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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees SO4-O months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hitler is a guy we're gonna be talking about a lot today because we're talking about the Dulles Brothers Part 2, and we'll be covering their time in the war, which involves a lot of Nazis. I'm Robert Evans. This is, you know, behind the ********. You should know that this is the second episode we're doing on this series, and my guest is, again, Jason Pargin. Jason, how are you doing? Do some people start with Part 2 of a series like this? Do we have to catch them, catch them up with? If they are Jason, they're maniacs, and I feel no need to pander to them. There's a question I did want to ask, though, because when you left off the two Dulles brothers, and again, just because it's been a week or whatever, you've got the elder brother, Foster Dulles, who is not yet going. He's going to be Secretary of State later. You've got the younger Allen. Who was later going to take over the CIA right now? They're not doing that right now. They are helping to basically negotiate the post war, post World War One peace with Germany, correct? Yes. And the terms of that that will wind up the terms of the piece of World War One, set the stage for everything that comes after. Right up until today. Yes. So how old are these brothers when that is occurring? Because they're not. They're not very old. Well, I mean like 20. OK. Like like Alan. Well, yeah, in their, in their they're so Foster's older Foster starts. College? Well, no. He starts high school in 1904, so he's graduated by 1908. World War One starts when he's in his early 20s. He's in his late 20s and Alan is in his early 20s, I think. OK. So when you think about your early 20s. Would you have felt confident in your ability to redraw the map of post war? Europe, after all, done a pretty good job. I think I could have you know, because the the only people who have their **** together in in all of Europe in my opinion. My opinion, Jason. Is probably going to be, I don't know, uh, ******* Bosnia. Nothing's ever gone wrong there. Let's give it all to Bosnia. Let them figure it out. I think that's how I do it. You got greater Bosnia and then you got Russia. There could be an entire there have been entire, unsure, horrifying books written about. The way that. The map, and after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and everything else, like everything that's happening all the way through Al Qaeda and ISIS. And everything comes down to, in many ways, how those borders were drawn by people who in many cases had never even visited the places they were. No. And it one of the most telling things in the world, if you want to know. Understand a lot of white people in a lot of parts of the Middle East feel the way they do and why things have gone the way they do is the vast majority of people in the United States and England and France have never heard of the Sykes Picot Treaty. Every ******* kid in Iraq and Syria knows what Sykes Picot was because it created their ******* world. And it was a treaty that, you know, Sykes and Picot, I think were a British and French guys. But. It's some. Yeah, this is, this is the period that. While that's happening. And I will say, you know, in fairness, redrawing the boundaries of Europe as a result of this conflict, what they're doing is not the same as what's being done to the Ottoman Empire because that's much more violent and horrible. Like, they understand Europe a lot better. They're often negotiating with the people who are running these countries because, like they, you know, they for one thing think that Europeans get to have more input into what happens with their nations. Than the people of the Ottoman, former Ottoman territories. Yeah. It's just it's a very consequential period of world history, quite as the same after World War One the whole world order kind of gets reshuffled and yeah, I think one of which of the Dulles brothers was dealing with Germany's repayment of their that is foster, foster like how that comes down, that's going to sow the seeds of. Everything. Everything that happens up until today like it's it's hard to overstate how. The mistakes are made at the time, and maybe things couldn't have been anticipated. I don't know. That's a whole separate deal. It's hard to overstate how important. What their work was here up through until the time both of these men die. Because it is a personal beef of mine that when we talk about politics in America today, when we look for a historical example, we have like two, yeah, everyone is either Hitler. Or. Mao, I don't know. Yeah. It's everything is either 1984 or Hitler. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wish. I wish you could insult the President by saying he's like Woodrow Wilson. And I wish you could insult a A an administration's foreign policy by saying it's like, it's like the dose is the rent charge. Yeah. The to the average person today, like arguing on the Internet, those names, I guarantee you don't mean anything. They don't. And it's. One of the things that's fascinating about this, that you were kind of touching on is that when the most consequential decisions in modern history are being made, a number of people at the table are just some dudes grandkids. You know, like, the Dulles brothers are not the only people who get in this position, including, like, the crowned heads of Europe, you could argue, but, like, how much a factor this is that the people making these calls are? All buddies and relatives of each other. In a lot of ways it's different because in America we're not supposed to have royalty. We're not, but we do and and so, but when you but when you look and he said, well, gosh, how were these two guys fresh out of college or fresh out of their first jobs, like sitting at the table, help redraw what the future looks like? And it's like, Oh well, they were having dinner with foreign leaders when they were in kindergarten. It's there are classes of people. Do when you're growing up, you have the option of saying, well, do you want to go into your father's business and be a minister or do you want to be Secretary of State like your grandfather? And that's one of the options. And you're just traveling in a circle of people and you have, as you mentioned the previous episode, like their jobs they were getting at the time didn't pay much at all. Yeah, totally irrelevant to this class of people. That's not what it's about. Like, they are destined to be names in the history books. And so they have the money. If they want to spend a year in India or do whatever they did to see these parts of the world and all these things would influence how they see the world. They have the ability to do that. You, you didn't you you could not have to have taken off and and just, you know, traveled around and and all of this and failed your way upward the way Allen did. Yeah. Now, Jason, as we get into this because we ended the last episode noting that this is the period, the world, the end of World War One, in which communism really gets fixed. On the dullest boys radar, right? And of course it would like it wasn't really a massive topic of discussion until the Russian Revolution. That really made it something that a lot of American conservatives were obsessed about because they see, you know, you see like the business leaders and the crowned heads of Russia get murdered and have their stuff taken and it scares a lot of people. But it is worth noting as we start this episode that the hardline anti Communist attitudes that were adopted by Foster and Allen Dulles immediately. After the Russian Revolution were not necessarily the default, even among conservatives. Herbert ******* Hoover is one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history, and during this period of time he urged Woodrow Wilson to reevaluate the Bolshevik movement and acknowledge that it had quote true social ends and roots in quote grievous injustices to the lowest classes in all the countries that have been affected. Hoover warned that in the United States the advancement of communist causes. Is directly the fault of American reactionaries who had stimulated Bolshevism by viciously attacking social welfare programs. Now, if you know anything about Hoover, it's wild that he's the one saying this, but he is. History has gotten rewritten. Yeah, in terms of looking backward about and then in the same way where it's like, well, we always hated the Nazis. So, like, well, yeah, yeah. We're about to talk about that a lot, Jason. No, no. Yeah. So the idea that the communism was. Always antithetical to everything. America is godless, and it's there's no freedom. And it's like, well, like Herbert Hoover was saying, yeah, these guys have a point. And because what it replaced was not American style, yes, of course we have this thing where it's like the whole world is either America or its communist. It's like, well, no. But I mean, to his credit, he is very astutely noting that one of the reasons these causes are being advanced in the United States is because reactionaries are refusing any kind of meaningful. Social welfare, so he's not entirely like that, is a. That is a pretty astute observation, I would say. Yeah, it is a level of nuance on the subject that America would have, would be in no mood for a few decades later. And a kid from one of one of the worst presidents in American history, the guy who who just kind of steers us right into the Great Depression, is staying this amazing Herbert. So Woodrow Wilson and the Dulles brothers did not listen to Herbert Hoover. Between 1919 and 1920, President Wilson deployed the US Army to suppress labor or racial unrest 25 times. That's the army, not the National Guard. We don't talk about that a lot either. The Dulles Brothers enthusiastically supported this after the war. Allen continued his diplomatic career for a while, but eventually left to join his brother at Sullivan and Cromwell now. By that point, Foster Dulles had been made a full partner in the firm, which was more powerful than ever as the United States grew through the 1920s. Become the Wests preeminent power. Sullivan and Cromwell continued to do the work of weaving their corporate clients into the very fabric of American governance. In the US, foster Dulles presided over the merger of a group of oil drillers and refiners into Amoco. He worked with mining corporations in Chile and Peru's sugar plantations in Cuba, banks in France. He specialized in helping US utility companies take control of utilities and foreign nations, generally by bribing their governments. Alan's first post? World War One. Posting was to the US embassy in Turkey. Now, again, he is technically a diplomat at this point, but his real job in all these postings is to gather intelligence. He's a spy. But at this point, again, not a very good one, because as soon as Alan sets up shop in Turkey, he falls for the most obvious forgery of all time, the protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yeah, baby, yeah, scratch that one off your bingo card and then really reevaluate your life if you have a bingo. Start with the protocols of the Elders of Zion on it. That's maybe think about if you're a podcast listener. I'm sorry, you can't go very many podcast episodes without running into it, either in a good way or a very bad way. So I'm going to quote from the Devil's Chess Board by David Talbot here. One day, the young American diplomat was given a copy of the protocols of the Elders of Zion by a British reporter who had fished the scurrilous document out of a second hand bookstore in Istanbul's old European Quarter. The protocols purported to offer a secret plan for Jewish world domination and included tales about Christian children being sacrificed for Passover, feast rituals and other lurid fantasies. By the time Dulles got his hands on the book, which was the creation of the Russian Czars, anti-Semitic secret police, the document had been widely denounced and discredited. But Dulles took it seriously. Enough to send a coded report about the secret Jewish plot back to his superiors in Washington. So he he sends this back to the State Department. Like, you guys gotta hear about this. Uh, incredible spy. The authors who named it that? How upset were they when they later heard the much more ****** title, The Devil's Chess Board? Ohh, so much better of a time thought. Incredibly, we should have called our thing the Devil's Chess Board. The Devil's chess board. Ah, it is a pretty good book. It's actually by the guy who founded Salon, which is not a website I like a lot, but yeah, Allen Dulles got married in 1920 to a woman named Clover who he almost immediately. Seated on it was a miserable relationship, but they would stay together the rest of their lives. Clover was prone to depression, while Alan barely paid attention to her and slept around constantly. His sister Eleanor estimated that he had more than 100 mistresses. To the extent that Ellen Dulles was capable of feeling bad about anything, he seems to have felt kind of bad about this. At one point he wrote to his wife and advised her to ask her friends for advice on how to, quote, live with a queer duck like me, he later confessed in a letter. I don't feel I deserve as good a wife as I have, as I am rather too fond of the company of other ladies. So there's there's a degree of self-awareness that he has because he's he's she is miserable, like on the verge sometimes of suicide because he's he's just constantly sleeping with her and like he'll tell her about it, like he's not even trying to hide it. Like he'll like brag about his new mistresses to like their kids. Like it's. He's a weird dude. A weird dude who, like most narcissists I assume, could turn on the charm when he wanted to and probably worked like a magic spell like that is the worst type of person to be in a relationship with when they can turn that on and then just turn it off instantly. Now, one of the chief problems in their union, as you were kind of getting at Jason, was Allen's temper. He was prone to angry rants that would provoke his wife to curl up into a fetal position. When he finally stopped, she'd leave the house and wander for hours. They were miserable together. So perhaps it's for the best that Alan spent most of his time traveling around the world ignoring her. Clover tried to make the best of a bad situation by focusing on her son and two daughters. While her husband was an arch conservative, she became obsessed with Penal Reform. And spent a great deal of time visiting prisoners. She was known to regularly stop for long conversations with homeless people and impoverished men and women. In bread lines and letters to her family, she wrote that she felt guilty for her wealth. Alan felt no such guilt. He was known to not even pick up napkins. He dropped at dinner, leaving that for his servants. So they're very different people. In 1931, Allen started an affair with a blonde Russian immigrant whose husband was chronically ill. He did not try to hide his relationship from his wife, and in fact bragged to her and to his children about the relationship. One of his biographers later wrote. Sex, it appears, was to Allen Dulles, a form of physical therapy, something one did to keep himself fit for more important things. Clovers, insistence on staying home with the children, and her increasing preoccupation with prisoners rights were treated by him as a betrayal of her obligation. Be as good and faithful companion. If Clover would not travel when Alan asked, then he could not really be blamed if he diverted himself with other women, always of his own class in station. So pretty cool dude, I guess is what I'm getting at. Jason, yeah, and if he was a narcissist as I threw out a wild guess in the previous episode, if you disagree, that is fine. If he was, literally, everything that happens here is totally unsurprising to you, right? He does not conceive of anyone else. He is the main character in the story. That is his life. Everyone else are extras. And he it's not that he can't have feelings or emotions. But the fits of rage, the fact that when you make a narcissist angry, your humanity disappears. You are just an object. You're a receptacle for their rage. And so whatever love he felt for someone like that, it is different because he said, like, you know, I don't, you know, I don't deserve a wife as as good as her or or whatever. Again, he's still not thinking of her as an. You know, like a separate person with agency and the same thing with the servants and everyone else. I personally believe this is just my opinion, that his whole worldview is kind of shaped by that. And the fact that we have a system where narcissists consistently bubble to the top explains a lot about the way. Name, name or popular figure. I'm not saying that Donald Trump was a narcissist. I again, I've not spoke to the man. I I certainly could not make that determination. He kind of has some elements of 1 in my opinion. Again if you disagree, yeah. Those of you who know what Donald Trump personally. I know some of you are friends. You know, this has a this are our number one hotspot for listeners is Mar-a-lago, actually. So, but I think guys like this, they can't fully conceive of consequences to themselves or to other people like they just. Everything about the way and and like the idea that the citizens of these other countries where they're going to do the things, spoiler alert that they're going to be doing over the next few decades. The idea that the people suffering because of that, that those are actual human beings, I don't think would enter the mind of someone like AL adult. I don't think he can really conceptualize that. No, I don't. And that's what I was saying earlier, I think makes him different from his brother because Foster is not the same. I think Foster has and it evolves. Through time, an ideology, well, he goes through a couple of different ones, but he acts based on things that he believes about the world. And I think with Alan, it's more he acts based on things he believes about himself or wants to have for himself. It's almost like you have the representation of what we now think of as, like the modern conservative movement where you have the Bible true believers. Yeah. And then like the Donald Trump wing. Yeah. Who's just in it for lower is really interesting. Gonna look at this? Yeah. And so that's how you can wind up with, like, a womanizer, a crazy party boy. Who has the loyal devotion of these studious Bible thumpers in the South? And it's like, how do they have anything in common? Well, look at the Dulles brothers, raised by the same family at the same time, in the same era. Two very different people that would wind up on the same mission for, in my view, totally different reasons. Yeah, yeah, I think, I think you're right on the money with that. That is not a I think a way I would have. Thought to bring it up, but. Let's get moving. OK, so foster, by comparison to his brother, was utterly devoted and as far as we know, loyal to his wife Janet. But the brothers were similar in the fact that neither of them did seem to give a good *** **** about their children. David Talbot writes that Alan treated his kids as if they were quote visitors in his house and they were both just, they were both like complete workaholics. You know, I I think with Allen it was more he really didn't care all that much. Foster is just working all the time. They're both people. Who their children are #1, then this is them being a product of their time, right? That's the wife's job, right? When they're older, I'll help them start their careers off and stuff and like they're but like, it's her job to raise them. I have to go change the world. But neither of them are very warm fathers, you would say? Now, as the roaring 20s gave way to the Great Depression of the early 1930s, the Dulles brothers grew increasingly concerned about the spread of communist sympathy at home and abroad in Foster. This ignited a deep and enthusiastic sympathy for the Nazis, who he regarded as the best bet for stopping Communism's westward advance in Europe. While he does not seem to have fallen for the protocols of the Elders of Zion like his younger brother fosters, Nazi sympathies led him to some pretty vile behavior from the Devil's Chess Board. Quote in 1932, as Hitler began his takeover of the German government, Foster visited 3 Jewish friends, all prominent bankers, in their Berlin office. The men were in a state of extreme anxiety during the meeting. At one point, the bankers, too afraid to speak, made motions to indicate a truck parked outside and suggested that it was monitoring their conversation. They indicated to him that they felt absolutely no freedom, Eleanor recalled. Foster's reaction to his friend's terrible dilemma unnerved his sister. There's nothing that a person like me can do in dealing with these men. Except to probably keep away from them, he later told Eleanor. They're safer if I keep away from them. Actually, there was much that a Wall Street power broker like John Foster Dulles could have done for his endangered friends, starting with Pulitzer, pulling strings to get their families and at least some of their assets out of Germany before it was too late. And I think David Talbot is right on the money here. This is not a situation where he could have done nothing. The Nazis were extremely happy to let very wealthy Jewish people leave Europe, often with some of their assets. In order to please foreign dignitaries, stuff like that happened. A man with fosters pole would have had no trouble getting his friends out of Nazi Germany. Many other influential foreigners did the same. And in fact, Hitler himself intervened to allow a Jewish Doctor Who had treated his mother's cancer to immigrate from Germany with his assets. This was not an impossible thing, he just didn't do it. It was, I think he just got spooked or he didn't really care all that much one way or the other. Now the fact that foster. Told us absolutely could have saved his friends is underscored by the fact that he was seen by the Nazis as one of their most valuable American friends. In fact, without Foster Dulles, it is possible that the Nazi military buildup and the Blitzkrieg would not have happened, or certainly wouldn't have happened in the form that it did. See, and this is interesting, Foster Dulles made his fortune building and advising cartels. This is what he specialized in for that big law firm. Cartels are groups of competing businesses who agree to fix prices and close their supply and distribution networks. Outsiders in order to maximize profits. Now, this was not then or now a popular idea to anyone but people who invest in cartels because it increases prices and generally reduces the quality of products for everybody else. Foster defended cartels as forces for stability, and he made it like his argument was that it's it protects economies from wild swings. Now, one of Foster's big clients was the International Nickel Company, which was based in the United States. Foster was both. The legal counsel and a director and member of the Executive Board. In the early 1930s, as the Nazis solidified their hold on power, fostered dollars helped merge the International Nickel Company and a Canadian affiliate into a cartel with France's two major nickel producers. In 1934, he brought a German company in IG Farben, the largest German nickel producer, into the cartel, Stephen Kinzer writes. Quote This gave Nazi Germany. Access to the cartels resources without dolus. According to a study of Sullivan and Cromwell, Germany would have lacked any negotiating strength with international nickel, which controlled the world's supply of nickel, of crucial ingredient in stainless steel and armor plate. So. Without this cartel, and without Foster's role in it, it's possible the Nazis don't have access to the metal they need to make the armor for their tanks, which is cool. And he was not unique. No, no, no, no, no. In the American business world, again, it's hard to. He's not unique at this stage. Certainly in 19, this is 1932 was the last 35 years, 34 is when he brings in IG Farben and a lot of Americans are working with the Nazis. Absolutely, yeah. This is a stage where in the American business, especially if you. Think that you're picking between the Nazis and the communists. There's a lot that kind of came down on the side of. There's a lot to be discussed there about what they knew or should have known at the time. Because again, the issues that the Jews were having in Germany, like you talked to any of them, you could have found out what was coming and and Foster had, you know, and Foster had. And so the argument that they should have known that, like, I get that we're looking back at this, knowing how things turned out and that that is not. Completely fair. Like there may. We may be getting judged just as harshly 100 years from now from things that we expressed support for or whatever. But yeah, for Will Wheaton mainly. But yes, but of all the people on Earth who probably could have, should have known better. I think it's fair to say that Foster Dulles was one of those. Yeah. And his his complicity will get deeper at this stage 34. I mean, he didn't necessarily know the Germans. He couldn't have known they're going to use all of this nickel to make tanks and take over a large chunk of the planet. Although I guess you could safely argue wasn't a huge guess if you were reading the things that Hitler was putting out, right? Because, like, what year did mine? Come out. Uh, jeez, 24 I think is when it was written, at least. Yeah, this is complicated territory that the exact year you're talking about matters a lot. Yes, because a lot of people don't immediately know, like, well, when was Poland invaded or when did it? When did they find out about the Holocaust? There is plenty of support in the 30s for Hitler in the United States at the stage we're talking about. But again I it mine comp was not dug up and discovered later Hitler's feelings about the Jews was not something that came out later and and where he had to be cancelled later on if it was known it was never OK. It's just you have to Orient yourself in time to understand what's like, how he could be so callous or how he could you know like. Leave those friends, because did he know the degree of danger that those friends were in? Probably not, but. I don't know. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And well, yeah, I'm gonna continue actually with a quote from the brothers that talks about. So he one of the guys he works with is this this guy shocked, who is like kind of running the economy for the Nazis in this. Quote, working with shocked Foster helped the National Socialist state find rich sources of financing in the United States for its public agencies, banks and industries. The two men shaped complex restructuring of German loan obligations at several debt conferences. Berlin conferences that were officially among bankers but were in fact closely guided by the American and German governments and came up with new formulas that made it easier for the Germans to borrow money from American banks. Sullivan and Cromwell floated the first American bonds issued by the giant German steelmaker and arms manufacturer Krupp AG extended IG Farben's global reach and fought successfully to block Canada's effort to restrict the the export of steel to German arms makers. According to one history, the firm quote represented several provincial governments, some large. Industrial combines a number of big American companies with interest in the Reich and some rich individuals. By another account, it quote thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime. So the longer he does this, the more the deeper he gets into specifically helping the German state arm itself. Right. Canada is trying to stop her export of steel because they see Germany arming Sullivan and Cromwell under Foster says we gotta get around that. We got to make sure these Nazis have enough steel so his complicity deepens over time. Now, Alan actually spent a decent amount of time with like real *** knots, azis, including the Nazis, Nazi of them all. Oh, sorry, they're talking about Alan now. Not foster. And the difference between them? And this is interesting because Alan actually meets Hitler and I don't think Foster does. Alan sits down with the fear in 1933. That said, he was not like his brother in this. Alan actually met with Hitler in his role as a diplomat and a spy. He was asked to do this by FDR. And a number like he was like, FDR sends Allen Dulles to Europe to meet with Hitler and a couple of other European leaders, and Allen and his partner in this project, they're going on, a diplomat named Davis, ask Hitler about reports of violence against political dissidents and Jews. Hitler claims that he was just taking action to, quote, protect the millions in foreign capital that are invested in Germany. So that is interesting to me, that, like FDR, while Foster is actively working with the Nazis to help their economy and to help their rearming, Alan gets sent over to spy on them with FDR, and Alan asks them directly about all of the horrible Nazi **** they're doing. And Hitler says all we're arresting these people, we're putting them in camps to protect foreign capital that's invested in Germany. And it's obviously that's not entirely why he was doing it. But I think it's interesting that that's the line of argument he picks with the Americans. And you could see why he think it would work because there's guys like. Foster. Now, Alan Dulles at this stage didn't see anything unsettling about the Nazis. However, he returned to Berlin two years later in 1935 and could not ignore the brutality of the regime. He reported back that Nazi Germany had left him with a quote sinister impression. Stephen Kinzer calls Nazi ISM quote the first and only important subject on which the Dulles Brothers seriously disagreed. That said, Allen's main issue with the Nazis was not their oppression of minorities or their murder of political rivals. It was that he was smart enough to guess where the whole fascism thing was heading, and he knew that he was pretty sure that the US is going to wind up at war with Nazi Germany. He wanted to spare Sullivan and Cromwell the shame of being associated with the regime once war broke out. That's really interesting to me, that, like, of the two guys, Foster, who is driven by a moral code, gets really deep in with the Nazis. And Alan pretty quickly is like, oh, these ******* are bad news. And it may just be self preservation, you know? And Allen helped some German Jews out of. Nazi Germany, did he not? There's a yeah, I think there's. We'll talk about what he did. OK. Cause it's complicated Jason. This is all complicated at this stage because obviously neither one of the brothers were like ohh yeah we'd be fine with if several years from now Hitler is trying to you know, bomb the, you know England off the map like no one wants a World War in Europe. It's just that if it sounds like I'm not going far enough in criticizing the people friendly. Nazis. It's because I feel like it would be very easy decades from now to look back and say, well, why was the United States so. Buddy, buddy with China. Yeah. And you can see that with every modern genocide and there's always financial interests who often are willing to keep profiting from the regime that's doing the genocide. You know, it's not. It's more normal than not for people to go along with terrible. Things if they're not that closely tied to them because the alternative is rocking the boat. But I think what we're talking about Foster here is very different because he really like his brother Alan after 35 is like, these guys are bad news. You know, you can argue Alan actually did have some sort of a moral compass and he was just like, this is a step too far. Or you can say it was just self preservation, but he's pretty consistent after 35. These guys are a problem and we need to be cut ties with them. We need to not be in business with them. What is Foster's position then? Is he's just so scared of the communists or is he? Stated by something else, I think he likes them to some extent. I don't think he's a Nazi because I don't get any hint that he's like super in anti-Semitism where or whatever. I don't think that he wants the United States, but he's he refuses to turn his back on them, and in fact he became their most enthusiastic cheerleader in the halls of American power. He repeatedly pushed back against arguments by other members of his law firm, some of whom were Jewish, that they should reduce or end their dealings with the Third Reich. From 1933 on, all letters written from the German offices of Sullivan and Cromwell ended with **** ******. Now this was required by law, but it was not something Foster had any problem with. While Allen politely disagreed with his brother, their sister Eleanor was much more outspoken on the matter. She too traveled to Nazi Germany and the horrors of the regime were not lost on her. She repeatedly begged Foster to stop doing business with Hitler. He ignored her, complaining that she was working herself up. Over nothing. When FDR denounced the repressive measures of the Nazi government, foster Dulles denounced FDR as a demagogue trying to drum up mass emotionalism. 1 Contemporary claimed that most of Foster's political energy in the 1930s went towards, quote, rationalizing this Hitler movement. So he is not just kind of not wanting to rock the boat at a time in which it starts to be politically acceptable and common to to to go against the Nazis. He's really still on their side and even his brother. Is like, dude, this ain't it, you know? In the summer of 1935, partners of Sullivan and Cromwell held a vote to determine whether or not they should cease representing German clients. The crimes of the Nazi regime had become too blatant and numerous for Foster's colleagues, at least one of whom was Jewish, to ignore. Foster complained that pulling out would harm the firm's prestige. His brother Alan argued that staying was unconscionable. In the end, everyone but Foster voted to suspend the firm's operations in Nazi Germany. There are some accounts that. Foster wept after the vote. Like as soon as his partners like, say, we're pulling out, he just, like breaks down. You know who won't? Partner with the Nazi regime. The products and services that support this podcast. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or four. Family and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twist at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet. Very happy at Mint Mobilcom behind. Now a word from our sponsor that our help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just, you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy. And better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy. Try better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind. Betterhelp com behind hey Robert Evans here. It's been like two months since I got LASIK laser eye surgery and my vision is still 2020. So many things about my daily life has changed. I don't have to worry about putting on a mask and my glasses fogging up and have to take out contacts at night or put them in the day. I don't have to like, worry all the time when I'm traveling. Like, how many contacts do I have by go swimming at the lake during the summer? Something I like to do, go to the beach or whatever. I don't have to worry about losing a contact or, you know, bringing swimming glasses or something with me. Everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know. I went in, I had my consultation. They told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in a couple of days later. But a Bing bada boom, you know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visit my LASIK offer. Dot com to schedule your free consultation now. Ohh, we're back. We're back. And we're still talking about Nazis and namely how Foster Dulles deals with them. So in kind of late Ish 1935, his firm votes to stop doing business with the Nazis. He cries, and I'm going to quote from the brothers about what happens next. Later, he backdated the announcement, the announcement that they cut their ties with the Nazis by a year to make it appear that the firm had closed its German offices in 1934 rather than 35. He and Janet, however, continued to visit Germany as the Nazi regime tightened its grip on power, making trips in 1936, nineteen 37 and 1939. Apparently nothing he saw disturbed him. He supported the Neutralist America first committee. Sullivan and Cromwell drew up its articles of incorporation without charge and roused its members with speeches denouncing Churchill, Roosevelt, and other war mongers. Hitler impressed him as quote one who from humble beginnings and despite the Handcap handicap. An alien nationality had attained the unquestioned leadership of a great nation. Only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy or Japan contemplates war among upon us, he assured businessmen at the Economic Club of New York on March 22nd, 1939. So he's pretty pretty pot committed, Jason. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the point where, yeah, there was plenty of evidence there. We were on the line. You if you have lived in America. For five minutes. People have a way of getting dug into their positions and to how you can go from, well, I don't support war all the way to, well, you know, Hitler is actually a great leader. It's the way we are. It's. You know, I don't know. I feel like you can get dragged down a path of someone who thinks that, like they're standing up for righteousness or they just don't want war. But there's a difference between. Look, you know someone like Hitler needs to be contained but but a World War will kill 10s of 1,000,000 versus. You know, Hitler's actually the hero in all this, which is where it felt like he landed somehow. Yeah, yeah, that's that's definitely kind of the sight of this that he's on. When the Nazis invaded Poland a few months later, Foster remained committed to the defending the regime. He gave a public speech where he attacked Britain for declaring war against Germany and reiterated his belief that there was no reason for the United States to get involved. Foster published an open letter where he begged for a change in the quote. International status quo to prevent powerful forces emotionally committed to exaggerated and drastic change. This was interpreted by his brother Alan to be a plea for the West to embrace Nazism in order to fight communism. We've already established that Alan was something very close to it. You know, a narcissist sociopath. There's some stuff going on there you could argue if you were as irresponsible as Jason and I am, and we are, and this is our podcast, what are you gonna do about it? You're going to come in here and tell us we're wrong? No, you're not. But Alan was actually, despite whatever moral failings he has, Alan was outraged with his brother's behavior at this point. And he tried to appeal to his brother's religion, asking, how can you call yourself a Christian? And ignore what is happening in Germany. It is terrible. So this is, and this is really interesting to me because Foster is, up to this point, much more sympathetic than Allen. But Allen Dulles, a monster, is being like, what is wrong with you? Like, why are you still defending the Nazis so much? It's a very strange thing. It doesn't go the way you would expect it to go. Yeah, but and also there is some kind of a happy end of this because again, John Foster Dulles standing up for the Nazis even after they invaded Poland. He was not cancelled too hard for his pro Hitler. So he he was able to come back from that, that embarrassing period of his life, that gaffe now, if Twitter had existed, he would have gotten cancelled. Jason. That's that's what protects us now from similar disasters. So Foster Dulles visited Nazi Germany for the last time, and I think 1938. He seems to have grudgingly accepted by this point that the Nazis were not a group he wanted to be super publicly associated with, although again, he would continue to defend them for a couple of years. Later in the year he decided to run for Congress, his main platform was attacking the New Deal, complaining that instead of launching new social programs, Roosevelt should fight the depression by cutting government spending. He accused. FDR quote attempting to stir up class feeling by trying to regulate the securities market, Foster's campaign went nowhere. He was a terrible, terrible political well, terrible at getting elected, but it helped establish him as a political voice within the Republican Party. But in the late 1930s both Dulles Brothers were working for Sullivan and Cromwell, which despite dropping Germany had you know, continued to be the largest law firm in the United States. Historian Peter Gross argues that even calling it a law firm is reductive to the point of. Accuracy. He saw it as, quote, a strategic Nexus of international finance, the operating core of a web of relationships that constituted power. The firm did offer legal associates to draft contracts, preserve estates, and argue in courtrooms. But this was not the profession of law as practiced by Foster and Allen Dulles. Their Sullivan and Cromwell sought nothing less than to shape the affairs of all the world for the benefit and well-being of the select their clients. It's a fascinating organization, Sullivan and Cromwell, and I wonder what how many listeners of yours have ever heard the name of that firm before? Today I had only heard them mentioned in mentioned them in this show during like the Panama episodes. But even then I didn't know this. I just knew that that was like the lawyer who kinda, I just had an angle in Panama. Yeah, it's. Again, maybe something that ought to be in a textbook somewhere for kids, maybe. But I think even now we still think of the world as a series of competing countries, and that's so reductive, like that hasn't been true in a long time. It corporations span borders and their interest span borders, and it's it's hard to understand that you can have. Two countries that were with each other but the same corporation doing business, and both in trying to arrange for things to follow a certain way, you don't fully understand history. Until you understand. That element of it and this stuff we're going to get into about going to war on behalf of fruit companies again, that it's, you talk about like the phrase Banana Republic, and that's where that comes from, right? Even now, I think the average person has a completely incorrect mental picture because how a law firm could have that big of a role in shaping the world. Seems again like the stuff of conspiracy theories. Yep. But it's really understanding that the movement of capital and what why that matters and that how that influences the decisions that politicians make, that's not conspiracy stuff. That's the way the world functions now in a global economy. And you have to almost think of it in terms of like, these these alliances are less important in many cases than the corporations that span the borders and what they're. What they're trying to accomplish, and especially you, comes down to things like workers advocating for certain rights and certain countries and things like that. That's going to play into everything that's about to happen. Yep. Yeah, it sure is. It sure is, Jason. Not in a good way, no, not nothing that happens on this show is in a good way. As a general rule, that's that's a behind the ******** guarantee. When one of your main sources is called the Devil's Chess Board, you're. You're in for an upbeat episode. Good times for everybody. Oh Lord. Ohh Jason, so. Yeah, and in this idea, the fact that Sullivan and Cromwell should shape the affairs of the world for the benefit of their clients, this was something the Dulles brothers agreed with, right? They may have had a little bit of a debate over whether or not Nazism was OK, but they were on board for this now, during World War One. Both brothers had kind of fully fallen under the sway of the Wilsonian concept that's known as liberal internationalism. And the basic idea behind liberal internationalism is that international conflict. Arises only from misunderstandings between ruling elites, social injustices, political oppression, religious and ethnic strife. This all is a distraction from the real issue, which is people in charge of different countries not getting along. Since international conflict is just conflict between elites, then commerce is the ultimate way to guarantee peace, right? That's how it feeds back into their ideas of capitalism, because you guarantee peace by ensuring the international movement of corporations like basically and and. Financial interests, it's, and this is a pretty common idea, right, that if you have a two nations with McDonald's and them have never gone to war, you know, stuff like that. I think we we've all heard like versions of this idea. Now, internationalists like the Dulles brothers felt that the United States had a duty to embrace its destiny as the world's great power. American values should be spread through the world or across the world through the engine of American business. The state's main role, then, is to use its power, and particularly its armed might, in order to promote and defend American business interests abroad. Foster Dulles had spent most of his life, even prior to World War One, doing this job Allen Dulles came to embrace. His role as defender of the wealthy and powerful in the post war years, one historian wrote that he quote never bothered to understand the technical aspects of financial maneuverings. But under the influence of Foster and the firm, he grew sensitive to the elites goal of transnational power to generate prosperity for the world and of course, themselves. Now, Foster and Allen were some of the founding members of the Council on Foreign Relations. This is something they helped to create. The CFR was established in the early 1920s and this is something you see in conspiracy theories all the time. The CFR is in a billion different conspiracy theories for good reason. I mean sometimes for good reason, often for nonsense reasons. Now, the CFR was established in the early 20s with the goal of bringing powerful people together to further the ends of American corporate and political power. The club was invitation only and membership became highly desired both for prestige and because it de facto put you in a room with the wealthiest and most influential people on Earth. The club's motto was a single Latin word, ubique, which means everywhere. So again, not hard to see why there's so many conspiracies about this group. I think their logo was like an octopus strangling the globe. Possibly, yes, it is an octopus murdering children is the logo and drinking their blood which is rich in adrenochrome. Of Jesus like. These people don't even do do you not listen to yourselves? Is the question I would like to ask them like look at what you how? How could how would you expect people not to start turning out conspiracy theories about this **** when you you say **** like that anyway? As World War 2 drew nearer, Foster devoted himself increasingly to writing articles for foreign affairs, the New Republic, and the Atlantic, establishing a reputation as a sagacious foreign policy expert. Alan, meanwhile, found himself drifting away from legal pursuits towards another special club called the Room. The room was made-up of thirtyish year old bankers or thirtyish bankers, businessmen, and corporate lawyers with deep contacts in foreign capitals. Most of them were like Allen, men with intelligence and. Espionage backgrounds from the last war. Now the head of this little club, the room was a guy named William Donovan. Now Donovan was a war hero corporate lawyer with an interest in the burgeoning field of intelligence. Donovan and Allen Dulles advised FDR on covert operations abroad in the pre World War Two years, and they used their connections to arrange corporate cover for American agents headed into Nazi Europe or the Soviet Union when the war broke out for the United States. The room. Morphed rather naturally into the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. This was the chief US spy agency of World War Two and the direct predecessor of the CIA. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. As the war drew nearer, Bill Donovan and a few other farsighted men saw that the United States was going to need an intelligence agency in 1940. the US had basically no intelligence setup. Would it existed during World War One, had basically been tossed into the trash bin in the intervening years. Different government agencies, including the FCC, gathered foreign Intel in one form or another, but none of them had any idea what the others were doing. There was no interagency communication. Most of what the White House knew about the foreign, about foreign countries. Internal affairs came from guys like Donovan, who knew the president personally and traveled around doing his, you know, spy work on their own. So in the US entered the war in 1941, the OSS was established to formalize these very ad hoc intelligence networks. Allen Dulles. Annoying the OS and once again he was sent to burn for the duration of the war to get what Intel he could on Nazi occupied Europe. And again, he wasn't great at his job. Donovan's aides regularly complained about the low quality of the intelligence coming out of burn in 1944, Allen was responsible for two hilariously inaccurate predictions, both based on bad Intel. Prior to the Normandy landings, he told his superiors that the Nazi regime was quote near collapse and that the Allies would just haven't thus have an easy time in France. Of D-Day, which I don't know if you've watched the documentary Saving Private Ryan, but we did not. There were some bad days after the invasion. Now, Allen Dulles was a very prominent figure by the time the OSS sent him to burn, and every German agent in the country knew why he was there. As soon it was like publicize that he'd arrived and that he was a spy. His guise as a spy then did not fool anybody. Nobody got tricked into thinking he was really a diplomat by some accounts, the main reason he was put in that position? And burn it all was because his presence would draw out Nazis. And while Alan was in burn, he didn't just spy on Nazis, he worked alongside them. See, one of Alan's buddies during this. Was a guy named Thomas Mckitrick, president of the Bank of International Settlements Settlements. The BIS was one of the shadiest banks in history. Although nominally Swiss, by 1940 the BIS was controlled by the Nazi regime. Five of its directors would later be charged with war crimes incurred, including Herman. Schmitz, who was also the CEO of IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate that manufactured Zyklon B Schmitz, by the way, was also a client of Sullivan and Cromwell. Now tied together, all this is so. The BIS became a critical partner to the Nazi regime, laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi gold that had been looted from occupied countries. Some of this gold had literally been ripped out of the bodies of concentration camp inmates. When Dulles and Mckittrick started talking, one of Alan's goals was to get information about the Nazi regime from Mckittrick, which is reasonable. But when he and Mckittrick got to talking, they discovered a point of common interest. They both had friends and clients with assets in Nazi Germany, and they wanted to protect those. Assets. Now FDR and his people were aware of what Allen Dulles was getting up to, and they tried to stop Mckittrick's. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau junior hated the man and pushed the administration to block BIS funds from being used in the United States. Mckittrick hired Foster Dulles to be his lawyer, and Foster was able to reverse Morgenthau's order in 1943. Mckittrick even traveled to the United States for a banquet in his honor hosted by executives from General Motors. Standard Oil and other companies that had profited from aiding the Nazi war effort and were grateful that Mckittrick had gotten their money out of the country. Now, as World War 2 drew to a close, Mckittrick and Allen Dulles would collaborate on their shadiest venture yet from the Devil's Chess Board quote. In the final months of the conflict, the men collaborated against a Roosevelt operation called Project Safe Haven that sought to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. Administration officials feared that by hiding their ill gotten wealth, members of the German elite planned to bide their time after the war and would then try to regain power. Morgenthau sit Treasury Department team, which spearheaded project Safe Haven, reached out to the OS and BIOS for assistance, but dollars and Mckittrick were more inclined to protect their clients. Interests. Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of US finance and national security, Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to post war power to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And working with Mckittrick, Allen Dulles was hugely successful at stalling project Safe Haven and ensuring that many surviving Nazi collaborators escaped the war with their fortunes intact. But you know who didn't escape the war? Their fortunes intact. The products and services. Here's some ******* ads. You know what we're doing here? Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant. Families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind now a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great. Option it's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. Hey, Robert Evans here. It's been like two months since I got LASIK laser eye surgery and my vision still 2020. So many things about my daily life has changed. I don't have to worry about putting on a mask and my glasses fogging up and have to take out contacts at night or put them in the day. I don't have to like, worry all the time when I'm traveling. Like, how many contacts do I have by go swimming at the lake during the summer? Something I like to do, go to the beach or whatever. I don't have to worry about losing a contact or, you know, bringing swimming glasses or something. With me, everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know, I went in, I had my consultation, they told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in couple of days later about it being about a boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free. Consultation now. So we're back, and we're talking about how Allen Dulles helped get Nazi money out of Europe and helped Nazi collaborators escape the war with all their money. So Foster was also involved in the protecting Nazi fortunes game. Working from New York, he used the kind of corporate ******** math people like him are great at to hide the US assets of IG Farben, Merck and other German cartels that legally should have been confiscated by the federal government. David Talbot. Writes quote some of Foster's legal origami allowed the Nazi regime to create bottlenecks in the production of essential war materials such as diesel diesel fuel injection motors that the US military needed for trucks, submarines, and airplanes. By the end of the war, many of Foster's clients were under investigation by the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, and Foster himself was under scrutiny for collaboration with the enemy. But Foster's brother was guarding his back from his frontline position in Europe. Allen was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations. That threaten the two brothers and their law firm shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his associates who stayed behind to help run the occupation of post War Germany, observed Nazi hunter John Loftus, who poured through numerous war documents related to the Dulles Brothers when he served as a US prosecutor and the Justice Department under President Jimmy Carter. So pretty cool brothers all altogether, it's hard to overstate. That the fact that even before, for people that are not World War Two history buffs, the fear of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Cold War started before World War Two was over. We're not going to get off into the use of the atomic bomb and how part of that had to do with. Jockeying for position with the Soviets. And everyone knew what was coming next. Or at least the people who pulled the strings of power knew what was coming next, that you were going to transition neatly from this war right into possibly OK. When we set up the Manhattan Project, we didn't set up a project to build 2 bombs, we set it up to build a whole bunch of them. Even though we knew it wasn't gonna take a whole bunch to defeat Nazi Germany, those were being built for whatever was coming with the Soviets. So the fact that they so quickly pivoted from, OK, we've beaten the Nazis, now we need to protect whatever business interests against the whatever's coming from the threat of communism, which is going to inform these guys entire worldview right over the next couple decades that there are alive that. Happened immediately. Like as the World War Two was winding down, the people who would be the cold warriors were already kind of getting into position. Yeah, and that's a big part of what's happening here now. The death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt immediately prior to the end of World War Two was hugely fortunate for the Dulles brothers. David Talbot argues that had FDR survived the war, they probably would have faced criminal charges. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who served with Allen. The OSS later claimed that both brothers were guilty of treason during World War Two and again Supreme Court Justice. You know, like, not not. This is not a fringe attitude that these guys committed treason during the war, but of course they were not punished. When the war ended, Allen stayed on with the OSS. His first two jobs were to gather evidence that could be used in the Nuremberg War crimes trials and. His other job was to bring Nazi spy master Reinhard Galen into the OSS to help them spy on the Soviets. So his jobs are both find evidence about these Nazi war criminals so we can prosecute them. And you know this guy who ran the Nazi secret police? Hire him. Not again. Not the only Nazi who's going to end up getting hired by this. It was a whole. It was a whole thing. It was a whole thing. Well, if you know American history, the line between behavior that will get you executed for treason and that will get you put in charge of the country is surprisingly blurry. Yeah. It's it really is on which side of that line you can land on any given moment. Yeah. And it's Speaking of other Nazis, the there's a. TV show out now called for all mankind. That's like an alternate history of like, what if the Soviets had gotten to the Moon 1st? And it kind of reimagines the space race, you know, and how it would have changed as a result of that. One of the guys, a real guy who was probably the single man most responsible for the US rocket program was Verner von Braun, who built the Nazi V2 rockets. And there's a couple of really good scenes with von Braun in the show that I actually think do him do justice to what he did. But yeah. You you're right, Jason, this is a ton of guys that they do this with. But it's interesting to me that Alan's job is both to find evidence about Nazi war crimes and to hire A Nazi spy master. And we'll talk about Reinhard Galen a little more in the next episode. So Alan worked on these tasks until September 20th, 1945, when President Harry Truman signed an order abolishing the OSS. During the war, the agency had accumulated a number of secret powers that were seen as necessary for the survival of the nation. Truman was worried that these powers in peacetime might be a threat to American democracy. He transferred the OSS Research unit to the State Department, and its espionage units to the War Department. Allen Dulles and most of his fellow Spooks, though, found themselves out of a job. The years immediately following World War Two were rough ones for Allen and Foster. Allen was particularly unhappy with peace, and spent his free time writing letters to old OS comrades and saying things like most of my time is spent reliving those. Exciting days. So he's actually kind of depressed after World War Two, because he doesn't get to be a fun spy anymore. Foster does better. In the post war years, he expands his reputation as a public intellectual. During the war he had been overcome by a new flowering of his Christian faith, which led him to preach tolerance and forgiveness and urge peace between the warring powers. But starting in late 1945, he changed rapidly in the direction of a hawk. The cause was, of course, the USSR, from the brothers quote in a series of articles. In life, he painted a steadily more frightening picture of the Soviet threat. His first major volley was a two-part series published in June 1946, entitled Thoughts on Soviet conduct and what to do about it. In it, he set the urgent tone that defined how he, the Republican and Democratic parties, and most Americans, would view the world for a generation. Soviet leaders, Foster wrote, have launched a worldwide campaign that aimed to subjugate the West, to quote, eliminate what are to us the essentials of a free society. And to impose on conquered people's assystem repugnant to our ideals of humanity and fair play. Already, he asserted, the Soviets had built a shadowy network of allies and non communist countries who pretended to be patriots but in reality take much guidance from Moscow. This made Soviet communism the unseen force directing nationalist movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Never in history have a few men in a single country achieved such worldwide influence, he concluded. And here we go. This is a huge part of what the John Birch Society becomes, right. And he's not a fringe figure. The birchers are he's not. Yeah. Everything about that we kind of take for granted about the way to this day we talk about the world will eventually be either all Communist or it will be all America. It will all be America. There will there will either be Chick-fil-A restaurants in every country in the world, or else we will all fall to China. But the the. The the idea that the world will eventually be all one thing or all the other. This is where it starts and once that idea takes hold. To this day, we still live under that it. When, you know, when 911 happened, there was no thought of attacking that as this is a single terrorist group and these people need to be arrested and rooted out. It's no, this is worldwide Islam that we must fight a war everywhere because the whole world will either be under the umbrella of al Qaeda or else the whole world will be under the umbrella of American Christianity and capitalism. And they're like this. Idea that. It's everywhere. The enemy is everywhere, and the we must therefore also be everywhere. We must have spies everywhere. We must have bases everywhere. This, in my view, is where it starts. It's so important to note that Jason, because. That didn't used to be how conflict worked, right? They didn't it didn't it? You like, it didn't always have to be like, OK, well, this group of people has attacked us, which means we're now in an existential struggle for the future of the entire human race. But that's the only place the rhetoric goes now, like instantly now down to the point where, like, people are, there are people who will talk that way about, like, ******* cancel culture, right? That it's like the start of this slide into a totalitarian hellscape, because that's. That's just where once you raise the rhetoric to that level, it's it's. I mean, for one thing, it's unprofitable to have it be anywhere lower, right? You're just not going to get people interested and then you don't make that sweet sub stack money. Are you going to get on sub stack Jason? I don't I I don't know it's. I've heard it will come down to how it's CMS is set up. Is it easy to use? I don't know. But yeah, I'm thinking about it, I think. I could just take a Glenn Greenwald turn, do pretty well on that you have to get cancelled 1st and then you have to make getting cancelled your entire personality. I mean, that's the path. There are people who have tried to cancel me because there's certain I'm a CIA asset, which is why I'm doing this episode to provide good PR for my employers. Good stuff. So Foster's writing was influential and formed a major part of the growing belief among US leaders that the Soviet Union was hell bent on world domination. Despite his antipathy to the Dulles brothers, Truman embraced this idea. In 1947, he spoke before a joint session of Congress and declared totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples by direct or indirect aggression undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States. He asked Congress for $400 million. Military aid to give to nations with growing communist movements in order to suppress them. Obviously, this marked the start of the Truman Doctrine and what many historians will name as the opening salvo of the Cold War. Now, while Foster was beating the drums of conflict with the USSR, Allen and his old OSS buddies were tramping around Washington talking to any elected leader who would listen about the pressing need for a peacetime intelligence agency. the United States had never had anything like that but dollars and his friends. Further, insisting that this new agency should have secret powers greater than even the OSS had enjoyed, this new agency would be different from anything that had existed before then. Now, at the time, the standard among national intelligence agencies was that you kept intelligence gathering separate from analysis and action. So one group of people gets the information, another group of people decides what to do about it and actually acts based on it, right? It kind of a separation of powers, so you don't have an all powerful organization. Gathering information and overthrowing governments of its own accord, you know, not a bad idea. Because, again, yeah, it was. One of the reasons people didn't want these things to be tied is they thought it would lead to a situation where operatives gathering information would bias the information they gathered towards whatever actions they already wanted to take. During World War Two, the OSS had ignored this traditional dividing line and justified it because they were. It was World War I. The situation was extreme. We gotta do what we gotta do. Dolis and their fellows, though, wanted this new agency Truman was establishing to retain this power in peace. Time. Now, after disbanding the OSS, President Truman had formed an organization called the Central Intelligence Group to advise him to advise him on intelligence matters. It had no authority to carry out operations. It was just about keeping the president informed. Allen, basically. Allen Dulles decides, OK, We've got this thing. The cig. Maybe the way to get what I want to establish a new OSS is to expand what the CIG can do. Cuz Truman's already willing to make the CIG be a thing, I could just gradually push it to have more and more power. In 1946, Republicans won big in congressional elections. This gave the old OS men like Allen the leverage they needed. In 1947, they succeeded in pushing a bill through Congress that established a National Security Council. To advise the President on foreign policy and a Central Intelligence Agency to gather Intel and act on it. That's what the IG became, according to one writeup of the deliberations behind this bill collected by Stephen Kinzer. Quote. There were strong objections to having a single agency with the authority to both collect secret intelligence and to process and evaluate it for the president. The objections were overruled and the CIA became a unique organization among Western intelligence services, which uniformly keep their secret operations separate from their overall intelligence activities. Now, the National Security Act also contained a key clause, which was worded vaguely enough to give the new agency a frightening amount of leeway. The CIA was authorized to carry out not only duties explicitly spelled out by the law, but also quote such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security. As the National Security Council may from time to time direct, this technically meant that the agency could take any action anywhere on Earth. With the president's approval. And they did. So that's cool, and they sure did. Ohh, and we're gonna talk about that, Jason, in part three. But for now, we're gonna talk about your puggles. Yes, my most recent book is called Zoe Punches the Future in *** ****. If you are dissuaded by that title or by my personality, read the reader reviews. They're all very good. They're all good. Or just pretend it's called weathering heights, yeah. That's actually my fifth novel. I've got a bunch out there. The online booksellers make it very easy to find them because they'll all be gathered together. Otherwise, I'm on all of the social media platforms. Just Google my name, it's they'll come up. Google Jason's name. Find him, find his books, find him. You know, be your own CI. Be the CIA you wanna see in the world. Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus, I can't recommend it. 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In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. The four whole months the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.