CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Directors of Central Intelligence

Allen Welsh Dulles (1893-1969)

DCI, 26 Feb. 1953-29 Nov. 1961

Material on Dulles

The CIA "has released to Princeton University some 7,800 documents" covering Dulles' career. The materials can be accessed online. See below, Princeton University, Staff, "Dulles Papers Released by CIA to Princeton Are Now Online," News@Princeton, 23 Jan. 2008.

Baker, Russell. "The Other Mr. Dulles--Of the CIA." New York Times Magazine, 6 Mar. 1958, 17, 96-97. [Petersen]

Bancroft, Mary. Autobiography of a Spy. New York: Morrow, 1983.

Bancroft worked for Allen Dulles in Switzerland in World War II.

Brands, H.W., Jr. "Allen Dulles and the Overthrow of Clausewitz." In Cold Warriors: Eisenhower's Generation and American Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Charlesworth, Lorie, and Michael Salter. "Ensuring the After-Life of the Ciano Diaries: Allen Dulles' Provision of Nuremberg Trial Evidence." Intelligence and National Security 21, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 568-603.

Interesting article about Dulles' efforts to retrieve a copy of the diaries of Count Ciano, Mussolini's foreign minister 1936-1943, from Ciano's wife and the use of the diaries at the Nuremberg trial of Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Edwards, Robert, and Kenneth Dunne. A Study of a Master Spy, Allen Dulles. London: Housemans, 1961.

Rocca and Dziak: "This attack on Allen Dulles may be an example of KGB-directed disinformation."

Grose, Peter. Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Clark comment: Publication of this biography of Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961, ranks as one of the more important events in intelligence historiography in the 1990s. Grose's research is of the highest quality, and he tells his story well. Agency critics and noncritics alike have found things to quibble about in Grose's presentation, but the heart and soul of the work remain unscathed. For anyone seriously interested in this period of American and/or intelligence history, Gentleman Spy is a mandatory read.

Click for an extensive selection of reviews.

Jackson, Wayne G. Allen Welsh Dulles As Director of Central Intelligence, 26 February 1953-29 November 1961. 5 vols. Washington, DC: CIA History Office, [released with deletions,1994].

Zubok, "Spy vs. Spy," CWIHPB 4 (Fall 1994), fn. 22, describes this five-volume work as the "internal CIA history of [Dulles'] tenure as Director..., declassified with deletions in 1994, copy available from the CIA History Office and on file at the National Security Archive, Washington, DC."

Kent, Sherman. "Allen Welsh Dulles: 1893-1969." Studies in Intelligence 13, no. 2 (Spring 1969): 1-2.

This is Kent's tribute to his boss, broadly and specifically as it related to analysis.

Mosley, Leonard. Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network. New York: Dial, 1978.

Campbell, IJI&C 3.1, says that "Leonard Mosley's book as a source on Allen Dulles ... is full of inaccuracies and imagined events." Petersen warns, "Caveat Lector."

Murphy, Mark. "The Exploits of Agent 110: Allen Dulles in Wartime." Studies in Intelligence 37, no. 5 (1994): 63-70.

In 1917, with the U.S. declaration of war on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the young Allen Dulles moves from the U.S. Embassy in Vienna to the U.S. legation in Bern. He was assigned to "take charge of intelligence." And the story goes on from there, with Dulles returning to Bern with the OSS in 1942. Dulles' handling of two important sources, Fritz Kolbe and Hans Bernd Gisevius, is discussed.

Petersen, Neal H., ed. From Hitler's Doorstep: The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942-1945. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1996.

Macartney, Intelligencer 8.1, believes that this compendium "will prove to be a boon to World War II historians." He suggests that it be read in conjunction with Jürgen Heideking and Christof Mauch, eds., American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler: A Documentary History (Scranton, PA: Westview, 1996).

The reviewer for Virginia Quarterly Review 73.1 comments that "Petersen has carefully and caringly edited the radioteletype and telegraph messages to present a detailed picture of American intelligence gathering in its early days. Petersen also provides a most helpful introduction."

Phillips, Cabell. "Mr. Dulles of the Silent Service." New York Times Magazine, 29 Mar. 1953, 12 ff. [Petersen]

Phillips, David Atlee. "The Great White Case Officer." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 1, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 97-102.

Fond -- and fanciful -- remembrance of Allen Dulles, written by the former chief of CIA Latin American operations.

Powers, Thomas. "The Founding Father." New York Review of Books, 1 Dec. 1994. Chapter 3 in Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda, 45-57. Rev. & exp. ed. New York: New York Review of Books, 2004.

Reviewing Grose's Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (1994), Powers comments that "Dulles was not the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the best, certainly not the wisest, or even the most aggressive,... [but] he was without question the most important director of the CIA in its first half century.... Allen Dulles did for American intelligence what John Paul Jones did for the American Navy."

Princeton University. Staff. "Dulles Papers Released by CIA to Princeton Are Now Online." News@Princeton, 23 Jan. 2008. [http://www.princeton.edu]

"The Central Intelligence Agency has released to Princeton University some 7,800 documents covering the career of Allen W. Dulles, the agency's longest-serving director, which now can be viewed online....

"The Allen W. Dulles Digital Files released to Princeton contain scanned images of professional correspondence, reports, lectures and administrative papers covering Dulles' tenure with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) ... as well as his career with the CIA and his retirement. The CIA culled these documents from Dulles' home office, and the agency maintains the originals."

See "Allen W. Dulles Papers: Digital Files Series, 1939-1977: Finding Aid" at: http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead/eadGetDoc.xq?id=/ead/mudd/publicpolicy/MC019.09.EAD.xml. The page with the "Finding Aid" notes: "Items relating to Dulles' time with the CIA have been heavily redacted, obscuring the names of correspondents as well as individuals and events mentioned in reports and letters, greatly reducing the research potential of these materials. "

Salter, Michael. "Intelligence Agencies and War Crimes Prosecution: Allen Dulles's Involvement in Witness Testimony at Nuremberg." Journal of International Criminal Justice 2 (2004): 826-854.

Smith, Bradley F., and Elena Agarossi. Operation Sunrise: The Secret Surrender. New York: Basic, 1979. London: André Deutsch, 1979.

Constantinides calls this a "scholarly history" of the Allied effort to secure the surrender of German forces in Italy. The authors "go too far at times" in seeking to revise the view of Allen Dulles' role in the surrender negotiations, especially in suggesting that Dulles had accomplished nothing in OSS up to this time.

See Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), for Dulles' firsthand account of Operation Sunrise.

Srodes, James. Allen Dulles: Master of Spies. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999.

Stein, Washington Post, 20 Jun. 1999, suggests that this is a story "that now has been told many times, unfortunately for James Srodes." In a similar vein, Hochschild, Times Literary Supplement, 17 Sep. 1999, suggests that the reason for a new biography of Dulles is that the author "apparently thinks Dulles deserves a more admiring view" than was given in Peter Grose's Gentleman Spy.

For Goulden, Intelligencer 10.2, "Srodes' strength is that he grasps what made Mr. Dulles an effective spymaster." The author also "devotes major space to the OSS period, providing a keen insight into the daily activities of a working intelligence officer."

Harold Ford, IJI&C 13.2, suggests that while "Srodes points up some weakness and failures, ... on balance [he] generates marked and deserved gratitude for Dulles's many contributions to American life.... Srodes is especially good at pointing out that Allen Dulles had made a lifetime of contributions to United States diplomacy and foreign policy long before he had become DCI.... [And he] renders an excellent treatment of the many episodes of Dulles's incumbency as DCI."

To Bates, NIPQ, Spring 2000, this book is "entertaining and easy to read." The narrative of Dulles' service in Bonn "is well done and describes in detail [his] fine espionage tradecraft." Srodes does, however, spend "an inordinate amount of time on the Bay of Pigs fiasco."

Weiner, Tim. "The Great White Case Officer." Washington Monthly, Nov. 1994, 50-53.

This is a review article of Peter Grose's Gentleman Spy (1994).

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