Our country’s cheerleaders are wedded to the notion of American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us. There is an implacable brutality to power that is familiar throughout the world and throughout history. And no matter where power rules, there is the same determination by those in high places to keep their activities hidden.
The Devil’s Chessboard seeks to shine a torch down the well of “deep politics,” as Peter Dale Scott—an important scholar of American power—has termed this underworld of unaccountable authority. Until we have a full reckoning of the Dulles era and its high crimes, the country cannot find its way forward.
In the course of researching this book, I came to know Joan Talley, one of the three children of Allen Dulles. When we met in her Santa Fe cottage, in a room cluttered with books and artifacts, Joan was nearing ninety and, after a long career as a Jungian therapist, devoting herself to editing the searingly intimate diaries of her mother. Our conversations at times took on a therapeutic character, as we wrestled with the painful legacy of her father and, more broadly, the American soul. In an effort to understand her family, and her own life, Joan had delved deeply into the historical literature on the Cold War and the CIA. She had read all about the coups and trench coat mayhem. “It seems we just went wild,” she told me. “And the CIA was leading the way.”
But as she pored through her mother’s diaries, Joan also was seeking a deeper understanding of her father than mere history can provide. One afternoon, she invoked Jung’s Red Book, the master’s night journey into his own tortured soul. “Jung says you must embrace the dark, as well as the light, to understand life,” remarked Joan, sitting in the passenger seat as I drove her dusty Prius through New Mexico’s high-desert chaparral.
The next morning, we spoke again over the phone. Joan was still agitated by our conversations about her father the previous day. She was trying to make sense of how she could have been so oblivious to this violent rush of history as a younger woman, even when it roared right through her own living room.
“Life sweeps you along—you see people floating by. Everyone is so busy and in the moment. It’s only later that you realize what happened and how alarming it all was. You read books and you finally try to put it all together, and you don’t know what to believe.
“But it’s very important to understand it all—the dark and the light.”
Allen Dulles went to war on November 9, 1942, crossing into neutral Switzerland from Vichy France, just minutes before the Nazis closed the border. He later told the story of his border crossing with pulse-racing, dramatic flair. But, in reality, it went surprisingly smoothly, especially considering the forty-nine-year-old Wall Street lawyer’s high international profile. After presenting his passport to the French gendarme at the border station near Geneva, Dulles paced the train platform while the policeman made a phone call to Vichy authorities. Then, after a hovering Gestapo agent conveniently disappeared, the gendarme obligingly waved Dulles through. It was almost as if Dulles was expected.
There was nothing undercover about Allen Dulles’s wartime exploits in Switzerland. Afterward, he made much of his espionage adventures, with a sympathetic press and then equally credulous biographers dutifully repeating his beguiling tales. But, in truth, there was little daring involved—for a very simple reason. Dulles was more in step with many Nazi leaders than he was with President Roosevelt. Dulles not only enjoyed a professional and social familiarity with many members of the Third Reich’s elite that predated the war; he shared many of these men’s postwar goals. While serving in his Swiss outpost, Dulles might have been encircled by Nazi forces, but he was also surrounded by old friends.
After crossing the border, Dulles wasted no time in settling into Bern, the scenic Swiss capital where he had begun his espionage career a quarter century earlier as a junior member of the U.S. legation during World War I. The medieval city—built on cliffs overlooking the glacial-green Aar River, as it flowed down from the white-capped Alpine peaks on the horizon—held a treasure of memories. During the earlier war, there had been embassy parties and rounds of tennis—with balls arriving in diplomatic pouches from back home, courtesy of his brother Foster. There was an international parade of mistresses—young secretaries from the consulates that filled the city’s diplomatic quarter as well as free-spirited women from the local art colony. He met his conquests for drinks and pleasure at the Bellevue Palace Hotel, the elegant Art Nouveau fortress that dominated the Old City’s skyline. Dulles affected the look of a dashing Continental cavalry officer in those days, with a waxed mustache, slim waist jacket, and high starched collar.
One of his affairs during the First World War had a brutal ending. She was a young Czech patriot who worked alongside Dulles in the U.S. legation offices. British agents concluded that she was using her position to pass information to exiled Czech leader Jan Masaryk as well as to the Germans. When the British confronted Dulles with their suspicions, the ambitious young diplomat knew he was in an awkward spot, and he quickly complied with their plans. One night Dulles took the woman to dinner, and afterward he strolled with her along the cobblestone streets to an agreed-upon location, where he handed her over to two British agents. She disappeared forever.
When Dulles returned to Bern in 1942 for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s World War II spy agency, he set up his base of operations in his residence—the ground-floor apartment of a handsomely renovated fourteenth-century mansion at 23 Herrengasse, near the city’s majestic cathedral. Dulles later insisted that he had carefully chosen the location with security in mind, since the street ended in a cul-de-sac. He prevailed upon municipal authorities to extinguish the lamplight outside his building, giving late-night visitors a measure of anonymity as they slipped in and out. Guests seeking more confidentiality could enter Dulles’s apartment from the rear, climbing an ancient flight of stone steps that rose steeply to his back terrace from the grape arbors and dark river below.
But all this cloak and dagger was a bit of a charade. As soon as Dulles showed up in Bern, his arrival was reported in one of Switzerland’s leading newspapers, which announced him—to the spy’s great delight—as “the personal representative of President Roosevelt.” This afforded Dulles a status that would be very useful as he pursued his various intrigues.
After arriving at 23 Herrengasse with such great fanfare, Dulles found himself under intense scrutiny. Although the newly arrived American spy had enjoyed long friendships with many in the enemy camp, each side trusted the other only up to a point. From across the street, Nazi agents kept close watch on the Dulles residence twenty-four hours a day. The Germans also infiltrated his staff—his cook turned out to be a spy and his janitor stole carbon copies of his documents out of his trash. Meanwhile, Swiss intelligence agents, who worked closely with their Nazi counterparts, eavesdropped on Dulles’s phone conversations. There was little that was secret about the American spy’s life in Bern.
None of this seemed to disturb Dulles, who wandered openly through the streets of Bern in a rumpled raincoat and a fedora cocked carelessly