Allen Dulles

Allen Welsh Dulles (April 7, 1893—January 29, 1969) was director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1953 to 1961, appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and serving under the subsequent Kennedy administration as well. He had previously been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War.

Dulles was the younger brother of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In his early career, Allen Dulles worked as a lawyer at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where his brother was a chairman and senior partner. The Dulles brothers, both working in the interest of Sullivan & Cromwell and on the behalf of their corporate clients such as the United Fruit Company, and both holding influential positions of U.S. foreign policy, worked in collaboration on enacting the imperialist foreign policy of the United States.

Under Dulles as director, the CIA participated in the overthrow of government in Iran in 1953, the overthrow of government in Guatemala in 1954, the Project MKUltra mind control program, and the planning of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba which had been intended to overthrow Fidel Castro. The CIA was also during this period involved in plans for the assassination of Patrice Lumumba during the Congo Crisis and to the overthrow of government in Indonesia.

Family

Their grandfather, John W. Foster, was the secretary of state under president Benjamin Harrison, served as U.S. minister to the court of Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg, and negotiated an (unadopted) treaty for the annexation of Hawaii. Allen Dulles was also the nephew of Robert Lansing, who was secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson.

1953 Iran coup d'etat

See also: Islamic Republic of Iran#Pahlavi monarchy, United States imperialism#Iran

Working with British spies, the Dulles brothers engineered the 1953 coup of Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian prime minister who had nationalized Iran’s oil industry. Political analysts Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould described this event as "the CIA's first rollback success" and wrote that the British asked for assistance and the CIA sent Middle East expert Kermit Roosevelt with a team and "plenty of dollars" for the purposes of bribery, and that, in a series of machinations, the CIA overthrew nationalist Mossadegh and brought the pro-U.S. Shah into power.

1954 Guatemala coup d'etat

See also: United Fruit Company, Republic of Guatemala#Árbenz presidency

Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles collaborated on the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala’s left-leaning democratically-elected president. At the time, the United Fruit Company (UFC) was a prominent client of Sullivan & Cromwell which had provided both Allen and Foster with legal fees over the years. UFC felt threatened by Árbenz’s land reform project, which would expropriate the company's land while offering compensation. Irritated by potential diplomatic obstacles to the coup, Foster removed both the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala and the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, replacing them with more pliant officials. Allen, meanwhile, picked Tracy Barnes, a product of Groton, Yale and Harvard Law School, to oversee the plot’s psychological warfare. After the 1954 coup against Árbenz, the company regained all the land it lost in the land reform and banned banana workers' unions.

1957 Indonesia operation

In the work Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, authors Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin describe how, beginning in 1957, President Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the CIA under director Allen Dulles launched a massive covert military operation in Indonesia, paving the way for the Indonesian army's eventual massacre of half a million people in anti-communist violence in 1965-66. The aim of the CIA interference was to topple or weaken Indonesia's President Sukarno, viewed as too friendly toward Indonesia's Communist Party, and to weaken the Indonesian army. The CIA funneled financial support and weapons to rebel colonels on the islands outside Java. Author Greg Pulgrain further contends that Allen Dulles had a number of motivations for wanting Sukarno to be ousted by a military-led regime that was aligned to the West, as he had brokered deals between the Dutch and US oil interests in the 1930s and had inside knowledge about a large gold deposit (one of the largest gold finds in history) in Indonesia which had yet to be publicly announced and mined.

The role of Allen Dulles in the destabilization of Indonesia based on insider knowledge of the gold deposit is also discussed by historian Aaron Good on Geopolitical Economy Report, in an episode titled "How Western empires meddled to exploit Indonesia's huge gold reserves." Good states that Dulles and other corporate lawyers had a role in establishing the 60% US-owned and 40% Dutch-owned Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company, which, in 1936, sent out an exploration expedition which ended up discovering a deposit of ore consisting of very high copper and gold concentration. Good states that "this information [was] like dynamite, but it was kept secret" and that in the report made by the expedition they misleadingly obscured the value of the gold, apparently intending to keep it largely unknown for several years until they were in a position to mine it. Adding on to Good's explanation, a co-host of the episode describes the affair as a "one to two trillion dollar heist over the course of 20 years" and said that looking at events in Indonesia this way, it explains one of the motivations for stirring up the conditions for such a large scale attack against communists (and people accused as communists) in the country, because the few people who had inside corporate knowledge of the ore deposit "stood to gain everything, an unimaginable amount of wealth, bigger than most countries' economies."

1961 failed Bay of Pigs invasion

The invasion was planned under the Eisenhower administration, and then attempted early on in the Kennedy administration. However, the invasion force was overwhelmed by Cuba’s military, producing one of the Kennedy administration’s most embarrassing episodes and leading Kennedy to push Allen Dulles to resign, which he did in autumn of 1961.