Ike's Spies (29 page)

Both the Dulles brothers had gout, “terrible gout,” but John Foster never failed to take his pills on schedule, while Allen “was always having trouble, because he would forget to take his pills.… Allen Dulles didn't have the brilliance of either his sister or his brother, but he had a perfectly good set of brains.”

Both men were a little soft, dumpy, nonathletic. Huge, perfectly round eyeglasses gave them an owlish appearance. Allen had thinning hair, a large forehead, black bushy eyebrows, a prominent
nose, and a strong, jutting chin. Allen's pipe, which he was constantly lighting, peering over, or waving around to make a point, gave him the appearance of a Princeton professor, perhaps of history or political science. He had a gray mustache, twinkling gray eyes, a booming laugh, and an advanced sense of irony that added to the impression of a detached intellectual. John Foster had more of a giggle than a laugh. Where Allen tended toward tweedy, Ivy League clothes, John Foster favored severe, double-breasted, conservative suits, giving the appearance of a successful banker.

Howard Hunt remembered Allen Dulles as “a man who was physically imposing. He had a very large head, almost white hair, a sort of a Teddy Roosevelt mustache.” Dulles inspired great loyalty and affection among all those who worked for him. To a man, they praised him almost to excess, even twenty years after he left the
CIA
. Hunt said, “He was one of the most thoughtful, kindly men that I have ever known. In fact, I can't think, with the exception of my own father I can't think of anybody more deserving of such a description.” Richard Bissell, who was in the
CIA
for over two decades, said, “I can't think of anybody in the agency who didn't like Allen. Everyone both liked and admired him. Which is quite a tribute over a period of years.”

Macomber recalled that Allen was much more informal than John Foster. In 1951 he went to see Allen in his
CIA
office. “Allen Dulles in those days was number two, Beetle Smith was one, and Allen was deputy director. But he was eminent enough for me. I remember going in there, and my boss sat down, and the first thing I knew he put his feet up on Allen Dulles' desk. The only person who seemed to notice it was me.”
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Because of his vast experience and innumerable contacts, Allen Dulles was a natural choice for the job assigned to him by Donovan when World War II began, chief of the
OSS
mission in Switzerland. His diplomatic cover was as an assistant to the minister in the American Legation, but in fact he operated his intelligence group from a fifteenth-century house in Berne overlooking the Aar River.

As a master spy, Dulles got more credit than he deserved. He was praised for two outstanding accomplishments—the penetration of the Abwehr, Hitler's intelligence service, and as the man responsible for the surrender of German troops in Italy. In fact, in both cases, Dulles was merely convenient. The Abwehr hardly needed
penetrating, as its head, the bumbling Admiral Canaris, all but shoved top-secret material into Dulles' hands, and Field Marshal Kesselring turned to Dulles to arrange the surrender of his forces, not because Dulles was brilliant, but because he was there.

Everyone knew he was there, according to Kenneth Strong, which would normally be regarded as a disaster to a spy, but which in Dulles' case was a boon. The publicity he received helped him accomplish his task because, Strong points out, “often the difficulty with informants is that they have no idea where to take their information. What Switzerland needed during World War II was a well-known market for intelligence, and this is what Dulles provided.” Indeed, he was “beseiged by a multitude of informants,” which helped him add to his wide network of contacts and spies throughout Europe.

Unlike Smith, Dulles was soft-spoken, polite, easygoing. He had, Strong recalled, “an infectious, gusty laugh, which always seemed to enter a room with him.” Where Smith was blunt and direct, Dulles seemed almost scatterbrained. “Even when I came to know him better in later years,” Strong wrote, “I was seldom able to penetrate beyond his laugh, or to conduct any serious professional conversation with him for more than a few sentences.”
²⁵

But there was, Strong also noted, “a certain hardness in his character.” He was a great believer in the possibilities of covert operations. Robert Anderson, Eisenhower's Secretary of the Navy, regarded him as “one of the great intelligence figures in the century. And I think largely because he loved it so.”
²⁶
Strong said he was “the last of the great Intelligence officers whose stock-in-trade consisted of secrets and mysteries. He might without disrespect be described as the last great Romantic of Intelligence.”
²⁷

Dulles was Smith's opposite in many ways, including politics. It usually comes as a surprise to Americans to learn that their most famous Director of Central Intelligence was a liberal—but he was. While Smith was bringing McCarthy's friends into the
CIA
, Dulles was just as busy bringing liberals on board. One
CIA
newcomer recruited by Dulles was William Sloane Coffin, later chaplain of Yale University and a leading dove during the Vietnam War. Another liberal was a Dartmouth College professor of English, art museum director, and
OSS
veteran, Thomas Braden. Lyman Kirkpatrick was a third. Tracey Barnes and Richard Bissell were others.

Under the influence of Dulles and his recruits, the
CIA
extended
its financial support of foreign organizations to the non-Communist political left. Braden later recalled, “In the early 1950s, when the Cold War was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare. I remember, for example, the time I tried to bring my old friend Paul Henri-Spaak of Belgium to the U.S. to help out in one of the
CIA
operations.” Allen Dulles mentioned Spaak's proposed journey to the Senate Majority Leader, William F. Knowland of California, one of McCarthy's chief supporters.

“Why,” the senator said, “the man's a socialist.”

“Yes,” Dulles replied, “and the head of his party. But you don't know Europe the way I do, Bill. In many European countries, a socialist is roughly equivalent to a Republican.”

“I don't care,” Knowland growled. “We aren't going to bring any socialists over here.”
²⁸

Richard Bissell, a Ford Foundation official who joined the
CIA
, where he had a spectacular career, and who characterized himself as an eastern liberal, later remembered the agency in the early fifties as “a place where there was still intellectual ferment and challenge and things going on.” It was the one governmental agency that was not running scared from McCarthy, and as such it attracted some of America's best and brightest young men.
²⁹
The
CIA
was the good way to fight communism. McCarthyism was the bad way.

Smith, the hard-boiled military man, was something of a McCarthyite, looking for Communists under his bed at night. At the height of the 1952 presidential election campaign, he told a congressional committee, “I believe there are Communists in my own organization. I do everything I can to detect them, but I am morally certain, since you are asking the question, that there are.”
³⁰

Allen Dulles refused to join a witch hunt. John Foster Dulles was a great disappointment to many career Foreign Service officers because he failed to protect the State Department from McCarthy. Allen was a hero to cu agents precisely because he did stand up to McCarthy. After Ike made him the
DCI
, Allen warned his employees that he would fire anyone who went to McCarthy with leaks or accusations against agency employees. He also persuaded Eisenhower to have Vice President Richard Nixon go to McCarthy to pressure the senator to drop his plan for a public investigation of
Communist infiltration into the
CIA
.
^*
As one result, throughout Ike's term in office morale in the
CIA
was excellent, in sharp contrast to the State Department. The relaxed, freethinking atmosphere Dulles created was deeply appreciated.
³¹

In summing up his impressions of the Dulles brothers, Bissell said, “They were quite different temperamentally.… Allen was a more open person.… He was a warmer, more outgoing individual, and I think he inspired much more loyalty. I admired certain aspects of Foster Dulles very much. He was a tough man, on occasion a very courageous person. He didn't choose to deploy his courage much against McCarthy, and I never liked that aspect.”
³²

With Allen Dulles in place in the
CIA
, young idealists joined the “Company,” underwent their training, and then sallied forth to save the world. It was all supersecret, superexciting, supernecessary. Professors at Yale, Harvard, and other prestigious institutions recommended their best students to the
CIA
, and the agency kept expanding.

UNDER THE SMITH-DULLES TEAM
, the
CIA
covert action capability skyrocketed. The Office of Policy Coordination (
OPC
), the branch of the Agency in charge of such activities, leaped from a total personnel strength of 302 in 1949 to 2,812 in 1952, with an additional 3,142 overseas contract personnel. In 1949,
OPC'S
budget was $4.7 million; by 1952 it was $82 million, a nearly twentyfold increase. In 1949,
OPC
had seven foreign stations; by 1952 it had forty-seven such stations.
³³

That was a lot of people turned loose with an awful lot of money. And the attitude in
OPC
was an early version of the infamous “body count” in Vietnam—agents were judged by the number of projects they initiated and managed. There was vicious internal competition between agents over who could start the most projects. By 1952 there were forty different covert-action projects under way in one central European country alone.
³⁴

Former agent Victor Marchetti points out that “one reason, perhaps the most important, that the agency tended to concentrate largely on covert-action operations was the fact that in the area of traditional espionage (the collection of intelligence through spies)
the
CIA
was able to accomplish little against the principal enemy, the Soviet Union. With its closed society, the U.S.S.R. proved virtually impenetrable.”
³⁵

The East European satellites were somewhat easier to penetrate, or so at least
OPC
liked to think. In the early Smith-Dulles years, the
CIA
set up a vast underground apparatus in Poland. Millions of dollars in gold were shipped there in installments. Agents inside Poland used radio, invisible ink, and other classic spy methods to get reports back to their controllers in West Berlin. These Polish operatives continually asked for additional agents and more gold; on occasion an agent would slip out to make a direct report on progress, and ask for even more agents and money.

It was a great achievement, or so the
CIA
thought, until late in 1952 when to its chagrin the agency discovered that it was all a hoax. The Polish secret service had almost from the beginning co-opted the entire network. There was no real
CIA
underground in Poland. The Poles kept the operation going in order to lure anti-Communist Polish exiles back into their homeland, where they were promptly thrown into prison or else run by controllers, just as the British had run German spies in the Double-Cross System. In the process, Marchetti writes, “the Poles were able to bilk the
CIA
of millions of dollars in gold.”
³⁶

Such a contretemps would have been a major embarrassment, at best, for any other government agency, but the
CIA
could shrug it off because, in truth, almost no one in authority wanted to know the details of what the
CIA
was doing. On this occasion, Dulles called in the agents responsible, asked some somber questions, got the shocking answers, puffed on his pipe, and finally rose from his chair to go face an executive session of Senator Richard Russell's Armed Services Committee.

“Well”—Dulles shrugged—“I guess I'll have to fudge the truth a little.” His eyes twinkled at the word “fudge,” according to Tom Braden, who was there. Then he turned serious as he pulled his old tweed topcoat over his rounded shoulders. “I'll tell the truth to Dick [Russell]. I always do.” Then the twinkle returned, and he added, with a chuckle, “That is, if Dick wants to know.” But Dick did not want to know, either then or later, as he publicly stated on a number of occasions.
³⁷

It may be that Truman, too, did not want to know. That could be the explanation for his statement, “I never had any thought
when I set up
CIA
that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.” In April 1964, Allen Dulles challenged the former President on that remark, reminding Truman of various covert operations that the
CIA
carried out during his term. Another explanation is that Truman was misquoted, and a third has it that he was in his eighties by that time and may not have been responsible for what he was saying. In any event, much as he may have disliked dirty tricks and “Gestapo” tactics, it is abundantly clear that the
CIA
was fully involved in such activities during his presidency.
³⁸

Kennan, too, may have hoped that the
CIA
would merely be a funding agency for friendly overseas organizations, but eventually he almost certainly had to know better. That is, if he wanted to know.

The point is, as noted by the Church Committee, that “by 1953 the agency had achieved the basic structure and scale it retained for the next twenty years.”
³⁹
Created by Truman, shaped by Smith and Dulles, it was one of Eisenhower's chief assets when he became President—“the State Department for unfriendly countries,” as Allen Dulles once described it. Like
ULTRA
or the Double-Cross System or the French Resistance, it was a weapon available to the Commander in Chief for the life or death struggle for freedom and democracy around the world.
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