2024~14. The Devil's Chessboard

David Talbot. 2015.

This was not at all what I was expecting.  A deep dive into the CIA starting with WWII and continuing through the assassination of Bobby Kennedy was not on the list of things I would have picked up to read, like not ever.  But, this was fascinating.  It takes conspiracy theory and just doubles down on it, presenting tons of details that appear so well documented that it is hard not to start thinking that the deep state has indeed run the world for a very long time.

The book starts in the build up of Nazi Germany, when Allen Dulles and, to a lesser extent, his bother John Foster Dulles (for whom the DC airport is named) develop close connections to Hitler and his upper administration.  The graphic depictions of the Holocaust is a precursor to other atrocities throughout the book, but while it was not bedtime reading, the details of the horrors felt important to an understanding of exactly what these men knew about what was happening, when they knew it, and the opportunities they had to alter the course of the genocide.  As not only Nazi sympathizers, but as active friends and colleagues with the Nazi leadership, the CIA's founding fathers did not get off to a good start.  That this agency and the men behind it became so powerful as to run a shadow government, even after they let the agency is shocking.

I had no idea where the book was headed as I read it, so each new era was fascinating.  Some of the history I knew well, but other pieces were not things I had studied or were familiar with.  More than that, though, the book veers seemingly off course onto remarkably interesting tangents, such as the role race played in Castro's Cuba. So many side stories weaved together to provide the backdrop for the chapters on JFK's assassination. From McCarthyism and The Bay of Pig to Freud and Jung to race relations and the Cold War, this book packs a ton of topics into every chapter.

I wasn't sucked into the book in the way that I sometimes am where I cannot stop reading because the book often reads more like a dense text book than a best-seller, but I did get sucked into the book in the way that sometimes happens where I in the book's world even when I am not reading.  I definitely spent the last few weeks wondering which parts of what is happening now politically are the results of a new guard that is the legacy of the men portrayed in this book.   

On a side note, the number of gay men in the CIA and adjacent is fairly shocking given how many of them were also being blackmailed, pressured, or threatened because of their sexual orientation, not to mention the number of gay men do this to other gay men.  These storylines are almost glossed over, but are painful to think about.  I was also troubled by the author's references to pedophiles and the sexual abuse of boys in the same category.

On a second side note, if you google the book, the first hit is to the CIA website, but when you jump there, it says: "Page not found. CIA.gov has changed . . ."  I am so curious what used to be posted there.

​Recommend.  

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