University Law School. One of the talented law school graduate’s first job interviews was with Foster Dulles at Sullivan and Cromwell. СКАЧАТЬ