The brothers also sanctioned assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, trained opium-growing soldiers in an attempt to undermine Maoist China and sent Saudi soldiers into the oil-rich Buraimi Oasis in the Persian Gulf which they sought to wrest control of from Great Britain. Stephen Kinzer’s book, The Brothers, provides a detailed portrait of the Dulles brothers, who dominated foreign policy making in the 1950s and helped transform the CIA from an “intelligence agency that carried out occasional clandestine plots into a global force ceaselessly engaged in paramilitary and regime change campaigns.”Along with Guatemala’s Operation PBSuccess, the brothers orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh after he threatened to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, backed a separatist rebellion against Indonesia’s socialist prime minister and a vicious counterinsurgency against agrarian reformers in Philippines, molded a secret army in Laos after rigging elections, and built up a police state in South Vietnam after boycotting the Geneva conference. CIA director Allen Dulles stands next to the pair, his satchel full of cash, while Dwight Eisenhower’s face is pictured in a bomb.

In one of the most compelling pieces of twentieth century political art, Glorious Victory, Diego Rivera depicts Secretary of State John Foster Dulles shaking hands over a pile of dead corpses with Castillo Armas who deposed Guatemala’s left-leaning President Jacobo Arbenz in a 1954 coup. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

The brothers by stephen kinzer