1. Allen Welsh Dulles was an American lawyer who was the first civilian director of central intelligence, and its longest serving director.
27 Facts About Allen Dulles
1. 2.
Allen Dulles taught school in India before entering the diplomatic service in 1916.
3.
Later in life Allen Dulles said he had been telephoned by Vladimir Lenin, seeking a meeting with the American embassy on April 8,1917, the day before Lenin left Switzerland to travel to Saint Petersburg aboard a German train.
4.
Allen Dulles unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the US State Department to publicly denounce the forgery.
5.
From 1922 to 1926, Allen Dulles served as chief of the Near East division of the Department of State.
6.
Allen Dulles became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, the first new director since the Council's founding in 1921.
7.
Allen Dulles was the Council's secretary from 1933 to 1944 and its president from 1946 to 1950.
8.
Allen Dulles met with Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and the prime ministers of Britain and France.
9.
Allen Dulles rarely spoke about his meeting with Hitler, and future CIA director Richard Helms had not even heard of their encounter until decades after the death of Allen Dulles and expressed shock that his former boss had never told him about it.
10.
Allen Dulles helped some German Jews, such as the banker Paul Kemper, escape to the United States from Nazi Germany.
11.
Allen Dulles was assisted in intelligence-gathering activities by Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, a German emigrant.
12.
Allen Dulles received valuable information from Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat, one whom he described as the best spy of the war.
13.
Allen Dulles was in contact with the Austrian resistance group around the priest Heinrich Maier, who collected information through many different contacts with scientists and the military.
14.
In particular, Allen Dulles then had crucial information for Operation Crossbow and Operation Hydra.
15.
Allen Dulles was involved in Operation Sunrise, secret negotiations in March 1945 to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy.
16.
In 1947, Allen Dulles served as a senior staffer on the Herter Committee.
17.
Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA, under Allen Dulles's orders, had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and fed disinformation to him in order to discredit him, in order to stop his investigation of alleged communist infiltration of the CIA.
18.
Allen Dulles is considered one of the creators of the modern United States intelligence system and was a guide to clandestine operations during the Cold War.
19.
Allen Dulles established intelligence networks worldwide to check and counter Soviet and eastern European communist advances as well as international communist movements.
20.
In 1953, Allen Dulles was involved, along with Frank Wisner, in Operation Ajax, the covert operation that led to the removal of democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, and his replacement with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran.
21.
Allen Dulles was strongly opposed to Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.
22.
In 1960 a plan to kill Lumumba was considered and Allen Dulles allocated $100,000 to the plan, but it never materialised.
23.
Allen Dulles believed that Lumumba posed "a grave danger as long as he was not disposed of".
24.
Allen Dulles referred to the Bay of Pigs failure as "the worst day of my life" and developed a strong dislike of Kennedy, later telling journalist Willie Morris "that little Kennedy, he thought he was a god".
25.
Allen Dulles found life outside the CIA difficult, with his friend James Angleton recalling "He had a very difficult time to decompress".
26.
Allen Dulles published the book The Craft of Intelligence in 1963, and edited Great True Spy Stories in 1968.
27.
Allen Dulles died on January 29,1969, of influenza, complicated by pneumonia, at the age of 75, in Georgetown, DC Allen Dulles was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.