Meet the Kleptocrats: How Two Brothers Undermined Democracy in America and the World
Today, the name “Dulles” is associated primarily with Washington D.C.’s main airport. That airport’s namesake, however, regards two highly consequential figures in American and world history, whose actions and legacy have largely been swept under the rug.
The Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen Welsh Dulles, were successful businessmen and extremely influential figures in the shaping of American foreign policy. Their political careers were tied largely to Eisenhower’s presidency, with John and Allen serving as Secretary State and director of the C.I.A., respectively. In these capacities they amassed tremendous powers, which they used to the advantage of their own ends, and at the expense of the country and the world. While they might be relative unknowns in the modern public consciousness, they have left a monumental, lasting impact on both American and global politics.
John Foster Dulles was born on February 25, 1888 in Washington, D.C. Allen followed him in birth on April 17, 1893, born in Watertown, New York. The Dulles family already had political connections; John and Allen’s grandfather, John Watson Foster, served as a Colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, and worked in president Benjamin Harrison’s administration as Secretary of State, during which he was an instrumental figure in overthrowing the native government in Hawaii. The brothers’ uncle, Robert “Bert” Lansing, served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, and helped drive Wilson’s imperialist foreign policy through interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
The brothers’ father, Allen Macy Dulles, was a Presbyterian minister with a background in missionary work, and subjected his sons to a strict, religious lifestyle that involved daily church attendance and cold baths. From a young age the Dulles Brothers were practically indoctrinated into adopting a sort of “Missionary Calvinist” mindset — that is, it was the Christian duty of good, religious men to go out into the world and fight evil forces, as opposed to merely trusting in God that good would eventually triumph. It was these religious views that would later shape the brothers’ political outlook on the world.
After a robust education at both George Washington University and Princeton, the brothers would both be employed at Sullivan & Cromwell, a New York-based law firm whose clientele included large American corporations with business interests overseas. They also worked as diplomats, and were major proponents of the emerging idea that American foreign policy should be directed towards pushing American business interests across the world. In a time when the rise of communism was causing grave global concerns, the Dulles brothers became united in their opposition to what they saw as an ideology that — with its goal of abolishing capitalism — was a grave threat to big business.
It was the Dulles’ brothers’ prestigious business and political connections that gave them an elevated voice in politics. John Foster Dulles was highly critical of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies during the Great Depression. Referring to Roosevelt as a “demagogue”, John Foster’s opposition to the president made him a prominent voice in the Republican Party; it can be argued that the present-day Republican Party’s extreme aversion to anything that can remotely be considered “socialist” was in part influenced by the Dulles brothers’ anti-communist, pro-business mindset.
The brothers’ opposition to communism also led them to make some rather questionable choices prior to and during World War II. Viewing Nazi Germany as an anti-communist bulwark, the Dulles brothers supported economic cooperation between American and German businesses in helping Germany re-arm and prepare for war. In the 1930s, John Foster required his legal staff in Berlin to write “Heil Hitler!” on all of the office’s outgoing mail. Allen, during his time serving as an O.S.S. agent in Switzerland during the war, ordered the rescue of an SS General from Italian communist guerrillas. After the war, Allen helped make sure that one German intelligence officer, Reinhard Gelhen, would be able to evade justice at the Nuremberg Trials.
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, impressed by John Foster Dulles’ central role in the peace talks between Japan and the United States that culminated in the signing of the 1951 San Francisco Treaty he had helped create, appointed John Foster and Allen Dulles as Secretary of State and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, respectively. It was in these positions — the first and only time in American history that brothers controlled both the overt and covert sides of American foreign policy — that the Dulleses had the ability to impose their views across the world.
The Central Intelligence Agency had been established by President Harry S. Truman in 1947, initially intended to brief the president on intelligence and national security developments. However, Allen Dulles greatly expanded its powers and abilities during his time as director. In Iran, the British Petroleum corporation (BP) had a monopoly over the country’s oil fields; however, in 1951, Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized its oil. Horrified, Britain appealed to the United States for help, and John Foster and Allen Dulles were able to convince President Eisenhower to authorize a C.I.A.-backed coup in Iran. For chessmaster Allen Dulles, this was a doable task, as Iran, then a free democratic society, could be easily infiltrated and corrupted by covert intelligence operatives.
The coup, co-orchestrated by the C.I.A. and M.I.6., was executed in August 1953. Mossadegh was ousted, and the Shah of Iran was given full dictatorial power. The C.I.A. celebrated the success of the operation, and the Dulles brothers were greatly pleased. Iran, meanwhile, was subjected to 25 years of the Shah’s autocratic, unpopular rule, which culminated in the Iranian Revolution of 1979; the Shah was overthrown, and the radical, theocratic Islamist regime of the Ayatollahs took over, a regime that was and continues to be unapologetically anti-American, and anti-democracy.
Meanwhile in Guatemala, president Jacobo Arbenz had initiated a land reform program which confiscated land owned by the American-owned banana company United Fruit, and redistributed it amongst the Guatemalan people. The Dulles brothers, who had both worked as lawyers for United Fruit and had served on its board of directors, once again took advantage of Guatemala’s free democratic society to stage a coup in 1954 that saw Arbenz overthrown and Castillo Armas, a military dictator, installed. From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala was embroiled in a brutal civil war between the US-backed military dictatorship and leftist rebels, once which claimed the lives of 200,000 people.
Then there was Vietnam. In 1954, Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh, who had been fighting a continuous guerrilla war since 1941 against the Japanese and then the French, seemed to be emerging victorious. Peace accords were held in Geneva, and France appeared poised to throw in the towel and accept the possibility that Ho Chi Minh had, in fact, won. A temporary partition between Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, and the French-backed State of Vietnam in the south was proposed, with democratic elections to unify Vietnam to be held the following year. However, John Foster Dulles, representing the United States at Geneva, objected to these proposals, and left the conference before a resolution could be reached. Perhaps if it weren’t for Dulles’ exit, the entire Vietnam War — and the 50,000 Americans and nearly 3 million Vietnamese who died as a result of it — might possibly have been averted.
It was also during the Dulles brothers’ tenure in Eisenhower’s administration that European colonization in Africa and Asia was collapsing. Many of these newly independent nations — such as Indonesia and the Republic of Congo — chose not to take a side in the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union. The Dulles brothers, however, firm in their “us and them” mentality, only saw these so-called “neutral” nations as merely more puppets of the Kremlin attempting to undermine American global hegemony. In the Congo’s case, Allen Dulles ordered the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, which then led to the installation of the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Mobutu.
John Foster Dulles died on May 24, 1959, following a slow, agonizing bout of stomach cancer. Allen Dulles, meanwhile, continued to serve as C.I.A. director into the first several months of John F. Kennedy’s administration. Dulles had planned to carry out many more covert operations throughout his career, including potentially ordering the assassination of French president Charles DeGaulle. However, any of those future aspirations were cut short when, in April 1961, Kennedy dismissed Dulles as C.I.A. director after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
In 1963, over two years after Dulles’ firing, President Kennedy was assassinated. Some who believe that the C.I.A. was behind Kennedy’s death have claimed that the assassination was carried out by the agency in retribution for Dulles’ dismissal. Others have claimed that Dulles was directly involved with the assassination, and may in fact have given the order; proponents of this theory point out that Dulles was a major participant of the Warren Commission that investigated Kennedy’s death.
The alleged involvement of Dulles in the JFK assassination isn’t the first time that people have accused the infamous spymaster of being involved in top-secret government affairs. Project MKULTRA, which the C.I.A. launched in 1953 and involved nightmarish mind-control experiments on unwitting human test subjects, was authorized by Allen Dulles during his tenure as C.I.A. director. The project remained classified by the U.S. government for many years, before eventually being exposed to the American public in 1975, six years after Dulles had died on January 26, 1969.
In addition to their questionable foreign policy decisions and intelligence actions, the Dulles brothers were major proponents of bringing deep-state kleptocracy to America. Not only did they overthrow democratic governments across the world in order to defend corporate interests, but they also had a distrust for representative democracy and people’s government in general, viewing the people’s will as an impediment to the affairs of the corporate state. Allen Dulles is even quoted as having said that, “Democracy only works if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can’t sit back and let democracy run itself.”
In a country — and a world — where the governments have often been accused of prioritizing the interests of big corporations over the rights of common people, it has been inferred that the Dulles brothers were among those instrumental figures in undermining liberalism and democratic values in favor of kleptocracy. One might now be convinced that the Dulles brothers somehow hijacked our democracy and foreign policy to meet their own goals; however, one should not take this idea home. The actions of these brothers are merely reflective of America’s imperialist and neocolonialist foreign policy, as well as the dangers posed upon the people by corporate overlords with unchecked power and influence.
Looking at the bigger picture, the Dulles brothers were not a cause, but were and are a mere symptom of one of the many problems that faces this world today. Merely, they were a cog powering the machine that has been perpetually bringing about the erosion of democracy and the corporatization of the state. It is through studying people such as the Dulleses that we can begin to discover how deep the powers that control us have entrenched themselves within this broken society.
Sources
- https://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/234752747/meet-the-brothers-who-shaped-u-s-policy-inside-and-out
- https://theintercept.com/2015/11/02/the-deepest-state-the-safari-club-allen-dulles-and-the-devils-chessboard/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170605231103/https://www.thedailybeast.com/web/20170605231103/http://www.thedailybeast.com/did-cia-director-allen-dulles-order-the-hit-on-jfk
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/3QSkENg5zGjzW6fIfVN41y
