Allen Dulles

Allen Welsh Dulles (April 7, 1893 - January 29, 1969) served as Director of Central Intelligence from February 26, 1953, to November 29, 1961 - the longest tenure of any DCI, the first civilian DCI, and the only brother of a sitting Secretary of State to hold the position. Dulles built the CIA into the instrument of Cold War covert action that executed Operation AJAX in Iran (1953), Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala (1954), and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (1961). The Bay of Pigs disaster cost him his position - President John F. Kennedy forced his resignation, along with Richard Bissell and C.P. Cabell - and his subsequent appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy's assassination placed him in the remarkable position of overseeing the investigation of the event that had ended both his patron's life and his own career.¹

Early Career: Law, Diplomacy, and OSS

Dulles was born in Watertown, New York, to a Presbyterian minister. His maternal grandfather John Watson Foster had been Secretary of State under President Harrison; his uncle Robert Lansing served as Secretary of State under Wilson. His elder brother John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State under Eisenhower, making the Dulles brothers the only siblings simultaneously to head the CIA and State Department.

After Princeton and brief missionary work in India, Dulles entered the diplomatic service and served at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as an intelligence analyst. He joined the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell - which also employed his brother John Foster - where Sullivan & Cromwell represented major corporate interests including United Fruit Company. This connection became significant two decades later when the Dulles brothers, now respectively CIA Director and Secretary of State, authorized operations against a Guatemalan government that had expropriated United Fruit's landholdings.

During World War II, Dulles served the OSS as station chief in Bern, Switzerland from 1942 to 1945 - the most significant OSS posting in Europe, given Switzerland's position as a neutral intelligence hub. His operational achievements included:

• Fritz Kolbe (codenamed "George Wood"), a German Foreign Ministry official who provided hundreds of authentic diplomatic cables, widely considered the most valuable Allied human source of the war in Europe.
• Operation Sunrise (early 1945): Dulles negotiated with SS General Karl Wolff for the early surrender of German forces in Italy, producing the German capitulation on May 2, 1945 - one week before V-E Day.
• The recruitment of Reinhard Gehlen, chief of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front (Fremde Heere Ost), who surrendered his microfilmed Soviet intelligence records and his entire agent network to U.S. forces. The Gehlen Organization subsequently became the nucleus of West German intelligence and a continuing CIA asset, despite Gehlen's Nazi associations and the impossibility of verifying the bona fides of his inherited Soviet networks.¹

The Gehlen Organization and Its Consequences

The incorporation of Gehlen's network into American intelligence - authorized at the senior OSS level and carried forward into the early CIA - represented a foundational decision whose consequences extended through the Cold War. Gehlen's agents included former Nazis, SS veterans, and individuals with war crimes histories. The networks he claimed were penetrating Soviet intelligence were, in many cases, networks the Soviets had already turned.

The unverifiable provenance of Gehlen's Soviet networks meant that the intelligence they produced - which formed a significant portion of early CIA's knowledge about the Soviet Union - was of unknown reliability. Some of it may have been Soviet-directed disinformation fed through networks the KGB controlled. The relationship between the Gehlen inheritance and Angleton's subsequent mole hunt paranoia - his conviction that CIA's Soviet intelligence was systematically compromised - has been examined by historians without definitive resolution.¹

American Committee on United Europe

Dulles was vice-chairman of the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), which Richard Aldrich describes as formed to support Winston Churchill and the European Movement and officially incorporated in February 1949. William J. Donovan was its chairman, and Thomas W. Braden, a former OSS officer, was its executive director.² Aldrich reports Braden's assertion in the 1980s that ACUE funds originated with the CIA, and writes that the 1962 Oxford thesis of F. X. Rebattet, son of the European Movement's secretary-general George Rebattet, "confirms that most ACUE funds originated with the CIA."³ Dulles also corresponded with Max Ascoli, whose papers index a photocopy of a typed letter from Dulles dated May 27 among the 1968 letters on the closing of The Reporter.⁴ A February 7, 1958 letter to Dulles from the chairman of the President's Committee on Scientists and Engineers thanks him for addressing the Conference on America's Human Resources at Yale University and encloses a participant list that includes "Mr. Max Ascoli, Editor and Publisher, The Reporter."⁵ Hugh Wilford writes that The Reporter's deputy Philip Horton used contacts with Donovan, Dulles and James Jesus Angleton to enhance its foreign coverage.⁶

DCI: Iran, Guatemala, and the Covert Action Doctrine

Dulles was named Deputy Director (Plans) in 1951 and became DCI on February 26, 1953, days after President Eisenhower's inauguration. His brother John Foster simultaneously became Secretary of State. The confluence gave the Dulles brothers a degree of combined policy and intelligence authority unprecedented in American government.

Operation AJAX (August 1953): Working with British intelligence, Dulles's CIA executed the coup that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and returned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to full power. The operation was designed and led in the field by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. Operation AJAX established the operational template that Dulles and Bissell believed could be replicated elsewhere.

Operation PBSUCCESS (June 1954): The CIA's overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was presented to Eisenhower as a vindication of covert action - a small paramilitary force, CIA air assets, and psychological warfare had collapsed a government with minimal U.S. exposure. Dulles and his team drew exactly the wrong lesson: that the model was transferable. The direct organizational line from PBSUCCESS to the Bay of Pigs ran through the same personnel - Howard Hunt, Tracy Barnes, David Atlee Phillips - applying the same framework to a target that had fundamentally different characteristics.⁷

MKULTRA: Dulles authorized the CIA's human experimentation program in April 1953 under Technical Services Staff chief Sidney Gottlieb. The program used LSD and other substances on unconsenting subjects, including mental patients, prisoners, and unwitting CIA employees. Dulles's authorization memorandum noted concerns about Soviet brainwashing capabilities and framed the program as defensive research. The program's scope - eventually comprising 150 subprojects at 80 institutions - far exceeded what Dulles's authorization documents described.

On August 26, 1960 Dulles cabled the Leopoldville station that the station officer was to be given "wider authority," including "even more aggressive action if it can remain covert," and wrote that "we realize that targets of opportunity may present themselves to you."⁸ The cable authorized up to $100,000 "to carry out any crash programs on which you do not have the opportunity to consult HQS," and assured the station officer that the message had been "seen and approved at competent level" in the State Department.⁸ The Church Committee documented the cable as one of a sequence that began with Tweedy's cable of August 18, 1960 and Bissell's of August 19.⁸

MKULTRA: The Sandoz Panic and the Olson Death

Dulles approved MKULTRA on April 13, 1953, ten days after Richard Helms proposed a program for the "covert use of biological and chemical materials," with an initial $300,000 exempt from normal financial controls and payable blindly on the signatures of Gottlieb and TSS chief Willis Gibbons. Acting in a climate of Cold War urgency, that same month Dulles approved a $240,000 payment after an intelligence report claimed Sandoz wanted to sell 10 kilograms of LSD on the open market; CIA officers flew to Switzerland with a black bag of cash only to learn Sandoz had produced barely 40 grams in fifteen years, the entire panic stemming from a military attaché who confused milligrams with kilograms. When Frank Olson died in November 1953 after Gottlieb dosed him with LSD at Deep Creek Lodge, Dulles ordered Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick to investigate; the resulting reprimands were softened through six drafts and placed in no personnel file.⁹

Rockefeller's Special Group and the Human Ecology Front

Under Eisenhower, Dulles reported all CIA covert operations, including MKULTRA, the coups, and assassination planning, to the NSC "Special Group" chaired by Nelson Rockefeller, the structure formalized by NSC 5412/2 in December 1955 that gave the president plausible deniability; in a 1955 "Family Jewels" briefing Dulles described the full range of covert programs to Rockefeller's board. When MKULTRA needed a research hospital, Dulles sought Rockefeller's approval for a scheme to channel CIA money through private foundations to win matching federal grants for a wing at Georgetown University Hospital. The program's primary funding front, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, was organized at Dulles's initiative through Harold Wolff, the Cornell neurologist who had treated Dulles's brain-damaged son; Dulles attended one of its first board meetings. His relationship with D. Ewen Cameron predated the funding: in November 1945, still with the OSS, Dulles had sent Cameron to Nuremberg to assess whether Rudolf Hess was fit to stand trial.¹⁰

Bay of Pigs and Forced Resignation

The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 17-19, 1961 was the catastrophic failure that ended Dulles's career. The operation had been developed under Eisenhower and inherited by Kennedy; Dulles and Bissell had assured Kennedy that the plan was viable. After Kennedy's cancellation of the D-Day follow-up air strikes, the collapse of the cover story at the United Nations, and the capture of 1,179 Brigade 2506 members, the disaster's scope was evident.

Kennedy publicly accepted responsibility but was privately furious. He reportedly told aide Ted Sorensen that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" - a remark almost certainly apocryphal in its precise wording but consistent with his documented anger. The Taylor Commission's findings and the classified Kirkpatrick IG report both pointed to fundamental CIA failures in planning, execution, and judgment.

Dulles submitted his resignation in September 1961; it was formally accepted November 29, 1961. He was replaced by John McCone. The CIA's own history states that a "humiliated President Kennedy did not wait for either report before cleaning house at CIA" and that he accepted resignations from Dulles and from Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell, who stayed at their posts until their successors were selected a few months later.¹¹ Bissell and Cabell were also forced out. CIA veterans viewed their dismissal as Kennedy scapegoating the agency for a failure the White House had co-created by canceling the air strikes.¹

The Warren Commission

On November 29, 1963 - exactly two years after Dulles's forced resignation - President Lyndon Johnson appointed the Warren Commission to investigate Kennedy's assassination. Among the seven commissioners Johnson named was Allen Dulles despite Kennedy’s firing of Dulles.¹²

The investigation was examining whether CIA-connected parties (specifically the anti-Castro exile networks and organized crime figures that Dulles had directly overseen) had any role in the assassination. He was now in a position to shape what evidence the Commission sought, what witnesses it called, and what conclusions it reached regarding the CIA programs he had run.

Dulles was reportedly among the most active commissioners in shaping the investigation's scope. He briefed commissioners on CIA history and procedures. Book V of the Church Committee's final report states that, with the exception of Dulles, it is unlikely anyone on the Warren Commission knew of the CIA's assassination efforts, and that Dulles knew of the plots with underworld figures that had taken place during his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence.¹³ The Church Committee's 1975 interim report states that Dulles "did not inform the other members about the plots that had occurred during his term as DCI,"¹⁴ and also states that "it is not entirely certain that Dulles was ever made aware of the true nature of the underworld operation."¹⁵ The ZR/RIFLE assassination plotting program was, in the same period, not disclosed to the Commission at the agency level by Richard Helms as Deputy Director for Plans. Helms testified that Dulles "was sitting right there" in the Commission's deliberations and "knew about this," and that he did not know what Dulles had said to the Commission about the plots.¹⁶ The CIA's failure to disclose the assassination plots to the Warren Commission was documented by the Church Committee in 1975; Dulles's role as both a commissioner and the former DCI who had authorized the programs is the structural conflict of interest the Commission's composition created.

Angleton testified that Dulles consulted him before agreeing to President Johnson's request that he serve, that the two were in frequent contact, and that they informally discussed the progress of the investigation and what further work the CIA could do.¹⁷ At the January 22, 1964 executive session, the Commission took up a report that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a paid FBI informant. Dulles asked whether the purpose of such a hire could have been to penetrate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He said that practically any American could obtain a passport good for anywhere, and that the Passport Bureau had no record of Oswald's defection. Near the end of the meeting, Dulles said: "I think this record ought to be destroyed."¹⁸ FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's files held an index card on Dulles that cross-referenced a November 29, 1963 memorandum.¹⁹

The House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979) found that the Warren Commission's failure to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy was "attributable in part to the failure of the Commission to receive all the relevant information that was in the possession of other agencies and departments of the Government," and that the CIA "was deficient in its collection and sharing of information both prior to and subsequent to the assassination."²⁰ The report does not name Dulles in those findings. It states that the committee did not ignore the possibility that certain CIA officials who knew that close scrutiny of United States-Cuban relations could have exposed the CIA-Mafia plots might have tried to keep the CIA's or the Warren Commission's inquiry from the question of Cuban complicity, and that it determined that only Deputy Director Helms was in a position to have both the knowledge and the power to accomplish such a cover-up and was satisfied, on the basis of its investigation, that it was "highly unlikely he in fact did so."²¹ It found that the details of the AMLASH plot and the CIA-Mafia plots should have been provided to the Warren Commission.²²

Death and Legacy

Dulles spent his post-CIA years writing, lecturing, and defending the covert action programs he had built. His book The Craft of Intelligence (1963) was the first major public account of CIA operations by a former director. He died in Washington on January 29, 1969, of influenza complicated by pneumonia, eighteen months before the full extent of MKULTRA and the assassination plots became public.

The 2022 report of the United Nations Eminent Person summarized the argument of Greg Poulgrain's 2020 book, JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, which posits that Dulles formed a motive to remove Dag Hammarskjöld following a policy conflict over the United Nations' intended intervention in the dispute over the sovereignty of West New Guinea.²³ The report recorded Poulgrain's proposition that the Operation Celeste documents, which refer to a plan to kill Hammarskjöld by causing his plane to crash, mention Dulles by name, stating: "UNO is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed. Allen Dulles agrees and has promised full cooperation from his people."²³ Poulgrain compared this with the Church Committee's account of Dulles expressing a "wish [to] give every possible support" to a plan to kill Lumumba.²³ The report stated that it was not necessary at that stage to assess the probative value of Poulgrain's information, and that it underscored the importance of "proving or disproving the veracity of the Operation Celeste hypothesis and Dulles's alleged involvement (as relied on by Poulgrain)."²⁴