David Talbot Quotes

Here's my love, not in little droplets, but from the very river of my being. It reaches all the way down to the roots of my being, tangling my heart in its burning mesh. For you. Drink deep.

Our country’s cheerleaders are wedded to the notion of American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us. There is an implacable brutality to power that is familiar throughout the world and throughout history.

If Dulles could use a person, that person was somehow real for him. If not, that person didn’t exist.

You understand the fundamental principle of an icon, don’t you? “Inspired by God” “Not made by hands” “Supposedly directly imprinted upon the background material by God Himself” All Icons fundamentally were the work of God. A revelation in material form. And sometimes new icon could be made from another simply by pressing a new cloth to the original and a magic transfer would occur.

It will be under the name David Talbot.” “My clothes. There’s a stash of them here under the name Isaac Rummel. Just a suitcase or two, and some coats. It’s really winter, isn’t it?” I gave him the key to the room. This was humiliating. Rather like making a servant of him. Perhaps he’d change his mind and put our new lodgings under the name of Renfield.

Louis found me in the rear parlor, the one more distant from the noises of the tourists in the Rue Royale, and with its windows open to the courtyard below. I was in fact looking out the window, looking for the cat again, though I didn't tell myself so, and observing how our bougainvillea had all but covered the high walls that enclosed us and kept us safe from the rest of the world. The wisteria was also fierce in its growth, even reaching out from the brick walls to the railing of the rear balcony and finding its way up to the roof. I could never quite take for granted the lush flowers of New Orleans. Indeed, they filled me with happiness whenever I stopped to really look at them and surrender to their fragrance, as though I still had the right to do so, as though I still were part of nature, as though I were still a mortal man.

It took me a long time to realize that when he talks it is only for the purpose of obtaining something.

Don't go," he said, and his voice was so soft and imploring that it took my breath away. But I was already going. I barely heard him call out to me: "I need you. You're the only friend I have." How tragic those words! I wanted to say I was sorry, sorry for all of it. But it was too late now for that. And besides, I think he knew. All life seemed utterly unbearable to me now.

After a long discussion of the country's woes, the interviewer asked Bobby, "But you are an optimist?" Kennedy nodded and smiled his weary-eyed smile. "Just because you can't live any other way, can you?" he replied.

What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest. These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of tea. “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.” He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters,” he said. “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. “I guess I will see them there soon.

Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.)

city’s anthem, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” was written in 1954 by two gay lovers who were pining for “the city by the bay” after moving to Brooklyn Heights.

When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, don’t you want somebody to love.

I never could stand racism or indifference to poverty. That doesn’t make me a lefty ideologue. It makes me an ordinary American.

Frisco”—a violation of local custom that, as Herb Caen had impatiently explained for many years, was committed only by clueless rubes.

That little Kennedy... he thought he was a god.

In San Francisco, racism came at you with a smile.

alarmed zoo guards by sticking his hand through the bars of a cage to pat the cheek of a Bengal tiger. “This is like prison—I have been in prison, too,” said Fidel, who had survived Batista’s cages.

few of the some five thousand convicted Nazis were still in prison after 1953. A number of the interventions on behalf of fortunate war criminals could be traced to the quiet stratagems of Allen Dulles.

It’s vital that you remind everyone around you at the hospital that you’re still a human being, even when you feel like a gravely wounded animal. The hospital care providers were not my family, but I soon realized that I needed them to care about me as if we were connected by blood.

I now live in a ghost world, and not everyone who was once close to me wants to venture into this shadowy place to hang out with me. Some people are clearly spooked. I remind them of their own frailty and mortality. I get it; it’s understandable. But it confirms my spectral status to me.

During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena. In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality.

Moscone and Milk were the dynamic duo of San Francisco’s progressive revolution. They never forgot what they were elected to do: to fight for the burdened and afflicted, for those whose voices were never heard in the halls of power. They fought for the rights of workers, minorities, gays, and renters. And they made the same enemies: the chamber of commerce, developers, realtors, the SFPD.

And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war’s mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.

Sister Boom Boom—a half-Catholic, half-Jewish drag queen named Jack Fertig, who wore a whore’s makeup and a nun’s habit and vamped it up with the other political pranksters in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—was an especially aggravating thorn in Feinstein’s side. Boom Boom ran a remarkably aggressive campaign against Feinstein during her 1983 reelection bid, under the slogan “Nun of the Above,” eventually winning twenty-three thousand votes.

The Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner—San Francisco homeboy, and a shrewd product of Bay Area Catholic schools—got it. “The difference between San Francisco and Berkeley was that Berkeley complained about a lot of things. Rather than complaining about things, we San Franciscans formed an alternative reality to live in. And for some reason, we got away with it. San Francisco became somewhere you did things rather than protesting about them. We knew we didn’t have to speechify about what we should and shouldn’t do. We just did.

San Francisco’s battles are no longer with itself but with the outside world, as it exports the European-style social ideas that drive Republican leaders and Fox News commentators into a frenzy: gay marriage, medical marijuana, universal health care, immigrant sanctuary, “living” minimum wage, bicycle-friendly streets, stricter environmental and consumer regulations. Conservatives see these San Francisco values as examples of social engineering gone mad. But in San Francisco, they’re seen as the bedrock of a decent society, one that is based on a live-and-let-live tolerance, shared sense of humanity, and openness to change.

Everything leads me to believe it,” he replied. “They got their hands on this communist who wasn’t one, while still being one. He had a sub par intellect and was an exalted fanatic—just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. . . . The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the way they had probably planned it would. . . . But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin—supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory! “Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder. “America

Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing

Kennedy, he gushed, was “graceful, gay, funny, witty, teasing and teasable, forgiving, hungry, incapable of being corny, restless, interesting, interested, exuberant, blunt, profane, and loving.

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin,

viewed the onrush of anticolonial independence in the Third World as a “destructive hurricane,” Kennedy recognized it as the future.

The underground struggle between these two icons of power is nothing less than the story of the battle for American democracy.

the two men collaborated against a Roosevelt operation called Project Safehaven that sought to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries.

It is not widely recognized that the Nazi reign of terror was, in a fundamental way, a lucrative racket—an extensive criminal enterprise set up to loot the wealth of Jewish victims and exploit their labor. The chemical giant Farben was at the forefront of integrating concentration camp labor into its industrial production process,

The Allies had chosen Nuremberg to put the Third Reich on trial for its aggression and crimes against humanity because the city had been the main stage for Hitler’s pageantry, playing host each year to the Nazi Party’s extravagant propaganda spectacles.

As the first war crimes trial got under way in Nuremberg in November 1945, the spirit of FDR and the president’s justice warriors—men like Pell and Morgenthau—hovered over the legal forum. But the political foes who had opposed Roosevelt’s day of reckoning for the Nazis did not fully surrender. They remained determined to control the proceedings at Nuremberg and to protect valued members of Hitler’s hierarchy.

Prince Max was only one of the emissaries Himmler dispatched across Europe to seek a separate peace deal with the United States and England. At one point, Himmler even recruited fashion designer Coco Chanel, bringing her to Berlin to discuss strategy.

Morgenthau was acutely sensitive about the anti-Jewish sentiments that prevailed in the country, not least in the nation’s capital, where private clubs would restrict membership to white Christians until well into the 1960s.

The inscription reminded Jung, who said he always felt “unsafe,” that he was “in the presence of superior possibilities.

Jung’s portrait of Hitler is as chilling a picture of psychopathology as you will find.

But men of action learn to conquer these disquieting voices inside, Nixon reminded himself. “One of the most trying experiences an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or fly from it,” Nixon wrote in Six Crises. “It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers.

A leader acted decisively. The failures are “those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee.

The crucial task of unifying the power elite, according to Mills, fell to a special subset of the corporate hierarchy—top Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers.

Mills took aim at the most important topics in American society: the soul-killing, “cheerfully robotic” regimentation of corporate life; the unique terrors of the nuclear age—an age, he argued, when war itself had become the enemy, not the Russians; and, of course, the overworld of American power, a realm that he believed few average citizens could grasp, even though it cast a long shadow over their daily existence.

I look forward to the time when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet’s robes and settles down to being a sociologist again,” he wrote in the New York Post. Mills considered himself

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked. With his long, dour face topped by his ever-present banker’s homburg, the elder Dulles always seemed to be on the brink of foreclosing on all human hope and happiness.

Allen Dulles was one of the wiliest masters of secret power ever produced by America. And his most ambitious clandestine efforts were directed not against hostile governments but against his own. While serving in multiple presidential administrations, he learned to manipulate them and sometimes subvert them.

As director of the CIA, Allen Dulles liked to think he was the hand of the king, but if so, he was the left hand—the sinister hand. He was master of the dark deeds that empires require.

The Dulles brothers were not intimidated by mere presidents. When President Franklin Roosevelt pushed through New Deal legislation to restrain the rampant greed and speculation that had brought the country to economic ruin, John Foster Dulles simply gathered his corporate clients in his Wall Street law office and urged them to defy the president. “Do not comply,” he told them. “Resist the law with all your might, and soon everything will be all right.

After the war, Dulles helped a number of notorious war criminals escape via the “Nazi ratlines” that ran from Germany, down through Italy, to sanctuary in Latin America, the Middle East, and even the United States.

Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office.

And, as Dulles knew, Switzerland was a financial haven for the Nazi war machine.

He is considered to be essentially a dangerous type of man.” None of this mattered to Allen Dulles when Malaxa turned up at his office at Sullivan and Cromwell. The pertinent fact was that the Romanian had a huge fortune, and he was willing to spend millions of it where Dulles wanted him to. In return for financing Dulles’s far-flung anti-Communist network—which stretched from Buenos Aires to Bucharest—Malaxa secured Dulles’s influential help in his battle to stay in the United States.

Mills called this professional and social synchronicity “the fraternity of the successful.

Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite,

Instead of the fairy world conjured by her mother, she was forced to dwell in a world “too pedestrian, too filled with anxiety, with duty, with the necessity to be always right.

And on the weekend of the assassination, Dulles hunkered down for unexplained reasons at a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia known as “the Farm,” despite the fact that he had been removed from the agency two years earlier.

Just as puzzling is why the American press never troubled itself to explore this intriguing question.

As Jung observed, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious

The drive for absolute control was the only passion that truly gripped Allen Dulles.

Long was convinced that he was being persecuted by “the communists, extreme radicals, Jewish professional agitators [and] refugee enthusiasts.” He was part of the State Department’s deeply entrenched, high-born culture—a WASP aristocracy that regarded immigrants, particularly those non-Christian newcomers from central and eastern Europe, as socially offensive and potentially subversive. Anti-Jewish attitudes in this insular club were so deeply ingrained that they were reflexive.

Fritz Sander, the engineer who invented the system, later lamented the fact that he could not patent his creation because it was considered a state secret.

They all had been infected with dangerous ideas during the Arbenz era because, in the words of one observer, “they believed [that] in a democracy the people chose the government, Guatemala needed land reform, and workers deserved protection under the law.

Wolff was also privy to another Sunrise dirty secret: the extent to which the separate peace pact was a cold betrayal of the United States’ and Britain’s wartime Soviet allies.

When the Luftwaffe bombers roared over London, they dropped huge flares to illuminate their targets, and the city was cast in a spectral glow just before the explosions began.

There was always a dark shadow around the San Francisco rainbow. From the very beginning, violence, desperation, and fear stalked the streets of the Haight, side by side with the euphoria. “When I hear about the Summer of Love, I say, ‘Where was that?’” remarked Lewis. “It was there, but always lurking below was this seething hatred and fear from Vietnam and the Cold War. There was always this feeling that we were going to die.

Fosters Gefühlskälte trat krass zutage, als er 1932, während Hitler sich anschickte, die deutsche Regierung zu übernehmen, drei jüdische Freunde, prominente Bankiers, in Deutschland in ihrer Berliner Filiale besuchte.

Die Männer waren in einem Zustand höchster Besorgnis.

Prolog

»Dieser kleine Kennedy… der hat gedacht, er ist ein Gott.«1

Die Worte zischten scharf und ungehörig wie ein Fluch durch die Wohlanständigkeit der milden Abendluft.

Der Mann war wieder er selbst: der gesprächige, liebenswerte Allen Welsh Dulles, ein Mann, dessen gesellige Umgangsformen eine Welt finsterer Geheimnisse maskierten.

In der Öffentlichkeit übernahm John F. Kennedy, der frischgewählte Präsident, die Verantwortung für das Fiasko und bedachte Dulles mit gnädigen Worten, während er die Entlassung des alternden Geheimdienstlers nach einem halben Jahrhundert im öffentlichen Dienst unter acht verschiedenen Präsidenten in die Wege leitete.

Nachdem ihm Präsident Eisenhower freie Hand gelassen hatte, als Weltpolizist jedes Aufbegehren, das die amerikanische Vorherrschaft bedrohte, niederzuschlagen, stürzte Dulles’ CIA national gesinnte Regierungen in Afrika, Lateinamerika und im Nahen Osten und nahm sogar lästige Staatsführer verbündeter europäischer Länder ins Visier.

Unterdessen übte sein Bruder John Foster Dulles – Eisenhowers offizieller Außenminister – mit seinen häufigen Predigten über die Niedertracht der Kommunisten und seinen ständigen Drohungen mit atomarer Auslöschung sein Amt mit der unheildräuenden Düsterkeit eines vom Weltgericht besessenen Pfarrers aus.

John Foster Dulles brauchte den Kommunismus so sehr wie die Puritaner die Sünde,

1959 erlag John Foster Dulles rasch einem Magenkrebs.

Nur Allen Dulles, obwohl schon über das Pensionsalter hinaus, stand noch fest an der Spitze, entschlossen, das Ancien Régime nicht untergehen zu lassen.

Als Präsident Kennedy 1961 seine energische neue Präsidentschaft antrat, beschloss er, Allen Dulles als CIA-Chef zu behalten, trotz der offenkundigen Differenzen ihrer Weltsichten.

Selbst während seines stürmischen Werbens um Martha Clover Todd, eine freigeistige Schönheit aus einer prominenten Familie,

der er nach drei Tagen einen Heiratsantrag machte, ließ sich Allen nicht von einem langen Schachturnier mit seinem Bruder abhalten.

Die gleiche Strategiefixierung übertrugen die Dulles-Brüder später auf die Weltpolitik.

John Foster Dulles stieg zum politischen Chefberater Amerikas auf, ein Mann mit der Bestimmung, leise mit Königen, Premierministern und Despoten zu konferieren. Er sah sich selbst gern als Schachmeister der freien Welt.4

Später, als Bruder Allen Dulles während des Zweiten Weltkriegs auf dem europäischen Kontinent als oberster Geheimdienstler der USA operierte, ignorierte er unverfroren Präsident Roosevelts Politik der bedingungslosen Kapitulation der Achsenmächte und verfolgte seine eigene Strategie von Geheimverhandlungen mit SS und deutscher Wehrmacht.

Ihm war mehr daran gelegen, den Sicherheitsapparat des Dritten Reiches zu retten und ihn gegen die Sowjetunion zu wenden – die für ihn immer der wahre Feind Amerikas war.

Nach dem Krieg verhalf Dulles einer Reihe berüchtigter Kriegsverbrecher zur Flucht auf der sogenannten Rattinlinie, auf der Nazis von Deutschland nach Italien und von dort weiter in Zufluchtsorte in Lateinamerika, im Nahen Osten und sogar in den Vereinigten Staaten flohen.

Kennedy verweigerte die Ausweitung einer Operation, die er die ganze Zeit für schäbig gehalten hatte.

ein Bruch der Washingtoner Etikette, wo es als schlechter Stil gilt, den Präsidenten zu kritisieren, dem man bis vor kurzem noch gedient hat.

Die Geschichte von Allen Dulles hört nicht auf, Amerika zu verfolgen.

Viele jener Praktiken, die bei den Amerikanern bis heute anfallartige Schübe der Gewissensprüfung auslösen, haben ihren Ursprung in der Zeit von Dulles’ prägender Herrschaft über die CIA.

Experimente mit Gedankenkontrolle, Folter, politischer Mord, außergesetzliche Auslieferungen, die massenhafte Überwachung von US-Bürgern und ausländischen Verbündeten: All das waren zu Zeiten von Dulles’ Herrschaft weithin eingesetzte Mittel.

Dulles war zu großer persönlicher Grausamkeit fähig, gegenüber seinen Vertrauten ebenso wie gegenüber seinen Feinden.

Terror herrschte während solcher Aufstände, und die Angst der Zivilgesellschaft war zu groß, um die Mörder zur Rechenschaft zu ziehen.

Sie begriff nicht, wie sie als junge Frau angesichts der gewaltsamen historischen Ereignisse der damaligen Zeit nur so blind hatte sein können, obwohl das Geschehen doch praktisch durch ihr eigenes Wohnzimmer gefegt war.

Aber es ist sehr wichtig, alles zu verstehen: die Dunkelheit und das Licht.«

Es gab nichts Heimliches an Allen Dulles’ Aktivitäten in der Schweiz der Kriegsjahre, auch wenn er seine Spionageabenteuer hinterher zu verlockenden Geschichten aufbauschte,

Während er auf seinem Schweizer Außenposten diente, mochte Dulles von Nazis umzingelt sein, aber er war auch von alten Freunden umgeben.

Mit der mittelalterlichen Stadt mit Blick auf die schneebedeckten Alpen, aus denen die gletschergrüne Aare zu Tal fließt, verbanden sich für ihn ein Fülle von Erinnerungen – an Botschaftspartys während des Ersten Weltkriegs, an Tennisspiele mit Bällen, die (mit bester Empfehlung seines Bruders Forster) im Diplomatengepäck ankamen, an die umworbenen jungen Sekretärinnen aus den Konsulaten, die ebenso wie die freigeistigen Damen aus der örtlichen Künstlerkolonie das Diplomatenviertel der Stadt belebten.

Eine seiner Affären während des Ersten Weltkriegs nahm ein brutales Ende.2 Sie war eine junge tschechische Patriotin, die an Dulles’ Seite in den Büros der US-Gesandtschaft arbeitete.