“The Most Soul-Searching Decision”
After his heart attack, doctors warned Eisenhower to avoid “irritation, frustration, anxiety, fear and, above all, anger,” but when they tried to lay down the law, he barked, “Just what do you think the Presidency is?”
Liberated from hospital in November 1955, he went to Gettysburg, where he stalked the frozen grounds with a nine-iron, telephoned commands to the West Wing and wondered “what the failing health of a President might do to the office and to the cause for which a whole administration might be working.” He told Jim Hagerty, “I just hate to turn this country back into the hands of people like Stevenson, Harriman and Kefauver.”
On Leap Day 1956, the President declared for re-election. “I really don’t know the exact moment when he decided to run again,” said Hagerty. “But I do know that history was made sometime in those weeks at Gettysburg. It was then that he really faced the sheer, God-awful boredom of not being President.” Eisenhower’s friend General Lucius Clay said, “I don’t care what happens to the Republican party but if he quits, it’ll kill him.”
The lower half of the ticket remained unresolved. The President doubted that Richard Nixon could attract the “discerning Democrats” and independents required if the Republicans were ever to become a majority party. He knew that as sitting Vice President, Nixon might be the inescapable nominee in 1960. He told Nixon that perhaps he should take a Cabinet post during the second term: four years at the Pentagon might give him executive experience that would be useful if he ever wished to run for President. Nixon was noncommittal.
Another talk was pure Alphonse and Gaston. Nixon: “You tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.” Eisenhower: “No, I think we’ve got to do what’s best for you.”
“Nixon will never be President,” Eisenhower told the Republican national chairman, Leonard Hall. “People don’t like him.” Hall said it would be “the easiest thing to get Nixon out of the picture willingly. I have known Dick a long time.” Recording their talk on his hidden machine, the President said, “All right. You see him and talk to him, but be very, very gentle.” Hall failed; he later said, “I never saw a scowl come so fast over a man’s face.”
For months, as a friend recalled, Nixon went through “absolutely indescribable anguish.” He refused to commit hara-kiri; Eisenhower refused to fire him. Perhaps the President feared that a scorned Nixon would mobilize the Right against him, perhaps that a public execution would harm his genial image. In March 1956, before reporters, he announced his view that the Vice President should “chart his own course.” In April, Nixon went to the Oval Office and said he would be “honored” to run again: “The only reason I waited this long to tell you was that I didn’t want to do anything that would make you think I was trying to force my way on the ticket if you didn’t want me on it.”
The President said he was glad and had only wondered why it had taken him so long to say so. He called Jim Hagerty: “Dick has just told me that he’ll stay on the ticket. Why don’t you take him out right now and let him tell the reporters himself?” In later years, Milton Eisenhower said that “a more sensitive man” than Nixon would have taken his brother’s hint and left the ticket: “But he wanted to be there. He thought this was his chance to be President.”
That month, for the first time in history, a major peacetime American spy operation was exposed to the world. Builders of the Berlin Tunnel had forecast that if it were ever uncovered, the Soviets “would probably suppress knowledge of the tunnel’s existence.” Like Foster Dulles’s forecast about a U-2 downing, the CIA had felt that for the Soviets “to admit that the U.S. had been reading their high-level communications circuits” would cause them to lose face.
In 1955, with Eisenhower’s approval and British help, CIA men in West Berlin burrowed into the eastern zone and tapped the telephone lines from Berlin to Leipzig. Western agents sat inside the narrow passage far underground, listening in on conversations about the Soviet order of battle and location of Soviet troops. The tunnel brought in so much material that Richard Bissell considered limiting the amount sent to Washington.
In the winter of 1955, heaters inside the tunnel melted snow on the East Berlin farmer’s field under which it ran. The CIA bought up Sears, Roebuck’s East Coast inventory of plastic pipe and installed an air-cooling system. It has been said that the Soviets had learned of planning for the tunnel at the start from George Blake, an agent in the British Secret Service, but let the project proceed to protect him. Another version has it that the project was discovered during routine maintenance of the telephone line. Whatever the story, on the evening of April 15, 1956, Soviets and East Germans burst into the tunnel. Americans fled to the western side so hastily that when the enemy arrived, a percolator inside the tunnel was still brewing coffee.
The Kremlin denounced the “perfidy of the American and British aggressors.” East Berliners were taken to view the “criminal conspiracy” of the “terrorists and warmongers.” The Chinese tacked up pictures of the tunnel in shops and factories; Peking’s press reported them as “aroused to lively discussion and indignation.” But Western papers almost all lauded the project. The New York Herald Tribune called it “a venture of extraordinary audacity.… If it was dug by American intelligence forces—and that is a general assumption—it is a striking example of their capacity for daring undertakings.” When the tunnel was exposed, Foster Dulles ribbed his sister Eleanor, a German expert in the State Department; she shot back that it was “all Allen’s fault.”
Soon the Berlin Tunnel was called “the most highly publicized peacetime espionage enterprise in modern times.” But no American newspaper prominently suggested that Eisenhower had authorized the project or had even known about it. At his next press conference, reporters did not ask a single question about the tunnel.
Privately the President was sorry that its usefulness was done, “but you had to anticipate that it was coming to an end,” Andrew Goodpaster recalled. “I think he felt that there had been carelessness that drew the attention of the East Germans.” Eisenhower responded by tightening White House supervision of all CIA activities encroaching on foreign sovereignty.
Four days after revelation of the Berlin Tunnel, the West was once more thrown on the defensive by the exposure of another spy operation. Khrushchev and Bulganin had sailed to Great Britain aboard the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, for a goodwill visit. The trip, Khrushchev’s first to the West, was widely considered an off-Broadway try-out for a later visit to the United States. Eager to preserve the cordial spirit of Geneva, Anthony Eden ordered British intelligence to refrain from operations against the Russian ship. But the Admiralty wished to learn the pitch of the cruiser’s screws as it sat in Portsmouth harbor. A “free-lance” frogman, Commander Lionel Crabbe, “offered” to do the deed on his own.
One evening at dinner, one of the Russians asked the First Lord of the Admiralty, “What was the frogman doing off our bows this morning?” Crabbe was never seen again alive. Later his headless body was washed ashore; there was evidence that homicidal Soviet counterintelligence men had been waiting for him in a hidden compartment under the cruiser.
The Soviets publicized the affair. Eden’s Labour opposition forced the issue in Parliament. The Prime Minister fired the Director General of the British Secret Service. Apprehensive about further humiliations that might damage his reputation and sour relations with the Russians, he remembered the U-2 and told Washington, “This isn’t the moment to be making overflights from here.”
Bissell and the Brothers Dulles thought of West Germany. Although the Federal Republic had joined NATO in 1955, Konrad Adenauer remained wary of abandonment by the United States. After Geneva, when Eisenhower sent Zhukov a friendly note by diplomatic pouch, West German intelligence informed Adenauer, who reputedly suspected a secret dialogue on how to sell West Germany down the river. Such evidence of American fidelity as the Berlin Tunnel and the large CIA station in Frankfurt made the Chancellor feel less insecure.
Bissell and Pearre Cabell flew to Bonn. In Adenauer’s office, they showed him U-2 pictures and briefed him on the program. As Bissell recalled, the Chancellor was “delighted” by the technical achievement and the fact that the Americans were being “rather ingenious in the whole matter of the Cold War.” The U-2 pilots, support people and planes were moved to Wiesbaden.
Khrushchev and Bulganin could not have expected that the West would hand them such propaganda gifts as the Berlin Tunnel and the Commander Crabbe affair during their British tour. Before they sailed for Russia, Jacob Malik, then Soviet Ambassador to London, threw the two leaders a boisterous farewell in the faded bourgeois grandeur of Claridge’s.
“A very unusual party, to say the least,” muttered a guest as four thousand politicians, earls, editors, dowagers, radicals and gatecrashers feasted on caviar and salmon, knocked over lamps and vases and stamped cigarettes into the rug. Some sagged to the floor, unused to vodka in Russian servings; they were trampled by others surging across the steamy room to have a look at the guests of honor. Introduced to Charlie Chaplin, Khrushchev said, “You are a genius.” Blacklisted by Hollywood and the U.S. Passport Agency, the Little Tramp and Paul Robeson were cherished Soviet symbols of American political repression. Khrushchev declared, “They repudiate you—but we honor you.”
Harold Stassen was serving in London as Eisenhower’s delegate to disarmament talks. Andrei Gromyko found him in the crush and asked, “Have you met Khrushchev yet?” Stassen shook his head and was taken to an anteroom for an audience.
Khrushchev bellowed against Open Skies: “You treat the Soviet Union like a rich uncle treats a pauper nephew!” The Soviet Union didn’t want pictures of anyone else’s land. Why were Americans always so eager to peek into other people’s bedrooms? Only the Soviet leadership’s great respect for President Eisenhower had kept them from turning down Open Skies right away in Geneva.
Why did Americans always meddle in other people’s business? Look at Guatemala! “We are not ignorant savages any more. You cannot frighten us as you could have done thirty years ago.” Khrushchev said he was sure that Eisenhower wanted peace, but not John Foster Dulles. “Gromyko would not have said that, but he is a diplomat. I am an amateur.”
Stassen hurried to the American Embassy and cabled Washington that Khrushchev had seemed to turn down Open Skies once and for all.
By now, Eisenhower was ready to resort to the U-2. Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell wished to begin flying into Russia by mid-June. By then, the spring rains would be done and the fliers could clearly view long-range bomber bases and other sites in the western Soviet Union. U-2 pictures of American cities from seventy thousand feet were unveiled in the Cabinet Room. The President marveled that he could “easily count the automobiles in the streets and even the lines marking the parking areas for individual cars.”
Eisenhower asked Allen Dulles what would happen if a plane malfunctioned. As Goodpaster recalled, “Allen’s approach was that we were unlikely to lose one. If we did lose one, the pilot would not survive.… We were told—and it was part of our understanding of the situation—that it was almost certain that the plane would disintegrate and that we could take it as a certainty that no pilot would survive … and that although they would know where the plane came from, it would be difficult to prove it in any convincing way.”
Perhaps, but the President was still troubled by the risk of invading Soviet airspace in peacetime. Time and time again he said, “Such a decision is one of the most soul-searching questions to come before a President. We’ve got to think about what our reaction would be if they were to do this to us.” To Goodpaster, the answer was clear: “Our reaction would be to try to shoot them down, of course.… It would be approaching a provocation, a probable cause of war because it was a violation of their territory.”
Eisenhower agreed in principle to a first set of flights into Russia: the pilots must cover vital targets quickly. He asked Dulles to “concentrate the operations on high-priority items” and suggested a “ten-day period of operations followed by a report.”
Late at night on June 7, 1956, Mamie Eisenhower thought the President was suffering another coronary. Doubled up with pain, he was taken from his bed to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where physicians found a blocked intestine: immediate surgery was required to prevent gangrene. “If we don’t move fast, we are going to lose our patient,” said one doctor. Twenty-four hours after the attack, Goodpaster called Sherman Adams from home and said, “I am leaving right now to go to Walter Reed.”
“For what purpose?”
“To observe his competency should any military decisions become important.” Goodpaster was joined by Adams and Hagerty in the operating room, where they had the “eerie and striking” experience of watching surgeons work on the motionless body of the President. Two days later, Eisenhower was out of sedation. He wrote his boyhood friend Swede Hazlett, “My ‘innards’ have been pictured, described and discussed in the papers, to say nothing of the television and radio, until you, along with many others, must be heartily sick of the whole business.”
The President’s brush with death did not postpone the U-2’s maiden voyage into Russia. But there were clouds over the western Soviet Union and it took some time to put equipment in place in Wiesbaden. On June 16, anti-government riots broke out in East Germany. The Kremlin sent tanks to put down the revolt. While waiting for the weather to clear, Bissell won permission “to do some preliminary overflights over the satellites in Eastern Europe”—an excellent opportunity to show Eisenhower what the U-2 could do.
On June 21, Bissell, James Killian and Edwin Land spoke with Goodpaster about the “yield to be expected” from U-2 flights and “thoughts and preparations regarding malfunctioning.” Goodpaster told them that “the President must be contacted before deep operations into the Soviet Union are initiated.”
Another delay. During the final week of June, Nathan Twining and nine other Air Force men went to Moscow. The U-2 could hardly begin violating Soviet airspace while Twining and his party were enjoying Soviet hospitality. The group had been invited by their Soviet counterparts to view Aviation Day, the annual rite in which Soviet pilots flew new aircraft over the capital in spectacular formations. Aviation Day was obviously designed to impress the West with Soviet air power: in 1955, Western attachés had been astonished by the number of long-range bombers on display.
In the spring of 1956, Twining, LeMay and other Air Force titans testified before Congress that Russia “has almost closed the air power gap. In airplane after airplane, they are approaching us in quality and surpassing us in quantity.” Eisenhower was skeptical of the Bomber Gap but hoped that Twining’s group would find out more about Soviet air power. Perhaps the mission might achieve a primitive form of Open Skies: “If they want to trade military visits and really see what the other country has in a military sense, they might invite our chiefs.… I am very anxious to see how far the Soviets are ready to go in making offers and working for relationships.”
Twining’s party viewed Soviet aerial acrobatics, aircraft factories and flying schools. Riding in the private plane of his opposite number, Marshal R. A. Rudenko, Twining noted that it was “quite ornate and furnished in mid-Victorian style, with Persian rugs on the floor and flowered china in racks along the wall.”
On Aviation Day, Khrushchev unexpectedly joined foreign guests at an Army reception in Moscow and toasted Eisenhower, friendship and peace. When he toasted China, the Americans sat stock-still and did not raise their glasses. By the end of the affair, Khrushchev was reliably reported to be drunk. “You are probably interested in our rockets and our ballistic missiles!” he called across the room to Twining. “You would like to see them, wouldn’t you?”
Twining nodded, wondering whether this might be a trap.
“Well, we want to see yours too! Show us your planes and we’ll show you our ballistic missiles! But we won’t show them to you today. Today is too early. We’ll do it at some future date. Meanwhile, you keep yours and we’ll keep ours. We’ll show you what competition is!”
All laughed and applauded. Khrushchev shook hands with Twining, certain that he had had the last word. He did not know that Twining was involved in a plan to begin flying deep into the Soviet Union a few days hence, and that if it worked, the United States would begin to have a better idea how many planes and missiles the Russians really had.
On Monday, July 2, Soviet skies were clearing. Richard Bissell asked Goodpaster for permission to begin crossing the Soviet border. The mission was lent greater urgency by communications intelligence that suggested possible mobilization in the wake of the East German riots. Next morning, Goodpaster saw the President, recuperating at Gettysburg. Eisenhower granted ten days to fly. Then the CIA must return with a report. Goodpaster returned to Washington and told Bissell, “The President has authorized flights for a period of ten days.”
“Of course, that’s ten days of good weather.”
“That is absolutely wrong. Ten days from now.”
The U-2 project team of 1956 was housed in the CIA’s K Building, one of the hideous wartime “temporary” office blocks on both sides of the Reflecting Pool near the Lincoln Memorial. Bissell found the place “unappetizing.” One day a CIA man was working there alone, “plotting the downfall of the Soviet Union,” when Allen Dulles walked in and said, “Good God, this is a damned pig sty!”
By Bissell’s account, it was six o’clock on Tuesday evening, July 3, when he walked into the U-2 Operations Center. The base in West Germany had been notified that “we may be flying a mission, and this will be the flight plan and you’d better get pilots, navigational aids and everything else set up.” Bissell found that “the boys had laid out a flight directly to Moscow, ninety-degree turn, then directly over Leningrad, then down the Baltic coast—all coastal, air, radar installations.” Bissell’s men told him, “Let’s go for the big game the first time. We’re safer the first time than we’ll ever be again.”
Six o’clock was “the major briefing and a full review of weather,” Bissell later recalled. “If everything looked good, a single code word went to the field saying, ‘The mission is on, the flight plan as transmitted is approved.’” Bissell told them to send the code word to West Germany. By 11:30, a summer moon glimmered on the Reflecting Pool. Bissell returned to the Ops Center: “The weather was still good, so I sent the ‘go’ message.”
Next morning, as Bissell recalled, he went to CIA headquarters at 8:30. It was Wednesday, July 4, the 180th birthday of the United States. By his recollection, he walked into the Director’s office and said, “Well, Allen, we’re out and running.”
“Where is it flying?”
“It’s flying first over Moscow, then over Leningrad, then home.”
Dulles turned pale: “Was it really wise to do that the first time?”
“The first time is the safest. We should hear within another hour.”
As American planes began flying deep into his country, Khrushchev stood, of all places, in the garden of Spaso House, the American Ambassador’s residence in Moscow. Charles Bohlen was presiding over the Embassy’s annual Independence Day reception; in the spirit of Geneva, Khrushchev had decided to attend. The yellow 1914 mansion was built by a sugar baron for his mistress, confiscated after the Revolution and leased to the United States in 1933 when it opened diplomatic relations with the Soviets. Avis Bohlen showed Khrushchev the corn she was raising in her garden. Almost nothing was more likely to impress the leader known in the provinces as Nikita the Corn-Grower. He said, “I am glad to see American corn grows so well in Russia.”
Khrushchev boasted to the American journalist Marvin Kalb that the Soviets had “the best, the tallest basketball players in the world.” Kalb politely reminded him that this distinction belonged to the United States. Khrushchev ascertained that Kalb played basketball and asked how tall he was. “Only six centimeters shorter than Peter the Great,” said Kalb. From then on, Khrushchev addressed him as Peter the Great.
A professor from Columbia University asked the Soviet leader about Soviet decision-making. “We disagree and we take a vote,” said Khrushchev. He pointed at Molotov and said, “We have had differences between us.”
“Not noticeably,” said the American.
Khrushchev laughed: “Not noticeably.”
Chip Bohlen knew about the U-2 project but not that the first plane was flying over Moscow: that way, if it were ever revealed, he could more honestly say that he did not know anything about the matter. Before Khrushchev left, newsreel men rolled their cameras as the Soviet leader congratulated Americans on their holiday and toasted the health of President Eisenhower.
President Eisenhower was at Gettysburg, chipping golf balls onto the putting green behind his house. The surgery had weakened his stomach muscles and he stooped as he walked.
“I am ready to put the whole nasty business behind me,” he wrote Swede Hazlett. “The farm has never looked better and I have been happily renewing my acquaintance with my tiny Angus herd. Official business, a small amount of ‘farming,’ and a strict regime of treatment, mild exercise and rest more than occupy my days.” A Secret Service man brought David and Anne Eisenhower from Fort Belvoir to spend the holiday with their grandparents, but by noon it was raining and the President moved the celebration indoors.
At the CIA, Richard Bissell shouted with pleasure. The weather over Russia had been perfect, the pilot had used all his film and it was on its way to the United States. As Bissell recalled, “It was a very exciting moment.” He called Allen Dulles and told him that “our boy” was home safe. “A very relieved man he was,” said Bissell later, “and so was I, for that matter.” He scheduled another flight.
On Thursday, July 5, Nathan Twining went to Gettysburg to give the President an eighty-minute report on his Soviet trip. He told reporters that his tour had convinced him that Russia was “rapidly catching up” with the United States. During his visit, the door to Soviet military development had been opened “a little crack, but what lies in those rooms, we do not know.” He did not tell the press that he soon expected the U-2 to show him.
More planes crossed the western Soviet Union. Bissell told Goodpaster that there was no further evidence of mobilization. Bissell and Dulles had hoped that the planes “would not be picked up at all” by Soviet radar. But Soviet radar turned out to be so strong that it was tracking every flight.
In West Germany, James Killian was inspecting a National Security Agency listening post as the first U-2s soared into Russia: “I found there this group of people who were listening in on what was happening in the Soviet Union, baffled and astonished at what they were hearing.” It seemed to be an intruder plane, but the NSA people knew—or thought they knew—that no plane in the world could fly over seventy thousand feet. As Killian recalled, “I didn’t tell them what it was.”
In Moscow, Khrushchev knew exactly what it was, and he was angry. How could Twining be so arrogant as to send American planes to violate Soviet frontiers immediately after accepting Soviet hospitality? “We welcomed him as a guest and entertained him,” Khrushchev complained in May 1960. “He left our country by air and next day sent a plane flying at great altitude into our country.… Only an animal like Twining would do its dirty business in the same place it eats. From such behavior, we drew one conclusion—Improve rockets! Improve fighter planes!”
Friday, July 6. Eisenhower and George Allen watched carpenters building a playhouse for the President’s grandchildren on the Gettysburg lawn. Goodpaster called to say that he had talked to Bissell: “No operation was run today, and it appears that none will be run tomorrow.”
More flights. Then Moscow lowered the boom. On Tuesday, July 10, the Soviet Ambassador marched into the State Department and handed Foster Dulles a formal protest against pirate flights by “a U.S. Air Force twin-engine plane” from West Germany. With specific times, dates and routes, the note complained that the violations were obviously “intentional and for purposes of reconnaissance.” What was more, they were waged at a time “when relations between governments are improving and when mutual confidence is growing.” Who must have sanctioned the violations? “Reactionary circles hostile to the cause of peace” who were “worried by the relaxation of mutual tensions.”
Zaroubin turned on his heel and left the building. Copies of his note were passed out to reporters, who rushed to their atlases. Lincoln White declared, “We know absolutely nothing about this.” Another State Department official: “If American planes penetrated that deep inside Russia and remained so long, why didn’t Soviet fighters attempt to shoot them down?” Allen Dulles gave the bad news to Goodpaster, who found the President unstartled by the Soviet protest; he later said that Eisenhower had “anticipated something like this.”
On Wednesday, July 11, Foster Dulles wrote a draft reply avowing that no military plane had violated Soviet airspace. He read it over the telephone to his brother, who said, “Fine—perfect—good luck!” Then he submitted the draft for Eisenhower’s approval. The President asked him to “button it up” by adding that American flight plans “carefully exclude such overflights as the Soviet note alleges.”
In Moscow, at the French Embassy’s Bastille Day reception, Bulganin took Chip Bohlen aside and asked if he knew anything about the incursions. Bohlen said he had “no information whatsoever.” Bulganin told him the Kremlin had “indisputable evidence” from radar that the Americans had violated Soviet airspace: “This is a very serious matter.”
At an Egyptian Embassy fete, newsmen asked Marshal Rudenko about the Soviet protest: How did they know that the planes were American? Rudenko said that the planes had flown too high to see their markings but the silhouettes looked American. Didn’t many countries own American planes? Maybe so, but even then, Washington was responsible. Why hadn’t the Soviets shot down the planes? The Kremlin did not wish to exacerbate world tensions, but if the flights continued, it would take “all necessary measures.”
Eisenhower admired the CIA for doing what the Air Force probably could not have done—building new spy planes and sending them deep into Russia within nineteen months. But Moscow’s instant, angry protest changed the terms of the U-2 program. It was one thing to dart in and out of Soviet airspace with the Russians dimly aware, quite another for them to track every flight and issue a public complaint. Zaroubin had made it clear that the Russians considered the flights an insult that would “aggravate relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.”
As Goodpaster recalled, “There was a high level of provocation here, a considerable level of risk, and the President wanted tighter control, a great deal tighter control.” Eisenhower called Allen Dulles to the White House.
With his signature bow tie, well-trimmed white mustache and tweed jacket fragrant of pipe tobacco, the CIA Director resembled the Free World’s chief intelligence man less than he did a Princeton history professor who perhaps spent a few months each winter skiing in Switzerland. Little more than the quick movement of the intelligent eyes behind his rimless glasses suggested his past life as a spy.
Dulles’s demeanor, his interest in food and wine and his sardonic sense of irony were all more European than American. He was more attuned than Eisenhower—or Foster Dulles—to the ambiguities and minor hypocrisies in people, foreign policy and political theory. A captivating storyteller and connoisseur of secrets and mysteries, he once noted, “There is something about intelligence that gets into the blood.”
Richard Bissell found Allen Dulles a warmer man than the Secretary of State, “and I think he inspired more loyalty.” Robert Amory said, “I loved Allen Dulles. A pain in the neck in many ways, but he was so sweet. He could bawl your ass out for something … and then about a quarter of five on a summer afternoon, he’d say, ‘How about finding a fourth for tennis on my courts on Q Street?’ He meant more to me than any other man of his generation but my father.”
“His charm was irresistible and his intensity of rage was occasionally overwhelming,” said his sister Eleanor. “I know that there were months in our later years when I stayed out of his orbit to avoid the stress and furor that he stirred in me.” The intensity was never far from the surface. At a State Department meeting on Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the CIA Director reputedly once said, “If that colonel of yours pushes us too far, we’ll break him in half.”
Dulles did little to discourage the notion that he was a commander on the front lines of the Cold War who could change hostile regimes, frustrate the KGB, pierce the Iron Curtain and do other minor miracles of daring and skill. He once counseled a reporter to think of the CIA as “the State Department for unfriendly countries.” In the Soviet press, Ilya Ehrenburg called Dulles “the most dangerous man in the world, far more dangerous than John Foster Dulles.” If the CIA chief ever managed to force his way into heaven, “he would be found mining the clouds, shooting up the stars and slaughtering the angels.” Dulles sometimes read this encomium aloud before audiences, adding that he was pleased that the Russians put him a notch higher than his brother.
Although the majority of the CIA’s work was intelligence analysis, covert operations were his undying love. “Boy, he loved to get into the exact details of ‘Where are you going to meet this guy and what’s the fallback position?’” said Amory. Colleagues called him “the Great White Case Officer.” Dulles saw his task as that of devising ways to help the United States prevail in a hard world: “If you believe in a program, you may have to break a little crockery to put it into effect.” He told his sister Eleanor, “Do you realize my responsibilities? I have to send people out to get killed! Who else in this country in peacetime has the right to do that?”
He was born in 1893 with a club foot, which his father reputedly believed to be the mark of Cain. When it was corrected, brothers and sisters were told never to mention the problem outside the family. At eight, he wrote a six-thousand-word history of the Boer War, which Foster pronounced “an infantile effort,” but which their grandfather had privately published and sold to raise funds for Boer relief. Allen followed his older brother to Princeton and taught in missionary schools in India, China and Japan.
In 1916, his uncle Robert Lansing invited him to join the Foreign Service, but this was not his natural habitat. When the American minister in Vienna gave him his suit for cleaning, Dulles said, “I may be your third secretary, but I am not your valet.”
During the First World War, he took charge of intelligence in Berne. Since boyhood, he had been entranced by the heroes who strode across the pages of British spy fiction. Intelligence was an inevitable channel for his curiosity about the difference between people’s public and private selves and his British public school-type penchant for doing complex feats with seeming lack of effort. “I am one of the many cogs in the wheel and I cannot tell you much what I do,” he wrote his family. “Except that it has to do with Intelligence!”
He gathered information from exiles of Russia, Germany and other lands who were moving through Switzerland. As he later told CIA recruits, once he was called by a Bolshevik who said he must speak with someone in the American legation in Berne. Dulles resisted because he had a tennis date with an appealing young woman; by the time the Russian arrived, his office would be closed. “Tomorrow will be too late,” said the Russian, but Dulles would not stay to see the caller. As he later revealed, the Russian turned out to be Lenin, on his way to Petrograd to command the Russian Revolution and remove his country from the war.
After the war, when the United States reduced its intelligence service, Dulles returned to the State Department in Washington, where he became chief of Near Eastern affairs. No doubt stifled by the bureaucracy, he took night law courses to join his elder brother at Sullivan and Cromwell in 1926. Improbably he ran (without success) for Congress from Manhattan.
At the 1940 Republican convention, he saw William Donovan, onetime Republican candidate for governor of New York, who told him that Franklin Roosevelt had quietly asked him to lay the groundwork for a new American intelligence organization. Dulles asked, “When do you want me to start?” In an office at Rockefeller Center, he built a staff of European experts and renewed old links to European refugees. J. Edgar Hoover complained to the President that Dulles was “hiring a bunch of Bolsheviks.”
During the war, working from a fifteenth-century house in Berne, he earned his name in Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services by running espionage operations against Germany. He became romantically involved with Mary Bancroft, student of Jung, the Boston-born daughter of the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. She later recalled that one evening at Dulles’s house they had begun to “thoroughly enjoy ourselves” when the doorbell rang. He put his hand over her mouth and scribbled, “DON’T MOVE. DON’T MAKE A SOUND.” After more rings, he smiled and wrote, “PERSISTENT BASTARD, ISN’T HE?”
She asked, “How do you know it was a he?” and Dulles let out his Santa Claus laugh.
At the end of the war, the Swiss frontiers opened to a flood of Americans. Bancroft noticed that “much of the sparkle and charm went out of Allen’s personality as I had known it. It was rather like the way an exuberant young person behaves when his parents show up.” Harry Truman disbanded the OSS and Dulles returned to the law.
In 1947, Truman asked Congress for a permanent agency to give Presidents reliable, balanced information and forecasts of global events. Before Congress Dulles testified, “The Central Intelligence Agency should have nothing to do with policy. It should try to get at the hard facts on which others must determine policy.” Congress also licensed the CIA to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” In time, these included deploying private armies and greasing the skids under foreign leaders.
The Agency’s raison d’être was to warn the President against a Soviet surprise attack. “America’s people expect you to be on a communing level with God and Joe Stalin,” Director Walter Bedell Smith told his men in 1950. “They expect you to be able to say that a war will start next Tuesday at 5:32 P.M.” In 1951, Smith made Dulles his deputy. He valued Dulles’s experience and ties to the foreign policy establishment and was almost confounded by the breadth of his acquaintanceship: “Allen, can’t I ever mention a name that you haven’t played tennis with?”
After Eisenhower’s election, Beetle Smith told a friend that he would have preferred to remain at CIA but his old boss wished him at State. Allen Dulles was the logical heir. One story had it that Dulles had accepted the deputy’s post on condition that Smith would recommend him for the top job when he resigned. Smith doubted the wisdom of placing two brothers at State and CIA. He thought Dulles “a fair operator of clandestine operations, but a weak administrator for an organization as large and diverse as the CIA.” Dulles was “too emotional to be in this critical job.”
Eisenhower had known Dulles during the war. In 1949, they were fellow members of a study group at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1952, Dulles briefed Eisenhower campaign advisers on Eastern Europe. But the new President also recalled that during the final winter of the war, Dulles had antagonized the Soviets while secretly bargaining for the surrender of German troops in Italy. Roosevelt had been compelled to send an apology to Stalin on the day he died. This episode was one reason for Eisenhower’s insistence in 1945 on working to build mutual trust with the Russians.
Still, the President-elect could not ignore Dulles’s thirty-five years in intelligence, his subtle mind and skill with journalists and congressmen. As Eisenhower said of the elder Dulles as Secretary of State, Allen seemed to have been in schooling for this job all of his life. He won the appointment, but the President evidently remained somewhat wary. Eisenhower’s junior aide William Ewald (who later helped to write his memoirs) felt that “such trust as he usually reposed in his leading lieutenants he did not repose in Allen Dulles.”
Late in life, Dulles told his sister Eleanor that 1953 and 1954 were the good years at the CIA. It was a time when the world seemed young, when intelligence people under a sympathetic President were helping to reshape the world for free and decent people. By the middle fifties, with more people and money than State, the CIA was acquiring its own training grounds, soldiers, bases, equipment, ships, planes and other tools to perform global operations with more self-reliance.
Dulles’s relations with Capitol Hill were unexcelled. Before one private session with Richard Russell’s Senate Armed Services Committee, he told an aide, “I’ll tell the truth to Dick. I always do.” Then, with a chuckle and twinkling eyes: “That is, if Dick wants to know!” Wayne Morse of Senate Foreign Relations once told him, “Once again your keen mind here this afternoon has provided us with another great seminar.” Clarence Cannon of House Appropriations: “Mr. Dulles, I want to ask you one more question. Are you sure you have enough money?”
The “brother act,” as Amory called it, was a crucial source of influence. Since childhood, Allen had looked at Foster with admiration, envy, affection and some unease. It was Foster who was shown off to visitors as a child and who received the largest share of the family inheritance. Foster was said to think that Allen’s enthusiasms were sometimes faintly adolescent and that he sometimes needed guidance for his own good. Allen once said that he never regretted that his life had been freer and more adventurous than his brother’s.
Running State and CIA put the iron into their relationship. One CIA man “always had strong feelings that their effective relationship was conducted over the telephone … or after or before dinner, or in brief meetings outside their office, with nobody else present.” Another recalled that “a word from one to the other substituted for weeks of interagency debate.” Even if the two brothers had primly refrained from dealing with business outside the office, the illusion of power would have conferred nearly the same influence as power. In the absence of the brother act, the U-2 might never have won the President’s approval or been built and flown so swiftly.
Dwight Eisenhower did not quarrel with the notion that the Cold War must be waged by new rules. “I have come to the conclusion that some of our traditional ideas of international sportsmanship are scarcely applicable in the morass in which the world now founders,” he wrote Lewis Douglas in 1955. “Truth, honesty, justice, consideration for others, liberty for all—the problem is how to preserve them, nurture them and keep the peace (if the last is possible) when we are opposed by people who scorn these values.”
In the 1982 study that became a milestone of Eisenhower revisionism, the political scientist Fred Greenstein cast Eisenhower as a “hidden-hand President” who preferred to use behind-the-scenes methods to avoid expending mass political support. Eisenhower’s interest in covert action was the international expression of this hidden-hand leadership. He was reluctant to send troops into combat or compromise his reputation for seeking peace and self-determination, but neither was he willing to be a passive contender in the Cold War. Between the State Department’s persuasion and the Pentagon’s open force, the CIA offered a middle route.
Covert action allowed Eisenhower to achieve foreign policy aims without alienating American or world public opinion (unless or until the operations were revealed). Preparing the nation for a military adventure, defense buildup or negotiation meant the expensive, exhausting work of educating congressmen and voters and seeking their approval. A clandestine solution needed almost no one’s approval but his own. Covert action allowed the President to moderate the costs of conventional forces: a quiet threat uttered to a foreign leader, a briefcase full of cash handed to a rebel commander cost less than keeping great armies and navies girded for war.
Eisenhower was doubtless sensitive to the fact that the CIA had great power both to help and hurt him. If the cover were blown on a covert operation and the President’s role was revealed, it would damage his reputation and moral authority. It was not accidental that Richard Bissell won final permission to fly the U-2 into Russia not from Eisenhower but Goodpaster. That way, in a mishap, the President could plausibly deny involvement in the adventure. But this caused other problems. Walling off the President too much from covert action deprived him of the chance to scrutinize operations which, if they failed, could wreak momentous damage on American foreign policy. Throughout his Presidency, Eisenhower groped for ways to tighten supervision of the CIA. This was not easy. As Goodpaster said, covert action remained “a very weakly controlled business.”
In 1954, Senator Mike Mansfield and Congressman Stuyvesant Wainwright pressed for a House-Senate intelligence watchdog panel. Allen Dulles resisted: “In intelligence, you have to take certain things on faith. You have to look to the man who is directing the organization and the result he achieves. If you haven’t got someone who can be trusted or who gets results, you’d better throw him out and get somebody else.” Eisenhower told Wainwright that he would be damned if he would give Joe McCarthy the chance to get his foot in the CIA’s door.
Instead the President asked James Doolittle to chair a secret panel to examine the Agency. The panel concluded, “We must develop effective sabotage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.”
But General Doolittle gave Eisenhower a mixed report on the Director: Dulles’s main strength was “his unique knowledge of the subject. He has his whole heart in it.… He is a man of great honesty, integrity, loyally supported by his staff. His weakness, or the weakness of the CIA, is in the organization.” Doolittle questioned the “family relationship” with the Secretary of State: “It leads to protection of one by the other or influence of one by the other.” Dulles’s “emotionalism” was evidently “far worse” than it appeared.
The President rose to Dulles’s defense. He thought the family relationship might be “beneficial.” As for emotionalism, “I have never seen him show the slightest disturbance.… Here is one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have, and it probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it.” Nevertheless Eisenhower called Dulles to the White House and asked him to hire “a top administrative man” to improve CIA management. Dulles simply replied that he had done “a good deal of tightening up” and would continue to do so.
In late 1954, the President formed a permanent panel to oversee covert activities. The 5412 Committee, or Special Group, included Dulles and representatives of the White House, State and Defense. They were asked to evaluate all covert projects large enough to cause political damage if exposed. The most potentially damaging operations must be referred to the President’s office for consent. It was after the Berlin Tunnel’s failure that Eisenhower ordered them to know in advance about every CIA project encroaching on foreign sovereignty. But this mandate did not include the U-2: he thought the spy flights too sensitive for consideration by even the Special Group.
In January 1956, Eisenhower formed the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities for periodic outside evaluation. The Board’s chairman was James Killian; its bipartisan membership included such eminent citizens as Doolittle, Omar Bradley, David Bruce, Joseph P. Kennedy and Robert Lovett. By the end of its first year, the PBCFIA found “extraordinary blockages and delays” in CIA communications. Members complained that the Agency’s covert action branch was “operating for the most part on an autonomous and free-wheeling basis in highly critical areas.” Covert operations were “sometimes in direct conflict with the normal operations being carried out by the Department of State.”
Killian and colleagues thought Allen Dulles an impressive intelligence man, “particularly in the dark parts of intelligence gathering,” but “a bad administrator.” Repeatedly they complained to the President. Each time, Eisenhower said, “Well, where can I find his equal as an intelligence expert?” The Board told the President he should either fire Dulles or force him to hire an administrative deputy.
Goodpaster later recalled that Eisenhower “raised it with Dulles and finally concluded that he had a choice to make. Dulles would not stay under those circumstances, and if he wanted Dulles to stay, he wasn’t going to be able to force this on him. At that point, he decided it would be better to have Dulles stay and keep the pressure on him.… He thought Dulles was very, very capable and had great ideas, great understanding. He really was tied into the realities, country by country, so that he was a tremendous national asset and he didn’t want to give him up.”
At the White House, Dulles presented the first U-2 pictures of the Soviet Union. As Bissell recalled, these included aerial photos of the Kremlin and the Winter Palace—dazzling evidence of the fact that “we can take pictures of Moscow and Leningrad and they can’t lay a mitt on us.” The President praised their quality, but when Dulles asked for more flights, he refused. Troubled by the Soviet protest, he said, “We’d better stand down more or less indefinitely. Don’t start again until you get permission.”
Dulles was disappointed. Then Eisenhower told him that the CIA would never again get blanket permission to make unlimited U-2 flights during a given period. Each future flight plan must be brought to the Oval Office for approval. As Bissell later said, “It became pretty evident as the weeks passed that permission would be pretty hard to get.” In August 1955, Pearre Cabell called Foster Dulles about “our favorite project.” He wished to know “where we stand” and “where we might go.”
“Not sure there is much place to go,” came the reply. “This latest episode upset things quite a bit.”
That month, Frank Powers and Sammy Snider flew commercially to London on the first leg of their trip to Turkey, where the CIA and Air Force had established the second major U-2 base. During a visit to Pound, Powers had told his parents that he was joining a NACA weather research program, but his father was skeptical. The pilot gave his wife a list of emergency telephone numbers and a mailing address:
c/o Mr. Calvin E. Mundell
P.O. Box 4054
Valley Village Station
N. Hollywood, California
Barbara wondered why her husband’s name was typed without military rank.
After their flight to London and another flight to Athens, Powers and Snider boarded an Air Force transport. As Snider recalled, “We were pretty well conscious of not talking shop in public—even on an Air Force plane.” They landed in Turkey and gazed out at the desert on which they had pledged to spend at least the next year of their lives.
Powers knew that he had failed to deceive his canny mountain father about what he was really doing abroad. Before departure, when he called his parents to say good-bye, Oliver had said, “I’ve figured out what you’re doing.”
“What do you mean? I told you what I’m doing.”
“No, I’ve figured it out. You’re working for the FBI.”