The Devil’s Chessboard

Based on explosive new evidence, bestselling author David Talbot tells America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA.

Drawing on revelatory new materials – including exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, newly discovered U.S. government documents, and U.S. and European intelligence sources – Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures.

Dulles’s decades as the director of the CIA – which he used to further his public and private agendas – were dark times in American politics. Calling himself ‘the secretary of state of unfriendly countries’, Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients – colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, culminating in the assassination of his political enemy, John F. Kennedy.

Indeed, The Devil’s Chessboard offers shocking new evidence in the killings of both President Kennedy and his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy. This is an expose of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state – and the battle for America’s soul.

Reviews

From the reviews of BROTHERS:

'Brothers brilliantly evokes the Kennedys and their court – a brash yet idealistic fraternity reminiscent of Mad Men and The West Wing … Expertly researched through inner-circle interviews, the book suggests a conspiracy was also behind Bobby's murder in 1968, and names two spooks who Talbot believes were part of the JFK Dallas plot' Guardian

‘Bracing … full of shocking moments and juicy tidbits’ Los Angeles Times

‘Pulitzer Prize-bait … [a] manic and near-perfect tale of the Kennedy brothers … shows us America’s Camelot in a brand-new light’ San Francisco Weekly

'Riveting, disturbing and sometimes unbearably sad' Irish Times

About the author

David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and the acclaimed national bestseller Season of the Witch. He is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon, and was a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine and the features editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He has written for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, and other major publications.