Playing With Pawns
America’s most powerful team of brothers in the post-World War II era was not named Kennedy. It was the Dulles brothers — John Foster as secretary of state and Allen as director of the Central Intelligence Agency — who permanently changed the nation’s diplomatic and intelligence-gathering activities into a means of waging covert war against foreign governments posing real or imagined threats to the United States and the “free world.” Half a century before “regime change” was the mantra of neoconservatives demanding the overthrow of governments in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, the Dulles brothers plotted and carried out the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, attempted to subvert and overthrow regimes in Indonesia and Cuba, and helped plan an assassination in the Congo. Stephen Kinzer’s recently published book, The Brothers, details the means by which the two men formed “a nexus of power unmatched in American history.”
All in the Family
The brothers developed a taste for the machinations of world politics early in life. Their maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, had been secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison and helped direct the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy of Queen Liliuokalani. Foster endorsed the sending of American troops to the islands in support of a rebellion by white settlers, who took control of the new government of Hawaii.
“The native inhabitants had proved themselves incapable of maintaining a respectable and responsible government,” Foster later wrote, “and lacked the energy or will to improve the advantages which Providence had given them.” Foster became “the first American secretary of state to participate in the overthrow of a foreign government,” Kinzer wrote.
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