Chancellor of Justice (Finland)

Transcription

Welcome to Books of our Time brought to you by The Massachusetts School of Law and seen nationwide Today we shall discuss a book entitled The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer it is a dual biography of John Foster Dulles and and allen Dulles who lead the united states into a series of foreign adventures whose effects have decisively shaped todays world. The books author Stephen Kinzer is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, an columnist for the boston Globe and a former reporter for the New York times. Stephen has reported from more than 50 countries on four continents. He is with me today to discuss his book and I am lawrence r velvel the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law. Stephen thank you for being here today. Why did allen dulles and Truman and Helms think we needed a secret service? The OSS became well in effect became the CIA didn't it? The OSS was our wartime intelligence agency and Allen Dulles was one of the major figures so he was the head of the bureau the station in Switzerland when the war ended he became OSS station chief in Berlin 10 days after he got there Truman abolished the OSS. So here's mr. spy he doesn't have a spy agency anymore and so he went back to sullivan and cromwell back to his law office and he spent essentially most of his time hanging around with his old friends from the OSS. Think about what a change this was. All during the war they're sending secret agents behind Nazi lines they're risking everything day by day the whole world is swirling around their decisions and one day you go home and it's back to looking at the debentures in the law office it was too much of a shock. They were like the pilots in the battle of Britain who the war is over their back being a milkman up somewhere in liverpool it was too big a shock and I think one of the reasons that the Dulles that Allen Dulles and the other OSS veterans the former spies were so eager to push the united states into the intelligence business was that they were bored and the CIA was created in a way to address their boredom. The CIA was never created as an agency to assess what was happening in the world reflect on American foreign policy try to understand processes no it was an institution designed to strike to hit to intervene to crash into other countries to shape policies in other countries and that served the personal needs of people like allen dulles of course that was a match for whittles was happening in the world. We saw the rise of another power we realized actually one of the reasons that we were so terrified of the soviets in excess of what we had to be is that we had no idea what was going on there we assumed he worst so I think it was Allen Dulles' idea that was very harmful in the long run to American intelligence he was the co-author of the bill that created the CIA and in that bill the national security act of 1947 he did something that had never been done in the history of western intelligence. All western intelligence agencies particularly the british who were held up as the gold standard of intelligence had a firm rule and that is there has to be an absolute division a firewall between on the one side the people who gather and analyze intelligence and on the other side the people who cary out covert action because if you have them all in one agency every foreign intelligence assessment is going to end by saying and so we need a covert action. But Allen insisted on bringing both of these into the same agency because he wanted to be in charge of intervening in other countries and that I think was an original sin that lead the CIA off the track of being an intelligence agency and into the area of cloak and dagger operations. The CIA was the only intelligence agency in the world that did both. Exactly nobody had ever done that before and the dangers that the british and others had seen exactly came to pass. Welf protection is a primary function of any organism that is as true of the green grass as it is of continental nuclear powers. since the beginning of man tribes and clans have spied on one another across the valleys across the oceans and now across the world. This is the headquarters of the Central Intelligence agency of the United states government. Everybody knows it although the sign on the gate reads bureau of public roads. it might have been designed by Ian Fleming secret cubicles computers which translate russian to english at 30,000 words an hour documents burned in a 100,000 dollar furnace. This is the Pentagon of the secret war a depot of subversion and a kind of clandestine university for many years its scholarly headmaster was a super spy in the classic mold named Allen Dulles. Intelligence is nothing really other than information and knowledge from the days of Socrates by various methods and even before that mankind has been seeking knowledge of everything that influences his own life of the life of the nation to which he belongs. The idea that it is necessarily nefarious its always engaged in overthrowing foreign governments is false that's for the birds. Now there are times there are times when the unites states government feels that the developments in another government such as in the Vietnam situation is of a nature to imperil the safety and the security and the peace of the world and ask the the central intelligence agency to be its agency in that particular situation. Alison was a legal assistant with much bigger dreams. Eric turned his business background into so much more. They found their futures at the Massachusetts School of Law so can you. Immerse yourself in a fun supportive campus environment. Learn your professional skills from instructors with real world experience. Take the first step in changing your life at the most affordable law school in New england. . Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. Your future starts here. Mr. Dulles I know you've heard this many times that there are people who say that we with regard to the CIA are waging a secret war with an invisible government We are obviously engaged in many facets of what is generally called the cold war which the communists policies forced upon us. No use denying that that's a fact of life but may I say this and I do it with all solemnity at no time has the CIA engaged in any political activity of any intelligence activity that wasn't approved at the highest level. Whatever you say about it the CIA has kept busy for the past 18 years.This is Laos in south east asia not so much a kingdom as a political playing field for the great powers. some Laotian warriors are supplied by the russians some by the americans. The united states supplies 100,000 tribesmen with rice and bullets through a sort of air CIA. Secret contracts with so called private airlines one is called Air America. In all a fleet of 50 aircraft is involved all flown by civilians who are often the target of communist gunfire. We found two of the pilots in a hong kong bar a New Zealander named Len Kowper and and American named Chuck bay reminiscing about their secret flights. So as we were flying along I heard uh bubububububbubu biting into the aircraft and so I looked out the side there and these and the PL's were lined up about 15 or 20 on each side at practically point blank range one of the boys quit the day after he was a little bit green the men that you knew down there how many guys were killed well there's serino and campbell, chip brown woody ford well sometimes we really didn't know you know I mean we would arrive I'd arrive down at the office in the morning and they'd say you've got to fly down to to right up north right on the chinese border right at the very northern end of laos quite often I didn't even know what I was going to do I just knew that I had a load to take up there and people to take up there I didn't know what they were for I wasn't paid to know all I was paid to do was take them up there. Really i I never really knew who Iwas picking up . What did they have to do with Edward Lansdale and guatemala and In my book I go thru a number of cases where the dulles brothers set off these terrible long term processes and Vietnam is really a fascinating one. Actually john foster dulles is more responsible for the US involvement in vietnam than any single individual. here'e the story. That's quite an indictment. It really is when you think of everything that spun out of that we're still living with the results. In 1954 there was a conference in Geneva to decide what to do about Indochina as the conference was opening the french garrison collapsed there and Ho Chi Minh's forces took over Dien Bien Phu and proclaimed there right to control at least a part of what we would now call North Vietnam. So they had this big conference in Geneva the chinese were there the french were there the british were there the local powers were there and John Foster Dulles represented the United states. It only took them a few days to realize that at this conference one of the results was definitely going to be an agreement that since nobody could stop Ho Chi Minh on the ground he had earned a right to a little piece of territory in Indochina. When he realized when foster dulles realized this he got up and left. It's the only time in American history that an American Secretary of State has walked out of a major diplomatic conference in the middle. He realized that the french the british and everyone else was ready to concede. Actually it was Churchill who said that he loss of the fortress must be faced we couldn't hold on to it you have to admit the facts on the ground. foster dulles didn't do this he flew home the first thing he did was call in his brother and say those wimpy europeans can't hang on to Vietnam we're going to do it we're going to crush Ho Chi Minh. I want you to start a covert operation to turn back the tide in Vietnam get rid of Ho Chi Minh and impose our rule in that part of the world. that was when he hired Edward Lansdale who had been a covert operative in other parts of south east asia including in the phillipines that began the operation that built and built up to exactly what we were doing in the sixties which is to stop Ho Chi Minh to get rid of him it never occurred to them that this was a person with very deep roots in his own country and that it was only going to waste away our own security by trying to crush such a popular figure. Foster Dulles think of it this way if that one guy, john foster dulles had not made that one decision while flying back from geneva to washington I'm not going to accept this treaty I'm going to fight against it we could have avoided the entire american involvement in vietnam. As i say it's a massive indictment. What caused the what caused the Dulles Brothers to think that it was America's role to be a beacon unto the world you know and all that kind of stuff. I think it's a combination of factors. One is this belief in America's providential role American Exceptionalism which they assimilate from youth part of the excuse me for interrupting that assimilation was it in part caused by the fact that they always had these big wheels over at their house discussing american foreign policy and so on yes and not only that but they never had anyone else the only people they ever heard from the people in the top elite it would never have occurred to them to find out what the ordinary Vietnamese thought they had nothing but contempt for ordinary people the other piece I think has to do with their religious background they were brought up to believe that there's a true faith and that those who don't believe in it are wrong are backward it's not a question of there's one religion that might be appropriate for one group and another might be better for another group for various reasons and if you can believe that you can also believe that one political system is right for one country and a slightly different one or very different one would be appropriate for another so there believe that there is only one solution to every problem bled into their belief that America had been given essentially by god the key to understanding how the world should be organized and therefor it's good for everybody to listen to the United States. It was their view that other countries tend to be selfish and greedy they pursue their own interests so they shouldn't be allowed to be powerful and guide the world the united states would never do this in fact we sacrifice ourselves in order to help other countries. This is the self image that began to develop therefor if you feel that you're only helping other countries then the people in those countries who protest and say no you're not helping us you're hurting us are people simply to be brushed aside or if they can't be brushed aside crushed. Why did Eisenhower buy in so fully to John Foster Dulles' views. I think to a certain degree he softened them I can point out in the book that during the 1952 presidential campaign Foster Dulles was writing Eisenhower's speeches on foreign affairs and sometimes Eisenhower would make little changes in them and insert the phrase by peaceful means which Foster Dulles didn't like. None the less I do think that Eisenhower saw the world much the way they did he had no more understanding then they did of the third world at that time the desire of small countries to control their own resources was becoming very widespread and intense it was a new phenomenon in the world and it really challenged the whole way the world was organized I think Eisenhower had no appreciation for the intensity of nationalism that people felt in the third world and he truly believed in this paradigm that the Soviet's were behind every nationalist movement For Example Sukarno in Indonesia one day announced that he wanted the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United states to come at their own timing to come to Indonesia So the soviet leader said great I'm going to Indonesia so he got all kinds of publicity he made some nice speeches Eisenhower never went and foster dulles told him not to go because Sukarno is not our friend he's a neutralist don't go we never made our case to the indonesian people the way the soviets did because foster dulles felt that we're right anyway we shouldn't have to sell our cause to ordinary people. that's I've known people like that it's ok to know them but it's terrible when they get into such a high position to be ignorant as a private citizen is bad enough and in fact this is why I think American ignorance is sometimes worse than the ignorance of others. we're we it's often said that American's don't know or care much about the world which may be true but this is true about many other people but there's a difference. If people in Paraguay don't know anything about Iran for example it's a shame they're missing out on something but it doesn't really hurt anybody it doesn't have an effect but we act on our ignorance. Whole countries and regimes and nations shaped because of our ignorance so that makes our ignorance more dangerous than the ignorance of others. Are we stronger this year as against Russian than last year I think probably not it's pretty hard to judge those things my estimate would be that the tide is still running against us. Everywhere I look around the world the question is what maybe we're going to lose next you know we seem to be on the defensive and their on the offensive the question is what are we going to lose each year more than what are we going to gain. You can look around the whole circle of the world and you find one spot after another after another after another where the question is are we going to lose this bit of the free world is it going to be Iran or is it going to be Egypt or is it going to be Indochina or is it going to be korea or what's it going to be. Now our people have been in this positing for so long and it seems so hopeless and there's been so much negativism now sir do you see any way by which we can reverse this process so that we can gain hope again in America. Absolutely convinced that we can do it. And how can we do it Well we've been entirely negative in our approach we've lost the good old fashioned American dynamism. When we were a little nation and just were getting started we stood for something that was so vital and so dramatic and exciting in the world that everybody everywhere wanted to follow our example We were the dynamic force in the world And then the despots were all wondering what they were going to lose next and then you had a terrific despotism again lead by Russian Leader Tzar Alexander was a great most powerful potentate in the world his power stretched all around the world down into mexico into south america and what happened then the question was what they were going to lose and finally they were driven back back and back and we can recapture that american spirit. stuck in a cubicle jess was going nowhere. carol made the switch from a tech company ever was an undergrad who knew he wanted more he deserved more find your future at the Massachusetts school of law. Immerse yourself in a fun supportive campus environment learn professional skills from instructors with real world experience take the first step in changing your life at the most affordable law school in new england Massachusetts School of Law at Andover your future starts here. While diplomats traveled and statesmen pondered a frail man with a wispy beard in the drab dug in city of Hanoi held many of the answers to president Johnson's world wide peace offensive His name was Nguyễn Sinh Côn when he was born 75 years ago. Today he is Ho Chi Minh The president of North Vietnam. Hanoi August 1945 the man who calls himself Ho Chi Minh he who enlightens is greeted by delirious crowds when he arrives with his guerrilla forces after Japan's defeat. Smaller crowds greet the french returning to their colony. Ho proclaims vietnam's independence in September 1945. The French treat him as a head of an independent state. years before this same man left his homeland became a sailor a pastry chef in London a photo retoucher in France and rented a dress suit and derby hat to petition President Wilson at Versailles in 1919. Ho pleaded for independence for Vietnam no one listened to him except the French communists. He became a founding member of their party in 1920. Then began his long march to power. Moscow New York Berlin prisons in Hong Kong and china were his way stations. He assumed a dozen different names as he rose in the hierarchy of world communism but he never lost site of his main goal Vietnamese independence. in the summer of 1946 in Napoleon's castle at fontainebleau he seeks to obtain from the french full independence for his country. Paris treats the former photo retoucher with full honors but behind the glittering exteriors lurked the realities of post-war france . A weak government at home and strongly entrenched colonial interests overseas. Until the end Ho hopes for an agreement last minute talks with french overseas minister Marius Moutet fail. The handshake is that of men about to enter the ring Why did we want so badly to get rid of Ho? I think it was because we could not imaging that a person who was a communist could have any other redeeming factors. I give you a very interesting anecdote that's a powerful statement it is so the OSS the American Secret Service collaborated with Ho Chi Minh We dropped arms to him we even dropped cigarette packs and we dropped a military mission to work with Ho Chi Minh's communist guerrillas fighting the Japanese in World War Two. When the war ended the American military mission was withdrawn they were working for the OSS and the commander of it had a farewell dinner with Ho and he said to him now I have to ask you are you a communist? And Ho replied yes but that doesn't mean we can't still be friends does it? Actually it did. I would have been one option to say Ho Chi Minh is a communist ok we start there within that reality what can we do? No we didn't do that we thought that's the end of the story he said he was a communist and that's all there can't be anymore contact. And we had these fantasies of course that he was working for the chinese and the chinese were working for for the Soviets we didn't realize that the Vietnamese and chinese had hated each other for 1000 years that was just a detail. as far as we understood communism was all run from the kremlin Ho Chi Minh could not be considered a nationalist he was a communist and that was the end of the story. I you know I'm talking from 50 years beyond that time but how could we have been so naive ignorant whatever phrase you wish to use to not understand that there are natural enmities everywhere. To think that just because both groups of people live in southeast asia ergo they have to be friendly and united against us I mean this is crazy in retrospect. It's great to see a big monolithic enemy out there you know some historians like Arnold Toynbee have suggested that countries need enemies and if you don't have an enemy you should go get one because without an enemy countries are not organized they get diffuse they get loose they don't have an organizing principle for their society so the bigger the more powerful and frightening your enemy is the better it is to maintain discipline and cohesion and conformity in society I think that's why this image of the all encompassing enemy was so appealing to them. We dug a tunnel under Berlin and this was regarded as what a coup what a coup and we're tapping into russian this and that you know communications why don't you explain what really happened You know Allen Dulles' super successes as a spy master all essentially fall apart when you begin to uh when you begin to analyze them so it turns yeah we did dig this tunnel into the Soviet and East German communications network in Berlin and actually was considered one of the CIA's great Coup's for many years afterward but the CIA was aware immediately after it happened that the Soviets knew about it all along and in fact only a few weeks after it finally opened the Soviets crashed in front eh other side and the CIA agents had to run out the other end so it was one of these operations that seemed like a great success but actually wasn't. And it really is an example of how effectively every one of Allen Dulles' big operations either failed or almost failed. In fact one of my favorite stores about him comes from his period as the American spymaster in World War one in Switzerland Allen was a serial even pathological adulterer he had 100 mistresses from Clare Booth Luce to the Queen of Greece wait say that again from Clair Booth Luce to the Queen of Greece? He was entertaining the Queen of Greece in the office of the CIA Director. Um which later might explain why greek American relations were so friendly during that period. Anyway back in World War one Allen dulles was already lets say very active very friendly sort of a person when women were around and he had a busy weekend planned he had a big date for the weekend he was getting ready for it on a friday night leaving the American ligation and the phone rang and it was one of these many exiles who had gathered in Switzerland some thick accent who said to him I won't try to imitate the accent I have a message for America I Have to speak to you and deliver my message I want to make a deal with America I have to speak to America and Allen said fine call me on Monday and the guy said I can't can't be monday it has to be tonight and Allen said it can't be tonight because I have other things on my mind they went back and forth and finally Allen hung up he went out for his fun weekend and it wasn't until years later that he found out who that caller was it was Lenin and Lenin that weekend boarded the sealed train that took him to the Finland station and back to St. Petersburg what was the message he wanted to deliver to the united states? When he said he wanted to make an overture to the US what could that have meant so it shows you that uh this is a story Allen himself used to tell many of his operations really went badly partly because of his own misjudgements. you know uh didn't you say in the book so Lenin got in a sealed train and went back to change the course of history some kind of comment like that Imagine how it might have changed in another direction. I always felt that Lenin was not a passionate ideologue it wasn't marxism leninism that drove him it was power he was looking for a partner he was approaching the germans had he been able to make contact with the americans I don't even want to spin that one out. yeah um why uh why was Vietnam so important to Dulles I mean this is just a little country what 10,000 miles away from us your absolutely right and looking at the story from the perspective of today this is the obvious question. Who cares. Uh but I think you can see the answer in Dulles' statements of that period he was one of the first to use in public this phrase the domino theory Vietnam was not important in itself just like Guatemala was not important in itself once you started to see the dominos falling communists would take over everywhere That assumes that there was a kind of central plan and that uh for example what Ho Chi Minh was doing was all part of a communist effort to spread communism throughout that part of the world and the Philippines would be next and then Hawaii would be next in line and it implicitly rejects the idea that the revolution in Vietnam or the War in Vietnam or the conflict in Vietnam was a product of factors inside Vietnam. It wasn't part of an international conspiracy The Dulles brothers were never able to see that they couldn't believe that these countries had any independence or that their leaders had any kind of independent thought lets face it they were insisting that all US allies do exactly what america wanted so they assumed that the soviets were telling this to all their friends in the world. And so Joe Stalin it was really Joe Stalin vs. Truman and of course when the Dulles brothers were in power Stalin was gone they had a chance to try to build a different relationship and had they done so I think this very prospect that the cold war could have become shorter and less intense but they couldn't believe this they were locked in a paradigm of internal conflict and they saw the entire world through that sense. I must say I was discussing something with my wife and she agrees with you that uh communism or the fear of russia was I think you said the glue that held the united states together in the fifties. And I would say that the understanding that we had of the evils of Stalin's soviet union were not exaggerated that was a horrific regime and he was one of the most prolific mass murderers of modern history. Our mistake was not in over-estimating his evil our mistake was projecting it onto people like the leader of Iran and the leader of Guatemala and the leader of Indonesia who were all popularly elected nationalists in a democratic political system but we assumed that everything evil we saw int he Soviet Union was either happening or about to happen in those countries so our mistake wasn't in our assessment of what was happening inside the Soviet Union it was in our transference of that to so many countries where the dynamic was completely different. Those countries weren't they they were basically asian we didn't transfer it so much to european nations did we? Well there was always a partiality I think uh one reason the Dulles Brothers acted the way they did is they understood Europe very well and I think that's because they were of a class that was connected to Europe. When they studied diplomacy not just the two of them but all the people of their class and era they were studying european diplomacy they understood the factors that shaped europe for example they were willing to negotiate with Tito he was a communist but they understood what Yugoslavia meant in comparison to other communist countries to Italy because they knew Europe but they had no knowledge or interest in Africa Asia Latin America Later on henry kissinger would say I know nothing about nor am I interested in the world south of the Pyrennes. That was the Dulles brothers attitude nothing important or positive could ever come out of those countries the forces that shaped those countries were very different than the forces that shaped Europe One of the main forces was the drive to create some sort of national identity after centuries of colonialism another was the drive to control your own resources and not be dominated by foreign corporations The Dulles brothers didn't understand these factors because those are not factors in europe they were completely Europe oriented but the new world that was emerging was all in asia africa latin america they feared that world. Do the russinas have a CIA The KGB is one of the most sinister organizations that ever was organized are they any good are the russians good at this oh yes oh my yes you take some of their operations their classic and when we lost Czechoslovakia that was a classic operation you take that operation in Cuba great skill was shown in that you take several things they're working on now such as Indonesia the Sudan and so forth and so on they have a marvelous apparatus. Do they spend more money than we do in these activities They must do we have an application of morality in our activities they don't. Oh far more than they do yes could you talk on that subject Well only that as far as I know we don't engage in assassinations and kidnappings and things of that kind as far as I know we never have as far as we know they have and done it quite consistently. Did you apply for example moral standards to what you did when you were the director of the CIA Yes I did why because I don't think given the caliber of the men and women I had working for me I didn't want to ask them to do a thing that I wouldn't do. One or two said that even what I assigned them they preferred not to do that was alright with me I didn't ask them to do it All I can say is that I'm a parson's son and I was brought up as a presbyterian maybe as a Calvinist maybe that made me a fatalist I don't know um but I hope I have a reasonable moral standard. Over 25 years ago we said legal education was broken. Change is uncomfortable but its often needed so we rolled up our sleeves and we fixed it. Law schools are just too expensive our isn't. Most schools don't teach needed professional skills our does because our professors continue to have real world experience. to often you settle for a career that's less than what you hoped for. you shouldn't. come see the future. the massachusetts school of law at andover. Your future starts here. The man who created the U-2 also planned the Bay of Pigs. One was a fantastic success but the other wasn't. The truism in our society that moral ends don't justify immoral means and yet you and your colleagues in the CIA must on many occasions have had to abandon that principle how do you deal with it? I suppose that the way people deal with this under all kinds of circumstances and the one that occurs to me as the most prominent historically is warfare. Is that they feel a higher loyalty and that they are acting in obedience to that higher loyalty. In my position in the CIA I had a chance to know of and remotely to observe many operations and I will not deny that there were occasions when the Americans involved in these as it were out on the front had as people do in war time to undertake actions that were contrary to their moral precepts but I will say that I think this happens less often again than one might surmise i think the morality of shall we call it for short the cold war is so infinitely easier than the morality of almost any kind of a hot war that I never encountered this as a serious problem. I think that it's clear in your book that the Dulles brother's failed with regard to Nasser and with regard to the Hungarian crisis the latter I remember because I was here's a silly thing but I was in a fraternity at the time in Ann Arbor and one of the guys who came to work at the fraternity house was a hungarian refugee. well that story is really a poignant one and it shows I think one of the worst aspects of the dulles approach so one of their views when they came into office was that containment the policy that had been followed by Truman and Dean Acheson his secretary of state was an evil thing containment essentially meant we understand that communism is where it is but we're going to contain it and we're not going to allow it to grow. So the Dulles idea was this was a bad policy we have to have liberation policy he called it like roll back we're going after the communists where they are actually this never happened they followed the same containment policy that Truman and acheson had followed it was all for it was all for domestic consumption it was all rhetoric everybody in washington understood this when they heard this idea we're going to roll back communism nobody in washington took it seriously we weren't going to bomb moscow or invade china but the tragedy was the people in Eastern Europe didn't realize it was all rhetoric. Those poor Hungarians were listening and they thought it was real it was being broadcast on radio free europe we had agents inside Hungary telling them if you rise up Americans will come and help you because doesn't foster dulles say this all the time give us the chance to roll back the communist regime in your country so they did they rose up and we never sent them one bullet or one rifle nor were we ever intending to we never even considered it and we just allowed the soviets to come in and crush that rebellion and execute it's leaders and cause tremendous dislocation in Hungary and throughout eastern europe. It was really I think a terrible thing to have done to a brave people it's bad enough to say we can't help you but at least be honest about it don't say if you rise up and expose yourself to die we're going to help you and then when they do that don't go into help that is what the dulles brothers did. Well you know it's the idea that we're going to go to Hungary to help them against the Russians is beyond crazy. And everybody in America realized that except the poor innocent naive Hungarians who heard it on the radio and thought if the secretary of state is saying it it must be true. What was their relationship with people like Castro well you know and Lumumba which is a very uh I remember Lumumba very well and he uh I guess we were afraid that the Uranium would not be coming to us from out of the Congo I mean who knew the Uranium that fueled the bombs that ended world war 2 came from The Congo. who knew Well actually that's one of the questions that I often get asked about this book who knew I'll tell you the comment that I get the most often from this book and from other books i've written is a variation of that I always get this question its uh How come I didn't know any of this or I lived through this time I thought I understood what was happening only now do I see that I went to college I studied history part of what I'm trying to do is break away from the official narrative you know history is not always the way it is presented to you in books and sometimes there's a tiny footnote at the bottom of the page that's actually more important than the whole page and thats what I'm trying to do in my books is to try to break away from the narrative we're always told and see if we can look at history in a different way that will help us not only understand history better but understand our country and ourselves better. Well let me ask a pointed and poignant question do you think you're succeeding? I'm trying to bang my spoon on the highchair it's a very slow process but let me let me tell you this story I start out my book with the account of what happened to john foster dulles' bust in Dulles airport. So the story is that the bust was unveiled by president kennedy you can watch it on youtube I went out to find the bust at the airport and I found out it was gone they had taken it away and they had put it in some private conference room and I use this as a metaphor for how much we have forgotten the Dulles brothers and then after the book came out I made a lot of speeches I traveled the country talking about this book and I told that story a lot that was the opening anecdote of my standard speech what happened to the Dulles bust it's gone and it shows you how we've forgotten Dulles only a few weeks ago I got a phone call from someone saying you're not going to believe this I'm in Dulles Airport they've put the bust back out so I thought wow the power of the press somebody must have either heard me speak or read this book and decided it's not right that the guy after whom the airport is named doesn't even have his bust out here so i thought well I've achieved something but after awhile I began to think wait a minute maybe I've achieved something bad because now I've gotten to the point where maybe he's going to be honored without any context so my next goal is now that I've helped get the bust back out there is to see if I can get a stand setup nearby where I can sell copies and tell people who john foster dulles really was. I wish you luck with that. Why did Lyndon Baines Johnson put Allen Dulles on the Warren commission? This is really a fascinating story uh Allen Dulles retired already fading into Alzheimers after the bay of pigs debacle he retired very unwillingly since he was fired by President Kennedy and he only came back to public life twice he was sent on this odd mission to mississippi after civil rights workers were killed there and we later figured out that the reason was Lyndon Johnson wanted J. Edgar Hoover to send FBI folks down there to find out who killed those kids be he wouldn't do it he couldn't get Hoover to move because hoover didn't care about civil rights workers but Hoover hated Allen Dulles so Johnson figured if I send Allen Dulles down there even for one day I'll get Hoover into action and it worked then came the Warren Commission this was really interesting because you have this odd circumstance of the CIA director whose been fired by Kennedy now becoming a member of the Warren Commission investigating who killed kennedy Johnson did that for a particular reason. Johnson was one of the few people who understood that the CIA had been active in assassination programs in the Caribbean and that Allen Dulles and the CIA had been particularly active in trying to assassinate Castro among others. Johnson did not want the Warren Commission to know this he was eager to have the Warren Commission come up quickly and decisively with one crazy assassin theory and he put Allen on the Commission to assure that this secret would be hidden and Allen succeeded in this and he did it in two way. He would brief the members of the Warren Commission and their investigators on what questions to ask the CIA witnesses then he would brief the witnesses and tell the what questions were coming and what to answer and what not to say. And sure enough the Warren commission never found out about American assassination plots against other leaders which might have lead them to all kinds of areas of investigation so his job was to make sure including the death of Kennedy potentially why not we don't know but we do know that the Warren commission never pursued many leads partly because it never knew those leads were out there and some of those most promising leads were kept hidden by a plan devised by Johnson and carried out by Allen Dulles. There just do come moments and unfortunately quite a lot to them in world affairs when power has to be exerted and I have long felt that many of the criticisms that are leveled at this one agency of the government are in fact the criticisms of those who hate to admit to themselves or anyone else that power must sometimes be used and as I implied a moment ago they choose to level their criticism at one piece of the US government I can assure you that the CIA when I was there as director and I'm quite sure it's the same with Mr. McCone has given these committees full information about what it's doing how it's spending it's money and how it operates. When I appeared before them again and again I've been stopped by members of the congress who say we don't want to hear about that we might talk in our sleep don't tell us that I remember the day my future started walking with Beau thinking about my life I had big dreams but my career was going nowhere thats when I discovered the Massachusetts School of Law a few years later I'm here with beau but now I'm thinking about my clients problems instead of my own. Teachers with real world experience a fun campus and the most affordable law school in new England change your life The massachusetts school of law at andover your future starts here. It's reputation for being a law unto itself comes from junior officials who in all honesty see it learn of its' activities after the fact and have had no chance to participate in the decisions that prompted these actions to be taken. Well mr bissell would these junior officials include ambassadors? I have known of cases the ones the only ones that I can remember are a good many years in the past when ambassadors have been kept in ignorance of activities of the CIA in the countries to which they are accredited in every case and without exception with the express approval of the secretary of state. But I can assure you that as the machine works no important decisions are made on CIA evidence alone as far as I know not in any situation that i know it certainly wasn't done in Cuba or in Guatemala or in these other cases those who believe that the US government on occasion retorts to force when it shouldn't should in all fairness and justice direct their views to the question of national policy and not hide behind the criticism but whereas the President and the Cabinet generally are enlightened people there is an evil an ill controlled agency which imports this sinister element into US policy. You say that the dulles brothers were the chief promoters of the fear that gripped the US in the fifties vis a vis Russia maybe you can elaborate on that The Dulles brothers preached this gospel that didn't portray the Soviets merely as a geopolitical rival but rather a force that intended to end all civilization as we know it. There is a little impulse I think for all of us to want to believe that the moment we're living in is the great hinge point of history The dulles brothers really bought into this at one point Foster Dulles said a threat like this to humanity only emerges every thousand years and the last one he could come up with was when Muslims invaded Spain that was the force of barbarism and I think that was what we projected onto the Soviet Union What the barbarian hordes were to Rome that's what we thought the Soviets were. In addition it was impossible for them to accept the reality that the soviet union had been completely shattered by war didn't have a highway system didn't have a train system almost no industrial capacity if we had seen it that way we wouldn't have gotten so excited would you repeat that I've never heard that that's just a fabulously powerful no highways no industrial system no bridges everything had been wrecked by the war we don't understand this we didn't suffer one bomb in that war all of Russia was devastated and they had lost 10 million citizens so the image of the all powerful russia was actually a myth and many of the officers in the CIA who were on the front lines of the war now recognize this I have some quotes that are quite vivid from people who were practically running the anti-soviet projects for the CIA during the fifties say they now realize how mistaken they were one of them writes words like hysteria paranoia come to mind when we try to understand what we thought back then so Why were we that way? I think its because we felt that there was an imminent threat to our lives and security in a way that made us feel better it made us feel our mission was more important than it might otherwise have been we don't like to think of ourselves as just one country among many countries in the world. I think it's one of the things that 's the most different about americans almost everyone else in the world thinks of themselves as living in one country in a world with lots of countries we don't think that way we think the world is divided into two groups of countries and one group is the United States and the other group is all the other countries in the world that are more or less the same. If we are leading a global fight against huge evil that makes us more important and makes us feel like the entire fate of humanity is in our hands. Does this stem from Naziism? I think it does although interesting enough the Dulles brothers particularly Foster Dulles never saw anything bad with Naziism Foster Dulles had close relations with the Nazi regime he was the principal salesman for bonds from germany in the united states during the 1930's. he sold 900 Million dollars in 1930's money of bonds for germany during the Nazi era for local governments corporations and banks he engineered the international nickel coalition that brought the german firm Krup into the consortium that gave the Nazi's access to the world's nickel supply which is vital for arming tanks and other war machines so Foster Dulles saw in Soviet communism evils that he had never seen in the Nazi regime. Was he working for his law firm at the time? yes and he had a great admiration for the order of the Nazi regime in fact he was always jealous of Allen because Allen had gotten meet Hitler but Foster never did and Ithink Foster always regretted that that's really something. You say also that the Brothers or at least John foster I guess knew nothing of nuance or ambiguity that there were the christians and there was everybody else and you'd think this is a study in brain science and groupthink maybe you could elaborate those ideas. We've talked a lot about how the world situation and geopolitics shaped the dulles brothers but I do think you have to get into the realm of human psychology a little bit to understand them. There is an impulse to surround yourself with people who believe what you believe and will reinforce you and the dulles brothers did this, they converted the whole foreign policy process into a kind of reverberation echo chamber of their own views. We also know now in these last years there's been quite a boom in neuroscience research and one of the things we've learned is that the brain essentially is wired to accept information that confirms what we already believe and when we see things that challenge what we believe or that suggest what we believe is wrong there's an automatic impulse to reconfigure that in our brain. To reject it as wrong. You like to think that as mature adults we're able to master that impulse and realize that we have it and not succumb to it but the Dulles brothers didn't they only wanted to hear from people who believed what they believed and I mention a few cases of people in this book who for example might one guy suggested for example as they were planning the plot against the democratic government of Guatemala that actually thousands of Guatemalan peasant families were starving to death because they couldn't get any land and there were hundreds of thousands of acres of unused land owned by this American fruit company and what Guatemala was doing was actually what we did in the Homestead Act in the 19th century. He was immediately shut down and told not to talk like that anymore that's nonsense we know they're directed by the Communists in Moscow there was a not just impulsive but truly systematic campaign and effort to make sure that nobody on the outside could penetrate the policy process and that's actually something that has resounded through american policy in the future. George Bush never spoke to a single person who counseled against invading Iraq because he had made clear to his people around him I don't want to talk to anybody like that he can honestly say everybody I consulted told me this war wold be a good idea. If you only consult people who have been that carefully vetted in advance you can be sure to get unanimity. Do we ever do it differently? I don't mean that sarcastically I mean it quite seriously. I wonder if now we are getting to a moment in our history where we are more dubious about crashing into other countries we realize that these things don't always work out so well for us. I'm not so sure how permanent this is. I wonder are we just reacting because we got a couple of really good punches in the face in Iraq and Afghanistan and maybe when the memory fades we'll get some smelling salts and get back in the ring again fighting or have we learned some longer term lessons. I think there's so much pushing us into these interventions including the defense industry the political climate in the US this sense of American ability to master every challenge I think that it's dangerous it pulls us back I remember that great line at the end of The Godfather Part 3 I think it was overtime you try to get out they pull you back in. I sometimes feel that applies to our interventionism in the world overtime we seem to realize we've made some mistakes and it actually undermines our national security something else happens we're seeing it right now suddenly we saw somebody beheaded on television this was so awful we have to invade another country today. I think that impulse is still there and that's why I'm still beating my spoon on the high chair. You know that beheading stuff is a powerful example emotion is always the enemy of wise statesmanship and of course those groups are eager to pull us in. They would love to have us come and fight because then every radical in the world will then come in and fight alongside of them so what buttons can they push to make us crazy and fall into their trap they've figures out the theatrical aspect of this very well and the superficicality of the way american reacts. Well I want to thank you for coming here this is your second time is it not it is indeed and I hope it isn't the last. Write another book. I'm going to do that and possibly one of the main reasons I'm going to do that is so that I can come back and do another one of these interviews. I wish I could believe that. anyhow thank you. To our audience thank you very much and be with us again next time.