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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
The election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 had permanent consequences for U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. major oil companies, which before the election were facing criminal charges for their cartel arrangements, instead were freed to continue their activities, until “In some of the faraway countries where it did business…. Exxon's sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy.” Parallel to this was a radical escalation in 1953 of CIA covert operations. Major plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala, both of which had been turned down by Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, now proceeded, redefining America's relationship to the third world.
1 Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 19-20. The name Exxon was used from 1973.
2 Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 159: “In writing to Truman on 3 May 1961 about the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Acheson said: Why we ever engaged in this asinine Cuban adventure, I cannot imagine. Before I left [the department] it was mentioned to me and I told my informants how you and I had turned down similar suggestions for Iran and Guatemala and why I thought this Cuban idea had been put aside, as it should have been” [citing Dean Acheson, Among friends: personal letters of Dean Acheson, ed, David S. McLellan and David C. Acheson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), 159].
3 Tom Wicker, New York Times, April 29, 2966.
4 Paul S. Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision: a history of the American people, Volume II (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1995), 812.
5 Some in Washington wished to indict other Wall Street figures for wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany. Among those investigated were Herbert Walker and his son-in-law Prescott Bush (father of George H.W. Bush), for their role in representing the American interests of Fritz Thyssen, the German mogul who financed Hitler. According to John Loftus, Allen Dulles may also have been involved: “If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank's lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles' client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles's other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles' cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously” (John Loftus, “How the Bush Family Made Its Fortune from the Nazis,” Tetrahedron.org, September 27, 2000; cf. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews New York: st' Martin's Press 1994], 358-60).
6 Adam LeBor, “Meet the American Banker Who Helped Hitler Loot Jewish Gold-While Spying for the OSS,” Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life, August 30, 2013,
7 Frank W. Thackeray, ed., Events that Changed Germany (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 170. For text of JCS 1067, see here.
8 James Srodes, Allen Dulles: master of spies (Washington: Regnery, 2009), 373.) For a relatively dispassionate account of Allen Dulles's wartime opposition to Roosevelt's intentions to de-industrialize Germany, see e.g. Stuart Eizenstat, coordinator, “U.S. and Allied Efforts To Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During World War,” 37: “Dulles looked forward to a postwar settlement that envisioned the United States working closely with European business and banking circles to reshape Western and Central Europe according to American interests.” See also Stuart Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (Jackson, TN: PublicAffairs, 2009).
9 Two other relevant examples: Truman in 1945 terminated General Donovan's plans to convert OSS into a peacetime CIA; but two years later he was persuaded to accept a plan, drafted largely by Allen Dulles, for just such a CIA. In 1948 Defense Secretary James Forrestal preferred that funds for the anti-Communist parties in the 1948 Italian election should be raised privately, and the hat was passed at the elite Brook Club in New York. But Allen Dulles, still just a lawyer, persuaded the CIA to take over the funding program.
10 Adam LeBor, “Meet the American Banker Who Helped Hitler Loot Jewish Gold-While Spying for the OSS,” Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life, August 30, 2013.
11 Eric Rauchway, “How the Soviets saved capitalism,” TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, April 5, 2013.
12 Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), 63.
13 “On February 8, 1951, about a month before the scheduled start of the trial, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy met in secret session in Washington to discuss the Rosenberg prosecution… The main purpose of the meeting was to determine what classified information could be made public at the trial” (Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: the man and the secrets [New York: Norton, 1991], 421)
14 Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: the shadowy history of the secret bank that runs the world (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 17. Cf. p. 37: “The Standard Oil-IG Farben agreement set the pattern for a series of powerful cartels. John Foster Dulles carried out much of the pioneering legal work for these.”
15 Lebor, Tower of Basel, 95. White was the principal author of the so-called Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize Germany. At the same time, White “tried without success [against Morgenthau] to soften the plan by allowing Germany to rebuild the industries in the Ruhr under international supervision” (James M. Boughton, “The Case against Harry Dexter White: Still Not Proven” [IMF Working Paper WP/00/149, 2000], 12.) This fact challenges one of the common claims against White: that he wished to weaken Germany in order to please the USSR.
16 Lebor, Tower of Basel, 96.
17 Lebor, Tower of Basel, 121-22, 124. Cf. Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the making of a new world order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); James Calvin Baker, Bank for International Settlements: Evolution and Evaluation (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 7: “During World War II, some attempts were made to abolish the BIS, so the Federal Reserve delayed joining the Board. After the war, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were established at the Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, conference to form agencies to facilitate the finance and development operations of the United Nations. U.S. officials believed the BIS operations might be co-opted by these new agencies. However, the United States position on this matter was mellowed by the belief that the BIS might be able to perform beneficial operations with the IMF especially and, perhaps, with the World Bank.”
18 Frank W. Thackeray, ed., Events that Changed Germany (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 170. For text of JCS 1067, see here.
19 Lebor, Tower of Basel, 120.
20 James Srodes, Allen Dulles: master of spies (Washington: Regnery, 2009), 373.) For a relatively dispassionate account of Allen Dulles's wartime opposition to Roosevelt's intentions to de-industrialize Germany, see e.g. Stuart Eizenstat, coordinator, “U.S. and Allied Efforts To Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During World War,” 37: “Dulles looked forward to a postwar settlement that envisioned the United States working closely with European business and banking circles to reshape Western and Central Europe according to American interests.” See also Stuart Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (Jackson, TN: PublicAffairs, 2009).
21 Lebor, Tower of Basel, 138.
22 James Calvin Baker, The Bank for International Settlements: Evolution and Evaluation (Westport, CT: 2002), 203. Cf. John Singleton, Central Banking in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 149: “In 1948 the BIS agreed to return 3,740 kg of looted gold to the original owners. After this concession, the US assets of the BIS, which had been frozen during the war, were unblocked.”
23 Loftus and Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 109-13. Citing testimony from a former naval intelligence officer, Daniel Harkins, they claim that some of the funds were cycled through the post-war “World Commerce Corporation, with Allen Dulles, naturally, as their lawyer” (110). Cf. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis, and The Swiss Banks (New York: St. Martin's/ Griffin, 1998), 278-79. I discuss their claims in American War Machine, 54-56.
24 Baker, Bank for International Settlements, 203.
25 Lebor, Tower of Basel, 140.
26 For the case against White, see e.g. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 125-26, 139. For rebuttal, see e.g. James M. Boughton, “The Case against Harry Dexter White: Still Not Proven,” IMF Working Paper WP/00/149, 2000, 1:”Evaluation of that [VENONA and other new] evidence in the context of White's career and worldview casts doubt on the case against him and provides the basis for a more benign explanation.”
27 Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952], 431; discussion in David Chambers (Whittaker Chambers' grandson), “The Baffling Harry White,” History News Network, May 21, 2012.
28 John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 222; citing “Confidential interviews, former agents, U.S. CIC; former officers, U.S. MIS; former officers and agents, SSU, CIG, and OPC” (557n17).
29 Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), 63.
30 Loftus and Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 221.
31 On March 26, 1943, Congressman Jerry Voorhis introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives calling for an investigation of the Bank for International Settlements, including “the reasons why an American retains the position as president of this Bank” (John Spritzler The people as enemy: the leaders' hidden agenda in World War Two [Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2003], 97; cf. Lebor, Tower of Basel, 97).
32 Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 46-47. With limited evidence, Russell Baker also suspects that Prescott Bush, another prominent member of the BIS German-American financial complex, may have flown to California and participated in the Nixon campaign (Family of secrets: the Bush dynasty, the powerful forces that put it in the White House, and what their influence means for America New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009], 162-164).
33 Loftus and Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 156. Dillon Read had handled 29 percent of the Wall Street financing of German reparations (Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the rise of Hitler [Seal Beach, CA: ‘76 Press, 1976], 29).
34 Conrad Black, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 113.
35 Lewis Hartshorn, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Case That Ignited McCarthyism, 42. Today almost no one believes this. The accepted charges against White are that he shared information, and possibly passed documents, that reached the Soviet Union.
36 The sensational charges against Hiss, such as that he was the architect of betrayal at Yalta, would come later.
37 G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 62.
38 Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins, The Nazi Hydra in America (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 2008), 195; cf. 193-94, 273-74, 368-70, etc.
39 Willard Edwards, “Hiss spy paper linked to late treasury aid,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 29, 1949, 1-2. The doctor who signed White's death certificate (and who was not present when White died) later denied that digitalis was a factor. More recently the rightwing author John Koster has charged (with no evidence other than a contemporary movie which White might have seen) that White overdosed on digitalis in order to commit suicide (John P. Koster, Operation Snow: how a Soviet mole in FDR's White House triggered Pearl Harbor Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2012], 204-05).
40 Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 63; citing Peter Grose, Gentleman spy: the life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 297n (run-in).
41 Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 78. An anti-Hiss author has implied the opposite, suggesting from an annotation in the file that the identification of ALES as Hiss was made much later, in 1969 (White, Alger Hiss's looking-glass wars, 225). But a partially declassified FBI memo from 1950, viewable on line here, makes it clear that by then the FBI was already investigating the possibility that Hiss was ALES, who had reportedly flown to Moscow after the Yalta conference (“The Alger Hiss Story: Venona and the Russian Files”).
42 Summers, Arrogance of Power, 78.
43 Benjamin Weiser, “Nixon Lobbied Grand Jury to Indict Hiss in Espionage Case, Transcripts Reveal,” New York Times, October 12, 1999: “Judge Peter K. Leisure of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who ordered the release after reviewing detailed summaries of the transcripts, had ruled that an exception to traditional grand jury secrecy should be made for the archive. “‘The court finds the public has a significant interest in disclosure of Nixon's testimony,' Judge Leisure wrote. ‘Grand jury testimony by a Congressional official allegedly attempting to influence a grand jury's charging decisions is of inherent and substantial historical importance.'''
44 Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Washington: Regnery, 2000), 233-34.
45 Conrad Black, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 122.
46 “President Nixon Remembers the Alger Hiss Case: Selected References from the Nixon Tapes,” Stanley I. Kutler (ed.), Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997), 7.
47 In addition, the materials produced by Chambers “included a long letter in Harry White's own handwriting” (Haynes and Klehr, Venona: decoding Soviet espionage in America, 139).
48 Black, Richard M. Nixon, 131. My on-line investigations have failed to find a more detailed description of these cables. Black's account should however be enough to establish that, if the microfilms did in fact come from Hiss, then Hiss was not, as many believe, the “ALES” of VENONA cable traffic, whose work was described as “obtaining military information only” (see facsimile reproduced in Summers, Arrogance of Power, 493).
49 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 362n; quoting from Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 69. The five rolls are now deposited in the National Archives (Record Group 60.3.5), Black was in error when he claimed that the withheld rolls contained “Navy Department secret files” (Black, Richard M. Nixon, 130); the Navy files were publicly available.
50 This impression is corroborated by the odd fact that the records of the long-defunct HUAC committee “were sealed, in 1976 [under Ford], for an additional fifty years” (Summers, Arrogance of Power, 77).
51 At the time Andrews “vowed that he could make Nixon president” (Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI [New York: Random House, 2012], 476n).
52 We now know that on December 3 the Justice Department notified the FBI that an indictment of Chambers [for perjury] was contemplated (Athan Theoharis, Chasing spies: how the FBI failed in counterintelligence but promoted the politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War years [Chicago : Ivan R. Dee, 2002], 115; citing Allen Weinstein, Perjury: the Hiss-Chambers case New York : Random House, 1997], 271). Not surprising, since by this time Chambers was a self-admitted perjurer!
53 Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Education of a Politician 1913-1962, 128 (emphasis in original); Robert O. Blanchard, ed., Congress and the news media (New York, Hastings House, 1974), 305.
54 Gary Allen, Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask (Boston, Western Islands, 1971].
55 “Alger Hiss,” emphasis added. The brevity of the storage in the pumpkin (not known at the time) is also conceded by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr: “The film had actually been in the pumpkin only since that morning…. Chambers explained later that he had briefly hidden the film in the pumpkin because he had feared that agents from Hiss's defense team would steal it” (John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Early Cold War spies: the espionage trials that shaped American politics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 108).
56 Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 69. The day before leaving, Nixon reportedly told the House doorkeeper, William Miller, “‘I'm going to get on a steamship, and you will be reading about it/ I am going out to sea, and they are going to send for me. You will understand when I get back.'. Coast Guard logs also reportedly suggest that arrangements for Nixon's return had been made even before his ship left harbor in New York, which would confirm suspicion that the trip was a charade to ensure maximum publicity.” (loc. cit., 70; citing William Miller, Fishbait: The Memoirs of the Congressional Doorkeeper Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977], 41-).
57 Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), 305.
58 Donald A. Ritchie, Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 75. Ritchie, like many other authors, writes that Nixon (and Stripling) went out to the pumpkin field accompanied by Bert Andrews (Donald A. Ritchie, Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps New York: Oxford University Press, 2005], 75). Ritchie and the rest are probably relying on the badly edited posthumous memoir of Andrews, ed. Peter Andrews, A tragedy of history; a journalist's confidential role in the HissChambers case (Washington: Robert. B. Luce, 1962]. Cf. U.S. State Department, History of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security of the United States, 56: “On December 2, 1948, Andrews joined Nixon on a trip to Chambers' farm near Westminster, Maryland.” But on December 2, Nixon was already beginning his preplanned sea voyage.
59 David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979), 260.
60 Drew Pearson, Toledo Blade, August 4, 1968. Pearson added, “Thanks in part to Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune, Mr. Nixon's mentor, the headlines helped catapult Mr. Nixon into the Senate.”
61 Sheldon Anderson, Condemned to repeat it: “lessons of history” and the making of U.S. Cold War containment policy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 95.
One who still blames the Yalta handover on Hiss (and on Harry Hopkins, another alleged Soviet agent) is Christina Shelton, in Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason (New York: Simon & Schuster, Threshold Editions, 2012), 121-22.
62 The J. Henry Schröder & Co. Bank and J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation (Schrobanco, the firm of which Allen Dulles had been an officer) had a financial stake in all three of Allen Dulles' major CIA covert operations. Schrōder had financed the creation of Anglo-Persian (later Anglo-Iranian) oil: thus Frank Cyril Tiarks was a partner both in J. Henry Schröder & Co., and also in the Anglo- Iranian Oil Company (1917–1948). (He was also a member of the Ribbentrop-inspired Anglo- German Fellowship and of the British Union of Fascists.) Schrobanco had a stake in the International Railways of Central America, a firm developed in conjunction with what became United Fruit in order to ship out United Fruit's bananas in Guatemala. Both Schrōders and Schrobanco were heavily invested in Cuban sugar; and M.E. Rionda, president of Cuba Cane Corporation, was a member of Schrobanco's board.
63 The surrender at Yalta of Eastern Europe to Soviet domination is still blamed on Hiss (and on Harry Hopkins, another alleged Soviet agent) by retired DIA intelligence analyst Christina Shelton, in Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason (New York: Simon & Schuster, Threshold Editions, 2012), 121-22. Cf. Ann Coulter, Treason: liberal treachery from the cold war to the war on terrorism (New York: Crown Forum, 2003).
64 Richard Brinkman, Corporate Pharaohs: A Vicious Circle of Globalization (Xlibris Corp, 2013.), 234.
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