Birth Of The CIA - Allen Dulles - Forgotten History

When people fly into Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., very few know why it has that name, let alone know anything about the man behind it. During World War II, Brigadier General William J. Wild Bill Donovan ran the Office of Strategic Services, and he ran secret operations all over the world, from Asia to Europe, hiring and recruiting civilians and active duty military as covert operatives. The experiences of the OSS saw the need to create a specialized organization that could handle intelligence gathering and covert operations with plausible deniability. The successor of the OSS, the Central Intelligence Agency, continued that legacy with very mixed and controversial results. Who was Alan Dulles? How did he become the first civilian CIA director? What was his record as director? Did he commit crimes against the U.S. Constitution and international law? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, military veteran, historian, author, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. Alan Welsh Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, and he, along with his older brother, John Foster Dulles, served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State. Their family had a long history of government service. His younger sister, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, became a diplomat. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, was Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison, while his uncle, by marriage, Robert Lansing, was Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Dulles graduated from Princeton University and joined the State Department as a diplomat in 1916. Dulles was first assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, Austria, but was then transferred to Bern, Switzerland, along with the rest of the embassy staff just before the U.S. entered the First World War. Dulles would have known Woodrow Wilson's plan to get the U.S. involved long before he requested a declaration from Congress. Dulles claimed many years later that while in Bern that he was called by Vladimir Lenin, who wanted to meet with him on April 8, 1917, the day before Lenin left for St. Petersburg aboard a German train. It is believed that the meeting took place. Surviving the Spanish flu, Dulles attended the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, along with his brother John. Afterward, he was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, and he helped expose the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery in 1921. These were documents forged by the Russians in 1897 to instigate anti-Jewish sentiment, as the documents were supposedly a global plan by world Jews and Freemasons to destroy Christian nations. It was published in all the Allied newspapers and even well-known anti-Semite automaker Henry Ford's private newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, used them as proof of a Jewish threat. Dulles unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the U.S. State Department to publicly denounce the forgery, but anti-Semitism in the government was very strong, as much as racial segregation was. After this, Dulles served five more years as chief of the Near East Division of the Department of State from 1922 until 1926. Dulles earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School in 1926 and took a job at the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, where his brother John Foster Dulles was a partner. Due to his overseas experience, he became director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, the first new director since the council's founding in 1921. He also served as the council's secretary from 1933 to 1944 and then again as its president from 1946 to 1950. He was making a lot of important friends and a few enemies as well. However, back during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Dulles was a legal advisor to the Arms Limitation Delegation at the League of Nations. During his travels, he met with Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and the various British and French prime ministers. In April 1933, Dulles and Norman Davis met with Hitler and propaganda minister Josef Goebbels in Berlin. After these meetings, Dulles reported that things were not as bad as had been reported in Germany, and he found both of these men quite forthright and But that opinion changed after he was again in Germany in 1935, after the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and due to the treatment of Jews, he convinced his law firm to discontinue doing business in Germany. Dulles also helped some German Jews, like banker Paul Kemper, immigrate to the United States. As World War II in Europe was entering its second year, and the Japanese empire had stormed through China and began assaulting Asia proper, Donovan brought Dulles into the OSS, stationed in Europe, and on August 12, 1942, he was headquartered in Bern, Switzerland, once again. Dulles had made many contacts while in Europe, many of which were members of the various resistance movements. That was his value. His first primary contact was Austrian Catholic priest Meyer had intimate relationships with many scientists, designers, and engineers, and was able to provide Dulles with military intelligence on new weapons, such as the V-1 and V-2 rockets, the Me-262 jet, and the Me-163 rocket fighter development, as well as details on the Tiger I, and even the new U-boat designs, such as the Type 9C, and others. Along with this information, he also provided the top secret locations where these weapons were being built, which was passed on to the U.S. Army Air Force and Royal Air Force Bomber Commands. It was also Meyer and his group who provided the first concrete evidence of the death camp at Auschwitz in Poland, as well as the establishment of many others, such as Chelmno, Belsen, Treblinka, and Mauthausen, etc., and Dulles relayed this information to Washington. One of Dulles' best contacts was head of the Abwehr, German intelligence, the anti-Nazi admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris fed incredible information to Dulles through their mutual contacts, including German strategic plans, operational objectives, such as Hitler's plan for Operation Citadel, which developed into the Battle of Kursk. All of this information was passed to the various allies, including Stalin, who was at first, early in the war, reluctant to believe any intelligence that he received. Regarding the Battle of Kursk and Prokhorovka, see our video on that battle. However, on this occasion, Stalin did believe the intelligence, and he acted upon it. Donovan made his tactical deployment decisions regarding his agents in Europe based upon these reports, thus his sending OSS assets into Yugoslavia to support Josef Broz Tito alongside British special operations executive. Admiral Canaris was also involved in the July 20, 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler, and he supplied all the information to Dulles long before the plot was launched. After Canaris was exposed, arrested, and later executed, Dulles's internal intelligence sources virtually dried up. Dulles was also well informed on Hitler's wavering decision to kidnap Pope Pius XII, as well as the College of Cardinals, to use as a bargaining chip. See our video on that operation as well. SS Lieutenant General Karl Wolff was opposed to the plan, and he was instrumental working with Dulles to make sure that did not happen. However, Dulles knew a good opportunity when he saw it. He learned that Wolff had been placed as commander of all Waffen-SS forces in Northern Italy. Wolff was also the German military governor of Northern Italy and the plenipotentiary to Benito Mussolini during the last two years of the war. Knowing that Wolff would have been condemned as a war criminal for his involvement in the Holocaust, he reached out through a Swiss emissary. If Wolff could negotiate the surrender of SS forces, he would be insulated from the war crimes trials afterward. Wolff was very interested, and stated this during his 1984 interview that he had with me. Himmler had appointed me to command SS forces at the Gustav Line and hold that area. I knew that with the condition of our forces and the weight of the Allies pushing north that it was only a matter of time. I met Dulles in March 1945 and we came to an agreement, as we all knew that the war was effectively over. From that point it was a matter of saving lives. After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin Station Chief and later as Station Chief in Bern, Switzerland. The Office of Strategic Services was dissolved in October 1945 and its function transferred to the State and War Departments. While in this capacity, Dulles ran Operation Paperclip and Wolff helped. We have a video on this operation as well that brought former German scientists, engineers, various technicians, specialists and chemists to the United States in order to get a head start on the USSR. President Harry S. Truman wanted the best and brightest minds that had worked for Hitler, captured by the Western Allies, not the Soviets. The problem was that he didn't want anyone connected to the Nazi Party. Well, that ruled out about 98% of the people he wanted because, unless you were a member of the NSDAP, you did not hold a high security clearance nor did you have a highly sensitive job in the Third Reich, such as the most standout member of that collective, Dr. Werner von Braun. Dulles and Donovan then scrubbed the records of all those in US and British custody, removing any information that would connect them to the Party and Hitler in particular. Wolff also amazingly made that list. Dulles and his brother John were advisors to Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey. They, along with former Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, who was also the first Secretary of Defense, helped form the Office of Policy Coordination. In 1949, Dulles co-authored the Dulles-Jackson career report, which was highly critical of the new Central Intelligence Agency, which had been established by the National Security Act of 1947. Truman was less than amused by the report and appointed Lieutenant General Walter Beedle Smith as the new Director of Central Intelligence. Then Smith recruited Dulles to oversee the Agency's covert operations as Deputy Director for Plans, which he managed from January 4, 1951. On August 23, 1951, Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, second in the intelligence hierarchy and running global operations as the Cold War heated up. After the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Beedle Smith was appointed to the Department of State and Dulles then became the first civilian director of the CIA. Due to the damage that was being done, at Dulles' request, President Dwight D. Eisenhower demanded that Senator Joseph McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA. Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA, under Dulles' orders, had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and fed disinformation to him, fueling his belief in Communists having infiltrated the CIA in order to discredit him, and it worked. In 1953, Dulles, along with Frank Wisner, ran the covert Operation Ajax that led to the removal of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installed the Western-friendly Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran. The well-orchestrated coup spanned a five-day period from August 15th to 19th, 1953, when the CIA, along with Britain's MI6, masterminded the coup to maintain control over Iranian oil and to prevent Tehran from falling under Soviet influence after World War II. Due to information regarding the relationship between the two nations, it was feared that the Soviets planned a takeover of the country following the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian oil company by Mossadegh. On August 18th, 1953, Dulles met with the Shah while on vacation in Rome, and the two met at the Hotel Excelsior while checking in. The meeting turned out to be fortuitous as the Prime Minister, General Faisal Saeedi, who was Western-friendly, remained in the country assisting the United States and the coup. Mark Gazirowski, a professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans, says, that to many in Iran, the coup proved Washington's duplicity. The United States, which portrayed itself as the guardian of freedom, was seen as resorting to nefarious means to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own strategic interests. Author Stephen Kinzer stated, that the 1975 revolution was a long-term effect of the increasing repression from the Shah, who came to power as a result of the coup. That Islamic revolution brought to power a fanatically anti-American regime that has spent more than 30 years working to undermine American interests all over the world. The 1953 coup, which was the agency's first major successful overthrow of a foreign government, became a template for the future. The Soviets responded by increasing their political and military assistance and presence in the Middle East, especially in Syria and in North Africa, supplying weapons to Egypt, Libya, and Iraq. This would lead to more problems in the future. For decades, the United States denied playing any part in the Iranian coup, but that position ended in 2009 when President Barack Obama acknowledged Washington's role. In Britain, meanwhile, the government-funded BBC provided details in 2011 of how it broadcast anti-Mozart programs to undermine his government. On March 30, 1949, Syrian Colonel Husni al-Zaim, in a bloodless coup, detailed seizing power from President Shoukri al-Kawathli, with Western approval and support from James Hugh Keeley, Jr. and undercover CIA officer Stephen J. Meade. Zaim then enacted policies that benefited both Britain and the US, such as the construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline on Syrian territory and banning both the Communist Party and Islamic extremists, as well as signing an armistice with Israel. But Zaim did not last long, because some of the officers who were involved in al-Zaim's coup, such as Adib al-Shugashaki and Sami al-Hinawi, staged another coup six months later in August 1949 and had their friend al-Zaim tried and executed by a firing squad. Due to Dulles' fear of a Communist takeover, he approached President Eisenhower, and an estimated $3 million in bribes were paid to facilitate the assassinations of Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj, head of military intelligence, Afif al-Bizri, army chief of staff, and Khalid Bakdash, leader of the Syrian Communist Party with MI6 assistance. The operational plan by the US and UK intelligence agencies would fund a Free Syria Committee and supply weapons to paramilitary troops, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria would be made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage, and violence directed against neighboring governments. These provocations would serve as the pretext for an outside invasion, led theoretically by the Kingdom of Iraq, but that plan failed. Dulles was also instrumental in the CIA-led coup, codenamed Operation PB Success, that removed President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala in 1954 and installed a more reliable and user-friendly government. Dulles and the CIA were chastised for not being aware of the Soviet launch of the world's first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957 by the Soviet Union. Eisenhower was less than amused to learn of the fact from the news media information supplied by the Kremlin. US Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay, then Commander of Strategic Air Command, stated, Dulles was not impressing me, never did. His brother John Foster Dulles was another Ivy League asshole who really needed a day job, and I never really thought much of him either. Yet Dulles' ego overrode his common sense when he decided that the CIA could handle the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation to oust Fidel Castro using mercenaries, giving the USA plausible deniability. See our video on the Bay of Pigs for more information. President John F. Kennedy reportedly said he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. However, following a rigorous inquiry into the agency's affairs, methods, and problems, Kennedy did not splinter it after all and did not recommend congressional supervision. Instead, Kennedy transferred the CIA to the Department of Defense under the close supervision and control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which would also report on CIA plans and operations to the President. The CIA took the public hit for the failure, but Kennedy did not go unscathed. The one spot that shined where Kennedy was concerned was Dulles' great relationship with Lockheed as they worked with designer Kelly Johnson and his skunkworks on developing the U-2 spy plane. On November 28, 1961, Kennedy presented Dulles with the National Security Medal at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The next day, on November 29, the White House released Dulles' resignation letter and he was replaced by John McCown. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Allen Dulles as one of the seven commissioners of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. Some historians later criticized the appointment, noting that Kennedy had fired him, so he was unlikely to be impartial in passing the judgment's charge to the Warren Commission. In the view of journalist and author Stephen Kinzer, Johnson appointed Dulles primarily so that Dulles could coach the commission on how to interview CIA witnesses and what questions to ask, because Johnson and Dulles were both anxious to ensure that the commission did not discover Kennedy's secret involvement in the administration's illegal plans to assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders. Ironically, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president's brother, also urged Lyndon Johnson to put Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission to mask the discovery of Kennedy's clandestine involvement in Cuba. Despite his successes and a few failures, Allen Dulles' character was always being called into question, and despite being married to Martha Clover Todd since 1920 and having three children, he was less than faithful. According to his own sister Eleanor, Dulles had at least a hundred extramarital affairs while in Europe, including many while as director of the CIA. He was apparently having several affairs while overseeing the Project MK-ULTRA mind control program. In 1966, Princeton University's American Whig-Cleosophic Society awarded Dulles the James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service, and Dulles published the book The Craft of Intelligence in 1963, and he edited Great Tree Spy Stories in 1968. Allen Walsh Dulles died on January 29, 1969 of influenza complicated by pneumonia at the age of 75 in Georgetown, D.C., and was buried in Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland. Thanks for watching today's episode of Forgotten History. If you like this episode, please consider becoming a channel member or joining our Patreon page. This would help us offset the ever-increasing cost of production. As always, please like, share, and comment, and if you have any show ideas, please contact us and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Until next time!