Behind the Bastards - Part One: How The Dulles Brothers Created The CIA And Destroyed Everything Else

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

Robert is joined by Jason Pargin to discuss the Dulles Brothers.FOOTNOTES: https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/the-dulles-brothers-and-their-legacy-of-perpetual-war-94191c41a653 https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-cia-director-allen-dulles-order-the-hit-on-jfk https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/opinion/04schlesinger.html https://tnsr.org/2019/11/the-collapse-narrative-the-united-states-mohammed-mossadegh-and-the-coup-decision-of-1953/ https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dulles-announces-policy-of-massive-retaliation https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/perceptions-of-childhood https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BY5QX1K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SFZB93Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast that generally starts with me shouting something atonally that's either related or not related to the subject of the episode. Today it is. This is Behind the Bastards podcast. Bad people. Talk about them. Never introduced well. Now, did you say, did you say Coos as in, like, takeover government? Or Coos as an NBA player, Kyle? Coos, ma. I have never heard of the NBA, so no, I was talking about the Coos. I was talking about the Coos. And here to talk with me about a lot of Coos this week

is my old boss and editor for, I don't know, like a decade. Jason Parjan! It was almost 13 years I was the executive editor at Crack. So does your time at Crack, does it seem like 1,000 years ago, or does it seem like yesterday? It's weird. Yeah, it does seem like an impossibly different lifetime and also is foundational to everything about who I am now, which is a weird way for it to feel. Because when you showed up there, you were a literal child, right?

I was 20, yeah. I was 20 years old. I thought you were like 16 when you first showed up on the message board, so I could be wrong about that. Oh, no, I was, but that was before it was cracked. That was back when it was your weird little website, Pointless Waste of Time. I'm trying to make it clear to the listeners what exactly we were referencing here, because it's not something we briefly met at a job a while ago. His formative years were kind of spent in an operation that I ran. So a lot of the things that are wrong with Robert Evans today, you can blame me for.

Oh, good to know. I intend to, in federal court, in the upcoming series of trials, actually, Jason, that my entire legal defense is structured around that. This is really great to know. Thank you so much, Jason. But no, like you did actually, like you were my, you edited most, it was you were Brockway that edited most of the writing I put out for the entire start of my career pretty much. So thank you. Yeah. And then Robert was the person who brought original journalism to Cracked,

because prior to that, it was a lot of like lists and things that were just referencing other sources. And he brought the concept of actually interviewing people and creating new content. And while I worked at Cracked, like basically every other night, I would have a stress dream about Cracked, like I had blown a deadline or had screwed something up. And one night toward the end, I had a dream in which Robert went to some country where there was a revolution going on in Eastern Europe. And I had to go with him as his editor, which in real life, he's laughing because that's not a thing that occurred. I worked from my bedroom editing poop jokes into articles. But in this dream, for some reason, they sent me along with you to cover this violent uprising in, I don't know, the Ukraine somewhere.

And when we arrived in the dream, it was stressful because it became clear once we arrived that you were not there to cover the revolution, that you, in fact, were part of it, and that brought a flak jacket. And I was like trying to email back to the home office, like, do you know Evans is like part of this militia? Like, ethically, can we, like, I don't know how to edit this because he's like, I think he's now like leading part of it. And so woke up like extremely upset. And those are the type of dreams I had. And my dreams, I was a much more important figure in journalism than I was in real life. Whereas in real life, I was just constantly having to like check the Wikipedia page for transformers to make sure that I had the name of Starscream spelled correctly.

Jason, I mean, that's both a fun dream and a pretty good idea for a Netflix original series. You could make some solid, some solid money off of that, I'm just saying. Well, Jason, how do you feel about the CIA? I have mixed feelings because on one hand, I know they keep us safe. Yes, as John Krasinski says. Yeah, as I've seen, I've read a lot of Tom Clancy books. I mean, at heart, they're patriots. But sometimes they have to make tough decisions.

Like which governments get to have democracies and which don't? Well, do you do you know anything about the guys who are kind of most formational behind making the CIA and what it is, the Dulles brothers? Have you heard much about these guys? I have. And my first exposure to the name Dulles was when watching the movie Die Hard 2. Yes, same, actually. That was the name of the airport that the terrorists were taking over. Yeah.

And I think it was less than a year later, I was watching the Oliver Stone JFK conspiracy movie and he mentioned Dulles as being one of the conspirators he thought in the assassination. I like pointed at the screen and said, Aha, Dulles, that's the guy who owns that airport in Die Hard. And then it turns out it's actually, no, it's not the same. It was named after. There's more than one Dulles. To let the to establish my knowledge, I knew one fact about the Dulles's and it turned out it was wrong. You know, my my my only memory of Die Hard 2 is that guy, that actor who was also a Republican congressman, right? Who played the head of the airport.

Fred Thomas ran for ran for president. He did run for president, but it wasn't he at some point that he actually served in the Senate or something? Surely not. My dad loves him. I don't know. He was he was fine in Die Hard. But I remember him saying Dulles Tower about a million times. And yes, that was my first interaction with these guys.

Interaction's the wrong way to put it. But no, they're they're a fascinating set of characters and we're going to talk about them for way too much time today. So I hope you're happy, Jason. I hope you're happy because now I have to read 16,000 words about the Dulles brothers. And that will that will be him compressing it as much as possible because one of these guys ran the CIA. The other secretary of state at the same time and they we're leaving out so much. Two of the most important people in the history of the modern world in terms of how they shape the world. It is these guys names come up in every conspiracy theory, but you don't need any of that.

The actual things they did run so wide and so deep. The actual conspiracies they were like inarguably a part of. You don't. So, yeah. The sooner we get started, the better because we are if this will not leave you with a full education on the Dulles. It's no matter how long we go. We could do a Joe Rogan length episodes. Yeah, we could set aside the next six months and get a decent grounding on these guys. But we have an afternoon.

So let's do the really irresponsibly brisk version of this. Cool. So it may be hard to believe for people listening today, but for a long time, our country did not have any kind of state intelligence apparatus. Obviously, like the CIA and the FBI don't go back forever. I think most people assume that. But the very idea that our country would need a group of people to handle international espionage doesn't go back very far. For most of our nation's history, that sort of international intelligence was gathered by a weird assortment of public figures, charming diplomats and like celebrities.

Guys like Ben Franklin, like Ben Franklin in his day kind of did what we now have intelligence agencies for. You would have these guys who were like celebrities and kind of intelligence gathers who would travel around the world and hop knob with rich and powerful people in other countries and then bring back information to the government about shit that was happening in France or whatever. Like that was intelligence in the 17 and 1800s, you know. Now, the most famous example of intelligence during this period was probably what came to be known as the Great Game, which is a political and diplomatic shit fight between the Russian and British empires over Afghanistan that lasted most of the 1800s. This is like a century of screwing around in Afghanistan between both countries. The Great Game was, you know, soldiers played their role in it, right? There were actual battles and invasions, but the most decisive moves in it were the result of this kind of coterie of really shady characters, noblemen and diplomats and adventurers who would forge back room alliances and put kings on thrones and instigate wars. Like there's a bunch of wild history with the Great Game. But that was like CIA shit back before there was a CIA.

Now, for most of modern history, that sort of stuff was the purview of European powers. The US didn't do a lot of that stuff. In Washington, DC, through most of the 1800s, very few elected leaders felt there was value in collecting intelligence about foreign countries at all. Part of this came from a belief that the United States was best off isolating herself and that gathering information about other countries was useless. And part of it came from an idea elucidated by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that, quote, gentlemen do not read each other's mail. Basically, it's rude. It's kind of gauche to have spies, because that's not the way we want to do things in our nice civilized country. Now, one of the first American officials to make a concerted push for organized intelligence gathering was Secretary of State John Watson Foster. Now, John Foster's greatest claim to fame was the fact that in 1893, he directed the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. President Harrison had encouraged white settlers in the islands to rebel against the Queen, Liliu Kalani.

And when they did, Secretary of State Foster approved the landing of US troops in Honolulu to aid the settlers, who declared themselves a government and were then recognized by the United States. A whole bunch of horrible stuff was done to the Hawaiians that we don't have a lot of time to cover today. We will at some point in the future. It's a real fucked up tale. What's important for today is that John Watson Foster was the first American Secretary of State to participate in the overthrow of a foreign government, a government outside of the continental United States. I guess, depending on how you want to look at, you know, the genocide of indigenous people, you could kind of see it that way. But going to a set of islands off the continent and overthrowing a sovereign government there feels like a change, you know, and he's the first Secretary of State to participate in something like this. His justification for this would establish a pattern that has been followed by most of his successors. I think it would be fair to say. He wrote in order to justify, you know, the conquering of Hawaii, basically, he wrote, quote, The native inhabitants had proved themselves incapable of maintaining a respectable and responsible government and lacked the energy or will to improve the advantages with which Providence had given them.

So you do see a lot of like ties to kind of how the the the conquest, you know, the westward expansion was justified, right? They're not making use of this land and the way that we are. So that justifies us taking over. Yeah. And Foster was, in many ways, the first really modern US Secretary of State. He was probably our government's earliest major advocate of espionage. In 1892, he started to assign military attachés to American embassies and diplomats. He sent out agents to different European cities to go into military libraries and bookstores and comb publication lists so that our Defense Department would get early warning about foreign advances in arms technology. And, you know, when we're talking about that stuff, that's pretty reasonable, right? You have a country you want to keep it safe from other countries, not not inherently immoral to like figure out what kind of guns they're buying.

You know, that's that's hard to argue with, as opposed to, you know, conquering Hawaii. Yeah. And John Foster's intelligence agency, this kind of thing that he starts to establish is kind of fundamentally defensive in the 1890s. He established a military intelligence division out of his office and he used it to collect and analyze information his agents sent him from Europe. It grew steadily. And when World War One became a thing, its size and scope of operations exploded. The man most responsible for the expansion of the military intelligence division was another Secretary of State, a guy named Robert Lansing. The inciting incident for Lansing's dedication to international intelligence was the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by a German U-boat. The American people believe that the Lusitania was a defenseless passenger liner. And the fact that 128 Americans had died on it caused rage and anti-German sentiment to spread throughout the country.

Now, the Germans argued that the Lusitania had been transporting war material for the British and that meant it was a valid target for war. And we now know they were right. Like the Lusitania was full of fucking guns by the kind of rules set down. They were within their rights to sink it. But that was kind of hushed up at the time. As recently as my time in school, this was not taught. The Lusitania was it was just a passenger boat that was sunk by the Germans because it's hard. I feel like and even now when you explain it, I think when you hear Germans, you automatically assume the Nazis. Yeah, the bad guys. It's like, no, this is this is World War One. They're not the bad guys. They're not the good guys.

We could easily have joined the German side in World War One. This is nothing that we're about to explain with the Lusitania makes sense until you understand this part, which is that America, there was a bitter debate as to whether or not we had any business in these European wars when World War One and then World War Two in both cases. And fucking World War One is like, you know, World War Two, my stances. Well, there were Nazis. Like we had to do something at a certain point. World War One, there's a real good argument to be had that if we had just kind of let that play out, things wouldn't have been. Well, they certainly wouldn't have been the way they went. Who knows if it would have been better. It would have been different. There's a reason we have no movies about World War One for the most part, like compared to how many you've gotten about killing Nazis.

There's a reason why, you know, like if Indiana Jones adventures took place in World War One era, it would not be quite as compelling to be going up against the Kaiser's people. No, it was a totally different scenario. And the morality of getting involved into what degree we got involved in using that sinking as the excuse to get involved is very tangled and very muddy as compared to everything that happened later. It's like, well, we were we were late to come to World War Two. It's like, again, something skipped over very quickly in my history education and public school. It always is. And it's weird. It's frustrating me that the most recent major movie touchstone for World War One and German guilt in that war is Wonder Woman, which just portrayed an actual dude as like a literal evil God trying to destroy humanity. When it was like, no, he was just he was he was one of a bunch of identically immoral guys on every side of that conflict. Yeah, good stuff.

So yeah, at the time, as you've just said, the only very few Americans knew that the Lusitania had been filled with illegal war material. Now, one person who did know was Secretary of State Robert Lansing, because he was privy to the fact that his government had secretly agreed to violate the Neutrality Act by shipping guns to Great Britain. The next few years saw a huge buildup in both US military and an attendant international espionage apparatus. And by 1918, John Foster's military intelligence division had more than 1200 employees and worked with agents and multiple government agencies. Now, I bring all this up because Robert Lansing and John Foster were the uncle and grandfather, respectively, of the Dolis Brothers, which is fun. So these are the dudes who in a lot of ways raise the guys who come create the CIA. And the Dolis Brothers are John Foster Dolis, who we're just going to call Foster and Alan Welsh Dolis, who will call Alan. Now, these men would together invent the modern CIA overthrew governments of more countries than most people ever visit and enable a number of genocides and ethnic cleansings in the name of fighting communism and helping fruit companies.

John Foster Dolis was born in Washington D.C. on February 25, 1888. His little brother Alan was born on April 7, 1893 in Watertown, New York. The Dolis Brothers were two of five children. And from the beginning, they were extremely close. Their father, also named Alan, was a Presbyterian minister, which is not a super showy gig. He made very little money. And from what I can tell, he was a pretty decent guy. One of the stories his family told about him is there was a time when he, like, during a snowstorm literally gave the coat off his back to a homeless man. There was another moment where he, like, suffered a lot of criticism within church leadership because he performed a marriage ceremony on a woman who had been divorced before. Like, that was a huge deal in the late 1800s, right, that you would you would let a divorced woman marry again. But their dad is seems to be a decent guy. And is like, well, no, I'm not going to not marry her. So good on you. Minister Alan Dolis. He was a quiet, thoughtful, retiring man. And his sons did not take after him at all.

They were both utterly captivated with their grandfather, with their grandpa, Foster, their mother's father, who was the former secretary of state. And by the point they came into the picture, an international diplomat, they were equally taken with their uncle, Bert, also on their mother's side. That guy also became a secretary of state. The fact that Alan Dolis, their dad made very little money meant that the Dolis family was extremely dependent upon the fosters for financial support, which frustrated Alan. John Foster was thus the patriarch of the family. And the Dolis brothers spent every summer with him on his lake house in Lake Ontario. They were raised to believe that power was in their blood. And from a very young age, they grew up with conversations about geopolitics around the dinner table. Since John Foster was so prominent, these conversations often included foreign statesmen and diplomats visiting the old man for help with some issue or another. The book The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer gives a good overview of how the summer days on the lake tended to go. Early every summer morning in the first years of the 20th century, two small boys awoke as dawn broke over Lake Ontario. Their day began with a cold bath, the only kind their father allowed. After breakfast, they gathered with the rest of their family on the front porch for a Bible reading, sang a hymn or two, and knelt as their father led them in prayer.

Their duty done, they raced to the shore where their grandfather and uncle were waiting to take them out to stalk the wily smallmouth bass. So, yeah, that's that's that's how the guys who found the CIA grow up and shaped the modern world as we know it now. It completely changed the life of every person listening to these two these two dudes growing up under the care of taking cold baths under the care of this very by the way, if anyone listening, if you're trying to mentally picture what the dullesses looked like, what you're picturing, that's what they looked like. What we just described. Yeah, you don't have to go look it up. You can picture these these white guys who are raised taking cold baths. Yeah, they will pop unbidden into your head like Athena and from the skull of Zeus. It's it's it's almost magical. Did one of them smoke a pipe? You say? Absolutely, Jason.

Why was he smoking a pot? My imagination, because he did. They look like Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life. They do. Yes. Yeah, as did. Yeah. Mr. Potter might have been based on their grandfather. That's a solid point. Again, the guys they're fishing with are two former secretaries of state. Now, an Allen who grew up to be the head of the CIA would later recall that his interest in espionage was first peaked by these fishing trips with his grandpa and uncle. His experience of, quote, finding the fish, hooking the fish and playing the fish, working to draw him in and tire him until he's almost glad to be caught in the net, which is sinister as hell.

Because for everyone else, fishing is like a peaceful pastime where you can be alone with your thoughts. And for this guy, it's all about seeing the hope die from the fish's eyes. The fish give up. Just screaming, I want to do this to people someday. I do want to interject here if it's OK. Yeah. In an audio format, when you're talking about multiple members of a family, it is very easy to get lost. Yeah. To be clear, there are two guys, one ran the CIA, one was Secretary of State at the same time for the most part. Their terms overlapped mostly. And they worked hand in hand. When we talk about what each of them did, there's a lot of overlap because they work together. You know, the CIA, when the CIA is dedicating itself to reshaping foreign policy and the Secretary of State, like they work hand in glove. So when you talk about Alan and Foster, it's going to be easy to get mixed up, but just one's the CIA guy. That's Alan.

The other is going to become Secretary of State. That's Foster. And it's more confusing here because they're both on a boat with their grandpa Foster, who was also a Secretary of State. Their uncle Bert's easier. Thank God. But yeah, it's going to be messy. We'll do our best here. So both of the boys seem to find their childhoods idyllic, as creepy as we might find aspects of them. Alan, who again ran the CIA later, wrote, quote, Here in delightful surroundings, we indulged ourselves not only in fishing, sailing and tennis, but in never ending discussions on the great world issues which our country was then growing up to face. These discussions were naturally given a certain weight and authority by the voice of a former Secretary of State and a Secretary of State to be. We children were at first the listeners and the learners, but as we grew up, we became vigorous participants in international debates.

And again, sometimes these debates are like literally with like the ambassador to China will be over for lunch. So like they're, you know, these guys are growing up in the halls of power, even though it's their grandpa's house. Now, the Dulles household was extremely religious, but Alan Dulles was much less religious than his father, who was also confusingly named Alan Dulles. Foster Dulles, the young Foster Dulles, not the grandpa Foster Dulles did take strongly to religion, but his kind of version of Christianity was particularly bleak and focused on labor. His favorite hymn was work for the night is coming, which sounds like a fucking bummer. By age two, his mother noted that he was fascinated by prayers and quote always says amen very hardly. At age seven, he celebrated his birthday by memorizing seven Psalms. Their mother, Edith, considered her sons to be too special for public school.

And so the Dulles boys were tutored by live in governesses and eventually attended a private academy. Now, John Watson Foster, their grandpa and the former Secretary of State was the chief male influence on both young men. It behooves us to spend some time talking in more detail about what kind of politician he was. John Foster was a committed ideological capitalist. He recognized early on that American farmers and manufacturers had gotten so good at mass production that they were putting out more goods than American people could consume. This meant they needed foreign markets and access to foreign resources in order to grow the economy. Now, the only way to secure both of those things was what Stephen Kinzer describes as a, quote, muscular, assertive foreign policy that would force weaker countries to trade with Americans on terms Americans considered fair. Now, I've repeatedly mentioned the things that Foster did as Secretary of State, but in some ways what he did after leaving office is more interesting because he became kind of one of the first lobbyists in American history.

He used his deep ties to the Republican Party and international diplomats to promote the interests of a variety of corporations who paid him handsomely for his counsel. John Foster had always been a wealthy man, but he grew richer by leaps and bounds due to his skill at influencing and changing US foreign policy to benefit his corporate clients. He was a devoted grandfather and he made certain both grandsons spent time around him while he worked, so they would learn the tricks of the trade before they were fully adults. Not only did they live with him in the summer, but he regularly borrowed them during the winters, which he spent in DC. Young Foster Dulles made his first visit to the White House when he was five years old as a guest for the birthday party of one of President Harrison's grandchildren. Young Allen started visiting his grandpa in DC soon after. Both brothers regularly died with their grandfather in a carousel of influential people, ambassadors, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, presidents Taft, Roosevelt, Cleveland, McKinley and Wilson. By the time these kids were teens, they had met like five US presidents.

Now, in their early childhoods, both boys were told to keep quiet and just listen to the adults, which they did. Allen was noted as being particularly curious about other people. He was an avid listener and during his first winter in DC, he became fascinated with the Boer war. Interestingly, he came down on the side of the Boers, writing, quote, the Boers want peace, but England has to have the gold. And so she goes around fighting all the little countries. So he won't stay that sympathetic with the little countries. But that's a that's a fun bit of irony, Jason. I feel like it is extremely important to understand where these guys are coming from because every listener is going to ask themselves later when you get into the horror stories. Did these guys do what they did because they truly believed in it?

Or were they doing it because they were doing favors for their rich corporate friends and this was just cover for it. I hear this all the time where people tend to take a very cynical view saying, well, they actually never worried about communism. It was just an excuse to crack down on mass labor practices like where workers were demanding rights, things like that. The truth is harder to get at. Because I think on some level, these guys were both true believers and God has blessed the world with the United States of America. And we are chosen by this brand of Christianity they believed in to save the world from whatever. And then you say, well, yeah, but how does like free trade come into it? How does he go from that to like the freaking fruit company stuff we're going to get into?

Which is people who don't aren't enough familiar with that period of history think I'm joking about. Earlier you were joking about over there. No, there's a fruit genocide coming up. Like how do you get from there? It's like if you don't understand the interplay between Christianity capitalism and the belief that capitalism is God's will for mankind, then you don't understand entire swaths of the United States populace. Because I think it's very, if you hook this guy up to a lie detector test, it's like, did you honestly believe that communism was a threat to mankind?

He would say yes, and it would come up that he's telling the truth. But when you see what they did and what they clearly knew they were doing, it's very hard to reconcile that. Villains are not black and white. Villains are complicated. That's why this show exists. That's why it's interesting. And I think we'll get into this more. I'll be interested in your thoughts at the end of this. I think it's different for both of them.

I think one of the brothers is a true believer and I think one of the brothers was more or less a psychopath. But, you know, that's impossible to know for sure. I'm interested in kind of your thoughts on that as we get to the end of this. Because they're both different people, you know, like that is important. Like they're not they're not both doing they're both doing a lot of the same things, but they have different justifications for it. And we'll we'll cover that. But Jason, here's some products by things. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Jason, I hope you enjoyed those ads. I think Foster Dulles would have enjoyed those ads. He would have loved products. The thing we were talking about before the break is extremely important because I have been referring to the Dulles brothers as if they are two people who like two short people in the same suit who functioned as one human being.

That is not true. They had the same upbringing. They both helped shape the rabid war against communism that would mark the 50s and 60s and everything thereafter. They were different people. As we go, I think that will become clearer, I assume. Yeah, it will. Again, I'm interested in your thoughts on... We'll get to that at the end because they are very different guys. We'll be talking about that pretty soon because they start to separate in this period in a lot of ways. When we had left off, young Alan Dulles had written an essay about how the Bowers, who were basically people living in a British colony, the British would say people living in a British colony who were being unruly and they had to fight them, and the British established what some people would argue were the first modern concentration camps during their war with the Bowers, and Ali was very much on the side of the Bowers, saying that England is just greedy for money. And his grandfather was so impressed by the essay he wrote that he actually paid to have it printed privately. This made Ali's brother Foster very jealous, and he complained that his younger brother's anti-colonial attitude was, quote, wrong-headed and infantile.

I'm sorry, you keep calling him Ali. Did people call him Ali? Yeah, his family called him Ali. OK. There's like three people who all have the same name in this show, so it pays us to be really clear here in this episode. So one of our best sources on the Dulles brothers as they grew up was their sister, Eleanor Dulles. And she deserves an episode of some podcast, not this one, because she was not a bastard. She was actually an amazing woman in an era in which the idea of educating girls was controversial. She grew to become an internationally renowned diplomat and, in fact, headed the U.S. State Department's German desk immediately after World War Two, which is like a big gig, you know?

She's an incredible person, and she seems to have been something of the family liberal or at least the most progressive member of her family. I don't want to box her too much into a contemporary ideological category, but she was not like her brothers. We get some of our most unsettling stories about them from her, and I'm going to quote now from the book The Devil's Chestboard by David Talbot, quote, Alan loomed large in her life. She attached herself to him at an early age, but she learned to be wary of his sudden explosive mood shifts. Most people saw only Alan's charm and conviviality, but Eleanor was sometimes the target of his inexplicable eruptions of fury. Her infractions were often minor. Once Alan flew into a rage over how closely she parked the car to the family house, his moods were like the dark clouds that billowed without warning over Lake Ontario. Over in life, Eleanor simply took herself, quote, out of his orbit to avoid the stress and fury that he stirred in me. Alan was darker and more complex than his older brother, and his behavior sometimes mystified his sister.

One summer incident during their childhood would stick with Eleanor for the rest of her life. Alan, who was nearly 10 at the time, and Eleanor, who was two years younger, had been given the task of minding their five-year-old sister, Nathaline, with her blonde curls and sweet demeanor, Nathaline, the baby in the family, was usually the object of everyone's attention. But that day, the older children got distracted as they skipped stones across the lake's surface from the family's wooden dock. Suddenly, Nathaline, who had retrieved a large rock to join in the game, went tumbling into the water, pulled down by the dead weight of her burden. As the child began floating away towards the lake's deep cold waters, her pink dress buoying like an air balloon, Eleanor began screaming frantically. But Alan, who by then was a strong swimmer, was strangely impassive. The boy just stood on the dock and watched as his little sister drifted away.

Finally, as if prompted by Eleanor's cries, he too began yelling. Drawn by the uproar, their mother, who was recovering in bed from one of her periodic pounding migraines, came flying down the dock and plunging into the water, rescued little Nathaline. So that's an interesting tale about Alan. And it's interesting, it seems to have stuck with his sister for decades since. A little interesting. And Talbot goes on to note that throughout his life, Alan Dolis was notably, quote, slow to feel the distress of others. Which is part of why I think some of the things I do about Alan Dolis, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Foster, on the other hand, when Foster was 15, his mother, Edith, took him on a tour of Europe. And Alan joined him kind of late in the visit. Edith's goal here was to open her children's eyes to the possibilities of the world. And in this, she succeeded. Foster and Alan were close, but very different, where Foster was hyper focused and a workaholic with poor social skills. Ali was hyperactive and prone to rage. Eleanor considered her older brother more like a second father. And so he was, you know, kind of a kinder and warmer figure, it seems.

In 1904, when Foster was 16, he left home to start school at Princeton, his father's alma mater. He had spent most of his youth as the special boy of his family, donated on by a famous grandfather and constantly exposed to powerful people. Suddenly finding himself in a school where he was not particularly special must have been hard. He described what Stephen Kinzer just calls an outburst of self-hatred, which was fueled, I think, both by this and by his first schoolboy crush. Now, this is a particularly complex issue because Princeton was an all male school. This means that Foster Dulles's first love was another boy, a quote, wild-eyed rebel, as he wrote, two years older than himself. Now, this boy returned the crush. And for a time, both young men enjoyed an extremely intense but celibate kind of gay thing.

It seems it's kind of hard to pin down. This was a different era. And you read about, especially when you read about like British colonialists, you read about a lot of really, really close intimate male relationships that were speculated about to this day. We talked about this with Henry Morton Stanley. And we don't actually know kind of like what the sexuality of everyone involved in here, because at that point, the consequences of being outed as gay were so extreme. And people didn't talk about it, right? So who knows, like, what was actually going on here?

It's not clear to me. Whatever the situation, the Dulles family biographer described Foster's feelings for this boy as, quote, an emotion of a kind he had never experienced before. Eventually, though, this older partner who does seem to have been gay, attempted to take things in a physical direction. And I don't we don't know that if if Foster didn't reciprocate because he wasn't, or because he just didn't have any of the kind of emotional or mental vocabulary to understand what was going on. We really have no idea. We're talking about like 1904 here. Stephen Kinzer writes, quote, to a young man who had so far only embarrassedly kissed a girl at a party. It was a devastating and shocking revelation of what he knew from his Bible to be a shame and a sin.

He conveyed the sense of degradation with such effect that the fellow student walked out of his room and left the college. So whatever happened there, it's a bummer. I think we can we can land on that for sure. Now, Foster's school career continued, obviously. And in the summer before his senior year, his grandfather offered him a huge opportunity. The imperial government of China had hired his grandfather to advise his its delegation to the Second Hague Peace Conference in the Netherlands. The older foster took his grandson along as secretary. This experience had obviously had had an impact on him.

He's in high school and he's helping to his former Secretary of State Grandpa run part of the Hague Conference for China. How old would he have been at this time? Seventeen, maybe. Wow. Yeah, of course, that has an impact on you. And by the time he returned to Princeton for his senior year, Foster had decided not to become a preacher. You know, when he went to Princeton, he'd kind of wanted to follow in his dad's footsteps. Instead, though, when he comes back from this conference, he's decided he wants to be a, quote, Christian lawyer.

And this nearly broke his mother's heart. His family was very set on him following his dad as a Presbyterian minister. Now, Foster graduated in 1908 with a philosophy degree. His thesis paper was good enough that it earned him a year-long scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris. When he returned to the US from this, he enrolled at a law school in DC so he could live with his grandfather. For the next two years, he worked on his degree and acted as his grandfather's assistant. Foster paid close attention to the way the old man wielded power and influence to accomplish the diplomatic goals of his many corporate clients. While Foster was busy preparing to follow in his grandfather's footsteps, Alan Dulles also gained admission to Princeton.

Remember, he's a couple of years younger than his brother. So where his brother had been studious and reserved, Ali was a party boy, constantly drinking and sleeping with women and getting in trouble. He was regularly late on his schoolwork. He always crammed at the last minute for exams, but he still managed to graduate with distinction, which really pissed off his father, right? His dad kind of is heckling him this whole time that you're spending all this time partying. You're not going to graduate. And then he parties anyway and graduates with great grades, which really pisses off dad. Now, Ali's thesis didn't win him a year at the Sorbonne, but it won him a cash prize that he used to travel to India.

While he was on board the steamship that would take him there, he read a book called Kim by Rued Kipling. Now, Kim is a novel about the son of an Irish soldier in India, orphaned at a young age and left to adventure around Southeast Asia and up into the Himalayas. He's adopted by a wise llama and is eventually found and brought back to Great Britain, where he receives proper education and is trained to be a spy and then sent back to the Himalayas to participate in the great game and thwart Russian agents. Now, this is an interesting book. It's kind of seen as an example of kind of like one historian of children's literature called it the apotheosis of the Victorian cult of childhood, which is this. The idea that a childhood is a thing is really kind of new in the late 1800s, early 1900s, right? Children were just kind of like labor or things that died for a long time. And the idea that like there was something like sacred and special and that children might even have special insight that adults don't have was kind of being explored in fiction during this time. And that's a big aspect of the novel Kim.

There was also a counter cultural element to this kind of idea of the cult of the child, an obsession with the inherent innocence of children and a belief that this made them better than fallen and corrupt adults. Anyway, Alan Dulles falls in love with this book and he's particularly enamored by the way Kipling described the British Empire, which in Kim is a fundamentally heroic force. It's described Kipling describes the Empire as quote the sort to oversee justice because they know the land and the customs of the land. Now, during the course of the book, Kim is told by this Lama he befriends that quote from time to time God causes men to be born and thou art one of them who have a lust to go ahead at the risk of their lives. And discover news. And this book changes Alan Dulles's life. He keeps a copy of it by his bedside table for the but when he dies like decades later, this book is next to his table. Like it never leaves his side like the literal copy that he takes with him to India doesn't leave aside the rest of his life.

And when he lands in India after the steamship, he uses his Princeton connections to get a job teaching English as a young white dude in early 1900s India. He lived like a king for the first time in his life. He had servants and Alan quickly realized that he quite like having like having servants from then on as Eleanor wrote quote. There was hardly a time when he didn't have someone to fetch and carry for him. Now, the work he did in India was not super demanding. So Ali had ample time to engage in his schoolboy dreams of Eastern adventure. He explored ruins. He studied Sanskrit. He went to readings by Hindu mystics.

He found himself drawn particularly to the anti-colonial movement, which is interesting because he's he's consistent with this and that he also criticized the British Empire over their treatment of the boars. But he loves this book, which is really a love poem to the British Empire. He's kind of dealing with a lot of controversial stuff at this period, which I find interesting. And while you don't ever want to like diagnose someone from afar, like that's a basic journalism. No, no, yeah, but Alan Dulles sounds like a classic narcissist from everything he does from the burst of rage. Like how dare you do the thing that I didn't want you to do like and to the fact that he can't really conceptualize other people as having agency or value that he didn't see why it matters if other people die or whatever. And then he enjoys having servants in his own that sees life as being kind of easy for him that would probably fly into a rage the moment it wasn't. That's all narcissism stuff.

And I think again, I'm not an expert in any subject, let alone this one. To me, that's what he feels like as a classic narcissist or above all else, which by the way, is a huge advantage if your goal is to run the world from behind the scenes. Narcissism is not the only people who do. Yeah. And this job narcissism is not a detriment. We know it's almost like being tall for basketball. And I think one of the things that kind of that very irresponsible Jason diagnosis that I also make over the over the internet to a man who died before I was born. I think that also ties in pretty well to why he finds Kim so attractive.

That particular line that I read that from time to time, God causes men to be born who are going to go out and do great discover news and bring information about the world and change it. Yeah. You are the protagonist of reality. Yes. God has chosen you to be the main character of the story. Yeah. You are Jason Statham, which, you know, my fellow Stathamites know there's only one Jason Statham and it is confusingly Dwayne The Rock Johnson. You know what else is Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Jason?

Products and services. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're just celebrating the rock for a moment. Oh, that was beautiful. Drinking them in.

So during his time at Princeton, Alan Dolis dated numerous women, most of whom he either cheated on or dumped very quickly. One of these women was Janet Avery. He found her boring. She was, in his words, too conventional and practical. So he dropped her and immediately afterwards, his older brother Foster started dating her. They soon married and were married like the rest of their lives. Foster is very dedicated to his wife and very, very much in love. Alan, I don't know is capable of that kind of relationship. We'll talk about that more later.

Now, once he was done with law school, Foster reached out to the head of the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm to inquire about a job. Now, at the time, Sullivan and Cromwell was probably the most powerful law. They may be the most powerful law firm that ever existed by a long margin. Sullivan and Cromwell had been formed in 1879 to do something that at the time was new, bring investors and businesses together to create large modern corporations. Their job in an era when corporations didn't really exist in the kind of the modern sense of the word was to create them. That's what this law firm did. Stephen Kinzer writes, quote, Sullivan and Cromwell played an important role in the development of modern capitalism by helping to organize what its official history calls some of America's greatest industrial, commercial and financial enterprises.

In 1882, it created Edison General Electric Company. Seven years later, with the financier J.P. Morgan as its client, it wove 21 steel makers into the National Tube Company. And then in 1891, merged National Tube with seven other companies to create U.S. Steel, capitalized at more than $1 billion, an astounding sum at the time. The railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, whom President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced as a malefactor of great wealth and enemy of the Republic, hired the firm to wage two of his legendary proxy wars, one to take over the Illinois Central Railroad and another to fend off angry shareholders at the Wells Fargo Bank. It won the first with tactics that a New York newspaper called one of those ruthless exercises of their power of sheer millions. And the second with complex maneuvers that, according to a book about the firm, amounted to deceit, bribery and trickery that was all legal. Soon afterwards, working on behalf of French investors who were facing ruin after their effort to build a canal across Panama collapsed, Sullivan and Cromwell achieved a unique triumph in global politics. In the masterful lobbying campaign, its endlessly resourceful managing partner, William Nelson Cromwell, persuaded the United States Congress to reverse his decision to build a canal across Nicaragua and to pay his French clients $40 million for their land in Panama instead.

We could do episodes on this law firm. They invent a lot of the modern U.S. economy, or at least not invent. They are foundational in the structural formation of a huge amount of the modern U.S. economy. We talk about them a little bit more in our episodes on Panama with Chelsea Manning, if you want to check some of that out. Now, one newspaper editorial described William Cromwell as, quote, the man whose masterful mind, wedded on the grindstone of corporate cunning, conceived and carried out the rape of the Isthmus, which is the kind of writing you don't get in editorials anymore. That's a shame. Now, this was the guy that Foster Dulles sent in his job application to the guy who raped Panama is the dude he applies for a gig with. Now, normally, you know, Foster Dulles at this time has just graduated Princeton. He has no established legal career. This is the biggest law firm in the world. Normally, a dude with Foster's resume is not going to get the attention of the guy who's maybe the most powerful single lawyer on the planet. But William Cromwell was good friends with Foster's grandfather, the former Secretary of State, who put in a good word for his grandson and assured that the an assured Cromwell that the fresh out of law school 20 something would do well at the job. So Foster gets hired, you know, nepotism, obviously, right? How else is it going to start for this guy?

His starting salary was 1250 per week, which actually put him about $100 a year below the average American salary at the time. So they're not paying him much at a start. But of course, his grandpa is rich and his grandfather sends him money every month, which ensures he's able to still afford a nice home in New York City, close to his firm's new office. You know, this is him kind of introducing himself to high society, to politics. You have to have a nice house to host people. His grandpa pays for all that. Foster Dulles was a hard worker, though. He was a workaholic from the get go. He was actually unable to walk during his honeymoon with Janet. Because right before the honeymoon, he took a business trip to British Guyana, which gave him a nearly fatal dose of malaria. And this will be kind of the pattern of their relationship. He doesn't cheat on his wife. He's very dedicated to her, but he is even more dedicated to his work. Alan Dulles returned home after his time in India. And unlike his older brother, he did not initially have a strong sense of direction for his life. It was World War One that would finally provide the younger Dulles brother with his great inspiration.

During the war years, Great Britain sent Captain Alex Gont to Washington, D.C. to act as their government's military attaché here. Now, Gont was, of course, friends with Alan's uncle Lansing, who was, by that point, the U.S. Secretary of State under Wilson. This is Uncle Burt, right? The guy he goes fishing with as a kid is the Secretary of State when World War One gets off. And Alan spends time with his uncle and this British spy who's working to kind of try to convince the U.S. to get involved in the war on Great Britain's behalf. Alan spends a lot of time with his uncle and Captain Gont. And he listens with rapt attention as Gont talks about his job. Now, at this point, the British were trying their damnedest to bring the U.S. into war on their side of the equation. For Captain Gont, this meant hiring Pinkerton detectives to monitor U.S. ports and hiring agents to infiltrate and report on groups with, quote, anti-British attitudes. Alan Dulles was enthralled by this. One source close to him at the time later recalled,

he thought of Gont as one of the most exciting men he had ever met. He made up his mind that one of these days he would become an intelligence operative just like him. And you get kind of a James Bond vibe from Gont. Of course, Alan wants to be this guy. So Alan takes the Foreign Service exam in 1916. He passes and joins the State Department and he soon made a diplomat. Because again, his grandpa is the former Secretary of State, his uncle is the current Secretary of State. Not hard to get a gig at the State Department when your uncle is the Secretary of State. The department sent Alan to Bern, Switzerland, which was both close enough to the war to be exciting and neutral enough to still have the kind of nightlife that Alan Dulles enjoyed. He spent most of his time there hobnobbing with other diplomats and, by one account, sleeping his way through the local refugee population. Diplomat was Alan's official job title, but in that place and time his real job was espionage, spying on other diplomats, building sources and funneling information back to the U.S.

He found this extremely exciting and he bragged to his family that his life was now filled with, quote, unmentionable happenings. He writes this in a letter back home like, I'm a spy, guys. Isn't that cool? At what point in history, because it sounds like it was before this, at what point in history did we as a culture or in the West as a culture decide that being a spy was sexy? I think it's the great game. I think that's what really, because there's all these like Kim, all these novels that you can see, you could draw a direct line from Kim to James Bond. These novels kind of idolizing these British men of action who travel into the mysterious East and spend time hiking through the mountains and leading insurgencies and fighting Russian spies. And that's really when it becomes popular fiction of the day makes it romantic. And then World War One kind of makes it accessible because suddenly there's a much more of a need for espionage workers and you have this idea that it's sexy. And while you had that same idea about combat, right, that's a big reason why World War One starts the way it does is all of these colonial wars and kind of tricked young Western boys into thinking that war was this glorious, exciting adventure.

That gets disabused by machine guns and artillery shells. The romance around espionage doesn't because it's different, you know, it is it is easier to make it sexy because you're not just charging with a thousand other anonymous guys into death's jaws. But to me, this is crucial and a crucial point in understanding why later on Alan is going to be able to do what he does because even before James Bond, we had this cultural image of that there's something extremely cool about someone like you compared it to combat. The difference is that combat is legal. That is something that is done within the law and within that a government has declared war. You're you're operating by the rules of combat in uniform. The entire thing with espionage is you're operating outside the law and we love it. You are James Bond. You are murdering somebody who because they're trying to develop a weapon and you're, you know, hitting them with a poison blow dart you fired from your watch. That is against the law. You actually are not allowed to kill people with a poison watch. It's most countries have laws against doing that. We love spies because they go off the grid, because they operate behind the scenes, because they don't answer to anybody. They get the job done and whether you're talking about Jack Ryan or Ethan Hunt or James Bond to this day.

We love that idea of these guys who go out there behind the scenes off the books and they keep us safe and we don't want to know what they're doing. And so even this show, when you talk about the atrocities, there's still some segment of people. It's like, well, yeah, but that's what had to be done to stop. That's what had to be done. And, you know, I if I can get a little conspiratorial here, I think you can draw a line between why spy stories are so sexy and why the government actually does put our government puts a significant amount of resources into helping Hollywood tell stories about like Jack Ryan and the gangster era, because I think the fascination with spies and gangsters comes from the same place. They're both people who violate the rules of society, right? They're both people who go who are breaking the law. And we think that's sexy. There's there's a deeply embedded attitude in our culture that doing things like breaking the breaking the rules in that way and like a cool violent way is hot. And, you know, the 20s and 30s people fucking loved gangsters. My cousin, pretty boy Floyd had songs written about him and all these stories about him and like people. That was a real problem for the federal government, because number one, it made it harder to catch these people that folks were so sympathetic to them.

And I think that people are attracted to spies for the same reason, but it's good for the government if people think spies are cool. It's good for the government. People like the CIA, you know, I don't know. I don't know how conspiratorial I can get there because I don't think it's it's super nuanced. I think it's it's a matter of like, is the same reason why the Defense Department will hand over military assets to Hollywood if they want to film a movie that's going to make the military look good. And that's not a conspiracy theory. The the Department of Defense will will demand to see the script before they'll let you shoot on an aircraft carrier. And if you've got a senior there that makes the military look bad or ineffective, they will make you change it and they will change it. I don't know. I haven't fully developed the thought of like the connection between that and gangster stuff. But you can read people like the director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover talking about what a problem it is that people think gangsters are cool. There was a lot of talk about that in early movies of the day. A lot of the very first police union in the country, the Portland Portland Police Union,

put out a big statement in the 19 late forties about how dangerous Hollywood gangster movies are because they were going to get people to think that organized crime was cool. And that all these people who were who were enemies of society were actually heroes. And I see a connection between that and kind of our romance with espionage. Well, and our romance with Dirty Harry type cops who who shoot first and ask questions later and they don't let the Constitution get in their way. You know, it's like they don't let some lawyer get let this with this monster back out in the street. So I'm just going to put a bullet in the guy and we cheer for it. And it's like, well, yeah, but it's a fantasy because that's the world we want to live in where you don't have to check with anybody before you shoot the bad people. But you can't mistake that for the real world. But in the case of like, would you as a people care about what is being done by the city and Guatemala or Iran or any of those places?

And the answer is, well, culturally, no, because we have been reassured that these people are just out there looking out for our interests. And yeah, if they've got to torture somebody or, you know, we've all seen that happen where Jack Bauer has to torture the guy to find out when the bomb is going to go off. So yeah, the CIA is having to torture terrorists. Yeah, it's like Jack Bauer. It's like 24. It's like, well, OK, who told you that? And when did you decide that in a democracy where they're supposed to answer the people, when did you decide that it's that OK for them to operate in the shadows? And it goes back to Dulles. It does. And it goes back from Alan Dulles. He's inspired a lot by Kipling and, you know, this fiction of the area that starts to romance it. That's why the story has to start here, because you don't understand the worldview he was operating under until you understand where he came from. Yeah. And yeah, he was. So there is a fun story from his time in Bern that that I think people will enjoy.

So first off, this sets up that Aladulles was not great at his job. Now, one night while he was in Bern during World War One, he gets a call from a Russian exile living in Bern who had an urgent message for the United States. The exile insisted that he should meet with Alan Dulles that night. But Alan was going to go on a date with, as he later described it, two blonde and spectacularly buxom Swiss sisters, twin sisters, who would agree to a weekend rendezvous in a country in. And so he blows this Russian off. You want to guess what this Russian guy's name was? Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Of course. There were only two possibilities there.

Yeah, it's I mean, and like one of two things is possible either. And it's perfectly in character with what we actually know about him. He blew off meeting Lenin to go on a date with two girls or he lied about blowing off Lenin to go on a date with two girls later to make himself seem cooler. Has there been any studies about, because I've heard many men boast that they had sex with two sisters. I've not known any sisters who would go out and then find a single man to have sex with. That seems weird, right? That does. Because it feels like you're wind up in a threesome with your sibling. Like I'm having trouble picturing like me and my brother going out to pick up some check. It's like, oh, no, it'll be both of us. And so she can boast later. Like, oh, yeah, I picked up a couple of dudes, couple of couple of dudes from from the Midwest America.

So it's actually just us telling if this is just the story he told later that also want to call attention to something that may have like may have caused a lot of your listeners kind of stopping their tracks. You said Alan was actually not very good at his job. And I think a lot of people, a lot of people would be saying, well, but then how did he keep getting promoted? You have to understand that America back then, it wasn't the pure meritocracy that it is now. Yeah, like, like sometimes if you were born, if you, for instance, grew up where at the age of five, you were having dinner with presidents. If you had enough powerful friends, you could be awful at your job and you would just keep failing upward. Yeah, we didn't solve that problem till decades later. Yeah, I mean, we had to fight very hard to completely and totally resolve that issue in our society. And thankfully, we did. Thankfully, we did. Anyway, so what whether or not that story about blowing off Lenin is true.

Alan Dulles would claim to regret blowing him off for the rest of his life. And he was pretty consistent about this. He later wrote, quote, here the first chance if, in fact, it was a chance to start talking to the communist leaders was lost. And that's the way he would sort of frame this in his life. Like I screwed up a chance to maybe have set off US-Soviet relations on a better footing, which kind of makes me think it might be real. Because he doesn't, he portrays himself as being important here, but he doesn't portray himself as doing the right thing. Like he constantly seems to regret it. I don't know what the truth is, right? Lenin was in burn during that period, so it's not impossible. Now, eventually, young Alan Dulles wound up dating a Czech woman who had been hired by the American legation in burn.

And the two grew close. But then Alan was informed by British intelligence that she was working for the Austrians, using her access to the American code room to pass on information. They informed Alan that she needed to be liquidated and he did not blink in sending his girlfriend off to die. He took her out to dinner the very next night and instead of taking her home, dropped her off with two British agents who we have to assume murdered her. She was never seen again. Jesus. If Alan Dulles exp- Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty fucked up. I mean, that is like spy shit.

Yeah, that's some spy shit if I ever heard it. That's some James Bond shit, actually. Oh, fuck. Having to kill your double-agent girlfriend. That was the plot of like six of the James Bond movies. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. But again, James Bond is sexy because he's a narcissist. Right. He cannot. Right. Can't forget that. Good point. You know. And so we worship that figure. It's like, wow, he's so cold in the face of the mission having to get done. You know, it didn't faze him.

It's like, well, see, an in a fictional hero. And I not read the Kipling book, but there's an element of that. We decided it's like, yeah, but he gets things done. Yeah. He gets results like Dirty Harry. Grandpa Foster died in 1917. As a result, Alan Dulles had to rely on his uncle, the Secretary of State, to subsidize his tiny government salary from this point forward. But of course, his uncle had plenty of money.

And so Alan had plenty of money. This enabled him to live the high life and burn, hosting parties and taking out again, just tons and tons of women. Only a few of whom he helped the British assassinate. Now, Uncle Burt would also, during this period, provide Foster Dulles with his first opportunity to screw with a sovereign nation. And this is the start of Foster Dulles, who later becomes the Secretary of State, messing around with foreign politics. And I'm going to quote from The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer. A pro-American regime in Cuba, led by the Conservative Party, was seeking to hold power after losing an election, and followers of the victorious liberals rose up in protest. Violence threatened the interest of 13 Sullivan and Cromwell clients, owners of sugar mills, railways and mines who had $170 million, the equivalent of $3 billion in the early 20th century, invested in Cuba.

They turned to the firm for protection. Foster took the case and traveled immediately to Washington. The next morning, he had breakfast with Uncle Burt. By his own account, he, quote, suggested that the Navy Department send two fast destroyers, one for the northern coast and one for the southern coast of the portion of Cuba controlled by the revolutionaries. Lansing agreed, his uncle agreed, and the warships were dispatched that afternoon. Marines landed and spread into the countryside to repress protests, beginning what would be a five-year occupation. I think a lot of Americans don't know that after the Spanish-American war, we sent Marines in to brutally crush a popular uprising in occupied Cuba. Kind of makes the Castro stuff make more sense when you know that history, which might be white.

And this era of right around World War One, the context of all this and the reason why this stuff keeps coming up, the globalization of the economy is exploding at this point. There's always been trade between countries, of course, going back since the invention of boats. But now the total integration where you cannot manufacture vehicles or wagons or cars in this country without steel from this country, petroleum from this country, fabric from textiles from this country, where you've now got this network. So now, whether or not the American government's interests are relevant all over the world, American employers and corporations' interests factually are to the tune of, as you said, billions and billions of dollars. This is where that really becomes true. World War One is like the turning point where from that point on, we're in like a one-world economy by necessity where stuff is being shipped all over, like shipping becomes a thing. So this concept of, well, why would we care about putting down some revolution and some, it's like, well, there was a sugar mill there, as I think you said. You know, a sugar cane plantation or something. It's like, well, yeah, but why would we care about that? It's like, well, that plantation is owned by this corporation that's actually not in that country.

But it's, you know, in these corporations span borders, but they don't have the power to put down a revolution. So this whole thing, like it sounds like conspiracy talk when you say, well, the government's just working on behalf of the corporations, but it literally was acting on behalf of the corporations. It's not, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's the reason this stuff was being done. Yeah. It was literally the secretary of state's grandson, the employee of these business owners in Cuba, who not Cuban business, these guys who owned businesses in Cuba, going to his uncle and saying, will you send in the Marines from my friends who pay me? Like, that's how it happened. I mean, people used fancy or language back then, but that's how it happened. So again, the question is, in his mind, was there some unified, like, ideology of are we rescuing the citizens there from something? And that to me is like asking to what point, to what degree did Donald Trump believe anything he said? I have no idea. We'll talk about Foster's ideology more. It evolved. At this time, I don't think he has, I think he's still the, to the extent that he's driven by ideology.

It's his grandfather's, right? This idea that American capitalism and nationalism are best served by forcing, using our power to force other countries to trade with us and give us access to resources, right? And that that's a valid thing to use the military for, because it's good for us. And this is my country. That's kind of Foster Dulles's, the grandpa Foster Dulles's ideology. At this point, it's his grandson's ideology that will change. We're going to talk about kind of how what he believes alters over time. But my guess is at this point, he still kind of believes what his grandfather believed. That's the sense that I get. Again, if you want to read the book, The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer, you listening, it's a wonderful book. Actually, a lovely fan sent me a copy of it in the mail, a hard copy, which kind of inspired me to finally say, I've been wanting to do an episode on the Dulles Brothers for a while. But but thank you person who sent me the book. I hope you're listening and I hope you're happy with this episode.

Motherfucker. So anyway, yeah, Foster Dulles, the younger, learned a lot of lessons from his intervention in Cuba. The most significant of which was that it was actually super easy for a wealthy corporation to convince the US to intervene and dominate the politics of a smaller nation for profit. It worked well for him. For his part, Uncle Burt was impressed with his nephew and quickly sent him out on another mission. The US government, which had now entered the war on the side of the Allies, wanted to purge all German influence from Central America. Now, this was probably prompted in part by the Zimmerman Telegram, which was a letter that Kaiser sent to Mexico asking if Mexico might be interested in attacking the US to get us off of Germany's back. There was never any chance of this leading to anything because the Mexican government wasn't an idiot. They'd already lost two wars to the United States. They weren't going to do it. The Kaiser.

We've done two episodes on one of the dumbest men to ever have power in history. The Zimmerman Telegram is like one of the worst own goals in the history of geopolitics. Just an amazing gift that he handed the British. And this telegram's existence was really all that the State Department needed to justify setting Foster Dulles to Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua to fuck with some German immigrants. During this period, Costa Rica was ruled by a dictator, General Federico Tenoco, who had seized power with the help of the United Fruit Company, who was a client of Foster's law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. General Tenoco was in debt to the company and Foster used this leverage over him to convince the dictator to confiscate the property of German immigrants. He did the same in Nicaragua, whose dictator General Emiliano Chamorro had also been put in power by the US government after his democratically elected predecessor had tried to borrow money from European rather than US banks. That's why we overthrew the government of Nicaragua because he wanted loans from the wrong country. It's good shit. Now, when World War One ended, both Dulles brothers wound up taking part in a massive peace conference in Paris.

Foster worked on laying out the rules by which German reparations would be imposed. And his main contribution here had to do with debt financing, which I do not understand at all, and I'm not even going to try to explain, but that's what he's working on here. And it's an important job, right? That's what's important to understand. The question of how Germany is going to repay its war debts is a matter of international importance. And Foster Dulles is one of the key people trying to work that out. So it's a big gig. Alan Dulles gets a job for the Boundary Commission, which was also a big job because its duty was to redraw the borders of Europe after World War One. Both men spent a lot of time with President Woodrow Wilson as a result. In fact, they got to spend more time with Wilson than his own Secretary of State. Their uncle did, because at that point, their uncle had kind of fallen out of favor with the president. Wilson had a major influence on them. He was a big believer in the USA's duty to, quote, carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity to less civilized and generally non-white people, and to, quote, convert them to the principles of America.

Now, Wilson was a profound racist, a big supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. But unlike many white supremacists of his day, he believed non-white people could sustain a democracy, if, quote, properly directed by whites. In order to properly direct different nations, President Woodrow Wilson intervened in foreign nations more than any other president before him. In fact, he may have intervened in more foreign nations than every other president before him combined. He sent US troops into Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, and even in the turbulent period following the Bolshevik Revolution into the USSR, well, into Russia at the time. Now, the USSR had just started to be a thing during this period. And the fact that the Russian Civil War was still, and in fact, the Russian Civil War was still ongoing when the brothers are in this conference. The US attempted and ultimately failed to stop the Bolsheviks from winning. That's why Wilson sent in troops. The Dulles brothers came to agree during this period that communism was now the greatest threat to the kind of capitalism and the kind of democracy that they held dear. Over the following years and decades, both Foster and Alan Dulles would come to see the battle against communism as the defining struggle of their lives.

But Jason, that's a struggle we're going to talk about in part two. How you doing? I'm done all right. Good. Good. Well, that's part one. That's part one of the Dulles story. Lay in the groundwork. Really getting behind them. Anything you'd like to plug at the end of this episode, Jason? Yes. If you want to check out the last book I wrote, it is called Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. It is a science fiction novel. It is the title conveys exactly what kind of book it is. I don't need to say anything else. I have written several books. You can Google my name. All of which are wonderful.

Yeah. Evan's vouchers for them. I do. I've been reading your books, I think, since I was like 13 or 14 when you were publishing it. Chunk Every Halloween on your website. Yes. Now I'm doing that full-time and then part-time M.A. just a podcast guest. Part-time podcast guest. Full-time guy who had one of his books adapted by Don Coscarelli, who also made Bubba Hotep, which is a pretty significant thing to add to a resume. If you've never heard of me before, if you've encountered some of my work, it was probably either the movie or the book John Dies at the End. It's a horror novel and a movie that you can find on any streaming service.

But that book is the reason I can write full-time basically. So read some stuff, Yates. Read his books and then come back and listen to more about the Dulles Brothers. Part two, Dulles Carter. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.