THE MOST EXTRAVAGANT DREAMERS TO HAVE HEADED THE CENTRAL Intelligence Agency are those who sparked its creation. Bringing a peacetime intelligence agency into being required resuscitating an instrument of war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). One of the dreamers, William J. Donovan—“Wild Bill” to his acolytes—had headed the OSS in World War II. He continued to lobby for a similar entity. Without Bill Donovan the road to a peacetime agency would have been longer and rockier. But if you want someone who not only advocated but actually played a major role in setting up the agency, and then led it during the Cold War, that man has to be Allen Welsh Dulles. Without exaggerating, you can say that Allen Dulles built the house that is the CIA.
You could have expected it. This man filled the mold of the quintessential spy. Although Dulles had a career as a Wall Street lawyer, he found his true calling as a spook. Some might say Dulles played his international contacts for espionage purposes; others, that he used his intelligence role to shield foreign friends. Either way, he immersed himself early, kept up his interest in clandestine affairs, became Donovan’s quick and willing ally at the OSS, and fought alongside Wild Bill for the new agency. Dulles imagined himself as the Great White Case Officer, luring agents the way Moby-Dick lured whalers.
A SPY OF QUALITY
After World War II, fame came to Allen Dulles. He had been OSS station chief in Switzerland, probably the best known OSS person besides Wild Bill himself. Dulles was renowned for two achievements. One had been spying. Agents reporting to Dulles had friends and relatives among, or were members of, the German high command. Some plotted against Adolf Hitler. The Dulles pipeline into the inner thinking of the Nazis had been a vital source, unmatched among the Allies, even the Russians, who had a well-established spy network but one a layer more remote from the centers of Nazi power. Dulles’s other signal success, the negotiation known as Operation Sunrise, had brought about a German-Italian surrender in northern Italy.
The OSS outpost in Bern, Switzerland, became Dulles’s to run throughout his active service in the war, partly because of the difficulty of reaching Switzerland. Allen had crossed the border from Vichy France under the noses of the Nazi Gestapo. Just after that, the Germans took over Vichy, in November 1942, closing that access. Partly due to those conditions, partly to his success, there could not be any question of recalling Mr. Dulles, or officer 110, as he was known in OSS messages.
The neophyte station chief sought out business associates from prewar days and also put out a welcome mat for anyone who wanted to walk in with significant intelligence. One of his contacts was an agent for Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Years later the Soviets would publish that spy’s reports on the talks, which had Allen speaking disparagingly of bankers, politicians, and Jews. A German mining executive gave Dulles better data. So, despite the OSS man’s alleged opinions, did his banker friends. Mary Bancroft, American expatriate, femme fatale, and Allen’s mistress, also furnished information and ideas. Noel Field, a former State Department colleague working with refugees and resistance groups, afforded Dulles access to networks beyond his own. An old acquaintance, Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, became the first important German; for Dulles he ran an entire ring of subagents.
There were other agents, many of them anti-Nazi Germans. Two became stars. One, Fritz Kolbe, served as personal assistant to the liaison officer between the German high command and the country’s foreign office. The other, Hans Bernd Gisevius, an official of the German interior ministry, opened a window into the inner sanctum of anti-Hitler resistance, even in the Abwehr, Germany’s intelligence service. Dulles’s wartime reports to Washington became a prime source, the kind protected with an exclusive access list. By early 1944, the White House had begun conveying the Bern material to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Some challenged the authenticity of Dulles’s reports, but the drumbeat of incredible intelligence spoke for itself.
Not only did Allen Dulles provide key information during the war; as it ended, a Dulles feeler helped simplify the German surrender, taking a mass of troops off the board. Station chief Dulles worked through trusted lieutenants. One was C. Tracy Barnes, an OSS captain who made his mark with Dulles by quietly making a copy of the diaries of the former Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, convincing Ciano’s wife—the daughter of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini—that the material would be safer with the Americans. Another key spy was Schulze-Gaevernitz, who could speak to the German generals. Dulles brought them together with American field commanders and opened talks that turned into Operation Sunrise. Senior Germans agreed on April 29, 1945, to surrender three days later. Some 225,000 German and Italian troops stopped fighting. Dulles, hobbling on a crutch in those days due to a flare-up of his gout, secured the largest surrender of enemy forces accomplished by anyone at the OSS.
Allen Welsh Dulles, born to a family of distinction, had paths smoothed for him but nevertheless became a high achiever. Born in the spring of 1893, Allen was the third of five children of Allen Macy Dulles, a Presbyterian minister in Watertown, New York, and his wife, Edith Foster Dulles. The three a.m. birth revealed a baby with a clubfoot, but the family had been well enough off, in this age without health insurance, that Allen could have an operation to correct that condition. Sister Eleanor recalled the pack of children as being “like a pride of lions.” Allen’s father’s uncle served as U.S. ambassador to England from 1877 to 1879. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, had been secretary of state to President Benjamin Harrison and was the author of books on world affairs. His mother’s sister was married to Robert M. Lansing, “Uncle Bert,” a Watertown lawyer who became counselor to the U.S. government in international maritime negotiations while Edith was pregnant with Allen. On and off, Lansing engaged in U.S.-foreign legal dealings right through Allen’s childhood, and by the time the latter left for college, Uncle Bert was counselor to the State Department. Clearly, forebears established a strong tradition of government foreign service.
Uncle Bert adopted the custom of bringing the Dulles children to visit at his vacation home on an island in Lake Ontario. Older brother John Foster went first, but Allen followed at age seven. It was an important moment in world affairs—the British were fighting a war against the Boers in South Africa, and there were fears that Germany, whose emperor favored the Boers, might use its fleet to smuggle arms or obstruct shipping. A stream of American and foreign diplomats and public figures paraded through Uncle Bert’s parlor. Young Allen saw them when coming in from swimming or bass fishing. He showed early interest in foreign policy a year later, writing an essay, soon expanded to a veritable book, on the Boer War.
“Allie” began making international contacts. Having been educated at home by reading and exchanges with parents and governesses, he found the public schools in Auburn, New York, disappointing. His parents sent Allen to boarding school, the École alsacienne in Paris. By 1910 he was matriculating at Princeton University, where older brother John Foster had already gone. Allen graduated on the eve of World War I. He toured East Asia, spent a year in India teaching English, then went back to Princeton for his master’s degree, obtained in 1916.
By then the future spymaster had already drunk from the espionage well. His first sip occurred courtesy of Uncle Bert and the State Department, where Lansing first figured as a high aide and then became Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state. Both Dulles boys whetted their swords on the intricacies of diplomacy. John Foster, having secured his law degree in 1911, joined the Wall Street firm Sullivan and Cromwell and then consulted with State on legal aspects of negotiations. Then the department hired Allen as a diplomat. After receiving his master’s, Dulles went to Vienna as legation secretary. In early 1917, Washington broke diplomatic relations with Austria-Hungary as the United States entered World War I. American diplomats withdrew, first to Switzerland. Whereas many continued to France, Allen Dulles wound up at the Bern embassy.
After a couple of weeks with no portfolio, Dulles’s superiors drafted him to handle intelligence matters. In World War I, the United States had no spy service other than specialized branches of the armed forces. Responsible for all aspects of foreign affairs, the State Department created a small code-breaking office in Washington, and sections for espionage at various embassies, Bern being one. So Allen Dulles participated in an enterprise that took him away from dreary visa and passport duties. Though not especially productive as a spy, Allen came away with at least one whopper of a story. That first summer he was seeing a woman, daughter of a Swiss industrialist, who liked to play tennis. One Sunday they had a match scheduled when Allen got a phone call from a Russian. Of all people, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, about to leave exile for his native Russia, wanted to see someone from the U.S. embassy. Dulles had no idea who Lenin was and no intention of standing up his girlfriend. He never saw the Bolshevik. Lenin left the next day, crossing Germany in the famous sealed train, on his way to igniting the Russian Revolution. Allen W. Dulles dined out on that for decades. That story made him the Great White Case Officer.
At war’s end, the young diplomat, seconded to the American delegation to Versailles, reunited with his brother, whom familiars had begun calling Foster, in Paris as legal counsel for the United States. Allen continued dabbling in espionage, picking up bits of gossip and insider tips. Once the peace treaty had been signed, he went to Berlin as first secretary.
Allen married in late 1920. Martha Clover Todd had met him only months earlier, when he was between diplomatic posts. The attraction is not clear. Preoccupied, self-doubting, a devotee of psychoanalysis, Clover, as she was known, showed genuine emotion. Allen stayed aloof, only superficially interested unless he thought someone useful. Sadly, this detachment extended even to their three children. Clover did not accompany Allen on his next posting, to the American Commission in Constantinople, and perhaps that was a mistake. Her husband began to step out with a succession of mistresses. In addition, Dulles exhibited behaviors of a classic manipulator, uninterested in anyone not useful to him, heaping attention on a small number of associates, showing his temper in a calculated way. He returned to Washington in the spring of 1922 and led the Near East Division at State for four years.
Dulles followed his brother to the law, studying after hours and taking courses at George Washington University. He earned his law degree in 1926. Allen then resigned from the State Department. He had been offered the post of counselor at the Beijing embassy, a promotion but no more money than he already earned. That led to the break. Foster had made partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, and he brought Allen in as a starting lawyer. For over two decades, except the time Dulles spent with OSS, he functioned as an international lawyer alongside Foster. More than that, he used contacts made as a diplomat to further Sullivan and Cromwell’s fortunes. German bankers Swiss and Austrian nationals became Sullivan clients. One of Germany’s big problems that stemmed from the Treaty of Versailles was the need to pay war reparations. With a crippled economy and inflation rampant, reparations were a major headache. Allen Dulles’s law firm not only supervised German bond sales to meet these expenses, but also suggested ways to make the reparations scheme more tolerable.
The German account suited Allen Dulles. He had other legal dealings in South America. His travels took him in many directions—away from Clover. Allen and Clover seem to have had an open relationship; they exchanged letters and conversed about his encounters, adventures, and liaisons with other women. Allen, quite the rake, conquered hearts at every turn. At the height of World War II, with Allied forces battering their way across France, Clover managed to reach Switzerland, volunteering as an ambulance driver to join her husband. In Bern she became a close friend of Allen’s mistress Mary Bancroft. Clover seems to have taken her husband’s adventures in stride, and Allen appears to have used his personal affairs to further his spy work.
SPOOKS AND ASHES
When World War II ended, the world was a mess. Smoke rose from the ruins of Berlin. German and Japanese industrial plants and cities had been carpet bombed or, worse, attacked with incendiaries. Atomic bombs had been dropped. American official Henry Morgenthau had had a scheme to punish Germany by reducing it to a pastoral economy. Though wiser heads prevailed, reality proved not very different. Soviet conquerors, eager to replace economic engines devastated by war, were carting away much of the German industry that had survived. Germany collapsed into a barter system in which potentates dealt in cigarettes, women’s nylon stockings, clothing, wood, and other things that might get you through the winter or the night. Italy had been worked over too. The victors were scarcely better off. Britain and France both continued food rationing. Russia had lost somewhere between 18 and 31 million people.
All this merely scratched the surface. The fact that Soviet armies now stood on frontiers far from the motherland, having gained a wide protective belt to shield it, offered the West little comfort. Soviet territorial changes in eastern Europe included absorbing the Baltic States, plus parts of Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Romania. Russia awarded German land to Poland and Romanian territory to Hungary. Citizens of German lineage had property seized and were expelled. Other eastern Europeans simply fled the Soviets. “Displaced persons” (DPs) became the label for a vast human migration, comparable to the sea of Middle Eastern refugees escaping the troubles in that region in the 2010s. In 1945–46 alone, there were more than 14 million DPs, about half from former German lands suddenly made into Poland or Russia. Even as some settled in new places, others languished in DP camps in the occupation zones of Germany and Austria. As might be expected, Soviet agents infiltrated the flow, taking advantage of the chaos to enter the West. Weeding out Soviet spies quickly became a concern. The DPs also represented a pool from which intelligence services could find people to send east.
Denazification—a deliberate effort to extirpate the National Socialist ideology—framed a second issue. The Allied powers arrested former Nazi leaders and prosecuted them for war crimes. (In the Far East, Japanese were prosecuted too—some of them for waterboarding.) Lesser Nazis were barred from positions of official responsibility, denied work permits, or simply ostracized. This treatment became an intelligence problem in several ways. The security services sought to track and apprehend suspected war criminals, but they also wished to recruit German scientists, technocrats, and others with particular skills. In those cases, demonstrating that some former official had not been tainted by a Nazi past assumed great importance. Both the American and Russian guided-missile programs would be jump-started by former German scientists.
Allen Dulles entered the German stage here. As the war wound down, Dulles watched from Bern. One by one, starting with Tracy Barnes, his best operatives had gone home. Dulles hoped to be OSS chief for Europe, but instead General Donovan assigned him to head a new German mission. A different unit was looking for scientists. Dulles arrived in Berlin six weeks after the German surrender, visiting his old haunts but at length setting up shop at the Henkel, a former champagne winery near Wiesbaden. Bases subordinate to the station were established in Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin.
At the village of Biebrich, Dulles lived in the Horn Rabbit House, so named because its owner had decorated the walls with the mounted heads of rabbits. As common for quasi-military billets—and this one had been furnished by the Army’s Quartermaster Corps—Dulles shared the quarters with a cross section of individuals who became the first generation of CIA leaders. Richard Helms, officially a U.S. Navy officer, served as chief of the espionage branch. Frank Wisner, also of the Navy, headed special operations. Wisner had returned from service as OSS chief in Turkey and then the so-called Hammerhead mission to Romania. He was the tenant most comfortable with the rabbit heads—the Romanians had entertained him with weekend duck hunts. Helms writes that Wisner, at Biebrich, still seemed shaken by what he had seen in Romania. In residence as well, indeed responsible for the critical daily ration of Glühwein, the cinnamon-flavored warmed red wine that is a European treat, was Harry A. Rositzke, a philologist by trade, who served as the mission’s top planner.
In July Allen returned to Berlin and focused on the base there. The OSSers helped find evidence for war crimes indictments and created lists of Germans suitable for employment, as well as those who ought to be proscribed. Some believe Dulles had a burning party, finding and destroying documents implicating his prewar German business associates. It is certainly true that Allen openly advocated favorable treatment for “Good Germans,” by which he meant people who had resisted the Nazis, people like those who came to Bern to tell the OSS of Hitler’s doings. About the time the Great White Case Officer began this advocacy, President Harry Truman abolished the OSS. Dulles left Germany then. In December 1945, Allen put in separation papers to leave government service. Richard Helms affirms that money played a role. Helms notes that brother Foster, who had stayed at Sullivan and Cromwell, earned several times what Allen could expect. And Foster had a job for him. So the younger sibling returned to Sullivan and Cromwell.
So far as the Good German issue is concerned, among the truly good and the great were plenty motivated by self-interest. And there were at least two sides to the issue, since Western interests changed with the onset of the Cold War. Denazification abruptly became a lesser priority. Former German generals helped Americans understand Soviet military practices, so suddenly they were afforded special treatment in the prisoner-of-war system. Soon former German intelligence people who had worked against the Russians offered to help the U.S. military. This unit became the nucleus of a new German intelligence agency. All the groups of Germans who helped the West in the Cold War later turned out to have members who concealed Nazi pasts, some quite atrocious. But such a résumé had yet to become a problem while Allen Dulles, at Sullivan and Cromwell, lobbied for a peacetime intelligence agency. As time passed, the younger Dulles stayed active in foreign affairs, serving as a consultant when the House of Representatives considered the Marshall Plan. He went beyond advocating for “good” Germans and put an oar into espionage waters.
The Office of Strategic Services had too many enemies. The unit formally existed as an appendage of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) but administratively lay within the War Department (the U.S. Army). The Army had its own intelligence section, the G-2, a loose espionage unit nicknamed the Pond, and a Counterintelligence Corps with other spooky functions. Army people looked askance at the odd ducks Wild Bill Donovan had gathered under his wing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported Donovan, but he passed away in the spring of 1945. Harry S. Truman, who succeeded, had no special esteem for the OSS. He instructed the Army, Navy, and the State Department to propose postwar arrangements.
President Truman abolished the OSS by executive order that September. A rally at Washington’s Riverside Stadium, where OSS heroes were honored at a mass ceremony, was almost its last official act. Donovan’s suggestions for a new entity, his appeal upon learning Truman’s intentions, did not sway the president. Within the War Department, Donovan’s insistence that the JCS be consulted was met by a paper showing the Joint Chiefs fully cognizant of the plan to demobilize the OSS.
State already had a recommendation to create an Office of Research and Intelligence, duplicating the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, while its covert operations components were judged not useful in peacetime. The Army and the Navy both had intelligence units that gathered information by technological means (radio intercept, aerial photography) as well as special operations forces, so the OSS seemed redundant. The actual running of spies seemed the only function neglected. Here the War Department (Army) grasped the reins to run a Strategic Services Unit. Truman created a National Intelligence Authority (NIA) to supervise the spooks, and a Central Intelligence Group (CIG) as a small operating unit.
On January 24, 1946, Mr. Truman staged an amusing ceremony at the end of a White House meeting in which he outfitted his new CIG chief, Sidney Souers, and his newly designated personal representative on the NIA, Admiral William D. Leahy, with black cloaks, highwaymen’s hats, and wooden daggers. The photos of this scene, sadly, do not survive. White House aides proclaimed the new spooky supervisors looked splendid.
Sidney Souers had been a rear admiral in the Naval Reserve, a player in the JCS intel arena during the war, and a man too easily overlooked in American spy lore. He had sound instincts and, more important, the president’s ear, for Souers was a Missouri businessman and a figure in the Kansas City political circles that Truman had inhabited as senator from Missouri. Not only did Truman make his Missouri acolyte a superspy, but also, when the president went on to create the National Security Council, he coaxed Souers back to help there too. Director Souers’s key accomplishments came in laying down a CIG structure, beginning with three persons in a two-room office up the street from the White House, and in selecting the right people to fill it. Eager to mend business relations he had ignored during the war, Souers stayed only a few months. When he left, the agency had swollen—to fifty-five people. Ten of them monitored intelligence collection, twice that many worked on reports, the rest did everything from disseminate papers to planning to security.
In April 1946, Souers secured the future of the Central Intelligence Group by absorbing the Strategic Services Unit. The SSU organization furnished the bulk of CIG staff through the next year. Souers also zeroed in on his replacement, Army Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg, a dynamic go-getter who had led a tactical air force in Europe and who happened to be a nephew of the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Vandenberg pressed for additional personnel and new spy functions. He revamped the Office of Reports and Estimates, the agency’s first analytical unit, and he supported upgrading the entire CIG. By the winter, State Department counterparts were considering with Vandenberg how to keep their respective analysis shops from tripping over each other. “Co-ordination”—of both information collection and report production—consumed much attention through the first half of 1947.
Others, not least William J. Donovan and Allen Welsh Dulles, were unhappy with the system. Co-ordination be damned. They pressed for a new spy agency. Wild Bill had not taken lightly the dismantling of the OSS. From before it happened, he fought back. OSSers who had been journalists were fed information for articles recounting its exploits, others were quietly given material for more ambitious projects. So long as the articles and books lamented the absence of a robust peacetime agency, Donovan did not much care that wartime secrets were spilled. Allen Dulles took the opportunity to pen a piece for the Saturday Evening Post with the story of his Operation Sunrise secret negotiations. That led to a book contract, and Dulles used Germany’s Underground to argue there had been “good” Germans, including those who plotted to assassinate Hitler, a subset of them being his spies at Bern.
Like Allen, Wild Bill Donovan had a Wall Street law firm, and from there he agitated for his spy agency. Senator Vandenberg, the CIG chief’s uncle, became one target. Donovan hosted regular meetings of the old OSS crowd, using them to press too. Through a joint committee, Congress meanwhile investigated the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, delivering its report late in 1946, with conclusions that offered a natural platform to advocate a peacetime agency.
Before Christmas, Director Vandenberg had readied a draft of possible legislation and forwarded it to the White House. There, Harry Truman already had a project for unification of the armed services on his desk, and he added the intelligence agency language to it. The president sent Congress this proposal in January 1947. By spring enough momentum had developed that legislators asked Dulles, who was president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, to comment on the spy agency’s shape. In August Dulles joined a small outside group advising Vandenberg. Dreamer that he was, Allen could not help being mesmerized by the CIA, the National Security Act, and all that went with them.
Most of Allen’s comments were workmanlike suggestions regarding the powers this law would afford an intelligence chief and his organization. He agreed with those, eager to prevent the creation of a Gestapo-like entity, who opposed placing active military officers in CIA positions. Another item deserves mention. Dulles recommended that language be inserted to create an “official secrets act” prohibiting unauthorized disclosures, by both agency employees and anyone else in government. This disturbing proposal—odd coming from someone who had recently revealed secret OSS negotiations—Congress rejected. But it shows how the sirens of secrecy moved in on the ground floor of the fledgling spy entity.
Hearings and debates continued through the summer. Along the way, the “national defense act” morphed into the National Security Act. When passed, it became the most extensive realignment of government powers prior to creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. It popularized the very term “national security”; until World War II, this had not existed as a formal concept. It created the National Security Council, an NSC staff to serve the president, set up a unified military command (called the “National Military Establishment,” but soon enough transmogrified into the Department of Defense), provided for a peacetime draft, made the Air Force a separate armed service, outlined a formal charter for the Marine Corps, and created the Central Intelligence Agency.
A major concern in the debates revolved around fears that the agency could become a secret police like the Nazi Gestapo, which used torture to extract confessions in Germany. Those concerns were expressed in both houses of Congress. Allen Dulles agreed, and related this to the parallel concern over military officers leading the agency. The very first point made in describing CIA authorities in the National Security Act of 1947 is that “the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions.” While the 1947 act provided for a CIA, it described an entity oriented to intelligence analysis, said next to nothing about other agency functions, and—aside from the domestic-operations and secret-police prohibitions—almost nothing was mentioned about permissible versus prohibited agency activity. The act was no real charter.
During all the to-and-fro, Vandenberg departed the CIG, his place taken by Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. In answer to the fears over military persons Hillenkoetter readily volunteered to resign his commission. Congress did not oblige him to do so. Hillenkoetter established a tradition that was largely honored until the 1990s.
The admiral at least had the right formal qualifications. The fifty-year-old had been a quasi-professional intelligence officer before that military specialty existed. As a young officer in Panama in the mid-1920s, Hillenkoetter set up a spy network. The task whetted his appetite. The admiral had no fewer than four tours as a naval attaché, collecting information. In Vichy France before America entered World War II, he had conducted special operations too—helping the French underground smuggle individuals between German-occupied France and safe areas in Vichy territory and North Africa. During a crucial period of the Pacific war, 1942 to spring of 1943, Hillenkoetter helped set up the original “all-source fusion center” at Pearl Harbor. His assignment immediately before CIG had (again) been as naval attaché to France. More than that, Admiral Hillenkoetter had actually been at Pearl Harbor, so he could refer to that incomparable experience. Executive officer of the battleship West Virginia, Roscoe stood in his cabin dressing when the Japanese attack began on December 7, 1941. He headed for the bridge, but in the few minutes it took to reach the quarterdeck, torpedoes hit and West Virginia started sinking. He had a personal reason for wanting a crackerjack spy agency.
Hillenkoetter’s watch brought significant developments. The Soviets successively installed Communist-led governments in the eastern European nations. They kept a huge army poised there. Refusing cooperation with the Western Allies, the Soviets stopped attending foreign ministers’ conferences. In 1947 they completed taking over Czechoslovakia. The pro-Western prime minister leaped out a window—or was thrown. People spoke of the “captive nations” of eastern Europe. British allies informed Washington they would be pulling out of their commitments in Greece, where a Communist insurgency fought the government. There were places—in the Ukraine, the Baltic states, more quietly in Romania, to some degree in Poland—where nationalists opposed the Soviets. Greece demanded U.S. attention. Next the United States began a sustained foreign aid program under the Marshall Plan.
The launch of the Central Intelligence Agency took place at this moment of burgeoning hostility. An Office of Research and Evaluation had already been created. Absorption into CIG of the Strategic Services Unit created a fledgling clandestine service. CIG christened this its Office of Special Operations (OSO), with two-thirds of its personnel.
Demands for active Cold War measures grew to a drumbeat and led to the inception of CIA covert operations. It happened during the mad rush to make the CIA’s potential a reality. The National Security Act of 1947 assigned the agency five roles, four of which concerned either producing intelligence estimates and reports, carrying out activities of common concern, or coordinating information collected by the broader community. The law barely mentioned espionage, much less covert operations. The early meetings of the new National Security Council (NSC) hammered out a series of NSC intelligence directives to guide CIA efforts. The fifth role, a simple catchall, in its current form provides that the agency shall conduct “such other functions and duties related to intelligence as the President or the National Security Council may direct.”
That vague language eventually opened the door to a host of CIA actions that took the agency far from its roots. Covert operations were among the newfangled activities. President Truman had already changed the gameboard by declaring his doctrine—the United States would help countries that could not help themselves, starting with Greece and Turkey. In the wake of the Czech coup, particularly, came demands that the CIA conduct psychological warfare. Unlike wartime special units conducting ad hoc activities, here a peacetime agency acquired a permanent mission. The road would not be smooth, but it transformed the Central Intelligence Agency.
The top CIA lawyer, general counsel Lawrence Houston, argued in official opinions that the National Security Act did not authorize covert action. Director Hillenkoetter followed suit, agreeing with the need for “psychological warfare”—as these activities were then known—but ceding the playing field to the military. This encompassed all kinds of measures to affect the will or beliefs of target populations and countries, bending them to CIA purposes, or at least to an affinity for United States policies. Senior diplomats—among them the renowned George Kennan—and military men kept up pressure for action under the Truman Doctrine. President Truman approved a scheme to make the State Department responsible for “psywar” and covert action, but Secretary of State George C. Marshall rejected that proposition. Marshall’s prestige and power were such that Truman backed off. In December Truman approved directive NSC-4A, making the CIA responsible for psychological warfare after all.
Secretary Marshall did not mind the State Department furnishing policy guidance for psywar but he wanted no operational role, for he wished to preserve a distinction between action programs and diplomacy. The American military felt similarly. Suddenly political developments in Italy threatened Washington’s interests. In late 1947 Truman’s NSC, fearing that the Italian Communists—easily the largest political force in the country, its ranks swollen thanks to the prestige the party had gained from its leading role in fighting the Nazis—might win elections there, requested CIA intervention.
Intelligence officer James J. Angleton, with many contacts in Italy, warned that the Italian Communists were cornering the market on newsprint, the cheap paper used for newpapers. Defense Secretary James Forrestal worried that the budget had no money in it to book radio ads or recruit influence peddlers. Allen Dulles stepped in, circulating collection plates at a couple of his social clubs. Within days CIA operatives were throwing cash around in Rome. After the new year, the president set aside over a million dollars (equivalent to more than $10 million in 2016) for the Italian project.
The Italian election turned out the way Truman wanted, with the Christian Democrats victorious. Similar operations followed in France. The Communist challenge seemed to mushroom in February 1948, with the Czech takeover and new tensions in Germany. Cobbling together operations on the fly would never work. Not long afterward, George Kennan proposed a new covert activity framework, with an entity under general supervision from the State Department but not formally part of it, the CIA, or the military. A panel drawn from all those agencies would guide the new unit. Covert operations expanded tremendously. Meanwhile, Marshall Plan aid involved steady dealing in foreign currencies, and that trading could be tapped to launder—and increase—CIA funding for covert action. President Truman liked the idea.
In Italy there would be plenty more elections—with the CIA backing the Christian Democrats for decades. On the global stage, the NSC preferred a permanent covert action unit anyway. Dulles advised combining covert action and espionage in a single CIA entity. He did not mind its taking guidance from State but stipulated the unit should have considerable autonomy, that it be permitted to appeal to the NSC if the CIA’s director’s decisions went against it, and that it be headed by an outsider, presumably himself.
The National Security Council, meeting on June 3, 1948, mulled over the proposals. The council approved most of them, in its directive NSC 10/2, but rejected placing espionage and covert operations within a single unit. Mr. Kennan became the initial chair of the board of directors, called the Operations Advisory Committee (eventually the 10/2 Panel, launched as the interagency covert-operations approval authority).
Officials called the new unit the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). The OPC became the covert action arm of the United States government. It had little to do with either policy or coordination. Kennan offered the OPC post to Dulles, but 1948 was a presidential election year, and Allen, out campaigning for Republican candidate Thomas Dewey, turned down the job. He anticipated heading the entire CIA in a Dewey administration. So Kennan turned to Frank Gardiner Wisner, a friend and, at that point, a fellow diplomat, to be OPC’s first head. Allen Dulles became the godfather.
In 1948–49 in Washington at the birth of the CIA, it was too soon to speak of ghosts, but now in the lengthening shadows of seven decades of agency history, it is clear the ghosts rose even then, and they stayed. Sigmund Freud, the patriarch of psychological theory and psychiatry, once elaborated a concept of the “uncanny,” in which the Viennese mentalist included ghosts. Analysis of the uncanny, Freud postulated, inevitably led to an animistic view of the universe as one populated by human spirits. Allen Dulles laid claim to a place among the spirits when he labored so hard to revive the OSS, his American spy agency. As Freud noted, among the commonplaces of fairy tales and religions are the false semblance of death and the raising of the dead, if only as disembodied spirits. Later we will see how Mr. Dulles ended his career in a way that ensured true ghostliness.
The links of psychological DNA were very clear. In February 1946, George Kennan had authored the so-called Long Telegram, in which he had foreseen Soviet hostility and advocated “containing” Russia. Allen Dulles had worked against the Russians in Germany at the end of the war. Frank Wisner, a Dulles subordinate, ran a section of the State Department that dealt with the displaced persons, had been shocked by the Russians’ brute force, and wanted to combat them. Harry Truman, believing Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to be installing a Communist empire, agreed. America’s wartime ally Winston Churchill famously charged that Russia had brought down an “Iron Curtain” along the borders of eastern Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic. OPC’s mission would be to roll it back.
A hiring campaign staffed the OPC quickly. Recruits gained higher rank than they would have elsewhere, including at CIA. More came from the military. Benefiting from temporary-duty assignees from both the agency and the military, the OPC within months had several hundred people and seven overseas stations. Wisner’s first budget totaled $4.8 million. Officers were divided into functional groups for psychological warfare, political warfare, economic warfare, preventive direct action, and one for everything else. Half a dozen regional divisions paralleled those of the Marshall Plan. Operations were called projects.
Allen Dulles acquired a new quasi-operational role, drawing up legal papers for New York State certification of the National Committee for a Free Europe (later the Free Europe Committee), incorporated in June 1949. The CIA and State Department had agreed on the outlines of this scheme four months earlier. Dulles became a senior official and joined its board of directors. He would be executive secretary too. The National Committee became the umbrella for “black”—secret—psychological operations, in the first of which the CIA launched balloons across Eastern Europe with propaganda or reconnaissance payloads. It also ran Radio Free Europe, a quite elaborate effort to broadcast propaganda into the new Soviet satellite states. Project Umpire, begun even before the formal creation of the OPC or the National Committee, was the CIA’s name for the use of broadcast and print media to influence events behind the Iron Curtain. This was among America’s first covert operations.
Dulles’s role mushroomed. Sid Souers, the erstwhile spy chief, had returned to Washington as executive secretary of Truman’s NSC. The president’s national security adviser, for that’s what Souers had become, convinced Truman that the performance of the intelligence services needed review. Dulles became one of three principals—and the chairman—of the survey panel. In this role he had his greatest impact. With William H. Jackson, a psychological warfare authority, and Matthias Correa, representing secretary of defense James Forrestal, Dulles rummaged through CIA activities for nearly a year. Director Hillenkoetter considered Allen an antipathetic and obnoxious character sticking his fingers in every pie. During the survey, rioting broke out in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, while Secretary of State George Marshall attended a conference there. This crisis, known as El Bogotazo from the city’s name, shook Truman’s administration. Congressional committees questioned the failure of the intelligence agency to foresee the discontent. Allen’s survey took that line, coming in widely critical of the CIA. The survey group’s report drew two major conclusions: first, that the agency had failed to fulfill its mission of producing estimative intelligence and, second, Allen Dulles’s hobbyhorse, that the OPC covert operators and the spies of the OSO should be combined.
When the survey went to Truman’s NSC at the beginning of 1949, the CIA and other agencies rebutted its criticisms. Director Hillenkoetter accomplished the notable feat of securing passage of the CIA Act of 1949, with some positive but more negative effects that persist to this day. This law endowed the agency’s director with powers to protect vaguely defined “sources and methods,” to spend money off the books, and to fire employees at will. The Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations continued to go their separate ways. No unification occurred. Some thought the new Defense Department opposed consolidation. Others blame the FBI, smarting at the CIA’s taking over its Latin American networks. Hillenkoetter always maintained that infighting between the Pentagon and State delayed the move. The Pentagon rejected OPC’s Frank Wisner as chief of a merged unit; State opposed OSO’s Colonel Robert A. Schow, an Army officer.
Feuding dragged on for many months. Within the CIA the competition had consequences. The interagency OPC, having bigger budgets and higher ranks, offered greater salaries for the same work. It poached OSO people, dangling before veterans, nostalgic for their wartime roles, prospects for daring covert projects. OSO officers considered themselves the professionals, OPC the upstarts. Though many on both sides had OSS roots, the OSO operatives had stayed on through the lean years until the advent of the CIA. Their OPC colleagues had left for private life. They were the amateurs. In overseas embassies the OPC and OSO chiefs were direct competitors. But the OPC station chiefs, with their higher ranks, were senior to chiefs of the parallel CIA espionage unit. Meanwhile, at headquarters, the Operational Aids Division, responsible for cover identities and technical support, belonged to the OSO, not Frank Wisner. It had no clear duty to serve the OPC. The problems remained intractable. In the autumn of 1951, when Joseph B. Smith joined the OPC as a young psywar planner, so far as rank and file knew, a merger of OPC and OSO remained just a rumor.
By then Allen Welsh Dulles had come onstage himself. For a time, his primary role had been in the shadows with the National Committee for a Free Europe. Soon enough, Radio Liberty (RL), intended to broadcast directly into Russia, joined RFE as an operating unit. The committee and the Radios, as the CIA soon knew them, were Wisner’s creatures, among the first agency “proprietaries,” supposedly private entities that in reality were wholly or substantially funded by the agency and responded to its instructions.
Another proprietary coming online in this period was Civil Air Transport (later renamed Air America), a private business the CIA took over by investment. Within a year, an ostensibly private trading concern on Taiwan called Sea Supply complemented it. The advent of these entities arguably introduced new words into the CIA lexicon, starting with radio and proprietary but soon extending to the notion of CIA contract employees (as opposed to the agency’s officers) and to the question of who could be trusted with knowledge of a true situation, that is, persons who were “witting” versus “unwitting.”
The degree to which individuals knew about their CIA links is an intriguing question, especially in the context of Europe’s intellectual Cold War—Allen’s first battleground. Mr. Dulles was certainly witting, as was DeWitt C. Poole Jr., president of the National Committee and also an OSS veteran. Indeed, seven of the thirteen directors of this period had had wartime experience in intelligence or psychological warfare. Dulles and Poole met with Wisner once the group had formed and been recognized by the State Department. Allen pushed for direct National Committee fundraising to increase public awareness of the group and serve as cover for covert CIA funding. The “Crusade for Freedom” would function as the fund-raising arm. Dulles took Wisner to see Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the time president of Columbia University, who had agreed to chair the crusade. George Urban, an RFE broadcaster, later head of programming, and ultimately the director, felt the links were “subtly consultative and mutually enriching rather than of an order-taking kind.”
However, there was indeed CIA guidance to RFE/RL on what to emphasize. The CIA referred to the National Committee by the cryptonym QK/Ivory*; there were other code names, for the Radios, for the people, and for ancillary elements. Agency pundits nicknamed DeWitt Poole the Little Napoleon. Senior CIA officials debated terms under which they would permit the Free Europe Committee to conduct its fund-raising, tailoring them to CIA money flows. Crowdfunding never financed more than a fraction of the committee’s budget, which reached $10 million in its first year ($100 million in 2016 dollars) and tripled over time.
The 7.5 kilowatt shortwave radio with which Radio Free Europe began broadcasting had been procured by the Office of Policy Coordination from U.S. Army surplus. Most early RFE/RL equipment derived from the CIA, and U.S. Army officers were the first heads of the enterprise. RFE began broadcasting on July 4, 1950. It was an index of the homogeneity of American opinion at the time that Radio Free Europe won the Peabody Award in 1950, an important journalism prize, for contributions to international understanding. The psywar mafia loved that.
In June 1950, North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel, invading the south and triggering the Korean War. The CIA had given a few days’ warning of the northern capability to act, but not of its intentions. Dulles had gone to Europe to mark the start of RFE broadcasts. He came back to take up the implications of North Korea’s moves at the Council on Foreign Relations. Allen was determined to agitate for sacking Hillenkoetter, already in the crosshairs for El Bogotazo.
No lobbying was required, however. The admiral had already asked the Navy for an active command at sea.
President Truman offered the CIA job to establishment stalwarts who turned him down, and then to General Walter Bedell Smith, former ambassador to Moscow and, during the war, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff. Bedell Smith, with a sharp sense of duty, accepted. Without much knowledge of intelligence work, he wanted a skilled deputy. Smith turned to William H. Jackson of the NSC survey group. Peter Grose, a Dulles biographer, attributes the suggestion to Sid Souers, but the idea is far more likely to have been Smith’s own or to have come from Eisenhower. Jackson had been with them as a top psychological warfare leader under General Omar Bradley, surviving many bureaucratic ambushes designed to cut down the psy warriors. Bedell Smith, dyspeptic and sharp-tongued, conventionally minded but a brilliant judge of men, had seen Jackson up close. So Bill Jackson came to the CIA. He would knock heads together and make a start on unification. As an Eisenhower associate he had connections in the military; as a former partner at law with Frank Wisner at the firm Carter Ledyard & Milburn, he had an in with the OPC chieftain. Jackson was uniquely qualified.
Allen Dulles got a place too. Not above some dissimulation, Dulles would say in his book The Craft of Intelligence that “writing reports for the government sometimes has unexpected consequences. You may be asked to put your recommendations into effect.” The truth is Mr. Dulles had long been positioning himself for this. Bedell Smith took over the CIA on October 7, 1950. Allen Dulles started as a consultant the same day. In The Craft of Intelligence, he maintains that he intended to stay for just six weeks to help Smith get acclimated. In fact Allen angled for a job—and he succeeded. On December 21, Bill Jackson’s morning staff meeting took up the matter of the announcement of Allen Welsh Dulles as an agency deputy director responsible for a new Directorate of Plans unifying the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations—the unit of which Allen had long dreamed.
ATOP NAVY HILL
America’s clandestine service in those days inhabited wood-frame “temporary” office buildings denoted by letters. Building I, known familiarly as Quarters Eye, housed the front office. Others included J, K, and L, and ran the length of the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. They were across from other wartime “temps” erected at the foot of Navy Hill, beneath the CIA’s main headquarters, built on the western face of the height in 1904 at 2430 E Street, Northwest. As Allen soon learned, Quarters Eye and the others were drafty and cold by winter and dreadfully hot in the summer. They also blocked the view to the Lincoln Memorial. Dulles arrived there in January 1951. He approached the job cautiously at first, thinking himself a consultant, taking a per diem but no salary, committed for only six months. But Allen would not have been the Great White Case Officer if the Great Game had not enchanted him.
The deputy director for plans (DDP) hastened to make himself useful and before long indispensable. Almost his first act as DDP was to pass on a series of CIA papers that proposed principles for control of intelligence operations in peace and war. The proposals were for the NSC and the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command led by General Eisenhower, recalled to active service. The papers, with code names like Magnitude and Demagnitize, became enduring headaches. Dulles approved a draft NSC directive, delayed a paper on guerrilla warfare, and wanted the NATO study reworked. The proposition that CIA would control covert operations in peacetime and the generals take over in a war became problematical when war was “limited,” like in Korea. Dulles received a paper on psywar issues from the Army’s General Robert McClure. After briefings from OPC’s Wisner and OSO’s Schow, the deputy director accompanied Director Smith on an inspection of CIA stations.
By April the new DDP confidently presented regional and single-country accounts of his activities. Dulles had begun to review all covert projects. He prepared fresh clandestine activity procedures for NATO and reached out to foreign leaders and intelligence officials. One of them, former Polish general Władysław Anders, came from a place where OPC had swung into clandestine action. The biggest venture took place in Albania, where the CIA and the British were launching a joint effort to overthrow the Communist regime. At the end of April, the DDP gave his take on the twenty-odd OPC projects under way, promised not to start anything new, and declared he would close out others as they completed. It didn’t happen.
Deputy director Dulles prepared to receive delegations for an international spy conference, where, among other things, the CIA and the British MI-6 reviewed the Albania plan. On April 27, at Director Smith’s morning staff meeting, Dulles no doubt delighted discussing how the CIA might exploit the Peabody Award given to RFE. The next day he took a victory lap, going to New York to address a dinner of OSS veterans.
The Radios were an initiative the CIA never gave up, at least on Dulles’s watch. Indeed, the agency expanded and multiplied the effort, widening covert political influence efforts to include a publications arm, quietly distributing the Bible, other religious tracts, and a variety of Western books behind the Iron Curtain. Secret funding of youth groups and labor unions followed. In Italy and France, these tactics had been utilized to influence specific elections. Now Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner regularized and globalized the technique for an open-ended campaign. When Congress held hearings on the public dispute between President Truman and former Korean War commander General Douglas MacArthur, whom Truman had fired for insubordination, the CIA entertained a suggestion from Robert McClure that the hearings be used to plant false information to deceive the Soviets. In short the advent of the Directorate of Plans and the coming of Allen Dulles did nothing to circumscribe CIA covert operations.
Mr. Dulles strove to make himself indispensable. Whether the issue was arrangements for secret warfare in NATO, stationing a small CIA staff at Pearl Harbor to liaise with the Pacific Command, or the prospective agency role in “electro-magnetic warfare,” Dulles furnished advice and volunteered his directorate.
Walter Bedell Smith suffered no fools and never really warmed to Dulles. Allen had been DDP for just a couple of months when Smith instructed Bill Jackson to conduct a fresh survey, this time only of the DDP, and with only himself as judge. Supposed to be Jackson’s legacy—he had promised Smith just six months and had already stayed longer—the survey threatened Dulles’s rice bowl. Still classified. Director Smith convened CIA’s assistant directors as a “projects review committee” to pass on OPC’s schemes. That made Allen’s a minority vote. But Dulles won some too. With “electro-magnetic warfare”—then a euphemism for the Radios—the director tried to squelch the CIA role, but Radio Free Europe and other organs of propaganda fit Truman’s idea of psychological warfare so well the CIA chief struck out. General Smith also approved a suggestion that spy missions or project proposals with relatively small costs could be approved within DDP, avoiding the more cumbersome agency-wide project review.
There were other signs of discomfort—and of “Beetle” Smith’s pain too. The director had ulcers, had had stomach surgery in the summer of 1950, and had lost about forty pounds, nearly a quarter of his bulk. He lived on soda crackers and mush, consumed all day long, not just at mealtimes. Beetle could be cold and distant. Pundits cracked he was the most even-tempered person in the world—always mad. One time General Smith declared a meeting ended the moment Dulles arrived and apologized for being late. Another time the director demanded that the DDP fix a gasoline leak that bothered the Air Force. Smith thought little of Dulles as an administrator. Once, when the DDP suggested some management massage, the CIA boss stopped him cold. “Allen,” Bedell Smith shot back, “you don’t know how to run anything! What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever run?” A top aide records Smith on another occasion: “Allen isn’t a bad administrator. It’s just that he’s entirely innocent of administration.”
Another time General Smith harangued his assembled deputies, then challenged them to see who could write up what he had said in directive form. Administration chief Lincoln White accepted the challenge. He did it right away. White showed the paper to covert ops boss Frank Wisner, who refused to sign off even though he had not opposed Smith’s challenge. Then White handed the directive to Allen Dulles, who said he would take care of it. In the hallway next day, White ran into General Smith, who demanded to know what had happened. White explained that he had completed the directive but left it with Allen. “You gave it to Allen Dulles, for God’s sake?” the CIA chieftain exclaimed. “He won’t understand it! Get it away from him right now!”
Director Smith wanted staff to stand to attention when he entered—the Army way. Mr. Dulles was willing to stand but refused to do Army drills. Once Beetle chewed out a senior official who gave him a precise answer when he’d asked for an approximation. In the privacy of his office, Allen laughed off Bedell Smith’s quirks as the antics of a martinet. A standard Dulles quip would be, “The General was in fine form this morning!”
William Jackson, eager to return to his business affairs, resigned as Smith’s number two. The director needed a new deputy director of central intelligence. Jackson recommended Gordon Gray, a North Carolinian. Gray had been secretary of the army, a university president, was a tobacco and broadcasting magnate, and had served alongside Bill Jackson in World War II. He’d been a candidate for CIA director but had refused. Now he rejected the deputy position too. Harry Truman prevailed upon Gray to come to Washington as staff chief of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), a novel new NSC unit to manage the Cold War. Director Smith, instead of getting him as deputy, rushed to find office space for PSB, a supervisory unit, which Gray preferred be on “neutral” territory. The Strategy Board became the 10/2 Panel’s covert operations staff.
Next Smith hoped to entice General MacArthur’s ex–intelligence czar, Charles Willoughby. He even speculated on ex-employees of the FBI. Smith got close to Willoughby, close enough to look for a plane to bring him to Washington, but the former Far Eastern person slipped away.
At mid-July, Dulles, using his agency pseudonym Robert A. Ascham, set off on a weeks-long inspection of the CIA’s European stations. Reenergizing the political actions in Italy and France was key. Agency officials estimated that Communist party sources in those two countries fabricated half of what they gave CIA. On the trip, Dulles took aboard explanations and helped his officers brainstorm fresh ploys. This kind of monitoring of field activity became known in early CIA idiom as cruising, and it became a favorite activity of agency higher-ups. Nicely descriptive, it will be used that way in this text. Meanwhile Director Smith, pressed to find someone, turned to Allen after all. Shortly after his cruise, in August 1951, just as President Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board, Allen W. Dulles ascended to second-in-command of the entire U.S. intelligence establishment.
Reporting on his cruise to Director Smith, Allen Dulles led an extended discussion of what would become one of the CIA’s most haunted initiatives, its support for an intelligence service in Germany. The Germans were a mixture of former Nazis and, only slightly less suspect, German military professionals. Efforts were sponsored by the U.S. Army at first, under the code name Rusty. The Army accepted German officer Reinhard Gehlen’s initiative to bring together a circle, first simply to recount wartime experience against the Soviets, then to create an actual spy service. The Americans, desperate for knowledge of Russia, had already enlisted hosts of German officers to recount their experiences. The spy project seemed a simple extension. Gehlen and his associates went to Washington in August 1945. They were code named Bolero. Some others, called Keystone, stayed in Germany, where they laid the groundwork for a new service starting early in 1946. That summer the Americans united Bolero with Keystone to create Rusty. Gehlen took charge, his unit gradually becoming known as the Gehlen Organization.
The Americans had nothing like it. If the Army or the SSU, the CIA’s progenitor, had more than a handful of spies outside the occupation areas at that time, it would have been surprising.
Gordon M. Stewart, then the top spook in Germany, believed it more important to spy out the Russians than hunt down Nazi war criminals. He trolled DP camps looking for recruits. Those who agreed, given several months training, were assigned to a network. After a while Stewart had one net of seventeen agents, plus a penetration that ran into Soviet-occupied Lithuania.
“The Org,” as Gehlen’s familiars knew it, claimed to have six hundred agents behind the Iron Curtain. But the Army, out of money, repeatedly tried to pass Rusty along to the SSU. That agency felt the Gehlen enterprise to be overambitious, expensive, and bedeviled by poor security and management. Another appeal, to Hoyt Vandenberg once his Central Intelligence Group had taken over SSU, also failed. Americans felt that the Org drew overly broad conclusions from inadequate evidence. Rusty cost more than the CIG’s entire network in Germany, which had started making progress on sources. Even empire builder Vandenberg knew enough to steer clear.
Attitudes changed as Truman gravitated toward creating the CIA. Fresh reviews of German espionage accorded it more value. Watching from the wings, believing “good Germans” were good friends, Allen Dulles supported the change. His book Germany’s Underground appeared as the Rusty debate swirled. A momentary setback occurred that summer, when the Army reversed itself, blocking its bid for the spooks to take over. Just weeks later, the CIA materialized and, equally important, the Gehlen Organization moved out of the U.S. military compound that had housed it, opening a headquarters at Pullach, near Munich. Opinion soured at the newly formed CIA as officers stationed in Germany reported doubts.
Richard Helms, chief of the OSO division that spied in central Europe, got warnings of the Org’s security weaknesses. This theme always repeated. It could not have been otherwise in a milieu in which Nazism had tainted Germany, and a portion of Gehlen’s people had been Nazi operatives. Not only was there a possibility that war criminals would be revealed; there were risks the Russians might discover such evidence and use it to blackmail the spies.
The boundary case was that of Heinz Felfe, whom the CIA knew as UJ/Drowsky. Born in eastern Germany in 1918, Felfe had joined the Nazi party, become a policeman, then an SS officer affiliated with the Nazi foreign intelligence agency. Nazi spymasters assigned him to Switzerland. Here was somebody Allen Dulles might have known. More than that, Felfe became known elsewhere. British soldiers captured him at the end of the war, and Felfe admitted his Nazi ties. He worked for British intelligence during the Rusty era, but MI-6 dropped him, suspecting that he also worked for the Soviets, which he did. Some believe Drowsky was motivated by anger at the West for the 1945 firebombing of his home city, Dresden. He joined the Gehlen Organization in 1951. Within a few years, Felfe had risen to chief of counterespionage, making him the best-informed German regarding CIA activities in his country. That occurred despite fears about Drowsky’s loyalty. Arrested in November 1961, Felfe is believed to have compromised sixty-five CIA operations.
American suspicions never evaporated. General Vandenberg’s resistance has already been noted. Division chief Helms told OSO boss Dan Galloway in 1948 that the Russians were aware of U.S. military support of the Gehlen Organization even if they had some details wrong.
Admiral Hillenkoetter rejected having anything to do with Rusty. Opposition began to crumble when Gehlen got a new American defender, James H. Critchfield. Working for the Army in Germany and Austria, Critchfield moved over to the CIA in 1948 and had been sent to Munich as chief of base. He arrived in a beat-up black Chevy carrying a typewriter in his front seat and a secretary in back. Critchfield’s review of the Org impressed observers as the most thorough yet, and he argued that Gehlen’s unit would be the most important influence on a German intelligence service. The agency would be left in the cold if it refused to get on board.
The CIA became Gehlen’s keepers in the summer of 1949. The German spy boss resented the spooks, who proved more intrusive than the U.S. military. In 1950 Critchfield cut the guts out of the Org’s planned operations, slashing projects from 150 to 49, then to a mere 10. He told Reinhard Gehlen that the German agency, in terms of sophistication, remained second-rate. Germany established an internal security service in 1950, yet in foreign intelligence Gehlen had another half decade to wait. But things were moving. Allen Dulles told General Smith in August 1951 that the best opportunity to obtain intelligence on the Soviets lay in the eastern zone of Germany, and that the Org had been the prime source to date. There were several penetrations under way, and the deputy director for central intelligence wanted them coordinated. A month later, Gehlen, invited by CIA’s Critchfield, made his first visit to America as a spy chieftain. Allen Dulles was on a roll. But the Russian spies moved quickly, and right through until the unification of Germany at the end of the Cold War their agents and penetrations bedeviled the West.
Deputy Director for Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles. The title had a certain ring to it. Administrator or not, Dulles had become second-in-command of the CIA. More than that, in the early years—indeed until past 9/11—the director of central intelligence (DCI) and deputy director of central intelligence (DDCI) functioned as heads of the entire United States intelligence community—the military agencies, the FBI, the State Department’s small analytical unit, to some extent the Secret Service—everybody. For Allen the DDCI post, one divorced from operations, in one sense represented a step down, compensated by the community-wide leadership role. Dulles no longer just had charge of the spies. Now he could keep an eye on them while nosing into everything else, too.
Records of Walter Bedell Smith’s meetings, as well as notes made by the DCI’s executive assistant, reveal that DDCI Dulles did just that. First came the war scare of 1951. War scares, periods of heightened tensions triggered by real or imagined threats, occurred several times during the Cold War. The first, a real scare, had come in 1948, the year the Russians blockaded Berlin and took over Czechoslovakia. The American commander in Germany issued a warning that war might break out. In 1950, coincident with the Korean War, the Soviets began mobilizing military forces in all the satellite states of eastern Europe, stoking more Western fears. Moscow threatened invasion of one of its own satellites, Yugoslavia, for insufficient fealty to Soviet policies. The CIA took to drafting weekly and monthly reviews of the troop mobilizations but never issued a war warning. In 1951 the fears returned. Harry Truman ordered fresh appraisals of Russian capabilities for a surprise attack. While cruising that summer, Allen Dulles evidently heard things that worried him, too. Soon after Dulles ascended to DDCI, he and Smith mulled over the possibility of a crisis, perhaps as soon as that fall, considering a special code word access compartment for intelligence on Soviet intentions.
Nothing happened, but the episode led CIA to set up a warning apparatus in the form of an Intelligence Watch Committee whose entire purpose would be to alert the government of imminent crises, especially ones involving the main enemy, the Russians.
The list of innovations Allen Dulles initiated, supported, or resisted is really the record of the CIA’s organizational evolution. Dulles served at a time of changes. They begin with the burgeoning unattributable CIA psychological warfare machine, including the Free Europe Committee, RFE/RL, and new links with labor unions and youth groups. A CIA International Organizations Division was formed in the DDP to spearhead these black projects. Merging the operations side of the agency was a proposal with which Dulles was identified. Yet there was no rush to accomplish it. Merger had been on the books since the creation of the OPC, was reemphasized in each survey, and was a management goal for Walter Bedell Smith, yet it remained a pipe dream. Dulles made a beginning in June 1951, integrating the Latin American units of OPC and OSO.
The DDI added an Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) to monitor day-to-day events. The Olympian Board of National Estimates looked for long-term trends and issued its National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). OCI’s intelligence reports in the Central Intelligence Bulletin, inaugurated in 1952, long served as the staple of U.S. secret reporting. An existing Office of Research and Reports kept its eye on the Soviet economy. The Office of Scientific Intelligence covered all manner of technical issues. By 1955 there were over nine hundred analysts in these entities and the Board/Office of National Estimates. The DDI became an information machine larger than some countries’ entire security services. At the DDP a Technical Services Division was formed to support operations with gadgets, drugs, cover documents, and the like. A counterintelligence staff gained increasing importance. New technology like the U-2 spy plane, plus the need to manage proprietaries, led to creation of a Development Projects Division. The CIA created a series of logistical bases in forward locations including Germany (Frankfurt), Okinawa, the Philippines, and so on, and training bases in Germany and on the island of Saipan. More than a thousand people in the agency’s administration directorate worked just on functions that supported DDP operations.
At the opposite end of the spectrum the agency dragged its feet cooperating with Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board. Despite the fact that General Smith chaired the 10/5 Panel (which supervised the PSB)—with Allen his stand-in as necessary—and that CIA provided a number of its staff, the agency danced only reluctantly with the president’s fancied Cold War command post. CIA security clearances for PSB personnel were delayed, requested documents slow to appear, and agency appointments to Strategy Board working groups were often held up. At one point Loftus Becker, CIA’s chief of analysis, refused, on secrecy grounds, even to tell PSB how much the agency spent on reports. In September 1951 General Smith ordered up a summary of CIA covert operations across the globe. The Strategy Board would review and approve it. More than half a year passed before the report existed, even in draft, and weeks more until the PSB luncheon where the briefing took place.
POLITICAL TERRAFORMING
Allen Dulles’s tenure as DDCI lasted only a year and a half. Late in 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower won election as president. Eisenhower (“Ike”) brought in John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and appointed Walter Bedell Smith his deputy. Smith could keep an eye on Allen’s brother. Beetle warned Ike of Allen’s poor administrative ability. Wild Bill Donovan still wanted the job. But President Eisenhower gave Dulles the nod for DCI. Donovan made do with an appointment as ambassador to Thailand. Allen held sway at the agency through the first year of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. When Dulles took over the front office, there were roughly fourteen thousand people working for the CIA.
Much as Bedell Smith had done with William H. Jackson and Dulles himself, Allen liked to work through lieutenants. General Charles Pearre Cabell, a former chief of Air Force intelligence, functioned as his DDCI and did most of the heavy lifting of management. Lincoln K. “Red” White, deputy director for support, handled administration. Robert Amory led the Directorate of Intelligence and, alongside him, Sherman Kent skippered the NIE effort. Dulles kept up his engagement in espionage and covert operations. Frank Wisner remained chief lieutenant there, but Dulles built channels to subordinates such as Al Ulmer, the SSU’s first postwar station chief in Vienna, who had migrated to the agency. He brought Tracy Barnes over from the Psychological Strategy Board. Richard M. Bissell became technology man, at the forefront of creating novel spyware. Within his community, Allen Dulles became an inspirational figure. He gave loyalty back, nowhere more apparent than when the notorious Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy, whose persecution of alleged “Communists” in government ruined many careers, came after the CIA. Just when Dulles reached the director’s office, McCarthy startled everyone by picturing the agency as full of Commies. On March 21, 1953, Director Dulles appeared on Capitol Hill to defend the CIA. McCarthy singled out William P. Bundy, an analyst and special assistant to Bob Amory. Bundy had married a daughter of Dean Acheson, which made him brother-in-law to Alger Hiss. He’d contributed to a legal defense fund that helped defend Hiss against espionage charges. Dulles knew it and told Bundy not to worry.
As it happened, Bill Bundy needed the kind of security clearance that involves nuclear weapons data. Naturally the information about Hiss and Bundy formed part of the investigative file assembled to decide on the clearance. It seems McCarthy had the FBI wired. Within forty-eight hours of Bundy’s file going over to the Bureau for review, a McCarthy aide had the information and the senator slung new charges at the agency. On July 9, Amory told Bundy to get out of town. He went home to Massachusetts to play golf with his dad. Walter Pforzheimer told McCarthy’s office that Bundy was away and could not answer a subpoena.
While Senator McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn raged, agency lawyer Pforzheimer asserted that they could subpoena anyone they liked but only Allen Dulles would answer. When the summons came, Allen sought President Eisenhower’s help to knock it down, but the president refused to obstruct a congressional investigation. Dulles next turned to Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who happily did the favor. Director Dulles met Senator McCarthy on July 16 to smooth his ruffled feathers, and he testified at the Government Operations Committee on August 3. They exchanged correspondence. McCarthy moved on to target the U.S. Army.
Over the years, Allen Dulles’s gout gradually worsened. Agency officers would not be surprised, entering the DCI’s office, to find it steamy as a Turkish bath, humidifiers running incessantly, while the boss sat in slippers, swaddled in blankets. Dick Helms had seen Dulles like that back in Germany at the end of World War II. Ray Cline observed him this way on Navy Hill in the mid-1950s. Cline, a senior analyst with the Office of Current Intelligence, accompanied his boss Huntington Sheldon when they went to the DCI’s office for Dulles to review briefing drafts to be presented at NSC meetings.
It would be late in the day. Dulles, tired, his glasses pushed up on his forehead, held the papers in gnarled hands about nine inches before his nose. Darkness gathered. Sometimes he would have a swath wrapped about his head. The image is of a swami with his crystal ball. The spy chieftain typically rejected more than half the material, complaining about quality, and rambled on. DDCI Cabell, national estimates chief Sherman Kent, and DDI Bob Amory often sat in on these séances, which sometimes lasted into the night.
But here, in 1956 to be precise, Cline witnessed Director Dulles at a key moment in Cold War history. At the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the methods of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, most especially Stalin’s personality cult. Khrushchev spoke privately to an audience of top Communist leaders in February, even as Allen circled the globe on one of his most celebrated cruises.
When he got back, Dulles demanded that his operatives search high and low for the Khrushchev speech, of which the CIA had heard only rumors. Clandestine service work brought in the explosive text. Director Dulles recalls the episode as one of the high points of his CIA career. Suspecting there must be a prepared text, that Khrushchev’s denunciation had been too long and too detailed to have been an extemporaneous sally, Allen ordered a hunt for the document. Different versions—not necessarily conflicting—claim that the text came from a Polish Communist official, from a senior member of the Italian Communist party, or from the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. Jim Angleton had sources in both Italy and Israel, and many Polish Jews had immigrated to Israel but still had ties in the old country. Israeli historians offer yet another version: the journalist Philip Ben of Le Monde obtained the text from Warsaw Communist party chief Stefan Staszewski, passed it on to a different Israeli spy service, the Mossad, and Israeli intelligence gave it to the CIA.
You can almost hear Dulles whistle.
In some versions, Allen’s Turkish bath was going when he decided to push a political warfare button. Ray Cline had been senior manager for the national estimates analysts, work that brought him into contact with CIA directors and eventually White House aides. That led to his post at the head of the agency’s current intelligence shop and, because of his expertise on the Russians, the assignment to help authenticate this speech. Spooks were torn between saying nothing, preserving the security of their source, and revealing the speech to score propaganda points. Frank Wisner and James Angleton insisted on secrecy. They wanted to “exploit” the speech, leaking portions at key moments. Cline argued for opening it up.
On Saturday, June 2, 1956, with Cline in the DCI’s office helping Dulles with a speech, the director probed him on his views. Cline recited them. With a twinkle in his eye, Allen suddenly exclaimed, “By golly, I am going to make a policy decision!”
This sounds dramatic—the CIA is not supposed to make policy—but Allen had not been candid. Long before Cline remembers this happening, Mr. Dulles sent a full copy of the Khrushchev speech to presidential staff secretary Andrew Goodpaster. Indeed, he had sent an advance copy on May 17 and a revised version at month’s end. It is unthinkable that Dulles would have made a decision of this importance without consulting President Eisenhower. Moreover, the form that the revelation took—publication of the full Khrushchev text in the State Department Bulletin plus an attention-drawing prior leak to the New York Times—could not have been done without Ike’s approval.
Weeks later, the fact that the British Broadcast Corporation had put passages of the speech on its airwaves occasioned comment at Dulles’s staff meetings.
Deception in this simple recounting of an historic incident, unfortunately, is something that became endemic. Justified in the first instance by appeals for necessary operational security, and enshrined by a law known as the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which awarded the CIA director a mission to protect “sources and methods,” over time legitimate purpose became distorted. Deception misled enemies, but it also cloaked faults. The inclination to report events in ways that reflected favorably on U.S. intelligence became overwhelming, substituting for protection of national security.
Keeping to this predilection for predigested “history,” in 2011 official agency historians produced a review of covert operations that purported to analyze the record. It concluded that nearly 80 percent of CIA interventions had had the goal of promoting and protecting democracy. Both the Iran and Guatemala operations—Allen Dulles’s signal successes—produced dictatorships. The half-assed Congo intervention also led to dictatorship. No CIA action on Dulles’s watch installed a democratic system. The interventions in Japan and the Philippines had the effect of preventing democratic movements from exercising political rights. In France and Italy, the CIA actively manipulated existing democratic systems to obstruct the emergence of leftist sentiment. Those covert ops were about restricting the political spectrum in foreign lands, not fostering democracy. The United Nations charter, to which the United States subscribes as treaty law, prohibits intervention in the internal affairs of other nations. The most charitable observation is that CIA historians must have focused simply on advocates’ goals articulated, not substantive outcomes; or perhaps they employed a highly contrived notion of “democracy.”
For now, the important point is that Dwight Eisenhower relied on the CIA for political intervention more than any postwar president until Ronald Reagan, so a substantial proportion of the instances analyzed took place on Dulles’s watch.
In the 1970s, the agency attracted considerable criticism for its handling of journalists. The critics focused on the CIA’s “Wurlitzer”—its use of the media to plant stories to orchestrate global deceptions. The Khrushchev speech is one example. Another facet was use of media to lend “cover,” or identity protection, to covert operatives. Almost ignored, the agency’s massaging of its own image through relations with journalists, columnists, and editors is equally insidious. This, too, began under Allen Dulles. What the media said about the agency became a frequent topic at the deputies meetings where Director Dulles held forth. For example, on Halloween 1956, the DCI complained of a “scurrilous” profile of him and commentary on the CIA that had appeared in a British magazine. Someone noted that the American general Claire Chennault, who had sold the CIA one of its proprietaries, sat on the magazine’s executive council. Dulles promptly ordained that the next time anyone saw Chennault, he ought to be told, “He is in bad company,” referring to the offending writer. Likewise, Allen’s associate Frank Wisner was notorious for wanting to get out a reply anytime he saw something annoying, and Wisner would personally telephone journalists and tell them off. He spent long hours laboring over the texts of releases the agency might promulgate to counter bad publicity.
The temptation to curry public favor by selective revelation was seldom resisted, and a habit of deep, reflexive secrecy became engrained. The deceptive approach is also apparent with respect to CIA covert operations—as Mr. Dulles well knew. It extended even to phone conversations with his brother Foster, in which they commonly parsed their language in referring to locales of CIA projects (for example, that “matter on the other side of the world” for Indonesia).
Agency projects were often of indeterminate value. One such would be the WIN fiasco in Poland. WIN stood for Wolność i Niepodległość, or Freedom and Independence, and represented the rump of the secret army of World War II. General Anders, with whom Allen had met, led the Polish veterans association, WIN’s supporters in the West. A London office claimed five hundred full-time fighters in Poland, another twenty thousand semi-active partisans, and a hundred thousand sympathizers. These partisans would take to the field if war came. They just needed money, weapons, radios—the usual stuff. The British were WIN’s first patrons but gave up the game. Frank Wisner took over in February 1949. OPC knew WIN as BE/Duffy. In Berlin the CIA made arrangements to smuggle people and small consignments into Poland under the cryptonym BE/King.
WIN exfiltrators arrived with specific requests. The Pentagon loved the idea of a Polish underground to contest the westward march of Soviet reinforcements in war. But the entire operation, front to back, had been a Soviet intelligence snare. The Russians had rolled up the real WIN years earlier. They kept some Poles around for just this kind of lure, played out into 1952. By then the CIA had furnished more than a million dollars in gold coins, revealed NATO war plans, and handed over state-of-the-art spy gear. When the CIA asked its WIN agents to nominate key choke points for NATO air bombardment the Soviets decided the game was up. Give true targets and they’d be baring their own plans; listing phony ones would unmask the deception, for the locations of transportation hubs could be verified. In late December, the scandal blew wide open when Radio Warsaw broadcast “confessions” from its fictive CIA agents and Poland opened a show trial.
This outcome plagued the secret warriors, Allen Dulles especially. In OSS days, back in Switzerland, he had worked with the leftist do-gooder and accused Soviet spy Noel Field. Fast forward to the late 1940s: Soviet security arrested Field, living in Prague, accusing him of being a CIA spy, making him the basis for trials Stalin used to impose new leadership in the Czech and Hungarian Communist parties and to wipe out Russian competitors for political power. The WIN disaster had all those features.
Fallout did not end there. State Department official Robert P. Joyce drafted a memorandum that amounted to an indictment of the whole covert ops technique. Joyce, witting because he had long served as the State representative or alternate on the 10/2 Panel, approving covert ops proposals, knew the drill. More than that, Joyce had been a friend to CIA. He’d been a housemate of Allen’s in the Wiesbaden champagne winery and an OSS operative in Yugoslavia. Joyce had gotten an education in secret warfare.
At this moment, New Year’s Eve 1952, State had yet to learn whether the United States would be able to keep its Warsaw embassy at all. Poland could have broken diplomatic relations. Joyce conceded the U.S. military interest in disrupting Russian reinforcements, attributing to this much of CIA’s effort in WIN. But OPC had begun the game in 1949—before NATO existed—and officials at CIA and State, too, had warned against wishful thinking. Yet in the heat of action, State had not done enough to turn back pressures for continuation. The Psychological Strategy Board had never crafted a major plan for Poland, and its supervisory panel had looked at the WIN project only as part of its broadbrush review. Joyce analyzed tactics too: the Soviets had Eastern Europe so well wired that, given available contacts and techniques, operating there had become impossible. No resistance organization could survive.
Bob Joyce had been an early proponent of OPC action, a supporter of the Albania failure, but the WIN fiasco completed his turn to opposition. A month later, Joyce filed an even more scathing indictment. He argued that CIA operations were less and less geared to diplomatic strategy or policy objectives, receiving insufficient guidance to support national interests. More than that, Wisner’s unit had tried to do too much, too quickly, with inadequate staffing, and with characteristic American impatience.
Evident failure plus internal criticism put the CIA in jeopardy. Allen Dulles wanted victories to make his case. Whereas Bob Joyce believed them overemphasized, President Eisenhower wanted even more covert ops. In 1953–55, Eisenhower’s first years, a succession of these occurred, in Iran, Guatemala, and South Vietnam. In each, the project fell apart in key respects. Yet shaping up as failures, they suddenly succeeded. For TP/Ajax, the scheme to overthrow the legally constituted government of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, mounted in conjunction with the British MI-6, agency-recruited crowds failed to move the Iranian military. In PB/Success in Guatemala, the CIA-organized rebel army largely ran away. In both operations, however, the targeted enemies lost their nerve and were swept away. Allen Dulles framed the results as unalloyed victories. The next year, 1955, the agency engineered devastation in Saigon as part of a series of armed political maneuvers that cemented the power of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. The CIA coups, in effect, were acts of political terraforming.
Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s Iran mastermind, received the National Security Medal, the spy’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor. To shape the picture reaching the public, Director Dulles prevailed on the New York Times to recall its own correspondent from Guatemala and had other journalists report doctored news from Iran. Later Dulles gave interviews to reporters preparing an article on the agency for the Saturday Evening Post. Both operations entered CIA lore as glorious. Both came back to bite.
The president empaneled an outside review under General James Doolittle to look specifically at covert operations, and the Doolittle survey gave the agency a clean bill of health. The appraisers wanted the agency to be as tough as they imagined the Russians to be. In private, with Eisenhower, Doolittle questioned keeping Allen Dulles. After all, Foster was secretary of state, and that smacked of undue influence. Ike replied that he would keep Allen, warts and all.
Not about to start a hot war with the Russians, Ike sought to disrupt their control mechanisms and turn back Soviet expansion. But the tool created to fight the Russians in Europe was turned against the Third World. Iran and Guatemala were only the first wave.
The Eisenhower years saw CIA operations aimed at Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Indonesia, Tibet, China, and the Congo. None succeeded. There were political actions in the Philippines, Italy, and France. Psychological Strategy Board plans for Japan barely got off the ground, but CIA operated there too. It accumulated a spotty record, relatively successful in Japan and the Philippines, but with varying outcomes elsewhere.
Upheavals in the Soviet bloc, when they occurred, were spontaneous. In East Berlin in 1953, the CIA refused help to anti-Soviet rioters. Eisenhower approved a policy on disrupting Soviet influence—and his NSC machinery churned out reports on what had been done to further these goals. Radio Free Europe started Operation Veto to foment long-term resistance in Hungary. Operation Focus succeeded it. The agency periodically issued directives to RFE on broadcast themes. But when Budapest rose against the Soviets in 1956, RFE denied that it had had any role, and the Eisenhower administration insisted that no one had encouraged the rebels, whom the Russians repressed brutally. Internal CIA reports admitted a handful of minor infractions only—all related to the personal views of RFE broadcasters or to misinterpretation of their remarks. Here CIA had served policy, but Eisenhower’s goals far exceeded practical capabilities.
This is a good place to dispose of the fiction that the CIA does not participate in policy making. Director Dulles made a joke of that in the matter of Khrushchev’s speech, but the assertion is both oft-reiterated and wrong. The agency does more than speak truth to power, the standard articulation of its role. Once begun, any covert operation becomes a feature of U.S. policy, and the agency wants a say in strategy. In addition, obtaining, preparing, and maintaining the bases to mount operations requires arrangements with foreign nations and necessarily entails policy measures. The mere existence of and desire for such bases drives policy too. Here are examples from Allen Dulles’s time: CIA’s success in planting a pro-U.S. government in Guatemala led to the idea that a country could be used as base for CIA-armed forces to overthrow Fidel Castro. The agency planned to do so, and the president went along.
The U-2 spy plane furnishes another example. This overhead reconnaissance program required regional main bases (in the United Kingdom, Turkey, the Republic of China, and Japan) and temporary operating bases elsewhere (Norway, West Germany, and Pakistan). Access to, and overflight rights from, all these places were matters for diplomatic negotiation, success of which directly concerned the CIA. Aid money, military assistance, private information, and other special arrangements accommodated the foreign allies that the CIA required.
Dulles’s very important bureaucratic advantage—his brother John Foster as secretary of state—usually trumped the opposition. The brothers privately arranged for many sorts of mutual support, conversed informally at each other’s homes, and came to each other’s aid at NSC meetings. This extraordinary circumstance endured through most of the Eisenhower years, until 1958, when Foster developed cancer.
Allen never seemed so engaged as when he dealt with clandestine service matters, though there, too, he did not prove especially prescient. Once, with a CIA covert operation under way, he bet Treasury Secretary George Humphrey $3 that Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser would be ousted within a matter of months. In the fall of 1957, Dulles had to pay up. Nasser remained at the head of Egypt for another decade. No matter. It would be under Dulles that the CIA acquired the shape and missions that sustained it into a distant future. Every cycle he could, Allen would address those graduating from CIA spy training. He told them the story of missing the contact he might have made with Vladimir Lenin. The point was constant vigilance. All of them should be Great White Case Officers.
LANGLEY OR BUST
Allen Dulles built a real house for the Central Intelligence Agency. Long before he moved up Navy Hill to the DCI’s office, Dulles knew the deleterious effects of officers’ scattered existence in seedy buildings. The “temps” down by the Reflecting Pool were awful. Wags cracked that even the repairs needed repairs. And the walk up Navy Hill could take ten minutes or more. In the rain or with snow, that could be miserable. Beetle Smith’s people told him that agency personnel were scattered among twenty-seven buildings all over town. In Vandenberg and Hillenkoetter’s day, it had already been ten. As early as 1951, cramped office space had made OPC reluctant to hire more people.
General Smith set out to do something. Congress appropriated a bit of money. The old-timers’ tale is that a cost-conscious legislator, seeing an unidentified budget line item, cut it. Meetings on a new building took place in 1952, but with the demands of the Korean War Director Smith put aside the issue, and he soon left.
Allen Dulles got a wake-up call one morning when President Eisenhower became lost on the road to CIA, hardly a ten-minute drive from the White House. It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. Ike volunteered to drop brother Milton at the agency. He gave his Secret Service detail no notice, and his driver had no inkling that the CIA building lay behind a fence with a sign reading Government Printing Office. Despite its nearby location, and the fact that Washington tour buses routinely stopped in front of the “Printing Office” to proclaim it the most secret of agencies, Ike had to telephone Allen for directions. For the short term, Mr. Dulles ordered a new sign that actually identified the Central Intelligence Agency. The larger solution would be a new building. Director Dulles hoped Ike would be a supporter. He was.
In The Craft of Intelligence, Allen tells that story to make the point that he favored openness, a minimum of secrecy for the CIA. But the immediate problem was a new home. Early one Saturday morning, Ike summoned Dulles, who took Red White with him. It was May 7, 1955. At the White House, the president told his spy chief that the District of Columbia was absolutely off limits. He wanted agency headquarters located in the direction the government planned to relocate in case of a nuclear attack—to the west. Ike and Dulles discussed one tract in Alexandria (technically, south, not west) and another in Falls Church as the most promising alternatives.
Under Washington urban design rules, the National Capitol Regional Planning Council had to approve land use. In April 1955, after opposition from local residents, the CIA announced it had given up on the Falls Church tract. The agency looked at a property that had belonged to the defunct Heurich Brewery, now occupied by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
But Allen discussed the Falls Church site with Eisenhower anyway, as it conformed more closely with Ike’s preferences. Suddenly, in late June, the CIA reversed itself.
Citizens excoriated the agency’s sudden reversals, arguing that Fairfax County was already challenged in providing water, sewer and other services. In the summer of 1955 residents of the Langley–Great Falls area protested to the Speaker of the House shortly after Mr. Dulles appeared to testify in behalf of a $54.5 million ($492 million in 2016) appropriation. According to Dulles, in July 1955 the boards of Fairfax and Arlington counties, the Falls Church City Council, and the Fairfax County Planning Commission all endorsed the plan. But that spring the McLean Citizens Association not only had voted against any CIA complex, it had defeated an alternate resolution making approval contingent on the United States paying every bill entailed in creating the support infrastructure. Agency inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick lived in that neighborhood, and folks gave him an earful.
Among urban planners, National Capital Regional Planning Council chairman Max S. Wehrly dissented from the majority report approving the McLean site. Wehrly, executive director of the Urban Land Institute and an authority on land use and taxation, believed the CIA’s complex would have a greater local impact on McLean than building it anywhere else in Fairfax. Among other things, the county would have to rewrite its just-completed master plan. Counting service workers, the CIA facility could be expected to bring in more than 22,000 new people daily. Estimates were that less than a tenth of them lived in the Virginia suburbs already. The water treatment plant then being funded was designed to service only 7,500 residents. There were legal complications relating to Arlington furnishing more water to Falls Church. In addition, accommodating CIA headquarters required extension, improvement, or both, of the George Washington Memorial Parkway and two other roads. Government spent $8.5 million ($76.6 million in 2016) to extend the parkway from Sprout Run to Langley’s Route 123.
Wehrly lost the fight. Toward the end of the year, a regional council member from Alexandria passed away. That left an alternate delegate from Falls Church, who liked the idea, to cast his vote in favor of the McLean location. The plan passed the planning commission, a local group that worked with the council, on December 5. The national authority approved the final plans on February 3, 1956. Had one vote changed at either level, the outcome would have been a tie—with the plan rejected.
The land that became Allen’s “campus” had belonged to Joseph Leiter, a Chicago tycoon who died in 1932. The Treasury seized his thirty-two-room “country” house, abandoned a few years later, in settlement of tax debts. The house burned down in 1945. About a hundred acres in addition to the Leiter property completed the CIA complex, in the place called Langley, Virginia.
Red White recalls that Allen and he spent long hours making arrangements. The new building would have central heating and air-conditioning. It was Dulles who shielded Red from the wrath of Wild Bill Donovan, whom he first met here. Donovan lobbied White to select a particular builder and a site in southeast Washington. Deputy director White knew Wild Bill had once headed the Public Buildings Service and well knew the contracting procedures, which precluded the end run Donovan proposed. The badgering continued until Allen rebuffed his old boss.
To avoid more shenanigans, Dulles selected Harrison and Abramowitz as lead architects. They worked with an inside unit of the Office of Support under Anthony T. Zaia, who could interpret design and engineering-ese for the other spooks. An agency committee made wish lists. Walter Jessel, DO officer and records specialist, convinced the architects to provide a system of pneumatic tubes to carry paper—and later punched cards—throughout the facility. The advent of the computer rendered that quaint very soon but, more important, he won the day on including conduits to carry future electric and electronic cables, which made all the difference when computers came. Dulles often began staff meetings with progress updates. Dick Helms, who attended them, recalled, “We sometimes thought he was trying to build it with his own hands, brick by brick.”
The Cold War continued at high intensity as construction began. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first space satellite, in October 1957, the same month that ground clearing commenced at Langley. The country’s leaders were consumed by the “missile gap” intelligence dispute in the summer of 1958 when grading and drainage site preparations were finished—in the face of some of the worst snowstorms and summer rainfall in Washington in many years. Around that time, a C-118 aircraft (the same that had carried Allen on much of his world tour a couple of years earlier), pressed into service for a reconnaissance mission along the Russo-Turkish border, blundered into Soviet airspace and was shot down.
Construction arrangements were completed at the end of 1958. The contract, awarded in March 1959, came within a week of the day the CIA helped spirit the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa, a part of its secret war in Tibet. Harrison and Abramowitz had designed the United Nations complex in New York. The Tibetans and their American sympathizers pushed for a UN hearing. Superstructure work began in May; the missile gap had grown worse by then. Lincoln White faced repeated prodding from Pentagon potentates to install deep bunkers and shelters underneath Langley headquarters. But practically no one at the CIA believed in surviving a nuclear war. White stood his ground, and here, too, Director Dulles’s interventions proved vital.
The design for the Langley building provided for 1,400,000 square feet and facilitated CIA secrecy. Open and clandestine services employees transited the same lobby but entered a half of the building dedicated to their own work. Officers hardly ever crossed cultures. Even at meals, the cafeteria had been arranged so that a central kitchen served the DDP people on one side, and the rest of the crew on the other. No one crossed over to lunch together except by arrangement. Exchanges between the open and clandestine sides of the agency were strictly monitored. The building would be completed in 1961. By then Allen Dulles was in crisis.
Deputy Director Lincoln White anticipated that the Central Intelligence Agency would build its headquarters and then have a gala opening. Director Dulles wanted a cornerstone laying instead. Several times the boss returned to this. His deputy for administration, shuddering at the work he’d have to do for that, dragged his feet. After doing this dance a few times, White openly suggested the combined cornerstone and dedication ceremonies. Dulles nixed that.
“Red,” Allen exclaimed, “you know you have to have a cornerstone to hold up the building.”
“The cornerstone doesn’t really hold up anything,” Lincoln White riposted.
But White really stirred Allen up when he suggested that, once the headquarters had been finished, they could put up a bronze plaque with everyone’s name on it.
“You have apparently forgotten that we are about to have a presidential election.” Dulles loomed, very serious. “After [that] I may not be director. I want my name on that cornerstone and I don’t want it on some bronze plaque that somebody can take down.”
The part about Allen Dulles mulling over his legacy may not, or may, be accurate—Lincoln White’s reputation was as an honest man to a fault—but it has to be true that by this point Dulles worried about top cover for the CIA. There was lingering anger toward the agency over the Hungarian uprising, either at the presumed U.S. role in stirring up trouble and then standing aside or at the feeble efforts made to help simple people uprooted by tragedy. In Venezuela in 1958, Vice President Nixon had been ambushed by rioting much like El Bogotazo. An ambitious CIA gambit to overthrow Indonesian leader Sukarno failed miserably. Eisenhower now had a watchdog group monitoring U.S. intelligence, and it was scathing on the planning and conduct of the Indonesia project. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came to America for a visit in the fall of 1959, encountering Allen in the receiving line at a White House dinner. Even Khrushchev could throw subtle daggers, and he countered Dulles’s sally about CIA reports on Russia with the quip that, “I believe we get the same reports, and probably from the same people.”
The dynamic duo of Allen and John Foster Dulles had broken, however, ruptured by Foster’s cancer. The secretary of state made his last foreign trip in January 1959; by April he felt so sick, he had to resign. Foster died on May 24. Christian Herter replaced him. That changeover proved less detrimental to CIA interests than it could have been, because Herter had long been Allen’s friend. They had met as far back as 1919, during the Versailles conference, where they worked in close harmony. Later, in 1947, with Herter a congressman from Massachusetts, he had Allen consult with his committee on the Marshall Plan. Dulles and Herter were not what Allen and Foster had been, but they were mutually helpful all the same. However, Herter lacked the bureaucratic base to protect the CIA, and worse, whereas Foster had been a crusader willing to overlook peccadillos, Herter was a stickler for rules.
Dwight D. Eisenhower enjoyed the Dalai Lama rescue. CIA operatives had included a cameraman of amazing dexterity in their special team, sent to assist the holy man’s exfiltration to India in 1959 during a revolt against Chinese rule. His film had been edited into a movie screened at the White House. Ike now spent most of the time he devoted to intelligence on the U-2 flights—approving flight plans, reviewing the take. The mercurial president expressed fury at the continual delays and disasters in the CIA’s development of a photo reconnaissance satellite. As Director Dulles saw it, an event that brought Eisenhower to the CIA amid pomp and ceremony, with Ike expected to strike a positive chord, had to be helpful.
Allen got his way. A cornerstone laying took place at Langley on November 3, 1959. The Central Intelligence Agency proposed that the president should preside over the event, and it soon appeared on his calendar. Accounts differ on Ike’s enthusiasm. There is evidence that he insisted on no speech, but naturally that didn’t fly. His remarks, directed more at CIA officers’ roles than at the agency’s achievements, recognized that although “the work of this agency demands of its members the highest order of dedication, ability, trustworthiness and selflessness, . . . their reward can be little except the conviction they are performing a unique and indispensable service for their country.”
Ike meanwhile wrestled with the question of what to do about Cuba, whose pro-American dictator, Fulgencio Batista, had been overthrown at the outset of 1959. The revolutionary government of Fidel Castro exhibited amorphous tendencies toward socialism. The question on officials’ minds became “Is he communist?” Vice President Richard Nixon met Castro during the latter’s visit to America, slightly ahead of Khrushchev. Nixon decided that Castro was communist and circulated a memo arguing the case.
Director Dulles’s line is disputed. Historians like Stephen Rabe and Bevan Sewell portray the CIA director as taking a more moderate position throughout 1958–59, maintaining that Castro was a pragmatist even though figures surrounding him might be communists. Agency officer Victor Marchetti, on the other hand, recounts Dulles personally intervening in intelligence analysis to rewrite reports, painting Castro’s victory as unnatural and predicting a slaughter that would go beyond that of the French Revolution. Eisenhower refrained from acting until Cuba nationalized American businesses and property. In March 1960, when a cargo ship mysteriously blew up in Havana harbor, Washington accused Cuban communists of sabotage. Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations. He also ordered Dulles to craft a plan to topple Castro.
For one more brief moment, the Central Intelligence Agency rode on top of the world. Then, on May Day, one of its U-2 spy planes disappeared over Russia. The foolish cover story held that the plane, collecting weather data, went off course and fell apart. The Russians, who had shot it down, captured and exhibited cameras, film, spy gear, and pilot Francis Gary Powers. The Soviets had a propaganda bonanza. Premier Khrushchev used the occasion to break up a summit conference about to take place in Paris. May 1, 1960, became another CIA fiasco.
After that, Allen Dulles rode a bucking bronco. The spooks were blessed in August when their spy satellite Project Corona finally produced a workable photo platform. But that same month came rumbles in preparations for the Cuban operation, now too big for the agency to handle alone. President Eisenhower agreed to involve the U.S. military, providing Green Beret trainers to whip Cuban exile recruits into shape. A special program also canvassed the Air National Guard, eventually focusing on the Alabama air guard, for pilots and crewmen to help the Cubans learn to fly the B-26 bombers the CIA had obtained for the exile air force.
The new resources brought confidence, but for a sharp observer they should also have raised doubts. Throughout the 1950s, the agency had done best when reliant on its own resources. In those projects where the Directorate of Plans had had important inputs from the U.S. military—Indonesia, Korea, the Chinese offshore islands, Burma—the operations turned messy with reduced or no impact. On its own, the CIA had flubbed too, but at least there were also the “successes” of Iran and Guatemala.
Through the summer and into the fall, the CIA made efforts to get a partisan resistance going inside Cuba. Various exile groups were mobilized. Some sabotage took place. But the Castro security forces were vigilant and no resistance took hold. The CIA-supported infiltration program repeatedly failed to connect with any internal networks. In November, on the verge of that presidential election Director Dulles so feared, President Eisenhower suddenly demanded a recasting of the whole Cuba project—as a conventional invasion in support of partisans, who remained elusive. That should have raised doubts. Dulles simply moved ahead.
The 1960 election would bring John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the White House. Contrary to Allen’s fears, JFK asked him to stay on at the agency. In fact, the defeated candidate, Richard Nixon, had he won, might have fired Dulles. Nixon expressed deep anger at the CIA in later years, believing that it had accorded Kennedy an unfair advantage in briefings while he, the vice president, fully aware of the covert operations, held his tongue in their televised debates where Kennedy advocated doing something about Castro. “I was faced with a heads-he-wins, tails-I-lose proposition,” Mr. Nixon wrote in 1964. Had he revealed the covert op, “and point[ed] out that I had been one of its strongest advocates, I would pull the rug out from under Kennedy’s position. But if I did so, the project would [have been] doomed.” It is ironic that a Republican might have fired the Republican, Dulles, while a Democrat invited him to stay on. Allen happily agreed.
The Cuba operation, reframed as an invasion, had reached the top of the list—poised to destroy Dulles’s leadership. The exile troops, now styled a “brigade,” were ready to go. Nicaraguan and Guatemalan leaders who had made bases in their countries available to the CIA were restive and ready to be free of the foreign troops. Growing evidence from Cuba indicated that Castro had become aware of Project Ate and had begun taking countermeasures. Then came protests among the Cuban exile fighters, and troublemakers were isolated and confined while the operation took place. A covert ops planner in 1960–61 could plausibly have concluded that the Cuban project, cryptonym JM/Ate, had gone off track.
President Kennedy asked for reviews of Ate and got them. The reviews sounded optimistic but were subtly conditional. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were lukewarm. Kennedy, fearing diplomatic consequences, opted to reduce the invasion’s “visibility.” He tailored it in several ways that also reduced potential. At this point, CIA and military participants in this scheme really did entertain doubts. Allen Dulles might have too, but no one said anything. Nor did anyone say much when notices of the plot—still vague, but anticipating the use of Cuban exiles in an attempt to oust Fidel—began appearing in the press. The fact that news was out there did not provoke Kennedy to rethink CIA’s entire scheme.
All this ended with the exile invasion on April 17, 1961. It took place at the Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. The beach, Playa Girón. Historians have dubbed it “the perfect failure” for a multiplicity of reasons. The question is, why did Allen not appreciate that? Instead, he helped contribute to the deception surrounding the operation, traveling to Puerto Rico with Clover to catch some rays and address the annual conference of the Young Presidents’ Organization. While the trip had some value, it also made the CIA chief unavailable at the height of a key covert operation.
Details belong elsewhere, but there can be no doubt that the failure stripped Allen Dulles of his luster. Kennedy spoke of breaking the agency into a thousand pieces. He complained of CIA perfidy. He ordered a fullscale review of the flop, appointing Allen as one of the review group, partly to ensure that CIA security concerns were taken into account, but also to require Dulles to redo his sums, to sit through an exhaustive waltz through every imaginable aspect of this horror. Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, along with General Maxwell D. Taylor, the chairman—and JFK’s special military assistant—ensured that White House interests were protected.
Later Mr. Dulles squirmed on the hook. The appearance of insider accounts from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen, plus Dick Bissell’s July 1965 riposte to them, got Allen off the bench. But he split hairs to contrive some explanation for the mishap, only to leave multiple drafts on the cutting room floor. Instead, in The Craft of Intelligence, Allen wrote, “I have not commented on any details of the 1961 Cuban operation and do not propose to do so here.” This refusal did not keep him from saying, in a different passage, that an account of the disaster based upon extended interviews with four of the key Cuban exile commanders had created a “new crop” of myths about the CIA. In fact the Cuban exiles’ rendering had been on the money—and the agency had attempted to suppress it.
This botch terminated Allen Dulles at the CIA. The White House watchdog group known as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which Jack Kennedy had abolished but now brought back, recommended on July 18, 1961, that the CIA consider locating its clandestine service somewhere other than the new Langley headquarters. President Kennedy did not do that. He sought a replacement for Dulles and came up with John A. McCone. The president made one more concession to the long-serving spy chieftain. Kennedy agreed to take part in Langley’s dedication. That took place on November 28, 1961. John McCone entered on duty the next day. Allen Dulles took home the National Security Medal as consolation prize. The cafeteria opened only in February 1962, the seventh-floor director’s suite needed another month, and the last construction would be completed in November 1963. By then Allen Dulles was long gone.
So Allen Dulles the dreamer helped conceive a United States intelligence agency and breathed life into its form. Mr. Dulles built the house in which the CIA lived. But the detritus of disastrous operations gradually loomed over the glory of successful ones until the Bay of Pigs completed the undermining. Dulles’s ghost seemed to teach “lessons”—most important for the CIA’s future, that the mission was the thing, that anything else, including outside efforts at regulation, posed obstacles to be bypassed. That lesson proved misguided. Had JFK moved the agency’s operations unit away from Langley, he might have avoided or reduced the impact of this lesson. On the personal level, the Dulles ghost reminds us that in spy work, as in few other arenas, one mistake can wipe away a lifetime of achievement. (This is not a claim that everything else Allen Dulles accomplished was an achievement, at least not in the positive sense.) Mr. Dulles learned that lesson too late. He may have been the first to inhabit the new headquarters, but his ghost moved in before Langley’s doors ever opened.
On another level, it needs to be said that spying will always be a sensitive area, easily distorted by corruption—whether of the moral, material, or political variety—or stymied by inherent limitations of method, the difficulty of attaining goals, or indeed the unrealism of the goals themselves. A people really have no defense against repressive or renegade security agencies save for enforcing accountability, and that starts with personnel.
Unlike what Allen Dulles wrote about the secrecy of agency headquarters, his campus still operated under a cloak of deception. Until coming out of the closet in 1973, the George Washington Memorial Parkway exit that led to the back gate at CIA had a sign variously identifying it as leading to the Bureau of Public Roads, the Fairbanks Highway Research Station, or the Federal Highway Administration. It became an index of the rising controversy surrounding the agency that these phony road signs were stolen and exhibited on mantels all over the nation’s capital. Indeed the cost of replacing highway signs became significant. Meanwhile, over time there developed a small group of intrepid CIAers, who lived on the Maryland side of the Potomac, commuting to work by canoe. That fulfilled a dream of another sort.
* There is confusion regarding CIA code names. A cryptonym is a code word or phrase used to refer to something in messages or documents. Agency cryptonyms had two parts and were called “digraphs.” The first part was usually a two-letter couplet that classified the subject, place, or person referred to by regional or functional category. The rest would be a presumably nonsense word making the identification unique and completing the digraph. In agency documents, digraphs are usually rendered in all capital letters with no distinctions. Here, for clarity, the text will separate the parts of a digraph with a slash mark (“/”). In other instances it will skip the letter couplet and give the code word (the project name) in roman type.