John Foster Dulles Quotes

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year

A man's accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail.

It is one of the most dangerous, in fact potentially suicidal, things a great nation can do in world affairs: to cut off its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice and a misguided dispensation of good and evil. Foster

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained quite clearly the dilemma that the United States faced. They complained that the Communists had an unfair advantage: they were able to "appeal directly to the masses" and "get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich." That causes problems. The United States somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.

I made a fool of myself over John Foster Dulles. I made an ass of myself over John Foster Dulles. Something wasn’t right. They weren’t laughing. I pushed on. The first time I saw him ’twas at the UN. I never had been one to swoon over men, But I swooned and the drums started pounding and then … I MADE A FOOL OF MYSELF OVER JOHHHNNN FOSTER DULLES…. Nothing. Nada. They were just sitting there, staring at me. It wasn’t that they were unruly or not interested. It would’ve been better if they had been, but no, they were paying attention, they just weren’t laughing. I felt like I was performing in front of an oil painting. And this was only the opening number. I had twenty minutes to go. My body was heavy with dread.

Oscar-winning triumph. The New York Times called it “a disturbing revelation of the savagery that prevailed in the hearts of the old gun-fighters, who were simply legal killers under the frontier code.” It was that and more. The hero acts precisely as many Americans believe their country acts in the world. He is an enforcer of morality and a scourge of oppressors; he comes from far away but knows instinctively what must be done; he brings peace by slaying wrongdoers; he risks his life to help others; and for all this he wishes no reward other than the quiet satisfaction of having done what was right. Shane reinforced a cultural consensus

You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war. Some say that we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art... If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.

Former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, “The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.” Lesson

In particular, the CIA was the brainchild of men like Allen Dulles.19 Along with his brother, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles was a longtime employee of Sullivan and Cromwell, the storied Wall Street law firm whose clients included the world’s largest multinational corporations.

Unterdessen übte sein Bruder John Foster Dulles – Eisenhowers offizieller Außenminister – mit seinen häufigen Predigten über die Niedertracht der Kommunisten und seinen ständigen Drohungen mit atomarer Auslöschung sein Amt mit der unheildräuenden Düsterkeit eines vom Weltgericht besessenen Pfarrers aus.

John Foster Dulles brauchte den Kommunismus so sehr wie die Puritaner die Sünde,

1959 erlag John Foster Dulles rasch einem Magenkrebs.

John Foster Dulles stieg zum politischen Chefberater Amerikas auf, ein Mann mit der Bestimmung, leise mit Königen, Premierministern und Despoten zu konferieren. Er sah sich selbst gern als Schachmeister der freien Welt.4

Indem er Leuten wie John Foster Dulles Männer wie William Douglas auf den Hals hetzte, brachte Präsident Roosevelt die Plutokratie zur Raserei.

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked.

Americans, even fairly knowledgeable ones, are prey to what might be called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism. Muckraking investigative journalists, now and then exceptions to this rule, lack the patience of the scholar, are completely dependent on their sources, and do not usually understand the minds of politicians in high places. Thus I. F. Stone hinted that Dulles might have been involved in a conspiracy with MacArthur and Chiang to provoke war in Korea, and a gaggle of critics descend on this ridiculous conspiracy theory. It is, indeed unlikely that Dulles was anything more than Acheon’s messenger in June 1950. But he and Acheson were structurally reconstituting a political economy that was a deadly threat to Korean revolutionaries. And conspiracies do exist, even if Foster Dulles was an implausible participant (his countenance was almost as unlikely as Sir John Pratt’s).

a cartoon showing John Foster Dulles on the toilet, with the caption: “The only man in Washington who knows what he is doing.

Exceptionalism”—the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations—was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics.

In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do—because they were Americans.

was brought into the firm, but his network of global contacts quickly paid off. Within the firm he became known as “the little minister.” Although he often worked in Europe, he also became the firm’s key man for deals in Latin America. During his first year as an associate, with help from former colleagues

General Federico Tinoco,

Politik Amerika bersifat global. Suatu negara harus berada pada pihak yang satu atau berada di pihak yang lain. Sikap yang netral itu tidak bermoral - john Foster Dulles

It was Churchill who called John Foster Dulles “the only bull who brings his own china shop with him,” and who coined the progression, “dull, duller, Dulles.

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked. With his long, dour face topped by his ever-present banker’s homburg, the elder Dulles always seemed to be on the brink of foreclosing on all human hope and happiness.

The Dulles brothers were not intimidated by mere presidents. When President Franklin Roosevelt pushed through New Deal legislation to restrain the rampant greed and speculation that had brought the country to economic ruin, John Foster Dulles simply gathered his corporate clients in his Wall Street law office and urged them to defy the president. “Do not comply,” he told them. “Resist the law with all your might, and soon everything will be all right.

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin,

When these same globalists became fearful of worldwide communism (they needed separate national or economic blocs to play off against each other for the tensions necessary for maximum profit and control), they supported National Socialism in Germany. German army intelligence agent Adolf Hitler was funded to provide a bulwark against the Communist tide by enlarging his National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis), in turn sowing the seeds of World War II. Three prominent Americans who were instrumental in funding the Nazis were National City Bank (now Citicorp) chairman John J. McCloy; Schroeder Bank attorneys Allen Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles; and Prescott Bush, a director of Union Banking Corporation and the Hamburg America shipping line.

It is interesting to note that, following World War II, McCloy became the high commissioner of occupied Germany; John Foster Dulles became President Eisenhower’s secretary of state; Allen Dulles became the longest-serving CIA director; and Bush, as a senator from Connecticut, was instrumental in forming the CIA. It might also be noted that both McCloy and Allen Dulles sat on the largely discredited Warren Commission assigned by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Dulles got what he wanted in the negotiations: Wolff and his men in Italy agreed to lay down their arms to the Allied troops. It was, at least on its face, a military and intelligence coup that proved a capstone in Dulles’s ascendant career, helping land him the job of CIA director eight years later, under President Eisenhower, side by side with his brother, John Foster Dulles, who was secretary of state. Viewed with any perspective, however, the early surrender did not hold up as the momentous occasion that Dulles had envisioned it. Coming just six days before the full surrender of Germany, its military impact was blunted. Lives were saved in Italy, to be sure, but most of them were likely Germans and Italians, not Americans.

previous secretary of war, Henry Stimson, memorably put it, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” One of the few American officials who had promoted intelligence

followed Adam Smith on economics, Edmund Burke on society, The Federalist Papers on government, and a merger of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles on national security.

The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.

A more venomous opponent, Christopher Hitchens, made the charge, all too familiar on the left, that Kissinger was a war criminal—what else could he be if his lethal policies had no other aim but his personal advancement? Hitchens drew up a “Bill of Indictment” that charged Kissinger with crimes in such places as Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor. International relations, Hitchens wrote, were treated “as something contingent to his own needs.” One Kissinger defender, his authorized biographer Niall Ferguson, has argued that every postwar administration before Nixon’s—Truman’s, Eisenhower’s, Kennedy’s, and Johnson’s—“could just as easily be accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity.” He pointed out that Eisenhower’s policies in Guatemala had led to the deaths of about 200,000 people. Causing or condoning death, even of innocents, was the price of being a superpower with a global role. Yet perhaps with the exception of Truman (because of his decision to use atomic weapons against Japan), no one was put in the leftist dock as a war criminal so often or to the same degree as Kissinger, not John Foster Dulles, not Dean Rusk. Why, Ferguson wondered, did Kissinger’s accusers subject him to a “double standard”? The left, however, didn’t see a double standard. Kissinger, alone among postwar policymakers, was charged with making decisions out of personal interest, not national or global concerns. According to his critics, he “believed in nothing,” though it would be more accurate to say that what he believed in was weighing means against ends, a kind of situational, pragmatic ethics that rejected the left’s moralistic strictures. What he didn’t believe in were absolutes. “There is no easy and surely no final answer,” he said. To be sure, valid objections could be raised against specific Kissinger policies, even in his own terms of weighing means against ends—the invasion of Cambodia, for example, or the tilt toward Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis—and there is certainly truth to Seymour Hersh’s assertion that “Nixon and Kissinger remained blind to the human costs of their actions.” Callousness has always been the besetting sin of Realpolitik, and it is not difficult to find examples of almost brutal coldness in Kissinger’s record. “It’s none of our business how they treat their own people,” he said of Moscow’s policy toward Soviet Jews. “I’m Jewish myself, but who are we to complain?” Actual human beings could get lost as power was being balanced.

a meeting of the National Security Council on March 20, 1958, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a rather startling admission. Visibly weakened by the terminal cancer to which he would succumb in a little over a year, he allowed that he had been quite wrong in regarding the nationalist and anticolonialist movements he had engaged in battle around the world as fifth columns for communism. As the scribe of the meeting paraphrased him, in looking at the three trouble spots that most concerned the Eisenhower administration at that moment—Indonesia, North Africa and the Middle East—Dulles had now concluded that “the directing forces are not communist, but primarily forces favorable personally to a Sukarno, a Nasser or the like. Developments in these areas had not been initiated by Soviet plots.

Fue su época de gloria. Mezclando las amenazas con una capacidad inaudita para la intriga y un olfato generalmente certero, un espíritu práctico así como un coraje temerario, se las arregló para armar una junta militar, apoyada por la corona y equipada con armas y dinero de Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña, que derrotó a las guerrillas e instaló un régimen autoritario y represivo en el país. Se ganó entonces el apelativo del Carnicero de Grecia. John Foster Dulles y su hermano Allen, el jefe de la CIA, pensaron que semejante diplomático era el hombre adecuado para representar en Guatemala al país que había decidido acabar por las buenas o las malas con el gobierno de Jacobo Árbenz. Y, en efecto, apenas llegado a Guatemala con su infalible sombrerito borsalino engalanado con una pluma, sin preocuparse de verificar sobre el terreno si las acusaciones de ser el de Árbenz un régimen capturado por el comunismo eran exageradas e irreales —como se atrevió a sugerirle su segundo en la legación—, empezó a trabajar con ímpetu en la demolición de ese gobierno.

Six years later, when he ran to secure the presidential nomination for the Republican Party, he joined forces with John Foster Dulles, the brother of Allen Dulles – best known for his role as the first civilian head of the CIA in the early years of the Cold War. Dulles, a member of the “internationalist” camp of American politics that typified the attitudes of the elite “Eastern Establishment,” impressed upon Dewey the importance of overcoming the isolationist factions of the Republican Party.6,7 What Dulles got in exchange for his steering of Dewey in pursuit of political power was his own rise through the ranks of the party, ultimately culminating in his service as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

Brinkmanship: "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost." — John Foster Dulles, 1956 Bureaucrats, caution of: "There are old bureaucrats and there are bold bureaucrats, but there are no old, bold bureaucrats." — U.S. Department of State saying Bureaucrats, foreign ministry: Officials in foreign ministries have an advantage which few other bureaucrats have; when dealing with an especially awkward or apparently insoluble problem they can instruct their nation's ambassadors abroad to register concern about it, enabling themselves to claim to their superiors and to other interested parties at home that they have done something about the issue. If there are no results, they can impute blame to someone else for this deplorable outcome. If the issue is resolved, they will be in a position to claim credit for this. Bureaucrats, statesmen: In times of crisis, statesmen go straight for the jugular; bureaucrats go directly for the capillaries.

When Israel ignored UN demands that it halt work on a canal to divert water from the Jordan River in September 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles promptly announced that the United States was suspending foreign assistance. The threat worked: Israel agreed to stop the project on October 27 and U.S. aid was restored.5 Similar threats to halt American aid played a key role in convincing Israel to withdraw from the territory it had seized from Egypt in the 1956 Suez War.

Later in life he came to believe that his interest in espionage was shaped in part by the experience of “finding the fish, hooking the fish and playing the fish, [working] to draw him in and tire him until he’s almost glad to be caught in the net.

We did not think of these people in terms of foreign policy, but we did grow to understand the life, the poverty, the superstitions, and the eager hopefulness of those with whom the missionaries dealt,” the boys’ younger sister Eleanor later wrote. “Foster gained much from these contacts, some of which he renewed in later life.… There was something unique that left an indelible mark on all of us—not only a deep faith in central religious truths, but also a sense of the obligation of such a faith toward each other and toward those distant people who were striving to gain new light and freedom.

Algernon Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell founded their law firm in 1879 to pursue a new business art: bringing investors and enterprises together to create giant corporations. Sullivan & Cromwell played an important role in the development of modern capitalism by helping to organize what its official history calls “some of America’s greatest industrial, commercial, and financial enterprises.” In 1882 it created Edison General Electric Company. Seven years later, with the financier J. P. Morgan as its client, it wove twenty-one steelmakers into the National Tube Company and then, in 1891, merged National Tube with seven other companies to create U.S. Steel, capitalized at more than one billion dollars, an astounding sum at that time. The railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, whom President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced as a “malefactor of great wealth” and “enemy of the Republic,” hired the firm to wage two of his legendary proxy wars, one to take over the Illinois Central Railroad and another to fend off angry shareholders at the Wells Fargo bank.

Soon afterward, working on behalf of French investors who were facing ruin after their effort to build a canal across Panama collapsed, Sullivan & Cromwell achieved a unique triumph in global politics. Through a masterful lobbying campaign, its endlessly resourceful managing partner, William Nelson Cromwell, persuaded the United States Congress to reverse its decision to build a canal across Nicaragua and to pay his French clients $40 million for their land in Panama instead. Then he helped engineer a revolution that pulled the province of Panama away from Colombia and established it as an independent country, led by a clique willing to show its gratitude by allowing construction of a canal on terms favorable to the United States. One newspaper called him “the man whose masterful mind, whetted on the grindstone of corporate cunning, conceived and carried out the rape of the Isthmus.

One of the few American officials who had promoted intelligence gathering was John Watson Foster, who in 1892–93 had begun the practice of assigning military attachés to American legations and embassies, and had dispatched agents to European cities to “examine the military libraries, bookstores, and publishers’ lists in order to give early notice of any new or important publications or inventions or improvements in arms.

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At the end of his junior year, Foster was given an opportunity few college students could imagine. The imperial government of China, which “Grandfather Foster” represented in Washington, hired the former secretary of state to advise its delegation to the Second Hague Peace Conference in the Netherlands, and he took his grandson along as secretary. The conference was part of an ambitious effort, promoted by President Theodore Roosevelt and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, to establish global rules that would reduce the danger of war. History assigns it only modest importance, but for nineteen-year-old John Foster Dulles it was a breathtaking introduction to the world of high-level diplomacy and international law. He was able to watch statesmen from dozens of countries ply their trade, with his grandfather at hand to interpret their aims, motives, and tactics.

The twenty-eight-year-old Vietnamese nationalist who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh had already seen much of the world. He had visited India, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and even the United States, where he worked briefly as a pastry chef at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. The end of the Great War found him in France, which ruled his native Vietnam as a colony. There he became an anticolonial agitator.

After leaving office, “Grandfather Foster” considered returning to his Indiana law practice, but after hearing another Indiana lawyer recount a long legal battle over a hog, he decided to stay in Washington.

Allie was preparing for a date on a Friday afternoon—according to one version he was meeting “two blonde and spectacularly buxom Swiss twin sisters who had agreed to a weekend rendezvous at a country inn”—when he received a telephone call from a Russian exile who said he had an urgent message to deliver to the United States, and insisted they meet that night. With his mind focused on the forthcoming weekend, Allie brushed him off. Years afterward he learned that the caller was Lenin, and that the reason Lenin never called back was that the next day he boarded his sealed train to St. Petersburg and set off to change the course of history. “Here the first chance—if in fact it was a chance—to start talking to the Communist leaders was lost,” Allie later admitted.

Presidents had ordered interventions before, but Wilson’s were different because of the reason he repeatedly gave: he wanted to bring democracy to oppressed people. This was a radically new concept. Past American leaders had taken the opposite view, that darker-skinned people were incapable of self-government and needed to be ruled by others—a view summarized by the first American military commander in Cuba, General William Shafter, when he pronounced Cubans “no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell.” Wilson thought otherwise. “When properly directed,” he asserted, “there is no people not fitted to self-government.

Two of his specialties were organizing overseas-loan syndicates for New York banks and helping utility companies take control of utilities in foreign countries. Foster also took a ghostwriting assignment from his mentor Bernard Baruch, who like many of Wilson’s friends and admirers was disturbed by the runaway success of a 1919 book attacking the Versailles treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes. The book warned that the treaty’s reparations section, which Foster had drafted and Baruch presented as his own, exposed Europe to “the menace of inflationism.” Baruch resolved to reply. His book, ponderously titled The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty, argued that reparations clauses were “vital to the interest of the American people and even more vital to world stability.” Foster did most of the writing and editing, for which Baruch paid him ten thousand dollars.

Sex, it appears, was to Allen Dulles a form of physical therapy, something one did to keep himself fit for more important things,” one biographer has surmised.

The Dulles brothers were paragons of the Wilsonian idea that came to be known as “liberal internationalism.” They believed that trouble in the world came from misunderstandings among ruling elites, not from social or political injustices, and that commerce could reduce or eliminate this trouble. This was a refined version of the “open door” policy the United States had embraced for decades—a policy that might better be called “kick in the door” because it was aimed at forcing other countries to accept trade arrangements favorable to American interests. At its core was the reassuring belief that whatever benefited American business would ultimately benefit everyone.

I’m not sure I want to go to heaven,” Douglas mused later in life. “I’m afraid I might meet John Foster Dulles there.

He was a good tennis player and he knew when to lose. If he was playing with a tycoon’s wife, he made certain they would win. But if the tycoon himself was in the opposite court, he’d keep the game ding-donging along until practically the final volley, when Allen would fumble and flub. That way the tycoon felt marvelous, having won a hard-fought game, and his wife didn’t feel too bad either—after all, it wasn’t her fault they’d lost—and both felt benevolent toward Allen. Such a good loser he was, too.

Among Foster’s premier clients was the New Jersey–based International Nickel Company, for which he was not only counsel but also a director and member of the executive board. In the early 1930s he steered it, along with its Canadian affiliate, into a cartel with France’s two major nickel producers. In 1934 he brought the biggest German nickel producer, I.G. Farben, into the cartel. This gave Nazi Germany access to the cartel’s resources. “Without Dulles,” according to a study of Sullivan & Cromwell, “Germany would have lacked any negotiating strength with [International Nickel], which controlled the world’s supply of nickel, a crucial ingredient in stainless steel and armor plate.

The two men, spymaster and spiritual seeker, met at the beginning of 1943 and struck up what Allen called a “still-experimental marriage between espionage and psychology.” Jung wrote a series of reports, including psychological profiles of Hitler and other Nazi leaders, that Allen said were of “real help to me in gauging the political situation.” Some reached the Allied commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, who sent Jung a letter of commendation after the war ended.

Donovan was a born leader of men,” Allen Dulles later wrote of the dynamo who became his wartime boss. “He had indefatigable energy and wide-ranging enthusiasm combined with great courage and resourcefulness.… He knew the world, having traveled widely. He understood people. He had a flair for the unusual and for the dangerous, tempered with judgment. In short, he had the qualities to be desired in an intelligence officer.

Allen was less than thrilled at the prospect, but with the Office of Strategic Services shutting down he had no better option. At the end of 1945 he resigned from government service for the second time. He returned to law practice under his brother’s supervision, and with some difficulty began feigning interest in bonds, debentures, and indemnities. “Much of the sparkle and charm went out of Allen’s personality as I had known it,” Mary Bancroft later wrote. “It was rather like the way an exuberant young person behaves when his parents suddenly show up.

Western secret services had always kept the collection of intelligence strictly separate from the analysis and possible action that might follow from it, since concentrating those functions in a single agency was thought likely to lead to intelligence reports tainted by pressure from covert operatives. This principle had been allowed to lapse during wartime, and the OSS men became accustomed to doing every part of the job: collecting intelligence, analyzing it, and acting on it. President Truman had created a loose body called the Central Intelligence Group to advise him on intelligence matters, but he gave it no authority to carry out covert operations. Allen wished this to change. “The collection of secret intelligence is closely related to the conduct of secret operations,” he argued in one confidential report. “The two activities support each other and can be disassociated only to the detriment of both.

On January 2, 1951, he formally began his career at the CIA. He had already won a concession from his boss. His title would not be “deputy director for operations,” but “deputy director for plans,” which he found more suitably obscure. The Soviets were not deceived. They had closely followed Allen’s career, and when he joined the CIA, the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg took note. “Even if the spy Allen Dulles should arrive in Heaven through someone’s absentmindedness,” Ehrenburg wrote in Pravda, “he would begin to blow up the clouds, mine the stars, and slaughter the angels.

Not until more than a decade had passed did one reason for this epic failure become clear. The senior British intelligence officer assigned as liaison to the CIA, Kim Philby, was a double agent working for the Soviets. Philby spent years in Washington and knew the top CIA men as well as any outsider. Later he wrote that he had found General Smith to have “a precision-tooled brain,” but was less impressed with Allen.

The new National Security Act contained a tantalizing clause worded to allow endlessly elastic interpretation. It authorized the CIA to perform not only duties spelled out by law, but also “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” This gave it the legal right to take any action, anywhere in the world, as long as the president approved. “The fear generated by competition with a nation like the USSR, which had elevated control of every aspect of society to a science, encouraged the belief in the United States that it desperately needed military might and counterespionage by agencies that could outdo the Soviet spymasters,” the historian Robert Dallek has written.

Six-footer John Foster Dulles looks like a serious, mild-mannered professor, but don’t let his looks fool you,” his campaign brochure urged. “He’s serious all right, but the way he’s handled the Reds has proved he’s far from mild. He’s downright serious about keeping the world from going Communist. From the front row, he’s watched the Red menace creep over one-third of the face of the globe, and he’s learned some bitter truths. The Reds know he knows those truths. That’s why Andrei Vishinsky screamed, ‘That man should be put in chains.’ Can you think of a better tribute or a greater reason for keeping him in the Senate? The Commies dislike Foster Dulles for the same reason you will like him. He knows that their greatest threat to us is internal penetration by fellow-travelers. That’s why he fights Socialism and every sign of this political cancer in this country.… No wonder the Russians don’t want him in Washington!

His first operation, in the Philippines, was remarkably successful. It also led him into a long and fateful relationship with Edward Lansdale, a former advertising executive who became one of the most admired CIA operatives of his age. Lansdale conceived a strategy, based in part on manipulating superstitions, religious beliefs, and rumors, by which he believed the army of the Philippines could defeat a Communist-led insurgency. He had also discovered a rising Catholic politician, Ramon Magsaysay, and was grooming him for national leadership.

Foster, meanwhile, continued making news as the Republican member of American diplomatic missions. Several times he clashed dramatically with Andrei Vishinsky, the fire-breathing Soviet deputy foreign minister, who had been chief prosecutor at Stalin’s grotesque Great Purge trials. He would later write that Vishinsky’s arrogant intransigence was for him “a streak of lightning that suddenly illuminated a dark and stormy scene. We saw as never before the magnitude of the task of saving Europe for Western civilization.

On the afternoon of October 8, CIA officers presented this plot, called Operation Fortune, to their counterparts at the State Department. Frank Wisner said that the CIA was seeking approval “to provide certain hardware to a group planning violence against a certain government.” Another officer asserted that the operation was necessary because “a large American company must be protected.” State Department officials at the meeting, according to one account, “hit the ceiling.” One of them, David Bruce, Allen’s old OSS comrade, told him that the State Department “disapproves of the entire deal.” The next morning Smith gave his men the bad news. J. C. King, chief of the Western Hemisphere division, recorded the meeting in a memorandum. The Director explained to [initials not declassified] that all plans for the operation were canceled. [Initials not declassified] then pointed out the responsibilities we have toward the people who are already in the field and who have committed themselves, and the dangers to the entire Caribbean of the decision reached yesterday. The Director replied that he was fully aware of the dangers inherent in such a decision, but that this Agency is merely an executive agency to carry out the policies of the Department of State and the Department of Defense, and if they instruct us not to engage in a certain operation, we shall not engage in that operation. [Initials not declassified] then commented that the Department of State might very well change its position in the near future.… To this the Director agreed.

Lansdale operated with very little money,” according to one account. “His mode of operation was to gain the confidence of the Filipinos and to persuade them to take the necessary actions to promote Magsaysay, and to do this to help their own country and not to help the United States. However, on one of his trips to Washington, Allen Dulles offered Lansdale five million dollars to finance the CIA operations in the Philippines. Lansdale was uneasy about this amount of money and asked if he was supposed to buy votes with it.… He did finally accept one million dollars, which was delivered to him in cash by another CIA operator in the Philippines.” Lansdale’s counterinsurgency campaign was brilliantly designed and brought near-total victory. He also helped make Magsaysay a global symbol of anti-Communist nationalism, guiding him first onto the cover of Time and then to the presidency of the Philippines. Allen was thrilled. His appetite whetted, he twice offered to overthrow a foreign government.

The contest for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948 was not just between Dewey and Taft, but between the “internationalist” and “isolationist” wings of the party. Foster was Dewey’s foreign policy adviser during the campaign, and through Dewey, he pressed his internationalist views. In a series of memos for the candidate, he argued that the United States faced imminent threat and was called to forward defense around the world. “The enemies of human freedom are ever present and constantly looking for what seem to be soft spots,” he wrote. He also published an article in Life pledging that Republicans would move the United States “from a purely defensive policy to a psychological offensive, a liberation policy which will try and give hope and a resistance mood within the Soviet empire.

Reports in the American press depicted Foster as the wizard who managed the San Francisco conference from behind the scenes. They were the result of his practice of briefing reporters privately at the end of each day’s proceedings, usually placing himself at the center of events. This greatly irritated the delegation’s chairman, Secretary of State Stettinius, and its official spokesman, Adlai Stevenson,

One of the most productive relationships Foster developed in the 1940s was with the ambitious journalistic entrepreneur Henry Luce, who had become the country’s most powerful opinion maker. Luce’s views reached one million subscribers to Time, four million subscribers to Life, eighteen million listeners who heard The March of Time each week on the radio, countless more who watched The March of Time newsreels, and an elite business audience that subscribed to Fortune—by one estimate “at least a third and perhaps considerably more of the total literate adult population in the country.” No other media baron had anything approaching his reach or influence.

Congress accepted Truman’s worldview and appropriated the $400 million he requested for military aid to countries where Communist influence was seen to be growing. Some historians pinpoint this as the moment when the Cold War began in earnest, as the United States proclaimed that it considered the entire world a battleground between the superpowers.

it was particularly comforting to the more established figures of Washington to have a man like Allen Dulles as head of the CIA. His job so readily lent itself to the abuse of power, but he was a comforting figure.… He was affable as his brother, Foster, was not. Even more importantly, he lacked Foster’s dogmatism and righteousness and rigid certainties.… A man that accessible, that open and gregarious, could hardly be a part of a world of invisible men with false identities who worked in the darkness. Rather, he seemed a thoughtful, fair-minded, humane public servant who seemed to offer reassurance that whatever things his men were doing, they were the kind of things that everyone at the party would approve of. He was not only the head of the closed society, he was its ambassador to the open one.

Years later it became clear that Allen’s efforts to influence the American press were not casual or episodic, but part of a multifaceted project called Operation Mockingbird. Through it he funneled information, some of it classified, to journalists disposed to promote the CIA worldview, among them James Reston of the New York Times, Benjamin Bradlee of Newsweek, and the influential columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop. Operatives also planted stories in smaller news outlets and then arranged for them to be amplified through networks controlled by friendly media barons. Frank Wisner, who helped oversee Mockingbird, called it the CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer.

Many historians have observed that, as Stephen Ambrose put it, “Eisenhower and Dulles continued the policy of containment. There was no basic difference between their foreign policy and that of Truman and Acheson.” Eisenhower, though, combined the mind-set of a warrior with a sober understanding of the devastation that full-scale warfare brings. That led him to covert action. With the Dulles brothers as his right and left arms, he led the United States into a secret global conflict that raged throughout his presidency.

Eisenhower would also have seen covert action as humanitarian. It was a way to fight high-stakes battles at low cost. Never foreseeing the long-term effects these operations might have, he imagined them as almost bloodless.

Not content with striking this heavy blow against the position of foreign capital in Iran, Mossadegh soon dealt another. Parliament chose him as prime minister on April 28, 1951. Before accepting, he asked for a vote in favor of nationalizing the country’s oil industry. It was unanimous. This dramatic step boded ill for another of Allen’s most important clients, the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, which served as financial agent for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and on whose board he sat. It also jolted Foster, who was then seeking business in Iran for another Sullivan & Cromwell client, the Chase Manhattan Bank. Beyond that, it was a frontal attack on the structure of the petroleum industry, with which the firm had been deeply involved for decades and which had become a foundation of the global economy. Mossadegh’s opposition to Western privilege made him the sort of leader the Dulles brothers instinctively mistrusted. Their mistrust turned to enmity when he helped kill the OCI contract. It sharpened further when he nationalized his country’s oil industry. He embodied one of their nightmares: a populist rabble-rouser who stirs the masses by rejecting the way the world is run.

At one point Allen told his friend Nelson Rockefeller that if he was not named to direct the CIA, he might seek to become president of the Ford Foundation, which was already a cover for much covert action. The Washington Post published an editorial asserting that some CIA operations seemed “incompatible with democracy,” but it did not mention the fact that the agency’s deputy director was hoping for a promotion. Inauguration Day came and went without an announcement. Finally, at the end of January, Eisenhower gave Allen the job. He would be the third director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the first civilian to hold the post. On February 26, 1953, the Senate confirmed his appointment without opposition.

Whatever personal pleasure Eleanor took from Eisenhower’s victory stemmed from what it meant not for her, but for her brothers. Neither was young by the time he reached the pinnacle of power; Foster was sixty-five years old, Allen sixty. Long experience had hardened their view of the world. As the most intense phase of the Cold War began, it became the official view of the United States.

In the election of November 4, 1952, Eisenhower won a landslide victory over Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Foster was the likely secretary of state but not a sure thing. His clipped, sanctimonious manner had irritated many in Washington. Others objected to his Manichean worldview. Some European statesmen thought him lacking in grace, subtlety, and wisdom. The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, went so far as to write Eisenhower asking him to choose someone else. For a time Eisenhower seemed to be leaning toward John J. McCloy, who had run the World Bank and then became high commissioner for Germany. He also considered Paul Hoffman, the administrator of the Marshall Plan—which covertly funneled 5 percent of its budget to the CIA—and Walter Judd, a militantly anti-Communist congressman from Minnesota.

The elaborate OCI proposal to Iran, five volumes long, envisioned huge-scale projects including hydroelectric plants, rebuilt cities, and new industries imported from abroad. Mohammad Reza Shah, who had grown up mainly in Europe and knew little of his homeland, was captivated but uncertain. The directors of OCI needed a special envoy to close the deal. They hired Allen, who was a famous charmer as well as the former head of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. In the autumn of 1949, Allen flew to Tehran to meet the shah. He must have been persuasive. Soon after he returned home, it was announced that Iran had agreed to pay OCI a staggering $650 million—more than five billion in the early twenty-first century—to complete a massive seven-year enterprise. This would be the largest overseas development project in modern history. It was the greatest triumph of Allen’s legal career. For Sullivan & Cromwell it opened a world of possibilities. “OCI provided the King of Kings with a blueprint for economic revolution,” Time reported, “and US and Western European businessmen with a guide to a vast new area of relatively untapped markets.

Moscow’s involvement in Iran was negligible,” the historian Richard Immerman later concluded, “but [Foster] Dulles could not distinguish between indigenous nationalism and imported communism.

Not until 2005 did the first serious studies of Gladio appear. In one of them, the Swiss scholar Daniele Ganser reported that in eight of the fifteen countries where the CIA shaped “stay-behind” armies—Italy, Turkey, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Sweden—“links to terrorism have been either confirmed or claimed.

Declassified records show that on this same day, April 4, Allen set in motion another of his extraordinary projects: MKULTRA, a mind-control experiment that aimed to test the value of drugs in black operations. He received a proposal from one of his trusted operatives, Richard Helms, recommending that the CIA “develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials” that could be used in “discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.” Soon afterward he approved MKULTRA with a budget of $300,000. It included experiments in which LSD was administered to CIA and other government employees, doctors, prisoners, mental patients, and prostitutes and their clients.

Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy had three components: a smaller army, nuclear deterrence, and covert action. The first two were public. Few knew about the third.

Joe, you’re not going to have Bundy as a witness,” Allen said. The senators were startled, but Allen held fast and departed cheerfully. Later that day he called Vice President Nixon and asked him to use his influence to calm McCarthy. Nixon did so. Never again did any of McCarthy’s investigators seek to question a CIA officer. Some quietly cheered Allen’s successful defiance, though Walter Lippmann warned that it would strengthen “the argument that the CIA is something apart.

McCarthy was a leading promoter of the loose but powerful “China Lobby.” So was Henry Luce, who used Time and Life to promote the view that China had been “lost” in part because of perfidy in the State Department; he featured Chiang on no fewer than ten Time covers. Foster appointed a “China Lobby” favorite, a Virginia banker named Walter Robinson, as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. Eisenhower picked another, Admiral Arthur Radford, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It took Roosevelt just a couple of weeks to throw Tehran into chaos. On the night of August 15, he sprung his trap. He sent the elite Imperial Guard, sworn to obey only the shah, to Mossadegh’s house with orders to arrest him. The operation went disastrously wrong. Mossadegh had learned of the plot, and the Imperial Guard, which was to have captured him, was itself captured by loyal soldiers. Upon hearing this news on the radio at six o’clock the next morning, the shah panicked, grabbed a couple of suitcases, and fled to Rome. This first attempted CIA coup was worse than a failure. Not only did Mossadegh survive, but the shah, America’s best Iranian friend, had scurried into exile.

Douglas also visited Iran that year, to travel on horseback through tribal homelands. He was one of the few Americans of his generation to become thoroughly absorbed with Iran. In interviews, articles, and a book called Strange Lands and Friendly People, he championed Mossadegh as “a great popular hero” who was “passionately Persian and anti-Soviet in his leanings,” embraced “democratic ideals,” and “offers an alternative to Communist leadership.” This was exactly opposite to the Dulles view. Foster and Allen saw Mossadegh through an ideological prism, as an enemy of global capitalism and therefore a threat to the West. Douglas saw him as Iran’s liberator and did not much care whether he served American interests.

The one-sided agreements that Sullivan & Cromwell conceived to promote United Fruit’s interests in Latin America were legendary. One of them, signed in 1936 with General Jorge Ubico, the dictator of Guatemala, gave the company rule for ninety-nine years over tracts that comprised one-seventh of the country’s arable land, as well as control of its only port. These contracts were engineered by the lawyer who had more experience than any other American in the exquisite art of squeezing concessions out of weak countries. “John Foster Dulles, back in the early days when his law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell represented United Fruit, was reputed to be the author of the actual concessions which the firm negotiated on our behalf,” a former United Fruit vice president, Thomas McCann, wrote in his history of the company. “I was told this by Sam G. Baggett, longtime United Fruit general counsel and the man who should have known.

Foster never forgot the trauma of Woodrow Wilson’s collapse after his failure to win Senate approval for American entry into the League of Nations. From it he drew the lesson that makers of American foreign policy must work closely with Congress and avoid alienating any of its prominent members.

No statesman was ever as close to Foster as Adenauer. This closeness extended to Allen, who with Adenauer’s blessing built strong ties between the CIA and the West German secret services, and to their sister Eleanor, who was one of the most prominent Americans in Germany during the 1950s. She was the first member of the family Adenauer met, over lunch at the beginning of 1953.

John Moors Cabot, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, came from a family that held United Fruit stock, and his brother, Thomas, had been the company’s president. Another member of their family, Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to the United Nations, had defended the company so vigorously during his years as a U.S. senator from Massachusetts that he became known as “the senator from United Fruit.” Robert Cutler, the president’s national security adviser, was a former member of United Fruit’s board of directors. Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith spoke of his wish to join the United Fruit board

In mid-1954 Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana publicly accused the CIA of tapping Figueres’s telephone, an offense that he said could have “tremendous impact” on the region. This did not stop Allen from encouraging the anti-Figueres plotters, but they failed for two reasons. First, Allen was preoccupied with deposing Arbenz in nearby Guatemala; second, since there was no army in Costa Rica, he had no instrument through which to carry out a coup.