A Comprehensive Review of Reclaiming History Part VIII

James DiEugenio 18 Bugliosi’s Bungle, Part VIII
the infamous I. G. Farben chemical company (ibid., pp. 125–7). This Dulles
client was another huge early contributor to the Nazis. When Sullivan and
Cromwell helped construct Farben’s American alliances, and its subsidiaries,
Farben insisted on secret German control (ibid., p. 136). Through its industrial
might and scope, Farben became a crucial contributor to the war effort. For instance,
in 1943, Farben was responsible for the entire Wehrmacht supply of
synthetic rubber, methanol, and lubricating oil, plus 95% of its poison gas, 84%
of German explosives, and 70% of German gunpowder (New York Times, October
21, 1945). As Senator Homer Boone said during a Senate hearing on military
affairs on June 4, 1943, “Farben was Hitler and Hitler was Farben.” Allen
Dulles was important to Sullivan and Cromwell in this regard: since he helped
draft parts of the Versailles Treaty, he could advise Farben on how to bypass
them, and illegally rearm Germany (Heilbrunn, p. 34). Allen also served as general
counsel for J. Henry Schroder, New York, whose Hamburg banking branch
was a chief backer of Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS (ibid.). Allen tried
to fuzz up all this hobnobbing with the Nazis as he socialized with the English
upper classes by saying that the U.S. had no interest in “fights over oppressed
races and lost causes” (ibid.).
In 1940, William Donovan hired Allen to serve in the Office of Coordinator of
Information (COI), which would later turn into the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS). Stationed in Berne again, Dulles ran agents all across Europe. He had a
habit of playing both sides. For instance, in France he ran money to “DeGaulle’s
Free French guerillas but also to the anti-Gaullist factions of his arch-rival,
General Giraud” (Mosley, p. 144). In Germany, he worked with both Nazis and
anti-Nazis. It is here again where some of Dulles’s most controversial acts occurred.
The first was the attempted working out of a sort of “separate peace”
with the SS in northern Italy through General Karl Wolff. This was initiated
without any knowledge by his superiors, and continued like that for weeks.
When Dulles finally reported it, Stalin was enraged: he accused Dulles of trying
to arrange a private accommodation with Germany, based, in part, on anti-
Bolshevism. For this reason, the Joint Chiefs told Dulles to terminate the contacts
(ibid., p. 184).
There may be some truth to Stalin’s accusation. When the war ended, Dulles
became OSS chief in Germany. There he got to know two men who would figure
prominently in his efforts to construct the future Central Intelligence Agency:
Richard Helms and Frank Wisner (ibid., p. 226). Wisner told Dulles, “Forget the
Nazis and get in there and find what the Commies are up to instead.” (ibid.,
p. 229) In this regard, Dulles proposed a scheme by which a group of anti-Nazi
students would stage a coup in Berlin, take over the city, and then have a force
of Anglo-American paratroopers occupy the capital and make it pro-Western—
all before the Russian troops arrived. It was wisely rejected by General Eisenhower:
it may have started World War III; for when the Russians got wind of it,
they planned on drenching any American occupying force “by accident” with an
artillery bombardment (ibid., p. 230).
With this dropped, Dulles found a new way to find out what the Soviets were up
to. He heard that General Reinhard Gehlen was hiding in Bavaria. Gehlen was
the commander of the Nazi intelligence apparatus for Eastern Europe; he spe-
ASSASSINATION RESEARCH / Vol. 6 No. 1 © Copyright 2009 James DiEugenio