DULLES, ALLEN

The Central Intelligence Agency’s  director of central intelligence (DCI) from 1953 to 1961, Dulles was a New York lawyer who had served in the State Department as a diplomat in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. He was in Switzerland in both world wars and in 1943, as the Office of Strategic Services representative in Bern, had recruited a German Foreign Ministry official, Fritz Kolbe, who supplied him with copies of secret  high-level telegrams. Dulles was mystified by a lack of British enthusiasm for his coup, unaware of ULTRA. After the war, Dulles ran U.S. intelligence operations in Germany from Frankfurt and advised on the reorganization of the newly created CIA before being appointed DCI. He was considered the archetypal intelligence officer and, with his brother John Foster Dulles as secretary of state, exercised considerable influence over U.S. foreign policy, but was forced to resign following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.