David Talbot: Allen Dulles & 'The Devil's Chessboard'

week and watch for the authors in the near future on Book TV. Salon.com co-founder David Talbot is next on Book TV. His book, *The Devil's Chessboard*, focuses on the Dulles Brothers: Alan Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA, and John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under President Eisenhower.

So, David had a couple of announcements to start off things. I think, did you say or no, not an announcement, but I just a few, uh, introductory remarks, maybe to set the stage for our conversation. Patrick, uh, and, uh, what you want to introduce me first? Well, this is, uh, this is David Talbot, and I'm Patrick Marks. This is my little shop, the Green Arcade. You've probably been here before, or maybe not. And, uh, thank you. We just celebrated seven years here, and David has been a part of it. Actually, uh, David was, uh, born in Los Angeles and, uh, a L.A. kid. And, uh, befitting a legend, we don't know what year that was, but, uh, and he, you know, his father was Lyall Talbot, who was an amazing heartthrob and, uh, and an actor. And, uh, according to his sister Margaret, who wrote this book, *The Entertainer*, uh, quite a guy. And it was quite a family. And his, uh, brother Steve was also a really interesting guy who was, uh, uh, a fantastic documentarist, uh, video maker. He was very, uh, well-known for doing, um, the *Frontline* series, and also to the Baby Boomers, he was known as Gilbert. Gilbert? And *Leave It to Beaver*? Yes, yes. We were a sitcom family.

So, uh, David was a journalist. He worked, uh, during the heyday for CW Daddy. Wow, that's deep. I remember. Who remembers? Rolling Stone. The great rock and roll magazine, *Rolling Stone*. You probably know *Rolling Stone*. And as the editor at *Mother Jones*, which is still going, doing really well. And I interviewed David for the, this book, *The Devil's Chessboard*. And I was at the Examiner. And then he was one of the first people to sort of say, "Oh my God, the internet exists. Maybe we can do journalism on it." And he, uh, started Salon.com. Yes, sir. Which is still going and is still a vital organ. Can I use that word? But, uh, so his book, *Season of the Witch*, which you might know, if I can hold up the prop. And yay, there are several major fans of this book, not only in San Francisco but throughout the country. And this book has recently been chosen as the One City One Book for the city of San Francisco by the San Francisco Public Library. It's compulsory that you read it. You must. It's on the Muni bus. Tells you to read it. I mean, you know something's going on. Then, uh, and then he also was the author of the bestselling book, *The Brothers*, and *The Brothers*, which I think is, uh, we can talk, you know, you'll let us know about this later, but the, it's the hidden history of the Kennedy years. So this idea of hidden history, I think, is sort of what we're kind of here tonight, and what eventually led to *The Devil's Chessboard*. I would say that's correct. Yeah, that's a safe statement.

Now, he's also, one more thing, if I can go on with the introduction, is that, uh, David is also, uh, amidst all these things he's been doing, is also involved, uh, in in civic, uh, matters recently with a group called Vision SF. And I don't know if you've heard of that, but if you haven't, you might look into it. And it has to do with, I don't know, for lack of a better word, taking back our city. Yes. From the 1%. As if that's not enough, when do you have time to go to Zurich? Um, I can always squeeze that in. He's also working now on, uh, or actually, it's already going, and it's a, a new, uh, series, uh, called Hot Books. And the first book has come out, and it's called *The Beast Inside*. The Beast Side. I'm sorry, *The Beast Side*. The Beast Side. It's all that Dulles stuff, you know, exactly. Living and dying while black in America. And this book is, uh, just a fantastic book and a very important commentary in our lives today, here in this country. And there's a couple of other books coming out soon. Is that true? Yeah, we can talk about that later. Okay. So without further ado, let's get to *The Devil's Chessboard*. Now, the, the, uh, subtitle is *Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government*. So, can you tell us how you got from *The Brothers* to *The Devil's Chessboard*?

Well, with your permission, Patrick, I was just, I'm going to start with a few remarks of my own, and then we'll get into conversation mode. But I, I wanted to set the stage by talking about, uh, what I was trying to do with the book. Um, it's, it's basically a counternarrative about power. You know, power tells its own story. Power is its best publicist. Power is its best spinner of the truth and of history. And, uh, we've seen this again and again, uh, throughout our lives. People, my generation, and many of the people here, uh, Saddam was behind 9/11. Saddam was producing weapons of mass destruction. Uh, the North Vietnamese fired on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Lee Harvey Oswald, uh, single-handedly killed John F. Kennedy. No, Fidel Castro killed John F. Kennedy. These are the stories that power has told about itself throughout my lifetime. They essentially, these are the real conspiracy theories, and they're told by power with the complicity of the American media, the corporate media. And these are the stories that have had, unfortunately, some tragic consequences as well, as we all know from the examples that I just cited.

So, it's the job of people like me, uh, historians, alternative historians, journalists, to present the truth, basically, to cut through this mythmaking, this, uh, spinning of history, of reality. And, uh, you know, it's, it's no easy task because there's Hollywood, there's, uh, the corporate media, there's Fox News. And again and again, day after day, 24/7, they're telling us their reality. And as C. Wright Mills, the great sociologist who wrote *The Power Elite* back during the Cold War in the 1950s, and was one of the first to really analyze the phenomenon of the Dulles Brothers and that power circle, as he famously said about these men, "Such men as these," because they were 99% men in those days, and probably 96% today. "Such men as these are crackpot realists. In the name of realism, or reality, they've created a paranoid reality, reality all of their own, and we're forced to live within that paranoid reality." It's the Communists out to kill us. It's, you know, uh, people living in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan. There's always a bogeyman. There's always someone that we have to fear. And as a result of that, they've created a lucrative racket. And that's what it is. That's that's what happened during the Cold War. That's what's happening during the war on terror.

So, it's the job of people like myself, it's the job of of you all, of an engaged citizenry, to see through that mythology, to do the work, to do the research, to know what's really happening in our country and make the right decisions. By the end of reading my book, and I hope you read the book, um, I hope you believe, as I do, that the name Dulles should go down in infamy in American history, just like the name Kissinger, the name Cheney, the name Rumsfeld. These are names that should be stripped off, uh, every building, every airport, Dulles Airport, and replaced with the names of true American heroes like Martin Luther King and others. And so tonight, I want to announce a campaign to do exactly that. To take the name Dulles, it was named after John Foster Dulles, who has his own criminal background, the brother of Alan Dulles, who was Secretary of State under Eisenhower. Take that name off the name of our nation's capital airport, where so many people, thousands of people each day, come from around the world. It's the gateway to our country. And it's a name that should instead, as I say, go down in infamy and be replaced by a name that stands for peace and world harmony. So, with that, well, opening statement, let's have a talk.

Well, one of the things, you know, is this, my water, by the way. Yes, it is. Okay. One of the things I'm wondering about is the process of, of doing that, of doing the research, of what, in doing this book, where did you go and what did you do? And, and how much were you aware of initially? I've read the book, so if you haven't, you'll be, you might think you know a lot of these stories about, uh, the CIA unsettling governments, of assassination, of extraordinary rendition. But how did you, where did you go? Did you travel around? Did you meet people who talked? Did you go to archives? I know Karen Croft's one of your, your partners, uh, did a lot of work, and you were in Italy. Yeah, we did a lot of work. Karen Croft, who is my colleague and collaborator, is here tonight. I couldn't have done the book without her. Uh, and since the book really begins, uh, with the Nazi period, with Alan Dulles going to Switzerland during World War II as a member, uh, as a leading, uh, you know, agent of the OSS, which was our spy agency during World War II. Of course, we're dealing with, you know, history that is quite old at this point, in terms of trying to find living, uh, voices who can tell you about that history. And of course, we follow sort of the Dulles arc through World War II and into the Cold War, and then through the Kennedy period. And it really is an epic narrative about, as I said earlier, the struggle, which we've been living through all our lives, between the forces of secrecy, of permanent war, and the forces of democracy. And, uh, it's really a battle for the, the soul of our nation.

So, yeah, many of the people, of course, from that era, including Alan Dulles himself, of course, is long dead. But their children, in many cases, are still alive. We interviewed Alan Dulles's daughter, Joan. We interviewed, uh, some key people who are still living from that period. And of course, we, uh, use documents. The documents that we could use. Now, that's a whole other game, of course. The government plays, as Orwell told us in *1984*, uh, "Those who would control the future control the past." And so it's a struggle for every researcher, for every historian, for every journalist who's trying to dig up the history that belongs to the American people, to get at those documents. And of course, the government often still withholds these documents.

You also, document, you also talk about how they constantly were destroying documents. Well, they destroy documents, they hide them, they, they refuse, they, you know, in violation, often of federal law, to release them, uh, because of political pressure. There was a bill passed in 1998 under Clinton, uh, the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. And I did use, uh, many, many documents, uh, that were released as part of that treasure trove. But that was only came about because of, uh, stiff political pressure from Elizabeth Holtzman, who was a congresswoman at the time, uh, and others in Congress, uh, to get the CIA to release these documents. That's what, because they were often embarrassing to our intelligence agencies, because what many of these documents showed, and what my book, uh, goes into in depth, is the extent to which US security agencies were actually collaborating, uh, with Nazi forces, even during the war, in the case of Alan Dulles in Switzerland, and certainly after the war, when we wanted to repurpose many of these, uh, Nazi officials for the war against the Soviet Union, the Cold War. So, yeah, it's always a battle. Sometimes you have to file Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. Even that doesn't work. Often they stonewall you. Uh, we can talk about the Kennedy era. That's a whole other story where they, uh, again, in violation of federal law, the JFK Records Act that was passed in the early 1990s, still refused to release key documents related to the Kennedy presidency and his assassination. So, it really is up to the American people to decide whether we want our own history. It belongs to us. Are we going to demand it or not? I mean, that's what it comes down to.

But don't you think at the same time, there's this idea of, uh, what you're saying there, there's this constant breaking of the law, and they get away with it, and Dulles got away with it constantly, and he made sure he got away with it. Then also, because of the complicity, you know, between lawmaking, that type of, uh, government, and let's say the private sector, because they all came from Wall Street. So we've sort of seen this kind of complicity, and then eventually you end up with what you, you call the deep state, or maybe that's Peter Dale Scott's deep state, or, but this concept of another, another operating. Now, this obviously, uh, didn't die with Alan Dulles. Do you think? No, I mean, uh, just leading you on on that question. Yeah, I mean, again, the, uh, these forces, and what, what it's, what C. Wright Mills in the 1950s called the power elite. The, it's a permanent government, essentially, that operates no matter who is happens to be elected or in the White House. Men like Alan Dulles thought that democracy was too important to be left in the hands of mere people like you and me, or our elected representatives. So they kept power as tightly as they could within their circle. Um, these were Wall Street, right, bankers. Uh, the Dulles Brothers ran the most powerful law firm on Wall Street, Sullivan and Cromwell. They, you know, often, you know, shuttle back and forth between Washington and and Wall Street, uh, in national security positions and so on. High-level corporate officials, military and intelligence officials. They belong to the same clubs. They, their children go to the same schools. They intermarry. It's a very cohesive power circle, particularly so, I think, in those days. Maybe it's a little more diverse, a little more complex today than when C. Wright Mills was writing *The Power Elite* in the late 1950s during the Dulles era. But, uh, there's a lot of cohesion, and they work within organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, uh, in New York, which the Dulles Brothers dominated for many years. And this is where they work out their ideas and their policies, whether it's to overthrow the democratically elected government in Guatemala because it's threatening, uh, US corporate interests, or whether it's to drop the bombs, uh, nuclear bombs, atomic bombs on Japan, uh, or whether it's to kill a president. I think they work these ideas out among themselves. I'm not suggesting that Alan Dulles was some Superman who, uh, went about, you know, doing all this mischief around the world and at home all by himself. He was very much a corporate lawyer in that respect. He would only act, I think, when he felt that there was a consensus within that group. And so they did have the mechanisms like the Council on Foreign Relations and others, and they still do, to work out this policy. Um, and of course, most of this, if not all of it, uh, in many cases, is kept secret from the American people.

So, you know, and that leads us to the idea of the Fifth Estate. Now, let's say that, uh, like we're always talking about now, how the, um, the journalism has, it's more difficult. But, you know, reading your book, it seems that the *New York Times* was in their pocket, and there was very little, it seems that dissent was not, didn't really come from, not the media. Yeah, the media was not the watchdogs they, they should be, and there really wasn't a watchdog. And, and even though, you know, you point out that even in the highest circles of power, like within the White House, these guys were doing their own thing, and they were beyond the law. Well, the, well, the media was actually part of this power circle. So I should say that, you know, among the other members of the Council on Foreign Relations are often the top executives of the *New York Times*, *The Washington Post*, CBS, and so on. And they're all on a first-name basis, a very chummy basis with Alan Dulles. In fact, he would hold these annual kind of drink fests around New Year's each year, where he would invite the top people, top reporters, and editors, and executives from these, uh, leading media organizations at at his club. His club was called The Alibi Club, which was appropriate. Uh, and so the, it was very cozy, very cozy relationship. And so when people said, "Well, certainly these things would have been exposed by the American media." I mean, we have this vast, you know, kind of media apparatus. And, you know, I always laugh about that as someone who spent my whole life in the media, knowing, you know, how compromised, actually, most, uh, people, uh, in these media organizations are compromised by power. And, you know, even today, you know, the *New York Times* was very complicit, of course, in the WMD lies, uh, that led tragically to the war in Iraq and to the ongoing, uh, disaster that's going on in the Middle East today. But certainly back in Alan Dulles' time, I mean, you can go into his files, as I did, and Karen and I, in Princeton, um, and, you know, the files are largely purged, of course, of, you know, the most probably revealing stuff by the CIA. But there still is a lot in there that's very interesting. And among other things are his very chummy letters back and forth with these media figures at the *New York Times* and *Newsweek* and so on. He's chummy with them. I mean, you know, he has nicknames for them. Uh, one letter after, uh, the Warren Report came out, and he was, of course, a very important figure on the Warren Report. Some people thought he dominated to the extent that it should have been called the Dulles Commission, not the Warren Commission. And after, this is a letter from the Washington bureau chief, I believe, of *Newsweek* to Alan Dulles after the Warren Report came out, saying, "Dear Mr. Dulles, thank you so much for directing our coverage, basically, of the Warren Commission, of the Warren Report. We couldn't have done it under such a tight deadline without your guiding hand." You know, so, uh, it's right there to be read in these files.

So, just to bring it up to the present, so how, how has this book been? How do you feel your book has been posited or been received? And could you talk a little bit about that? Even in your hometown, they're gobsmacked. The media, um, because it's been interesting. I, yeah, again, I've read some of them, so I was wondering how you feel about that, because some of them have been really rather strange. Think, well, if I hadn't shocked the media, I don't think I would have done my job. I mean, you know, they are the gatekeepers. They, as I started off with my introductory remarks by saying, they have an interest in telling a certain version about America. And so this is a counter-story, a counternarrative. And so there, yeah, there's been great resistance to the book from the media gatekeepers. I've been told that, uh, *The Washington Post* is not going to review it, but I slipped one by them there. And I actually wrote an op-ed piece that did appear in *The Washington Post*, so you do what you can do. It's guerrilla warfare. Uh, I was on my way to Al Jazeera America in a car in Manhattan, uh, a week or so ago on my book tour. I was lined up by, you know, to do an interview, uh, in New York for Al Jazeera America. And suddenly my publicist got an, uh, email saying it's been canceled. And when he asked why, he was surprised, of course, uh, he got a one-word reply in through the email: "Politics." So they were pretty upfront about it. Politico, the, um, online publication, uh, started by former *Washington Post* people, has become sort of the voice online for mainstream political coverage. They had me lined up to do something. One of the key people there, uh, who actually is a very good reporter, called my book a masterpiece and said that he wanted me very badly to write something based on the book for Politico. But someone above spiked it at the last moment and instead ran a piece by a guy named Phil Shannon, who was a former *New York Times* reporter who has been peddling a CIA disinformation line for some time now, mainly that Fidel Castro was behind, uh, the murder of President Kennedy, which is literally the oldest conspiracy theory there is about JFK's assassination and complete BS. So, you know, that's what happens. It's a war. Writing is fighting. I didn't, I didn't expect anything different from this book. But the fact is, it's not a media monolith. We, people like us, have ways to get messages out. There's alternative media. There's Democracy Now! There's Pacifica Radio. There's *Mother Jones*. There's Salon, which was why I started Salon, to have an alternative voice like that. And because of that, the book has now become a bestseller, which I'm very proud of, despite this pushback. Great. Yeah, that's what I wanted to hear you say. Right on. And it's, uh, doing, I think it did start taking off, really, in California for some reason. Is that correct? California led the way. Yeah, it became a bestseller here first, in Northern California first.

So, this, I don't know if this is a silly question or not, but, uh, can I ask a possible silly question? Of course. So, it has to do with extraordinary rendition. So, do you, in reading this book, these people, the, and the effect, still of, I can see why you called it *The Devil's Chessboard*, because they really were playing with nations, with people, and the effects, so many of them were deaths, suicide, nations in, you know, crumbled, you know, legacy of ashes, as that, you know, the term goes. So, were you, to, do you guys ever fear for your own lives? You mean, you think I'll end up at Guantanamo? Well, probably not as a public figure. It's more difficult these days. I don't know. I'm just curious. Is, you know, does that thought, even reading it, sometimes you think, "Oh God, it's creepy."

Well, again, my, my point is to have an impact, uh, to shift, uh, the public's understanding of what's happening in our country. Uh, this is not just ancient history. This is history that's still very relevant today. Extraordinary rendition, torture, extra-legal assassinations, mass surveillance of private citizens. All of these began not after 9/11, but under the reign of Alan Dulles back in the Cold War. So for us to understand that Cold War history is essential for us to confront what's going on in our country today. So, do I worry about my own self? No. I worry about what's still happening to people in Pakistan, people in Afghanistan, to our own soldiers who are asked to fight these endless wars, uh, under impossible circumstances. Uh, so that's what drives me. It's, it's that this is on my conscience. This is on my soul as an American, as an, as a journalist and historian. Like I know it's on all of our consciences here tonight. And we have to say, "Finally, enough." And it's my job to give us the information. And there are other wonderful people out there doing the same. People I worked with at Salon, like Glenn Greenwald, who's an American hero, Jeremy Scahill, many others doing the same. And that's why I started this new book imprint, Hot Books, to be able to publish more books like this that shed light on what's happening to our country today. But at some point, we do have to say, "Enough." You know, the presidential campaign is underway right now, and there's no focus at all on these issues that Ed Snowden tried to bring forth, you know, about the, the growth of this Big Brother state that has intruded into every aspect of our lives. This, you know, the hearing with Hillary Clinton with, by Benghazi, there was no mention of what the actual thing was, right? There was no talk about why are we there? What, why, why, why do they hate us? That's a good question. Well, exactly. I mean, we're shocked that people, uh, when we start to have heavy boots in all these countries and interfere in all these other countries, we're shocked that actually people fire guns at us, at our emissaries, and try to kill us. I mean, this should not be shocking to the American people. Or that there are atrocities like the hospital in Afghanistan, stand that was run by Doctors Without Borders, that children and nurses and, and doctors are blown up, uh, in these attacks that are supposedly collateral damage. Well, collateral damage is an essential part of an imperial, uh, situation, an imperial war that we are constantly fighting. That's what happens in these situations. We are, our representatives, our soldiers are killed, and to a much greater extent, the civilians in these poor, benighted countries where we've intruded, where we've invaded, die by the thousands. And so again, this is a legacy of the Alan Dulles imperial arrogance of this country, that we have a right to the world. That's what they felt like coming out of World War II. They had a right to the world. We have a right to the world's markets. We have a right to the world's resources. We have a right to do whatever you want to people around the world who are less powerful than we are. And at some point, we, you know, you have to understand there's going to be blowback. There's going to be consequences. And, you know, the American people need to wake up to this. And, uh, I hope my book is at least a small part of that awakening.

So, the, let me ask you then about, uh, one of the Hot Books. I think the topic is about war criminals. Yeah. But does this kind of fit right in? Well, right. Uh, so Hot Books is this new imprint I've started with Skyhorse Publishing, which is a very brave and independent, uh, publisher in New York, run by, uh, publisher named Tony Lyons. And one of our first books, after *The Beast Side*, which we talked about earlier, is a book called *American Nuremberg*. And it's been written by a philosophy professor at USF, University of San Francisco, right here, Rebecca Gordon. Uh, and she wrote a book earlier for Oxford University Press called *Mainstreaming Torture*, which looked at how we've become culturally, you know, uh, accustomed now to accepting torture in our name, as part of US policy. And this book, she looks at the top US officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations, from those presidents on down, from President Bush and President Obama themselves, who should, by the principles and standards that were set at Nuremberg after World War II, be tried for war crimes. Um, and it's a very restrained, very, I think, uh, uh, provocative, uh, argument for why we should hold, at least a citizen's tribunal, because politically, of course, we know it's impossible to create something official like Nuremberg. It, there's just not enough, uh, political opportunity for obvious reasons to do that in this country. But there are precedents like the Russell Tribunal, that Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, established during the 1960s with Jean-Paul Sartre, to examine war crimes in Vietnam. This was a very distinguished commission, uh, back in 1967. And I think, again, for the soul of our country, for our own conscience, we have to take steps, as, uh, as an engaged citizenry, to do something like this, to examine what's been done in the last 15 years under the so-called War on Terror in our names. I agree.

So, wasn't it, uh, you tell the story about Jesus Galindez? Jesus Galindez. Yes. And I was wondering if you could just tell a story because I, I wanted to read a quote that happened after that. If you just, well, so you bring up extraordinary rendition again. Nothing new here. This was not an invention of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Uh, it was actually a creation of the CIA during, uh, the Cold War. So, in one of the first cases of extraordinary rendition that I'm aware of, it's a remarkable story. There was a young, brilliant scholar, uh, named Jesus de Galindez, who was a, a refugee from Basque, Spain. He fled Franco's fascist government after the war. Ended up, unfortunately, jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, because he ended up in the Dominican Republic, which was then under the brutal rule of Rafael Trujillo. When he fell afoul of the Trujillo dictatorship, he fled there and ended up in New York City, where he was studying for his PhD at Columbia and working as a lecturer at Columbia. Well, he, his PhD thesis was about actually an inside look, because he'd had some inside information about the brutality of the Trujillo dictatorship. And Trujillo's agents were everywhere. He was a very, uh, powerful guy, backed strongly by the Eisenhower government, by the CIA, because he was a supposedly anti-communist. That's all you had to be in those days to get US backing. And, uh, his agents stalked, uh, Galindez in New York City. They showed up in his classrooms and tried to intimidate him. They tried to threaten him into, uh, stopping, you know, seizing work on his, his thesis. But he, uh, refused. And so one day he was, uh, headed home, uh, downtown, uh, from Columbia, and he was grabbed by agents who actually went under the employ of the CIA. These were CIA contractors. He was hustled to an airport in on Long Island and flown back to the Dominican Republic, where he was horribly tortured and and murdered by Trujillo. So, this is what extraordinary rendition is. And this happened, uh, in the 1950s, not, you know, after 9/11. And then, I guess this is from your book. One of your, one of the students from Columbia, who I think her name was Joy, what was her name? Maria Joy? One of his students, yeah, yeah. And she wrote, "If this can happen here, what is left? Everybody who has some sense of responsibility and a feeling for democracy and freedom should be concerned." And I thought, that is what your book is all about. Yeah, that was absolutely. I thought that was a very moving letter that she wrote, I think to *The New Republic*. Was it? It was *The New Republic*, yeah. And trying to get people to be concerned about this case, because at that point, they didn't know where Galindez had gone. He'd been disappeared. Uh, but of course, they had, you know, suspicions about what had happened to him. And Eisenhower, actually, even President Eisenhower was asked about his disappearance during a press conference, and he kind of avoided answering. Columbia University was kind of complicit in a way, because the president, Grayson Kirk, at the time, was, uh, sat on commissions and and foundations that were supported by the CIA. Uh, the Columbia administration did nothing to look into the Galindez case. So, you know, it's again, one of these dark, uh, episodes from CIA history, uh, that we write about in *The Devil's Chessboard*. But again, I just think that this concern is why we're all here, and why you do what you do. And, and I also wanted to say, you know, ask you, um, what, what is new that you really, what's the newest thing that you found out in doing this that you found most relevant?

Well, I think the, the key, sort of, uh, headlines from my book began with the Nazi period, began with the extent to which Alan Dulles and his circle, his intelligence circle, collaborated with the Nazis. Before, in the case of Sullivan and Cromwell, the Wall Street law firm, because they represented Nazi business interests, including IG Farben, the notorious chemical company that produced Zyklon B, the pesticide that was used to exterminate Jews. And, you know, they're exchanging Christmas cards, the Dulles Brothers, with the heads of IG Farben up into actually into the early war period. Uh, Dulles, from his perch in Switzerland during the war, continued to represent Nazi interests. He was trying to cut deals, side deals, in defiance of, uh, Roosevelt's policy of unconditional surrender, with Nazi emissaries. Separate peace deals. After the war, he helped establish the so-called rat lines, that were escape routes for Nazi war criminals that were set up, so they could flee from Germany over the Alps, down through Italy, and overseas to safety. He even helped, uh, rehabilitate some of the more notorious Nazi war criminals, allowing them to go back into daily life, even official life, in West Germany. Post-war Germany. The top spy master in West Germany, I tell the story, is Reinhard Gehlen, who was Hitler's top spy master on the bloody Eastern Front. And, uh, Alan Dulles helped install him as the top intelligence official in, uh, West German government. He played a very important role in the Cold War for many years. So that's number one: the collaboration with the Nazis. I argue, in some ways, that we didn't crush the Third Reich so much as repurpose it for the Cold War.

Secondly, there's a lot of things in the Cold War period that I go into that haven't come out before, including the fact that we targeted not only the governments in Guatemala, which we know about, Iran, which was with great disastrous results that we're still dealing with today, but even the the government of an ally, President Charles de Gaulle in France, antagonized national security interests in this country, and Dulles and particular, by trying to settle the war in Algeria, the colonial war. Uh, US national security interests were concerned. They thought that Algeria and North Africa, with its oil, might fall into Soviet hands. As a result, they thought de Gaulle was too stubborn a nationalist. He was flirting with the idea of breaking away from NATO and so on. And so, in 1961, on the heels of the, uh, one other CIA crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, young President Kennedy, who's just been inaugurated a couple months before, is now faced with another crisis related to the CIA. Charles de Gaulle and his government are furious, are screaming that the CIA is backing a right-wing French military coup against him. And President Kennedy is put in the extremely awkward position of telling the de Gaulle government, "Well, I'm not in control of the CIA. I can't speak for them. I'm not supporting this coup, but I'm not, I can't speak for the CIA."

And then, finally, I think the, the big headline, of course, in my book that's getting a lot of pushback from the, uh, media gatekeepers, looks at Alan Dulles' involvement in the Kennedy assassination itself. De Gaulle, by the way, felt that these Dulles forces were behind the assassination of President Kennedy. He told his, uh, information minister when he came back from the funeral of John Kennedy that, "The same national security forces in the US that targeted me killed President Kennedy." That has never really been reported in this country. Uh, that book has never even been translated. It was a memoir by de Gaulle's information minister that he wrote that was published in France, never translated in the US. So that's, uh, very important. I present, I think, very compelling new evidence that ties Dulles to the assassination, and of course, to the cover-up, because he played such a critical role on the Warren Commission. I mean, how convenient, this guy who had been fired by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, a bitter enemy of the, the president, ends up being the top investigator into his crime, into his murder. I mean, this is the way that this power group worked, with again, the complicity or laziness of the American media. Absolutely.

Maybe we, you want to turn it over to? I was going to say, you know, so let's have a big hand for David. Thank you. Thank you. And we'd like to know if you want to do a little Q&A here. If you do, if you could come up and talk into the microphone, that way would be great. And we also would like to make sure it's a question and not a statement, if that's possible. I know people sort of say, have a statement at the end, but, uh, so anybody like to come up, right? You need to come up and talk if you, you want to ask this here.

I just noticed what came out with, along with your book was a, another rerun of, uh, Gary Webb. And I was wondering if you'd like to talk about connections across those two journalists. Very well. Journalist, uh, so the question was about the journalist Gary Webb, who, uh, wrote, uh, *Dark Alliance*, was that what it's called? Yeah. He, as a reporter for the *San Jose Mercury*, he investigated, uh, um, the connection between, uh, the CIA and the Contras in Central America, and how they allowed the Contras to run drugs into this country to help finance their activities there. Uh, and it was a, uh, a bombshell when that story broke. Uh, he came under heavy fire from the CIA as a result of it, and heavy pressure, ultimately, from his own newspaper and from the American media that kind of went after him instead of pursuing the story itself. And he ended up being, you know, his career ended up being ruined. And it was, uh, I think one of the great tragedies of American journalism, that here's, you know, one of the great truth-tellers, one of the brave, uh, investigative journalists, and, you know, instead of winning the awards that he should have won, his career was ruined, and he ended up actually, uh, committing suicide. So, the, uh, there, you know, I, I was at Salon at the time. I think one of the great regrets I have, actually, is not being tuned in enough to that story as it was happening to hire Gary Webb and put him to work, because those kinds of, uh, talented and intrepid journalists are far too few. Uh, and I would have loved to have given him another safety raft. Uh, and when I saw, read, read about his story by, because it was written by, by Nicholas Schou, who was actually a very good reporter. *Kill the Messenger*. It later became a great movie with Jeremy Renner starring as Gary Webb. You should all see the movie and read the book. And in fact, because of Karen Croft, I signed up Nicholas Schou to write a book for me for the Hot Books series. Oh, great. What's that? Um, well, I'll tell you about it later. Okay. You're on a need-to-know basis. Patrick, it's still, it's still in, uh, kind of hush-hush mode. Oh, cut that out. Anyway, yes. So Gary Webb is a hero, and, you know, unfortunately, he's not with us any longer. And I'm inspired by what he did, in part by what I've done with *The Devil's Chessboard*. I think your book coming out has inspired people talking about it. That's great. I'm, I'm glad if the people are making that connection.

I also like to come up and ask a question. You could come up and ask a question. It'd be good. You, that's not, we're going through. If you could come up and, if you want to. So you're asking if Gary Webb did indeed commit suicide? Yeah, there there's definitely some, uh, some, you know, ways about the way he supposedly committed suicide that have raised questions. I, I'm sorry, sir, I just don't know enough about the details to go into it. Uh, so, let's, we'll leave it there. Other questions here? Yeah, if you would. If, uh, presidents don't have the power, the power somewhere else, then how could we as citizens have a criminal? Who would we take, take against this criminal court? You know, how do we get to the power, not Bush or Obama, but the real power?

That's a very, you put your finger on the key question. Uh, how do we go about holding these people accountable? Uh, we are in a democracy, nominally, um, and how do we go about, uh, acting as if, uh, the popular will, the public will, matters? So, as I said, um, earlier, you know, obviously we don't control Congress. Every wing of the government is in support of the war on terror. Every wing of government is in support of suppressing our own history, of not releasing documents that the American people have to, uh, we probably are in a worse situation right now than we were even in some ways during the Cold War, uh, because of the sort of, uh, you know, reign of terror, uh, and repression that 9/11 unleashed. So, what we can do is, unfortunately, I think we have to do outside of the mainstream political arena. We have to, I think, be inspired, as I said earlier, by things like the Bertrand Russell Commission during the Vietnam War. I think that would be an amazing, uh, uh, you know, step forward if we could bring together legal scholars, some people from the political system, investigative journalists, experts in constitutional law, and so on, and bring them together for an, for this public inquiry into, uh, you know, the war on terror and the crimes that have been committed in our name. And, and, and, and, you know, organize us in such a way that it got maximum media exposure. And, you know, various public organizations, hopefully human rights groups, participate in this. I think that would at least begin the national dialogue that we're missing in the presidential campaign. I mean, these issues aren't being discussed at all, even by Bernie Sanders, as far as I can know. Bernie has done a wonderful job of focusing on the wealth gap, which is another, you know, enormous crisis for the country. And, and I, you know, obviously we, you know, we have to commend him for doing that. That was desperately needed, also, that national discussion. But the national discussion about the permanent war that we're in, and whenever you're in a permanent war situation, it's going to, it's going to erode democracy at home. You can't have those two things existing at the same time, because a national security state is anathema to a democracy, to a healthy democracy. So there's no way that Congress is going to do this on its own. We have to act as a, we created this public commission, a public inquiry in Washington D.C. to shame Congress and to get as much media exposure as we could. It would at least initiate this national discussion that we sorely need at this point.

[Applause]

Yeah, if you don't mind, uh, with regard to, uh, a national security state being inconsistent with democracy, last night on Charlie Rose, Ted Koppel appeared, talking about the possibility of, uh, internet sabotage and this kind of thing. Do you have any comments to make about that? I think that's the beginning. He seems to be launching a campaign to raise consciousness about this, this, uh, problem. And I, I personally don't think the national security state is going to go away anytime soon. Uh, I wonder if you have any thoughts on Koppel's campaign.

Well, I'm not clear about what he's doing. Is he trying to suggest that the internet is a, a terrorist tool and that we have to crack down on it somehow? We're very vulnerable to, uh, mass blackouts, you know, right? So they always have some new scare for us, you know, some new thing that we have to hide under the beds and worry about our beds. So, you know, Ted Koppel, I think, is part of that corporate media, that national security media. He has been his whole career. What's shocking is when some of these guys actually start to break away from that consensus. You know, Dan Rather gave me a shout-out. Dan Rather was part of that, you know, sort of corporate mainstream world for many years, and then of course, had his own kind of, uh, traumatic break with it, uh, following the story he did on Bush and the National Guard, uh, and as a result, he was fired by CBS. And so now he's been in the wilderness for some time. And he gave, he was good enough to give me a shout-out for *The Devil's Chessboard* and said, you know, "You've been telling the truth for a long time now." And so, that was great to hear from him. Unfortunately, it happens for some of these people after they're sort of like, you know, thrown overboard. Uh, I wish it happened while they were actually in positions of power and we could, they could do more, you know, to, uh, enlighten the American people. But, yeah, I don't believe what Ted Koppel says. I don't believe what Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, rather, you know, his point of view either. These are very mainstream people. They're not about shaking up, you know, the national conversation. They're about putting America to sleep, which he often does for me.

Hi, Mr. T. I finished a book this summer by L. Fletcher Prouty, *The Secret Team*, and I was curious. He seems to suggest that the, uh, the Fletcher Prouty, you said Prouty? Yes. *The Secret Team*. He seems to suggest that the 1947 National Security Act seems to...

Have you given the CIA their their power or whatever? And, uh, how do you feel about, uh, maybe changing that? I know changing the names on airports and everything would be good, but maybe something that really took something away from them, such as that power.

So, uh, El Fletcher Prouty was an Air Force officer and an American hero. You know, the American military, uh, has a number of these people throughout our history. Uh, thankfully, uh, Smedley Darlington Butler. Uh, how many people know Smedley Darlington Butler's name? The, the famous Marine hero who actually, uh, became a great champion of peace and democracy. Uh, and Fletcher Prouty is another military hero, and people should, uh, read his books. He's not with us any longer, but he, he wrote, uh, extensively about how the National Security State was eroding democracy. And, in fact, was in a great position to see this happen because he was the liaison at one point between the Air Force and Allen Dulles's CIA. So he knew Allen Dulles quite well.

1947 is the year that the CIA is created. The National Security, uh, you know, charter's passed. Uh, Harry Truman is president. Uh, he later felt, came to feel that he created a Frankenstein. And I think Prouty probably believed the same. Uh, but this was the president himself who was saying this. Uh, he always intended, he said, Truman, for the CIA to be nothing more than an intelligence gathering organization that would then, uh, collate the best information and pass it on to the president in the White House. But instead, it became this, um, this action, uh, arm that went around the world, uh, overthrowing governments and assassinating people and so on.

And Harry Truman wrote a remarkable op-ed piece about this in the Washington Post shortly after President President Kennedy was killed. And it really was a bombshell at the time, given the kind of traumatized state of the nation then, just weeks after Dallas. And what he wrote in the Washington Post was that, yes, that the CIA was had become this kind of rogue agency, and that was not only endangering democracies overseas, but at home.

So Alan Dulles was stunned by this, um, and he knew he couldn't let it stand. So he immediately goes into action. He tries to strong-arm Harry Truman, who's now around 80 years old, retired in Independence, Missouri. He tries to pressure Truman into withdrawing, retracting his own article. Uh, you know, but Truman's a stubborn guy, famously, and and refuses. So Dulles flies down to Missouri and personally, again, puts the pressure on him and says, "Mr. President, you certainly remember that when you created the CIA, you wanted it to be this activist agency and so on." Truman won't hear anything, uh, of that, and it stands by his article.

So Dulles does the next best thing. He can't change reality. So what does he do? And this is how, of course, intelligence agencies operate all the time. They change the record. So he writes a letter for the record, Dulles to the General Counsel of the CIA, and says, "Oh, I just came back from visiting Harry Truman. You know, he was very, uh, upset to hear, uh, that his article had been read that way. He didn't mean to say that. He was confused about how it actually had had come through that way." He made him out to be, in other words, this senile guy who didn't know what he was doing. Maybe some deputy had put him up to it and so on. So that's became the CIA's official story. It got picked up in various histories and various essays written by CIA-friendly historians and so on. So Alan Dulles was a master at that, at manipulating the truth when the truth didn't satisfy his needs.

Um, obviously, uh, command a huge amount of information related to the Dulles era, and especially the Kennedy assassination, and all of the enormous literature that's come out of it. And the credibility of that material, um, is spotty, shall we say. And I'm just curious. There's, um, the, the story that's always sort of alleged about the plot to sort of involve, uh, Cuba more deeply in the assassination of John Kennedy. But yet, very few, um, U bits of of information have ever surfaced, uh, trying to make that connection, uh, more tangible.

So you mean the allegation that Fidel Castro is behind the assassination, or or that, uh, that there was some complicity there? Um, and I, I came across a book, uh, a few years ago that was is the only source that I know that really, uh, talks about it. It's called JFK: The Second Plot, by a guy named Matthew Smith, published in England. Um, and I'm just curious to know, are you familiar with it?

I'm not, no. Um, what's he say? Basically, that the sheriff of the adjoining county to Dallas, um, actually has, uh, the wing numbers of the airplane that was sitting idling on the runway at the time of the assassination with a flight plan to Cuba. And the allegation was that Oswald, or someone, was supposed to fly there? Yes. And there, there's a whole series of connections about how the, he was supposed to be transported, you know, to the airport that the, the sheriff, uh, seems to corroborate. So I just thought that was kind of an interesting tidbit that I kept looking for in your book. I just finished it a few days ago.

Okay. Um, well, I, I can't comment, uh, specifically on the book, unfortunately, because I haven't read it. But I will comment, and I think it's very important, on this long, uh, you know, complicated, you know, allegation that Fidel Castro and Cuba was somehow involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. I think it's, you know, to be blunt about it, it's the oldest lie that's been told about the Kennedy assassination. And, in fact, it was being disseminated, that lie. It was a disinformation line by the CIA and its friendly assets in the American media and the world media while the president's body was still warm. That was the first conspiracy theory being pumped out about the Kennedy assassination. And here's why it was preposterous. I'll, I'll go into some of the just key things.

At the very moment when President Kennedy's being shot in Dallas, he's meeting with a peace envoy, Castro, from JFK. The French journalist Jean Daniel, who's carrying an olive branch from Kennedy. Now, this is one of several, uh, peace envoys who, on the president's request, has gone down to Havana to try and find, find a way finally to diffuse the tension, uh, between Havana and Washington. And as soon as the message is delivered in Havana, they find out of the assassination. Castro is devastated because he now realizes these peace, these back-channel peace negotiations are finished. And he says to, uh, you know, Jean Daniel, "This is terrible. Basically, everything's changed." And then he says, "Now watch, the next thing we'll know, we'll hear is that they're pinning it on me." And of course, that's exactly the next broadcast from America is connecting Lee Harvey Oswald to Cuba through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

You know, uh, the Bridge of Spies film by Spielberg, uh, leaves one key thing out. The new film, it's a, you know, entertaining movie with Tom Hanks and so on. And it's about this guy who is an American hero, James Donovan, who was a New York corporate attorney who was recruited by Kennedy to go to Berlin to, you know, to win the release of Francis Gary Powers in return for, uh, the release of a Soviet spy. And it's a great story. But he, it's presented as if he's doing this pretty much on his own, like he's a lone ranger. And as I wrote in my op-ed piece recently in the Washington Post, this actually, you know, very delicate diplomatic dance had the complete support of Khrushchev in Moscow and Kennedy in Washington because both of these world leaders were actually trying to diffuse the Cold War. And this was one of the first steps in that direction.

Now, they also leave out the fact, uh, there's a little crawl at the end of the movie saying, "Oh, later Jim Donovan was used by Kennedy to win the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners in Cuba," which is true. But there's an even more interesting story about Jim Donovan and Kennedy in Cuba, which is that after he won the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, the Kennedy brothers asked Donovan again to widen his efforts in Cuba and to establish a broader peace, understanding with Castro. And he went down on more than one occasion. Hit it off with Castro. They were both drinkers. They loved to talk, Donovan and Fidel, late into the night. And he was on the verge of, of forging a grant with, uh, Havana. But, uh, the CIA was not in support of this.

And when they got word of this back channel that Kennedy had set up with Havana, they actually went to Donovan and said, "Hey, on your next trip to Cuba, we understand that Fidel is a scuba enthusiast. Why don't you take him this wetsuit, uh, which he would enjoy putting on?" Well, the wetsuit, of course, was infused with poisons cooked up in the CIA labs. This is a famous story, of course, that one of the many ways that the CIA tried to kill Castro was with a poison wetsuit.

So here's the CIA in one of the many cases in which it tried to sabotage Kennedy policy, and the Kennedy policy aimed at ending the Cold War with Moscow and Havana. And this is one of the most flagrant ways, using a peace emissary, this peace envoy who was an American hero, to try and kill Castro unwittingly. So it's a remarkable story. And, uh, you know, the CIA's effort to blame Castro for what I believe actually came out of the anti-Castro plot against Kennedy, as Bobby Kennedy figured out immediately as Attorney General. And I write about this in both my books, Brothers and Devil's Chessboard, that's the source of the plot, not Castro himself. It's the anti-Castro operation that's being run by the CIA with the Mafia's help. That's the blowback that killed JFK. And, you know, Fidel Castro had nothing to do with JFK's assassination.

It's, it's sort of like a "for want of a better word" discussion. I mean, I'm really struck by the minutia and the detail that you provide, which really makes it, you know, show, don't tell. But to me, this, don't you think that the collaboration begins before World War II? And that the National Security State was actually born out of World War I? And the whole creation of Nazi Germany is a feature of US foreign policy? And that this entire endless war machine is much older than World War II? I mean, if you could.

Yeah, you're right. And for simplicity, I, I kind of focus on in the book with the World War II period and with Dulles slipping across the border into Switzerland. But I do allude to some of the earlier history as well. And you're right, for instance, Sullivan & Cromwell, their Wall Street law firm, the Dulles brothers' firm, was, uh, really made a fortune off of being sort of at the center of the reparations game that was going on at the time, you know, to rebuild Germany. And that's where they start to embed themselves, uh, in these German corporate interests. And when Hitler comes on the scene, they just sort of seamlessly go with him as the person who's rebuilding Germany as the regime. Uh, but yeah, it goes back to World War I. I mean, really, you could say, speaking of Smedley Butler, it could goes back to the turn of the century when the American Empire first is created in the Spanish-American War in the Philippines and Cuba and so on. And those, uh, Banana Republic Wars that, uh, America was fighting. You know, Smedley Butler, who is this Marine hero who's forced as a young Marine to fight in all these dirty wars, these imperial wars throughout the Caribbean and Central America and so on, you know, said later, "I wasn't, uh, fighting for Uncle Sam. I was fighting for Wall Street." And, you know, um, you know, he said he was a bigger gangster, basically, than Al Capone. Um, so, and he said, "War is a racket." You know, he wrote a book, War Is a Racket. So, you know, he was drawing on his experience from wars that really were starting at the turn of the century, around 1900. And that Mark Twain, among others, as another great American hero, was crusading against and wrote against, saying America was going down a very dark path. And, uh, I wrote a book, actually, kind of a graphic history, illustrated by the great Spain Rodriguez, the late cartoonist. And Spain, I worked on that, uh, that tried to bring, uh, you know, the Butler, Smedley Butler story to a younger audience. So yes, there is more history there.

What's the name of that book? Uh, Devil Dog? Do you have that, Patrick? I thought you were a total [Laughter] completist. Uh, any other questions? I have Shadow Knights. Sorry. Oh, okay. Thank you. Can you talk about Angleton as a, um, cultural czar? I think you called him. And if I can sneak in a second question, if Dulles's kind of world and milieu is deception and lies, how do you, um, how do you work through that and come to something that seems to be a resemblance of the truth in doing research?

Yeah, good question. So James Jesus Angleton, how many people know that name? Legendary chief of Counter Intelligence, uh, and the leading intellectual, sort of an artist, really an artist of artist of deceit, um, and covert action. So he was Allen Dulles's right-hand person. They go way back together. Uh, they start working together really during World War II, the final days of the war, where they're very active in Rome. James Angleton has some deep roots in Italy. His family, um, he prided himself on being very connected there. And that sort of spy-versus-spy atmosphere in Rome right after the war is fascinating. And I try and evoke that period. You know, one of the things I tried to do, by the way, was write an anti-spy novel, basically. I wanted to grip the reader, and I think the book really does pull you along with all these amazing stories, but they're all true. Um, and, uh, so Angleton is this amazing character. And one of the things he's doing in Rome is setting up these rat lines to allow the Nazis to escape. And he sets up a kind of a luxury apartment in Rome for some of the more notorious and flamboyant Nazis. Um, and, uh, so he, you know, has a lot of deep history with Dulles. And in fact, he later said, he suggested at the end of his life that the reason I became so successful within the CIA was basically I had the goods on Allen Dulles, and he had to keep promoting me. Um, and so that's an interesting thing. He also was a Catholic. Uh, so he had something of a conscience, kind of a soiled conscience. And as he was dying from all the cigarettes he had smoked over the years, and he was racked by coughs and lung cancer at the end, you know, he said, "The heads of the CIA, the great legends of the CIA like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, were all going to end up in Hell." He told a journalist who was visiting him, and he said, "I, I imagine I'll be seeing them there shortly."

He was this, uh, artist, in a way, though, as you, uh, suggest. At Yale, he, uh, published a very well-respected poetry journal. He knew Ezra Pound and hung out with E.E. Cummings. And he, you know, he understood that the Cold War was very much a war of ideas and a culture war. And so under Angleton and his, uh, deputies within the CIA, they pumped a fortune into different front groups, uh, cultural front organizations that subsidized poets and, uh, poetry journals and, uh, conferences, literary conferences, and magazines, including some of the more famous ones, Paris Review and so on, uh, Encounter magazine. So he understood this war as an, a war of ideas, an intellectual war. And, uh, that, and he was able to create, I think, a very strong cultural hegemony within sort of the intelligentsia in this country and in Western Europe. Um, and you broke away from that at great peril to your career, really. I mean, suddenly funds would dry up, you didn't get teaching positions. You know, it was very effective. So Stalin, you know, and the Soviet Union, maybe had more brutal methods of controlling intellectuals and artists, but certainly, uh, the Western way, the Angleton way, was almost even more effective in some ways, because it was full of self, it was driven by self-censorship and a sense that we didn't want to break away as an artist from this Cold War consensus. So the few people who did at the time were heroes, I think. And one of the ones that I highlight in my book is C. Wright Mills, who, when I was in college, was, you know, a very well-known figure because of his book, The Power Elite. But it's been largely forgotten now. But, you know, he was a critic of these Cold War intellectuals. He said, basically, "You're all about American triumphalism and and celebrating, uh, America. And you, that's not the role of an intellectual. The role of an intellectual is to be rigorously independent and critique power, and you've all sold out." And intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger, liberals who were among the most compromised by Angleton and his cultural funding, were furious at people like, at, at Mills. And so there were great debates between Mills and Schlesinger. Sadly, you know, Mills, after championing the Cuban Revolution, he wrote a big bestseller called Listen, Yankee. He went down to Cuba and hung out with Fidel and Che in the early days. He died very young, I think it was late 40s, in 1962, I think it was.

One more, one more must come up here. Show. Um, so I think a lot of your audience here today came out either inclined to believe your particular counternarrative, or with a counternarrative of their own that they wanted to put to you. As someone who simply wandered in because the topic seemed interesting, you use two terms in describing the book: one is a counternarrative, which I think means something intended to question the common narrative. The other one is a true story, which means something else entirely, especially for a historian. Why is the, you know, the, let's say, Georgetown political science student, or the MIT computer science student, somebody who's educated, who has an idea of what logic is, but who may not be an expert in the subject, why, what, why should they take your to be the true story?

That's a good question. And you really have to read the book, you know, not just listening tonight, to look at the evidence that I compile and the argument that I put together. You know, I think, speaking of Arthur Schlesinger, I think it was Schlesinger who said, "History is an ongoing argument." And I understand that my book will be challenged, uh, from many directions, and it is being challenged. And, you know, the people who have their own ideological bias, that I can see right away, that are trying to knock this story down, I dismiss those. But I take, uh, to heart, actually, people who have done their own work and have researched, uh, this history as exhaustively as I have. And so I often learn from these dialogues with them, you know, whether it's on the internet or face to face. Uh, I understand I didn't get everything right. I didn't get the whole story, perhaps. But I really do think this is the work of my lifetime. And Karen Croft and I worked very hard on this. We've been working basically for about 10 years on this. When you look at both my book, Brothers, and this book, and, um, I think this book is the most complete version of this history that we have at this point. I expect it to, you know, as I say, to be challenged and to evolve, maybe, over time. But as of the year 2015, if you want a real understanding of what happened in the Cold War to this nation, in the eyes of the secret government, and how democracy was, uh, undermined, and how people were killed, heroes who would fight that secret state, then I think you have to read my book.

Great. That's a great way to end. I want to let you know too that David will be at the Howard Zinn Book Festival, which is November 15th at, uh, Mission, uh, branch of City College. Thank you, David. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Karen. Thank you, concerned citizens. And please, I'll be signing books. Yes, please get some books. And where should I be? Get them signed? Why don't you stay there? Okay, stay here. Yeah, or a table, maybe a table. I can move these for you. Great. This looks cool. The name's been a lot, hasn't it? For the most part. Are you studying history? Uh, it's a passing interest for.