The mass media tend to paint a simplistic, “good guys versus bad guys” picture of complex events in other countries, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and Iran. This has also been the case regarding the crisis in the Ukraine, where the story is often presented as a one-sided demonization of Russia, a view that is encouraged by western politicians “striking heroic poses” (Chomsky) while hypocritically presenting themselves as champions of democracy and human rights.

While all governments try to manipulate public opinion, arguably none has had such dire global effects as the United States during the Cold War, when Washington portrayed the Soviets as an “evil empire” trying to conquer the world. Central to that campaign were Allen Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles. As heads of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department respectively, they had more impact on Washington’s foreign policies in the 1950s than anybody except President Dwight Eisenhower himself.

Their bloody record is reconstructed in a fascinating history by Stephen Kinzer, an historian and award-winning journalist for the New York Times.

Foster (as he was called) and Allen were sons of privilege, born in “a haven for New York millionaires on the shore of Lake Ontario.” Their father was a pastor at the local Presbyterian Church, and they were bred to see themselves as part of a “missionary Christianity, which tells believers that they understand eternal truths and have an obligation to convert the unenlightened.”

Even as young boys, they “dined with ambassadors, senators, cabinet secretaries, supreme court justices”, and presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. As adults, they were the ultimate insiders, both in Washington and on Wall Street.

Not surprisingly, the Dulles brothers accepted the view, as common now as it was then, that the United States is an “exceptional” nation because it is “inherently more moral” than other countries. As a superpower, then, Washington had both the right and the duty to, “not only topple governments but guide the course of history.”

Another element in their world view was even more fundamental: “protecting the right of large American corporations to operate freely in the world,” regardless of the wishes of the (“unenlightened”) people in other nations. If that corporate “right” was not recognized by foreigners, the brothers had no qualms about using tactics such as bribery, sabotage, assassinations, and even military force in order to destroy those people who dared resist the United States and its corporate clients.

One early incident foreshadowed their cold-bloodedness. When Allen was working for the US government in Switzerland during the First World War, he was told that a woman he was dating was passing information to Austria and must be “liquidated.” One night after taking her to dinner, Allen delivered her to two British agents. “She was never heard from again.”

The brothers reached the height of their power in 1953, when Eisenhower became president. One of their first crusades was to target the democratically-elected government of Iran, headed by the nationalist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Iran’s sins included taking control of the oil industry, at the time almost completely owned by the British.

The final straw, however, was the Iranian parliament’s refusal to accept a deal with a US business conglomerate which would cost that country more a half a trillion dollars (in today’s currencies). The company, OCI, was a client of Allen Dulles, who, working with the British, directed a successful coup which overthrew Iran’s democracy and replaced it with the dictatorship of the Sha—who, coincidentally, was also a client of Allen. The consequences of that conspiracy are still being felt to this day.

Only a year later, the Dulles brothers were instrumental in overthrowing another democratic government, this time in Guatemala, led by President Jacobo Árbenz. In this case, it was the US corporate giant, United Fruit Company, that had a problem. By “coincidence,” the multinational was not only a client of both Allen and Foster, but they also “held substantial blocks of United Fruit stock.”

President Árbenz made the mistake of assuming that Guatemala belonged to Guatemalans, and won passage of a land reform law which “required large landowners to sell the uncultivated parts of their holdings…for distribution to peasant families.” United Fruit owned most of the country’s richest land but left 85% uncultivated.

Again, the CIA went into action, launching a propaganda campaign about “communists,” staging a phoney uprising, and working with reactionary elements of the Guatemalan army. The result was a coup which forced Arbenz out and established a military dictatorship that lasted for decades. The body count in that period was almost a quarter of a million killed, most by government death squads supported by the United States.

Other bloody interventions took place around the world, in Laos, the Congo, Indonesia, Eastern Europe, Lebanon, and even inside the Soviet Union itself.

Two of these clandestine initiatives stand out. The biggest failure in Allen Dulles’s career was the attempt to destroy the Cuban revolution. The US government was upset when their puppet dictator in Havana, Fulgencio Batista, was overthrown at the expense of American businesses, such as ATT as well as United Fruit and the Mafia, which economically dominated the country. (The scene in The Godfather, Part II, showing US businessmen slicing up a cake in the shape of Cuba, is a realistic metaphor).

When numerous terrorist attacks and assassination attempts failed to overthrow Castro’s government, the CIA launched an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Fidel Castro himself led the counter-attack which completely defeated the exiled Cubans who made up the invasion force.

John Kennedy, who had just become president, publicly accepted “sole responsibility” for the failure. “In private, however, he cursed ‘CIA bastards’ for luring him into it.” Several months later, he fired Allen as head of the Agency.

However, the most horrendous of all the Dulles brothers’ foreign interventions didn’t explode until after they were gone. It took place in a country which few Americans had heard of in the early 1950s — Vietnam.

In brief: the Vietnamese, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, allied themselves with the United States to fight their common foe in the Second World War — imperial Japan. The Vietnamese wanted to expand that friendship after the war, but Washington preferred to help the French try to regain control over their former colonies in Indochina (including Laos and Cambodia).

After the Vietnamese decisively defeated France at the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a peace conference was held in Geneva. The French agreed to move their troops to the southern part of Vietnam, while the victorious Viet Minh units would go north. The Accord called for an internationally supervised free vote in 1956 to allow the Vietnamese to determine their own government. The US refused to allow the election because, as Eisenhower admitted, Ho would win “80% of the vote.”

Instead, the brothers found a Vietnamese Catholic living in the United States, and made him “Prime Minister” of something they invented: “the Government of South Vietnam.” They then staged an election in which their puppet “won” over 92 per cent of the vote, and proceeded to establish a repressive police state.

By the time the US was defeated in Indochina, several million people had been killed, millions more wounded, and the door was opened to the genocidal horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

Kinzer has done a very thorough job of chronicling the many factors that influenced the Dulles brothers, as well as their record in promoting US political and economic interests. He also shows how closely the US media worked with Washington in propaganda campaigns to convince citizens that, “truth, justice, and the American way” always go together.

Hopefully, “The Brothers” will make it more difficult to deceive the public into supporting future campaigns to slay imaginary “monsters”, while ignoring the real threats, such as global warming and growing inequality.

Peter G. Prontzos has taught for over 25 years at Langara College in Vancouver, receiving the 2017 Instructor Emeritus in Political Science and Interdisciplinary Studies.