Everything about Allen Welsh Dulles totally explained
Allen Welsh Dulles (
April 7,
1893 –
January 29,
1969) was the first civilian and the longest serving (1953-1961)
Director of Central Intelligence (de-facto head of the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency) and a member of the
Warren Commission. Between stints of government service, Dulles was a corporate lawyer and partner at
Sullivan & Cromwell.
Ironically, his name is more known and used by mass-media in modern-day Russia, than in the homeland, as the author of so-called "Dulles' Plan", a cold war KGB propaganda forgery.
Early life and family
Allen Dulles was born on
April 7,
1893, in
Watertown, New York, and grew up in a family where public service was valued and world affairs were a common topic of discussion. Dulles was the son of a
Presbyterian minister, the younger brother of
John Foster Dulles,
Eisenhower's
Secretary of State and Chairman and Senior Partner of
Sullivan & Cromwell, and the grandson of
John W. Foster, another U.S. Secretary of State and brother to diplomat
Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His uncle (by marriage)
Robert Lansing also was a U.S. Secretary of State. His nephew,
Avery Dulles, is a
Cardinal of the
Roman Catholic Church and a
Jesuit priest and noted theologian who teaches and resides at
Fordham University in
The Bronx, New York. He graduated from
Princeton University, and in
1916 entered the diplomatic service. Dulles was serving in Switzerland and was responsible for reviewing and rejecting
Lenin's application for a visa to the United States. In
1926 he earned a law degree from
George Washington University and took a job at the New York firm where his brother,
John Foster Dulles, was a partner.
Background in Intelligence
Dulles was appointed by
William J. Donovan to become head of operations in New York for the
Coordinator of Information (COI), which was set up in Room 3603 of
Rockefeller Center, taking over offices staffed by Britain's
MI6. The COI was the precursor to the
Office of Strategic Services, renamed in
1942.
During the 1930s Allen Dulles gained much experience in
Germany. An early foe of
Adolf Hitler, Dulles was transferred from Britain to
Berne,
Switzerland for the rest of
World War II, and notably was heavily involved in the controversial and secret
Operation Sunrise. He is featured in the classic Soviet TV series
Seventeen Moments of Spring for his role in that operation. Dulles became the station chief in Berne, Switzerland, for the newly formed
Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), a logical one. Dulles supplied his government with much sensitive information about
Nazi Germany.
Dulles worked on intelligence regarding
German plans and activities. Dulles established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi intelligence officers (who linked him, through
Hans Bernd Gisevius, to the tiny but daring opposition to Hitler in Germany itself). Although Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the plotters of the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the conspirators nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy but accurate warnings of plans for Hitler’s
V-1 and
V-2 missiles.
Dulles's career was jump-started by the information provided by
Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat and a foe of the
Nazis. Kolbe supplied secret documents regarding active German spies and plans regarding the
Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. In
1945, he played a central role in negotiations leading to the unconditional capitulation of German troops in Italy.
After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin station chief. In
1947, Congress created the
Central Intelligence Agency. Dulles was closely involved with its development. His translator at this time was
Henry Kissinger, who worked for Army Intelligence.
Dulles' CIA
Operation Paperclip assimilated Nazi scientists into the American establishment by obscuring their histories and short circuiting efforts to bring their true stories to light. The project was led by officers in the United States Army. Although the program officially ended in September 1947, those officers and others carried out a conspiracy until the mid-fifties that bypassed both law and presidential directive to keep Paperclip going. Neither Presidents
Truman nor
Eisenhower were informed that their instructions were ignored.
In the
1948 Presidential election, Allen Dulles was Republican nominee
Thomas E. Dewey's chief advisor. The Dulles brothers and
James Forrestal helped form the
Office of Policy Coordination. Under President Eisenhower, Dulles became CIA director.
CIA career
In
1953, Dulles became the first civilian
Director of Central Intelligence, which had been formed in
1947 as part of the
National Security Act; earlier directors had been military officers. The Agency's covert operations were an important part of the
Eisenhower administration's new
Cold War national security policy known as the "New Look". Under Dulles's direction, the CIA created
MK-Ultra, a top secret
mind control research project which was managed by
Sidney Gottlieb. Dulles also personally oversaw
Operation Mockingbird, a program which influenced American media companies as part of the "New Look".
At Dulles' request,
President Eisenhower demanded that
Senator McCarthy discontinue issuing
subpoenas against the CIA. In March, McCarthy had initiated a series of investigations into potential
communist subversion of the Agency. Although none of the investigations revealed any wrongdoing, the hearings were still potentially damaging, not only to the CIA's reputation but also to the security of sensitive information. Documents made public in
2004 revealed that the CIA had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and intentionally fed disinformation to him in order to discredit him.
In the early 1950s the
U.S. Air Force conducted a competition for a new photo reconnaissance aircraft.
Lockheed Aircraft Corporation's
Skunk Works submitted a design number called the CL-282, which married sailplane-like wings to the body of a supersonic interceptor. This aircraft was rejected by the Air Force, but several of the civilians on the review board took notice, and
Edwin Land presented a proposal for the aircraft to Dulles. The aircraft became what is known as the
U-2 spy plane, and it was initially operated by CIA pilots. Its introduction into operational service in
1957 greatly enhanced the CIA's ability to monitor
Soviet activity through overhead photo surveillance. Ironically, the aircraft eventually entered service with the Air force, who still operate it today.
At the direction of President
Eisenhower, Dulles established
Operation 40, comprised of 40 officials and agents whose primary area of operations was the Caribbean region, including
Cuba. On 4th March, 1960, La Coubre, a ship flying a Belgian flag, exploded in Havana Bay. It was loaded with arms and ammunition destined for the armed forces of the government of Fidel Castro. The explosion killed 75 people and over 200 were injured. Fabian Escalante, an officer of the Department of State Security (G-2), later claimed that this was the first successful act carried out by Operation 40.
Operation 40 not only was involved in sabotage operations but also, in fact, evolved into a team of assassins. One member,
Frank Sturgis, claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents... We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time."
Over the next few years Operation 40 worked closely with several anti-Castro Cuban organizations including
Alpha 66. CIA officials and freelance agents such as
William Harvey,
Thomas G. Clines,
Porter Goss,
Gerry Patrick Hemming,
E. Howard Hunt,
David Sánchez Morales,
Carl Elmer Jenkins,
Bernard Barker,
Barry Seal,
Frank Sturgis,
William Robert Plumlee ("Tosh" Plumlee), and William C. Bishop also joined the project.
Dulles went on to be successful with the CIA's first attempts at removing foreign leaders by covert means. Notably, the elected
Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of
Iran was deposed in 1953 (via
Operation Ajax), and
President Arbenz of
Guatemala was removed in
1954. The Guatemalan coup was called
Operation PBSUCCESS. Dulles was on the board of the
United Fruit Company. Dulles saw these kind of clandestine activities as an essential part of the struggle against
communism.
During the
Kennedy Administration, Dulles faced increasing criticism. The failed
Bay of Pigs Invasion and several failed
assassination plots utilizing CIA-recruited operatives from the
Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans directly against
Fidel Castro undermined the CIA's credibility, and pro-American but unpopular regimes in Iran and Guatemala that he helped put in place were widely regarded as brutal and corrupt. The reputation of the agency and its director declined after the
Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco; he and his staff (including
Director for Plans Richard Bissell and Deputy Director
Charles Cabell) were forced to resign (September 1961). President Kennedy didn't trust the CIA, and he reportedly intended to dismantle it after the Bay of Pigs failure. Kennedy said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." Ironically, Dulles was later appointed to the
Warren Commission, the official government investigation of the assassination of
John F. Kennedy.
Later life
Dulles published the book
The Craft of Intelligence (ISBN 1-59228-297-0) in 1963.
On
November 29,
1963, President
Lyndon Johnson appointed Dulles as one of seven commissioners of the
Warren Commission to investigate the
assassination of the U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Despite his knowledge of the several assassination plots by the CIA against Castro, he isn't documented to have mentioned these plots to any investigating authorities during the Warren Commission.
In 1969 Dulles died of
influenza, complicated by
pneumonia, at the age of 75. He was buried in
Greenmount Cemetery in
Baltimore, Maryland.
"Dulles' Plan"
Since the late 1970s, anti-Western publications in
Russia have referred to the so-called
Dulles' plan (Russian:
план Даллеса). It is to be believed the text of a secret plan to destroy the self-consciousness of the Russian people through the ideological manipulation of the population by means of a "
fifth column" and the corruption of nation's morals. The source of "Dulles' Plan" text is never quaoted. Some speculate, it might have been Allen Dulles' speech to the
US Congress, a secret report by him or a passage from one of his books written between 1945 - 1953. There are no known speeches or writings of Dulles that contain portions or in whole of the "Dulles' Plan". However, the entire text almost word-by word repeats the words spoken by a character in the second edition of
The Eternal Call (Russian:
Вечный зов), a novel by Anatoly Ivanov..
In modern Russia, despite the public knowlage of the fact of the forgery of "Dulles' Plan" the text is quated by prominent Russian politicians (for example
Vladimir Zhirinovsky,
Nikolay Kondratenko,
Sergey Glazyev), as well as the government press, TV, Russian Orthodox priests, writers, journalists, artists. (for example
Sergey Kara-Murza. Based on so called "Dulles' Plan" "facts" Russian government controlled TV channel RENTV in April 2008 created and aired in in the prime-time 50 minute TV "documentary" of the title
"USSR: Ordered to Destroy"
(Russian - "СССР. Приказано уничтожить".
Dulles' plan became a tool of anti-American propaganda that's on the rise in Russia of the 21st Century.
In Russian mass-media
Dulles' Plan may also refer to the different program, NSC 20/1 (
U.S. objectives with respect to Russia), outlined by the National Security Council in 1948, which established two basic goals for U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union: reduction of the power and influence of the
U.S.S.R. to the point that they'd no longer threaten international stability, as well as accomplishment of a fundamental change in the theory and practice of international relations as applied by the Soviet government. This included promotion of the gradual retraction of undue Russian power and influence from
Eastern Europe and of institutions of federalism in the Soviet Union which would permit a revival of the national life of the
occupied Baltic peoples, termination of the projection of the subversive communist intellectual influence far abroad and attempts to compel the Soviets to recognize the practical undesirability of international antagonism.
There are no references to
Dulles' Plan on Western websites, except multiple question marks.
(External Link)"Dulles' Plan" on Russian websites.
Bibliography
- The Craft of Intelligence : America's Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World ISBN 1-59228-297-0
- From Hitler's Doorstep: the wartime intelligence reports of Alan Welsh Dulles ISBN 0-271-01485-7
- Germany's Underground ISBN 0-306-80928-1
- Marshall Plan ISBN 0-85496-350-2
- The Secret Surrender : The Classic Insider's Account of the Secret Plot to Surrender Northern Italy During WWII ISBN 1-59228-368-3
- Classic Spy Stories ISBN 1-59228-484-1
Further Information
Get more info on 'Allen Welsh Dulles'.
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