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."

1960s Congo operations

An August 27, 1960 telegram drafted by Allen Dulles from the CIA to the Station in the Congo discusses how the removal of leadership (although the name "Lumumba" is noted as being "garbled" in the record of the telegram) in Congo "must be an urgent and prime objective" and a "high priority of our covert action":

In high quarters here it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [garble—Lumumba?] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences for the prestige of UN and for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action. Hence we wish to give you wider authority along lines Leop 07723 and Leop 07854 and Dir 461155 including even more aggressive action if it can remain covert.

A different document prepared in the CIA, titled "Operations in the Congo" which was noted (in handwriting) as being prepared for Nixon (who was Vice President at the time) on September 7, 1960, summarizes some of the CIA's activities in Congo aimed at ousting Lumumba up to that point:

In the period immediately preceding Congo independence, CIA efforts in the Belgian Congo concentrated on establishing direct contact with as many responsible political figures as possible and influencing their actions. [...] In the immediate post-independence period, CIA continued to maintain contact with the assets it had been developing and to be on the lookout for new ones for whatever contingencies might arise. [...] CIA concentrated on developing contact with [less than 1 line not declassified] assets who were in active opposition to Lumumba or appeared to have that potential. These were developed with the long-range view of possible active use against Lumumba and on a day to day basis in tactical opposition to increasing signs of Soviet Bloc influence in the Lumumba Government [...] To accomplish this and to implement operations to this end, CIA has been steadily reinforcing the Leopoldville station with additional personnel and funds, and the Director of Central Intelligence has given the station authority to take decisions on the spot [...] CIA has been coordinating an effort to have the Senate assemble and pass a vote of no confidence in the Lumumba Government. [...] On the basis of what information we have so far received it would appear that Kasavubu’s precipitate action has at least seriously jeopardized the plan for ousting Lumumba by constitutional means.

An editorial note by the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian mentions that a September 21 telegram to the CIA reports the station chief "urged arrest or other more permanent disposal of Lumumba" in a meeting with Colonel Mobutu, warning against potential reconciliation between Lumumba and Kasavubu.

A September 24, 1960 telegram from the CIA to the Congo station, drafted and released by Dulles, reads, "We wish give every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position".

The U.S. plot to poison Lumumba is discussed in an editorial note by the Office of the Historian, describing a 1975 testimony to the Church Committee. "The means of assassination had not been restricted to use of this toxic material, but the Chief of Station emphasized that although selection of a mode of assassination was left to his judgment, it had been essential that it be carried out in a way that could not be traced back either to an American or the U.S. Government [...] the Chief of Station confirmed to the Church Committee that the top priority possibility listed in telegram 0026 involved instructing an agent to infiltrate Lumumba’s entourage to explore means of poisoning him."

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.