Hmm, we're bad. By the time we get to the third part of this, I just have nothing. It's either a tonal screeching or just what you got, which is ship And I'm ashamed. But what are you? What are you gonna do? You're gonna go to another podcast? You're gonna listen to the fucking Cometown. No, you're not. You're gonna listen to the third part of the Dullest Brothers episode. You you worms, you Brian Shrimp. I'm sorry, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing here. My guest again for part three, who is my guest in the episode? Not my guest in emotionally abusing my audience for no reason is Jason Pargeon. Part of it is that this is a big subject, I guess, not just that it's a seventeen hour long marathon of podcasts. It's a it's a big subject to try to explain, to try to condense, to try to convey, and it's big. It's like we're trying to explain why the world is the way it is now and has been for the last half century. It's difficult to get it across. It would be one thing, like if you're just doing a very long podcast on say the O. J. Simpson trial, which is one singular subject with a certain number of players, this subject the Dullest Brothers in the Cold War. It's so expansive and there's so many side roads you could get off on that it is mentally taxing to even think about it. It's fucking exhausting. Um. And it's you know, I was just saying the other like, there's a there is a set of left wing conspiracy theories. You think that I'm a CIA operative, And I'm sure those people um who sometimes listen to the podcast for reasons that that escaped me um will be like, Oh, he didn't bring this up, and it's because he doesn't want people to say, or he didn't bring this up and because he doesn't want people thinking about it. No, it's because there's too much. Like we're barely going to talk about m k Ultra, which Alan Dulls masterminded in a lot of ways, and which was the cia A drugging thousands of random people with acid. We're not even gonna really get into it today because there's just too much to cover. We're gonna do a whole two partter on M K. L. Drew Don't don't, don't worry about that. There's a lot to talk about here, but like there's just you can't unless you're gonna be talking for fifty hours about the Dullest Brothers and what they did, You're going to leave shit out. It's just too big a subject. And then there's a question of like how much time do you devote to what they did, and how much time do you devote to the influence of what they did and how it shook out in history and the context of why they did why, Which is why I find this interesting myself, as like what goes through the mind of someone like that. But for example, one of the two brothers, he is just now about to become the head of CIA, just trying to convey to the average person what all the CIA does, because it's not just a bunch of spies. Every country's got that the CIA. You will ultimately here like they seem to have their own army, couple of them, and can organize and can invade countries. It's like, well, now, wait a second, how does that tie into what we know about Like a James Bond type characters like, the CIA is more than what you think it is. The reason conspiracy people can think that they've got their fingers in a podcast host is because there's almost no limit on what they can do as long as the President wants it done. Which is where the last episode left off, is that they basically have this mission statement is like whatever whatever it takes, that's it. That's the end of the sentence. It's whatever. Part of like what the CIA like. Why the CIA like work the way it did is you have you you have a bunch of different ways that you're going to be shotgunning money out to people and shotgunning arms out to people, and you use you establish all these different agencies and all these different you have these little different rat lines through other government agencies that do other stuff too, but that you're also able to shotgun money through or have operatives in because again there's no limit to what the CIA can do if the President tells them to or if they're pretty sure the President would have told them too, but they didn't want to bother him about it, so they just did it anyway, which is also something the CIA does. Cool dudes, Yeah, as John Krasinski said, we should be thankful for them every day. Jason, did you catch when John Krasinski got into a Twitter fight with Cody over that? No? I didn't. Oh yeah, Well, there's there was an account that kept really dragging Cody for Cody dragging John Krasinski for talking about how great the CIA is, and people started to think that maybe it was John Krasinski. And then there's a thing you can do where you can see some of the letters in uh, somebody's email address if you try to get their password on Facebook and it seems to match with John Krasinski's email. It was a good time. We all had a fun week um with John Krasinski and Cody arguing. Cody Johnston friend of the pod um. Anyway, all right, I'm sorry, let's let's just get into this episode. So from the beginning, the more intelligent members of the federal government had their reservations about the CIA. The United States has never before had an international intelligence agency outside of wartime, let alone one with the purview as wide as whatever the president says. Um Dean Atchison, President Truman's foreign policy adviser and an eventual Secretary of State expressed quote gravest forebodings about the CIA when it was established. He warned the President that quote, neither he, nor the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it. Harry Truman himself leader wrote, it was not intended to be a cloak and dagger outfit. It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world. Now, it's debatable as to whether or not Harry Truman's being honest here right like did was that really your intent? Or did you just see what happened and want to distance yourself from it? That can be argued. But if Truman's goal from the beginning was for it to be very different than what it became, he and didn't really fight hard to stop it from a changing. Six months after the CIA's creation, communists in Czechoslovakia carried out what is often referred to as a constitutional coup. Now, the history here is complex, but in brief, at the end of World War Two, the Czech Communist Party was super popular due to the fact that they fought against the Nazis and the fact that the USSR had liberated Czechoslovakia from the Nazis. Communism was pretty popular at the end of the war um the party grew from about fifty thousand members of nineteen forty five to well over a million by nineteen forty eight. It swept the nineteen forty six elections, winning thirty eight percent of the vote, which is still the best ever performance of a European communist party in a free election. Now, since Czechoslovakia was a parliamentary democracy, the Communists didn't take complete power because they'd won. They just were like the dominant block and government. You know, that's how parliaments work. But they quickly alienated voters and fractured the broad left wing alliance they've been a part of, you know, understandable reasons. Once you take power, you're never as popular as you are when you're trying to get it. It became clear that the next set of elections were going to go worse for the Communists, and so they used their control of the police and a network of trade union militious to seize total power. This set off alarm bells across the West and led to a sort of paranoia that other European communist parties were just biding their time. Until they could carry out the same kind of coup. So the CIA used this in as an excuse to start pouring money into operations aimed at countering other European communist parties, namely in Italy and France. In Italy, they funded a Christian nationalist party that was seen as pro us, and they recruited Catholic officials to preach against communism. They drowned the nation in a wave of propaganda. Alan Doles was not yet a regular employee of the CIA, but he took a leave of absence from his lawyering to kind of pro bono help organize CIA efforts in Italy, because again he missed the fun of being a spy. Now, the fact that Alan Dullis had traveled to Italy to help the CIA did not go unnoticed. Again, he's a bad spy. The Boston Globe ran an article with the headline Dullas masterminds new Cold War plan under secret agents. So really bad at being a secret agent. I just can't emphasize this enough. Kind of the way that James Bond catched his catch phrases him telling people his name, Yeah, if you're if you're a famous spy, that's bad. But he was a famous spy. Yeah, he was a famous spy, which you shouldn't be so at this stage of things, the CIA's aide in Italy, Will Aid, is a weird that what this? You know, the ship the CIA is doing in Italy was entirely focused around propaganda and providing funds to sympathetic politicians are mostly focused. But even at this early stage, Alan and his colleagues were just discussing the possibility of organizing mass violence as a way to achieve their ends. They reached out to several officers in the Italian military with the aim of organizing a couta ta if the Communists won. From right up by the Wilson Center quote, they viewed the project as possessing an extremely grave implications, carrying with it the probability of plunging Italy into a bloody civil war and seriously hazarding the start of World War Three. But since the scheme represented a final, though thorough desperate action to hold Italy for the Western Bloc, they did not want to discard it and recommended immediate exploration. So they decide, like, okay, Italy might go Communists, we have to set up a network capable of carrying out a coup if the Communist went an election, we have to like get all these guys in the army to help, to be willing to overthrow the government. Even though if that happens it might start World War three and end all life and hume on Earth, the fact that it would stop Italy from going communist is a worthy risk. Like that's the cost been, Like we have them in writing making that cost benefit analysis basics. Once you have an enemy that you've decided as an existential threat to everything, and as we mentioned in the last episode, that became the habit of making sure we always had one of those ye, you will have a blank check to do absolutely anything in anything, including exterminating life on Earth. We were and are fully prepared to render the species extinct rather than let it continue on under communism. If you sit back and think about that, that's kind of weird. Yeah, it's it's a little odd because like, I'm not a I'm not a state communist, but I think life, even with all the critiques I have of the U. S s R, still better than death. But once that template was established after World War Two, it would always be so and we mentioned last episode that after Nino and then like Islam and the encroaching, like the fear of you had, you had small towns in America passing laws saying that they could not be ruled by Sharia law. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's some small town in Nebraska afraid that it any day now the Muslims are going to come take over that small town. And because that's our only way we can think about problems. So if you have that in mind that at any moment, Islam is going to utterly take over the world and depose capitalism. Capitalism the most unkillable idea in the history of civilization, like almost impossibly durable ideology. Yeah, yeah, the idea. Once you've sold the idea that civilization and freedom and free markets and capitalism are utterly fragile and at any moment can be toppled by the next threat on the horizon, whether it's communism, whether it's the Muslims. What are the next thing is going to be? And we must do anything, anything, anything is morally justified, and stopping it, you're doomed. You have set yourself down a dark road because there's no checks in that direction. The moment anyone says, hey, you went too far, it's like, oh, so you're a secret comy. And that was that was the atmosphere the Dulles Is established and would establish, and that we've lived under until now. You can still scare. You can win elections today with the red scare. People are still just as afraid of Communism as they were, which is bizarre. Like the idea that Donald Trump can talk about encroaching Marxism in America, It's like, what power do Marxists have in this country? But it doesn't matter that fear run is now etched into our d n A and you can thank the Dullest Brothers for that to a very large extent, you really can um. It's bleak um. It's I really it would be nice to be able to have because it, you know, it leads to this, It leads to this, this kind of same thing on the other end of things, where because of this the way that kind of these tensions around communism when I get ratcheted because just that's the way we go when we talk about enemies and our culture right that it's existential, you get It's led to this complete death of nuance on all sides. So now if you're if you're on the far left, you can't be like, you can't analyze geopolitics by saying like, okay, well who's the right and who's in the wrong. There's a lot of people who just be like, well, whoever is not the United States is in the right, and that leads them to back Bashar al Assad or whatever um or, or back Russia, or think that that China is is this perfect um embodiment of the socialism they want. It's it all. It infects everything. I guess the fact that everyone has to be at this level of every threat as an existential threat, every threat ends an extermination. I I think it just it has got it. It's so deep into our culture that it affects everything, and that's probably bad. It's it's extremely important to understand that mindset, though, because this is this is what we'll govern, the way they're going to do business for the rest of the time they're in power, that the Dulleses are in power, which is about to start very soon, because everything we've discussed, when these guys should have ruined their career as many times over, they will both be rewarded by becoming two of the most powerful people on earth in the history that we've laid out is going to get them elevated to about as high as you can go without being president. And I in ways more powerful than presidents some presidents they both served longer. Yeah, so definitely they're both more powerful than Jimmy Carter was. I think we can all agree on that. So yeah. In France, the CIA intervened to crush a Communist led strike of duck dock workers in Marseille. They developed an ongoing relationship with several clans of Corsican gangsters who they hired and used to violently crushed the labor movement in Marseilles in nine and again in nineteen fifty. And I think this is kind of the first example of the CIA basically bringing in a mercenary force to do violence against their political enemies. And it's I don't I don't know that anyone dies, and they might have happened. I haven't found a lot of detail on this, but this is kind of the very beginning. Now, while Alan Dulas was helping his colleagues in the Agency explore the boundaries of their new powers, Foster Dulas was still a lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell. He continued to dip his toes into politics, growing deeper woven into the upper strata of the Republican Party as the nineteen fifties took off. His attitude about international orders started to shift. Before and during World War Two. As we talked about last episode, he believed the root of conflict was the failure of national leaders to cooperate. Right, that's why you know, you want to spread all this business around because it creates these these inner connections that can bring peace. Now, Foster's view shifted as the Cold War kicked off. He came to believe that all global instability had its roots in the action of a single nation, the Soviet Union. Now, this was a period in which, and I guess you can say that's kind of consistent to his earlier view, because the Soviet Union doesn't ostensibly accept you know, business interests and stuff. So I don't know, maybe that's how he justified it in his head. This was a period though, in which labor movements and anti colonial movements were taking off in Africa and Indo China and in Latin America just to name a few places. Um Foster viewed all of this as not the results of decades of oppression, of poverty, of exploitation, but as the result of Soviet meddling. From the Brothers quote, he began reading and rereading Problems of Leninism, a collection of Stalin's essays and speeches. By one account, he owned six or more pencil marked copies and kept each in one of his workplaces. He considered it a blueprint for world conquest and came to believe that the October Revolution had basically been the seed of an inevitable process that, if left unchecked, would end the very existence of world capitalism. Now, Foster believed that Soviet Communism was doing to the West into the Christian world what Islam had done hundreds of years earlier, and a lot of his writings he would draw a direct connection between what Islam did during like the time that's kind of the Muslim empires were expanding, and then what we call the medieval period um and he would draw a line between that and Soviet communism, which I find interesting because in the you know, the twenty one century, a lot of conservatives drew back to kind of Soviet like the kind of the way we talked about the Soviet Union to talk about the problems of radical Islam. It's just interesting that Foster recognized. I guess that connection too in a way both because they're there are both is He sought threats to the Christian Western order. Um, and if you want to see the perfect intersection of those saying, watched the movie Rambo three. Yes, like not a joke, Um, it's all in there. So Foster was willing to admit, it's interesting to me that that Auster sees Soviet Communism as this kind of existential threat in a way that he didn't see Nazism. He was willing later on to admit that the Nazis had committed terrible crimes, and even that those crimes had had their roots to night Nazi ideology, but he accepted Nazism as essentially Western Communism, he thought was an ultimate evil and impossible to compromise with. You can compromise with Nazis, Foster believed you can't compromise with Communists, which is ironic in part because both the Nazis and Communists compromise with each other on a number of occasions. But that's aside the point now. In his columns and speeches, Dulas insisted that the United States was in a struggle to the death with Communism. Defeat would mean the end of humanity. Quote, we are the only great nation whose people have not been drained physically or spiritually. It devolves upon us to give leadership and restoring principle as a guide to conduct. If we do not do that, the world will not be worth living in. Indeed, it probably will be a world in which human beings cannot live again. The victory of communism is the extermination of the human race. That's the only way this ends. Um. Yeah. Now, it's worth noting that Foster Dulus was not unopposed in his views. One man who argued against him was Reinhold Neiber, who he'd served with in the Just Endurable Peace Commission after the war. Neiber weren't warned that the great danger to the West was not Communism but the American ego, writing quote, if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would only be the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a great nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle, and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history, but by hatred and vain glory, which I think is accurate both then and now. Like you can s the same thing about our response to nine eleven. In a lot of ways, Um, the danger is not what actual attacks the enemy carries out. It's about how our egos lead us to react to them. That's extremely key here, because the entire purpose of doing this series and why it's relevant and why it's interesting lies in my opinion, and that the reason the Dulles doesn't matter is because this ideology that everything stopping communism justifies anything and everything. That's what they brought to the world or helped cement in the world, because that's what that quote that you you know, you read off there about that like surrendering, surrendering to communism means extinction of the human race, as if communism is a cancer that's growing in the body of humanity. That sounds like the ranting of an extremist, crazy person at a rally, that that would bayly become the de facto American belief for the next half century. Everything about the way we behaved and everything that the CIA did, it all comes back to that and the fact that that was so easy to abuse. Because once you've established that any pro labor movement is secretly communist, you now have justification to to intervene anywhere labor rights spring up in the name of stamping out the seeds of communism. Because of that slippery slope fallacy, where anywhere you have workers taking to the streets and demanding better conditions, are demanding whatever things that otherwise would seem distinctly American, you can now justify intervention in any in all sorts of underhand ways, based on, well, this is fighting the cancer, this is fighting the knife at the throat of humanity that is communist. Someome where there's some alternate reality where the capitalists simply says, hey, will outcompete them, will show them the capitalism is better, will you know, will lead by example, will become so strong with our economy that we will prove that communism doesn't work, that that is not the path they took. Nope, And it's you know, there's an interesting similarity to me when we talk about the way the rhetoric works and where it leads people to something I see kind of in the I'm seeing increasingly become common on on both the kind of extremist libertarian and the extremist right wing um with groups like the Proud Boys and groups like the Boogaloo Boys, where they walk around the shirts that are that say shoot your local pedophile, and they're not. Their problem is not actually with pedophiles. What they are doing is equatings basically saying this thing, this thing that comes up again and again in conspiratorial culture where all of your enemies are secretly pedophiles, And the reason you would want to do that is because you can do anything to a pedophile. It's the ultimate evil. So I wear these shirts that harry these signs that same opposing pedophiles, and whoever I'm beating up is a pedophile, right, Like, that's that's it's this, it's the same. I know it's not the same kind of logic, but it's an extension of that logic of if the enemy is ultimate, then all remedies are on the table, you know, yeah, because there can be because at that point, any nuance is weakness. Any nuance and how you approach like, oh, so you want nuance, and how you approach pedophile as well, we know what you are. It's because they want to shut down any discussion of what they're doing, and that lets you go as far as you want, because if you can just tag your enemies as whatever, this trump card, this trump card of evil that you know at this point, there's nothing that even needs to be discussed. Look, there will be people possibly who listen to this episode or these series and say, oh, so you prefer a world and wish everyone's living under the flag of the Soviet Union or in which these countries fall under. It's like that's a child's thinking that that the foreign policy is black and white, and this battle between good and evil. That's the stuff of blockbuster movies. That's not how the real world works. But it's not. And but again it's so pervasive because you get this attitude on the other side and the people who read who know a lot of this stuff that we're saying about the dullest and who it radicalizes them. But part of what they take out of it as well, then everything I've heard bad about the Soviet Union must be a lie. And that's complicated by the fact that we did tell a lot of lies about the Soviet Union. But that doesn't mean it was a good government. Like it. For one thing, it like it didn't work out in the long run. Um, but you you get this, you can't. I don't know. There's there's no room for nuance. Um. If you decide one side is bad, then whoever they're in opposition to has to be good and your friends and it can't ever be complicated because again, if it's complicated, if it's nuanced, then for one thing, the level of the number of options you have and sort of confronting it are are reduced, and you don't get to necessarily feel great about what you did or whatever. But movies give you a black and white version of reality because it is a fantasy that that the pure morality, where the bad guys literally refer to themselves as the dark side. It's that's that's a fantasy. That's not how it exists. And so you can have people in the name of fighting something that is truly bad, such as child predators, and using that as justification to do unrelated terrible things, and that doesn't make them heroes. It's the world is messy like that. This is why, for those of you who have been listening through this whole series, the very first thing I asked was do you think the dulles Is were true believers? Do you think they believed in what they were doing, that they were actually saving the world. And the answer to that is difficult to decipher even as individuals, because the two brothers approached this from very different directions, and we need see the decisions they made and the and then the position they took later in life is very different where they started. Even in this case of two people, it's hard to discern did they actually think they were fighting on behalf of good or were they just using it as cover to do things on behalf of their former clients from that law firm. And it's also I think sometimes it's a mix of things. UM. I'll compare this. I'll compare this to some some of the kids in Portland who do UM, do some of the rioting. UM. I think there are people who believe strongly that because of how bad these issues with policing are, because of how and just capitalism is, and because of how ineffective peaceful protests has seemed to be in their in their lives, the best thing they can do is to go out and cause damage right to to businesses, UM to to police infrastructure. Because that gets attention, that brings people, makes people care about the issue, and that that accomplishes you know, they'll point to like the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis and the impact that had on getting some variant of justice for George Floyd. UM. And they're there there, and and that's logically consistent. I believe that they do believe that when they go out and they light a fire, some of those other people will also during that, you know, loot from an apple store. And I think that taking stuff from the apple store. Not that I'm equating that morally with overthrowing governments, but there's a mix of I believe in this thing, but also here's an opportunity for me, you know, like, oh, I can get a free thing to write like it's it's it's an opportunity. It's a mix of belief and opportunity. And I think you see that. I think you see that in everybody, right. And I think sometimes we've tried to find justifications for things that are our opportunities for us, UM when we're also doing things we believe in. I think it kind of everybody does that. These guys are just doing it at a much bigger scale. But I think it is a mix of I believe, at least for Foster, I believe these things about the world. I believe in this struggle. I believe that the stakes are this high. Oh, but also I can help this guy that you know is paying me, I can help him out too while furthering the struggle. I I do think it. You know, it's a mix of things. And you have factions within the government, within the business community where they may have some other motivation for seeing a government overthrown. They may have been they may have run into opposition and trying to build a factory there, or a rubber factory or whatever. And so then it's very easy say, well, you know, he's secretly friendly with communists or whatever. Same way as with the Red scare in the United States, if you had a beef with somebody and he wanted to get them rejected from the industry, it was you could drum up that, well, you know, he attended a meeting of communists last month. I can prove it. And that even though you personally have no concern about communism where anything whatsoever, it becomes a convenient opportunity to jump on board and use that as an excuse all of the stuff. This is not off the subject. This is this is this is the this is explaining. Yeah, why America was the way it was because you did have a combination of true believers, but then you had a lot of people who saw opportunity to jump to jump in. Yes, that is exactly what we're what we're going to be talking about all day today. First, take an AD break, though, Yeah, Sophie, you know what, why don't you take an AD break? Huh? I would love to. I would Okay, Well go do it, Sophie. We'll be back soon. We're back. So if he just took an AD break, it was lovely, great time. Thank you, complain, I'm glad. In April of ninety eight, while the Secretary of State was in Bogata for a conference, one of Columbia's elected leaders was assassinated. This sparked riots and mass violence that killed thousands, and eventually this kind of We've talked about violencia in Colombia a couple of times on this podcast, including during the Protocols episodes. This this kind of fed into that hundreds of thousands of people died by the time it was all over. In short, what happened, the assassination of this leader in Colombia and the violence that followed it was the result of a number of things. Growing conspiracism, you know, we've talked about that in the Protocols episode, violent rhetoric among the right wing, the linguer, results of economic depression, severe inequality, a bunch of stuff contributed to the fact that left and right in Columbia started massacring each other. For years um but American leaders paid had paid zero attention to Colombian politics. None of them knew any of the history, none of them had paid attention to why this was happening, and so they just kind of assumed that the violence had come out of nowhere. And Foster Dulles decided this meant that the violence was the fault of Moscow, that, oh, this seemed to come out of nowhere because I haven't been paying attention to Columbia. It must be the Soviets fault, right, they're trying to destabilize our backyard. The seizure of power by Czech communists and the violence in Columbia we're seeing as proof that the Soviet Union was orchestrating a grand global plan to destroy the United States. A Senate report later claimed US leaders were in a state of quote near hysteria by June of nineteen. So like they're actually freaked out about this, right, this is not a bunch of cold calculating you know, capitalists plotting to destroy this. So these are these are got a lot of people, a lot of the people who are necessary in order for the crimes we were about to talk about to happen. Believe truly that like the they're staring down the barrel of a Soviet rifle, so to speak. That same month, June of the National Security Council issued Directive n SC tende Slash two secret order approved by President Truman that increased the CIA's power. The directive stated that the U s SR had launched a vicious campaign against the US, and in return, the CIA had to carry out propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage, anti sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, and subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movement guerrillas and refugee liberation groups. These operations were to be quote so planned and executed that any U s Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and that if uncovered, the U. S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Now, the fact that this was being pushed and had been done by Truman caused an uproar. It actually sparked something of a civil war in the Republican Party between isolationist and internationalist conservatives and the Dullest brothers are in a nationalist right because they think that the U. S Should intervene internationally to protect cap um. That said, during this big debate within the Republican Party, they were mostly on the outside looking in. They still spent the vast majority of their time working for Sullivan and Cromwell. Alan Dullis is not a CIA employee. He's kind of contracted with them a few times, but he's not a full time employee, and Fosters still doing law stuff. Um Foster did help in the negotiations that led to the creation of NATO um Alan during this period mostly obsessed over trying to make the CIA a bigger and bigger thing, because again he really missed the fun ship he'd done during the war. His quest was helped along in June of nineteen fifty when North Korea invaded South Korea. We now know that Stalin and the uss are were not behind this invasion, and in fact, a lot of folks within the Soviet Union didn't think it was a good idea at all. It was it was it was really not their call. It was a thing that North Korea decided to do. But America, the Americans assumed that this was part of this vast secret war the Soviets were carrying out that like everyone was happening in Colombia, what had happened in Czechoslovakia and North Korea. These are all again, these are all like pieces on a chessboard that the Soviets are playing um in order to wipe out Christian capitalist civilization. The unexpectedness of the attack convinced many that the United States needed to put more money and invest more power into the CIA so that future attacks wouldn't come as a surprise. In autumn, the Director of the CIA hired Alan Dullas for a six week consultants contract. At the end of the contract, he was offered the job of Deputy Director of Operations. This gave Alan Dullas control over all covert operations carried out by the US overseas. One of his first acts was to convince Congress to approve a hundred million dollars for the CIA to arm paramilitary groups exiled from various Communist nations. Dullas sent agents across the world to launch attacks and foment rebellions. Many of these guys were caught immediately. Alan Dulas actually sent thousands of people to death in the first couple of years he was had this position in the CIA, and he felt no guilt about any of this, saying, quote, at least we're getting experience for the next war. Yeah, that's the kind of guy who gets this job. He doesn't see these people as people now. Allen's first major success would come in nineteen fifty two when Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Adela Stevenson fought over who would get to be the president. Alan. While this was happening, turned his eyes towards the lovely nation of Guatemala. Then and now, Guatemala was a very poor country and the largest landowner was the United Fruit Company, a longtime client of Sullivan and Cromwell. Foster Dullus had done work for them in the past. The Devil's chessboard gives a pretty good overview of the situation in Guatemala. By the late nineteen forties. Quote, the giant company, whose operations sprawled throughout the Caribbean, ran Guatemala less like a banana republic than a banana colony. United Fruit not only owned huge plantations, but almost every mile of railroad track in the count tree, the only major Atlantic port, and the telephone system, and the capital rulers came and went at the whim of the company. Now. One of these rulers was Jorge Ubiko, who considered the peasants of Guatemala to be beasts of burden, fit only to labor for the rich. Under his reign in the early nineteen forties, guatemal and farm workers were roped together like animals and delivered by the army to United Fruit plantations, where they were forced to work in debt slavery to the country, to the company or to other landowners like this was like our bananas were made by slave labor. They were chaining men together to force them to pick fruit. Sevent of Guatemala's land was owned by two percent of the population, and a number of folks in Guatemala thought this was fucked up. Some of those folks were the members of the Guatemalan Communist Party who started agitating and organizing for reform. Now, not only come Juanists were doing this, not only communists thought this was wrong. One non communist person who realized how fucked up the situation was was a guy named Jacobo Arbez. Now, Arbez was again not a Communist. He was actually a young, rich kid, the son of a Swiss immigrant father in a mixed raised Ladina mother. Despite his wealth and privilege, his upbringing was rough to in part to his father's suicide. As a young man, Arbez joined the Guatemalan Army and became an officer. He married the daughter of an El Salvadorian coffee plantation owner in ninety eight. Now his wife, Maria, had been educated at a Catholic woman's college in California. She had also grown up wealthy, but she was uncomfortable with the fact that her father had gotten rich off the backs of poor workers. Jacobo had been raised by an indigenous Maya nanny, and his relationship with her made him sensitive to the plight of the indigenous people of Guatemala. Over the course of many long conversations, Jacobo and Maria decided to become reformers and to try to make Guatemala a more equitable country. They open to their home to activists, including a number of communists. This made them ostracized by the local aristocracy. Maria later said, but what did we care? They were parasites like in El Salvador. I wanted to broaden my horizons. I hadn't come to Guatemala to be a socialite or pray, play bridge or golf. So, spurred on by his wife, Jacobo Arbist entered politics, and in nineteen forty four he helped to lead a coup that overthrew Jorge Ubiko. In the years that followed guatemala transition to a full democracy. In nineteen fifty Yacobo decided to run for president on a campaign of a grarian reform. He was elected, and in June of nineteen fifty two he succeeded in pushing through a massive land reform bill. Under the bill, a huge amount of private land was handed over to poor peasants, including a significant amount of United fruit land. Now, the communists would have considered this kind of a fucked up compromise right, he did not go nearly as far as a lot of people on the left wanted. This was actually a pretty moderate bill. One of the things he ensured was that the land he took from United Fruit and other companies was only land that was not under cultivation. So he basically said, I'm not gonna funk with your ongoing financial operations, but you own all this land that you're not doing anything with, just to own it, and I'm going to give that back to the people. Like that's what our Bez does. But of course the elite in Guatemala did not see his reform as a compromise necessary to build a healthier society. United Fruits started crying foul. Paid propagandists in the United States put out a series of red baiting articles with titles like Red Front Titans grip on Guatemala, United Fruit becomes victim of Guatemala's Awakening. Shortly after our Beza's land reform bill passed, the dictator of not Nicaragua, Anastasio Somazo uh so Maza, visited d C and told the CIA that if they gave him weapons, he would quote clean up Guatemala for you. In no time. Stephen Kinser goes on to write Alan liked the idea. With j. Royal Smith's approval and by some accounts, with indirect encouragement from the White House, he established a small team of CIA operatives that conceived a plot aimed at setting off a coup in Guatemala. On the afternoon of October eight, CIA officers presented this plot, called Operation Fortune, to their counterparts in the State Department. Frank Wissner said that the CIA was seeking approval to provide certain hardware to a group of people planning violence against a certain government. Another officer asserted that the operation was necessary because a large American company must be protected. State Department officials at the meeting, according to one account, hit the ceiling. One of them, David Bruce, Allen's old OSS comrade, told him that the State Department disapproves of the entire ordeal. So this is not immediately popular people. This is not something that everyone like agrees as a good idea. There are folks in the State Department who are like, seems kind of sucked up to um overthrow the government of this country to help a fruit company. You know, it's the kind of thing that you would almost think the voters should have a say in because you're you're wanting to you know, once upon a time, a long long time ago, only Congress could declare war, and when we went to war, it was like an official thing rather than as became the policy later, we just kind of stumbled into conflicts where one day you'll just hear that we've launched cruise missiles at some country, picked your country, and there was no it was never put to a vote or anything. It's just something we're doing. I sitting here right now, can I tell you how many countries we are doing drone strikes in? I don't know. That's just we just take that for granted now that well, somewhere we're probably launching a drone strike at a wedding somewhere, but it's probably, you know, to take out of terrorists or something. The beginning of this that we now consider kind of normal, really, as far as I know, comes back here where it's like, oh, this government is turning red, let's just sneak in under the table and just knock it over. Not with an official declaration of war. We're not a war with Guatemala, like why would we be? But this might drive up the prices of bananas or whatever. So it's like, all right, uh, and this became standard operating procedure. This is not I don't even know what to say about it, because because if you're looking at it like propaganda from the time, they would have like a picture of a map and the map is slowly all turning red as the Russia, like the commies, bleed out and take over one country after another after another after another. And you heard how long it took Robert to explain the complexities of what was actually going on there. And that was a very brief, very overview of an incredibly complicated situation. And when you boil that down to oh, this is just stopping the evil communists, you have no concept of what's actually going on. Like you were, it would be better for you to have never heard of the country than to boil it down in your mind where it's like, oh, these people were soldiers of the Soviet Union and this is just another front in our war. Like that is an objectively insane way to look at it. It's great that that's just how everything worked for decades. Um. Yeah, in part because like you know, if they had framed it as like, well, these people are taking land that our corporations owned but don't use, so that they can live lives of slightly less unfathomable desperation. Um that that that doesn't sound as good as they're they're trying to destroy christendom um and we have to stop them in Guatemala or they will be in pow Keepsie, you know, next week, which is you know how a lot of it was framed. But you you don't have to be a crazy person with like with like news clippings and red yarn on your wall drawing connections to say, wait a second, So the law firm that represented that fruit company employed the future Secretary of State and and uh or the director's head of CIA, Like, it's not. You don't have to dig define the connections. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's pretty out in the open. It was a company that they had done work on behalf of them, and they were doing them a favor under the guise of stopping communism. Like, it's not, this is not a conspiracy theory. I realized that most of the time on the Internet, when people bring up the CIA, it's accusing them of things that may be improbable or hiding aliens or whatever. You have to understand the real things the CIA did. They were absolutely real. It's you don't need the fantasy. It's yeah, you don't, it's there's there's there's enough to fill a lifetime of work trying to understand the stuff that they absolutely did. Um So, as I said, like Alan Dullas kind of brings to the State Department this plan to a symbole a bunch of CIA operatives and overthrow the government of Guatemala, and they get shot down by the State Department. But that's in early nineteen fifty two. Now, in November of that year, the election happens and Dwight D. Eisenhower wins. Truman had acted as depending on who you trust, kind of a restraining hand on the CIA. He was cautious about them. He didn't let them do all the things that Alan Dullas wanted to do. Eisenhower had no desire to restrain the CIA, and of course in nineteen fifty three he made Alan Dullis head of the CIA, which was not a great call. Now, as a lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell, Alan had been the legal envoy of the company to Guatemala. He had actually visited so often during his time with the company that he started taking his wife on trips with him, and he did not like his wife, so that meant something. Eisenhower made Foster Dulas in the same year United In fifty three his secretary of State. Now this was the result of years of politicking and ass kissing by Foster, which finally paid off now that a Republican was in office again. Foster two had his connections in Guatemala Before World War One. Foster Dulas had visited the country as a Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer. His job had been to monitor labor unrest and communist activity in Guatemala. Both brothers lobbied extensively for intervention against Our Beez, and they were not alone. United Fruit was extremely well connected to the Eisenhower administration. The Under Secretary of State, Walter Beatle Smith, was a close friend of the president, and he also happened to be applying for a high placed position with United Fruit after the coup. He was named to the company's board after Rectors Henry Cabot Lodge, Eisenhower's un ambassador, had a number of family investments in the United Fruit. John Morris Cabot in Church, in charge of Latin American affairs of the State Department, was the brother of United Fruits former CEO. The husband of the President's personal secretary, was the head of pr for United Fruits. So this is not just the c I a thing right. They are deeply embedded with the Eisenhower administration. Now, Eisenhower's administration labeled Guatemala a Soviet beachhead in the Hemisphere, even though Arbez again was not at all a communist. Secretary Foster Dullas declared that he was forcing a communist type reign of terror on the country. The US ambassador to Guatemala, working under the CIA's direction, tried to bribe Arbez with two million dollars to cancel his land reforms are best, said no, so the ambassador threatened to have him murdered. When that failed, the Dulless brothers decided there was nothing to do but overthrow him. They found an angry, disgraced colonel named Carlos arma Us who was working as a furniture salesman in Honduras. They hired a bunch of mercenaries to be his revolutionary army and The CIA provided him with weapons, intelligence, and air cover. As he invaded Guatemala, CIA pilots bombed the capital, which panicked the population. Dozens of officers in Our Best's army were bribed to abandon their president. In June of nineteen fifty four, Yacobo decided he could not hold out any longer. He fled the presidential palace, sending out one last radio address in which he accused the United Fruit Company and its allies in quote US ruling circles of reigning fire and death upon Guatemala, which they had done. Of course, the CIA blocked the transmission from going out. I'm gonna not gonna let not gonna let that guy get a last word in the Arbez families spent the rest of their lives fleeing from country to country, never able to find comfort or happiness. One of Yourcobo's daughters committed suicide, and the former president himself was harried and tracked and harassed and threatened by the Sea i A until the day he died. Like they didn't just overthrow him. They anytime someone said anything nice about him, anytime he was on the verge of like rebuilding something like they would go into like it was personal. They wanted to ruin this man's life. They were trying to drive him to suicide. To be honest, Well, it's so strange that he wasn't able to find a home in Moscow since he was clearly an agent of He did live there for a while because they were willing to take him in, but they didn't like him because he wasn't a Communist and he didn't like living there, so he left UM. I think he wound up in um somewhere in Latin America. Eventually might have been Cuba. But like he he didn't have a lot of options because the US would threaten any country that offered to take him in UM, So the only options he had was the Soviet block, which then fed into US. Probably. Look, he went running to Russia because he loves communism. Well, you threatened Mexico if they let him live there, Like what it was? He where is he supposed to go while he was supposed to kill himself? Yep, good ship. So Alan Dullas considered the overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected leader to be among his greatest accomplishments. Now, the operation had been code named p B success and David Talbot writes well about the celebration that followed in d C quote. When they filed into the East Wing Theater for their Guatemala slide show, the PB success team was at the height of its glory. The room was filled with the administration's top dignitaries, including the President himself, his cabinet, and the Vice President. Afterward Eisenhower. Ever, the soldier asked Dullas how many men he had lost, just one, Dullas told him. Incredible, exclaimed the President. But the real body count and Guatemala started after the invasion, when the CIA backed regime of Castile Armas began to clean the nation of political undesirables, labor organizers, and peasants who had too eagerly embraced Arbez's land reforms. It was the beginning of a blood soaked era that would transform Guatemala into one of the twentieth injuries most infamous killing fields. The stainless Coup, as some of its CIA engineers like to call it, would actually result in a type of gore including assassinations, rampant torture and executions, death squad mayhem, and the massacres of entire villages. By the time that the blood letting had ran its course four decades later, over two hundred and fifty thousand people had been killed in a nation whose total population was less than four million when the reign of terror began. That's like five percent of the population thereabouts. So that's good one of the two. Now, when most people talk about the early days of CIA coup's, they'll bring up Guatemala and Iran. Both stories have a number of similarities. For one thing, Alan Dulas also had business interests in Iran. In nine, working for Sullivan and Cromwell, Dullas had flown to Tehran and negotiated a lucrative oil deal with the Shaw. Under the deal, a consortium of U S engineering firms would be paid six hundred and fifty million dollars to modernize the nation. It was at the time the largest foreign development project in US history. Now the Shaw and Dullus kept in contact. During the same time, the royal ruler of Iran was not popular. Developing left wing and communist movements were agitating for his overthrow, which deeply worried both the British and the Americans, who had invested heavily in Iran's oil industry. In at a party hosted by Alan Dullas for the Council of Foreign Relations, the Shah of Iran promised, my government and people are eager to welcome American capital to give it all possible safeguards. He promised not to nationalize the oil industry, which is something that the communists wanted and you can draw it's similar to like what Arbez was doing in Guatemala right there. Foreign powers have basically, through working with corrupt leaders they put in power, bought access, exclusive access to our resources for way too cheap. We want those things because this is our country. Um So that's kind of what the left is agitating for in Iran. We don't want the British to profit off our oil industr red that should be our money. It's our fucking oil. And obviously the Shah promises to his friends in the CIA and in the Council Foreign Relations that will never happen. But of course the show was unpopular, not surprising. In nineteen fifty one, he was forced to appoint a reformer, Mohammed Massada, as Prime minister after the Iranian parliament nominated Massada by a vote of seventy nine to twelve. So this is a popular guy. Like, that's not a fucking close vote. Now, Massada had founded a political party called the National Front, which was a pro democracy party that was kind of center left. Again like Arbez, this guy's kind of center left as opposed to being a radical. The National well, they were, I mean, the National Front was kind of radical for Iran at the time, but not to the extent that the Communists were. The National Front again, they were not communists. They wanted a democratic system, They were not state communist. They wanted a democratic system, and they agitated in the streets for Iranian independence from foreign economic domination. Now, right around this time there was also a Shia religious fundamentalist party that had carried out a wave of assassinations. Um, and they were, you know, they were they also all of these kind of groups, the Shia, the Communists, and the National Front are anti you know, the foreign colonizers and broadly speaking anti the Shah Um but for different reasons, um. And all of this kind of unrest means that Iran is very unstable in this period, and the main reason why the Shah appoints Massada prime minister outside of the fact that Parliament told him to was because he was kind of afraid that not doing so would lead to a revolution. Massada immediately launched a series of sweeping social reforms, unemployment compensation, sick benefits for workers, an end to forced labor for peasants, and a land reform bill bill that forced landlords to give twenty percent of their revenues to tenants. Basically, they had to put a chunk of the revenues they made his landlords into like public works projects, so it would go back to the people. In nineteen fifty two, Massada nationalized the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, a British business that had inked to deal with the shot to control Iranian oil until nineteen The British were furious, but Massada argued that Iranians were rightful owners of their oil. The British responded by instituting an international oil blockade of Iran. They actually sent in ships to blockade the Persian Gulf, so Iran can't sell the oil that is Iran's. But you know again, they would argue that, well, we bought access to it for until nineteen ninety three, so they have no right to take it from us um. I guess it depends on how much you like the British. Uh. This all created Iran's economy, which led to massive domestic unrest, but Massada still remained broadly popular. The British appealed to the Americans for help, or, depending on who you believe, the Eisenhower administration was worried that all the unrest would embolden the Communists and lead them and lead to a revolution that would send their oil over to the Soviets. So the CIA had been active in Iran since nineteen forty eight. They were actually led there by Teddy Roosevelt Son Kermit. So a big part of this story is a dude named Kermit, which I can't over emphasize. Now, the main thing the CIA had been doing in Iran was fighting the Two dep Party, which was Iran's communist party, and they had mostly been focused on setting up what they called a stay behind network. This is a group of militants who could act as an insurgency if the Communists win power. The CIA was doing this all over the place. They did this in Europe, like they were setting up stay behind networks in Italy and stuff. There's this whole thing called Operation Gladioli that will cover at some point in a separate episode. But like, this is the thing the CIA is doing all over the damn world anywhere there's a single leftist trying to run for political office, They're setting up networks of you know, assassins and terrorists in case those people get too much power. Now, Britain was expelled entirely from Iran in nineteen fifty two. They tried to convince the US to overthrow the government by arguing that, like Mossada's successment, that the Communists were about to take over. Eisenhower was actually hesitant to believe them, um, but the dullest brothers were, of course very bullish on the idea. Cooler heads pointed out that none of the conservative politicians in Iran had the popularity to replace Massada, and so if he was forced out, the only popular alternatives would be Shea hardliners, which weren't any friendlier to the West. So at first the British were rebuffed. You know, the Eisenhower administration comes up with some very good reasons why they don't think overthrowing Massada is going to be a good idea. Eisenhower suggested stabilizing the Massada government with a one million dollar loan to help them through the blockade period. It was basically like, well, okay, maybe they have the right to to not let the English have their oil. Let's give them cash so that their society doesn't collapse in the communists can't take power, which seems like a pretty good solution to me, actually, um, but of course this is not what they do. He was actually convinced, in part by the Dullest brothers not to do this, and so instead he tried fruitlessly to negotiate with Massada to allow the British to take back control of the oil company he nationalized. Masada refused, saying that the history of his nation's leadership was filled with corrupt cowards who had bowed to Western money, and he wasn't going to add to that legacy. In March of nineteen fifty three, Alan Dulas attended a National Security Council meeting with seven pages of talking points in his hand, aimed at convincing the rest of the Eisenhower administration to overthrow Massada from the devil's chessboard. Quote Iran was confronted with a maturing revolutionary set up, Dulus warned, and if the country fell into communist hands, sixtent of the Free world's oil would be controlled by Moscow. Oil and gasoline would have to be rationed at home, and US military operations would have to be curtailed. In truth, the global crisis over Iran was not a Cold War conflict, but a struggle quote between imperialism and nationalism, between first and third worlds, between North and South, between developed industrial economies and underdeveloped countries dependent on exporting raw materials. Dullus made sought out to be a stooge of the communists, but he was far from it. So the the Iranian communists. Again, Massada is kind of like Arbez. He's not a communist, and the communists, you know, respect some of the things he's doing, but they don't like him all that much. Um. He was not friendly to Moscow. And the Soviets actually didn't want to get involved in Iran because they're not dumb. They understand sixty percent of the free world, whatever you about six of the US oil supply, that's a thing will go to war over like, That's not a thing Russia wanted to funk with. In this period of time, but of course nobody in the Eisenhower administration was listening to reason. Once the Dullis brothers got their propaganda machine chearning. Over the course of several weeks, Alan and Foster succeeded in convincing Eisenhower that Iran was the next great battle of the Cold War, and that if he didn't move quickly, it would become North Korea, but with the world's largest oil reserves. In June of nineteen fifty three, Allan Dulas presented the CIA's plan to his brother and a handful of other key policymakers. The actual coup plot had been drawn up by Kermit Roosevelt, who had already been arming and organizing an anti communist resistance in the country. The plot started with the assassination of numerous Iranian military and political leaders loyal to Massada. One general was found ripped apart by a roadside outside of Tehran. Others had their throat slit. Now, while all this was going down, unrest was growing in Iran. The Shah was actually forced to flee the country because a large band of communists and democratic militants were roaming the streets tearing down statues of him. And destroying royal property. These militants were loyal to Massada, while some of them were some of them were communists. It was both groups out in the street, and both broadly on the same page as far as this goes. But on August eighteenth, the U. S. Ambassador sat down with the Prime Minister and claimed falsely that Massada's supporters had threatened the U. S. Embassy David Talbot writes quote. He warned that if the Prime Minister did not restore order, the United States would have to avoid aculate all Americans and withdraw recognition of Masada's government. The gambit worked. Masada lost his nerve, according to Henderson, and immediately ordered his police chief to clear the streets. It was the U. S. Diplomat later observed the old man's feeble mistake. With masada supporters off the streets, the CIA's hired thugs were free to take their place, backed by rebellious elements of the military. On the morning of August nineteenth, as Mosada huddled in his home with his advisers, tanks driven by pro Shaw military officers, and street gangs whose pockets were literally stuffed with CIA cash converged on the Prime Minister's residence Mosada was of course overthrown and imprisoned. The Shah, who had been shopping in France with his wife, was brought back to govern the country. He was not popular, and in order to keep him in power, the CIA had to go to war with the Iranian left wing, massacring communists and pro democracy activists wherever they found them. The chief focus of their violence was the TUTA, the communist party, and with CIA's helped, the Shah's West trained security forces tracked down four thousand two de party members between nineteen fifty three and nineteen fifty seven. These guys were basically all tortured. They were whipped, they were beaten. Some of them had chairs smashed on their heads, they had their fingers broken. A lot of them were subjected to something called capani, which is a torture method where you're hung by hooks. At least eleven people diet under torture during this period, mostly from brain hemorrhages. Dozens more were executed um and of course, with the Shaw back in power, Iran's oil was d nationalized, but under the new arrangement of Iran's oil profits went to US Oil producers in d C. The overthrow of Massada was hailed as a great success, as had you know, was the later overthrow of our bez An. Internal CIA report on the coup described the party they held after the coup as a day that should never have ended, for it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction, and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it. This did sound. It was a good time. Everybody's having a good one. You know what else will overthrow the government of Iran in order to gain access to its vast oil reserves. I don't know about that products, and I mean probably at least one of them, right, I mean, statistically speaking, statistically speaking, one of our sponsors would happily overthrow the Iranian government. So here's some ads. We're back. So the shop was of course eventually overthrown in nineteen seventy nine, and part of why the current government that exists in Iran was able to take power this, this hardline Shia fundamentalist regime, was because the communists and left wing movements in Iran had been utterly annihilated, right Like, That's a big part of why the Ayatolas are able to take power is that there's no other anti government organized anti government forces in Iran because they've been massacred by the CIA, whereas the Shia fundamentalists had kind of been allowed to grow. Can I jump in here just a moment. It's I feel like for a lot of the listeners there has to has to feel like whiplash at this point, because it wasn't that long ago. In this series, we were describing an American government that was did not want to get involved in World War One at all, and really hesitated to get involved in World War Two because like, oh, well, that's that's Europe's mess. Like what business do we have deciding whether or not Hitler owns France or what It's like, you know, that's none of our business. Like there was a sizeable faction of conservatives saying, small government, keep you mind our own business. That's what small government is. Small government is not you build a military that has to patrol the entire globe and to go from that a decade later or so too. Looking at the mess you described in Iran, the tangled mess of factions and things that get into oil rights and all of this and deciding oh no, that's we've got to be a part of that, and having it spin out of control, and exactly the way the isolationists would have warned you about that you cannot control what happens after that. This is not a video game. You're not playing at Risk or whatever where you can just flip a switch and decide this country is not going to be communist. You don't know what's going to happen after that. Just as you know, we celebrated when the Soviets lost in Afghanistan, and then not that many what fifteen years later, you know, the bullback from that arrives on our shores. Like you can't control what's going to happen. So everything the isolationists have been saying plays out here because you look at like how this direct directly led to the rise of radical Islam and that region. And it's very frustrating to me that the you will hear people say today, well, we shouldn't be in the Middle East. Those people have been fighting with each other for thousands of years. It's like, no, they haven't. These were specific decisions that were made by people in Washington who had not been elected. These are people who have been appointed to their positions because they were born into the right family and worked for the right law firm. And the reason the geopolitical map looks the way it does in one is because of the decisions that the row of dominoes they started falling over back then. Yeah, and then it's like it always does piss me off when people talk about like, well it's always been a mess over there. Number one, For a long time, they were the dominant power in the Western world. Um. And for another thing, like a lot of these countries didn't exist, Like live You wasn't a country until it was made a country by France and England, Like they just decided, oh, that looks like a good countrys they were carving up ship and like yeah, it's much more I think direct with ship, like Iran, where it's like, well, no, they had a government. They had a pretty reasonable political movement that was doing reasonable things to try to improve things for the people of Iran, and it was crushed and the reasonable people were murdered. So the people who took power when the CIA backed government eventually failed were not reasonable, Okay, And we could also talk about how like a lot of why Iran is so the Ranian government is so messed up. Is the horrible war they had with Iraq that was directly incided and encouraged and funded by the United States who armed both sides. Like yeah, it's you don't have to if someone disagrees with us, you don't have to rebut with the sins of the regime that was overthrown, because that's not the point. You can't predict what's going to happen in a situation like this, and when they had this party like, well, look how easy that was. You know, you have uh, you know, a government that looks like it's leading the wrong direction. You're gonna lose oil rights, and well, hey, if you think about it, that's the national security issue, because if we don't have oil that are whatever. It's like, okay, if you could go back to them and say, let me show you what the next seventy years looks like because of this, But they've made a different decision. I don't know. I don't know if they cared the thought that that they boiled the world down into such a simple equation. It's like, well, as long as we blunt the encroachment of the Soviets here, that's all that matters. It's like, is it really because you know that just because you repelled the Soviets, it doesn't mean that that place suddenly becomes a franchise of the United States. It's like everybody has this view of like World War Two, where it's like, well, you you defeat Germany and then you know, Germany becomes a modern industrial democracy, you like there are best friends. Now. It's like, yeah, it's not that simple. It's not. And the people still thought, like I heard that during the Iraq War. It's like, well, you know, once we get an American friendly regime in there and we bring democracy to them, and they will thank us, and they'll have their fast food franchises and they'll have consumerism. It's like, okay, do you know what the different like ethnic groups are in their region? Do you understand that the borders were drawn not by the Iraqis but by people who didn't live there, Like, do you understand any of that? Do you understand who the curds are? Do you understand what? There's so much that even the people who went to war I didn't know or care about, they like it to be you know that. I think George W. Bush even towards the end of his like he never was totally clear that there were different factions of Islam that hated each other like more than they hate us. The insistence on having this black and white view of the world is so destructive. But I swear to God, you see it come up again and again and and these people have to know better again. Just you had to race through the situation in Iran to try to explain it like that is the most surface level explanation. It still took you a while to get through it. I think some of the people making decisions did not necessarily have even that level of a grasp of because I don't think they would have been as enthused about sticking their their hands into it if they did, because they if you, if if so, you would look at and say, oh, there's no way this ends well, because you're not gonna be able to babysit that situation unless you just occupy the country. But we don't do that because we're the good guys. No, we um we do the good guy thing, which is overthrowing the democratically elected government, and then when a much worse government takes power, um endlessly saber rattling about their dangers um, which also has the effect of breaking some people's brains and making them defend the Iranian government because clearly, if it's just it all, it's just this this incredibly frustrating feedback loop where everything just is always accelerating into less and less reasonable and more and more dangerous things. I don't know. This is why I admire the rare person I run across who says, oh, I don't understand all that stuff is too confusing. It's like, actually, you're more correct the person the person on Twitter who thinks and characters and like a snarky burn you can summarize like what we should be doing over there shouldn't be doing over there, because it's it's like, man, I that's the attitude that that got us into this situation that it's it's like, well, these people are bad, and so we'll we'll just kick them over and then leave and it'll all sort itself. Well no, no, so yeah, Jason, Um, you know, that's most of what we're going to cover. In terms of the CIA's FUCKERI in this period, I mean, there's so much. Over the following years, Allen dulass Cia would create the Republic of South Vietnam almost out of whole cloth, which was pretty horrible government. Um, and they did it in order to challenge you know, the North. Uh. They attempted to carry out a coup in Indonesia, which failed. In nineteen sixty Allan Dulas helped to mastermind the assassination of Patrice Lamumba, a socialist president of the Congo. Prior to Lamamba's killing, Dullas wrote, quote, if Lamomba continues to be in power, the result will be at best chaos and at worst in eventual seizure of power by the communists, with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the u WIN and the interests of the free world. His dismissal must therefore be an urgent and priority objective. Now, Lamamba's assassination led to a horrible, violent war the presidency of Joseph Mbutu, a brutal dictator who robbed the nation lined and left it and like what is still to this day a perpetual state of multi civil war. There's just I mean, the Congo has been torn apart ever since. And obviously a lot of that blame goes onto the Belgians too. But it's just farcical that that that Dullas ever thought that, like, oh, if Lamombo gets in power, then we'll have chaos and the congo like nobody. And again, I don't know if you were to tell him what had happened, if he would have changed his actions. I don't think so Um, I just don't now. Alan Dulas retired in nineteen sixty one. I think Foster had been out for a while at that, but I mean he was only Secretary of State for you know, four years or so he passed away, I think, and then he passed by nineteen fifty nine something like that. Am I wrong about Dullas Foster? Yeah? I thought he. I thought he left office nine nine for health reasons. Yeah, nineteen fifty nine, and he was in so Um when he died. That's where why we have Dullas Airport is it got named after him. And I think it was actually J. F. K who who inaugurated Dullas Airport and given nice speech about, you know, all of the wonderful things that that Foster Dulas had done for the country. It was not named after Alan Dullas Um. There was a statue of Foster Dulas that used to be in Dullas Airport that is now has been moved out of the public part of the airport, and it's now just kind of like sitting awkwardly in a conference room. Because about ten or so years later, people started to get embarrassed with Foster Dulas's legacy. Once again, you don't hear about these guys anymore, you know. Um, But yeah, it happened pretty quickly, Like these people went from being in the news constantly too by the time they were both out of politics in nineteen sixty one, fading really fast from popular memory considering how influential they were. Some of it, I think some of it's probably that people started to feel ashamed of what they've done, But I think more of it was probably it wasn't in anybody's best interests to help people remember, Like I think everyone listening to this heard about the Bay of Pigs in school, didn't but don't know the name Alan Dullas necessarily or don't remember it. Yeah, like all of these things that were just part of the Cold War and helped shape everything about the policy and all those different parts of the world. That's that was the dulless is all of it either entirely them or partly them. It's baffling how much they did. And the best way the highlight that is by how much we're leaving out. We're not talking about the Bay of Pigs, which was Alan Dulas Baby. We're not talking about the fact that after World War Two he was given the job of building a new German intelligence agency to combat the Soviets, and he hired General Reinhard Galen, Hitler's former head of intelligence. Galen played a huge role in the Holocaust. But dulla Is in the c I a kind of handwave that um and allowed him to hire other members of the Gestapo to work with the CIA in West Germany. There were complaints within the CIA about all of the Nazis they were having to work with. One of the guys who got brought in to work with the CIA was Conrad Fibig, who um worked at the CIA through Galen and was later charged with murdering eleven thousand Jews in Belarus during the war. There was a memo we have about this guy wherein one CIA employee suggests it might be smart to drop such types from employment, like and Dullis gets asked about this guy. Uh, Dellas gets asked about Galen in general the British, because the British are really unhappy with the fact that we keep hiring all these Nazis. Um and Dullis gets asked about like Galen and all the Nazis hire Again. Dallas's responses, I don't know if he's a rascal. Rasco was not the allegation the type of memo some of you in the listenership have gotten about an inappropriate term that they would like you to stop using an emails or something like that. They got that mimo about well maybe we should not hire x Nazis and was like, well, are you sure? Are the dude who killed the Lefon fastened people? Yeah, he's problematic. Are you aware of these problematic cancel culture comes for the SS. Now. One of the things that's funny is he like so so he says he gets asked about Galen, he says, I don't know if he's a rascal. There are a few archbishops and espionage. Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club. Which is funny because Alan DULs absolutely invited Reinhard Galen to his club on numerous occasions. He actually hosted parties for the Nazi spy chief at the Chevy Chase Club whenever he would visit DC. Um, it's just good ship, it's just good ship. Um. Now. Galen's big influence on Alan Dullus was the fact that Galen was a guy who believed that everything was justified in combating the communist threat. Um. He wrote at one point, in an age in which war is the paramount activity of man, the total annihilation of the enemy is its primary aim, which is a very fascist thing to say, and something both of the Dullis brothers got on board with because they were instrumental in pushing a policy on the US government called massive retaliation. John Foster doulla Is actually laid out this idea in a speech to the CFR when he insisted the U s would protect its allies quote through the deterrent of massive retaliatory power. I'm gonna quote from a write up and history dot Com here. Dullis began his speech by examining the communist strategy that he concluded has it had at its goal the bankruptcy of the United States through over extension of its military power, but strategically and economically, the secretary explained it was unwise to permanently commit US land forces in Asia to support permanently other countries, or to become permanently committed to military expenditure so that vast they lied to lead to practical bankruptcy. Instead, he believed a new policy of getting maximum protection at a bearable cost should be developed. Although Dollas did not directly refer to nuclear weapons, it was clear that the new policy was describing would depend upon the massive retaliatory power of such weapons. Which is interesting because on a moral level, what he's saying here is it's too expensive to go to war all the times we would need to go to war to counter the Soviets. You know what's cheap is a fucking nuke. That's good ship. And we could talk a lot about massive retaliation and how that idea played a big role in the escalation of the US commitment to Vietnam in Nixon's bombing of Cambodia. UM. But we're running way too long as it is. UM. I want to end by acknowledging mk ultra Um, which is the part of Dolus's legacy that I think people are probably most familiar with. This is the CIA giving everybody LSD. The idea behind this was that Alan Dulas had become convinced that the Soviets were carrying out mind control research and we needed to do mind control research to counter them, even though we actually had information that they weren't really doing all that much um. But that was beside the point. Alan Dulas wanted thousands of people to be dosed with LSD, and that's exactly what happened. We'll do a whole two partter on this someday. For right now, I want to talk about the aspect of it that had the biggest that says the most about Alan Dulas as a human being, which is the fact that he subjected his son to some aspects of the mk Ultra program. So his kid, Alan Dulas Jr. Or Sonny, was a brilliant young man with an incredible academic record and a sharp mind. His mom and his sisters all adored him, but Alan Dulas Sr. Was kind of incapable of taking any pride in his son, and this kind of pushed his son to try to impress him, and in order to do this, Sonny joined the Marine Corps. He fought with incredible courage in Korea and one commendations for reckless bravery under fire until he was hit by North Korean shell in nifty two and his brain was permanently damaged. When he came home, Sonny was unable to take care of himself. Therapy did not seem to help. He would get lost easily. He would launch into angry rants where he called his father a Hitler lover and a Nazi collaborator. His family dubbed these paranoid, even though they were pretty accurate. In desperation, Alan Dulas sent his son to Dr Harold Wolfe, who worked on the MK Ultra program. We know something of what was done to Sonny thanks to his sister Joan, who visited him during this period. From the Devil's Chessboard quote. Joan has disturbing memories of visiting her brother at a New York hospital where he was subjected to excruciating insulin shock therapy, one of the experimental procedures employed on the CIA's human guinea pigs, used primarily for the treatment of schizophrenia. Insulin doses were meant to jolt patients out of their madness. The procedure resulted in coma and sometimes violent convulsions. The most severe risks included death and brain damage. The one study at the time I claimed that this mental impairment was actually beneficial because it reduced patients tension and hostility. Joan recalls that her brother kept begging her when she visited him, can't you do something for me? I'm going mad? He showed no improvement from his treatment. Um, and of course obviously he wouldn't. Um. It just seems to have done horrible damage. Eventually he just started like stopped talking to his parents and stopped, like like he just decided, like I have to just pretend that I'm fine so that they will stop torturing me this way. UM, I don't know, it's that's that's Alan fucking Dullus, you know. I mean, of course he would like that's how he solves his problems. And and I don't know if you were about to cover this, but now he was fired after the Bay of Pigs. Correct then can be effectively forced him to resigned. But yeah, yeah, so I I began this series by talking about my first like exposure to him in the realm of like ci a conspiracy stuff was in Oliver Stone GfK movie because after Kennedy fired Dullus, and then exactly two years later or so, h Kennedy would be assassinated right November twenty seconds something like that. Uh. And then when they would form the warrant commission to try to find out who had assassinated JFK, Alan Dullas winds up on the commission who JFK had fired for doing for botching his his behind the scenes uh C I a stuff in the form of the Bay of Pigs. So if you're wondering why like conspiracy theories and stuff persist and why they have like there's enough truth for them to go on to keep them fueled, it's stuff like this, Like that's that's as shady as can be. It would seem to to my uh innocent eyes. Yeah, it's incredibly shady. It's one of those reasons where when I'm talking about conspiracy theories, I don't put the JFK assassination in the same realm as you know, hollow earth stuff, because there's reasons to have questions about what went down, you know, not that I'm you know, a magic bullet or like whatever, like I I don't, I'm not, I have no, I'm not convinced on that, but it's certainly there's some sketchy ass ship that went down. It would be weird if people weren't theorizing about reasons why that might have happened. I want to end Jason because we've mostly talked about the Dullest Brothers and the kind of men they were, how they came about, and how that led them into what they did, and how that led to the creation of the CIA. I also want to quote a passage from The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer that lays out kind of the talent Alan cultivated because he was he headed the CIA during its formative years. This talks out the kind of people he recruited, and I think this is the note that I want to end on. Quote. All were gregarious, intrigued by possibilities, liked to do things, had three bright ideas a day, shared the optimism of stock market plungers, and were convinced that every problem had its handle and that the CIA should find a way to reach it. The intelligence historian Thomas Powers has written they also tended to be white Anglo Saxon patricians from old families with old money, at least at the beginning and they somehow inherited traditional British attitudes towards the colored races of the world, not the puka sahib arrogance of the Indian Raj, but the mixed fascination and condescension of men like T. E. Lawrence, who were enthusiastic partisans of the alien cultures into which they dipped for a time, and rarely doubted their ability to help until it was too late. These were the best men who formed the core of the early CIA. Most came from privileged backgrounds that isolated them from ordinary life, and had gone to the right schools. During the war, they had traded genteel lives for death defying adventures. Upon returning home, they found the quiet routines of peace unfulfilling. Yep, it is hard to overstate the power of boredom world events. And then when certain wealthy people can decide, for example, you know what, I think it would be funny if I ran for president. Uh. Sometimes sometimes people just want to find something to do and decide. You know what, I think that the uncivilized races need me to come rescue them. Yeah, it is it. It is fitting that all of the people who kind of form the background of the early c I are dull list types. They are rich kids from the aristocracy who go to private schools, have an exciting time in the war, and come home bored. And also I think with that kind of ego that they know what's best for the world. That has to be a factor. And then you've got people like Alan DAAs, who I fully believe a big chunk of his motivation is that nothing gets you laid like saying you're a spy. And yeah, you can overestimate the impact of boredom or getting laid, or his his ability to be able to say, well, you know that revolution just happened. That was me. It's like I was. I barely escaped with my life like I had. You know that that guy was assassinated. I killed him myself with a poison dart from my wrist. Watch. Why don't we talk about this? I can't tell the story here in the restaurant, but if we come up to my room whereas to see you and me, I can tell you the story in privacy with you and your twin sister, the three of us. You know you do a great Alan DUIs. So yeah, there you go, everybody. I these are two names. Everyone should know. These are names when when we say we have shorthand, like talk about this, that's McCarthy, is um or that's whatever. The names dullest should be among those that everybody knows his shorthand and they're not. So if we have helped some people know these names and know what hand they had in shaping the mess, that is a role today. There you go, We've done a service. Yes, that's all we ever tried to do service. And if you don't know the names of the modern versions of the dullest is find out m hm Yes, John Krazinski, Google John Krazinski. Jason you got anything to um? Yes? Since I yes. Since I abandoned uh the online publishing industry last year and left my job at Crack and a full time author, I am a New York Times bestselling author of several increasingly stupid books. The last one was called Zoe Punch is the Future and the Dick. It is a book two in a series. You do not have to have read the first one. It is as good of a place to start as any or you can go to Amazon, or if you have a more ethical place you buy your books from. You can prowse any of them by looking up my name. Um. Otherwise, I also have social media. All the social media is except TikTok. Are you on TikTok? Evans uh no no. I I am frightened and confused by anything that the kids like. Okay, so for you on TikTok. The handful of TikTok videos that I've seen segments of on Twitter have convinced me that we need to do a reverse logans run. I love TikTok. I'm just not like posting on there. It's a great time. I've learned so many helpful tips on organization and like what products to buy that actually work. It's like it's like yelp but video, Well, you can either do what Sophie. There's also a lot of puppies. There's a lot of puppy easy guys. I'm just gonna say it again reverse Logan's run. I said in the previous episode, though, like it's easy for us to look back on the past and condemn how casual they were about Nazis and various I think in the future they'll look back at how we tolerated TikTok and they'll say the same It's like, how could they not see where that was going? Yeah? How could they not tell that TikTok would lead to the annihilation of the dolphins in two? And I saw it coming? But thanks for having me on this was this was a lot of information to try to get through very quickly. We left out so much. We love thought so many stories that could have You're gonna do an entire series on mk ultra, a multi part series on mk ultra is also going to wind up leaving out a lot, a lot of a lot of wild shit. It's just the nature of it. If the best thing podcast can do is encouraged people to go out and buy books on the subject, and her susan further because you you are not informed because you listen to nine hours above podcast on it, I know it listens like there was a lot to get through. There's so much more and it's all just as interesting it really is. And if you want to learn more, buying The Brothers, which is where I recommend starting with Stephen kenzer Um and then The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot, will will that that will actually give you a pretty solid base of understanding of these guys. And what they did. But of course there will still be a lot more, all right,