Book summary “The devil's chessboard”: summary

Introduction

You live in a democracy, yet you suspect that powerful unelected forces pull the strings behind public policy. You wonder how shadow networks operate without accountability, shaping wars, assassinations, and global economies from behind the scenes.

Allen Dulles built an unaccountable corporate intelligence apparatus that subverted American democracy and prosecuted a brutal shadow war during the Cold War.

The book traces this hidden history from the Wall Street boardrooms of Sullivan and Cromwell to the wartime espionage networks of Bern. You will see how the CIA grew into a parallel government that overthrew foreign leaders and defied presidents. The narrative follows the terminal collision between Allen Dulles and John F. Kennedy, culminating in the assassination in Dallas and the cover-up directed by Dulles himself.

The following questions guide this investigation:

• How did Wall Street lawyers shape American foreign policy?
• What role did former Nazi officers play in early Cold War intelligence?
• Why did the CIA clash so violently with the White House?
• How did the Warren Commission conceal the truth about the Kennedy assassination?

1. Corporate Origins and the Worldview of the Elite

Sullivan and Cromwell

The worldview of the Dulles brothers was forged in the corporate boardrooms of Wall Street, where they believed democracy required careful management by an elite circle.

Running Sullivan and Cromwell, John Foster and Allen Dulles served as top executives for privileged men they viewed as the true seat of power in America. When President Franklin Roosevelt pushed through New Deal legislation to restrain economic speculation, John Foster Dulles urged his corporate clients to defy the law.

Allen and Foster Dulles grew up in an emotionally detached family environment that fostered a lack of empathy. Raised by a Presbyterian minister father and an active mother, the brothers were influenced by their grandfather, former Secretary of State John Watson Foster. They displayed persistent indifference toward the suffering of others, which shaped their later professional behavior.

During a childhood trip to Lake Ontario, ten-year-old Allen Dulles stood impassively on a dock watching his five-year-old sister Nataline drift away into deep water until their mother intervened.

The Wall Street and Nazi Connection

Wall Street law firms like Sullivan and Cromwell played a major role in financing German industrial conglomerates prior to and during World War II. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles managed financial networks that funneled U.S. investments into German cartels such as IG Farben and Krupp Steel.

Foster Dulles continued to represent German cartels and defended pro-Nazi lobbyist Gerhardt Westrick even after Westrick celebrated the Nazi defeat of France. In 1935, Foster Dulles finally closed the Berlin office of Sullivan and Cromwell after pressure from partners.

2. Wartime Intrigue and Nazi Rescues in Bern

During World War II, Allen Dulles used his diplomatic posting in neutral Switzerland to run an independent foreign policy, maintain ties with Nazi-aligned contacts, and shelter war criminals from justice.

When a 49-year-old Allen Dulles crossed into Switzerland in November 1942, he insisted on being stationed in Bern rather than London. You can see how this move gave him free rein with minimal supervision from Washington. He set up his Office of Strategic Services base at 23 Herrengasse, a 14th-century mansion.

Dulles lived at 23 Herrengasse and met openly with informants, double agents, and Nazi aristocracy like Prince Max Hohenlohe.

Operation Sunrise

Dulles engaged in unauthorized secret negotiations with Nazi intermediaries to construct a European order aligned with anti-Soviet goals. He met repeatedly with Prince Maximilian Egon von Hohenlohe, an emissary of Heinrich Himmler. Dulles gave Prince Max the secret OSS code number 515 and forwarded his reports on Himmler to Washington.

Despite receiving critical documentation from informants like Eduard Schulte and Fritz Kolbe, Dulles largely ignored warnings about the Holocaust. He sent more than three hundred communiqués from Bern that rarely mentioned the killing of Jews. When meeting Eduard Schulte in Zurich in spring 1943, Dulles asked him to write a memo on the mood of the German people instead.

Protecting Nazi Assets

Allen Dulles orchestrated a clandestine rescue mission to save SS General Karl Wolff and systematically shielded major war criminals from justice.

Fearing that Wolff's capture would allow the Red Army to expand its influence, Dulles had his subordinate Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz organize an armed convoy across enemy lines. On April 26, 1945, when Karl Wolff was surrounded by partisans at Villa Locatelli, OSS agent Don Scotti and a mixed team drove through gunfire to rescue him. Wolff greeted them in full SS uniform and offered them expropriated British Scotch.

To honor an implicit immunity deal, Dulles suppressed a damning OSS report detailing Wolff's role in mass slaughter. Eleven of the original Nuremberg defendants were sentenced to hang, but Dulles prioritized building a strong West Germany against perceived Soviet threats.

Allen Dulles told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting on December 3, 1945, that the U.S. could not run a new Germany without employing former Nazi party members.

Out of eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials stretching from 1946 to 1949, two hundred accused German war criminals were prosecuted. Out of five thousand convicted Nazis, few remained in prison after 1953. Wolff was transferred to a psychiatric institution in Augsburg in 1946, and later received a four-year sentence reduced to time already served following a denazification hearing in Hamburg in March 1948.

3. Institutionalizing the CIA and Expanding the Shadow War

Allen Dulles systematically outmaneuvered and subverted multiple U.S. presidents who employed him. You watch him ignore FDR's policy of unconditional surrender to negotiate with Nazis, expand Truman's newly created CIA into a massive Cold War colossus, and leave Eisenhower with a legacy of ashes.

Allen Dulles expanded the CIA into a massive Cold War colossus, utilizing private-front organizations, Nazi gold, and ruthless covert operations without presidential control.

The Rise of the CIA

Defense Secretary James Forrestal appointed a review committee in early 1948, and Allen Dulles assumed control of it. The Dulles-Jackson-Correa Committee delivered its 193-page report in January 1949, concluding with a demand that the agency take full advantage of its wide legal authority.

Dulles operated outside traditional government oversight by utilizing private-front organizations and expanding covert action units. He helped establish the National Committee for a Free Europe as a CIA front financed partly by Nazi gold, pouring $2 million into clandestine projects. He also guided Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination into a massive covert apparatus engaging in sabotage, subversion, and assassination without presidential control.

Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination expanded to 3,000 employees and 3,000 independent contractors operating 47 overseas stations by 1952. Under Allen Dulles, the CIA expanded into an autonomous agency that operated largely free from democratic oversight and congressional accountability. Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook concluded in her 1981 book The Declassified Eisenhower that Eisenhower was America's most covert president, actively participating in his own cover-ups.

Erica Wallach walked from West Berlin into East Germany in August 1950, was arrested at SED headquarters, imprisoned in Schumannstrasse Prison, and later sent to Vorkuta where she shoveled gravel. The twenty-eight-year-old survived five years of harsh imprisonment in Soviet labor camps by undergoing a profound mental adjustment and accepting total isolation.

You can survive extreme confinement by following specific internal rules:

• give up all hope of returning to family and past comforts;
• rise early each morning in the dark to work hard and avoid freezing;
• ingratiate oneself with fellow prisoners to break up monotony;
• realize that mental torture is a creation of one's own spirit and resolve not to break.

Mind Control and MKULTRA

The CIA launched the MKULTRA program to develop mind control and interrogation techniques, drastically expanding secret research on human subjects. Initiated by Allen Dulles with an initial budget of $300,000, MKULTRA grew into a multimillion-dollar operation spanning a quarter of a century. It enlisted leading universities, hospitals, and researchers to experiment with drugs like LSD and biological agents, often treating human subjects as expendable.

Frank Olson, a CIA biochemist working at Camp Detrick, was unknowingly dosed with LSD by Sidney Gottlieb during a CIA retreat at Deep Creek Lake, leading to his fatal fall from a New York hotel room a week later.

Allen Dulles subjected his brain-damaged son to experimental MKULTRA treatments administered by prominent psychiatric researchers, causing further deterioration. Desperate to help his son, Allen Dulles enlisted top MKULTRA-connected physicians like Dr. Harold Wolff, who received $300,000 in research grants, and Dr. Ewen Cameron. Allen Jr. endured harsh procedures including insulin shock therapy and electroshock, which failed to improve his condition.

Joan Dulles visited her brother at New York Hospital and the Allan Memorial Institute, watching him suffer through insulin shock treatments and complaining that he was going mad. The CIA later made a $750,000 payout to nine families harmed by Cameron's experiments.

4. Global Overthrows and the Power Elite

Operating alongside corporate allies, the CIA overthrew democratically elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala to protect Western economic interests while the Eisenhower administration maintained a policy of nuclear brinksmanship.

Given free rein by President Eisenhower, Allen Dulles toppled nationalist regimes across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. You can see how this earned Allen Dulles the moniker of secretary of state for unfriendly countries as he waged a brutal shadow war.

Coup in Iran and Guatemala

Mossadegh took office in 1951 and nationalized oil by seizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The Dulles brothers convinced President Eisenhower that Iran was falling to Communism, using this as a pretext to launch a covert operation led by Kermit Roosevelt that employed bribed military leaders, street gangs, and targeted assassinations.

On August 19, 1953, pro-shah military officers using U.S.-built Shermans and CIA-funded mobs attacked Mossadegh's residence, forcing his escape and imprisonment. The shah and Queen Soraya had arrived in Rome on August 18, 1953, waiting out the coup before returning to power. Between 1953 and 1957, agents tracked down and tortured 4,000 Tudeh party members.

Jacobo Arbenz implemented a sweeping land reform bill in 1952 that expropriated uncultivated lands from the United Fruit Company to redistribute to impoverished peasants. In Guatemala, 2 percent of landowners held 70 percent of farm acreage under Decree 59. The Eisenhower administration launched Operation PBSUCCESS, a covert operation involving psychological warfare, bombings, and a mercenary invasion to protect the company.

Jacobo Arbenz was subjected to a public humiliation at the Guatemala City airport on September 9, 1954, where he was forced to strip to his underwear in front of news cameras before fleeing into exile. Over the four decades following the coup, 250,000 people were killed in Guatemala.

The Power Elite

Sociologist C. Wright Mills published his masterpiece The Power Elite in 1956, living in a farmhouse outside New York City and riding a self-built motorcycle to Columbia University. He argued that society is ruled by individuals controlling strategic command posts within major corporations, government machinery, and the military establishment. These dominant groups share a mutual stake in a permanent war economy and frequently exchange roles, socialize in the same clubs, and send their children to exclusive schools.

American political power is concentrated within a unified power elite consisting of corporate chiefs, government leaders, and military officers rather than competing pluralistic groups. The national security complex operated largely untethered from democratic checks and balances, existing primarily to protect multinational corporate interests abroad.

Multinational giants like Chase Manhattan, Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, and General Motors were supported by a global network of U.S. military bases, spy stations, and alliances with despotic regimes, granting the establishment immense leverage. David Rockefeller provided Chase Manhattan Bank Foundation funds off the books to CIA propagandist Tom Braden, including a $50,000 check for an anti-Communist European youth campaign.

5. The Clash with Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs Fiasco

The Bay of Pigs invasion exposed a bitter war between Allen Dulles and President Kennedy over foreign policy visions, leading to Dulles's ouster and the formation of an anti-Kennedy shadow network.

While Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers viewed Third World anticolonial movements as a destructive threat, John F. Kennedy recognized them as an inevitable historical future. You watched JFK break from the nuclear brinksmanship and rigid anti-communism of the Eisenhower-Dulles regime. He favored sympathy for national liberation movements in places like Algeria, the Congo, and Vietnam.

The Bay of Pigs Disaster

Allen Dulles deliberately orchestrated his absence during the Bay of Pigs invasion to trap President Kennedy into committing full-scale U.S. military force. Over fourteen hundred CIA-trained anti-Castro exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs, and more than a hundred invaders were killed by Castro's forces.

Dulles flew to a luxury resort in Puerto Rico on the eve of the invasion to project an air of carefree relaxation while leaving his deputy Dick Bissell in charge. He calculated that when the exiles bogged down on the beaches, the resulting military crisis would force the untested president to send in U.S. Marines and air cover.

As the operation collapsed, Richard Drain met Dulles at Baltimore's Friendship Airport in a CIA-issued Chevrolet. Dulles wore a dinner jacket and a bemused smile, refusing to panic, and asked Drain to refresh his memory about Greek Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis. Allen Dulles called the failed invasion the blackest day of my life and later tried to write his side of the story in an unpublished manuscript with magazine editor Willie Morris.

The Post-CIA Shadow Network

Following the disasters in Cuba and France, President Kennedy systematically purged Allen Dulles and his inner circle from the federal government. Kennedy forced Allen Dulles into retirement, replaced him with John McCone, and ousted key Dulles loyalists including Dick Bissell, General Charles Cabell, and Admiral Arleigh Burke. The attorney general, Robert Kennedy, also had Eleanor Dulles fired from her post at the State Department. Age sixty-eight when historians painted Dulles as a spymaster in decline, he refused to fade away.

After being fired by President Kennedy, Allen Dulles transformed his Georgetown home into an anti-Kennedy government in exile. Unmoored only briefly after his ouster in November 1961, Dulles regularly hosted top CIA officers, military generals, and figures linked to anti-Castro mafia operations, continuing to operate as America's shadow intelligence chief.

In April 1963, Dulles met with Paulino Sierra Martinez, a former henchman for dictator Fulgencio Batista whose anti-Castro activities were underwritten by the Mafia and corporations.

6. The Dallas Tragedy and the Warren Commission Cover-Up

Despite being a bitter political enemy of the slain president, Allen Dulles maneuvered his way onto the Warren Commission to steer the investigation toward a lone gunman narrative.

The Assassination in Dallas

Former CIA director Allen Dulles spent the entire weekend of November 22-24, 1963, at Camp Peary, the agency's clandestine training base known as the Farm, before participating as an investigator on the Warren Commission. Three weeks prior to the assassination, Dulles visited Dallas. Dulles addressed a Brookings Institution breakfast in Virginia on the morning of November 22 before traveling to Camp Peary.

The Warren Commission Cover-Up

Dulles lobbied President Lyndon Johnson for a spot on the official inquiry, working behind the scenes with former CIA colleagues to protect the agency from scrutiny and focus blame entirely on Lee Harvey Oswald. Backed by establishment figures and President Lyndon Johnson, Dulles teamed with John McCloy and Gerald Ford to block independent staff investigations, place loyalists in key legal positions, and purge CIA documents. CIA counterintelligence officer Ray Rocca met privately with Dulles at his home to strategize on how to dismiss allegations that Oswald was a government agent.

Allen Dulles served as a member of the Warren Commission yet deliberately concealed his prior associations with figures of interest in the Kennedy assassination, such as Paulino Sierra Martinez. Despite the Secret Service's suspicions regarding Paulino Sierra Martinez and his ties to arms deals and assassination threats just before the assassination, his name was completely omitted from the Warren Report. Allen Dulles, who knew Sierra, never disclosed these connections to his fellow commission members.

Dulles lobbied successfully to become a member of the presidential investigative panel and proceeded to so thoroughly dominate its proceedings that observers viewed it effectively as his commission. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren handed the commission's report to President Johnson in September 1964, with Allen Dulles present as a dominant member. The final Warren Report contained 912 pages, with only 10 percent of the report dealing with actual facts of the case, accompanied by 26 volumes of appendices.

10 Key Ideas

1. The worldview of the Dulles brothers was forged in the corporate boardrooms of Wall Street, where they believed democracy required careful management by an elite circle.
2. During World War II, Allen Dulles used his diplomatic posting in neutral Switzerland to run an independent foreign policy, maintain ties with Nazi-aligned contacts, and shelter war criminals from justice.
3. Allen Dulles orchestrated a clandestine rescue mission to save SS General Karl Wolff and systematically shielded major war criminals from justice.
4. Allen Dulles expanded the CIA into a massive Cold War colossus, utilizing private-front organizations, Nazi gold, and ruthless covert operations without presidential control.
5. The CIA launched the MKULTRA program to develop mind control and interrogation techniques, drastically expanding secret research on human subjects.
6. Operating alongside corporate allies, the CIA overthrew democratically elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala to protect Western economic interests while the Eisenhower administration maintained a policy of nuclear brinksmanship.
7. Sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that American political power is concentrated within a unified power elite consisting of corporate chiefs, government leaders, and military officers rather than competing pluralistic groups.
8. The Bay of Pigs invasion exposed a bitter war between Allen Dulles and President Kennedy over foreign policy visions, leading to Dulles's ouster and the formation of an anti-Kennedy shadow network.
9. Following his ouster, Allen Dulles transformed his Georgetown home into an anti-Kennedy government in exile and continued to operate as America's shadow intelligence chief.
10. Despite being a bitter political enemy of the slain president, Allen Dulles maneuvered his way onto the Warren Commission to steer the investigation toward a lone gunman narrative.