![\"\"](\"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/allen-dulles-v2.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: Byron Rollins\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n
Jon Schwarz
\nThe Intercept<\/p>\n
AS I READ<\/u>\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America\u2019s Secret Government<\/a><\/em>, a new book by\u00a0Salon<\/em><\/a>\u00a0founder David Talbot, I couldn\u2019t help thinking of an obscure corner of 1970s history: the Safari Club.<\/p>\n Dulles \u2014 the Princeton man and white shoe\u00a0corporate lawyer who served as\u00a0CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency history \u2014 died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived. And nothing about it appears in\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Chessboard<\/em>.\u00a0<\/i>But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu.<\/p>\n Any normal person would likely hear the Safari Club saga as a frightening story of totally unaccountable power.\u00a0But if there\u2019s one thing to take away from\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Chessboard<\/em>, it\u2019s this: Allen Dulles would have seen it differently \u2014 as an inspiring tale of hope and redemption.<\/p>\n Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles\u2019 entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War\u00a0II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we\u2019ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, \u201cDon\u2019t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I\u2019m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say \u2018I want it, give it to me\u2019? They control it.\u00a0All<\/em>\u00a0of it.\u00a0All<\/em>\u00a0of it. All the time.\u201d<\/p>\n While there, Turki, who\u2019d graduated from Georgetown University in the same class as Bill Clinton, delivered a speech at his alma mater\u00a0that included an\u00a0unexpected history lesson<\/a>:<\/p>\n In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran \u2026 so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don\u2019t know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Turki was not telling the whole truth. He was right\u00a0that his Georgetown audience likely had never heard any of\u00a0this before, but the Safari Club had been known across the Middle East for decades. After the Iranian revolution the new government gave\u00a0Mohamed Hassanein Heikal<\/a>, one of the most prominent journalists in the Arab world, permission to examine the Shah\u2019s archives. There Heikal discovered the actual formal, written agreement between the members of the Safari Club, and wrote about it in a 1982 book called\u00a0Iran: The Untold Story<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n And\u00a0the Safari Club was not simply the creation of the countries Turki mentioned \u2014 Americans were involved as well. It\u2019s true the U.S. executive branch was somewhat hamstrung during the period between the post-Watergate investigations of the intelligence world and the end of the Carter administration. But the powerful individual Americans who felt themselves \u201cliterally tied up\u201d by Congress \u2014 that is, unfairly restrained by the most democratic branch of the U.S. government \u2014 certainly did not consider the decisions of Congress to be the final word.<\/p>\n Whatever its funding sources, the evidence suggests the Safari Club was largely the initiative of these powerful Americans. According to Heikal, its real origin was when Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, \u201ctalked a number of rich Arab oil countries into bankrolling operations against growing communist influence on their doorstep\u201d in Africa. Alexandre de Marenches, a right-wing aristocrat who headed France\u2019s version of the CIA, eagerly formalized the project and assumed operational leadership. But, Heikal writes, \u201cThe United States directed the whole\u00a0operation,\u201d and \u201cgiant U.S. and European corporations with vital interests in Africa\u201d leant a hand. As John K. Cooley, the\u00a0Christian Science Monitor<\/i>\u2019s longtime Mideast correspondent,\u00a0put it<\/a>, the setup strongly appealed to the U.S. executive branch: \u201cGet others to do what you want done, while avoiding the onus or blame if the operation fails.\u201d<\/p>\n This all seems like something Americans would like to know, especially since de Marenches may have extended his covert operations to the 1980 U.S. presidential election. In 1992, de Marenches\u2019 biographer\u00a0testified in a congressional investigation<\/a>\u00a0that the French spy told him that he had helped arrange an October 1980 meeting in Paris between William Casey, Ronald Reagan\u2019s 1980 campaign manager, and the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The goal of such a meeting, of course, would have been to persuade Iran to keep its American hostages until after the next month\u2019s election, thus denying Carter any last-minute, politically potent triumph.<\/p>\n De Marenches and the Safari Club certainly had a clear motive to oust Carter: They blamed him for allowing one of their charter members, the Shah, to fall from power. But whether de Marenches\u2019 claims were true or not, we do know that history unfolded exactly as he and the Safari Club would have wished.\u00a0The hostages weren\u2019t released until Reagan was inaugurated, Reagan appointed Casey director of the CIA, and from that point forward America\u2019s\u00a0intelligence \u201ccommunity\u201d was back in business.<\/p>\n And yet\u00a0normal citizens would have a hard time just\u00a0finding out the Safari Club even existed, much less the outlines of its activities. It appears to have been mentioned\u00a0just once<\/a>\u00a0by the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>, in a profile of a French spy novelist. It likewise has made only one appearance in the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>, in a\u00a02005 online chat<\/a>\u00a0in which a reader asked the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u2019s former Middle East bureau chief Thomas Lippman, \u201cDoes the Safari Club, formed in the mid-70s, still exist?\u201d Lippman responded: \u201cI never heard of it, so I have no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n The fallout from Watergate\u00a0initially would have horrified him, with\u00a0mere elected members of Congress placing restrictions on patricians\u00a0like himself. But he then would have been thrilled to see the ingenuity with which his heirs escaped those bonds, and deeply satisfied that the club\u00a0did its work while staying hidden from the prying eyes of History.<\/p>\n As Talbot points out, Dulles stated his worldview publicly and explicitly in 1938 during his only run for political office: \u201cDemocracy only works if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can\u2019t sit back and let democracy run itself.\u201d Unsurprisingly, homilies like this did not carry him to victory. But so what? He went on to wield far greater power than most elected officials ever have.\u00a0And while Dulles is the star of\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Chessboard<\/em>, he\u2019s surrounded by an enormous supporting cast.<\/p>\n As Talbot\u00a0explains<\/a>, \u201cWhat I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s.\u201d It\u2019s a huge, sprawling book, and an amalgam of all the appalling things Dulles and his cohort definitely did, things the evidence suggests they\u00a0probably<\/i>\u00a0did, and speculation about things they might plausibly have done. More than a\u00a0biography, it\u2019s a exploration\u00a0of well-organized pathology.<\/p>\n It includes detailed reexaminations of Dulles\u2019s most notorious failures, such as the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the nightmarish\u00a0mind control program MK-ULTRA, as well as his most notorious \u201csuccesses,\u201d the CIA\u2019s overthrow of democratic governments in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954. Talbot notes that an internal CIA account of the Iran coup fairly\u00a0glowed with joy<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cIt was a day that never should have ended. For it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it.\u201d According to a participant in an Oval Office briefing for President Eisenhower, Dulles\u2019s brother John Foster, then secretary of state, \u201cseemed to be purring like a giant cat.\u201d<\/p>\n But by this point these events are fairly well-known. Perhaps most compelling is Talbot\u2019s in-depth look at Dulles\u2019s lesser-known yet still extraordinarily sordid projects. As the Swiss director of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, Dulles \u2014\u00a0whose law firm had represented German corporations and many U.S. corporations with German interests \u2014 quietly attempted to undermine Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s demand that Germany surrender unconditionally, going so far as to order the rescue of an SS general\u00a0surrounded by Italian partisans. Dulles also led the push to save Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi head of intelligence on the Eastern Front and a genuine monster, from any post-war justice. Dulles then made certain Gehlen and his spies received a cozy embrace from the CIA, and helped push him to the top of West Germany\u2019s Federal Intelligence Service.<\/p>\n Also gruesome\u00a0is the lurid story of how Jesus de Galindez, a lecturer at Columbia University, was kidnapped in Manhattan by U.S. government cutouts and delivered to Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo then had Galindez, whose expos\u00e9s of corruption Trujillo feared, boiled alive and fed to sharks, and ordered the murder of\u00a0the American pilot who\u2019d flown Galindez there.\u00a0All under the beneficent gaze of CIA Director Allen Dulles.<\/p>\n In a sense, however, all of\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Chessboard<\/em>\u00a0seems to exist to set the stage\u00a0for the final chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. In the first 500 pages you are convinced that Dulles would have had no moral qualms about killing any politician, including Americans. You learn Dulles had a lifetime of experience in arranging assassinations, and apparent ties to attempts to overthrow or murder French president Charles de Gaulle. And you discover the depth of his grudge against John F. Kennedy, who dismissed him and several of his key underlings after the Bay of Pigs.<\/p>\n But were JFK and possibly Robert Kennedy killed by conspiracies involving Dulles? That\u2019s the conjecture\u00a0of\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Chessboard<\/em>.\u00a0<\/i>There\u2019s no question Talbot has pulled together a lot of suggestive old information, and uncovered some that\u2019s new. Furthermore, he certainly proves there was a great deal of reluctance on the part of journalists and politicians at the time to pull on even the most obvious threads. But 50 years later, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any way to say much\u00a0for sure on this subject, except that it\u2019s\u00a0pretty interesting<\/i>.\u00a0(Given humanity\u2019s history of catastrophic slapstick, I\u2019ve always enjoyed the theory that a Secret Service agent\u00a0shot Kennedy accidentally<\/a>.)<\/p>\n In the end, whatever the reality\u00a0of Talbot\u2019s most sensational claims, he unquestionably makes the case that \u2014 unless you believe we\u2019re governed by\u00a0shape-shifting space lizards<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 your darkest suspicions about how the world operates\u00a0are likely\u00a0an underestimate. Yes, there is an amorphous group of unelected corporate lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an American \u201cdeep state<\/a>,\u201d setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of line. They do collaborate with and nurture their deep state counterparts in other countries, to whom they feel far more loyalty than their fellow citizens. The minions of the deep state\u00a0hate and fear even the mildest moves towards democracy, and fight against it by any means available to them. They\u2019re not all-powerful and don\u2019t get exactly what they want, but on the issues that matter most they almost always win in the end. And while all this is mostly right there in the open, discernible by anyone who\u2019s curious and has a library card, if you don\u2019t go looking you will never hear a single word about it.<\/p>\nIn February 2002, Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until September 1, 2001, traveled to\u00a0Washington, D.C.<\/h3>\n
So it\u2019s really too bad Allen Dulles didn\u2019t\u00a0live to see the Safari Club.<\/h3>\n