"The Brothers"

[fiefoe]

No suspense here, Stephen Kinzer's dual biography of the brothers who were at the epicenter of the Cold War is a straight-up hate-read.

• an extraordinary family: his brother, Allen Dulles, who served in a great many administrations, stretching back, I believe, to President Hoover, all the way to this one; John Foster Dulles, who at the age of 19 was, rather strangely, the secretary to the Chinese delegation to The Hague, and who served nearly every Presidential administration from that time forward to his death in 1959; their uncle, who was secretary of state, Mr. Lansing; their grandfather, who was secretary of state, Mr. Foster.
• Dedicated by the president of the United States while the world watched, now shunted into a little-used room opposite baggage claim, this bust reflects what history has done to the Dulles brothers.
• Only long after the Dulles brothers died did the full consequences of their actions become clear. They may have believed that the countries in which they intervened would quickly become stable, prosperous, and free. More often, the opposite happened. Some of the countries they targeted have never recovered. Nor has the world.
• One of the most cosmopolitan young American women of her generation, Edith Foster, met Allen Macy Dulles in 1881, when both were touring Paris. Edith, just eighteen, was living a Gilded Age fairy tale.
• Foster: at five he displayed a “lovely devotional spirit”; and he celebrated turning seven by memorizing seven psalms.
• John Watson Foster’s brief term as secretary of state for a singular accomplishment. 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.
• “Grandfather Foster”: invent a new profession: broker for corporations seeking favors in Washington and chances to expand abroad. It was an idea that fit the era.
• Allie became a published author at the age of eight. His older brother was unimpressed, sniffing that Allie’s anticolonial ideas were “wrong-headed and infantile.” <> That view may have been correct, but in pronouncing it, Foster showed a judgmental harshness that never softened. From early childhood he was solemn, disciplined, and reserved, but also sharply self-righteous.
• the third, Eleanor: earned a doctorate from Harvard, traveled extensively in Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, taught economics, helped run the Social Security system, attended the Bretton Woods conference that reorganized the world economy after World War II, held a variety of diplomatic posts, and wrote a dozen books
• Eleanor on Foster: The feeling was more than returned. It was an exhilarating experience until the moment when he discovered from his adored older partner that male relationships can also have their physical side. To a young man who had, so far, only embarrassedly bussed a girl at a party, it was a devastating and shocking revelation of what he knew from his Bible to be a shame and a sin.
• By the time he returned to Princeton, Foster had decided he would not become a preacher, as those closest to him had expected, but a “Christian lawyer.” This “nearly broke my mother’s heart,” he later confessed.
• * Sullivan & Cromwell achieved a unique triumph in global politics. Through a masterful lobbying campaign, its endlessly resourceful managing partner, William Nelson Cromwell, persuaded the United States Congress to reverse its decision to build a canal across Nicaragua and to pay his French clients $40 million for their land in Panama instead. Then he helped engineer a revolution that pulled the province of Panama away from Colombia and established it as an independent country, led by a clique willing to show its gratitude by allowing construction of a canal on terms favorable to the United States... Sullivan & Cromwell thrived at the point where Washington politics intersected with global business. John Foster Dulles worked at this intersection for nearly forty years.
• * Kim is about the glory of empire and the nasty things that must sometimes be done in secret to defend it. In an introduction to a later edition, the critic and activist Edward Said called it “a master work of imperialism.” To Allie it was beyond inspirational. He never parted with his copy. It was on his bedside table when he died.
• Few in Washington had ever paid much attention to collecting intelligence about other countries, either because they believed the United States did not need it or because of the notion that, as a previous secretary of war, Henry Stimson, memorably put it, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
• WW I: he war years gave Allie his first chance to plunge into the netherworld where he would spend much of his life. Though not yet twenty-five, he became a genuine spymaster, spending his days and nights with a polyglot carousel of Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Albanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Czech, Bulgarian, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Russian plotters.
• * With his mind focused on the forthcoming weekend, Allie brushed him off. Years afterward he learned that the caller was Lenin, and that the reason Lenin never called back was that the next day he boarded his sealed train to St. Petersburg and set off to change the course of history. <> “Here the first chance—if in fact it was a chance—to start talking to the Communist leaders was lost,” Allie later admitted.
• * Sullivan & Cromwell clients, owners of sugar mills, railways, and mines who had $170 million...invested in Cuba. They turned to the firm for protection... By his own account he “suggested that the Navy Department send two fast destroyers—one for the northern coast and one for the southern coast of the portion of Cuba controlled by revolutionaries.” Lansing agreed, and the warships were dispatched that afternoon. Marines landed and spread into the countryside to repress protests, beginning what would be a five-year occupation.
• Wilson argued ceaselessly for the principle of self-determination. He defined the term as meaning that “national aspirations must be respected,” that no people should be “selfishly exploited,” and that all must be “dominated and governed only by their own consent.” His application of this principle, however, was highly selective. He believed that self-determination was the right of people who lived in the collapsing Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, but not those who lived in overseas colonies.
• The Paris conference: Allie wrote home that the experience was “one of thrilling interest and opportunity” that gave him “a rare chance to get a glimpse into world politics.” For Foster it was that and more: a decisive push toward wealth and power.
• A strong strain of paternalism also shaped Wilson’s worldview. He was a product of Southern gentility, admired the Ku Klux Klan, and considered segregation “not humiliating but a benefit.” As president he ordered both the federal bureaucracy and the Washington transit system segregated. He hosted the premiere of the film The Birth of a Nation at the White House
• * Foster also took a ghostwriting assignment from his mentor Bernard Baruch, who like many of Wilson’s friends and admirers was disturbed by the runaway success of a 1919 book attacking the Versailles treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes. The book warned that the treaty’s reparations section, which Foster had drafted and Baruch presented as his own, exposed Europe to “the menace of inflationism.” Baruch resolved to reply. His book, ponderously titled The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty,
• Life with Clover was increasingly complicated. At one point Allen confronted her with an exorbitant bill from Cartier’s, and she calmly explained that she had learned of his relationship with another woman and had bought herself an emerald necklace as “compensation.” She then announced that she intended to buy a new piece of jewelry each time she discovered one of his affairs.
• He was a good tennis player and he knew when to lose. If he was playing with a tycoon’s wife, he made certain they would win. But if the tycoon himself was in the opposite court, he’d keep the game ding-donging along until practically the final volley, when Allen would fumble and flub. That way the tycoon felt marvelous, having won a hard-fought game, and his wife didn’t feel too bad either—after all, it wasn’t her fault they’d lost—and both felt benevolent toward Allen. Such a good loser he was, too.”
• He made no effort to hide the relationship, raving freely not just to friends but to his wife and children about his wonderful new “tennis partner.” Unapologetic adultery had become an established aspect of his character. It remained so all his life.
• Avery (Foster's son): As Cardinal Dulles, one of his last public pronouncements was a statement criticizing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for being too “extreme” in seeking to expel accused pedophiles from the priesthood.
• on Allen’s fortieth birthday—April 7, 1933—he was riding a train to Berlin on his way to meet Adolf Hitler... Hitler, well briefed on his guests’ role in global finance, replied that he was simply imposing order “to protect the millions in foreign capital that are invested in Germany.”
• Foster had picked up the concept of “dynamic” forces in eternal conflict with “static” ones. Bergson used this dichotomy as a way to understand religion and morality, but Foster applied it to global politics, which he interpreted as “the cyclical struggle between the dynamic and the static forces of the world.” This was a way of placing nations into neat groups, which appealed to his ordered mind. During the 1930s he began describing France and Britain as “static” societies, interested only in defending what they had, and predicting that the future would be shaped by three newly creative and “dynamic” powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan.
• * Foster had helped design the Dawes Plan of 1924, which restructured Germany’s reparation payments in ways that opened up huge new markets for American banks,.. This made him the preeminent salesman of German bonds in the United States, probably the world. He sharply rejected critics who argued that American banks should invest more inside the United States,.. Foster made much money building and advising cartels
• The columnist Drew Pearson gleefully listed the German clients of Sullivan & Cromwell who had contributed money to the Nazis, and described Foster as chief agent for “the banking circles that rescued Adolf Hitler from the financial depths and set up his Nazi party as a going concern.”
• * Germany effectively defaulted on its debts to American investors. Foster represented the investors in unsuccessful appeals to Germany, many of them addressed to his old friend Schacht. Clients who had followed Sullivan & Cromwell’s advice to buy German bonds lost fortunes. That advice, according to one study, “cost Americans a billion dollars because Schacht seduced Dulles into supporting Germany for far too long.” <> Foster never took responsibility for this fiasco
• “Who is in favor of our closing down our operation in Germany?” All raised their hands.
  “Then that is decided,” he said. “The vote is unanimous.”
  By some accounts, Foster wept after pronouncing those words. Later he backdated the announcement by a year, to make it appear that the firm had closed its German offices in 1934 rather than 1935.
• 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... At its core was the reassuring belief that whatever benefited American business would ultimately benefit everyone.
• Promoters of “internationalism” were eager above all to preserve stability. Like many of them, Foster saw authoritarian leaders like Hitler as valuable allies in the fight against Bolshevism. Regimes that maintained order and disciplined themselves economically, he believed, were always better than those that pandered to groups impatient for social change.
• One of the most striking aspects of the Dulles brothers’ careers in the period between the world wars was the ease with which they moved between service to government and to private clients. Sometimes they served both at once. In a later age, their conflicts of interest would have been considered not just unethical but illegal. Yet no one asked them for financial disclosures, and few eyebrows were raised when they found ways to profit from their diplomatic assignments.
• * Second was an even wider-ranging effort to debrief everyone in New York, especially merchant seamen and newly arrived immigrants, who could give information—the more precise, the better—about European cities, ports, roads, rail lines, airports, factories, and military bases. Allen’s agents also swarmed over docks, sailors’ registry offices, and holding pens for “enemy aliens,” offering money for objects that immigrants might have considered worthless but that could be valuable to infiltrators. They bought old suits, neckties, overcoats, and shoes that could help agents blend in, and also identity cards, ration books, and other documents for forgers to use as models.
• Allen had chosen his suite at Rockefeller Center in part because it adjoined one where another secret operation was under way, run by the legendary Sir William Stephenson, later revealed to be the spymaster Churchill called “Intrepid” and supposedly a model for Commander Fleming’s fictional agent 007.
• The upper reaches of the OSS comprised what Drew Pearson called “one of the fanciest groups of dilettante diplomats, Wall Street bankers, and amateur detectives ever seen in Washington.” Many from this group would go on to help shape the United States in the second half of the twentieth century:
• various Italian exile and partisan groups, which sent him a stream of emissaries seeking American support for various plots. The emissaries ranged from a future prime minister, Ferruccio Parri, to a daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini, Countess Wally Toscanini Castelbarco, whom Allen promptly seduced.
• chief of the new OSS station in Berlin: His first two projects were oddly contradictory: gathering evidence to be used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and integrating the legendary Nazi spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and his far-flung espionage network into the OSS.
• * One of the most productive relationships Foster developed in the 1940s was with the ambitious journalistic entrepreneur Henry Luce, ... Fortune—by one estimate “at least a third and perhaps considerably more of the total literate adult population in the country.”... Foster had much in common with Luce. Both were internationalist, pro-business Republicans shaped by Calvinist principles and the missionary tradition; Luce’s parents were missionaries, and he was born in China. Both believed Providence had ordained for the United States a unique role in the world. Both abhorred all forms of socialism, and saw in Moscow a godless tyranny dedicated to destroying the West... “Both had the good fortune of discovering that their religion and their politics were complementary.… Both Presbyterians were men of great mental vigor who sunk to narrowest parochialism in the area where the molten materials of their religion, patriotism, and politics fused into one cold and flinty mass. Such ferociously aggressive men were uncomfortable with ideological competition.…
• For much of his life, Foster had believed that the root of conflict and global instability was the failure of nations to cooperate. After the war he abandoned this view. In his new theology, threats to peace came not from the recklessness of nations, but the recklessness of one nation: the Soviet Union. .. At least as important as Foster’s immersion in Problems of Leninism was what he called the “very great transformation” in Soviet behavior.
• Several times he clashed dramatically with Andrei Vishinsky, the fire-breathing Soviet deputy foreign minister, who had been chief prosecutor at Stalin’s grotesque Great Purge trials. He would later write that Vishinsky’s arrogant intransigence was for him “a streak of lightning that suddenly illuminated a dark and stormy scene. We saw as never before the magnitude of the task of saving Europe for Western civilization.” <> Vishinsky combined a confrontational style with an absolute insistence on squeezing every bit of advantage for his side,
• * “The objections were overruled, and CIA became a unique organization among Western intelligence services, which uniformly keep their secret operations separate from their overall intelligence activities.”
• the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg took note. “Even if the spy Allen Dulles should arrive in Heaven through someone’s absentmindedness,” Ehrenburg wrote in Pravda, “he would begin to blow up the clouds, mine the stars, and slaughter the angels.”
• Nearly every man he sent into action was quickly discovered, and many were executed—hundreds in Europe, thousands in Asia. These losses did not disturb him.
  “At least we’re getting experience for the next war,” he reasoned.
  Not until more than a decade had passed did one reason for this epic failure become clear. The senior British intelligence officer assigned as liaison to the CIA, Kim Philby, was a double agent working for the Soviets.
• “All were gregarious, intrigued by possibilities, liked to do things, had three bright ideas a day, shared the optimism of stock market plungers, and were convinced that every problem had its handle and that the CIA could find a way to reach it,” the intelligence historian Thomas Powers has written. “They also tended to be white Anglo-Saxon patricians from old families with old money, at least at the beginning, and they somehow inherited traditional British attitudes toward the colored races of the world—not the pukka sahib arrogance of the Indian Raj, but the mixed fascination and condescension of men like T. E. Lawrence, who were enthusiastic partisans of the alien cultures into which they dipped for a time and rarely doubted their ability to help, until it was too late.”
• * They yearned to fight again, and either found or helped create an enemy so terrifying that fighting became essential. On the outcome of this shadowy war, they convinced themselves, hung the fate of the United States, civilization, and humanity itself.
• * We were all hysterical at the time,” Harry Rositzke wrote decades later... The specter of a powerful Russia was remote from the reality of a country weakened by war, with a shattered economy, an overtaxed civilian and military bureaucracy, and large areas of civil unrest. The illusory image was at least partly due to a failure of intelligence.… Had there been even the rudiments of an American intelligence effort in the Soviet Union during the war, or had we concentrated on intelligence operations against Russia and Eastern Europe in the postwar lull, the course of the Cold War might have been different. It was our almost total ignorance of what was going on in the “denied area” behind the Iron Curtain that helped create the false image of a super-powerful Soviet Union.
• The Washington Post published an editorial asserting that some CIA operations seemed “incompatible with democracy,” but it did not mention the fact that the agency’s deputy director was hoping for a promotion.
• * Eisenhower would also have seen covert action as humanitarian. It was a way to fight high-stakes battles at low cost. Never foreseeing the long-term effects these operations might have, he imagined them as almost bloodless.
• * This destiny reached apotheosis in the Dulles brothers. They were raised in a parsonage and taught from childhood that the world is an eternal battleground between righteousness and evil. Their father was a master of apologetics, the discipline of explaining and defending religious belief. They assimilated what the sociologist Max Weber described as two fundamental Calvinist tenets: that Christians are “weapons in the hands of God and executors of His providential will” and that “God’s glory demanded that the reprobate be compelled to submit to the law of the Church.” <> The second force that shaped the brothers was American history. They could only have been awed by its upward arc... In their belief that the United States knew what was best for the world, as in their missionary Christianity, they reflected dominant strains in the society that produced them. <> As adults, Foster and Allen were shaped by a third force: decades of work defending the interests of America’s biggest multinational corporations.
• The Dulles brothers, however, did. 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 United States waged secretly during the 1950s.
• Allen knew that the shah had not forthrightly described what was happening there. Far from embodying what he called “democratic values common to our two countries,” the shah had become the chief enemy of Iran’s democratic movement. Just weeks before he flew to New York, a throng of protesters, angered by his attempt to pack parliament by stealing an election,
• Mossadegh emerged from an ancient culture enveloped in fatalism, poetry, and a belief that most problems will never be solved because injustice rules the lives of men... They believed that poor countries could progress only by welcoming outsiders; he hated what foreign power had done to Iran.
• * mistrust turned to enmity when he helped kill the OCI contract. It sharpened further when he nationalized his country’s oil industry. He embodied one of their nightmares: a populist rabble-rouser who stirs the masses by rejecting the way the world is run. <> This made Mossadegh the first monster the Dulles brothers set out to destroy.
• Foster had identified an emerging enemy of freedom in the world: neutralism. He defined it as the “immoral and shortsighted” belief that countries could hold themselves apart from the Cold War confrontation. This put him at odds with emerging statesmen like Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, who wanted his country “to avoid entanglement in power politics and not to join any group of powers as against any other group,” and the new Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser
• Allan: A man that accessible, that open and gregarious, could hardly be a part of a world of invisible men with false identities who worked in the darkness. Rather, he seemed a thoughtful, fair-minded, humane public servant who seemed to offer reassurance that whatever things his men were doing, they were the kind of things that everyone at the party would approve of. He was not only the head of the closed society, he was its ambassador to the open one.
• propel the United States to the extreme of overthrowing him. That became possible only when several other factors converged. <> First was the imperative of scoring a public “win,” somewhere or other, in the global struggle against Communism... Striking against Mossadegh was also tempting because of the political risk of not doing so. Senator Joseph McCarthy and other anti-Communist zealots in Congress were denouncing diplomats they blamed for the “loss” of China... The final factor in this equation was pressure from Britain.
• Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s last hope was to reach across the Atlantic for help. He invited President Truman to “gallop together” with him against Mossadegh. Truman refused, for two reasons. First, he did not believe the CIA should overthrow governments, and second, he was an anticolonialist who had no sympathy for what he called the “block headed British.”... That cleavage disappeared when Eisenhower replaced Truman in the White House.
• The operation in Burma was an early example of how closely the two brothers collaborated—and of how often their projects produced unintended consequences. Eager to destabilize the Communist regime in China, they created a guerrilla force of Chinese Nationalists in northern Burma, drawn from remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated army. Foster’s role was to provide diplomatic cover, which he did by denying repeatedly that the United States was connected to the insurgency. He even kept the operation secret from his diplomats in the region. By the end of 1953, however, it became clear that the CIA was the outside force dropping arms to the insurgents and seeking to provoke war on a volatile border. This led to a burst of patriotic outrage in Burma
• “Moscow’s involvement in Iran was negligible,” the historian Richard Immerman later concluded, “but [Foster] Dulles could not distinguish between indigenous nationalism and imported communism.”
• 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... One prisoner who participated, the future New England gang leader James “Whitey” Bulger, later wrote that the experiments were “nightmarish” and “would plunge me into the depths of insanity.”
• Daniele Ganser reported that in eight of the fifteen countries where the CIA shaped “stay-behind” armies—Italy, Turkey, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Sweden—“links to terrorism have been either confirmed or claimed.”: In order to guarantee a solid anti-Communist ideology of its recruits, the CIA and MI-6 generally relied on men of the conservative political Right. At times, former Nazis and right-wing terrorists were also recruited … Can it be that the United States itself, potentially in alliance with Great Britain and other NATO members, should be on the list of states sponsoring terrorism
• It was the premiere of the year’s most poetic film, Shane, starring Alan Ladd as a brooding, noble gunman in the old West. His character personified the way the Dulles brothers perceived America’s role in the world. <> Shane unfolds in a frontier valley where thugs are threatening peaceable people. One good man with a gun appears. Nobody has invited him, but decent folk understand that he has come to free them. He kills the thugs, and with that violent act brings peace to the valley. His service complete, he rides away. All are grateful.
• She accepted and began commuting to Berlin. After her first trip, she returned to a rude shock: her brother wanted to fire her. They had drifted apart, and he did not appreciate her habit of lecturing him.
• Neither Foster nor Allen ever convened subordinates or anyone else to discuss whether overthrowing Mossadegh was a good idea. They never considered alternatives. Instead they acted on an unspoken consensus: Mossadegh was in rebellion against the West; his rebellion exposed Iran to Soviet influence; therefore he must be deposed. <> Foster avoided debate at the State Department through the simple expedient of not informing either of its Iran specialists that a plot was under way. Allen had to do a bit more.
• It is a marvelous twist of history: President Theodore Roosevelt helped usher the United States into the “regime change” era, and half a century later his grandson followed him into the business of deposing governments. <> Roosevelt crossed into Iran from Iraq on July 19, 1953
• This first attempted CIA coup was worse than a failure. Not only did Mossadegh survive, but the shah, America’s best Iranian friend, had scurried into exile. <> Roosevelt might have quit and returned home in defeat. He still, however, had a key advantage. Mossadegh was a trusting soul, unwise to the ways of the covert world, and never imagined that a CIA officer was in Iran directing the rebellion; he presumed that the shah had been behind it, and that with the shah gone the danger was past. He relaxed security restrictions and released prisoners.
• In the early 1950s, Allen and his brother began to focus on Guatemala as something more than a banana land and a producer of bright-colored handicrafts. In their Cold War cosmology, it became the place where Moscow’s global conspiracy reached closest to American shores, led by a Kremlin puppet masquerading as a nationalist. Drawn to Guatemala by their work for United Fruit, they became arbiters of its fate. <> “Some paradox of our nature,” the essayist Lionel Trilling has observed, “leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”
• * Stalin had been dead for eight months, and the interim Soviet leader, Georgi Malenkov, was sending out peace feelers. Churchill and Laniel proposed another summit to which Malenkov would be invited. Foster was adamantly opposed and blocked the idea. <> “This fellow preaches like a Methodist minister,” Churchill complained privately. “His bloody text is always the same: that nothing but evil can come out of a meeting with Malenkov. Dulles is a terrible handicap. Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.”
• one historian has written. “US officials believed that if they accepted a Soviet proposal, they would add respectability to the Soviet leadership and enhance Moscow’s prestige. In their view, consenting to a Soviet initiative was tantamount to receiving a propaganda defeat before world opinion.… The objective became out-maneuvering the opponent in the battle for public opinion; positions were put forward more to win public acclaim than to pave the way for compromise at the bargaining table.”
• A team that he assembled, led by James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and including Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid photography, shaped what became a large-scale operation to spy on Communist countries by taking photographs from aircraft flying far above their territories. It would produce valuable intelligence, but would also lead to one of the great foreign policy debacles of the Eisenhower era.
• * The Arbenz government expropriated nearly four hundred thousand acres of fallow land owned by United Fruit and offered to pay in compensation what United Fruit had declared the land to be worth for tax purposes: $1,185,115.70. In reply, the State Department—not the company—scornfully demanded more than ten times that.
• One of the oddest aspects of the Dulles brothers’ approach to Latin America was that as they assaulted the leaders of Guatemala and Costa Rica, they happily accepted a president of Bolivia who was in some ways more radical than either one...  A State Department spokesman justified American aid to Bolivia with the odd explanation that the Paz government was “Marxist rather than Communist.”
• * Arbenz may have believed it was out of practice or no longer in that business. If so, he miscalculated. Like Mossadegh, he failed to grasp the intensity of the Cold War fears that had come to envelop Washington. He saw his reform program as no more radical than the New Deal—without realizing that many in the new Republican elite, including Foster, considered the New Deal to have been an abomination... Mossadegh and Arbenz rejected this premise. Their crackdowns on corporate power led Foster and Allen to presume that they were serving Soviet ends. Two reasons for striking at them—defending corporate power and resisting Communism—blended into one.
• The Caracas resolution was a masterpiece of diplomatic legerdemain. Toriello later marveled at its ingenuity. <> “Asking other American republics to take joint action against Guatemala in any way would appear to be what it really was: interference in the internal affairs of a member nation in clear violation of the basic principles of the inter-American system,” he wrote. “Happily for the State Department, Mr. Dulles’s talent, so successfully proven in various diplomatic triumphs in Europe and Asia, managed to square the circle with a clever solution: in order not to be accused of intervening, let us say that there has been a foreign intervention in an American nation and that we are coming to its aid. Let us call the hateful nationalist-democratic movement in Guatemala ‘communist intervention’ and, claiming that we are moved by the great democratic tradition of the United States and the need to save ‘Christian civilization,’ liberate that country from this foreign aggression.”
• This broadside, which was reprinted the following morning in Guatemalan newspapers, had a profound impact. Ordinary people who had until then admired Arbenz heard for the first time that he was in fact their enemy. Most important, the warning came from their pastors, who many considered veritable messengers of God. It had a deep, transformational effect on Guatemala’s collective psyche.
• All of the leading candidates to succeed him were more conservative than he was, low-level campaigning had already begun, and there was every indication that the election would be held as scheduled. Foster, Allen, and their boss in the White House, however, were in no mood to wait patiently for a couple of years while events took their course in Guatemala.
• Foster launched his part of the campaign with a speech to the Overseas Press Club in New York on March 29, 1954. His central challenge was to explain to Americans why they must resist Ho. The answer was what he called the “domino theory.”
• Allen pursued his interest in propaganda and mass psychology... He funneled money to supposedly independent groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the National Student Association, and to cultural figures—sometimes without their knowledge—including Dwight Macdonald, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, James Michener, and Mary McCarthy... After Europeans began citing the absence of African American actors in Hollywood films as evidence of racism in the United States, he assigned an officer to visit producers and urge them to hire more. Perhaps his most imaginative media operation was taking control of the animated film version of George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian classic Animal Farm... he arranged for the film version to end quite differently. Only the pigs are corrupt, and ultimately patriotic rebels overthrow them. Orwell’s widow was disgusted,
• Part of the reason Allen was able to cultivate an image of success was that he managed to keep his failures quiet. The most glaring of them was his inability to foment upheaval inside the Soviet Union, but there were others. One was his effort to seize control of the oil-rich Buraimi Oasis on the Persian Gulf.
• * when Dulles came in, Zhou Enlai moved towards him, obviously to shake his hand. A number of photographers were around, and Dulles quite brusquely turned his back.… This deeply wounded Zhou, and over the years, even up to now, Zhou recounts this incident to visitors, and it very deeply, I think, affected his attitude.
• Had Foster accepted the Geneva accord and persuaded Eisenhower to do so, the United States could have avoided involvement in Vietnam. Instead he resisted it, did not consider the United States bound by its provisions, and ultimately acted to subvert it.
• * They bribed soothsayers to predict doom in the north, persuaded priests to tell their parishioners that “the Virgin Mary has fled to the south,” and distributed leaflets suggesting that Ho’s regime was plotting anti-Catholic pogroms, had invited Chinese troops into the country who were raping Vietnamese women, and expected an American nuclear attack. Tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, responded to this campaign.
• The face he chose belonged to a young man named Tom Dooley, a handsome young Notre Dame graduate who had become a doctor, enlisted in the navy, and thrown himself into the noble mission of rescuing Christians from Ho. .. The Tom Dooley story was a masterstroke for Allen, Lansdale, and the CIA. It might have been tarnished when Dooley was forced out of the navy for homosexuality, but the facts were hushed up.
• Churchill agreed. After one of their meetings he remarked, “Foster Dulles is the only case I know of a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.”
• Bandung: On the day the conference opened, twin front-page headlines in the Observer, Indonesia’s only English-language newspaper, read “United States Refuses to Send Message to Asian-African Conference” and “Best Wishes for Asian-African Conference from Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
• “Suppression of alternatives, both on the general and particular level, led to a circularity in and reinforcement of existing policies,” the Pentagon Papers concluded years later. “There is little indication that U.S. policymakers, their thoughts dominated by the objective of containing the monolithic communist bloc, faced up to the costs of winning the Indochina war, even while direct U.S. intervention was being considered.”
• * As ballots were being cast, Lansdale advised Diem to announce that he had won 60 to 70 percent of the vote. This turned out to be one of the few times he could not bend Diem to his will. Diem insisted that his vote total be announced as 98 percent—and then decided on 98.2.


• “No systematic or serious examination of Vietnam’s importance to the United States was ever undertaken,” Leslie Gelb, the editor of the Pentagon Papers, wrote a quarter century later. “It was ritualistic anti-Communism and exaggerated power politics that got us into Vietnam. These were articles of faith and were not, therefore, ever seriously debated.”
• About East Asia, by contrast, they knew little. Blinded by their anger at “losing” China and robbed of expertise by the dismissal of the State Department’s “China Hands,” they never gave Ho the chance they gave Tito. Instead they drew closer to Diem, their anti-Ho.
• “Please don’t say you are going to withdraw the offer,” the Egyptian ambassador pleaded. Patting his jacket pocket, he added, “We have the Russian offer to finance the dam right here.”
  “Well then,” Foster replied curtly, “as you already have the money, you have no need of our support. The offer is withdrawn.”
  Nasser was outraged—“Americans, may you choke on your fury!”—and six days later, he lashed out against the West by nationalizing the Suez Canal, which was controlled by Britain and France. The British, desperate to hold their last major possession in the Middle East, decided to invade Egypt in the hope of deposing him... Eisenhower was furious, partly because he wished to see an end to European power in the Middle East in order to open the region to American influence. He began what turned out to be a successful effort to force the British, French, and Israelis to withdraw from Egypt. He also realized that the invasion had made Nasser a hero of epic proportions, and reluctantly told Foster and Allen that deposing him was no longer a realistic possibility.
• President Sukarno of Indonesia: If the hidden story of the Dulles brothers is the covert war they waged against six enemies, their anti-Sukarno operation is its most hidden episode.
• Indonesia and its dazzlingly charismatic leader, however, posed a challenge that was not simply strategic but also conceptual, cultural, even spiritual... Sukarno emerged from an opposite tradition, one that emphasizes harmony and conciliation, finds good and evil mixed everywhere, and abhors confrontation. What Foster and Allen took as Sukarno’s abandonment of the West was actually his attempt to make foreign policy according to principles that shape life in Indonesia
• Allen: conceived one of his most bizarre projects, a pornographic film featuring an actor made up to look like Sukarno... a bald head because Sukarno was supposedly sensitive about his baldness. Prints were discreetly sprinkled around East Asia, but they had no evident effect.
• * His film starred the war hero Audie Murphy as the American in Vietnam, now portrayed as a selfless defender of freedom rather than a deluded imperialist. Lansdale, who helped write the screenplay, praised it as “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair.” Greene was appalled. Just as it had done with Animal Farm a few years earlier, the CIA helped transform a thoughtful book about the perils of power into a simpleminded Cold War fable.
• instead of flying “sterile,” as CIA pilots were supposed to, he was carrying no fewer than thirty compromising documents. These included an identity card granting him access to Clark Air Base, a copy of secret orders assigning him to Archipelago, and a flight log documenting his past missions. He had bombed military bases, ships, warehouses, a bridge, and even, by accident, a church—inflicting heavy casualties in the most vivid atrocity of the war.
• The agency had not failed so utterly since its ill-fated effort to set off civil war in the Soviet Union a decade earlier. The largest covert operation the CIA had yet launched—if “covert” can describe a project embracing an army of thousands, assets in nearly a dozen countries, and everything from pornography to the Seventh Fleet—had collapsed.
• Sukarno... quickly moved from being a weak leader, forced to conciliate among rival factions, to a strongman who ruled by command... In their eagerness, they oversimplified the complex political landscape of a newly independent nation, embarked on a major operation without a clear goal, underestimated the army’s determination to prevent Indonesia from breaking apart, and misunderstood their clients, who despite receiving much weaponry did not want to fight.
• * The emergence of Nasser and his nationalist ideology in the mid-1950s, however, led Foster to shift his view. He considered Arab nationalism illegitimate and inherently anti-Western. Soviet leaders, sensing an opening, abandoned Israel and embraced the Arab cause. Foster, who had not previously been sympathetic to Zionism, jumped into the strategic vacuum and steered the United States steadily closer to Israel.
  This made Foster and Allen midwives of both relationships that framed America’s approach to the Middle East for the next half century: the one with Saudi Arabia and the one with Israel.
• Sukarno, who admitted that “when it comes to women I am weak,” received Pope’s wife and sister and could not resist their tears. He pardoned the pilot with a private message.. “We killed thousands of Communists,” Pope said, “even though half of them probably didn’t know what Communism meant.”
• Archipelago produced three winners: Sukarno, the Indonesian army, and the PKI. All believed they had won the right to more power. They fell into intensifying conflict, culminating with a failed PKI coup in 1965 and a staggeringly brutal response by the generals
• For his part, Sukarno never ceased lamenting the troubles he had with the United States. He saw them as fully unnecessary, the result of colossal misunderstandings. Poignantly, he accepted his share of blame... “But look here, Sukarno is a shouter. He is emotional. If he is angry, he shoots thunderbolts. But he thunders only at those he loves. I would adore to make up with the United States of America.… Oh, America, what is the matter with you? Why couldn’t you have been my friend?”
• * Jazz was a potent weapon in America’s Cold War arsenal, and “Satchmo” had become arguably the most beloved musician in the world... When the trumpeter dined with the secret agent on October 28, 1960, he was unwittingly breaking bread with a CIA officer under orders to kill one of Africa’s heroes.
• Foster's funeral: “Some fellow got up and read all of the Old Testament,” former secretary of state Dean Acheson groused over a drink later in the day. “Then somebody else, not to be outdone, read all of the New Testament. By that time I was so tired I could hardly bear it. The number of eulogies—you’d never believe it.… The greatest mistake I made was not to die in office.”
• * U-2: There was absolutely no deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been.” A couple of days later Khrushchev struck back. <> “I must tell you a secret,” he said with a smile at a press conference in Moscow. “When I made my first report, I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well.”
• Lumumba: After passing a rigorous examination, he won appointment as a postal clerk, one of the few civil service jobs available to natives. Later he became a beer salesman, which gave him the chance to crisscross the Congo and hone his talents as a persuasive speaker.
• In the course of barely more than a single dizzying day, Lumumba went from a prison cell in the Congo to an elegant conference hall in Brussels, from penal servitude to chief negotiator for his country’s independence. Before he sat down for the first negotiating session, a Belgian doctor rubbed salve into his wrists where manacles had cut his skin, and tended to scars from flogging that laced his back.
• Many listening on radio approached delirium. None had ever heard an African address colonial power in terms remotely like these, let alone in the presence of a reigning monarch. <> In one electrifying moment, a former postal clerk and beer salesman propelled himself to mythic status.
• Within a couple of days, all but a few hundred of the Congo’s twenty-five thousand Belgians were gone, including nearly every doctor, civil servant, and technician in the country. On July 10, claiming the need to protect civilian lives, Belgian commandos began parachuting into remote regions of the Congo. <> The first ten days of independence were an unmitigated disaster for Lumumba and his country.
• Neither Foster nor Allen knew or cared much about Africa. The State Department had no bureau of African affairs until 1957. Allen was even slower
• Patrice Lumumba’s assassination was an unpardonable, cowardly, and disgustingly brutal act. Belgium, Kasavubu and Mobutu, and Moise Tshombe bear the main responsibility for this atrocity. The United States, and possibly other Western powers as well, tacitly favored it and did nothing to stop it... Lumumba’s murder stunned the world and set off a wave of anti-Western passion in Africa and beyond.
• * Lumumba, it is now clear, had no long-term geopolitical strategy. He spent the two hundred days between his inauguration and his death frantically improvising, reacting to onrushing events. Khrushchev did the same. <> The first Soviet aid project in Africa was a shipment of snowplows for Guinea, where no flake of snow has ever fallen. Next was a cargo of wheat for the Congo’s “oppressed workers and peasants,” which could not be used since the Congo had no flour mill.
• Allen admitted that the flamboyant Bond bore “very little resemblance” to a real spy, yet to a certain degree both he and Kennedy conflated reality with the Bond novels. Bond’s triumphs strengthened their faith in covert action. It was a case of life imitating art imitating life, as when gangsters watch gangster movies for tips on how they should behave.
• For years Wisner had worked relentlessly on plans to liberate the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe. When his Hungarian operatives launched their uprising in 1956, he sent Allen a stream of cables demanding help. He even composed an “ultimatum” to the Soviets that he wanted Eisenhower to deliver. No one paid attention. The Soviets brutally crushed the Hungarian resistance. Wisner, not without reason, blamed himself. He felt betrayed by Allen and everyone in Washington, who, as he realized with acute pain, never intended their calls for “liberation” in Eastern Europe to be taken seriously.
• Ultimately and inevitably, their rebellion was crushed by overwhelming Chinese power. Tens of thousands were killed. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s principal leader, who fled the repression in 1959, later observed that Americans’ help for his cause had been “a reflection of their anti-Communist policies, rather than 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.”
• Allen’s decision to accept reappointment would decisively reshape his place in history. He had emerged from eight years as Eisenhower’s spymaster with a powerful reputation. His triumphs were widely rumored, his failures little known, and his lack of interest in managing the sprawling CIA apparent only to Washington insiders. To all appearances he was both a brilliantly successful intelligence officer and an honorable gentleman. Had he retired at this point, he might have basked in admiration for the rest of his life.
• * One of Castro’s closest comrades, the Argentine-born guerrilla Che Guevara, had been in Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed the 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. Castro agreed that a revolutionary regime in Cuba must avoid those mistakes. Upon taking power, he cracked down on dissent and purged the army.
• * The Eisenhower administration pressed the International League, one of professional baseball’s top minor leagues, to announce that it was pulling its baseball team, the Sugar Kings, out of Havana. Love of baseball is deeply ingrained in the Cuban psyche. Castro, an avid fan who had been known to suspend cabinet meetings so he could watch the Sugar Kings play, protested that this blow violated “all codes of sportsmanship.” He even offered to pay the team’s debts. It was to no avail. The Sugar Kings became the Jersey City Jerseys, who went bankrupt the next year. The Cuban people lost one of their strongest sentimental ties to the United States.
• This was the summer when Eisenhower did twice what no previous American president is known ever to have done: approve plans to assassinate a foreign leader... Eisenhower told the Special Group he wanted the Cuban leader “sawed off.” His second target, Lumumba, had not yet risen to power.
• Bissell had to conjure a way to strike at Castro. His idea was either brilliant or ridiculous: hire the Mafia. <> American gangsters had forged a rewarding partnership with Batista and lost everything when Castro swept to power. Bissell saw what he wanted: men angry enough at Castro to want him dead, and experienced enough to know how to kill him... six poison pills compounded by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the agency’s “health alteration committee.”
• Kennedy faced a no-win situation. He was young, inexperienced in world affairs, and new in office. During his campaign he had vowed to confront Castro. Many Americans wished him to do so. Now Allen—with Bissell always at his side—was giving him a plan... “We made it very clear to the President that to call off the operation would have resulted in a very unpleasant situation,” Allen later said.
• Kennedy had doubts about the invasion plan, and Bissell accommodated each of them... Historians have long wondered why Bissell allowed the operation to proceed despite these major changes, rather than telling Kennedy that they greatly reduced the chances for success... To cancel would have been equivalent to a forfeit... Another possible reason … was that Bissell assumed President Kennedy would not let it fail—would do, that is, whatever was necessary to make it succeed, even if that meant sending US military forces to the rescue.
• aggressive actions against Cuba.” That was the logical assumption; what else would the chief of a covert service be doing while his service launched its least covert operation ever? The truth was more prosaic. Allen was doing just what he seemed to be doing: delivering a bland speech while men he had helped send to war were dying on a beach not far away.
• the Bay of Pigs: This was the first time the CIA was fully unmasked seeking to depose the leader of a small country whose crime was defying the United States. It became a reviled symbol of imperialist intervention. A new wave of anti-Americanism began coursing around the world.
• the bust of John Foster Dulles at the airport that bears his name, and found that it had been relegated to a closed room near baggage claim. As my quest ended, I learned that a similar fate had befallen Glorious Victory. The Pushkin Museum
• A Senate report in the 1970s described Allen’s years running the CIA as “a lost opportunity.”
  “Jolly, gregarious, and extroverted in the extreme, Dulles disliked and avoided confrontations at every level,” the report concluded. “He failed to provide even minimal direction over the departmental intelligence components at a time when intelligence capabilities were undergoing dramatic changes.”
  Allen had the cold-bloodedness an intelligence director needs, but not enough intellectual rigor or curiosity. Carried away by his love of the cloak-and-dagger game, he lost sight of the limits to what covert action can achieve.
• * Allen imagined himself as a modern incarnation of Sir Francis Walsingham, the chief of Queen Elizabeth’s feared spy network in the sixteenth century, who promoted English power through deft combinations of intrigue and violence. The truth was more prosaic. Allen spent much time in a world of self-reinforcing fantasy. He created an image for himself and came to believe it.
• Social scientists have long used examples from the Cold War to illustrate the syndromes of groupthink, thought suppression, denial projection, structural blindness, and even mass hysteria. In 1960 the psychologist Charles Osgood wrote that the pull toward consistency “can plague big minds as well as little, in high places as well as low.” He called his first piece of evidence “Specimen 1: International Affairs.”
• Certain beliefs are so important for a society or group that they become part of how you prove your identity.… The truth is that our minds just aren’t set up to be changed by mere evidence.
• * Foster and Allen brought the United States into partnership with dictators in several parts of the world, and in some countries they intervened to replace democratic governments with tyrannies. Nonetheless they considered themselves paladins of liberty. By some standards, this leap of logic made them hypocrites. They justified it by applying a particular definition of freedom. It had little to do with civil rights or social welfare. Their view of freedom was above all economic: a country whose leaders respected private enterprise and welcomed multinational business was a free country.
• An orderly transfer of power in Guatemala would show that it was possible for a country’s voters to choose socialism and then freely return to traditional capitalism. This would undermine the Cold War model, which rested on the premise that socialist influence must be resisted because socialist gains are always irreversible. <> Foster and Allen could not allow history to prove them wrong, so they set out to change it.
• * Foster and Allen exemplified this national egoism. Empathy was beyond their emotional range. Sympathizing with the enormous complexities facing leaders of emerging nations would have required them to consider those leaders independent agents, rather than instruments of Soviet power. Their compulsive oversimplification of the world prevented them from seeing its rich diversity. In this, too, they were quintessentially American.