Allen Dulles

Allen Dulles

Type	Person
Also known as	Dulles
On the Timeline	2 events, 1961–2022

Allen Welsh Dulles (7 April 1893 – 29 January 1969) was an American lawyer and intelligence officer. He was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and the longest-serving head of the Central Intelligence Agency, leading it from 1953 until he was forced out after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.^[1] He was then appointed to the Warren Commission on President John F. Kennedy's assassination.^[1] In UFO lore, Dulles is best known as the supposed recipient of a memo from Kennedy dated 28 June 1961, asking for a review of "MJ-12" operations. The memo is one of a group of disputed papers associated with the Majestic 12 legend, which the FBI called "completely bogus".^[2][4][6] A calendar entry declassified in 2022 shows that Dulles did meet Kennedy twice on 28 June 1961. Believers have cited it, but it says nothing about UFOs.^[6]

Early life and career

Dulles was born on 7 April 1893 in Watertown, New York. He was one of five children of the Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith Foster.^[1] His older brother, John Foster Dulles, became Eisenhower's Secretary of State. His sister Eleanor Lansing Dulles was a diplomat. His grandfather John W. Foster and his uncle by marriage Robert Lansing had both been Secretaries of State.^[1] He was schooled at home by tutors, graduated from Princeton University and taught in India before entering the diplomatic service in 1916.^[1] In 1920 he married Martha "Clover" Todd, and they had three children.^[1]

• Diplomacy. Posted to Vienna and then Bern, he later said that Lenin had telephoned the American embassy seeking a meeting the day before leaving Switzerland in 1917. He attended the Paris Peace Conference.^[1]
• The Protocols. In 1921, at the U.S. embassy in Istanbul, he helped expose The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery.^[1]
• Law and the Council. He was chief of the State Department's Near East division from 1922 to 1926, then took a law degree at George Washington University and joined his brother's firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1927, its secretary from 1933 to 1944 and its president from 1946 to 1950.^[1]
• Germany. In April 1933 he and Norman Davis met Hitler in Berlin. In 1935, troubled by the Nazi treatment of Jews, he led a successful move to close Sullivan & Cromwell's Berlin office.^[1]

The OSS

In October 1941 William J. Donovan recruited Dulles into what became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In November 1942 he arrived in Bern as the OSS's Swiss director.^[1] From there he gathered intelligence on Germany through émigrés and resistance contacts.^[1]

• Fritz Kolbe. The German diplomat, whom Dulles called the best spy of the war, supplied documents on German spies and the Me 262 jet fighter.
• The Maier group. This Austrian resistance group gave him information on V-weapons, tanks and aircraft factories, and reported the mass murder at Auschwitz.
• Operation Sunrise. In March 1945 he negotiated the local surrender of German forces in northern Italy. Historians have criticised these talks for offering the SS general Karl Wolff protection from prosecution.

British intelligence was sceptical of him. MI6's assistant chief, Claude Dansey, called him a "fool" who "swallows [false information] easily".^[1] The Wikipedia account also records allegations that, as the war ended, Dulles and Sullivan & Cromwell worked with German industrialists to move Nazi funds out of Germany.^[1]

The CIA

In 1949 Dulles co-wrote the Dulles–Jackson–Correa Report, which was sharply critical of the young CIA. Partly as a result, Truman appointed General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence.^[1] Smith brought Dulles in as Deputy Director for Plans, in charge of covert operations, from 4 January 1951. On 23 August 1951 Dulles became Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.^[1] After Eisenhower's election, Smith moved to the State Department and Dulles became the first civilian DCI.^[1] As director he oversaw:^[1]

• Coups. He oversaw the 1953 coup against Iran's prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Operation Ajax) and the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's president Jacobo Árbenz (Operation PBSuccess).
• MKUltra. He oversaw the Project MKUltra attempt to develop mind control.
• The U-2. Edwin Land presented him with Lockheed's CL-282 design, which became the U-2 spy plane. It entered service in 1957, and one was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960.
• McCarthy. Documents released in 2004 showed that the CIA, on his orders, broke into Senator Joseph McCarthy's office and fed him disinformation to stop his investigation of the agency.
• Congo. In 1960 he allocated $100,000 to a plan to kill Patrice Lumumba, which was never carried out.

He is regarded as one of the creators of the modern U.S. intelligence system.^[1] Shellenberger's timeline for the House Oversight Committee notes that Dulles was a member of the National Security Council's 5412/2 Special Group. The group was formed on 28 December 1954 to coordinate covert operations and later became the 303 and 40 Committees. Shellenberger says its topics often included science and technology, but adds that it is unknown whether it dealt with UFOs.^[5]

The CIA and UFOs in 1952–53

Dulles was the CIA's deputy director when the agency first took a serious interest in UFOs. After the wave of sightings over Washington in July 1952, the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence reviewed the Air Force's UFO project, apparently starting around 28 July 1952. In December 1952 it recommended a scientific panel.^[3] The CIA historian Gerald Haines noted that the 1952 build-up of sightings "alarmed the Truman administration". The Wikipedia account notes that the Director of Central Intelligence was involved in the study.^[3] The Robertson Panel first met on 14 January 1953 under the physicist Howard P. Robertson, shortly before Dulles became director.^[1][3] The panel concluded that UFOs were no direct threat to national security. It recommended a public education campaign to reduce interest in the subject and suggested that civilian UFO groups be monitored.^[3] The sources read here do not record Dulles's personal views on UFOs.

Dismissal

After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, Dulles came under increasing criticism. In the autumn of 1961 he and his deputies Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell were forced to resign.^[1] On 28 November 1961 Kennedy presented him with the National Security Medal at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and the next day the White House released his resignation letter. John McCone replaced him.^[1] Dulles called the Bay of Pigs "the worst day of my life". He came to dislike Kennedy strongly, later telling the journalist Willie Morris: "that little Kennedy, he thought he was a god".^[1]

The MJ-12 papers

Dulles appears in several disputed documents linked to the Majestic 12 story. Shellenberger's timeline describes them:^[6]

• The Kennedy memo. A memo from Kennedy to Dulles dated 28 June 1961 requests a review of "MJ-12" intelligence operation plans as they relate to Cold War psychological warfare plans. See Kennedy MJ-12 memo of June 1961.
• The "operations review". A second document, dated 5 November 1961, purports to be an "operations review" of MJ-12 by Dulles. It refers to the Kennedy memo and says the operations were properly classified under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
• The SNIE. A third, of the same date, purports to be a Special National Intelligence Estimate on "MJTWELVE" operations for the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. It mentions six crash recoveries of "unidentified space vehicles" involving nuclear materials. Shellenberger notes that Hal Puthoff says this estimate is legitimate.

The earlier version of this article also mentioned "a partly burned document said to be related" to the Kennedy memo. That document is not described in the sources read here. See Burned Kennedy MJ memo.

The Majestic 12 documents as a whole are widely considered forgeries.^[2] On 15 September 1988 an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent passed one to the FBI's Dallas office. After the OSI reported on 30 November that no such committee had ever been authorised or formed, the FBI declared the document "completely bogus".^[2] Later batches were given to the researcher Timothy Cooper from 1992. The researcher Karl Pflock suspected Cooper of writing bogus documents himself, and the CIA concluded that a Cooper-supplied document linking Marilyn Monroe's death to UFOs was fraudulent.^[2]

The Kennedy assassination researcher Seamus Coogan, who has written exposés of far-fetched conspiracy theories, examined the "Majestic Documents" website run by Robert Wood and his son Ryan Wood.^[4] He made several points:^[4]

• Ratings. The site rated all its Kennedy-related documents suspiciously highly on its "authenticity meter".
• Cooper. In 2009, he wrote, Cooper himself denounced Stanton Friedman and the Woods and said the papers he had passed on were likely frauds.
• The 2011 revival. In April 2011 the Daily Mail and AOL News reported that the CIA had released Kennedy–UFO documents to an author, William Lester, under the Freedom of Information Act. Coogan wrote that Lester "never, ever" received them from the CIA. The papers had circulated since the 1990s and had been judged a hoax.
• Angleton. Coogan argued that mixing the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe and UFOs created a "phony sideshow" that distracted from serious research. In his view this had its roots in disinformation by the CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, of the kind Angleton "later helped Allen Dulles perform".

The 2022 calendar

On 17 December 2022 a newly declassified entry from Dulles's calendar showed that he met Kennedy on 28 June 1961 at 12:00 and again at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time.^[6] Shellenberger's timeline notes that this "may be significant" because the disputed Kennedy memo bears the same date.^[6] The calendar records only the meetings, not what was discussed. Shellenberger's source for the entry is an online forum post.^[6] See Dulles–Kennedy meeting of 28 June 1961.

Warren Commission and later life

After Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Dulles one of the seven members of the Warren Commission.^[1] Some historians criticised the appointment, arguing that a man Kennedy had fired was unlikely to be impartial.^[1] The journalist Stephen Kinzer argued that Johnson wanted Dulles to steer the commission away from Kennedy's secret plans to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. Robert F. Kennedy also urged the appointment.^[1] In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the CIA as an institution was not involved in the assassination.^[1]

Dulles published The Craft of Intelligence in 1963, although it was largely ghostwritten, and edited Great True Spy Stories in 1968.^[1] He is reported to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease in his final years. He died of influenza complicated by pneumonia on 29 January 1969, aged 75, in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., and was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.^[1] He has been portrayed in many films and novels, including The Good Shepherd (2006) and Bridge of Spies (2015).^[1]

On the UAP Timeline

• Kennedy MJ-12 memo of June 1961 (28 June 1961) — An alleged Kennedy memo asks the CIA to review 'MJ-12' operations.
• Dulles–Kennedy meeting of 28 June 1961 (17 December 2022) — A declassified calendar shows CIA chief Allen Dulles met President Kennedy on 28 June 1961.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Allen Dulles”, “Majestic 12”, “Robertson Panel”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.