Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Warren Commission Decided 6: Dulles

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Happy New Year! We’re back with another installment of The Warren Commission Decided to round out our excavation into the backgrounds and baggage of the seven commissioners LBJ appointed to seal up the narrative of the JFK assassination in the wake of the murder of Lee Oswald. And we’ve saved the worst for last: God’s own monster, Allen Welsh Dulles.Oceans of ink have been spilled, and miles of vocal cords chafed recounting the genocidal legacy of Allen Dulles. You know we’re averse to trodding familiar ground, so this episode delves into some areas we hope will be fresher. It wouldn’t be 4RA without a healthy dose of Oedipal psychology, so we dig into the Foster-Lansing-Dulles klan to consider what makes these freaks tick. Then, we touch on Allen’s career of evil from his jumpstart in espionage (and Aryo-philia) during WWI, to his participation in the Versailles conference, to his law practice at Sullivan & Cromwell, to his peak as longtime CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.Again, we gloss over a lot of the greatest hits to give you the deeper cuts, all while focusing on Dulles’s deep-seated racism and how it informed his tolerance - or even admiration - for Nazism. We also highlight his absolute mastery of the art of deception. Finally, we end up where we always do: with his relationship with JFK, their breakup after the Bay of Pigs debacle, and his selection as commissioner. Perhaps when JFK fired the old silver fox, he should have been more “careful with that axe.” It’s another banger: dig in!

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us. where you were with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources.

We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mouse.

He knows so long as to die. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. insecure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? This is not going to see. I am. This is a model. This is coming. This is Fort Reich. Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology.

I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back, listener. For another and installment of the Warren Commission decided. After a lengthy detour into the Lifetimes and Fourth Reich significance of John J. McCloy, we're back with our next and final commissioner, Alan Welsh Dulles. Before we jump into it, just remind you to reach out to us on social media at Fourth Reich Pod.

or by email at forthrighteckpod at gmail.com. We also have a Patreon site that we encourage and implore our true fans to sign up and give us a little donation to keep this operation going and to help us expand it. What also helps us expand it is for you to rate, review, subscribe, and spread. read the word about our podcast. And once again, this week, we'd like to avoid an overly lengthy recap. So just listen to the previous episodes in the series if you've not done so already. But just a very brief, and I promise it will be brief, recap to make a long story very short

and to orient you to where we are right now in this miniseries. So you'll recall that in the hours after the assassination of JFK, LBJ wanted the FBI and local Texas authority to have the last word on the assassination. And so did Jay Edgar Hoover. But there was this cabal of members of the Georgetown set. These are largely guys from old money. They're from families that can trace their roots. back to the 13 colonies. These are families like the family Washington Post columnist Joe Alsop

and Deputy Attorney General Nick Cotsonback grew up in. These folks urged LVJ to establish what they called a Blue Ribbon Commission to rubber-stamp the FBI's findings and quell any doubts about the official narrative that Oswald acted alone. And so advised by this group, LVJ named seven commissioners, the Chief Justice Earl Warren, plus two members of each legislative chamber in Congress, and two members of the public. And by now we've roughly broken them all down into what we call into two buckets and what we call the offensive picks and the defensive picks the offensive picks of course are the guys that johnson counted on to do his personal bidding and protect the narrative essentially and the defensive guys are folks that he picked that lbj

picked to sort of bring them in the full because he worried if he didn't keep a close watch or a tight lid on this group, they might try and launch investigations of their own. And now we've spent the last couple of weeks focusing on one of the two members of the public, John J. McCloy. And we talked about how his whole life story is the Fourth Reich story personified. Now comes the worst for last. The most unambiguously evil guy of the bunch, former CIA director, OSS veteran,

and a lawyer whose career at Sullivan and Cromwell put him in front of some of the most ruthless and exploitative interests of all time. These are companies from IG Farben in Nazi Germany to United Fruit here in the new world. We're talking, of course, about Alan Dulles, and Dulles is probably the most famous Warren Commissioner, or at least his intervention in the Warren Commission, has been the subject of the most investigation and scholarship and popular history.

And so, you know, we're not big here on Fourth Reich Archaeology on covering well-trod ground, right? We are not reinventers of any wheels. And what really makes our show tick is looking at new angles and digging up existing information from that Fourth Reich lens. So we're not going to do the same sort of a deep dust. dive on Dulles as we've done into the more unexplored or under explored characters of the Warren Commission like John Sherman Cooper and John J. McCloy. Instead, today we're going to cover some of the highlights of Dulles' biography and background and take stock of some of the major takeaways we've picked up so far on the Warren Commission excavation. So without any further ado,

let's go ahead and get digging. There are people who say that we, with regard to the CIA, war with an invisible government. We are obviously engaged in many facets of what is generally called the Cold War. But may I say this, and I do it with all solemnity. And no doubt as the CIA engaged in any political activity or any intelligence activity, It was not approved at the highest level. If you had ten more commissions, you'd never get away from the idea that maybe there was a plot.

We just didn't find any cases. And we can't complain if some people didn't agree with this entire later. But here are the fact. Some of the papers and some of the documents that are in the archives are in the archives are there, but are withheld from public view by the FBI, the CIA, and organizations that we have some experience. Is there anything in those, which are years from now, and they may be released, to upset Applegarth? That really is vital as far as forming of judgment

to what really happened that has been made available. And you're satisfied with the judgment? I am satisfied with the judgment. I know of no new fact, no new ever that has been presented. Many women? Sure, I am. Mr. Dulles, let me put some of the criticisms to you. Was it a hasty job?

No, no. I don't understand where that came from. We had no time limit. Was it a shoddy? job, a flip-shod job. I don't know. I don't know. We examined all the witnesses that were available,

uh, wouldn't we felt would add anything new. I know of no other Americans in the history of this country who have served at administrations of seven presidents and yet at the end of each administration, each president of the United States

has paid tribute to his service and also has counted Alan Dulles as their friend. Counted Alan Dulles is their friends, their friends, their friends, their friends, their friends, their friend. Like so many guys that we've talked about here, the Alsups, the Bundys, the Rostow's, the Kennedys, the Dulles, are definitely force multiplied in terms of their power and influence by the fact that they are brothers. their rise to power, it really is hand in hand. Of course, they also had a younger sister, Eleanor, who was of mind with them too. She went on to join the State Department as an analyst and spent much of her diplomatic career where? You guessed it? In Germany. When she was back stateside, she was teaching the next generation of imperialists and spooks at the Georgetown School

of foreign service and unfortunately she had a very similar looking mug to foster dulles anyone who's ever seen foster dulles would say that he's got an unfortunate face for a gentleman eleanor was never really part of the dynamic duo that was the dallas brothers probably due to uh exclusion on account of her sex. And maybe we will follow up on her in a future dedicated episode. But for now, let's turn to the Dulles brothers. Yeah. So the brothers, interestingly, had kind of polar opposite personalities. But at the same time, their personalities really complemented one another. And I think this stems from opposite reactions on their part. to their sort of overbearing father, who was a Presbyterian minister in New York State.

You see, the whole Dulles family was required by their father to attend church every single day, and the kids were homeschooled by private tutors until college, because their father did not trust the secular... public schools to impart his puritanical old world, or rather pre-revolutionary moral rigidity. Now, Foster Dulles, as we've discussed many times, came from the mold of his father. He was a dower, self-righteous, moralist, political extremist. This made him personally unlikable and was viewed as stiff and unpersonable by others around him, albeit highly efficient and effective as an anti-communist crusader. Now, as you mentioned Dick, Foster Dulles also had negative Riz.

He had a permanent scowl on his face, and he had this tall and hunched posture that you just see the guy and he's almost monstrous in his appearance. Alan, by contrast, was a rakish rebel with a sort of charm about him. During their childhood, Alan would scurry about on the periphery of the paternalistic domain of his dad and big brother. He was more charismatic, more outgoing, and became known as a real ladies' man in his own right. Alan was also much more morally flexible than was Foster. So unlike Foster, Alan was a guy who liked to have a good time. And you could say, even well before Kamala Harris was even born, that Alan Dulles brought a certain kind of joy to politics.

Not that they were twins. They weren't twins, of course, Foster was older, but this sort of reminds me of the movie twins with Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, where Schwarzenaier gets like all the good aspects of the, genetics and Danny DeVito gets nothing yeah and tell them about those so that's sort of the dynamic oh yeah that's yeah exactly I was going to say tell them about those genetics because these guys had some real pedigree didn't they oh they sure did we don't want you folks to think that these two fellas were just a couple sons of a preacher man because they were not

The Foster Lansing Dulles clan had a pedigree as good as any. Their mother was a woman named Edith Foster, who was the daughter of Secretary of State John W. Foster. Now, among Grandpa Foster's accomplishments was the overthrowing of the Hawaiian monarchy that precipitated American colonization of the island kingdom. Get this. Grandpa Foster is also credited with having literally invented the practice of corporate lobbying in D.C. after his government service. Now, there's an apple tree that would drop its fruit right underneath them branches.

Meanwhile, Edith Foster's sands. sister, Eleanor Foster, married another Secretary of State, namely Robert Lansing, who served as Secretary of State and ran the foreign policy for arch-racist President Woodrow Wilson. He's come up on the podcast before, namely in connection with his role at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, which of course culminated in the all-important Treaty of Versailles. As a reminder, the global world order that emerged from Versailles was one characterized by this so-called mandate system for imperial colonies. And under the mandate system, colonized peoples would be entitled to some

self-determination, because after all, the winning side of the Great War purported that it fought that war in the name of freedom, democracy, and human dignity. And so there was certain lip service paid to liberation of the colonies. However, that's all it was. It was a facade without any real substance to it, because the mandate system ultimately bestowed the authority in the same imperial masters to determine whether their political, quote-unquote, children had grown up enough to earn their independence. It was sort of a middle stage of this burgeoning Fourth Reich model in between outright, colonial rule and the corporate neo-colonialism that would come to the fore through institutions

like the World Bank, which McCloy headed at a pivotal moment, as we discussed in earlier episodes of this series. Now, for Robert Lansing, the personal was political, or maybe the political was personal. So he shared and maybe even exceeded the white supremacist outlook of his boss, Widra Wilson, for example, leading a vicious military siege and occupation of AIT, and flippantly asserting that black people are unfit for self-rule. Jesus. Now, a lot of the mainstream,

history books that we read and rely on for factual information they might take all this family history that we're talking about here and chalk it up to men with the values of their times or some other such apologia i fucking hate that too it's like yeah we are also of our times and our times tell us that you know genocide is okay or that it's not really happening despite what we see every day and other lies. But guess what? We also have the discernment that comes with the human brain and we make a choice to use it, to call it as it is. And that's why here on Fourth Reich archaeology, we reject that take and take a different approach, namely to lament that we are trapped in the sick and disgusting world that these genocidal maniacs created in their image.

And their image for the world extends all the way down to what is accepted as a common moral compass. And so even today, the Foster Lansing white supremacy informs what is accepted as common sense and conventional wisdom among the American ruling class. All that's really changed are that the terms we use to describe it are even more euphemistic and come off as more polite. And just very quickly, before we move along with our narration, I wanted to read a particular gem of euphemism presented in what is really an entire volume of euphemism, namely Alan Dulles's quasi-autobiographical book,

The Craft of Intelligence, which we'll get into a little bit later in the episode, as it was written and published right around the time of the Kennedy assassination. So in that, Dulles is talking about his early days under the wing of his uncle, Robert Lansing. In Switzerland, during the war days, I gathered intelligence on what was going on behind the fighting front in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans. I was, in fact, much more of an intelligence officer than a diplomat. Assigned to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 for the Versailles Treaty negotiations, I helped draw the frontiers of the new Czechoslovak.

and worked on the problems relating to Russia's revolution and the peace settlement in Central Europe. When the conference closed, I was one of those who opened our first post-war mission in Berlin in 1920, and after a tour of duty at Constantinople, I served four years as chief of the Near East Division of the State Department. Note how Dulles describes scheming to undermine the new Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union as working on the problems relating to Russia's revolution. And note how confabulating with the industrialist base of what would soon become Nazi Germany is referred to as working on the peace settlement in central Europe. It's almost too on the nose. But all of this just reflects that Dulles' outlook and the white supremacist worldview

that he very deeply held was never too far from that contemptible ideology. of Nazism, that is almost universally reviled, whereas, at least in my day, not too long ago, and I would assume to this day as well that Woodrow Wilson, the 14 points, the Versailles Conference, and the League of Nations truly did reflect a goal of humanity to fight the war to end all wars and to bring people together to prevent further global conflagration. And a peace We got sweet gifts a gap

We got harmonious time Know every song of love That ever has been sung But the intentions can be evil Both hands can be fun and freezing And so that is just a way To invert the truth of the real historical progression of events, which is really a bridge from the colonial world

order under the old genocidal empires to the corporate-dominated capitalist world order of the more technologically advanced post-war period. All right, back to Alan Dulles. Both he and Foster, they attended Princeton for undergrad. So no surprises there, right? So they're both alumni of Princeton. And then after that, here's the big surprise, is that they both went to George Washington University Law School.

Now, that's interesting because up until now, All our heavy hitters go to Yale or Harvard or maybe Penn, you know, Ivy Leaks. But it's interesting that the Dulles has went to GW law instead of one of the Ivy League schools. Because GW was known more and still is today, to some respect, as somewhat of a trade school in law for government employees. rather than your Harvard or Yale, where the life of the mind was paramount. Of course, another G.W. Law alumnus was J. Edgar Hoover. Their choice of G.W. just goes to show how important their family connections were. They wanted to be close to their uncle Bob, who was resting on his laurels and writing his memoir in the fractured.

and short-lived glow of glory that accompanied him home from Versailles. And as we noted in an earlier episode, Lansing brought the Dulles Brothers with him to the peace conference at Versailles. So without belaboring the point, the Dulles brothers at this point had solidly formed the same world view as their uncle and as each other, I guess, notwithstanding their personality difference. And so they both had their long-term sites set on a career in foreign affairs. Now, after law school, Alan joined the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, where Foster was already climbing the social and professional ladder of that firm.

For the listeners who are interested in this component of the Dulles Brothers' lives, we invite you to check out the Program to Chill series on Sullivan and Cromwell, or Salkrom as it's now known in shorthand. We're not going to spend too much time on that here, other than to say that like fellow commissioner, John J. McCloy, the Dulles Brothers' legal career in private practice was marked by Nazi business deals and the expansion of American financial interests abroad. Yeah, and that's not the only similarity that they have to McCloy.

So also like McCloy, Alan Dulles' legal work, work, and this episode is about Alan Dulles, so I mean, anything that we say about Alan is likely to be parallel to some degree or another by his big brother Foster, but we'll talk about Alan for purposes of the Warren Commission, and his legal work at Sullivan and Cromwell, just like John McCloy, it did not stop him from keeping a foot firmly planted in the public sector and in the foreign policy establishment. So, for example, he also joined the Council of Foreign Relations in 1927. And, in fact, Foster Dulles had helped to co-found the CFR with the Rockefellers and with McCloy back in 1921, I believe it was.

and Alan Dulles preceded John McCloy as president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He held that post from 1946 until 1950, so just a little bit before McLeoy took the reins. Again, like McCloy, Dulles accumulated a lot of solid experience in Germany and in the European continent

during both Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s. Sullivan and Cromwell, as we mentioned in an earlier episode, maintained an affiliate firm, a subsidiary in Germany until 1935. And Dulles also, of course, met Hitler. You get his autograph? You know, I don't. know if he did get his autograph, but he did have some nice things to say about Hitler. So he had been in Germany accompanying a delegation under the auspices of the League of Nations, because, you know,

the League of Nations was put in charge as sort of an international body to oversee compliance with the terms of the Versailles Treaty. And the corporate lawyers like the Dulles brothers were much more interested in bending the rules of the Versailles Treaty to profit their clients and by extension themselves, right? So on one of these friendly junkets to Germany in 1933, Dulles wrote a letter to Foster after meeting Hitler, telling him, that things were not quite as bad as the alarmists in America were making them sound. And on that same trip, I think he met Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and praised Goebbels, sincerity and frankness. Jesus.

It's what he's known for, after all, sincerity and frankness, that and parenting. I think those are the real legacies of Kerrvels. Look, yeah, he's like, he's like, look, he's got some pretty weird ideas about the Jews, but at least he's honest about them. And all the while, right, Sullivan and Cromwell was making bank for its financier clients, such as Brown Brothers Harriman, including the infant, famous Prescott Bush, as well as the investment firm Dylan Reed and company and all of these investment houses amassed war chests of their own in stocks and bonds of German industries,

which spent the 1930s working overtime to turn the nation of Germany into a war machine. Yeah, and during the war, of course, Alan Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services, who commonly referred to as the OSS, and he served in Bern, Switzerland the whole time. Now, while he was ostensibly fighting the Nazis, he really had a sport and attitude about it. And what we mean that is that, you know, he took a clinical sort of gentlemanly approach. He bought into the whole British model for intelligence as a game between peers looking to outwit each other in the field, gambling, as it were, over so many thousands of millions of human lives. Famously, he attempted to negotiate a separate peace treaty with the Nazis in Italy through Operation Sunrise with SS General Carl Wolf. one of Himmler's favorite deputies.

The purpose of that, of course, being to ice out the Russians from the terms of the peace so that the Nazis would surrender exclusively to the United States and could then potentially mobilize once again against the Soviet Union. Let's take a step back, and I think this is a good point to point out what Alan Dulles' own son, Alan Dulles Jr., had to say about him. In a 2007 interview conducted by Mark De Pugh, when asked about what he recalled about growing up, Dulles Jr. said, Well, I remember there were some very unusual things. I think the basis of it I have just recently started to learn was that Alan Welsh Dulles was a German spy.

in that same interview, Dulles Jr. said, well, as I said, one thing, the really basic fact that I have never realized was that Alan Welsh Dulles was a German spy. Now, I do just want to point out that Dulles Jr. suffered severe head injury during the Korean War, and it left him disabled and unable to care for himself for the rest of his life. Also want to point out that Dulles Sr. once entrusted his son to the care of Dr. Harold Wolfe. Of course, Dr. Wolf was the prominent psychiatrist and key participant in the CIA's M.K. Ultra program. So this is some pretty bizarre stuff coming from Dulles' own son. And it also shows how close

Dulles was with the Germans as well as how clinical the guy was, even with his own family. And this clinical sort of gentleman's game approach, I think it's like, you know, one of Dulles' greatest contributions

to the game, right? Like, you're able to now talk about using biological warfare, torture, killing tens of thousands of people in such a removed and clinical way where it's no different than talking about, you know, game pieces on the board, which it's like, once you do that, you can really do anything with people's lives.

Yeah, and that reminds me just to drop one of the references. If you want to learn more on Dulles, recommend the David Talbot book, The Devil's Chess Board. So after the war, Dulles went back into private practice, but still kept that foot. squarely in the door of the U.S. government, working with his old OSS. colleagues to staff up Wisner's OPC and plot in scheme with the rest of the Georgetown set about world affairs. So, as reported in the Georgetown set book, that's by Greg Herkin. Dulles wrote a letter to one of his OSS colleagues, bemoaning how it was an appalling thing to come back

after heading a spy network to handling corporate indentures most of my time is spent reliving those exciting days Jesus so he used whatever persuasive authority he had to attack the newborn CIA

under Admiral Roscolle Hillen Coeter this was when the OPC was still housed outside the CIA. And so he set the young agency on a path that would be more to his liking should an opening arise. And if the if and when the Democratic Party finally left office after so many years, that time did eventually come, of course. Of course. Yeah. And again, you know, this puts him in the same exact circle with John J. McCloy, with Dean Acheson, with George Kenan, Frank Wisner, this same group of personalities who would eventually populate the cabal

whispering into LBJ's ear about the Warren Commission. Those are the same guys making the blueprints for the CIA in the immediate post-war period and planning out how U.S. covert warfare would look for the next half century or more. And they get the keys to the kingdom after Eisenhower is elected president in 1952. So as we have discussed on the show, Foster Dulles becomes secretary. of state, and Alan is named head of the CIA. The stars are aligned for their vision board to become reality. And maybe we can take a quick tour of the imagination to think about what their vision board might look like. Well, for one, it's got a lot of corporate logos on it.

You know, you've got your GE logo here. You've got your Ford logo. Loco, Texaco, Shell Oil, Brown Brothers Harriman, to be sure, General Motors, Standard Oil, because their vision was a vision of corporate plunder of the resources, both human and natural, of the third world. Just as back in the 30s, they saw how Germany turned its national territory into a war machine, well, they wanted that for the entire world, really, on behalf of the capitalist bloc. I'm from where the golden diamonds are ripped from the earth, right next to the slave castles where the water is cursed.

Rebelde, Conocido, enterado vivo, like other Argentino, disappeared, because Rico laws don't apply to the CIA, and motherfuckers make sneakers for a quarter a day. I'm from where they overthrow democratic leaders Not for the people but for the Wall Street Journal readers From where blacks, indigenous peoples and Asians Were once slaves of the Caucasians And it's amazing how they trained them To be racist against themselves in a place they was raised

And you kept us caged and destroyed our culture And said that you civilized us Rape our women and when we were born you despised us Gentrified us age and provocateur divide us And crucified every revolutionary Messiah So I must start a global riot It's not even your fake anti-communist dictators can keep quiet. Fuck your charity medicine try to murder me.

The immunizations you gave us were full of mercury. So now I see the third world like the rap game soldier. Nationalize the industry and take it over. Lock and load your gun where I'm from the third world sun. In the many places but I'm third world born. Guerrillas hit and run where I'm from the third world son. You polluted everything and now the third world's gone. The water's poison where I'm from the third world son.

700 children died by land. Revolutional come where I'm from the third world. Some constant occupation leaves the third world's home. And on Allen's vision board, you could imagine some embellishments and decorations, a smiley face, a sun wearing sunglasses, a flower. Because for him, the process had to be filled with plenty of fun, adventure, and hijinks. along the way. On Allen's vision board, there's also going to be a few pin-up girls because his vision included a lot of fucking. According to his sister Eleanor, who I shudder to think why she knew this, Alan had over 100 extramarital sexual affairs during the course.

of his marriage to Clover Dulles. I'm not going to even think about how Eleanor might have gotten wind of all of Allen's body count. I have an idea. Alan thought he was talking of Foster Dulles when he was revealing that. Oh, man. Ironically, you know, the cocksmanship of Alan Dulles was one of the things that he had in common with the man who had become his arch nemesis John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And indeed, Kennedy kept Dulles on as head of the CIA after the transition between the party.

in 1960 to 61. As we've said before, JFK campaigned in 1960 as a Cold War hawk, and indeed he governed as one, or at least he did at the very outset of his administration. And to that end, he welcomed Dulles into the White House, and all indications are that even though they didn't see eye to eye on everything, that, you know, Kennedy thought that he could work together with Dulles, keep him under his wing, and, you know, under control more or less, as they worked together towards their shared goal of U.S. hegemony and economic and political prosperity.

That's right. Now, we're not going to recount all the exploits of the Dulles CIA here, since we've covered in other episodes some of that stuff, and you can definitely find plenty on that elsewhere. Like we said before, we recommend the book The Devil's Chess Board by David Talbot, Burton Hershey's Old Boys, and Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers has some good info, although for that one, put the old limited hangout flag on that. Plus, there's a lot of material on this stuff, folks, that you can either take a look at, you know,

the general big picture stuff or on specific operations or regions of activity in the middle of the 20th century. Yeah, there's really no shortage. Feel free to reach out to us if you want more recommendations on anything this is history that's hidden in plain sight. Yeah, whether by region or operation. That's right. But we're just going to pause briefly here for a moment to point out

Dulles' obvious operational oversight and involvement that's something we've referenced in passing several times in this series. Namely, that's the CIA's deep involvement in political assassination. The most prominent one being the dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of attempts on Fidel Castro's life. I mean, at this point it's like a trope all of the different ways they've tried to kill Castro. Dulles also ordered a hit on the first post-independence leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, setting the the stage for the lengthy dictatorship of General Mobutu Seseko, which continued the exploitive and oppressive practices that the Belgian colonial regime had had in place for the century

prior. And of course, the absolutely horrific conditions in the Congo persist to this day, thanks largely to the CIA continuing colonial projects. So Dulles was involved in all of that, and while he was involved, he was not shy about publicly denying his involvement and denying things that he knew to be true. He was also aware that the CIA teamed up with its old friends in the mafia to sometimes get the job. job done. Yeah, in other words, Dulles was both a gangster and a very talented liar. And that's pretty important. Like, you think about taking people at their word. And when can you, without documentation of a lie, really distrust a public figure? Well, in the case of Alan Dulles,

the answer is, pretty much whenever he opens his mouth. This is a mendacious son of a bitch. What is that? This reminds me of the Colin Farrell line and the new, it's sort of a new show, The Penguin. What's the difference between the mafia and the government? That's the mafia's organized. Okay, but less well known is the CIA's association with fascist forces in the French army

who attempted to overthrow the government of President Charles de Gaulle in April 1961. Dulles shared the French fascists outrage that Degal had abandoned France's colonial claims over Algeria, and he would rail against Degal as being as bad as a communist. Of course, whenever asked about it, Dulles was quick to deny any CIA knowledge of involvement in the plots. now for his part there's no indication that jfk had any knowledge or role in the french ops and he did his best to reassure de gall of the u.s's support for its long-time ally indeed one of the earliest signs that jfk might not be such a committed imperialist came in nineteen fifty seven when he gave a strong speech against french colonialism in north africa on the Senate floor. Yeah, and the point of that is to say that while JFK had some visibility into the CIA's covert operations, he was not omniscient about them.

And there was a real tension between the operational side of the CIA that had cranked up under the Eisenhower administration and the incoming Kennedy administration that saw its grip on the levers of power within the American government itself loosened to a degree by the interference by this dullest block of covert operators within the CIA. And that came to a real head also coincidentally in April 1961 with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The lines are sharply defined. The East-West struggle embraces the fate of Cuba. And here in East Berlin, the red propaganda machine is in high gear to show support of Castro's leftist government.

Now, you are probably familiar with the Bay of Pigs invasion, you know, long story, short, the U.S. had been training an expeditionary force of Cuban exiles for a ground invasion of the island in order to topple Castro. And they thought that there would be an uprising, or they intended for there to be an uprising among the population that would coincide or be spurred on by this invasion and would eventually result in the overthrow of the regime. regime. Mr. Kennedy replies, the U.S. won't tolerate outside military intervention in Cuba. Addressing American newspaper editors, he makes a declaration of policy, its historic importance reflected in the gravity of the Cuban crisis. Should it ever appear that the inter-American

doctrine of non-interference merely conceals or excuses a policy of non-action, if the nations of this hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments, against outside communist penetration, then I want it clearly understood that this government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligation which are to the security of our nation. The operation was planned during the Eisenhower administration,

but after seeking and receiving assurances that no uniformed U.S. forces would be pulled in to the fray, JFK gave his approval. Now, what JFK didn't know at the time that he signed on to the operation was that extensive plans had already been put in place to provide U.S. air support for the invasion in order to neutralize Cuba's defenses.

Of course, that air support was inconsistent and would have been incompatible with Kennedy's insistence on no involvement of U.S. troops. This small band of gallant Cuban refugees must have known that they were chancing, determined as they were against heavy odds, to pursue their courageous attempts to regain their island's freedom. Cuba must not be abandoned to the communists, and we do not intend to abandon it either. And so when the inevitable happened, for their part, Dulles and the other CIA brass involved in planning the Bay of Pigs, including notably our friend Dickie Bissell. Remember, he was Jerry Ford's Yale faculty advisor in the America First Committee way back in 1939. well, they didn't see the hiccup in Kennedy's restrictions on the operation as a deal breaker, right?

So they went ahead, they put the green light up and launched the operation, assuming that if the CIA and the military spoke in one voice to the president and told him that the air support was necessary, to succeed in the operation, well, they just couldn't fathom that JFK would say no, right? Well, he did. Things went down exactly as everybody pretty much knew they would. The invasion forces got trapped in a cul-de-sac on the beach at Playa Giron. The CIA and the military shouted in one resounding voice in unison for air support, and JFK shattered their expectations.

He denied the request, the invasion failed, the survivors were captured, and the U.S. was humiliated. It was caught red-handed in a coup attempt aimed at its neighbor in the Caribbean Sea. It was a disaster. A landing was made by a Cuban exile brigade. I think that the members of the brigade were under the impression that the planes which were available, which were the B-26 planes, would give them protection on the beach.

That did not work out. That was one of the failures. The training jets which were used against them were very effective and therefore we were not, the brigade was not able to maintain air supremacy on the beach. so that I think that made it clear. As I've said from the beginning, the operation was a failure and that the responsibility rests with the White House. The Bay of Pig's disaster was a military and diplomatic defeat for the new president.

And, you know, obviously a disaster for many reasons, not the least of which, that it inflated the myth of Castro, who was able to not only defeat the U.S.-backed dictator, leadership in that island, but also went toe to toe with the United States and won. So in the aftermath, everyone's got egg on their face. Without getting into all the details, JFG fires Dulles, Bissell, and General Charles Cabell for their role in the debacle. And apropos of nothing, Cabell's brother, Earl, was then the mayor of Dallas, Texas. Now, JFK really leaned into the pageantry pomp of putting Dulles out of the pasture.

Remarks of the president upon the retirement of Mr. Allen Dulles as CIA director. from the new CIA building in Washington, D.C., November 28, 1961. D. Ellis and Cohn, General Campbell, members of the Central Intelligence Agency. I want to, first of all, express my appreciation to you all for the opportunity that this ceremony gives to tell you how grateful we are in the government and in the country for the services that the personnel of this agency render to the country. It is not always easy. Your successes are unheralded. Your failures are trumpeted. I sometimes have that feeling myself about But I'm sure we realize that how important is your work, how essentially it is, and how in the long sweep of history, how significant your effort will be judged.

So I do want to express my appreciation to you now, and I'm confident that in the future you will continue to merit the appreciation of our country as you had in the past. I regard Alan Dulles as an almost unique figure in our country. I know of no man who brings a greater sense of personal commitment to his work, who has less pride in office than he has, and therefore I was most gratified when we were committed today to come out to this agency to present this award to him in your presence. like to read the citation. Alan Welsh Dulles is hereby awarded the National Security Medal. He has every other declaration, and so we wanted to give him this one. As principal, as principal intelligence advisor to the President of the United States, Mr. Dulles has fulfilled

the responsibilities of his office with unswerving purpose and high dedication. His 10 years of service in the Central Intelligence Agency have been the climax of a lifetime. of unprecedented and devoted public service, beginning in the First World War and stretching through the administrations of seven presidents. The outstanding contributions Mr. Dulles has made to the security of the United States have been based upon a profound knowledge of the role of the intelligence officer, a broad understanding of international relations, and a naturally keen judgment of men and affairs. The zestful energy and undaunted integrity of his service to his country. will be an enduring example to the profession he has done so much to create.

And I hereby present the United States of America to all show, to see these presence greetings. This is to certify that the President of the United States of America has awarded the National Security Medal to Alan W. Dulles for outstanding contribution to the National Intelligence effort, November 1961. After his firing, Dulles was invited to dinner at the home of Prescott Bush, then serving as the senator from CIA, I mean Connecticut.

Dulles showed up with John McCone, his designated successor. Bush later wrote, We tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick at heart and angry too. For it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco, and here they were making Alan seem to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I've never forgiven them. Privately, JFK wore a very different face. He and his brother Bobby get Eleanor Dulles fired from her.

job in the State Department, and they were fuming about how they wanted to break up the CIA, and, you know, the saying is that they wanted to break it up into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds. Meanwhile, Alan Dulles was telling his old OSS and CIA buddies that he was not much for retirement or long vacations. And his Q Street, home in Georgetown became a gathering place for anti-Kennedy's spooks, both within and outside the government. Between his firing in 1961 and his appointment to the Warren Commission in November 1963, Dulles bided his time. He put pen to paper and wrote his quasi-autobiographical work of CIA Apologia called the Craft of Intelligence, in which he had some ghostwriting assistance

from the likes of Bay of Pigs veteran E. Howard Hunt. You may know him as the Watergate burglar. And Dulles also, just as so many of our beloved American ex-office holders, hit the speaking circuit and got picked up checks from various law firms, think tanks, and NGOs. He even got a speaking invitation to a group of Republican members of Congress invited by none other than then Illinois Congressman Donald Rumsfeld. This is like in Burn After Reading, Malcovich, gets fired and he goes, I've been thinking about writing a book or, you know, a sort of memoir. Yeah.

Yeah, he's got like the dry martini alarm clock. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so all the while, Dulles is holding court there on Q Street. Remember, it just blocks away from our friends in the Georgetown set, the Alps, the Grams, the Wisner's, et cetera, et cetera. And he had many visitors coming in and out of his house, including really rough and tumble, rowdy folks, even killers. He even was known to have visited with certain Cuban exiles who had been involved in

the CIA mafia plots to kill. Castro. I wonder why a former government officer might have an interest in mixing it up with such riffraff. But let's just keep a pin in that fact for now. Meanwhile, on the world stage, back in France, the exact same fascist army forces behind the failed 1961 coup that Dulles knew about and lied about? Well, they took a shot at the president and missed. They tried to kill de Gaulle famously in August 1962, an event immortalized in the film The Day of the Jackal. And even though that coup failed, it did reflect a depth of planning which captivated all spectators. I mean, for God's sakes became a best-selling novel and a major motion picture.

And luckily for Alan Dulles and his Kennedy-hating click of bitter ex-spooks and spurned corporate executives, just as it had done in WW1 and WW2, America was not about to be upstaged by the French No, we were going to teach those frogs a lesson in winning. Benjure, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Okay, so here we are again in November, 1963, and Jack has been capped. Alan Bellis, 2191. Hello, unpleasant this news for you. We're going to name a name.

very shortly a presidential commission made up of seven people two from the house two from the Senate three two from the public and one from the court as a study group to go into this FBI report this court of inquiry and all the incidents connection of the assassination of our beloved friend and you've got to go on that farm you've got you very certain I know you can I know you can and not a doubt about it just to just get ready now to go in there and do a good job. We've got to have a... America's got to be united in this hour and... ...five to be in any...

...this hour. ...and you consider that my previous work and previous... Thank you. I'll be talking to you, father. Right. And I'll get you entirely quiet. Please do. Please do, listen out.

Because I haven't cleared it with one other man. I understand. I'll be at your orders if you want. Thank you, sir. I think of nothing else I think of nothing running it. Excuse me and that's the old job

there. The honor. Allad Ellis is just another one of those names that is constantly on LBJ's tongue when he's making his rounds of calls to establish

the Warren Commission after November 24th. But there really is no documentary or phone call record of why and when Dulles gets put on the list. It's, sort of like with McCloy, it's like obvious that he would be at least considered.

But we don't have any concrete evidence of why and when that happened. No, and in fact, there's competing narratives. Of course. And my favorite one is this narrative from Johnson himself late in his life. So after leaving office, LBJ would say that Bobby Kennedy had been the one who suggested both Dulles and McCloy. But of course, this was after Bobby Kennedy had been murdered. So he wasn't around to clarify or rebut that point. It's a classic LBJ.

Yeah. You could think of it. He's like, well, I'll just... That's such classic. I'll tell him Bobby did it. Yeah. I'm sure that he did that for a lot of things. It was, whatever it was.

Like, oh, yeah, well, that was Bobby. You go and ask him. So, to put it shortly, this is really making our bullshit detectors go off. And it sounds like complete and utter horse pucky. But there is this weird relationship between Bobby and Dulles, right? For example, Bobby recruited Alan Dulles in the middle of the Warren Commission in the summer of 1964 to go to Mississippi and do a patch up investigation of the murder of three civil rights leaders down there. And, you know, this one is really mysterious to us. It's got a

big old question mark about the odd bedfellows that Bobby Kennedy and Alan Dulles made. Yeah, that one I've looked into it. There are, again, recorded phone. calls on it. If anybody has any ideas about that, we'd love to hear from you. So shoot us an email or hit us up on social media about it. But I can't make heads or tails of that one. But what's less mysterious is the real story of why and how Dulles most probably got selected for the Warren Commission. You know, in spite of Lyndon Johnson. really self-serving narrative, dropping the dime on Bobby Kennedy. So for our money, Dulles is the guy for the Alsup-Acheson, Georgetown, Cabal

to have entrusted with the oversight of the entire operation of the Warren Commission. And there is a good deal of evidence backing this up. So first, Dick Helms, who was another CIA lifer, who became the director of the CIA under LBJ and kept that job under Richard Nixon, he told historian Michael Kurtz that he personally persuaded Johnson to appoint Dulles with the goal to make sure no agency secrets came out during the investigation. And obviously, LBJ also shared that goal. He wouldn't have wanted to be the victim, the political victim, of a backlash, should it

come out that the CIA was engaged in assassinations and dirty tricks all over the world. Now, other sources in the know similarly said that Dulles himself lobbied to get appointed. And once again, this totally tracks with everything that we know about Dulles' personality and his privileged position vis-à-vis the Georgetown set. So even if he embodied this sort of higher than that, aloofness on the social scene. For example, Greg Herkin in the Georgetown set book talks about how Dulles was famous for starting in to these very intriguing stories of espionage and black ops and that he'd stop right before getting to the good

parts and then just get up and leave in the middle of the party. So it's very much a a self-mythologized mystique and a very performative way of asserting his dominance and his unaccountability to even the most powerful social forces in Washington. Of course, he and his wife Clover lived on Q Street and, They were just blocks away from all these guys. And he was a frequent dinner guest, and it should also be noted that Dulles was the boss. And the close boss and professional friend and protector of Frank Wisner, who himself was sort of besties with all of those Georgetown set folks. and so it would be obvious to them that Dulles was the man for the job

and nobody else would be similarly poised to marshal the powers of persuasion and charisma that Dulles so famously wielded to his own benefit and to the benefit of a lot of the corporations he represented and to the detriment of pretty much everybody else in the world. So I think that's the inward, the subjective and kind of most plausible inward story about Dulles' pick. Outwardly, LBJ had legitimate reasons to want to keep tabs on the CIA, given the foreign sensitivities around Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union. Union. In one of LBJ's phone calls with congressional leaders, he is asked if he's going to name the then

current CIA director John McCone to the commission. But LBJ declined because he doesn't want a conflict of interest for a current government employee. Now, this is the same reason, at least ostensibly, why Hoover was never considered for the commission. But Alan Dulles was a private citizen, so he was fair game. And as we discussed in the last episodes, the last several episodes on McCloy, Dulles just like McCloy was the quintessential offensive pick. He's not just some parochial offensive pick to serve LBJ's interests like Dick Russell, who was his man on the inside.

But Dulles, more so than anything, is an imperial offensive pick to serve the interest of a deep state apparatus that LBJ knew about, but neither fully understood nor controlled. So I think at this point it's good to just sort of pause and do a quick reminder, that LVJ was a political creature of the Texas oil lobby.

Those guys definitely knew how to play dirty. They definitely had their streams crossed with the CIA, and they definitely entrusted their secrets to lawyers like Dulles and McCloy and their ilk. And they did. definitely knew how to and did control the scene in Dallas. And all of this was definitely known by LVJ. Yeah, I like to think of Johnson in this period of time,

experiencing the pangs of paranoia in his own right, right? Just think about him sitting there with, you know, in his boxer shorts. And he's contemplating, you know, who really killed Jack. And I think he would have had some suspicions of his own about who might have been involved. But at the same time, I think he had a real fear to speak frankly and openly about. it. You know, we talked about McLeod being the Tom Hagen character in the Godfather. Yeah. And we could kind of think of Dulles as like Michael Corleone. Yeah. And if we're thinking in those terms, think of Lyndon Johnson as Michael's wife, Kay. Right. She kind of knows what's going on.

And she's, at least in the first movie, she's willing to benefit from it and willing to accept that, you know, it's all for the greater good. But then, if she were to bring it up, don't ask me about my business, Lyndon. He's standing there that closed the door in his face, right? Lyndon Johnson is, he's not the top of the totem pole. and I think the presidency, right, the office of the president after November 22nd never has been the top of the totem pole. And Johnson understood that, and so he did it. He wanted to do the right thing, the right thing being whatever would preserve his own power.

But maybe I'm the one that's paranoid. Yeah, I think you're a little paranoid. And I think I'm a little paranoid. And I think our listeners are also a little paranoid, but I think rightfully so. Well, I think at this point it's safe to say that we have covered exhaustively every one of the members of the Foreign Commission. And onward we go to covering the story of the dynamics, the superficial sort of investigation that was done, the people they interviewed,

and they're ultimately the way they came about the conclusions that they ultimately shared with LVJ and the rest of the country. All together in the storm comes a tall, handsome man in a dusty black coat with a red right hand. Right, and just as a. important as the evidence they reviewed and the people they interviewed are the evidence they chose not to review and the people they chose not to interview. All that and more when we pick up the Warren Commission Decided series in 2025. Happy New Year, listener. For now, I'm Dick.

And I'm Don saying farewell. And keep digging. that you can do he's a god he's a man he's a ghost he's a guru there are whispering his name

through this disappearing land but hidden in his coat is a red right hand you don't know you know you don't know money

get you some you don't have no call or get you one you don't have no self-respect you feel like an insect well don't you worry buddy because here he comes through the gaiters and the borri and the valley and the stream Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.