Allen Dulles
Allen Welsh Dulles was an American lawyer who was the first civilian director of central intelligence, and its longest serving director. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency during the early Cold War, he oversaw numerous activities, such as the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the Project MKUltra mind control program, and the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. As a result of the failed invasion of Cuba, Dulles was forced to resign by President John F. Kennedy and was replaced with John McCone for the remainder of the Kennedy administration.
Following his resignation, Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission tasked with investigating President Kennedy's assassination. His inclusion on the panel, despite having been dismissed by Kennedy and formerly serving as head of the CIA, has prompted sustained discussion among historians and commentators regarding potential conflicts of interest. While the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the CIA as an institution was not involved in the assassination, debate persists over the extent of internal agency knowledge, as well as Dulles’s influence on the commission’s scope and findings.
Between his stints of government service, Dulles was a corporate lawyer and partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, was the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower administration and is the namesake of Dulles International Airport.
Early life and family
Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, one of five children of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles, and his wife, Edith Dulles. Allen Macy Dulles mixed theological liberalism with stern orthopraxy.He was five years younger than his brother, John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State and chairman and senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, and two years older than his sister, the diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison, while his uncle by marriage, Robert Lansing was Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Growing up in a parsonage, Dulles was made to attend church daily. As his parents distrusted public education, Dulles was homeschooled by various private tutors.
Dulles graduated from Princeton University, where he participated in the American Whig–Cliosophic Society. He taught school in India before entering the diplomatic service in 1916. In 1920, he married Martha "Clover" Todd. They had three children: daughters Clover and Joan, and son Allen Macy Dulles II, who was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War and spent the rest of his life in and out of medical care.
According to his sister, Eleanor, Dulles had "at least a hundred" extramarital affairs, including some during his tenure with the CIA.
Early career
Initially assigned to Vienna, he was transferred to Bern, Switzerland, along with the rest of the embassy personnel shortly before the U.S. entered the First World War. Later in life Dulles said he had been telephoned by Vladimir Lenin, seeking a meeting with the American embassy on April 8, 1917, the day before Lenin left Switzerland to travel to Saint Petersburg aboard a German train. After recovering from the Spanish flu he was assigned to the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, along with his elder brother Foster.In 1921, while at the US Embassy in Istanbul, he helped expose The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery. Dulles unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the US State Department to publicly denounce the forgery.
From 1922 to 1926, Dulles served as chief of the Near East division of the Department of State. He then earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at Sullivan & Cromwell, the New York firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner. He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, the first new director since the Council's founding in 1921. He was the Council's secretary from 1933 to 1944 and its president from 1946 to 1950.
During the late 1920s and the early 1930s, he served as legal adviser to the delegations on arms limitation at the League of Nations. He met with Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and the prime ministers of Britain and France. In April 1933, Dulles and Norman Davis met with Hitler in Berlin on State Department duty. After the meeting, Dulles wrote to his brother Foster and reassured him that conditions under Hitler's regime "are not quite as bad" as an alarmist friend had indicated. Dulles rarely spoke about his meeting with Hitler, and future CIA director Richard Helms had not even heard of their encounter until decades after the death of Dulles and expressed shock that his former boss had never told him about it. After meeting with German Information Minister Joseph Goebbels, Dulles stated he was impressed with him and cited his "sincerity and frankness" during their interaction.
In 1935, Dulles returned from a business trip to Germany concerned by the Nazi treatment of German Jews and, despite his brother's objections, led a movement within the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell to close their Berlin office. The effort was successful, and the firm ceased to conduct business in Nazi Germany.
As the Republican Party began to divide into isolationist and interventionist factions, Dulles became an outspoken interventionist, running unsuccessfully in 1938 for the Republican nomination in New York's Sixteenth Congressional District on a platform calling for the strengthening of U.S. defenses. Dulles collaborated with Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, on two books, Can We Be Neutral?, and Can America Stay Neutral?. They concluded that diplomatic, military, and economic isolation, in a traditional sense, were no longer possible in an increasingly interdependent international system. Dulles helped some German Jews, such as the banker Paul Kemper, escape to the United States from Nazi Germany.
World War II and OSS career
In July 1941, with World War II raging in Europe, William J. Donovan was tasked by US President Roosevelt to establish an American intelligence service, which became the Office of Strategic Services. Dulles was recruited by Donovan in October 1941, and assigned as liaison with the "British Security Co-ordination" office in New York City.In 1942, Dulles was sent to Switzerland, arriving in Bern on
on 12 November 1942. He rented an apartment at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of the war. As Swiss Director of the OSS, Dulles gathered intelligence about German plans and activities, and established wide contacts with German émigrés and resistance figures, including anti-Nazi intelligence officers. He was assisted by Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, a German emigrant. Dulles also received valuable information from German diplomat Fritz Kolbe, whom he described as the best spy of the war. Kolbe supplied secret documents about active German spies and plans for the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. Dulles' activities resulted in tension with MI6, who had been building up extensive operations in Switzerland since 1939. They warned their station head, Frederick 'Fanny' Vanden Heuvel, that Dulles would "lend himself easily to any striking proposal which looks like notoriety". Vanden Heuvel agreed that Dulles was "out for himself", but became a personal friend.
One of Dulles' early contacts was Hans Bernd Gisevius, the Zürich representative of German military intelligence. Gisevius was already an important source for Polish intelligence and MI6, as he regularly met with their agent Halina Szymańska. Gisevius purported to be involved in anti-Nazi circles, but MI6 suspected that some of the information he provided about German military plans was intentional misinformation, and it is still unclear where his true loyalty lay at this time. One of Gisevius' claims was that the Germans could read the cipher that Dulles was using, but despite knowing this, Dulles used it to send to Washington a report of his Gisevius meeting, including a claim that the Germans planned to launch suicide attacks against London with flying boats. MI6 were unimpressed, both because he was potentially putting his source in danger and because the plan was implausible. The assistant chief of MI6, Claude Dansey, described Dulles as a "fool" who "swallows easily". At a subsequent meeting, Gisevius urged Dulles to use MI6 communications instead, which he did. By February 1944, Szymańska reported that Gisevius was persona non grata with his own side and unable to provide any intelligence, which MI6 considered was due to Dulles allowing the source of his information to become widely known in Washington.
File:Bundesarchiv RH8II Bild-B0788-42 BSM, Peenemünde, Startvorbereitungen V2.jpg|thumb|Allen Dulles used information from Heinrich Maier's resistance group for the very important Operation Crossbow.
Dulles was in contact with the Austrian resistance group around the priest Heinrich Maier, who collected information through many different contacts with scientists and the military. From 1943 onward, he received very important information from this resistance group about V-weapons, tanks, and aircraft, and related factories. This helped Allied bombers to target important armaments factories. In particular, Dulles obtained crucial information for Operation Crossbow and Operation Hydra. The group reported to him about the mass murder in Auschwitz. Through the Maier Group and Kurt Grimm, Dulles also received information about the economic situation in the Nazi sphere of influence. After the resistance group was uncovered by the Gestapo, Dulles sent American agents to Austria to contact any surviving members.
Although Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the German anti-Hitler conspirators, they nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy but accurate warnings of plans for the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket.
As the Third Reich neared defeat in 1944 and 1945, Dulles and his law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, worked with several German industrialists to move Nazi funds out of Germany's territory. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the German SS, began transferring Nazi wealth, including that stolen from Jewish Holocaust victims, to other countries to support a postwar "Fourth Reich." Brigadeführer Kurt Baron von Schröder, who cooperated with Himmler on his plan, was a business associate of Dulles. Dulles and Schröder created companies through which they moved Nazi wealth to other nations. This operation infuriated U.S. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who unsuccessfully pressured President Harry S. Truman to disrupt the plan. However, given the ties of the British royal family to German wealth, no formal investigation began.
Dulles was involved in Operation Sunrise, secret negotiations in March 1945 to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy. His actions in Operation Sunrise have been criticized by historians for offering German SS General Karl Wolff protection from prosecution at the Nuremberg trial, and creating a diplomatic rift between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin station chief and later as station chief in Bern. The Office of Strategic Services was dissolved in October 1945 and its functions transferred to the State and War Departments.