Allen Dulles

Biography

Allen Welsh Dulles was born in Watertown, New York, in 1893, the son of a Presbyterian minister and the younger brother of John Foster Dulles. After graduating from Princeton and teaching in India, he joined the diplomatic service in 1916, served in Vienna and Bern during the First World War, and was on the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. From 1922 to 1926 he headed the State Department's Near East division.

He then took a law degree at George Washington University and joined his brother at the New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell, while advising American delegations on arms limitation at the League of Nations. He was a long-time officer of the Council on Foreign Relations, its secretary from 1933 and its president from 1946 to 1950. In the Second World War he ran the Office of Strategic Services station in Bern, gathering intelligence on Germany from émigrés and anti-Nazi contacts.

Dulles joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951 as deputy director for plans and soon became deputy director. In February 1953 he became director of central intelligence, the first civilian in the post, and over nearly nine years he oversaw covert operations including the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, the MKUltra drug experiments, and the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

After the Bay of Pigs failed, John F. Kennedy forced him out in November 1961. In 1963-1964 he sat on the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy's assassination, a choice that has drawn lasting criticism. He died in 1969.