(Apr 7, 1893 – Jan 29, 1969) A Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served as Secretary of State, an attorney for Standard Oil, a longtime board member of the Rockefeller Foundation, and maintained strong ties to the Council and to the Rockefellers. After starting the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, he was the first CIA director from 1953 to 1961 – which is still the longest tenure in agency history for arguably its most powerful director. Born into a wealthy and influential family, he spent most of his life serving the interests of America’s power elite, the true ruling class of the country. Dulles created the OSS / CIA as a government-funded, PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL POLICE FORCE which watched over the investments and interests of the rich.
Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite.
Dulles himself said “I’m more of a Wall Street lawyer than a spy.” Dulles, with the help of Pauley, created a “CIA inside of the CIA” by using the German Black Eagle Trust and Yamashita gold that was part of the spoils of WWII that were stolen from Germany and Japan. Allen Dulles became manager of these funds and commodities when he became CIA head.
A 1934 congressional investigation alleged that George Herbert Walker’s “Hamburg Amerika Line, was a cover for I. G. Farben’s Nazi espionage unit in the United States, subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States.” Prescott Bush, Walker’s partner along with Averell Harriman, hired Allen Dulles to hide the assets.
The shipping line smuggled in German agents, propaganda, and money for bribing American politicians to see things Hitler’s way. The holding company was Walker’s American Shipping & Commerce, which shared the offices with Union Banking. In an elaborate corporate paper trail, Harriman’s stock in American Shipping & Commerce was controlled by yet another holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, run out of Walker’s office.
Standard Oil of New Jersey had completed a major stock transaction with Dulles’s Nazi client, I. G. Farben. By the end of January 1937, Dulles had merged all his cloaking activities into one client account: “Brown Brothers Harriman-Schroeder Rock.” Schroder was the Nazi bank on whose board Dulles sat. The “Rock” were the Rockefellers of Standard Oil, who were already coming under scrutiny for their Nazi deals. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, all the shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized as being in effect held for enemy nationals. Union Banking was an affiliate of Brown Brothers Harriman. The U.S. government found that huge sections of Prescott Bush’s empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort.
As part of the settlement, Walker and Prescott Bush became spies for Allen Dulles. Walker went to Supreme Allied Headquarters in London to advise on covert “psychological operations.” Prescott Bush’s clients, including the Thyssens, fled to Switzerland, where they joined Dulles’s efforts.
Dulles’s job, simply put, was to hijack the US government to benefit the wealthy. Whenever profits of American business interests were jeopardized overseas, Dulles and his CIA men made sure that “democracy” would deliver the correct outcome — by any means necessary. Whether it was through disinformation, funding opposition groups, sabotage, bribery, murder, or coup d’etat, the CIA let nothing and nobody stand in their way.
Perhaps nothing is more troubling than Dulles’s behavior around the time that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Although Kennedy had fired him in 1961, Dulles basically kept, de facto, running the CIA anyway, as Talbot notes. And, even more ominously, after Kennedy was killed in Dallas on Friday November 22, Dulles moved into The Farm, a secret CIA facility in Virginia, where he remained for the weekend — during which time the “suspect,” Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed, and a vast machinery began to create the “lone gunman” myth that has dominated our history books to the present. And that same machinery began to bury evidence that Oswald himself had deep connections into US intelligence.
The Dallas CIA shooters of JFK came up from Mexico with the help of the Permargo Corporation and E. Howard Hunt. Permargo was a company formed by Dulles operatives Edwin Pauley and George Bush Sr. Edwin Pauley used the Black Eagle gold to bribe U.S. politicians; later Reverend Sun Myung Moon became part of this operation and Bush Sr. received over $10 million from the Moon organization. Prescott Bush and Allen Dulles became close friends after working together in 1938 to place more Saudi oil under USA control.
Throughout all this, it is clear, Dulles was no rogue operative. He was serving the interests of America’s corporate and war-making elites. And he went all out. The “former” CIA director was so determined to control the JFK death story spin, as Talbot chronicles below, that he even tried to strong-arm former president Harry Truman when the plain-spoken Missourian broadly hinted that he suspected the Agency was involved in Kennedy’s murder.
Fortunately for the conspirators, the deeply flawed case against Lee Harvey Oswald never made it to court…. Oswald’s shocking murder — broadcast live into America’s homes — solved one dilemma for Dulles, as he monitored the Dallas events that weekend from the Farm, his secure CIA facility in Virginia. But it soon became apparent that Oswald’s murder created another problem — a wave of public suspicion that swept over the nation and beyond…. To many people who watched the horrifying spectacle on TV, the shooting smacked of a gangland hit aimed at silencing Oswald before he could talk.
In fact, this is precisely what Attorney General Robert Kennedy concluded after his investigators began digging into Ruby’s background. Bobby, who had made his political reputation as a Senate investigator of organized crime, pored over Ruby’s phone records from the days leading up to the Dallas violence. “The list [of names] was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the Rackets Committee,” RFK later remarked. The attorney general’s suspicions about the death of his brother immediately fell not just on the Mafia, but on the CIA — the agency that, as Bobby knew, had been using the mob to do some of its dirtiest work….
Meanwhile, down in Independence, Missouri, another retired president, Harry Truman, was fuming about the CIA. On December 22, 1963, while the country was still reeling from the gunfire in Dallas, Truman published a highly provocative op-ed article in The Washington Post, charging that the CIA had grown alarmingly out of control since he established it.
His original purpose, wrote Truman, was to create an agency that simply coordinated the various streams of sensitive information flowing into the White House. “I have never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” he continued. But “for some time, I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of Government.” The CIA had grown “so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.”
But the increasingly powerful agency did not just menace foreign governments, Truman warned—it now threatened democracy at home. “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society,” he concluded ominously, “and I feel that we need to correct it.”
The timing of Truman’s opinion piece was striking. Appearing in the capital’s leading newspaper exactly one month after the assassination, the article caused shock waves in political circles. There was a disturbing undertone to the straight-talking midwesterner’s warning about the CIA. Was Truman implying that there was “sinister and mysterious intrigue” behind Kennedy’s death? Could that have been what he meant when he suggested that the agency represented a growing danger to our own democracy?
Allen Dulles knew the danger of words, the wrong kind of words. As CIA director, he had spent an untold fortune each year on countering the Soviet propaganda machine and controlling the world’s conversation, including the political and media dialogue in his own country. Within minutes of the Kennedy assassination, the CIA tried to steer news reporting and commentary about Dallas, planting stories that suggested — falsely — that Oswald was a Soviet agent or that Castro was behind JFK’s murder.
Still, Dulles would not accept defeat. Unable to alter reality, he simply altered the record, like any good spy.
In actuality, both Khrushchev — who broke down weeping in the Kremlin when he heard the news — and Castro were deeply distressed by Kennedy’s death. Both men had been greatly encouraged by Kennedy’s peace initiatives in the final year of his presidency, and they feared that his assassination meant that military hard-liners would take control in Washington …
But despite the CIA’s strenuous efforts, press coverage of the Kennedy assassination began spinning out of its control. Dulles knew that immediate steps must be taken to contain the conversation…. If Harry Truman — the man who created the CIA — was worried that it had become a Frankenstein, it might be only a matter of time before prominent European figures, and even some stray voices in America, began to question whether the agency was behind JFK’s murder.
It was Dulles himself who jumped in to put out the Truman fire.He tries for a year to persuade Truman to change his position and recant his damaging words about the CIA. Truman stood by them, so Dulles did what all good spies do… he lied.
On April 21, 1964, upon returning to Washington, Dulles wrote a letter about his half-hour meeting with Truman to CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston. During their conversation at the Truman Library, Dulles claimed in his letter, the elderly ex-president seemed “quite astounded” by his own attack on the CIA when the spymaster showed him a copy of the Post article. As he looked it over, Truman reacted as if he were reading it for the first time, according to Dulles. “He said that [the article] was all wrong. He then said that he felt it had made a very unfortunate impression.”
The Truman portrayed in Dulles’s letter seemed to be suffering from senility and either could not remember what he had written or had been taken advantage of by an aide, who perhaps wrote the piece under the former president’s name. In fact, CIA officials later did try to blame a Truman assistant for writing the provocative opinion piece. Truman “obviously was highly disturbed at the Washington Post article,” concluded Dulles in his letter, “… and several times said he would see what he could do about it.”
The Dulles letter to Houston — which was clearly intended for the CIA files, to be retrieved whenever expedient — was an outrageous piece of disinformation. Truman, who would live for eight more years, was still of sound mind in April 1964. And he could not have been shocked by the contents of his own article, since he had been expressing the same views about the CIA — even more strongly — to friends and journalists for some time.
After the Bay of Pigs, a Dulles sabotage of JFK to force him into a full invasion of Cuba, Truman had confided in writer Merle Miller that he regretted ever establishing the CIA. “I think it was a mistake,” he said. “And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it…. [Eisenhower] never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand…. It’s become a government all of its own and all secret…. That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society.” Likewise, after the Washington Post essay ran, Truman’s original CIA director, Admiral Sidney Souers — who shared his former boss’s limited concept of the agency — congratulated him for writing the piece. “I am happy as I can be that my article on the Central Intelligence Agency rang a bell with you because you know why the organization was set up,” Truman wrote back to Souers.
In a letter that Truman wrote to Look magazine managing editor William Arthur in June 1964 — two months after his meeting with Dulles — the ex-president again articulated his concerns about the direction taken by the CIA after he left the White House. “The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President,” wrote Truman. “It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.”
Dulles’s relentless effort to manipulate Truman — and failing that, the Truman record — is yet one more example of the spymaster’s “strange activities.” But Dulles’s greatest success at reconstructing reality was still to come. With the Warren Report, Dulles would literally rewrite history. The inquest into the death of John F. Kennedy was another astounding sleight of hand on Dulles’s part. The man who should have been in the witness chair wound up instead in control of the inquiry.
“Allen Dulles had a lot to hide.”
How did Allen Dulles — a man fired by President Kennedy under bitter circumstances — come to oversee the investigation into his murder?
This crucial historical question has been the subject of misguided speculation for many years. The story apparently began with Lyndon Johnson, a man not known for his devotion to the truth. It has been repeated over time by various historians, including Johnson biographer Robert Caro, who one would think would be more skeptical, considering the exhaustive detail with which he documented LBJ’s habitual deceit in his multivolume work.
In his 1971 memoir, Johnson wrote that he appointed Dulles and John McCloy to the Warren Commission because they were “the two men Bobby Kennedy asked me to put on it.” With Bobby safely dead by 1971, LBJ clearly felt that he could get away with this one. But the idea that LBJ would huddle with the man he considered his rival and tormentor, in order to discuss the politically sensitive composition of the commission, is ludicrous.
The Warren Commission’s inquiry had the ability to shake the new Johnson presidency — and the US government itself — to their very core. In making his choices for the commission, Johnson later wrote, he sought “men who were known to be beyond pressure and above suspicion.”
What LBJ really wanted was men who could be trusted to close the case and put the public’s suspicions to rest. The Warren Commission was not established to find the truth but to “lay the dust” that had been stirred up in Dallas, as McCloy stated — “dust not only in the United States, but all over the world.”
Equally preposterous is the notion that Bobby Kennedy would nominate Dulles and McCloy — two men who had fallen out with President Kennedy while serving on his national security team — to investigate his brother’s murder. Like Dulles, whose former agency Bobby immediately suspected of a role in the assassination, McCloy was a Cold War hard-liner…
McCloy, who had served as chairman of Chase Manhattan before David Rockefeller moved into the bank’s leadership role, was closely aligned with Rockefeller interests. After leaving the Kennedy administration, McCloy joined a Wall Street law firm where he represented anti-Kennedy oilmen Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, with whom he had done business since his days at Chase Manhattan.
It was the national security establishment, not Bobby Kennedy, that advised the new president to put Dulles and McCloy on the Warren Commission. And Johnson — finely tuned to the desires of the men who had put him in the Oval Office — wisely obliged them.
The Dulles camp itself made no bones about the fact that the Old Man aggressively lobbied to get appointed to the commission. Dick Helms later told historian Michael Kurtz that he “personally persuaded” Johnson to appoint Dulles. According to Kurtz, Dulles and Helms “wanted to make sure no agency secrets came out during the investigation…. And, of course, if Dulles was on the commission, that would ensure the agency would be safe. Johnson felt the same way—he didn’t want the investigation to dig up anything strange.”
Dulles tried to establish the framework for the inquiry early on by handing the other commission members copies of a book titled The Assassins by Robert J. Donovan, a Washington journalist. Donovan’s history of presidential assassins argued that these dramatic acts of violence were the work of solitary fanatics, not “organized attempts to shift political power from one group to another.”
William Corson, a former Marine Corps officer and Navy intelligence agent who was close to Dulles, confirmed that the spymaster pulled strings to get on the Warren Commission. He “lobbied hard for the job,” recalled Corson, who had commanded young Allen Jr. in the Korean War. After he took his place on the commission, Dulles recruited Corson to explore the Jack Ruby angle. After spending months pursuing various leads, Corson eventually concluded that he had been sent on a wild-goose chase. “It is entirely possible I was sent on an assignment which would go nowhere…. Allen Dulles had a lot to hide.”
Among those urging Johnson to give Dulles the Warren Commission job were establishment allies like Secretary of State Dean Rusk, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation. These same voices were raised on behalf of McCloy. In fact, the commission was, from the very beginning, an establishment creation. It was sold to an initially reluctant LBJ by the most influential voices of the Washington power structure, including Joe Alsop — the CIA’s ever-dependable mouthpiece — and the editorial czars of The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Johnson wanted the investigation handled by officials in Texas, where he felt more in control, instead of by a “bunch of carpetbaggers.” But in a phone call to the White House on the morning of November 25, Alsop deftly maneuvered Johnson into accepting the idea of a presidential commission made up of nationally renowned figures “beyond any possible suspicion.”
When Johnson clung to his idea of a Texas investigation, the sophisticated Alsop set him straight, as if lecturing a country simpleton. “My lawyers, though, Joe, tell me that the White House — the president — must not inject himself into local killings,” LBJ said, almost pleadingly. “I agree with that,” Alsop said as he smoothly cut him off, “but in this case it does happen to be the killing of the president.”
Dulles immediately accepted Johnson’s request to join the commission when the president phoned him on the evening of November 29. “I would like to be of any help,” Dulles told Johnson, though he did feel compelled to at least raise the propriety of appointing a former CIA director who was known to have a troubled relationship with the deceased president:
“And you’ve considered the work of my previous work and my previous job?” Dulles asked inelegantly. “I sure have,” LBJ replied, “and we want you to do it. That’s that…. You always do what is best for your country. I found that out about you a long time ago.”
The Warren Commission was named after Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, the distinguished jurist President Johnson strong-armed into chairing the JFK inquest. But as attorney Mark Lane — one of the first critics of the lone-gunman theory — later observed, it should have been called the “Dulles Commission,” considering the spymaster’s dominant role in the investigation. In fact, Dulles was Johnson’s first choice to chair the commission, but LBJ decided that he needed Warren at the helm to deflect liberal criticism of the official inquiry…
Dulles tried to establish the framework for the inquiry early on by handing the other commission members copies of a book titled The Assassins by Robert J. Donovan, a Washington journalist. Donovan’s history of presidential assassins argued that these dramatic acts of violence were the work of solitary fanatics, not “organized attempts to shift political power from one group to another.” It was quickly pointed out to Dulles that John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln as part of a broader Confederate plot to decapitate the federal government, rather famously contradicted Donovan’s theory. But, undeterred, Dulles continued to push the commission to keep a tight frame on Oswald.
Dulles offered that he would like to get these aspects of the inquiry “into the hands of the CIA as soon as possible to explain the Russian parts.” Senator Russell, long used to dealing with the intelligence community, reacted skeptically. “I think you’ve got more faith in them than I have. I think they’ll doctor anything they hand to us.”
Dulles was a whirlwind of activity, especially outside the hearing room, where he deftly maneuvered to keep the investigation on what he considered the proper track…. There was no detail too small for Dulles to bring to the chief counsel’s attention. “A great deal of the description of the motorcade and the shooting will be unclear unless we have a street map and, if possible, a photo taken from the sixth floor window,” Dulles wrote Rankin in a July 1964 memo. “Is this possible?” Dulles was particularly eager to explore any leads suggesting Oswald might be a Soviet spy — a soon discredited idea that Angleton would nonetheless keep promoting for the rest of his life.
Peculiar Behavior of Security Agencies
Despite Dulles’s efforts to keep the commission away from any hints of a domestic conspiracy, from time to time uncomfortable questions along these lines cropped up. During an executive session convened by the panel on December 16, 1963, Warren raised an especially sensitive matter — the mysterious failure of the country’s security agencies to keep close watch on someone with Oswald’s background. [Note from WhoWhatWhy editor: For an eerie parallel in Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the purported mastermind of the Boston Marathon bombing, see this.]
How, for instance, did a defector simply stroll into the US immigration office in New Orleans — as he did the previous summer — and obtain a passport to return to Russia? “That seems strange to me,” Warren remarked.
Actually, passports were rather easy to obtain, Dulles observed. When the discussion turned to the puzzling ease with which Oswald got permission to return to the United States with his Russian wife, Dulles offered that he would like to get these aspects of the inquiry “into the hands of the CIA as soon as possible to explain the Russian parts.”
Senator Russell, long used to dealing with the intelligence community, reacted skeptically. “I think you’ve got more faith in them than I have. I think they’ll doctor anything they hand to us.”
Russell was edging painfully close to the fundamental problem at the core of the Warren panel’s impossible mission. How could the board run a credible inquest when it had limited investigative capability of its own and was largely dependent on the FBI and the other security agencies for its evidence — agencies that were clearly implicated in the failure to protect the president?
The Warren Commission was, in fact, so thoroughly infiltrated and guided by the security services that there was no possibility of the panel pursuing an independent course. Dulles was at the center of this subversion. During the commission’s ten-month-long investigation, he acted as a double agent, huddling regularly with his former CIA associates to discuss the panel’s internal operations.
Source: WhoWhatWhy.com
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