Reply #9: Great post -- I've saved it to review at leisure

[starroute]

I was going over some of this same territory myself last night, in the context of working up a post about Allen Dulles and his role in the development of the techniques of psychological torture that we are seeing in Iraq. I think what I posted on that thread is worth repeating here in the context of your information.

c. 1919 - As a State Department delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, it is Dulles (then a young Wall Street lawyer) who lets the DuPonts know that their continuing to do business with Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty will be "winked at." (The DuPonts were represented by another Wall Street lawyer, William Donovan, who during World War II would become head of the OSS, precursor of the CIA.)

1934 - A congressional investigation identifies the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line (owned by Prescott Bush's father-in-law) as a cover for I.G. Farben. Instead of divesting the assets, Bush hires Allen Dulles to hide them. Dulles and his brother then continue working as the lawyers for Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman in their dealings with Nazi firms.

1940's - Dulles is said to have used his position in the OSS to help Nazi businessmen smuggle their wealth to Argentina. After the war, he continues this by helping Nazis to escape to South America.

1951 - Dulles is made deputy director of the newly-established CIA and works with Averell Harriman (now Truman's national security advisor) to develop covert operations, psychological warfare, and propaganda.

1953 - Dulles is appointed director of the CIA by Eisenhower and is given far more of a free hand. He masterminds the overthrow of Mossagdeh in Iran in 1953 and that of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. He is later discredited by the U-2 incident (1960) and the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) and is (at least according to one account) finally fired by Kennedy for his part in planning Operation Northwoods.

1963 - Dulles serves on the Warren Commission.


I'm aware that I've barely scratched the surface on this topic. In particular, there is apparently far more to the story of Dulles's relationship with Kennedy. I'm also interested in Dulles's work for United Fruit in the 1920's and how it ties in with the overthrow of Arbenz in the 1950's. And Dulles's connection with the Bushes is clearly relevant to the question of whether George H.W. Bush was working for the CIA in the late 50's/early 60's.

The Bush-Harriman-Dulles axis was pivotal to so many of the shady dealings of the 20th century that it seems amazing that their central role wasn't noticed earlier. Even now, it is hard to get it into perspective. The emphasis has tended to be on demonstrating that the Bushes were involved with unsavory people and events -- but it is looking more and more as thought they and their allies were the driving force behind many of those events. The story of where the US went wrong after World War II involves these same people at every wrong turning, and it is very important to get all this out in the open.