Allen Dulles
Allen Welsh Dulles (/ˈdʌlɪs/ DUL-iss; April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was an American lawyer who was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest serving director to date. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program, 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 fired by President John F. Kennedy.
Allen Dulles
Harry S. Truman
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Position established
January 29, 1969 (aged 75)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
3
John Foster Dulles (brother)
John Welsh Dulles (grandfather)
Miron Winslow (great-grandfather)
Harriet Winslow (great-grandmother)
Avery Cardinal Dulles (nephew)
Dulles family
Dulles was a member of the Warren Commission that investigated the Kennedy's assassination. A conspiracy theory suggesting that Dulles and the CIA were somehow involved in Kennedy's assassination and its potential cover up in the Warren Commission have been subject to popular debate among historians, political commentators and conspiracy theorists. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that the CIA was not involved in the assassination of Kennedy.[1]
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.[2]
Early life and family[edit]
Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York,[3] one of five children of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles, and his wife, Edith (née Foster) Dulles. 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.[4] 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.[5][6]
Dulles graduated from Princeton University, where he participated in the American Whig–Cliosophic Society.[7] He taught school in India before entering the diplomatic service in 1916.[8] In 1920, he married Martha "Clover" Todd (March 5, 1894 – April 15, 1974). They had three children: daughters Clover and Joan,[9] and son Allen Macy Dulles II (1930–2020), who was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War and spent the rest of his life in and out of medical care.[10]
According to his sister, Eleanor, Dulles had "at least a hundred" extramarital affairs, including some during his tenure with the CIA.[11]
Early career[edit]
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.[12] Later in life Dulles said he had been telephoned by Vladimir Lenin, seeking a meeting with the American embassy on April 8, 1917,[12] 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.[13]
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.[14][15]
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.[16]
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.[17] 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.[18]
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.[19][20] The effort was successful, and the firm ceased to conduct business in Nazi Germany.[21]
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.[21] Dulles collaborated with Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, on two books, Can We Be Neutral? (1936), and Can America Stay Neutral? (1939). They concluded that diplomatic, military, and economic isolation, in a traditional sense, were no longer possible in an increasingly interdependent international system.[22] Dulles helped some German Jews, such as the banker Paul Kemper, escape to the United States from Nazi Germany.[23]
Later life[edit]
Later, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, on November 29, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Dulles as one of seven commissioners of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of the U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Some historians later criticized the appointment, noting that Kennedy fired him. Therefore, he was unlikely to be impartial in passing the judgments charged to the Warren Commission. In the view of journalist and author Stephen Kinzer, Johnson appointed Dulles primarily so that Dulles could "coach" the Commission on how to interview CIA witnesses and what questions to ask because Johnson and Dulles were both anxious to ensure that the Commission did not discover Kennedy's secret involvement in the administration's illegal plans to assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders.[48][49] Robert F. Kennedy also urged Lyndon Johnson to put Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission most likely fearing revelation of Kennedy's clandestine involvement in Cuba.[50]
In 1966, Princeton University's American Whig-Cliosophic Society awarded Dulles the James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service.[51]
Dulles published the book The Craft of Intelligence in 1963,[52] and edited Great True Spy Stories in 1968.
He died on January 29, 1969, of influenza, complicated by pneumonia, at the age of 75, in Georgetown, D.C.[2][3] He was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.[53]
Works available online
Archival materials