The American intelligence official who institutionalized covert war
In 1945, negotiations for the surrender of northern Italy hastened the war's end while excluding the Soviet representative and Italian partisans.
Allen Dulles was an American diplomat, lawyer, and intelligence chief who linked wartime secret negotiations to the covert interventions of the Cold War. As head of the OSS station in Bern, he advanced Operation Sunrise, the negotiation of the German surrender in northern Italy, while its exclusion of the Soviet ally and implications for Italian partisan power exposed the tensions within the Allied coalition. He later led the CIA through coups in Iran and Guatemala and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, expanding both the reach of the American intelligence state and the questions of responsibility attached to it. His resignation after Cuba did not end his influence, which remains emblematic of the union of intelligence gathering and imperial intervention.
Also known as: Allen Welsh Dulles
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1916–1926U.S. State Department diplomat in Europe and the Near East
- 1927–1944Legal adviser on diplomacy and arms limitation; Council on Foreign Relations secretary and president
- 1942–1945Chief of the OSS station in Bern; led the Operation Sunrise negotiations
- 1945Chief of the OSS station in Berlin
- 1951–1953CIA Deputy Director for Plans and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
- 1953–1961Director of Central Intelligence
- 1963–1964Member of the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination
Related historical events
The Warren Commission and the Question of Agency Accountability (1963–1964)
After Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Dulles as one of seven commissioners on the Warren Commission investigating the killing; the body itself was established by Executive Order 11130 on November 29, 1963. Dulles joined it as a former Director of Central Intelligence whom Kennedy had forced out after the Bay of Pigs. Johnson drew the members from both parties and both houses of Congress, among them Chief Justice Earl Warren and the diplomat and former World Bank president John J. McCloy.
The commission's 888-page final report, presented to Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public three days later, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy and acted alone, and that Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald. Its findings proved controversial and have been both challenged and supported by later studies. Even inside the commission, three members, Sherman Cooper, Boggs and Russell, disagreed with the single-bullet theory advanced to explain how one shot wounded both Kennedy and Governor John Connally. Cooper called the conclusions "premature and inconclusive", and Russell wrote a dissenting opinion holding that "a number of suspicious circumstances" prevented him from agreeing there was no conspiracy, and that a lack of evidence precluded the conclusive determination that Oswald, and Oswald alone, without the knowledge, encouragement or assistance of any other person, planned and perpetrated the assassination. With Russell's agreement that statement was not included in the final report, and Warren, insisting on unanimity, also refused his request for a footnote reading "Senator Russell dissents".
The appointment immediately raised questions of conflict of interest. That a man Kennedy had dismissed sat on the panel judging his death prompted lasting discussion among historians and commentators about his impartiality. In the view of the journalist and author Stephen Kinzer, Johnson appointed Dulles primarily so that he could "coach" the commission on how to interview CIA witnesses and what questions to ask, because Johnson and Dulles were both anxious that the inquiry not uncover Kennedy's secret involvement in the administration's plans to assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders. Robert F. Kennedy likewise urged Johnson to place Dulles on the panel, most likely fearing exposure of Kennedy's clandestine involvement in Cuba.
The controversy outlived the report. The 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the CIA as an institution was not involved in the assassination, but debate persisted over the extent of internal agency knowledge and over Dulles's influence on the commission's scope and findings. In a panel led by a former intelligence chief examining his own former agency, the episode condensed the Cold War problem of where responsibility for the American intelligence state should rest.