Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Stealing A Play's Script is Thespionage

2024-Mar-13

This is the first post breaking the tradition of reporting on the blog updates, unless I suppose I generate an ‘update’ tag to assign to this blog post. Oh, I need to make those schema changes to the blog_post model. I won’t mention it again, but there are always updates going on. Check the git repo. The commit notes are getting wordy yet professional.

Anyway, it feels somewhat strange jumping right into the review portion. Perhaps I can fill these first half with some biographical stuff. I try to frame my reviews so that it’s more of an exposition about my interests and how they brought me to choosing the book I read, rather than a direct assertion of the book's quality. I’m a bit of a book slut, so it’s hard for me to find a reason to badmouth a book that I finished. Not finishing a book is my greatest condemnation of a book.

If you have been an avid reader of the blog here at fredlambuth.com, you’d know I am partial to books about national espionage, to include non-fiction tales of whatever nation’s intelligence agency and spy fiction that gets so outlandish it ceases to be spy fiction. Knowing that, it should bring no surprise to see my next book choice -The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer. A dual biography of John Foster and Allen Dulles, the heads of the US State department and the Central Intelligence Agency throughout both Eisenhower administrations, respectively.

Those names are not exactly well known in the general public despite having reached the highest echelons of the executive branch of the national government, and leveraged their positions vigorously for almost a decade. Their decisions reached into every corner of the world and laid down the framework for international relations for decades. All that and now they are both hardly known, except as trivial knowledge about buildings that bear their name.

I learned of who John Foster Dulles was by discovering the namesake for the international airport in Washington D.C. I learned of Allen a few years ago by reading another book that dealt with the brothers, but mostly Allen: The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot. That book painted a far more sinister picture of Allen Dulles, even slipping a little bit into the mad world of JFK assassination conspiracies. As I mentioned in my previous blog post talking about Annie Jacobsen, I sometimes can appreciate a more reserved writing style that might not pay off viscerally when dealing with controversial subjects such as global espionage. The Devil’s Chessboard reveled in portraying Allen as a cartoon villain CIA director, plotting shadowy moves and speculating on so many possible outcomes or connections. Kinzer does not hide his disgust for either of the brothers, but only in the most academic tone and with little to no speculating on just what else the brothers got up to in their halcyon days of the 1950s running the surface and secret foreign policy of the United States. Kinzer just thinks these guys were jerks because they let their beliefs cloud their reason, which is extra bad when you are a national leader.

This book is recommended for solid learning about US foreign policy throughout their lifetime, pre-Cold War in their youth and the start of the Cold War at the end of their careers. The latter half of the book deals with their acts after reaching their highest office. From that all factors involved in the US’s forays into Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, and several other developing countries get thoroughly hammered. If you are an old hand about reading what the CIA were up to in the 1950s, the thoroughness can get repetitive. Hearing some of the more outlandish tales of the spy world repeated in this book did give me some glee.

Although the Dulles brothers did not enter public service until the later acts of their lives, they were still representatives of US foreign policy when they acted as partners of the prominent Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. This firm’s key clients were a cohort of multinational corporations with investments abroad, namely resource gathering in the lesser developed nations. John Foster and Allen cut their teeth in the international circuit of diplomacy by speaking on behalf of very wealthy corporate clients that wanted to extract even more wealth from wherever they had their operations. By the time the brothers had to act on behalf of the United States of America instead of the United Fruit Company they were aware that was almost the same thing in their esteem.

The deeper intentions or foundational principles of each of the brothers was not touched upon in The Devil’s Chessboard. That book was more concerned about detailing anything nefarious they enacted in their tenure as statesmen instead of discerning the moral path they chose to their political ends. Kinzer goes much deeper into just what the brothers were trying to do, and this is where Kinzer finds the avenue to express his disgust with the brothers.

Allen is portrayed as a bit of a cavalier. A cad. The more lively of the two who actually seemed to enjoy himself at the seat of the secret foreign policy of the USA. John Foster on the other hand was the more sober and somber one. Not the life of the party at all. Somebody who took to religion and doubled down on the righteousness of religion in his adult years. They both felt their ultra blue blood lifestyle and way of life was tantamount to being just what ‘truth, justice, and the American Way’ is supposed to mean, so making sure their rich friends stayed rich was ultimately their goals. Foster sounds like to be the only true believer in the goodness of their cause. Allen might have been in it just for the laughs!

Kinzer finds disgust in both these men for allowing their Cold War paranoia to calcify together into what became the Containment strategy for constraining the USSR inside of Russia. John Foster was a fanatic for anti-communism that was fueled by his religious fervor. Allen approached anti-communist projects with just as much zeal, yet his motivations were professional rather than personal. Allen appeared to really enjoy controlling all the cover action, intelligence gathering, international travel, and somewhat hidden esteem he has in the spy world. He practically invented, or at least standardized, the central intelligence agency of the USA.

John Foster’s legacy does include being the steward of a state department that had to grow into something almost completely different than when he started the job. He got a busy airport named after him, but I think Allen Dulles has a cult audience in the spy crowd. Reading about pious Foster was more tiresome than the cavorting Allen Dulles, who seemed to be the ultimate ladies’ man among the elites. His extramarital conquests would include princesses and prime minster’s wives. He must have been one helluva talker because I don’t feel any elan or a hint of grace looking at his pipe smoking mug. I suppose compared to John Foster’s constipated midwestern college professor look, Allen comes off looking quite dashing. As well, Foster dealt with the surface level of Cold War policy. The fun stuff the US did in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, et al was done by people working in the CIA office, not the official US embassy.

I suppose I see overarching themes surfacing among the last few blog posts. The obvious answer is their time and place settings. They all deal with the USA, all mostly in the 20th century, and they tend to be about action movies dealing with the stuff I read about in non-fiction books: computers, corporations, national defense, spies, and geopolitics. If I were to reach back all the way to when I was a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons, and when cartoons were played in large blocks on Saturday mornings, I had more or less the same interests. Guns, robots, secret agents, and international intrigue. I like the same stuff as I did decades ago, only with a sophisticated veil.