Keeping a finger in the pie
M. R. D. Foot
ALLEN DULLES by James Srodes Regnery, $34.95, pp. 624 This full and fascinating biography deals with one of the century's formative figures, less in the public eye than his elder brother John Foster Dulles who was secre- tary of state and apostle of nuclear deter- rence at the depth of the Cold War, but hardly less influential where it mattered.
The brothers are often, wrongly, described as patricians. They went to good tailors; but their father was nothing grander than a Presbyterian minister on a modest salary. It turned out a help that their mother's father, General Foster, had among many careers been for a few months secretary of state; and it helped still more that an aunt married Robert Lansing, who held the same post in Woodrow Wilson's second presidency. Both John Foster and Allen did well as law students at Yale; and both entered the American diplomatic ser- vice, rising to participate in the peace congress at Paris that met in 1919-20 after the end of the first world war.
During the war, Allen had served succes- sively in Vienna and in Berne, early win- ning friends and influencing people. As an elderly man, he had a reputation as a raconteur, and was fond of a tale going back to the spring of 1917. Just after five on a Friday evening, the legation telephone in Berne rang. The rest of the staff had left already. Dulles told the caller, who insisted on speaking to someone in authority, that the office was closed till Monday morning, and went off to keep a tennis appointment with a pretty girl. By Monday morning the caller, who was Lenin, was already sealed into a train for Finland, whence he was to start the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
It is still unclear whether, on his way from Washington to Vienna, Dulles was given some basic training in what the secret services still like to call tradecraft by the British as he passed through London. All through his working life, he was aware of the need for Anglo-American co- operation; equally, he was always prepared to steal a march on the Brits if fair occa- sion to do so offered. Srodes writes with quiet authority on Dulles's secret service career, taking care to explain when he is relying on documents and when he is quot- ing memories (which are more likely to be fallible); when papers have not yet been released, he does not pretend to guess what might be in them.
Dulles did not start serious secret work till 1941, when — even before the USA entered the war against Hitler — he helped his friend 'Wild Bill' Donovan find recruits for the body that turned into the Office of Strategic Services in mid-1942. Dulles him- self always indicated that he had been brought in to help Donovan after Pearl Harbor, one of many established errors that Srodes puts right. At the age of 49, Dulles talked his way past a frontier con- trol already manned by the Gestapo to get into Switzerland from Vichy France in mid- November 1942, and settled in Berne as a semi-secret representative of F. D. Roosevelt.
His German-Swiss cook was understood to be in German pay, but he managed to entertain numerous visitors from outside Switzerland, particularly bankers and industrialists whom he had befriended when working for Sullivan & Cromwell, his brother's law firm, during a break from diplomacy in the 1930s. He was thus able to provide the USA with a great deal of intelligence about the German war econo- my, and to maintain tenuous contact with various groups of resisters who wanted to destroy Nazism from within. They lacked his common sense as well as his tenacity; most of them came to horrible ends.
As Srodes is able to explain, OSS was by no means unique in the American intelli- gence community, and Truman dissolved it promptly after the end of the war; but . and this is our orthopaedic design.' Dulles continued to keep a finger in the intelligence pie, rose to head the covert operations section of the CIA, and finally ran the whole of it himself with unbounded energy, in spite of failing health. In the end it was he who had to take the blame — even if it did not all fairly fall on him or on his agency — for the Bay of Pigs disaster of 1961; eight years later he died.
His surviving family have been a great help to his biographer. No secret is made of his reputation as a womaniser, which was extensive; it is also clear how much his mar- riage meant both to him and to his wife. This book would surely have pleased him, and will be a great help to historians.
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