Allen Welsh Dulles
Allen Welsh Dulles (born April 7, 1893 in Watertown , Jefferson County , New York , † January 29, 1969 in Washington, DC ) was an influential director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 and a member of the Warren Commission . As head of the CIA, he was largely responsible for the government overturns in Iran and Guatemala, the invasion of Cuba and the murder of Patrice Lumumba , the first democratically elected head of government in the Congo. Dulles was the younger brother of John Foster Dulles , Secretary of State of the United States from 1953 .
Life
Coming from a diplomatic family, Dulles started working for the USA in 1916, first in the Vienna embassy and later in Bern . The anecdote that Dulles liked to tell at every party in later life is famous: he turned down a meeting of the then unknown Russian politician in exile Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in Switzerland in favor of a tennis match with a young lady, whereupon the man, later known as Lenin, returned to Russia had traveled and triggered the October Revolution . After the First World War he worked with his brother John Foster Dulles as an advisor to his uncle, the US Secretary of State Robert Lansing , in the negotiations for the Versailles Treaty . There the protocols of the Elders of Zion , launched in diplomatic circles, circulated which Dulles and the journalist Philip Graves exposed as a forgery in 1921 while at the embassy in Constantinople . In 1926 he turned down a post as ambassador in Beijing and resigned from the diplomatic service.
Allen Dulles followed his brother John Foster Dulles as a lawyer in the international business law firm Sullivan & Cromwell , which not only looked after the interests of its clients legally, but above all with lobbying work and occasional public relations staging. In order to promote bonds for German reconstruction, so-called Heidelberg bonds , a German-friendly atmosphere was created by placing German operettas in the USA. The firm represented US as well as German and other European companies. These included the Chase Bank of the Rockefeller family, Ford , ITT , SKF , IG Farben , the Belgian National Bank , the builders of the Panama Canal and the United Fruit Company , which controlled Central American agriculture. The firm also acted as a covert placeholder for company shares and operated political lobbying. John Foster Dulles, who had risen to become director of Sullivan & Cromwell, acted as the American general representative of the then largest chemical company in the world, IG Farben.
Allen Dulles, who had dealt with German bankers like Hjalmar Schacht between the world wars , also represented Prescott Bush in his dealings with the German Reich in 1936 . While Dulles was personally not enthusiastic about Hitler on a visit in 1933, he committed himself to German interests. The Dulles brothers spoke out publicly against US entry into the war until this was no longer politically opportune after the attack on Pearl Harbor .
OSS
During the Second World War, Dulles was the envoy of the US secret service Office of Strategic Services in Bern, which was founded after the USA entered the war in neutral Switzerland, which was surrounded by the Axis powers . Dulle's actual function was an open secret: he served as a contact point for informers and resistance fighters from Nazi Germany . He worked on clearing up German plans and activities and was in close contact with the co-conspirator of July 20, 1944, Hans Bernd Gisevius , who was an Abwehr agent in Zurich . Dulle's most important agent was the German diplomat and resistance fighter Fritz Kolbe , who was mistaken for a double agent by the British and the Americans because of the high quality of his information . Kolbe regularly provided secret documents about active German spies and plans for the Me 262 fighter plane .
The verdict on Dulle's work is mixed. He underestimated the psychological effect of the area bombing on the German civilian population. Much important information from the resistance was misunderstood. So Dulles knew about the Holocaust early on . Like many US soldiers, the anti-communist was of the opinion that the more preferable opponent was the Soviet Union , which was allied with the USA at the time , and from which the Western powers withheld tactical knowledge gained through the wiretapping programs ULTRA and MAGIC .
In February 1945 SS General Karl Wolff made contact with Dulles through Swiss middlemen ( Max Waibel and others). The negotiations led to an early armistice in Italy on May 2, 1945, six days before Germany's total surrender on May 8, 1945. With this Operation Sunrise , Dulles prepared early on for post-war cooperation with National Socialists, with whom he wanted to contain communism.
Dulles wrote a book about the conspirators of July 20, 1944 , which was also published in German, but which was not a sales success either in the USA or in Germany. During his years in Bern, Dulles a. a. with a friend and former patient of Carl Gustav Jung , the American Mary Bancroft. Bancroft translated an extensive manuscript by Hans Bernd Gisevius from German into English on Dulles' order for the American secret service . Dulles also had an affair with her. Mary Bancroft brought Dulles together with Carl Gustav Jung. Jung provided him with his assessments of the psychology of high Nazis and the psychological situation of Germans during the war and National Socialism. Dulles passed these assessments on in his reports to the US government.
Think tanks
After the secret service OSS, which was improvised during the war, was disbanded in 1945, Dulles campaigned for the establishment of an institutional foreign secret service , but initially did not get a chance due to the unexpected re-election of Truman, whose Republican opponent Thomas E. Dewey he had supported. Instead, he worked again at Sullivan & Cromwell and maintained intensive contacts through societies that he organized regularly. One of his clients was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi .
In 1946 Dulles succeeded Russell C. Leffingwell as President of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). In 1948 he was a board member of the American Committee for a United Europe . The initiative for Radio Free Europe , financed by private donations and by the US Congress , which broadcasted to the Soviet bloc, as well as the covert funding of anti-communist media, such as the newspaper The Month , which also became a forum for left-wing intellectuals against the Stalinist communism became. Soviet media repeatedly attacked Dulles.
In 1950 he joined the private "Committee to Investigate the Katyn Massacre " founded by the journalist Julius Epstein , which demanded access to classified material from the authorities and finally enforced the establishment of a committee of inquiry, the Madden Committee .
CIA
Dulles criticized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) , which was finally reorganized after makeshift arrangements in 1947, as too bureaucratic and at that time favored public propaganda by private institutions instead of clandestine activities , whereby he also included the disinformation of the US population. After the start of the Korean War , which came as a surprise to the United States , where the CIA did not have a single agent on site, CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith brought the experienced secret service man on board as a consultant in 1950 and gave him a position as director for special operations, which was then kept secret. This included the infiltration of the Eastern Bloc states by detached agents who were supposed to observe military movements, the establishment of a network of stay-behind organizations and spy flights over the Soviet Union. Dulles transformed the agency, founded as an intelligence agency, into an expensive military instrument that Smith believed would be long-term military organizations. In fact, covert military operations became the main function of the CIA.
In 1953, the new US President Dwight D. Eisenhower Dulles, who had already advised him in Europe during the Second World War, appointed the CIA as director, which for the first time was led by a civilian instead of high generals. At the same time Dulles brother John Foster Dulles acted as Secretary of State, as his instrument Dulles and the CIA saw themselves.
In March 1953 the US Senator Joseph McCarthy started a series of investigations into the potential communist infiltration of the USA, in which he also targeted the CIA. Under pressure from Dulles, Vice President Richard Nixon asked McCarthy to refrain from interrogating CIA people on alleged security threats. For the first time, Dulles was able to ensure the immunity of the CIA from public investigations, which, however, earned him criticism in the press.
After he won the presidential election, John F. Kennedy left the legendary hardliner Dulles in office to avoid criticism from the conservative camp. During Kennedy's reign, Dulle's target became increasingly critical. The pro-American regimes in Iran and Guatemala were viewed as brutal and corrupt. After the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs , which had permanently damaged the reputation of the USA, Kennedy dismissed Dulles and his deputy in 1961, but awarded him the medal for national security. As his successor, Kennedy chose the Republican John McCone, who is also considered a hardliner .
Warren Commission
After Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Dulles was a controversial member of the Warren Commission , which was supposed to investigate the attack. Dulles pushed the single perpetrator theory from the start, which blocked investigations in other directions. So he downplayed the claim spread by Lee Harvey Oswald's family that Oswald was a CIA agent and thwarted any search for clues in the direction of the CIA.
Mediator in the racism conflict
Allen Dulles was reactivated one more time in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson to negotiate with the Mississippi establishment as an integrative figure accepted by the Conservatives during the crisis over missing anti-racist civil rights activists . Even Dulles was appalled by the mentality of the southerners close to the Ku Klux Klan and was unable to achieve anything; nor against the right-wing John Birch Society .
Dulles died at the age of 75 of flu complicated by pneumonia .
Dirty tricks
Political murders and human experiments
Dulles, who had already planned assassinations on Hitler, accepted the political assassinations of foreign heads of state as an opportune intelligence tool. He had wanted to liquidate the Soviet head of state Josef Stalin during a visit to Paris, which CIA chief Smith, who had been given a free hand by Truman, did not allow. As the new CIA director, Dulles ordered undercover assassinations on, among others, Fidel Castro , Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo . The liquidation of the Chinese prime minister by attacking his plane was also considered. Dulles, who tended to use unusual methods, initiated the CIA program MK ULTRA (also: MKULTRA) in 1953, which hoped, among other things, to make people docile with psychodrugs or to poison them covertly. As part of MK ULTRA, thousands of human experiments were carried out , among other things . Often, randomly selected test subjects, including prison inmates, government officials and hospital patients, were exposed to highly potent psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline without their knowledge . Several deaths are documented in detail, but the then CIA director Richard Helms had all CIA files on the project destroyed in 1972, which made the investigation of the US Congress ( Church Committee ) , which was just beginning, very difficult. MK ULTRA had been kept secret from both future US presidents and Dulle's successor, John McCone .
Covert manipulation of foreign domestic politics
In France, Dulles financed the split in the union, thereby weakening its communist wing. In Italy, Dulles sponsored people from the Mafia, whose Italian-American branch had cooperated with the OSS in the conquest of Italy during the Second World War.
Covert coups
After Iran showed sympathy for the Soviet Union and Mohammad Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister there, the Dulles brothers had bought, but actually apolitical Iranians stage uprisings in favor of the Shah in 1953, which killed over 100 people. Dulles was in Italy with the Shah, his former client, during the coup. The Operation Ajax was rated for decades the first major success of the CIA, which, however, with the Iranian revolution capsized into the opposite (see also Blowback ).
Accompanied by all kinds of disinformation campaigns such as aircraft painted with false national emblems and imitation radio news anchors, Dulles staged coups in which he had the elected President of Guatemala , Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán , overthrown in 1954. Arbenz had previously nationalized agriculture , previously controlled by the United Fruit Company , in which Dulles held shares and which he had represented as a lawyer and lobbyist. The operation PBSUCCESS was PR expert Edward Bernays presented the domestic media as a revolution.
These covert operations were an important part of Eisenhower's new policy during the Cold War . Following the divide and rule strategy , the CIA secretly supported rival conflicting parties on both sides, which is why it was always automatically on the winning side in the revolutions in South and Central America. Dulles had even supplied arms to the Cuban Revolution.
Likewise, the CIA-controlled Bay of Pigs invasion should have appeared as an intra-Cuban affair that also involved masked aircraft. The CIA presented to the press in Florida alleged planes of deserted Castro pilots, which, however, were of a more modern design than those of the Cuban military.
Domestic operations
Contrary to the strict postal laws, Dulles had international mail monitored. Although the CIA was only allowed to operate abroad, it was also active domestically and operated covert bases that were hidden in cinemas by Howard Hughes , who cooperated with the CIA, among other places . In Florida and Louisiana, the CIA organized training camps for Cuban exiles who prepared , among other things, for the Bay of Pigs invasion . Dulles advocated Operation Mockingbird , a program designed to influence US media companies.
disinformation
In 1956, Dulles played Khrushchev's secret speech , with which he initiated the de-Stalinization , to the New York Times . After the Soviet Union had called the speech not, as expected, a forgery, but merely as inaccurate, Dulles launched apparently more precise versions, which made Khrushchev's desire for peace appear unbelievable.
Altitude reconnaissance
At Dulles' insistence, Eisenhower agreed to illegal flights over the Soviet Union for espionage purposes, which the public denied. Only four people in the White House were informed of the existence of the new height reconnaissance aircraft U2 operated by the CIA . Protests by the Soviet Union against the violation of their airspace were denied as propaganda. As Eisenhower always feared, its credibility was damaged in 1960 after a U2 was shot down, after the crashed U2 was initially passed off as a civilian research aircraft by NASA, until the Soviet Union presented the surprisingly surviving pilot Gary Powers to the world as a CIA man.
Others
Dulles' sister was the diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles, known as the "Mother of Berlin" . His daughter Joan was married to the Austrian publisher Fritz Molden from 1948 to 1953 .
Works
- Germany's underground. Macmillan, New York NY 1947. In German:
- Conspiracy in Germany. Afterword by Wolfgang von Eckardt, the translator of the book, Europa Verlag, Zurich 1948. (A representation of part of the resistance movement against National Socialism, with whom Dulles came into contact as a secret service employee during the war)
- as editor: Great True Spy Stories. Harper & Row, New York NY 1968 (in German: The silent war. Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, Munich 1968).
literature
- Lucas Delattre: Fritz Kolbe . The main spy of World War II. Piper, Munich / Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-492-04589-8 .
- Peter Grose: Allen Dulles. Spymaster. The Life & Times of the First Civilian Director of the CIA. André Deutsch, London 2006, ISBN 0-233-00189-1 .
- Phillip Knightley: The Second Oldest Profession. Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century. Fully revised edition with two new chapters. Pimlico, London 2003, ISBN 1-84413-091-6 .
- James Srodes: Allen Dulles. Master of Spies. Regnery, Washington, DC 1999, ISBN 0-89526-314-9 .
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David Talbot : The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. HarperCollins 2015, ISBN 978-0-00-815966-5 .
- German: The devil's chessboard. The CIA, Allen Dulles, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. Translated by Andreas Simon dos Santos. Westend, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-86489-149-6 .
Movie
- The Master Spy of Bern , directed by Mathias Haentjes. Portrait of Allen Welsh Dulles, first broadcast in 2005 on Swiss television SF1 report on SRF - Switzerland in World War II - The Master Spy of Bern 4/6
Web links
- Literature by and about Allen Welsh Dulles in the catalog of the German National Library
- Markus Kompa: The dirty tricks of Allen Dulles at Telepolis .
Individual evidence
- ^ David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government , Harper New York 2015, ISBN 978-0062276162
- ^ Council on Foreign Relations: Historical Roster of Directors and Officers
- ↑ Andrzej Przewoźnik, Amerykanie a Katyń ( Memento of August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Rzeczpospolita, April 9, 2010.
- ^ John F. Kennedy, "Remarks Upon Presenting an Award to Allen W. Dulles," Nov. 28, 1961. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Dulles, Allen Welsh |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American Director of the CIA (1953–1961) |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 7, 1893 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Watertown , New York |
| DATE OF DEATH | 29th January 1969 |
| Place of death | Washington, DC |