The Old Man and the CIA, Part 1: American Gestapo | Historical
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Content warning: This episode contains references to suicide. Incoming transmission. Welcome. This is True Spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. True Spies. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know?

What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. Truman created the CIA in 1947, and he says he does not want the CIA to be, quote, an American Gestapo. He does not want them going around fomenting truths, overthrowing governments, assassinating people, and that was the vision that Alan Dulles had. I'm Sofia DiMartino, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. The Old Man and the CIA.

There were two paths that America could have gone on after World War II. Franklin Roosevelt and high-level aides of his pointed the path towards one way, which was America would lead the world through diplomacy and attempt to bring the Soviet Union into its orbit through diplomatic goodwill and through economic and financial mechanisms. That was one vision.

Indulge me for a second in an exercise of the imagination. What would the world look like if the United States had never embarked on the Cold War? If Soviet Russia and America had built upon the uneasy truce of World War II and come to accept one another? Perhaps it sounds preposterous, but in the throes of post-war optimism, Franklin D. Roosevelt believed it might be possible.

The other vision, much more aggressive, much more clandestine, much more confrontational, was the Dulles brothers. And the Dulles brothers were much more sly and much more conniving in their pursuit of power. And I believe that the bad guys essentially won in this dynastic struggle for the soul of America. There are two distinct breeds of influence in this world.

There's the influence that is proudly, vocally wielded by those in the public eye. This influence is the currency of politicians, pop stars, and all who stand atop a stage and command our attention. Franklin D. Roosevelt traded in this kind. And then there's the other kind, the secret currents of power that lurk out of view, detached from celebrity or idealism.

The invisible strings of the puppeteer. The story you're about to hear concerns the second breed of influence and the man who became its master. I think Allen Dulles was one of the central figures of secret power in the US, really from the early part of the 20th century up until he died. It's time to meet your guide in this hidden history of the United States.

I'm David Talbot. I'm the author of The Devil's Chessboard, Alan Dulles, The CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government. For the historian David Talbot, no single individual has had a greater impact on the fate of the American nation than Alan Dulles, the first civilian director of the CIA, a figure affectionately referred to by those who worked for him as the old man.

Over the next two episodes of True Spies, you're going to get up close and personal with one of the most notorious spymasters the world has ever seen. A man who saw, in the global currents of communism, an apocalypse in the making, and who cast himself as protector of the soul of the West. A man who would stop at precisely nothing in his campaign to keep America pure.

You're going to stalk the old man through the members clubs and Georgetown brownstones where the fates of individuals and nations are sealed. You're going to learn what makes him tick and what ticks him off. Yes, you're going to find out all about the devil and his chessboard. But first, you need to understand where he comes from. Because men like Allen Dulles don't emerge out of nowhere.

Alan Dulles himself had a very modest background. He and his brother John Foster Dulles were the sons of a Presbyterian minister. Though five years younger than John Foster, Alan was the first of the Dulles children to inherit the name of his reverend father. It seemed he inherited little else from the man of the house. I think that he in particular had some contempt for his father because he was a do-gooder.

He literally would give you the coat off his back, as he did on one occasion to a poor woman who needed it. And I think he and Foster, his older brother, both had contempt for this sort of do-gooder sense of the world. Growing up in the sleepy retreat of Watertown in upstate New York, the Dulles brothers quickly learned disdain for their father and his limited means.

Luckily for the young Alan Dulles, there were other role models available. Glamorous visitors in well-tailored suits. Men who regaled in booming voices stories from the backstages of power in Washington and New York. On his mother's side, there were a number of statesmen, diplomats, bankers, and a world of power that he was exposed to as a young man growing up.

Allen's mother, Edith, was the daughter of John Watson Foster, briefly Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison. It was through his constant benefaction that the Dulles family was able to get a taste of the finer things in life and a glimpse of the thrill of influence.

Allen Dulles got his own first taste of influence in 1916, when he graduated from Princeton University and entered the diplomatic service. A slender and striking young man, with a high brow and pale, piercing eyes, he was stationed in Bern, Switzerland, during the dying gasps of the First World War.

Later, he joined the American delegation at the Paris Peace Accord with his elder brother, John Foster. But once the sojourn of a European war had concluded, it was time for the Dulles brothers to find their true path in life. Suffice to say, they neglected to follow in their father's down-at-heel footsteps.

They were more interested in power and they became heads, John Foster Dulles, of the most powerful law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, on Wall Street. And Allen Dulles did really the dirty work for that law firm, a lot of espionage and dark work for their different corporate clients. Where did this instinct for so-called dark work come from?

Dulles had always enjoyed a certain reputation in his family, as a boy with a certain detachment. Like when he'd seen his younger sister, Nataline, sink below the water at their lakeside holiday home and had simply watched on, impassive, as others scrambled to save her. Did this cold passivity make him a natural fit for the business of lies and secrecy?

Perhaps, in any case, it was on Wall Street that Allen Dulles truly began to indulge his instinct for hidden manipulation. It was also here that he honed his politics. That was a very conservative firm, very Republican firm. Sullivan and Cromwell had offices in Nazi Germany. Foster Dulles continued to be very close to the Nazi regime, to his clients in Germany.

It's at this point in the story that we must ask a question that will crop up time and time again: Was this relationship between the Dulles Brothers law firm and Nazi Germany born out of pure financial gain, ideological alignment, or some combination of the two? It would be fair to say that at this point the brothers saw more cause for concern in Stalin's expansionist USSR.

where the machinery of capitalism had already been dismantled and done away with. If he had to choose between that and National Socialism, well who can say what he'd have picked? Alan did eventually force his brother to close up shop in Berlin, as the evidence of Hitler's anti-Semitic campaigns mounted. But when war broke out in Europe once again, the brothers did all they could to oppose America's entry.

They were fundamentally suspicious of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his ambitious, anti-elite New Deal. They advised their clients to resist the New Deal, to resist FDR. They were very much opposed to that reform on Wall Street that FDR stood for. Yet when the time came, and America did enter the war, Allen appears to have had a change of heart.

Perhaps he sensed the opportunity for a victory lap around Europe, a chance to be at the center of history. No doubt a compelling opportunity for a man with a taste for power. Alan Dulles was sent by Franklin Roosevelt to be the main spy in continental Europe during the war.

This mission would be under the banner of the newly formed OSS, America's fledgling wartime spy agency. But why would Roosevelt insert such a vocal critic into this prominent position? I think he was sent as a dangle to see what Nazi officials, what Nazi captains of industry he would meet stationed where he was in Bern, Switzerland during the war.

Of course, this is all speculation. But what's undeniable is that Allen Dulles did meet with prominent Nazis during the war.

And in fact, his career as a spy during World War II is capped by Operation Sunrise, a deal that he made with Karl Wolf, one of the top Nazi generals in Italy. He made a secret deal with him that violated FDR and Churchill's agreement to

that they made in Casablanca during the war, that they would fight Germany till the end. There would be no secret surrenders, no secret separate deals with Nazi commanders. Dulles violated that agreement by pursuing this pact with Wolf. When the Soviets caught wind of Dulles' secret negotiations with Wolf, it stoked their paranoia that the US was attempting to negotiate a separate peace with Nazi Germany.

Roosevelt was furious at the carelessness of the rogue spy. After the war ended, Dulles ostensibly returned to civilian life, his official standing with the President tarnished by Operation Sunrise. The OSS itself, always intended as a wartime operation, was dismantled.

But by 1947, with a Cold War heating up, the new president, Harry Truman, was forced to concede that a permanent central intelligence agency might be necessary. Out of the ashes of the OSS, he created the CIA. But there was no role for his vocal critic, Alan Dulles, within the operation. But by then, Dulles had become acquainted with the thrill of secret power.

He continues his somewhat devious rise, even during the Truman administration. And he continued to work, I think, in a kind of deceptive and secretive way as a spy in those years. He was not an official within the Truman administration, Allen tells, but he continued to operate that way.

Truman had been explicit about his intentions with the CIA. He did not want an American Gestapo. And yet, even in its infancy, it appears that the CIA had found impunity to act as it saw fit. How else to explain the fact that Allen Dulles, effectively banished from the Secret Services, could continue to operate as a spy in the organization without the president's knowledge?

This detail also reminds us of something important about Allen Dulles. The man refused to take no for an answer. And he collaborated, I think secretly, with Frank Wisner and other CIA colleagues, former OSS people, in pursuing his aggressive Cold War policies, which were, I think, even more aggressive than President Truman's.

One of the operations Dulles organized off the books was Operation Splinter Factor. It centered around an American diplomat called Noel Field. Field, a family friend of Allen Dulles, had been a communist spy during the war, where he'd worked with both Soviet Russia and the OSS during the brief window in which their aspirations were aligned.

After the war was over, he bid his American colleagues farewell and defected to the Eastern Bloc. And he was dangled a position, a teaching position in what was then Czechoslovakia. When news of his family friend's new position breached Allen Dulles, he decided to use him for an experiment.

Dulles and Wisner heard about this and used the Field family, put out the word that they were part of a spy operation aimed at the Stalin regime. Dulles was curious to know how easily he could influence the situation behind the Iron Curtain.

He pushed bogus intelligence to contacts in the East. Intelligence that suggested devoted communist Nor Field and his entire family were actually committed American spies. In other words, he impassively offered up a man he'd once considered a friend as sacrifice.

All to see if he could get under the skin of the Soviet leader. Joseph Stalin, who was famously paranoid and violent and murderous, took the bait. And the Field family, unfortunately, were victims in this plot. They were tortured, imprisoned, kept behind the Iron Curtain for many years as a result of the Dulles and Wisner machinations.

By Talbot's estimation, Operation Splinter Factor sparked a ruthless purge, not just of the Field family, but on innocent citizens of the Eastern Bloc, caught up in the crosshairs of Stalin's paranoia. And Dulles took this as a victory, proof of his ability to wreak havoc beyond the Iron Curtain.

Operation Splinter Factor was a success on his terms, not for the liberals, the Jews, the nationalists who opposed Stalin's regime behind the Iron Curtain. Those people rounded up, they were tortured, they were put on show trials, they were often killed. So Stalin went nuts and his paranoia overwhelmed him and many of these people died as a result.

In 1951, Allen Dulles was finally offered an official position in the CIA, by now under the leadership of Walter "Beetle" Smith. And in 1953, when President Eisenhower was elected and "Beetle" Smith was shifted to the State Department, Dulles landed the job he had always dreamed of. He was finally appointed head of the CIA by President Eisenhower in 1953.

At the very same time, Eisenhower selected Allen's brother, John Foster, as his Secretary of State. From their positions of power, they wasted no time in cleaning house.

The Dulles brothers not only cemented their power during the Eisenhower years, they drove out remnants of the New Deal. They drove about liberals and Democrats from Washington through the Cold War repression, through the blacklist, through Joe McCarthy, who they controlled or fought and manipulated in many ways.

The Dulles brothers stoked the anti-communist rhetoric of the time, using Senator McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities to cast their opponents into political exile and strengthen their own grasp on the strings of secret power.

According to Talbot, it was their fraternal partnership that directed America's positioning in the world. ICI is a very passive, weak American president, not the hero that he's come to be known as. He empowered during his eight years as the president, the more aggressive Cold War warriors, the Dulles brothers, to carry out their own policy. Talbot sees this as a deadly mistake.

albeit one born out of an understandable impulse. So I believe that President Eisenhower was deathly afraid of another war breaking out. He'd seen the effects of World War II. He'd seen the casualties. He'd seen the great losses. He'd seen how Europe was devastated by the war. He didn't want to repeat a world war. He didn't think America even had the money to pursue

a third world war like that. So he outsourced his foreign policy to the CIA largely. He said, you'll conduct war on the cheap, a shadow war with the Soviet Union, and will threaten to use nuclear weapons because at that stage, the U.S. had almost complete superiority, nuclear superiority. So John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, threatened again and again to use nuclear weapons all around the world against China, against the Soviet Union, and so forth.

All while Allen Dulles and his CIA conducted a shadow war wherever he saw a communist threat. One of the very first targets of his campaign was the Central American country of Guatemala, where a tropical fruit importer called the United Fruit Company had long operated.

The United Fruit Company was a major corporate power in this part of the world, in Latin America, starting really early on in the 20th century and certainly going on up until the end of the century. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Co. owned half a million acres of land, as well as the nation's railroads, port, and telecommunications infrastructure. In the first part of the 20th century, business was booming.

But the nation's citizens, many of them employed by the United Fruit Co., were living in dire poverty. Against the backdrop of this injustice, a charismatic young politician quickly climbed the ranks of Guatemala's government in the 1940s. This man's name was Jacobo Arbenz. Jacobo Arbenz is the democratically elected president of Guatemala. He's the Kennedy, essentially, of Guatemala.

Just like Kennedy, Arbenz was part politician, part celebrity. He and his glamorous wife, Maria Cristina Villanova, were Guatemala's golden couple.

He was married to a woman from a wealthy family in El Salvador, but she herself was very progressive. She had friends who were Marxists. She had friends who realized the country had to change, that this old feudal structure had to be changed in Central America for there to be justice and for people to have a decent way of life.

So when Arbenz was elected, her husband was elected, he had inclinations that way himself, of course, but I think she pushed him further. She was the Eleanor Roosevelt or the Jackie Kennedy of Guatemala. She, I think, had him expand his political vision.

Jacobo Arbenz's headline policy in the 1950 election that saw him crowned president was land reform. Jacobo Arbenz said that he would nationalize land for very poor peasantry in Guatemala that was not being used. This was the arable land, good land, that the United Free Company was allowing to go uncultivated.

This seizure and redistribution of unused land might sound radical on the surface of things. But what was key to his reforms was redistributing this land and not expropriating the land without due payment. He was willing to pay for it, but he wanted the peasants to be able to till the land. And he understood that was the only way that there would be a true revolution as country needed that was nonviolent and

And that would redistribute the wealth that was held, as I say, in a very fetal way by the landowners, by United Fruit, by the military, and so on. But whether or not Arbenz intended to pay for the land was irrelevant to the United Fruit Corporation.

They could not countenance being undermined by some petty radical in a country that they effectively owned. And by Talbot's estimation, they knew exactly who to lobby back home for support with their predicament.

Here again we see that convenient intersection of business interest and ideology.

After all, Dulles was inclined to agree with United Fruit Co.'s reading

Land reform in Guatemala was out of the question. That, to the Dulles brothers and the Eisenhower administration, was communist activity, was a communist threat. And so, Allen Dulles decided to exercise the influence of the Central Intelligence Agency. He needed Eisenhower's sign-off, of course, but in the context of an escalating Cold War, that was an easy sell.

So they sold Guatemala to him by saying, look, the communists have a foothold here. Arbenz is really a wolf in sheep's clothing. He's importing weapons from the Soviet orbit. They could convince this aging, kind of weak president of just about anything.

Better to head off this revolutionary moment at the pass, the Dulles brothers advised Eisenhower. They were confident they could organize a swift, efficient coup. Or with minimal risk to American lives, they wouldn't even need to send troops.

They found a renegade officer, kind of a hapless character, to lead this coup against the Arbenz administration, which had been duly elected by the people of Guatemala. The CIA's chosen puppet was a man named Carlos Castillo Amos. He was a low-level military guy selling furniture, I believe, in a neighboring country before he was recruited and given this role to play.

In 1954, just a year after Dulles took the reins at the CIA, the agency armed and trained a small army of men to fight under Amos.

With whatever means they had at their disposal, they sowed the seeds of insurrection. The CIU's power, its influence, its networks, its connections, its money. They spread money throughout these countries, desperately poor countries, to win over people. And of course they create mobs by giving people a few dollars to do their dirty work for them.

They also launched a campaign of psychological warfare, undermining Arbenz's government any way they could. And this is very important, even to this day. The CIA and Aladnals in particular developed friendships, relationships with the top media people in this country. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, CBS, and so forth.

He would go to lunch with them. They had nicknames for each other. They were very chummy, very close. He persuaded the New York Times, Dulles did, to withdraw his reporter from Guatemala before the coup because he was reporting in a very fair way, very objective way, what was actually happening.

Well, the CIA didn't want the truth about Guatemala told, not in the New York Times, so they prevailed upon the New York Times' Folger to withdraw this guy, to pull him out of the country. On the 18th of July, 1954, Armas' small army invaded Guatemala and headed towards the capital. They were far outnumbered by Arbenz's still loyal military,

But the threat of American airstrikes and even an invasion weighed heavily on the president's mind. He was told there'd be great bloodshed if he resisted this coup, that many people would die as a result.

And so, Jacobo Arbenz faces a stark choice. His vision for Guatemala had always been peaceful revolution. But now he has a CIA-backed army marching on the capital, threatening to undo all the work of his presidency. How far will he go to bring about the change his country desperately needs?

By the way, young Che Guevara was in Guatemala at that time, and he advised the supporters of the Arbenz presidency to fight back, to distribute guns to the poor people, the peasants of that country, to resist the coup. But Arbenz simply couldn't stomach the idea of so much bloodshed. So he did what he felt was the necessary and heroic thing, which was to step down from power.

On the 27th of June, Jacobo Arbenz taped a final message to his people, intended for broadcast on radio an hour later.

But the CIA had other plans. The limit who he can reach is his farewell address. And it's unclear to this day how many people actually heard that final broadcast because the CIA interfered with the communication. And so his resignation that same day came without much fanfare. Perhaps Arbenz imagined at least that his torment would now be over. He was wrong.

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He's humiliated. First of all, there was an assassination attempt against him on the way to the airport. Boom. A car in Arbenz's motorcade explodes, its pieces scattered to the streets of Guatemala City. But the would-be assassins have targeted the wrong vehicle.

There were fake cars that were used in the motorcade, fortunately, carrying bodyguards and so forth. So the assault was on the wrong car. They didn't injure or obviously kill Akobo Arbenz, but an attempt was made. Howard Hunt, who's the CIA agent, later said that he was involved in some way. Then, when a shaken Arbenz arrives with his family at the airport…

He's surrounded by press, he's surrounded by mobs who were created by the CIA, essentially. And he's forced to humiliate himself on cameras that go around the world and photographs and so on. He's said to be smuggling cash out of the country. So he's forced to strip in front of the cameras down to his underwear to show that he's not carrying cash as he's forced into exile.

Arbenz's family is forced to watch on as the proud man is taunted before their eyes. Yet, look at the photos taken that day, and you'll see a man still standing tall, despite the indignities he's been subjected to. This defiance, this refusal to crumble under the CIA's campaign must have frustrated a man like Allen Dulles.

For him, it's not enough to defeat Jacobo Arbenz. He must be crushed entirely. It's a process that begins in that airport, but continues wherever the Arbenzes try to rebuild some semblance of a life.

It's a very tragic story. They fly originally to Mexico from Guatemala. Then they fly to Paris, France. They seek asylum in Switzerland behind the Iron Curtain. Whatever place they go to, they meet political problems. They're told he can't teach, he can't meet with the press, that he's a shadow person, he's invisible.

Anywhere that the CIA or the American government exerts any kind of influence, the Arbenzes find their path obstructed. Eventually, they follow their old friend and advisor, Che Guevara, to another Latin American hotbed of idealism. But even there, life is not simple.

Even Cuba, where he seeks asylum in Castro's Cuba, he's seen as a loser because he lost Guatemala. So he's told that he can't teach, he can't do anything. So he's a man without a country, really, without an identity. And behind each new disgrace lurks the ominous puppeteering of Alan Dulles' CIA.

The CIA is often behind the bad press that he gets. He's accused of being a communist, he's accused of having stolen money from Guatemala's treasury, neither of which are true. So this bad press kind of hounds him wherever he goes. As the once great politician watches the proportions of his own life grow smaller and smaller, he comes increasingly to cherish what he does still have, his family.

He's very close to his grown daughter. She's a beautiful woman. She gets involved with another celebrity, a matador, I believe. He's, you know, a ladies' man because he's very handsome and a celebrity. And she walks into a cafe in Latin America where he was at the time, and she kills herself in front of them.

There's no indication that this incident had anything to do with the CIA's campaign, but that scarcely made any difference to Jacobo Arbenz. He must have felt cursed. I don't believe that Acco Arbenz ever recovered from the death of his daughter. He mourned her for the rest of his life. The end of Arbenz's own life in 1971 is similarly brutal.

He ends up dying in a very violent, very suspect way in a Mexico City hotel room, scolded to death in a bathtub. That's not the way people usually commit suicide. And yet, by this time, Jacobo Arbenz, humiliated politician, defeated alcoholic, perpetually grieving father, cuts such a tragic figure, no one thinks twice.

That's why the charge that he committed suicide at the Ante in Mexico City Hotel, because he was a very, I think, sad man, you know, stuck. It's a suitably punishing end to a desperately sad story.

But the CIA, and especially the Dulles brothers, never saw it that way. Back in 1954, after Arbenz had resigned, they debriefed President Eisenhower on what they described as a bloodless coup. And he's elated because they brought off this thing with very few deaths and so forth, and they changed power, the regime in Guatemala.

Mission accomplished then. A nation rescued from the communist scourge, safely in the hands of the American-backed military man Carlos Castillo Armas. And he survives on himself for a few years before he's assassinated also. In reality, the legacy that the CIA left in Guatemala is anything but bloodless.

Now, in Guatemala, it's led to years of killing fields, of torture, of executions of journalists, trade unions, progressive political officials being disappeared, jailed, killed, executed. Years and years of violence and bloodshed and upheaval in not only Guatemala, but throughout the region. And that's directly as a result of

of US policies in those countries that disrupted the efforts towards democracy in those countries. And Akhba Arbenz is a key example, I think, his downfall of the US policies, which are so tragic and I think, you know, anti-democratic as they say. Was this outcome really what Eisenhower had in mind when he sought to prevent war at any cost?

Talbot believes the president was manipulated by the Dulles brothers, used to consolidate their own influence in the high-power circles of American business and to further their ideological campaign against the existential threat of communism. At the end of the Eisenhower presidency, John Foster has died. He died in the second term of cancer. But Allen Dulles is still very much alive.

And he accused Alan Dallas on this day of leaving him a legacy of ashes. And why did Dallas leave Eisenhower this legacy? Because again and again, he'd sabotage Eisenhower's attempts at creating peace with the Soviet Union. And he'd done this through his own machinations as CIA director.

Perhaps it was this belated understanding that motivated Eisenhower's iconic farewell speech, broadcast to the nation on the 17th of January 1961. In that speech, Eisenhower warned against the insidious influence of what he termed the military-industrial complex. To quote: "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. It's a stark warning from a man who signed off on violent anti-democratic coups in nations like Guatemala and Iran. But as far as Allen Dulles was concerned, Eisenhower's warning was irrelevant. This was a rinse and repeat model of operation.

From his position at the top of the CIA, he was convinced he could roll out the same secret warfare time and time again, irrespective of opponent, irrespective of the desires of whoever happened to be sitting in the White House. He was president-proof. Soon enough, his theory would be put to the test by a new president for one thing. I think he thought Kennedy was inexperienced, was young, was malleable.

It would be put to the test by a new revolutionary. Castro was something he'd never come across before. He was a charismatic, very popular nationalist hero at home. And it would be put to test by another Latin American nation, one that had witnessed the collapse of the Guatemalan Dream and was prepared.

I think that's one reason why the Cuban Revolution was very well armed and did kill and execute people after the revolution to cement their own power, because they felt that they were up against a very powerful enemy. In part two of The Old Man and the CIA, Alan Dulles meets his match at the Bay of Pigs.

I think he was stunned by Kennedy, how stubborn he was, how resolute he was, how he stood his ground at the big picks. I think that he thought Kennedy would cave and he didn't. And I think he was shocked by that. I'm Sophia DiMartino. If you're interested in JFK and the Cold War era, you may like to own a piece of it.

Spyscape is now offering a limited number of original hand-drawn artworks from the Cold War classic film Animal Farm, which was secretly funded by the CIA as anti-communist propaganda. The artworks are on view and available to buy at Spyscape now. Visit spyscape.com slash animal farm for details.

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