“Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.”

David Talbot’s 2015 book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government makes a credible case that Dulles, CIA director from 1953 to 1961, deservedly ended up in hell, and if you don’t believe in it, then in some other ghastly place for all eternity.

Unpacking Dulles’ times, impact and legacy is quite a journey, what with friendships with Nazis, false flag operations, psychological warfare activities, programs to covertly assassinate foreign leaders, and other activities so disturbing that they are genuinely difficult to read about. He seemingly peaked in the two-year period from 1953 to 1954 with two stunningly successful CIA-engineered coups, which, if nothing else, demonstrated his (and his agency’s) proficiency at crushing pesky trans-national ideas about national sovereignty and social reform. The first coup was the U.S. and British-backed overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh (Prime Minister of Iran) in Operation Ajax, who had had the utter temerity to consider nationalising that country’s oil supplies. That wouldn’t do at all, for how then could the global empires exercise their God given right to uninterrupted supplies of vital commodities?

The second was Operation PBSuccess in Guatemala, a country which was little more than the plaything, vassal state and cash cow of the American company United Fruit. (Dulles and his brother John Foster (U.S. Secretary of State) were closely linked to United Fruit.) The pesky idea in question (that of President Jacobi Arbenz) was the redistribution of Guatemalan land to actual Guatemalans. In response, CIA Operation PBSuccess delivered a 1954 coup so savage in nature that it left an ugly, bloody scar on the 20th century. A vicious civil war followed, from which Guatemala only emerged in 1996.

We know about Operation Ajax, Operation PBSuccess, Operation Mockingbird and other enterprises undertaken by Dulles and his set thanks to the 1975 US Senate Church Committee, which investigated abuses by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. In between times, the grandfatherly, pipe smoking CIA Director maintained a busy schedule manipulating, white anting and ultimately outlasting a string of Presidents. Talbot is at his best when depicting the nuances of their relationships, even though the default mostly ranged from mutual wariness to mutual contempt.

(Franklin) Roosevelt distrusted Dulles and his brother due to their links with Nazi financial interests (of course, they had links with Nazi financial interests). Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law, creating the CIA. Years later, Dulles tried unsuccessfully to pressure an elderly and presumably repentant Truman to withdraw his startlingly blunt Washington Post opinion piece published shortly after JFK’s assassination, which called in no uncertain terms for the intelligence agency he created to be reined in.

Eisenhower let Dulles have a free rein for most of his Presidency. He eventually wised up, but by then, unfortunately, ‘it was far too late for (Eisenhower) to do anything about his spymaster and the parallel government that he seemed to run’. When Eisenhower finally spoke out, he too was startlingly blunt, warning his country in his January 1961 Presidential Farewell Address about the military industrial complex ecosystem of lobbyists, captains of industry, and politicians. Yes, Truman and Eisenhower were prototype conspiracy theorists.

The Devil’s Chessboard is fascinating and frustrating in almost equal measures, due to Talbot’s over-reliance on other authors rather than primary sources. A prime example is Talbot’s reproduction of the ‘parallel government’ idea, that Dulles became ‘a master at seeding Washington bureaucracies with agency men, placing his loyalists in top positions in the Pentagon, State Department, and even the White House’, eroding ‘all opposition like the Colorado River eroding the Grand Canyon’.

Talbot’s sole source here appears to be the mysterious Fletcher Prouty in his book ‘The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World’. The idea that Dulles set up what amounted to a shadow government is fascinating, and totally consistent with his character, but is it wholly credible? It’s hard to tell. Talbot just blithely quotes claims in Prouty’s book – and many others. A stronger case would enable the reader to robustly defend this premise, and its implications.

A fairly strong case can be made that, late in life, as a member of the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles enjoyed triumphantly presiding over the details of the bloody demise of the only President who took decisive action to check his power and influence, but whom once again, just like Dulles, he characteristically outlasted. ‘’That little Kennedy’ he fumed with a staggering deficit of irony to writer Willie Morris in 1965, ‘he thought he was a god’’.