Runaway “Intelligence” Services
Many historians agree that the Cold War commenced, effectively, with “Operation Sunrise” in the closing stages of the second world war.
Sunrise was a rogue operation run by Allen Dulles to secure the freedom of Nazi SS General Karl Wolff, second in command to Himmler of the entire SS and then the head of Nazi operations in Italy.
So who was Allen Dulles? At the time, Dulles was both a Wall Street lawyer with mega-corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and a Swiss-based US intelligence agent with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) – the military spy service which eventually became the CIA. Dulles was doing deals on behalf of US corporate clients with Nazi Germany before, during, and after the war. Many of these corporate clients were utilising slave labour in Nazi concentration camps to assist in cutting costs globally and were heavily committed to siding with Germany at the outset of war.
Instrumental to this were Dulles’ good relations with leading Nazi figures. Apart from Wolff, Dulles met and knew personally many Nazi and SS luminaries, including Hitler himself (in March 1933) and SS Leader Heinrich Himmler, many of whom he assisted to escape via his “ratlines” to Argentina and elsewhere in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Dulles went on to become the longest serving head of the CIA, America’s chief “spook”.
So why was his Sunrise operation considered the commencement of the Cold War? Because Dulles undermined Roosevelt’s insistence that Nazi surrender should be unconditional, ie: no secret negotiations or deals for clemency. This was an insistence shared by all the Allied leaders, including Churchill and Stalin. In blatant contradiction of this policy, Dulles secured an “early” (it was only a mere six days before the full unconditional capitulation of Germany and all Axis forces) surrender of German troops in Italy in exchange for clemency towards General Wolff. Stalin, already paranoid about Western duplicity, interpreted this as a unilateral US breach of the agreed unconditional surrender policy and suspected that America was now doing secret deals with Germany and others which would eventually lead to an invasion of the Soviet Union (as Western powers had done before in the course of the Russian revolution).
Stalin apparently trusted Roosevelt, but when Roosevelt died he was left with Harry Truman – a staunch “anti-communist” and relatively weak force. If Roosevelt had lived, it is very likely that he would have had Dulles tried for treason, but Truman, even though he disliked and distrusted Dulles, lacked the resolve and political strength to pull such a thing off.
All of this led to the diminishment of Stalin’s trust and the hardening of his position and the certainty of an “iron curtain” at the final battle lines.
But Dulles didn’t stop at Sunrise. He went on to involve himself deeply in the above mentioned “ratlines” – the programmes by which leading Nazis were able to escape Germany and settle quietly elsewhere in the world. As part of his ratline operations, Dulles even went so far as to interfere with the Nuremberg trials, doing what he could to protect his Nazi “assets” and clients, not least Karl Wolff. He was also a staunch supporter of Thomas McKittrick, the driving force behind the infamous Bank of International Settlements (BIS). BIS, set up to handle German reparation payments after WW1, had become the vehicle of choice for leading Nazis to stash their ill-gotten gains in Switzerland.
Dulles’s career as CIA chief spook ended when Kennedy fired him for lying to him in the build up to the invasion of Cuba. The resulting Bay of Pigs fiasco led directly on to the later, potentially globally cataclysmic Cuban missile crisis which was defused by Kennedy at the very last minute. Despite being fired, Dulles continued to exert informal control over many CIA activities, including – many allege – the assassination of Kennedy himself.
The fact that a monster like Dulles could act with impunity in direct contradiction of US policy and in defiance of US presidents serves to illustrate what has become of intelligence services generally. In the heady days of his Swiss intrigues with Nazis before, during, and after the war, Dulles was not alone. Elements of British, French, and the earliest forms of Mossad (Israeli intelligence) were engaged in the same sorts of practises.
Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (also at Sullivan & Cromwell) had an abiding hatred of communism because it threatened the interests of their corporate clients. They hated trade unionists and “liberals” for the same reason and for the two post war decades oversaw the development of US “national security” policy – Al as head of CIA; JF as US Secretary of State (Foreign Secretary).
Apart from rebuilding the then West German intelligence service with former Nazis, Dulles was also dabbling in the clandestine overthrow of foreign governments. For starters, he was instrumental to the toppling of the democratically elected Persian (now Iranian) government of Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh rose to popular acclaim in the face of the excesses and abuses of the hereditary Shah and his consumer-driven wife Soraya. They fled the country to live it up in Rome where they were contacted by Dulles. Through copious CIA slush funding, infiltrations, and mass media manipulations, Mossadegh was hounded out of office in 1953 and the grateful Shah returned to his throne. There followed years of repressions, torturings, and murders while Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, Standard Oil, and other corporate entities swept back in, paid the Shah his backhanders, and resumed control of the country’s vast natural resources.
John Foster was just as rabidly anti-communist as his brother. As the French were on the verge of being booted out of Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, he offered “two A-bombs” to French foreign minister Georges Bidault. Fortunately Bidault was sufficiently shocked and horrified to decline the offer.
Having developed a taste for “the game” of toppling governments, Dulles moved on to Guatemala where he oversaw the destruction of Jacobo Arbenz and his democratically elected socialist, people-oriented government. This was managed on the ground by Howard Hunt – later of Watergate fame. Arbenz was replaced by the dictator Castillo Armas to the tumultuous applause of America’s United Fruit Company who, just like the oil corporations in Persia/Iran, swept back in to take control of Guatamala’s economy.
These set the pattern for continuing CIA international meddlings in the affairs of Chile, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Cuba, and elsewhere. The techniques included blackmail, media manipulation, bribery, mis and disinformation, support for dictators, assassinations, and paid for “revolutions”.
The fact that so few of us knew or know about these despicable activities, and that Dulles served so long as CIA chief, suggests that things have moved right along since. Like Hoover at the FBI, Dulles was so entrenched at the CIA that incoming US presidents found it very difficult to govern without his “knowledge” and guidance. The same applied to his successors as CIA chief. They always “knew better” than incoming presidents – especially as the quality of those presidents began to decline sharply.
Caitlin Johnstone (https://caitlinjohnstone.com/ ) makes the point that “So Much Of What The CIA Used To Do Covertly It Now Does Overtly”. She holds the view that : “I was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he made an observation we’ve discussed here previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public perception.
Greenwald said: “If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population,” Greenwald said. “They used to try to do it secretly. They don’t even do it secretly any more. They don’t need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American population.”
Although Dulles met with David Ben-Gurion in Washington in May 1953 to formalise, without the knowledge of US government and contrary to its policies, covert co-operation between the two agencies, it appears that, over time, Mossad has become the tail that wags the CIA dog. For example, Zionist Jonathan Pollard was tried for spying for Mossad whilst working at US naval intelligence during the 1980s. There are other ongoing examples, not least the appallingly lax security regarding the Pennsylvania-based NUMEC corporation and its depleted uranium products which seem to reach other parts of the planet without let or hindrance.
Mossad has always been careful about what it shares with the CIA. The latter has become such a large sprawling organisation rife with internal fiefdoms and competition that it’s relatively easy to play elements off against each other. Mossad, being much smaller and much tighter, tends to be contemptuous of the beast. It knows much more about the CIA than the CIA knows about Mossad. In this sense, Mossad could be said to be the leading intelligence service of today.
But the other frightening fact about runaway intelligence services is the extent to which they are involving themselves in commerce. Not only is there a revolving door which allows high ranking spooks to become executive officers of corporations and vice versa, but there is also increasing involvement by spook agencies, using non-accountable offshore slush funds, to invest heavily in such corporations. This is most notable among corporations involved in armaments and, more and more, cyber-security.
The pattern that emerges is that “our interests abroad” are not “our” interests at all; they are (and have been since colonial times) the interests of corporations and their major shareholders, who now not only buy and sell politicians but also buy and sell intelligence services. The armed interventions so regularly called for to protect “their” interests are funded by “us” and fought for by our more expendable sons and daughters.
Generally speaking, these orientations are reflected more and more in all the smaller fry western “intelligence” services (such as the UK ones) with one major difference. Being effectively left out of the global loop, they exist more exclusively to manipulate and control domestic populations than to counter the activities of foreign interventions.
The travesty of the 2019 UK elections and the ongoing internal machinations of the UK Labour Party are a graphic testament to the interventions of “intelligence” services from home and from abroad.
