The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot connects a few more dots in the JFK assassination story. It’s ostensibly a biography of Allen Dulles, former head of the CIA under Eisenhower and Kennedy, but Talbot’s book examines how Dulles’ criminal acts helped to create the Orwellian national security state we currently inhabit.

“Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies,” Talbot writes, “These were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign.”

President Eisenhower gave Allen Dulles and his elder brother John Foster a long leash for their foreign policy schemes, but John F. Kennedy had different ideas, and a vastly different set of values. He had the gall to take responsibility for his own foreign policy, and this deeply troubled Allen Dulles and those he represented.

Kennedy had reluctantly agreed to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Dulles and his fellow warmongers were convinced JFK would give in at the last minute and send in US troops to back them up. But they misjudged him. The mission was a humiliating failure and a major blow to America’s global stature.

Furious the CIA had attempted to blackmail him into all-out war with the Soviet Union with a crazy scheme that was hatched under the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

Dulles’ Bay of Pigs manipulation lost him all credibility with Kennedy. JFK took the high road in public, though, refusing to blame the CIA outright – although in private he made it clear the Agency was not to be trusted. The enmity between the pair grew.

Under Dulles, the CIA sabotaged Kennedy’s directives while supporting right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis as the West’s bulwark against communism, just as its predecessor the OSS had done since World War II.

Dulles engineered a coup d’état with the help of the wealthiest and most influential families in America. They conspired under the auspices of Allen Dulles’s network of former Nazis, organized crime figures, media moguls and mercenaries – to undermine the dreams and aspirations of most of the world’s citizens.

People living at the time will never forget where they were when they heard the news of the assassination; but how many Americans can still recall the cheers that went up and the celebrations that JFK’s death elicited in many parts of the country when his death was announced?

JFK was surrounded by enemies; his policies were subverted and ignored  by many of his top aids. Here is a very short list of the people who hated him the most and why:

• He was hated by the Pentagon for not considering nuclear war a first option; even more so for his intention to pull all US advisors out of Vietnam by 1965;
• Big Oil for his support for the Oil Depletion Allowance;
• Republicans for being “soft” on communism;
• the racists and right-wingers for his stance on civil rights;
• The mob for enforcing the laws of our nation and refusing to be bought off;
• the Cuban exiles who wanted Cuba returned to the despots;
• J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI – for any number of reasons…
• Crucially, he was hated by Allen Dulles, head of the CIA – who was fired by JFK yet somehow managed to land on the Warren Commission investigating his incredibly suspicious death.

To sum it up: JFK was feared and loathed by what most of us would consider to be THE FORCES OF EVIL. 

His bravery was commendable considering the forces pitted against him. Ultimately he failed. 

These same forces are still firmly in control of the global economy today. 

Democracy in America is a thin veneer which hides the reality that we are actually ruled by a military junta supported by a deeply entrenched corporate oligarchy. The only reason citizens are permitted to vote is to perpetuate the illusion of choice: a choice between the lesser of two evils; both controlled by the War Machine.

That is what we call ‘democracy’ now.