Part One: How The Dulles Brothers Created The CIA And Destroyed Everything Else

I was talking about the coups, and here to talk with me about a lot of coups this this week. Uh is my old boss uh. And editor for I don't know, like a decade Jason Pargeon. It was almost thirteen years the executive editor at Cracked. So does your time at Cracked? Does it seem like a thousand years ago? Or does it seem like yesterday? It's weird. Yeah, it does seem like an impossibly different lifetime. Um, and also is foundational to everything about who I am now, um,

which is a weird way for it to feel. Because when you showed up there, you were a little child, right, I thought you were like sixteen when you first showed up on the message board. So I could be wrong about that. Oh no, I was, but that was before it was Cracked. That was back when it was your weird little website, pointless waste of time. I'm trying to make it clear to the listeners what what exactly we were referencing here, because it's not it's not something we

briefly met at a job a while ago. It's his formative years were kind of spent in an operation that I that I ran. So a lot of the things that are wrong with Robert Evans today you can blame me for in federal court in the upcoming series of trials. Actually, Jason, uh that my entire legal defense is structured around that. This is really great to know. Thank you so much, Jason.

But no, like you did, actually like you were my you edited most you It was you were Brockway that edited most of the writing I put out for the entire start of my career pretty much. Um, so thank you. Yeah. And then Robert was the person who brought original journalism to Cracked, because prior to that it was a lot of like lists and things that were just rerivancy, know the sources, and he brought the concept of actually interviewing

people and creating new content. And while I worked at crancked uh, like basically every other night I would have a stress dream about cracked, like I had blown to deadline or had screwed something up, and one height towards the end, I had a dream in which Robert went to some country where there was a revolution going on in eastern Europe and I had to go with him as his editor, which in real life, he's laughing because

that's not a thing that occurred. I worked from my bedroom editing coop jokes into articles, but in this dream, for some reason, they sent me along with you to cover this violent uprising in I don't know, the Ukraine somewhere. And when we arrived in the dream, this was it was stressful because it became clear once we arrived that you were not there to cover the revolution, that you,

in fact were part of it a flat jacket. And I was like trying to email back to the home office, like do you know Evans is like part of this militia? Like ethically can we like I can't. I don't know how to edit this because he's like I think he's now like leading part of it and so woke up like extremely upset. And those are the type of dreams

I had. Right in my dreams, I was a much more important figure in journalism than I was in in real life, Whereas in real life I was just constantly having to like check the Wikipedia page for Transformers to make sure that I had the name of Star Scream spelled correctly. Jason, I mean, that's both a fun dream and a pretty good idea for a Netflix original series. You you you could make some solid, some solid money

off of a him. Just say, well, Jason, how do you feel about the c I A. I have mixed feelings because on one hand, I know they keep us safe. Yes it's John Krazinski says, yeah, as as I've seen. I've read a lot of Tom Clancy books. I mean, there are heart their patriots, but sometimes they have to make tough decisions like which government's get to have democracies

and which don't. Well, do you do you know anything about the guys who are kind of most formational behind making the see I into what it is, the Dullus brothers. Have you heard much about these guys? I have, and that my first exposure to the name Dullus was when watching the movie die Hard to actually that was the name of the airport that the terrorists were taking over.

And I think it was less than a year later I was watching the Oliver Stone JFK conspiracy movie and he mentioned Dullus as being one of the conspirators he thought and the assassination. I like pointed at the screen and said, ah, Dullest, that's the guy who owns the airport and die Hard and and then it turns out it's actually, no, it's not the same. It was named after there's more than one dollar so to let the to establish my knowledge, I knew one fact about the

Dullus is and it turned out it was wrong. You know, my my my only memory of die Hard two is that guy, that actor who was also a Republican congressman, right, who played the head of the airport for president, didn't he did run for but it wasn't he also elected at some point? Did he actually serve in the Senator something? Surely not? My dad loves him. Um, I don't know he was. He was fineing die Hard, but I remember

him saying Dullest Tower about a million times. And yes, that was my first interaction with these guys interactions the wrong way to put it, But no, they're They're a fascinating set of characters and we're going to talk about them for way too much time today. So I hope

you're happy, Jason. I hope you're happy, because now I have to read words about the Dullest Brothers and that will that will be him compressing it as much as possible, because one of these guys ran the CIA, the other Secretary of Stay at the same time, and they we're leaving out so much. Two of the most important people in the history of the modern world in terms of how they shape the world it is. These guys names come up in every conspiracy theory, but you don't need

any of that. The actual things they did run so wide, and so the the actual conspiracies they were like inarguably a part of you don't. So yeah, the sooner we get started, the better, because we are. If this will not leave you with a full education on the Dullest better how long we go. We could do a Joe Rogan length episodes and it would we could set aside the next six months and and and get a decent grounding on these guys. But we have an afternoon. So

let's do the really irresponsibly brisk version of this. UM. So it may be hard to believe for people listening today, but for a long time, our country did not have any kind of state intelligence apparatus. UM. Obviously, like the CIA and the FBI, don't go back forever. I think most people assume that. But the very idea that our country would need a group of people to handle international

espionage doesn't go back very far. For most of our nation's history, that sort of international intelligence was gathered by a weird assortment of public figures, charming diplomats and like celebrities, guys like Ben Franklin. Like Ben Franklin in his day kind of did what we now have intelligence agencies for.

You would have these guys who were like celebrities and kind of intelligence gathers who would travel around the world and hobnob with rich and powerful people in other countries and then bring back information to the government about ship that was happening in France or whatever. Like. That was

intelligence in the seventeen and eight teen hundreds, you know, UM. Now, the most famous example of intelligence during this period was probably what come to be came to be known as the Great Game, which is a political and diplomatic ship fight between the Russian and British empires over Afghanistan that lasted most of the eighteen hundreds. This is like a century of screwing around in Afghanistan between both countries. Um, the Great Game was You know, soldiers played their role

in it, right. There were actual battles and invasions, but the most decisive moves in it were the result of this kind of coterie of really shady characters, noblemen and diplomats and adventurers who would forge backroom alliances and put kings on thrones and instigate wars Like there. There's a bunch of wild history with the Great Game. Um, but that was like c I a ship back before there was a CIA. Now, for most of modern history, that sort of stuff was the purview of European powers. The

US didn't do a lot of that stuff. In Washington, d c. Through most of the eighteen hundreds, very few elected leaders felt there was value in collecting intelligence about foreign countries at all. Part of this came from a belief that the United States was best ice off isolating herself, and that gathering information about other countries was useless, and part of it came from an idea elucidated by Secretary of War Henry Stimpson that quote, gentlemen do not read

each other's male Basically, it's it's rude. It's kind of ghosh to have spies, because that's not the way we want to do things in our nice, civilized country. Now, one of the first American officials to make a concerted push for organized intelligence gathering was Secretary of State John Watson Foster. Now, John Foster's greatest claim to fame was the fact that in eighteen ninety three he directed the

overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. President Harrison had encouraged white settlers in the islands to rebel against the Queen Liliu Kalani, and when they did, Secretary of State Foster approved the landing of US troops in Honolulu to aid the settlers, who declared themselves a government and were then recognized by the United States. A whole bunch of horrible stuff was done to the Hawaiians that we don't have a lot of time to cover today. We will at some point

in the future. It's it's a real fucked up tail. What's important for today is that John Watson Foster was the first American Secretary of State to participate in the overthrow of a foreign government, the government outside of the continental United States. UM. I guess, depending on how you want to look at, you know, the genocide of indigenous people,

you could kind of see it that way. But going to a set of islands off the continent and overthrowing a sovereign government there feels like a change, you know. Um And he's the first Secretary of State to participate in something like this. His justification for this would establish a pattern that has been followed by most of his successors. UM. I think it would be fair to say, uh, he wrote into in order to justify, you know, the the

conquering of Hawaii. Basically, he wrote, quote the native inhabitants had proved themselves incapable of maintaining a respectable and responsible government and lacked the energy or will to improve the advantages with which Providence had given them. So you do see a lot of like ties to kind of how the conquest, you know, the westward expansion was justified. Right, they're not making use of this land and the way

that we are, so that justifies us taking over. Yeah, and Foster was in many ways the first really modern U S Secretary of State. He was probably our government's earliest major advocate of espionage. In eighteen ninety two, he started to assign military attaches to American embassies and diplomats. He sent out agents to different European cities to go into military libraries and bookstores and comb publication lists so that our defense department would get early warning about foreign

advances in arms technology. And you know, when we're talking about that stuff, that's pretty reasonable, right. You have a country, you want to keep it safe from other countries, not a not inherently immoral to like figure out what kind of guns they're buying. You know, that's that's hard to argue with UM as opposed to, you know, conquering Hawaii. Yeah, and John Foster's intelligence agency, this kind of thing that

he starts to establish is kind of fundamentally defensive. In the eighteen nineties, UM he established a Military Harry Intelligence Division out of his office, and he used it to collect and analyze information his agents sent him from Europe. It grew steadily, and when World War One became a thing, it's size and scope of operations exploded. The man most responsible for the expansion of the Military Intelligence Division was

another Secretary of State, a guy named Robert Lansing. The inciting incident for Lansing's dedication to international intelligence was the sinking of the Lusitania in nineteen fifteen by a German U boat. The American people believed that the Lusitania was a defenseless passenger liner, and the fact that hundred Americans had died on it caused rage an anti German sentiment

to spread throughout the country. Now, the Germans argued that the Lusitania had been transporting war material for the British and that meant it was a valid target for war. And we now know they were right, Like the Lucitania was full of fucking guns. Um by the kind of rules set down, they were within their rights to sink it. But that was kind of hushed up at the time. As recently as my time in school, this was not taught. It was just a passenger boat was sunk by the Germans.

Because it's hard, I feel like, and even now when you explain it, I think when you hear Germans, you automatically assume not the Nazis. Yeah, the bad guy's like, no, no, this is this is World War One. They're not the bad guys. They're not the good guys. We could easily have joined the German side in World War One. This

is nothing that we're about to explain. But the dullises makes sense until you understand this part, which is that America there was a bitter debate as to whether or not we had any business in these European wars when World War One and then World War Two in both cases, and fucking world War One is like, you know, world War Two, my stances, well, there were Nazis, Like we had to do something at a certain point. Um world

War One. There's a real good argument to be had that if we had just kind of let that play out, things wouldn't have been well, they certainly wouldn't have been the way they went. Who knows if it would have been better, it would have been different. There's a reason we have no movies about World War One were the most part like compared to how many you've gotten about

killing Nazis. Uh, there's a reason why. You know, like if Indiana Jones Adventures took place in World War One era, would not be quite as compelling to be going up against the Kaiser's people. It was a totally different scenario.

And the morality of getting involved, into what degree we got involved in using that sinking as the excuse to get involved, is very tangled and very muddy as compared to everything that happened later, where it's like, well we were we were late to come to World War two. It's like, uh, they again, something skipped over very quickly. In my history education in public school, it always is,

and it's weird. Just it's it's frustrated me that the most recent major movie touchstone for World War One and German guilt in that war is Wonder Woman, which just just portrayed an actual dude as like a literal evil god trying to destroy humanity. Um, when it like, now, he was just he was. He was one of a bunch of identically immoral guys on every side of that conflict. Good stuff. So yeah, at the time, as you've just said, the only very few Americans knew that the Lusitania had

been filled with a legal war material. Now, one person who did know was Secretary of State Robert Lansing, because he was privy to the fact that his government had secretly agreed to violate the Neutrality Act by shipping guns to Great Britain. The next few years saw a huge build up in both the US military and an attendant and international espionage apparatus, and by nineteen eighteen, John Foster's Military Intelligence Division had more than twelve employees and worked

with agents and multiple government agencies. Now I bring all this up because Robert Lansing and John Foster were the uncle and grandfather, respectedly of the dullest brothers. Which is fun. So these are the dudes who, in a lot of ways raise the guys who come create the CIA um and the dull his brothers are John Foster Doulas, who were just going to call Foster, and Allan Welsh Doulas,

who will call Allen Um. Now these men would together invent the modern CIA, overthrew governments of more countries than most people ever visit, and enable a number of genocides and ethnic cleansings in the name of fighting communism and helping fruit companies. John Foster Doulas was born in Washington, d C. On February eight eight His little brother, Allan was born on April seventh, eighteen ninety three. In Watertown, New York. The Dullest brothers were two of five children,

and from the beginning they were extremely close. Their father, also named Allen, was a Presbyterian minister, which is not a super showy gig. He made very little money and from what I can tell, he was a pretty decent guy. One of the stories his family told about him as there was a time when he liked, during a snowstorm, literally gave the code off his back to a homeless man.

There was another moment where he like suffered a lot of criticism within church leadership because he performed a marriage ceremony on a woman who had been divorced before. Like that was a huge deal in the late eighteen hundreds, right that you would you would let a divorced woman marry again. But their dad is seems to be a decent guy um and is like, well no, and I'm not gonna not marry her. Um, So good on you,

Minister Alan Dullish. He was a quiet, thoughtful, retiring man, and his sons did not take after him at all. They were both utterly captivated with their grandfather. With their grandpa Foster, their mother's father, who was the former Secretary of State, and by the point they came into the picture and international diplomat, they were equally taken with their uncle Bert also on their mother's side, that guy also

became a Secretary of State. The fact that Alan Dullis their dad, made very little money meant that the Dullest family was extremely dependent upon the Fosters for financial support, which frustrated Allan. John Foster was thus the patriarch of the family, and the Dulles brothers spent every summer with him on his lake house in Lake, Ontario. They were raised to believe that power was in their blood, and from a very young age they grew up with con

stations about geopolitics around the dinner table. Since John Foster was so prominent, these conversations often included foreign statesmen and diplomats visiting the old man for help with some issue or another. The book The Brothers by Stephen Kinser gives a good overview of how these summer days on the lake tended to go. Quote early every summer morning in the first years of the twentieth century, two small boys

awoke as dawn broke over Lake Ontario. Their day began with a cold bath, the only kind their father allowed. After breakfast, they gathered with the rest of their family on the front porch for a Bible reading, sang a himm or two and not as their father led them in prayer. Their duty done, they raced to the shore, where their grandfather and uncle were waiting to take them

out to stalk the wily smallmouth bass. So yeah, that's that's that's how the guys who found the Cia grow up and shaped the modern world as we know now, completely changed the life of every person listening to this. These two, these two dudes growing up under the care taking cold Dad's under the care of this very By the way, if anyone listening, if you're trying to mentally picture what the dullest has looked like, what you're picturing,

that's what they looked like. We just well, we just described. Yeah, you don't have to go look it up. You can picture these these white guys who are raised taking cold as Yeah, they will pop unbidden into your head like Athena and from the skull of Zeus. It's it's it's almost magical. Did one of him smoke a pipe? You said, absolutely, Jason, Why don't he smoking to pop my imagination because he didn't they look like Mr Potter from It's a Wonderful Life.

They do, Yes, as did Yeah. Mr Potter might have been based on their grandfather. That's a solid point again. The guys they're fishing with, our two former secretaries of State, um Now and Alan, who grew up to be the head of the CIA, would later recall that his interest in espionage was first peaked by these fishing trips with

his grandpa and uncle. The experience of quote finding the fish, hooking the fish, and playing the fish, working to draw him in and tire him until he's almost glad to be caught in the net, which is sinister as hell because for everyone else, fishing is like a peaceful pastime. We can be alone with your thoughts, and for this guy, it's all about seeing the hope die from the fish's eyes. Give up. I want to do this to people someday. I do want to interject here if it's okay in

an audio format. When you're talking about multiple members of a family, it is very easy to get lost. To be clear, there are two guys, one man, the c I A one was Secretary of State at the same time.

For the most part, they they their terms overlapped mostly, and they work hand in hand when when we talked about what each of them did, there's a lot of overlamp because they worked together, you know, the CIA, and when when the CIA is dedicating itself to reshaping foreign policy and the Secretary of State, like, they work hand in gloves. So when you talk about Alan and Foster, it's gonna be easy to get mixed up. But just

one is the CIA guy, that's Alan. The other is going to set And it's more confusing here because they're both on a boat with their grandpa Foster, who was also a Secretary of State. Their uncle Bert's easier, thank god. Um, but yeah, it's it's it's gonna be messy. Um, we'll do our best here. So both of the boys seemed to find their childhood's idyllic as creepy as we might

find aspects of them. Alan, who again ran the CIA, later wrote quote here in delightful surroundings, we indulged ourselves not only in fishing, sailing, and tennis, but in never ending discussed discussions on the great world issues which our

country was growing up to face. These discussions were naturally given a certain weight and authority by the voice of a former Secretary of State and a Secretary of State to be We children were at first the listeners and the learners, but as we grew up we became vigorous participants in international debates. And again sometimes these debates are like literally with like the ambassador to China will be

over for lunch. Like there you know this. These these guys are growing up in the halls of power, even though it's their grandpa's house now. The Dulless household was extremely religious, but Alan Dullas was much less religious than his father, who was also confusingly named Alan Dulles Foster Dulls, the young Foster Dullas, not the grandpa. Foster Dullas did take strongly to religion, but his kind of version of

Christianity was particularly bleak and focused on labor. His favorite hymn was work for the night is coming, which sounds like a fucking bummer um. By age two, his mother noted that he was fascinated by prayers and quote always says ah men very heartily. At age seven, he celebrated his birthday by memorizing seven psalms. Their mother, Edith, considered her sons to be too special for public school, and so the dullest boys were tutored by live in governesses

and eventually attended a private academy. Now John Watson Foster, their grandpa in the former Secretary of State, was the chief male influence on both young men. It behooves us to spend some time talking in more detail about what kind of politician he was. John Foster was a committed ideological capitalist. He recognized early on that American farmers and manufacturers had gotten so good at mass production that they were putting out more goods than American people could consume.

This meant they needed foreign markets and access to foreign resources in order to grow the economy. Now, the only way to secure both of those things was what Stephen Kinser describes as a quote muscular, assertive foreign policy that would force weaker countries to trade with Americans on terms

America is considered fair. Now, I've repeatedly mentioned the things that Foster did as Secretary of State, but in some ways what he did after leaving office is more interesting, because he became kind of one of the first lobbyists in American history. He used his deep ties to the Republican Party and international diplomats to promote the interests of a variety of corporations who paid him handsomely for his counsel.

John Foster had always been a wealthy man, but he grew richer by leaps and bounds due to his skill at influencing and changing US foreign policy to benefit his corporate clients. He was a devoted grandfather, and he made certain both grandsons spent time around him while he worked so they would learn the tricks of the trade before

they were fully adults. Not only did they live with him in the summer, but he regularly borrowed them during the winters, which he spent in d C. Young Foster Dulus made his first visit to the White House when he was five years old, as a guest for the birthday party of one of President Harrison's grandchildren. Young Allan started visiting his and Paul in d C. Soon after.

Both brothers regularly dined with their grandfather and a carousel of influential people ambassadors, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, Presidents Taft, Roosevelt, Cleveland, McKinley, and Wilson. By the time these kids routines, they had met like five US presidents um Now. In their early childhoods, both boys were told to keep quiet and just listen to the adults, which they did. Um Ali was noted as being Alan was

noted as being particularly curious about other people. He was an avid listener, and during his first winter in d C he became fascinated with the Boer War. Interestingly, he came down on the side of the Boers, writing quote, the Boers want peace, but England has to have the gold, and so she goes around fighting all the little countries. So he won't. He won't stay that sympathetic with the

little countries. Um. But that's a that's a fund that I are any Jason, I feel like it is extremely important to understand where these guys are coming from, because every listener is going to ask themselves later when you get into the horror stories. Did these guys do what they did because they truly believed in it? Or were they doing it because they were doing favors for their rich corporate friends and this was just cover for it.

I hear this all the time, where people tend to take a very cynical view saying, well, they actually never worried about communism. Is just an excuse to crack down them mass labor practices where like where workers were demanding right things like that. The truth is harder to get at because I think on some level, these guys were both true believers in God has blessed the world with the United States of America and we are chosen by this brand of Christianity. They believed in to save the

world from whatever. And then you say, well, yeah, but how does like free trade come into it? How does he had to go from that too? Like the freaking fruit company stuff we're gonna get into, which is people who don't are enough familiar with that period of history. I think I'm joking about earlier you were joking about over them up, Like how do you get from there? There?

It's like, if you don't understand the interplay between Christianity, capitalism, and that like the belief that like capitalism is God's will for mankind, then you don't understand entire spots of the United States populace. Because I think it's very if you hook this guy up to a light deteched our test is like, did you honestly believe that communism was a threat to mankind? He would say yes, and I

would come up, he's telling the truth. But when you see what they did and what they what they clearly knew they were doing, it's very hard to reconcile that. It's not Villains are not black and white. Villains are are complicated. That's why this show exists, That's why it's interesting. And I think we'll get into this more. I mean, I'll be interested in your thoughts at the into this.

I think it's different for both of them. I think one of the brothers is a true believer, and I think one of the brothers was more or less a psychopath. But you know, that's that's that's impossible to know for sure. I'm interested in kind of your your thoughts on on that as we get to the end of this, because they're both different people, you know, like that is important, Like they're not they're not both doing They're both doing a lot of the same things, but they have different

justifications for it, and we'll we'll cover that. But Jason, here's some products by things. Oh we're back, uh, Jason. I hope you enjoyed those ads, um. I think I think Foster Dullus would have enjoyed those ads. He would have loved, he would have loved products. The thing we were talking about before the break is extremely important because I have been referring to the Dullus brothers as if they are two people who like two short people in the same suit, who functioned as one human being. That

is not true that they had the same upbringing. They both helped shape the the rapid war against communism that would mark the fifties and sixties and everything thereafter that. Yeah, they were different people, and as we go, I think that will become clearer. I assume how yeah, it will.

I'm interested again, I'm interested in your thoughts on what we'll We'll get to that at the end, because they are very different guys, and we'll be talking about that pretty soon, because they start to separate in this period

in a lot of ways. So when we had left off, um, young Alan Dullus had written an essay about how the Bowers, who were basically people living in a British colony, the British would say people living in a British colony who were being unruly and they had to fight them, and the British established what some people would argue with the first modern concentration camps during their war with the Bowers, and Ali was very much on the side of the Bowler,

saying like England is just greedy for money. And his grandfather was so pressed by the essay he wrote that he actually paid to have it printed privately. Um. This made Ali's brother Foster very jealous, and he complained that his younger brother's anti colonial attitude was quote wrongheaded and infantile. I'm sorry you keep calling him Ali. Did people call

him Ali or yeah, his family called him Alle. There's like three people who all have the same name in this show, so it pays us to be really clear here in this episode. UM. So, one of our best sources on the Dullest Brothers as they grew up was their sister, Eleanor Dulls. And she deserves an episode of some podcast, not this one, um, because she was not

a bastard. She was actually an amazing woman. UM. In an era in which the idea of educating girls was controversial, she grew to become an internationally renowned diplomat and in fact headed the U. S. State Department's German desk immediately after World War Two, which is like a big gig, you know. UM, She's an incredible person, and she seems to have been something of the family liberal, or at

least the most progressive men of her family. I don't want to boxer too much into a contemporary ideological category, but she was not like her brothers. Um we get some of our most unsettling stories about them from her. And I'm gonna quote now from the book The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot. Quote. Alan loomed large in her life. She attached herself to him at an early age, but she learned to be wary of his sudden, explosive mood shifts.

Most people saw only Alan's charm and conviviality, but Eleanor was sometimes the target of his inexplicable eruptions of fury. Her infractions were often minor. Once Alan flew into a rage over how closely she parked the car to the family house, his moods were like the dark clouds that billowed without warning over Lake Ontario. Later in life, Eleanor simply took herself quote out of his orbit to avoid

the stress and furor that he stirred in me. Alan was darker and more complex than his older brother, and his behavior sometimes mystified his sister. One summer incident during their childhood would stick with Eleanor for the rest of her life. Alan, who was nearly ten at the time, and Eleanor, who was two years younger, had been given the task of minding their five year old sister, Nataline,

with her blonde curls and sweet demeter. Nataline, the baby in the family, was usually the object of everyone's attention, but that day, the older children got distracted as they skipped stones across the lake's surface from the family's wooden dock. Suddenly, Nataline, who had retrieved a large rock to join in the game, went tumbling into the water, pulled down by the dead

weight of her burden. As the child began floating away towards the lake's deep cold waters, her pink dress booying like an air balloon, Eleanor began screaming frantically, but Alan, who by then was a strong swimmer, was strangely impassive. The boy just stood on the dock and watched as his little sister drifted away. Finally, as if prompted by

Eleanor's cries, he too began yelling. Drawn by the uproar their mother, who was recovering in bed from one of her periodic pounding migraines, came flying down the dock and

plunging into the water, rescued little Nataline. So that's an interesting tale about Alan Um and it's interesting it seems to have stuck with his sister for decades since Um little interesting and Talbot goes on to note that throughout his life, Alan Dulas was notably quote slow to feel the distress of others Um, which is part of why I think some of the things I do about Alan Dulas.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Foster on the other end, when Foster was fifteen, his mother, Edith, took him on a tour of Europe Um and Alan joined him kind of late in the visit. Edith's goal here was to open her children's eyes to the possibilities of the world, and in this she succeeded. Foster and Alan were close, but very different. Where Foster was hyper focused and a workaholic with poor social skills, Ali was hyperactive and prone

to rage. Eleanor considered her older brother more like a second father Um, and so he was, you know, kind of a kinder and warmer figure. It seems in nineteen o four, when Foster was sixteen, he left home to start school at Princeton, his father's alma mater. He had spent most of his youth as the special boy of his family, doated on by a famous grandfather and constantly

exposed to powerful people. Suddenly finding himself in a school where he was not particularly expect special must have been hard. He described what Stephen Kinser just calls an outburst of self hatred, which was fueled I think both by this and by his first schoolboy crush. Now this is particularly complex issue because Princeton was an all male school. This means that Foster Doulas's first love was another boy a quote wild eyed rebel, as he wrote, two years older

than himself. Now this boy returned the crush, and for a time both young men enjoyed an extremely intense but celibate kind of gay thing. It it seemed. It's kind of hard to pin down. This was a different era, and you read about, especially when you read about like British colonialists, you read about a lot of really really close intimate male relationships that are speculated about to this day.

We talked about this with Henry Morton Stanley. Um, and we just we don't actually know kind of like what the sexuality of everyone involved in here, because at that point the consequent insts of being outed as gay were so extreme, um, and people didn't talk about it, right, So who knows, like what was actually going on here? It's not clear to me, um, whatever the situation. The Dullest family biographer described Foster's feelings for this boy as quote,

an emotion of a kind he had never experienced before. Eventually, though, this older partner, who does seem to have been gay, attempted to take things in a physical direction. And I don't we don't know that if um, if Foster didn't reciprocate because he wasn't or because he just didn't have any of the kind of emotional or mental vocabulary to understand what was going on. You know, we really have

no idea. We're talking about like nineteen o four here, um, Stephen Kinser writes, quote, to a young man who had so far only embarrassedly kissed a girl at a party, it was a devastating and shocking revelation of what he knew from his Bible to be a shame and a sin. He conveyed the sense of degradation with such effect that the fellow student walked out of his room and left the college. So whatever happened there, it's a bumber. Um.

I think we can we in land on that for sure. Now, Foster's school career continued, obviously, and in the summer before his senior year, his grandfather opered him. He offered him a huge opportunity. The Imperial Government of China had hired his grandfather to advise his its delegation to the Second Hague Peace Conference in the Netherlands. The older Foster took his grandson along as secretary. This experience had obviously had

an impact on him. He's like in he's he's in a high school and he's helping to his former secretary of state, grandpa run part of the Hague Conference for China. Like how old would he have been at this time? Seventeen? Maybe? Yeah? Like that, of course that hasn't impact on you, um. And by the time he returned to Princeton for his senior year, Foster had decided not to become a preacher.

You know. When he went to Princeton, he had kind of wanted to follow in his dad's footsteps um instead, though, when he comes back from this conference, he's decided he wants to be a quote Christian lawyer um, and this nearly broke his mother's heart. His family was very set on him following his dad as a Presbyterian minister. Now, Foster graduated in nineteen o eight with a philosophy degree.

His thesis paper was good enough that it earned him a year long scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris when he returned to the U S. From this, he enrolled at a law school in d C so he could live with his grandfather For the next two years, he worked on his degree and acted as his grandfather's assistant. Foster played paid close attention to the way the old man wielded power and influence to accomplish the diplomatic goals of his many corporate clients, while Foster was busy preparing

to follow in his grand foot past footsteps. Alan Dulis also gained admission to Princeton Or. He's a couple of years younger than his brother, so where his brother had been studious and reserved, Ali was a party boy, constantly drinking and sleeping with women and getting in trouble. He was regularly laid on his school work. He always crammed at the last minute for exams, but he still managed to graduate with distinction, which really piste off his father. Right.

His dad kind was heckling him this whole time that you're spending all this time partying, you're not going to graduate. And then he parties anyway and graduates with great grades, which really pisces off dad. Now, Ali's thesist didn't win him a year at the Sore Bone, but it won him a cash prize that he used to travel to India. While he was on board the steamship that would take him there, he read a book called Kim by Ruard Kipling. Now. Kim is a novel about the son of an Irish

soldier in India. Orphaned at a young age and left to adventure around Southeast Asia and up into the Himalayas. He's adopted by a wise lama and is eventually found and brought back to Great Britain, where he receives proper education and is trained to be a spy, and then sent back to the Himalayas to participate in the Great Game and thwart Russian agents. Um. Now, this is an

interesting book. It's it's kind of seen as an example of kind of like one historian of children's literature called it the apothesis of the viccor the Victorian cult of childhood, which is this this the idea that a childhood is a thing is really kind of new in the late eight hundred, it's early nineteen hundreds, right, children were just kind of like labor or things that died for a

long time. Um. And the idea that like there was something like sacred and special and that children might even have special insight that adults don't have was kind of being explored in fiction during this time, and that's a big aspect of the novel Kim. There was also a countercultural element to this kind of idea of the cult of the child, an obsession with the inherent innocence of children and a belief that this made them better than

fallen and corrupt adults. Anyway, Alan Dules falls in love with this book, and he's particularly enamored by the way Kipling described the British Empire, which in Kim is a fundamentally heroic force. It's described Kipling describes the Empire as quote the sort to oversee justice because they know the land and the customs of the land. Now, during the course of the book, Kim is told by this Lama

he befriends that quote. From time to time God causes men to be born, and thou art one of them who have a luss to go ahead at the risk of their lives and discover news. And this book changes Alan Dulis's life. He keeps a copy of it by his bedside table for the but when he dies, like decades later, this book is next to his table like it never leaves his side, like the literal copy that he takes with him to India doesn't leave aside the

rest of his life. When he lands in India after the steamship, he uses his Princeton connections to get a job teaching English. As a young white dude in early nineteen hundreds India, he lived like a king. For the first time in his life. He had servants, and Alan quickly realized that he quite like having liked having servants. From then on, as Eleanor wrote, quote, there was hardly a time when he didn't have someone to fetch and

carry for him. Now, the work he did in India was not super demanding, so Ali had ample time to engage in his schoolboy dreams of Eastern adventure. He explored ruins, he studied Sanskrit, He went to readings by Hindu mystics. He found himself drawn particularly to the anti colonial movement, which is interesting because he's he's consistent with this, and that he also criticized the British Empire over their treatment of the Boers. But he loves this book, which is

really a love poem to the British Empires. He's kind of dealing with a lot of controversial stuff at this period, which I find interesting. And while you don't ever want to like diagnose someone from Afar, like that's a basic journalism, no no, but Alan Doulas sounds like a classic narcissist from everything he does, from the burst of rage like how dare you do the thing that I didn't want

you to do? Like, and to the fact that he can't really conceptualize other people as having agency or value, that he didn't see why it matters of other people die or whatever, and then that he enjoys having servants an you know that sees life is being kind of easy for him. That would probably fly into a rage the moment. It wasn't that's all narcissism stuff. And I think, again, I'm not an expert any subject, let alone this one.

To me, that's what he feels like as a classic narcissist above all else, which, by the way, is a huge advantage if your goal is to run the world from behind the scenes. Narcissism is not people who do yeah, and and this job, Narcissism is not a detriment. We know. It's almost it's like being tall for basketball. And I think one of the things that kind of that very irresponsible Jason diagnosis that I also make um over the over the internet to a man who died before I

was born. Um. I think that also ties in pretty well to why he finds Kim so attractive. That particular line that I read that from time to time God causes men to be born who are going to go out and do great discover news and you know, bring uh information about the world and change it. You know, you are the protagonist of reality. Yes, God has chosen

you to be the main character of the story. Yeah, you are Jason Statham, um, which you know, my fellow Statham might snow there's only one Jason Statham, and it is confusingly Dwayne the Rock Johnson. You know what else is Dwayne the Rock Johnson Jason Products and Services. We're back and we're just celebrating the Rock for a moment. UMU drinking him in. So during his time at Princeton, Alan Dullis dated numerous women, most of whom he either cheated on or dumped very quickly. One of these women

was Janet Avery. He found her boring. She was, in his words, too conventional and practical, so he dropped her, and immediately afterwards his older brother Foster started dating her. They soon married and were married like the rest of their lives. Foster is very dedicated to his wife um and very very much in love. Alan, I don't know is capable of that kind of relationship. We'll talk about that more later. Now. Once he was done with law school, Foster reached out to the head of the Sullivan and

Cromwell law firm to inquire about a job. Now, at the time, Sullivan and Cromwell was probably the most powerful law They may be the most powerful law firm that ever existed. Um by a long margin. Sullivan and Cromwell had been formed in eighteen seventy nine to do something that at the time was new, bring investors and businesses together to create large, modern corporations. Their job in an era when corporations didn't really exist in the in the kind of the modern sense of the word, was to

create them. That's what this law firm did. Stephen Kinzer writes, quote Sullivan and Cromwell played an important role in the development of modern capitalism by helping to organize what its official history calls some of America's greatest industrial, commercial, and financial enterprises. In eighteen eighty two, it created Edison General

Electric Company. Seven years later, with the financier JP Morgan as its client, it wove twenty one steelmakers into the National Tube Company, and then in one merged National Tube with seven other companies to create US Steel. Capitalized it more than one billion dollars, an astounding sum at the time.

The railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, whom President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced as a malefactor of great wealth and enemy of the Republic, hired the firm to wage two of his legendary proxy wars, one to take over the Illinois Central railroad and another to fend off angry shareholders at the Wells Fargo Bank, and won the first with tactics and that a New York newspaper called one of those ruthless exercises of their power of sheer millions, and the

second with complex maneuvers that, according to a book about the firm, amounted to deceit, bribery and trickery that was all legal. Soon afterwards, working on behalf of French investors who were facing ruin after their effort to build a canal across Panama collapsed, Sullivan and Cromwell achieved a unique triumph in global politics through a master a lobbying campaign.

It's endlessly resourceful. Managing partner William Nelson Cromwell persuaded the United States Congress to reverse this decision to build a canal across Nicaragua and to play pay his French clients forty million for their land in Panama. Instead, we could do episodes on this law firm like they're they invent a lot of the modern US ecoto, or at least not invent. They are foundational in the structural formation of

a huge amount of the modern US economy. UM we talk about them a little bit more in our episodes on Panama with Chelsea Manning. UM, if you want to check some of that out. Now, one newspaper editorial described William Cromwell as quote the man whose masterful mind wetted on the grindstone of corporate cunning, conceived and carried out the rape of the Isthmus, Which is the kind of

writing you don't get in editorials anymore. M that's a shape. Now, this was the guy that Foster Dolast in his job application to the guy who raped Panama is the dude he applies for a gig with. Now, Normally, you know, Foster Dolts at this time has just graduated Princeton, He has no established legal career. This is the biggest law firm in the world. Normally, a dude with Foster's resume is not going to get the attention of the guy who's maybe the most powerful single lawyer on the planet.

But William Cromwell was good friends with Foster's grandfather, the former Secretary of State, who put in a good word for his grandson and assured that the assured Cromwell that the fresh out of law school twenty something, UM would do well at the job, so Foster gets hired. You know, nepotism obviously, right, how else is it going to start

for this guy? Um? His starting salary was twelve fifty per week, which actually put him about a hundred dollars a year below the average American salary at the time, so they're not paying him much at a start. But of course, his grandpa's rich, and his grandfather sends some money every month, which ensures he's able to still afford a nice home in New York City close to his firm's new office. No, this is him kind of introducing himself to high society, to politics. You have to have

a nice house to host people. His grandpa pays for all that. Foster Dulas was a hard worker, though he was a workaholic from the get go. He was actually unable to walk during his honeymoon with Janet because right before the honeymoon he took a business trip to British Guyana, which gave him a nearly fatal dose of malaria. And this will be kind of the pattern of their relationship. He doesn't cheat on his wife. He's very dedicated to her,

but he is even more dedicated to his work. Alan Dullas returned home after his time in India, and unlike his older brother, he did not initially have a strong sense of direction for his life. It was World War One that would finally provide the younger Dullus brother with his great inspiration. During the war years, Great Britain sent Captain Alex Gaunt to Washington, d C. To act as

their government's military attache here. Now, Gaunt was, of course friends with Alan's uncle Lansing, who was by that point the U S Secretary of State under Wilson. His uncle, Burt Right, the guy he goes fishing with as a kid, is the Secretary of State. When World War One gets off, and Alan spends time with his uncle and this British spy who's working they're kind of trying to convince the U S to get involved in the war. On Great

Britain's behalf. Alan spends a lot of time with his uncle and Captain Gaunt, and he listens with rapt attention as Gaunt talks about his job. Now, at this point, the British were trying their damnedest to bring the U S into war on their side of the equation. For Captain Gaunt. This meant hiring Pinkerton detectives to monitor U s ports and hiring agents to infiltrate and report on groups with quote anti British attitudes. Alan Dulas was enthralled

by this. One source close to him at the time later recalled he thought of Gaunt as one of the most exciting men he had ever met. He made up his mind that one of these days he would become an intelligence operative just like him, and you get kind of a James Bond vibe from Gaunt. Of course, Allan wants to be this guy. So Alan takes the Foreign Service examined nineteen sixteen. He passes and joins the State Department, and he soon made a diplomat because again, his grandpa

is the former Secretary of State. His uncle's the current Secretary of State. Not hard to get a gig at the State State Department when your uncle's the Secretary of State. The department sent Alan to burn, Switzerland, which was both close enough to the war to be exciting and neutral enough to still have the kind of nightlife that Alan Dullis enjoyed. He spent most of his time there hob nobbing with other diplomats and by one account, sleeping his

way through the local refugee population. Diplomat was Alan's official job title, but in that place in time, his real job was espionage, spying on other diplomats, building sources, and funneling information back to the US. He found this extremely exciting, and he bragged his family that his life was now filled with quote unmentionable happenings. He writes this in a letter back home, like I have a spy. Guys, this

isn't that cool. At what point in history, because it sounds like it was before this, At what point in history did we as a culture, or in the West as a culture, decide that being a spy was sexy. I think it's the great game. I think that's what really because there's all these like Kim, all these novels that you can see, you can draw it a direct

line from Kim to James Bond. These novels kind of idolizing these British men of action who travel into the mysterious East and spend time hiking through the mountains and leading insurgencies and fighting Russian spies. Um. And that's really when it becomes popular fiction of the day, makes it romantic um, and then World War One kind of makes it accessible because suddenly there's a much more of a need for espionage workers and you have this idea that

it's sexy, and while you had that same idea about combat. Right, That's a big reason why World War One starts the way it does is all of these colonial wars and kind of tricked young Western boys into thinking that war was this glorious, exciting adventure that gets disabused by machine guns and artillery shells. The romance around espionage doesn't because it's different, you know it is it is easier to make it sexy because you're not just charging with a

thousand other anonymous guys into death's jaws. Um. But to me, this is crucial and a crucial point and understanding why later on Alan is going to be able to do what he does, because even before James Bond, we had this cultural image of that there's something extremely cool about

someone like you. Compared it to combat. The difference is that combat is legal there, that that is something that is done within the law, and within that a government has declared war, you're you're operating by the rules of combat and uniform. The entire thing with espionage is you

are operating outside the law, and we love it. If you are James Bond, you are murdering somebody who because they're trying to develop a weapon, and you're, you know, hitting them with a poison blow dart you fired from your watch. That is against the law. You actually are not allowed to kill people with a poison watch. It's

most countries have laws against new doing that. We love spies because they go off the grid, because they operate behind the scenes, because they don't answer to anybody, they get the job done. And whether you're talking about Jack Ryan or Ethan Hunt or James Bond, to this day, we love that idea of these guys who go out there behind the scenes, off the books, and they keep us safe and we don't want to know what they're doing.

And so even this show, when you talk about the atrocities, there's still some segment of people it's like, well, yeah, but that's what had to be done to stop the

one had to be done. And you know, I if I can get a little conspiratorial here, I think you can draw a line between why spy stories are so sexy and why the government actually does put Our government puts a significant amount of resources into helping Hollywood tell stories about like Jack Ryan um and the gangster era, because I think the fascination with spies and gangsters comes

from the same place. They're both people who violate the rules of society, right, They're both people who go who are who are breaking the law, um, and we think that's sexy. There's there's a deeply embedded attitude in our culture that doing things like breaking the breaking the rules in that way and like a cool, violent way is hot. Um. And you know, the twenties and thirties, people fucking loved gangsters. My cousin Pretty Boy Floyd had songs written about him

and all these stories about him and like people. That was a real problem for the federal government because number one, it made it harder to catch these people that folks were so sympathetic to them. And I think the people are attracted to spies for the same reason. But it's good for the government. If people think spies are cool, it's good for the government. People like the CIA, you know. Um,

I don't know. I don't know how conspiratorial I can get there, because I don't think it's it's super nuanced. I think it's it's a matter of like is the same reason why the the Defense Department will and over military assets to Hollywood if they want to film a movie that's gonna make the military look good, and that's not a conspiracy theory, the Department of Defense will will demand to see the script before they'll let you shoot

on an aircraft carrier. And if you've got a scene in there that makes the military look bad or in effective, they won't make you change it, and they will change it. I don't know. I I haven't fully developed the thought of like the connection between that and gangster stuff, but you can read people like the director of the FBI, j Ad Grow who we're talking about what a problem it is that people think gangsters are cool. Um. There was a lot of talk about that in early movies

of the day. UM, a lot of the very first police union in the country, the port Portland Police Union, put out a big statement in the nineteen late forties about how dangerous Hollywood gangster movies are because they were going to get people to think that organized crime was cool and that all these people who were who were

enemies of society were actually heroes. And I see a connection between that and kind of our romance with espionage, but well and our romance with dirty Harry type cops who who first and ask questions later, and they don't let the constitution get in their way. You know, it's like there unless some lawyer let this, let this monster

back out in the streets. So I'm just gonna put a bullet in the guy, and we cheer for it, and it's like, well, yeah, but it's a fantasy because that's the world we want to live in where you don't have to check with anybody before you shoot the bad people. But you can't mistake that for the real world.

But in the case of like, would you as a people care about what is being done by the say in Guatemala or Iran or any of those places, and the answers, well, culturally no, because we have been reassured that these people are just out there looking out for our interests. And yeah, if they've got to torture somebody or you know, we've all seen that happen where where Jack Bauer has to torture the guy to find out when when the bomb's going to go off. So yeah,

the c i A. Is having to torture terrorist. Yeah, it's like Jack Bauer, it's like twenty four Like, well, okay, who told you that whether you decide that in the in them to see where they're supposed to answer to the people, when did you decide that it's that okay for them to operate in the shadows? Yeah, and it goes back to Dulas, it goes it does and I and it goes back from from Alan Dulas. He's inspired a lot by Kipling and you know this fiction of

the area that starts to romance. And that's why the story has to start here because you don't understand the worldview he was operating under until you understand where he came from. Yeah, and yeah he was. Um so there is a fun story from his time and Burn, uh that that I think people will enjoy. So, uh, First off, this sets up that Allan Dulis was not great at

his job. Um. Now, one night, while he was in Burn during World War One, he gets a call from a Russian exile living in Burn who had an urgent

message for the United States. The exile insisted that he should meet with Alan Dulas that night, but Allen was going to go on a date with As he later described it, too blond and spectacularly buxom Swiss sisters, twin sisters who had agreed to a week in rendezvous at a country in and so he blows this Russian off you want to guess with this Russian guy's name was Vladimir Ilioch Lennon. Of course, there were only two possibilities there.

I I so yeah, it's I mean, and like one of two things is possible either, and it's perfectly in character with what we've actually know about him. He blew off meeting Linen to go on a date with two girls, or he lied about blowing off Lennen to go on a date with two girls later to make himself seem cooler. Has there been any studies about because I've heard many men both that they had sex with two sisters. I've not known any sisters who would go out and then

find a single man to have sex. That seems weird because it feels like you're wind up in a threesome with your sibling, like I'm I'm trail picturing, like like me and my brother going out to pick up some check its like, oh no, it'll be both of us, And so she can boast later like oh, yeah, I picked up a couple of dudes, a couple of a

couple of dudes from from the Midwest, America. Uh so it's actually just us telling if this is just the story he told later that also want to call attention to something that may have like you may have caused a lot of your listeners kind of stopping their tracks. You said Alan was actually not very good at his job, and I think a lot of people, a lot of people be saying, well, but then how did he keep getting promoted? You have to understand that America back then,

it wasn't the pure meritocracy that it is now. Like like sometimes if you were born, if you, for instance, grew up where at the age of five you were having dinner with presidents, if you had enough powerful friends, you could be awful at your job and you would just keep failing upward. Yeah, we didn't solve that problem til decades later. Yeah, I mean, we had to fight very hard to completely and totally resolve that issue in

our society, and thankfully we did. Thankfully we did. Anyway, So what what whether or not that story about blowing off Lennen is true. Alan Dulas would claim to regret blowing him off for the rest of his life, and he was pretty consistent about this. He later wrote, quote here, the first chance, if in fact it was a chance

to start talking to the communist leaders, was lost. And that's the way he would sort of frame this in his life, like I screwed up a chance to maybe have set off U S Soviet relations on a better footing, which kind of makes me think it might be real because he doesn't. He portrays himself as being important here, but it doesn't portray himself as doing the right thing like he he constantly seems to regret it. I don't know what the truth is, right, Lennon wasn't burned during

that period, so it's not impossible now. Eventually, young Alan Dulas wound up dating a check woman who had been hired by the American legation in burn and the two grew close. But then Alan was informed by British intelligence that she was working for the Austrians, using her access to the American code room to pass on information. They informed to Alan that she needed to be liquidated, and he did not blink in sending his girlfriend off to die.

He took her out to dinner the very next night, and instead of taking her home, dropped her off with two British agents who we have to assume murdered her. She was never seen again. Yeah, um, it's pretty fucked up. I mean that is like spic ship. That's James Bond ship. Actually, um, having to kill your double aged girlfriend. That that it was a plot of like six of the James Bond movies. Yes, yeah, yeah right, but again he James Bond is sexy because

he's a narcissist. He cannot can't forget that, uh you know, and so we we worshiped that figure. It's like, wow, he's so cold in the face of the mission having to get done. You know, it didn't phace him. It's like, well, see in a fictional hero. And I not read the Kipling book, but there's an element of that he decided. It's like yeah, but he gets things done, he gets results,

like dirty Harry. Grandpa Foster died in nineteen seventeen. As a result, Alan Dulas had to rely on his uncle, the Secretary of State, to subsidize his tiny government salary from this point forward. But of course his uncle had plenty of money, and so Alan had plenty of money. This enabled him to live the high life and burn, hosting parties and taking out again just tons and tons of women, only a few of whom he helped the

British assassinate. Now Uncle Burt would also during this period provide Foster Dulus with his first opportunity to screw with a sovereign nation. Uh. And this is the start of Foster Dulus, who later becomes the Secretary of State, messing around with foreign politics. And I'm gonna quote from The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer. A pro American regime in Cuba, led by the Conservative Party was seeking to hold power after losing an election, and followers of the victorious Liberals

rose up in protest. Violence threatened the interest of thirteen Sullivan and Cromwell clients, owners of sugar mills, railways, and nines, who had a hundred and seventy million dollars the equivalent of three billion in the early twentieth century invested in Cuba. They turned to the firm for protection. Foster took the case and traveled immediately to Washington. The next morning he

had breakfast with Uncle Burt. By his own account, he quote suggested that the Navy Department sent two fast destroyers, one for the northern coast and one for the southern coast of the portion of Cuba controlled by the revolutionaries. Lansing agreed, his uncle agreed, and the warships were dispatched. That afternoon, marines landed and spread into the countryside to repress protests, beginning what would be a five year occupation.

I think a lot of Americans don't know that after the Spanish American War, we sent marines into brutally crush of popular uprising and occupied Cuba. It kind of makes the Castro stuff make more sense when you have that history, which might be wh yeah, and this era of right around World War One, the context of all this and the reason why this stuff keeps coming up. The globalization

of the economy is exploding at this point. But like there's always been trade between countries, of course, going back since the invention of boats, but now the total integration where you cannot manufacture you know, vehicles or wagons or cars in this country without steal from this country, petroleum from this country, you know, fabric from textiles from this country, where you've now got this network. So now whether or not the American government's interests are relevant all over the world.

American employers and corporation's interests factually are to the tune of as you said, billions and billions of dollars. This is where that really becomes true. World War One is like the turning point where from that point on we are on in like a one world economy by necessity, where stuff is being shipped all over, Like shipping becomes

a thing. So this concept of well, why would we care about putting down own some revolution and some it's like, well, there was a sugar mill there, as I think you said, are there's you know, a sugarcane plantation something. It's like, well, yeah, but why would we care about that? Like, well that that plantation is owned by this corporation that's actually not in that country, but it's you know, in these corporations spanned borders, but they don't have the power to put

down a revolution. So this whole thing, like it sounds like conspiracy talk when you say, well, the government's just working on behalf of the corporations, but it literally was acting on behalf of the corporations. It's not. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's the reason this stuff was being done. It was literally the Secretary of State's grandson, the employee

of these business owners in Cuba who not Cuban. Isn't these guys who owned businesses in Cuba going to his uncle and saying, will you send in the Marines from my friends who pay me? Like that's how it happened. I mean people used fancy or language back then, but that's how it happened. So again the question is in his mind, was there some unified like ideology of are we rescuing the citizens there from something? And that to me is like asking to what point, to what degree

did Donald Trump believe anything? He said, I have no idea. We'll talk about Foster's ideology more it it evolved at this time. I don't think he has. I think he's still the the to the extent that he's driven by ideology.

It's his grandfather's right, this idea that American capitalism and nationalism are best served by forcing using our power to force other countries to trade with us and give us access to resources, right, and that that's a valid thing to use the military for because it's good for us and and this is my country. That's kind of Foster Dolus is the grandpa. Foster dolus Is ideology at this point.

It's his grandson's ideology that will change. We're going to talk about kind of how what he believes alter is over time. But my guess is at this point he's still kind of believes what his grandfather believed. That's the sense that I get. Um again, if you want to read the book The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer, you listening. It's a wonderful book. Actually, a lovely fan sent me

a copy of it in the mail, a hard copy. Um, which kind of it inspired me to finally say, I've been wanting to do an episode on the Dollas Brothers for a while. But but thank you person who sent me the book. UM. I hope you're listening, and I hope you're happy with this episode. Um, motherfucker. So anyway, Um. Yeah.

Foster Dolus the Younger learned a lot of lessons from his intervention in Cuba, the most significant of which was that it was actually super easy for a wealthy corporation to convince the US to intervene and dominate the politics of a smaller nation for profit. It worked well for him. Um, for his part, Uncle Bert was impressed with his nephew

and quickly sent him out on another mission. The U. S Government, which had now entered the war on the side of the Allies, wanted to purge all German influence from Central and Erica. Now this is probably prompted in part by the Zimmerman Telegram, which was a letter the Kaiser sent to Mexico asking if Mexico might be interested in attacking the US to get us off of Germany's back. There was never any chance of this leading to anything,

because the Mexican government wasn't an idiot um. They'd already lost two wars to the United States. They weren't going to do it. The Kaiser, We've done two episodes on him, one of the dumbest men to ever have power in history. The Zimmerman Telegram is like the one of the worst owned goals in the history of geopolitics, like just an

amazing vict gift that he handed the British um. And this telegrams existence was really all that the State Department needed to justify sitting Foster Dulus to Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua to funk with some German immigrants during this period, Costa Rica was ruled by a dictator, General Federico Tinoco, who had seized power with the help of the United Fruit Company, who was a client of Foster's law firm,

Sullivan and Cromwell. General Tinocco was in debt to the company, and Foster used this leverage over him to convince the dictator to confiscate the property of German immigrants. He did the same in Nicaragua, whose dictator, General Emiliano Chamorro, had also been put in power by the US government after his democratically elected predecessor had tried to borrow money from European rather than US banks. That's why we overthrew the

government of Nicaragua, because he wanted loans from the wrong country. Um, it's good ship. Now. When World War One ended, both Dullus brothers wound up taking part in a massive peace conference in Paris. Foster worked on laying out the rules

by which German reparations would be imposed. And his main contribution here had to do with debt financing, which I do not understand at all, and I'm not even going to try to explain, But that's what he's working on here, and it's an important job, right, That's what's important to understand, the question of how Germany is going to repay its war debts is a matter of international importance, and Foster Dullus is one of the key people trying to work

that out. So it's it's a big gig. Alan Dullis gets a job for the Boundary Commission, which was also a big job because it's it's good with duty was to redraw the borders of Europe after World War One. Both men spent a lot of time with President Woodrow Wilson as a result. In fact, they got to spend more time with Wilson than his own Secretary of State their uncle did because at that point their uncle had kind of fallen out of favor with the President. Wilson

had a major influence on them. He was a big believer in the USA's duty to quote carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity to less civilized and generally non white people and to quote convert them to the principles of America. Now, Wilson was a profound racist, a big supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, but unlike many supremacist white supremacists of his day. He believed non white people could sustain a democracy if quote properly directed

by whites. In order to properly direct different nations, President Wouldrow Wilson intervened in foreign nations more than any other president before him. In fact, he may have intervened in more foreign nations than every other president before him combined. He sent US troops into Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, and even in the turbulent period following the Bolshevik Revolution, into the U s s a while into Russia at

the time. Now, the USSR had just started to be a thing during this period, and the fact that the Russian Civil War was still and in fact, the Russian Civil War was still ongoing when the brothers are in this conference. The US attempted and ultimately failed to stop the Bolsheviks from winning. That's why Wilson sent in troops. The Dullest brothers came to agree during this period that communism was now the greatest threat to the kind of capitalism and the kind of democracy that they held dear

over the following years. In decades, both Foster and Allen Dulas would come to see the battle against communism as the defining struggle of their lives. But Jason, that's a struggle we're going to talk about in part two. How you doing, I'm done? All right, good good, Well that's part one. That's part one of the dullest story, laying the groundwork, really getting behind him. Anything you'd like to plug up the this episode, Jason, Yes, if you want to check out the last book I wrote, it is

called Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. It is a science fiction novel. Uh it is. The title conveys exactly what kind of book it is. I don't need to say anything else. I have written several books. You can google my name, all of which you're wonderful. Yeah, that evans vouchers for them, so I do. I've been reading your books, I think since I was like thirteen or fourteen when you were publishing it Chunk every Halloween on your website. Yes, now and now I'm doing that

full time and then part time. M a just a podcast guest shows full time guy who had one of his books adapted by Don Coscarelli, who also made Bubba Hotep, which is which is a pretty significant thing to add to a resume. If you've never heard of me before. If you've encountered from my work, it was probably the movie or the book John Dies at the end, the horror novel and a movie they can find on any stream mean service. But that's yeah, that that that book

is the reason I can write full time basically. Yet, so read some stuff theypes, read his books, and then come back and listen to more about the Dulless Brothers Part two Dullis Carter h h h h m hm