Allen Dulles
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Allen Dulles was the long-serving CIA director, in office until January 1961, whom John Kiriakou calls a "monster" and "a very dark figure in American history", adding that both Dulles brothers were dark figures.

The Guatemala coup

The charge Kiriakou returns to most often is the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's government, which he narrates as a business decision rather than a strategic one. The United Fruit Company had been shipping Guatemalan bananas to the United States for the better part of a century, owning the train, the tracks, and the land on both sides of them, and by 1954 the Guatemalan government was arguing it made nothing from the trade and should nationalise the crop. In the version he tells from the workers' side, the labourers earning around ten cents a day wanted to organise a union and take a larger share, "and the CIA said, 'Actually, no.'"

The reason, in Kiriakou's account, was the composition of the board. Three of United Fruit's directors were John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State; Allen Dulles, his brother, the CIA director; and the brother of President Eisenhower's secretary. The company later became Chiquita Banana, and Kiriakou's summary of the outcome is that the coup installed a military dictatorship, gave rise to the term "banana republic," and "Chiquita got to keep all the bananas."

His estimates of how long the dictatorship brutalised the country vary between tellings, "the next 20 plus years" in one, "the next half a century" in another, but the verdict does not: Guatemala "still hasn't gotten over that coup," and remains one of the most dangerous places in the world.

He draws two structural lessons from it. The first is that the CIA does not think past the operation: it does not ask what a corrupt dictatorship will do afterwards, or that it will likely let drugs move through the country, "all they think is, hey, we get to keep the bananas and we install a friendly dictatorship." The second is that nothing stopped it, because at the time there were no congressional oversight committees at all.

Reputation inside the CIA

By the time Kiriakou joined, Dulles was "kind of forgotten," his era of "kicking asses and taking names" from 1952 to 1960 long past, though his bust still greeted visitors at CIA headquarters. Kiriakou asked about him when he first started, and reports the answer from old-timers as a distinction between two kinds of standing: everybody feared James Angleton, but they respected Dulles.

He draws the same line morally, and in Dulles's favour. Unlike Angleton, Dulles "knew he had been doing some filthy stuff", knew, in other words, that he was a bad guy, and Kiriakou repeats the account of him saying on his deathbed that he would "see my boys back in hell."

Truman, and the op-ed the CIA killed

Kiriakou confirms the account that Dulles went to former President Truman's home to try to talk him out of pursuing his public complaints against the CIA. The complaint took the form of a Washington Post op-ed shortly after the Kennedy assassination, which did not appear in the paper's afternoon edition because the CIA demanded the Post remove it, and it did.

The Kennedy assassination

Dulles also appears in Kiriakou's stated conclusion about the Kennedy assassination. He does not call it a CIA operation, he notes the director at the time was a close friend of Robert Kennedy's, and by his description a good and decent man, but believes elements of the CIA were responsible. The men he has in mind are those who hated John Kennedy for not providing air cover at the Bay of Pigs and wanted revenge, including one very famous Greek American whose name, Kiriakou says, "does not bear repeating."

What connects them to Dulles is contact. "These guys were still in constant touch with the Dulles brothers, who were also just dark stains on American history", and it is from there that he says he came to the conclusion that CIA officers carried it out. He is explicit that he did not think this while he worked at the agency, when he found the idea so absurd he could not believe people discussed it: "it's like, we're the good guys. Why would we kill the president?"

See also

- United Fruit and the Arbenz coup
- James Jesus Angleton
- JFK Assassination
