Born in 1893 and educated at Princeton University, Allen Dulles began his intelligence career rather humbly in 1916 when he was stationed as a diplomat in Bern, Switzerland collecting political data for the State Department on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I. By the late 1920’s he was working with his older brother John Foster Dulles (who became Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower in the ‘50s) as a lawyer and international finance specialist for Sullivan and Cromwell, a Wall Street law firm in New York. Across the 1930s he and his brother worked with top Nazi industrialists and played a major role in fostering U.S.-Nazi corporate relations. He was a legal counsel for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the infamous Nazi chemical giant I.G. Farben, (the producer of the poison gas used in the extermination of the Jews.) as well as banks and financial institutions established by German steel magnate and Nazi supporter August Thyssen. In 1933 both Dulles brothers attended a meeting with Adolph Hitler in Germany at which German industrialists pledged to support Hitler in exchange for Hitler’s promise to suppress the German labor unions. They encouraged their Western clients to contribute to the Nazi party and war machine and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Dulles brothers by their actions significantly helped Hitler and the Nazis attain power and build up their war machine once they were in power. They had many communication lines into the Nazi regime.

When the U.S. entered WWII, Dulles became the Bern (Switzerland) station chief for the wartime Office of Strategic Services. At one point none other than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suspected Dulles of being a traitor due to his connections to Nazi linked corporations. After the war was over Dulles was instrumental in helping Nazi corporations that had used slave labor to produce Nazi war materials evade prosecution. He and his brother were also able to prevent the prosecution Nazis who were known mass killers and assisted in arranging their flight from Germany and Europe to the U.S. or South America. He helped the Nazi intelligence apparatus turn over its assets to the West specifically negotiating the surrender of Nazi General Reinhard Gelen, the top German spymaster dealing with Russia and the eastern front. Gelen brought with him his corp of 350 or so Nazi intelligence operatives and they all proceeded to go to work for the OSS and ultimately the CIA under Dulles. Gelen’s group was added to as other Nazi’s found their way to him and ultimately numbered as high as 4,000, being mostly former German army and SS officers.

 By the early 50s, when Dulles assumed the post of director of the CIA, he was well connected in the both the intelligence and international banking fields. Through the 1950’s under the Eisenhower Administration he shepherded the CIA away from merely an intelligence coordination office into a nearly autonomous covert operations force, beyond the control of the President, and the likes of which the country had never seen. That was the man running the CIA at the time Kennedy came into office.

To give you some idea of how the CIA under Alan Dulles operated and interfered in the internal affairs of other nations we will take a look at an actual example; the Central American country of Guatemala in 1954. A leader named Jacobo Arbenz had won the Guatemalan presidential election of 1950. After establishing himself in office he started initiating land reforms in which land held by several U.S. corporations that had been ceded to them or sold to them by earlier Guatemalan dictators (to the dictator’s profit and to the loss of the Guatemalan people) was nationalized and made available for peasant use and ownership. The largest of these corporations was United Fruit Company, a former client of Dulles’s old law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. United Fruit owned something like 42% of the arable land in Guatemala and they weren’t going to take this loss lying down. They exerted pressure in Washington D.C. on the Truman and later the Eisenhower administrations which resulted in the full covert operations force of the CIA being called into operation against Arbenz. The CIA actions taken included a black propaganda campaign against Arbenz from a CIA secret radio station in southern Florida that would broadcast into Guatemala labeling Arbenz a Soviet puppet and a communist. In addition the CIA equipped and trained a 480 man rebel force under a disaffected Guatemalan right wing general for the purpose of staging a coup d’état against the Arbenz government and also created hit lists of Arbenz sympathizers to be assassinated during the coup and the days immediately following. In order to avoid being killed Arbenz and his top advisors resigned their posts and fled the country. Guatemala, destabilized by CIA interference in their internal affairs, ended up in a prolonged civil war that lasted over 30 years and in which several hundred thousand Guatemalans died.

The Guatemalan coup of 1954 is typical of CIA covert ops being run around the world during the Dulles tenure that were justified as fighting communism. Very few Americans at the time knew these actions and coups were taking place in their name and using their tax dollars; but they were taking place and these actions by the CIA did not endear the U.S. to the peoples of these countries, of that I can assure you. The actions I refer to definitely involved assassinations of heads of state. Included in CIA documents from this Guatemalan operation recently released by Freedom of Information Act requests was a 19 page manual on how to carry out political assassinations. One shudders to consider the use to which this manual was put during the Dulles era at CIA and in the decades following based on his example and the policies he set while running the CIA.

 By 1961, when JFK came into office, the CIA’s Vietnam operation was simmering but the Cuban operation was about to boil over. The invasion group of Cubans equipped by the CIA for the purpose of re-taking Cuba from Castro had been in training for some time. Part of the operation called for the assassination of Castro prior to the invasion and the CIA had partnered with none other than the Mafia in order to get it done; another great use of your tax dollars. However, none of the various schemes they concocted were effective and by mid April of 1961, immediately prior to the scheduled invasion, Castro was still in power. The CIA prevailed upon the new Kennedy administration and it was decided the invasion would take place anyway. So on April 18, 1961, with JFK only 3 months into his administration, the CIA’s Cuba Brigade hit the beaches at a place called the Bay of Pigs on the Cuba coastline and attempted to take the country back from Castro. The invasion was a miserable failure. Something had happened to prevent the brigade’s expected air cover and the small Cuban air force was not destroyed while the planes sat on the tarmac as had been planned. Those few planes were then able to take to the air and cut the CIA’s Cuba brigade to pieces on the beaches.

 When it was apparent that the invasion was on the verge of collapse the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA tried to pressure the new President to intervene with U.S. forces to help the Brigade. Kennedy, realizing this as an act of war and against international law, refused. He would not go to war over the failed Cuban Brigade. Publicly he accepted responsibility for the failure at the Bay of Pigs. Privately he felt he had been lied to and misled by the CIA and Dulles. He ordered his brother Robert, who was the Attorney General, to conduct an investigation to determine the cause of the failure, and as a result of this he fired the top two posts in the CIA, director Allen Dulles and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell.

It was following the Bay of Pigs disaster that JFK made his famous statement that he wanted to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”As if the firing of Dulles and Cabell was not enough he took the first step to removing the CIA’s covert operations power on June 28^th, 1961 when he issued National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM for short) #55. NSAM #55 was directed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces of the United States. It basically stated that the President held the Joint Chiefs as responsible for advice regarding Cold War operations as he did for advice regarding actual wartime operations. This signaled to the CIA the intent to move Cold War operations and activities away from the CIA and to the regular military. Needless to say none of these actions were received well in the hallowed halls of intelligence. In addition, though Dulles and Cabell were gone, many of their loyal intelligence officers remained in the CIA in high posts and they and many of the surviving Cuban brigade blamed JFK for the failure at the Bay of Pigs. The schism between Kennedy as Commander in Chief and his own government’s intelligence community had reached irreparable proportions and would have disastrous effects for both the young President and the nation.

Two years later, on Nov 22^nd 1963, President John F. Kennedy would die in a hail of bullets at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, supposedly fired by a lone and crazy assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. When Oswald himself was gunned down two days after JFK by Jack Ruby, thus ensuring he would not stand trial, President Lyndon Johnson chose to head off any further inquiry into Kennedy’s murder by appointing a Presidential commission to investigate and assign responsibility for the assassination. He appointed as head of the commission the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren. And In a final irony as regards his relationship to JFK, who do you suppose Johnson also appointed to the Warren Commission? None other than our old friend Allen Dulles.

The fox was back in the henhouse.