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.
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
CIA director who alone warned that Soviet missiles were coming to Cuba
He warned that a surprise attack on Cuba would leave the United States with a 'Pearl Harbor indictment,' and argued that Castro and Khrushchev should be given 24 hours' warning before any airstrike.
An American businessman and Republican, he was appointed CIA Director by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Throughout the summer and fall of 1962, he repeatedly warned that the Soviets would place nuclear missiles in Cuba, warnings the intelligence community dismissed, and on September 20, in the 'honeymoon telegram' sent from Paris, he demanded imaginative analysis of the Soviet buildup; on October 14 he ordered the U-2 overflights that discovered the missile sites. He served under President Johnson after Kennedy's assassination but resigned in 1965 over disagreements about the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
Career timeline
- 1929Executive VP, Consolidated Steel Corporation
- 1937Co-founder, Bechtel-McCone Corp.
- 1941–1945President, California Shipbuilding Corp.
- 1950–1951US Under Secretary of the Air Force
- 1958–1961Chairman, US Atomic Energy Commission
- 1961–19656th Director of Central Intelligence
The National Security Advisor who chose not to wake the president on the first night of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Ray Cline's voice on the phone: 'Those things we've been worrying about, it looks as though we've really got something.' Bundy asked, 'You're sure?'
National Security Advisor (1961–1966) under Kennedy and Johnson, and a key architect of the Vietnam War escalation. On the evening of October 15, 1962, the CIA informed him of Soviet missile bases in Cuba; he decided to wait until morning to tell the president, fearing that a hastily called nighttime meeting would blow secrecy. After leaving government in 1966, he served as president of the Ford Foundation and, in his later years, helped lead the campaign to renounce first use of nuclear weapons.
Career timeline
- 1940AB in Mathematics, Yale University
- 1943–1946US Army intelligence officer
- 1949–1953Professor of Government, Harvard University
- 1953–1961Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard
- 1961–1966US National Security Advisor
- 1966–1979President, Ford Foundation
- 1979–1989Professor of History, New York University
