The Rise of Americas Secret

Government: The Deadly Legacy of ExCIA Director Allen Dulles Pt. 2

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The Rise of Americas Secret Government: The Deadly Legacy of Ex-CIA Director
Allen Dulles

Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace
Report. Im Amy Goodman. Our guest is David Talbot. His book is The Devils
Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of Americas Secret Government. Hes
the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon. Lets start with the title, The
Devils Chessboard. Why did you call it that, David?
DAVID TALBOT: The Devils Chessboard refers to the fact that the Dulles brothers
John Foster Dulles, whos secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his brother, Allen
Dulles, who I focus on, head of the CIAthey loved to play chess with each other.
They would go at it for hours, even when Allen Dulles was about to be married. He kept
his wife-to-be waiting around while the two brothers went at it. And they tended to look
at the world as their chessboard. People were pawns to be manipulated. So I felt that
was ayou know, an apt metaphor.

But, Amy, I wanted to go back to what you were talking aboutalternative media
before this. I thinkI just want to underline what you were saying about how essential
it is to have countervoices. They are the lifeblood of democracy. And shows like yours
and public radio are just essential. You know, my book is having a hard time getting
through the media gatekeepers. They dont want to hear about this, and in part because
the CIA, particularly under Allen Dulles, but even today, are masters at manipulating the
media. Ive been on shows and been bumped. I was scheduled to be on shows at the last
minute, strangely. I was supposed to write something for Politico magazine. Someone
there called the book a "masterpiece." They wanted the book to be, you know,
showcased there. Instead, I was bumped from Politico. And an article based on recently
leaked CIA documentsconveniently leakedwas written by a former New York
Times reporter, Phil Shenon, and what he did was to basically accuse Fidel Castro of
assassinating President Kennedy. This has been a CIA disinformation line for years. So
the CIA is still manipulating the media, and its essential that independent media exists,
like this.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the relationship between The New York Times
publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Allen Dulles?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, the Sulzberger family had a long relationship with Dulles.
When he was inaugurated as CIA director, one of the Sulzbergers wrote to him, saying,
"This is the best news Ive heard in years." In another letter, he calls him affectionately
"Ally." They were on a first name basis. They belonged to the same clubs. They were
masters atthe Dulles brothers, particularly Allenat manipulating the media. After
the Warren Report comes out, the official investigation of the assassination of President
Kennedy, one of the top editors at Newsweek writes to Allen Dulles. And Im getting all
this from Allen Dulless own files; he was very proud of the fact that he couldhe had
the media in the palm of his hand. But this Newsweek editor writes to him, "Thank you
so much for basically directing our coverage of the Warren Report. We couldnt have
done it without you." So, you know, this was the kind of cozy relationship that existed
between the CIA and the media in those years. CBS, Newsweek, The New York Times,
The Washington Post, they were all in the palm of the CIAs hands. They all lived
together in Georgetown. They had cocktail parties together. It was a very cozy set.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, in Guatemala today, there has been a popular uprising.
It has been quite astounding. Otto Prez Molina, OPM, the president, was thrown out, is
in jail right now. I wanted to go to Allan Nairn, longtime investigative reporter, who
was in Guatemala during this period. And this also goes back to 1954. But Allan Nairn
has been covering Guatemala since the 1980s.
ALLAN NAIRN: This is an oligarchy in Guatemala which kills its own unionists,
which kills peasants who try to organize the plantations, which works hand in glove
with Washington and is now trying to hold onto their power, because, for the first time,
its under threat. I mean, this is a historic moment. It all began in 1954, when the CIA
invaded Guatemala, overthrew a democratically elected government and put the army in
power. And now, the people have risen.
AMY GOODMAN: So, thats Allan Nairn talking about this most recent uprising. But,
David Talbot, can you go back to 1954, where we left off in Part 1 of our conversation,

and talk about what actually happened? Who was Allen Dulles, the CIA director, and his
brother, John Foster Dulles, the statethe secretary of state, working for?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, of course, their original power goes back to Sullivan &
Cromwell, this very powerful Wall Street law firm that John Foster Dulles ran and
where Allen Dulles worked. And among their clients was United Fruit. United Fruit, of
course, was this colossus, this corporate colossus, that ruled much of Latin America,
owned, you know, vast acreage in Guatemala and many other countries. They werent
just a banana company. They were a multinational real estate company. They owned
often the utilities. And they owned the local political elites in those countries.
In the early '50s, Jacobo rbenz, this young military officer, a reform officer, starts to
emerge as a potential leader. He runs for president and is elected by his people on a
reform campaign. And one of the first things he does, of course, in this country that's
basically a medieval country ruled by land barons, is to begin to nationalize some of the
land, thats not being even used by United [Fruit], and give it to the people themselves,
the farmers, to work. And this provokes a major backlash from United Fruit, from the
local political elites, the oligarchs, and from the CIA. Allen Dulles, working for
Eisenhower as CIA director, portrays Jacobo rbenz as a dangerous communisthe
wasntand prepares to overthrow him in a military coup, which does occur.
What I tell the story of, mostly I focus on, is the tragic aftermath of that coup, because
not only for the rbenz family, which, in some ways, were the Kennedys of Guatemala
glamorous, young couple, Jacobo and Mara rbenz, their children, very goodlooking, wealthy, but very committed to uplifting the poor in that country. And after the
coup, theyre sent into a terrible exile. No country will touch them, because CIA
pressure. The CIA and the State Department pressure every country, from Mexico
throughout Latin America, not to take the rbenz family in. Theyre finally forced to go
behind the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia to seek exile. Theyre not happy there. They
finally end up back in Mexico, but theyre under tight supervision. The family is
haunted. Its stalked wherever it goes. One of his daughters commits suicide. And
Jacobo rbenz himself ends up dead under mysterious circumstancesscalded to death
in a bathtub in a Mexico City hotel. His family today believes that he was assassinated.
And given the fact that the CIA had a death list of left-wing figures, journalists, political
leaders, after the coup that were to be eliminated, that, you know, is a distinct
possibility.
So, these ripples of tragedy, after these coups, go on and on. You know, the CIA and
Allen Dulles told Eisenhower after the Guatemala coup, "Oh, it was a clean coup. You
know, hardly anyone died." But the fact is, tens of thousands of people died in the
killing fields of Guatemala as a result of that coup, and that violence continues today.
AMY GOODMAN: And wasnt it also a precursor to what happened with the Bay of
Pigs? Move forward like, what, six years, and explain what happened.
DAVID TALBOT: Right. Well, emboldened by how easy it was to do a regime change
in Guatemala, yes, when Fidel Castro comes to power in Cuba, he again antagonizes the
same corporate interests that the Dulles brothers representoil companies, like the
Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil, and others, agribusiness firms. So they believe that
Fidel has to be eliminated, and they begin plotting, under the Eisenhower

administration, with Eisenhowers approval, to kill, to assassinate Fidel Castro. And, in

fact, at one point, Fidel Castro, who was beloved in this country after the revolution
he had overthrown a thug, a Mafia-backed thug, Batista, a very corrupt and violent
dictatorship. He was seen as the future, and very glamorous, he and Che Guevara and so
on. They would come to New York and would be mobbed by people in the streets.
When they came to New York for a U.N. meeting in 1960, though, the Eisenhower
administration was already pushing back, and no hotel would take them. Finally, a hotel
in Midtown did take them, but there wasthey asked for so much money as security,
they were basically blackmailing Fidel. He was outraged, and he ended up staying in a
hotel in Harlem that took him in.
AMY GOODMAN: Hotel Theresa.
DAVID TALBOT: Hotel Theresa. And they stood up to this Washington pressure, the
manager of that hotel, who was African-American. He had grown up in Jim Crow
South. And he said, "You know, I know what its like to be denied a roof over your
head. This Cuban delegation can stay here." So it was a very
AMY GOODMAN: Did he meet Malcolm X there?
DAVID TALBOT: He did. It was a very dramatic moment. Malcolm X makes a visit to
the Hotel Theresa. He squeezes into his suite, where theres dozens of people crammed.
They have a very interesting encounter, Fidel and Malcolm. And it really changed their
lives and had a big impact on both of those men for years afterwards. In fact, Malcolm
said he was one of the few white men that he learned to respect and appreciate. And, by
the way, there was an FBI guy taking notes the whole time in that hotel room, so we
know some of what happened there and the dialogue, because of the FBI report on this.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was it?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, his name was not revealed, but there was an agent surveilling
him. But meanwhile, while Fidel is there, meeting with Khrushchev from the Soviet
Union and Nasser from Egypt and the world leaders and embarrassing the Eisenhower
administration, because here hes gone to Harlem, and, you know, no one else would
take him in, in Midtown Manhattanmeanwhile, the Mafia is meeting with CIA agents
at the Plaza Hotel, just blocks away, plotting his assassination. So, a lot of intrigue in
1960 going on in New York. And then, to make it even more interesting, a young JFK,
whos campaigning for president, after Fidel has left, shows up at the Hotel Theresa and
basically says, "This is revolutionary ground Im standing on. And we should welcome
the winds of change and the revolution, the future. We shouldnt be afraid of it." So,
very endand begins to talk about the mortality rate of black infants in Harlem and
many of the issues that are still current.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, look at what President Kennedy, then President Kennedy,
did, when it came to Cuba
DAVID TALBOT: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: what happened under his reign, from the Bay of Pigs to the
endless assassination attempts of Fidel Castro.

DAVID TALBOT: Kennedy did do a flip-flop, to an extent, after that. He came in as

president. He was young. He was untested, under a lot of pressure from the national
security people in his administration. He inherited the Bay of Pigs operation, the plans
for that. He was basically told, "Look, if you pull the plug on this thing, its so far along
now, there will be a major political backlash against you." So he was kind of
sandbagged by the CIA. He did go through with it, but he had no intention of widening
it into an all-out U.S. military assault on the island, on Cuba. But thats what the CIA
had in mind. They knew that this motley crew of Cuban exiles they put together to
invade the island wasnt sufficient to unseat Castro. But what they hoped and what they
planned was that a young President Kennedy, as this invasion was bogged down on the
beaches of the Bay of Pigs, would be forced then to send in the Marines and the U.S.
Air Force to topple Castro.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, the Cuban missile crisis, the closest we ever
came to a nuclear war.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, but Kennedy stood his ground, and he didnt do that. And that
was the beginning of his break, at the Bay of Pigs, between the CIA and Cubaand
President Kennedy. And then, yes, that became even more severe with the Cuban
missile crisis the following year. Again, the military in this country and the CIA thought
that we could take, you know, Castro out. During the Cuban missile crisis, they were
prepared to go to a nuclear war to do that. President Kennedy thought people like Curtis
LeMay, who was head of the Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, was half-mad. He said,
"I dont even see this man in myyou know, in my sight," because he was pushing for
a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. And even years later, Curtis LeMay, after
years after Kennedy is dead, in an interview that I quote from in the book, bitterly
complains that Kennedy didnt take this opportunity to go nuclear over Cuba. So,
President Kennedy basically, I think, saved my lifeI was 12 years old at the time
saved a lot of our lives, because he did stand his ground. He took a hard line against the
national security people and said, "No, were going to peacefully resolve the Cuban
missile crisis."
AMY GOODMAN: And then President Kennedy, on November 22nd, 1963, was
assassinated.
DAVID TALBOT: Thats right.
AMY GOODMAN: Were talking to David Talbot, who is author of The Devils
Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of Americas Secret Government. What
did you find when it came to Kennedys assassination?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, first of all, after Kennedy did fire Allen Dulles after the Bay of
Pigs, Dulles didnt get the memo. He went home to Georgetown and continued to
operate from his home as if he were still running the CIA. His top deputies came on a
regular basis to meet with him. He
AMY GOODMAN: You had notes of his wife and his mistress.
DAVID TALBOT: Thats right. I found his daybook, who he was meeting with. I read
histhe correspondence. I read his mistresss diaries and journals.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was his mistress?

DAVID TALBOT: A woman named Mary Bancroft, a very interesting woman, related
to the gentleman who started or was the top editor at The Wall Street Journal. She had
aspirations of her own. She became a spy for Allen Dulles in Switzerland during World
War II when they started their affair. And curiously, then, when his wife shows up in
Switzerland at the end of the war, Clover Dulles, the two women become friends.
Clover Dulles figures out whats been going on. She kind of gives it a pass. And the two
women then form a tight bond throughout the rest of their lives. And their
correspondence is fascinating. They both were patients of Carl Jung, one of the
founding fathers of psychiatry in Switzerland.
And they called Allen Dulles "The Shark," these two women, because they both knew
the kind of man they were dealing withfull of surface charm and, you know, a very
popular party guest on the Washington circuit, but underneath a very cold man, a man
who was capable of sending people to their death with the blink of an eye, a man who
was capable of putting his own child, Allen Jr., in the hands of an experimental doctor
who was working for the CIA in the notorious MKULTRA program, which Naomi
Klein and others have written about.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain it very briefly, and what happened to Allen Jr.?
DAVID TALBOT: MKULTRA wasthey called it the Manhattan Project of the mind.
It was an attempt by the CIA, fundingmillions of dollarsfunding scientists and
doctors around the country, major institutions, to see if we could program people for
whatever purpose. It was a mind control program. His son, Allen Jr., came back from
the war, Korean War, with a piece of shrapnel in his brain. He was brain-damaged, and
the family had difficulty with him. He was trying to find his way. And at one point,
Allen Dulles put him in the hands of this scientist here in New York who did
unspeakable sort of experiments on him involving insulin overdose therapy, which is a
very traumatic therapyconvulsions, sometimes resulting in death. His sister was
appalledAllen Dulless daughterwhen she went to visit him in the hospital. And it
was from her that I got this story.
Joan Dulles is a very amazing womanJoan Talley, as shes known today, a retired
Jungian therapist in New Mexico, drives a Prius with an Obama sticker on it. Im sure
her father is spinning in his grave. But she, herself, like many of us, at the age of 90
when I interviewed her, was grappling with this dark legacy in America, that played out
within her own family. You know, shes looking back on this now and is appalled, in
some way, that sheit was a part of her life. But shes reading the booksand I hope
she reads mineand is coming to some kind of determination about her father.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what MKULTRA was used for.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, MKULTRA, among other things, they were seeing if they
could program a Manchurian candidate, assassins who would act in a robotic-like
fashion to kill on CIA command. They were also using it as enhanced interrogation, as
we call it today. Soviet prisoners who would fall into our hands, they were
AMY GOODMAN: And the drug is actually?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, many different drugs, psychedelicLSD was one of the
drugs. They subjectedthere was a particular place in Canada at the Allan Institute and
McGill University in Canada, where one of these doctors, Dr. Ewen Cameron, he
operated something called the sleep room, where women, manymostly women, and
patients of his would be put. These were people who were suffering from common
neurotic disorders, postpartum depression and so on. And they were put in this sleep
room and, through massive doses of various psychedelic drugs, were put into a sleep
state, and then tape loops were played over and over again in an attempt to erase their
bad patterns of thinking, and often wiping out their memory. They would come out of
these experiments not knowing their family, who they were. In one case, a woman was
reduced to an infantile state. She couldnt use a toilet. And this was the wife of a
Canadiana member of the Canadian Parliament. So this was all CIA-funded research
during the Cold War, and it was, you know, basically the most inhumane sort of
methods being used on people.
AMY GOODMAN: Were talking to David Talbot, and we digressed from the
assassination of John F. Kennedy.
DAVID TALBOT: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you learned in writing The Devils Chessboard.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, as I was saying, after he was fired by Kennedy, Dulles went to
his home. He continued
AMY GOODMAN: And why was he fired?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, he was fired after the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy realized he
shouldnt have kept Dulles on from the Eisenhower years. They were philosophically
too different. And the Bay of Pigs was the final straw for him. So he was pushed out
after that.
Andbut Dulles, as I say, continued to sort of set up an anti-Kennedy government in
exile in his home in Georgetown. Many of the people he was meeting with, several of
the people, including Howard Hunt and others, later became figures of suspicion during
the House Select Committee on Assassination hearings in Washington in the 1970s. You
know, most Americans dont know that that was the last official statement, the last
official report, on the Kennedy assassination, not the Warren Report back in 1964. But
the Congress reopened the investigation into John Kennedys assassination, and they did
determine he was killed as the result of a conspiracy.
So a number of the people who came up during this investigation by Congress were
figures of interest who were meeting with Allen Dulles. They had no, you know,
obvious reason to be meeting with a "retired" CIA official. The weekend of Kennedys
assassination, Allen Dulles is not at home watching television like the rest of America.
Hes at a remote CIA facility, two years after being pushed out of the agency by
Kennedy, called The Farm, in northern Virginia, that he used when he was director of
the CIA as a kind of an alternate command post. Well, hes there while Kennedy is
killed, after Kennedy is killed, when Jack Ruby then kills Lee Harvey Oswald. That

whole fateful weekend, hes hunkered down in a CIA command post. So, there are many
odd circumstances like this.
I also found out from interviewing the children of another former CIA official that one
of the key figures of interest in the Kennedy assassination, a guy named William
Harvey, who was head of the CIA-Mafia plot against Castro and hated the Kennedys,
thought that they were weak and so on, he was seen leaving his Rome station and flying
to Dallas, by his own deputy, on an airplane early in November 1963. This is a
remarkable sighting, because to place someone like William Harvey, the head of the
CIAs assassination unit, put there by Allen Dulles, in Dallas in November of '63 before
the assassination is a very important fact. The CIA, by the way, refuses, even at this late
date, to release the travel vouchers for people like William Harvey. Under the JFK
Records Act, that was passed back in the 1990s, they are compelled by federal law to
release all documents related to the Kennedy assassination, but they're still withholding
over 1,100 of these documents, includingand I
AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen seconds.
DAVID TALBOT: I used the Freedom of Information Act to try and get the travel
vouchers for William Harvey. Theyre still holding onto them.
AMY GOODMAN: How many calls are you getting in the mainstream media to do
interviews?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, thank God, I was saying earlier, for alternative media, like
this, Amy, because there is resistance to this book. First of all, I call out the mainstream
media. I say that New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, they were all
under his thumb. They did his bidding.
AMY GOODMAN: Whose thumb?
DAVID TALBOT: Allen Dulless thumb. So, when the Warren Report came out, I was
saying that one of the editors, top editors, at Newsweek wrote to him and said, "Thank
you so much, Mr. Dulles, for helping shape our coverage of the Warren Report." Well,
of course, Allen Dulles was on the Warren Commission. In fact, some people thought it
should have been called the Dulles Commission, because he dominated it so much. So,
you know, its way too cozy, the relationship between Washington power and the media.
And
AMY GOODMAN: What was the relationship between Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the
publisher of The New York Times, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, they were social friends, not just him, but other members of
the Sulzberger family. I found, you know, cozy correspondence between them,
congratulating him when he was inaugurated, Dulles, as CIA director. They called him
"Ally," one of the Sulzberger families, in one letter. They would get together, you know,
every year. Dulles would hold these media sort of drink fests for New Years. And these
were, you know, top reporters, top editors, would get together with the CIA guys and
rub elbows and get a little drunk. And, you know, when Allen Dulles didnt want a
reporter, because he felt he was being overly aggressive, covering, say, Guatemala

Sydney Gruson, the reporterin the run-up to the coup there in 1954, he hadhe made
a call to The New York Times and had him removed. That was because of his
relationship with Sulzberger, the publisher. So, that was the kind of pull that Allen
Dulles had.
AMY GOODMAN: How did that work?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, they just took him out. They removed Gruson. They
transferred him, I think to Mexico, at that point.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you compare Smedley Butler, the general, who wascalled
himself, what? A racketeer for capitalism, when he was asked to overthrow countries
and said no
DAVID TALBOT: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: to Allen Dulles?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, ones a hero, and ones a villain, to put it pure and simple.
Smedley Darlington Butler, who Ive also written aboutI wrote an illustrated history,
for readers of all ages, called Devil Dog. Smedley was an American hero. He was a guy
who joined the Marines at 16, didnt know any better, ran off all around the world
fighting Americas imperial wars from China to throughout Latin America, ended up in
France during World War I. And by the time he was a middle-aged man, he had seen the
kind of dirty work that was done by Americas soldiers in the name of American
business interests. And he said he was like Al Capone. He said, "We marines were like
Al Capone, except that Al Capone couldnt even measure up to us, the kind of thuggery
that we were capable of, that we committed in Americas name throughout Latin
America, particularly."
AMY GOODMAN: And wasnt it just not through Latin America, like overthrowing
rbenz, but wasnt the Pitcairn family in the United States involved with attempting a
coup against FDR and wanted to recruit Smedley Butler to do it?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, thats whatas I write in my book, that it was his great
moment of heroism, because he was a hero to soldiers, to the rank and file. He had
spoken to the famous Bonus Army March, where World War I veterans were demanding
pay for the time they had lost when they were overseas. He spoke before them. It was a
very controversial thing he did as a retired officer, retired general from the Marines. And
so, because he was so popular with the rank and file, when a number of corporate
families like the DuPonts and others became furious at FDR for being a class traitor, as
they called him, and pushing through these Wall Street reforms and other things that
were infuriating them, they went torepresentatives of theirs went to Smedley Butler
and said, "Would you lead a march again, like the Bonus Army March on Washington?
But this time we want them to be armed, the soldiers to be armed." Essentially, "Will
you lead a coup against Franklin Roosevelt?" And instead of going along with this, he
went before Congress and outed this plot.
AMY GOODMAN: And who were the families? Who were the

DAVID TALBOT: Well, DuPonts were one of them. The family that owned
Remington, the arms factory, was also involved. A number of these people were clients
of the Dulleses. Foster Dulles, by the way, John Foster Dulles, who later became
secretary of state, ran the Wall Street firm Sullivan & Cromwell. When FDR starts to
push through some of these reforms, like the Security Exchange Commission and
others, Glass-Steagall, he convenes all his wealthy clients in his office on Wall Street
and says, "Just ignore this. Well resist this. We wont go along with these reforms."
AMY GOODMAN: The Nazis? Very quickly.
DAVID TALBOT: The Nazis, well, they have a very tight relationship, many Nazi
businessmen, with the Dulles brothers. And when Allen Dulles was in Switzerland,
supposedly working for our side, the OSS, during the war, he was actually using that to
meet with a lot of Nazis and to cut separate deals with them. He did indeed finally cut a
separate peace deal with the Nazi forces in Italy against FDRs wishes. FDR had a
policy of unconditional surrender. Dont
AMY GOODMAN: This was Operation Paperclip?
DAVID TALBOT: This was Operation Sunrise, was this deal that he made. And then he
set up these rat-lines, so-called, where Nazis, leading Nazi war criminals, escaped after
the war through the Alps in Switzerland, down into Italy and then overseas to Latin
America and even in the United States. One of the key Nazis he saved was Reinhard
Gehlen, Hitlers former chief of intelligence, who he installed, Dulles, as head of West
German intelligence after the war, a man who should have stood trial at Nuremberg.
AMY GOODMAN: Who turned you down?
DAVID TALBOT: You know, well, Politico was one. Politico, you know, one of the
leading publications, online publications and a print publication, you know, hadI was
supposed to write something for them there. Instead, they went with a piece by, as I say,
a former New York Times guy named Phil Shenon, based on leaked CIA documents that
basically pin the Kennedy assassination on Fidel Castro. This is absurd. Fidel Castro,
when he heard about Kennedys assassination, crumpled. He knew that Kennedy was
trying to open back channels with him to establish peace between Cuba and the United
States, years before Obama finally did. In fact, Jean Daniel, who was a French reporter,
was with Fidel, at Kennedys behest, in Havana, basically carrying this olive branch to
Fidel from Kennedy, when they got the terrible news from Dallas.
AMY GOODMAN: Who do you think killed John Kennedy?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, I believe what Robert Kennedy believed. Robert Kennedy, as I
showed in my book earlier, Brothers, and in this book, looked immediately at the killing
team that was put together by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro. That CIA killing team, I
think, was responsible for killing President Kennedy, as well. That team that was killing
foreign leaders, that was targeting foreign leaders, that Dulles had assembled, including
men like William Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Moralesthese were all key figures of
suspicion by Congress during the House Assassinations Committee investigation in the
70s. That was the team that was brought to Dallas. I now identify those men. A couple
of them admittedHoward Hunt, on his death bed, admitted that he was involved in the

Kennedy assassination, and the mainstream media completely overlooked this shocking

AMY GOODMAN: Howard Hunt, who was Watergate.

DAVID TALBOT: He was the leader of the Watergate break-in and a legendary CIA
action officer, and very close to Allen Dulles, revered Allen Dulles. On his death bed, he
revealed that he was part of that plot. Again, 60 Minutes looked at it and then walked
away. I know a lot about this story. But the media has been, I think, shockingly remiss
in not looking into this investigation. Its a taboo subject. But its clearI think I
present overwhelming evidence that Allen Dulles was complicit in this, in the
assassination of the president. And he conveniently ran the investigation into the
presidents murder, because he strong-armed President Johnson into appointing him to
the Warren Commission, where he became the dominant figure.
AMY GOODMAN: David Talbot, author of the new book, The Devils Chessboard:
Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of Americas Secret Government.