Allen Dulles

Allen Dulles grew up in a family that treated foreign policy as an inheritance: his grandfather and an uncle by marriage had both served as secretary of state, and his older brother, John Foster Dulles, would later hold the job outright under Eisenhower. Tutored privately, he went to Princeton, taught school briefly in India, and joined the diplomatic service in 1916, posted first to Vienna and then to Bern. He later earned a law degree at George Washington University, joined the Wall Street firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and spent the 1920s and 1930s as an international lawyer who also ran the Council on Foreign Relations, respectable, well connected, and, after finally meeting Hitler in 1933, willing to write home that conditions there "are not quite as bad" as reported.

Recruited into the Office of Strategic Services in 1942, Dulles ran its Bern station through the war, cultivating German sources including a diplomat he called the best spy of the war and receiving early, detailed warnings about V-weapons and the concentration camps from an Austrian resistance network. He carried that career into the new Central Intelligence Agency, becoming director in 1953 and holding the post longer than anyone before or since. Under him the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, ran the mind-control program MKUltra, and flew U-2 spy planes over Soviet territory. In 1961 the Bay of Pigs invasion he had approved collapsed within three days, and President Kennedy forced him out of the agency that autumn.

He called the Bay of Pigs the worst day of his life and never forgave the president who removed him over it. Two years later Lyndon Johnson put him on the Warren Commission investigating that same president's assassination, an appointment that placed a man Kennedy had just fired in charge of judging what killed him, one the historian Stephen Kinzer has argued was meant less to find the truth than to keep the commission from stumbling onto the CIA's own plots against Fidel Castro. His sister Eleanor later said he had "at least a hundred" affairs over the years, spanning his marriage to Clover Todd and his years running the agency. He spent his final years fading into Alzheimer's disease, the details of Bern, Tehran, and Guatemala going with him.

Richard Helms, who ran the CIA a decade after him, had a plaque to Dulles placed in the agency's headquarters lobby, and for years the CIA's own memory of him was heroic: the man who built modern American intelligence from almost nothing. What came out afterward, the assassination plots, MKUltra's nonconsenting subjects, and coups in Tehran and Guatemala whose consequences outlasted the Cold War itself, has made that memory much harder to hold onto uncomplicated. He has since been portrayed on screen more often as a symbol of unaccountable power than as its architect, in JFK, Bridge of Spies, and elsewhere, an odd kind of afterlife for a man who spent a career preferring not to be seen at all.

Allen Dulles's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Operation Ajax mission
  CIA-backed coup that removed Iran's Mohammad Mossadegh 1953
• Operation PBSuccess mission
  CIA-backed coup that removed Guatemala's Jacobo Árbenz 1954
• U-2 reconnaissance program mission
  High-altitude spy-plane program run by the CIA under his direction 1957
• Bay of Pigs invasion mission
  Approved by Dulles; collapsed within three days and ended his CIA career 1961
• The Craft of Intelligence book
  His account of intelligence work, published after leaving the agency 1963

• April 7, 1893 aged 0 Born in Watertown, New York
• 1916 aged ~23 Enters the US diplomatic service, posted to Vienna and then Bern
• April 1933 aged 39 Meets Adolf Hitler and writes that conditions "are not quite as bad" as reported
• November 12, 1942 aged 49 Arrives in Bern as OSS station chief
• February 26, 1953 aged 59 Becomes Director of Central Intelligence
• August 1953 aged 60 CIA-backed coup removes Iran's Mohammad Mossadegh
• April 1961 aged 67 Bay of Pigs invasion collapses within three days
• November 29, 1961 aged 68 Forced to resign as CIA director
• January 29, 1969 aged 75 Dies in Washington, D.C.

• John Foster Dulles 1888–1959
  Eisenhower's Secretary of State who built Cold War alliances and advocated massive nuclear retaliation. brother
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. fired by