The Brothers: John FosterDulles, Allen Dulles, & Their Secret World War

Stephen Kinzer “The Brothers: John FosterDulles, Allen Dulles, & Their Secret World War” Times Books, 2013, 328 pps   

This book is a dual biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles who led the United States into wars and intrigues that decisively shaped today’s world.  John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some major themes of harm caused by the Dulles brothers’ along with Eisenhower, their enabler, can be illustrated by three items.  For instance: immediately after Stalin’s death, there were numerous overtures from the Soviets to the West.  Foster and Allen categorically rejected them and may have lengthened the Cold War.  Next was their inability to understand Third World nationalism.  They were too quick to see Moscow’s hand behind cries for independence and social reform in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.  These continents were to them little more than a vast Cold War battleground.  Lastly, as has become clear with the passage of time, Foster and Allen never imagined that their intervention in foreign countries would have such devastating long-term effects—that Vietnam would be plunged into a war costing more than one million lives, or that Iran would fall to violently anti-American zealots, or that the Congo would descend into decades of horrific conflict.  Their lack of foresight led them to pursue reckless adventures that, over the course of decades, measurably weakened American security.  Yet, it must be remembered, Foster and Allen depended on Eisenhower for all they did—at least, all they did while Eisenhower was in office.

Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther than this book. “The Brothers” is a riveting chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of “inconvenient” regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world.

The O.S.S. was dissolved in 1945 by President Truman, but was soon reborn as the C.I.A. The author notes that Truman did not support plots against foreign leaders but his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, had no such scruples. By 1953, with Allen Dulles running the C.I.A. and his brother in charge of the State Department, the interventionists’ dreams could, shall we say, blossom. Kinzer lists what he calls the “six monsters” that the Dulles brothers believed had to be brought down: Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Sukarno in Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Only two of these, Ho Chi Minh and Castro, were hard-core Communists. The rest were nationalist leaders seeking independence for their countries and a measure of control over their natural resources.

The brothers’ evil-vs.-good worldview proved to be a poor tool for dealing with the complexities of the postcolonial era. Leaders like Lumumba and Mossadegh might well have been open to cooperation with the United States, seeing it as a natural ally for enemies of colonialism. However, for the Dulles brothers, and for much of the American government, threats to corporate interests were categorized as support for communism. “For us,” John Foster Dulles once explained, “there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others.” Rejected by the United States, the new leaders turned to Moscow.

My Notes:

Pg. 11:  The brothers’ grandfather, John Watson Foster, was the first American secretary of state to participate in the overthrow of a foreign government.  In 1893 he helped direct the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.  President Harrison had discreetly encouraged white settlers in Hawaii to rebel against Queen Liliuokalani, and when they did, Secretary of State Foster endorsed the landing of American troops at Honolulu to support them.  The settlers proclaimed themselves Hawaii’s new government, the US quickly recognized their regime, and the monarchy was no more.

Pg. 24:  "John Foster Dulles was a young associate, still in his 20s at Sullivan and Cromwell, when one of the partners called him in and said, 'We've got problem in Cuba. There's been an election. And the liberals, who want to limit the power of American companies in Cuba, have won.'

"So John Foster Dulles got on the train. He went to Washington. He went to see his uncle, the secretary of state. And he told his uncle, 'We need to send two warships to Cuba and land marines in Cuba to force the liberals to call off their revolution demanding that the election be recognized.'

"Those warships were sent. The next day they began a six year occupation of Cuba. That all began because of a threat to American companies that were represented by the Dulles brothers."

Pg. 54:  Even after the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, John Foster Dulles gave a speech lamenting Britain’s declaration of war against Germany and asserting that there was ‘neither in the underlying causes of the war, nor in its long-range objectives, any reason for the US becoming a participant.’ (This was one of the few disagreements the brothers ever had; John Foster was still disgruntled that his law firm had unanimously outvoted him about continuing business with Nazi Germany).

Pg. 55:  The Dulles brothers were paragons of the Wilsonian idea that came to be known as ‘liberal internationalism.’  They believed that trouble in the world came from misunderstandings among ruling elites, not from social or political injustices, and that commerce could reduce or eliminate this trouble. 

Pg. 73:  Allen spent many months beginning at the end of 1944 and continuing until May 3, 1945 negotiating with Karl Wolff, commander of SS forces in Italy, to surrender.  He was successful in getting this surrender a full five days before the war ended.

Pg. 75:  On September 20, 1945, Truman signed an order abolishing the OSS.  He feared that the secret powers it had accumulated during the war might in peacetime, expand to threaten American democracy.  To avoid this, he transferred the OSS research unit to the State Department and its espionage and counterespionage units to the War Department. 

Pg. 84:  Foster was much more against Communism than he had ever been against Nazism.  He had come to recognize Nazism as an ideology that led to great crimes, but during the 1930s he accepted it because he considered its identity essentially Western, Christian, and capitalist.  Communism was none of those.  In Communism, Foster saw something he never saw in Nazism: an ultimate evil with which no compromise could ever be possible.

Pg. 87:  Western secret services had always kept the collection of intelligence strictly separate from the analysis and possible action that might follow from it, since concentrating those functions in a single agency was thought likely to lead to intelligence reports tainted by pressure from covert operatives.  This principle had been allowed to lapse during wartime, and the OSS men became accustomed to doing every part of the job: collecting intelligence, analyzing it, and acting on it.  In 1947 Truman signed a bill creating the CIA and the CIA became a unique organization among Western intelligence services, which uniformly keep their secret operations separate from their overall intelligence activities.  Furthermore, they were given the legal right to take any action, anywhere in the world, as long as the president approved.  (Even though the CIA was given broad powers, Truman never unleashed them; this would dramatically change with Eisenhower).

Pg. 104:  In retrospect, the Republican charges of the Democrats treating the confrontation with Communism as a ‘nice-nice little powder-puff duel’ (Nixon), seems exaggerated.  During Truman’s term the US forced Russians out of Iran in 1946, came to the aid of the Greek government in 1947, met the Red Army’s challenge at Berlin and inaugurated the Marshall Plan in 1948, and blocked the North Korean aggression in Korea.

Pg. 113:  Foster advised Eisenhower to renounce the Korean cease-fire, send armies across the demilitarized zone, and not rest ‘until we have shown before all of Asia, our clear superiority by giving the Chinese one hell of a licking.’  Eisenhower decided to do the opposite.  In spite of all the Republican rhetoric, Eisenhower and Foster’s foreign policy of containment was essentially the same as that of Truman and Acheson had been.  Eisenhower, though, combined the mind-set of a warrior with a sober understanding of the devastation that full-scale warfare brings.  That led him to covert action.  With the Dulles brothers as his right and left arms, he led the US into a secret global conflict that raged throughout his presidency. Truman had used the CIA to carry out covert operations, but drew the line at plotting against foreign leaders.  That line evaporated when he left office. 

Pg. 117:  Because Eisenhower made clear—despite his campaign rhetoric—that he would not approve ‘rollback’ campaigns aimed at overthrowing established Communist regimes, Foster and Allen had to find other enemies.  Six impassioned visionaries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America became the monsters they went abroad to destroy.  Their campaigns against these six were momentous battles in the global war the US waged secretly during the 1950s.  These monsters were Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Sukarno in Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Only two of these, Ho Chi Minh and Castro, were hard-core Communists. The rest were nationalist leaders seeking independence for their countries and a measure of control over their natural resources.

P

g. 132:  By 1953 the CIA had become a truly global organization, six times larger than when it was founded in 1947.  Allen commanded fifteen thousand employees in fifty countries, with an annual budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, no accounting necessary. 

Pg. 134:  In April, 1953, one month after Eisenhower gave Operation Ajax his tacit approval, Allen signed and order approving the expenditure of $1 million to be used ‘in any way that would bring about the fall of [Iran’s] Mossadegh.’  Never before had an official of the US government approved such an order.  On the same day, Allen set in motion another of his extraordinary projects: MKULTRA, a mind-control experiment that aimed to test the value of drugs in black operations.  Allen also established secret prisons in Germany, Japan, and the Panama Canal Zone, where suspected double agents were subjected to what would later be called enhanced interrogation.’  Shortly after the overthrow of Iranian leader Mossadegh and the placement of the Shah in power, the brothers moved on to overthrow the Guatemalan leader Arbenz.  Arbenz had passed the first serious land reform law in Central American history.  It required large landowners to sell the uncultivated part of their holdings to the government, for distribution to peasant families.  United Fruit owned more than half a million acres of the country’s riches land and left 85 percent uncultivated.  It took this law as a declaration of war.  So did the Dulles brothers, who enjoyed steady income from United Fruit legal fees and stock dividends.  (Shortly after, Arbenz was displaced with a leader more acceptable to the brothers and the land reform was repealed.)

Pg. 176:  Now the brothers focused on Ho Chi Minh.  They mistakenly saw China as a pawn of the Soviet Union and Ho, also mistakenly, as a puppet of both.  In 1950, Truman eager to win French support for the American-led war in Korea, agreed to begin subsidizing France’s war in Vietnam.  He sent $100 million.  By 1952 this aid had tripled to $300 million. Two year later it was nearly $1 billion.  Between 1950 and 1954 the US paid most of the cost of the French war against Ho.  The more than $2 billion was not enough to turn the tide; late in 1953 the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu.  (Amazingly the brothers did not see Tito as this same kind of Soviet pawn).

Pg. 186:  Allen’s most imaginative media operation was taking control of the animated film version of George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian classic Animal Farm.  The book’s ending in which animals realize that both ruling groups in the barnyard are equally corrupt, is a trenchant rejection of the binary worldview. Allen realized that this message implicitly contradicted much of that the US was saying about the Cold War.  He arranged for the film version to end quite differently.  Only the pigs are corrupt, and ultimately patriotic rebels overthrow them.  The United States Information Agency distributed this film around the world.

Pg. 213:  The Eisenhower administration and the brothers repeatedly called for the ‘liberation’ of Eastern Europe.  Allen had gone further, sending agents to encourage rebellion in every country behind the Iron Curtain.  Yet when an uprising broke out in East Germany in 1953, the US refused to aid the rebels.  Three years later in Hungary (Budapest), the story was much the same.  Then their plans to overthrow Nasser were disrupted by the French, Israeli, British invasion of the Suez Canal which effectively made Nasser an area hero.  Eisenhower forced the abandonment of this invasion—he wanted European influence in the Middle East diminished and replaced with US influence.

Pg. 248:  In 1960 Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the elected leader of the Congo, was ordered killed by the US.  Eisenhower in 1955 created a very secret Special Group with just five members: the president, his national security adviser, the undersecretaries of state and defense, and the director of the CIA.  Its stated purpose was to authorize covert operations, but it also served as Eisenhower’s link to covert action.  Politically and diplomatically it would have been unseemly, and inciting, for the President to order coups, assassinations, and other mischief.  The Special Group acted as his proxy.  But in the end, its actions—its decisions, its approvals—were taken on behalf of the President, with his knowledge and approval.  This group authorized this killing.  Luckily, the Belgians took care of the actual assassination so the US did not have to do it (the Belgians had him beaten to death, nothing fancy).  He was replaced with the more acceptable Joseph Mobutu.

Pg. 253:  Foster died on May 24, 1959 and was replaced by Christian Herter.  The first new figure to emerge on the world stage during Herter’s tenure was Fidel Castro.  Allen created a Task Force and directed it to come up with a plan for covert action in Cuba. When the plan was ready, Eisenhower approved it.  However, the U-2 spy plane incident on May 1^st, 1960, distracted them.  Allen presumed it had exploded and accordingly helped concoct a cover story for Eisenhower to use.  It then turned out that the pilot, Gary Powers, was a prisoner and the plane, photo equipment, and photographs were hardly damaged.

Pg. 277:  In late 1960, the Sino-Soviet split burst into public view when Khrushchev abruptly withdrew all Soviet advisers from China.  Allen then devised a plan to foment civil war in China by intervening in Tibet.  The Tibetans had resisted Chinese efforts to subject and assimilate them in the 1950s.  The CIA, always alert for chances to make trouble inside the Communist heartland, began working with Tibetan rebels in 1957.  At the peak of this ‘war for the roof of the world,’ the CIA was supporting an army of fourteen thousand men.  Ultimately and inevitably, their rebellion was crushed by overwhelming Chinese power.  Tens of thousands were killed.  The Dalai Lama later observed that Americans’ help for his cause had been ‘a reflection of their anti-Communist policies, rather than a genuine support for the re-establishment of Tibetan independence.’  Allen said the operation was worthwhile because it baited the Chinese into brutal repression and therefore produced ‘propaganda value.’

Pg. 285:  US involvement in Cuba:  In 1898 President William McKinley sent American troops to Cuba to help rebels overthrow Spanish rule.  They succeeded.  Immediately afterward, the US Congress voted to renege on its pledge, enshrined in law as the Teller Amendment, to withdraw the troops after victory and respect Cuban independence.  McKinley named an American, military governor.  Later the US granted Cuba limited self-rule but landed troops whenever American interests seemed threatened.  That happened in 1906, 1912, and 1917—when Secretary of State Robert Lansing dispatched an occupation force at the suggestion of his nephew John Foster Dulles whose Sullivan & Cromwell clients wished to ensure the continuance in power of a regime that respected their investments.  For much of the twentieth century Cuba remained a quasi-colony of the US, until the last of its pliant dictators, Batista, was ousted.

Pg. 290:  Che Guevara had been in Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed the CIA coup against Arbenz.  Later he told Castro why it succeeded.  He said Arbenz had foolishly tolerated an open society, which the CIA penetrated and subverted and also preserved the existing army, which the CIA turned into its instrument.  Upon taking power, Castro cracked down on dissent and purged the army.  On May 13, 1960 Eisenhower told the Special Group he wanted the Cuban leader ‘sawed off.’  On August 18, 1960, as the plot to kill Castro was unfolding, Eisenhower decreed his second death sentence against Lumumba in the Congo.  After Kennedy won the presidential election in November, Eisenhower might have frozen the anti-Castro operation, or at least asked Allen to test Kennedy’s interest.  Instead he expanded it.  He approved a ‘change in concept’; rather than smuggle small teams of infiltrations into Cuba, the CIA would launch a full-scale invasion, perhaps with support from the US military.  Eisenhower’s national security adviser, Gordon Gray, suggested staging a phony Cuban attack on the American base at Guantanamo Bay to use as a pretext for war.  Kennedy was briefed on this on November 18^th.