This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction – it’s history. David Talbot’s previous book, the bestseller “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” explored Robert F. Kennedy’s search for the truth following his brother’s murder. His new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” zooms out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.

This isn’t merely a whodunit story, though. Talbot’s ultimate goal is exploring how the rise of the “deep state” has impacted the trajectory of America, and given our nation’s vast influence, the rest of the planet. “To thoroughly and honestly analyze [former CIA director] Allen Dulles’s legacy is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy,” Talbot told Salon. “To really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems.”

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Just as America’s current national security apparatus has used terrorism as a justification for spying on American citizens, torture, and the annihilation of innocent civilians as collateral damage, Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how spymaster Allen Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. For readers unfamiliar with Dulles’ history, the first few chapters are like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water. Talbot’s assertion that Dulles is a psychopath is hard to dismiss after the intelligence agent is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Allen Dulles and his fellow Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy.

Jumping from geopolitical strategy to the psychological realm, Talbot details how it was not only enemies who had reason to fear Dulles, but his own friends and family, as well. The book veers into a dark, terrifying investigation of the MKUltra Project, a hideous “mind control program” developed by the CIA during Dulles’ reign as director, that dosed unsuspecting people with LSD, pushed the limits of sleep deprivation and engaged in other deeply unethical experiments. The program has been exposed, bit by bit, over decades, thanks to lawsuits and previous investigative reporting, but Talbot sheds light on how Dulles subjected his own son and attempted to “enroll” his wife in these hideous “therapies.”

By the time “The Devil’s Chessboard” eventually climaxes with the events that unfolded in Dallas in 1963, Talbot’s argument that Dulles had both the power and temperament to execute such a plot is more than believable. “Dulles’ favorite word about someone was whether they were useful or not,” Talbot said. “And that’s the way he thought of everyone – to what extent could he use them.”

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This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. [Full disclosure: David Talbot is the founder and former CEO of Salon.]

You begin the book by detailing the Dulles brothers’ sympathy, collaboration and eventual rescue of many high-ranking Nazis during and after World War II. Once you see how comfortable and even eager they were to align themselves with people who epitomize the worst evils of the 20th century, it becomes easier to accept some of the most shocking accusations that come later in the book. Why were the brothers so willing to offer support, even to the point of committing treason, for the Nazis?

I think the story of the Dulles brothers is the story of the amorality of American power, and by extension, all power. On some level, Allan Dulles was a psychopath. He didn’t feel the feelings of other people, and certainly wasn’t able to put himself in shoes of the Jewish people, who were on the brink of the Holocaust in Europe, and even during the Holocaust. He was a man who felt history and politics should be controlled by the elite few. He and his brother were raised in this milieu. Their family was full of statesmen and people who had been at the helm of the country for generations.

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They felt that the greater goal of America during the war was reestablishing Germany as a bulwark against growing Soviet power. They felt all along that the Soviet Union represented the greater threat. They were, in fact, very socially comfortable with many members of the Nazi elite, including bankers, security and intelligence people. To them, the whole question about war crimes and the horrors the Nazis had committed during the war were secondary to the more important geo-political questions [such as] who will rebuild Germany after the war and how to make sure the Soviet Union does not overrun Europe.

The thing that I found startling when I was researching the book was the extent to which Dulles, as the top U.S. spy in continental Europe throughout most of the war, was again and again given inside reports on the Holocaust… of what happening inside this inferno and the massive roundup of Jews, and what was happening to them once they were rounded up. He was given these reports at great risk of these people who snuck into Switzerland – with documents and eyewitness accounts – and again and again he failed to relay these inside reports to Washington as it was developing. So, imagine the kind of compartmentalization – there is some kind of psychopathology to it – where it doesn’t even enter into your equation all this massive suffering of the Jewish people.

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Dulles was an incredibly cold and remote figure, even with his family. For him, it was all about the game of power. That’s why I called the book: “The Devil’s Chessboard.” He and his brother were obsessive chess players, and they treated people as if they were pawns in their game, and not as human beings.

So it’s clear that even during the height of World War II, while the U.S. and Russia were fighting as allies against the Axis Powers, the Dulles brothers saw Russia as the real enemy. One of the most notorious manifestations of this agenda that you discuss in the book is how an attempt to rescue and negotiate with Nazis – against Roosevelt’s wishes – during Operation Sunrise helped trigger the Cold War by proving to Russia that the U.S. couldn’t be trusted. Was the Cold War inevitable?

Look, Joseph Stalin was no choirboy. He was a monster. And he was gripped with his own dark paranoia as well. Certainly what he did to his people was barbaric – as barbaric as what Hitler did to his people. So, I am not defending Stalin at all. But the fact is: FDR had worked out a very interesting partnership with him, and without that partnership, Hitler couldn’t have been defeated.

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The Soviet Union and Soviet people took the brunt of Hitler’s violence and turned it back against him. Really, the Soviet Union was primarily responsible – although American history books don’t reflect this – for the defeat of Nazi forces. FDR knew that he had to keep that coalition together. There were a number of people in the Roosevelt administration – including Roosevelt himself – who felt that, for the good of world peace, that partnership with Russia had to be continued after the war.

So, I feel that if FDR had lived, there is a good chance that the Cold War could’ve been avoided because of the unique relationship of trust between Stalin and Roosevelt. Even while Roosevelt was alive and was sick in the final weeks of war, he was still struggling to maintain that delicate partnership. But, at the same time, you have Dulles in Switzerland, doing everything he can to undermine that partnership by going behind FDR’s back, in violation of FDR’s policy of unconditional surrender. He had a policy that no one was supposed to negotiate deals with the Nazi leaders, that the Nazis were to be fully crushed.

In defiance of that, Allen Dulles throughout most of his time in Switzerland, was meeting with various high-level Nazi representatives, and trying to cut a separate deal with them. [Dulles’s deals] would’ve left much of the Nazi regime highly intact. And in fact, he does cut this deal in Sunrise with Karl Wolff, who is head of Nazi security in Italy and a vile figure (who by all measures should’ve been tried in Nuremberg with the original defendants, and probably would’ve been convicted and hung). Wolff was the right-hand man to [SS Chief] Himmler and the liaison between Hitler and Himmler. This is a guy who had lots of blood on his hands.

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But, Dulles protected him and made this deal with him that really didn’t result in anything significant from the strategic point of view. It might’ve ended the war in Italy a few days earlier, but it didn’t save many lives – except the lives of war criminals whom Dulles was dealing with. And, as you say, the even worse effect of this was to instill the idea in Stalin’s mind that the United States was stabbing him in the back by cutting this separate deal in Italy. Everything that President Roosevelt had done to try and maintain this partnership with Stalin throughout the war was effectively dismantled by Dulles in a matter of weeks through the Operation Sunrise dealings.

What do you think Dulles ultimately saw the as the benefits of Operation Sunrise? Was heightening this confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, and antagonizing Stalin his goal?

Operation Sunrise was prompted by several things or had several motivations. One: he was trying to stop the Red Army, who were advancing across Europe. So he was trying to cut a peace deal as quickly as possible with the Nazi forces that would prevent the Soviet army from entering Italy (there was a strong communist party in Italy too – a strong Left).

For him, it was “the clash of civilizations” [similar to how] many conservatives feel today about Islam. Communism and the Soviet Union represented, to people like the Dulles brothers – who were these iconic mouthpieces or lawyers or diplomats for Western capitalism – the ultimate enemy. So, Russia had to be stopped and crushed at all costs. They saw the Cold War as inevitable. Just as many of the Nazis they were dealing with saw the Cold War as part two of their own epic crusade against Bolshevism. In that respect, the Nazi war criminals and the Dulles brothers really did have a common enemy and a common goal.

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In some ways, because of people like the Dulles brothers, and other like-minded people in the U.S. government and military, we didn’t defeat the Third Reich so much as repurpose them for the Cold War. Many of the people in [Chancellor Konrad] Adenauer’s government in West Germany after the war included a number of high-ranking Nazis.

In the CIA’s employment of former Nazis, American agents worked very closely with these people who part of a regime that was characterized by fascism, violence against its own people, domestic surveillance and other similarly undemocratic attributes. How much of an influence did Nazis have on the nascent CIA and, in a greater sense, the American government?

I think the Nazis had a very pernicious influence on Washington’s thinking during the Cold War. [German intelligence chief] Reinhard Gehlen, for instance, was feeding Dulles and the CIA all sorts of false information about military strength of the Soviet Union, and their aggressive intentions. The Soviet Union, of course, had suffered epically during World War II and was in no mood to plunge into World War III.

But in the mind of people like Gehlen, these fascists who had been at war with the Soviet Union for years, they thought the Soviet Union was about to launch World War III. They injected a paranoid spore into Washington’s mind, and they fed people like CIA officials with lots of bogus intelligence. So, in some ways, our paranoia about the Soviet Union... you see that through the figure of the ex-Nazi scientist “Dr. Strangelove” in the Kubrick film, you that sort of mentality. That was all too true…the feeling that in some ways World War III or this nuclear Holocaust that many people thought was coming was the final stage of this Wagnerian, fascist, apocalyptic view of history.

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There are other characters in “Dr. Strangelove” inspired by real people too. General Ripper was influenced by [U.S. Air Force general] Curtis LeMay, who you talk about in the book as wanting to use nuclear weapons or atomic bombs as a solution to every foreign policy.

That’s right. In fact, I was talking with Dan Ellsberg about the film, and he said that he and other defense analysts, who were working at the Pentagon at the time, called it a documentary, not a film, because it was so accurate and true to life. So, the “mind meld” between former Nazis like Gehlen and Dulles was incredibly poisonous and had tragic consequences throughout the Cold War.

Although your book is historical nonfiction, it reads like a spy thriller. So even though we’re talking about events that happened decades ago, I don’t want to spoil readers by giving away your whole case for why Allen Dulles was ultimately the mastermind behind JFK’s murder and the subsequent coverup. So I’ll just ask you to explain however much of the case you’re comfortable with.

I tried, in a very thoroughly documented way, to show how not only Dulles, but the men who were in his network of powerful Wall Street bankers and lawyers and powerful figures in Washington in the national security world developed a feeling that they were the true center of power in America, and not whoever happened to be occupying the White House.

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--which wasn’t necessarily untrue.

Right, I mean, that was the beginning of what many scholars now call the deep state. [The deep state] is essentially an alternative network of power that runs the country no matter who is in the White House. I think the book is in some ways a narrative that brings that idea to life. It wasn’t just Kennedy; As I said, it was starting with Roosevelt, then Truman, then Eisenhower -- theses presidents that Dulles and the people around Dulles were serving, they were also subverting. They were basically following their own line, the line they had worked out privately amongst themselves in groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, and other elite organizations, or just over dinners or at the private clubs they belonged to (The Metropolitan Club or the Navy Club or the Alibi Club).

So, by the time that this young Jack Kennedy comes along in the final third of [my] book, you start to see that Dulles doesn’t have much respect for the president. He particularly didn’t have much respect for a young, untested president like John F. Kennedy. He had first met Kennedy when he was a very young and physically frail senator. He had just been operated on for back surgery and could barely stand up. He met him at the Kennedy family home back in Palm beach. He thought of himself as Kennedy’s mentor and tutor, and he thought JFK would be a very pliable, young president and open to direction and advice from men like Dulles.

But they had this very acrimonious split over CIA-led invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, where Kennedy felt he had been lied to and sandbagged, and forced into supporting this invasion. I think that the plan all along was the CIA had wanted the invasion to fail, but Dulles hoped and was completely convinced that Kennedy would be forced to send in the full might of the U.S. military to save the invasion and to crush Castro. When Kennedy didn’t do that and refused to escalate it into an international crisis, it provoked this split within the Kennedy government that led to Dulles being forced out of power, much to his shock. He had never been treated that way by a president).

But, he doesn’t just go back home to [retire] after that. As my book shows, he goes back to Georgetown and begins to set up an anti-Kennedy government in exile. He operates as if he’s still running the CIA. And when I read that when I was doing my research… that set off all sorts of lights for me because here you have a guy who is not going gently into the good night of retirement. He feels in some ways Kennedy is an aberrant president and doesn’t deserve to be in power, and that he isn’t really protecting the interest of the state as vigilantly as he should. So, he begins to meet with all his former top aides at his home. These are not just top officials within the CIA, but field agents. He is dining with them in the clubs in Washington. And they are basically creating their own policy.

Again, I show how they acted to subvert Kennedy’s policies, which Kennedy... as his administration went on was trying to find a way out of the Cold War, out of this nuclear knot that had been tied. He and his counterpart Nikita Kruschev were trying to find a way to loosen this knot, but the national security hardliners, who were in control of the CIA, even after Dulles was fired, thought that was weak, naïve, and a dangerous policy. They tried to resist it in every way they could.

I think these tensions between the Kennedy White House and these hardliners grew and grew over the next few years, and exploded in Dallas. I do indicate that Dulles was centrally involved in the assassination planning and that the assassination team that he had created to kill foreign leaders like Fidel Castro and others… that several members of these teams were actually spotted in Dallas in the weeks leading up to the assassination. Allan Dulles himself, who had been retired for two years, during the weekend of Kennedy’s assassination, goes to a remote CIA facility, which is an alternative command post in northern Virginian called “The Farm,” where he monitors activity in Dallas.

Of course, he also becomes a prominent figure on the Warren Commission [the official commission to investigate JFK’s assassination]. He lobbied to have himself appointed by President Johnson on the Warren Commission. He was so active in directing that so-called investigation that some close observers thought it should’ve been called the Dulles Commission.

So, there are no smoking guns – because we are talking about the CIA – and they were careful about having no smoking guns. I am writing about a very secretive world and there aren’t any obvious pieces of evidence, but there are many pieces of evidence that I do accumulate that think, overall, make a convincing case that Allen Dulles did play a crucial role in these events.

The Kennedy assassination, and related events, such as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Warren Commission, are some of the most thoroughly investigated and analyzed chapters of recent American history. How do you go about digging up evidence that hasn’t already been found and stories that haven’t been told? What is the difference between an investigative reporter and a historian?

A lot of these doors are shut when you are dealing with the intelligence world – obviously, they don’t want this history to come out. Recently, the CIA released with great fanfare hundreds of presidential CIA briefings that were given to President Kennedy and Johnson, but they were heavily redacted and controlled. When they do a document release, it is very heavily choreographed. Some things still come out in these document releases. After Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, there was so much public pressure on the government to release classified material related to Kennedy assassination and presidency there was a law passed called the JFK Records Collection Act and thousands and thousands of pages were released. The CIA is still withholding 15,000 key documents related to the Kennedy assassination including [documents related to] people in the Dulles assassination group. It is vital that we get those 15,000 documents that the CIA is still withholding in defiance of that law.

There are a lot of clues in those [released] documents and I have used a lot of them. For instance, in the Nazi period that I write about, there was a bill passed by Congress called The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act that had a wealth of information about the extent to which the U.S. intelligence was collaborating with leading Nazis, and I drew on that wealth of material. Many historians are doing that now as well. That is important, and I do not want to downplay that – how important it is that we have a right to our own history. As Orwell wrote, “Those who control the past, control the future.”

Even when you meet a stonewall there, you can go around it sometimes by finding living sources. So, for the book, I interviewed a number of people who were the children of major CIA officials including Allen Dulles’s daughter, Joan, who was nearing 90 when I talked to her. She is an amazing person, and in some way, the exact opposite of her father, who was this cold and remote figure. She is a retired Jungian therapist, living in Santa Fe. She drives an old Prius with an Obama sticker. She represents everything that would make her father scream in his grave. She, late in her life, is trying to come to terms about what her family legacy is all about, and this dark side of history. As a Jungian, she realizes that the darkness hold many valuable truths if you can shine a light on them. She and I, together, though many interviews, tried to make sense about her father, her parent’s marriage, and about what kind of man he was.

I interviewed a young – at the time – army intelligence officer in Rome at a critical period, post-WWII. It was the period when Dulles and associates like James Jesus Angleton were setting up Nazi ratlines to let these war criminal escape. As they were doing this, this young, conscientious intelligence army officer – William Gowen – was trying as hard as he could to round these war criminals up and bring them to justice. It was “spy versus spy” in Rome in these post-war days. So, those were amazing stories that he was able to relate to me.

You track down these people, and if they are no longer living, you talk to their family members. Then, there are also the written records: the journals and the diaries that some of these people kept. For example, Dulles’s own wife and his mistress, Mary Bancroft [kept records] – those were fascinating too, and are available in the library.

You try to build this composite portrait from many different pieces of evidence you accumulate. Then, what you’re trying to do is tell the best story, in a way. I have a saying that the best story wins.

I have been, through my exhaustive work on this, which started back with my first book “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” examining this swath of history for 10 years. At the end of the day, you want to put together a story that is meaningful, has the ring of truth to it, and help people see American history in a way that they’ve never done before. I am not interested in recycling the same old fairy tales that you see on PBS, or that you see in best-selling history books, Spielberg or Tom Hanks movies. Those are the stories that are meant to put Americans to sleep and not wake them up. I’m interested in waking people up, and I think this book is going to do that. I think it is going to shock people; I think it will be controversial; I think it will be attacked. But, this is what I want. I want to start a debate.

One of the most common responses to any JFK conspiracy is the idea that if the CIA was really involved, the media would have broken the story by now. You do a great job of baking a rebuttal into your story, by showing cold, hard evidence that many of the people running the pre-Internet corporate media, both TV networks and the most influential newspapers and magazines of the day, were either friends with Dulles, scared of Dulles or submissive to the power he wielded. You even give examples of letters from Dulles to executives offering suggestions of how they should be covering stories and their sycophantic responses. How was Dulles so effective in controlling the narrative around JFK’s death and so many other events?

I think the elite world in America was a very small and circumscribed one. We’re talking about a network that the sociologist C. Wright Mills [exposed] because he was one of the first who was trying to understand how power really worked in America. But that world he was writing about was a fairly small group of men, including Wall Street bankers and lawyers and people who held prominent positions in Washington and national security. They all tended to know each other. They all belonged to the same clubs and organizations. They all traded jobs and positions and hired each other. Their children went to the same universities and prep schools. They socialized together.

That was a tight world and Dulles was on personal basis with many, if not most, of the heads of the top media corporations. He was close to the people who owned and ran The New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Henry Luce’s Time empire. He was particularly close to both Henry Luce and his wife; in fact, he was probably having an affair with Claire Luce. So, he could call up and say, “Well, we don’t like what this correspondent is writing about down in Guatemala. We think you should remove him.” And they did.

There was a sense that we were all in this together. It wasn’t just one friend doing a favor for another. The Cold War ideology was so strong, and the sense that this is a national emergency, so this was your patriotic duty to help out the CIA and its battle with world communism. And so, many reporters willingly did the bidding of the CIA, providing them with information when they were posted overseas or writing stories that CIA wanted them to write.

This was not unusual. Later, it was exposed – much of this by Carl Bernstein in a famous investigative piece that he wrote in the Rolling Stone in the 1970s. It shocked a lot of people. He named names of hundreds people who were on the CIA payrolls in the media or were CIA assets. But, at the time, it wasn’t shocking. Most people would’ve felt that there was a natural alliance between the national security agencies and the media because we were in this international struggle together.

Maybe, it’s not so shocking to people today because essentially you find the same merger of consciousness around the war on terror. There’s so much that goes unreported or that is overworked. When you think of everything that has been done in the name of American people or the war on terror, there has been some good investigative reporting, but by and large, the war on terror gets fundamental support from corporate media. It was the same if not more so during the Cold War. People thought if there was something going on in the Kennedy assassination, they would’ve dug it out. That is just wishful thinking because there was no kind of enterprise reporting on the Warren Commission, on the assassination, on the investigation into the assassination. Any effort in that regard was termed wild, crazy, and outside the parameters of what was legitimate journalism

And in some ways, it still is.

Absolutely. Even now, this book, my reputation, and the early reviews it’s getting should make this book, at least, the kind of book that gets prominent treatment in the media, even if it criticized. There have been a couple of shows already – I won’t say their names – who said that they don’t want to have me on because the book says that the JFK assassination was an inside job. So, there is still a fear of this, a fear of looking at it with an open mind.

America media, if anything, has become even more cowardly in some ways of criticizing the national security state. The national security state is much more powerful today than it was even under Dulles. A lot of the things we are grappling with today such as extraordinary rendition, torture, mass surveillance of private citizens, extra-legal assassinations, those all were developed under Dulles. To thoroughly and honestly analyze Dulles’s legacy, in some ways, is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy. In some way, to really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems, and that is really frightening.

One of the major questions that this book raises is: how powerful is the president? Eisenhower famously warned of the rise of the military-industrial complex during his farewell speech and it would certainly appear as though his most dire predictions came true. Obama is the perfect example of how even a candidate with strong progressive credentials can be corrupted so quickly and thoroughly once in office...

In democracy, you would want to think that your president, elected by the people, who is the commander and chief, is in charge. One of the great revelations for me has been how every president, one way or another, has been played by or manipulated by or fooled by their national security officials. And that goes back to Eisenhower.

Even before Eisenhower, there was the famous memo from John Foster Dulles to his corporate clients of [the law firm] Sullivan and Cromwell. Regarding the implementation of Roosevelt's New Deal, he wrote, “Do not comply. Resist the law with everything in your might and everything will be alright.”

Yes, that was when John Foster Dulles was running a powerful law firm on Wall Street, so he wasn’t in government at that point. But, even when presidents like Eisenhower issued these defiant statements about the military-industrial complex, and the power that the security agencies have… that was a convenient time for him to say that. First of all, he was leaving office. The fact is that Eisenhower allowed that military-industrial-intelligence complex to grow to frightening proportions, and he never directly confronted the power of Dulles and the generals. Or he didn’t do so in an effective way. And he left this, a growing monster, to a young president: John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy did try to deal with – I think he was the last president to confront the frightening power of the security agencies – we know what happened as a result. I think he was killed for that reason.

People can read the book and make their own decisions, but the fact is that ever since Kennedy, no president has seriously challenged the growing power of the national security state. Even Kennedy, who was standing up to them again and again, was often unable to be effective.

At one point, right on the heels of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, suddenly [French] President de Gaulle, an ally, is under siege from his own generals, who were rebelling in Algeria because he was trying to bring the bloody colonial war in Algeria to a close. The French generals, who are in open revolt, are about to descend on Paris. De Gaulle has to go on national television and issue a call to the people of France to aid him to push back this attempted coup. He tells the press and his information ministers that the CIA is behind the coup – and that JFK is not behind it, but JFK is not in control of his own government. So, the CIA tried to overthrow a western ally without the support of the president.

De Gaulle later said that he believed that some of the same U.S. security forces who had targeted him were responsible for Kennedy’s death, and that’s one of those stories that never make it to the American press.

Yes, after de Gaulle came back from Kennedy’s funeral, he told his information ministers that the same U.S. security forces that had targeted him or tried to overthrow his government were responsible for killing President Kennedy, and that Oswald was a convenient fall guy, patsy, scapegoat, and that American people didn’t want to know the truth and will never find out the truth. Unfortunately, that all came out to be [true]. That statement that de Gaulle gave to his information minister was published in the minister’s memoir years later. When that came out in France, it was never translated; it was never published in the US; and no one really publicized it at all in this country. That’s why history is so selective; history is an ongoing argument. You do need to bring an investigative journalist sensibility to history often to get to the truth.

Do you think we are as close as we’ll ever get to understanding what happened with JFK’s assassination, at least in our lifetime? Or do you think there is something that could dispel any doubt about the CIA’s involvement or some of the missing pieces that there isn’t a smoking gun for?

If there was ever a smoking gun, it was probably burned by the CIA long ago. But that said, I do think these 1,100 documents that the CIA is withholding – and they’re withholding them for a reason because they don’t want people to see them – have to do with some of the key CIA officers involved in Allen Dulles’s assassination apparatus, the apparatus which he used against foreign leaders. For any of those violent, particularly lethal men to be connected to Dallas – I have an eye-witness that pinpoints one of these men, William Harvey, on a plane to Dallas, shortly before the assassination. He was spotted by his own deputy. And his deputy told his children years later that was convinced that William Harvey was involved in the assassination of Kennedy. This was the guy who was responsible for the assassination operation aimed at Fidel Castro. He was working with the mafia to kill Castro. He was a notorious figure in the CIA. So, for him to be flying to Dallas, shortly before the assassination, at least raises some serious questions.

Among the documents that the CIA continues to withhold in defiance of the JFK Records Collection Act, are documents related to William Harvey, his whereabouts, and his travel records. So, that’s the kind of information that we need to force the CIA to release in compliance with the law. And the only way they’ll do that is if there is enough outcry from the public and political pressure. There was that kind of pressure after Oliver Stone’s film, back in the 1991. Of course, Oliver Stone got all sorts of holy hell from the media, for being a nut and a conspiracy freak. To this day, Oliver is traumatized by the kind of treatment he got then.

Speaking of Hollywood, one of thing we talked about [previously] was how when you were researching your book and learning about Dulles, you couldn’t help but think of comparisons to Lannisters from “Game of Thrones.” Do you think there is any chance that “The Devil’s Chessboard” could be adapted into a movie or TV series?

I don’t think there is a realistic chance that the main studios/players/network in Hollywood will produce a movie based on this book, and I’ll tell you why. I had the same experience with my earlier book, which looked at Bobby Kennedy’s search for truth into the assassination of his brother. It was optioned by Lionsgate and it came close to being set up as a TV miniseries or movie in several different places, but at the last minute, people got cold feet and shied away from it.

So far, I’ve had the exact same experience with “The Devil’s Chessboard.” Two major agencies have been representing the book in Hollywood. There was huge initial interest from all major players including Brad Pitt and George Clooney, and many others. The books circulated like hot cakes this summer as soon as it came out in galleys and I think as they read it and realized what was in it, despite what a dramatic narrative it is and despite how “House of Cards” showed that there is a huge public appetite for the dark side of power, this is too dark and scary for them.

George Clooney, in particular, was the first person to read it. It was rushed over to him by his agent the first weekend it came out… and he freaked out. These people have already seen Oliver Stone get “Oliver Stoned.”

I think no one in Hollywood will go near this. George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, the people who do American history, are more about mythologizing American history. They’re not about, as Joan Dulles told me, getting to and understanding the dark side. They’re dealing in fairy tales.