Exactly 70 years ago today, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff — and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Sixteen years later — just one month after the Kennedy assassination — Truman published a bombshell in The Washington Post: “I have never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations… It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of Government… so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.”
When it comes to behind-the-scenes intrigue, no one could out-sinister Allen Dulles, director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles’s job, simply put, was to hijack the US government — for the benefit of the wealthy.
What he did, and how he did it, has never been more relevant, given the state of the nation in 2017. That’s why we are excerpting some revelatory chapters from David Talbot’s recent Dulles biography, “The Devil’s Chessboard.”
https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/07/26/devils-chessboard-allen-dulles-cia-rise-american-secret-government/