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

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Part Three of our episodes on the Dulles Brothers with guest, Jason Pargin. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 podcasts. 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 podcasts. We're back! By the time we get to the third part of this, I just have nothing. It's either a tonal screeching or just what you got, which is shit, and I'm ashamed. But what are you going to do? You're going to go to another podcast? You're going to listen to the fucking Come Town? No, you're not. You're going to listen to the third part of the Dulles Brothers episode. You worms. You brine shrimp.

I'm sorry. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing here. My guest again for part three, who is my guest in the episode, not my guest in emotionally abusing my audience for no reason, is Jason Parjan. Part of it is that this is a big subject. I guess not just that it's a 17-hour-long marathon of podcasts. It's a big subject to try to explain, to try to condense, to try to convey, and it's big. We're trying to explain why the world is the way it is now and as the last half century. It's difficult to get it across. It would be one thing.

If you were just doing a very long podcast on, say, the O.J. Simpson Trial, which is one singular subject with a certain number of players, this subject, the Dulles Brothers and the Cold War, it's so expansive and there's so many side roads you could get off on that it is mentally taxing to even think about it. It's fucking exhausting. I was just saying the other. There is a set of left-wing conspiracy theories who think that I'm a CIA operative. I'm sure those people who sometimes listen to the podcast for reasons that escape me

will be like, oh, he didn't bring this up and it's because he doesn't want people to say, or he didn't bring this up because he doesn't want people thinking about it. No, it's because there's too much. We're barely going to talk about MK Ultra, which Alan Dulles masterminded in a lot of ways and which was the CIA drugging thousands of random people with acid. We're not even going to really get into it today because there's just too much to cover. We're going to do a whole two-parter on MK Ultra. Don't worry about that. There's a lot to talk about here.

Unless you're going to be talking for 50 hours about the Dulles Brothers and what they did, you're going to leave shit out. It's just too big a subject. And then there's a question of how much time do you devote to what they did and how much time do you devote to the influence of what they did and how it shook out in history. And the context of why they did what they did, which is why I find this interesting myself is what goes through the mind of someone like that. But for example, one of the two brothers, he is just now about to become the head of CIA.

Just trying to convey to the average person what all the CIA does because it's not just a bunch of spies. Every country's got that. The CIA, you will ultimately hear like they seem to have their own army and can organize and can invade countries. It's like, well, now wait a second. How does that tie into what we know about like a James Bond type character? It's like the CIA is more than what you think it is. The reason conspiracy people can think that they've got their fingers in a podcast host is because there's almost no limit on what they can do as long as the president wants it done,

which is where the last episode left off is that they basically have this mission statement. Whatever it takes, that's it. That's the end of the sentence. It's whatever. Part of why the CIA worked the way it did is you have a bunch of different ways that you're going to be shotgunning money out to people and shotgunning arms out to people. And you use, you establish all these different agencies and all these different, you have these little different rat lines through other government agencies that do other stuff too, but that you're also able to shotgun money through or have operatives in. Because again, there's no limit to what the CIA can do if the president tells them to,

or if they're pretty sure the president would have told them to, but they didn't want to bother him about it, so they just did it anyway, which is also something the CIA does. Cool dudes. As John Krasinski said, we should be thankful for them every day. Jason, did you catch when John Krasinski got into a Twitter fight with Cody over that? No, I didn't. Well, there was an account that kept really dragging Cody for Cody dragging John Krasinski for talking about how great the CIA is.

And people started to think that maybe it was John Krasinski. And then there's a thing you can do where you can see some of the letters in somebody's email address if you try to get their password on Facebook. And it seems to match with John Krasinski's email address. It was a good time. We all had a fun week with John Krasinski and Cody arguing. Cody Johnston, friend of the pod. Anyway, all right. I'm sorry. Let's just get into this episode. So from the beginning, the more intelligent members of the federal government had their reservations about the CIA,

the United States has never before had an international intelligence agency outside of wartime, let alone one with a purview as wide as whatever the president says. Dean Atchison, President Truman's foreign policy advisor and an eventual secretary of state, expressed, quote, gravest forebodings about the CIA when it was established. He warned the president that, quote, neither he nor the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it. Harry Truman himself, leader, wrote, it was not intended to be a cloak and dagger outfit. It was intended merely as a center for keeping the president informed on what was going on in the world.

Now, it's debatable as to whether or not Harry Truman's being honest here, right? Like, was that really your intention or did you just see what happened and want to distance yourself from it? That can be argued. But if Truman's goal from the beginning was for it to be very different than what it became, he and didn't really fight hard to stop it from changing. Six months after the CIA's creation, communists in Czechoslovakia carried out what is often referred to as a constitutional coup. Now, the history here is complex, but in brief at the end of World War II,

the Czech Communist Party was super popular due to the fact that they fought against the Nazis and the fact that the USSR had liberated Czechoslovakia from the Nazis. Communism was pretty popular at the end of the war. The party grew from about 50,000 members in 1945 to well over a million by 1948. It swept the 1946 elections, winning 38% of the vote, which is still the best ever performance of a European Communist Party in a free election. Now, since Czechoslovakia was a parliamentary democracy, the communists didn't take complete power because they'd won.

They just were like the dominant bloc in government. You know, that's how parliaments work. But they quickly alienated voters and fractured the broad left-wing alliance they'd been a part of for understandable reasons. Once you take power, you're never as popular as you are when you're trying to get it. It became clear that the next set of elections were going to go worse for the communists, and so they used their control of the police and a network of trade union militias to seize total power. This set off alarm bells across the West and led to a sort of paranoia that other European Communist Parties

were just biting their time until they could carry out the same kind of coup. So the CIA used this as an excuse to start pouring money into operations aimed at countering other European Communist Parties, namely in Italy and France. In Italy, they funded a Christian nationalist party that was seen as pro-U.S. and they recruited Catholic officials to preach against communism. They drowned the nation in a wave of propaganda. Alan Dulles was not yet a regular employee of the CIA, but he took a leave of absence from his lawyering to kind of pro bono help organize CIA efforts in Italy,

because again, he missed the fun of being a spy. Now, the fact that Alan Dulles had traveled to Italy to help the CIA did not go unnoticed. Again, he's a bad spy. The Boston Globe ran an article with the headline, Dulles masterminds new Cold War plan under secret agents. So really bad at being a secret agent. I just can't emphasize this enough. Kind of the way that James Bond catch his catchphrases him telling people his name.

Yeah. If you're if you're a famous spy, that's bad. He was a famous spy. Yeah, he was a famous spy, which you shouldn't be. So at this stage of things, the CIA's aid in Italy. Well, aid is a weird what this, you know, the shit the CIA is doing in Italy was entirely focused around propaganda and providing funds to sympathetic politicians are mostly focused. But even at this early stage, Alan and his colleagues were discussing the possibility of organizing mass violence as a way to achieve their ends.

They reached out to several officers in the Italian military with the aim of organizing a coup d'etat if the communists won from a right up by the Wilson Center, quote. They viewed the project as possessing an extremely grave implications carrying with it the probability of plunging Italy into a bloody civil war and seriously hazarding the start of World War Three. But since the scheme represented a final, though thorough, desperate action to hold Italy for the Western Bloc, they did not want to discard it and recommended immediate exploration. So they decide like, OK, Italy might go communist. We have to set up a network capable of carrying out a coup if the communists win an election. We have to like get all these guys in the army to help to be willing to overthrow the government. Even though if that happens, it might start World War Three and end all life and hum on Earth. The fact that it would stop Italy from going communist is a worthy risk. Like that's the cost.

But like we have them in writing, making that cost benefit analysis base. Once you have an enemy that you've decided is an existential threat to everything. And as we mentioned in the last episode, that became the habit of making sure we always had one of those. Yep. We will have a blank check to do absolutely anything, anything, including exterminating life on Earth. We were and are fully prepared to render the species extinct rather than let it continue on under communism. Yep. If you sit back and think about that, that's kind of weird.

It's a little odd because like I'm not a I'm not a state communist, but I think life, even with all the critiques I have of the USSR, still better than death. Once that template was established after World War Two, it would always be so. And we mentioned last episode that after 9 11, then like Islam and the encroaching like the fear of you had you had small towns in America passing laws saying that they they could not be ruled. They could not be ruled by Sharia law. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There's some small town in Nebraska afraid that it any day now the Muslims are going to come take over that small town. And because that's our only way we can think about problems.

So if you have that in mind that at any moment Islam is going to utterly take over the world and depose capitalism, capitalism, the most unkillable idea in the history of civilization. An almost impossibly durable ideology. Yeah. Yeah. Once you've sold the idea that civilization and freedom and free markets and capitalism are utterly fragile. And at any moment can be toppled by the next threat on the horizon, whether it's communism, whether it's the Muslims, what are the next things going to be? And we must do anything, anything, anything is morally justified and stopping it. You're doomed.

You have set yourself down a dark road because there's no checks in that direction. The moment anyone says, hey, you went too far. It's like, oh, so you're a secret commie. And that was that was the atmosphere the Dallas is established and would establish and that we've lived under until now. You can still scare. You can win elections today with the red scare. Yep. People are still just as afraid of communism as they were, which is bizarre.

Like the idea that Donald Trump can talk about encroaching Marxism in America. It's like, what power do Marxists have in this country? But it doesn't matter that fear run is now etched into our DNA. And you can thank the Dallas brothers for that to a very large extent. Yeah, you really can. It's bleak. I really it would be nice to be able to have because it leads to this. It leads to this this kind of same thing on the other end of things where because of this, the way that kind of these tensions around communism when I get ratcheted, because just that's the way we go when we talk about enemies and our culture, right?

That it's existential. You get it's led to this complete death of nuance on all sides. So now if you're if you're on the far left, you can't be like you can't analyze geopolitics by saying like, OK, well, who's the right and who's in the wrong? There's a lot of people who just be like, well, whoever's not the United States is in the right. And that leads them to back Bashar al-Assad or whatever, or back Russia or think that China is this perfect embodiment of the socialism they want. It's it all it infects everything, I guess the fact that everyone has to be at this level of every threat is an existential threat. Every threat ends in extermination. I think it just it has got it.

It's so deep into our culture that it affects everything. And that's probably bad. It's it's extremely important to understand that mindset, though, because this is this is what will govern the way they're going to do business for the rest of the time they're in power. The dollars are in power, which is about to start very soon, because everything we've discussed with these guys should have ruined their careers many times over. They will both be rewarded by becoming two of the most powerful people on earth. Yeah, in the history of the human race laid out is going to get them elevated to about as high as you can go without being president. And I in ways more powerful than presidents, some presidents, they both served longer. Yeah, so yeah, definitely, they're both more powerful than Jimmy Carter was.

I think we can all agree on that. Yeah. So yeah, in France, the CIA intervened to crush a communist led strike of duck dock workers in Marseille. They developed an ongoing relationship with several clans of Corsican gangsters who they hired and used to violently crush the labor movement in Marseille in 1947 and again in 1950. And I think this is kind of the first example of the CIA basically bringing in a mercenary force to do violence against their political enemies. And it's I don't I don't know that anyone dies. It might have happened. I haven't found a lot of detail on this, but this is kind of the very beginning. Now, while Alan Dulles was helping his colleagues in the agency explore the boundaries of their new powers, Foster Dulles was still a lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell.

He continued to dip his toes into politics, growing deeper woven into the upper strata of the Republican Party. As the 1950s took off, his attitude about international order started to shift. Before and during World War Two, as we talked about last episode, he believed the root of conflict was the failure of national leaders to cooperate, right? That's why, you know, you want to spread all this business around because it creates these these interconnections that can bring peace. Now, Foster's view shifted as the Cold War kicked off. He came to believe that all global instability had its roots in the action of a single nation, the Soviet Union. Now, this was a period in which and I guess you can say that's kind of consistent to his earlier view because the Soviet Union doesn't ostensibly accept, you know, business interests and stuff. So I don't know.

Maybe that's how he justified it in his head. This was a period, though, in which labor movements and anti-colonial movements were taking off in Africa and Indochina and in Latin America, just to name a few places. Foster viewed all of this as not the results of decades of oppression, of poverty, of exploitation, but as the result of Soviet meddling from the brothers, quote, he began reading and rereading problems of Leninism, a collection of Stalin's essays and speeches. By one account, he owned six or more pencil marked copies and kept each in one of his workplaces. He considered it a blueprint for world conquest and came to believe that the October Revolution had basically been the seed of an inevitable process that if left unchecked would end the very existence of world capitalism. Now, Foster believed that Soviet communism was doing to the West and to the Christian world what Islam had done hundreds of years earlier. And a lot of his writings, he would draw a direct connection between what Islam did during like the time that's kind of the Muslim empires were expanding and then what we call the medieval period. And he would draw a line between that and Soviet communism, which I find interesting because in the 21st century, a lot of conservatives drew back to kind of Soviet like kind of the way we talked about the Soviet Union to talk about the problems of radical Islam.

It's just interesting that Foster recognized, I guess, that connection to in a way both because there there are both is he sought threats to the Christian Western order. And if you want to see the perfect intersection of those thing, watch the movie Rambo three. Yes. Like not a joke. It's all in there. So Foster was willing to admit it's interesting to me that that Foster sees Soviet communism as this kind of existential threat in a way that he didn't see Nazism. He was willing later on to admit that the Nazis had committed terrible crimes and even that those crimes had had their roots in night Nazi ideology. But he accepted Nazism is essentially Western communism, he thought was an ultimate evil and impossible to compromise with you can compromise with Nazis.

Foster believed you can't compromise with communists, which is ironic in part because both the Nazis and communists compromise with each other on a number of occasions. But that's aside the point. Now, in his columns and speeches, Dolis insisted that the United States was in a struggle to the death with communism. Defeat would mean the end of humanity. Quote, we are the only great nation whose people have not been drained physically or spiritually. It devolves upon us to give leadership and restoring principle as a guide to conduct. If we do not do that, the world will not be worth living in. Indeed, it probably will be a world in which human beings cannot live.

Again, the victory of communism is the extermination of the human race. That's the only way this ends. Yeah. Now, it's worth noting that Foster Dolis was not unopposed in his views. One man who argued against him was Reinhold Neiber, who he'd served with in the just and durable peace commission after the war. Neiber warned that the great danger to the West was not communism, but the American ego, writing, quote, If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would only be the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a great nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle, and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history, but by hatred and vain glory.

Which I think is accurate both then and now. Like you can say the same thing about our response to 9-11 in a lot of ways. The danger is not what actual attacks the enemy carries out. It's about how our egos lead us to react to them. That's extremely key here, because the entire purpose of doing this series and why it's relevant and why it's interesting lies, in my opinion, and that. The reason the dullesses matter is because this ideology that everything, stopping communism justifies anything and everything, that's what they brought to the world or helped cement in the world. Because that quote you read off there about that like surrendering to communism means the extinction of the human race, as if communism is a cancer that's growing in the body of humanity.

That sounds like the ranting of an extremist crazy person at a rally. That that would basically become the de facto American belief for the next half century. Everything about the way we behaved and everything that the CIA did, it all comes back to that and the fact that that was so easy to abuse. Because once you've established that any pro-labor movement is secretly communist, you now have justification to intervene anywhere labor rights spring up in the name of stamping out the seeds of communism. Because of that slippery, slow fallacy where anywhere you have workers taking to the streets and demanding better conditions or demanding whatever, things that otherwise would seem distinctly American, you can now justify intervention in any and all sorts of underhand ways based on, well, this is fighting the cancer.

This is fighting the knife at the throat of humanity that is communism, where there's some alternate reality where the capitalist simply says, hey, we'll out-compete them. We'll show them that capitalism is better. We'll, you know, we'll lead by example, we'll become so strong with our economy that we will prove that communism doesn't work. But that is not the path they took. Nope. And it's, you know, there's an interesting similarity to me when we talk about the way the rhetoric works and where it leads people to something I see kind of in the, I'm seeing increasingly become common on on both the kind of extremist libertarian and the extremist right wing with groups like the Proud Boys and groups like the Boogaloo Boys,

where they'll walk on the shirts that are that say, shoot your local pedophile. And they're not their problem is not actually with pedophiles. What they are doing is equating basically saying this thing this thing that comes up again and again in conspiratorial culture where all of your enemies are secretly pedophiles. And the reason you would want to do that is because you can do anything to a pedophile. It's the ultimate evil. So I wear these shirts. I carry these signs that say I'm opposing pedophiles and whoever I'm beating up is a pedophile, right? Like that's that's it's this.

It's the same. I know it's not the same kind of logic, but it's an extension of that logic of if the enemy is ultimate, then all remedies are on the table. You know, yeah, because there can be because at that point, any nuance is weakness. Yep. Any nuance and how you approach like, oh, so you want new ones and how you approach pedophiles? Well, we know what you are. It's because they want to shut down any discussion of what they're doing. And that lets you go as far as you want, because if you can just tag your enemies as whatever this Trump card, this Trump card of evil that, you know, at this point, there's nothing that even needs to be discussed.

Look, there will be people possibly who listen to this episode or these series and say, oh, so you prefer a world in which everyone's living under the flag of the Soviet Union, or in which these countries fall under. It's like, that's a child's thinking that that foreign policy is black and white and this battle between good and evil. That's the stuff of blockbuster movies. That's not how the real world works. No, but it's not. But again, it's so pervasive because you get this attitude on the other side and the people who know a lot of this stuff that we're saying about the Dulles and who it radicalizes them. But part of what they take out of it is, well, then everything I've heard bad about the Soviet Union must be a lie. And that's complicated by the fact that we didn't tell a lot of lies about the Soviet Union, but that doesn't mean it was a good government. Like for one thing, it like it didn't work out in the long run.

But you get this. You can't. I don't know. There's there's no room for nuance. If you decide one side is bad than whoever they're in opposition to has to be good in your friends. And it can't ever be complicated because again, if it's complicated, if it's nuanced, then for one thing, the level, the number of options you have and sort of confronting it are reduced. And you don't get to necessarily feel great about what you did or whatever. But movies give you a black and white version of reality because it is a fantasy that the pure morality where the bad guys literally refer to themselves as the dark side. It's that's a fantasy. That's not how it exists. And so you can have people in the name of fighting something that is truly bad, such as child predators and using that as justification to do unrelated, terrible things. And that doesn't make them heroes. It's the world is messy like that.

This is why for those of you who have been listening through this whole series, the very first thing I asked was, do you think the dollaces were true believers? Do you think they believed in what they were doing that they were actually saving the world? And the answer to that is difficult to decipher even as individuals because the two brothers approached this from very different directions. And when you see the decisions they made and then the position they took later in life is very different from where they started. Even in this case of two people, it's hard to discern. Did they actually think they were fighting on behalf of good or were they just using it as cover to do things on behalf of their former clients from that law firm? Well, and it's also I think sometimes it's a mix of things. I'll compare this. I'll compare this to some of the kids in Portland who do do some of the rioting. I think there are people who believe strongly that because of how bad these issues with policing are because of how unjust capitalism is and because of how ineffective peaceful protest has seemed to be in their in their lives.

The best thing they can do is to go out and cause damage right to two businesses to police infrastructure because that gets attention that brings people makes people care about the issue and that that accomplishes. You know, they'll point to like the burning of the third precinct in Minneapolis and the impact that had on getting some variant of justice for George Floyd. And that's logically consistent. I believe that they do believe that when they go out and they light a fire, some of those other people will also during that, you know, loot from an Apple store. And I think that taking stuff from the Apple store, not that I'm equating that morally with overthrowing governments, but there's a mix of I believe in this thing. But also here's an opportunity for me, you know, like, oh, I can get a free thing too. Right. Like it's it's it's an opportunity. It's a mix of belief and opportunity. And I think you see that. I think you see that in everybody. Right. And I think sometimes we try to find justifications for things that are our opportunities for us when we're also doing things we believe in. I think it kind of everybody does that. These guys are just doing it at a much bigger scale. But I think it is a mix of I believe, or at least for Foster, I believe these things about the world. I believe in this struggle.

I believe that the stakes are this high. Oh, but also I can help this guy that, you know, is paying me. I can help him out too. While furthering the struggle, I do think it, you know, it's a mix of things. And you have factions within the government within the business community where they may have some other motivation for seeing a government overthrown. They may have been they may have run into opposition and trying to build a factory there or a rubber factory or whatever. And so then it's very easy to say, well, you know, he's secretly friendly with communists or whatever, same way as with the Red Scare in the United States. If you had a beef with somebody and you wanted to get them rejected from the industry, it was you could drum up that, well, you know, he attended a meeting of communists last month. I can prove it and that even though you personally have no concern about communism or anything whatsoever, it becomes a convenient opportunity to jump on board and use that as an excuse. And all of this stuff, this is not off the subject. This is this is this is the subject explaining why America was the way it was because you did have a combination of true believers.

But then you had a lot of people who saw opportunity to jump to jump in. Yes, that is exactly what we're what we're going to be talking about all day today. First take a take an ad break though. Yeah, Sophie, you know what? Why don't you take an ad break? I would love to. I would love. Okay, well, go do it, Sophie. Okay, Robert. All right, we'll be back soon.

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 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 offending 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. We're back. Sophie just took an ad break. It was lovely. Great time. I can't complain. I'm glad. In April of 1948, while the Secretary of State was in Bogota for a conference, one of Columbia's elected leaders was assassinated. This sparked riots and mass violence that killed thousands.

And eventually this kind of we've talked about love violence in Columbia a couple of times on this podcast, including during the protocols episodes. This this kind of fed into that hundreds of thousands of people died by the time it was all over. In short, what happened to the assassination of this leader in Columbia and the violence that followed it was the result of a number of things. Growing conspiracism, you know, we've talked about that in the protocols episode, violent rhetoric among the right wing, the linger results of economic depression, severe inequality. A bunch of stuff contributed to the fact that left and right in Columbia started massacring each other for years. But American leaders paid had paid zero attention to Colombian politics. None of them knew any of the history. None of them had paid attention to why this was happening.

And so they just kind of assumed that the violence had come out of nowhere and Foster Dulles decided this meant that the violence was the fault of Moscow. That, oh, this seemed to come out of nowhere because I haven't been paying attention to Columbia. It must be the Soviets fault, right? They're trying to destabilize our backyard. The seizure of power by communists and the violence in Columbia were seen as proof that the Soviet Union was orchestrating a grand global plan to destroy the United States. A Senate report later claimed U.S. leaders were in a state of, quote, near hysteria by June of 1948. So like, they're actually freaked out about this, right? This is not a bunch of cold calculating, you know, capitalists plotting to destroy this. So these are these are got a lot of people, a lot of the people who are necessary in order for the crimes we're about to talk about to happen.

Believe truly that like the they're staring down the barrel of a Soviet rifle, so to speak. That same month, June of 1948, the National Security Council issued Directive NSC tend to a slash to a secret order approved by President Truman that increased the CIA's power. The directive stated that the USSR had launched a vicious campaign against the U.S. And in return, the CIA had to carry out propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, and subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movement, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups. These operations were to be, quote, so planned and executed that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Now, the fact that this was being pushed and had been done by Truman caused an uproar. It actually sparked something of a civil war in the Republican Party between isolationist and internationalist conservatives. And the Dulles brothers are internationalists, right, because they think that the U.S. should intervene internationally to protect capital. That said, during this big debate within the Republican Party, they were mostly on the outside looking in.

They still spent the vast majority of their time working for Sullivan and Cromwell. Alan Dulles is not a CIA employee. He's kind of contracted with them a few times, but he's not a full-time employee and Foster's still doing law stuff. Foster did help in the negotiations that led to the creation of NATO. Alan, during this period, mostly obsessed over trying to make the CIA a bigger and bigger thing because, again, he really missed the fun shit he'd done during the war. His quest was helped along in June of 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea. We now know that Stalin and the USSR were not behind this invasion and, in fact, a lot of folks within the Soviet Union didn't think it was a good idea at all. It was really not their call. It was a thing that North Korea decided to do. But the Americans assumed that this was part of this vast secret war the Soviets were carrying out.

What was happening in Colombia, what had happened in Czechoslovakia and North Korea, these are all pieces on a chessboard that the Soviets are playing in order to wipe out Christian capitalist civilization. The unexpectedness of the attack convinced many that the United States needed to put more money and invest more power into the CIA so that future attacks wouldn't come as a surprise. In autumn, the director of the CIA hired Alan Dulles for a six-week consultants contract. At the end of the contract, he was offered the job of deputy director of operations. This gave Alan Dulles control over all covert operations carried out by the U.S. overseas. One of his first acts was to convince Congress to approve $100 million for the CIA to arm paramilitary groups exiled from various communist nations. Dulles sent agents across the world to launch attacks and foment rebellions. Many of these guys were caught immediately. Alan Dulles actually sent thousands of people to death in the first couple of years that he had this position in the CIA, and he felt no guilt about any of this, saying, quote,

at least we're getting experience for the next war. Yeah, that's the kind of guy who gets this job. He doesn't see these people as people. Now, Alan's first major success would come in 1952, when Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Adelaide Stevenson fought over who would get to be the president. Alan, while this was happening, turned his eyes towards the lovely nation of Guatemala. Then and now Guatemala was a very poor country, and the largest landowner was the United Fruit Company, a longtime client of Sullivan and Cromwell. Foster Dulles had done work for them in the past. The devil's chess board gives a pretty good overview of the situation in Guatemala by the late 1940s, quote, the giant company whose operations sprawled throughout the Caribbean ran Guatemala less like a banana republic than a banana colony.

United Fruit not only owned huge plantations, but almost every mile of railroad track in the country, the only major Atlantic port in the telephone system. In the capital, rulers came and went at the whim of the company. Now, one of these rulers was Jorge Ubico, who considered the peasants of Guatemala to be beasts of burden, fit only to labor for the rich. Under his reign in the early 1940s, Guatemalan farm workers were roped together like animals and delivered by the army to United Fruit Plantations, where they were forced to work in debt slavery to the country or to the company or to other landowners. Like this was like our bananas were made by slave labor. They were chaining men together to force them to pick fruit. 70% of Guatemala's land was owned by 2% of the population and a number of folks in Guatemala thought this was fucked up. Some of those folks were the members of the Guatemalan Communist Party who started agitating and organizing for reform.

Now, not only communists were doing this, not only communists thought this was wrong, one non-communist person who realized how fucked up the situation was, was a guy named Jacobo Arbez. Now, Arbez was, again, not a communist. He was actually a young rich kid, the son of a Swiss immigrant father and a mixed-race Ladina mother. Despite his wealth and privilege, his upbringing was rough due in part to his father's suicide. As a young man, Arbez joined the Guatemalan army and became an officer. He married the daughter of an El Salvadoran coffee plantation owner in 1938. Now, his wife, Maria, had been educated at Catholic Women's College in California. She had also grown up wealthy, but she was uncomfortable with the fact that her father had gotten rich off the backs of poor workers. Jacobo had been raised by an indigenous Maya nanny, and his relationship with her made him sensitive to the plight of the indigenous people of Guatemala.

Over the course of many long conversations, Jacobo and Maria decided to become reformers and to try to make Guatemala a more equitable country. They opened their home to activists, including a number of communists. This made them ostracized by the local aristocracy. Maria later said, but what did we care? They were parasites, like an El Salvador. I wanted to broaden my horizons. I hadn't come to Guatemala to be a socialite or play bridge or golf. So, spurred on by his wife, Jacobo Arbez entered politics, and in 1944 he helped to lead a coup that overthrew Jorge Ubico. In the years that followed, Guatemala transitioned to a full democracy. In 1950, Jacobo decided to run for president on a campaign of agrarian reform. He was elected, and in June of 1952 he succeeded in pushing through a massive land reform bill. Under the bill, a huge amount of private land was handed over to poor peasants, including a significant amount of united fruit land.

Now, the communists would have considered this kind of a fucked up compromise, right? He did not go nearly as far as a lot of people on the left wanted. This was actually a pretty moderate bill. One of the things he ensured was that the land he took from United Fruit and other companies was only land that was not under cultivation. So, he basically said, I'm not going to fuck with your ongoing financial operations, but you own all this land that you're not doing anything with, just to own it, and I'm going to give that back to the people. Like, that's what Arbez does. But of course, the elite in Guatemala did not see his reform as a compromise necessary to build a healthier society. United Fruit started crying foul. Paid propagandists in the United States put out a series of red-baiting articles with titles like Red Front, Titan's Grip on Guatemala. United Fruit becomes victim of Guatemala's awakening.

Shortly after Arbez's land reform bill passed, the dictator of Nicaragua Anastasio Somazo visited D.C. and told the CIA that if they gave him weapons, he would, quote, clean up Guatemala for you in no time. Stephen Kinzer goes on to write, Alan liked the idea with General Smith's approval and by some accounts with indirect encouragement from the White House, he established a small team of CIA operatives that conceived a plot aimed at setting off a coup in Guatemala. On the afternoon of October 8th, CIA officers presented this plot called Operation Fortune to their counterparts in the State Department. Frank Wissner said that the CIA was seeking approval to provide certain hardware to a group of people planning violence against a certain government. Another officer asserted that the operation was necessary because a large American company must be protected. State Department officials at the meeting, according to one account, hit the ceiling. One of them, David Bruce, Alan's old OSS comrade, told him that the State Department disapproves of the entire ordeal. So this is not immediately popular. This is not something that everyone agrees is a good idea.

There are folks in the State Department who are like, seems kind of fucked up to overthrow the government of this country to help a fruit company. It's the kind of thing that you would almost think the voters should have a say in because you're wanting to, you know, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, only Congress could declare war. And when we went to war, it was like an official thing. Rather than as became the policy later, we just kind of stumbled into conflicts where one day you'll just hear that we've launched cruise missiles at some country, pick your country. And there was no, it was never put to a vote or anything. It's just something we're doing. I sitting here right now cannot tell you how many countries we are doing drone strikes in. I don't know. That's just, we just take that for granted now. Well, somewhere we're probably launching a drone strike at a wedding somewhere, but it's probably, you know, to take out a terrorist or something. The beginning of this that we now consider kind of normal really, as far as I know, comes back here where it's like, oh, this government is turning red.

Let's just sneak in under the table and just knock it over. Not with an official declaration of war. We're not a war with Guatemala. It's like, why would we be? But this might drive up the prices of bananas or whatever. So it's like, all right. And this became standard operating procedure. This is not, I don't even know what to say about it. Because if you're looking at it like propaganda from the time they would have like a picture of a map and the map is slowly all turning red as the Russia like the commies bleed out and take over one country after another after another after another. And you heard how long it took Robert to explain the complexities of what was actually going on there. And that was a very brief, very overview of an incredibly complicated situation. And when you boil that down to, oh, this is just stopping the evil communists, you have no concept of what's actually going on. Like you were, it would be better for you to have never heard of the country than to boil it down in your mind where it's like, oh, these people were soldiers of the Soviet Union, and this is just another front in our war. Like that is an objectively insane way to look at it.

Yeah. It's great that that's just how everything worked for decades. Yeah, in part because like, you know, if they had framed it as like, well, these people are taking land that our corporations own but don't use so that they can live lives of slightly less unfathomable desperation. That doesn't sound as good as they're trying to destroy Christendom and we have to stop them in Guatemala or they'll be in Pau Kipsi, you know, next week, which is, you know, how a lot of it was framed. But you don't have to be a crazy person with like, with like news clippings and red yarn on your wall drawing connections to say, wait a second, so the law firm that represented that fruit company employed the future secretary of state and, or the director of head of CIA. Like it's not, you don't have to dig to find the connections. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's pretty out in the open. It was a company that they had done work on behalf of them and they were doing them a favor under the guise of stopping communism. Like it's not, this is not a conspiracy theory. I realize that most of the time on the internet when people bring up the CIA, it's accusing them of things that may be improbable or hiding aliens or whatever.

You have to understand the real things the CIA did, they were absolutely real. It's you don't need the fantasy. It's yeah, you don't. It's there's there's there's enough to fill a lifetime of work trying to understand the stuff that they absolutely did. So, as I said, like Alan Dolis kind of brings to the State Department this plan to assemble a bunch of CIA operatives and overthrow the government of Guatemala and they get shot down by the State Department. But that's in early 1952. Now, in November of that year, the election happens and Dwight D. Eisenhower wins. Truman had acted as, depending on who you trust, kind of a restraining hand on the CIA. He was cautious about them. He didn't let them do all the things that Alan Dolis wanted to do. Eisenhower had no desire to restrain the CIA. And of course, in 1953, he made Alan Dolis head of the CIA, which was not a great call. Now, as a lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell, Alan had been the legal envoy of the company to Guatemala.

He'd actually visited so often during his time with the company that he'd started taking his wife on trips with him, and he did not like his wife. So that meant something. Eisenhower made Foster Dolis in the same year, 1953, his secretary of state. Now, this was the result of years of politicking and ass-kissing by Foster, which finally paid off now that a Republican was in office again. Foster, too, had his connections in Guatemala. Before World War I, Foster Dolis had visited the country as a Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer. His job had been to monitor labor unrest and communist activity in Guatemala. Both brothers lobbied extensively for intervention against Arbez, and they were not alone. United Fruit was extremely well connected to the Eisenhower administration. The undersecretary of state, Walter Beatle Smith, was a close friend of the president, and he also happened to be applying for a high-placed position with United Fruit.

After the coup, he was named to the company's board of directors. Henry Cabot Lodge, Eisenhower's UN ambassador, had a number of family investments in United Fruit. John Morris Cabot, in charge of Latin American Affairs for the State Department, was the brother of United Fruit's former CEO. The husband of the president's personal secretary was the head of PR for United Fruit. So this is not just a CIA thing, right? They are deeply embedded with the Eisenhower administration. Now, Eisenhower's administration labeled Guatemala a Soviet beachhead in the hemisphere, even though Arbez, again, was not at all a communist. Secretary Foster Dolis declared that he was forcing a communist-type reign of terror on the country. The US ambassador to Guatemala, working under the CIA's direction, tried to bribe Arbez with $2 million to cancel his land reforms.

Arbez said no, so the ambassador threatened to have him murdered. When that failed, the Dolis brothers decided there was nothing to do but overthrow him. They found an angry, disgraced colonel named Carlos Armaz, who was working as a furniture salesman in Honduras. They hired a bunch of mercenaries to be his revolutionary army, and the CIA provided him with weapons, intelligence, and air cover as he invaded Guatemala. CIA pilots bombed the capital, which panicked the population. Dozens of officers in Arbez's army were bribed to abandon their president. In June of 1954, Yacobo decided he could not hold out any longer. He fled the presidential palace, sending out one last radio address in which he accused the United Fruit Company and its allies in, quote, US ruling circles of reigning fire and death upon Guatemala, which they had done.

Of course, the CIA blocked the transmission from going out. I'm not going to let that guy get a last word in. The Arbez family spent the rest of their lives fleeing from country to country, never able to find comfort or happiness. One of Yacobo's daughters committed suicide and the former president himself was harried and tracked and harassed and threatened by the CIA until the day he died. Like they didn't just overthrow him. They anytime someone said anything nice about him anytime he was on the verge of like rebuilding some like they would go into like it was personal. They wanted to ruin this man's life. They were trying to drive him to suicide, to be honest.

Well, it's so strange that he wasn't able to find a home in Moscow since he was clearly an agent of the Soviet Union. He did live there for a while because they were willing to take him in, but they didn't like him because he wasn't a communist and he didn't like living there. So he left. I think he wound up in somewhere in Latin America eventually might have been Cuba. But like he didn't have a lot of options because the U.S. would threaten any country that offered to take him in. So the only options he had was the Soviet bloc, which then fed into U.S. property. Look, he went running to Russia because he loves communism. Well, you threatened Mexico if they let him live there.

Where was he supposed to go? Well, he was supposed to kill himself. Yep, good shit. So Alan Dulles considered the overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected leader to be among his greatest accomplishments. Now, the operation had been codenamed PB Success and David Talbot writes well about the celebration that followed in D.C. Quote, when they filed into the East Wing Theater for their Guatemala slideshow, the PB Success team was at the height of its glory. The room was filled with the administration's top dignitaries, including the president himself, his cabinet and the vice president. Afterward, Eisenhower, ever the soldier, asked Dulles how many men he had lost.

Just one, Dulles told him. Incredible, exclaimed the president. But the real body count in Guatemala started after the invasion, when the CIA-backed regime of Castillo-Armas began to clean the nation of political undesirables, labor organizers, and peasants who had too eagerly embraced Arbes' land reforms. It was the beginning of a blood-soaked era that would transform Guatemala into one of the 20th century's most infamous killing fields. The stainless coup, as some of its CIA engineers like to call it, would actually result in a tide of gore, including assassinations, rampant torture and executions, death squad mayhem, and the massacres of entire villages. By the time that the bloodletting had ran its course, four decades later,

over 250,000 people had been killed in a nation whose total population was less than 4 million when the reign of terror began. That's like 5% of the population thereabouts. So that's good. One of the two. Now, when most people talk about the early days of CIA coups, they'll bring up Guatemala and Iran. Both stories have a number of similarities. For one thing, Alan Dulles also had business interests in Iran. In 1949, working for Sullivan and Cromwell, Dulles had flown to Tehran and negotiated a lucrative oil deal with the Shah. Under the deal, a consortium of U.S. engineering firms would be paid $650 million to modernize the nation.

It was at the time the largest foreign development project in U.S. history. Now, the Shah and Dulles kept in contact. During the same time, the royal ruler of Iran was not popular. Developing left-wing and communist movements were agitating for his overthrow, which deeply worried both the British and the Americans who had invested heavily in Iran's oil industry. In 1949, at a party hosted by Alan Dulles for the Council of Foreign Relations, the Shah of Iran promised, My government and people are eager to welcome American capital to give it all possible safeguards.

He promised not to nationalize the oil industry, which is something that the communists wanted. And you can draw it similar to what Arbez was doing in Guatemala, right? Foreign powers have basically, through working with corrupt leaders, they put in power, bought exclusive access to our resources for way too cheap. We want those things because this is our country. So that's kind of what the left is agitating for in Iran. We don't want the British to profit off our oil industry. That should be our money. It's our fucking oil. And obviously, the Shah promises to his friends in the CIA and in the Council of Foreign Relations.

That'll never happen. But of course, the Shah was unpopular. Not surprising. In 1951, he was forced to appoint a reformer, Muhammad Masada, as prime minister, after the Iranian parliament nominated Masada by a vote of 79 to 12. So this is a popular guy. Like, that's not a fucking close vote. Now, Masada had founded a political party called the National Front, which was a pro-democracy party that was kind of center-left. Again, like Arbez, this guy's kind of center-left as opposed to being a radical.

The National Front was kind of radical for Iran at the time, but not to the extent that the communists were. The National Front, again, they were not communists. They wanted a democratic system. They were not state communists. They wanted a democratic system. And they agitated in the streets for Iranian independence from foreign economic domination. Now, right around this time, there was also a Shia religious fundamentalist party that had carried out a wave of assassinations. And they were, you know, they also, all of these kind of groups, the Shia, the communists in the National Front, are anti, you know, the foreign colonizers and, broadly speaking, anti the Shah, but for different reasons. And all of this kind of unrest means that Iran is very unstable in this period.

And the main reason why the Shia appoints Masada prime minister outside of the fact that parliament told him to was because he was kind of afraid that not doing so would lead to a revolution. Masada immediately launched a series of sweeping social reforms, unemployment compensation, sick benefits for workers, an end to forced labor for peasants, and a land reform bill that forced landlords to give 20% of their revenues to tenants. Basically, they had to put a chunk of the revenues they made as landlords into like public works projects, so it would go back to the people. In 1952, Masada nationalized the Anglo-Iranian oil company,

a British business that had inked a deal with the Shia to control Iranian oil until 1993. The British were furious, but Masada argued that Iranians were rightful owners of their oil. The British responded by instituting an international oil blockade of Iran. They actually sent in ships to blockade the Persian Gulf, so Iran can't sell the oil that is Iran's. But, you know, again, they would argue that, well, we bought access to it for until 1993, so they have no right to take it from us. I guess it depends on how much you like the British. This all cratered Iran's economy, which led to massive domestic unrest,

but Masada still remained broadly popular. The British appealed to the Americans for help, or depending on who you believe, the Eisenhower administration was worried that all the unrest would embolden the communists and lead them and lead to a revolution that would send their oil over to the Soviets. So the CIA had been active in Iran since 1948. They were actually led there by Teddy Roosevelt's son, Kermit. So a big part of this story is a dude named Kermit, which I can't overemphasize. Now, the main thing the CIA had been doing in Iran was fighting the two-debt party,

which was Iran's Communist Party. And they had mostly been focused on setting up what they called a stay-behind network. This is a group of militants who could act as an insurgency if the communists win power. The CIA was doing this all over the place. They did this in Europe. Like, they were setting up stay-behind networks in Italy and stuff. There's this whole thing called Operation Gladio that we'll cover at some point in a separate episode. Like, this is the thing the CIA is doing all over the damn world.

Anywhere there's a single leftist trying to run for political office, they're setting up networks of, you know, assassins and terrorists in case those people get too much power. Now, Britain was expelled entirely from Iran in 1952. They tried to convince the U.S. to overthrow the government by arguing that, like, Mossada's assessment that the communists were about to take over. Eisenhower was actually hesitant to believe them. But the Dulles brothers were, of course, very bullish on the idea. Cooler heads pointed out that none of the conservative politicians in Iran had the popularity to replace Mossada.

And so if he was forced out, the only popular alternatives would be Shia hardliners, which weren't any friendlier to the West. So at first, the British were rebuffed. You know, the Eisenhower administration comes up with some very good reasons why they don't think overthrowing Mossada is going to be a good idea. Eisenhower suggested stabilizing the Mossada government with a $100 million loan to help them through the blockade period. It was basically like, well, OK, maybe they have the right to not let the English have their oil.

Let's give them cash so that their society doesn't collapse and the communists can't take power, which seems like a pretty good solution to me, actually. But of course, this is not what they do. He was actually convinced, in part, by the Dulles brothers not to do this. And so instead, he tried fruitlessly to negotiate with Mossada to allow the British to take back control of the oil company he'd nationalized. Mossada refused, saying that the history of his nation's leadership was filled with corrupt cowards who had bowed to Western money, and he wasn't going to add to that legacy.

In March of 1953, Alan Dulles attended a National Security Council meeting with seven pages of talking points in his hand, aimed at convincing the rest of the Eisenhower administration to overthrow Mossada. From the devil's chessboard, quote, Iran was confronted with a maturing revolutionary setup, Dulles warned. And if the country fell into communist hands, 60% of the free world's oil would be controlled by Moscow. Oil and gasoline would have to be rationed at home, and U.S. military operations would have to be curtailed.

In truth, the global crisis over Iran was not a Cold War conflict, but a struggle, quote, between imperialism and nationalism, between first and third worlds, between North and South, between developed industrial economies and underdeveloped countries, dependent on exporting raw materials. Dulles made Mossada out to be a stooge of the communists, but he was far from it. So the Iranian communists, again, Mossada's kind of like Arbez. He's not a communist, and the communists, you know, respect some of the things he's doing, but they don't like him all that much.

He was not friendly to Moscow, and the Soviets actually didn't want to get involved in Iran, because they're not dumb. They understand 60% of the free world, whatever you call it, 60% of the U.S. oil supply, that's a thing we'll go to war over. Like, that's not a thing Russia wanted to fuck with in this period of time. But of course, nobody in the Eisenhower administration was listening to reason once the Dulles brothers got their propaganda machine churning. Over the course of several weeks, Allen and Foster succeeded in convincing Eisenhower

that Iran was the next great battle of the Cold War, and that if he didn't move quickly, it would become North Korea, but with the world's largest oil reserves. In June of 1953, Allen Dulles presented the CIA's plan to his brother and a handful of other key policymakers. The actual coup plot had been drawn up by Kermit Roosevelt, who had already been arming and organizing an anti-communist resistance in the country. The plot started with the assassination of numerous Iranian military

and political leaders loyal to Mossadah. One general was found ripped apart by a roadside outside of Tehran. Others had their throat slit. Now, while all this was going down, unrest was growing in Iran. The Shah was actually forced to flee the country because a large band of communist and democratic militants were roaming the streets, tearing down statues of him and destroying royal property. These militants were loyal to Mossadah,

while some of them were communists. It was both groups out in the street and both broadly on the same page as far as this goes. But on August 18th, the U.S. ambassador sat down with the prime minister and claimed falsely that Mossadah's supporters had threatened the U.S. embassy. David Talbot writes, He warned that if the prime minister did not restore order, the United States would have to evacuate all Americans and withdraw recognition of Mossadah's government.

The gambit worked. Mossadah lost his nerve, according to Henderson, and immediately ordered his police chief to clear the streets. It was, the U.S. diplomat later observed, the old man's feeble mistake. With Mossadah's supporters off the streets, the CIA's hired thugs were free to take their place, backed by rebellious elements of the military. On the morning of August 19th, as Mossadah huddled in his home

with his advisors, tanks driven by pro-Shah military officers and street gangs whose pockets were literally stuffed with CIA cash emerged on the prime minister's residence. Mossadah was, of course, overthrown and imprisoned. The Shah, who had been shopping in France with his wife, was brought back to govern the country. He was not popular, and in order to keep him in power,

the CIA had to go to war with the Iranian left wing, massacring communists and pro-democracy activists wherever they found them. The chief focus of their violence was the Tudah, the Communist Party. And with CIA's help, the Shah's US-trained security forces tracked down 4,000 Tudah party members between 1953 and 1957. These guys were basically all tortured. They were whipped. They were beaten. Some of them had chairs smashed on their heads.

They had their fingers broken. A lot of them were subjected to something called Kapani, which is a torture method where you're hung by hooks. At least 11 people died under torture during this period, mostly from brain hemorrhages. Dozens more were executed. And of course, with the Shah back in power, Iran's oil was denationalized. But under the new arrangement, 40% of Iran's oil profits went to US oil producers.

In DC, the overthrow of Masada was hailed as a great success, as had, you know, was the later overthrow of Arbez. An internal CIA report on the coup described the party they held after the coup as a day that should never have ended, for it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction, and of jubilation, that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it. This did sound like a good time. Everybody's having a good one. You know what else will overthrow the government of Iran in order to gain access to its vast oil reserves? I don't know about that, but... I mean, probably at least one of them, right?

I mean, statistically speaking. One of our sponsors would happily overthrow the Iranian government. So, here's some ads. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedli 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. So the Shah was, of course, eventually overthrown in 1979. And part of why the current government that exists in Iran was able to take power, this hardline Shia fundamentalist regime, was because the communist and left wing movements in Iran had been utterly annihilated, right? Like that's a big part of why the ayatollahs are able to take power is that there's no other anti-government organized anti-government forces in Iran because they've been massacred by the CIA, whereas the Shia fundamentalists had kind of been allowed to grow. Can I jump in here just a moment? I feel like for a lot of the listeners, it has to feel like whiplash at this point because it wasn't that long ago in this series,

we were describing an American government that was did not want to get involved in World War One at all and really hesitated to get involved in World War Two. Because like, oh, well, that's Europe's mess. Like what business do we have deciding whether or not Hitler owns France or what? It's like, you know, that's not our business. Like there was a sizable faction of conservatives saying small government keep, you know, mind our own business. That's what small government is. Small government is not. You build a military that has to patrol the entire globe and to go from that a decade later or so to looking at the mess you described in Iran, the tangled mess of factions and things that get into oil rights and all of this and deciding, oh, no, that's, we've got to be a part of that. And having it spin out of control in exactly the way the isolationists would have warned you about. That you cannot control what happens after that. This is not a video game.

You're not playing at risk or whatever where you can just flip a switch and decide this country is not going to be communist. You don't know what's going to happen after that, just as, you know, we celebrated when the Soviets lost in Afghanistan. And then not that many, what, 15 years later, you know, the blowback from that arrives on our shores like you can't control what's going to happen. So everything the isolationists have been saying plays out here because you look at it like how this directly led to the rise of radical Islam in the region. And it's very frustrating to me that you will hear people say today, well, we shouldn't be in the Middle East. Those people have been fighting with each other for thousands of years. No, they haven't. These were specific decisions that were made by people in Washington who had not been elected. These are people who have been appointed to their positions because they were born into the right family and worked for the right law firm.

And the reason the geopolitical map looks the way it does in 2021 is because of the decisions that the row of dominoes they started falling over back then. Yep. Yeah. And then it always does piss me off when people talk about like, well, it's always been a mess over things. Number one, for a long time, they were the dominant power in the Western world. And for another thing, like a lot of these countries didn't exit, like Libya wasn't a country until it was made a country by France and England. Like they just decided, oh, that looks like a good country. They were carving up shit. And like, yeah, it's much more, I think, direct with shit like Iran, where it's like, well, no, they had a government. They had a pretty reasonable political movement that was doing reasonable things to try to improve things for the people of Iran.

And it was crushed and the reasonable people were murdered. So the people who took power when the CIA backed government eventually failed were not reasonable. And we could also talk about how like a lot of why Iran is so the Iranian government is so messed up is the horrible war they had with Iraq that was directly incited and encouraged and funded by the United States who armed both sides. Yeah. It's you don't have to if someone disagrees with us, you don't have to rebut with the sins of the regime that was overthrown because that's not the point. You can't predict what's going to happen in a situation like this. And when they had this party like, well, look how easy that was, you know, you have a, you know, a government that looks like it's leaning in the wrong direction, you're going to lose oil rights. And well, hey, if you think about it, that's a national security issue because if we don't have oil, whatever.

It's like, okay, if you could go back to them and say, let me show you what the next 70 years looks like because of this. Well, they have made a different decision. I don't know. I don't know if they cared. Yeah. The thought that that they boiled the world down into such a simple equation. It's like, well, as long as we blunt the encroachment of the Soviets here, that's all that matters. It's like, is it really because, you know, just because you repelled the Soviets, it doesn't mean that that place suddenly becomes a franchise of the United States.

It's like everybody has this view of like World War II where it's like, well, you, you defeat Germany and then, you know, Germany becomes a modern industrial democracy. You know, like there are best friends now. It's like, yeah, it's not that simple. It's really not. And the people still thought like, I heard that during the Iraq war. It's like, well, you know, once we get an American friendly regime in there and we bring democracy to them and they will thank us and they'll have their fast food franchises and they'll have consumerism. It's like, okay, do you know what the different like ethnic groups are in their region? Do you understand that the borders were drawn not by the Iraqis, but by people who didn't live there?

Do you understand any of that? Do you understand who the Kurds are? Do you understand what there's so much that even the people who went to war didn't know or care about? They like it to be, you know, that I think George W. Bush, even toward the end of his, like he never was totally clear that there were different factions of Islam. Yeah. That hated each other like more than they hate us. The insistence on having this black and white view of the world is so destructive. I swear to God, you see it come up again and again and these people have to know better.

Again, just you had to race through the situation in Iran to try to explain it. Like that is the most surface level explanation. It still took you a while to get through it. I think some of the people making decisions did not necessarily have even that level of a grasp because I don't think they would have been as enthused about sticking their hands into it if they did. Because if so, you would look at it and say, oh, there's no way this ends well. Yep. Because you're not going to be able to babysit that situation unless you just occupy the country. But we don't do that because we're the good guys.

No, we do the good guy thing, which is overthrowing the democratically elected government. And then when a much worse government takes power, endlessly saber rattling about their dangers. Which also has the effect of breaking some people's brains and making them defend the Iranian government. Because clearly, it's just this incredibly frustrating feedback loop where everything just is always accelerating into less and less reasonable and more and more dangerous things. I don't know, Jason. This is why I admire the rare person I run across who says, oh, I don't understand all that stuff is too confusing. It's like, actually, you're more correct. Yes.

Nearly always. The person on Twitter who thinks in 280 characters in like a snarky burn, you can summarize like what we should be doing over there or shouldn't be doing over there. Because it's like, man, that's the attitude that got us into this situation that it's like, well, these people are bad and so we'll just kick them over and then leave and it'll all sort itself out. Nope. Nope. So yeah, Jason, you know, that's most of what we're going to cover in terms of the CIA's fuckery in this period. I mean, there's so much over the following years Alan Dulles's CIA would create the Republic of South Vietnam almost out of whole cloth, which was a pretty horrible government. And they did it in order to challenge, you know, the North.

They attempted to carry out a coup in Indonesia, which failed in 1960 Alan Dulles helped to mastermind the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, a socialist president of the Congo. Prior to Lumumba's killing, Dulles wrote, quote, if Lumumba continues to be in power, the result will be at best chaos and at worst an eventual seizure of power by the communists with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the U.N. and the interests of the free world. His dismissal must therefore be an urgent and priority objective. Now, Lumumba's assassination led to a horrible violent war. The presidency of Joseph Mabutu, a brutal dictator who robbed the nation blind and left it in like what is still to this day, a perpetual state of multi civil war. There's just I mean, the Congo has been torn apart ever since. And obviously, a lot of that blame goes on to the Belgians, too.

But it's just farcical that that that Dulles ever thought that like, oh, if Lumumba gets in power, then we'll have chaos in the Congo. Like, oh, nobody. And again, I don't know if you were to tell him what had happened if he would have changed his actions. I don't think so. I just don't. Now, Alan Dulles retired in 1961. I think Foster had been out for a while at that. I mean, he was the only secretary of state for four years or so. He passed away, I think.

And didn't he pass away in 1959, something like that? Am I wrong about that? Dulles? Foster? Yeah. I thought he left office in 1959 for health reasons. Yeah, 1959. And he was in.

So when he died, that's why we have Dulles Airport. Is it got named after him? And I think it was actually JFK who who inaugurated Dulles Airport and gave a nice speech about, you know, all of the wonderful things that that Foster Dulles had done for the country. It was not named after Alan Dulles. There was a statue of Foster Dulles that used to be in Dulles Airport that is now has been moved out of the public part of the airport and is now just kind of like sitting awkwardly in a conference room. Because about 10 or so years later, people started to get embarrassed with Foster Dulles's legacy, which again, you don't hear about these guys anymore, you know. But yeah, it happened pretty quickly, like these people went from being in the news constantly to by the time they were both out of politics in 1961, fading really fast from popular memory. Considering how influential they were.

Some of it, I think some of it's probably that people started to feel ashamed of what they'd done. But I think more of it was probably it wasn't in anybody's best interest to help people remember. Like, I think everyone listening to this heard about the Bay of Pigs in school didn't know the name Alan Dulles necessarily or don't remember it. Yeah, like all of these things that were just part of the Cold War and helped shape everything about the policy and all those different parts of the world. That's that was the Dulles's. All of it either entirely them or partly them. It's baffling how much they did and the best way to highlight that is by how much we're leaving out. We're not talking about the Bay of Pigs, which was Alan Dulles's baby.

We're not talking about the fact that after World War Two, he was given the job of building a new German intelligence agency to combat the Soviets. And he hired General Reinhardt Galen, Hitler's former head of intelligence. Galen played a huge role in the Holocaust, but Dulles and the CIA kind of hand wave that and allowed him to hire other members of the Gestapo to work with the CIA in West Germany. There were complaints within the CIA about all of the Nazis they were having to work with. One of the guys who got brought into work with the CIA was Conrad Feibig, who worked with the CIA through Galen and was later charged with murdering 11,000 Jews in Belarus during the war. There was a memo we have about this guy wherein one CIA employee suggests it might be smart to drop such types from employment. And Dulles gets asked about this guy. Dulles gets asked about Galen in general, because the British are really unhappy with the fact that we keep hiring all these Nazis.

And Dulles gets asked about like Galen and all the Nazis is hiring and Dulles's response is, I don't know if he's a rascal. Rascal was not the allegation. The type of memo some of you in the listenership have gotten about an inappropriate term that they would like you to stop using in emails or something like that. They got that memo about, well, maybe we should not hire ex-Nazis. And he was like, well, are you sure? Are you the dude who killed 11,000 people? Yeah, he's problematic. Are you aware of these problematic? Cancel culture comes for the SS.

Now, one of the things that's funny is he's like, so he says, he gets asked about Galen. He says, I don't know if he's a rascal. There are a few archbishops in espionage besides one needn't ask him to one's club, which is funny because Alan Dulles absolutely invited Reinhard Galen to his club on numerous occasions. He actually hosted parties for the Nazi spy chief at the Chevy Chase Club whenever he would visit D.C. It's just good shit. It's just good shit. Now, Galen's big influence on Alan Dulles was the fact that Galen was a guy who believed that everything was justified in combating the communist threat. He wrote at one point in an age in which war is the paramount activity of man.

The total annihilation of the enemy is its primary aim, which is a very fascist thing to say and something both of the Dulles brothers got on board with, because they were instrumental in pushing a policy on the U.S. government called massive retaliation. John Foster Dulles actually laid out this idea in a speech to the CFR when he insisted the U.S. would protect its allies, quote, through the deterrent of massive retaliatory power. I'm going to quote from a write up in history.com here. Dulles began his speech by examining the communist strategy that he concluded has had as its goal the bankruptcy of the United States through over extension of its military power. Both strategically and economically, the secretary explained it was unwise to permanently commit U.S. land forces in Asia to support permanently other countries and to become permanently committed to military expenditures so vast they lead to practical bankruptcy.

Instead, he believed a new policy of getting maximum protection at a bearable cost should be developed. Although Dulles did not directly refer to nuclear weapons, it was clear that the new policy he was describing would depend upon the massive retaliatory power of such weapons, which is interesting because on a moral level, what he is saying here is it's too expensive to go to war. All the times we would need to go to war to counter the Soviets. You know what's cheap is a fucking nuke. That's good shit. And we could talk a lot about massive retaliation and how that idea played a big role in the escalation of the U.S. commitment to Vietnam in Nixon's bombing of Cambodia. But we're running way too long as it is. I want to end by acknowledging MK Ultra, which is the part of Dulles's legacy that I think people are probably most familiar with.

This is the CIA giving everybody LSD. The idea behind this was that Alan Dulles had become convinced that the Soviets were carrying out mind control research and we needed to do mind control research to counter them, even though we actually had information that they weren't really doing all that much. But that was beside the point. Alan Dulles wanted thousands of people to be dosed with LSD and that's exactly what happened. We'll do a whole two-parter on this someday. For right now, I want to talk about the aspect of it that says the most about Alan Dulles as a human being, which is the fact that he subjected his son to some aspects of the MK Ultra program. So his kid, Alan Dulles Jr. or Sonny, was a brilliant young man with an incredible academic record and a sharp mind. His mom and his sisters all adored him. But Alan Dulles Sr. was kind of incapable of taking any pride in his son.

And this kind of pushed his son to try to impress him. And in order to do this, Sonny joined the Marine Corps. He fought with incredible courage in Korea and won commendations for reckless bravery under fire until he was hit by a North Korean shell in 1942 and his brain was permanently damaged. When he came home, Sonny was unable to take care of himself. Therapy did not seem to help. He would get lost easily. He would launch into angry rants where he called his father a Hitler lover and a Nazi collaborator. His family dubbed these paranoid even though they were pretty accurate. In desperation, Alan Dulles sent his son to Dr. Harold Wolf, who worked on the MK Ultra program. We know something of what was done to Sonny thanks to his sister, Joan, who visited him during this period from the devil's chessboard.

Joan has disturbing memories of visiting her brother at a New York hospital where he was subjected to excruciating insulin shock therapy, one of the experimental procedures employed on the CIA's human guinea pigs. Used primarily for the treatment of schizophrenia, insulin doses were meant to jolt patients out of their madness. The procedure resulted in coma and sometimes violent convulsions. The most severe risks included death and brain damage. The one study at the time claimed that this mental impairment was actually beneficial because it reduced patients' tension and hostility. Joan recalls that her brother kept begging her when she visited him, can't you do something for me? I'm going mad. He showed no improvement from his treatment. And of course, obviously, he wouldn't. It just seems to have done horrible damage. Eventually, he just started, like, stopped talking to his parents and stopped, like, he just decided, like, I have to just pretend that I'm fine so that they will stop torturing me this way. I don't know. That's Alan fucking Dulles, you know? And of course he would. Like, that's how he solves his problems.

And I don't know if you were about to cover this, but now he was fired after the Bay of Pigs, correct? Didn't Kennedy effectively force him to resign? Yeah, I mean, he resigned, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So I began this series by talking about my first, like, exposure to him in the realm of, like, CIA conspiracy stuff was an Oliver Stone JFK movie. Because after Kennedy fired Dulles, and then exactly two years later or so, Kennedy would be assassinated, right? 1963, November 22nd, something like that. And then when they would form the Warren Commission to try to find out who had assassinated JFK, Alan Dulles winds up on the commission. He sure was. Who JFK had fired for doing, for botching his behind the scenes CIA stuff in the form of the Bay of Pigs.

So if you're wondering why, like, conspiracy theories and stuff persist and why they have, like, there's enough truth for them to go on to keep them fueled, it's stuff like this. Like, that's as shady as can be, it would seem, to my innocent eyes. Yeah, it's incredibly shady. It's one of those reasons where when I'm talking about conspiracy theories, I don't put the JFK assassination in the same realm as, you know, hollow earth stuff. Because there's reasons to have questions about what went down, you know, not that I'm, you know, a magic bullet or like whatever. Like, I'm not, I have no, I'm not convinced on that. But it's certainly there's some sketchy ass shit that went down. It would be weird if people weren't theorizing about reasons why that might have happened. I want to end Jason because we've mostly talked about the Dulles brothers and the kind of men they were how they came about and how that led them into what they did and how that led to the creation of the CIA. I also want to quote a passage from the Brothers by Stephen Kinzer that lays out kind of the talent Alan cultivated because he was he headed the CIA during its formative years. This talks about the kind of people he recruited. And I think this is the note that I want to end on.

Quote, all were gregarious, intrigued by possibilities, liked to do things, had three bright ideas a day, shared the optimism of stock market plungers and were convinced that every problem had its handle and that the CIA should find a way to reach it. The intelligence historian Thomas Powers has written. They also tended to be white Anglo-Saxon patricians from old families with old money, at least at the beginning, and they somehow inherited traditional British attitudes towards the colored races of the world. Not the Puka Saheb arrogance of the Indian Raj, but the mixed fascination and condescension of men like T.E. Lawrence, who were enthusiastic partisans of the alien cultures into which they dipped for a time and rarely doubted their ability to help until it was too late. These were the best men who formed the core of the early CIA. Most came from privileged backgrounds that isolated them from ordinary life and had gone to the right schools. During the war, they had traded genteel lives for death defying adventures. Upon returning home, they found the quiet routines of peace unfulfilling. Yep. It is hard to overstate the power of boredom and shaping world events. And when certain wealthy people can decide, for example, you know what, I think it would be funny if I ran for president.

Sometimes people just want to find something to do and decide, you know what, I think that the uncivilized races need me to come rescue them. Yeah, it is. It is fitting that all of the people who kind of formed the background of the early CIA are dullest types. They are rich kids from the aristocracy who go to private schools, have an exciting time in the war and come home bored. And also, I think with that kind of ego that they know what's best for the world, that has to be a factor. And then you've got people like Alan Dulles, who I fully believe a big chunk of his motivation is that nothing gets you laid like saying you're a spy. And yeah, you can't overestimate the impact of boredom or getting laid. Or his ability to be able to say, well, you know, that revolution just happened. That was me. It's like I barely escaped with my life. Like I had, yeah, that guy was just fascinated. I killed him myself with a poison dart from my wristwatch.

Why don't we talk about this? I can't tell the story here in the restaurant, but if we come up to my room, where's this you and me? I can tell you the story in privacy with you and your twin sister, the three of us. You know, you do a great Alan Dulles. So yeah, there you go, everybody. These are two names everyone should know. These are names that when we say we have shorthand, like talk about this, that's McCarthyism or that's whatever. The names Dulles should be among those that everybody knows is shorthand and they're not. So if we have helped some people know these names and know what hand they had in shaping the mess that is a role today. There you go. We've done a service.

Yes. And that's all we ever tried to do service. And if you don't know the names of the modern versions of the Dulles's, find out. Yes, John Krasinski, Google John Krasinski. Jason, you got anything to plug up? Yes, since I abandoned the online publishing industry last year and left my job at crack. I'm a full time author. I am a New York Times bestselling author of several increasingly stupid books. The last one was called Zoe punches the future in the dick. It is booked to in a series. You do not have to have read the first one.

It is as good of a place to start as any or you can go to Amazon or if you have a more ethical place you buy your books from. You can browse any of them by looking up my name. Otherwise, I also have social media. All the social media is except tick tock. Are you on tick tock Evans? No, no, I am frightened and confused by anything that the kids like. So for you on tick tock. No, the handful of tick tock videos that I've seen segments of on Twitter have convinced me that we need to do a reverse logins run. I love tick tock. I'm just not like posting on there.

It's a great time. I've learned so many helpful tips on like organization and like what products to buy that actually work. It's like it's like Yelp, but video. Well, you can either do what Sophie suggested. There's also a lot of puppies. There's a lot of puppies, you guys. I'm just going to say it again, reverse logins run. I said in a previous episode that like it's easy for us to look back on the past and condemn how casual they were about Nazis and various. I think in the future, they'll look back at how we tolerated tick tock and they'll say the same. It's like, how could they not see where that was going?

Yeah. How could they not tell that tick tock would lead to the annihilation of the dolphins in 2022? And I saw it coming. But thanks for having me on. This was a lot of information to try to get through very quickly. We left out so much. We left out so many stories that could have. You're going to do an entire series on MK Ultra. A multi-part series on MK Ultra is also going to wind up leaving out a lot. A lot. A lot of wild shit.

It's just the nature of it. The best thing podcasts can do is encourage people to go out and buy books on the subject and pursue them further. Because you are not informed because you listened to nine hours of a podcast on it. I know it seems like there was a lot to get through. There's so much more and it's all just as interesting. It really is. And if you want to learn more buying the Brothers, which is where I recommend starting with Stephen Kinzer. And then the Devil's Chestboard by David Talbot.

That will actually give you a pretty solid base of understanding of these guys and what they did. Of course, there will still be a lot more. All right. 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 in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.