In the second episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, David Talbot, Salon.com founding editor, tells how former CIA chief Allen Dulles defied FDR to conscript former Nazi leaders in preparation for war with the Soviet Union--one of many deviations from official history excitingly recounted in Talbot's new book, "The Devil's Chessboard."
Talbot describes how Dulles assisted efforts to overthrow foreign governments in defiance of American authority, and alludes to new information he says supports the idea that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in a conspiracy that may have involved Dulles.
Talbot also says several mainstream media publications have refused to review his book. Like Talbot's book, the conversation dwells in the particulars of obscure and obscured U.S. history. But its relevance to our understanding of how the U.S. government operates in the present is clear. Below is one of the interview's choice moments.
"Scheer: You describe Allen Dulles', basically his plot to keep the Soviets out Italy and to find good Germans and good Italians, even if they were with Mussolini, to then help us. And he expects, right or wrong, that there's going to be a war with the Soviet Union.
Talbot: Absolutely. Well that was his secret plan called "Operation Sunrise" in direct defiance, by the way, of Roosevelt policy, again this policy of unconditional surrender. He's busy trying to cut a separate deal in violation of this policy with the Nazis, primarily in Italy at the end of the war. And he succeeds. And they do surrender, just in a matter of a few days before the general surrender in Italy. As I say had no real strategic value. it didn't really save any lives, except the lives of the Nazis whose necks were saved by dealing with Dulles. But this begins this policy of Dulles' incorporating elements of the Third Reich into post-war Germany. And as I say in the book, in some ways the Third Reich was not defeated or crushed, the FDR wanted, so much as repurposed for the Cold War. There were key people in Nazi leadership who were rehabilitated by Dulles and others."
Hear Talbot speak in person at the Peace Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Nov. 17 at 7 PM (3916 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver City).