In his calendar for October 2, 1963, Dulles penciled in an interesting appointment. “Dillon,” he wrote—by which he meant C. Douglas Dillon, the Treasury secretary and former Wall Street financier. After Dillon’s name, Dulles scrawled “Bank Reps.” There was no further explanation for the scheduled appointment. But the proximity of the meeting to the Kennedy assassination raises compelling questions, particularly since Dillon, as Treasury chief, was in charge of President Kennedy’s Secret Service protection. And the banking industry was locked in a long-running battle with the president over his economic policies.

When it came to undertaking secret missions, Allen Dulles was a bold and decisive actor. But he acted only after he felt that a consensus had been reached within his influential network. One of the principal arenas where this consensus took shape was the Council on Foreign Relations. The Dulles brothers and their Wall Street circle had dominated this private bastion for shaping public policy ever since the 1920s. Over the years, CFR meetings, study groups, and publications provided forums in which the organization’s leading members— including Wall Street bankers and lawyers, prominent politicians, media executives, and academic dignitaries—hammered out major U.S. policy directions, including the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan and the Cold War strategy of “containment” aimed at the Soviet Union. The CIA-engineered coup that overthrew Guatemala’s democratic government was put in motion by Dulles after a CFR study group urged tough action against Arbenz’s left-wing administration. If CFR was the power elite’s brain, the CIA was its black-gloved fist.

As the global reach of American industry and finance grew during the postwar era, so did the U.S. national security complex. America’s vast system of military and covert power was aimed not just at checking the Soviet threat but at protecting U.S. corporate interests abroad. Behind the rapid international growth of multinational giants like Chase Manhattan, Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, and GM lay a global network of U.S. military bases, spy stations, and alliances with despotic regimes. The twin exigencies of the Cold War and U.S. empire gave the national security establishment unprecedented free rein to operate. The CIA was empowered not only to engage in the deadly “spy versus spy” antics against the KGB that became the stuff of Cold War legend but to subvert democratic governments that were deemed insufficiently pro-American and to terminate these governments’ elected leaders.

Dedicated to the dark necessities of expanding American power, this security complex began to take on a hidden life of its own, untethered from the checks and balances of democracy. Sometimes CIA officials kept the White House and Congress informed; often they did not. When John Chancellor of NBC News asked Dulles if the CIA made its own policy, the spymaster insisted that during his tenure he had regularly briefed congressional committees about the agency’s budget and operations. But, he added, Congress generally preferred to remain blissfully ignorant of the distasteful things done in the government’s name. “When I appeared before them,” said Dulles, “again and again I’ve been stopped by members of the Congress, who said, ‘We don’t want to hear about that, we might talk in our sleep. Don’t tell us this!’”
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/04/part-12-devils-chessboardfor-good-of.html