The Devil’s Chessboard - Softcover

Talbot, David

4.33

5,062 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0008162077 ISBN 13: 9780008162078

Publisher: William Collins, 2015

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Based on explosive new evidence, bestselling author David Talbot tells America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA.

Drawing on revelatory new materials - including exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, newly discovered U.S. government documents, and U.S. and European intelligence sources - Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures.

Dulles’s decades as the director of the CIA - which he used to further his public and private agendas - were dark times in American politics. Calling himself ‘the secretary of state of unfriendly countries’, Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients - colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, culminating in the assassination of his political enemy, John F. Kennedy.

Indeed, The Devil’s Chessboard offers shocking new evidence in the killings of both President Kennedy and his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy. This is an expose of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state - and the battle for America’s soul.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

“A Cold War villain of realpolitik whose successes and blunders were unrivaled. As framed by Talbot, Dulles’s extra-legal interventions, coups, slush funds, and ex-Nazi collaborations were as much pro-corporate as anti-Communist, more Cheneyish than Nixonian.... He’d fit right into our globalized, subcontracted, and hypersurveilled era.” (New York Magazine)

“Dulles is unmasked as the backstage manipulator of US policy (foreign and domestic) from the Cold War up to his skillful defense of the highly suspect Warren Commission report. Those who scoff at conspiracy theories might have a change of mind after reading this book.” (Boston Globe, Pick of the Week)

“A frightening biography of power, manipulation, and outright treason...The story of Allen Dulles and the power elite that ran Washington, D.C., following World War II is the stuff of spy fiction...All engaged American citizens should read this book and have their eyes opened.” (Kirkus, starred review)

“A damning biography―of the CIA’s longest standing director―and an expos� of American politics.... One would be hard pressed to find a book that is better at evoking the strange and apocalyptic atmospherics of the early Cold War years in America.... Neither le Carr� nor Graham Greene could do any better.” (Daily Beast)

“Offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship.” (Mother Jones)

“This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction ― it’s history.... By the time ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’ eventually climaxes with the events that unfolded in Dallas in 1963, Talbot’s argument that Dulles had both the power and temperament to execute such a plot is more than believable.” (Salon)

From the Back Cover:

America's greatest untold story: the United States' rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials, David Talbot exposes the underside of one of America's most influential figures. The Devil's Chessboard tells the timely, provocative, and gripping story of the rise of the national security state--and the battle for America's soul.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.