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

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

Part Two of 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.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hitler is a guy we're going to be talking about a lot today. We're talking about the Dolis Brothers, Part 2, and we'll be covering their time in the war, which involves a lot of Nazis. I'm Robert Evans. This is, you know, Behind the Bastards. You should know that. This is the second episode we're doing on this series.

And my guest is again, Jason Parjan. Jason, how are you doing? Do some people start with Part 2 of a series like this? Do we have to catch them up with...? If they are, Jason, they're maniacs, and I feel no need to pander to them. There is a question I did want to ask, though, because when you left off the two Dolis Brothers, and again, just because it's been a week or whatever, you've got the elder brother, Foster Dolis, who is not yet going...

He's going to be Secretary of State later. You've got the younger Alan, who is later going to take over the CIA. Right now, they're not doing that. Right now, they are helping to basically negotiate the post-World War I peace with Germany, correct? Yes. And the terms of that that will wind up... The terms of the peace of World War I set the stage for everything that comes after right up until today. Yes.

So how old are these brothers when that is occurring? Oh, geez. Because they're not very old. No. I mean, like 20. Okay. Like Alan... Well, yeah, and they're in there.

So Foster's older. Foster starts college... Well, no, he starts high school in 1904. So he's graduated by 1908. World War I starts when he's in his early 20s. He's in his late 20s, and Alan is in his early 20s, I think. Okay. So when you think about your early 20s, would you have felt confident in your ability to redraw the map of post-war Europe?

Yeah. No, I think I could have done a pretty good job. I think I could have, you know, because the only people who have their shit together in all of Europe, in my opinion, my opinion, Jason, is probably going to be, I don't know, fucking Bosnia. Nothing's ever gone wrong there. Let's give it all to Bosnia. Let them figure it out. I think that's how I do it. You got greater Bosnia, and then you got Russia.

There could be an entire... There have been entire, I'm sure, horrifying books written about the way that the map, and after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and everything else, like, everything that's happening all the way through Al-Qaeda and ISIS and everything comes down to, in many ways, how those borders were drawn by people who, in many cases, had never even visited the places they were. No. Yeah. And one of the most telling things in the world, if you want to know, understand a lot of white people in a lot of parts of the Middle East feel the way they do and why things have gone the way they do, is the vast majority of people in the United States and England and France have never heard of the Sykes-Picot Treaty. Every fucking kid in Iraq and Syria knows what Sykes-Picot was, because it created their fucking world. And it was a treaty that, you know, Sykes and Picot, I think, were of the British and French guys, but it's...

Yeah, this is the period, that period, while that's happening. And I will say, you know, in fairness, redrawing the boundaries of Europe as a result of this conflict, what they're doing is not the same as what's being done to the Ottoman Empire, because that's much more violent and horrible. Like, they understand Europe a lot better. They're often negotiating with the people who are running these countries, because, like, they, you know, they, for one thing, think that Europeans get to have more input into what happens with their nations than the people of the Ottoman, former Ottoman territories. Yeah. It's just, it's a very consequential period of world history. Incredible. Like, after World War I, the whole world order kind of gets reshuffled. And I think one of, which of the Dulles Brothers was dealing with Germany's repayment of their... That is foster. Foster. Like, how that comes down, that's gonna sow the seeds of everything. Everything that happens up until today. Like, it's hard to overstate how the mistakes were made at the time, and maybe things couldn't have been anticipated. I don't know. That's a whole separate deal. It's hard to overstate how important what their work was here up through until the time both of these men die.

Because it is a personal beef of mine that when we talk about politics in America today, when we look for a historical example, we have, like, two. Yeah. It's either Hitler or Mao, I don't know. Everything is either 1984 or Hitler. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I wish, I wish you could insult the president by saying he's like Woodrow Wilson. And I wish you could insult an administration's foreign policy by saying it's like the Dulles is a rent charge. Yeah. To the average person today, like, arguing on the internet, those names, I guarantee you don't mean anything. They don't. And it's one of the things that's fascinating about this that you were kind of touching on is that when the most consequential decisions in modern history are being made, a number of people at the table are just some dude's grandkids.

You know, like the Dulles brothers are not the only people who get in this position, including like the crown heads of Europe, you could argue. But like how much a factor this is that the people making these calls are all buddies and relatives of each other in a lot of ways. It's different because in America, we're not supposed to have royalty. We're not. Right. But we do. And so when you look and you say, well, gosh, how are these two guys fresh out of college or fresh out of their first jobs like sitting at the table to help redraw what the future looks like? And it's like, oh, well, they were having dinner with foreign leaders when they were in kindergarten.

There are classes of people who when you're growing up, you have the option of saying, well, do you want to go into your father's business and be a minister? Do you want to be secretary of state like your grandfather? And that's one of the options. And you're just traveling in a circle of people and you have, as you mentioned in the previous episode, like their jobs they were getting at the time didn't pay much at all. Totally irrelevant to this class of people. That's not what it's about. Like they are destined to be names in the history books. And so they have the money if they want to spend a year in India or do whatever they did to see these parts of the world and all these things that would influence how they see the world. They had the ability to do that.

You didn't. You could not have taken off and just traveled around and all of this and failed your way upward the way Alan did. Yeah. Now, Jason, as we get into this, because we ended the last episode noting that this is the period the world, the end of World War One in which communism really gets fixed on the Dulles boys radar. Right. And of course it would like it wasn't really a massive topic of discussion until the Russian Revolution that really made it something that a lot of American conservatives were obsessed about. Because they see, you know, you see like the business leaders and the crowned heads of Russia get murdered and have their stuff taken. And it scares a lot of people. But it is worth noting as we start this episode that the hard line anti-communist attitudes that were adopted by Foster and Alan Dulles immediately after the Russian Revolution were not necessarily the default, even among conservatives.

Herbert fucking Hoover is one of the most conservative presidents in US history. And during this period of time, he urged Woodrow Wilson to reevaluate the Bolshevik movement and acknowledge that it had, quote, true social ends and roots in, quote, grievous injustices to the lowest classes in all the countries that have been affected. Hoover warned that in the United States, the advancement of communist causes was directly the fault of American reactionaries who had stimulated Bolshevism by viciously attacking social welfare programs. Now, if you know anything about Hoover, it's wild that he's the one saying this, but he is. History has gotten rewritten in terms of looking backward about, and then in the same way where it's like, well, we always hated the Nazis. So like, well. Yeah, we're about to talk about that a lot, Jason. No.

Yeah, so the idea that the communism was like always antithetical to everything America, it's godless and there's no freedom. And it's like, well. Like Herbert Hoover was saying, these guys have a point. Because what it replaced was not American style. Yes, of course. We have this thing where it's like the whole world is either America or its communist. But I mean, to his credit, he is very astutely noting that one of the reasons these causes are being advanced in the United States is because reactionaries are refusing any kind of meaningful social welfare. So he's not entirely like that is a that is a pretty astute observation, I would say. It is a level of nuance on the subject that America would have would be in no mood for a few decades later.

Again, from one of one of the worst presidents in American history, the guy who who just kind of steers us right into the Great Depression is staying this amazing. Oh, Herbert. So Woodrow Wilson and the Dulles Brothers did not listen to Herbert Hoover. Between 1919 and 1920, President Wilson deployed the US Army to suppress labor or racial unrest 25 times. That's the army, not the National Guard. We don't talk about that a lot either. The Dulles Brothers enthusiastically supported this. After the war, Allen continued his diplomatic career for a while, but eventually left to join his brother at Sullivan and Cromwell.

Now, by that point, Foster Dulles had been made a full partner in the firm, which was more powerful than ever. As the United States grew through the 1920s to become the West's pre minute power, Sullivan and Cromwell continued to do the work of weaving their corporate clients into the very fabric of American governance. In the US, Foster Dulles presided over the merger of a group of oil drillers and refiners into a moco. He worked with mining corporations in Chile and Peru, sugar plantations in Cuba, banks in France. He specialized in helping US utility companies take control of utilities and foreign nations, generally by bribing their governments. Allen's first post World War One posting was to the US Embassy in Turkey. Now, again, he is technically a diplomat at this point, but his real job in all these postings is to gather intelligence. He's a spy, but at this point, again, not a very good one because as soon as Allen sets up shop in Turkey, he falls for the most obvious forgery of all time.

The protocols of the elders. Yes, scratch that one off your bingo card and then really reevaluate your life if you have a bingo card with the protocols of the elders of Zion on it. That's maybe think about it. If you're a podcast listener, I'm sorry, you can't go very many podcast episodes without running into it either in a good way or a very bad way. So I'm going to quote from The Devil's Chestboard by David Talbot here. One day, the young American diplomat was given a copy of the protocols of the elders of Zion by a British reporter who had fished the scurrilous document out of a second hand bookstore in Istanbul's old European quarter. The protocols purported to offer a secret plan for Jewish world domination and included tales about Christian children being sacrificed for Passover feast rituals and other lurid fantasies. By the time Dulles got his hands on the book, which was the creation of the Russian Tsar's anti-Semitic secret police, the document had been widely denounced and discredited.

But Dulles took it seriously enough to send a coded report about the secret Jewish plot back to his superiors in Washington. So he sends this back to the State Department. You guys got to hear about this. Incredible spy. The authors who named it that, how upset were they when they later heard the much more badass title, The Devil's Chestboard? Oh, so much better of a time. Incredible time. We should have called our thing The Devil's Chestboard.

The Devil's Chestboard. It is a pretty good book. It's actually by the guy who founded Salon, which is not a website I like a lot, but yeah. Alan Dulles got married in 1920 to a woman named Clover, who he almost immediately cheated on. It was a miserable relationship, but they would stay together the rest of their lives. Clover was prone to depression, while Alan barely paid attention to her and slept around constantly. His sister Eleanor estimated that he had more than a hundred mistresses. To the extent that Alan Dulles was capable of feeling bad about anything, he seems to have felt kind of bad about this.

At one point, he wrote to his wife and advised her to ask her friends for advice on how to, quote, live with a queer duck like me. He later confessed in a letter, I don't feel I deserve as good a wife as I have, as I am rather too fond of the company of other ladies. So there's a degree of self-awareness that he has, because she is miserable, like on the verge sometimes of suicide, because he's just constantly sleeping with her. And like, he'll tell her about it. Like, he's not even trying to hide it. Like, he'll like brag about his new mistresses to like their kids.

Like, it's he's a weird dude. A weird dude who like most narcissists, I assume, could turn on the charm when he wanted to and probably work like a magic spell. Like that is the worst type of person to be in a relationship with when they can turn that on and then just turn it off instantly. Now, one of the chief problems in their union, as you were kind of getting at, Jason, was Alan's temper. He was prone to angry rants that would provoke his wife to curl up into a fetal position. When he finally stopped, she'd leave the house and wander for hours. They were miserable together, so perhaps it's for the best that Alan spent most of his time traveling around the world ignoring her.

Clover tried to make the best of a bad situation by focusing on her son and two daughters. While her husband was an arch-conservative, she became obsessed with penal reform and spent a great deal of time visiting prisoners. She was known to regularly stop for long conversations with homeless people and impoverished men and women in bread lines. In letters to her family, she wrote that she felt guilty for her wealth. Alan felt no such guilt. He was known to not even pick up napkins he dropped at dinner, leaving that for his servants. So they're very different people. In 1931, Alan started an affair with a blonde Russian immigrant whose husband was chronically ill.

He did not try to hide his relationship from his wife and, in fact, brag to her and to his children about the relationship. One of his biographers later wrote, Sex, it appears, was to Alan Dulles a form of physical therapy, something one did to keep himself fit for more important things. Clover's insistence on staying home with the children and her increasing preoccupation with prisoners' rights were treated by him as a betrayal of her obligation to be his good and faithful companion. If Clover would not travel when Alan asked, then he could not really be blamed if he diverted himself with other women, always of his own class and station. So, pretty cool dude, I guess is what I'm getting at, Jason. And if he was a narcissist as I threw out a wild guess in the previous episode, if you disagree, that is fine. If he was literally everything that happens here is totally unsurprising to you, right?

He does not conceive of anyone else. He is the main character in the story that is his life. Everyone else are extras. And it's not that he can't have feelings or emotions, but the fits of rage, the fact that when you make a narcissist angry, your humanity disappears. You are just an object. You're a receptacle for their rage. And so whatever love he felt for someone like that, it is different because he said, like, you know, I don't deserve a wife as good as her or whatever. Again, he's still not thinking of her as a separate person with agency.

And the same thing with the servants and everyone else. I personally believe this is just my opinion that his whole worldview was kind of shaped by that. And the fact that we have a system where narcissists consistently bubble to the top explains a lot about the way, name a world a popular figure. I'm not saying that Donald Trump was a narcissist. Again, I've not spoke to the man. I certainly could not make that determination. He kind of has some elements of one, in my opinion. Again, if you disagree, those of you who know Donald Trump personally, I know some of your friends, you know.

This has a, our number one hotspot for listeners is Mar-a-Lago actually. So, but I think guys like this, they can't fully conceive of consequences to themselves or to other people like they just everything about the way and like the idea that the citizens of these other countries where they're going to do the things, spoiler alert, that they're going to be doing over the next few decades, the idea that the people suffering because of that, that those are actual human beings. I don't think would enter the mind of someone like Alan Delt. I don't think he can really conceptualize that. No, I don't. And that's what I was saying earlier. I think makes him different from his brother because Foster is not the same. I think Foster has and it evolves through time. An ideology will actually, he goes through a couple of different ones, but he, he acts based on things that he believes about the world.

And I think with Alan, it's more he acts based on things he believes about himself or wants to have for himself. It's almost like you have the representation of what we now think of as like the modern conservative movement where you have the Bible true believers. Yeah. And then like the Donald Trump wing. Yeah. Who's just in it for lower taxes. That is a really interesting way to look at this. Yeah. And so that's how you can wind up with like a womanizer, a crazy party boy who has the loyal devotion of these studious Bible thumpers in the south.

And it's like, how do they have anything in common? Well, look at the Dallas brothers raised by the same family at the same time in the same era. Two very different people that would wind up on the same mission for in my view, totally different reasons. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think you're right on the money with that. That is not a, I think a way I would have thought to bring it up, but let's get moving. Okay. So Foster by comparison to his brother was utterly devoted.

And as far as we know, loyal to his wife Janet, but the brothers were similar in the fact that neither of them did seem to give a good goddamn about their children. David Talbot writes that Alan treated his kids as if they were, quote, visitors in his house and they were both just they were both like complete workaholics. You know, I think with Alan, it was more he really didn't care all that much. Foster is just working all the time. They're both people who their children are number one. Then this is them being a product of their time, right? That's the wife's job, right? You know, when they're older, all help them start their careers off and stuff and like they'll, but like it's, it's her job to raise them. I have to go change the world, but neither of them are very warm fathers, you would say.

Now, as the roaring 20s gave way to the Great Depression of the early 1930s, the Dulles brothers grew increasingly concerned about the spread of communist sympathy at home and abroad. In Foster, this ignited a deep and enthusiastic sympathy for the Nazis, who he regarded as the best bet for stopping communism's westward advance in Europe. While he does not seem to have fallen for the protocols of the elders of Zion, like his younger brother, Foster's Nazi sympathies led him to some pretty vile behavior from the devil's chessboard, quote. In 1932, as Hitler began his takeover of the German government, Foster visited three Jewish friends, all prominent bankers, in their Berlin office. The men were in a state of extreme anxiety during the meeting. At one point, the bankers, too afraid to speak, made motions to indicate a truck parked outside and suggested that it was monitoring their conversation. They indicated to him that they felt absolutely no freedom, Eleanor recalled. Foster's reaction to his friend's terrible dilemma unnerved his sister.

There's nothing that a person like me can do in dealing with these men, except to probably keep away from them, he later told Eleanor. They're safer if I keep away from them. Actually, there was much that a Wall Street power broker like John Foster Dulles could have done for his endangered friends, starting with pulling strings to get their families and at least some of their assets out of Germany before it was too late. And I think David Talbot is right on the money here. This is not a situation where he could have done nothing. The Nazis were extremely happy to let very wealthy Jewish people leave Europe, often with some of their assets, in order to please foreign dignitaries. Stuff like that happened. A man with Foster's pole would have had no trouble getting his friends out of Nazi Germany.

Many other influential foreigners did the same. And in fact, Hitler himself intervened to allow a Jewish doctor who had treated his mother's cancer to immigrate from Germany with his assets. This was not an impossible thing. He just didn't do it. It was, I think he just got spooked or he didn't really care all that much one way or the other. Now, the fact that Foster Dulles absolutely could have saved his friends is underscored by the fact that he was seen by the Nazis as one of their most valuable American friends. In fact, without Foster Dulles, it is possible that the Nazi military buildup and the Blitzkrieg would not have happened or certainly wouldn't have happened in the form that it did. See, and this is interesting.

Foster Dulles made his fortune building and advising cartels. This is what he specialized in for that big law firm. Cartels are groups of competing businesses who agree to fix prices and close their supply and distribution networks to outsiders in order to maximize profits. Now, this was not then or now a popular idea to anyone but people who invest in cartels because it increases prices and generally reduces the quality of products for everybody else. Foster defended cartels as forces for stability and he made it like his argument was that it protects economies from wild swings. Now, one of Foster's big clients was the International Nickel Company, which was based in the United States. Foster was both their legal counsel and a director and member of the executive board. In the early 1930s, as the Nazis solidified their hold on power, Foster Dulles helped merge the International Nickel Company and a Canadian affiliate into a cartel with France's two major nickel producers.

In 1934, he brought a German company in, IG Farben, the largest German nickel producer into the cartel. Stephen Kinzer writes, quote, This gave Nazi Germany access to the cartels resources. Without Dulles, according to a study of Sullivan and Cromwell, Germany would have lacked any negotiating strength with international nickel, which controlled the world supply of nickel, a crucial ingredient in stainless steel and armor plate. So without this cartel and without Foster's role in it, it's possible the Nazis don't have access to the metal they need to make the armor for their tanks, which is cool. And he was not unique. No, no, no, no, no, in the American business world. Again, it's hard to. He's not unique at this stage, certainly. In 19, this is 1932 was the last 30.

34 is when he brings in IG Farben. And a lot of Americans are working with the Nazis. Absolutely. Yeah. This is the stage where in the American business, especially if you think that you're picking between the Nazis and the communists, there's a lot that kind of came down on the side of. There's a lot to be discussed there about what they knew or should have known at the time, because again, the issues that the Jews were having in Germany, like you talked to any of them, you could have found out what was coming. And Foster had, you know. And Foster had. And so the argument that they should have known, like I get that we're looking back at this knowing how things turned out and that that is not completely fair. Like there may we may be getting judged just as harshly a hundred years from now from things that we express support for or whatever. Yeah, for Wil Wheaton, mainly. Of all the people on earth who probably could have should have known better. I think it's fair to say that Foster Dulles was one of those.

Yeah. And his his complicity will get deeper at this stage 34. I mean, he didn't necessarily know the Germans. He couldn't have known they're going to use all of this nickel to make tanks and take over a large chunk of the planet. Although, I guess you could you could safely argue, wasn't a huge guess if you were reading the things that Hitler was putting out. Right. Because like it's what year did mine come come out? Oh, geez, 24, I think is when it was written, at least. Yeah. This is complicated territory. The exact year you're talking about matters a lot. Yes, because a lot of people don't immediately know, like, well, when was Poland invaded or when did it? When do they find out about the Holocaust? There is plenty of support in the 30s for Hitler in the United States at the stage we're talking about.

But again, mine comp was not dug up and discovered later. Hitler's feelings about the Jews was not something that came out later and where he had to be canceled later on. It was known. It was never OK. It's just you have to orient yourself in time to understand what's like how he could be so callous or how he could, you know, like leave those friends behind. Because did he know the degree of danger that those friends were in? Probably not. But I don't know. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And well, yeah, I'm going to continue actually with a quote from the brothers that talks about. So he one of the guys he works with is this this guy shocked, who is like kind of running the economy for the Nazis in this period.

He wrote, working with shocked foster helped the not national social estate find rich sources of financing in the United States for its public agencies, banks and industries. The two men shaped complex restructuring of German loan obligations at several debt conferences in Berlin. Conferences that were officially among bankers, but were in fact closely guided by the American and German governments and came up with new formulas that made it easier for the Germans to borrow money from American banks. Sullivan and Cromwell floated the first American bonds issued by the giant German steelmaker and arms manufacturer, Krupp AG, extended IG Farben's global reach and fought successfully to block Canada's effort to restrict the the export of steel to German arms makers. According to one history, the firm quote represented several provincial governments, some large industrial combines, a number of big American companies with interest in the Reich and some rich individuals.

By another account, it quote, thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime. So the longer he does this, the more the deeper he gets into specifically helping the German state arm itself, right? Canada is trying to stop export of steel because they see Germany arming. Sullivan and Cromwell under Foster says, we got to get around that. We got to make sure these Nazis have enough steel. So his complicity deepens over time. Now, Alan actually spent a decent amount of time with like real ass Nazis, including the Nazi is Nazi of them all. Oh, sorry. We're talking about Alan now, not Foster.

And the difference between them in this is interesting because Alan actually meets Hitler and I don't think Foster does. Alan sits down with a fear in 1933. That said, he was not like his brother in this. Alan actually met with Hitler in his role as a diplomat and a spy. He was asked to do this by FDR and a number. It's like he was like FDR sends Alan Dolis to Europe to meet with Hitler and a couple of other European leaders. And Alan and his partner in this project, they're going on a diplomat named Davis asked Hitler about reports of violence against political dissidents and Jews. Hitler claims that he was just taking action to, quote, protect the millions in foreign capital that are invested in Germany.

So that is interesting to me that like FDR, while Foster is actively working with the Nazis to help their economy and to help their rearming, Alan gets sent over to spy on them with FDR and Alan asks them directly about all of the horrible Nazi shit they're doing. And Hitler says, all we're arresting these people, we're putting them in camps to protect foreign capital that's invested in Germany. And it's obviously that's not entirely why he was doing it, but I think it's interesting that that's the line of argument he picks with the Americans. And you can see why he think it would work because there's guys like Foster. Now Alan Dolis at this stage didn't see anything unsettling about the Nazis. However, he returned to Berlin two years later in 1935 and could not ignore the brutality of the regime. He reported back that Nazi Germany had left him with a, quote, sinister impression.

Stephen Kinzer calls Nazism, quote, the first and only important subject on which the Dolis brothers seriously disagreed. That said, Alan's main issue with the Nazis was not their oppression of minorities or their murder of political rivals. It was that he was smart enough to guess where the whole fascism thing was heading. And he knew that he was pretty sure that the U.S. is going to wind up at war with Nazi Germany. He wanted to spare Sullivan and Cromwell the shame of being associated with the regime once war broke out. That's really interesting to me that like of the two guys, Foster, who is driven by a moral code, gets really deep in with the Nazis. And Alan pretty quickly is like, oh, these fuckers are bad news. And it may just be self-preservation, you know.

And Alan helped some German Jews out of Nazi Germany. Did he not? There's, yeah, I think there's, we'll talk about what he did. Okay. Because it's complicated, Jason. This is all complicated at this stage because obviously neither one of the brothers were like, oh, yeah, we'd be fine with if several years from now. Hitler is trying to, you know, bomb the, you know, England off the map. Like no one wants a world war in Europe.

It's just that if it sounds like I'm not going far enough in criticizing the people friendly to the Nazis, it's because I feel like it would be very easy decades from now to look back and say, well, why was the United States so buddy, buddy with China? Yeah. And you can see that with every modern genocide and there's always financial interests who often are willing to keep profiting from the regime that's doing the genocide, you know. It's not, it's more normal than not for people to go along with terrible things if they're not that closely tied to them because the alternative is rocking the boat. But I think what we're talking about with Foster here is very different. Because he really like his brother Alan after 35 is like, these guys are bad news. You know, you can argue Alan actually did have some sort of a moral compass and he was just like, this is a step too far. Or you can say it was just self preservation.

But he's pretty consistent after 35. These guys are a problem and we need to be cut ties with them. We need to not be in business with them. What is Foster's position then? Is he's just so scared of the communists or is he motivated by something else? I think he likes them to some extent. I don't think he's a Nazi because I don't get any hint that he's like super anti-Semitism or whatever. I don't think that he wants the United States, but he's he refuses to turn his back on them.

And in fact, he became their most enthusiastic cheerleader in the halls of American power. He repeatedly pushed back against arguments by other members of his law firms, some of whom were Jewish, that they should reduce or end their dealings with the Third Reich. From 1933 on, all letters written from the German offices of Sullivan and Cromwell ended with Heil Hitler. Now, this was required by law, but it was not something Foster had any problem with. While Allen politely disagreed with his brother, their sister Eleanor was much more outspoken on the matter. She too traveled to Nazi Germany and the horrors of the regime were not lost on her. She repeatedly begged Foster to stop doing business with Hitler. He ignored her, complaining that she was working herself up over nothing.

When FDR denounced the repressive measures of the Nazi government, Foster Dulles denounced FDR as a demagogue, trying to drum up mass emotionalism. One contemporary claimed that most of Foster's political energy in the 1930s went towards, quote, rationalizing this Hitler movement. So he is not just kind of not wanting to rock the boat at a time in which it starts to be politically acceptable and common to go against the Nazis. He's really still on their side. And even his brother is like, dude, this ain't it, you know. In the summer of 1935, partners of Sullivan and Cromwell held a vote to determine whether or not they should cease representing German clients. The crimes of the Nazi regime had become too blatant and numerous for Foster's colleagues, and at least one of them was Jewish to ignore. Foster complained that pulling out would harm the firm's prestige.

His brother, Alan, argued that staying was unconscionable. In the end, everyone but Foster voted to suspend the firm's operations in Nazi Germany. There are some accounts that Foster wept after the vote, like as soon as his partners like say we're pulling out, he just like breaks down. You know who won't partner with the Nazi regime? The products and services that support this podcast. 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 U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt.

And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads?

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left 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 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. Oh, we're back. We're back. And we're still talking about Nazis and namely how Foster Dulles deals with them. So in kind of late-ish 1935, his firm votes to stop doing business with the Nazis. He cries and I'm going to quote from the brothers about what happens next. Later, he backdated the announcement that they cut their ties with the Nazis by a year to make it appear that the firm had closed its German offices in 1934 rather than 35. He and Janet, however, continued to visit Germany as the Nazi regime tightened its grip on power, making trips in 1936, 1937, and 1939. Apparently, nothing he saw disturbed him.

He supported the Neutralist America First Committee. Sullivan and Cromwell drew up its articles of incorporation without charge and roused its members with speeches denouncing Churchill, Roosevelt, and other warmongers. Hitler impressed him as, quote, one who from humble beginnings and despite the handicap, handicap of an alien nationality, had attained the unquestioned leadership of a great nation. Only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy, or Japan contemplates war upon us. He assured businessmen at the Economic Club of New York on March 22, 1939. So he's pretty, pretty pot committed, Jason. Yeah. Yeah. And this is a point where there was plenty of evidence. There was a lot.

You, if you have lived in America for five minutes, people have a way of getting dug into their positions. And to how you can go from, well, I don't support war all the way to, well, you know, Hitler is actually a great leader. It's the way we are. You know, I don't know. I feel like you can get dragged down a path of someone who thinks that like they're standing up for righteousness or they just don't want war. But there's a difference between, look, you know, someone like Hitler needs to be contained, but a world war will kill tens of millions versus, you know, Hitler is actually the hero in all this, which is where it felt like he landed somehow. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's definitely kind of the site of this that he's on. When the Nazis invaded Poland a few months later, Foster remained committed to defending the regime.

He gave a public speech where he attacked Britain for declaring war against Germany and reiterated his belief that there was no reason for the United States to get involved. Foster published an open letter where he begged for a change in the quote international status quo to prevent powerful forces emotionally committed to exaggerated and drastic change. This was interpreted by his brother Alan to be a plea for the West to embrace Nazism in order to fight communism. We've already established that Alan was something very close to it, you know, narcissists, sociopath. There's some stuff going on there. You could argue if you were as irresponsible as Jason and I am. And we are. And this is our podcast. What are you going to do about it? You're going to come in here and tell us we're wrong. No, you're not. But Alan was actually, despite whatever moral failings he has, Alan was outraged with his brother's behavior at this point. And he tried to appeal to his brother's religion, asking, how can you call yourself a Christian and ignore what is happening in Germany? It is terrible.

So this is and this is really interesting to me because Foster is up to this point much more sympathetic than Alan. But Alan Dulles, a monster is being like, what is wrong with you? Like, why are you still defending the Nazis so much? It's a very strange thing. It doesn't go the way you would expect it to go. Yeah. But and also there is some kind of a happy end of this. Because again, John Foster Dulles standing up for the Nazis, even after they invaded Poland, he was not canceled too hard for his pro Hitler. So he was able to come back from that, that embarrassing period of his life. That's that gaffe. Now, if Twitter had existed, he would have gotten canceled, Jason. That's that's what protects us now from similar disasters. So Foster Dulles visited Nazi Germany for the last time in I think 1938.

He seems to have grudgingly accepted by this point that the Nazis were not a group he wanted to be super publicly associated with, although again, he would continue to defend them for a couple of years. Later in the year, he decided to run for Congress. His main platform was attacking the New Deal, complaining that instead of launching new social programs, Roosevelt should fight the depression by cutting government spending. He accused FDR of, quote, attempting to stir up class feeling by trying to regulate the securities market. Foster's campaign went nowhere. He was a terrible, terrible, well, terrible at getting elected. But it helped establish him as a political voice within the Republican Party. By the late 1930s, both Dulles brothers were working for Sullivan and Cromwell, which despite dropping Germany had, you know, continued to be the largest law firm in the United States. Historian Peter Gross argues that even calling it a law firm is reductive to the point of inaccuracy. He saw it as, quote, a strategic nexus of international finance, the operating core of a web of relationships that constituted power.

The firm did offer legal associates to draft contracts, preserve estates and argue in courtrooms, but this was not the profession of law as practiced by Foster and Alan Dulles. Their Sullivan and Cromwell sought nothing less than to shape the affairs of all the world for the benefit and well-being of the select, their clients. It's a fascinating organization, Sullivan and Cromwell. And I wonder how many listeners of yours have ever heard the name of that firm before today? I had only heard them mentioned and mentioned them in the show during like the Panama episodes, but even then I didn't know this. I just knew that that was like the lawyer who kind of, I just, you know, had an angle in Panama. Yeah, it's, again, maybe something that ought to be in a textbook somewhere for kids. Maybe, but I think even now we still think of the world as a series of competing countries and that's so reductive.

Like that hasn't been true in a long time. Corporations span borders and their interests span borders. And it's, it's hard to understand that you can have two countries that were with each other, but the same corporation doing business and both and trying to arrange for things to fall a certain way. Don't fully understand history until you understand that element of it and the stuff we're going to get into about going to war on behalf of fruit companies. Again, that it's, you talk about like the phrase banana republic and that's where that comes from, right? Even now, I think the average person has a completely incorrect mental picture because how a law firm could have that big of a role in shaping the world. Seems again, like the stuff of conspiracy theories. Yep.

But it's really understanding that the movement of capital and what, why that matters and that how that influences the decisions that politicians make. That's not conspiracy stuff. That's the way the world functions now in a global economy. And you have to almost think of it in terms of like the, these alliances are less important in many cases than the corporations that span the borders and what they're, what they're trying to accomplish. And especially when you come down to things like workers advocating for certain rights in certain countries and things like that, that's going to play into everything that's about to happen. Yep. Yeah, it sure is. It sure is, Jason.

Not in a good way. No, nothing that happens on this show is in a good way as a general rule. That's, that's behind the bastards guarantee. When one of your main sources is called the Devil's Chest Ward. You're in for an upbeat episode. Good times for everybody. Oh, Lord. Oh, Jason.

So, yeah, and in this idea, the fact that Sullivan and Cromwell should shape the affairs of the world for the benefit of their clients, this was something the Dulles brothers agreed with, right? They may have had a little bit of a debate over whether or not Nazism was okay, but they were on board for this. Now, during World War One, both brothers had kind of fully fallen under the sway of the Wilsonian concept that's known as liberal internationalism. And the basic idea behind liberal internationalism is that international conflict arises only from misunderstandings between ruling elites, social injustice, political oppression, religious and ethnic strife. This all is a distraction from the real issue, which is people in charge of different countries not getting along. Since international conflict is just conflict between elites, then commerce is the ultimate way to guarantee peace, right? That's how it feeds back into their ideas of capitalism, because you guarantee peace by ensuring the international movement of corporations, like basically, and of financial interests. And this is a pretty common idea, right?

That if you have two nations with McDonald's and them have never gone to war, you know, stuff like that, I think we've all heard like versions of this idea. Now, internationalists like the Dulles brothers felt that the United States had a duty to embrace its destiny as the world's great power. American values should be spread through the world or across the world through the engine of American business. The state's main role then is to use its power and particularly its armed might in order to promote and defend American business interests abroad. Foster Dulles had spent most of his life, even prior to World War One, doing this job. Alan Dulles came to embrace his role as defender of the wealthy and powerful in the postwar years. One historian wrote that he, quote, never bothered to understand the technical aspects of financial maneuverings. But under the influence of Foster and the firm, he grew sensitive to the elite's goal of transnational power to generate prosperity for the world and, of course, themselves.

Now, Foster and Alan were some of the founding members of the Council on Foreign Relations. This is something they helped to create. The CFR was established in the early 1920s, and this is something you see in conspiracy theories all the time. The CFR is in a billion different conspiracy theories, for good reason. I mean, sometimes for good reason, often for nonsense reasons. Now, the CFR was established in the early 20s with the goal of bringing powerful people together to further the ends of American corporate and political power. The club was invitation only and membership became highly desired both for prestige and because it de facto put you in a room with the wealthiest and most influential people on earth. The club's motto was a single Latin word, ubique, which means everywhere.

So again, not hard to see why there's so many conspiracies about this group. I think their logo was like an octopus strangling the globe. Yes, yes, it is an octopus murdering children is the logo and drinking their blood, which is rich in adrenochrome. Jesus. Like, did these people don't even, do you not listen to yourselves? Is the question I would like to ask them, like, look at what you, how, how could, how would you expect people not to start turning out conspiracy theories about their shit? You say shit like that. Anyway.

As World War Two drew nearer, Foster devoted himself increasingly to writing articles for foreign affairs, the New Republic and the Atlantic, establishing a reputation as a sagacious foreign policy expert. Alan, meanwhile, found himself drifting away from legal pursuits and towards another special club called the room. The room was made up of 30ish year old bankers or 30ish bankers, businessmen and corporate lawyers with deep contacts in foreign capitals. Most of them were like Alan, men with intelligence and espionage backgrounds from the last war. Now, the head of this little club, the room was a guy named William Donovan. Now, Donovan was a war hero slash corporate lawyer with an interest in the burgeoning field of intelligence. Donovan and Alan Dulles advised FDR on covert operations abroad in the pre-World War Two years, and they used their connections to arrange corporate cover for American agents headed into Nazi Europe or the Soviet Union. When the war broke out for the United States, the room morphed rather naturally into the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services.

This was the chief US spy agency of World War Two and the direct predecessor of the CIA. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. As the war drew nearer, Bill Donovan and a few other farsighted men saw that the United States was going to need an intelligence agency. In 1940, the US had basically no intelligence setup. What had existed during World War One had basically been tossed into the trash bin in the intervening years. Eight different government agencies, including the FCC, gathered foreign intel in one form or another, but none of them had any idea what the others were doing. There was no interagency communication. Most of what the White House knew about foreign countries' internal affairs came from guys like Donovan, who knew the president personally and traveled around doing his spy work on their own.

So in the US entered the war in 1941, the OSS was established to formalize these very ad hoc intelligence networks. Alan Dulles joined the OSS and once again he was sent to burn for the duration of the war to get what intel he could on Nazi occupied Europe. And again, he wasn't great at his job. Donovan's aides regularly complained about the low quality of the intelligence coming out of burn. In 1944, Alan was responsible for two hilariously inaccurate predictions, both based on bad intel. Prior to the Normandy landings, he told his superiors that the Nazi regime was, quote, near collapse and that the allies would just have thus have an easy time in France on D-Day, which I don't know if you've watched the documentary Saving Private Ryan, but we did not. There were some bad days after the invasion.

Now, Alan Dulles was a very prominent figure by the time the OSS sent him to burn. And every German agent in the country knew why he was there as soon as it was like publicized that he'd arrived and that he was a spy. His guys as a spy then did not fool anybody. Nobody got tricked into thinking he was really a diplomat. By some accounts, the main reason he was put in that position in burn at all was because his presence would draw out Nazis. And while Alan was in burn, he didn't just spy on Nazis. He worked alongside them. See, one of Alan's buddies during this period was a guy named Thomas McKittrick, president of the Bank of International Settlements.

The BIS was one of the shadiest banks in history. Although nominally Swiss by 1940, the BIS was controlled by the Nazi regime. Five of its directors would later be charged with war crimes, including Herman Schmitz, who was also the CEO of IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate that manufactured Zyklon B. Schmitz, by the way, was also a client of Sullivan and Cromwell. Fun how tied together all this is. So the BIS became a critical partner to the Nazi regime, laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi gold that had been looted from occupied countries. Some of this gold had literally been ripped out of the bodies of concentration camp inmates. When Dulles and McKittrick started talking, one of Alan's goals was to get information about the Nazi regime from McKittrick, which is reasonable.

But when he and McKittrick got to talking, they discovered a point of common interest. They both had friends and clients with assets in Nazi Germany, and they wanted to protect those assets. Now, FDR and his people were aware of what Alan Dulles was getting up to, and they tried to stop McKittrick. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. hated the man and pushed the administration to block BIS funds from being used in the United States. McKittrick hired Foster Dulles to be his lawyer, and Foster was able to reverse Morgenthau's order. In 1943, McKittrick even traveled to the United States for a banquet in his honor, hosted by executives from General Motors, Standard Oil, and other companies that had profited from aiding the Nazi war effort and were grateful that McKittrick had gotten their money out of the country. Now, as World War II drew to a close, McKittrick and Alan Dulles would collaborate on their shadiest venture yet, from the devil's chessboard.

In the final months of the conflict, the men collaborated against a Roosevelt operation called Project Safehaven that sought to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. Administration officials feared that by hiding their ill-gotten wealth, members of the German elite planned to bide their time after the war and would then try to regain power. Morgenthau's Treasury Department team, which spearheaded Project Safehaven, reached out to the OSS and BIS for assistance, but Dulles and McKittrick were more inclined to protect their clients' interests. Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to post-war power to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And working with McKittrick, Alan Dulles was hugely successful at stalling Project Safehaven and ensuring that many surviving Nazi collaborators escaped the war with their fortunes intact. But you know who didn't escape the war with their fortunes intact? The products and services. Here's some fucking ads, you know what we're doing here. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left 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 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. So we're back and we're talking about how Alan Dolis helped get Nazi money out of Europe and help Nazi collaborators escape the war with all their money. So Foster was also involved in the Protecting Nazi Fortunes game. Working from New York, he used the kind of corporate bullshit math people like him are great at to hide the US assets of IG Farben, Merck, and other German cartels that legally should have been confiscated by the federal government. David Talbot writes, quote, Some of Foster's legal origami allowed the Nazi regime to create bottlenecks in the production of essential war materials such as diesel fuel injection motors that the US military needed for trucks, submarines, and airplanes. Foster's brother was guarding his back from his frontline position in Europe. Alan was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm.

Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dolis and his associates who stayed behind to help run the occupation of post war Germany. Observed Nazi Hunter John Loftus who poured through numerous war documents related to the Dolis brothers when he served as US prosecutor in the Justice Department under President Jimmy Carter. So pretty cool brothers all all together. It's hard to overstate that the fact that even before for people that are not World War Two history bus, the fear of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Cold War started before World War Two was over. We're not going to get off into the use of the atomic bomb and how part of that had to do with the whole whole of her position with the Soviets and that everyone knew what was coming next or at least the people who pulled the strings of power knew what was coming next. That you were going to transition neatly from this war right into possibly. Okay, when we set up the Manhattan Project, we didn't set up a project to build two bombs that we set up to build a whole bunch of them. Because even though we knew it wasn't going to take a whole bunch to defeat Nazi Germany, those were being built for whatever was coming with the Soviets.

The fact that they so quickly pivoted from, okay, we've beaten the Nazis. Now we need to protect whatever business interests against the whatever is coming from the threat of communism, which is going to inform these guys entire world view, right? Of the next couple of decades that they're alive. That happened immediately. Like as the World War Two was winding down, the people who would be the Cold Warriors were already kind of getting into position. Yeah, and that's a big part of what's happening here. Now, the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt immediately prior to the end of World War Two was hugely fortunate for the Dulles Brothers. David Talbot argues that had FDR survived the war, they probably would have faced criminal charges. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who served with Allen in the OSS, later claimed that both brothers were guilty of treason during World War Two. Again, Supreme Court Justice, you know, like not, not, this is not a fringe attitude that these guys committed treason during the war. But of course, they were not punished.

When the war ended, Allen stayed on with the OSS. His first two jobs were to gather evidence that could be used in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. And his other job was to bring Nazi spy master Reinhard Galen into the OSS to help them spy on the Soviets. So his jobs are both find evidence about these Nazi war criminals so we can prosecute them. And you know, this guy who ran the Nazi secret police hire him. Again, not the only Nazi who's going to get hired by this. It was a whole, it was a whole thing. It was a whole thing. Well, if you know American history, the line between behavior that will get you executed for treason and that will get you put in charge of the country is surprisingly blurry.

Yeah, it's, it really is. On which side of that line you can land on at any given moment. Yeah, and it's speaking of other Nazis. There's a TV show out now called for all mankind. That's like an alternate history of like what if the Soviets had gotten to the moon first and it kind of reimagines the space race, you know, and how it would have changed as a result of that. One of the guys, a real guy who was probably the single man most responsible for the US rocket program was Werner von Braun, who built the Nazi V2 rockets. And there's a couple of really good scenes with von Braun in the show that I actually think do do do do him do justice to what he did. But yeah, you're right, Jason, this is a ton of guys that they do this with.

But it's interesting to me that Alan's job is both to find evidence about Nazi war crimes and to hire a Nazi spy master. And we'll talk about Reinhard Galen a little more in the next episode. So Alan worked on these tasks until September 20, 1945, when President Harry Truman signed an order abolishing the OSS. During the war, the agency had accumulated a number of secret powers that were seen as necessary for the survival of the nation. Truman was worried that these powers in peacetime might be a threat to American democracy. He transferred the OSS research unit to the State Department and its espionage units to the War Department. Alan Dulles and most of his fellow spooks, though, found themselves out of a job. The years immediately following World War Two were rough ones for Alan and Foster.

Alan was particularly unhappy with peace and spent his free time writing letters to old OSS comrades and saying things like, Most of my time is spent reliving those exciting days. So he's actually kind of depressed after World War Two because he doesn't get to be a fun spy anymore. Foster does better in the postwar years. He expands his reputation as a public intellectual. During the war, he had been overcome by a new flowering of his Christian faith, which led him to preach tolerance and forgiveness and urge peace between the warring powers. But starting in late 1945, he changed rapidly in the direction of a hawk.

The cause was, of course, the USSR. From the brothers, quote, In a series of articles for life, he painted a steadily more frightening picture of the Soviet threat. His first major volley was a two-part series published in June 1946 entitled Thoughts on Soviet Conduct and What to Do About It. In it, he set the urgent tone that defined how he, the Republican and Democratic parties, and most Americans would view the world for a generation. Soviet leaders, Foster wrote, had launched a worldwide campaign that aimed to subjugate the West to, quote, eliminate what are, to us, the essentials of a free society, and to impose on conquered peoples a system

repugnant to our ideals of humanity and fair play. Already, he asserted, the Soviets had built a shadowy network of allies and non-communist countries who pretended to be patriots, but in reality take much guidance from Moscow. This made Soviet communism the unseen force directing nationalist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Never in history have a few men in a single country achieved such worldwide influence, he concluded. And here we go. This is a huge part of what the John Birch society becomes, right? And he's not a fringe figure. The Birchers are. He's not. Yeah.

Everything about that we kind of take for granted about the way, to this day, we talk about the world will eventually be either all communist or it will be all America. It will all be America. There will, there will either be Chick-fil-A restaurants in every country in the world or else we will all fall to China. But the, the, the idea that the world will eventually be all one thing or all the other, this is where it starts. And once that idea takes hold to this day, we still live under that. When, you know, when 9-11 happened, there was no thought of attacking that as this is a single terrorist group and these people need to be arrested and rooted out. It's no, this is worldwide Islam that we must fight a war everywhere because the whole world will either be under the umbrella of Al Qaeda or else the whole world will be under the umbrella of American Christianity and capitalism.

And they're like this idea that it's everywhere. The enemy is everywhere and we must therefore also be everywhere. We must have spies everywhere. We must have bases everywhere. This in my view is where it starts. It's so important to note that, Jason, because that didn't used to be how conflict work, right? They didn't, it didn't, it's like, it didn't always have to be like, OK, well, this group of people has attacked us, which means we're now in an existential struggle for the future of the entire human race. But that's the only place the rhetoric goes now. Like instantly now down to the point where like people are there are people who will talk that way about like fucking cancel culture, right? That it's like the start of this slide into a totalitarian hellscape because that's that's just where once you raise the rhetoric to that.

It's it's I mean, for one thing, it's unprofitable to have it be anywhere lower, right? You're just not going to get people interested and then you don't make that sweet sub-stack money. Are you going to get on sub-stack, Jason? I don't I don't know. It's I've heard it will come down to how it's CMS is set up. Is it easy to use? I don't know. But yeah, I'm thinking about it. I think I think I think I could I could just take a Glenn Greenwald turn do pretty well on that. You have to get canceled first and then you have to make getting canceled your entire personality. That's the path.

There are people who have tried to cancel me because they're certain I'm a CIA asset, which is why I'm doing this episode to provide good PR for my employers. Good stuff. So Foster's writing was influential and formed a major part of the growing belief among US leaders that the Soviet Union was hellbent on world domination. Despite his antipathy to the Dulles Brothers, Truman embraced this idea. In 1947, he spoke before a joint session of Congress and declared totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.

He asked Congress for $400 million in military aid to give to nations with growing communist movements in order to suppress them, obviously. This marked the start of the Truman Doctrine and what many historians will name as the opening salvo of the Cold War. Now, while Foster was beating the drums of conflict with the USSR, Alan and his old OSS buddies were tramping around Washington, talking to any elected leader who would listen about the pressing need for a peacetime intelligence agency. The United States had never had anything like that, but Dulles and his friends went further, insisting that this new agency should have secret powers greater than even the OSS had enjoyed. This new agency would be different from anything that had existed before then.

Now, at the time, the standard among national intelligence agencies was that you kept intelligence gathering separate from analysis and action. So one group of people gets the information, another group of people decides what to do about it and actually acts based on it, right? A kind of a separation of powers so you don't have an all-powerful organization gathering information and overthrowing governments of its own accord. You know? Not a bad idea. Again, yeah, it was... One of the reasons people didn't want these things to be tied is they thought it would lead to a situation

where operatives gathering information would bias the information they gathered towards whatever actions they already wanted to take. During World War II, the OSS had ignored this traditional dividing line and justified it because, you know, it was World War II. The situation was extreme. We got to do what we got to do. Dulles and their fellows, though, wanted this new agency, Truman, was establishing to retain this power in peacetime. Now, after disbanding the OSS, President Truman had formed an organization called the Central Intelligence Group

to advise him on intelligence matters. It had no authority to carry out operations. It was just about keeping the president informed. Allen, basically, Allen Dulles decides, OK, we've got this thing, the CIG. Maybe the way to get what I want to establish a new OSS is to expand what the CIG can do because Truman's already willing to make the CIG be a thing, I can just gradually push it to have more and more power. In 1946, Republicans won big in congressional elections. This gave the old OSS men like Allen the leverage they needed. In 1947, they succeeded in pushing a bill through Congress that established a National Security Council

to advise the president on foreign policy and a Central Intelligence Agency to gather, entail, and act on it. That's what the CIG became. According to one write-up of the deliberations behind this bill, collected by Stephen Kinzer, quote, there were strong objections to having a single agency with the authority to both collect secret intelligence and to process and evaluate it for the president. The objections were overruled and the CIA became a unique organization among Western intelligence services, which uniformly keep their secret operations separate from their overall intelligence activities. Now, the National Security Act also contained a key clause, which was worded vaguely enough to give the new agency

a frightening amount of leeway. The CIA was authorized to carry out not only duties explicitly spelled out by the law, but also, quote, such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council made from time to time direct. This technically meant that the agency could take any action anywhere on earth with the president's approval. And they did. So that's cool. And they sure did.

Oh, and we're gonna talk about that, Jason, in part three. But for now, we're gonna talk about your pluggables. Yes, my most recent book is called Zoe Punches the Future and the Dick. If you're dissuaded by that title or by my personality, read the reader reviews. They're all very good. They're all good or just pretend it's called Wuthering Heights. Yeah. That's actually my fifth novel I've got a bunch out there.

The online booksellers make it very easy to find them because they'll all be gathered together. Otherwise, I'm on all of the social media platforms. Just Google my name. They'll come up. Yeah, Google Jason's name. Find him. Find his books. Find him.

You know, be your own CIA. Be the CIA you want to see in the world. 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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.