Speaker 1: Hmm, we're bad. By the time we get to the
Speaker 1: third part of this, I just have nothing. It's either
Speaker 1: a tonal screeching or just what you got, which is
Speaker 1: ship And I'm ashamed. But what are you? What are
Speaker 1: you gonna do? You're gonna go to another podcast? You're
Speaker 1: gonna listen to the fucking Cometown. No, you're not. You're
Speaker 1: gonna listen to the third part of the Dullest Brothers episode.
Speaker 1: You you worms, you Brian Shrimp. I'm sorry, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing here.
Speaker 1: My guest again for part three, who is my guest
Speaker 1: in the episode? Not my guest in emotionally abusing my
Speaker 1: audience for no reason is Jason Pargeon. Part of it
Speaker 1: is that this is a big subject, I guess, not
Speaker 1: just that it's a seventeen hour long marathon of podcasts.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a big subject to try to explain,
Speaker 1: to try to condense, to try to convey, and it's big.
Speaker 1: It's like we're trying to explain why the world is
Speaker 1: the way it is now and has been for the
Speaker 1: last half century. It's difficult to get it across. It
Speaker 1: would be one thing, like if you're just doing a
Speaker 1: very long podcast on say the O. J. Simpson trial,
Speaker 1: which is one singular subject with a certain number of players,
Speaker 1: this subject the Dullest Brothers in the Cold War. It's
Speaker 1: so expansive and there's so many side roads you could
Speaker 1: get off on that it is mentally taxing to even
Speaker 1: think about it. It's fucking exhausting. Um. And it's you know,
Speaker 1: I was just saying the other like, there's a there
Speaker 1: is a set of left wing conspiracy theories. You think
Speaker 1: that I'm a CIA operative, And I'm sure those people
Speaker 1: um who sometimes listen to the podcast for reasons that
Speaker 1: that escaped me um will be like, Oh, he didn't
Speaker 1: bring this up, and it's because he doesn't want people
Speaker 1: to say, or he didn't bring this up and because
Speaker 1: he doesn't want people thinking about it. No, it's because
Speaker 1: there's too much. Like we're barely going to talk about
Speaker 1: m k Ultra, which Alan Dulls masterminded in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, and which was the cia A drugging thousands
Speaker 1: of random people with acid. We're not even gonna really
Speaker 1: get into it today because there's just too much to cover.
Speaker 1: We're gonna do a whole two partter on M K. L.
Speaker 1: Drew Don't don't, don't worry about that. There's a lot
Speaker 1: to talk about here, but like there's just you can't
Speaker 1: unless you're gonna be talking for fifty hours about the
Speaker 1: Dullest Brothers and what they did, You're going to leave
Speaker 1: shit out. It's just too big a subject. And then
Speaker 1: there's a question of like how much time do you
Speaker 1: devote to what they did, and how much time do
Speaker 1: you devote to the influence of what they did and
Speaker 1: how it shook out in history and the context of
Speaker 1: why they did why, Which is why I find this
Speaker 1: interesting myself, as like what goes through the mind of
Speaker 1: someone like that. But for example, one of the two brothers,
Speaker 1: he is just now about to become the head of CIA,
Speaker 1: just trying to convey to the average person what all
Speaker 1: the CIA does, because it's not just a bunch of spies.
Speaker 1: Every country's got that the CIA. You will ultimately here
Speaker 1: like they seem to have their own army, couple of them,
Speaker 1: and can organize and can invade countries. It's like, well, now,
Speaker 1: wait a second, how does that tie into what we
Speaker 1: know about Like a James Bond type characters like, the
Speaker 1: CIA is more than what you think it is. The
Speaker 1: reason conspiracy people can think that they've got their fingers
Speaker 1: in a podcast host is because there's almost no limit
Speaker 1: on what they can do as long as the President
Speaker 1: wants it done. Which is where the last episode left off,
Speaker 1: is that they basically have this mission statement is like
Speaker 1: whatever whatever it takes, that's it. That's the end of
Speaker 1: the sentence. It's whatever. Part of like what the CIA like.
Speaker 1: Why the CIA like work the way it did is
Speaker 1: you have you you have a bunch of different ways
Speaker 1: that you're going to be shotgunning money out to people
Speaker 1: and shotgunning arms out to people, and you use you
Speaker 1: establish all these different agencies and all these different you
Speaker 1: have these little different rat lines through other government agencies
Speaker 1: that do other stuff too, but that you're also able
Speaker 1: to shotgun money through or have operatives in because again
Speaker 1: there's no limit to what the CIA can do if
Speaker 1: the President tells them to or if they're pretty sure
Speaker 1: the President would have told them too, but they didn't
Speaker 1: want to bother him about it, so they just did
Speaker 1: it anyway, which is also something the CIA does. Cool dudes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: as John Krasinski said, we should be thankful for them
Speaker 1: every day. Jason, did you catch when John Krasinski got
Speaker 1: into a Twitter fight with Cody over that? No? I didn't.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Well, there's there was an account that kept
Speaker 1: really dragging Cody for Cody dragging John Krasinski for talking
Speaker 1: about how great the CIA is, and people started to
Speaker 1: think that maybe it was John Krasinski. And then there's
Speaker 1: a thing you can do where you can see some
Speaker 1: of the letters in uh, somebody's email address if you
Speaker 1: try to get their password on Facebook and it seems
Speaker 1: to match with John Krasinski's email. It was a good time.
Speaker 1: We all had a fun week um with John Krasinski
Speaker 1: and Cody arguing. Cody Johnston friend of the pod um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm sorry, let's let's just get into this episode.
Speaker 1: So from the beginning, the more intelligent members of the
Speaker 1: federal government had their reservations about the CIA. The United
Speaker 1: States has never before had an international intelligence agency outside
Speaker 1: of wartime, let alone one with the purview as wide
Speaker 1: as whatever the president says. Um Dean Atchison, President Truman's
Speaker 1: foreign policy adviser and an eventual Secretary of State expressed
Speaker 1: quote gravest forebodings about the CIA when it was established.
Speaker 1: He warned the President that quote, neither he, nor the
Speaker 1: National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a
Speaker 1: position to know what it was doing or to control it.
Speaker 1: Harry Truman himself leader wrote, it was not intended to
Speaker 1: be a cloak and dagger outfit. It was intended merely
Speaker 1: as a center for keeping the President informed on what
Speaker 1: was going on in the world. Now, it's debatable as
Speaker 1: to whether or not Harry Truman's being honest here right
Speaker 1: like did was that really your intent? Or did you
Speaker 1: just see what happened and want to distance yourself from it?
Speaker 1: That can be argued. But if Truman's goal from the
Speaker 1: beginning was for it to be very different than what
Speaker 1: it became, he and didn't really fight hard to stop
Speaker 1: it from a changing. Six months after the CIA's creation,
Speaker 1: communists in Czechoslovakia carried out what is often referred to
Speaker 1: as a constitutional coup. Now, the history here is complex,
Speaker 1: but in brief, at the end of World War Two,
Speaker 1: the Czech Communist Party was super popular due to the
Speaker 1: fact that they fought against the Nazis and the fact
Speaker 1: that the USSR had liberated Czechoslovakia from the Nazis. Communism
Speaker 1: was pretty popular at the end of the war um
Speaker 1: the party grew from about fifty thousand members of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five to well over a million by nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: It swept the nineteen forty six elections, winning thirty eight
Speaker 1: percent of the vote, which is still the best ever
Speaker 1: performance of a European communist party in a free election. Now,
Speaker 1: since Czechoslovakia was a parliamentary democracy, the Communists didn't take
Speaker 1: complete power because they'd won. They just were like the
Speaker 1: dominant block and government. You know, that's how parliaments work.
Speaker 1: But they quickly alienated voters and fractured the broad left
Speaker 1: wing alliance they've been a part of, you know, understandable reasons.
Speaker 1: Once you take power, you're never as popular as you
Speaker 1: are when you're trying to get it. It became clear
Speaker 1: that the next set of elections were going to go
Speaker 1: worse for the Communists, and so they used their control
Speaker 1: of the police and a network of trade union militious
Speaker 1: to seize total power. This set off alarm bells across
Speaker 1: the West and led to a sort of paranoia that
Speaker 1: other European communist parties were just biding their time. Until
Speaker 1: they could carry out the same kind of coup. So
Speaker 1: the CIA used this in as an excuse to start
Speaker 1: pouring money into operations aimed at countering other European communist parties,
Speaker 1: namely in Italy and France. In Italy, they funded a
Speaker 1: Christian nationalist party that was seen as pro us, and
Speaker 1: they recruited Catholic officials to preach against communism. They drowned
Speaker 1: the nation in a wave of propaganda. Alan Doles was
Speaker 1: not yet a regular employee of the CIA, but he
Speaker 1: took a leave of absence from his lawyering to kind
Speaker 1: of pro bono help organize CIA efforts in Italy, because
Speaker 1: again he missed the fun of being a spy. Now,
Speaker 1: the fact that Alan Dullis had traveled to Italy to
Speaker 1: help the CIA did not go unnoticed. Again, he's a
Speaker 1: bad spy. The Boston Globe ran an article with the
Speaker 1: headline Dullas masterminds new Cold War plan under secret agents.
Speaker 1: So really bad at being a secret agent. I just
Speaker 1: can't emphasize this enough. Kind of the way that James
Speaker 1: Bond catched his catch phrases him telling people his name, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're a famous spy, that's bad. But
Speaker 1: he was a famous spy. Yeah, he was a famous spy,
Speaker 1: which you shouldn't be so at this stage of things,
Speaker 1: the CIA's aide in Italy, Will Aid, is a weird
Speaker 1: that what this? You know, the ship the CIA is
Speaker 1: doing in Italy was entirely focused around propaganda and providing
Speaker 1: funds to sympathetic politicians are mostly focused. But even at
Speaker 1: this early stage, Alan and his colleagues were just discussing
Speaker 1: the possibility of organizing mass violence as a way to
Speaker 1: achieve their ends. They reached out to several officers in
Speaker 1: the Italian military with the aim of organizing a couta
Speaker 1: ta if the Communists won. From right up by the
Speaker 1: Wilson Center quote, they viewed the project as possessing an
Speaker 1: extremely grave implications, carrying with it the probability of plunging
Speaker 1: Italy into a bloody civil war and seriously hazarding the
Speaker 1: start of World War Three. But since the scheme represented
Speaker 1: a final, though thorough desperate action to hold Italy for
Speaker 1: the Western Bloc, they did not want to discard it
Speaker 1: and recommended immediate exploration. So they decide, like, okay, Italy
Speaker 1: might go Communists, we have to set up a network
Speaker 1: capable of carrying out a coup if the Communist went
Speaker 1: an election, we have to like get all these guys
Speaker 1: in the army to help, to be willing to overthrow
Speaker 1: the government. Even though if that happens it might start
Speaker 1: World War three and end all life and hume on Earth,
Speaker 1: the fact that it would stop Italy from going communist
Speaker 1: is a worthy risk. Like that's the cost been, Like
Speaker 1: we have them in writing making that cost benefit analysis basics.
Speaker 1: Once you have an enemy that you've decided as an
Speaker 1: existential threat to everything, and as we mentioned in the
Speaker 1: last episode, that became the habit of making sure we
Speaker 1: always had one of those ye, you will have a
Speaker 1: blank check to do absolutely anything in anything, including exterminating
Speaker 1: life on Earth. We were and are fully prepared to
Speaker 1: render the species extinct rather than let it continue on
Speaker 1: under communism. If you sit back and think about that,
Speaker 1: that's kind of weird. Yeah, it's it's a little odd
Speaker 1: because like, I'm not a I'm not a state communist,
Speaker 1: but I think life, even with all the critiques I
Speaker 1: have of the U. S s R, still better than death.
Speaker 1: But once that template was established after World War Two,
Speaker 1: it would always be so and we mentioned last episode
Speaker 1: that after Nino and then like Islam and the encroaching,
Speaker 1: like the fear of you had, you had small towns
Speaker 1: in America passing laws saying that they could not be
Speaker 1: ruled by Sharia law. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's some small
Speaker 1: town in Nebraska afraid that it any day now the
Speaker 1: Muslims are going to come take over that small town.
Speaker 1: And because that's our only way we can think about problems.
Speaker 1: So if you have that in mind that at any moment,
Speaker 1: Islam is going to utterly take over the world and
Speaker 1: depose capitalism. Capitalism the most unkillable idea in the history
Speaker 1: of civilization, like almost impossibly durable ideology. Yeah, yeah, the idea.
Speaker 1: Once you've sold the idea that civilization and freedom and
Speaker 1: free markets and capitalism are utterly fragile and at any
Speaker 1: moment can be toppled by the next threat on the horizon,
Speaker 1: whether it's communism, whether it's the Muslims. What are the
Speaker 1: next thing is going to be? And we must do anything, anything,
Speaker 1: anything is morally justified, and stopping it, you're doomed. You
Speaker 1: have set yourself down a dark road because there's no
Speaker 1: checks in that direction. The moment anyone says, hey, you
Speaker 1: went too far, it's like, oh, so you're a secret comy.
Speaker 1: And that was that was the atmosphere the Dulles Is
Speaker 1: established and would establish, and that we've lived under until now.
Speaker 1: You can still scare. You can win elections today with
Speaker 1: the red scare. People are still just as afraid of
Speaker 1: Communism as they were, which is bizarre. Like the idea
Speaker 1: that Donald Trump can talk about encroaching Marxism in America,
Speaker 1: It's like, what power do Marxists have in this country?
Speaker 1: But it doesn't matter that fear run is now etched
Speaker 1: into our d n A and you can thank the
Speaker 1: Dullest Brothers for that to a very large extent, you
Speaker 1: really can um. It's bleak um. It's I really it
Speaker 1: would be nice to be able to have because it,
Speaker 1: you know, it leads to this, It leads to this,
Speaker 1: this kind of same thing on the other end of things,
Speaker 1: where because of this the way that kind of these
Speaker 1: tensions around communism when I get ratcheted because just that's
Speaker 1: the way we go when we talk about enemies and
Speaker 1: our culture right that it's existential, you get It's led
Speaker 1: to this complete death of nuance on all sides. So
Speaker 1: now if you're if you're on the far left, you
Speaker 1: can't be like, you can't analyze geopolitics by saying like, okay,
Speaker 1: well who's the right and who's in the wrong. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of people who just be like, well, whoever
Speaker 1: is not the United States is in the right, and
Speaker 1: that leads them to back Bashar al Assad or whatever
Speaker 1: um or, or back Russia, or think that that China
Speaker 1: is is this perfect um embodiment of the socialism they want.
Speaker 1: It's it all. It infects everything. I guess the fact
Speaker 1: that everyone has to be at this level of every
Speaker 1: threat as an existential threat, every threat ends an extermination.
Speaker 1: I I think it just it has got it. It's
Speaker 1: so deep into our culture that it affects everything, and
Speaker 1: that's probably bad. It's it's extremely important to understand that mindset, though,
Speaker 1: because this is this is what we'll govern, the way
Speaker 1: they're going to do business for the rest of the
Speaker 1: time they're in power, that the Dulleses are in power,
Speaker 1: which is about to start very soon, because everything we've discussed,
Speaker 1: when these guys should have ruined their career as many
Speaker 1: times over, they will both be rewarded by becoming two
Speaker 1: of the most powerful people on earth in the history
Speaker 1: that we've laid out is going to get them elevated
Speaker 1: to about as high as you can go without being president.
Speaker 1: And I in ways more powerful than presidents some presidents
Speaker 1: they both served longer. Yeah, so definitely they're both more
Speaker 1: powerful than Jimmy Carter was. I think we can all
Speaker 1: agree on that. So yeah. In France, the CIA intervened
Speaker 1: to crush a Communist led strike of duck dock workers
Speaker 1: in Marseille. They developed an ongoing relationship with several clans
Speaker 1: of Corsican gangsters who they hired and used to violently
Speaker 1: crushed the labor movement in Marseilles in nine and again
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty. And I think this is kind of
Speaker 1: the first example of the CIA basically bringing in a
Speaker 1: mercenary force to do violence against their political enemies. And
Speaker 1: it's I don't I don't know that anyone dies, and
Speaker 1: they might have happened. I haven't found a lot of
Speaker 1: detail on this, but this is kind of the very beginning. Now,
Speaker 1: while Alan Dulas was helping his colleagues in the Agency
Speaker 1: explore the boundaries of their new powers, Foster Dulas was
Speaker 1: still a lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell. He continued to
Speaker 1: dip his toes into politics, growing deeper woven into the
Speaker 1: upper strata of the Republican Party as the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: took off. His attitude about international orders started to shift.
Speaker 1: Before and during World War Two. As we talked about
Speaker 1: last episode, he believed the root of conflict was the
Speaker 1: failure of national leaders to cooperate. Right, that's why you know,
Speaker 1: you want to spread all this business around because it
Speaker 1: creates these these inner connections that can bring peace. Now,
Speaker 1: Foster's view shifted as the Cold War kicked off. He
Speaker 1: came to believe that all global instability had its roots
Speaker 1: in the action of a single nation, the Soviet Union. Now,
Speaker 1: this was a period in which, and I guess you
Speaker 1: can say that's kind of consistent to his earlier view,
Speaker 1: because the Soviet Union doesn't ostensibly accept you know, business
Speaker 1: interests and stuff. So I don't know, maybe that's how
Speaker 1: he justified it in his head. This was a period though,
Speaker 1: in which labor movements and anti colonial movements were taking
Speaker 1: off in Africa and Indo China and in Latin America
Speaker 1: just to name a few places. Um Foster viewed all
Speaker 1: of this as not the results of decades of oppression,
Speaker 1: of poverty, of exploitation, but as the result of Soviet meddling.
Speaker 1: From the Brothers quote, he began reading and rereading Problems
Speaker 1: of Leninism, a collection of Stalin's essays and speeches. By
Speaker 1: one account, he owned six or more pencil marked copies
Speaker 1: and kept each in one of his workplaces. He considered
Speaker 1: it a blueprint for world conquest and came to believe
Speaker 1: that the October Revolution had basically been the seed of
Speaker 1: an inevitable process that, if left unchecked, would end the
Speaker 1: very existence of world capitalism. Now, Foster believed that Soviet
Speaker 1: Communism was doing to the West into the Christian world
Speaker 1: what Islam had done hundreds of years earlier, and a
Speaker 1: lot of his writings he would draw a direct connection
Speaker 1: between what Islam did during like the time that's kind
Speaker 1: of the Muslim empires were expanding, and then what we
Speaker 1: call the medieval period um and he would draw a
Speaker 1: line between that and Soviet communism, which I find interesting
Speaker 1: because in the you know, the twenty one century, a
Speaker 1: lot of conservatives drew back to kind of Soviet like
Speaker 1: the kind of the way we talked about the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union to talk about the problems of radical Islam. It's
Speaker 1: just interesting that Foster recognized. I guess that connection too
Speaker 1: in a way both because they're there are both is
Speaker 1: He sought threats to the Christian Western order. Um, and
Speaker 1: if you want to see the perfect intersection of those saying,
Speaker 1: watched the movie Rambo three. Yes, like not a joke, Um,
Speaker 1: it's all in there. So Foster was willing to admit,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to me that that Auster sees Soviet Communism
Speaker 1: as this kind of existential threat in a way that
Speaker 1: he didn't see Nazism. He was willing later on to
Speaker 1: admit that the Nazis had committed terrible crimes, and even
Speaker 1: that those crimes had had their roots to night Nazi ideology,
Speaker 1: but he accepted Nazism as essentially Western Communism, he thought
Speaker 1: was an ultimate evil and impossible to compromise with. You
Speaker 1: can compromise with Nazis, Foster believed you can't compromise with Communists,
Speaker 1: which is ironic in part because both the Nazis and
Speaker 1: Communists compromise with each other on a number of occasions.
Speaker 1: But that's aside the point now. In his columns and speeches,
Speaker 1: Dulas insisted that the United States was in a struggle
Speaker 1: to the death with Communism. Defeat would mean the end
Speaker 1: of humanity. Quote, we are the only great nation whose
Speaker 1: people have not been drained physically or spiritually. It devolves
Speaker 1: upon us to give leadership and restoring principle as a
Speaker 1: guide to conduct. If we do not do that, the
Speaker 1: world will not be worth living in. Indeed, it probably
Speaker 1: will be a world in which human beings cannot live again.
Speaker 1: The victory of communism is the extermination of the human race.
Speaker 1: That's the only way this ends. Um. Yeah. Now, it's
Speaker 1: worth noting that Foster Dulus was not unopposed in his views.
Speaker 1: One man who argued against him was Reinhold Neiber, who
Speaker 1: he'd served with in the Just Endurable Peace Commission after
Speaker 1: the war. Neiber weren't warned that the great danger to
Speaker 1: the West was not Communism but the American ego, writing quote,
Speaker 1: if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would
Speaker 1: only be the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary
Speaker 1: cause would be that the strength of a great nation
Speaker 1: was directed by eyes too blind to see all the
Speaker 1: hazards of the struggle, and the blindness would be induced
Speaker 1: not by some accident of nature or history, but by
Speaker 1: hatred and vain glory, which I think is accurate both
Speaker 1: then and now. Like you can s the same thing
Speaker 1: about our response to nine eleven. In a lot of ways, Um,
Speaker 1: the danger is not what actual attacks the enemy carries out.
Speaker 1: It's about how our egos lead us to react to them.
Speaker 1: That's extremely key here, because the entire purpose of doing
Speaker 1: this series and why it's relevant and why it's interesting
Speaker 1: lies in my opinion, and that the reason the Dulles
Speaker 1: doesn't matter is because this ideology that everything stopping communism
Speaker 1: justifies anything and everything. That's what they brought to the
Speaker 1: world or helped cement in the world, because that's what
Speaker 1: that quote that you you know, you read off there
Speaker 1: about that like surrendering, surrendering to communism means extinction of
Speaker 1: the human race, as if communism is a cancer that's
Speaker 1: growing in the body of humanity. That sounds like the
Speaker 1: ranting of an extremist, crazy person at a rally, that
Speaker 1: that would bayly become the de facto American belief for
Speaker 1: the next half century. Everything about the way we behaved
Speaker 1: and everything that the CIA did, it all comes back
Speaker 1: to that and the fact that that was so easy
Speaker 1: to abuse. Because once you've established that any pro labor
Speaker 1: movement is secretly communist, you now have justification to to
Speaker 1: intervene anywhere labor rights spring up in the name of
Speaker 1: stamping out the seeds of communism. Because of that slippery
Speaker 1: slope fallacy, where anywhere you have workers taking to the
Speaker 1: streets and demanding better conditions, are demanding whatever things that
Speaker 1: otherwise would seem distinctly American, you can now justify intervention
Speaker 1: in any in all sorts of underhand ways, based on, well,
Speaker 1: this is fighting the cancer, this is fighting the knife
Speaker 1: at the throat of humanity that is communist. Someome where
Speaker 1: there's some alternate reality where the capitalists simply says, hey,
Speaker 1: will outcompete them, will show them the capitalism is better,
Speaker 1: will you know, will lead by example, will become so
Speaker 1: strong with our economy that we will prove that communism
Speaker 1: doesn't work, that that is not the path they took. Nope,
Speaker 1: And it's you know, there's an interesting similarity to me
Speaker 1: when we talk about the way the rhetoric works and
Speaker 1: where it leads people to something I see kind of
Speaker 1: in the I'm seeing increasingly become common on on both
Speaker 1: the kind of extremist libertarian and the extremist right wing
Speaker 1: um with groups like the Proud Boys and groups like
Speaker 1: the Boogaloo Boys, where they walk around the shirts that
Speaker 1: are that say shoot your local pedophile, and they're not.
Speaker 1: Their problem is not actually with pedophiles. What they are
Speaker 1: doing is equatings basically saying this thing, this thing that
Speaker 1: comes up again and again in conspiratorial culture where all
Speaker 1: of your enemies are secretly pedophiles, And the reason you
Speaker 1: would want to do that is because you can do
Speaker 1: anything to a pedophile. It's the ultimate evil. So I
Speaker 1: wear these shirts that harry these signs that same opposing pedophiles,
Speaker 1: and whoever I'm beating up is a pedophile, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's that's it's this, it's the same. I know it's
Speaker 1: not the same kind of logic, but it's an extension
Speaker 1: of that logic of if the enemy is ultimate, then
Speaker 1: all remedies are on the table, you know, yeah, because
Speaker 1: there can be because at that point, any nuance is weakness.
Speaker 1: Any nuance and how you approach like, oh, so you
Speaker 1: want nuance, and how you approach pedophile as well, we
Speaker 1: know what you are. It's because they want to shut
Speaker 1: down any discussion of what they're doing, and that lets
Speaker 1: you go as far as you want, because if you
Speaker 1: can just tag your enemies as whatever, this trump card,
Speaker 1: this trump card of evil that you know at this point,
Speaker 1: there's nothing that even needs to be discussed. Look, there
Speaker 1: will be people possibly who listen to this episode or
Speaker 1: these series and say, oh, so you prefer a world
Speaker 1: and wish everyone's living under the flag of the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union or in which these countries fall under. It's like
Speaker 1: that's a child's thinking that that the foreign policy is
Speaker 1: black and white, and this battle between good and evil.
Speaker 1: That's the stuff of blockbuster movies. That's not how the
Speaker 1: real world works. But it's not. And but again it's
Speaker 1: so pervasive because you get this attitude on the other
Speaker 1: side and the people who read who know a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff that we're saying about the dullest and
Speaker 1: who it radicalizes them. But part of what they take
Speaker 1: out of it as well, then everything I've heard bad
Speaker 1: about the Soviet Union must be a lie. And that's
Speaker 1: complicated by the fact that we did tell a lot
Speaker 1: of lies about the Soviet Union. But that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it was a good government. Like it. For one thing,
Speaker 1: it like it didn't work out in the long run. Um,
Speaker 1: but you you get this, you can't. I don't know.
Speaker 1: There's there's no room for nuance. Um. If you decide
Speaker 1: one side is bad, then whoever they're in opposition to
Speaker 1: has to be good and your friends and it can't
Speaker 1: ever be complicated because again, if it's complicated, if it's nuanced,
Speaker 1: then for one thing, the level of the number of
Speaker 1: options you have and sort of confronting it are are reduced,
Speaker 1: and you don't get to necessarily feel great about what
Speaker 1: you did or whatever. But movies give you a black
Speaker 1: and white version of reality because it is a fantasy
Speaker 1: that that the pure morality, where the bad guys literally
Speaker 1: refer to themselves as the dark side. It's that's that's
Speaker 1: a fantasy. That's not how it exists. And so you
Speaker 1: can have people in the name of fighting something that
Speaker 1: is truly bad, such as child predators, and using that
Speaker 1: as justification to do unrelated terrible things, and that doesn't
Speaker 1: make them heroes. It's the world is messy like that.
Speaker 1: This is why, for those of you who have been
Speaker 1: listening through this whole series, the very first thing I
Speaker 1: asked was do you think the dulles Is were true believers?
Speaker 1: Do you think they believed in what they were doing,
Speaker 1: that they were actually saving the world. And the answer
Speaker 1: to that is difficult to decipher even as individuals, because
Speaker 1: the two brothers approached this from very different directions, and
Speaker 1: we need see the decisions they made and the and
Speaker 1: then the position they took later in life is very
Speaker 1: different where they started. Even in this case of two people,
Speaker 1: it's hard to discern did they actually think they were
Speaker 1: fighting on behalf of good or were they just using
Speaker 1: it as cover to do things on behalf of their
Speaker 1: former clients from that law firm. And it's also I
Speaker 1: think sometimes it's a mix of things. UM. I'll compare this.
Speaker 1: I'll compare this to some some of the kids in
Speaker 1: Portland who do UM, do some of the rioting. UM.
Speaker 1: I think there are people who believe strongly that because
Speaker 1: of how bad these issues with policing are, because of
Speaker 1: how and just capitalism is, and because of how ineffective
Speaker 1: peaceful protests has seemed to be in their in their lives,
Speaker 1: the best thing they can do is to go out
Speaker 1: and cause damage right to to businesses, UM to to
Speaker 1: police infrastructure. Because that gets attention, that brings people, makes
Speaker 1: people care about the issue, and that that accomplishes you know,
Speaker 1: they'll point to like the burning of the Third Precinct
Speaker 1: in Minneapolis and the impact that had on getting some
Speaker 1: variant of justice for George Floyd. UM. And they're there there,
Speaker 1: and and that's logically consistent. I believe that they do
Speaker 1: believe that when they go out and they light a fire,
Speaker 1: some of those other people will also during that, you know,
Speaker 1: loot from an apple store. And I think that taking
Speaker 1: stuff from the apple store. Not that I'm equating that
Speaker 1: morally with overthrowing governments, but there's a mix of I
Speaker 1: believe in this thing, but also here's an opportunity for me,
Speaker 1: you know, like, oh, I can get a free thing
Speaker 1: to write like it's it's it's an opportunity. It's a
Speaker 1: mix of belief and opportunity. And I think you see that.
Speaker 1: I think you see that in everybody, right. And I
Speaker 1: think sometimes we've tried to find justifications for things that
Speaker 1: are our opportunities for us, UM when we're also doing
Speaker 1: things we believe in. I think it kind of everybody
Speaker 1: does that. These guys are just doing it at a
Speaker 1: much bigger scale. But I think it is a mix
Speaker 1: of I believe, at least for Foster, I believe these
Speaker 1: things about the world. I believe in this struggle. I
Speaker 1: believe that the stakes are this high. Oh, but also
Speaker 1: I can help this guy that you know is paying me,
Speaker 1: I can help him out too while furthering the struggle.
Speaker 1: I I do think it. You know, it's a mix
Speaker 1: of things. And you have factions within the government, within
Speaker 1: the business community where they may have some other motivation
Speaker 1: for seeing a government overthrown. They may have been they
Speaker 1: may have run into opposition and trying to build a
Speaker 1: factory there, or a rubber factory or whatever. And so
Speaker 1: then it's very easy say, well, you know, he's secretly
Speaker 1: friendly with communists or whatever. Same way as with the
Speaker 1: Red scare in the United States, if you had a
Speaker 1: beef with somebody and he wanted to get them rejected
Speaker 1: from the industry, it was you could drum up that, well,
Speaker 1: you know, he attended a meeting of communists last month.
Speaker 1: I can prove it. And that even though you personally
Speaker 1: have no concern about communism where anything whatsoever, it becomes
Speaker 1: a convenient opportunity to jump on board and use that
Speaker 1: as an excuse all of the stuff. This is not
Speaker 1: off the subject. This is this is this is the
Speaker 1: this is explaining. Yeah, why America was the way it
Speaker 1: was because you did have a combination of true believers,
Speaker 1: but then you had a lot of people who saw
Speaker 1: opportunity to jump to jump in. Yes, that is exactly
Speaker 1: what we're what we're going to be talking about all
Speaker 1: day today. First, take an AD break, though, Yeah, Sophie,
Speaker 1: you know what, why don't you take an AD break? Huh?
Speaker 1: I would love to. I would Okay, Well go do it, Sophie.
Speaker 1: We'll be back soon. We're back. So if he just
Speaker 1: took an AD break, it was lovely, great time. Thank you, complain,
Speaker 1: I'm glad. In April of ninety eight, while the Secretary
Speaker 1: of State was in Bogata for a conference, one of
Speaker 1: Columbia's elected leaders was assassinated. This sparked riots and mass
Speaker 1: violence that killed thousands, and eventually this kind of We've
Speaker 1: talked about violencia in Colombia a couple of times on
Speaker 1: this podcast, including during the Protocols episodes. This this kind
Speaker 1: of fed into that hundreds of thousands of people died
Speaker 1: by the time it was all over. In short, what happened,
Speaker 1: the assassination of this leader in Colombia and the violence
Speaker 1: that followed it was the result of a number of things.
Speaker 1: Growing conspiracism, you know, we've talked about that in the
Speaker 1: Protocols episode, violent rhetoric among the right wing, the linguer,
Speaker 1: results of economic depression, severe inequality, a bunch of stuff
Speaker 1: contributed to the fact that left and right in Columbia
Speaker 1: started massacring each other. For years um but American leaders
Speaker 1: paid had paid zero attention to Colombian politics. None of
Speaker 1: them knew any of the history, none of them had
Speaker 1: paid attention to why this was happening, and so they
Speaker 1: just kind of assumed that the violence had come out
Speaker 1: of nowhere. And Foster Dulles decided this meant that the
Speaker 1: violence was the fault of Moscow, that, oh, this seemed
Speaker 1: to come out of nowhere because I haven't been paying
Speaker 1: attention to Columbia. It must be the Soviets fault, right,
Speaker 1: they're trying to destabilize our backyard. The seizure of power
Speaker 1: by Czech communists and the violence in Columbia we're seeing
Speaker 1: as proof that the Soviet Union was orchestrating a grand
Speaker 1: global plan to destroy the United States. A Senate report
Speaker 1: later claimed US leaders were in a state of quote
Speaker 1: near hysteria by June of nineteen. So like they're actually
Speaker 1: freaked out about this, right, this is not a bunch
Speaker 1: of cold calculating you know, capitalists plotting to destroy this.
Speaker 1: So these are these are got a lot of people,
Speaker 1: a lot of the people who are necessary in order
Speaker 1: for the crimes we were about to talk about to happen.
Speaker 1: Believe truly that like the they're staring down the barrel
Speaker 1: of a Soviet rifle, so to speak. That same month,
Speaker 1: June of the National Security Council issued Directive n SC
Speaker 1: tende Slash two secret order approved by President Truman that
Speaker 1: increased the CIA's power. The directive stated that the U
Speaker 1: s SR had launched a vicious campaign against the US,
Speaker 1: and in return, the CIA had to carry out propaganda,
Speaker 1: economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage, anti sabotage, demolition
Speaker 1: and evacuation measures, and subversion against hostile states, including assistance
Speaker 1: to underground resistance movement guerrillas and refugee liberation groups. These
Speaker 1: operations were to be quote so planned and executed that
Speaker 1: any U s Government responsibility for them is not evident
Speaker 1: to unauthorized persons, and that if uncovered, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Now, the
Speaker 1: fact that this was being pushed and had been done
Speaker 1: by Truman caused an uproar. It actually sparked something of
Speaker 1: a civil war in the Republican Party between isolationist and
Speaker 1: internationalist conservatives and the Dullest brothers are in a nationalist
Speaker 1: right because they think that the U. S Should intervene
Speaker 1: internationally to protect cap um. That said, during this big
Speaker 1: debate within the Republican Party, they were mostly on the
Speaker 1: outside looking in. They still spent the vast majority of
Speaker 1: their time working for Sullivan and Cromwell. Alan Dullis is
Speaker 1: not a CIA employee. He's kind of contracted with them
Speaker 1: a few times, but he's not a full time employee,
Speaker 1: and Fosters still doing law stuff. Um Foster did help
Speaker 1: in the negotiations that led to the creation of NATO
Speaker 1: um Alan during this period mostly obsessed over trying to
Speaker 1: make the CIA a bigger and bigger thing, because again
Speaker 1: he really missed the fun ship he'd done during the war.
Speaker 1: His quest was helped along in June of nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: when North Korea invaded South Korea. We now know that
Speaker 1: Stalin and the uss are were not behind this invasion,
Speaker 1: and in fact, a lot of folks within the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union didn't think it was a good idea at all.
Speaker 1: It was it was it was really not their call.
Speaker 1: It was a thing that North Korea decided to do.
Speaker 1: But America, the Americans assumed that this was part of
Speaker 1: this vast secret war the Soviets were carrying out that
Speaker 1: like everyone was happening in Colombia, what had happened in
Speaker 1: Czechoslovakia and North Korea. These are all again, these are
Speaker 1: all like pieces on a chessboard that the Soviets are
Speaker 1: playing um in order to wipe out Christian capitalist civilization.
Speaker 1: The unexpectedness of the attack convinced many that the United
Speaker 1: States needed to put more money and invest more power
Speaker 1: into the CIA so that future attacks wouldn't come as
Speaker 1: a surprise. In autumn, the Director of the CIA hired
Speaker 1: Alan Dullas for a six week consultants contract. At the
Speaker 1: end of the contract, he was offered the job of
Speaker 1: Deputy Director of Operations. This gave Alan Dullas control over
Speaker 1: all covert operations carried out by the US overseas. One
Speaker 1: of his first acts was to convince Congress to approve
Speaker 1: a hundred million dollars for the CIA to arm paramilitary
Speaker 1: groups exiled from various Communist nations. Dullas sent agents across
Speaker 1: the world to launch attacks and foment rebellions. Many of
Speaker 1: these guys were caught immediately. Alan Dulas actually sent thousands
Speaker 1: of people to death in the first couple of years
Speaker 1: he was had this position in the CIA, and he
Speaker 1: felt no guilt about any of this, saying, quote, at
Speaker 1: least we're getting experience for the next war. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the kind of guy who gets this job. He doesn't
Speaker 1: see these people as people now. Allen's first major success
Speaker 1: would come in nineteen fifty two when Republican Dwight Eisenhower
Speaker 1: and Democrat Adela Stevenson fought over who would get to
Speaker 1: be the president. Alan. While this was happening, turned his
Speaker 1: eyes towards the lovely nation of Guatemala. Then and now,
Speaker 1: Guatemala was a very poor country and the largest landowner
Speaker 1: was the United Fruit Company, a longtime client of Sullivan
Speaker 1: and Cromwell. Foster Dullus had done work for them in
Speaker 1: the past. The Devil's chessboard gives a pretty good overview
Speaker 1: of the situation in Guatemala. By the late nineteen forties. Quote,
Speaker 1: the giant company, whose operations sprawled throughout the Caribbean, ran
Speaker 1: Guatemala less like a banana republic than a banana colony.
Speaker 1: United Fruit not only owned huge plantations, but almost every
Speaker 1: mile of railroad track in the count tree, the only
Speaker 1: major Atlantic port, and the telephone system, and the capital
Speaker 1: rulers came and went at the whim of the company. Now.
Speaker 1: One of these rulers was Jorge Ubiko, who considered the
Speaker 1: peasants of Guatemala to be beasts of burden, fit only
Speaker 1: to labor for the rich. Under his reign in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen forties, guatemal and farm workers were roped together
Speaker 1: like animals and delivered by the army to United Fruit plantations,
Speaker 1: where they were forced to work in debt slavery to
Speaker 1: the country, to the company or to other landowners like
Speaker 1: this was like our bananas were made by slave labor.
Speaker 1: They were chaining men together to force them to pick fruit.
Speaker 1: Sevent of Guatemala's land was owned by two percent of
Speaker 1: the population, and a number of folks in Guatemala thought
Speaker 1: this was fucked up. Some of those folks were the
Speaker 1: members of the Guatemalan Communist Party who started agitating and
Speaker 1: organizing for reform. Now, not only come Juanists were doing this,
Speaker 1: not only communists thought this was wrong. One non communist
Speaker 1: person who realized how fucked up the situation was was
Speaker 1: a guy named Jacobo Arbez. Now, Arbez was again not
Speaker 1: a Communist. He was actually a young, rich kid, the
Speaker 1: son of a Swiss immigrant father in a mixed raised
Speaker 1: Ladina mother. Despite his wealth and privilege, his upbringing was
Speaker 1: rough to in part to his father's suicide. As a
Speaker 1: young man, Arbez joined the Guatemalan Army and became an officer.
Speaker 1: He married the daughter of an El Salvadorian coffee plantation
Speaker 1: owner in ninety eight. Now his wife, Maria, had been
Speaker 1: educated at a Catholic woman's college in California. She had
Speaker 1: also grown up wealthy, but she was uncomfortable with the
Speaker 1: fact that her father had gotten rich off the backs
Speaker 1: of poor workers. Jacobo had been raised by an indigenous
Speaker 1: Maya nanny, and his relationship with her made him sensitive
Speaker 1: to the plight of the indigenous people of Guatemala. Over
Speaker 1: the course of many long conversations, Jacobo and Maria decided
Speaker 1: to become reformers and to try to make Guatemala a
Speaker 1: more equitable country. They open to their home to activists,
Speaker 1: including a number of communists. This made them ostracized by
Speaker 1: the local aristocracy. Maria later said, but what did we care?
Speaker 1: They were parasites like in El Salvador. I wanted to
Speaker 1: broaden my horizons. I hadn't come to Guatemala to be
Speaker 1: a socialite or pray, play bridge or golf. So, spurred
Speaker 1: on by his wife, Jacobo Arbist entered politics, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty four he helped to lead a coup that
Speaker 1: overthrew Jorge Ubiko. In the years that followed guatemala transition
Speaker 1: to a full democracy. In nineteen fifty Yacobo decided to
Speaker 1: run for president on a campaign of a grarian reform.
Speaker 1: He was elected, and in June of nineteen fifty two
Speaker 1: he succeeded in pushing through a massive land reform bill.
Speaker 1: Under the bill, a huge amount of private land was
Speaker 1: handed over to poor peasants, including a significant amount of
Speaker 1: United fruit land. Now, the communists would have considered this
Speaker 1: kind of a fucked up compromise right, he did not
Speaker 1: go nearly as far as a lot of people on
Speaker 1: the left wanted. This was actually a pretty moderate bill.
Speaker 1: One of the things he ensured was that the land
Speaker 1: he took from United Fruit and other companies was only
Speaker 1: land that was not under cultivation. So he basically said,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna funk with your ongoing financial operations, but
Speaker 1: you own all this land that you're not doing anything with,
Speaker 1: just to own it, and I'm going to give that
Speaker 1: back to the people. Like that's what our Bez does.
Speaker 1: But of course the elite in Guatemala did not see
Speaker 1: his reform as a compromise necessary to build a healthier society.
Speaker 1: United Fruits started crying foul. Paid propagandists in the United
Speaker 1: States put out a series of red baiting articles with
Speaker 1: titles like Red Front Titans grip on Guatemala, United Fruit
Speaker 1: becomes victim of Guatemala's Awakening. Shortly after our Beza's land
Speaker 1: reform bill passed, the dictator of not Nicaragua, Anastasio Somazo
Speaker 1: uh so Maza, visited d C and told the CIA
Speaker 1: that if they gave him weapons, he would quote clean
Speaker 1: up Guatemala for you. In no time. Stephen Kinser goes
Speaker 1: on to write Alan liked the idea. With j. Royal
Speaker 1: Smith's approval and by some accounts, with indirect encouragement from
Speaker 1: the White House, he established a small team of CIA
Speaker 1: operatives that conceived a plot aimed at setting off a
Speaker 1: coup in Guatemala. On the afternoon of October eight, CIA
Speaker 1: officers presented this plot, called Operation Fortune, to their counterparts
Speaker 1: in the State Department. Frank Wissner said that the CIA
Speaker 1: was seeking approval to provide certain hardware to a group
Speaker 1: of people planning violence against a certain government. Another officer
Speaker 1: asserted that the operation was necessary because a large American
Speaker 1: company must be protected. State Department officials at the meeting,
Speaker 1: according to one account, hit the ceiling. One of them,
Speaker 1: David Bruce, Allen's old OSS comrade, told him that the
Speaker 1: State Department disapproves of the entire ordeal. So this is
Speaker 1: not immediately popular people. This is not something that everyone
Speaker 1: like agrees as a good idea. There are folks in
Speaker 1: the State Department who are like, seems kind of sucked
Speaker 1: up to um overthrow the government of this country to
Speaker 1: help a fruit company. You know, it's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that you would almost think the voters should have
Speaker 1: a say in because you're you're wanting to you know,
Speaker 1: once upon a time, a long long time ago, only
Speaker 1: Congress could declare war, and when we went to war,
Speaker 1: it was like an official thing rather than as became
Speaker 1: the policy later, we just kind of stumbled into conflicts
Speaker 1: where one day you'll just hear that we've launched cruise
Speaker 1: missiles at some country, picked your country, and there was
Speaker 1: no it was never put to a vote or anything.
Speaker 1: It's just something we're doing. I sitting here right now,
Speaker 1: can I tell you how many countries we are doing
Speaker 1: drone strikes in? I don't know. That's just we just
Speaker 1: take that for granted now that well, somewhere we're probably
Speaker 1: launching a drone strike at a wedding somewhere, but it's probably,
Speaker 1: you know, to take out of terrorists or something. The
Speaker 1: beginning of this that we now consider kind of normal, really,
Speaker 1: as far as I know, comes back here where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: this government is turning red, let's just sneak in under
Speaker 1: the table and just knock it over. Not with an
Speaker 1: official declaration of war. We're not a war with Guatemala,
Speaker 1: like why would we be? But this might drive up
Speaker 1: the prices of bananas or whatever. So it's like, all right, uh,
Speaker 1: and this became standard operating procedure. This is not I
Speaker 1: don't even know what to say about it, because because
Speaker 1: if you're looking at it like propaganda from the time,
Speaker 1: they would have like a picture of a map and
Speaker 1: the map is slowly all turning red as the Russia,
Speaker 1: like the commies, bleed out and take over one country
Speaker 1: after another after another after another. And you heard how
Speaker 1: long it took Robert to explain the complexities of what
Speaker 1: was actually going on there. And that was a very brief,
Speaker 1: very overview of an incredibly complicated situation. And when you
Speaker 1: boil that down to oh, this is just stopping the
Speaker 1: evil communists, you have no concept of what's actually going on.
Speaker 1: Like you were, it would be better for you to
Speaker 1: have never heard of the country than to boil it
Speaker 1: down in your mind where it's like, oh, these people
Speaker 1: were soldiers of the Soviet Union and this is just
Speaker 1: another front in our war. Like that is an objectively
Speaker 1: insane way to look at it. It's great that that's
Speaker 1: just how everything worked for decades. Um. Yeah, in part
Speaker 1: because like you know, if they had framed it as like, well,
Speaker 1: these people are taking land that our corporations owned but
Speaker 1: don't use, so that they can live lives of slightly
Speaker 1: less unfathomable desperation. Um that that that doesn't sound as
Speaker 1: good as they're they're trying to destroy christendom um and
Speaker 1: we have to stop them in Guatemala or they will
Speaker 1: be in pow Keepsie, you know, next week, which is
Speaker 1: you know how a lot of it was framed. But
Speaker 1: you you don't have to be a crazy person with
Speaker 1: like with like news clippings and red yarn on your
Speaker 1: wall drawing connections to say, wait a second, So the
Speaker 1: law firm that represented that fruit company employed the future
Speaker 1: Secretary of State and and uh or the director's head
Speaker 1: of CIA, Like, it's not. You don't have to dig
Speaker 1: define the connections. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's pretty
Speaker 1: out in the open. It was a company that they
Speaker 1: had done work on behalf of them, and they were
Speaker 1: doing them a favor under the guise of stopping communism. Like,
Speaker 1: it's not, this is not a conspiracy theory. I realized
Speaker 1: that most of the time on the Internet, when people
Speaker 1: bring up the CIA, it's accusing them of things that
Speaker 1: may be improbable or hiding aliens or whatever. You have
Speaker 1: to understand the real things the CIA did. They were
Speaker 1: absolutely real. It's you don't need the fantasy. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't, it's there's there's there's enough to fill a
Speaker 1: lifetime of work trying to understand the stuff that they
Speaker 1: absolutely did. Um So, as I said, like Alan Dullas
Speaker 1: kind of brings to the State Department this plan to
Speaker 1: a symbole a bunch of CIA operatives and overthrow the
Speaker 1: government of Guatemala, and they get shot down by the
Speaker 1: State Department. But that's in early nineteen fifty two. Now,
Speaker 1: in November of that year, the election happens and Dwight D.
Speaker 1: Eisenhower wins. Truman had acted as depending on who you trust,
Speaker 1: kind of a restraining hand on the CIA. He was
Speaker 1: cautious about them. He didn't let them do all the
Speaker 1: things that Alan Dullas wanted to do. Eisenhower had no
Speaker 1: desire to restrain the CIA, and of course in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three he made Alan Dullis head of the CIA,
Speaker 1: which was not a great call. Now, as a lawyer
Speaker 1: for Sullivan and Cromwell, Alan had been the legal envoy
Speaker 1: of the company to Guatemala. He had actually visited so
Speaker 1: often during his time with the company that he started
Speaker 1: taking his wife on trips with him, and he did
Speaker 1: not like his wife, so that meant something. Eisenhower made
Speaker 1: Foster Dulas in the same year United In fifty three
Speaker 1: his secretary of State. Now this was the result of
Speaker 1: years of politicking and ass kissing by Foster, which finally
Speaker 1: paid off now that a Republican was in office again.
Speaker 1: Foster two had his connections in Guatemala Before World War One.
Speaker 1: Foster Dulas had visited the country as a Sullivan and
Speaker 1: Cromwell lawyer. His job had been to monitor labor unrest
Speaker 1: and communist activity in Guatemala. Both brothers lobbied extensively for
Speaker 1: intervention against Our Beez, and they were not alone. United
Speaker 1: Fruit was extremely well connected to the Eisenhower administration. The
Speaker 1: Under Secretary of State, Walter Beatle Smith, was a close
Speaker 1: friend of the president, and he also happened to be
Speaker 1: applying for a high placed position with United Fruit after
Speaker 1: the coup. He was named to the company's board after
Speaker 1: Rectors Henry Cabot Lodge, Eisenhower's un ambassador, had a number
Speaker 1: of family investments in the United Fruit. John Morris Cabot
Speaker 1: in Church, in charge of Latin American affairs of the
Speaker 1: State Department, was the brother of United Fruits former CEO.
Speaker 1: The husband of the President's personal secretary, was the head
Speaker 1: of pr for United Fruits. So this is not just
Speaker 1: the c I a thing right. They are deeply embedded
Speaker 1: with the Eisenhower administration. Now, Eisenhower's administration labeled Guatemala a
Speaker 1: Soviet beachhead in the Hemisphere, even though Arbez again was
Speaker 1: not at all a communist. Secretary Foster Dullas declared that
Speaker 1: he was forcing a communist type reign of terror on
Speaker 1: the country. The US ambassador to Guatemala, working under the
Speaker 1: CIA's direction, tried to bribe Arbez with two million dollars
Speaker 1: to cancel his land reforms are best, said no, so
Speaker 1: the ambassador threatened to have him murdered. When that failed,
Speaker 1: the Dulless brothers decided there was nothing to do but
Speaker 1: overthrow him. They found an angry, disgraced colonel named Carlos
Speaker 1: arma Us who was working as a furniture salesman in Honduras.
Speaker 1: They hired a bunch of mercenaries to be his revolutionary
Speaker 1: army and The CIA provided him with weapons, intelligence, and
Speaker 1: air cover. As he invaded Guatemala, CIA pilots bombed the capital,
Speaker 1: which panicked the population. Dozens of officers in Our Best's
Speaker 1: army were bribed to abandon their president. In June of
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four, Yacobo decided he could not hold out
Speaker 1: any longer. He fled the presidential palace, sending out one
Speaker 1: last radio address in which he accused the United Fruit
Speaker 1: Company and its allies in quote US ruling circles of
Speaker 1: reigning fire and death upon Guatemala, which they had done.
Speaker 1: Of course, the CIA blocked the transmission from going out.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna not gonna let not gonna let that guy
Speaker 1: get a last word in the Arbez families spent the
Speaker 1: rest of their lives fleeing from country to country, never
Speaker 1: able to find comfort or happiness. One of Yourcobo's daughters
Speaker 1: committed suicide, and the former president himself was harried and
Speaker 1: tracked and harassed and threatened by the Sea i A
Speaker 1: until the day he died. Like they didn't just overthrow him.
Speaker 1: They anytime someone said anything nice about him, anytime he
Speaker 1: was on the verge of like rebuilding something like they
Speaker 1: would go into like it was personal. They wanted to
Speaker 1: ruin this man's life. They were trying to drive him
Speaker 1: to suicide. To be honest, Well, it's so strange that
Speaker 1: he wasn't able to find a home in Moscow since
Speaker 1: he was clearly an agent of He did live there
Speaker 1: for a while because they were willing to take him in,
Speaker 1: but they didn't like him because he wasn't a Communist
Speaker 1: and he didn't like living there, so he left UM.
Speaker 1: I think he wound up in um somewhere in Latin America.
Speaker 1: Eventually might have been Cuba. But like he he didn't
Speaker 1: have a lot of options because the US would threaten
Speaker 1: any country that offered to take him in UM, So
Speaker 1: the only options he had was the Soviet block, which
Speaker 1: then fed into US. Probably. Look, he went running to
Speaker 1: Russia because he loves communism. Well, you threatened Mexico if
Speaker 1: they let him live there, Like what it was? He
Speaker 1: where is he supposed to go while he was supposed
Speaker 1: to kill himself? Yep, good ship. So Alan Dullas considered
Speaker 1: the overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected leader to be among
Speaker 1: his greatest accomplishments. Now, the operation had been code named
Speaker 1: p B success and David Talbot writes well about the
Speaker 1: celebration that followed in d C quote. When they filed
Speaker 1: into the East Wing Theater for their Guatemala slide show,
Speaker 1: the PB success team was at the height of its glory.
Speaker 1: The room was filled with the administration's top dignitaries, including
Speaker 1: the President himself, his cabinet, and the Vice President. Afterward Eisenhower. Ever,
Speaker 1: the soldier asked Dullas how many men he had lost,
Speaker 1: just one, Dullas told him. Incredible, exclaimed the President. But
Speaker 1: the real body count and Guatemala started after the invasion,
Speaker 1: when the CIA backed regime of Castile Armas began to
Speaker 1: clean the nation of political undesirables, labor organizers, and peasants
Speaker 1: who had too eagerly embraced Arbez's land reforms. It was
Speaker 1: the beginning of a blood soaked era that would transform
Speaker 1: Guatemala into one of the twentieth injuries most infamous killing fields.
Speaker 1: The stainless Coup, as some of its CIA engineers like
Speaker 1: to call it, would actually result in a type of
Speaker 1: gore including assassinations, rampant torture and executions, death squad mayhem,
Speaker 1: and the massacres of entire villages. By the time that
Speaker 1: the blood letting had ran its course four decades later,
Speaker 1: over two hundred and fifty thousand people had been killed
Speaker 1: in a nation whose total population was less than four
Speaker 1: million when the reign of terror began. That's like five
Speaker 1: percent of the population thereabouts. So that's good one of
Speaker 1: the two. Now, when most people talk about the early
Speaker 1: days of CIA coup's, they'll bring up Guatemala and Iran.
Speaker 1: Both stories have a number of similarities. For one thing,
Speaker 1: Alan Dulas also had business interests in Iran. In nine,
Speaker 1: working for Sullivan and Cromwell, Dullas had flown to Tehran
Speaker 1: and negotiated a lucrative oil deal with the Shaw. Under
Speaker 1: the deal, a consortium of U S engineering firms would
Speaker 1: be paid six hundred and fifty million dollars to modernize
Speaker 1: the nation. It was at the time the largest foreign
Speaker 1: development project in US history. Now the Shaw and Dullus
Speaker 1: kept in contact. During the same time, the royal ruler
Speaker 1: of Iran was not popular. Developing left wing and communist
Speaker 1: movements were agitating for his overthrow, which deeply worried both
Speaker 1: the British and the Americans, who had invested heavily in
Speaker 1: Iran's oil industry. In at a party hosted by Alan
Speaker 1: Dullas for the Council of Foreign Relations, the Shah of
Speaker 1: Iran promised, my government and people are eager to welcome
Speaker 1: American capital to give it all possible safeguards. He promised
Speaker 1: not to nationalize the oil industry, which is something that
Speaker 1: the communists wanted and you can draw it's similar to
Speaker 1: like what Arbez was doing in Guatemala right there. Foreign
Speaker 1: powers have basically, through working with corrupt leaders they put
Speaker 1: in power, bought access, exclusive access to our resources for
Speaker 1: way too cheap. We want those things because this is
Speaker 1: our country. Um So that's kind of what the left
Speaker 1: is agitating for in Iran. We don't want the British
Speaker 1: to profit off our oil industr red that should be
Speaker 1: our money. It's our fucking oil. And obviously the Shah
Speaker 1: promises to his friends in the CIA and in the
Speaker 1: Council Foreign Relations that will never happen. But of course
Speaker 1: the show was unpopular, not surprising. In nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: he was forced to appoint a reformer, Mohammed Massada, as
Speaker 1: Prime minister after the Iranian parliament nominated Massada by a
Speaker 1: vote of seventy nine to twelve. So this is a
Speaker 1: popular guy. Like, that's not a fucking close vote. Now,
Speaker 1: Massada had founded a political party called the National Front,
Speaker 1: which was a pro democracy party that was kind of
Speaker 1: center left. Again like Arbez, this guy's kind of center
Speaker 1: left as opposed to being a radical. The National well,
Speaker 1: they were, I mean, the National Front was kind of
Speaker 1: radical for Iran at the time, but not to the
Speaker 1: extent that the Communists were. The National Front again, they
Speaker 1: were not communists. They wanted a democratic system, They were
Speaker 1: not state communist. They wanted a democratic system, and they
Speaker 1: agitated in the streets for Iranian independence from foreign economic domination. Now,
Speaker 1: right around this time there was also a Shia religious
Speaker 1: fundamentalist party that had carried out a wave of assassinations. Um,
Speaker 1: and they were, you know, they were they also all
Speaker 1: of these kind of groups, the Shia, the Communists, and
Speaker 1: the National Front are anti you know, the foreign colonizers
Speaker 1: and broadly speaking anti the Shah Um but for different reasons, um.
Speaker 1: And all of this kind of unrest means that Iran
Speaker 1: is very unstable in this period, and the main reason
Speaker 1: why the Shah appoints Massada prime minister outside of the
Speaker 1: fact that Parliament told him to was because he was
Speaker 1: kind of afraid that not doing so would lead to
Speaker 1: a revolution. Massada immediately launched a series of sweeping social reforms,
Speaker 1: unemployment compensation, sick benefits for workers, an end to forced
Speaker 1: labor for peasants, and a land reform bill bill that
Speaker 1: forced landlords to give twenty percent of their revenues to tenants. Basically,
Speaker 1: they had to put a chunk of the revenues they
Speaker 1: made his landlords into like public works projects, so it
Speaker 1: would go back to the people. In nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: Massada nationalized the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, a British business
Speaker 1: that had inked to deal with the shot to control
Speaker 1: Iranian oil until nineteen The British were furious, but Massada
Speaker 1: argued that Iranians were rightful owners of their oil. The
Speaker 1: British responded by instituting an international oil blockade of Iran.
Speaker 1: They actually sent in ships to blockade the Persian Gulf,
Speaker 1: so Iran can't sell the oil that is Iran's. But
Speaker 1: you know again, they would argue that, well, we bought
Speaker 1: access to it for until nineteen ninety three, so they
Speaker 1: have no right to take it from us um. I
Speaker 1: guess it depends on how much you like the British. Uh.
Speaker 1: This all created Iran's economy, which led to massive domestic unrest,
Speaker 1: but Massada still remained broadly popular. The British appealed to
Speaker 1: the Americans for help, or, depending on who you believe,
Speaker 1: the Eisenhower administration was worried that all the unrest would
Speaker 1: embolden the Communists and lead them and lead to a
Speaker 1: revolution that would send their oil over to the Soviets.
Speaker 1: So the CIA had been active in Iran since nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight. They were actually led there by Teddy Roosevelt
Speaker 1: Son Kermit. So a big part of this story is
Speaker 1: a dude named Kermit, which I can't over emphasize. Now,
Speaker 1: the main thing the CIA had been doing in Iran
Speaker 1: was fighting the Two dep Party, which was Iran's communist party,
Speaker 1: and they had mostly been focused on setting up what
Speaker 1: they called a stay behind network. This is a group
Speaker 1: of militants who could act as an insurgency if the
Speaker 1: Communists win power. The CIA was doing this all over
Speaker 1: the place. They did this in Europe, like they were
Speaker 1: setting up stay behind networks in Italy and stuff. There's
Speaker 1: this whole thing called Operation Gladioli that will cover at
Speaker 1: some point in a separate episode. But like, this is
Speaker 1: the thing the CIA is doing all over the damn
Speaker 1: world anywhere there's a single leftist trying to run for
Speaker 1: political office, They're setting up networks of you know, assassins
Speaker 1: and terrorists in case those people get too much power. Now,
Speaker 1: Britain was expelled entirely from Iran in nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: They tried to convince the US to overthrow the government
Speaker 1: by arguing that, like Mossada's successment, that the Communists were
Speaker 1: about to take over. Eisenhower was actually hesitant to believe them, um,
Speaker 1: but the dullest brothers were, of course very bullish on
Speaker 1: the idea. Cooler heads pointed out that none of the
Speaker 1: conservative politicians in Iran had the popularity to replace Massada,
Speaker 1: and so if he was forced out, the only popular
Speaker 1: alternatives would be Shea hardliners, which weren't any friendlier to
Speaker 1: the West. So at first the British were rebuffed. You know,
Speaker 1: the Eisenhower administration comes up with some very good reasons
Speaker 1: why they don't think overthrowing Massada is going to be
Speaker 1: a good idea. Eisenhower suggested stabilizing the Massada government with
Speaker 1: a one million dollar loan to help them through the
Speaker 1: blockade period. It was basically like, well, okay, maybe they
Speaker 1: have the right to to not let the English have
Speaker 1: their oil. Let's give them cash so that their society
Speaker 1: doesn't collapse in the communists can't take power, which seems
Speaker 1: like a pretty good solution to me, actually, um, but
Speaker 1: of course this is not what they do. He was
Speaker 1: actually convinced, in part by the Dullest brothers not to
Speaker 1: do this, and so instead he tried fruitlessly to negotiate
Speaker 1: with Massada to allow the British to take back control
Speaker 1: of the oil company he nationalized. Masada refused, saying that
Speaker 1: the history of his nation's leadership was filled with corrupt
Speaker 1: cowards who had bowed to Western money, and he wasn't
Speaker 1: going to add to that legacy. In March of nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, Alan Dulas attended a National Security Council meeting
Speaker 1: with seven pages of talking points in his hand, aimed
Speaker 1: at convincing the rest of the Eisenhower administration to overthrow
Speaker 1: Massada from the devil's chessboard. Quote Iran was confronted with
Speaker 1: a maturing revolutionary set up, Dulus warned, and if the
Speaker 1: country fell into communist hands, sixtent of the Free world's
Speaker 1: oil would be controlled by Moscow. Oil and gasoline would
Speaker 1: have to be rationed at home, and US military operations
Speaker 1: would have to be curtailed. In truth, the global crisis
Speaker 1: over Iran was not a Cold War conflict, but a
Speaker 1: struggle quote between imperialism and nationalism, between first and third worlds,
Speaker 1: between North and South, between developed industrial economies and underdeveloped
Speaker 1: countries dependent on exporting raw materials. Dullus made sought out
Speaker 1: to be a stooge of the communists, but he was
Speaker 1: far from it. So the the Iranian communists. Again, Massada
Speaker 1: is kind of like Arbez. He's not a communist, and
Speaker 1: the communists, you know, respect some of the things he's doing,
Speaker 1: but they don't like him all that much. Um. He
Speaker 1: was not friendly to Moscow. And the Soviets actually didn't
Speaker 1: want to get involved in Iran because they're not dumb.
Speaker 1: They understand sixty percent of the free world, whatever you
Speaker 1: about six of the US oil supply, that's a thing
Speaker 1: will go to war over like, That's not a thing
Speaker 1: Russia wanted to funk with. In this period of time,
Speaker 1: but of course nobody in the Eisenhower administration was listening
Speaker 1: to reason. Once the Dullis brothers got their propaganda machine chearning.
Speaker 1: Over the course of several weeks, Alan and Foster succeeded
Speaker 1: in convincing Eisenhower that Iran was the next great battle
Speaker 1: of the Cold War, and that if he didn't move quickly,
Speaker 1: it would become North Korea, but with the world's largest
Speaker 1: oil reserves. In June of nineteen fifty three, Allan Dulas
Speaker 1: presented the CIA's plan to his brother and a handful
Speaker 1: of other key policymakers. The actual coup plot had been
Speaker 1: drawn up by Kermit Roosevelt, who had already been arming
Speaker 1: and organizing an anti communist resistance in the country. The
Speaker 1: plot started with the assassination of numerous Iranian military and
Speaker 1: political leaders loyal to Massada. One general was found ripped
Speaker 1: apart by a roadside outside of Tehran. Others had their
Speaker 1: throat slit. Now, while all this was going down, unrest
Speaker 1: was growing in Iran. The Shah was actually forced to
Speaker 1: flee the country because a large band of communists and
Speaker 1: democratic militants were roaming the streets tearing down statues of him.
Speaker 1: And destroying royal property. These militants were loyal to Massada,
Speaker 1: while some of them were some of them were communists.
Speaker 1: It was both groups out in the street, and both
Speaker 1: broadly on the same page as far as this goes.
Speaker 1: But on August eighteenth, the U. S. Ambassador sat down
Speaker 1: with the Prime Minister and claimed falsely that Massada's supporters
Speaker 1: had threatened the U. S. Embassy David Talbot writes quote.
Speaker 1: He warned that if the Prime Minister did not restore order,
Speaker 1: the United States would have to avoid aculate all Americans
Speaker 1: and withdraw recognition of Masada's government. The gambit worked. Masada
Speaker 1: lost his nerve, according to Henderson, and immediately ordered his
Speaker 1: police chief to clear the streets. It was the U. S.
Speaker 1: Diplomat later observed the old man's feeble mistake. With masada
Speaker 1: supporters off the streets, the CIA's hired thugs were free
Speaker 1: to take their place, backed by rebellious elements of the military.
Speaker 1: On the morning of August nineteenth, as Mosada huddled in
Speaker 1: his home with his advisers, tanks driven by pro Shaw
Speaker 1: military officers, and street gangs whose pockets were literally stuffed
Speaker 1: with CIA cash converged on the Prime Minister's residence Mosada
Speaker 1: was of course overthrown and imprisoned. The Shah, who had
Speaker 1: been shopping in France with his wife, was brought back
Speaker 1: to govern the country. He was not popular, and in
Speaker 1: order to keep him in power, the CIA had to
Speaker 1: go to war with the Iranian left wing, massacring communists
Speaker 1: and pro democracy activists wherever they found them. The chief
Speaker 1: focus of their violence was the TUTA, the communist party,
Speaker 1: and with CIA's helped, the Shah's West trained security forces
Speaker 1: tracked down four thousand two de party members between nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three and nineteen fifty seven. These guys were basically
Speaker 1: all tortured. They were whipped, they were beaten. Some of
Speaker 1: them had chairs smashed on their heads, they had their
Speaker 1: fingers broken. A lot of them were subjected to something
Speaker 1: called capani, which is a torture method where you're hung
Speaker 1: by hooks. At least eleven people diet under torture during
Speaker 1: this period, mostly from brain hemorrhages. Dozens more were executed
Speaker 1: um and of course, with the Shaw back in power,
Speaker 1: Iran's oil was d nationalized, but under the new arrangement
Speaker 1: of Iran's oil profits went to US Oil producers in
Speaker 1: d C. The overthrow of Massada was hailed as a
Speaker 1: great success, as had you know, was the later overthrow
Speaker 1: of our bez An. Internal CIA report on the coup
Speaker 1: described the party they held after the coup as a
Speaker 1: day that should never have ended, for it carried with
Speaker 1: it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction, and of
Speaker 1: jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come
Speaker 1: up to it. This did sound. It was a good time.
Speaker 1: Everybody's having a good one. You know what else will
Speaker 1: overthrow the government of Iran in order to gain access
Speaker 1: to its vast oil reserves. I don't know about that products,
Speaker 1: and I mean probably at least one of them, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, statistically speaking, statistically speaking, one of our sponsors
Speaker 1: would happily overthrow the Iranian government. So here's some ads.
Speaker 1: We're back. So the shop was of course eventually overthrown
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy nine, and part of why the current
Speaker 1: government that exists in Iran was able to take power this,
Speaker 1: this hardline Shia fundamentalist regime, was because the communists and
Speaker 1: left wing movements in Iran had been utterly annihilated, right Like,
Speaker 1: That's a big part of why the Ayatolas are able
Speaker 1: to take power is that there's no other anti government
Speaker 1: organized anti government forces in Iran because they've been massacred
Speaker 1: by the CIA, whereas the Shia fundamentalists had kind of
Speaker 1: been allowed to grow. Can I jump in here just
Speaker 1: a moment. It's I feel like for a lot of
Speaker 1: the listeners there has to has to feel like whiplash
Speaker 1: at this point, because it wasn't that long ago. In
Speaker 1: this series, we were describing an American government that was
Speaker 1: did not want to get involved in World War One
Speaker 1: at all, and really hesitated to get involved in World
Speaker 1: War Two because like, oh, well, that's that's Europe's mess.
Speaker 1: Like what business do we have deciding whether or not
Speaker 1: Hitler owns France or what It's like, you know, that's
Speaker 1: none of our business. Like there was a sizeable faction
Speaker 1: of conservatives saying, small government, keep you mind our own business.
Speaker 1: That's what small government is. Small government is not you
Speaker 1: build a military that has to patrol the entire globe
Speaker 1: and to go from that a decade later or so too.
Speaker 1: Looking at the mess you described in Iran, the tangled
Speaker 1: mess of factions and things that get into oil rights
Speaker 1: and all of this and deciding oh no, that's we've
Speaker 1: got to be a part of that, and having it
Speaker 1: spin out of control, and exactly the way the isolationists
Speaker 1: would have warned you about that you cannot control what
Speaker 1: happens after that. This is not a video game. You're
Speaker 1: not playing at Risk or whatever where you can just
Speaker 1: flip a switch and decide this country is not going
Speaker 1: to be communist. You don't know what's going to happen
Speaker 1: after that. Just as you know, we celebrated when the
Speaker 1: Soviets lost in Afghanistan, and then not that many what
Speaker 1: fifteen years later, you know, the bullback from that arrives
Speaker 1: on our shores. Like you can't control what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: So everything the isolationists have been saying plays out here
Speaker 1: because you look at like how this direct directly led
Speaker 1: to the rise of radical Islam and that region. And
Speaker 1: it's very frustrating to me that the you will hear
Speaker 1: people say today, well, we shouldn't be in the Middle East.
Speaker 1: Those people have been fighting with each other for thousands
Speaker 1: of years. It's like, no, they haven't. These were specific
Speaker 1: decisions that were made by people in Washington who had
Speaker 1: not been elected. These are people who have been appointed
Speaker 1: to their positions because they were born into the right
Speaker 1: family and worked for the right law firm. And the
Speaker 1: reason the geopolitical map looks the way it does in
Speaker 1: one is because of the decisions that the row of
Speaker 1: dominoes they started falling over back then. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: it's like it always does piss me off when people
Speaker 1: talk about like, well it's always been a mess over there.
Speaker 1: Number one, For a long time, they were the dominant
Speaker 1: power in the Western world. Um. And for another thing,
Speaker 1: like a lot of these countries didn't exist, Like live
Speaker 1: You wasn't a country until it was made a country
Speaker 1: by France and England, Like they just decided, oh, that
Speaker 1: looks like a good countrys they were carving up ship
Speaker 1: and like yeah, it's much more I think direct with ship,
Speaker 1: like Iran, where it's like, well, no, they had a government.
Speaker 1: They had a pretty reasonable political movement that was doing
Speaker 1: reasonable things to try to improve things for the people
Speaker 1: of Iran, and it was crushed and the reasonable people
Speaker 1: were murdered. So the people who took power when the
Speaker 1: CIA backed government eventually failed were not reasonable, Okay, And
Speaker 1: we could also talk about how like a lot of
Speaker 1: why Iran is so the Ranian government is so messed up.
Speaker 1: Is the horrible war they had with Iraq that was
Speaker 1: directly incided and encouraged and funded by the United States
Speaker 1: who armed both sides. Like yeah, it's you don't have
Speaker 1: to if someone disagrees with us, you don't have to
Speaker 1: rebut with the sins of the regime that was overthrown,
Speaker 1: because that's not the point. You can't predict what's going
Speaker 1: to happen in a situation like this, and when they
Speaker 1: had this party like, well, look how easy that was.
Speaker 1: You know, you have uh, you know, a government that
Speaker 1: looks like it's leading the wrong direction. You're gonna lose
Speaker 1: oil rights, and well, hey, if you think about it,
Speaker 1: that's the national security issue, because if we don't have
Speaker 1: oil that are whatever. It's like, okay, if you could
Speaker 1: go back to them and say, let me show you
Speaker 1: what the next seventy years looks like because of this,
Speaker 1: But they've made a different decision. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't know if they cared the thought that that they
Speaker 1: boiled the world down into such a simple equation. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: as long as we blunt the encroachment of the Soviets here,
Speaker 1: that's all that matters. It's like, is it really because
Speaker 1: you know that just because you repelled the Soviets, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that that place suddenly becomes a franchise of
Speaker 1: the United States. It's like everybody has this view of
Speaker 1: like World War Two, where it's like, well, you you
Speaker 1: defeat Germany and then you know, Germany becomes a modern
Speaker 1: industrial democracy, you like there are best friends. Now. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not that simple. It's not. And the people still thought,
Speaker 1: like I heard that during the Iraq War. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, once we get an American friendly regime in
Speaker 1: there and we bring democracy to them, and they will
Speaker 1: thank us, and they'll have their fast food franchises and
Speaker 1: they'll have consumerism. It's like, okay, do you know what
Speaker 1: the different like ethnic groups are in their region? Do
Speaker 1: you understand that the borders were drawn not by the
Speaker 1: Iraqis but by people who didn't live there, Like, do
Speaker 1: you understand any of that? Do you understand who the
Speaker 1: curds are? Do you understand what? There's so much that
Speaker 1: even the people who went to war I didn't know
Speaker 1: or care about, they like it to be you know that.
Speaker 1: I think George W. Bush even towards the end of
Speaker 1: his like he never was totally clear that there were
Speaker 1: different factions of Islam that hated each other like more
Speaker 1: than they hate us. The insistence on having this black
Speaker 1: and white view of the world is so destructive. But
Speaker 1: I swear to God, you see it come up again
Speaker 1: and again and and these people have to know better again.
Speaker 1: Just you had to race through the situation in Iran
Speaker 1: to try to explain it like that is the most
Speaker 1: surface level explanation. It still took you a while to
Speaker 1: get through it. I think some of the people making
Speaker 1: decisions did not necessarily have even that level of a
Speaker 1: grasp of because I don't think they would have been
Speaker 1: as enthused about sticking their their hands into it if
Speaker 1: they did, because they if you, if if so, you
Speaker 1: would look at and say, oh, there's no way this
Speaker 1: ends well, because you're not gonna be able to babysit
Speaker 1: that situation unless you just occupy the country. But we
Speaker 1: don't do that because we're the good guys. No, we
Speaker 1: um we do the good guy thing, which is overthrowing
Speaker 1: the democratically elected government, and then when a much worse
Speaker 1: government takes power, um endlessly saber rattling about their dangers um,
Speaker 1: which also has the effect of breaking some people's brains
Speaker 1: and making them defend the Iranian government because clearly, if
Speaker 1: it's just it all, it's just this this incredibly frustrating
Speaker 1: feedback loop where everything just is always accelerating into less
Speaker 1: and less reasonable and more and more dangerous things. I
Speaker 1: don't know. This is why I admire the rare person
Speaker 1: I run across who says, oh, I don't understand all
Speaker 1: that stuff is too confusing. It's like, actually, you're more
Speaker 1: correct the person the person on Twitter who thinks and
Speaker 1: characters and like a snarky burn you can summarize like
Speaker 1: what we should be doing over there shouldn't be doing
Speaker 1: over there, because it's it's like, man, I that's the
Speaker 1: attitude that that got us into this situation that it's
Speaker 1: it's like, well, these people are bad, and so we'll
Speaker 1: we'll just kick them over and then leave and it'll
Speaker 1: all sort itself. Well no, no, so yeah, Jason, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, that's most of what we're going to cover.
Speaker 1: In terms of the CIA's FUCKERI in this period, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's so much. Over the following years, Allen dulass Cia
Speaker 1: would create the Republic of South Vietnam almost out of
Speaker 1: whole cloth, which was pretty horrible government. Um, and they
Speaker 1: did it in order to challenge you know, the North. Uh.
Speaker 1: They attempted to carry out a coup in Indonesia, which failed.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty Allan Dulas helped to mastermind the assassination
Speaker 1: of Patrice Lamumba, a socialist president of the Congo. Prior
Speaker 1: to Lamamba's killing, Dullas wrote, quote, if Lamomba continues to
Speaker 1: be in power, the result will be at best chaos
Speaker 1: and at worst in eventual seizure of power by the communists,
Speaker 1: with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the u WIN
Speaker 1: and the interests of the free world. His dismissal must
Speaker 1: therefore be an urgent and priority objective. Now, Lamamba's assassination
Speaker 1: led to a horrible, violent war the presidency of Joseph Mbutu,
Speaker 1: a brutal dictator who robbed the nation lined and left
Speaker 1: it and like what is still to this day a
Speaker 1: perpetual state of multi civil war. There's just I mean,
Speaker 1: the Congo has been torn apart ever since. And obviously
Speaker 1: a lot of that blame goes onto the Belgians too.
Speaker 1: But it's just farcical that that that Dullas ever thought that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: if Lamombo gets in power, then we'll have chaos and
Speaker 1: the congo like nobody. And again, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you were to tell him what had happened, if he
Speaker 1: would have changed his actions. I don't think so Um,
Speaker 1: I just don't now. Alan Dulas retired in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 1: I think Foster had been out for a while at that,
Speaker 1: but I mean he was only Secretary of State for
Speaker 1: you know, four years or so he passed away, I think,
Speaker 1: and then he passed by nineteen fifty nine something like that.
Speaker 1: Am I wrong about Dullas Foster? Yeah? I thought he.
Speaker 1: I thought he left office nine nine for health reasons. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine, and he was in so Um when
Speaker 1: he died. That's where why we have Dullas Airport is
Speaker 1: it got named after him. And I think it was
Speaker 1: actually J. F. K who who inaugurated Dullas Airport and
Speaker 1: given nice speech about, you know, all of the wonderful
Speaker 1: things that that Foster Dulas had done for the country.
Speaker 1: It was not named after Alan Dullas Um. There was
Speaker 1: a statue of Foster Dulas that used to be in
Speaker 1: Dullas Airport that is now has been moved out of
Speaker 1: the public part of the airport, and it's now just
Speaker 1: kind of like sitting awkwardly in a conference room. Because
Speaker 1: about ten or so years later, people started to get
Speaker 1: embarrassed with Foster Dulas's legacy. Once again, you don't hear
Speaker 1: about these guys anymore, you know. Um, But yeah, it
Speaker 1: happened pretty quickly, Like these people went from being in
Speaker 1: the news constantly too by the time they were both
Speaker 1: out of politics in nineteen sixty one, fading really fast
Speaker 1: from popular memory considering how influential they were. Some of it,
Speaker 1: I think some of it's probably that people started to
Speaker 1: feel ashamed of what they've done, But I think more
Speaker 1: of it was probably it wasn't in anybody's best interests
Speaker 1: to help people remember, Like I think everyone listening to
Speaker 1: this heard about the Bay of Pigs in school, didn't
Speaker 1: but don't know the name Alan Dullas necessarily or don't
Speaker 1: remember it. Yeah, like all of these things that were
Speaker 1: just part of the Cold War and helped shape everything
Speaker 1: about the policy and all those different parts of the world.
Speaker 1: That's that was the dulless is all of it either
Speaker 1: entirely them or partly them. It's baffling how much they did.
Speaker 1: And the best way the highlight that is by how
Speaker 1: much we're leaving out. We're not talking about the Bay
Speaker 1: of Pigs, which was Alan Dulas Baby. We're not talking
Speaker 1: about the fact that after World War Two he was
Speaker 1: given the job of building a new German intelligence agency
Speaker 1: to combat the Soviets, and he hired General Reinhard Galen,
Speaker 1: Hitler's former head of intelligence. Galen played a huge role
Speaker 1: in the Holocaust. But dulla Is in the c I
Speaker 1: a kind of handwave that um and allowed him to
Speaker 1: hire other members of the Gestapo to work with the
Speaker 1: CIA in West Germany. There were complaints within the CIA
Speaker 1: about all of the Nazis they were having to work with.
Speaker 1: One of the guys who got brought in to work
Speaker 1: with the CIA was Conrad Fibig, who um worked at
Speaker 1: the CIA through Galen and was later charged with murdering
Speaker 1: eleven thousand Jews in Belarus during the war. There was
Speaker 1: a memo we have about this guy wherein one CIA
Speaker 1: employee suggests it might be smart to drop such types
Speaker 1: from employment, like and Dullis gets asked about this guy. Uh,
Speaker 1: Dellas gets asked about Galen in general the British, because
Speaker 1: the British are really unhappy with the fact that we
Speaker 1: keep hiring all these Nazis. Um and Dullis gets asked
Speaker 1: about like Galen and all the Nazis hire Again. Dallas's responses,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he's a rascal. Rasco was not
Speaker 1: the allegation the type of memo some of you in
Speaker 1: the listenership have gotten about an inappropriate term that they
Speaker 1: would like you to stop using an emails or something
Speaker 1: like that. They got that mimo about well maybe we
Speaker 1: should not hire x Nazis and was like, well, are
Speaker 1: you sure? Are the dude who killed the Lefon fastened people? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's problematic. Are you aware of these problematic cancel culture
Speaker 1: comes for the SS. Now. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: funny is he like so so he says he gets
Speaker 1: asked about Galen, he says, I don't know if he's
Speaker 1: a rascal. There are a few archbishops and espionage. Besides,
Speaker 1: one needn't ask him to one's club. Which is funny
Speaker 1: because Alan DULs absolutely invited Reinhard Galen to his club
Speaker 1: on numerous occasions. He actually hosted parties for the Nazi
Speaker 1: spy chief at the Chevy Chase Club whenever he would
Speaker 1: visit DC. Um, it's just good ship, it's just good ship. Um. Now.
Speaker 1: Galen's big influence on Alan Dullus was the fact that
Speaker 1: Galen was a guy who believed that everything was justified
Speaker 1: in combating the communist threat. Um. He wrote at one point,
Speaker 1: in an age in which war is the paramount activity
Speaker 1: of man, the total annihilation of the enemy is its
Speaker 1: primary aim, which is a very fascist thing to say,
Speaker 1: and something both of the Dullis brothers got on board
Speaker 1: with because they were instrumental in pushing a policy on
Speaker 1: the US government called massive retaliation. John Foster doulla Is
Speaker 1: actually laid out this idea in a speech to the
Speaker 1: CFR when he insisted the U s would protect its
Speaker 1: allies quote through the deterrent of massive retaliatory power. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from a write up and history dot Com here.
Speaker 1: Dullis began his speech by examining the communist strategy that
Speaker 1: he concluded has it had at its goal the bankruptcy
Speaker 1: of the United States through over extension of its military power,
Speaker 1: but strategically and economically, the secretary explained it was unwise
Speaker 1: to permanently commit US land forces in Asia to support
Speaker 1: permanently other countries, or to become permanently committed to military
Speaker 1: expenditure so that vast they lied to lead to practical bankruptcy. Instead,
Speaker 1: he believed a new policy of getting maximum protection at
Speaker 1: a bearable cost should be developed. Although Dollas did not
Speaker 1: directly refer to nuclear weapons, it was clear that the
Speaker 1: new policy was describing would depend upon the massive retaliatory
Speaker 1: power of such weapons. Which is interesting because on a
Speaker 1: moral level, what he's saying here is it's too expensive
Speaker 1: to go to war all the times we would need
Speaker 1: to go to war to counter the Soviets. You know
Speaker 1: what's cheap is a fucking nuke. That's good ship. And
Speaker 1: we could talk a lot about massive retaliation and how
Speaker 1: that idea played a big role in the escalation of
Speaker 1: the US commitment to Vietnam in Nixon's bombing of Cambodia. UM.
Speaker 1: But we're running way too long as it is. UM.
Speaker 1: I want to end by acknowledging mk ultra Um, which
Speaker 1: is the part of Dolus's legacy that I think people
Speaker 1: are probably most familiar with. This is the CIA giving
Speaker 1: everybody LSD. The idea behind this was that Alan Dulas
Speaker 1: had become convinced that the Soviets were carrying out mind
Speaker 1: control research and we needed to do mind control research
Speaker 1: to counter them, even though we actually had information that
Speaker 1: they weren't really doing all that much um. But that
Speaker 1: was beside the point. Alan Dulas wanted thousands of people
Speaker 1: to be dosed with LSD, and that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1: We'll do a whole two partter on this someday. For
Speaker 1: right now, I want to talk about the aspect of
Speaker 1: it that had the biggest that says the most about
Speaker 1: Alan Dulas as a human being, which is the fact
Speaker 1: that he subjected his son to some aspects of the
Speaker 1: mk Ultra program. So his kid, Alan Dulas Jr. Or Sonny,
Speaker 1: was a brilliant young man with an incredible academic record
Speaker 1: and a sharp mind. His mom and his sisters all
Speaker 1: adored him, but Alan Dulas Sr. Was kind of incapable
Speaker 1: of taking any pride in his son, and this kind
Speaker 1: of pushed his son to try to impress him, and
Speaker 1: in order to do this, Sonny joined the Marine Corps.
Speaker 1: He fought with incredible courage in Korea and one commendations
Speaker 1: for reckless bravery under fire until he was hit by
Speaker 1: North Korean shell in nifty two and his brain was
Speaker 1: permanently damaged. When he came home, Sonny was unable to
Speaker 1: take care of himself. Therapy did not seem to help.
Speaker 1: He would get lost easily. He would launch into angry
Speaker 1: rants where he called his father a Hitler lover and
Speaker 1: a Nazi collaborator. His family dubbed these paranoid, even though
Speaker 1: they were pretty accurate. In desperation, Alan Dulas sent his
Speaker 1: son to Dr Harold Wolfe, who worked on the MK
Speaker 1: Ultra program. We know something of what was done to
Speaker 1: Sonny thanks to his sister Joan, who visited him during
Speaker 1: this period. From the Devil's Chessboard quote. Joan has disturbing
Speaker 1: memories of visiting her brother at a New York hospital
Speaker 1: where he was subjected to excruciating insulin shock therapy, one
Speaker 1: of the experimental procedures employed on the CIA's human guinea pigs,
Speaker 1: used primarily for the treatment of schizophrenia. Insulin doses were
Speaker 1: meant to jolt patients out of their madness. The procedure
Speaker 1: resulted in coma and sometimes violent convulsions. The most severe
Speaker 1: risks included death and brain damage. The one study at
Speaker 1: the time I claimed that this mental impairment was actually
Speaker 1: beneficial because it reduced patients tension and hostility. Joan recalls
Speaker 1: that her brother kept begging her when she visited him,
Speaker 1: can't you do something for me? I'm going mad? He
Speaker 1: showed no improvement from his treatment. Um, and of course
Speaker 1: obviously he wouldn't. Um. It just seems to have done
Speaker 1: horrible damage. Eventually he just started like stopped talking to
Speaker 1: his parents and stopped, like like he just decided, like
Speaker 1: I have to just pretend that I'm fine so that
Speaker 1: they will stop torturing me this way. UM, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's that's that's Alan fucking Dullus, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: of course he would like that's how he solves his problems.
Speaker 1: And and I don't know if you were about to
Speaker 1: cover this, but now he was fired after the Bay
Speaker 1: of Pigs. Correct then can be effectively forced him to resigned.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, so I I began this series by
Speaker 1: talking about my first like exposure to him in the
Speaker 1: realm of like ci a conspiracy stuff was in Oliver
Speaker 1: Stone GfK movie because after Kennedy fired Dullus, and then
Speaker 1: exactly two years later or so, h Kennedy would be
Speaker 1: assassinated right November twenty seconds something like that. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then when they would form the warrant commission to try
Speaker 1: to find out who had assassinated JFK, Alan Dullas winds
Speaker 1: up on the commission who JFK had fired for doing
Speaker 1: for botching his his behind the scenes uh C I
Speaker 1: a stuff in the form of the Bay of Pigs.
Speaker 1: So if you're wondering why like conspiracy theories and stuff
Speaker 1: persist and why they have like there's enough truth for
Speaker 1: them to go on to keep them fueled, it's stuff
Speaker 1: like this, Like that's that's as shady as can be.
Speaker 1: It would seem to to my uh innocent eyes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's incredibly shady. It's one of those reasons where when
Speaker 1: I'm talking about conspiracy theories, I don't put the JFK
Speaker 1: assassination in the same realm as you know, hollow earth stuff,
Speaker 1: because there's reasons to have questions about what went down,
Speaker 1: you know, not that I'm you know, a magic bullet
Speaker 1: or like whatever, like I I don't, I'm not, I
Speaker 1: have no, I'm not convinced on that, but it's certainly
Speaker 1: there's some sketchy ass ship that went down. It would
Speaker 1: be weird if people weren't theorizing about reasons why that
Speaker 1: might have happened. I want to end Jason because we've
Speaker 1: mostly talked about the Dullest Brothers and the kind of
Speaker 1: men they were, how they came about, and how that
Speaker 1: led them into what they did, and how that led
Speaker 1: to the creation of the CIA. I also want to
Speaker 1: quote a passage from The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer that
Speaker 1: lays out kind of the talent Alan cultivated because he
Speaker 1: was he headed the CIA during its formative years. This
Speaker 1: talks out the kind of people he recruited, and I
Speaker 1: think this is the note that I want to end on. Quote.
Speaker 1: All were gregarious, intrigued by possibilities, liked to do things,
Speaker 1: had three bright ideas a day, shared the optimism of
Speaker 1: stock market plungers, and were convinced that every problem had
Speaker 1: its handle and that the CIA should find a way
Speaker 1: to reach it. The intelligence historian Thomas Powers has written
Speaker 1: they also tended to be white Anglo Saxon patricians from
Speaker 1: old families with old money, at least at the beginning
Speaker 1: and they somehow inherited traditional British attitudes towards the colored
Speaker 1: races of the world, not the puka sahib arrogance of
Speaker 1: the Indian Raj, but the mixed fascination and condescension of
Speaker 1: men like T. E. Lawrence, who were enthusiastic partisans of
Speaker 1: the alien cultures into which they dipped for a time,
Speaker 1: and rarely doubted their ability to help until it was
Speaker 1: too late. These were the best men who formed the
Speaker 1: core of the early CIA. Most came from privileged backgrounds
Speaker 1: that isolated them from ordinary life, and had gone to
Speaker 1: the right schools. During the war, they had traded genteel
Speaker 1: lives for death defying adventures. Upon returning home, they found
Speaker 1: the quiet routines of peace unfulfilling. Yep, it is hard
Speaker 1: to overstate the power of boredom world events. And then
Speaker 1: when certain wealthy people can decide, for example, you know what,
Speaker 1: I think it would be funny if I ran for president. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sometimes sometimes people just want to find something to do
Speaker 1: and decide. You know what, I think that the uncivilized
Speaker 1: races need me to come rescue them. Yeah, it is it.
Speaker 1: It is fitting that all of the people who kind
Speaker 1: of form the background of the early c I are
Speaker 1: dull list types. They are rich kids from the aristocracy
Speaker 1: who go to private schools, have an exciting time in
Speaker 1: the war, and come home bored. And also I think
Speaker 1: with that kind of ego that they know what's best
Speaker 1: for the world. That has to be a factor. And
Speaker 1: then you've got people like Alan DAAs, who I fully
Speaker 1: believe a big chunk of his motivation is that nothing
Speaker 1: gets you laid like saying you're a spy. And yeah,
Speaker 1: you can overestimate the impact of boredom or getting laid,
Speaker 1: or his his ability to be able to say, well,
Speaker 1: you know that revolution just happened. That was me. It's
Speaker 1: like I was. I barely escaped with my life like
Speaker 1: I had. You know that that guy was assassinated. I
Speaker 1: killed him myself with a poison dart from my wrist. Watch.
Speaker 1: Why don't we talk about this? I can't tell the
Speaker 1: story here in the restaurant, but if we come up
Speaker 1: to my room whereas to see you and me, I
Speaker 1: can tell you the story in privacy with you and
Speaker 1: your twin sister, the three of us. You know you
Speaker 1: do a great Alan DUIs. So yeah, there you go, everybody.
Speaker 1: I these are two names. Everyone should know. These are
Speaker 1: names when when we say we have shorthand, like talk
Speaker 1: about this, that's McCarthy, is um or that's whatever. The
Speaker 1: names dullest should be among those that everybody knows his
Speaker 1: shorthand and they're not. So if we have helped some
Speaker 1: people know these names and know what hand they had
Speaker 1: in shaping the mess, that is a role today. There
Speaker 1: you go, We've done a service. Yes, that's all we
Speaker 1: ever tried to do service. And if you don't know
Speaker 1: the names of the modern versions of the dullest is
Speaker 1: find out m hm Yes, John Krazinski, Google John Krazinski.
Speaker 1: Jason you got anything to um? Yes? Since I yes.
Speaker 1: Since I abandoned uh the online publishing industry last year
Speaker 1: and left my job at Crack and a full time author,
Speaker 1: I am a New York Times bestselling author of several
Speaker 1: increasingly stupid books. The last one was called Zoe Punch
Speaker 1: is the Future and the Dick. It is a book
Speaker 1: two in a series. You do not have to have
Speaker 1: read the first one. It is as good of a
Speaker 1: place to start as any or you can go to Amazon,
Speaker 1: or if you have a more ethical place you buy
Speaker 1: your books from. You can prowse any of them by
Speaker 1: looking up my name. Um. Otherwise, I also have social media.
Speaker 1: All the social media is except TikTok. Are you on TikTok?
Speaker 1: Evans uh no no. I I am frightened and confused
Speaker 1: by anything that the kids like. Okay, so for you
Speaker 1: on TikTok. The handful of TikTok videos that I've seen
Speaker 1: segments of on Twitter have convinced me that we need
Speaker 1: to do a reverse logans run. I love TikTok. I'm
Speaker 1: just not like posting on there. It's a great time.
Speaker 1: I've learned so many helpful tips on organization and like
Speaker 1: what products to buy that actually work. It's like it's
Speaker 1: like yelp but video, Well, you can either do what Sophie.
Speaker 1: There's also a lot of puppies. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: puppy easy guys. I'm just gonna say it again reverse
Speaker 1: Logan's run. I said in the previous episode, though, like
Speaker 1: it's easy for us to look back on the past
Speaker 1: and condemn how casual they were about Nazis and various
Speaker 1: I think in the future they'll look back at how
Speaker 1: we tolerated TikTok and they'll say the same It's like,
Speaker 1: how could they not see where that was going? Yeah?
Speaker 1: How could they not tell that TikTok would lead to
Speaker 1: the annihilation of the dolphins in two? And I saw
Speaker 1: it coming? But thanks for having me on this was
Speaker 1: this was a lot of information to try to get
Speaker 1: through very quickly. We left out so much. We love
Speaker 1: thought so many stories that could have You're gonna do
Speaker 1: an entire series on mk ultra, a multi part series
Speaker 1: on mk ultra is also going to wind up leaving
Speaker 1: out a lot, a lot of a lot of wild shit.
Speaker 1: It's just the nature of it. If the best thing
Speaker 1: podcast can do is encouraged people to go out and
Speaker 1: buy books on the subject, and her susan further because
Speaker 1: you you are not informed because you listen to nine
Speaker 1: hours above podcast on it, I know it listens like
Speaker 1: there was a lot to get through. There's so much
Speaker 1: more and it's all just as interesting it really is.
Speaker 1: And if you want to learn more, buying The Brothers,
Speaker 1: which is where I recommend starting with Stephen kenzer Um
Speaker 1: and then The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot, will will
Speaker 1: that that will actually give you a pretty solid base
Speaker 1: of understanding of these guys. And what they did. But
Speaker 1: of course there will still be a lot more, all right,