By Jeeva
The USSR despite its flaws, if anything was considered world over as a force that could threaten the unholy interests of the rich and the ultra-rich. The ultra-rich elite of the 20th century was neither a restricted, national entity nor just a bunch of industrialists harmlessly running their business operations within their narrow spheres. In Iran, the British Petroleum company had been owning the majority of the country’s oil resources for decades. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company of USA had been owning the lion’s share of agricultural land to cultivate and market fruit and fruit-based products for a long time. In Congo, Belgian corporations had colonized a large proportion of the second largest country in Africa to exploit the country’s agricultural as well as mineral wealth.
In all these three countries, the exploitation of the local resources had led to the impoverishment of the local nationals and subsequently, the accumulation of tremendous profits for the corporations running them from abroad, mostly from Europe and the US.Among these three countries, the same story had lasted for decades in some, for centuries in another. Only by the middle of the twentieth century, inspired by the example of the USSR, the only working class-led state in the world whose ideology, Communism gave millions of toiling masses hope and encouragement to fight against these capitalist, foreign powers, every one of these enslaved nations started finding its voice. Each country began to produce a leader who was either fully Marxist or left-of centre and each of these leaders by then had learnt to woo the people and win popularity not through guns or bayonets, but through much softer, more civilized and the only universally accepted means of acquiringpolitical power- the ballot.
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The CIA was formed in 1947 directly as part of the National Security Act under the Truman administration to channel, collect and analyse all intelligence information emanating from various sourcesunder one managing entity. The immediate need to build an organization with vast resourcesand to keep itcompletely outside the purview of the (democratically elected) Congress originated out of the establishment’s fear and obsession to counter and contain the spread of Communism all over the world post 1945.
Allen Dulles, one of the lawyers representing a law firm named Sullivan and Cromwell was a well-connected spy who fought in the Second World War for the U.S. His brother John Foster Dulles was another lawyerwho would go onto become theSecretary of State under future President Eisenhower. In many ways, the idea of the CIA was pretty much the brainchild of people similar to the Dulles brothers whose interests were closely aligned to those represented by the law firm they were part of. Sullivan and Cromwell had a wide range of clients, most of them wealthy corporations managing businesses in all over the First and the Third World.
Allen Dulles during his campaign against the Axis powers in the early 1940s was stationed in Switzerland. With the help of a lot of sources and connections, he was able to even reach out to a coterie located within the enemy’s camp as well. Allen Dulles despite being witness to the rapacity of American corporations which were able to ward off the Great Depression of 1929 and its consequences with tons and tons of hoarded money and plenty of illegal business operations, was a strong anti-New Dealer, vehemently opposed to left-of-centre policies of the then President F.D. Roosevelt. Dulles very similar to his clients preserved strong anti-poor and anti-Welfarist views and suspected any behaviour that leaned towards these tendencies as Soviet-inspired and dangerously anti-American.
Dulles’s ability to reach out to Nazi ministers and top officials during the fag end of the war was trained towards a very peculiar aim- to secure a deal with Nazi Germany for the Allies and divert the entire war against the Soviet Union. This frivolous aim was also shared by many American corporations which didn’t want to antagonize an already business-friendly Hitler regime. Their paramount ambition was to mobilize and consolidate all the technological and military resources of the Allies towards obliterating their class enemy- the one and only anti-capitalist Soviet Union.
Dulles engaged in a lot of efforts to somehow strike a deal with the Nazis but FDR being one of the finest Presidents America ever had in terms of concern for the masses and basic moral scruple,managed to successfully ward off pro-Nazi tendencies within his administration. But even after Hitler’s death and the surrender of the Axis powers, Dulles didn’t want to disappoint his clientele. His ideas were directed towards making use of Nazi officials whose experience and expertise he assumed could be used against the Soviets during the soon-to-begin Cold War.
Dulles made use of his connections in the American establishment especially the judiciary to weaken the case of the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials against the Nazis. A good number of Nazi officials and partymen who were directly involved in the massacres and extermination of millions of Jews were helped by Dulles and his swash-buckling spies to escape arrests, confinement and harsh punitive sentences. Dulles also played a good role in the retention of the pro-Nazi bureaucracy in the new government of the Federal Republic even after the fall of the Third Reich in West Germany in direct contrast to Soviet-dominated East Germany where almost the entire old bureaucracy was purged by the new government of the GDR.
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In Guatemala, the rise of a new leader Jacobo Arbenz in 1951 threatens the interests of various American corporations some of which were directly controlling the strings of the previous government to their own benefit all these years. Dulles serving the CIA as its Deputy Director springs to their rescue collecting cash from various corporations to launch covert operations against the new democratically elected regime which has decided to partially nationalize land through a country-wide land reform.
Within months, a military coup is arrangedand Arbenz is shown the door. The whole country plunges into chaos and Dulles establishes himself as the go-to man whenever American corporations find themselves in trouble overseas.
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A similar scenario arises in Iran where a democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh announces the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in 1951. Within a couple of years, Iran’s oil is boycotted by its buyers under threat from the United Kingdom and of course the United States.The whole economy of Iran is brought to ruin, Allen Dulles obtains a funding of $1 million to facilitate the rise of anti-Mossadegh elements in the country, law and order problems are created and soon the political alliance led by Mossadegh is somehow broken. Soon the Shah of Iran issues orders to dismiss the government and Mossadegh is imprisoned until his death in 1967.
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The rise of a democratically elected Patrice Lumumba in 1960 directly threatens Belgian corporate interests in Congo. Belgium appeals the US to intervene labelling Lumumba ‘a Communist’ which he clearly was not. Millions of dollars arechannelled by CIA’s men to fund Katanga secessionists in Congo who successfully depose the charismatic, popular leader. Dulles makes sure that enough of his personnel are present in the African country to oversee the handover of the deposed President to the secessionists. Lumumba dies a terrible death engineered through hours and hours of physical blows at the hands of the CIA-backed Mobutu’s men and numerous atrocities are committed upon Lumumba’s supporters in the next few weeks all of which amounts to great embarrassment for the newly elected American President John F Kennedy in 1961.
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JF Kennedy was not only a hardline democrat but someone who was sincerely committed to the cause of ending the Cold War. Even if he was staunchly anti-Soviet, he was someone who could understand and appreciate the reasons behind the terrible suspicions that lurked on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Kennedy’s genuine efforts to reach out to the USSR touched a chord with his Soviet counterpart Khrushchev too who in turn was willing to negotiate and forge a deal for nuclear détente with the US.
Kennedy’s efforts towards peaceful co-existence with the USSR didn’t go well with the American establishment, most of which dominated by people like the Dulles’ brothers was chomping at the bit to enter into a full-on nuclear confrontation with the Soviet bloc. The 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion launched by the CIA, fully designed and directed by Allen Dulles was one such attempt to force Kennedy’s hand to formally launch a military invasion against Cuba thereby inviting the Soviet Union into the conflict.
Dulles made sure that he sent only underperforming personnel and badly trained commandoes with the Cuban Mafia to attack Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. The conflict didn’t last long as Castro’s well-trained forces easily defeated those of the Mafia. Dulles was pretty sure that a defeat at the hands of Castro for the US shall make Kennedy lose face at the international level which would he assumed, definitely trigger him to approve a formal declaration of war against the tiny island. But Kennedy being Kennedy, the pacifist and the man who had the guts to put the nation before himself stood his ground and shocked not only Allen Dulles but also his Chiefs of Staff and every single American business tycoon who had lost much of their wealth in Cuba post the ascent of Castro in 1959.
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Almost the entire story narrated above is a ruthlessly condensed version of what I had read in my recent book, The Devil’s Chessboard written by American scholar David Talbot. The bookboasts of a beautifully woven narrative pieced together from sources in American journalist circles, records from CIA and the government archives and also from the voices of the people who lived, met, saw and dined with Dulles and various other stars inside and outside the American establishment.
The last hundred pages or so focus on how the CIA refusing from the first to come under direct Congress supervision and managing to run a parallel government with a mind of its own, manages to even dislodge the head of the real American government by hatching a conspiracy of the most intricate kind. Having played a key role in killingJFKin 1962, the CIA manages even to receive a clean chit from the government-appointed Warren Commission to inquire into the most earth-shattering assassination of the century by having apparently the very mastermind behind the plot according to Talbot, Allen Dulles as one of the Commission’s chief investigators.
Talbot describes in painstaking detail how further inquiries into the Kennedy assassination subject keeps throwing hints that point to Allen Dulles time and again and how after a point even Harry Truman, the man who officially fathered the CIA in 1947 appears to regret his decisionterribly to form it, to the extent of even admitting it openly in one of his articles for the American press.