The CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was recently named in honor of George Bush, who served there only one year as its director and whose connection with the spy business was tangential at best. The honor should have gone to Allen Dulles, called, by his British counterpart Sir Kenneth W. D. Strong, the “greatest intelligence officer who ever lived.”
But Dulles was no former president whose name would be immortalized by a bill pushed through a Republican Congress. He is dimly remembered in today’s Washington as the younger brother of the more familiar John Foster Dulles (as in Dulles International Airport). Yet, Director Allen arguably exerted a greater influence for a longer period than Secretary of State John Foster.
Indeed, Allen Dulles plied the dark arts of espionage and covert operations for fifty-three years, starting in the summer of 1916 and climaxing with his plans for the Central Intelligence Agency, which he headed for more than eight years until the Bay of Pigs fiasco forced his resignation in 1961. His last three years as director of central intelligence coincided with my first three years as a Washington reporter. But I remember him as a vivid figure in the capital until his death in 1969 at age seventy-five, a stalwart at Georgetown dinner parties (wearing slippers sockless because of chronic gout), where he regaled fellow elitists with spy stories that never revealed all that much.
It is not merely that he is forgotten in a city with a diminishing sense of history. As seen through the prism of the late 1990s, Allen Welsh Dulles seems hugely improbable in comparison with those pale bureaucrats who followed him as director. He was born into the upper-class Eastern establishment, the grandson of one secretary of state (John Foster) and the nephew of another (Robert Lansing).
Conflicts of interest did not bother him as he blithely mixed practicing international law for the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell with special State Department assignments.
Journalist and biographer James Srodes does justice to this remarkable career in Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, though it does not achieve the seamlessly smooth narrative of the 1994 biography Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles by Peter Grose.
Srodes, however, has considerably more primary source material, and makes a greater effort to place his subject in history. To the counter-culture of the 1960s, Dulles was a mindless anti-Communist interfering with popular movements throughout the world. But Srodes, more accurately, describes him as a “Wilsonian liberal” calling for an American tutelary global role.
Dulles probably could thank his “Uncle Bert” (Secretary of State Lansing) for his not beginning public service as a private soldier in General John J. Pershing’s fruitless search for Pancho Villa along the Mexican border in 1916. His National Guard unit was activated for that duty just as young Allen was graduating from Princeton. But he wound up joining the U.S. foreign service in Vienna as one of his uncle’s new diplomat-intelligence officers.
After America entered World War I, the young diplomat managed a transfer to the Swiss capital of Bern. In that neutral hive of espionage activity, he entered the “Great Game.” It would provide him with a favorite anecdote. As Dulles told it, he “was about to close the legation early for a Friday afternoon tennis date — with a girlfriend — when the telephone rang.” It was Bolshevik emigre V. I. Lenin wanting to negotiate with somebody. He did not take or return the call, and that very weekend Lenin was off on the legendary sealed train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station and a place in history. Never refuse to talk to anyone, any time, Dulles would tell young intelligence officers.
He was back in Bern during the Second World War running American espionage operations with fabulous success. Srodes provides a fascinating account of the abundance of information provided by anti-Nazi Germans and of Dulles’s contacts with Hitler’s enemies in the German military. He is painted as a remorseless spy chief: Whenever he “suspected a walk-in of being a German plant, he routinely gave him a mission into France where the Resistance could execute him summarily.” The war ended with Dulles’s negotiation with SS General Karl Wolff resulting in a surrender that enabled the Western allies to beat the Russians to Trieste. Without this secret surrender, Srodes concludes, “the fighting could have lasted far longer.”
In postwar maneuvers over the shape of U.S. intelligence, Dulles was a mid-wife of the CIA, ended up as its deputy director, and pulled off a distinctly Dullesian maneuver. President Truman detested General Eisenhower, who had drafted plans for a revived Cold War military. “Dulles skillfully conveyed the suggestions to Averell Harriman, a trusted adviser to Truman, who with equal delicacy, slid the recommendations into a stack of proposals already on the President’s desk.” The result: the historic NSC 68 rearmament plan, authorizing covert operations against the Soviet Union. Dulles won the gratitude of Eisenhower, who named him CIA director upon entering the White House in 1953.
That began the “golden years of the CIA’s clandestine war against the Soviets.” There were highly publicized triumphs (saving the shah of Iran and overthrowing Guatemala’s leftist regime) and covered-up defeats (the annihilation of attempted insurrections in Albania and Tibet). Allen Dulles was, Srodes writes, “enchanted by the darker side of the clandestine struggle. . . . There was a sense of accomplishment in a successful operation — even one as banal as bribing a third world politician — that did not come from the most trenchant NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] presentation.”
The U-2 spy plane was one of the director’s greatest intelligence coups and its discovery by the Kremlin one of his greatest embarrassments, resulting in advice to President Eisenhower — rejected — that the president fire him. The end came less than two years later at the beginning of the Kennedy administration when the CIA-planned invasion of Cuba proved a failure. There was plenty of blame to go around, but the director of central intelligence had to take it all. President Kennedy told him: “If this were England and I were Prime Minister, I would have to resign. But it isn’t England, and I can’t resign. It’s you who has to go.”
Srodes’s book is so jammed with six decades of the Great Game that the master spy himself is obscured. The author devotes some space to Dulles’s well-deserved reputation as a philanderer. Under today’s standard, “it is inconceivable that he would have been hired by the Central Intelligence Agency at all, let alone serve as director.”
Srodes is more successful delineating his subject’s ideology. Far from a fierce anti-Communist ideologue, Dulles was an old-fashioned liberal Republican who “wanted a party that advanced a less grandiose version of the New Deal, along with a strong pro-preparedness position on defense.”
At the Versailles peace conference, he was a 25-year-old adviser to Woodrow Wilson (the only Democratic presidential candidate he voted for until Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964). Librarian of Congress James Billington, once a young CIA staffer, told Srodes that Dulles was a “real Wilsonian,” adding that he “was not in the world to make money, or to make trouble, but to make the world a better place for freedom.” The director himself praised Wilson for his “deep concern for the freedom and independence of people everywhere.”
So, it was in the Wilsonian tradition that Allen Dulles sanctioned dirty tricks, authorized secret wars, and silently sent men to their deaths. Srodes concludes that Dulles today would call for “a new elite” to enter the CIA to confront “a thousand smaller virulent tumors of terror” that have succeeded the Soviet menace. I would guess the old spymaster, Wilsonian to the core, would be at the forefront of the Kosovo interventionists and appalled at the way the operation was conducted.
Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a CNN commentator.
