As 1953 opened there was a new President, a new secretary of State, and a new director of the CIA. The working relationship between the three was to be extraordinarily close and effective. The shrewd, cautious Eisenhower, with his glittering war record, was the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover. He took a traditional Republican line on domestic issues, but on foreign policy he differed noticeably from the Congressional Republicans. Many of them still nourished a strong distrust of Britain and their isolationism, as so often in the past, took the form of a desire to act alone in the Far East and to ignore Europe. Eisenhower, with his wartime and NATO experience, knew that Europe could not be ignored. He also thought that the popular cries about rolling back communism should remain just hot air. Refusing to enter into an all-out arms race with the Soviets, he preferred to concentrate on deterrence, placing particular emphasis on elite high-tech forces such as Strategic Air Command.
As his secretary of State, Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles; as his director of Central Intelligence he appointed Foster's brother Allen. The Dulles brothers came from a family with a long and distinguished background in diplomacy and the law. Their maternal grandfather, John Foster, had been secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. Their uncle, Robert Lansing, had been Woodrow Wilson's secretary of State. John Foster Dulles had been a member of the U.S. team at the Versailles peace conference where he was a chief negotiator on war reparations. His New York law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell (where Allen also worked) was deeply involved in arranging American loans to Europe and he kept in close contact with European politics during the interwar period. Eisenhower and Dulles thus had impeccable foreign policy credentials and they taught something new to the Republicans: that an activist, liberal foreign policy could go hand in hand with conservatism at home.0
Next to his outwardly conservative and sombre brother, Allen Dulles had a more adventurous and romantic aspect. He graduated from Princeton in 1914, and then taught English for a year in India, developing a dislike of the British empire in the process. In 1916 he entered the State Department and was posted to Vienna. The following year he was sent to Bern. He liked to tell the story of his time in Switzerland that a Mr Lenin sent a message saying that he would like to meet him urgently. Dulles had an engagement to play tennis with friends, and so ignored the message. Only later did he realise that Lenin would probably have told him that he was returning to Russia. Who knows, Dulles later mused, if the course of history would have been different if he had met Lenin. In 1919 he joined his brother as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace conference. Then he served in Berlin and Constantinople, before returning to Washington as head of State's Near East division. In 1926 he left the foreign service and joined Sullivan & Cromwell. He kept a connection with the State Department, however, and served as legal adviser to the U.S. delegations at the League of Nations' Geneva conferences of 1927 and 1932. In 1942 William Donovan recruited him for the OSS, and from October 1942 until November 1945 he was head of clandestine operations in Europe, and of the OSS mission in Germany. In April 1945 he negotiated the surrender of German forces in northern Italy. He was the American closest to being a professional intelligence officer. He was friendly, warm and outgoing in personality and under his directorship the agency had a high profile which he relished. He gave an interview to Time which put him on the cover, and he insisted that DDI officers should have the opportunity to publish. Good lawyers know that you gain by disclosing as much as possible: Dulles was a DCI unimpressed by the cult of secrecy. He was also responsible for the construction of the new CIA headquarters at Langley in Virginia, a building which was even signposted on the George Washington Parkway.
Allen Dulles also had a well-earned reputation for being loyal to subordinates: he had protected CIA officers against McCarthy's witchhunt, and he was insistent that the agency's academic analysts should be able to publish their work in declassified form so that they could gain the respect of their peers. If they were not able to do this, he argued, the CIA would not be able to attract and retain high-quality staff. One of his greatest contributions to the agency was the high morale he created.
The role of the director of Central Intelligence was established during the Eisenhower presidency. He was the President's man in the intelligence community, and unquestionably the President's foremost adviser on intelligence matters. As head of the CIA, he was also in charge of the most active and apparently effective arm of U.S. foreign policy. The range of the agency's activities - collection, analysis, espionage and operations - challenged the power and authority of State and Defence. This was much less of a problem for Allen Dulles as long as his brother was secretary of State, but it was to bedevil his successors. If a DCI ever came into serious conflict with a secretary of State or the secretary for Defence, he knew he could not win without the President's support. The secretaries had the power, the budget and the pull in Congress. As R. Jack Smith, CIA deputy director of intelligence put it succinctly:
"Congressmen are naturally interested all the time for things in their local constituencies which the military can grant, for favours which State can grant. So if it comes to that kind of contest, the director can never win".1
Eisenhower always gave Allen Dulles his full support, and rejected pleas from the military and some Congressmen who were worried by CIA operations to get rid of him. "I'm not going to be able to change Allen", Eisenhower admitted. "I have two alternatives, either to get rid of him and appoint someone who will assert more authority or keep him with his limitations. I'd rather have Allen as my chief intelligence officer with his limitations than anyone else I know".2 In 1954 when Lieutenant General Doolittle spoke with Eisenhower about his report on the CIA, he was very critical of Dulles. Doolittle argued that while Dulles had a unique knowledge of and commitment to his subject, he was a bad organiser and had poor quality subordinates. He also thought it was unfortunate that his brother should be secretary of state. Eisenhower thought it was "beneficial". Doolittle said Dulles was "too emotional for the job". Eisenhower said he had never seen the "slightest disturbance" in him, pointing out that "here is one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have and it probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it".3
Eisenhower's support explains why Dulles was not much bothered about territorial rivalries. He preferred to work alone, depending on his close personal contacts within the governing elite. His brother, after all, was secretary of State and he had Eisenhower's complete confidence. A simple telephone call or meeting at home could sort out problems. For example, Tom Braden was having problems with the French desk at the State Department. He went to see his chief to complain:
"I said, 'Allen, French in the State Department doesn't want to do this', and Allen said 'What?!' then picked up the phone: 'Foster, one of your people seems to be a little less than cooperative.' That's power."4
With this kind of support Dulles was able to concentrate on covert operations - the part of his job which he enjoyed most and which attracted most praise from Eisenhower and from Foster. After his experiences in World War I and World War II, clandestine activities in all their forms were meat and drink to Dulles. Espionage was the part of the very fabric of his life and under Eisenhower's presidency he was given the opportunity to exploit it to the full.
Because of Dulles' personal preference for the cloak-and-d
