Page 63 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 63 of 237

Dulles submitted the report to Truman after his re-election. In 1950 General Smith summoned Dulles to
Washington. He came, expecting, he often said later, to stay six weeks. Instead, he remained eleven years. On
August 23, 1951, Dulles was appointed deputy director.

Soon after President Eisenhower was elected, he appointed Smith as Under Secretary of State and on February 10,
1953, named Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence. He took office sixteen days later. Up to that point two
admirals and two generals had held the job. Dulles became the first truly civilian director of the CIA.

To the post he brought a brilliant reputation as the wartime OSS chief in Switzerland. Perhaps even more
important, his brother was Secretary of State. The emergence of the Invisible Government in the 1950s to a
position of unprecedented strength cannot be comprehended unless a word is said about the Dulles brothers and
their relationship. Uniquely, they embodied the dualism -- and indeed the moral dilemma -- of United States
foreign policy since World War II.

John Foster Dulles and his younger brother were the sons of Allen Macy Dulles, a Presbyterian clergyman in
upstate Watertown, New York. Allen Dulles was born there on April 7, 1893.

Some thought they detected traces of a clergyman's zeal in the sternly moralistic public posture of Foster Dulles
as he conducted the nation's foreign policy during the Eisenhower years: the United States would contain the
advance of international Communism as it sought to subvert the underdeveloped nations; but America would
scrupulously avoid any interference in the internal affairs of other countries. The United States would not, in
short, adopt the evil tactics of subversion and secret manipulation practiced by the Communist enemy.

In this, Foster Dulles reflected the American ethic; the world as we would like it to be. While he took this public
position, his brother was free to deal with nastier realities, to overturn governments and to engage in backstage
political maneuvers all over the globe with the CIA's almost unlimited funds. He was, as Allen Dulles once put it,
able to "fight fire with fire" [4] in a less than perfect world. Because he was equally dedicated in his own secret
sphere, it was under Allen Dulles' stewardship that the CIA enjoyed its greatest expansion, particularly in the field
of government- shaking secret operations overseas.

In pursuing this dual foreign policy, these special operations were largely kept secret from the American people.
The exception, of course, was when something went wrong, as at the Bay of Pigs.

This is not to say that the same two-sided foreign policy would never have evolved had the director of the CIA
and the Secretary of State not been brothers. It very likely would have. But the natural friction between the
objectives and methods of the diplomats and the "spooks," between the State Department and the CIA, was to an
extent reduced because of the close working relationship of the Dulles brothers.* There was consequently less of
a check and balance.

In a sense, one might say the Dulles brothers were predestined to take over the levers of power in the conduct of
U. S. foreign affairs. Their mother's father, John Watson Foster, was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison
* in 1892-3. Robert Lansing, an uncle by marriage, was Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Another
uncle, John Welsh, was Minister to England under Rutherford B. Hayes.* With such a heritage, it is not surprising
that Foster and Allen were weaned on a diet of heady discussions of the affairs of state.

Allen Dulles was educated at Auburn, New York, Paris and Princeton. He taught English for a time in an
agricultural school in Allahabad, India; and in China and Japan as well. Then he joined the diplomatic service in
1916, serving in Vienna and, during the war, in Berne, chiefly as an intelligence officer. Three years later the two
brothers were together in Paris as staff members of the American delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference.
Their uncle, Secretary of State Lansing, was a member of the delegation. The following year Allen Dulles married