Allen Dulles

Allen Welsh Dulles (April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was an American diplomat, lawyer and intelligence officer who served as the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (1953–1961) — the longest-tenured director in the agency's history — and whose CIA presided over the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, Project MKUltra, and the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. A partner at Sullivan & Cromwell before joining the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II, he ran the Bern station from 1942 through the war's end and later shaped the CIA's covert-operations apparatus through the Dulles–Jackson–Correa Report and the Office of Policy Coordination. In exopolitics and UAP disclosure testimony he is described as the alleged central architect of a deep-state infrastructure for managing classified non-human intelligence programs outside elected government control — reportedly the individual most directly responsible for placing crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs beyond presidential oversight by routing them through private contractors and unelected committee structures. Dulles was allegedly one of the original or early members of the Majestic 12 committee, holding his position through multiple presidential administrations and surviving his firing by John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs — a firing that, in exopolitics analysis, marked the beginning of Kennedy's fatal confrontation with the deep-state structure Dulles purportedly embodied. He was dismissed by Kennedy, appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson to the Warren Commission, and died of pneumonia in 1969.

Early life and family

Dulles was born April 7, 1893 in Watertown, New York, the son of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and Edith (née Foster) Dulles. He was five years younger than his brother John Foster Dulles and two years older than his sister Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison; his uncle by marriage, Robert Lansing, held the same position under Woodrow Wilson. Homeschooled by private tutors, he graduated from Princeton University, where he participated in the American Whig–Cliosophic Society, and taught school in India before entering diplomatic service in 1916. In 1920 he married Martha "Clover" Todd (1894–1974); they had three children, including Allen Macy Dulles II (1930–2020), who was permanently disabled in the Korean War.

Early career and Sullivan & Cromwell

Initially assigned to Vienna, Dulles transferred to Bern, Switzerland, before U.S. entry into World War I. He later claimed that on April 8, 1917 he had received a telephone call from Vladimir Lenin seeking a meeting the day before Lenin's sealed-train departure to Petrograd. After recovering from Spanish flu he joined the American delegation at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference alongside his brother Foster. Posted to the Istanbul embassy in 1921, he helped expose The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery but failed to persuade the State Department to denounce it publicly. From 1922 to 1926 he served as chief of the Near East division of the State Department, then earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and joined Sullivan & Cromwell, where his brother Foster was a senior partner.

He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, served as its secretary (1933–1944) and its president (1946–1950). In April 1933 he and Norman Davis met Adolf Hitler in Berlin; Dulles reassured his brother that conditions "are not quite as bad" as reported, and after meeting Joseph Goebbels said he was impressed with his "sincerity and frankness". In 1935, concerned by Nazi treatment of German Jews, Dulles led a successful movement to close Sullivan & Cromwell's Berlin office over his brother's objections. He co-authored with Hamilton Fish Armstrong the isolationism-critiquing books Can We Be Neutral? (1936) and Can America Stay Neutral? (1939), ran unsuccessfully in 1938 for the Republican nomination in New York's 16th congressional district, and helped some German Jews — including the banker Paul Kemper — escape to the United States.

Daniel Sheehan, who served as general counsel to the U.S. Jesuit headquarters and investigated the classified UAP program, has described Dulles's later appointment as CIA director as rooted in his role as general counsel for Brown Brothers Harriman — the financial institution connecting the Harriman, Carnegie and Rockefeller interests that formed the core of the postwar private-power structure. Ian Carroll, researching the structural origins of the CIA's covert operations function, has argued that Dulles's primary strategic value at the agency's founding was his role as a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer, which gave him personal relationships with the CEOs of every major multinational corporation, including IG Farben and the United Fruit Company: "Allen Dulles worked at Sullivan and Cromwell as a lawyer and so he was very familiar with IG Farben producing chemicals and fruit companies and all these companies all around the world... And so suddenly you hire one guy, Allen, and you have just hired an entire network of multinational corporations."

World War II and OSS

In July 1941, William J. Donovan was tasked by President Roosevelt with establishing an American intelligence service — the Office of Strategic Services. Dulles was recruited by Donovan in October 1941 and assigned as liaison with the British Security Coordination office in New York City. In 1942 he was sent to Switzerland, arriving in Bern on November 12, 1942, and renting an apartment at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of the war.

As OSS Swiss Director, Dulles gathered intelligence on German plans and activities and established wide contacts with German émigrés and resistance figures, assisted by Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz. His most valuable asset was German diplomat Fritz Kolbe, whom Dulles described as the best spy of the war; Kolbe supplied secret documents on active German spies and the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. MI6 warned its station head that Dulles would "lend himself easily to any striking proposal which looks like notoriety" and agreed he was "out for himself," though they became personal friends. An early contact, Hans Bernd Gisevius of German military intelligence, claimed the Germans could read Dulles's cipher; MI6 assistant chief Claude Dansey described Dulles as a "fool" who "swallows [false information] easily."

From 1943 onward Dulles received critical information from the Austrian Heinrich Maier resistance group about V-weapons, tanks, aircraft and related factories, intelligence that informed Operation Crossbow and Operation Hydra; the Maier group also reported to him on the mass murder in Auschwitz. Although Washington barred him from making firm commitments to German anti-Hitler conspirators, they gave him accurate warnings of plans for the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket.

In 1944–1945 Dulles and Sullivan & Cromwell worked with German industrialists to move Nazi funds out of Germany's territory; Heinrich Himmler transferred Nazi wealth — including assets stolen from Jewish Holocaust victims — to other countries to support a postwar "Fourth Reich". Brigadeführer Kurt Baron von Schröder, cooperating with Himmler, was a Dulles business associate; J. Edgar Hoover unsuccessfully pressured President Truman to disrupt the plan. In March 1945 Dulles conducted Operation Sunrise, the secret negotiations for the local surrender of German forces in northern Italy, offering SS General Karl Wolff protection from prosecution at Nuremberg — actions criticized for creating a diplomatic rift between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. After V-E Day he served six months as OSS Berlin station chief; the OSS was dissolved in October 1945.

Harald Malmgren, a presidential adviser to four consecutive administrations (Kennedy through Ford) who was briefed on UAP matters by CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell, has stated that Bissell told him Dulles was personally involved in early crash-retrieval operations — including being physically present at a retrieved craft. Malmgren recounts Bissell saying: "The steps that Allen Dulles helped with the crash retrieval... I'm in Czechoslovakia and I'm standing on top of a saucer with Allen Dulles." according to Malmgren also identifies Dulles's protégé James Jesus Angleton — whose father Hugh Angleton was a Knights of Malta member — as the primary counterintelligence manager for UAP-related information from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Postwar period and founding of the CIA

In 1947 Dulles served as a senior staffer on the Herter Committee and became a prominent voice of the Georgetown Set of Cold War liberals involved in founding the CIA. During the 1948 presidential election he and his brother advised Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey and helped form the Office of Policy Coordination. In 1949 he co-authored the Dulles–Jackson–Correa Report, sharply critical of the CIA as established under the National Security Act of 1947; partly as a result, Truman named Walter Bedell Smith as the new Director of Central Intelligence. Smith recruited Dulles into the CIA as Deputy Director for Plans on January 4, 1951, overseeing the agency's covert operations. On August 23, 1951 he was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, the agency's second-ranking post, and in 1952–1953 was one of five members of the State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament.

Director of Central Intelligence (1953–1961)

After Dwight D. Eisenhower's election in 1952, Bedell Smith moved to the State Department and Dulles became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence on February 26, 1953. Dulles helped convince Eisenhower to adopt the State Department Panel's conclusion that the American public deserved to be informed of the perils of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The CIA's covert operations became a central plank of the Eisenhower administration's "New Look" Cold War national-security policy. At Dulles's request, Eisenhower demanded that Senator Joseph McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA; documents declassified in 2004 revealed that the CIA under Dulles had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and fed him disinformation to discredit his investigation of alleged communist infiltration of the agency.

Project MKUltra

In April 1953 Dulles authorized Project MKUltra, the CIA's illegal mind-control research program that conducted experiments on unwitting American and Canadian subjects with LSD, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and sexual abuse over the subsequent two decades. The program's records were largely destroyed in 1973 on the order of Director Richard Helms.

Iran coup (1953)

In 1953 Dulles, working with Frank Wisner, was involved in Operation Ajax, the covert operation that removed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The coup was prompted in part by fears of Soviet influence following the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. By coincidence, on August 18, 1953, Dulles was vacationing in Rome when the Shah fled there after a setback in the coup; the two met while checking in to the Hotel Excelsior.

Guatemala coup (1954)

In 1954 President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala was removed in a CIA-led coup carried out under the code name Operation PBSuccess. Eduardo Galeano described Dulles as a former member of the United Fruit Company's Board of Directors, though historian Richard Immerman's detailed examination makes no such claim, noting only that Sullivan & Cromwell had represented the company. Carroll has argued the Guatemala coup was a case study of the brothers' corporate-intelligence network: United Fruit, a Sullivan & Cromwell client, used its relationship with the Dulles brothers (Allen as CIA director and John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State simultaneously) to have a democratically-elected government labeled communist and overthrown.

U-2 program

In the early 1950s the United States Air Force rejected Lockheed's CL-282 photoreconnaissance proposal; civilians on the review board and Edwin Land presented it to Dulles, and the aircraft became the U-2 "spy plane", initially operated by CIA pilots. Its operational introduction in 1957 greatly enhanced overhead surveillance of Soviet activity; in 1960 the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 on Dulles's watch (see 1960 U-2 incident).

Congo

In 1960 a plan to kill Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba was considered and Dulles allocated $100,000 to it, though the plan never materialized; Dulles believed Lumumba posed "a grave danger as long as he was not disposed of."

Alleged role in crash retrieval and MJ-12

In exopolitics research, Michael Salla alleges that during the Eisenhower administration Dulles institutionalized the separation of NHI-related classified programs from standard government oversight channels. Working in coordination with General Nathan Twining and other MJ-12 principals, Dulles is said to have established the contractor-based funding and reporting structure that moved NHI-technology analysis from military facilities into private aerospace corporations, allegedly creating legal ambiguity about ownership and oversight that persists in current secret space programs.

Bay of Pigs and dismissal

Several failed CIA-backed assassination plots against Fidel Castro undermined the agency's credibility, and its reputation — and Dulles's — declined drastically after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco of April 1961. Kennedy reportedly said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds", though after a rigorous inquiry he transferred the CIA's command of foreign paramilitaries to the Department of Defense rather than dismantle the agency. In autumn 1961, following the Bay of Pigs and the Algiers putsch against Charles de Gaulle, Dulles and his entourage — including Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. and Deputy Director Charles Cabell — were forced to resign. On November 28, 1961 Kennedy presented Dulles with the National Security Medal at CIA headquarters in Langley; the next day the White House released his resignation letter. He was succeeded by John McCone. Dulles referred to the Bay of Pigs as "the worst day of my life" and developed a strong dislike of Kennedy, later telling journalist Willie Morris "that little Kennedy, he thought he was a god."

Warren Commission and the Kennedy assassination

After the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Dulles as one of seven commissioners of the Warren Commission investigating the killing. Historians have criticized the appointment given that Kennedy had fired him, making impartiality unlikely. Journalist Stephen Kinzer has suggested that Johnson appointed Dulles primarily so he could "coach" the Commission on how to interview CIA witnesses and what questions to ask — both men allegedly anxious to ensure that the Commission did not discover Kennedy's secret involvement in plans to assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders. Robert F. Kennedy also urged Johnson to place Dulles on the commission, most likely fearing revelation of Kennedy's clandestine Cuba operations.

In exopolitics and JFK research, Dulles's presence on the commission is treated as confirmation of institutional control: the man with the strongest motive to block a genuine investigation was placed in charge of ensuring none occurred. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stated publicly that the real head of the Warren Commission was Dulles — not its nominal chair, Chief Justice Earl Warren — and that he was certain the CIA was "directly involved in my uncle's assassination" and in the subsequent 60-year cover-up of the full documentation. Kurt Metzger and other commentators have cited Dulles as the originator of the conspiracy theory label as a pejorative, asserting that the CIA under Dulles allegedly deployed the phrase "conspiracy theory" through media contacts after the assassination to discredit critics of the Warren Commission and deflect inquiry into the CIA's own role.

Later life and death

In 1966 Princeton's American Whig–Cliosophic Society awarded Dulles the James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service. He published The Craft of Intelligence in 1963 (largely written by ghost writers) and edited Great True Spy Stories in 1968, and was honored by DCI Richard Helms with a plaque on the CIA building. Dulles's friend James Angleton recalled that out of the CIA "he had a very difficult time to decompress." Reported to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease in his final years, he died of influenza complicated by pneumonia on January 29, 1969, aged 75, in Georgetown, and was buried in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore.

Publications

• Can We Be Neutral? (with Hamilton Fish Armstrong). New York: Harper & Brothers / Council on Foreign Relations, 1936. OCLC 513361
• Can America Stay Neutral? (with Hamilton Fish Armstrong). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939. OCLC 256170
• Germany's Underground. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Template:LCCN
• The Secret Surrender: The Classic Insider's Account of the Secret Plot to Surrender Northern Italy During WWII. Harper & Row, 1966.
• The Craft of Intelligence. Harper & Row, 1963. ISBN 1592282970
• Great True Spy Stories (editor). New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
• From Hitler's Doorstep: The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942–1945 (ed. Neal H. Petersen). Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0-271-01485-2
• The Marshall Plan (with Michael Wala). Berg, 1993. ISBN 978-0854963508

Fictional portrayals

Dulles has been portrayed in Liberation (1970–1971), the Soviet miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973), William F. Buckley Jr.'s Blackford Oakes novels (1976–2005), Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), the 2003 docudrama The Commission (Jack Betts), The Good Shepherd (2006, as "Phillip Allen", played by William Hurt), the 2007 miniseries The Company, W.E.B. Griffin's The Honor of Spies (2009), Nick and Jake (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015, Peter McRobbie), and the 2024 BBC Radio dramatization Central Intelligence featuring Ed Harris.

Sources

• Grose, Peter (1994). Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0395516072. ＋{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Kinzer, Stephen (2013). The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War. New York: Times Books. ISBN 978-0805094978. ＋{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Srodes, James (1999). Allen Dulles: Master of Spies. Washington, D.C.: Regnery. ISBN 0-89526-314-9. ＋{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Talbot, David (2015). The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0062276216. ＋{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Weiner, Tim (2007). Legacy of Ashes: The History of the Central Intelligence Agency. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-51445-3. ＋{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

See also

• Deep state
• James Forrestal
• Assassination of John F. Kennedy
• John Foster Dulles

References

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This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Allen Dulles", as of 2026-04-27, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.